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THE GERMAN SECRET SERVICE IN AMERICA 1914-1918

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Count Johann von Bernstorff, the responsible director of Germany's
secret policies in America]




THE GERMAN SECRET
SERVICE IN AMERICA
1914-1918

BY

JOHN PRICE JONES

AUTHOR OF "AMERICA ENTANGLED"

AND

PAUL MERRICK HOLLISTER

[Illustration: Logo]

BOSTON

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS


Copyright, 1918,

BY SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

(INCORPORATED)




"It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary
insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no
self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights
as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The
military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They
filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators
and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf.
When they found they could not do that, their agents diligently
spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from
their allegiance--and some of these agents were men connected with
the official embassy of the German Government itself here in our own
capital. They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest
our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us
and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her--and that, not by
indirection but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office in Berlin.
They impudently denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly
executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our
people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our
own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their neighbors with
suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment and surprise whether
there was any community in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What
great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much
as we have desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice.
This flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we
withheld our hand."

--WOODROW WILSON, Flag Day Address
June 14, 1917




INTRODUCTION


A nation at war wants nothing less than complete information of her
enemy. It is hard for the mind to conceive exactly what "complete
information" means, for it includes every fact which may contain the
lightest indication of the enemy strength, her use of that strength,
and her intention. The nation which sets out to obtain complete
information of her enemy must pry into every neglected corner, fish
every innocent pool, and collect a mass of matter concerning the
industrial, social and military organization of the enemy which when
correlated, appraises her strength--and her weakness. Nothing less than
full information will satisfy the mathematical maker of war.

Germany was always precociously fond of international statistics. She
wanted--the present tense is equally applicable--full information of
America and her allies so as to attack their vulnerable points. She
got a ghastly amount of it, and she attacked. This book sets forth how
secret agents of the Teutonic governments acting under orders have
attacked our national life, both before and after our declaration of
war; how men and women in Germany's employ on American soil, planned
and executed bribery, sedition, arson, the destruction of property and
even murder, not to mention lesser violations of American law; how they
sought to subvert to the advantage of the Central Powers the aims of
the Government of the United States; how, in short, they made enemies
of the United States immediately the European war had broken out.

The facts were obtained by the writer first as a reporter on the
_New York Sun_ who for more than a year busied himself with no other
concern, and afterwards in an independent investigation. Some of
them he has cited in a previous work. This book brings the story of
Germany's secret agencies in America up to the early months of 1918.
Because the writer during the past six months has devoted his entire
time to the Liberty Loan, it became necessary for him to leave the
rearrangement of the work entirely in the hands of the co-author, and
he desires to acknowledge his complete indebtedness to the co-author
for undertaking and carrying out an assignment for which the full
measure of reward will be derived from a sharper American consciousness
of the true nature of our enemy at home and abroad.

So we dedicate this chronicle to our country.

JOHN PRICE JONES.

New York, June 1, 1918.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                                    PAGE
I THE ORGANIZATION                                            1

The economic, diplomatic and military aspects of
secret warfare in America--Germany's peace-time
organization--von Bernstorff, the diplomat--Albert, the
economist--von Papen and Boy-Ed, the men of war.

II THE CONSPIRATORS' TASK                                    19

The terrain--Lower New York--The consulates--The
economic problem of supplying Germany and
checking supplies to the Allies--The diplomatic problem
of keeping America's friendship--The military
problem in Canada, Mexico, India, etc.--Germany's
denial.

III THE RAIDERS AT SEA                                       28

The outbreak of war--Mobilization of reservists--The
Hamburg-American contract--The _Berwind_--The
_Marina Quezada_--The _Sacramento_--Naval battles.

IV THE WIRELESS SYSTEM                                       43

The German Embassy a clearing house--Sayville--German's
knowledge of U. S. wireless--Subsidized
electrical companies--Aid to the raiders--The _Emden_--The
_Geier_--Charles E. Apgar--The German code.

V MILITARY VIOLENCE                                          60

The plan to raid Canadian ports--The first Welland
Canal plot--Von Papen, von der Goltz and Tauscher--The
project abandoned--Goltz's arrest--The
Tauscher trial--Hidden arms--Louden's plan of invasion.

VI PAUL KOENIG                                               73

Justice and Metzler--Koenig's personality--von Papen's
checks--The "little black book"--Telephone codes--
Shadowing--Koenig's agents--His betrayal.

VII FALSE PASSPORTS                                          82

Hans von Wedell's bureau--The traffic in false
passports--Carl Ruroede--Methods of forgery--Adams'
coup--von Wedell's letter to von Bernstorff--Stegler--
Lody--Berlin counterfeits American passports--von Breechow.

VIII INCENDIARISM                                           100

Increased munitions production--The opening explosions--
Orders from Berlin--Von Papen and Seattle--July,
1915--The Van Koolbergen affair--The
Autumn of 1915--The Pinole explosion.

IX MORE BOMB PLOTS                                          117

Kaltschmidt and the Windsor explosions--The Port
Huron tunnel--Werner Horn--Explosions embarrass
the Embassy--Black Tom--The second Welland affair--Harry
Newton--The damage done in three years--Waiter
spies.

X FRANZ VON RINTELEN                                        138

The leak in the National City Bank--The _Minnehaha_--Von
Rintelen's training--His return to America--His
aims--His funds--Smuggling oil--The Krag-Joergensen
rifles--Von Rintelen's flight and capture.

XI SHIP BOMBS                                               154

Mobilizing destroying agents--The plotters in Hoboken--Von
Kleist's arrest and confession--The _Kirk
Oswald_ trial--Further explosions--The _Arabic_--Robert
Fay--His arrest--The ship plots decrease.

XII LABOR                                                   171

David Lamar--Labor's National Peace Council--The
embargo conference--The attempted longshoremen's
strike--Dr. Dumba's recall.

XIII THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA                           190

The mistress of the seas--Plotting in New York--The
_Lusitania's_ escape in February, 1915--The advertised
warning--The plot--May 7, 1915--Diplomatic
correspondence--Gustave Stahl--The results.

XIV COMMERCIAL VENTURES                                     203

German law in America--Waetzoldt's reports--The
British blockade--A report from Washington--Stopping
the chlorine supply--Speculation in wool--Dyestuffs
and the _Deutschland_--Purchasing phenol--The
Bridgeport Projectile Company--The lost portfolio--The
recall of the attachés--A summary of Dr. Albert's
efforts.

XV THE PUBLIC MIND                                          225

Dr. Bertling--The _Staats-Zeitung_--George Sylvester
Viereck and _The Fatherland_--Efforts to buy a press
association--Bernhardi's articles--Marcus Braun and
_Fair Play_--Plans for a German news syndicate--Sander,
Wunnenberg, Bacon and motion pictures--The
German-American Alliance--Its purposes--Political
activities--Colquitt of Texas--The "Wisconsin Plan"--
Lobbying--Misappropriation of German Red Cross
funds--Friends of Peace--The American Truth Society.

XVI HINDU-GERMAN CONSPIRACIES                               252

The Society for Advancement in India--"Gaekwar
Scholarships"--Har Dyal and _Gadhr_--India in 1914--
Papen's report--German and Hindu agents sent to the
Orient--Gupta in Japan--The raid on von Igel's office--
Chakravarty replaces Gupta--The _Annie Larsen_
and _Maverick_ filibuster--Von Igel's memoranda--Har
Dyal in Berlin--A request for anarchist agents--Ram
Chandra--Plots against the East and West Indies--
Correspondence between Bernstorff and Berlin,
1916--Designs on China, Japan and Africa--Chakravarty
arrested--The conspirators indicted.

XVII MEXICO, IRELAND, AND BOLO                              288

Huerta arrives in New York--The restoration plot--German
intrigue in Central America--The Zimmermann
note--Sinn Fein--Sir Roger Casement and the
Easter Rebellion--Bolo Pacha in America and France--A
warning.

XVIII AMERICA GOES TO WAR                                   320

Bernstorff's request for bribe-money--The President
on German spies--Interned ships seized--Enemy
aliens--Interning German agents--The water-front and
finger-print regulations--Pro-German acts since April,
1917--A warning and a prophecy.

APPENDIX                                                    335

A German Propagandist.




List of Illustrations


Count Johann von Bernstorff    _Frontispiece_

                                         PAGE

The German Embassy in Washington            2

Captain Franz von Papen                    12

Captain Karl Boy-Ed                        16

William J. Flynn                           22

Thomas J. Tunney                           26

Dr. Karl Buenz                             32

Passport given to Horst von der Goltz      64

Paul Koenig                                74

Hans von Wedell and his wife               84

Franz von Rintelen                        138

Robert Fay                                166

Dr. Constantin Dumba                      184

The _Lusitania_                           190

Advertisement of the German Embassy       194

Checks signed by Adolf Pavenstedt         230

George Sylvester Viereck                  234

Letter from Count von Bernstorff          236

Check from Count von Bernstorff           238

Letter-paper of "The Friends of Peace"    250

Dr. Chakravarty                           284

Jeremiah A. O'Leary                       302

Paul Bolo Pacha                           310




THE GERMAN SECRET SERVICE IN AMERICA




CHAPTER I

THE ORGANIZATION

     The economic, diplomatic and military aspects of secret warfare in
     America--Germany's peace-time organization--von Bernstorff, the
     diplomat--Albert, the economist--von Papen and Boy-Ed, the men of
     war.


When, in the summer of 1914, the loaded dice fell for war, Germany
began a campaign overseas as thoughtfully forecasted as that first
headlong flood which rolled to the Marne. World-domination was the
Prussian objective. It is quite natural that the United States, whose
influence affected a large part of the world, should have received
swift attention from Berlin. America and Americans could serve
Germany's purpose in numerous ways, and the possible assets of the
United States had been searchingly assayed in Berlin long before the
arrival of "Der Tag."

The day dawned--and Germany found herself hemmed in by enemies. Her
navy did not control the oceans upon which she had depended for a large
percentage of her required food and raw materials, and upon which she
must continue to depend if her output were to keep pace with her war
needs. If surprise-attack should fail to bring the contest to a sudden
and favorable conclusion, Germany was prepared to accept the more
probable alternative of a contest of economic endurance. Therefore, she
reasoned, supplies must continue to come from America.

Of importance scarcely secondary to the economic phase of her warfare
in the United States was the diplomatic problem. Here was a nation of
infinite resources, a people of infinite resource. This nation must
be enlisted on the side of the Central Powers; failing that, must be
kept friendly; under no circumstances was she to be allowed to enlist
with the Allies. One fundamental trait of Americans Germany held too
lightly--their blood-kinship to Britons--and it is a grimly amusing
commentary upon the confidence of the German in bonds Teutonic that he
believed that the antidote to this racial "weakness" of ours lay in the
large numbers of Germans who had settled here and become Americans of
sorts. But the German was alarmingly if not absolutely correct in his
estimate, for upon the conduct and zeal of Germans in America actually
depended much of the success of Germany's diplomatic tactics in America.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

The German Embassy in Washington, headquarters and clearing-house of
German intrigue in the world outside Mittel-Europa, 1914-1917]

The war, then, so far as the United States figured in Germany's
plan, was economic and diplomatic. But it was also military. German
representatives in the United States were bound by oath to coöperate
to their utmost in all military enterprises within their reach. With a
certain few notable exceptions, no such enterprises came within their
reach, and if the reader anticipates from that fact a disappointing
lack of violence in the narrative to follow, let him remember that
"all's fair in war," and that every German activity in the United
States, whether it was economic, diplomatic or military, was carried on
with a certain Prussian thoroughness which was chiefly characterized by
brutal violence.

We have come to believe that thoroughness is the first and last word in
German organization. Any really thorough organization must be promptly
convertible to new activities without loss of motion. If these new
activities are unexpected, the change is more or less of an experiment,
and its possibilities are not ominous. But truly dangerous is the
organization which transfers suddenly to coping with the expected.
Germany had expected war for forty years.

Her peace-time organization in America consisted of four executives:
an ambassador, a fiscal agent, a military attaché, and a naval attaché.
Its chief was the ambassador, comparable in his duties and privileges
to the president of a corporation, the representative with full
authority to negotiate with other organizations, and responsible to his
board of directors--the foreign office in Berlin. Its treasurer was
the fiscal agent. And its department heads were the military and naval
attachés, each responsible in some degree to his superiors in matters
of policy and finances, and answerable also to Berlin.

The functions of the chief were two-fold. Convincing evidence
produced by the State Department has placed at his door the ultimate
responsibility for executing Germany's commands not in the United
States alone, but throughout all of the world excepting Middle Europe.
Under his eyes passed Berlin's instructions to her envoys in both
Americas, and through his hands passed their reports. He directed
and delegated the administration of all German policy in the western
world and the far east, and of course directed all strictly diplomatic
enterprises afoot in the United States.

Germany could hardly have chosen an abler envoy than this latest of all
the Bernstorffs, Johann, a statesman whose ancestors for generations
had been Saxon diplomats. A glance at the man's countenance convinced
one of his powers of concentration: the many lines of his face seemed
to focus on a point between his eyebrows. And yet his expression
was hardly grim. The modeling of his head was unusually strong, his
features sensitive, with no trace of weakness. If there had been
weakness about his mouth, it was concealed by the conventional ferocity
of a Hohenzollern moustache, and yet those untruthful lips could
part in an ingratiating smile which flashed ingenuous friendliness.
His frame was tall and slender, his mannerisms suggested carefully
bridled nervous activity. The entire appearance of the man may best be
described by a much-abused term--he was "distinguished."

Count von Bernstorff, once his nation had declared war upon France and
England, went to war with the United States. As ambassador, diplomatic
courtesy gave him a scope of observation limited only by the dignity of
his position. A seat in a special gallery in the Senate and House of
Representatives was always ready for his occupancy; he could virtually
command the attention of the White House; and senators, congressmen
and office-holders from German-American districts respected him.
Messengers kept him in constant touch with the line-up of Congress
on important issues, and two hours later that line-up was known in
the Foreign Office in Berlin. As head and front of the German spy
system in America, he held cautiously aloof from all but the most
instrumental acquaintances: men and women of prominent political and
social influence who he knew were inclined, for good and sufficient
reasons, to help him. One woman, whose bills he paid at a Fifth Avenue
gown house, was the wife of a prominent broker and another woman of
confessedly German affiliations who served him lived within a stone's
throw of the Metropolitan Museum and its nearby phalanx of gilded
dwellings (her husband's office was in a building at 11 Broadway,
of which more anon); a third woman intimate lived in a comfortable
apartment near Fifth Avenue--an apartment selected for her, though
she was unaware of it, by secret agents of the United States. During
the early days of the war the promise of social sponsorship which any
embassy in Washington could extend proved bait for a number of ingénues
of various ages, with ambition and mischief in their minds, and the
gracious Ambassador played them smoothly and dexterously. Mostly they
were not German women, for the German women of America were not so
likely to be useful socially, nor as a type so astute as to qualify
them for von Bernstorff's delicate work. To those whom he chose to
see he was courteous, and superficially frank almost to the point of
naïveté. The pressure of negotiation between Washington and Berlin
became more and more exacting as the war progressed, yet he found time
to command a campaign whose success would have resulted in disaster
to the United States. That he was not blamed for the failure of that
campaign when he returned to Germany in April, 1917, is evidenced
by his prompt appointment to the court of Turkey, a difficult and
important post, and in the case of Michaelis, a stepping-stone to the
highest post in the Foreign Office.

Upon the shoulders of Dr. Heinrich Albert, privy counsellor and
fiscal agent of the German Empire, fell the practical execution of
German propaganda throughout America. He was the American agent of
a government which has done more than any other to coöperate with
business towards the extension of influence abroad, on the principle
that "the flag follows the constitution." As such he had had his
finger on the pulse of American trade, had catalogued exhaustively
the economic resources of the country, and held in his debt, as his
nation's treasurer in America, scores of bankers, manufacturers and
traders to whom Germany had extended subsidy. As such also he was the
paymaster of the Imperial secret diplomatic and consular agents.

You could find him almost any day until the break with Germany in a
small office in the Hamburg-American Building (a beehive of secret
agents) at No. 45 Broadway, New York. He was tall and slender, and
wore the sombre frock coat of the European business man with real
grace. His eyes were blue and clear, his face clean-shaven and faintly
sabre-scarred, and his hair blond. He impressed one as an unusual young
man in a highly responsible position. His greeting to visitors, of whom
he had few, was punctilious, his bow low, and his manner altogether
polite. He encouraged conversation rather than offered it. He had none
of the "hard snap" of the energetic, outspoken, brusque American man of
business. Dr. Albert was a smooth-running, well-turned cog in the great
machine of Prussian militarism.

Upon him rested the task of spending between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000
a week for German propaganda. He spent thirty million at least--and
only Germany knows how much more--in secret agency work, also known
by the uglier names of bribery, sedition and conspiracy. He admitted
that he wasted a half million or more. He had a joint account with
Bernstorff in the Chase National Bank, New York, which amounted at
times to several millions. His resources gave weight to his utterances
in the quiet office overlooking Broadway, or in the German Club in
Central Park South, or in the consulates or hotels of Chicago and New
Orleans and San Francisco, to which he made occasional trips to confer
with German business men.

His colleagues held him in high esteem. His methods were quiet and
successful, and his participation in the offences against America's
peace might have passed unproven had he not been engaged in a
too-absorbing conversation one day in August, 1915, upon a Sixth Avenue
elevated train. He started up to leave the train at Fiftieth Street,
and carelessly left his portfolio behind him--to the tender care of
a United States Secret Service man. It contained documents revealing
his complicity in enterprises the magnitude of which beggars the
imagination. The publication of certain of those documents awoke the
slumbering populace to a feeling of chagrin and anger almost equal to
his own at the loss of his dossier. And yet he stayed on in America,
and returned with the ambassadorial party to Germany only after the
severance of diplomatic relations in 1917, credited with expert
generalship on the economic sector of the American front.

Germany's military attaché to the United States was Captain Franz
von Papen. His mission was the study of the United States army. In
August, 1914, it may be assumed that he had absorbed most of the useful
information of the United States army, which at that moment was no
superhuman problem. In July of that year he was in Mexico, observing,
among other matters, the effect of dynamite explosions on railways.
He was quite familiar with Mexico. According to Admiral von Hintze he
had organized a military unit in the lukewarm German colony in Mexico
City, and he used one or more of the warring factions in the southern
republic to test the efficacy of various means of warfare.

The rumble of a European war sent him scurrying northward. From Mexico
on July 29 he wired Captain Boy-Ed--of whom more presently--in New York
to


     " ... arrange business for me too with Pavenstedt,"


which referred to the fact that Boy-Ed had just engaged office space in
the offices of G. Amsinck & Company, New York, which was at that time
a German house of which Adolph Pavenstedt was the president, but which
has since been taken over by American interests. And he added:


     "Then inform Lersner. The Russian attaché ordered back to
     Washington by telegraph. On outbreak of war have intermediaries
     locate by detective where Russian and French intelligence office."


The latter part of the message is open to two interpretations: that
Boy-Ed was to have detectives locate the Russian and French secret
service officers; or that Boy-Ed was to place German spies in those
offices.

Captain von Papen reported to his ministry of war anent the railway
explosions:


     "I consider it out of the question that explosives prepared in
     this way would have to be reckoned with in a European war...."


a significant opinion, which he changed later.

What of the man himself? He was all that "German officer" suggested at
that time to any one who had traveled in Germany. His military training
had been exhaustive. Though he had not seen "active service," his life,
from the early youth when he had been selected from his gymnasium
fellows for secret service in Abteilung III of the great bureau, had
been unusually active. He had traveled as a civilian over various
countries, drawing maps, harking to the sentiment of the people, and
checking from time to time the operations of resident German agents
abroad. His disguises were thorough, as this incident will illustrate:
In Hamburg, at the army riding school where von Papen was trained,
young officers are taught the French style. Yet one fine morning in
Central Park he stopped to chat with an acquaintance who had bought a
mare. Von Papen admired the mount, promptly named its breed, and told
in what counties in Ireland the best specimens of that breed could
be found--information called up from a riding tour he had made over
the length and breadth of Ireland. It is commonly said that horsemen
trained in the French style cling to its mannerisms, but a cavalier
revealing those mannerisms in Ireland, where the style is exclusively
English, would have attracted undue attention. So he had disguised even
his horsemanship!

[Illustration: _Copyright, International News Service_

Captain Franz von Papen]

A man who moves constantly about among more or less unsuspecting
peoples seeking their military weakness becomes intolerant. Tolerance
is scarcely a German military trait, and in that respect Captain
von Papen was consistently loyal to his own superior organization.
"I always say to those idiotic Yankees they had better hold their
tongues," he wrote to his wife in a letter which fell later into the
hands of those same "bloedsinnige" Yankees. He was inordinately proud
of his facility in operating unobserved, arrogant of his ability, and
blunt in his criticism of his associates. He telegraphed Boy-Ed on one
occasion to be more cautious. The gracious colleague replied, in a
letter:


     "Dear Papen: A secret agent who returned from Washington this
     evening made the following statement: 'The Washington people
     are very much excited about von Papen and are having a constant
     watch kept on him. They are in possession of a whole heap of
     incriminating evidence against him. They have no evidence against
     Count B. and Captain B-E (!).'"


And Boy-Ed, a trifle optimistically, perhaps, added:


     "In this connection I would suggest with due diffidence that
     perhaps the first part of your telegram is worded rather too
     emphatically."


Von Papen was a man of war, a Prussian, the Feldmarschal of the Kaiser
in America. In appearance he bespoke his vigor: he was well set up,
rawboned, with a long nose, prominent ears, keen eyes and a strong
lower jaw. He was energetic in speech and swift in formulating daring
plans. In those first frantic weeks after the declaration of war he
reached out in all directions to snap taut the strings that held
his organization together--German reservists who had been peaceful
farmers, shopkeepers or waiters, all over the United States, were
mobilized for service, and paraded through Battery Park in New York
shouting "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles!" to the strains
of the Austrian hymn, while they waited for Papen's orders from a
building near by, and picked quarrels with a counter procession of
Frenchmen screaming the immortal "Marseillaise." Up in his office sat
the attaché, summoning, assigning, despatching his men on missions
that were designed to terrorize America as the spiked helmets were
terrorizing Belgium at that moment.

And he, too, failed. Although von Papen marshaled his consuls, his
reservists, his thugs, his women, and his skilled agents, for a
programme of violence the like of which America had never experienced,
the military phase of the war was not destined for decision here, and
there is again something ironical in the fact that the arrogance of
Captain von Papen's outrages hastened the coming of war to America and
the decline of Captain von Papen's style of warfare in America.

The Kaiser's naval attaché at Washington was Karl Boy-Ed, the child
of a German mother and a Turkish father, who had elected a naval
career and shown a degree of aptitude for his work which qualified
him presently for the post of chief lieutenant to von Tirpitz. He was
one of the six young officers who were admitted to the chief councils
of the German navy, as training for high executive posts. In the
capacity of news chief of the Imperial navy, Boy-Ed carried on two
highly successful press campaigns to influence the public on the eve of
requests for heavy naval appropriations, the second, in 1910, calling
for 400,000,000 marks. He spread broadcast through cleverly contrived
pamphlets and through articles placed in the subsidized press, a
national resentment against British naval dominion. His duties took him
all over the world as naval observer, and he may be credited more than
casually with weaving the plan-fabric of marine supremacy with which
Germany proposed in due time to envelop the world.

So he impressed diplomatic Washington in 1911 as a polished
cosmopolite. Polished he was, measured by the standards of diplomatic
Washington, for rare was the young American of Boy-Ed's age who had
his cultivation, his wide experience, and his brilliant charm. He was
sought after by admiring mothers long before he was sought after by the
Secret Service; he moved among the clubs of Washington and New York
making intimates of men whose friendship and confidence would serve
the Fatherland, cloaking his real designs by frivolity and frequent
attendances at social functions. His peace-time duties had been to
study the American navy; to familiarize himself with its ship power and
personnel, with its plans for expansion, its theories of strategy, its
means of supply, and finally, with the coast defenses of the country.
He had learned his lesson, and furnished Berlin with clear reports.
On those reports, together with those of his colleagues in other
countries, hinged Germany's readiness to enter war, for it would have
been folly to attempt a war of domination with America an unknown,
uncatalogued naval power. (It will be well to recall that the submarine
is an American invention, and that Germany's greatest submarine
development took place in the years 1911-1914.)

[Illustration: _Copyright, International News Service_

Captain Karl Boy-Ed (on the right)]

And then, suddenly, he dropped the cloak. The Turk in him stood at
attention while the German in him gave him sharp orders--commands to
be carried out with Oriental adroitness and Prussian finish. Then
those who had said lightly that "Boy-Ed knows more about our navy than
Annapolis itself" began to realize that they had spoken an alarming
truth. His war duties were manifold. Like von Papen, he had his corps
of reservists, his secret agents, his silent forces everywhere ready
for active coöperation in carrying out the naval enterprises Germany
should see fit to undertake in Western waters.

America learned gradually of the machinations of the four executives,
Bernstorff, Albert, Papen and Boy-Ed. America had not long to wait
for evidences of their activity, but it was a long time before the
processes of investigation revealed their source. It was inevitable
that they could not work undiscovered for long, and they seem to have
realized that they must do the utmost damage at top speed. Their own
trails were covered for a time by the obscure identities of their
subordinates. The law jumps to no conclusions. Their own persons were
protected by diplomatic courtesy. It required more than two years
of tedious search for orthodox legal evidence to arraign these men
publicly in their guilt, and when that evidence had finally been
obtained, and Germany's protest of innocence had been deflated, it was
not these men who suffered, but their country, and the price she paid
was war with America.

A hundred or more of their subordinates have been convicted of various
criminal offenses and sent to prison. Still more were promptly interned
in prison camps at the outbreak of war in 1917. The secret army
included all types, from bankers to longshoremen. Many of them were
conspicuous figures in American public life, and of these no small
part were allowed to remain at large under certain restrictions--and
under surveillance. Germany's army in the United States was powerful
in numbers; the fact that so many agents were working destruction
probably hastened their discovery; the loyalty of many so-called
German-Americans was always questionable. The public mind, confused
as it had never been before by the news of war, was groping about for
sound fundamentals, and was being tantalized with false principles by
the politicians. Meanwhile Count von Bernstorff was watching Congress
and the President, Dr. Albert was busy in great schemes, Captain von
Papen was commanding an active army of spies, and Captain Boy-Ed was
engaged in a bitter fight with the British navy.




CHAPTER II

THE CONSPIRATORS' TASK

     The terrain--Lower New York--The consulates--The economic problem
     of supplying Germany and checking supplies to the Allies--The
     diplomatic problem of keeping America's friendship--The military
     problem in Canada, Mexico, India, etc.--Germany's denial.


The playwright selects from the affairs of a group of people a few
characters and incidents, and works them together into a three-hour
plot. He may include no matter which is not relevant to the development
of his story, and although in the hands of the artist the play seems
to pierce clearly into the characters of the persons involved, in
reality he is constructing a framework, whose angles are only the more
prominent salients of character and episode. The stage limits him,
whether his story takes place in the kitchen or on the battlefield.

The drama of German spy operations in America is of baffling
proportions. Its curtain rose long before the war; its early episodes
were grave enough to have caused, any one of them, a nine-days' wonder
in the press, its climax was rather a huge accumulation of intolerable
disasters than a single outstanding incident, and its dénouement
continued long after America's declaration of war. In the previous
chapter we have accepted our limitations and introduced only the four
chief characters of the play. It is necessary, in describing the
motives for their enterprises, to appreciate the problems which their
scene of operations presented.

The world was their workshop. Plots hatched in Berlin and developed in
Washington and New York bore fruit from Sweden to India, from Canada to
Chili. The economic importance of the United States in the war needs
no further proof than its vast area, its miles of seacoast, its volume
of export and import, and its producing power. As a diplomatic problem
it offered, among other things, a public opinion of a hundred million
people of parti- temperament, played upon by a force of some
40,000 publications. As a military factor, the United States possessed
a strong fleet, owned the only Atlantic-Pacific waterway, was bounded
on the south by Mexico and the coveted Gulf, and on the north by one of
Germany's enemies. There was hardly a developed section of the nation
which did not require prompt and radical German attention, or one
which did not receive it in proportion to its industrial development.
Washington, as the governmental capital, and New York as the real
capital became at once the headquarters of German operations in the
western world.

Count von Bernstorff directed all enterprises from the Imperial Embassy
in Washington, and from the Ritz-Carlton in New York. An ambassador
was once asked by an ingenuous woman at a New York dinner whether he
often ran counter of European spies. "Oh, yes," he replied. "I used to
stop at the ----, but my baggage was searched by German agents so often
that I moved to the ----. But there it was just as bad." "Didn't you
complain to the management?"--the lady wanted particulars. "No," the
diplomat answered naturally, "for you see every time Bernstorff stops
at the ---- I have his baggage searched, too!"

The strands of intrigue focussed from every corner of America upon
the lower tip of Manhattan. In a tall building at 11 Broadway, which
towers over Bowling Green and confronts the New York Custom House,
Captain Boy-Ed had his office. A long stone's throw to the northward
stood the Hamburg-American building; there Dr. Albert carried on much
of his business. Captain von Papen had offices on the twenty-fifth
floor of No. 60 Wall Street. If we regard 11 Broadway as the tip of
a triangle, with Wall Street and Broadway forming its right angle and
60 Wall Street as its other extremity, we find that its imaginary
hypotenuse travels through the building of J. P. Morgan & Company,
chief bankers for the Allies; through the New York Stock Exchange,
where the so-called "Christmas leak" turned a pretty penny for
certain German sympathizers in 1916; through the home of the Standard
Oil Companies, as well as through several great structures of less
strategic importance. There is more than mere coincidence in this
geometrical freak--Germany held her stethoscope as close as possible to
the heart of American business. Fortunately, however, the offices of
Chief William J. Flynn--until January, 1918, head of the United States
Secret Service--were in the Custom House near by.

After business hours these men met their subordinates at various
rendezvous in the city; the hotels were convenient, the Manhattan was
frequently appointed, and the Deutscher Verein at 112 Central Park
South was the liveliest ganglion of all the nerve centers of a system
of communication which tapped every section of the great community.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

William J. Flynn, chief of the United States Secret Service until 1918,
who led the hunt of the German spy]

In the lesser cities the German consulate served as the nucleus
for the organization. That in San Francisco is conspicuous for its
activity, for it prosecuted its own warfare on the entire Pacific
coast. Wherever it was necessary German sympathizers furnished
accommodations for offices and storage room. Headquarters of every
character dotted the country from salons to saloons, from skyscrapers
to cellars, each an active control in the manipulation of Germany's
almost innumerable enterprises.

Those enterprises may be best outlined perhaps, by recalling the three
phases of warfare which Germany had to pursue. America had shipped
foodstuffs and raw materials in enormous quantities for many years to
Germany. Dr. Albert must see to it that she continue to do so. The
Imperial funds were at his disposal. He had already the requisite
contact with American business. But let him also exert his utmost
influence upon America to stop supplying the Allies. If he could do it
alone, so much the better; if not, he was at liberty to call upon the
military and naval attachés. But in any case "food and arms for Germany
and none for the Allies" was the economic war-cry.

American supplies must be purchased for Germany and shipped through
the European neutral nations, running the blockade. If capital
proved obstinate and the Allies covered the market, it would be well
to remember that labor produced supplies; labor must therefore be
prevented from producing or shipping to the Allies. If labor refused to
be interfered with, the cargoes should be destroyed.

His enormous task would depend, of course, very much upon the turn of
affairs diplomatic. The State Department must be kept amicable. The
Glad Hand was to be extended to official America, while the Mailed Fist
thrashed about in official America's constituencies. Thus also with
Congress, through influential lobbying or the pressure of constituents.
Count von Bernstorff knew that the shout raised in a far-off state by a
few well-rehearsed pacifists, reinforced by a few newspaper comments,
would carry loud and clear to Washington. Upon his shoulders rested
the entire existence of the German plan, and he spent a highly active
and trying thirty months in Washington in an attempt to avoid the
inevitable diplomatic rupture.

The military problem quickly resolved itself into two enterprises:
carrying war to the enemy, and giving aid and comfort to its own
forces--in this case the German navy. As the war progressed, and the
opportunity for strictly military operations became less likely, the
two Captains occupied their time in injecting a quite military flavor
into the enterprises Bernstorff and Albert had on foot. As a strategic
measure Mexico must divert America's attention from Europe and remove
to the border her available forces. Meanwhile, German reservists
must be supplied to their home regiments. Failing that they must be
mobilized for service against Germany's nearest enemy here--Canada.
German raiders at sea must be supplied. German communication with her
military forces abroad must be maintained uninterrupted.

Long after the departure of the principals for their native land the
enterprises persisted. It may be well here to extend to the secret
agents of the United States the tribute which is their due. To Chief
Flynn, of the United States Secret Service of the Treasury Department,
to A. Bruce Bielaski, head of the special agents of the Department of
Justice, to W. M. Offley, former Superintendent of the New York Bureau
of Special Agents, to Roger B. Wood, Assistant United States District
Attorney, to his successor, John C. Knox, (now a Federal judge), to
Raymond B. Sarfaty, Mr. Wood's assistant who developed the Rintelen
case, to former Police Commissioner Arthur Woods of New York, his
deputy, Guy Scull, his police captain, Thomas J. Tunney, and to the
men who worked obscurely and tirelessly with them to avert disasters
whose fiendish intention shook the faith if not the courage of a
nation. Those men found Germany out in time.

[Illustration: Inspector Thomas J. Tunney of the New York Police
Department, head of the "Bomb Squad" and foremost in apprehending many
important German agents]

Germany was fluent in her denials. When the President in his message
to Congress in December, 1915, bitterly attacked Germans and
German-Americans for their activities in America, accusing the latter
of treason, the German government authorized a statement to the Berlin
correspondent of the New York _Sun_ on December 19, 1915, to the effect
that it


     "naturally has never knowingly accepted the support of any person,
     group of persons, society or organization seeking to promote the
     cause of Germany in the United States by illegal acts, by counsels
     of violence, by contravention of law, or by any means whatever
     that could offend the American people in the pride of their own
     authority. If it should be alleged that improper acts have been
     committed by representatives of the German Government they could
     be easily dealt with. To any complaints upon proof as may be
     submitted by the American Government suitable response will be
     duly made.... Apparently the enemies of Germany have succeeded
     in creating the impression that the German Government is in some
     way, morally or otherwise, responsible for what Mr. Wilson has
     characterized as anti-American activities, comprehending attacks
     upon property in violation of the rules which the American
     Government has seen fit to impose upon the course of neutral
     trade. This the German Government absolutely denies. It cannot
     specifically repudiate acts committed by individuals over whom it
     has no control, and of whose movements it is neither officially
     nor unofficially informed."


To this statement there is one outstanding answer. It is an excerpt
from the German book of instructions for officers:


     "Bribery of the enemy's subjects with the object of obtaining
     military advantages, acceptances of offers of treachery,
     reception of deserters, utilization of the discontented elements
     in the population, support of the pretenders and the like are
     permissible; indeed international law is in no way opposed to
     the exploitation of the crimes of third parties (assassination,
     incendiarism, robbery and the like) to the prejudice of the enemy.
     Considerations of chivalry, generosity and honor may denounce in
     such cases a hasty and unsparing exploitation of such advantages
     as indecent and dishonorable, but law, which is less touchy,
     allows it. The ugly and inherently immoral aspect of such methods
     cannot affect the recognition of their lawfulness. The necessary
     aim of war gives the belligerent the right and imposes upon
     him, according to circumstances, the duty not to let slip the
     important, it may be decisive, advantages to be gained by such
     means."

     ("The War Book of the German General Staff," translated by J. H.
     Morgan, M.A., pp. 113-114.)




CHAPTER III

THE RAIDERS AT SEA

     The outbreak of war--Mobilization of reservists--The
     Hamburg-American contract--The _Berwind_--The _Marina
     Quezada_--The _Sacramento_--Naval battles.


A fanatic student in the streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia, threw a bomb at
a visiting dignitary, and the world went to war. That occurred on the
sunny forenoon of June 28, 1914. The assassin was chased by the police,
the newspaper men, and the photographers, who reached him almost
simultaneously, and presently the world knew that the Archduke Francis
Ferdinand, of Austria, was the victim, and that a plain frightened
fellow, struggling in the shadow of a doorway, was his assailant.

Austria's resentment of the crime mounted during July and boiled
over in the ultimatum of July 23. Five days later, with Germany's
permission, Austria declared war on Servia. By this time continental
tempers had been aroused, and the Central Empires knew that "Der Tag"
had come. Austria, Russia, Germany, England, France and Belgium entered
the lists within a fortnight.

By mid-July Germany had warned her agents in other lands of the
imminence of war and a quiet mobilization had begun of the more
important reservists in America. Captain von Papen, after dispatching
his telegram from Mexico via El Paso to Captain Boy-Ed, hurried to
Washington, arriving there on August 3. He began to weld together
into a vast band the scientists, experts, secret agents and German
army-reservists, who were under German military oaths, and were
prepared to gather information or to execute a military enterprise "zu
Befehl!" How rapidly he assembled his staff is shown in testimony given
on the witness stand by "Horst von der Goltz," alias Bridgeman Taylor,
alias Major Wachendorf, a German spy who had been a major in a Mexican
army until July.

