did have to admit that the counter-intelligence system was inadequate and began a review. In October 1908 a new Official Secrets Act was drafted to allow arrests and searches without warrant, the registration of aliens (foreigners), the use of paid agents in Britain to unmask foreign spies and copying the German system instituted in 1866, in which a police or private detective under an intelligence officer ran spies abroad. Without peacetime preparations, Britain would enter a war "fatally handicapped". Edmonds was suspicious of German intentions because of a widespread assumption that the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War had been helped by its military intelligence effort and the ineptitude of French counter-intelligence. MO5 judged that German army reservists resident in France and the consular service had sent useful information to Germany. MO5 Got hold of a copy of the 1894 edition of "" the German Army Field Manual which required the use of spies by every command. In the 1890s, Edmonds had got to know several German intelligence officers, who had told him that a new department had been established in 1901 for naval intelligence gathering about Britain, the but this was assumed to be part of military intelligence, IIIb. Several German friends told Edmonds that they had been approached by the German Imperial Admiralty () to report on the movements of warships, observe dockyards, arsenals, aircraft and munitions factories. In 1909 Le Queux published "Spies of the Kaiser" in which London and the east coast were full of German spies disguised as barbers, waiters and tourists. The denunciation of alleged spies increased and the cases were passed on to Edmonds who began to classify German visitors according to their proximity to important buildings and other structures, those who entertained parties of visiting Germans or tradesmen and photographers who lived near dockyards and ports. Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War (1905–1912), refused to credit the existence of a German spy network and few other members of the government took it seriously. Even Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the Chief of the Great German General Staff (1906–1914) claimed that an invasion might be feasible but that supplying a landing force or re-embarking it would be impossible. During 1909 Edmonds was promoted to colonel and that year told Captain Vernon Kell, his deputy during his time in the Far East, that the commander of a German landing in East Anglia