Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM• 599

by adefector. Some of the clues pointed to an SIS officer who had

operated in Persia during the war and Zaehner was deeply wounded

by the idea that his own loyalty should have come under suspicion.

ZBYTEK, KAREL.A clerk in the e ́migre ́Czech Intelligence Office
(CIO) in London, which was funded by theSecret Intelligence Ser-
vice, Karel Zbytek was recruited by theCzech Intelligence Service
(StB) in 1955 and was codenamedlight. In return for large sums of
money, he betrayed CIO personnel in Belgium, Holland, Scandina-
via, Switzerland, the Middle East, West Germany, and Austria. In ad-
dition, he revealed the identities of 120 anticommunist CIO staff and
300 talent-spotter reports, thus enabling the StB to develop adouble
agentoperation. Although the CIO’s British liaison contacts con-
cluded the entire network had been penetrated, Zbytek escaped detec-
tion, and with £13,000 he had received from the StB, he bought a
small hotel in Folkestone.

ZEPPELINS.In an air raid on King’s Lynn in January 1915, two Ger-
man airships dropped 25 bombs and killed four people, transforming
modern warfare and making the enemy’s fleet of airships a target of
intense interest to British Naval Intelligence. Further raids were
mounted on England’s east coast and during 1916 eight Zeppelins
were shot down, five by aircraft. Naval Intelligence monitored the
enemy’s wireless traffic, broke theHandelsverkehrsbuchcode, and
provided a primitive early-warning system. When theL-32was de-
stroyed over Essex in September 1916, a copy of the new codebook,
theAllgemeinefunkspruchbuch, was recovered from the wreckage by
MajorBernard Trench, and all further raids were predicted and in-
tercepted.

ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM.In January 1917 the German foreign
minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a secret telegram to his ambassa-
dor in Washington, D.C., Count Bernstorff, by three different routes,
all encrypted in the same code: one was transmitted by radio from
Nauen to Sayville, Long Island; the second went via the Swedish
transatlantic cable from Stockholm; and the third was delivered to the
U.S. Embassy in Berlin for transmission on the American cable via
Copenhagen. The text announced an intention to engage in unrestric-