A German consul in El Paso had sounded out Goltz's willingness to
return to German service. "A few days later, the 3rd of August, 1914,
license was given by my commanding officer to separate myself from
the service of my brigade for the term of six months. I left directly
for El Paso, Texas, where I was told by Mr. Kueck, German Consul at
Chihuahua, Mexico, who stayed there, to put myself at the disposition
of Captain von Papen." This was two days before the final declaration
of war.

All German and Austro-Hungarian consulates received orders to
coördinate their own staffs for war service. Germany herself supplied
the American front with men by wireless commands to all parts of the
world. Captain Hans Tauscher, who enjoyed the double distinction of
being agent in America for the Krupps and husband of a noted operatic
singer, Mme. Johanna Gadski, chanced to be in Berlin when war broke
out, reported for duty and was at once detailed to return to the United
States and report to von Papen, as Wilhelmstrasse saw the usefulness of
an ordnance expert in intimate touch with our Ordnance Department and
our explosives plants. Two German officers detailed to topographical
duty, who had spent years mapping Japan, and were engaged in the same
work in British Columbia, jumped the border to the United States,
taking with them their families, their information and their fine
surveying and photographic instruments, and in the blocking out of the
country which the wise men in the East were performing, were assigned
to the White Mountains. Railroads and ships to the Atlantic seaboard
bore every day new groups of reserve officers from the Orient and
South America to New York for sailing orders.

They found von Papen already there. He established a consultation
headquarters at once with Boy-Ed in a room which they rented in the
offices of G. Amsinck & Co., at 6 Hanover Street. From that time
forward, New York was to be his base of operations, and it was at that
moment especially convenient to von Bernstorff's summer establishment
at Newport.

The naval situation at once became active. In the western and southern
Atlantic a scattered fleet of German cruisers was still at large. The
British set out eagerly to the chase. Security lay in southern waters,
and the German craft dodged back and forth through the Straits of
Magellan. From time to time the quarry was forced by the remoteness of
supply to show himself, and a battle followed; in the intervals, the
Germans lay _perdu_, dashing into port for supplies and out again to
concealment, or wandering over seldom traveled ocean tracks to meet
coal and provision ships sent out from America.

Captain Boy-Ed received from Berlin constant advices of the movements
of his vessels. On July 31, Dr. Karl Buenz, the American head of the
Hamburg-American Line, had a cable from Berlin which he read and then
forwarded to the Embassy in Washington for safekeeping. Until 1912
Buenz had had no steamship experience, having been successively a judge
in Germany, a consul in Chicago and New York, and minister to Mexico.
When at the age of 70 he was appointed Hamburg-American agent, one of
the first matters which came to his attention was the consummation of
a contract between the Admiralty Division of the German government and
the steamship line, which provided for the provisioning, during war,
of German ships at sea, using America as a base. This contract was
jealously guarded by the Embassy.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Dr. Karl Buenz, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line]

The cablegram of July 31 called on Dr. Buenz to carry out this
contract. There was consultation at once with Boy-Ed for the location
of the vessels to be supplied, merchant ships were chartered or
purchased, then loaded, and despatched. The first to leave New York
harbor was the _Berwind_. There was hesitancy among the conspirators as
to who should apply for her clearance papers--documents of which Dr.
Buenz protested he knew nothing. They finally told G. B. Kulenkampff,
a banker and exporter, that the _Berwind_ was loaded with coal, and
directed him to get the clearance papers. He swore to a false manifest
of her cargo and got them. The _Berwind_ carried coal to be sure--but
she also carried food for German warships, and she was not bound for
Buenos Aires, as her clearance papers stated. Thus the United States,
by innocently issuing false papers, made herself, on the third day of
the war, a party to German naval operations.

The steamship _Lorenzo_ dropped down the harbor, ostensibly for Buenos
Aires, on the following day, August 6, cleared by a false manifest, and
bearing coal and food for German sailors. On these ships, and on the
_Thor_ (from Newport News for Fray Bentos, Uruguay), on the _Heine_
(from Philadelphia on August 6 for La Guayra), on the _J. S. Mowinckel_
and the _Nepos_ (out of Philadelphia for Monrovia) and others Boy-Ed
and Buenz had placed supercargoes bearing secret instructions. These
men had authority to give navigating orders to the captains once they
were outside the three-mile limit--orders to keep a rendezvous with
German battleships by wireless somewhere in the Atlantic wastes.

The _Berwind_ approached the island of Trinidad and Herr Poeppinghaus,
who was her supercargo, directed the captain to lie to. Five German
ships, the _Kap Trafalgar_, _Pontus_, _Elinor Woerman_, _Santa Lucia_
and _Eber_, approached and the transfer of supplies started. It was
interrupted by the British converted cruiser _Carmania_. She engaged
in a brisk two-hour duel with the _Kap Trafalgar_ which ended only when
the latter sank into the tropical ocean. The _Berwind_ meanwhile put
the horizon between herself and the _Carmania_.

Few of the chartered ships carried out their intentions, although their
adventures were various. Hear the story of the _Unita_: Her skipper was
Eno Olsen, a Canadian citizen born in Norway. Urhitzler, the German spy
placed aboard, made the mistake of assuming that Olsen was friendly to
Germany. He gave him his "orders," and the skipper balked. "'Nothing
doing,' I told the supercargo," Captain Olsen testified later, with a
Norwegian twist to his pronunciation. "She's booked to Cadiz, and to
Cadiz she goes! So the supercargo offered me $500 to change my course.
'Nothing doing--nothing doing for a million dollars,' I told him. The
third day out he offered me $10,000. Nothing doing. So," announced
Captain Olsen with finality, "I sailed the _Unita_ to Cadiz and after
we got there I sold the cargo and looked up the British consul."

One picturesque incident of the provisioning enterprise was the
piratical cruise of the good ship _Gladstone_, rechristened, with a
German benediction, _Marina Quezada_. Under the name of _Gladstone_,
the ship had flown the Norwegian flag on a route between Canada and
Australia, but shortly after the outbreak of war she put into Newport
News. Simultaneously a sea captain, Hans Suhren, a sturdy German
formerly of the Pacific coast, appeared in New York, called upon
Captain Boy-Ed, who took kindly interest in him, and then departed for
Newport News. Here he assumed charge of the _Marina Quezada_.

"I paid $280,000 in cash for her," he told First Officer Bentzen. After
hiring a crew, he hurried back to New York, where he received messages
in care of "Nordmann, Room 801, 11 Broadway, N. Y. C."--Captain
Boy-Ed's office. Captain Boy-Ed had already told him to erect a
wireless plant on his ship--the equipment having been shipped to the
_Marina Quezada_--and to hire a wireless operator. He then handed
Suhren a German naval code book, a chart with routes drawn, and sailing
instructions for the South Seas, there to await German cruisers. Food
supplies, ordered for the steamer _Unita_ (which at that time had been
unable to sail) were wasting on the piers at Newport News and Captain
Boy-Ed ordered them put in the _Marina Quezada_. Two cases of revolvers
also were sent to the boat.

Again Suhren went back to the ship and kept his wireless operators
busy and speeded up the loading of the cargo, which was under the
supervision of an employee of the North German Lloyd. Needing more
money before sailing in December, 1914, he drew a draft for $1,000 on
the Hamburg-American Line, wiring Adolf Hachmeister, the purchasing
agent, to communicate with "Room 801, 11 Broadway."

Then trouble arose over the ship's registry. Though Suhren insisted
that he owned her, a corporation in New York whose stockholders
were Costa Ricans were laying claim to ownership, for they had
christened her and had secured provisional registration from the
Costa Rican minister in Washington. Permanent registry, however,
required application at Port Limon, Costa Rica. So hauling down the
Norwegian ensign that had fluttered over the ship as the _Gladstone_,
Captain Suhren ran up the Costa Rican emblem. He had obtained false
clearance papers stating his destination as Valparaiso. They were
based upon a false manifest, and he sailed for Port Limon. The Costa
Rican authorities declined to give Suhren permanent papers, and he
found himself master of a ship without a flag, and in such status not
permitted under international law to leave port. He waited for a heavy
storm and darkness, then quietly slipping his anchor, he sped out into
the high seas, a pirate. Off Pernambuco he ran up the Norwegian flag,
put into port and got into such difficulties with the authorities that
his ship and he were interned. His supplies never reached the raiders
and Boy-Ed learned of another fiasco.

The _Lorenzo_, _Thor_ and _Heine_ were seized at sea. The _Bangor_
was captured in the Straits of Magellan. Out of twelve shiploads of
supplies, only some $20,000 worth were ever transshipped to German war
vessels. This involved a considerable loss, as the following statement
of expenditures for those vessels made by the Hamburg-American Line
will show:


     _Steamer_                _Total payment_

     _Thor_                      $113,879.72
     _Berwind_                     73,221.85
     _Lorenzo_                    430,182.59
     _Heine_                      288,142.06
     _Nepos_                      119,037.60
     _Mowinckel_                  113,367.18
     _Unita_                       67,766.44
     _Somerstad_                   45,826.75
     _Fram_                        55,053.23
     _Craecia_                     29,143.59
     _Macedonia_                   39,139.98
     _Navarra_                     44,133.50
                               -------------
           Total               $1,419,394.49


Where did the money come from? The Hamburg-American Line, under
the ante-bellum contract, placed at Captain Boy-Ed's disposal three
payments of $500,000 each from the Deutsches Bank, Berlin; the
Deutsches Bank forwarded through Wessells, Kulenkampff & Co., credit
for $750,000 more. "I followed the instructions of Captain Boy-Ed,"
Kulenkampff testified. "He instructed me at different times to pay
over certain amounts either to banks or firms. I transferred $350,000
to the Wells-Fargo Nevada National Bank in San Francisco, $150,000 to
the North German Lloyd, then $63,000 to the North German Lloyd. The
balance of $160,000 I placed to the credit of the Deutsches Bank with
Gontard & Co., successors to my former firm. That was reduced to about
$57,000 by payments drawn at Captain Boy-Ed's request to the order of
the Hamburg-American Line."

The North German Lloyd was serving as the Captain's Pacific operative,
which accounts for the transfer of the funds to the West. (The same
line, through its Baltimore agent, Paul Hilken, was also coöperating
at this time, but not to an extent which brought the busy Hilken into
prominence as did his later connection with the merchant submarine,
_Deutschland_.) Following the course of the funds, federal agents
eventually uncovered the operations of Germans on the Pacific coast,
and secured the arrest and convictions of no less personages than the
consular staff in San Francisco.

The steamship _Sacramento_ left San Francisco with a water-line cargo
of supplies. A firm of customs brokers in San Francisco was given a
fund of $46,000 by the German consulate to purchase supplies for her;
a fictitious steamship company was organized to satisfy the customs
officials; on September 23 an additional $100,000 was paid by the
Germans for her cargo; a false valuation was placed on her cargo, and
she was cleared on October 3. Two days later Benno Klocke and Gustav
Traub, members of the crew, broke the wireless seals and got into
communication with the _Dresden_. Klocke usurped the position of master
of the vessel, and steered her to a rendezvous on November 8 with the
_Scharnhorst_, off Masafueros Island, in the South Pacific; six days
later she provisioned and coaled the German steamship _Baden_. She
reached Valparaiso empty. Captain Anderson said he could not help the
fact that her supplies were swung outboard and into the _Scharnhorst_
and _Dresden_.

Captain Fred Jebsen, who was a lieutenant in the German Naval Reserve,
took out a cargo of coal, properly bonded in his ship, the _Mazatlan_,
for Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. Off the mouth of Magdalena Bay the
_Mazatlan_ met the _Leipzig_, a German cruiser, and the cargo of coal
was transferred to the battleship. One of Jebsen's men, who had signed
on as a cook, was an expert wireless operator, and he went to the
_Leipzig_ with three cases of "preserved fruits"--wireless apparatus
forwarded by German agents in California. Jebsen, after an attempt to
smuggle arms into India, which will be discussed later, made his way
to Germany in disguise, and was reported to have been drowned in a
submarine. The _Nurnberg_ and _Leipzig_ lay off San Francisco for days
in August, the former finally entering the Golden Gate for the amount
of coal allowed her under international law. The _Olson_ and _Mahoney_,
a steam schooner, was laden with supplies for the German vessels and
prepared to sail, but after a considerable controversy with the customs
officials, was unloaded.

Perhaps the most bizarre attempt to spirit supplies to the Imperial
navy was that in which the little barkentine _Retriever_ figured as
heroine. Wide publicity was given the announcement that she was to be
sailed out to sea and used as the locale of a motion picture drama. The
Government found out, however, that her hull was well down with coal,
which did not seem vital to the scenario, and she was not permitted to
leave port.

The major portion of Germany's naval strength lay corked in the
Kiel Canal, where, except for a few indecisive sorties, Germany's
visible fleet was destined to remain for more than three years. At the
outbreak of war, the _Emden_, _Dresden_, _Scharnhorst_, _Gneisenau_
and _Nurnberg_ were at large in the southern oceans. On November 1 the
German cruisers met the British _Monmouth_, _Good Hope_, _Glasgow_ and
_Otranto_ off Coronel, the Chilean coast. The _Monmouth_ and _Good
Hope_ were struck a mortal blow and sunk. The _Glasgow_ and _Otranto_
barely escaped. In a battle off the Falkland Islands on December 7, as
the German army was being thrown back from Ypres, the _Scharnhorst_,
_Leipzig_, _Gneisenau_ and _Nurnberg_ were sunk by a reinforced British
fleet. (Walter Peters, one of the crew of the _Leipzig_, floated
about for six hours after the engagement, was picked up, made his way
to Mexico, and for more than three years was employed by a German
vice-consul in Mexico in espionage in the United States. Peters was
arrested as a dangerous enemy alien in Crockett, California, in April,
1918.) The _Dresden_ and _Karlsruhe_ escaped, and the former hid for
two months in the fjords of the Straits of Magellan. On February 26,
1915, an American tourist vessel, the _Kroonland_, passed east through
the Straits and into Punta Arenas harbor, while out of the harbor
sneaked the little _Glasgow_, westward bound. The _Dresden_, after
the American had passed, had run for the open Pacific; the _Glasgow_,
hot on her trail, engaged her off the Chilean coast five days later
and sank her, leaving only the _Emden_ and _Karlsruhe_ at large. The
_Karlsruhe_ disappeared.

The last lone member of the pack was hunted over the seas for months,
and finally was beached, but long before her activities became public
the necessity for supplying the German ships expired, from the
simple elimination of German ships to supply. Captain Boy-Ed's first
enterprise had been frustrated by the British navy and he turned to
other and more sinister occupations. Buenz, Koetter and Hachmeister
were sentenced to eighteen months in Atlanta, and Poeppinghaus to a
year and a day--terms which they did not begin to serve until 1918.[1]

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Dr Buenz' case is an enlightening example of the use made by German
agents in America of the law's delays. He was sentenced in December,
1915, for an offence committed in September, 1914. He at once appealed
his case to the higher courts, going freely about meanwhile on bail
furnished by the Hamburg American Line. In March, 1918, the Supreme
Court of the United States, to which his case had finally been pressed,
denied his appeal. His attorneys at once placed before President
Wilson, through Attorney-General Gregory, a request for a respite, or
commutation of his sentence, which the President, on April 23, 1918,
denied. Buenz pleaded the frailty of his 79 years--which had not
prevented him from keeping his social engagements while his appeal was
pending.




CHAPTER IV

THE WIRELESS SYSTEM

     The German Embassy a clearing house--Sayville--Germany's knowledge
     of U. S. wireless--Subsidized electrical companies--Aid to the
     raiders--The _Emden_--The _Geier_--Charles E. Apgar--The German
     code.


The coördination of a nation's fighting forces depends upon that
nation's system of communication. In no previous war in the world's
history has a general staff known more of the enemy's plans. We look
back almost patronizingly across a century to the semaphore which
transmitted Napoleon's orders from Paris to the Rhine in three hours;
we can scarcely realize that if the report of a scout had ever got
through to General Hooker, warning him that a suspicious wagon train
had been actually sighted a few miles away, Stonewall Jackson's
flanking march at Chancellorsville would have been checked in its first
stages. In this greatest of all wars a British battery silences a
German gun within two minutes after the allied airman has "spotted" the
Boche. The air is "Any Man's Land." What lies beyond the hill is no
longer the great hazard, for the wireless is flashing.

If the Allied general staffs had been provided with X-ray
field-glasses, and had trained those glasses on a certain brownstone
house in Massachusetts Avenue, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Streets, in Washington, they would have been interested in the
perfection of the German system of communication. They would have
observed the secretarial force of the Imperial Embassy opening and
sorting letters from confederates throughout the country, many so
phrased as to be quite harmless, others apparently meaningless. The
Embassy served as a clearing-house for all German and Allied air
messages.

Long before the war broke out the German government had seen the
military necessity for a complete wireless system. Subsidies were
secretly granted to the largest of the German electrical manufacturers
to establish stations all over the globe. Companies were formed
in America, ostensibly financed with American funds, but on plans
submitted to German capitalists and through them to the German Foreign
Office for approval. Thus was the Sayville station erected. As
early as 1909 a German captain, Otto von Fossberg, had been sent to
America to select a site on Long Island for the station. "The German
government is backing the scheme," he told a friend, although the
venture was publicly supposed to be under the auspices of the "Atlantic
Communication Company," in which certain prominent German-Americans
held stock and office. In 1911 an expert, Fritz von der Woude, paid
Sayville a visit long enough to install the apparatus; he came under
strict injunctions not to let his mission become generally known.

Boy-Ed watched the progress of the Sayville station with close interest
and considerable authority, and his familiarity with wireless threw
him into frequent and cordial relationship with the United States
naval wireless men and the Department of Commerce. On one occasion
the Department requested a confidential report from a radio inspector
of the progress made by foreign interests in wireless; the report
prepared went to Germany before it came to the hands of the United
States government. Again: the German government was informed in 1914
by Boy-Ed in Washington that the United States intended to erect a
wireless station at a certain point in the Philippines; full details,
as the Navy Department had developed them, were forwarded, and the
German government immediately directed a large electrical manufacturer
in Berlin to bid for the work. The site the United States had selected
was not altogether satisfactory to Germany, for some reason, so the
German government added this delicious touch: a confidential map of the
Philippines was turned over to the electrical house, with orders to
submit a plan for the construction of the American station on a site
which had been chosen by the German General War Staff!

The _Providence Journal_ claims to have discovered an interesting
German document--probably genuine--which reveals the scope of the
Teutonic wireless project. It was a chart, bearing a rectangle labeled
in German with the title of the German Foreign Office. From this
"trunk" radiated three "branches," each bearing a name, and each
terminating in the words. "Telefunken Co." The first branch was labeled
"Gesellschaft für Drahtlose Telegraphie, Berlin"; the second, "Siemens
& Halske, Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Berlin"; the third, "Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, Berlin."

From each branch grew still further subdivisions, labeled with the
names of electrical firms or agents all over the world, and all subject
to the direction of the German government. These names follow:

From No. 1: Atlantic Communication Co. (Sayville), New York;
Australasian Wireless Co., Ltd., Sydney (Australia); Telefunken
East Asiatic Wireless Telegraph Co., Ltd., Shanghai; Maintz & Co.
(of Amsterdam, Holland), Batavia (Java); Germann & Co. (of Hamburg),
Manila; B. Grimm & Co., Bangkok; Paetzold & Eppinger, Havana;
Spiegelthal, La Guayra; Kruger & Co., Guayaquil; Brahm & Co., Lima; E.
Quicke, Montevideo; R. Schulbach, Thiemer & Co. (of Hamburg), Central
America; Sesto Sesti, Rome; A. D. Zacharion & Cie., Athens; J. K.
Dimitrijievic, Belgrade.

From No. 2: Siemens Bros. & Co., Ltd., London; Siemens & Halske,
Vienna; Siemens & Halske, Petrograd; Siemens & Halske (K. G. Frank),
New York; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Sofia; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke,
Constantinople; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Dansk Aktsielskab),
Copenhagen; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Denki Kabushiki Kaishe), Tokio;
Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Companhia Brazileira de Electricidade), Rio
de Janeiro; Siemens-Schuckert, Ltd., Buenos Ayres; Siemens-Schuckert,
Ltd., Valparaiso.

From No. 3: A. E. G. Union Electrique, Brussels; Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, Basel; A. E. G. Elecktriska Aktiebolaget,
Stockholm; A. E. G. Electricitats Aktieselskabet, Christiania; A. E. G.
Thomson-Houston Iberica, Madrid; A. E. G. Compania Mexicana, Mexico;
A. E. G. Electrical Company of South Africa, Johannesburg.

The German manufacturers evinced a keen interest in the project of
a wireless plant in Nicaragua, laying special stress on the point
that "permanent stations in this neighborhood" would be valuable "if
the Panama Canal is fortified." From Sayville station the German
plan projected powerful wireless plants in Mexico, at Para, Brazil;
at Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; at Cartagena, Colombia, and at Lima,
Peru. A point in which Captain H. Retzmann, the German naval attaché
in 1911, was at one time interested was whether signals could be
sent to the German fleet in the English Channel from America without
England's interference. German naval wireless experts supervised the
construction, and although the stations were nominally civilian-manned,
and purely commercial, in reality the operators were often men of
unusual scientific intellect, whose talents were sadly underpaid if
they received no more than operators' salaries.

Gradually and quietly, Germany year by year spread her system of
wireless communication over Central and South America, preparing
her machinery for war. Over her staff of operators and mechanics
she appointed an expert in the full confidence of the Embassy at
Washington, and in close contact with Captain Boy-Ed. To the system of
German-owned commercial plants in the United States he added amateur
stations of more or less restricted radius, as auxiliary apparatus.

When the war broke out, and scores of German merchantmen were confined
to American ports by the omnipresence of the British fleet at sea, the
wireless of the interned ships was added to the system. Thus in every
port lay a source of information for the Embassy. The United States
presently ordered the closing of all private wireless stations, and
those amateurs who had been listening out of sheer curiosity to the
air conversation cheerfully took down their antennae. Not so, however,
a prominent woman in whose residence on Fifth Avenue lay concealed
a powerful receiving apparatus. Nor did the interned ships obey the
order: apparatus apparently removed was often rigged in the shelter
of a funnel, and operated by current supplied from an apparently
innocent source. And the secret service discovered stations also in
the residences of wealthy Hoboken Germans, and in a German-American
"mansion" in Hartford, Connecticut.

The operators of these stations made their reports regularly through
various channels to the Embassy. There the messages were sorted,
and it is safe to say that Count von Bernstorff was cognizant of the
position of every ship on the oceans. He was in possession of both the
French and British secret admiralty codes. In the light of that fact,
the manoeuvres of the British and German fleets in the South Atlantic
and Pacific became simply a game of chess, Germany following every move
of the British fleet under Admiral Cradock, knowing the identity of his
ships, their gun-power, and their speed. When she located the _Good
Hope_, _Monmouth_, _Glasgow_ and _Otranto_ off Coronel, Berlin, through
von Bernstorff, gave Admiral von Spee the word to strike, with the
results which we have observed: the sinking of the _Monmouth_ and _Good
Hope_, and the crippling of the _Glasgow_ and _Otranto_.

Throughout August, September and October, 1914, the system operated
perfectly. Bernstorff and Boy-Ed were confronted with the problem of
keeping the German fleet alive as long as possible, and inflicting as
much damage as possible on enemy shipping. Allied merchantmen left
port almost with impunity, and were gathered in by German raiders who
had been informed from Washington of the location of their prey. But
the defeat off Chile apparently was conclusive proof to England that
Germany knew her naval code, and the events of November and December
indicate that England changed her code.

It was while engaged in escort duty to the first transport fleet of the
Australian Expeditionary Force that the Australian cruiser _Sydney_
received wireless signals from Cocos Island shrieking that the _Emden_
was near by. The _Emden_, having been deprived for some time of news
of enemy ships, had gone there to destroy the wireless station, having
in the past three months sunk some $12,500,000 of British shipping.
Even while the island's distress signals were crashing out, the _Emden_
had her own wireless busy in an effort to drown the call for help, or
"jam" the air. On the following morning, November 9, the _Sydney_ came
up with the enemy. A sharp action followed. The _Sydney's_ gunfire was
accurate enough to cause the death of 7 officers and 108 men; her own
losses were 4 killed and 12 wounded; the _Emden_ fled, ran aground on
North Keeling Island, one of the Cocos group, and ultimately became a
total wreck.

In the same month the cruiser _Geier_ fled the approach of the British
and found refuge in Honolulu harbor. Her commander, Captain Karl
Grasshof, made the mistake of keeping a diary. That document, which
later fell into the hands of the Navy Intelligence Service, revealed a
complete disrespect for the hospitality which the American government
afforded the refugees. The _Geier's_ band used to strike up for an
afternoon concert, and under cover of the music, the wireless apparatus
sent out messages to raiders at sea or messages in English so phrased
as to start rumors of trouble between Japan and the United States.
The _Geier_ was the source of a rumor to the effect that Japanese
troops had landed in Mexico; the _Geier_ gave what circulation she
could to a report that Germans in the United States were planning an
invasion of Canada and was ably assisted in this effort by George
Rodiek, German consul at Honolulu; the _Geier_ caught all trans-Pacific
wireless messages, and intercepted numerous United States government
despatches. Captain Grasshof also spread a report quoting an American
submarine commander as saying he would "like to do something to those
<DW61>s outside" (referring to the Japanese Pacific patrol) provided he
(the American commander) and the German could reach an agreement. This
report Grasshof attributed to von Papen, and later retracted, admitting
that it was a lie. Grasshof's courier to the consulate in San Francisco
was A. V. Kircheisen, a quartermaster on the liner _China_, a German
secret service agent bearing the number K-17. Kircheisen frequently
used the _China's_ wireless to send German messages.

On December 8 occurred the engagement off the Falklands, which resulted
in the defeat of the German fleet. The _Karlsruhe_ within a short
time gave up her aimless wanderings and disappeared. In February the
_Glasgow_ avenged herself on the _Dresden_, and the _Prinz Eitel
Friedrich_ and the _Kronprinz Wilhelm_ fled into the security of
Hampton Roads for the duration of war.

The United States' suspicions had been aroused by the activity of
the German wireless plants, but the arm of the law did not remove at
once the German operators at certain commercial stations. They were
the men who despatched communications to Berlin and to the raiders.
Interspersed in commercial messages they sprinkled code phrases, words,
numbers, a meaningless and innocent jargon. The daily press bulletin
issued to all ships at sea was an especially adaptable vehicle for this
practice, as any traveler who has been forced to glean his news from
one of these bulletins will readily appreciate. There were Americans
shrewd enough, however, to become exceedingly suspicious of this
superficially careless sending, and their suspicions were confirmed
through the invention of another shrewd American, Charles E. Apgar.
He combined the principles of the phonograph and the wireless in such
a way as to record on a wax disc the dots and dashes of the message,
precisely as it came through the receiver. The records could be studied
and analyzed at leisure. And the United States government has studied
them.

At three o'clock every morning, the great wireless station at Nauen,
near Berlin, uttered a hash of language into the ether. It was
apparently not directed to any one in particular, nor did it contain
any known coherence. Unless the operator in America wore a DeForest
audian detector, which picks up waves from a great distance, he
could not have heard it, and certainly during the early part of the
war he paid no attention to it. The United States decided, however,
that it might be well to eavesdrop, and so for over two years every
utterance from Nauen was transcribed and filed away, or run off on the
phonograph, in the hope that repetition might reveal the code. Until
the code was discovered elsewhere, the phonographic records told no
tales, but then the State Department found that it had a priceless
library of Prussian impudence.

The diplomatic code was a dictionary, its pages designated by serial
letters, its words by serial numbers. Thus the message


     "12-B-15-C-7"


signified the twelfth and fifteenth words on the second page, and the
seventh word on the third page. This particular dictionary was one of a
rare edition.

To complement the diplomatic code the Deutches Bank, the German Foreign
Office, and their commercial representatives, Hugo Schmidt and Dr.
Albert, had agreed upon an arbitrary code which proved one of the most
difficult which the American authorities have ever had to decipher.
Solution would have been impossible without some of the straight
English or German confirmations which followed by mail, but as most
of these documents were lost or destroyed, the deciphering had to be
done by astute construction of testimony taken from Schmidt as late
as the fall of 1917. He had made the work doubly difficult by burning
the cipher key and most of his important papers in the furnace of the
German Club.

Simple phrases, such as might readily pass any censor without arousing
suspicion, passed frequently through Sayville station. The message
"Expect father to-morrow" meant "The political situation between
America and Germany grows worse. It is imperative that you take
care of your New York affairs." "Depot" meant "Securities"; "Depot
Pritchard" meant "Securities to be held in Germany"; "Depot Cooper"
meant "Securities to be forwarded to some neutral country in Europe."
Schmidt himself had the following aliases: "John Maley," "Roy Woolen,"
"Sidney Pickford," "George Brewster," "175 Congress Street, Brooklyn,"
"James Frasier," or "Andrew Brodie." Dr. Albert was mentioned as "John
Herbinsen," "Howard Ackley," "Leonard Hadden," or "Donald Yerkes."
James W. Gerard, the American ambassador at Berlin, was "Wilbur
McDonald"; America was "Fremessi" or "Alfred Lipton." To throw any
suspicion off the scent, the phrase "Hughes recovered" was translatable
simply as "agreed," whereas "Percy died" meant "disagreed." Amounts of
money were to be multiplied by one thousand.

This cipher code, so far as it had any system at all, showed a skilful
choice of arbitrary proper names, than which there is nothing less
suggestive or significant when the name is backed up by no known or
discoverable personality. These names met two requirements: they
carefully avoided any names of personages, and they sounded English or
American. Following is a table of the commoner symbols used:


    CODE                      TRANSLATION

Alcott                     Hugo Reisinger
Andeo                      Payments are
John Hazel: Chapman;
Thos. Hadley               G. Amsinck & Co.
Pythagoras Errflint        Argentine Finance
                             Minister
Lawrence McKay             Austrian Ambassador at
                             Washington.
John Hastings; Fred
Holden; Wm. Lounsbury
Flagside; Chas. Hall       Bankers Trust Co.
Henry Galloway             Belgium
Frenchlike; Blake          Berlin
Flammigere                 Bethlehem Steel Co.
Percy Bloomfield           Reichsbank
Gobber Milbank or
John Childs                Capt. Boy-Ed
George Mallery             British Ambassador at Washington
Charles Thurston:
Caffney Richard            British Government
Ernest Whiskard            Central Bank of Norway
Frederick Chappell,        The Submarine _Deutschland_
Walter Harris; Edmund
  Hutton                   Chase National Bank
Mills Edgar                Dr. Dernberg
Albert Hardwood            Empire Trust Co.
Herbert Hastings,
Langman Howard,
Luckett Ernest             Equitable Trust Co.
Eversleigh                 New York
Sidney Farmer and others   Speyer & Co.
Francis Hawkins            Farmers Loan & Trust Co.
Francis Manuel;
Edward Gary                German Government
Fleshquake                 Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
Clarence Hadden            First National Bank
Floezanbel                 George J. Gould
Floezuise                  J. P. Morgan
Wm. Gerome                 J. P. Morgan & Co.
Fluitkoker                 Wm. Barclay Parsons
Fleuxerimus                High Official of Bethlehem
                             Steel Co.
Fogarizers                 Chas. M. Schwab
John Hayward               Norwegian Government
Franklin Giltrap           Hamburg-American
                             Line
Theodore Hooper            Capt. von Papen
15 Code names represented
          the              Guaranty Trust Co.
Paul Overton; Robt.
  Hopkins                  Hanover Nat. Bank
George Hedding             Standard Mercantile
                             Agency
Hugh Sturges               Paul Hilken (_Deutschland_)
Clarence Marsh             Japanese Ambassador at
                             Washington
Howard Howe                Irving Nat. Bank
Herbert Miller             President of U. S.
Andrew Mills               Secretary of Commerce and
                             Labor
Theodore Mitchell          Secretary of Agriculture
Robert Moffatt             Secretary of State
Frank Monroe               Secretary of Treasury
Walter Montgomery          Secretary of Navy
Dolling                    London
Robert London              North German Lloyd
Steven Morgan              United States Congress
Frank Mountcastle          The name of the Deutsches
                             Bank is not to be mentioned
Steven Lawson              Royal Bank of Canada
Gafento                    Toluol (High explosive)


The chief significance of the discovery of the two codes is their
conclusive proof that while von Bernstorff was protesting to the
American government that he could not get messages through to Berlin,
nor replies from the foreign office, he was actually in daily, if not
hourly, communication with his superiors. Messages were sent out by
his confidential operators under the very eyes of the American naval
censors. After the break of diplomatic relations with Berlin, in
February, 1917, the authorities set to work decoding the messages,
and the State Department from time to time issued for publication
certain of the more brutal proofs of Germany's violation of American
neutrality. The ambassador and his Washington establishment had served
for two years and a half as the "central exchange" of German affairs in
the western world. After his departure communication from German spies
here was handicapped only by the time required to forward information
to Mexico; from that point to Berlin air conversation continued
uninterrupted.




CHAPTER V

MILITARY VIOLENCE

     The plan to raid Canadian ports--The first Welland Canal plot--Von
     Papen, von der Goltz and Tauscher--The project abandoned--Goltz's
     arrest--The Tauscher trial--Hidden arms--Louden's plan of invasion.


Underneath the even surface of American life seethed a German
volcano, eating at the upper crust, occasionally cracking it, and not
infrequently bursting a great gap. When an eruption occurred, America
stopped work for a moment, stared in surprise, sometimes in horror, at
the external phenomena, discussed them for a few days, then hurried
back to work. More often than not it saw nothing sinister even in the
phenomena.


Less than ten hours from German headquarters in New York lay Canada,
one of the richest possessions of Germany's bitter enemy England.
Captain von Papen had not only full details of all points of military
importance in the United States, but had made practical efforts to
utilize them. He knew where his reservists could be found in America.
When the Government, shortly after the outbreak of war, forbade the
recruiting of belligerents within its boundaries, and then refused to
issue American passports for the protection of soldiers on the way to
their commands, Captain von Papen planned to mobilize and employ a
German army on American soil in no less pretentious an enterprise than
a military invasion of the Dominion.

The first plan was attributed to a loyal German named Schumacher,
whose ambiguous address was "Eden Bower Farm, Oregon." He outlined in
detail to von Papen the feasibility of obtaining a number of powerful
motor-boats, to be manned by German-American crews, and loaded with
German-American rifles and machine guns. From the ports on the shores
of the Great Lakes he considered it practicable to journey under
cover of darkness to positions which would command the waterfronts
of Toronto, Sarnia, Windsor and Kingston, Ontario, find the cities
defenseless, and precipitate upon them a fair storm of bullets. A few
Canadian lives might be lost, which did not matter; an enormous hue and
cry would be raised to keep the Canadian troops at home to guard the
back door.

Von Papen entertained the plan seriously, and submitted it to Count
von Bernstorff, who for obvious diplomatic reasons did not care to
sponsor open violence when its proponent's references were unreliable,
its actual reward was at best doubtful, and when subtle violence was
equally practicable. Von Papen then produced an alternative project.

Cutting through the promontory which separates Lake Erie from the
western end of Lake Ontario runs the Welland Canal, through which all
shipping must pass to avoid Niagara Falls. This waterway is one of
Canada's dearest properties, and is no mean artery of supply from the
great grain country of the Northwest.

Its economic importance, however, was secondary in the German mind to
the psychological effect upon Canada which a dynamite calamity to the
Canal would certainly cause. The first expeditionary force of Canadian
troops was training frantically at Valcartier, Quebec. They must be
kept at home. Whether or not the idea originated with Captain von Papen
is of little consequence (it may be safely assumed that Berlin had long
had plans for such an enterprise); the fact is that it devolved upon
him as military commander to crystallize thought in action. The plot
is ascribed to "two Irishmen, prominent members of Irish associations,
who had both fought during the Irish rebellion," and was to include
destruction of the main railway junctions and the grain elevators in
the vicinity of Toronto.

The picturesque renegade German spy commonly known as Horst von der
Goltz is responsible for the generally accepted version of incidents
which followed his first interview with von Papen on August 22 at
the German Consulate in New York. He was sent to Baltimore under the
assumed name of Bridgeman H. Taylor, with a letter to the German Consul
there, Karl Luederitz, calling for whatever coöperation Goltz might
need. He was to recruit accomplices from the crew of a German ship then
lying at the North German Lloyd docks in the Patapsco River. With a man
whom he had hired in New York, Charles Tucker, alias "Tuchhaendler," he
visited the ship and selected his men. He then returned to New York,
where Papen placed three more men at his disposal, one of them being
A. A. Fritzen, of Brooklyn, a discharged purser on a Russian liner;
another Frederick Busse, an "importer," with offices in the World
Building, New York; and the third man Constantine Covani, a private
detective, of New York. After a few days the sailors from Baltimore
reported for duty, but were sent back, as Goltz noticed that his
movements were being watched.

