"One must not confine oneself to giving money to spies. One must also know how to show them honour when they deserve it."
Stieber was Governor of Brunn, the capital of Moravia, for several months, a position which Napoleon had also allowed his spy Schulmeister to hold at several towns in his time. It has to be remembered, however, that in both cases the spies were in districts about which they were far better acquainted than any members of the military or political _personnels_. Expediency also counted for something in each appointment. At the close of the war he was appointed a Prussian privy-councillor and minister of the national police. Asked afterwards how much he had expended on his network of strategic spies and traitors who practically sold Austria to Prussia in 1866, Stieber replied:
"One cannot set down in dollars the value of bloodshed which has been avoided, nor of victories which have been secured."
That Stieber was admitted to the more intimate confidences of Bismarck would seem indicated by the fact that in the year after Sadowa, the chief of police suggested, he tells in his Memoirs, that he should be entrusted with the task of doing in France what he had done in Bohemia. This was in June 1867, when he asked Bismarck for eighteen months' time in which to supply the Chancellor with all the military and regional intelligence of the French frontiers and invasion zones, which it was necessary to possess for a successful campaign. Prussia was then paying some £52,000 a year for the secret-intelligence service, and Bismarck was not slow to perceive that Stieber in his own way was making the path of victory more smooth for von Moltke's commanders. In the month of June the Chancellor had induced King William to confer on his police-minister the order of the Red Eagle, and in the course of the evening which followed the conferring of that decoration Bismarck and Stieber were for long engaged in conversation, the momentous nature of which was soon shown by the departure of Stieber, accompanied by his aides, Zernicki and Kaltenbach, into France with the object of laying down base-lines, as the surveyors put it. Among the various results of that journey was the appointment of over 1000 spies within the invasion zones with "head-centres" at Brussels, Lausanne and Geneva. Another result of this journey, he himself tells, was his handing over to Bismarck some 1650 reports of fixed local spies, in the pay of Prussia, 90 per cent. of them Prussians, which called for (_a_) the drafting of large bodies of German agriculturists into districts which lay along the possible routes of advancing German armies, and (_b_) the sending of several thousands of female employees for service in public places as barmaids or cashiers. It was emphasised that these women should be "as pretty as possible." Several hundred retired non-commissioned officers were to be sent to France, where local "fixed spies" guaranteed them employment of a commercial kind. Furthermore in the garrison towns in the eastern departments some fifty young and pretty girls to act as servants in canteens were requisitioned by Stieber, who laid stress on the fact that women of a "high type of morality" would hardly serve his purpose, which was to extract information from drinking soldiers. Several hundred more domestic servants were to be placed among the homes of middle-class people such as doctors, lawyers, merchants. From the year 1867, and in pursuance of Stieber's plans, some 13,000 German spies of the minor order were asked for, itself a sufficiently large body of immigrants, one would imagine, to awaken the suspicions of alert French people. Between that year and 1870, Stieber had added at least 20,000 more, all of them scattered in various kinds of capacities along the routes of intended invasion from Berlin and Belgium to Paris. There was one important interlude, however.