[1] Diederichs presented a memorandum arguing that without an intelligence staff it would be impossible for the navy to develop contingency plans for war.
[2] The Kaiser again approved the proposal and directed the Naval Office to implement it, but Tirpitz continued to obstruct Diederichs – this time by reducing his budget from the requested 150,000 marks to only 10,000.
It had three heads during its 18 years in existence; its first director was Commander (later Naval Captain) Arthur Tapken, whose qualifications may have been burnished by the fact that he was married to an Englishwoman.
The most important was the overseas intelligence gathering division, NI, which was managed from 1913 to 1919 by Commander (later Naval Captain) Fritz Prieger.
One of those employed by N in a minor position was Wilhelm Canaris, who rose to become head of the Abwehr, Nazi Germany's military intelligence service.
It was directly integrated into the Admiralstab and recruited exclusively from the Imperial Navy, in contrast to its more independent and less military-oriented British counterpart.
From its establishment in 1901 it sought to recruit a network of agents around the world to observe the movement of foreign warships, which in practice meant principally British ships.
BEs were originally intended to gather intelligence on foreign naval movements while VMs were to help supply German warships in wartime.
[4] Shipping employees were regarded as ideal candidates for recruitment; they were widely traveled, often expert in naval matters and were stationed across the world.
The German agent Carl Hans Lody, who spied in the UK in the early months of the First World War, was one such example of a shipping employee who had been recruited as an operative.
They include Dutch sailors Haicke Janssen and Willem Roos, who were both arrested in Great Britain and executed in the Tower of London, as well as Ernst Waldemar Melin, Augusto Alfredo Roggen and Irving Guy Ries.
[8] In addition, the German navy's operational plans changed so frequently that it made it almost impossible to undertake long-term intelligence-gathering.