Papen sent Goltz to Captain Tauscher's office at 320 Broadway for
explosives. On September 5, Captain Tauscher ordered 300 pounds of 60
per cent. dynamite to be delivered by the E. I. du Pont de Nemours
Company to Mr. Bridgeman Taylor. In a motor-boat Goltz applied at a du
Pont barge near Black Tom Island and the Statue of Liberty and took
away his three hundred pounds of dynamite in suitcases. The little
craft made its way up the river to 146th Street. The conspirators then
carried their burden to the German Club in Central Park South and later
in a taxicab to Goltz's home, where it was stored with a supply of
revolvers and electrical apparatus for exploding the charges.

[Illustration: Passport given to Horst von der Goltz under the _alias_
of Bridgeman H. Taylor]

A passport for facile entrance into Canada had been applied for by one
of Luederitz's henchmen in Baltimore in the name of "Bridgeman Taylor,"
and had been forwarded in care of Karl W. Buck, who lived at 843 West
End Avenue, New York. With this guerdon of American protection Goltz
set out for Buffalo about September 10--the last day of the Battle of
the Marne--Busse and Fritzen carrying the dynamite and apparatus, and
Covani, as Goltz naïvely related, "attending to me." He found rooms
at 198 Delaware Avenue, in the heart of Buffalo. He learned of the
terrain for the enterprise from a German of mysterious occupation,
who had lived in Buffalo for several years. Within a few days Goltz
and his companions moved on to Niagara Falls--a move made easier by an
exchange of telegraphic communications between Papen and himself. It
is only necessary to quote, from the British Secret Service report to
Parliament, those messages which Goltz received from the attaché, or
"Steffens," as Papen chose to sign himself:


     New York, N. Y. Sept. 15, 14

     Mr. Taylor, 198 Delaware Ave. Buffalo

     Sent money today. Consult lawyer John Ryan six hundred thirteen
     Mutual Life Building Buffalo not later than seventeenth.

     STEFFENS, 112 Central Park South
     12.45 p.


     New York, N. Y. Sept. 16-14

     Mr. Taylor, 198 Delaware Avenue, Bflo.

     Ryan got money and instructions.

     STEFFENS,
     1.14 p.


Goltz and Covani "consulted" Mr. Ryan, who had received $200 on
September 16 from Papen through Knauth, Nachod & Kuhne.

Then Goltz claimed that he made two aeroplane flights over Niagara
Falls, and "reconnoitered the ground." Something went wrong, for after
a week arrived the following telegrams:


     New York, N. Y. Sept. 24-14.

     John T. Ryan, 613 Mutual Life Bldg. Buffalo.

     Please instruct Taylor cannot do anything more for him.

     STEFFENS.
     12:51 p.


     New York, N. Y. Sept. 26-14.

     Mr. Taylor, care Western Union, Niagara Falls, N. Y.

     Do what you think best. Did you receive dollars two hundred

     RYAN
     9.45 A.


These messages are open to several constructions. They do not
contradict Goltz's claim that he "learned that the first contingent of
Canadian troops had left the camp." They could indicate that his chief
was not fully satisfied with his technique. Perhaps the most intriguing
feature of the telegrams is their presence in a safe-deposit vault in
Holland when Goltz was captured months later. It may be assumed that
if (as he maintained) he was being watched constantly in Buffalo by
the United States Secret Service, one of the first things he would
have done is to destroy any messages received. We leave the reader to
decide--after he has traced Goltz's history a step or two further.

Whatever the occasion, the Welland enterprise was dismissed; the
dynamite was left with an aviator in Niagara Falls; Fritzen and Busse
were discharged from service, and Covani and Goltz left for New York.
In a letter dated December 7, from Buffalo, poor Busse wrote to Edmund
Pavenstedt, at 45 William Street, New York, pleading that he had been
left without any money in Niagara Falls; that he had written to von
Papen and had been compelled to wait two weeks before he got $20.
His expenses had accumulated during the fortnight, he could not find
work, he even had sold his overcoat, and he begged Pavenstedt to send
him money to come back to New York. "My friend Fritzen," he added,
"was sent back some weeks ago by a gentleman in the German-American
Alliance.... I would appreciate anything you can do for me, especially
since I enlisted in such a task ... Von Papen signs himself Stevens."

The military attaché was frankly disgusted at the failure of the
undertaking. Goltz claims to have explained everything satisfactorily,
and to have been given presently a new commission--that of returning
to Germany for further instructions from Abteilung III of the General
Staff, the intelligence department of the Empire.

On October 8 Goltz sailed for Europe, armed with his false passport,
and a letter of introduction to the German Consul-General in Genoa. He
reached Berlin safely, received his orders, returned to England, and
was arrested on November 13. The public was not informed of his arrest,
yet in Busse's letter from Buffalo of December 7, he mentioned Goltz's
capture in London. News traveled fast in German channels.

Examination of his papers resulted in a protracted imprisonment, which
daily grew more painful, and finally Goltz agreed to turn state's
evidence against his former confrères. It was not until March 31, 1916,
that Captain Tauscher was interrupted at his office by the arrival of
agents of the Department of Justice, who placed him under arrest. He
was held in $25,000 bail on a charge of having furthered a plot to blow
up the Welland Canal.

Meanwhile Goltz's confession had implicated him in something more than
a casual acquaintance with the plot; stubs in the check-book of Captain
von Papen established payment made by the latter to Tauscher of $31.13,
which happened to be the exact total of two bills from the du Pont
Company to Captain Tauscher for dynamite and hemp fuses delivered on
September 5 and 13 to "Bridgeman Taylor." Prior to the trial in June
and July, 1916, Tauscher offered to plead guilty for a promise of the
maximum fine without imprisonment, but his offer was rejected by the
United States attorneys. A letter was introduced as testimony to his
good character from General Crozier, the then head of the Ordnance
Department at Washington. Goltz made an unimpressive witness, and
Captain Tauscher, protesting his innocence as a mere intermediary in
the affair, was acquitted of the charge.

Of the smaller fry Fritzen was arrested in Los Angeles in March, 1917.
He stated then to officers that he had made trips to Cuba after the
outbreak of war in 1914, had traveled over southern United States in
two attempts to reach Mexico City, and had finally found employment
on a ranch. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Tucker and Busse
were witnesses at the Tauscher trial and were treated leniently. Covani
turned from his previous occupation as hunter to that of quarry, and
was not apprehended.

Information gathered by the Federal authorities and produced in court
proved that Captain von Papen and reservist German army officers in
the country planned a second mobilization of German reservists to
attack Canadian points. That the project was seriously considered for
a time is evidenced by a note in the diary found on the commander of
the _Geier_, in Honolulu, in which he said that the German consul
in Honolulu, George Rodiek, had had orders from the San Francisco
consulate to circulate a report to that effect. Hundreds of thousands
of rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition that were to be
available for German reservists were stored in New York, Chicago and
other cities on the border. Many a German-American brewery concealed in
the shadows of its storehouses crates of arms and ammunition. Tauscher
stored in 200 West Houston Street, New York, on June 21, 1915, 2,000
45-calibre Colt revolvers, 10 Colt automatic guns, 7,000 Springfield
rifles, 3,000,000 revolver cartridges and 2,500,000 rifle cartridges.
When the New York police questioned him about this arsenal, he said he
had purchased them in job lots, for speculation. As a matter of fact
they had been intended for use in India, but had been diverted on the
Pacific coast and returned to New York.

A bolder version of the plot of invasion came from Max Lynar Louden,
known to the Federal authorities as "Count Louden." He was a man of
nondescript reputation, who had secret communications with the Germans
in the early part of the war. He confessed that he was party to a
scheme for the quick mobilization and equipment of a full army of
German reservists. Louden was consistently annoying to the Secret
Service in that he refused openly to violate the neutrality laws, but
the moment the authorities learned of the fact that he was supposed to
have two or three wives they made an investigation which resulted in
his imprisonment. His story, if not altogether reliable, is interesting.

Through German-American interests, the plans were made in 1914, he
said, and a fund of $16,000,000 was subscribed to carry out the
details. Secret meetings were held in New York, Buffalo, Philadelphia,
Detroit, Milwaukee, and other large cities, and at these meetings it
was agreed that a force of 150,000 reservists was available to seize
and hold the Welland Canal, strategic points and munitions centers.

"We had it arranged," said Louden, "to send our men from large cities
following announcements of feasts and conventions, and I think we could
have obtained enough to carry out our plans had it not been for my
arrest on the charge of bigamy. The troops were to have been divided
into four divisions, with six sections. The first two divisions were to
have assembled at Silvercreek, Mich. The first was to have seized the
Welland Canal. The second was to have taken Wind Mill Point, Ontario.
The third was to go from Wilson, N. Y., to Port Hope. The fourth was
to proceed from Watertown, N. Y., to Kingston, Ontario. The fifth was
to assemble near Detroit and land near Windsor. The sixth section was
to leave Cornwall and take possession of Ottawa.

"It had been planned to buy or charter eighty-four excursion and small
boats to use in getting into Canada. All of the equipment was to have
been put aboard the boats, and when quarters for 120,000 men had been
found it would have been easy to continue the expedition. The German
government was cognizant of the plan and maps, etc., were to have been
furnished by the German government. A representative of the British
Ambassador offered $20,000 for our plans."

But none of the first German-American expeditionary forces left for
their destinations. Their project was innocently foiled by Amelia
Wendt, Rose O'Brien and Nella Florence Allendorf. These ladies were
Louden's wives.




CHAPTER VI

PAUL KOENIG

     Justice and Metzler--Koenig's personality--von Papen's checks--The
     "little black book"--Telephone codes--Shadowing--Koenig's
     agents--His betrayal.


In a narrative which attempts so far as possible to proceed
chronologically, it becomes necessary at this point to introduce Paul
Koenig. For, on September 15, 1914, he sent an Irishman, named Edmund
Justice, who had been a dock watchman, and one Frederick Metzler to
Quebec for information of the number of Canadian troops in training. On
September 18 Koenig left New York and met Metzler in Portland, Maine.
He received his report, and on September 25 was in Burlington, Vt.,
where he conferred with Justice, and learned that the two spies had
inspected the fortifications in Quebec, and had visited the training
camps long enough to estimate the number and condition of the men.
(Their information Koenig reported at once to von Papen, and it is
possible that it dictated Papen's recall of Goltz from Buffalo the next
day.)

Who was Paul Koenig? His underlings knew him as "P. K.," and called
him the "bull-headed Westphalian" behind his back. He had a dozen
aliases, among them Wegenkamp, Wagener, Kelly, Winter, Perkins,
Stemler, Rectorberg, Boehm, Kennedy, James, Smith, Murphy, and W. T.
Munday.

He was a product of the "Kaiser's Own"--the Hamburg-American Line. He
had been a detective in the service of the Atlas Line, a subsidiary
of the Hamburg-American, and for some years before the war was
superintendent of the latter company's police. In that capacity he
bossed a dozen men, watching the company's laborers and investigating
any complaints made to the line. His work threw him into constant
contact with sailors, tug-skippers, wharf-rats, longshoremen, and
dive-keepers of the lowest type, and there was little of the criminal
life of the waterfront that he had not seen.

He had arms like an ape, and the bodily strength of one. His expression
suggested craft, ferocity, and brutality. Altogether his powerful frame
and lurid vocabulary made him a figure to avoid or respect. Waterfront
society did both--and hated him as well.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Paul Koenig, the Hamburg-American employe, who supplied and directed
agents of German violence in America]

Von Papen saw in Koenig's little police force the nucleus of just such
an organization as he needed. The Line put Koenig at the attaché's
disposal in August, 1914, and straightway von Papen connected certain
channels of information with Koenig's own system. He supplied
reservists for special investigations and crimes, and presently Koenig
became in effect the foreman of a large part of Germany's secret
service in the East. As his activities broadened, he was called
upon to execute commissions for Bernstorff, Albert, Dr. Dumba, the
Austro-Hungarian ambassador, and Dr. Alexander von Nuber, the Austrian
consul in New York, as well as for the attachés themselves. He acted as
their guard on occasion, served as their confidential messenger, and
made himself generally useful in investigation work.

The guilt-stained check-book of the military attaché contained these
entries:


     March 29, 1915. Paul Koenig (Secret Service Bill) $509.11

     April 18, Paul Koenig (Secret Service Bill) $90.94

     May 11, Paul Koenig (Secret Service) $66.71

     July 16, Paul Koenig (Compensation for F. J. Busse) $150.00

     August 4, Paul Koenig (5 bills secret service) $118.92


Those entries represent only the payments made Koenig by check for
special work done for von Papen. Koenig received his wages from the
Line. When he performed work for any one else he rendered a special
bill. This necessitated his itemizing his expenditures, and this
Germanly thorough and thoroughly German system of petty accounting
enabled our secret service later to trace his activities with
considerable success. Koenig and von Papen used to haggle over his
bills--on one occasion the attaché felt he was being overcharged, and
accordingly deducted a half-dollar from the total.

"P. K." also had an incriminating book--a carefully prepared notebook
of his spies and of persons in New York, Boston and other cities
who were useful in furnishing him information. In another book he
kept a complete record of the purpose and cost of assignments on
which he sent his men. He listed in its pages the names of several
hundred persons--army reservists, German-Americans and Americans,
clerks, scientists and city and Federal employees--showing that his
district was large and that his range for getting information and for
supervising other pro-German propaganda was broad. For his own direct
staff he worked out a system of numbers and initials to be used in
communication. The numbers he changed at regular intervals and a system
of progression was devised by which each agent would know when his
number changed. He provided them with suitable aliases. These men had
alternative codes for writing letters and for telephone communication
to be changed automatically by certain fixed dates.

Always alert for spies upon himself, Koenig suspected that his
telephone wire was tapped and that his orders were being overheard.
So he instructed his men in various code words. If he told an agent
to meet him "at 5 o'clock at South Ferry" he meant: "Meet me at 7
o'clock at Forty-second Street and Broadway." His suspicions were
well-grounded, for his wire was tapped, and Koenig led the men who were
spying on him an unhappy dance.

For example: he would receive a call on the telephone and would direct
his agent, at the other end of the wire, to meet him in fifteen
minutes at Pabst's, Harlem. It is practically impossible to make the
journey from Koenig's office in the Hamburg-American Building to 125th
Street in a quarter of an hour. After a time his watchers learned that
"Pabst's, Harlem" meant Borough Hall, Brooklyn.

He never went out in the daytime without one or two of his agents
trailing him to see whether he was being shadowed. He used to turn a
corner suddenly and stand still so that an American detective following
came unexpectedly face to face with him and betrayed his identity.
Koenig would laugh heartily and pass on. Thus he came to know many
agents of the Department of Justice and many New York detectives. When
he started out at night he usually had three of his own men follow him
and by a prearranged system of signals inform him if any strangers were
following him.

The task of keeping watch of Koenig's movements required astute
guessing and tireless work on the part of the New York police. So
elusive did he become that it was necessary for Captain Tunney to
evolve a new system of shadowing him in order to keep him in sight
without betraying that he was under surveillance. One detective,
accordingly, would be stationed several blocks away and would start out
ahead of Koenig. The "front shadow" was signaled by his confederates
in the rear whenever Koenig turned a corner, so that the man in front
might dart down a cross-street and manoeuvre to keep ahead of him. If
Koenig boarded a street car the man ahead would hail the car several
blocks beyond, thus avoiding suspicion. In more than one instance
detectives in the rear, guessing that he was about to take a car, would
board it several blocks before it got abreast of Koenig. His alertness
kept Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Terra, and Corell on edge for months.

It was impossible to overhear direct conversation between Koenig and
any man to whom he was giving instructions. Some of his workers he
never permitted to meet him at all, but when he kept a rendezvous it
was in the open, in the parks in broad daylight, or in a moving-picture
theatre, or in the Pennsylvania Station, or the Grand Central Terminal.
There he could make sure that nobody was eavesdropping. If he met an
agent in the open for the first time he gave him some such command at
this:

"Be at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street at 2:30 to-morrow afternoon
beside a public telephone booth there. When the telephone rings answer
it."

The man would obey. On the minute the telephone would ring and the
man would lift the receiver. A strange voice told him to do certain
things--either a definite assignment, or instructions to be at a
similar place on the following day to receive a message. Or he might be
told to meet another man, who would give him money and further orders.
The voice at the other end of the wire spoke from a public telephone
booth and was thus reasonably sure that the wire was not tapped.

And Koenig trusted no man. He never sent an agent out on a job without
detailing another man to shadow that man and report back to him in full
the operations of the agent and of any persons whom he might deal with.
He was brutally severe in his insistence that his men do exactly what
he told them without using their own initiative.

Koenig had spies on every big steamship pier. He had eavesdroppers
in hotels, and on busy telephone switchboards. He employed porters,
window-cleaners, bank clerks, corporation employees and even a member
of the Police Department.

This last, listed in his book as "Special Agent A. S.," was Otto F.
Mottola, a detective in the warrant squad. The notebook revealed
Mottola as "Antonio Marino," an alias later changed to Antonio
Salvatore. Evidence was produced at Mottola's trial at Police
Headquarters that Koenig paid him for investigating a passenger who
sailed on the _Bergensfjord_; that he often called up Mottola, asked
questions, and received answers which Koenig's stenographer took down
in shorthand. Through him Koenig sought to keep closely informed of
developments at Police Headquarters in the inquiry being made by the
police into the activities of the Germans. Mottola was dismissed from
the force because of false statements made to his superiors when they
questioned him about Koenig.

Koenig's very caution was the cause of his undoing. The detectives who
shadowed him learned that he "never employed the same man more than
once," which meant simply that he was careful to place no subordinate
in a position where blackmail and exposure might be too easy. To this
fact they added another trifling observation; they noticed that as time
went on he was seen less in the company of one George Fuchs, a relative
with whom he had been intimate early in the war. They cultivated the
young man's acquaintance to the extent that he finally burst out with
a recitation of his grievances against Koenig, and betrayed him to the
authorities.

"P. K." was defiant always. "They did get Dr. Albert's portfolio," he
said one day, "but they won't get mine. I won't carry one."




CHAPTER VII

FALSE PASSPORTS

     Hans von Wedell's bureau--The traffic in false passports--Carl
     Ruroede--Methods of forgery--Adams' coup--Von Wedell's letter
     to von Bernstorff--Stegler--Lody--Berlin counterfeits American
     passports--Von Breechow.


Throughout August, 1914, it was comparatively easy for Germans in
America who wished to respond to the call of the Fatherland to leave
American shores. A number of circumstances tended swiftly to make it
more hazardous. The British were in no mind to permit an influx of
reservists to Germany while they could blockade Germany. The cordon
tightened, and soon every merchant ship was stopped at sea by a British
patrol and searched for German suspects. German spies here took refuge
in the protection afforded by an American passport. False passports
were issued by the State Department in considerable quantities during
the early weeks of war--issued unwittingly, of course, for the
applicant in most cases underwent no more than the customary peace-time
examination.

We have already seen that von der Goltz easily secured a passport. The
details of his application were these: Karl A. Luederitz, the German
consul at Baltimore, detailed one of his men to supply Goltz with a
lawyer and an application blank (then known as Form 375). The lawyer
was Frederick F. Schneider, of 2 East German Street, Baltimore. On that
application Goltz swore that his name was Bridgeman H. Taylor, his
birthplace San Francisco, his citizenship American, his residence New
York City, and his occupation that of export broker. Charles Tucker
served as witness to these fantastic sentiments. Two days later (August
31) the State Department issued passport number 40308 in the name of
Taylor, and William Jennings Bryan signed the precious document.

It was not necessary at that time to state the countries which the
applicant intended to visit. Within a few weeks, however, that
information was required on the passport.

Each additional precaution taken by the Government placed a new
obstacle in the way of unlimited supply of passports. The Goltz
method was easy enough, but it soon became impossible to employ
it. The necessity for sending news through to Berlin by courier
was increasingly urgent and it devolved upon Captain von Papen to
systematize the supply of passports. The military attaché in November
selected Lieutenant Hans von Wedell, who had already made a trip as
courier to Berlin for his friend, Count von Bernstorff. Von Wedell
was married to a German baroness. He had been a newspaper reporter in
New York, and later a lawyer. He opened an office in Bridge Street,
New York, and began to send out emissaries to sailors on interned
German liners, and to their friends in Hoboken, directing them to
apply for passports. He sent others to the haunts of tramps on the
lower East Side, to the Mills Hotel, and other gathering places of
the down-and-outs, offering ten, fifteen or twenty dollars to men who
would apply for and deliver passports. And he bought them! He spent
much time at the Deutscher Verein, and at the Elks' Club in 43rd
Street where he often met his agents to give instructions and receive
passports. His bills were paid by Captain von Papen, as revealed by the
attaché's checks and check stubs; on November 24, 1914, a payment in
his favor of $500; on December 5, $500 more and then $300, the latter
being for "journey money." Von Wedell's bills at the Deutscher Verein
in November, 1914, came to $38.05, according to another counterfoil.
The Captain in the meantime employed Frau von Wedell as courier,
sending her with messages to Germany. On December 22, 1914, he paid the
baroness, according to his check-book, $800.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Hans von Wedell and his wife. He was an important member of the
false-passport bureau and she a messenger from von Papen to Germany]

The passports secured by von Wedell, and by his successor, Carl
Ruroede, Sr., a clerk in Oelrichs & Co., whom he engaged, were supplied
by the dozens to officers whom the General Staff had ordered back to
Berlin. Not only American passports, but Mexican, Swiss, Swedish,
Norwegian and all South American varieties were seized eagerly by
reservists bound for the front. Germans and Austrians, who had been
captured in Russia, sent to Siberia as prisoners of war, escaped and
making their way by caravan through China, had embarked on vessels
bound for America. Arriving in New York they shipped for neutral
European countries. Among them was an Austrian officer, an expert
aeroplane observer whose feet were frozen and amputated in Siberia, but
who escaped to this country. He was ordered home because of his extreme
value in observation, and after his flight three-fourths of the way
round the world, the British took him off a ship at Falmouth to spend
the remainder of the war in a prison camp.

Captain von Papen used the bureau frequently for passports for spies
whom he wished to send to England, France, Italy or Russia. Anton
Kuepferle and von Breechow were two such agents. Both were captured in
England with false passports in their possession. Both confessed, and
the former killed himself in Brixton Jail.

Von Wedell and Ruroede grew reckless and boastful. Two hangers-on at
the Mills Hotel called upon one of the writers of this volume one
day and told him of von Wedell's practices, related how they had
blackmailed him out of $50, gave his private telephone numbers and
set forth his haunts. When this and other information reached the
Department of Justice, Albert G. Adams, a clever agent, insinuated
himself into Ruroede's confidence, and offered to secure passports for
him for $50 each. Posing as a pro-German, he pried into the inner ring
of the passport-buyers, and was informed by Ruroede just how the stock
of passports needed replenishing.

Though in the early days of the war it had not been necessary for the
applicant to give more than a general description of himself, the cry
of "German spies!" in the Allied countries became so insistent that
the Government added the requirement of a photograph of the bearer.
The Germans, however, found it a simple matter to give a general
description of a man's eyes, color of hair, and age to fit the person
who was actually to use the document; then forwarded the picture of
the applicant to be affixed. The applicant receiving the passport,
would sell it at once. Even though the official seal was stamped on the
photograph the Germans were not dismayed.

Adams rushed into Ruroede's office one day waving a sheaf of five
passports issued to him by the Government. Adams was ostensibly proud
of his work, Ruroede openly delighted.

"I knew I could get these passports easily," he boasted to Adams. "Why,
if Lieutenant von Wedell had kept on here he never could have done
this. He always was getting into a muddle."

"But how can you use these passports with these pictures on them?"
asked the agent.

"Oh, that's easy," answered Ruroede. "Come in the back room. I'll
show you." And Ruroede, before the observant eyes of the Department
of Justice, patted one of the passports with a damp cloth, then with
adhesive paste fastened a photograph of another man over the original
bearing the imprint of the United States seal.

"We wet the photograph," said Ruroede, "and then we affix the picture
of the man who is to use it. The new photograph also is dampened, but
when it is fastened to the passport there still remains a sort of
vacuum in spots between the new picture and the old because of ridges
made by the seal. So we turn the passport upside down, place it on a
soft ground--say a silk handkerchief--and then we take a paper-cutter
with a dull point, and just trace the letters on the seal. The result
is that the new photograph dries exactly as if it had been stamped by
Uncle Sam. You can't tell the difference."

Adams never knew until long afterward that when he met Ruroede by
appointment in Bowling Green, another German atop 11 Broadway was
scrutinizing him through field-glasses, and examining every one who
paused nearby, who might arouse suspicion of Adams' ingenuous part in
the transaction.

Through Adams' efforts Ruroede and four Germans, one of them an
officer in the German reserves, were arrested on January 2, on the
Scandinavian-American liner _Bergensfjord_ outward bound to Bergen,
Norway. They had passports issued through Adams at Ruroede's request
under the American names of Howard Paul Wright, Herbert S. Wilson,
Peter Hanson and Stanley F. Martin. Their real names were Arthur
Sachse, who worked in Pelham Heights, N.Y., and who was returning to
become a lieutenant in the German Army; Walter Miller, August R. Meyer
and Herman Wegener, who had come to New York from Chile, on their way
to the Fatherland.

On the day when Ruroede, his assistant, and the four men for whom
he obtained passports were arrested, Joseph A. Baker, assistant
superintendent of the Federal agents in New York, took possession
of the office at 11 Bridge Street. As he was sorting papers and
making a general investigation, a German walked in bearing a card
of introduction from von Papen, introducing himself as Wolfram von
Knorr, a German officer who up to the outbreak of the war had been
naval attaché in Tokio. The officer desired a passport. Baker, after a
conversation in which von Knorr revealed von Papen's connection with
the passport bureau, told him to return the next day. When the German
read the next morning's newspapers he changed his lodging-place and his
name.

Von Wedell himself was a passenger on the _Bergensfjord_, but when he
was lined up with the other passengers, the Federal agents, who did
not have a description of him, missed him and left the vessel. He was
later (January 11) taken off the ship by the British, however, and
transferred to another vessel for removal to a prison camp. She struck
a German mine and sank, and Von Wedell is supposed to have drowned.

A few days before he sailed, he wrote a letter to von Bernstorff
which fixes beyond question the responsibility for his false passport
activities. The letter, dated from Nyack, where he was hiding, on
December 26, 1914, follows:


     "His Excellency The Imperial German Ambassador, Count von
     Bernstorff, Washington, D. C. Your Excellency: Allow me most
     obediently to put before you the following facts: It seems that an
     attempt has been made to produce the impression upon you that I
     prematurely abandoned my post, in New York. That is not true.

     "I--My work was done. At my departure I left the service, well
     organized and worked out to its minutest details, in the hands of
     my successor, Mr. Carl Ruroede, picked out by myself, and, despite
     many warnings, still tarried for several days in New York in order
     to give him the necessary final directions and in order to hold in
     check the blackmailers thrown on my hands by the German officers
     until after the passage of my travelers through Gibraltar; in
     which I succeeded. Mr. Ruroede will testify to you that without
     my suitable preliminary labors, in which I left no conceivable
     means untried and in which I took not the slightest consideration
     of my personal weal or woe, it would be impossible for him, as
     well as for Mr. von Papen, to forward officers and 'aspirants' in
     any number whatever, to Europe. This merit I lay claim to and the
     occurrences of the last days have unfortunately compelled me, out
     of sheer self-respect, to emphasize this to your Excellency.

     "II--The motives which induced me to leave New York and which, to
     my astonishment, were not communicated to you, are the following:

     "1. I knew that the State Department had, for three weeks,
     withheld a passport application forged by me. Why?

     "2. Ten days before my departure I learnt from a telegram sent
     me by Mr. von Papen, which stirred me up very much, and further
     through the omission of a cable, that Dr. Stark had fallen into
     the hands of the English. That gentleman's forged papers were
     liable to come back any day and could, owing chiefly to his lack
     of caution, easily be traced back to me.

     "3. Officers and aspirants of the class which I had to forward
     over, namely the people, saddled me with a lot of criminals and
     blackmailers, whose eventual revelations were liable to bring
     about any day the explosion of the bomb.

     "4. Mr. von Papen had repeatedly urgently ordered me to hide
     myself.

     "5. Mr. Igel had told me I was taking the matter altogether too
     lightly and ought to--for God's sake--disappear.

     "6. My counsel ... had advised me to hastily quit New York,
     inasmuch as a local detective agency was ordered to go after the
     passport forgeries.

     "7. It had become clear to me that eventual arrest might yet
     injure the worthy undertaking and that my disappearance would
     probably put a stop to all investigation in this direction.

     "How urgent it was for me to go away is shown by the fact that,
     two days after my departure, detectives, who had followed up my
     telephone calls, hunted up my wife's harmless and unsuspecting
     cousin in Brooklyn, and subjected her to an interrogatory.

     "Mr. von Papen and Mr. Albert have told my wife that I forced
     myself forward to do this work. That is not true. When I, in
     Berlin, for the first time heard of this commission, I objected to
     going and represented to the gentleman that my entire livelihood
     which I had created for myself in America by six years of labor
     was at stake therein. I have no other means, and although Mr.
     Albert told my wife my practice was not worth talking about, it
     sufficed, nevertheless, to decently support myself and wife and
     to build my future on. I have finally, at the suasion of Count
     Wedell, undertaken it, ready to sacrifice my future and that of
     my wife. I have, in order to reach my goal, despite infinite
     difficulties, destroyed everything that I built up here for myself
     and my wife. I have perhaps sometimes been awkward, but always
     full of good will, and I now travel back to Germany with the
     consciousness of having done my duty as well as I understood it,
     and of having accomplished my task.

     "With expressions of the most exquisite consideration, I am, your
     Excellency,

     "Very respectfully,

     "(Signed) HANS ADAM VON WEDELL."


Ruroede was sentenced to three years in Atlanta prison. The four
reservists, pleading guilty, protested they had taken the passports out
of patriotism and were fined $200 each.

The arrest of Ruroede exposed the New York bureau, and made it
necessary for the Germans to shift their base of operations, but it
did not put an end to the fraudulent passport conspiracies. Captain
Boy-Ed assumed the burden, and hired men to secure passports for him.
One of these men was Richard Peter Stegler, a Prussian, 33 years old,
who had served in the German Navy and afterward came to this country
to start on his life work. Before the war he had applied for his first
citizenship papers but his name had not been removed from the German
naval reserve list.

"After the war started," Stegler said, "I received orders to return
home. I was told that everything was in readiness for me. I was
assigned to the naval station at Cuxhaven. My uniform, my cap, my boots
and my locker would be all set aside for me, and I was told just where
to go and what to do. But I could not get back at that time and I kept
on with my work."

He became instead a member of the German secret service in New York.
"There is not a ship that leaves the harbor, not a cargo that is
loaded or unloaded, but that some member of this secret organization
watches and reports every detail," he said. "All this information is
transmitted in code to the German Government." In January, 1915, if not
earlier, Stegler was sent by the German Consulate to Boy-Ed's office,
where he received instructions to get a passport and make arrangements
to go to England as a spy. Boy-Ed paid him $178, which the attaché
admitted. Stegler immediately got in touch with Gustave Cook and
Richard Madden, of Hoboken, and made use of Madden's birth certificate
and citizenship in obtaining a passport from the American Government.
Stegler paid $100 for the document. Stegler pleaded guilty to the
charge and served 60 days in jail; Madden and Cook were convicted of
conspiracy in connection with the project, and were sentenced to 10
months' imprisonment.

"I was told to make the voyage to England on the _Lusitania_,"
continued Stegler. "My instructions were as follows: 'Stop at
Liverpool, examine the Mersey River, obtain the names, exact locations
and all possible information concerning warships around Liverpool,
ascertain the amount of munitions of war being unloaded on the
Liverpool docks from the United States, ascertain their ultimate
destination, and obtain a detailed list of all the ships in the harbor.'

"I was to make constant, though guarded inquiries, of the location of
the dreadnought squadron which the Germans in New York understand was
anchored somewhere near St. George's Channel. I was to appear as an
American citizen soliciting trade. Captain Boy-Ed advised me to get
letters of introduction to business firms. He made arrangements so
that I received such letters and in one letter were enclosed some rare
stamps which were to be a proof to certain persons in England that I
was working for the Germans.

"After having studied at Liverpool I was to go to London and make an
investigation of the Thames and its shipping. From there I was to
proceed to Holland and work my way to the German border. While my
passport did not include Germany, I was to give the captain of the
nearest regiment a secret number which would indicate to him that I was
a reservist on spy duty. By that means I was to hurry to Eisendal, head
of the secret service in Berlin."

Stegler did not make the trip because his wife learned of the
enterprise and begged him not to go. He too had run afoul of the
vigilant Adams, and was placed under arrest in February, 1915,
shortly after he decided to stay at home. In his possession were all
the letters and telegrams exchanged between him and Boy-Ed, and one
telegram from "Winkler," Captain Boy-Ed's servant.

Stegler also said that he had been told by Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, one of
Dr. Albert's assistants, that Boy-Ed previously had sent to England
Karl Hans Lody, the German who in November, 1915, was put to death as
a spy in the Tower of London. Lody had been in the navy, had served on
the Kaiser's yacht and then had come to this country and worked as an
agent for the Hamburg-American Line, going from one city to another.
Shortly after the war started Lody had gone on the mission of espionage
which cost him his life.

Captain Boy-Ed authorized the commander of the German cruiser _Geier_,
interned in Honolulu, to get his men back to Germany as best he could,
by providing them with false passports. Still another of Boy-Ed's
protégés was a naval reservist, August Meier, who shipped as a hand
on the freighter _Evelyn_ with a cargo of horses for Bermuda. On the
voyage practically all of the horses were poisoned. Meier, however, was
arrested by the Federal authorities on the charge of using the name of
a dead man in order to get an American passport. In supplying passports
and in handling spies, Captain Boy-Ed was more subtle than his
colleague, von Papen. Nevertheless the Government officials succeeded
in getting a clear outline of his activities. The exposure of Boy-Ed's
connection with Stegler made it necessary for the German Government to
change its system once more.

The Wilhelmstrasse had a bureau of its own. Reservists from America
reported in Berlin for duty in Belgium and France, and their passports
ceased to be useful, to them. The intelligence department commandeered
the documents for agents whom they wished to send back to America. Tiny
flakes of paper were torn from the body of the passport and from the
seal, in order that counterfeiters might match them up. On January 14,
1915, an American named Reginald Rowland obtained a passport from the
State Department for safe-conduct on a business trip to Germany. While
it was being examined at the frontier every detail of the document was
closely noted by the Germans. Some months later Captain Schnitzer,
chief of the German secret service in Antwerp, had occasion to send
a spy to England. He chose von Breechow, a German whom von Papen had
forwarded from New York, and who had his first naturalization papers
from the United States. To Breechow he gave a facsimile of Rowland's
passport identical with the original in every superficial respect
except that the spy's photograph had been substituted for the original,
and the age of the bearer set down as 31--ten years older than Rowland.

Von Breechow passed the English officials at Rotterdam and at Tilbury.
He soon fell under suspicion, however, and his passport was taken
away. When the British learned that the real Rowland was at home in
New Jersey, and in possession of his own passport, they sent for it,
and compared the two. Breechow's revealed a false watermark, stamped
on in clear grease, which made the paper translucent, but which was
soluble in benzine. The stamp, ordinarily used to countersign both
the photograph and the paper in a certain way, had been applied in a
different position. With those exceptions, and the suspicious Teutonic
twist to a "d" in the word "dark," the counterfeit was regular.

The Rosenthal case was the first to bring to light the false passport
activities in Berlin. Rosenthal, posing as an agent for gas mantles,
traveled in England successfully as a spy under an emergency passport
issued by the American Embassy in Berlin. Captain Prieger, the chief of
a section in the intelligence department of the General Staff, asked
Rosenthal to make a second trip. The spy demurred, doubting whether his
passport might be accepted a second time. The Captain turned to a safe,
extracted a handful of false American passports, and said: "I can fit
you out with a passport in any name you wish." Rosenthal decided to
employ his own. He was arrested and imprisoned in England.

As the State Department increased its vigilance the evil began to
expire. It was further stifled by concerted multiplication by the
Allies of the examinations which the stranger had to undergo. But
during its course it made personal communication between Berlin and
lower Broadway almost casual.




CHAPTER VIII

INCENDIARISM

     Increased munitions production--The opening explosions--Orders
     from Berlin--Von Papen and Seattle--July, 1915--The Van Koolbergen
     affair--The autumn of 1915--The Pinole explosion.


A bomb is an easy object to manufacture. Take a section of lead
pipe from six to ten inches long, and solder into it a partition of
thin metal, which divides the tube into two compartments. Place a
high explosive in one compartment and seal it carefully (the entire
operation requires a gentle touch) and in the other end pour a strong
acid; cap it, and seal it. If you have chosen the proper metal for
the partition, and acid of a strength to eat slowly through it to the
explosive, you have produced a bomb of a type which German destroying
agents were fond of using in America from the earliest days of their
operation.

