← Back to the front page

The Ace of Spies and Other Significant Espionage Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 20, 2019 33 min

Detective - Mystery — Throughout history, spies have aroused mixed feelings of fear, loathing, and admiration. Mixed Matches

6. Background of a Traitor

Alfred Redl was the son of a railway clerk, and was born into a poor family in the Galician province of Austria-Hungary, in what is now Ukraine. Wealth and family connections were the usual prerequisites back then for joining the Austro-Hungarian Army’s officer ranks and advancing. Redl had neither, but he had been precocious from an early age and was highly intelligent, which enabled him to secure a commission.

He had a talent for languages, and his facility with Russian got him assigned to the intelligence branch. There, Redl impressed his boss, General von Geislingen, whose protege Redl became. In 1900, Geislingen promoted Redl and made him his deputy, placing him in charge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s counterintelligence corps. Redl quickly gained a reputation for innovation in what had been a disorganized and backward branch, streamlining the system, and introducing new technologies such as the use of recording devices and cameras.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.