It must not be thought, from these few details of the training given to the official spies of the German system, that every member of the espionage corps is thus trained. Training such as is detailed here is only for the chief spies, the picked men who accomplish great things; few men could come out satisfactorily from the examinations set to these military and naval spies--few men, that is, of the class from which spies are recruited. The spies at "fixed posts," for instance, get very little training, since their duties do not involve nearly as much technical work as do those of the travelling members of the fraternity. Since much of the total of about 780,000 pounds per annum known to be distributed among the members of the German secret service (in addition to the probably larger sum of which no records are available) goes to the occupants of these fixed posts, it is obvious that the highly trained spy is in the minority. The highly trained spy, however, forms the nucleus and head of the system--he is a superior officer to the fixed post man or German tutor in a foreign family. The military and naval branches of the service are controlled by the Great German General Staff, while the diplomatic branch is controlled direct by the German Foreign Office, and, although recruited from among the military and naval branches, is independent of General Staff control. These divisions of the system must be taken as only approximate, for they interlink and work in and out each other to such an extent that no definite line can be drawn between them as regards actual work. They are all extensions of the plans that Stieber planned, and in all that pertains to the work of German espionage his hand is evident, his work persists, more than twenty years after his death.