When the first panic of war had passed, the Allied nations took
account of stock and sent their purchasing agents to America for
war materials. Manufacturers of explosives set to work at once
to fill contracts of unheard-of size. They built new factories
almost overnight, hired men broadcast, and sacrificed every other
consideration to that of swift and voluminous output. Accidents were
inevitable. Probably we shall never know what catastrophes were
actually wrought by German sympathizers, for the very nature of the
processes and the complete ruin which followed an explosion guarded the
secret of guilt. No doubt carelessness was largely to blame for the
earlier explosions, but instead of diminishing as the new hands became
more skillful, and as greater vigilance was employed everywhere, the
number of disasters increased. The word "disaster" is used advisedly.
Powder, guncotton, trinitrotoluol (or TNT, as it is better known),
benzol (one of the chief substances used in the manufacture of TNT) and
dynamite were being produced in great volume for the Allies in American
plants within a comparatively short time--all powerful explosives even
in minute quantity.

At sea the German navy was losing control daily. It therefore behooved
the German forces in America to stop the production of munitions at its
source. It may be well, for the force which such presentation carries,
to recount very briefly the major accidents which occurred in America
in the first few months after August, 1914.

On August 30 one powder mill of the du Pont Powder company (strictly
speaking the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Company) at Pompton Lakes, New
Jersey, blew up. In September a guncotton explosion in the Wright
Chemical Works caused the death of three people, and a large property
damage. In October the factory of the Pain Fireworks Display Company
was destroyed, and several people were killed. In the same month the
fireworks factory of Detwiller and Street in Jersey City suffered an
explosion and the loss of four lives. These explosions were the opening
guns.

Throughout August and September most of these accidents may be
attributed to the inexperience and confusion which followed greatly
increased production in the powder mills. But a circular dated November
18, issued by German Naval Headquarters to all naval agents throughout
the world, ordered mobilized all "agents who are overseas and all
destroying agents in ports where vessels carrying war material are
loaded in England, France, Canada, the United States and Russia."

Followed these orders:

"It is indispensable by the intermediary of the third person having
no relation with the official representatives of Germany to recruit
progressively agents to organize explosions on ships sailing to enemy
countries in order to cause delays and confusion in the loading, the
departure and the unloading of these ships. With this end in view we
particularly recommend to your attention the deckhands, among whom
are to be found a great many anarchists and escaped criminals. The
necessary sums for buying and hiring persons charged with executing the
projects will be put at your disposal on your demand."

Equally incriminating proof that the "destroying agents" were active in
and about the factories lies in a circular intercepted by the French
secret service in Stockholm, in a letter addressed by one Dr. Klasse in
Germany to the Pan-German League in Sweden, in which he said:

"Inclosed is the circular of November 22, 1914, for information and
execution upon United States territory. We draw your attention to the
possibility of recruiting destroying agents among the anarchist labor
organization." This circular was signed by Dr. Fischer, Councillor
General of the German Army.

In the first six months of 1915 the du Pont factories at Haskell,
N. J., Carney's Point, N. J., Wayne, Pa., and Wilmington, Del.,
experienced explosions and fires; a chemical explosion occurred
in a factory in East 19th Street, New York; the Anderson Chemical
Company, at Wallington, N. J., was rocked on May 3 by an explosion of
guncotton which cost three lives; five more lives were flashed out in
a similar accident in the Equitable powder plant at Alton, Ill. On
New Year's Day, the Buckthorne plant of the John A. Roebling Company,
manufacturers of shell materials, at Trenton, was completely destroyed
by fire, the property loss estimated at $1,500,000. And on June 26, the
Ætna Powder plant at Pittsburgh suffered a chemical explosion which
killed one man and injured ten others.

Most of these "accidents" had taken place near the Atlantic seaboard.
Yet Germany was active in the far West. On May 30 a barge laden with a
large cargo of dynamite lay in the harbor of Seattle, Washington. The
dynamite was consigned to Russia and was about to be transferred to a
steamer, when it exploded with a shock of earthquake violence felt many
miles inland, and comparable to the explosion in the harbor of Halifax
in December, 1917. Two counterfoils in von Papen's check-book cast some
light on the activities of the consulate in Seattle, the first dated
February 11, 1915, the amount $1,300, the payee "German Consulate,
Seattle," the penned notation. "Angelegenheit" (affair) preceded by a
mysterious "C"; the second dated May 11, 1915, for $500, payable to one
"Schulenberg"[2] through the same consulate.

The month of July was a holocaust. A tank of phenol exploded in New
York, the benzol plant of the Semet Solvay Company was destroyed at
Solvay, N. Y.; on the 7th serious explosions occurred at the du Pont
plant at Pompton Lakes and at the Philadelphia benzol plant of Harrison
Brothers (the latter causing $500,000 damage); on the 16th five
employees were killed in an explosion and fire at the Ætna plant at
Sinnemahoning, Pa., three days later there was another at the du Pont
plant in Wilmington; on the 25th a munitions train on the Pennsylvania
line was wrecked at Metuchen, N. J.; on the 28th the du Pont works
at Wilmington suffered again; and the month came to a fitting close
with the destruction of a glaze mill in the American Powder Company at
Acton, Mass., on the 29th. (The British army in Mesopotamia had just
entered Kut-el-Amara at this time, and far to the northward Germany was
prosecuting a successful campaign to force a Russian retirement from
Poland.)

Each incident raised havoc in its immediate vicinity. Each represents a
carefully worked-out plan involving a group of destroying agents. There
is not space here to describe the plots in detail, nor to picture the
horror of their results. But the affidavit of Johannes Hendrikus Van
Koolbergen, dated San Francisco, August 27, 1915, may serve to show
typical methods of operation, as well as to provide a story more than
usually melodramatic.

Van Koolbergen was a Hollander by birth, and a British subject by
naturalization. In April, 1915, he met in the Heidelberg Café, in
San Francisco, a man named Wilhelm von Brincken, who lived at 303
Piccadilly Apartments, and who asked Van Koolbergen to call on him
there. The latter, however, was leaving for Canada, and it was not
until some five weeks later that he returned and found that in
his absence von Brincken had twice telephoned him to pursue the
acquaintance.

Van Koolbergen called. Von Brincken explained that he was a German army
officer, on secret service, and employed directly by Franz Bopp, the
German consul in San Francisco. His visitor's identity and personality
was apparently well known to him, for he offered Van Koolbergen $1,000
for the use of his passport into Canada, "to visit a friend, to assist
him in some business matters." Van Koolbergen refused to rent his
passport, but volunteered to go himself on any mission. This offer
was discussed at a later meeting at the consulate with Herr Bopp, and
accepted, after, as Koolbergen said, "I became suspicious, and upon
different questions being asked me ... I became very pro-German in the
expression of my sentiments."

He was shown into an adjoining office, and von Brincken popped in, and
"asked me if I would do something for him in Canada ... and I answered:
'Sure, I will do something, even blow up bridges, if there is any money
in it.' (This struck my mind because of what I had read of what had
been done in Canada of late--something about a bridge being blown up--)
And he said: 'If that is so, you can make good money.'"

Von Brincken made an appointment with his newly engaged destroying
agent for the following day. On the window-sill of 303 Piccadilly
Apartments sat a flower pot with a tri- band around its rim.
If the red was turned outward towards Van Koolbergen as he came along
the street, he was to come right upstairs. If he saw the blue, he was
to loiter discreetly about until the red was turned; if the white area
showed, he was to return another day.

The red invitation signaled him to come up, and the two bargained for
some time over Van Koolbergen's Canadian mission, without coming to an
understanding. Once safely out of von Brincken's sight, the "destroying
agent" pattered to the British Consulate and betrayed to Carnegie Ross,
the consul, what was afoot. Ross urged him to advise Canada at once, so
Van Koolbergen retold his story in a letter to Wallace Orchard, in the
freight department of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Vancouver, B. C.

Orchard telegraphed back demanding Van Koolbergen's presence at once,
and furnished money and transportation. Meanwhile the latter had
pretended to accept von Brincken's commission to go to Canada and blow
up a military train, bridge, or tunnel on the Canadian Pacific line
between Revelstoke and Vancouver, for which he was to receive a fee
of $3,000. The German exhibited complete maps of the railroad, told
when a dynamite train might be expected to pass over that section of
the road, and outlined to Van Koolbergen just where and when he could
procure dynamite for the job. So on a Sunday morning in early May Van
Koolbergen arrived in Vancouver, and lost no time in getting in touch
with Orchard and the British Secret Service, with whom he framed the
following plan:

Van Koolbergen was to send a letter to von Brincken warning him that
something would happen in a day or two. The Vancouver newspapers would
then carry a prepared story to the effect that a tunnel had caved in
in the Selkirk mountains, whereupon Van Koolbergen was to collect for
his services, and to secure incriminating evidence in writing from von
Brincken if possible.

The plot worked well. The news story appeared, and cast a mysterious
air over the accident. Van Koolbergen at once wrote a postcard to von
Brincken:


     "On the front page of Vancouver papers of (date) news appears of a
     flood in Japan. Our system may be in trouble, so wire here at the
     Elysium Hotel."


A few days later Van Koolbergen returned to San Francisco and met von
Brincken, who told him that he had replied to the postcard by telegram:


     "Would like to send some flowers to your wife but do not know her
     address,"


which meant simply that he had wished to communicate with Van
Koolbergen through the latter's wife. (These messages, by the way, were
despatched from Oakland by Charles C. Crowley, who will appear again.)
And von Brincken paid Van Koolbergen $200 in bills, and asked him to
come to the consulate for the balance of his fee.

Franz Bopp was skeptical. For some reason he mistrusted Van Koolbergen.
He produced a map of British Columbia and asked him to describe what he
had accomplished. Van Koolbergen, confused for a moment, suggested that
he would be unwise to go into detail before three witnesses (Bopp, von
Brincken, and von Schack, the vice-consul). Bopp rose indignantly and
said that his secret was safe with three who had been sworn to serve
the Vaterland. So Van Koolbergen invented and related the story of The
Dynamiting That Never Was, supporting it with copies of the Vancouver
newspapers. Bopp wanted more proof; at Van Koolbergen's suggestion, he
wrote one Van Roggenen, the Dutch vice-consul at Vancouver, asking
him to "inquire of the General Superintendent of the Canadian Pacific
Railway Company why a car of freight which I expected from the East had
not arrived yet, and to kindly wire me at my expense." Van Roggenen
happened to be a friend of Van Koolbergen's, and of course any inquiry
made of the railroad for Van Koolbergen's car of freight would have
been tactfully construed and properly answered. But to make assurance
doubly sure, Van Koolbergen wired Orchard in Vancouver to send him the
following telegram:


     "Superintendent refuses information. Found out however that
     freight has been delayed eleven days on account of accident.
     Signed V. R."


Armed with this fictitious reply, which Orchard soon sent him, Van
Koolbergen called at the consulate, and was paid $300 more in cash.
In order to get as much money as possible as soon as possible, the
"destroying agent" agreed to cut his price from $3,000 to $1,750, and
was promised the money the next day. The next day came, but no money.
Van Koolbergen sent a sharp note to the Consul, suggesting blackmail,
and the German Empire in San Francisco capitulated; von Brincken met
Van Koolbergen at the Palace Hotel and paid him $1,750, (of which he
extracted $250 as commission!). He made Koolbergen sign a receipt for
$700, as he said a payment of $1,750 would look bad on the books, was
much too high--even seven hundred was high, but could be justified
if any one higher up complained. "And," concluded the thrifty Van
Koolbergen in his affidavit written August 27, "I have some of the
greenbacks given me by von Brincken now in my possession."

The San Franciscan participants in the episode were finally brought to
justice. Bopp, Baron Eckhardt, von Schack, Lieutenant von Brincken,
Crowley, and Mrs. Margaret Cornell, Crowley's secretary, were indicted,
tried, and convicted. The men received sentences of two years and
fines of $10,000 each; Mrs. Cornell was sentenced to a year and a day.
The three members of the consulate, thanks to their other activities,
involved themselves in a series of charges for which the maximum
punishment was something more than the average man's lifetime in
prison. Certain of their adventures will appear in other phases of
German activity to be discussed. They may be dismissed here, however,
with the statement that the California consulate also planned the
destruction of munitions plants at Ætna, Indiana, and at Ishpeming,
Michigan.

The State Department released on October 10, 1917, a telegram from
the Foreign Office in Berlin, addressed to Count von Bernstorff,
which established beyond question the chief's familiarity with these
operations, and more especially the continued desire of the Foreign
Office to interrupt transcontinental shipping in Canada. It is dated
January 2, 1916. Its text follows:


     "Secret. General staff desires energetic action in regard to
     proposed destruction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad at several
     points, with a view to complete and protracted interruption of
     traffic. Captain Boehm, who is known on your side, and is shortly
     returning, has been given instructions. Inform the military
     attaché and provide the necessary funds.

     "ZIMMERMANN."


The factory explosions continued. The Midvale Steel Company suffered
incendiary fires; a Providence warehouse containing a consignment of
cotton for Russia was burned; there were fires in the shell plant
of the Brill Car Company, in the Southwark Machinery Company, and
in the shell department of the Diamond Forge and Steel Company.
For August the ghastly recitation proceeds somewhat as follows:
Bethlehem Steel Company, powder flash, ten killed; League Island Navy
Yard, Philadelphia, fire on battleship _Alabama_; Newport News Navy
Yard, three fires in three weeks. In September an explosion in the
aeroplane factory of the Curtiss plant at Depew, New York, a German
suspected; explosions in the shell factory of the National Cable and
Conduit Company at Hastings, New York; an explosion of benzol and
wax in the plant of Smith and Lenhart, New York, in which two people
were seriously injured; an explosion in a fireworks factory at North
Bergen, N. J., in which two people were killed; an explosion which cost
two lives in the shell factory of the Westinghouse Electric Company
at Pittsburgh. Scarcely a week went by during the autumn without an
explosion and fire which wiped out from one to a dozen lives, and from
one hundred thousand to a million dollars. Munitions plants were blown
to atoms in a moment, and hardly before the charred ground had cooled,
were being rebuilt, for the guns in France were hungry.

Out of the mass of munitions accidents in the year 1915 stands sharp
and clear the Bethlehem Steel fire of November 10--of which all
Germany had had warning, and on which the German press was forbidden
to comment--when 800 big guns were destroyed. The du Pont and Ætna
organizations suffered again and again; a chemical plant had two fires
which cost three-quarters of a million dollars; two explosions in the
Tennessee Coal and Iron Works at Birmingham, Alabama, did considerable
property damage, and assisted Germany further by frightening labor away
from work. Suspects were arrested here and there, and always their
trails led back to German or Austrian nationality or sympathy.

Their chiefs were elusive. Captain von Papen sauntered out of the
Ritz-Carlton into Madison Avenue, New York, one afternoon. He idled
down to Forty-second Street, and paused, as if undecided where to
promenade. He turned east, walked a block, and turned again down the
ramp into the Grand Central Station. Quickening his pace--he had only
a minute more--he crossed the great waiting-room, presented a ticket
at the train gate, and a moment later was in the Twentieth Century
Limited, the last passenger aboard. He was seen next day in Chicago.
And for a month thereafter he was completely lost to the authorities,
while, as they found out later, he made a grand tour of the country,
going first to Yellowstone Park, then down the Pacific Coast to Mexico,
where he joined Boy-Ed, and finally returning to New York through
San Francisco. He had ample opportunity to confer with his consular
deputies, and his destroying agents. In August a train loaded with
7,000 pounds of dynamite from the du Pont works at Pinole, California,
was destroyed; in the evidence against von Papen is this letter
concerning the price to be paid for the Pinole job:


     "Dear S.: Your last letter with clipping today, and note what you
     have to say. I have taken it up with them and 'B'" (who was Franz
     Bopp) "is awaiting decision of 'P'" (who was von Papen) "in New
     York, so cannot advise you yet, and will do so as soon as I get
     word from you. You might size up the situation in the meantime."


Glancing back over the record of 1915--which was hardly mitigated in
the succeeding years of war--one is inclined to marvel at the hardy
perennial pose of the deported attaché, who said as he left the United
States:


     "I leave my post without any feeling of bitterness, because I know
     that when history is once written, it will establish our clean
     record despite all the misrepresentations and calumnies spread
     broadcast at present."


FOOTNOTE:

[2] Franz Schulenberg was a deserter from the German army who
advertised in the Spokane newspapers in February, 1915, for land on
which to colonize a number of Spanish families. These families turned
out to be Hindus, whom he proposed to employ in obtaining information
of Canadian shipping, to be relayed by secret wireless to German
raiders in the Pacific. Schulenberg was captured on December 5, 1917,
in an automobile on the road from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, two
days after he had left a woman spy who was associated with von Papen's
office, and who directed Schulenberg's movements in the United States.
He admitted having bought, in 1915, a ton of dynamite, fifty Maxim
silencers, fifty rifles, and a quantity of fuse for shipment to Hindus
near the Canadian border, between Victoria and Vancouver.




CHAPTER IX

MORE BOMB PLOTS

     Kaltschmidt and the Windsor explosions--The Port Huron
     tunnel--Werner Horn--Explosions embarrass the Embassy--Black
     Tom--The second Welland affair--Harry Newton--The damage done in
     three years--Waiter spies.


In the check-book of the military attaché was a counterfoil betraying
a payment of $1,000 made on March 27, 1915, to "W. von Igel (for A.
Kaltschmidt, Detroit)." That stub was part of a bomb plot.

A young German named Charles Francis Respa was employed in 1908 by
Albert Carl Kaltschmidt in a Detroit machine shop. Seven years later
Kaltschmidt had occasion to hire Respa again. To a group which included
Respa, his brother-in-law Carl Schmidt, Gus Stevens and Kaltschmidt's
own brother-in-law, Fritz Neef, he outlined a plan for destroying
factories in Canada. Neef was the Detroit agent for the Eisemann
magneto, and had a machine shop of his own.

"We are not citizens of this country," Kaltschmidt reiterated to his
accomplices. "It is our duty to stand by the Fatherland. The Americans
would throw us out of work after war started." (The Americans, on the
contrary, gave the ringleaders of the conspiracy plenty of hard labor
after the war started.) To seal the bargain Kaltschmidt paid the men
a retainer, and sent Stevens and Respa to Winnipeg to see whether it
might not be feasible to blow up the railroad bridge there.

Respa reported back. His next assignment was to go to Port Huron and
determine whether enough dynamite might be attached to the rear of a
passenger train bound through the international tunnel under the St.
Clair River to destroy the tube. Respa came to the conclusion that
it was not practicable, for the authorities were taking precautions
against just such an operation. Respa and Stevens were then despatched
to Duluth, where they met Schmidt and a fourth member of the group,
each carrying a suitcase containing numerous sticks of dynamite, and
the quartette returned with its explosives to Detroit.

Kaltschmidt then hired him for $18 a week. Respa had left Germany
before his term of military service came due; Kaltschmidt used this
information as a club over his head, for he knew the young man could
not return to the Fatherland. On June 21 Kaltschmidt called Respa
to his office in the Kresge Building, and showed him two elaborate
time-clock devices which could be so set as to fire bombs at any
specified hour, and Respa, at Kaltschmidt's command, carried the clocks
across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario, late that afternoon. His
sister, Mrs. Schmidt, went with him, and together they wandered about
until the hour when they knew that William Lefler, the night watchman
of the Peabody Overall Company factory in Walkerville, would go on duty.

Under cover of darkness, the brother and sister met Lefler, who gave
Respa two suitcases full of dynamite which Kaltschmidt had smuggled
piecemeal into Canada under the front seat of his automobile. Respa
attached the clocks to the charges, set one of the infernal machines
near the factory, and planted the other in the rear of the Windsor
armory, in which Canadian troops were asleep, and near which was a
Catholic girls' school. Then he and Mrs. Schmidt scurried back to
the ferry and took the last boat to Detroit. At three o'clock in the
morning they heard a muffled roar from the Canadian side; the factory
bomb had gone off. The other charge failed to explode: Respa said he
deliberately set the percussion cap at the wrong angle, because he
knew that soldiers were sleeping in the armory, and he had no stomach
for murder.

One of the gang was presently arrested, and Respa was spirited away
to the retirement of a mechanic's job in a West Hoboken garage. But
he grew restless, and spent his money, and Kaltschmidt refused him
more. He pawned his watch and his ring, bought a ticket to Detroit,
and presented himself before Kaltschmidt with a demand for money,
in default of which Respa proposed to "squeal." He was immediately
returned to the payroll.

The Canadian provincial detectives had begun to search for the night
watchman, Lefler. They found him, and from him they extracted a full
confession. Respa's arrest was easy, and the United States willingly
returned him, although Kaltschmidt did attempt to establish a false
alibi for his underling. Respa was sentenced to life imprisonment,
Lefler to ten years, for the destruction of the factory.

The dragnet closed in on Kaltschmidt. William M. Jarosch, a
German-born, who later enlisted in the United States Army, had been
introduced to Kaltschmidt in Chicago in 1915 by a former German
consul there, Gustav Jacobsen. Jacobsen recruited two other men,
and Kaltschmidt took the three to Detroit. Jarosch was directed to
secure employment at the plant of the Detroit Screw Works, but he
was rejected, so Kaltschmidt told him to watch the plant for a good
opportunity to set a bomb there. In the course of his sojourn in
Detroit he went to the Respa home in the placid little village of Romeo
and returned with a generous quantity of dynamite. This he delivered to
Neef, and in a conference at the magneto shop Kaltschmidt explained the
operation of the time-clock, and ordered Jarosch to set the device at
the Detroit Screw factory that night. He and his Chicago confederates
set out for the scene, but there were guards about, and Jarosch had no
desire for arrest, so he took the bomb to his hotel room, disengaged
the trigger, and calmly went to sleep. Next morning Kaltschmidt
reproached him, and Jarosch resigned, to return months later to show
Federal officers where he had buried some 80 pounds of dynamite,
nitroglycerine, and a bomb.

Kaltschmidt also conspired to destroy the Port Huron tunnel. For this
enterprise he contrived a car which he proposed to load with dynamite
set to explode with a time fuse. Fritz Neef, the Stuttgart graduate and
expert mechanical engineer, was his able assistant and adviser in this
project. The car was of standard railway gauge. It was to be set on
the Grand Trunk tracks at the mouth of the Port Huron end of the tunnel
and released, to roll down into the darkness under the river. At the
low point in the tunnel's curve the charge would explode, bursting the
walls of the tube, and completely interrupting the heavy international
freight traffic at that point.

The "devil car" never was released. Kaltschmidt was arrested, and
finally, in December, 1917, tried and convicted on three counts. He was
given the maximum sentence, of four years' imprisonment and $20,000
fine. His sister, Mrs. Neef, who had been an active intermediary, was
sentenced to three years' imprisonment and was fined $15,000; Carl
Schmidt and his wife were each condemned to two years in prison, and
assessed a fine of $10,000 each, and only old Franz Respa, the father
of the dynamiter, was acquitted.

The activities of this group received tangible approval from the
German Embassy. Even before von Papen drew the check on March 27 for
Kaltschmidt, the attaché's secretary, von Igel, had transferred $2,000
to the Detroit German from the banking firm of Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne
(January 23). On October 5, long after the Walkerville explosion,
but while the Port Huron venture was still a possibility, the Chase
National Bank of New York transferred to Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne
$25,000 from the joint account maintained there by Count von Bernstorff
and Dr. Albert, and next day the money was placed to Kaltschmidt's
credit.

The Port Huron tunnel was the object of German attentions from the
active San Francisco consulate. Crowley, who had been von Brincken's
messenger in the Van Koolbergen affair, and one Louis J. Smith, were
hired by Herr Bopp to go east on a destroying mission. They ran out of
money in New York, and called at the New York consulate for assistance.
They were told that the New York consulate had nothing to do with
Pacific coast activities, so they wired von Schack for funds. He
replied, chiding them for not having called on von Papen.

Late in June Smith left New York and joined Crowley at the Normandy
Hotel in Detroit. "Then we went to Port Huron," he said, "where we
planned to dynamite a railroad tunnel and a horse train. We didn't do
it, though.

"Then we went to Toronto, and Crowley told me to plant a bomb under a
horse train in the West Toronto yards. But I saw a policeman, and I got
out quick. Then we took some nitroglycerine, cotton, sawdust, and a tin
pan and some other things to Grosse Isle, Ontario, and went out back
of a cemetery and made some bombs.

"Well, we got back to San Francisco late in July, and Crowley and
I cooked up an expense account of $1,254.80, and took it up to the
consulate. Von Schack locked the door behind us, and then he said: 'I
don't want any statement. Tell me how much you want?' We told him, and
he said he would get it the following day. Then all of a sudden he
asked: 'How do I know you fellows did any jobs in Canada?'

"'Wire the mayor of Toronto and ask him!' Crowley answered."

On one occasion at least the Germans respected American property, for
the protection America might afford. Werner Horn, a former lieutenant
in the Landwehr, was in Guatemala when the war broke out. He made an
attempt to return to his command, but got no farther than New York,
where he placed himself at the disposal of Captain von Papen. On
January 18 the military attaché paid him $700. On February 2 Horn
exploded a charge of dynamite on the Canadian end of the international
bridge at Vanceboro, Maine, spanning the St. Croix River to New
Brunswick. The explosion caused a slight damage to the Canadian half
of the bridge. A few hours later Horn was arrested in Vanceboro, and
admitted the crime.

When the Canadian authorities applied for his extradition, the warrant
which Judge Hale issued was not executed, the United States Marshal
for Maine having received word from Washington that a well-preserved
treaty between Great Britain and the United States would cover just
such a case, and Horn was indicted on a charge of having transported
explosives from New York City to Vanceboro. His attorneys naïvely
attempted to secure his liberty by casting a protective mantle of
international law about his shoulders: Werner Horn, they said, was a
First Lieutenant of the West-Prussian Pioneer Battalion Number 17, and
as such was sworn by His Royal Majesty of Prussia to


     " ... discharge the obligations of his office in a becoming
     manner, ... execute diligently and loyally whatever is made his
     duty to do and carry out, and whatever is commanded him, by day
     and by night, on land and on sea, and ... conduct himself bravely
     and irreproachably in all wars and military events that may
     occur...."


Yet he was tried, and that without much delay, and convicted, and
sentenced to imprisonment.

Although the destruction of railways was an attractive means of
stopping the progress of munitions to the seaboard, and although
it was a recognized practice during 1915, it made the Embassy at
Washington uneasy. Bernstorff protested to the Foreign Office in Berlin
that if a German agent should be caught in the act of dynamiting a
railroad it would be exceedingly embarrassing for him, and increase
the difficulties of his already ticklish rôle of apologist and
explainer-extraordinary. The Foreign Office accordingly sent a telegram
to von Papen:


     "January 26--For Military Attaché.... Railway embankments and
     bridges must not be touched. Embassy must in no circumstances be
     compromised."

     (Signed) "REPRESENTATIVE OF GENERAL STAFF."


And thereafter American railway bridges and embankments were safe,
though their owners may not have been aware of the fact at the time.

It is no mere metaphor to say that during 1915 and 1916 the smoke of
German explosions in factories in the United States was spreading
across the sun, casting the deepening shadow of war over America.
There was dynamite found in the coal tender of a munitions train
on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Callery Junction, Pa., on
December 10, 1915, the day on which enormous quantities of wheat were
destroyed by fire in grain elevators at Erie. A few hours earlier
a two-million-dollar explosion had occurred at the Hopewell plant
of the du Pont works. Shortly before Christmas a ton and a half of
nitroglycerine exploded at Fayville, Illinois.

During 1916 there were a dozen major explosions in the du Pont
properties alone and literally dozens of lives were lost. Two arms
plants at Bridgeport, Conn., were blown up. An explosion in May wiped
out a large chemical plant in Cadillac, Michigan. A munitions works
of the Bethlehem Steel Company at Newcastle, Pa., was destroyed. The
climax in violence came, however, in the sultry night of August 1-2.
Shortly after midnight the rocky island of Manhattan trembled, and
the roar of a prodigious blast burst over the harbor of New York. Two
million pounds of munitions were being transported in freight trains
and on barges near the island of Black Tom, a few hundred yards from
the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty. Some one, somehow, supplied the
spark. The loss of life was inconsiderable, for that neighborhood was
not inhabited, but the confusion was complete. Heavy windows in the
canyons of lower Manhattan were shivered, and for a few moments many of
the streets rained broken glass. Shell-laden barges near the original
explosion set up a scattering fire which continued for some time, most
of the projectiles losing their power through lack of a substantial
breech-block. But the immigration station on Ellis Island was in
panic, and its position became more unpleasant as one of the blazing
barges drifted down upon it. The shock was felt far out in Jersey, and
northward in Connecticut. An estimate of damage was placed at thirty
millions of dollars, probably as accurate as such an estimate need be;
the event was utterly spectacular, and from the point of view of the
unknown destroying agent, effective.

Exactly one year after von Papen gave up the first attempt upon the
Welland Canal, a second enterprise began with the same objective.
Captain von Papen felt that von der Goltz had bungled. This time
he intrusted the mission to the doughty and usually reliable Paul
Koenig. On September 27, 1915, Koenig, with Richard Emil Leyendecker,
a "hyphenated American" who dealt during the daytime in art woods
at 347 Fifth Avenue, New York, and Fred Metzler, of Jersey City,
Koenig's secretary, went to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, accompanied by
Mrs. Koenig. They had no trouble in crossing the border and making a
thorough investigation of the canal, its vulnerable points, its guards
and the patrol routes of those guards. Koenig selected men whom he
detailed to watch the guards, and he fixed on satisfactory storage
places for his explosives. The party then returned to Niagara Falls and
later to New York.

They did not know that they were being trailed. All three men had been
under surveillance for nearly a year, and after their migrations near
the canal, the guard was reenforced. It became impossible to carry
out the plan. A few weeks later the detectives who were shadowing
Koenig noticed that George Fuchs, a relative whom he employed at a
meagre salary, was seldom seen in his company. They sought Fuchs out
and plied him with refreshment. A few glasses of beer drew out his
story: Koenig owed him $15, and he therefore bore no affection for
Koenig. The detectives turned him over to Superintendent Offley of the
Department of Justice, who sympathized with Fuchs to such an extent
that the latter retailed enough evidence of the Welland plot to secure
Koenig's indictment on five counts. Thus did a debt of thirty pieces
of silver--in this case half-dollars--rob the Hamburg-American Line of
a six-foot, 200-pound detective, and the German spy system in America
of one of its roughest characters, for, thanks to Fuchs' revelations,
Koenig was indicted for a violation of Section 13 of the Penal Code.

Herald Square, New York, was the center of open-air oratory every
evening until after America entered the war. Those who had stood and
fought their verbal battles during the day about the bulletin board
of the _New York Herald_ remained at night to bellow to the idle
passersby along Broadway, and one night Felix Galley, a leather-lunged
contractor, gave an impassioned discourse justifying Germany's entrance
into the war. When the meeting broke up he was followed home by one who
rather passed his expectations as a convert.

The stranger was Harry Newton. He had been employed in a munitions
plant in St. Catharine's, Ontario. He suggested to Galley that he
would take any orders for arson which the Germans had in mind, and
recommended that as proof of his ability he would oblige with a
dynamiting of the Brooks Locomotive Works at Dunkirk, N. Y., for a
retainer of $5,000. Or, he said, he could arrange to destroy the
Federal building or Police Headquarters. This was more than the German
had bargained for, and assuring Newton that he would first have to
consult the "chief," he ran straightway to the police and in great
agitation told what had happened. Captain Tunney, of the Bomb Squad,
assigned Detective Sergeant George Barnitz to the case.

The detective, posing as a German agent, found Newton at Mills Hotel
No. 3, and opened negotiations with him. After several talks, they met
on the afternoon of April 19, 1916, at Grand Street and the Bowery.
Barnitz said: "Now, I'm in a hurry--haven't much time to discuss all
this. You say you're in the business strictly for the money. The chief
is willing to pay you $5,000 if you will smash the Welland Canal
or blow up the Brooks Locomotive Works or burn the McKinnon, Dash
Company's plant at St. Catharine's. But how do we know you won't demand
more from us after you are paid? Maybe you'll want more cash for your
assistants."

Newton was quick to reply that he worked alone and wouldn't trust any
assistant. He was anxious to start with the Brooks "job" at Dunkirk and
told Barnitz he had left in the baggage-room of the New York Central
Railroad at Buffalo a suitcase containing powerful bombs. (The suitcase
actually contained a loaded 4-inch shell, with percussion cap and
fuse.) It would be necessary only for him to go to Buffalo, get the
suitcase, hasten to Dunkirk and blow up the locomotive works.

"Fine," said Barnitz. "You are under arrest."

Newton stared a moment, then laughed. "You New York cops are a damned
sight smarter than I ever thought you were," he said, "and you made me
think you were a German!"

At Police Headquarters he described his plan for blowing up the Welland
Canal. Having worked in a town located on the canal, he was familiar
with the position of the locks. "It would be a simple matter," he said.
"You see these buttons I am wearing on my watch chain and in my coat
lapel. The plain gilt one reads 'On His Majesty's Service.' The blue
and white one reads 'McKinnon, Dash Company, Munitions. On Service.'
Those buttons are passes that would let me into any munitions plant in
Canada or this country. They would pass me through the guards of the
canal. It would be easy for me to pretend to be a workman, get a boat
and, carrying a dinner pail, filled with explosives, to pick out a weak
spot in the canal works and destroy the whole business.

"It would be a cinch to burn the McKinnon, Dash plant. I could go back
to work there as foreman. Any Saturday night I could be the last to
leave. Before going I could saturate flooring with benzine and put a
lighted candle where within a half hour or so the flame would reach the
benzine."

Newton also suggested his willingness to dynamite the banking house of
J. P. Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, or to dynamite the banker's
automobile. He had a series of postcards in his own handwriting, which,
in case he was hired for a dynamiting, were to be mailed from distant
points every day while he was on the assignment, in order to establish
an alibi.

He was an irresponsible person, and one who could not be said to be
under orders from the attachés in lower Broadway. Yet he is typical
of the restless and lawless floating population of which the Germans
made excellent tools. When he heard Galley he promptly offered his
services; his boldness would have made him a capital destroying agent,
and it was fired by the speech in Herald Square, a speech inspired
from Berlin. Here was his opportunity to make money. Thus, by a
word of encouragement, by the whisper of "big money" to discharged,
dissatisfied or disloyal employees of munitions plants, the seed of
German violence was sown everywhere. Men who were well dressed and
of good appearance would be remarked if they prowled about factory
districts; men must be employed who would fade into the drab landscape
by the very commonplaceness of their clothing and action. They could be
hired cheaply and swiftly disowned, these Newtons!

The _New York Times_ on November 3, 1917, recapitulated the damage
wrought by German incendiarism as follows:

"A graphic idea of what the fire losses in the United States owe to
the work of war incendiaries may be gained from consideration of the
fact that the total fire insurance paid in the United States in 1915,
according to the figures of the National Board of Fire Underwriters,
was $153,000,000. It is estimated that 60 per cent. of the loss by
fires in this country is represented in insurance. Therefore, the total
fire loss in the United States in 1915 was something over $200,000,000.
Of the $153,000,000 paid out by the insurance companies, $6,200,000 was
represented by incendiary fires. A total of $62,000,000 was charged to
fires from unknown causes.

"In 1916 the total jumped by 20 per cent., meaning an increase of about
$40,000,000. The biggest items in this loss were those sustained in
munition fires and explosions. Black Tom holds the record with a loss
of $11,000,000; there was the Kingsland explosion, the Penn's Grove
explosion, and others, all generally admitted to be the work of spies,
which caused losses running into millions.

"It was estimated yesterday by an insurance official that the
incendiary loss in 1916 was easily $25,000,000, or $15,000,000 above
normal. And these figures take into consideration only fires where the
origin was proved to be incendiary. On the books of the underwriters
the Black Tom munitions fire is not listed as incendiary, because it
was never legally proved that a German spy set it going.

"This increase in losses for 1916 when the big munition explosions
occurred, derives significance in the discussion of losses by spy fires
since this country entered the war, because the figures of fire losses
in the United States for 1917 may reach $300,000,000, or a larger
increase over 1916 than 1916 losses showed over 1915. An estimate
made yesterday by the head of a fire insurance company shows that if
the average of the losses in the first seven months of the year is
maintained until Jan. 1 the total would reach well above $250,000,000,
and with the increases of the past few months might easily total
$300,000,000 as the cost of the American ash heaps for 1917."

How did the Germans know where munitions were being manufactured?
Rumor fled swiftly through the labor districts, and the news was
reported through the regular channels of espionage, cleared through the
consulates and German business offices, and forwarded to the attachés
and the Embassy. But the collection of information did not stop there;
it was verified from another source--a serviceable factor in the
general system of espionage.

The American manufacturer shared his nation's predilection for talking
at meal-time. As the war contracts were distributed about the country,
every machine shop worthy of the name became a "munitions plant" and
the romance of having a part in the war strained the discretion of most
of America's war bridegrooms; they simply "had to tell some one"; not
infrequently this some one was a reliable intimate, sitting across a
restaurant table at lunch.

There was in America an organization bearing a title which suggested a
neutral origin, but whose officers' names, down even unto the official
physician, were undeniably German. It was ostensibly for the mutual
benefit of the foreign-born waiters, chefs and pantrymen who composed
its membership. But its real significance was indicated by the location
of its branches (its headquarters were in New York). Trenton, New
Jersey, for example, was not a "good hotel town," and foreign waiters
usually are to be found in a town which boasts a hotel managed by
metropolitan interests, and supplied with a foreign staff; but Trenton
was a munitions center, and there was a branch of this association
there. Schenectady, the home of the General Electric Company, had
no first-class hotel; there was a branch of the association in
Schenectady. Conversely, numerous cities whose hotels were manned by
foreign waiters and cooks had no branches. The organization was founded
in Dresden in 1877.

Many a confidence passed across a table was intercepted by the acute
ears of a German spy. Members of the Anglo-French Loan Commission who
were staying at the Biltmore in 1914 were served by a German agent
in a waiter's uniform. It would have gone well for America and the
preparations of supplies for her later Allies if there had been posted
in every hotel dining-room the French admonition,


     "Taisez-vous! Ils s'ecoutent!"




CHAPTER X

FRANZ VON RINTELEN

     The leak in the National City Bank--The _Minnehaha_--Von
     Rintelen's training--His return to America--His aims--His
     funds--Smuggling oil--The Krag-Joergensen rifles--Von Rintelen's
     flight and capture.


There was a suggestion in the newspapers of dates immediately following
Paul Koenig's arrest that the authorities had been lax in allowing the
Germans to have later access to the safe in his private office in the
Hamburg-American building. As a matter of fact the contents of the safe
were well known to the authorities--how, it is not necessary to say.
The multitudinous notes and reference data kept by the industrious "P.
K." uncovered a plentiful German source of information of munitions.

They knew the factories in which war materials were being turned out.
They knew the numbers of the freight cars into which the materials were
loaded for shipment to the waterfronts. They knew the ships into which
those cargoes were consigned. How they knew was revealed by Koenig's
secretary, Metzler, after he had been arrested in the second Welland
episode.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Franz von Rintelen]

Down in Wall Street, in the foreign department of the National City
Bank, there was a young German named Frederick Schleindl. He had been
in the United States for several years, and had been employed by
various bankers, one of whom recommended him to the National City Bank
shortly after the outbreak of war. In the foreign department he had
access to cables from the Allies concerning the purchase of munitions.
It was customary to pay manufacturers for their completed orders when
the bank received a bill of lading showing their shipment by railroad
or their delivery at points of departure. Close familiarity with such
bills of lading and cablegrams gave Schleindl an up-to-the-minute
survey of the production of supplies.

In late 1914 Schleindl registered with the German consul in New York,
setting down his name and address as liable to call for special
service. In May, 1915, he was directed by the consul to meet a certain
person at the Hotel Manhattan; the unknown proved to be Koenig, who had
been informed of Schleindl's occupation by the alert German consul.
Playing on the youth's patriotism and greed, Koenig agreed to pay him
$25 a week for confidential information from the bank. From that time
forward Schleindl reported regularly to Koenig. Nearly every evening
a meeting occurred in the office in the Hamburg-American building,
and Koenig and Metzler would spend many hours a night in copying the
letters, cables and shipping documents. In the morning they would
return the originals to Schleindl on his way to work--he made it his
custom to arrive early at the bank--and the papers would be restored to
their proper files when the business day began.

On December 17, 1915, Schleindl was arrested. In his pocket were two
documents, enough to convict him of having stolen information: one
a duplicate of a cablegram from the Banque Belge pour Etrangers to
the National City Bank relating to a shipment of 2,000,000 rifles
which was then being handled by the Hudson Trust Company; the other
a cablegram from the Russian Government authorizing the City Bank to
place some millions of dollars to the credit of Colonel Golejewski, the
Russian naval attaché and purchasing agent. From a German standpoint,
of course, both were highly significant. Schleindl's arrest caused
considerable uneasiness in Wall Street, and other banking houses who
had been dealing in munitions "looked unto themselves" lest there be
similar cracks through which information might sift to Berlin. There
had been many such. Koenig was tried on the charge of having bought
stolen information, and convicted, but sentence was suspended, although
the United States already looked back on two years of waterfront
conspiracies to destroy Allied shipping.

The City Bank episode gave a clue to the source of those conspiracies,
by the white light which it cast upon an explosion in hold number 2 of
the steamship _Minnehaha_ on July 4, 1915. Thousands of magnetos were
stored there destined for automobiles at the front. The only person
besides the officers of the bank and of the magneto factory who could
have known of the ship in which they were transported was the man who
wrote the letter to the bank enclosing the bill of lading for the
shipment. Naturally the officers were not suspected of circulating the
news; the leak therefore must have occurred in handling the letter.
That theory was a strong scent, made no less pungent by the activities
in America of one Franz von Rintelen.

Rumor has credited Franz von Rintelen with relationship to the house
of Hohenzollern. Backstairs gossip called him the Kaiser's own son--a
stigma which he hardly deserved, as his face bore no resemblance to
the architecture of the Hohenzollern countenance. It was one of strong
aquiline curves; with a coat of swarthy grease paint he would have
made an acceptable Indian, except for his tight, thin lips. The muscles
of his jaws were forever playing under the skin--he had a tense,
nervous habit of gritting his teeth. From under his pale eyebrows
came a sharp look; it contrasted strangely with the hollow, burnt-out
ferocity and fright which peered out of the tired eyes of his fellow
prisoners when he was finally tried. He had a wiry strength and easy
carriage. If he had not been a spy, von Rintelen would have made an
excellent athlete.

Like Boy-Ed he had a thorough gymnasium training. He specialized in
finance and economics, entered the navy, and became captain-lieutenant.
At the end of his period of service he went to London and obtained
employment in a banking house. He then went to New York, where he was
admitted to Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co., and found time during his first
stay in America to serve as Germany's naval representative at the
ceremonies commemorating John Paul Jones. The German Embassy gave him
entrée wherever he turned. He was a member of the New York Yacht Club,
was received at Newport and in Fifth Avenue as a polished and agreeable
person who spoke English, French and Spanish as fluently as his native
tongue, and he acquired a broad firsthand knowledge of American
financial principles and methods. He left New York long before the war,
saying he was going to open Mexican and South American branches of a
German bank. When he returned to Berlin in 1909, he was well qualified
to sit in council with Tirpitz and the navy group and advise them on
the development of the German Secret Service in America. American
acquaintances who visited Berlin he received with marked hospitality,
and some he even introduced to his august friend, the Crown Prince.

In January, 1915, von Rintelen, then a director of the Deutsche Bank,
and the National Bank für Deutschland, and a man of corresponding
wealth, was commissioned to go to America, to buy cotton, rubber and
copper, and to prevent the Allies from receiving munitions. So he
went to America. And from his arrival in New York until his departure
from that port, he threw sand in the smooth-running machinery of the
organized German spy system.

He eluded the vigilance of the Allies by using a false passport. His
sister Emily had married a Swiss named Gasche. Erasing the "y" on her
passport he journeyed in safety to England as "Emil V. Gasche," a
harmless Swiss, who observed a great deal about England's method of
receiving munitions. Then he evaporated to Norway. His arrival in the
United States was forecast by a wireless message which he addressed
from his ship on April 3, 1915, asking an American friend of his to
meet him at the pier. The American owned a factory in Cambrai, France,
which had been closed by the German invasion on August 29, 1914. The
American had hastened to Berlin in late 1914 and asked his friend
Rintelen to see that the plant be opened. Rintelen had succeeded,
and was come now to break the good news, knowing perfectly well that
the American would be under deep obligation and would secure any
introductions for him which he might need. When the ship docked, the
friend was not there, for some casual reason. But Rintelen, always
suspicious, hired a detective, who spent a week investigating; then the
friend was discovered, and became Rintelen's grateful assistant.

So it happened that "Emil V. Gasche," the harmless Swiss, dropped
out of sight for the time being, and von Rintelen assumed the parts
of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." "Dr. Jekyll" visited the Yacht Club
and called upon wealthy friends, proving a more charming, more
delightful von Rintelen than ever. He met influential business men
who were selling supplies to the Allies. He was presented to society
matrons and débutantes whom he had use for. To these he was Herr von
Rintelen, in America on an important financial mission. "Mr. Hyde"
sought information from von Bernstorff, Dr. Albert, von Papen, Boy-Ed,
Captain Tauscher and George Sylvester Viereck about the production
of war supplies. Astounded by what he learned from them and had
corroborated from other sources, he began to realize how utterly he had
misjudged America's potential resources and what a blunder he had made
in his predictions to the General War Staff. He saw with a chilling
vividness the capacity of America to hand war materials to the Allies,
and her rapidly increasing facilities to turn out greater quantities
of ammunition and bullets. The facts he obtained struck him with
especial force because of his knowledge of the greater strategy. It
is upon a basis of the supplies of munitions in the Allied countries,
particularly Russia, as von Rintelen knew them, that his acts are best
judged and upon this basis only can sane motives be assigned to the
rash projects which he launched.

When he arrived in New York the German drive on Paris had failed
because in two months the Germans had used up ammunition they
confidently expected to last three times as long; the English and
French in the west could not take up the offensive because ammunition
was not being turned out fast enough; the Russian drive into Germany
and Austria would soon fail for lack of arms and bullets. In the
winter and spring of 1915 the Russians had made a drive into Galicia
and Austria, hurling the Austro-German armies back. They advanced
victoriously through the first range of the Carpathian mountains until
May. Meantime the German General Staff, as von Rintelen knew, was
preparing for a retaliating offensive. The War Staff knew Russia's
limited capacity to produce arms and ammunition, knew that during the
winter, with the port of Archangel closed by ice, her only source
for new supplies lay in the single-track Siberian railway bringing
materials from Japan. Rintelen realized that by spring the Russian
resources had been well nigh exhausted and he resolved that they must
be shut off completely. He knew that England and France could not help.
But spring had already come, and the ships were sailing for Archangel
laden with American shells.

Von Rintelen's reputation was at stake. The work for which he had
been so carefully trained was bound to fail unless he acted quickly.
He exchanged many wireless communications with his superiors in
Berlin--messages that looked like harmless expressions between his
wife and himself, messages in which the names of American officers
who had been in Berlin were used both as code words and as a means to
impress their genuineness upon the American censor. He received in
reply still greater authority than he had on the eve of his departure
from Germany. In his quick, staccato fashion he often boasted (and
there is foundation for part of what he said) that he had been sent to
America by the General Staff, backed by "$50,000,000, yes $100,000,00";
that he was an agent plenipotentiary and extraordinary, ready to take
any measure on land and sea to stop the making of munitions, to halt
their transportation at the factory or at the seaboard. He mapped out
a campaign, remarkable in its detail, scope, recklessness and utter
disregard of American institutions.

Germany made her first mistake in giving him a roving commission.
Germany was desperate, or she would have restricted von Rintelen to
certain well-defined enterprises. Instead he ran afoul of the military
and naval attachés on more than one occasion, offended them, and did
more to hinder than to help their own plans.

In early April he made his financial arrangements with the
Trans-Atlantic Trust Company, where he was known by his own name. Money
was transferred from Berlin through large German business houses, and
he deposited $800,000 in the Trans-Atlantic and millions among other
banks. He rented an office in the trust company building, and had his
telephone run through the trust company switchboard. He registered
with the county clerk to do business as the "E. V. Gibbon Company;
purchasers of supplies" and signed his name to the registry as "Francis
von Rintelen." In the office of the E. V. Gibbon Company he received
the forces whom he proceeded to mobilize; he was known to them as "Fred
Hansen." If he wanted a naval reservist he called on Boy-Ed; if an army
reservist was required von Papen sent him to "Hansen." Boy-Ed gave him
data on ship sailings, von Papen on munitions plants, Koenig on secret
service.

His first task was to buy supplies and ship them to Germany. He
boasted that there was no such thing as a British blockade. Using his
pseudonyms of Gibbon and Hansen he made large purchases and with the
aid of Captain Gustave Steinberg, a naval reservist, he chartered ships
and dispatched them under false manifests to Italy and Norway, where
their cargoes could be readily smuggled into Germany. Through Steinberg
he importuned a chemist, Dr. Walter T. Scheele, to soak fertilizer in
lubricating oil for shipment to the Fatherland, where the valuable
oil could be easily extracted. Through the same intermediary von
Rintelen gave Dr. Scheele $20,000 to ship a cargo of munitions under a
false manifest as "farm implements"; Dr. Scheele kept the $20,000 and
actually shipped a cargo of farm machinery.

Rintelen's next venture attracted some unpleasant attention. The United
States Government had condemned some 350,000 Krag-Joergensen rifles,
which it refused to sell to any of the belligerents. Rintelen cast
a fond eye in their direction. President Wilson had told a banker:
"You will get those rifles only over my dead body." Rintelen heard,
however, that by bribing certain officials he could obtain the guns,
so he sent out agents to learn what they would cost, and found a man
who said he could buy them for $17,826,000, part of which was to be
used for effective bribery. "So close am I to the President," said the
intermediary, "that two days after I deposit the money in the bank you
can dandle his grandchild on your knee!" But just when the negotiations
were growing bright, Rintelen was told that the man who proposed to
sell him the rifles was a secret agent from another government. A
certain "Dr. Alfred Meyer" was known to have been groping for those
rifles, and the newspapers and government officials became suddenly
interested in his real identity. A dowdy woman's implication reached a
reporter's ears; presently the newspapers burst out in the "discovery"
that "Dr. Alfred Meyer" was none other than Dr. Meyer-Gerhardt, a
German Red Cross envoy then in the United States. Like the popping of
a machine gun, "correct versions of the facts" were published: "Dr.
Meyer-Gerhardt denied vigorously that he was 'Dr. Alfred Meyer,'" then
"'Dr. Alfred Meyer' was known to have left the United States on the
same ship with Dr. Meyer-Gerhardt," then "an American citizen came
forward anonymously and said that he had posed as 'Dr. Alfred Meyer' in
order to test the good faith of the Government."

This last announcement may have been true. It was made to a New York
_Sun_ reporter by a German, Karl Schimmel, who professed his allegiance
to the United States, and by the "American citizen" who said he had
posed as "Dr. Alfred Meyer." It may have been made to shield Rintelen
himself, for the "American citizen" was an employe of a German
newspaper in New York, a friend of Rintelen's, a friend of Schimmel's
and Schimmel himself was in von Rintelen's pay.

Let a pack of reporters loose on a half dozen tangents and they will
probably scratch the truth. A _Tribune_ man heard a whisper of the
facts and set out on a hunt for "two Germans, Meyer and Hansen, who
have been acting funny." He frightened the personnel right out of the
office of the E. V. Gibbon Company. Captain Steinberg fled to Germany
with a trunkful of reports on the necessity of concerted action to
stop the shipment of munitions to the Allies, and Rintelen migrated to
an office in the Woolworth Building. Some one heard of his activities
there and he was evicted, taking final refuge in the Liberty Tower, in
the office of Andrew M. Meloy, who had been in Germany to interest the
German government in a scheme similar to Rintelen's own. In Meloy's
office Rintelen posed as "E. V. Gates"--preserving the shadow of his
identity as "Emil V. Gasche." So effective was his disappearance
from the public view, that he was reported to have gone abroad as a
secretary, and he sat in the tower and chuckled, and sent messages by
wireless to Berlin through Sayville, and cablegrams to Berlin through
England and Holland, and enjoyed all the sensations of a man attending
a triple funeral in his honor. "Meyer," "Hansen" and "Gasche" were all
dead, and yet, here was Rintelen!

Although his sojourn in New York covered a period which was the peak
of the curve of German atrocities in the United States, Rintelen was
a fifth wheel. No man came to America to accomplish more, and no man
accomplished less. No German agent had his boldness of project, and
no German executive met a more ignominious fate. Whatever he touched
with his golden wand turned to dross. He was hoodwinked here and there
by his own agents, and frustrated by the vigilance of the Allied and
the United States governments. He has been introduced here because of
his connection with subsequent events, and yet this picturesque figure
played the major part in not one successful venture.

Four months he passed in America, until it became too small for him.
In August the capture of Dr. Albert's portfolio and the publication
of certain of its contents frightened Rintelen, and he applied for a
passport as "Edward V. Gates, an American citizen of Millersville,
Pa.," but he did not dare claim it. Though he had bought tickets under
the alias, and had had drafts made payable in that name, he did not
occupy the "Gates" cabin on the _Noordam_, but at the last minute
engaged passage under the renascent name of "Emil V. Gasche," the
harmless Swiss. He eluded the Federal agents, and sailed safely to
Falmouth, England, where, after a search of the ship, and an excellent
attempt to bluff it through, he finally surrendered to the British
authorities as a prisoner-of-war. Meloy and his secretary were captured
with him.

Rintelen was returned to the United States in 1916. He was convicted
in 1917 and 1918 on successive charges of conspiracy to violate the
Sherman Anti-Trust law, to obtain a fraudulent passport, and to destroy
merchant ships--which combined to sentence him to a year in the Tombs
and nine years in a Federal prison.




CHAPTER XI

SHIP BOMBS

     Mobilizing destroying agents--The plotters in Hoboken--Von
     Kleist's arrest and confession--The _Kirk Oswald_ trial--Further
     explosions--The _Arabic_--Robert Fay--His arrest--The ship plots
     decrease.


The reader will recall a circular quoted in Chapter VIII, and issued
November 18, 1914, from German Naval Headquarters, mobilizing all
destroying agents in harbors overseas.

On January 3, 1915, there was an explosion on board the munitions ship
_Orton_, lying in Erie Basin, a part of New York harbor. On February 6
a bomb was found in the cargo of the _Hannington_. On February 27 the
_Carlton_ caught fire at sea. On April 20 two bombs were found in the
cargo of the _Lord Erne_. One week later the same discovery was made in
the hold of the _Devon City_. All of which accounts for the following
charge:


     "George D. Barnitz, being duly sworn, deposes and says ... on
     information and belief that on the first day of January, 1915,
     and on every day thereafter down to and including the 13th day of
     April, 1916, the defendants Walter T. Scheele, Charles von Kleist,
     Otto Wolpert, Ernst Becker, (Charles) Karbade, the first name
     Charles being fictitious, the true first name of defendant being
     unknown, (Frederick) Praedel ... (Wilhelm) Paradis ... Eno Bode
     and Carl Schmidt ... did unlawfully, feloniously and corruptly
     conspire ... to manufacture bombs filled with chemicals and
     explosives and to place said bombs ... upon vessels belonging to
     others and laden with moneys, goods and merchandise...."


Ninety-one German ships were confined to American harbors by the
activities of the British fleet, ranging from the _Neptun_, of 197
tons, in San Francisco Bay, to the _Vaterland_, of 54,000 tons, the
largest vessel on the seven seas, tied up to accrue barnacles at her
Hoboken pier, and later, as the _Leviathan_, to transport American
troops to France. Every one of the ninety-one ships was a nest of
German agents. Only a moderate watch was kept on their crews, and there
were many restless men among them. Every man aboard was liable to
command from Captain Boy-Ed, for the German merchant marine was part of
the formal naval organization. The interned sailors found shortly that
they could be of distinct service to their country without stirring
from their ships.

Not far from the North German Lloyd piers in Hoboken lived Captain
Charles von Kleist, 67 years old, a chemist and former German army
officer. One day there came to him one who spoke the German tongue
and who said he came from Wolf von Igel, in von Papen's office. Those
were good credentials, especially since the gentleman was inquiring on
von Igel's behalf whether Kleist needed any money in the work he was
doing. The polite caller returned a few days later with another man,
who spoke no German. Von Kleist asked whether he was also from the
Fatherland, and was told no, but "we have to use all kinds of people
in our business--that's how we fool these Yankees!" Von Kleist laughed
heartily, and wagged his head, and went out in the garden and dug up a
bomb-case and showed the visitors how it had been made. The visitors
were Detectives Barth and Barnitz.

They assured Kleist that von Igel wanted to know precisely what he
and his associates were doing, so no money might be paid to the wrong
parties. The aged captain wrote out a memorandum of his activities,
which he signed, and the detectives proposed a trip to Coney Island as
an evidence of good faith, so the three had a pleasant afternoon at the
Hotel Shelburne, and the officers then suggested: "Let's go up and see
the chief." "Chief" to von Kleist meant von Igel; he agreed, and was
taken gently into the arms of the chief of detectives.

He implicated, as he sat there answering questions, Captain Eno Bode,
pier superintendent of the Hamburg-American Line, Captain Otto Wolpert,
pier superintendent of the Atlas Line, and Ernst Becker, an electrician
on the North German Lloyd liner _Friedrich der Grosse_, tied up at
Hoboken. The other conspirators were induced to come to New York, and
were arrested at once. Bode and Wolpert, powerful bullies of Paul
Koenig's own stamp, proved defiant in the extreme. Becker, knowing no
word of English, was pathetically courteous and ready to answer. But it
remained for von Kleist to supply the narrative.

Becker, working on the sunny deck of the _Friedrich der Grosse_, had
made numerous bomb cases, rolling sheet lead into a cylinder, and
inserting in the tube a cup-shaped aluminum partition. These containers
he turned over to Dr. Walter Scheele at his "New Jersey Agricultural
Company," where he filled one compartment with nitroglycerine, the
other with sulphuric acid. Scheele supplied the mechanics with sheet
lead for the purpose. The bombs were then sealed and packed in sand for
distribution to various German gathering places, such as, for example,
the Turn Verein in the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum. Wolpert appeared there
at a meeting one night and berated the Germans present for talking
too much and acting too little; he wanted results, he said. Eugene
Reister, the proprietor of the place, said that shortly afterward
Walter Uhde and one Klein (who died before the police reached him) had
taken away a bundle of bombs from the Turn Verein and had placed them
on the _Lusitania_, just before her last voyage, and added that Klein,
when he heard of the destruction of the ship, expressed regret that he
had done it. Karl Schimmel--the same who had negotiated for the Krag
rifles--said later to Reister: "I really put bombs on that boat, but I
don't believe that fellow Klein ever did."

Following Kleist's information, agents of the Department of Justice
and New York police inspected the _Friedrich der Grosse_, and found
quantities of chlorate of potash and other chemicals. They brought back
with them also Garbode (mentioned in the charge as "Karbade"), Paradis
and Praedel, fourth engineers on the ship, who had assisted in making
the bombs, and Carl Schmidt, the chief engineer. All of the group were
implicated in the plot to the complete satisfaction of a jury which
concluded their cases in May, 1917, by convicting them of "conspiracy
to destroy ships through the use of fire bombs placed thereon."
Kleist and Schmidt received sentences of two years each in Atlanta
Penitentiary and were each fined $5,000; Becker, Karbade, Praedel and
Paradis were fined $500 apiece and sentenced to six months in prison.
Dr. Scheele fled from justice, and was arrested in March, 1918, in
Havana. A liberal supply of vicious chemicals and explosives discovered
in his "New Jersey Agricultural Company" implicated him thoroughly, if
the evidence given by his fellows had not already done so. When he was
finally captured he faced two federal indictments: one with Steinberg
and von Igel for smuggling lubricating oil out of the country as
fertilizer, under false customs manifests; the other the somewhat more
criminal charge of bombing.

On April 29, 1915, the _Cressington_ caught fire at sea. Three days
later, in the hold of the _Kirk Oswald_, a sailor found a bomb tucked
away in a hiding place where its later explosion would have started a
serious fire. So it came about that when the four lesser conspirators
of the fire-bomb plot had served their six months' sentences, they
were at once rearrested on the specific charge of having actually
planted that bomb in the _Kirk Oswald_. The burly dock captains, Bode
and Wolpert, who had blustered their innocence in the previous trial,
and had succeeded in securing heavy bail from the Hamburg-American
Line pending separate trials for themselves, were nipped this time
with evidence which let none slip through. Rintelen was haled from his
cell to answer to his part in the _Kirk Oswald_ affair, and the jury,
in January, 1918, declared the nine plotters "guilty as charged" and
Judge Howe sentenced them to long terms in prison. Rintelen, alone of
the group, as they sat in court, had an air of anything but wretched
fanatic querulousness. He followed the proceedings closely, and once
took the trial into his own hands in a flash of temper when the State
kept referring to the loss of the _Lusitania_. It went hard with the
nobleman to be herded into a common American court with a riff-raff of
hireling crooks and treated with impartial justice. In Germany it never
could have happened!

If those trials had occurred in May, 1915, the history of the transport
of arms and shells would not have been marred by such entries as these:


     May 8--_Bankdale_; two bombs found in cargo.

     May 13--_Samland_; afire at sea.

     May 21--_Anglo-Saxon_; bomb found aboard.

     June 2--_Strathway_; afire at sea.

     July 4--_Minnehaha_; bomb exploded at sea. (The magnetos.)

     July 13--_Touraine_; afire at sea.

     July 14--_Lord Downshire_; afire.

     July 20--_Knutford_; afire in hold.

     July 24--_Craigside_; five fires in hold.

     July 27--_Arabic_; two bombs found aboard.

     Aug. 9--_Asuncion de Larriñaga_; afire at sea.

     Aug. 13--_Williston_; bombs in cargo.

     Aug. 27--Lighter _Dixie_; fire while loading.


On August 31 the White Star liner _Arabic_, nineteen hours out of
Liverpool was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank in eleven
minutes, taking 39 lives, of which two were American. Germany, on
September 9, declared that the U-boat commander attacked the _Arabic_
without warning, contrary to his instructions, but only after he was
convinced that the liner was trying to ram him; the Imperial Government
expressed regret for the loss of American lives, but disclaimed any
liability for indemnity, and suggested arbitration. On October 5,
however, the government in Berlin had changed its tune to the extent of
issuing a note expressing regret for having sunk the ship, disavowing
the act of the submarine commander, and assuring the United States
that new orders to submarines were so strict that a recurrence of any
such action was "considered out of the question." If the cargoes could
be fired at sea, no submarine issue need be raised. And so fires and
bombs continued to be discovered on ships just as consistently as
before. The log, resumed, runs thus:


     Sept. 1--_Rotterdam_; fire at sea.

     Sept. 7--_Santa Anna_; fire at sea.

     Sept. 29--_San Guglielmo_; dynamite found on pier.


Now von Rintelen's handiwork was revealed in the adventures of Robert
Fay, or "Fae," as he was known in the Fatherland. In spite of the
imaginative quality of the enterprise, and the additional guilt which
it heaped upon the executives of the spy system, it was not successful.
There were vibrant moments, though, when only the mobilization of
police from two states and special agents from the Secret Service
and Department of Justice averted what would have developed into a
profitable method of destroying ships.

Lieutenant Robert Fay was born in Cologne, where he lived until 1902.
In that year he migrated to Canada, where he worked on a farm, and
later to Chicago, where he was employed as a bookkeeper until 1905. He
then returned to Germany for his military service, and went to work
again in Cologne, in the office of Thomas Cook & Sons. After a period
in a Mannheim machine shop he went home and devoted himself to certain
mechanical inventions, and was at work upon them when he was called out
for war service on August 1, 1914.

His regiment went into the trenches, and the lieutenant had some
success in dynamiting a French position. Conniving with a superior
officer, he deserted his command, and was sent to America by a German
reputed to be the head of the secret service, one Jonnersen. Jonnersen
gave Fay 20,000 marks for expenses in carrying out a plan to stop
shipments of munitions from America, and Fay arrived in New York April
23, 1915, on the _Rotterdam_.

Dr. Herbert Kienzle, a clock-maker, of 309 West 86th Street, had
written to his father in Germany bitterly assailing the United States
for shipping munitions, and enclosed in his letters information of
certain American firms, such as Browne & Sharp, of Providence, and
the Chalmers Motor Car Company, of Detroit, who were reputed to be
manufacturing them. These letters had been turned over to Jonnersen,
who showed them to Fay as suggestions. Upon his arrival in New York,
then, Fay called on Kienzle, who, though he was friendly enough,
was reluctant to know of the details Fay had planned. Dr. Kienzle
introduced Fay to von Papen, and later to Max Breitung, from whom he
purchased a quantity of potassium chlorate.

The deserter found his brother-in-law, Walter Scholz, working as a
gardener on an estate near Waterford, Connecticut, and brought him
to New York on a salary of $25 a week. The two crossed the Hudson to
Weehawken, N. J., and set to work to make bombs. Fay had a theory that
a bomb might be attached to the rudder of a ship, and so set as to
explode when the rudder, swinging to port, wound a ratchet inside the
device which would release a hammer upon a percussion cap. Their plan
was to have the parts manufactured at machine shops, assemble and fill
them themselves, and then steal up the waterfront in the small hours
and attach the infernal machines to outward bound vessels. Fay even
counted on disarming the police boats before setting out.

It took the two some three months to get the parts made and properly
adjusted. Meanwhile they employed their spare hours in cruising about
the harbor in a motor-boat. A machinist in West 42nd Street, New York,
made the zinc tank which they used as a model, and the two conspirators
shortly opened a garage in Weehawken where they could duplicate the
bomb cases unmolested.

There came a time when the devices were satisfactory, and Fay actually
attached one to the rudder of a ship to make sure that his adjustments
were correct. The next move was to obtain explosives. Fay's prejudice
against bombs placed in a ship's hold was that they rarely succeeded in
sinking the craft; seventy or eighty pounds of high explosive detonated
at the stern of a vessel, however, would blow the rudder away and not
only <DW36> the ship but would probably burst a hole in the stern,
mangle the screw, and split the shaft.

Captain Tunney, of the Bomb Squad, heard in October that two Germans
were trying to buy picric acid from a man who stopped at the Hotel
Breslin, and who called himself Paul Seib and Karl F. Oppegaarde,
as the occasion demanded. Tunney's men located the two Germans, and
some days later learned that they had placed an order for fifty-two
pounds of TNT, to be delivered at the Weehawken garage. The delivery
was intercepted, a similar but harmless substance substituted for the
explosive, and two detective-truckmen took the package away on their
truck to deliver it to Fay and Scholz. While they were in New Jersey,
Detectives Coy, Sterrett and Walsh found Fay at the Breslin, and
followed him back to Weehawken. As he left the garage in the evening in
his automobile, the automobile of Police Commissioner Woods followed
at a discreet distance. Up the Palisades the two cars paraded,
until in a grove near Grantwood, Fay and Scholz got out of their car
and disappeared into the woods with a lantern. After a time they
reappeared, and returned to the garage, the police following.

Next morning Chief Flynn was called into the hunt--the morning of
Saturday, October 23--and he assigned two special agents to the case.
The police department directed two detectives to watch the woods at
Grantwood where the conspirators had gone the night before. Detectives
Murphy and Fennelly, each equipped with linemen's climbers, arrived
at the wood-road about noon, and spent the next eleven hours in the
branches of a great oak tree which commanded the road. The perch was
high and the night wind chilly, but the watchers were rewarded at last
by the twin searchlights of an approaching car. Out of it stepped Fay
and Scholz. The men in the branches saw by the light of the lantern
which Scholz carried that Fay placed a package underneath a distant
tree, walked to a safe distance, exploded a percussion cap, watched the
tree topple over and went away, apparently satisfied with the power of
his explosives.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Robert Fay, who made bombs with which he hoped to <DW36> the shipment
of munitions to Europe]

Meanwhile other detectives were watching the rooming house at Union
Hill where Fay and Scholz lived, and they saw the two come in about 4
o'clock in the morning. Scholz had very little sleep, for there was a
ship leaving next day for Liverpool. He left the house at 7 A. M. and
went to the garage. Thereupon three detectives returned to the great
oak tree at Grantwood. About noon Fay and his brother-in-law drove up,
and unlocking the door of a rude hut in the wood, took out a bag, from
which they poured a few grains of powder on the surface of a rock. Fay
struck the rock with a hammer; a loud report followed, and the hammer
broke in his hand. A moment later he heard a twig snap behind him.
He turned, and saw a small army of detectives with drawn revolvers
closing in on him. Fay protested and pleaded, and offered to bribe the
detectives for his freedom, but he was locked up with Scholz. The two
had stored in a warehouse several cases containing their completed bomb
mechanisms; the police confiscated from their various caches five new
bombs, 25 pounds of TNT, 25 sticks of dynamite, 150 pounds of chlorate
of potash, two hundred bomb cylinders, 400 percussion caps, one
motor-boat, one chart of New York harbor showing all its fortifications
and piers, one foreign automobile, two German automatic pistols and a
long knife--a considerable arsenal.

Their confessions caused the arrest of Paul Daeche, who had furnished
them with explosives, Dr. Kienzle, Breitung, and Engelbert Bronkhorst.
Fay received a sentence of eight years in the penitentiary, but after
America went to war, Atlanta became too confining for his adventurous
spirit, and he escaped the prison, and is believed to have crossed
the Mexican border to safety. Scholz was sentenced to four years, and
Daeche to three. Kienzle, Breitung and Bronkhorst were not tried, their
apparent ignorance of Fay's designs outweighing in the jury's mind
their obvious German sympathies. Kienzle, upon the declaration of war
of April 6, 1917, became an enemy alien, and was interned.

So Lieutenant Fay never qualified in active service as a destroying
agent. Yet he was profligate in his intentions. He offered two men
$500,000 if they could intrigue among the shippers in order that a ship
laden with copper for England might wander from the path of convoy into
German hands, and he even entertained the fantastic hope, with his
chart and his motor-boat and his bombs, of stealing out of the harbor
to the cordon of British cruisers who hung outside the three-mile limit
and attaching his bombs to their rudders, that the German merchantmen
might escape into the open sea.

On October 26 the _Rio Lages_ caught fire at sea; fire broke out in
the hold of the _Euterpe_ on November 3; three days later there was
fire aboard the _Rochambeau_ at sea; the next day an explosion occurred
aboard the _Ancona_. And so the list runs on:


     Dec. 4--_Tynningham_, two fires on ship.
     Dec. 24--_Alston_, dynamite found in cargo.
     Dec. 26--_Inchmoor_, fire in hold.

     1916

     Jan. 19--_Sygna_, fire at sea.
     Jan. 19--_Ryndam_, bomb explosion at sea.
     Jan. 22--_Rosebank_, two bombs in cargo.
     Feb. 16--_Dalton_, fire at sea.
     Feb. 21--_Tennyson_, bomb explosion at sea.
     Feb. 26--_Livingston Court_, fire in Gravesend Bay.


April saw the round-up of the group who had been working under the
Hamburg-American captains, and although numerous fires occurred during
May, 1916, in almost every case they were traced to natural accidents.
The number mounted more slowly as the year advanced. With the entrance
of America into the war, and the tightening of the police cordon along
the waterfront, the chance of planting bombs was still further reduced,
but waterfront fires kept recurring, and until the day of ultimate
judgment in Berlin, when each of Germany's arsonists in America comes
to claim his reward, none will know the total of loss at their hands.
It was enormous in the damage it inflicted upon cargo, but it is
improbable that it had any perceptible effect upon the whole export of
shells for Flanders and France.




CHAPTER XII

LABOR

     David Lamar--Labor's National Peace Council--The embargo
     conference--The attempted longshoremen's strike--Dr. Dumba's
     recall.


Labor produced munitions. The hands of labor could be frightened
away from work by explosions, their handiwork could be bombed on the
railways, the wharves, the lighters, and the ships, but a surer method
than either of those was the perversion of the hearts of labor. So
thought Count von Bernstorff and Dr. Albert, who dealt in men. So
thought Berlin--the General Staff sent this message to America:


     "January 26--For Military Attaché. You can obtain particulars as
     to persons suitable for carrying on sabotage in the United States
     and Canada from the following persons: (1) Joseph McGarrity,
     Philadelphia; (2) John P. Keating, Michigan Avenue, Chicago; (3)
     Jeremiah O'Leary, 16 Park Row, New York.

     "One and two are absolutely reliable and discreet. Three is
     reliable, but not always discreet. These persons were indicated by
     Sir Roger Casement. In the United States sabotage can be carried
     out on every kind of factory for supplying munitions of war."

     (Signed) "REPRESENTATIVE OF GENERAL STAFF."[3]


So too thought von Rintelen, who hired men--usually the wrong ones.

Full of his project, he cast about for an intermediary. No sly chemist
or muscular wharf-rat would do for this delicate task of anesthetizing
men with the gas of German propaganda while it tied their hands and
amputated their centres of right and wrong; the candidate must be a man
of affairs, intimate with the chiefs of labor, skillful in execution,
and the abler the better. Von Rintelen would pay handsomely for the
right man. Whereupon David Lamar, the "Wolf of Wall Street," appeared
on the scene and applied for the job--an entrance auspicious for the
United States, for the newcomer's philosophy (if one could judge from
his previous career) was "Me First."

In an attempt to defraud J. P. Morgan & Co., and the United States
Steel Corporation Lamar had once impersonated Representative A.
Mitchell Palmer in certain telephone interviews. (Palmer became
custodian of alien property after the United States entered the war.)
He was convicted and sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Atlanta
Penitentiary. He appealed the case, and while he was out on bail
pending the appeal, he fell in with Rintelen.

In April, 1915, a New Yorker who dealt in publicity was introduced to
Rintelen, or "Hansen," by Dr. Schimmel. Rintelen offered the publicity
man $25,000 to conduct a campaign of propaganda for more friendly
relations with Germany, to offset the commercial power Great Britain
bade fair to have at the end of the war, and assured him that he would
go to any extreme to prevent shipments of munitions to the Allies. The
war, he said, would be decided not in Europe but in America. There must
be strikes in the munitions factories.

When the publicity man heard also that Rintelen was trying to stir up
trouble with Mexico, he wrote on May 13 to Joseph Tumulty, President
Wilson's secretary, informing him of the German's intentions. He was
referred to the Department of Justice, and at their dictation continued
in contact with Rintelen. Shortly thereafter David Lamar and his friend
Henry Martin took a trip to Minneapolis, where they met Congressman
Frank Buchanan and Ex-Congressman Robert Fowler, both of Illinois. Out
of that conference grew a plan for forming a labor organization the
object of which was ostensibly peace, and actually an embargo upon the
shipment of munitions abroad, but whether Buchanan and Fowler knew of
von Rintelen's connection with the scheme remains to be proved. It can
be readily seen that such a labor organization, if it had actually
represented organized labor, could have forced such a stoppage, either
by its collective potential voting power and influence, or by fostering
a nation-wide strike of munitions workers.

The nucleus formed in Chicago, about one William F. Kramer. "Buchanan
and Fowler came to me in June here in Chicago," said Kramer, "and told
me about their plan to form a council. We opened headquarters, and we
engaged two organizers, James Short and J. J. Cundiff, who got $50
a week apiece, a secretary, L. P. Straube, who got $50 a week, and
a stenographer. I was a vice-president, but I didn't get anything.
We were known then as Labor's Peace Council of Chicago, and we were
supposed to be in it because of our convictions against the shipment of
munitions. And I'll say that organized labor was made the goat."

Buchanan had no idea of restricting the council to one city. He called
upon Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, at
Atlantic City on June 9 and tried to induce him to back a movement
in Washington for an embargo. Gompers refused flatly and completely
to have anything to do with the plan, especially when Buchanan made
known his associates. Those associates were busy meanwhile lobbying
in Congress, representing themselves as friends of organized labor,
and pressing the embargo question. About a week later Congressman
Buchanan inflated the Chicago organization into Labor's National Peace
Council, with headquarters at Washington, to recommend the convocation
of a special session of Congress at once to "promote universal peace,"
which meant simply "to promote the introduction and enactment of an
embargo." Its members met frequently, and annoyed the President and
other important men,--even Andrew Carnegie,--with their importunings
for attention, and got exactly what they wanted--wide publicity.

About July 10 Andrew D. Meloy, whose office in New York Rintelen was
sharing at the time, noticed that his German associate began to keep a
clipping-file of news of the Council. Meloy learned of the project, and
assured Rintelen that he was foolhardy to attempt, by bribery of labor
officials, to divert common labor from earning high wages. To which
Rintelen replied brusquely: "Thanks. You come into this business about
11:45 o'clock."

Rintelen sent a telegram to Lamar in Chicago on July 16, the text of
which follows:


     "E. Ruskay, Room 700 B, Sherman Hotel, Chicago.

     "Party who receives $12,500 monthly from competitors is now
     interfering with business in hand. Do you know of any way and
     means to check him? Wire.

     "F. BROWN."


"Ruskay" was Lamar. Later in the day the German sent this message:


     "Twelve thousand five hundred now at capitol. Conference here
     today plans to guarantee outsiders and settlement possible within
     few days. New issue urgently needed. Notify B."


The "party" mentioned in the first despatch was the code designation
for Gompers, and he was indicated in the second message as "Twelve
thousand five hundred." "B" was Buchanan, upon whose connection with
labor Rintelen told Meloy the success of the plan rested. Lamar hurried
to New York, arriving July 19, and met Rintelen in a limousine at the
100th Street entrance to Central Park; on the ride which followed the
"Wolf" told Rintelen that a strike then going on among the munitions
workers at Bridgeport was "only a beginning of his efforts," and that
within thirty days the industry would be paralyzed throughout the
country. Meloy advanced the information that Gompers had just gone to
Bridgeport to stop the strike, to which Lamar replied:

"Buchanan will settle Gompers within twenty-four hours!"

The clippings kept coming in as testimony to the vigorous work being
done by the organization's press bureau: the Council attacked the
Federal Reserve Banks as "munitions trusts," it cited on July 8 nine
ships lying in port awaiting munitions cargoes, and attacked Dudley
Field Malone, then Collector of the Port of New York, for permitting
such ships to clear; it claimed to represent a million labor votes,
and four million and a half farmers; it listened eagerly to an address
by Hannis Taylor, a disciple of the late warmhearted Secretary of
State, Mr. Bryan, in which Taylor criticized President Wilson and
was roundly cheered by the German-American element in the audience.
Semi-occasionally during the midsummer heat Charles Oberwager, attorney
for the Council (whose firm had received handsome fees from von Papen),
rose to deny any German connection with the organization. The Council
assailed Secretary Lansing as a man "whose radicalism was liable to
plunge this nation into war." The Council assailed, in fact, any
project which furthered the interests of the Allies. Rintelen began to
have his doubts of the effectiveness of Lamar's work. The bank account
in the Trans-Atlantic Trust Company had dwindled from $800,000 to
$40,000, and Rintelen admitted that his transactions with Lamar cost
him several hundred thousand dollars. Labor's National Peace Conference
died quietly, Lamar flitted away to a country estate at Pittsfield,
Mass., and Rintelen started across the Atlantic Ocean.

August wore on. The Council was getting ready for a second gaseous
session, when Milton Snelling, a representative of the Washington
Central Labor Union, who had been elected a first vice-president of the
Council, withdrew from its membership, because he "discovered persons
participating in the meetings who have been hanging on the fringe of
the labor movement for their own personal aggrandizement, men who have
been discarded ... others never having been members of any organization
of labor," and because Jacob C. Taylor, the cigar-making delegate from
East Orange, N. J., said, in answer to a query as to the Council's
purpose: "We want to stop the export of munitions to the Allies. You
see Germany can make all the munitions she wants." Then--and it may
be coincidence--about one week later the _New York World_ began its
publication of certain of the papers found in the brief case which Dr.
Heinrich Albert, of the German Embassy, allowed to escape him on a New
York elevated train; on August 19 Buchanan resigned the Council, and
Taylor was elected to succeed him.

Indictments were returned against Rintelen, as well as against Lamar,
Martin, Buchanan and their associates, on December 28, 1915. Buchanan
at once exploded with a retaliatory demand for the impeachment of
United States District Attorney Marshall, upon which Congress dared
not take action. Marshall gracefully retired from the trial in May,
1916, lest he prejudice the Government's case, and Lamar, Martin and
Rintelen were convicted of infraction of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and
sentenced to one year each in a New Jersey prison. Thus ended Labor's
National Peace Council, thanks to David Lamar.

The project for an embargo looked attractive to the Embassy,
however--so attractive that while the Council was at the height of its
activity, Baron Kurt von Reiswitz wrote on July 22, 1915, from Chicago
to Dr. Albert:

"Everything else concerning the proposed embargo conference you
will find in the enclosed copy of the report to the Ambassador. A
change has, however, come up, as the mass meeting will have to be
postponed on account of there being insufficient time for the necessary
preparations. It will probably be held there in about two weeks.

"Among others the following have agreed to coöperate: Senator
Hitchcock, Congressman Buchanan, William Bayard Hale of New York and
the well known pulpit orator, Dr. Aked (born an Englishman), from San
Francisco.

"Hitchcock seemed to be very strong for the plan. He told our
representative at a conference in Omaha: 'If this matter is organized
in the right way you will sweep the United States.'

"For your confidential information I would further inform you that the
leadership of the movement thus far lies in the hands of two gentlemen
(one in Detroit and one in Chicago) who are firmly resolved to work
toward the end that the German community, which, of course, will be
with us without further urging, shall above all things remain in the
background, and that the movement, to all outward appearances, shall
have a purely American character. I have known both the gentlemen very
well for a long time and know that personal interest does not count
with them; the results will bring their own reward.

"For the purposes of the inner organization, to which we attribute
particular importance, we have assured ourselves of the coöperation of
the local Democratic boss, Roger C. Sullivan, as also Messrs. Sparman,
Lewis and McDonald, the latter of the _Chicago American_. Sullivan was
formerly leader of the Wilson campaign and is a deadly enemy of Wilson,
as the latter did not keep his word to make him a Senator; therefore,
principally, the sympathy of our cause."

One is inclined to wonder where Rintelen's vast credits went, during
his short visits in 1915. Lamar took a goodly sum, as we have seen;
the negotiations for the purchase of the Krag rifles cost him no small
amount; his ship bomb activities required a considerable payroll.
But as further evidence of the high cost of causing trouble, we must
consider briefly the profligate methods he employed in other attempts
to inflame and seduce labor.

A walkout by the longshoremen of the Atlantic coast would <DW36> the
supply of munitions to Europe, and might be successful enough to cause
a shell famine in France of which the Central Powers could readily
take advantage. There were 23,000 dock-workers in American ports; they
must be guaranteed a certain wage for five weeks of strike; the cost
in wages alone would therefore amount to about $1,635,000, besides
service fees to intermediaries. He had the money, and the first step
was taken in the otherwise placid city of Boston.

On May 7, 1915, the day the _Lusitania_ sank, William P. Dempsey, the
secretary-treasurer of the Atlantic Coast International Longshoremen's
Union, met Dennis Driscoll, a Boston labor leader and former city
office-holder, at the old Quincy House in Hanover Street. Driscoll
said that Matthew Cummings, a wealthy Boston grocer, had outlined to
him the plan for the strike, and said he was acting for parties who
were willing to pay a million dollars. Dempsey maintained his poise
when the startling information was recited, but he was frightened,
and at the conclusion of the interview he telegraphed at once to T.
V. O'Connor, the president of the union, requesting an interview. The
two union men met in Albany and discussed the affair pro and con,
arriving at the conclusion that they had best reveal the plot to the
Government. O'Connor accordingly told of the negotiations to Secretary
Wilson of the Department of Labor, and then in connivance with the
Secret Service, went on dealing with the grocer, constantly pressing
him for the identity of the principals who, he said, were prepared
to supply all the necessary money. He implicated George Sylvestor
Viereck, the editor of a subsidized German propaganda-weekly called
_The Fatherland_, and said that he had been introduced to him by Edmund
von Mach. Neither of those men figured except as intermediaries, and
Cummings suggested that Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, a loyal propagandist
then in the United States, was the director of the enterprises. Owing
to the high pitch of public feeling over the _Lusitania_, Cummings
could not receive permission from his superiors to go ahead with
O'Connor, but he did his best to keep O'Connor interested. The latter,
fearing that German agents were at work on the Pacific coast, took a
trip to the far West, and during his absence Cummings telegraphed him
twice. There the affair ended, for O'Connor ignored the message, and
on July 14 returned to New York to find that a German attempt to force
a walkout on the New York waterfront had failed, and that Cummings had
stopped playing with fire and had gone back to his grocery in Boston.

When the Government turned the story over to a newspaper to publish
on September 13, the time was not ripe to fix the responsibility for
the attempt. Dr. Dernburg was a popular scapegoat at the time, and
the implication of his authority in the attempt was allowed to stand.
Rintelen was in Donington Hall, a prison camp in England, and it was
months thereafter before the United States and British Secret Services
had fully compared notes on him. By that time there were other charges
lying against him which promised better cases than an abortive attempt
to promote a strike 'longshore.

We have witnessed the cumulative influence of newspaper reports in
surrounding Labor's National Peace Council with an almost genuine
atmosphere of national interest; we have been able to picture the
hostility which the publication of the longshoremen's strike story
aroused in legitimately organized labor; and although as a typical
instance of newspaper influence we should postpone the following
incident, it is a temptation too great to resist. It is the story of
The Story That Cost an Ambassador, and if any further plea for its
introduction be needed, let it be that it is another subtle attempt
upon labor in the summer of 1915.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Dr. Constantin Dumba, Austrian ambassador to the United States,
recalled after the disclosures of the correspondence captured on the
war correspondent, Archibald]

James F. J. Archibald, an American correspondent who had seen most of
the wars of recent years, and who wanted to see more, set sail from New
York on August 21, 1915, for Amsterdam, with his wife, his campaign
clothes, and a portfolio. At Falmouth, England, the usual search party
came aboard, and inspected the papers in the portfolio. Archibald
proved to be an unofficial despatch-bearer, upon whom his German and
Austrian acquaintances in the United States placed great reliance--such
men as Papen, Bernstorff, and Dr. Constantine Dumba sent reports to
their governments in his care.

On September 5 the _New York World_ burst forth with the text of one
of the letters--one from Dr. Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador at
Washington, to his chief in the foreign office at Vienna, Baron Burian.
It is worth reproducing here intact:


     "New York, August 20."

     "Your Excellency:

     "Yesterday evening Consul-General von Nuber received the enclosed
     aide memoire from the chief editor of the local influential paper
     _Szabadsag_, after a previous conversation with me in pursuance
     of his verbal proposals to arrange for strikes at Bethlehem in
     Schwab's steel and munitions factory and also in the middle West.

     "Archibald, who is well known to your Excellency, leaves today
     at 12 o'clock on board the _Rotterdam_ for Berlin and Vienna. I
     take this rare and safe opportunity of warmly recommending these
     proposals to your Excellency's favorable consideration. It is my
     impression that we can disorganize and hold up for months, if
     not entirely prevent, the manufacture of munitions in Bethlehem
     and the middle West, which, in the opinion of the German
     military attaché, is of great importance and amply outweighs the
     comparatively small expenditure of money involved.

     "But even if strikes do not occur it is probable that we should
     extort under pressure more favorable conditions of labor for our
     poor downtrodden fellow countrymen in Bethlehem. These white
     slaves are now working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. All
     weak persons succumb and become consumptive. So far as German
     workmen are found among the skilled hands means of leaving will be
     provided immediately for them.

     "Besides this, a private German registry office has been
     established which provides employment for persons who voluntarily
     have given up their places. It already is working well. We shall
     also join in and the widest support is assured us.

     "I beg your Excellency to be so good as to inform me with
     reference to this letter by wireless. Reply whether you agree. I
     remain, with great haste and respect,

     "DUMBA."


The aide memoire, written by the editor of a Hungarian weekly,
proposed to create unrest by a campaign in foreign language newspapers
circulated free to labor, muck-raking labor conditions in Bethlehem,
Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburg, and Bridgeport, where there were
great numbers of foreign workmen, Hungarians, Austrians, and Germans.
This was to be supplemented by a "horror novel" similar to the bloody
effort of Upton Sinclair to describe the Chicago stockyards. Special
agents of unrest, roll-turners, steel workers, soapbox orators,
picnic organizers, were all to be insinuated into the plants to
stir up the workmen. This editor had stirred them up a few weeks
before at Bridgeport--the strike which Lamar claimed as his own
accomplishment--and he presented to Baron Burian a really comprehensive
plan for creating unrest through his well-subsidized foreign-language
press. And in passing it on, Dr. Dumba stood sponsor for it.

The British government saw in the discovery of the letter and the cool
impudence of it, a rare chance for propaganda in America. So, as has
been said, the _World_ published the story, and at once the wrath of
the truly American people justified President Wilson in doing what he
and Secretary Lansing had already determined to do--to send Dr. Dumba
home. Perhaps Dumba's reference to the "self-willed temperament of the
President" in another note found on Archibald had something to do with
the haste with which the Ambassador's recall was demanded; it followed
on the heels of the publication of the letter:


     "By reason of the admitted purpose and intent of Mr. Dumba to
     conspire to <DW36> legitimate industries of the United States
     and to interrupt their legitimate trade, and by reason of
     the flagrant violation of diplomatic propriety in employing
     an American citizen protected by an American passport as a
     secret bearer of official despatches through the lines of the
     enemy of Austria-Hungary, the President directs us to inform
     your Excellency that Mr. Dumba is no longer acceptable to the
     Government of the United States as the Ambassador of his Imperial
     Majesty at Washington."


So went Dumba.

After his departure Baron Zwiedinek, his chargé d'affaires, and
Consul von Nuber advertised widely in Hungarian newspapers calling on
Austrians and Hungarians at work in munitions plants to leave. If they
wrote the Embassy on the subject, the reply they received read:


     "It is demanded that patriotism, no less than fear of punishment,
     should cause every one to quit his work immediately."


But neither threats, nor walking delegates, nor German spies could
check the output of shells and guns. An attempt made by Dr. Albert
to buy, for $50,000, a strike in Detroit motor factories failed. The
factories were making money as they had never made money before,
and labor was buying luxuries. To the American munitions-worker a
comfortable supply of money meant much more than the shrill bleat of
the Central Powers. And what was more, he was not entirely satisfied
that the right was all on Germany's side. (Our space does not
permit, nor is definite information at present available, to discuss
the anarchist, socialist, and I. W. W. elements of labor, and their
relations to Germany. These three factors, especially the last named,
effected in the years 1914-1918 a sufficient amount of industrial
unrest to qualify them as allies, if not actual servants, of the
Kaiser. Whether they were employed by Germany will be brought out in a
trial which began in Chicago in April, 1918.)

FOOTNOTE:

[3] McGarrity, Keating, and O'Leary, upon the publication of this
despatch, uttered vigorous denials of any connection with or knowledge
of the despatch or the affairs mentioned.




CHAPTER XIII

THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA

     The mistress of the seas--Plotting in New York--The _Lusitania's_
     escape in February, 1915--The advertised warning--The plot--May 7,
     1915--Diplomatic correspondence--Gustave Stahl--The results.


In the eyes of the German Admiralty the _Lusitania_ was the symbol
of British supremacy on the seas. There were larger ships flying the
Prussian flag, but one of them lay in her German harbor, the other
at her Little-German pier in Hoboken, while the _Lusitania_ swept
gracefully over the Western Ocean as she regally saw fit, leaving only
a thin trail of smoke for the sluggish undersea enemy to follow. Time
and again during the early months of war the plotters in Berlin had
attempted her destruction, and every time she had slipped away--until
the last, when the plot was developed on American soil.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

The _Lusitania_ leaving the Hudson River on her last voyage]

Her destruction would carry home to Germany news of heartening
influence out of all proportion to the mere sinking of a large single
tonnage. The German visible navy had, with the exception of scattering
excursions into the North Sea, and the swiftly quenched efforts of the
South Atlantic fleet, been of negligible--and irksome--consequence.
To sink the mistress of the British merchant fleet would be to inform
all the world that Britain was incapable of protecting her cargo and
passenger vessels, to puncture the comfortable British boast of the
moment that business was being performed "as usual," and to gratify
the blood-letting instincts of the Junkers. So von Tirpitz, with his
colleagues, undertook to sink the _Lusitania_, and to warn neutrals to
travel in their own ships or stay ashore.

Early in December, 1914, the German agents who met nightly at the
Deutscher Verein in Central Park South speculated on ways and means of
bringing down this attractive quarry. Communication between Berlin and
New York at that time was as facile as a telephone conversation from
the Battery to Harlem. There were new 110-kilowatt transmitters in
the German-owned Sayville wireless station, imported through Holland
and installed under the expert supervision of Captain Boy-Ed, and
memoranda issued in Berlin to the naval attaché were frequently the
subject of guarded conversation in the German Club within a few hours
after they had left the Wilhelmstrasse. Occasionally the conspirators
found it more tactful to drive through the Park in a limousine during
the evening, to discuss the project. Spies had made several trips to
Liverpool and back again aboard the ship, under false passports, and
Paul Koenig's waterfront henchmen supplied all necessary information
of the guard maintained at the piers. All this was passed up to the
clearing-house of executives, and their plans began to take shape.

Boy-Ed possessed a copy of the secret British Admiralty code, which
explained his frequent trips to Sayville. He knew--and Tirpitz's staff
therefore knew--the position of any British vessel at sea which had
occasion to utter any message into the air. But before he conceived a
use for this code other than as a source of information, he decided to
try out a code of his own.

He arranged with Berlin a word-system whose theory was popular with
Germany throughout the earlier years of her secret war communication:
under the guise of apparently harmless expressions of friendship, or
grief, or simple business, were transmitted quite definite and specific
secret meanings. A message addressed by wireless from the _Lusitania_
to a friend in England which read for example "Eager to see you. Much
love" would scarcely arouse suspicion, especially as there was no
word in it which might suggest military information. Yet in February,
1915, a message of that type was despatched from the eastward-bound
_Lusitania_ to a British station; it was intercepted and interpreted
by a German submarine commander in the "zone" nearby, who presently
popped up in the ship's wake and fired a torpedo. His information was
better than his aim. The _Lusitania_ dodged the steel shark, and fled
to safety, her wireless informing the British naval world meanwhile of
the presence of the U-boat.

The plotters had to reckon with her unequalled speed. The _Lusitania_
and her sister ship, the _Mauretania_, had each rather prided herself
in the past on reducing the other's fresh, bright passage-record from
Queenstown to New York--a record of four days and a few hours! The
submarine of 1915 knew no such speed, and it was necessary, if the
liner was to be torpedoed, to select out of the vastness of the ocean
one little radius in which the submarine might lie in wait for a
pot-shot. But just how?

Spies had reported that it was customary as the _Lusitania_ neared the
Irish coast on her homeward voyage for her captain to query the British
Admiralty for instructions as to where her convoy might be expected.
They reported that under certain conditions German agents might be
placed on board. And they reported that the wireless operator was
susceptible to bribery. Those three facts formed the nucleus of the
final plan.

Audacious as they were in their use of American soil as the base for
their plans, the German Embassy had certain obligations to the United
States Government, which they felt must be observed. The unspeakable
falsifying which is sometimes called expediency, sometimes diplomacy,
required that official America must know nothing of the intentions of
which the Embassy itself was fully conversant and approving. Further,
a palliative must be supplied to the American people in advance.
Consequently Count von Bernstorff, under orders from Berlin, inserted
in the _New York Times_ of April 23, 1915, the following advertisement:


     NOTICE

     Travelers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded
     that a state of war exists between Germany and her Allies and
     Great Britain and her Allies; that the zone of war includes the
     waters adjacent to the British Isles; that in accordance with
     formal notice given by the German Imperial Government, vessels
     flying the flag of Great Britain or any of her Allies are liable
     to destruction in these waters and that travelers sailing in the
     war zone on ships of Great Britain or her Allies do so at their
     own risk.

     IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY.

     Washington, D. C., April 22d, 1915.


[Illustration: OCEAN TRAVEL

NOTICE!

TRAVELLERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that
a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain
and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to
the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the
Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain,
or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and
that travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or
her allies do so at their own risk.

IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY

WASHINGTON, D. C., APRIL 22. 1915.

The newspaper advertisement inserted among "ocean travel" advertising
by the Imperial German Embassy prior to the _Lusitania's_ departure on
what proved to be her last voyage]

Germans in New York who knew of the plot dropped hints to their
friends; anonymous warnings were received by several passengers who had
booked their accommodations; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt received such a
message, signed "Morte." But such whispers were common, the _Lusitania_
had outrun the submarines before and could presumably do it again;
further, most Americans at that moment had some confidence left in
civilization.

The plot was substantially this: when Captain Turner, on the last
day of the voyage, should send his wireless query to the Admiralty,
inquiring for his convoy of destroyers, a wireless reply in the British
code directing his course must be sent to him from Sayville. His query
would be heard and answered by the Admiralty, of course, but the
genuine reply must not reach him.

Berlin assigned two submarines to a point ten miles south by west of
the Old Head of Kinsale, near the entrance to St. George's Channel. She
selected an experienced commander for the especial duty, and with him
went a secret agent to shadow him as he opened his sealed instructions,
and shoot him if he balked. And about the time when the U-boats slipped
out of the Kiel Canal, and threaded their way through the mine-fields
into the North Sea, submerging as they picked up the smoke of British
ships on the western horizon, the _Lusitania_ warped out of her pier in
the Hudson River and set her prow for Sandy Hook, the Grand Banks, and
Ireland.

She carried 1,254 passengers and a crew of eight hundred, a total of
more than 2,000 souls, of whom 1,214 were sailing to their death.
Germany had selected their graves; von Rintelen had two friends aboard
who were detailed to flash lights from the portholes in case the ship
made the submarine rendezvous at night. The _Lusitania_ carried bombs
which Dr. Karl Schimmel placed on board; she carried bombs which
wretched little Klein placed on board; she carried, too, the creature
who was to betray her. Her company was gay enough, and interesting;
besides Mr. Vanderbilt her passenger list included Charles Frohman,
the most important of theatrical managers; Elbert Hubbard, a quaint
and lovable writer-artisan; Charles Klein, a playwright; Justus Miles
Forman, a novelist; and numerous others of more or less celebrity,
among them an actress who lived to reënact her part in the tragedy
for the benefit of herself and a motion picture company. Ruthless as
it was, the _Lusitania_ also carried Lindon W. Bates, Jr., a youth
whose family had befriended von Rintelen. And there were the women and
children.

Meanwhile, Sayville was in readiness, a trained wireless operator
prepared at any moment to hear Captain Turner's inquiry, and to flash
a false reply with a perfect British Admiralty touch. On May 5 Captain
Boy-Ed received word from Berlin that he had been awarded the Iron
Cross. On May 7 the _Lusitania_ spoke: Captain Turner's request for
instructions. Presently the reply came, and was hurried to his cabin.
From his code book he deciphered directions to "proceed to a point ten
miles south of Old Head of Kinsale and thence run into St. George's
Channel, arriving at the Liverpool bar at midnight." He carefully
calculated the distance and his running time on the assumption that he
was protected on every side by the British fleet, and set his course
for the Old Head of Kinsale.

The British Admiralty also received Captain Turner's inquiry, just as
the Sayville operator had snatched it from the air, and despatched
an answer: orders that the _Lusitania_ proceed to a point some 70 or
80 miles south of the Old Head of Kinsale, there to meet her convoy.
_Captain Turner never received that message._ The British Government
knows why the message was not delivered, though the fact has not, at
this date, been made public.

The _Lusitania_ headed northeast all morning. At 1:20 o'clock she ran
the gauntlet of two submarines; a torpedo was released, and found its
target. The ghastly details of what followed have been told so fully,
so vividly, and so appealingly that they need not be repeated here.
They made themselves heard around a world that was already vibrant with
uproar. The first sodden tremor of the ship told Captain Turner that
he had been betrayed. He described later at the Coroner's inquest how
he had received orders supposedly from the Admiralty, and had set out
to obey them. He produced the copy of those orders, but of the genuine
message from the Admiralty he knew nothing. Asked if he had made
special application for a convoy, he said: "No, I left that to them. It
is their business, not mine. I simply had to carry out my orders to go,
and I would do it again."

America was in a turmoil. Germany had presumed too far; she--it is
almost incongruous to call Germany "she"--had believed that her warning
declaration that the waters about the British isles were a war zone
would be respected, or if not respected, would serve as an excuse, and
that the torpedoing would be accepted calmly by America. She was not
prepared for Colonel Roosevelt's burning denunciation of this act of
common piracy, nor for the angry editorial remonstrance of a people
outraged at the loss of one hundred and fourteen American lives. But
Germany recovered her presumptuous poise swiftly, and while ugly
medals were being struck off commemorating the German triumph over
the ship, and while destroyers were still searching British waters
for the bodies of the dead, she sent a note of commiseration and
sympathy to Washington. Three days later--on May 13--the United States
conveyed to Berlin a strong protest against the submarine policy which
had culminated in the sinking of the _Lusitania_. Three days before
Germany replied on May 28, a submarine attacked an American steamer,
the _Nebraska_, and the Imperial government followed up its first reply
with a supplementary note justifying its previous attacks upon the
American vessels _Gulflight_ and _Cushing_. Germany's fat was in the
fire.

A German editor in the United States had the effrontery to announce
that American ships would be sunk as readily as the _Lusitania_.
Secretary Bryan, of the Department of State, at that time a confirmed
pacifist, resigned his post on June 8, thus drawing the sting of a
second and sharper protest which went forward to Germany the next
day. To this the Foreign Office replied on July 8 that American
ships would be safe in the submarine zone under certain conditions,
and the President on July 21 rejected this diplomatic sop as "very
unsatisfactory." Count von Bernstorff finally announced, on September
1, that German submarines would sink no more liners without warning,
and his government ratified his promise a fortnight later. The
promise was at best a quibble, and it in no way restricted undersea
depredations upon commerce and human life. After the _Lusitania_
affair followed the _Leelanaw_, the _Arabic_, and the _Hesperian_
and on February 16, 1916, Germany acknowledged her liability for the
_Lusitania's_ destruction--the day after Secretary Lansing declared the
right of commercial vessels to arm themselves in self-defense, and five
days before the Crown Prince began the ten-months' battle of Verdun.

The published correspondence of the State Department gives in detail
the negotiations regarding maritime relations, a record of Imperial
hypocrisy which indicates clearly the desire and intention of the
Germans to retain their submarine warfare at any cost. There is not
space here to brief the papers, nor any great need, for it was the
_Lusitania_ which dictated the tone and outcome of the correspondence,
and which brought the United States rudely face to face with the cruel
facts of war.

In spite of these facts, Germany employed her agents in desperate,
devious and futile attempts to gloss over the crime. Relatives of those
who had drowned were persuaded by agents (one of them was "a lawyer
named Fowler, now under Federal indictment on another count") to sue
the Cunard Line for damages for having mounted guns on the liner,
thus making her liable to attack. Paul Koenig paid a German, Gustave
Stahl, of Hoboken, to swear to an affidavit that he had seen guns on
the ship; this affidavit was forwarded by Captain Boy-Ed on June 1, to
Washington, and had a wide temporary effect upon public sentiment until
Stahl was convicted of perjury and sentenced to 18 months in Atlanta.
It was Koenig who hid Stahl where neither the police nor the press
could find him after he made his statement, and it was Koenig who, at
the command of the Federal authorities, produced him. It was Rintelen
who dined on the night of the tragedy at the home of one of the
victims; it was Rintelen who received the news with a mild expression
of regret because "he had two good men aboard."

Tactically Germany had attained her objectives; her submarines had
obeyed orders and sunk a liner. Strategically Germany had made a gross
miscalculation; recruiting in England took a pronounced rise, the
Admiralty was shocked into redoubled vigilance, the United States
instead of swallowing the affront complicated the question of the
freedom of the seas beyond all untangling except by force of arms, and
beside the word "Belgium" on the calendar of crime the world wrote the
word "_Lusitania_," as equally typical of the warfare of the Hun.




CHAPTER XIV

COMMERCIAL VENTURES

     German law in America--Waetzoldt's reports--The British
     blockade--A report from Washington--Stopping the
     chlorine supply--Speculation in wool--Dyestuffs and the
     _Deutschland_--Purchasing phenol--The Bridgeport Projectile
     Company--The lost portfolio--The recall of the attachés--A summary
     of Dr. Albert's efforts.


In addition to the exercise of its diplomatic functions, now more
important than they had ever been before, the German Embassy had
assumed the burden of large commercial enterprises. Their execution
was entrusted to Dr. Albert, the privy councillor and fiscal agent
for the Empire. There was apparently no limit, either financial or
territorial, to the scope of his efforts, and the fact that he was able
to administrate such a volume of work is no small tribute to his zeal.
But that very zeal outran his regard for American law, so in one of his
earlier ventures he set out to substitute the law of the Empire for
that of the nation to which he was accredited.

Dr. Albert was informed on March 10, 1915, by a German lawyer,
S. Walter Kaufmann of 60 Wall Street, that his clients, the
Orenstein-Arthur Keppel Company, had an order for 9,000 tons of
steel rails to be shipped to Russia, despite instructions from the
company's home office in Berlin that "no orders should be accepted for
shipment to any country at war with Germany, because of Paragraph 89
of the Gesetz Buch." The Gesetz Buch is the German Penal Code. (One
of Kaufmann's law partners was Norvin R. Lindheim, legal adviser to
Germany's agents in the United States.) The manufacturers begged the
permission of the Embassy to accept the order and pass the actual
manufacture on to the United States Steel Company, in order to evade
the letter of Paragraph 89, and in order "to delay the order, if
that would in any way be desirable." The matter was neglected in the
Embassy, and on July 13 the Orenstein-Arthur Keppel Company wrote from
Keppel, Pa., to the German consul, Philadelphia, Dr. George Stobbe,
again asking permission to accept the order. The consul replied,
denying permission, on the ground that the shipment would facilitate
the Russian transport of troops, and that such action would be within
the meaning of Paragraph 89 of the Gesetz Buch. "That you are in
position to delay the delivery of the order, to the prejudice of the
hostile country ordering, in no way makes you less punishable," he
continued. He forwarded a copy of his ruling to the Ambassador for
approval, and it in turn was forwarded to Dr. Albert. The order was
not taken; the fear of punishment by Germany was greater than the
protection afforded by American Law.

The foregoing episode reveals the nature of Dr. Albert's chief
problem--the financial blocking of supplies for the Allies. Let Boy-Ed
destroy the ships, von Papen dynamite the factories and railways,
Rintelen run his mad course of indiscriminate violence--the smooth
financial agent would undertake only those great business ventures in
which his shrewdness and experience could have play. He was receiving
reports constantly on the economic status, and the following extract
from a report from G. D. Waetzoldt, a trade investigator in the
Consulate in New York, will illustrate the German frame of mind about
midsummer of 1915:

"The large war orders, as the professional journals also print, have
become the great means of saving American business institutions from
idleness and financial ruin.

"The fact that institutions of the size and international influence
of those mentioned could not find sufficient regular business to keep
them to some extent occupied, half at least, throws a harsh light upon
the sad condition in which American business would have found itself
had it not been for the war orders. The ground which induced these
large interests to accept war orders rests entirely upon an economical
basis and can be explained by the above-mentioned conditions which were
produced by the lack of regular business. These difficulties, resulting
from the dividing up of the contracts, are held to have been augmented,
as stated in business circles, by the fact that certain agents working
in the German interest succeeded in further delaying and disturbing
American deliveries....

"So many contracts for the production of picric acid have been placed
that they can only be filled to a very small part."

Dr. Albert also received a report from another trade expert, who had
had a long conference with ex-Senator John C. Spooner of Wisconsin
as to whether or not there could be prosecutions under the Sherman
Anti-Trust Law against British representatives because of the
restrictions placed by the British Government upon dealings by
Americans in certain copper, cotton and rubber.

Naturally one of the most vital problems that stirred Dr. Albert was
the British Orders in Council blockading Germany, from which resulted
the seizure of meat and food supplies and cotton by British war
vessels. He was always on the alert for information of the attitude
of the Administration and the people of the United States toward the
blockade. In another report dated June 3, 1915, Waetzoldt said:

"There can be no doubt that the British Government will bring into play
all power and pressure possible in order to complete the total blockade
of Germany from her foreign markets, and that the Government of the
United States will not make a strenuous effort to maintain its trade
with Germany....

"It has been positively demonstrated during this time that the falling
off of imports caused by the war in Europe will in the future be
principally covered by American industry....

"The complete stopping importation of German products will, in truth,
to a limited extent, especially in the first part of the blockade, help
the sale of English or French products, but the damage which will be
done to us in this way will not be great....

"The _Lusitania_ case did, in fact, give the English efforts in this
direction a new and powerful impetus, and at first the vehemence with
which the Anti-German movement began anew awakened serious misgivings,
but this case also will have a lasting effect, which, unless fresh
complications arise, we may be able to turn to the advantage of the
sales of German goods....

"The war will certainly have this effect, that the American business
world will devote all its energy toward making itself independent of
the importation of foreign products as far as possible....

"If the decision is again brought home to German industry it should
not be forgotten what position the United States took with reference
to Germany in this war. Above all, it should not be forgotten that
the 'ultimate ratio' of the United States is not the war with arms,
but a complete prohibition of trade with Germany, and in fact,
through legislation. That was brought out very clearly and sharply
in connection with the still pending negotiations regarding the
_Lusitania_ case."

That Dr. Albert used secret and perhaps devious means to secure his
information is revealed by an unsigned confidential report which he
received under most mysterious circumstances concerning an interview
by a man referred to as "M. P." with President Wilson and Secretary
Lansing. The person who wrote of "the conversation" on July 23, 1915,
with "Legal Agent" Levy and Mr. John Simon does not give his name. A
striking part of this conversation follows:

"Levy advises regarding a conference with M. P. Thereafter M. P. saw
Lansing as well as Wilson. He informed both of them that an American
syndicate had approached him which had strong German relations. This
syndicate wishes to buy up cotton for Germany in great style, thereby
to relieve the cotton situation, and at the same time to provide
Germany with cotton." (Dr. Albert attempted, with a suitable campaign
of press and political propaganda, to inflame the Southern planters
over the British embargo on cotton.) "The relations of the American
syndicate with Germany are very strong, so that they might even
possibly be able to influence the position of Germany in the general
political question. M. P. therefore asked for a candid, confidential
statement in order to make clear not only his own position, but also
necessarily the political opportunity. The result of the conversation
was as follows:

"1. The note of protest to England will go in any event whether Germany
answers satisfactorily or not.

"2. Should it be possible to settle satisfactorily the _Lusitania_
case, the President will bind himself to carry the protest against
England through to the uttermost.

"3. The continuance of the difference with Germany over the _Lusitania_
case is 'embarrassing' for the President in carrying out the protest
against England....

