Captain Bernard Frederick Trench (17 July 1880 – 10 October 1967) was a British soldier and famous spy who was caught and convicted by the German authorities just a few years before World War I.
[3] Trench had other accomplices on his mission to scout out information about the military installations on the island of Borkum but was the only person arrested from his spy ring.
[1][5] He was an agent of the spymaster and future first director of what would become the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, Mansfield Smith-Cumming.
Trench complained that the lax security at the fort was possible because of a promise from the prisoners not to attempt to break out.
[7] Captain Trench and another British subject caught spying, Captain Bertrand Stewart, were pardoned and released by the German Kaiser as a present to Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick when Augustus married the Kaiser's daughter, Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia.