My object in coming to Tientsin was to purchase photographic supplies, a new suit of clothes, books, a fountain pen, and a number of other things which could not be had in Mukden; but, as I intended to return immediately to the army, and as I wanted to keep myself above all suspicion of having dealings with the enemy, I went to the house of Colonel Agorodinkoff, the Russian secret service agent in Tientsin, and, at his request, took up my abode with him.
A few days in Tientsin showed me how it was that the Japanese were getting so much better information than the Russians. The latter had to depend on a set of most unreliable Greek, Armenian, Polish and
Jewish sutlers. The news these ignorant and bumptious men picked up in their sober moments was unreliable and inaccurate. Besides, they blabbed it to everybody who wished to "draw" them, and I am sure they would have cheerfully sold it to the Japanese if the latter had been foolish enough to bid for it. They used to come round after dark every day to the Russian agent's quarters, but the Japanese knew them all perfectly, for a Japanese agent had a room commanding the entrance to the colonel's house, and in this room there was always a watcher, day and night. Besides this, Japanese, got up as Chinese "jinrickshaw" men, were always stationed at our door, and nobody passed in or out without the head of the Japanese secret service organisation knowing of it at once. In fact, the Japanese system of espionage was absolutely perfect, and that because of the zeal with which every one of the Mikado's subjects in Tientsin worked for it. I shall give one example.
Going into a Japanese barber's on one occasion to get my hair cut, I talked to the barber while the operation was being performed about his native town, which I knew thoroughly, and I think he got the impression that I had just been in Japan. On going away, I found I had only got Russian money to pay him with. Now in Tientsin at that time, Russian money marked the owner of it as having been in Mukden, and I am told that, in Haicheng and Liaoyang, the Japanese used to imprison, and even put to death, Chinese whom they found in possession of rouble notes which they could not give a satisfactory account of. Therefore, the fact that I had Russian money and that I had evidently just come from Japan at once aroused the suspicions of the barber, and he very cleverly managed to detain me while he sent for a soldierly-looking fellow countryman who was probably in the secret service, and who came almost instantaneously to have a look at me.
It was their infinite capacity for taking pains that made the Japanese win in this war, and that made their intelligence service far superior to that of the Russians; but, by saying this, I do not mean to throw any discredit on Colonel Agorodinkoff. In fact, I was surprised that he could have done as much as he did, considering the unreliable tools he had to work with. Unfortunately, any European nation that gets into trouble with Japan will have similarly unreliable tools to depend on. It will be a question of money against patriotic fanaticism.
A Russian secret service agent in Mukden — I must explain that the censors were all secret service agents — once confessed to me that he found it absolutely impossible to get information from Japan.
u It's amazing! " he said. " It's as if the country were hermetically sealed. We can make no connections. We can get no news of military movements."
This was about the time that a persecuted Polish patriot, who had fled to Tokio, cursing the Tsar and all his works, had been coldly received by the Japanese, who had lost no time in seeing him on board the first outgoing steamer.
Of course the Russians got some information. Like the Japanese, and like every political or Press agent who cared to spend the money, they got all the telegrams that passed along the Chinese wires. A Russian newspaper correspondent, acting, I presume, for the
Russian agent at Shan-hai-kwan, with whom he lived, had bought my telegram about the Mishchenko raid over the counter of the railway telegraph office at Shanhai-kwan, just as you would buy a box of cigars at a tobacconist's, and, when I came down to Tientsin, the Russians knew all about my despatch. This is not fancy on my part, for I afterwards met the correspondent in question in Shanghai, and he unblushingly acknowledged what he had done.