"4. A contemplated English proposal to buy cotton in great style and
invest the proceeds in America would not satisfy the President as an
answer to the protest....

"5. The President, in order to ascertain from Mr. M. P. how strong the
German influence of this syndicate is, would like to have the trend
of the German note before the note is officially sent, and declares
himself ready, before the answer is drafted, to discuss it with M. P.,
and eventually to so influence it that there will be an agreement for
its reception, and also to be ready to influence the press through a
wink.

"6. As far as the note itself is concerned, which he awaits, so he
awaits another expression of regret, which was not followed in the last
note. Regret together with the statement that nobody had expected that
human lives would be lost and that the ship would sink so quickly.

"7. The President is said to have openly declared that he could hardly
hope for a positive statement that the submarine warfare would be
discontinued."

Dr. Albert conferred with Captains Boy-Ed and von Papen on all military
and naval matters having a commercial phase. Captain von Papen, on July
7, 1915, submitted to Dr. Albert a memorandum for his consideration and
further recommendation, headed "Steps Taken to Prevent the Exportation
of Liquid Chlorine." He told of the efforts made by England and France
to buy that chemical in America, estimated the output here, and cited
the manufacturers. He also enclosed a plan for checkmating the Allies
and concluded with the following paragraph:

"It will be impossible, however, for this to go on any length of time,
as the shareholders wish the profits to be derived therefrom. Dr.
Orenstein therefore suggests that an agreement be consummated with the
Electro Bleaching Company, through the President, Kingsley, whereby the
delivery of liquid chlorine by this country to France and England will
be stopped. A suggested plan is enclosed herewith.

"From a military standpoint I deem it very desirable to consummate such
an agreement, in order to stop thereby the further exportation of about
fifty-two tons of liquid chlorine monthly, especially in view of the
fact that in France there is only one factory (Rouen) which can produce
this stuff in small amounts, while it is only produced in very small
quantities, in England."

During 1914 and 1915 German speculation in wool was active. Early
in the war von Bernstorff summoned a German-American wool merchant
recommended by a business friend in Berlin and directed him to buy all
the wool he could secure. He did so, using Deutsches Bank credits for
the purchases made for Germany, and making his purchases of wool for
Germany even in Cape Town and Australia. The German-American, after
following this practice for some months, decided that his financial
allegiance belonged to America, so he tried, through Hugo Schmidt, to
induce the German interests in his firm to sell out to him. On August
9, 1915, Schmidt wrote to Keswig, the Berlin principal:

"Your friend here has inquired in London, and he offers no matter what
price may be realizable in London at that time to take over the wool
from you at the original price, in which case you would naturally pay
all the expenses, which are estimated to be about 6 per cent. As you
see, it is not so simple to deal with your friends."

The German-American's offer meant a good profit to him, as the London
price of wool at that time had advanced nearly 15 per cent. Yet he
apparently fell into no ill favor with Berlin, for in June, 1916, the
German Foreign office wrote von Bernstorff:

"Interested parties here have repeatedly made representations for
preferential treatment of the firm of Forstmann & Huffman in Passaic,
N. J., in connection with shipment of coal tar dyes to the United
States of America. Since this pure German firm, as is well known
on your side, undertook last year the wool supply for Germany, and
therefore claim it has been especially badly treated by England, it
is most respectfully recommended to Your Excellency, should there
be no reason to the contrary, to arrange for the greatest possible
consideration for this firm in the later distribution of the shipments
to consumers which now are in prospect."

Necessity, the mother of invention, had forced America's production
of coal-tar derivatives and dyestuffs upward enormously during the
first year of war. As the British blockade tightened, the German
supply, which had long constituted the world supply, was cut off
completely. The value of dyestuffs in America increased enormously
from 1914 to 1915. Germany witnessed this growth with apprehension,
and realized gravely that export expansion would follow increased
and perfected production in America, which it promptly did. German
chemical interests involved in a drug house familiar with the German
market, have testified that their firm "paid three times the value"
of a cargo of dyestuffs shipped from Bremen to Baltimore in 1916 in
the huge undersea-boat _Deutschland_, "which paid for the ship and
cargo." Her sister ship, the _Bremen_, which set forth for America, but
never arrived, was also "built with money furnished by the dyestuff
manufacturers," according to Ambassador Gerard.

The _Deutschland_ herself was 300 feet long, with a cargo capacity of
some 800 tons. She docked at the North German Lloyd piers in Baltimore,
and after loading a cargo of rubber and nickel, took an opportune
moment one foggy twilight to cast off and slip out to sea. She not only
returned safely to Germany but made another round trip to America,
putting in the second time at New London. She was at sea about three
weeks on each crossing of the Atlantic.

Dr. Albert made plans for buying up carbolic acid to prevent it from
reaching the Allies. Dr. Hugo Schweitzer, a German-American chemist
of New York, paid down $100,000 cash on June 3, 1915, to the American
Oil & Supply Company in New Jersey as part payment of $1,400,000 for
1,212,000 pounds of carbolic acid, of which the American Oil & Supply
Company had directed the purchase from Thomas A. Edison. Dr. Schweitzer
said that he bought the liquid not to prevent it from falling into the
hands of the Allies but to use in the manufacture of medical supplies.

Not the least interesting of Dr. Albert's financial experiences is
that which conceived and bore the Bridgeport Projectile Company. In a
conference early in 1915 in the offices of G. Amsinck & Co., in New
York, Count von Bernstorff came to the conclusion that one way to
prevent the shipment of munitions to the enemy was to monopolize the
industry, or at least to control it financially as far as possible. Dr.
Albert made an unsuccessful attempt to buy the Union Metallic Cartridge
plant for $17,000,000. He chose as his lieutenants for his next task
Hugo Schmidt, the New York representative of the Deutsches Bank, and
Karl Heynen, whose past record had been auspicious, as agent for Mexico
of the Hamburg-American Line. Heynen it was who had smuggled a cargo
of arms ashore for Huerta at Vera Cruz, under the nose of the American
fleet; he had received some 40,000 pesos (Mexican) for the coup, and he
was regarded as a capable individual. On March 31, 1915, the Bridgeport
Projectile Company was incorporated for $2,000,000, paid in, with
Walter Knight as president, Heynen as treasurer, and Karl Foster as
secretary and counsel.

Schmidt drew up a contract with the new-born company calling for a
large order of shells. On May 17 Heynen reported to Albert that 534
hydraulic presses for making shells of calibres 2.95 to 4.8 had been
ordered, and would cost $417,550. These orders, with all others for
tools and machinery which the Bridgeport company placed, were so
well concealed about the business world that as late as August the
impression was current that Great Britain was financing the company.
On June 30 Heynen reported to Albert through Schmidt that the first
shell cases would be manufactured under United States government
inspection, in order to create the impression that the company was
anxious for American contracts, and so that immediate delivery could be
made in case such contracts were actually secured. "The most important
buildings, forges, and machine shops, are almost under roof; the other
buildings are fairly under way; presses, machinery and all other
materials are being promptly assembled, and there is every indication
that deliveries will commence as provided in the contract; i. e., on
Sept. 1st, 1915."

The Bridgeport Projectile Company contracted with the Ætna Powder
Company, one of the largest producers of explosives in America, for
its entire output up to January, 1916, and then turned round and
offered the Spanish government a million pounds of powder. The Spanish
representatives may have suspected the identity of the company, for
they raised certain objections to the contract, to which Heynen
refused to listen, and he also reported to his superiors that British
and Russian purchasing agents were going to call on him within a few
days. He made a contract with Henry Disston & Co. for two million
pieces of steel, most of them tools, for which Schmidt advanced the
money. He contracted with the Camden Iron Works of Camden, N. J., for
presses, and posted a forfeit of $165,000 in case the contract should
be cancelled; the contract was signed and cancelled the next day by
the Bridgeport company, causing the Camden concern great business
difficulty.

Thus, by the manipulation of contracts, Dr. Albert and his associates
were accomplishing the following ends:

1. Arranging to supply Germany with shells and powder (as soon as
smuggling could be effected) at a time when official Germany was
attempting to persuade the United States to place an embargo on the
shipment of war materials to the Allies.

2. Securing a monopoly on all powder available.

3. So tying up the machinery and tool manufacturers that all their
production for months to come was under contract to the Bridgeport
Projectile Company, yet so wielding the cancellation clauses in its
contracts that delivery could be delayed and the date further postponed
when the manufacturers of machinery and tools could be free to take
Allied orders.

4. Arranging to accept contracts for the United States and the Allies
under such provisions that there would be no impossible forfeit if the
contracts could not be fulfilled. This would have the effect of making
the Allies believe that they were going to receive supplies which the
Bridgeport Projectile Company had no intention of furnishing them.

5. Heynen, by the contract with the munitions industry, which his
work afforded, knew where Allied orders for shells were placed, and
he learned to his pleasure that the Allies were being forced to
contract for shrapnel which was forged--a less satisfactory process
than pressing. He also learned that the first two orders for forged
shrapnel placed by the Allies had been rejected because the product was
inferior.

6. Paying abnormal wages with the unlimited funds at its disposal,
stealing labor from the Union Metallic Cartridge Company in Bridgeport,
and generally unsettling the labor situation.

7. Offering powder to Spain, a neutral with strong German affiliations.

The project was glorious in its forecast. But we may well let a German
hand describe how it failed; among the papers captured by the British
on the war correspondent and secret messenger Archibald at Falmouth in
late August was a letter from Captain von Papen to his wife in Germany,
in which he said:

"Our good friend Albert has been robbed of a thick portfolio of papers
on the elevated road. English secret service men of course." (Papen
was not altogether correct in this statement.) "Unfortunately, some
very important matters from my report are among the papers, such as the
purchase of liquid chlorine, the correspondence with the Bridgeport
Projectile Company, as well as documents relating to the purchase of
phenol, from which explosives are manufactured, and the acquisition of
Wright's aeroplane patents. I send you also the reply of Albert, in
order that you may see how we protect ourselves. This we compounded
last night in collaboration."[4]

Dr. Albert could hardly have chosen a more unfortunate set of documents
to carry about with him and lose. "Pitiless publicity" was his reward,
and the statement which he and von Papen prepared in refutation and
denial was received by those in authority as precisely the sort of
denial which any unscrupulous and able master of intrigue might be
expected to issue under the circumstances--and no more. If there had
been any doubt of the perniciousness of his activities--and there was
none--it would have been dispelled by the seizure of the Archibald
letters, but the result of the exposures of German activity which
made the _New York World_, a newspaper worth watching during August
and September, 1915, was not the expulsion of Dr. Albert, but of the
military and naval attachés. Albert, while he had been magnificently
busy attempting to disturb America's calm, had been cunning enough
to keep his hands free of blood and powder smoke; Boy-Ed and von
Papen had to answer for the origination of so many crimes that it
is almost incredible in the light of later events that they escaped
with nothing more than a dismissal. On December 4, Secretary Lansing
demanded their recall on account of their connection "with the illegal
and questionable acts of certain persons within the United States";
Bernstorff made no reply for ten days, and received a sharp reminder
for his delay; he then replied that the Kaiser agreed to the recall.
Four days before Christmas von Papen sailed for England and Holland.
On January 2 and 3, 1916, his effects were searched by the British at
Falmouth and two documents among others found may be cited here. Boy-Ed
sailed on New Year's Day, but with no incriminating documents, for he
had been warned.

The first document found on von Papen was a letter from President
Knight of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, dated Sept. 11, 1915,
addressed to Heynen at 60 Wall Street--the building in which von Papen
had his office--giving certain specifications for shells that were
being made in the new Bridgeport plant; the second was a memorandum of
an interview on December 21, between Papen, Heynen, G. W. Hoadley of
the affiliated American-British Manufacturing Company, and Captain
Hans Tauscher. The four men had discussed specifications for a time,
and had agreed that firing tests of the projectiles could be made "in
a bomb-proof place by electrical explosion." Delays in production at
Bridgeport are evident in the last sentence of the memorandum:


     "It was agreed that Mr. Hoadley, till date, has complied with
     all the conditions of the contracts of the 1st April, with the
     exception of the commencement of the delivery of the shells, which
     is due to _force majeure_, i. e., to failure to timely obtain
     the delivery of machinery and tools occasioned by strikes in the
     machine factories."


A letter to von Papen from Dr. Albert, then in San Francisco, undated
but obviously written in December, 1915, contained these farewell
sentiments:


     "Dear Herr von Papen,

     "Well, then! How I wish I were in New York and could discuss the
     situation with you and B. E.... So we shall not see each other
     for the present. Shall we at all before you leave? It would be
     my most anxious wish; but my hope is small. From this time, I
     suppose, matters will move more quickly than in Dumba's case.
     I wonder whether our Government will respond in a suitable
     manner! In my opinion it need no longer take public opinion so
     much into consideration, in spite of it being artificially and
     intentionally agitated by the press and the legal proceedings,
     so that a somewhat 'stiffer' attitude would be desirable,
     naturally quiet and dignified!... Please remember me to your chief
     personally. I assume that he still remembers me from the time of
     the 'experimental establishment for aircraft,' and give my best
     wishes to Mr. Scheuch, and tell him that the struggle on the
     American front is sometimes very hard.... When I think of your and
     Boy-Ed's departure, and that I alone remain behind in New York, I
     could--well, better not!"


Perhaps Dr. Albert would have accompanied the attachés had not the
submarine situation been so acute. For while the Government had in its
possession sufficient provocation for his dismissal, and that of Count
von Bernstorff as well, the Government's desire at that time was peace,
and stubbornly, patiently, it clung to its ideal in a dogged attempt to
preserve its neutrality. Dr. Albert had run the British blockade with
his supplies for Germany, and had roared protest when Great Britain
seized cargoes of meat intended for Germany, although she paid the
packers for them in full. He had floated a German loan through Chandler
& Company, a New York house of which Rudolph Hecht, one of his agents,
was a member; he had sold $500,000,000 worth of German securities; to
sum up his financial activities, he had played every trick he knew, and
his last year in America was unfruitful of result, for he was watched.
He returned to Germany personally enriched, for time and again,
prompted by stock tips from his German friends on stocks or "September
lard," and by diplomatic information which he knew would influence the
stock market, he made handsome winnings for von Bernstorff and himself.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] The captain added: "The sinking of the _Adriatic_" (by which he
meant the _Arabic_, which had been sunk without warning on August 19,
with a loss of sixteen lives, two of them American), "may be the last
straw for the sake of our cause. I hope the matter will blow over."
On October 5 the German Government, consistent with its assurance of
September 1 that no more ships would be sunk without warning, disavowed
the sinking of the _Arabic_, and offered to pay indemnities. So the
matter "blew over."




CHAPTER XV

THE PUBLIC MIND

     Dr. Bertling--The _Staats-Zeitung_--George Sylvester
     Viereck and _The Fatherland_--Efforts to buy a press
     association--Bernhardi's articles--Marcus Braun and _Fair
     Play_--Plans for a German news syndicate--Sander, Wunnenberg,
     Bacon and motion pictures--The German-American Alliance--Its
     purposes--Political activities--Colquitt of Texas--The
     "Wisconsin Plan"--Lobbying--Misappropriation of German Red Cross
     funds--Friends of Peace--The American Truth Society.


Some one has said that America will emerge from this war a gigantic
national entity, a colossus wrought of the fused metal of her scores
of mixed nationalities. That is naturally desirable, and historically
probable. If such is the result, Germany will have lost for all time
one of her most powerful allies--the German population in the United
States. Nearly one-tenth of the population of the United States in 1914
was of either German birth or parentage. Ethnic lines are not erased
in a generation except by some great emergency, such as war affords.
Germany is doomed to a deserved disappointment in the loss of her
American stock--deserved because she tried so hard to Germanize America.

She wasted no time in injecting her verbal propagandists into the
struggle on the American front. On August 20, 1914, Dr. Karl Oskar
Bertling, assistant director of the Amerika Institut in Berlin,
landed in New York, and went at once to report to von Bernstorff. The
Amerika Institut had of recent years made considerable progress in
familiarizing Germany with American affairs; its chief director, Dr.
Walther Drechsler, had been master of German in Middlesex, a prominent
boys' school in Massachusetts; he returned to Berlin in 1913 and was
attached, upon the outbreak of war, to the press office. All who were
associated with it knew something of America. It is characteristic of
the convertibility of German institutions to war that another executive
of this organization, employed in peace times to cement the friendship
between the two nations, should be sent on the day war was declared to
America to establish a German press bureau.

Dr. Bertling went about delivering pro-German speeches, and prepared
articles for the press on international questions. These he submitted
to Bernstorff himself for approval--one such story was to be published
in a Sunday magazine supplement to a long "string" of American
newspapers. Although every editor was on the lookout for any "war
stuff" which was written with any apparent background of European
politics, he found small market for his wares among the New York
newspapers, and some of his speaking dates were cancelled. He proposed
to publish, with one of his stories, a set of German military maps of
Belgium, but to this von Papen wrote him on November 21: "I entirely
agree with you in your opinion in regard to the maps--it is a two-edged
sword," and he added: "One observes how very ill-informed the average
American is." Bertling's lack of accomplishment drew censure, however,
from several sources: the head of the German-American Chamber of
Commerce in Berlin chided him for not having carried out his "special
mission to supply a cable service to South America and China," and the
late Professor Hugo Muensterberg of Harvard waxed righteously indignant
over the fact that Bertling opened and read a letter entrusted by the
psychologist to him for safe delivery to Dr. Dernburg. Bertling applied
to the Embassy for special employment, and on March 19, 1915, the
ambassador's private secretary wrote him:

"His Excellency is entirely agreeable to giving you the desired
employment, but he considers the present conditions too uncertain, as
his departure for Germany in the near future is not impossible."

Excellent testimony to the subtle iniquity of his task lies in
the names of the men whose pro-Ally utterances he was striving to
counteract. In a letter written December 20, 1914, to Bertling by C. W.
Ernst, a Bostonian of German birth and American naturalization, appears
this passage:

"Is it prudent to defend the German cause against such men as C. W.
Eliot and other Americans who consider themselves artistocratic and
important?... Who, apparently, was of more importance than Roosevelt,
to whom now even the dogs pay no attention?... The feeling of men like
Eliot, C. F. Adams, etc., is well understood. German they know not.
They understand neither Luther nor Kant, nor the history of Germany....
Tactically it is a mistake to be easy going with England, or in
discussion with her American toadies. By curtness, defiance, irony one
can get much further...."

His friend in the German-American Chamber of Commerce wrote again
to Berlin in a vein which showed how closely Germany herself was
watching publicity in America. "Viereck has sent me a letter," he
said, "and _Harper's_ printed some matter by way of Italy.... The
Foreign Office and the War Department urgently want more reports sent
here. If cables through neutral countries are not feasible, could
not Americans travelling be called upon? More steam, please.... The
exchange professors should get busy.... One is quite surprised here
that with the exception of Burgess and possibly Sloan, nobody seems
to be doing anything.... Nasmith's article, 'The Case for Germany,'
in the _Outlook_ is very good--inspired by me. The same of Mead's in
_Everybody's_."

And again: "We will dog Uncle Sam's footsteps with painful
accuracy--his sloppy, obstinate, pro-English neutrality we utterly
repudiate. When God wishes to punish a country he gives it a W. J. B.
as Secretary of State."

(When Bryan resigned, German rumors were circulated from time to time
that Secretary Lansing, who succeeded him, had had a falling out with
President Wilson, and was himself on the point of resigning. What Herr
Walther thought of "W. J. B."'s successor is a matter of conjecture.)

The documents found in Dr. Bertling's possession, and the method of
securing them, brought forth a sharp editorial from Bernard Ridder of
the _New Yorker Staats-Zeitung_, then one of the stanch members of
the foreign language press engaged in defending Germany. Dr. Bertling
remained unmolested in the United States until April, 1918, when he
was arrested as an enemy alien in Lexington, Mass., and interned.
Dr. Bernhardt Dernburg, to quote the words of a German associate,
"had some propaganda and wrote some articles for the newspapers" ...
and was "certainly in connection with the German Government," gave
Adolph Pavenstedt $15,000 in early October, 1914. To this Pavenstedt
added $5,000, and on October 12 paid the sum of $20,000 to the
_Staats-Zeitung_, to tide the newspaper over a rough financial period.
"I expected," said Pavenstedt," that if the business were bankrupt it
would be lost to the Ridders, who have always followed a very good
course for the German interests here."

[Illustration: Photographs of checks signed by Adolf Pavenstedt]

Soon after the war began George Sylvester Viereck brought out his
publication, _The Fatherland_, a moderately clever attempt to appeal
to intelligent readers in Germany's behalf. On July 1, 1915, the
publication having stumbled along a rocky financial path--for no
publication distributed gratis can make money--Dr. Albert wrote Viereck:

"Your account for the $1,500--bonus, after deducting the $250 received,
for the month of June, 1915, has been received. I hope in the course of
the next week to be able to make payment. In the meantime, I request
the proposal of a suitable person who can ascertain accurately and
prove the financial condition of your paper. From the moment when we
guarantee you a regular advance, I must

"1. Have a new statement of the condition of your paper.

"2. Practise a control over the financial management.

"In addition to this we must have an understanding regarding the course
in politics which you will pursue, which we have not asked heretofore.
Perhaps you will be kind enough to talk the matter over on the basis of
this letter, with Mr. Fuehr." Fuehr's office was across the hall from
Viereck.

Viereck had assembled about him among others a staff of contributors
which included Dr. Dernburg, Frank Koester, Rudolph Kronau, J. Bernard
Rethey, a writer who affects the _nom de plume_ of "Oliver Ames,"
Edmund von Mach (whose brother is an official of some prominence
in Germany), and Ram Chandra (the editor of a revolutionary Hindu
newspaper published in California). Viereck, in his paper, forecasted
the sinking of the _Lusitania_ and later gloated over it as well as
over the murder of Edith Cavell. His father is the Berlin correspondent
of his paper. They are both "naturalized" citizens of the United
States. One of his contributors, as late as 1918, wrote for Viereck a
peculiarly suspicious essay on his conversion to Americanism, setting
forth in exhaustive detail the pro-German convictions which he had
previously held, and the justification for them, and winding up with
a pallid renunciation of them, the document as a whole intended
ostensibly to stimulate patriotism, while in reality it would have
rekindled the dying German apology. The pernicious Viereck, whose
mental stature may be judged by the fact that he treasured a violet
from the grave of Oscar Wilde, sought to interest the Embassy in his
merits as a publisher of German books, and was supported, as pro-German
volumes were issued from the Jackson Press which he controlled. He
suggested, too, to Dr. Albert names of American publishing houses as
excellent media for bringing out propaganda books on account of their
obvious innocence of German sympathies.

A more patent attempt to influence the public originated in the German
Embassy itself. Dr. Albert, through intermediaries, schemed to obtain
for $900,000 control of a press association. The sale was not made. One
of Dr. Albert's agents, M. B. Claussen, formerly publicity agent for
the Hamburg-American Line, established in the Hotel Astor, New York,
the "German Information Bureau" for disseminating "impartial news about
the war" and "keeping the American mind from becoming prejudiced," and
he issued many a red-white-and-black statement to the newspapers.

The German interests also had designs on buying an important New York
evening newspaper, the _Mail_. One of von Papen's assistants, George
von Skal, a former reporter (and the predecessor as commissioner of
accounts of John Purroy Mitchel, New York's "fighting mayor"), entered
the negotiations in a letter written by Paul T. Davis to Dr. Albert at
the embassy. This letter, dated, June 21, 1915, set forth that--

"In November, 1914, my father, George H. Davis, conceived the idea
that Germany ought to be represented in New York by one of the papers
printed in English. He spoke to a number of German-Americans about
the scheme and finally through Mr. George von Skal got in touch with
Ambassador Count von Bernstorff. Mr. Percival Kuhne acted as the
head of the movement until it was found that he could not devote the
necessary time to the matter in hand and at father's suggestion Mr.
Ludwig Nissen was substituted.... We decided upon the _Mail_ as the
only paper that was not too expensive.... We opened negotiations with
the proprietors of the _Mail_ and proceeded until Ambassador Count von
Bernstorff notified both Mr. Kuhne and Mr. Nissen that at that time
nothing further should be done in the matter...."

The _Mail_ was sold, however, to Dr. Rumely.

Dr. Albert collected for General Franz Bernhardi the proceeds of the
publication in American newspapers of the latter's famous "Germany and
the Next War." Bernhardi wrote von Papen on April 9, 1915:

"I have now written two further series of articles for America.
The Foreign Office wanted to have the first of these, entitled
'Germany and England,' distributed in the American press; the other,
entitled 'Pan-Germanism,' was to appear in the Chicago _Tribune_.
They will certainly have some sort of effect, this is evident from
the inexpressible rage with which the British and French press have
attacked those _Sun_ articles."

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

George Sylvester Viereck, founder and Editor of _The Fatherland_ a
pro-German propaganda weekly known later as _Viereck's Weekly_]

Bernstorff and Papen, under orders from Chancellor von
Bethmann-Hollweg, in May, 1915, had under consideration the payment of
from $1,000 to $1,200 for the expenses of a trip to Germany for Edward
Lyell Fox, a newspaper writer, who "at the time of his last sojourn in
Germany" (in 1914) "was of great benefit to us by reason of his good
despatches."

Von Bernstorff himself wrote on March 15, 1915, to Marcus Braun, a
Hungarian, and editor of a review called _Fair Play_:


     "_My dear Mr. Braun_:

     "In answer to your favor of the 12th instant, I beg to say that I
     have read the monthly review _Fair Play_ for the last 3 years, and
     I can state that this publication is living up to its name, and
     that it has always taken the American point of view. During the
     last 7 months _Fair Play_ has, in its editorial policy, treated
     all belligerents justly and thereby rendered great services to
     the millions of foreign born citizens in this country, especially
     to those of German and Austro-Hungarian origin. _Fair Play_
     has fought for the rights of the latter and for truth, always
     maintaining an American attitude and showing true American spirit.

     "You are at liberty to show this letter to anybody who is
     interested in the matter, but I beg you not to publish it, as to
     (do) this would be contrary to the instructions of my government,
     who does not wish me to publicly advertise any review or newspaper.

     "Very sincerely yours,

     "J. BERNSTORFF."


On May 28, 1915, J. Bernstorff signed another gratifying document for
the same Braun--a check for $5,000 payable to the Fair Play Printing &
Publishing Company. Such was the reward of "true American spirit."

When Germany embarked upon an enterprise she usually followed charts
prepared by trained surveyors. Her attempts at newspaper and magazine
propaganda in the first ten months of war had been hastily conceived
and not altogether successful. One of the most comprehensive reports
which has come to light is a recommendation, dated July, 1915, in
which the investigator discusses the feasibility of a strong German
news-syndicate in America.

It was to be operated by two bureaus, one in Berlin as headquarters for
all news and pictures from Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and the
Balkans, one in New York for distribution of the matter to the American
press. Correspondents from America were to be given the privileges of
both Eastern and Western fronts, from 3,000 to 4,000 words a day were
to be sent by wireless from Nauen to Sayville, secret codes were to be
arranged so that the cable news might be smuggled past the enemy in
the guise of commercial messages. The bureau in New York was to gather
American news for Germany, and the service was eventually to extend
over the whole world.

[Illustration:

GERMAN EMBASSY
WASHINGTON, D.C.

Washington, D.C., March 15, 1915.

J.Na 4344

My dear Mr. Braun,

In answer to your favor of 12th instant I beg to say that I have read
the monthly review "Fair Play" for the last 3 years, and I can state
that this publication has been living up to its name and that it has
always taken the American point of view. During the last 7 months
"Fair Play" has, in its editorial policy, treated all belligerents
justly and thereby rendered great services to the millions of foreign
born citizens of this country, especially to those of German and
Austro-Hungarian origin. "Fair Play" has fought for the rights of the
latter and for truth, always maintaining an American attitude and
showing true American spirit.

You are at liberty to show this letter to anybody who is interested
in the matter, but I beg you not to publish it, as to this would be
contrary to the instructions of my Government, who does not wish me to
publicly advertize any reviews or newspaper.

Very sincerely yours,

_J. Bernstorff_

Marcus Braun, Esq.,
Editor of "Fair Play"
New York City.

Fac-simile of a letter from Count von Bernstorff to the editor of "Fair
Play"]

"In fact," said the report, "it will be particularly desirable to
inaugurate the Chinese service at once, so that the American public
is informed about that which really happens in order to create an
effective counter-weight against the Japanese propaganda in the
American press."

The New York bureau was estimated to cost $6,640 per month, the bureau
in Berlin about half that sum; two years' effort would have cost
about $200,000. The writer proposed to establish a lecture service as
auxiliary, the total expenses of which, covering the Chautauquas of one
summer, he estimated at $75,000. The investigator concluded:

"Hoping that my proposals will lead to a successful result, I will take
the liberty of advising in the interest of the German cause--aside from
the fact whether my proposals will be carried out or not--that the
following should be avoided on the part of Germany in the future:

"1. The Belgian neutrality question as well as the question of the
Belgian atrocities should not be mentioned any more in the future.

"2. It should not be tried any more in America to put the blame for
the world war and its consequences alone on England, as a considerable
English element still exists in America, and the American people hold
to the view that all parties, as usual, are partly guilty for the war.

"3. The pride and imagination of the Americans with regard to their
culture should not continually be offended by the assertion that
German culture is the only real culture and surpasses everything else.

"4. The publication of purely scientific pamphlets should be avoided in
the future as far as the American people are concerned, as their dry
reading annoys the American and is incomprehensible to him.

"5. Finally it is of the utmost importance that the authorities as well
as the German people cease continually to discuss publicly the delivery
of American arms and ammunition, as well as to let every American feel
their displeasure about it."

The Foreign Office never saw fit to act upon the investigator's
proposals, for less than a month after he had written his report, it
appeared, verbatim, in the columns of a New York newspaper. Axiom: The
most effective means of fighting enemy propaganda is by propaganda for
which the enemy unwittingly supplies the material.

[Illustration: Copy of a check from Count von Bernstorff to the Fair
Play Printing and Publishing Company]

Motion pictures appealed to the Germans as a practical and graphic
means of spreading through America visual proof of their kindness
to prisoners, their prodigious success with new engines of war, and
their brutal reception at the hands of the nations they were forced
in self-defence to invade. So Dr. Albert financed the American
Correspondent Film Company, two of whose stockholders were Claussen
and Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, a translator in Viereck's office. As late as
August, 1916, Karl Wunnenberg and Albert A. Sander, of the "Central
Powers Film Company," which was also subsidized to circulate
German-made moving pictures, engaged George Vaux Bacon, a free-lance
theatrical press agent, to go to England at a salary of $100 a week,
obtain valuable information, and transmit it in writing in invisible
ink to Holland, where it would be forwarded to Germany. The two
principals were later indicted on a charge of having set afoot a
military enterprise against Great Britain, and were sentenced to two
years in prison; Bacon, the cat's-paw, received a year's sentence.
(Sander, a German, had been involved in secret-agent work on a previous
occasion when he assaulted Richard Stegler for not disavowing an
affidavit explaining his acquisition of a false passport.) The secret
ink they gave Bacon was invisible under all conditions unless a certain
chemical preparation, which could be compounded only with distilled
water, was applied to it.

At the start of the war there began in Congress a vehement debate
over the question of imposing a legislative embargo on the shipment
of arms and ammunition to the Allies. In these debates participated
men who undoubtedly were sincere in the convictions they expressed.
Nevertheless, in the late winter and early spring of 1915, a hireling
of the Germans began to seek secret conferences with congressmen in a
Washington hotel and to outline to them plans for compelling an embargo
on munitions. His activities bring us to the affairs of the National
German-American Alliance, Germany's most powerful and least tangible
factor of general propaganda in the United States.

The organization had a large membership among Germans in America;
it has been estimated that there were three million members, who
constituted a great majority of the adult German-American population.
It received a Federal charter in 1907. The Alliance, to quote Professor
John William Scholl, of the University of Michigan, (in the New York
_Times_ of March 2, 1918), "strives to awaken a sense of unity among
the people of German origin in America; to 'centralize' their powers
for the 'energetic defense of such justified wishes and interests' as
are not contrary to the rights and duties of good citizens; to defend
its class against 'nativistic encroachments'; to 'foster and assure
good, friendly relations of America to the old German fatherland.' Such
are its declared objects.

"All petty quibbling aside, this programme can mean nothing else than
the maintenance of a Germanized body of citizens among us, conscious
of their separateness, resistant to all forces of absorption. It is
mere camouflage to state in a later paragraph that this body does not
intend to found a 'State within the State,' but merely sees in this
centralization the 'best means of attaining and maintaining the aims'
set forth above.

"All existing societies of Germans are called upon as 'organized
representatives of Deutschtum' to make it a point of honor to form a
national alliance, to foster formation of new societies in all States
of the Union, so that the whole mass of Germans in America can be
used as a unit for political action. This league pledges itself 'with
all legal means at hand unswervingly and at all times to enter the
lists for the maintenance and propagation of its principles for their
vigorous defense wherever and whenever in danger.'"

Professor Scholl, himself a teacher of German, continues: "A little
attention to the context of the sentences quoted shows that these
Germans demand the privilege of coming to America, getting citizenship
on the easiest terms possible, while maintaining intact their alien
speech, alien customs, and alien loyalties. That is 'assimilation,'
the granting of equal political rights and commercial opportunities,
without exacting any alteration in modes of life or 'Sittlichkeit.'
'Absorption' means Americanization, a fusing with the whole mass of
American life, an adoption of the language and ideals of the country,
a spiritual rebirth into Anglo-Saxon civilization, and this has great
terrors for the members of a German alliance.

"A glance back over the whole scheme will show how cleverly it was
made to unite the average recent comeoverer with his beer-drinking
proclivities, with the professor of German, who had visions of
increased interest in his specialty, and the professor of history,
who hoped for larger journal space and ampler funds, and the readily
flattered wealthy German of some attainments, into a close league
of interests, which could be used at the proper time for almost any
nefarious purpose which a few men might dictate.

"Add to this the emphatic moral and financial support of the
German-language press as one of the most powerful agencies of the
organization, and we have the stage set for just what happened a little
over three years ago."

The Alliance, long before the war, had been active in extending German
influence. Among other affairs, it had arranged the visit of Prince
Henry of Prussia. Its president, Dr. C. J. Hexamer, whose headquarters
were in Philadelphia, had received special recognition from the Kaiser
for his efforts--efforts which may be briefly set forth in a speech
addressed to Germans in Milwaukee by Hexamer himself:

"You have been long-suffering under the preachment that you must be
assimilated, but we shall never descend to an inferior culture. We are
giving to these people the benefits of German culture."

The outbreak of war made the Alliance an exceedingly important, if
unwieldy, instrument for shaping public opinion. It promoted and
sponsored a so-called National Embargo Conference in Chicago in 1915,
working hand-in-glove with Labor's National Peace Council in an
attempt to persuade Congress to pass a law forbidding the export of
munitions. At every congressional election, particularly in such cities
as Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, the hand of Prussia
was stirring about. When O. B. Colquitt, a former governor of Texas,
decided to run for the Senate in late 1915, he corresponded with the
editors of the _Staats-Zeitung_ and a New York member of the Alliance
for support from the German press and the German vote in his state.

The next year saw the approach of a presidential campaign, and the
Alliance established a campaign headquarters in New York to dictate
which candidates for United States offices should receive the solid
German-American vote. Such candidates had to record themselves as
opposed to the policies of the Administration. An effort was made to
further the nomination of Champ Clark as the Democratic candidate,
succeeding Wilson. A German professor, Leo Stern, superintendent
of schools in Milwaukee, after a conference with Hexamer there,
wrote to the New York headquarters approving the "Wisconsin plan"
(Hexamer's) for swaying the Republican national convention. This plan
set forth that "it is necessary that a portion of the delegations to
the ... convention--a quarter to a third--shall consist of approved,
distinguished German-Americans." The Alliance was bitterly opposed
to Wilson, it hated the lashing tongue and the keen nose of Theodore
Roosevelt, it distrusted Elihu Root, and deriving much of its income
from the liquor business, it feared prohibition.

Politically the Alliance was constantly active. It supported in
early 1916, through its friendly congressmen, the McLemore and Gore
resolutions, the latter of which, according to Hexamer, deserved
passage because it would--

"1. Refuse passports to Americans travelling on ships, of the
belligerents.

"2. Place an embargo on contraband of war.

"3. Prohibit Federal Reserve Banks from subscribing to foreign loans."
The Alliance's lobbyist called on Senators Stone, Gore, O'Gorman,
Hitchcock (all of whom he reported as "opposed to Lansing"), Senator
Smith of Arizona, Senators Kern, Martine, Lewis ("our friend"),
Smith of Georgia, Works, Jones, Chamberlain, McCumber, Cummins,
Borah and Clapp. Borah, he said, had "a fool idea about Americans
going everywhere." In the House of Representatives he canvassed the
Democratic and Republican leaders, Kitchin and Mann, and a group "all
of whom want the freedom of the seas," which included Dillon of South
Dakota, Bennett of New York, Smith of Buffalo, Kinchloe of New York,
Shackleford of Missouri, and Staley and Decker of Kentucky. "I saw
Padgett, chairman of the house naval affairs committee," he continued,
"he will fall in line after a while.... I am working with Stephens of
the House and Gore of the Senate to put their bills in one bill as a
joint resolution. I have told them that my league would aid them in
getting members of the House and the Senate, as well as helping them
with propaganda (this was their suggestion)."

