24. A Gay Spymaster
Alfred Redl (1864 – 1913) was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, who rose to become chief of that empire’s counterintelligence from 1900 to 1912. He was eventually placed in charge of tracking down and rooting out traitors and spies. All the while, he was himself a traitor who betrayed his country. Redl sold Austria’s secrets to its main rival and likeliest future enemy, tsarist Russia, whose chief spy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire he became. It is suspected that he also spied for both the French and Italians in exchange for money.
The son of a railway clerk, Redl was born into a poor family in the Galician province of Austria-Hungary, in what is now Ukraine. He lacked wealth and family connections, the usual prerequisites in those days for joining the Austro-Hungarian Army’s officer ranks and advancing. However, Redl had been precocious from an early age and was highly intelligent. That enabled him to secure a commission. He had a talent for languages, and his facility with Russian led to his assignment to the intelligence branch. He was also gay, in an environment in which homosexuality carried a great stigma. As seen below, that led to serious trouble.