Preferred Citation: Miller, Michael B. Berkeley: University of California Press, c Spy fiction between the wars was never as good as fact. No one wrote stories that match the ones in the archives. Looking back from the late twentieth century, one is startled at how authentic the stereotypes are. In mood, setting, action, and stock characters, the period need concede nothing to the spy novels and spy movies.
He called himself Chemnaoun Benzakour, but he also carried on his person a passport made out to Manuel Barrero. At Rabat he visited a Swiss who resided in the city, then he moved on to Casablanca. The man for whom he traveled was Langenheim, a German engineer who had come to North Africa in , was listed in the twenties as "one of the most important German agents in Morocco," and in was identified as a central figure in a comprehensive German program of espionage, propaganda, insurrection, gunrunning, and sabotage.
In native matters it seems that he controls the agents, ensures. He traded in skins, but he was also an intriguer. We have created images of this interwar shadow world that are not belied by the facts.
Espionage in the twenties and thirties was about spy rings, kidnappings, hijackings, and murders. Its milieu was inhabited by a host of dubious figures who were sucked into intrigues or who swooped down like great filthy carrion eaters when the pickings were ripe. Victims commingled with double agents, informants, gangsters, and professional spies.
The aura was that of great battles to be won, of tense, pressing, high stakes affairs. Underneath lay brutality, deceit, and an exceptionally high quotient of slime. But beyond the atmosphere were other dimensions, steeped in historical meaning as well as in ambiance and remindful of how the description of a milieu forces one to think about a particular period in time. Organization is a place to begin. Espionage in the interwar years was considerably more organized, more elaborate, and more methodically professional than it had been before Intelligence services had laboratories, they equipped their agents with technologically sophisticated instruments, and they developed international, even worldwide, circuits.
