Colonel Redl Returns

Over a century after the exposure of a major Russian spy network in Vienna, Austria decides to get serious about Kremlin espionage again

“Everything old is new again” is one of those shopworn clichés which happens to contain a good deal of truth. The human experience is indeed cyclical and repetitive in many ways. The Book of Ecclesiastes noted that there’s nothing new under the sun some 2,500 years ago.

This holds true regarding espionage too. Spying is famously called the Second Oldest Profession with good reason and the essence of the espionage business hasn’t changed a great deal in millennia. Humans have been stealing secrets from each other for as long as we’ve lived in anything resembling societies. Only the technology to do so has improved.

That said, once in a while a spy case comes along that’s genuinely memorable in its formulation and impact. One of classics of this genre broke 113 years ago this month, in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Colonel Alfred Redl was exposed as a longtime mole for Russia plus a few other countries. Redl’s story was so sensational, with such deep impact on recent European history, that he can plausibly be termed the Spy of the (Twentieth) Century.

The Redl case has never fully disappeared from consciousness in Austria and his story has inspired numerous books, countless articles, and no less than four movies, the most recent arriving in 1985. A beautiful film, that take by the celebrated Hungarian director István Szabó was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, yet it regrettably bears almost no resemblance to the real spy case. The only fully accurate point in Szabó’s film is that there was an Austro-Hungarian officer named Alfred Redl: the rest is pure fiction.

This follows a common pattern with artistic takes on espionage. Even when the facts of a given espionage affair are plentifully extraordinary – Redl was, in addition to being a brilliant intelligence officer as well as arch-traitor, a promiscuous homosexual and top-shelf bon vivant with a lurid private life – artists commonly misrepresent the story. Here Szabó’s take was typical, being considerably less interesting than the actual Redl affair.