The resolutions failed.

All these activities cost money. The German Embassy through Dr. Albert
furnished the headquarters of the Alliance with sufficient funds for
its many purposes. Count von Bernstorff is alleged to have handled a
large fund for bribery of American legislators, but the fact has never
been established, beyond his request in January, 1917, for $50,000, for
such purposes. It is a fact, however, that the National German-American
Alliance collected a sum of $886,670 during the years 1914-1917 for
the German Red Cross; this was turned over to von Bernstorff for
transmission to Germany, and officers of the Alliance have admitted
that of this sum about $700,000 was probably employed in propaganda
by Dr. Dernburg and Dr. Meyer-Gerhardt, who posed as the head of the
German Red Cross in America. Contributions to the German and Austrian
relief funds came in as late as October, 1917, although no part of them
were forwarded to Europe after the entrance of America into the war.

This last event occasioned further activity on the part of the
Alliance; during the period which followed the break in diplomatic
relaxations, and while Congress was debating the question of war,
members of Congress were deluged with an extraordinary flood of
telegrams from German-Americans cautioning them against taking such a
step. These telegrams were prepared by the Alliance and the "American
Neutrality League" and circulated among their members and sympathizers,
to be sent to Washington. The Alliance then issued to its branches
throughout the states a resolution of loyalty to be adopted in case war
was declared. This resolution, after making a hearty declaration of
loyalty to the United States, went on to belie its promise with such
pacifist utterances as this:

"Our duty before the war was to keep out of it. Our duty now is to get
out of it."

So earnest were the efforts of the Alliance to keep out of war that
some ten months after its declaration of loyalty was promulgated,
Congress decided to investigate the organization, with a view to
revoking its charter. The investigation wrote into the archives certain
characteristics of the Alliance which had long been obvious to the
truly American public; its deep-rooted Teutonism, its persistent
zeal, and its dangerous scope of activity. The courageous legislators
who initiated and pursued the investigation, in the face of constant
opposition of the most tortuous variety, had their reward, for on
April 11, 1918, the executive committee of the National Alliance met
in Philadelphia and dissolved the organization, turned the $30,000 in
its coffers over to the American Red Cross, and uttered a swan song of
loyalty to the United States. The body of the octopus was dead. One
by one, first in Brooklyn, then in San Francisco, then elsewhere, its
tentacles sloughed away.

A word for the pacifists. One pacifist constitutes a quorum in any
society. There were in America at the outbreak of war one hundred
million people who disliked war. As the injustices of Germany
multiplied, the patriotic war-haters became militarists, and there
sprang up little groups of malcontents who resented, usually by German
consent, any tendency on the part of the Government to avenge the
insult to its independence. Social and industrial fanatics of all
descriptions flocked to the standard of "Peace at Any Price," and for
want of a dissenting audience soon convinced themselves that they had
something to say.

Many of the peace movements which were set going during the first three
years of the war were sincere, many were not. A mass meeting held at
Madison Square Garden in 1915 at which Bryan was the chief speaker, was
inspired by Germany. In the insincere class falls also the "Friends
of Peace," organized in 1915. Its letterhead bore the invitation:
"Attend the National Peace Convention, Chicago, Sept. 5 and 6," and
incidentally betrayed the origin of the society. The letterhead stated
that the society represented the American Truth Society (an offshoot
of the National German-American Alliance), The American Women of
German Descent, the American Fair Play Society, the German-American
Alliance of Greater New York, the German Catholic Federation of New
York, the United Irish-American Societies and the United Austrian and
Hungarian-American Societies. Among the "honorable vice-chairmen"
were listed Edmund von Mach, John Devoy, Justices Goff and Cohalan (a
trinity of Britonophobes), Colquitt of Texas, Ex-Congressman Buchanan
(of Labor's National Peace Council fame), Jeremiah O'Leary (a Sinn
Feiner, mentioned in official cables from Zimmermann to Bernstorff as a
good intermediary for sabotage), Judge John T. Hylan, Richard Bartholdt
(a congressman active in the German political lobby), and divers
officers of the Alliance.

The American Truth Society, Inc., the parent of the Friends of Peace,
was founded in 1912 by Jeremiah O'Leary, a Tammany lawyer later
indicted for violation of the Espionage Act, who disappeared when his
case came up for trial in May, 1918; Alphonse Koelble, who conducted
the German-American Alliance's New York political clearing house;
Gustav Dopslaff, a German-American banker, and others interested in
the German cause. In 1915 the Society, whose executives were well
and favorably known to German embassy, began issuing and circulating
noisy pamphlets, with such captions as "Fair Play for Germany," and "A
German-American War." O'Leary and his friends also conducted a mail
questionnaire of Congress in an effort to catalogue the convictions of
each member on the blockade and embargo questions. Their most insidious
campaign was an effort to frighten the smaller banks of the country
from participating in Allied loans, by threats of a German "blacklist"
after the war, to organize a "gold protest" to embarrass American
banking operations, and in general to harass the Administration in its
international relations.

[Illustration: THE FRIENDS OF PEACE

Attend the National Peace Convention, Chicago, Sept. 5 and 6, 1915

_Representing_

     American Truth Society
     American Independence Union
     American Humanity League
     American Women of German Descent
     American Fair Play Society
     Continental League
     German-American Alliance of Greater N. Y.
     German Catholic Federation of New York
     United Irish-American Societies
     United Austrian & Hungarian-American Soc's
     Upholsterers' International Union
           and other American Societies.

_National Convention Committee_

JOHN BRISBEN WALKER,
                    of New York, Chairman

ALEXANDER P. MOORE,
                of Pittsburgh, Pa, Secretary

_Publicity Committee_

RUTLEDGE RUTHERFORD. Chairman
HENRY SCHAEFFER,   }
RICHARD M. McCANN, }  Secretaries
HUGH MASTERSON.    }

GENERAL OFFICES: 150 NASSAU ST., NEW YORK, N. Y.
Tel. 2888 Beekman

New York, ____________ 1915

_Hon. Vice-Chairman of Convention Committee_

Michael J. Ryan
Robert E. Ford
Edmund von Mach
John Devoy
Jeremiah B. Murphy
Henry Weismann
Horace L. Brand
Paul Mueller
Prof. Wm. I. Shepherd
Joseph Frey
Judge T. O'Neill Ryan
Richard Bartholdt
Jeremiah O'Leary
Judge John J. Rooney
Ferd Timm
E. K. Victor
Hon. John W. Goff
Hon. Daniel Cohalan
Joseph P. McLaughlin
Judge John T. Hylan
Judge J. Harry Tiernan
Patrick O'Donnell
James T. Clarke
Hugh H. O'Neill
Frank Buchanan
O. B. Colquitt
Daniel O'Connell
Col. Wm. Hoynes
Stephen E. Folan
John F. Kelly
Hon. James K. McGuire
A. L. Morrison
Miss Annie C. Malia
Ellen Ryan Jolly
Thomas O'Brien
J. B. Murphy
Thomas H. Maloney
T. J. Corrigan
Marry F. McWhorter
P. J. Reynolds
Frank J. Ryan
J. P. O'Mahony
Thomas F. Anderson

Letter-paper of "The Friends of Peace"]

So with their newspapers, rumor-mongers, lecturers, peace societies,
alliances, bunds, vereins, lobbyists, war relief workers, motion
picture operators and syndicates, the Germans wrought hard to
avert war. For two years they nearly succeeded. America was under
the narcotic influence of generally comfortable neutrality, and a
comfortable nation likes to wag its head and say "there are two sides
to every question." But whatever these German agents might have
accomplished in the public mind--and certainly they were sowing their
seed in fertile ground--was nullified by acts of violence, ruthlessness
at sea, and impudence in diplomacy. The left hand found out what the
right hand was about.




CHAPTER XVI

HINDU-GERMAN CONSPIRACIES

     The Society for Advancement in India--"Gaekwar Scholarships"--Har
     Dyal and _Gadhr_--India in 1914--Papen's report--German and
     Hindu agents sent to the Orient--Gupta in Japan--The raid on von
     Igel's office--Chakravarty replaces Gupta--The _Annie Larsen_
     and _Maverick_ filibuster--Von Igel's memoranda--Har Dyal in
     Berlin--A request for anarchist agents--Ram Chandra--Plots against
     the East and West Indies--Correspondence between Bernstorff and
     Berlin, 1916--Designs on China, Japan and Africa--Chakravarty
     arrested--The conspirators indicted.


As far back as 1907 a plot was hatched in the United States to promote
sedition and unrest in British India. The chief agitators had the
effrontery in the following year to make their headquarters in rooms in
the New York Bar Association, and to issue from that address numerous
circulars asking for money. The late John L. Cadwallader, of the
distinguished law firm of Cadwallader, Wickersham and Taft, was then
president of the Bar Association, and when he learned of the Hindu
activities under the roof of the association he swiftly evicted the
ringleaders. Their organization, chartered in November, 1907, was
called The Society for the Advancement of India. One of its officers
was a New York man to whom the British have since refused permission to
visit India. Its members included several college professors.

The presence of several educators in the list may be accounted for
by the fact that the society existed apparently for the purpose of
supplying American college training to selected Hindu youths. Many of
them were sent to the United States at the expense of the Gaekwar of
Baroda, one of the richest and most influential of the Indian princes;
the Gaekwar's own son was a student in Harvard College in the years
1908-1912. Considerable sums of money were solicited from worthy folk
who believed that they were furthering the cause of enlightenment in
India; others who sincerely believed that British rule was tyrannical
gave frankly to the society to help an Indian nationalist movement for
home rule; others contributed freely for the promotion of any and every
anti-British propaganda in India. The source of the latter funds may be
suggested by the understanding which long existed between the Society
for the Advancement of India and the Clan-na-Gael, an understanding
witnessed by the frequent quotation in the disaffected press of India
of articles from the _Gaelic-American_. Another successful solicitor
was a contemptible Swami, Vivekahanda, who discussed soul matters to
New York's gullible-rich to his great profit until the police gathered
him in for a very earthly and material offense. But the students were
the best material for revolt, whether it was to be social or military,
and we shall see presently how they were made use of.

The Gaekwar of Baroda came to America in the first decade of the new
century and expressed freely at that time his dislike for the British.
At the time of the Muzaffarpur bomb outrage, in which the wife and
daughter of an English official were killed, the police found in the
outskirts of Calcutta a Hindu who had been educated at an American
college at the Gaekwar's expense and who was at that time conducting a
school of instruction in the use of explosives and small arms; he even
had considerable quantities of American arms and ammunition stored in
his house. The youths who held "Gaekwar scholarships" in America were
under the general oversight of a professor attached to the American
Museum of Natural History, and the accumulation of evidence of the
activities of the students finally caused his removal.

The Society established branches in Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and even
in St. John, New Brunswick, and it thrived on the Pacific Coast. Within
the purlieus of the University of California, there lived in 1913 one
Har Dyal, a graduate of St. John's college at Oxford. Har Dyal in that
year founded a publication called _Gadhr_, which being translated means
"mutiny," its main edition published in Urdu, other editions published
in other vernaculars, and appealing not only to Hindus, but to Sikhs
and Moslems. The publication and the chief exponents of its thought
formed the nucleus of a considerable system of anti-British activity.

Whatever was anti-British found a warm reception in Berlin. England, in
August and September, 1914, was wrestling heroically with the problem
of supplying men to the Continent before the German drive should reach
the Channel. Her regulars went, and the training of that gallant "first
hundred thousand" followed. She combed her colonies for troops, and
having an appreciable force of well-trained native soldiers under arms
in India, she brought them to France, and the chronicles of the war
are already full of stories of the splendid fighting they did, and the
annoyance they caused to the grey troops of Germany. From the German
standpoint it was good strategy to incite discontent in India, both as
tending to remove the Hindu and Sikh regiments from the fighting zone,
and as distracting England's attention from the main issue by making
her look to the preservation of one of her richest treasure lands;
there was the further possibility, after the expected elimination of
Russia, of German conquest of India, and a German trade route from the
Baltic to the Bay of Bengal, through the Himalayan passes. Germany
seized upon the opportunity. The Amir of Afghanistan had trained his
army under Turkish officers, themselves instructed by Germany through
the forces of Enver Pasha. The Afghans were told that the Kaiser
was Mohammedan, and by the faith prepared to smite down the wicked
unbeliever, England. The Amir himself spoiled Germany's designs among
his people, however, for upon the outbreak of the war he pledged his
neutrality to the British Government, and he kept his word.

A report found on the war correspondent Archibald and written by
Captain von Papen to the Foreign Office in the summer of 1915, outlines
the German version of the situation in India:

"That a grave unrest reigns at the present time throughout India is
shown by the various following reports:

"Since October, 1914, there have been various local mutinies of
Mohammedan native troops, one practically succeeding the other. From
the last reports, it appears that the Hindu troops are going to join
the mutineers.

"The Afghan army is ready to attack India. The army holds the position
on one side of the Utak (?) River. The British army is reported to hold
the other side of the said river. The three bridges connecting both
sides have been blown up by the British.

"In the garrison located on the Kathiawar Peninsula Indian mutineers
stormed the arsenal. Railroads and wireless station have been
destroyed. The Sikh troops have been removed from Beluchistan; only
English, Mohammedans and Hindu troops remain there.

"The Twenty-third Cavalry Regiment at Lahore revolted, the police
station and Town House were stormed. The Indian troops in Somaliland in
Labakoran are trying to effect a junction with the Senussi. All Burma
is ready to revolt.

"In Calcutta unrest (is reported) with street fighting. In Lahore a
bank was robbed; every week at least two Englishmen killed; in the
northwestern district many Englishmen killed; munitions and other
material taken, railroads destroyed; a relief train was repulsed.

"Everywhere great unrest. In Benares a bank has been stormed.

"Revolts in Chitral very serious, barracks and Government buildings
destroyed. The Hurti Mardin Brigade, under Gen. Sir E. Wood, has been
ordered there. Deputy Commissioner of Lahore wounded through a bomb in
the Anakali Bazaar.

"Mohammedan squadron of the cavalry regiment in Nowschera deserted over
Chang, southwest Peshawar. Soldiers threw bombs against the family of
the Maharajah of Mysore. One child and two servants killed, his wife
mortally wounded.

"In Ceylon a state of war has been declared."

In February, 1915, Jodh Singh, a former student of engineering in the
United States, was in Rio de Janeiro. He was directed by a fellow
Hindu to call upon the German Consul, and the latter gave him $300
and instructions to proceed to the German consul in Genoa, Italy,
for orders. Thence he was forwarded to Berlin, where he attended the
meetings of the newly formed Indian Revolutionary Society and absorbed
many ideas for procedure in America. Supplied with more German money he
came to New York and was joined by Heramba Lal Gupta, a Hindu who had
been a student at Columbia, and Albert H. Wehde, an art collector. The
three went to Chicago, and Singh called at once upon Gustav Jacobsen,
the real estate dealer who will be recalled in the Kaltschmidt bomb
plots in Detroit. Jacobsen assembled a group of German sympathizers
which included Baron Kurt von Reiswitz, the consul, George Paul Boehm
(mentioned in instructions to von Papen to attack the Canadian Pacific
Railway) and one Sterneck. At the conference Jodh Singh, Boehm,
Sterneck and Gupta were detailed to go to the far East: Singh to Siam,
to recruit Hindus for revolutionary service; Gupta to China and Japan
to secure arms; Boehm to the Himalayas, to attack the exploring party
of Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the notorious, to impersonate Dr. Cook, and
thus travel about the hills spreading sedition. Wehde, with $20,000
of von Reiswitz's money, Boehm and Sterneck sailed for Manila, and
apparently escaped thence to Java, to meet two officers from the
_Emden_, for the three are at this writing fugitives from justice;
Jodh Singh was arrested in Bangkok and turned over to the British
authorities.

In the diary of Captain Grasshof of the German cruiser _Geier_,
interned in Honolulu, appears the following entry, establishing
Wehde's call in Hawaii, and the complicity of the Consulate there in
his plans:

"At the Consulate I met Mr. A. Wehde from Chicago, who is on way to
Orient on business.

"One of the Hindoos sent over by Knorr (naval attaché of German Embassy
at Tokio) left for Shanghai on the 6th. In Hongkong there are 500
Hindoos, 200 officers and volunteers, besides one torpedo boat and two
Japanese cruisers.

"K-17 (A. V. Kircheisen) was almost captured in Kobe. The first
officer of the _China_ warned him and he immediately got on board
again as soon as possible. K-17 informed me that the <DW61>s have sold
back to the Russians all the old guns taken from the latter during the
Russo-Japanese war."

Reiswitz in June added $20,000 more to the fund for revolution in
India. Gupta, to whom von Papen had paid $16,000 in New York, went on
to Japan with Dhirendra Sarkar, a fellow conspirator.

The presence of the two plotters in Japan became known to the
authorities and soon thereafter to the public. They were shadowed
everywhere, and a complete record was kept of their activities; the
newspapers discussed them, and it was common property that they gave
a banquet on the night of November 9, 1915, to ten other Hindus, to
toast a plot for revolution in India. On November 28 they were ordered
by the chief of police to leave Japan before December 2, which was
tantamount to a delivery into the hands of the British, as the only two
steamers available were leaving for Shanghai and Hong Kong, both ports
well supplied with British officers. On the afternoon of December 1 the
two plotters escaped in an automobile to the residence of a prominent
pro-Chinese politician (a friend of Sun Yat Sen) and were concealed
there, between false walls, until May, 1916, when they stowed away on
a ship bound for Honolulu. Sarkar returned to India, Gupta to America.
When the round-up came, in 1917, Jacobsen, Wehde and Boehm were each
convicted of violation of section 13 of the Federal Penal Code, and
sentenced to serve five years in prison and pay $13,000 fines; Gupta's
sentence was three years, his fine $200.

The scene shifts for a moment from the Orient to the Occident, and
the twenty-fifth floor of the building at 60 Wall Street, New York,
on the morning of April 19, 1916. There von Papen had had his office;
there when he was sent home in December, 1915, he had left in charge
a sharp-eyed youth named Wolf von Igel as his successor. Von Igel, at
eleven o'clock, was surveying the result of several hours' work in
sorting and arranging neat stacks of official papers for shipment to
the German Embassy at Washington, for he had got word that trouble was
brewing, and that the documents would be safer there. An attendant
entered. "A man wants to see you, Herr von Igel," he announced. "He
won't tell his business, except that he says it is important."

Von Igel was gruffly directing the attendant to make the stranger
specify his mission when the door burst open, and in dashed Joseph
A. Baker, of the Department of Justice, and Federal Agents Storck,
Underhill and Grgurevich.

"I have a warrant for your arrest!" shouted Baker. Von Igel jumped for
the doors of the safe, which stood open. Baker sprang simultaneously
for von Igel, and the two went to the floor in battle. The German was
overpowered, and the attendant cowed by a flash of revolvers.

"This means war!" yelled von Igel. "This is part of the German Embassy
and you've no right here."

"You're under arrest," said Baker.

"You shoot and there'll be war," said von Igel, and made another
frantic attempt to close the safe doors. A second skirmish ended in
von Igel's removal to a cell, while the agents took charge of the
documents. The collection was a rare catch. It contained evidence which
supplied the missing links in numerous chains of suspected German
guilt, and the matter was at once placed in the safe keeping of the
Government.

One letter was dated Berlin, February 4, 1916, and addressed to the
German Embassy in Washington. It reads:


     "In future all Indian affairs are to be exclusively handled by the
     committee to be formed by Dr. Chakravarty. Dhirendra Sarkar, and
     Heramba Lal Gupta, which latter person has meantime been expelled
     from Japan," ...


(Gupta was at that moment between the walls of the Japanese
politician's house.)


     ... "thus cease to be independent representatives of the Indian
     Independence Committee existing here.

     "(Signed) ZIMMERMANN."


The Embassy on March 21, 1916, wrote von Igel as follows:


     "The Imperial German Consul at Manila writes me:

     "'Unfortunately the captured Hindus include Gupta, who last was
     active at Tokio. The following have also been captured: John
     Mohammed Aptoler, Rulerhammete, Sharmasler, No-Mar, C. Bandysi,
     Rassanala. Apparently the English are thoroughly informed of all
     individual movements and the whereabouts at various times of the
     Hindu revolutionists.'

     "Please inform Chakravarty."


The name "Chakravarty" occurring in these two memoranda makes it
necessary here to turn back the calendar to 1915, in order to outline
another conspicuous Hindu-German activity. Not only were the East
Indian students and sympathetic educators in America prolific in their
verbal advocacy of revolt in India, but with German assistance they
attempted at least one clearly defined bit of filibustering, which if
it had been successful would have supplied the would-be mutineers in
the Land of Hind with the arms they so longed to employ against the
British.

The reader will recall the mention of a large quantity of weapons and
cartridges which Captain Hans Tauscher had stored in a building in
200 West Houston Street, New York, and which he said he had purchased
for "speculation." The speculation was apparently the project of
Indian mutiny, which in the eyes of the Indian Nationalist party was
to equal in grandeur the infamous mutiny of 1857. For those arms
were shipped to San Diego, California, secretly loaded aboard the
steamer _Annie Larsen_, and moved to sea. The plan provided for their
transshipment off the island of Socorro to the hold of the steamship
_Maverick_, which was to carry them to India. The two ships failed to
effect a rendezvous, and after some wandering the _Annie Larsen_ put
in at Hoquiam, Washington, where the cargo was at once seized by the
authorities. The _Maverick_ sailed to San Diego, Hilo, Johnson Island,
and finally to Batavia.

Count von Bernstorff had sufficient courage, on July 2, to inform
the Secretary of State "confidentially that the arms and ammunition
... had been purchased by my government months ago through the Krupp
agency in New York for shipment to German East Africa." On July 22,
he wrote again, asking that the arms be returned as the property of
the German Government, and offering to give the Department of Justice
"such further information on the subject as I may have" if they
cared to push an examination of the cargo. On October 5 he threw all
responsibility for the movements of the _Maverick_ upon Captain Fred
Jebsen, her skipper--by this time a fugitive from justice--and stating
"the German Government did not make the shipment, and knows nothing of
the details of how they were shipped"--which was a rather shabby way of
discrediting his subordinates.

It developed later that the arms were purchased--sixteen carloads of
them--by Henry Muck, Tauscher's manager, for $300,000, made payable
by von Papen through G. Amsinck & Co. to Tauscher. A part of the
shipment was sent to San Diego; the balance was to have gone to India
via Java and China, but never left on account of the protests of the
British Consul. Instead, a number of machine guns and 1,500,000 rounds
of ammunition were sold to a San Francisco broker who was acting as
agent for Adolphi Stahl, financial agent in the United States for the
Republic of Guatemala. When Zimmermann cabled to von Bernstorff on
April 30, 1916 (through Count von Luxburg in Buenos Aires), "Please
wire whether von Igel's report on March 27, Journal A, No. 257, has
been seized, and warn Chakravarty," he had grave concern over the
betrayal of German influences in the Hindu conspiracies. This was fully
justified when a correspondence notebook of von Igel's disclosed, among
other entries, the following transactions:

August 12, 1915--Captain Herman Othmer inclosed documents about
the _Annie Larsen_ and von Igel forwarded charter to Consul at San
Francisco.

September 2--The embassy forwarded papers from San Francisco about the
_Annie Larsen_ and von Igel returned them.

September 7--The embassy sent a telegram from San Francisco about the
_Maverick_.

September 9--The consulate, San Francisco, sent a letter for
information and von Igel replied with a telegram about _Maverick_
repairs.

September 9, 1915--The Embassy sent a letter from the consulate at
San Francisco about shipment and von Igel replied to embassy that the
proposals were impracticable.

October 1--The embassy sent a cipher message to Berlin about the
_Maverick_.

October 9--The Consulate, San Francisco, sent a letter about the
_Maverick_ negotiations.

October 20, 1915--Von Igel received a report about a shipment of arms
from Manila.

January 27, 1916--The embassy forwarded copies of telegrams to San
Francisco in the matter of the _Maverick_.

August 28--The Consulate, Manila, sent a cipher letter about the
transport of arms.

November 8, 1915--AAA 100 sent a report from or concerning Ispahan arms.

The peaceful Har Dyal, Oxford graduate, lecturer at Leland Stanford,
denizen of the University of California, and editor of _Gadhr_, had
laid down the following rules for the guidance of members of the group
of revolutionaries which he headed: each candidate for membership must
undergo a six months' probationary period before his admission; any
member who exposed the secrets of the organization should suffer death;
members wishing to marry could do so without any ceremony, as they
were above the law. Under such amiable rules of conduct he accumulated
a number of followers of the faith, and more swarmed to the tinkle
of German money. In August, 1914, the "first expeditionary force" of
revolutionists set sail for India in the _Korea_. A few months later,
Har Dyal left for Berlin, where he organized the Indian Revolutionary
Society, leaving Ram Chandra as his successor to edit _Gadhr_ in
Berkeley.

The avowed object of this society was to establish a Republican
government in India with the help of Germany. They held regular
meetings attended by German officials and civilians who knew India,
among them former teachers in India. At these meetings the Germans were
advised as to the line of conduct to be adopted. The deliberations
were of a secret nature. Har Dyal and Chattopadhay had considerable
influence with the German Government and were the only two Indians
privileged to take part in the deliberations of the German Foreign
Office.

Besides these societies there were in Berlin two other associations
known as the Persian and Turkish societies. The object of the first
named was to free Persia from European influences in general, and
create ill feeling against the British in particular, and to assist
the natives to form a republic. The object of the Turkish society
was practically the same. They established an Oriental translating
bureau which translated German news and other literature selected by
the Indian Revolutionary Society into various Oriental languages and
distributed the translations among the Hindu prisoners of war.

Har Dyal continued in close touch with American affairs. On October
20 and 26, 1915, he wrote to Alexander Berkman, a notorious anarchist
imprisoned in 1918 for violation of the draft law, urging Berkman to
send to Germany through Holland comrades who would be valuable in
Indian propaganda, and asking for letters of introduction "from Emma
or yourself" (Emma Goldman) to important anarchists in Europe; these
communications are unimportant except as they betray the Prussian
policy of making an ally of anarchy, although anarchy as a social
factor is the force from which Germany has most to fear. "Perhaps you
can find them," wrote Dyal, "in New York or at Paterson. They should
be real fighters, I. W. W.'s or anarchists. Our Indian party will make
all the necessary arrangements."

Ram Chandra went on with the work until he was stopped by the
Foreign Office. He printed anti-Britannic pamphlets quoting Bryan
for circulation in India; he printed and delivered to Lieutenant von
Brincken at the German Consulate in San Francisco some 5,000 leaflets,
which were to be shipped to Germany and dropped by the Boche aviators
over the Hindu lines in France: the handbills read, "Do not fight with
the Germans. They are our friends. Lay down your arms and run to the
Germans." Chandra and his crew supplied the _Maverick_ with quantities
of literature, but most of it was burned when the Hindu agents aboard
feared that there were British warships near Socorro Island. In the
same group were G. B. Lal and Taraknath Das, two former students at the
University of California, the latter a protégé of a German professor
there himself engaged in propaganda work.

Throughout the fall of 1915 the Hindus in America awaited word
of Gupta's success in Japan. They heard nothing but news of his
disappearance. Accordingly in December, Dr. Chakravarty, a frail little
Hindu of light chocolate complexion, sailed from Hoboken for Germany,
traveling as a Persian merchant, on a false passport. He made a good
impression on the Foreign Office, as may be judged by the following
letter, dated January 21, 1916, addressed to L. Sachse, Rotterdam:


     "Dr. Chakravarty will return to the United States and form a
     working committee of only five members, one of whom should be
     himself and another, Ram Chandra. In addition to sending more
     Indians home the new American committee will undertake the
     following:

     "1--An agent will be sent to the West India islands, where there
     are nearly 100,000 Indians, and will organize the sending home of
     as many as possible.

     "They have not yet been approached by us and there are no such
     difficulties in the way of their going to India as are encountered
     by our countrymen from the United States.

     "2--An agent will be sent to British Guiana with the same object.

     "3--A very reliable man will be sent to Java and Sumatra.

     "4--It is proposed to have pamphlets printed and circulated in
     and from America. The literature will be printed secretly and
     propaganda will be carried on with great vigor.

     "5--An effort will be made to carry out the plan of the secret
     Oriental mission to Japan. Dr. Chakravarty is in a position to get
     letters of introduction to important persons in Japan, as well as
     a safe-conduct for himself and other members of mission."


After conferring with Dyal, Zimmermann, and Under-secretary Wesendonk
of the Foreign Office, he was given money and sent back to the United
States, arriving in February, 1916. He at once sent H. A. Chen to
China to purchase arms and ship them to India. He then reported to
Wolf von Igel, who paid him $40,000 for the purchase of a house in
120th Street and one in 17th Street. There he held forth for more than
a year, working in conjunction with von Igel, and the latter with
the Embassy in Washington. His activities may be indicated, and the
complicity of the German Government again established, in the following
communications:


_From von Igel to von Bernstorff_


     "New York, April 7, 1916--A report has been received here that
     Dr. Chakravarty was taken Monday, the 3d of April, to the
     Providence Hospital with concussion of the brain in consequence
     of an automobile accident. His convalescence is making good
     progress. A certain Ernest J. Euphrat has been here and he came
     from the Foreign Office and had orders with respect to the India
     propaganda. He could not identify himself, but made a very good
     impression. He told us Herr von Wesendonk told him to say that
     Ram Chandra's activity in San Francisco was not satisfactory.
     This person should for the time being suspend his propaganda
     activities."

     "In re No. 303: Euphrat was sent by me to India in October of
     last year, and is so far as known here reliable. He was, indeed,
     recommended at the time by Marcus Braun. Please intimate to him
     cautiously that he should not speak too much about his orders he
     received in Berlin. San Francisco is being informed."

     "For Prince Hatzfeld."


_From New York to von Bernstorff_


     "New York, April 15, 1916--Mr. E. J. Euphrat has asked that the
     inclosed documents be forwarded to his excellency in a safe way.
     He asks for a reply as quickly as possible, because if he does not
     receive the desired allowance he will have to change the plans for
     his journey.

     "(Signed) K. N. ST."


_To H. Eisenhuth, Copenhagen, from New York, and unsigned_


     "May 2, 1916. We have also organized a Pan-Asiatic League, so that
     some of our members can travel without arousing any suspicion.
     Also everything has been arranged for the 'mission to Japan.'
     Please let me know when your men can come, so that we can approach
     the party more definitely. I had talks with one of the directors
     of the _Yamato Shimbun_ of Tokio and _Chinvai Dempo_ of Kyoto. It
     would not be necessary to buy off these papers, as they understand
     it is to mutual interest. But they ask for certain considerations
     to help their financial status. They are also decided to attack
     Anglo-Japanese treaty as antagonistic to national interest. To
     carry on work it will be necessary to place at the disposal of the
     committee here $25,000."


_Cablegram from Zimmermann, Berlin, to van Bernstorff, via von
Luxburg, Buenos Aires_


     "To Bernstorff, May 19, 1916: Berlin telegraphs No. 28 of May 19.
     Answer to telegram 23. Your excellency is empowered to give the
     Indians $20,000. No. 29 of May 19 in continuation of telegram No.
     16. Please, in making direct payments to Tarak Nath Das, avoid
     receipts. Das will receipt own payment through a third party as
     Edward Schuster.

     "(Signed) ZIMMERMANN."


_Zimmermann to Peking, transmitted by Luxburg, to Bernstorff for Peking
legation_


     "The confidential agent of the Nationalists here, the Indian,
     Tarak Nath Das, an American Citizen, is leaving for Peking by the
     Siberian Railway. Please give him up to 10,000 marks. Das will
     arrange the rest.

     "ZIMMERMANN."

     "Ambassador at Washington: Please advise Chakravarty.

     "LUXBURG."


_From Bernstorff, mailed at Mt. Vernon, N. Y., to Z. N. G. Olifiers, a
German agent in Amsterdam_


     "June 16, 1916--Referring to my letter A275 of June 8, Chakravarty
     reports: Organization has been almost completed, and many of our
     old members are active and free. Only they are afraid if arms
     are not available soon there may be premature uprising in Madras
     and the Punjab as well as in Bengal. The work in Japan is going
     unusually well, more than our expectations."


_From Berlin to Chakravarty_


     "July 13, 1916--In organizing work in the United States and
     outside, remember our primary object is to produce revolutions at
     home during this war. Trinidad, British Guiana and East Africa,
     including Zanzibar, should be particularly tapped for men.

     "We wired your name to Francis E. M. Hussain, Bachelor of
     Arts, Barr. at Law, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Through messenger
     communicate full programme desired in Trinidad to him, and mention
     the name 'Binniechatto.' He can be trusted. If, after some secret
     work, you think revolution can be organized in island itself, then
     we may try to smuggle arms, and our men will seize Government and
     set up independent Hindustani Republic. Do not let such plan be
     carried out if our prospects for work at home are likely to be
     ruined."


_A report from Chakravarty, written July 26, 1916_


     "I am going to Vancouver next week to see Bhai Balwant Singh
     and Nano Singh Sihra, who have asked me to go there to arrange
     definite plan of action for group of workers there, and then to
     San Francisco to induce Ram Chandra to plan our committee here,
     and to include him and his nominees in the said committee, so
     that our work does not suffer in the East by placing enemies on
     their guard and right track by his thoughtless, enthusiastic
     writings.... Gupta is back in New York and has seen me, but has
     not submitted any report. We need $15,000 more for the next six
     months to carry out the new plan and to continue the previous work
     undertaken."


_From von Bernstorff, at Rye, N. Y., to Olifiers, transmitting
Chakravarty's report_


     "August 5, 1916--Our organization has been well perfected in
     the West Indies and Houssain has been approached. We have also
     enlisted the sympathy of the Gongoles party, a strong fighting
     body of <DW52> people, who have ramifications all over Central
     America, including British Guiana and Guatemala. Arms can be
     easily smuggled there and if we can get some of the German
     officers in this country to go there and lead them there is every
     possibility that we can hold quite a while. But the question
     is--ask the Foreign Secretary whether it is desirable, for it
     might simply create a sensation and nothing more. As soon as we
     hold there the Governmental power the island would be isolated
     by the British navy, and the attitude of the United States is
     uncertain, and we may be compelled to surrender sooner or later;
     but if it serves any purpose either as a blind or otherwise, and
     after due consideration of its advantages and disadvantages, wire
     at once the authorities here to give us a few officers, as we need
     them badly, and other help necessary to carry out the plan, and it
     can be done without much difficulty. I believe if a sensation is
     desired something also can be done in London, at least should be
     tried. If we can get a few men from the Pacific Coast we can send
     them easily as a crew with a Dutch passport.

     "We are sending arms in small quantities through Chinese coolies
     over the border in Burmah, but in big quantities we do not find
     possibility. However, we are on the lookout. We have been trying
     our best with a Japanese firm who have a business affiliation
     in Calcutta, whether they will undertake to transmit some arms
     through their goods.

     "To complete the chain we are sending Mr. Chandra to London as a
     medical student in the university, and he will send men and other
     informations to you via Switzerland. We are also sending a few
     Chinese students to China to help us in the work, and if you want
     it can also be arranged they give you a personal report through
     Russia and Sweden.

     "We need $15,000 more, as I return from the Pacific Coast, to
     carry out these plans, excepting that of Trinidad operations,
     which, if you approve, wire at once the military agent here to
     arrange to buy and ship arms to us, before the enemy can be on
     guard."


_To H. Eisenhuth, Copenhagen, in cipher_


     "September 5, 1916--Arms can no more be safely sent to India
     through Pacific, except through Japanese merchandise or through
     China merchants, shipped to Chinese ports and then to our border.
     Responsible men are willing to take the risk and they are willing
     to send their confidential agents to Turaulleur."


_Chakravarty to Berlin, Foreign Office_


     "September 5, 1916--Li Yuan Hung is now President of China. He
     was formerly the southern revolutionary leader. W. T. Wang was
     then his private secretary. He is now in America and starting
     for China. He says Li Yuan Hung is in sympathy with the Indian
     revolution and would like English power weakened. Some of the
     prominent people are quite eager to help India directly, and
     Germany indirectly, without exposing themselves to any great risk,
     on three conditions:

     "The first--Germany to make a secret treaty with China, that
     in case China is attacked by any power or powers, Germany will
     give her military aid. It will be obligatory for five years
     after the discontinuance of the present war and there will be
     an understanding that China shall get one-tenth of all arms
     and ammunition she will receive for and deliver to the Indian
     revolutionaries and the Indian border.

     "In return, China shall prohibit the delivery of arms and
     ammunition in the name of the Chinese Government and from China
     through private sailing boats and by coolies to any nearby
     point or any border place as directed. She will help Indian
     revolutionaries as she can, secretly and in accord with her own
     safety.

     "But this is to be regarded as a feeler through a third party,
     and, if it is acceptable to the German Government, then they will
     send one of their trusted representatives to Berlin to discuss
     the details and plan of operations, and if it is settled, then
     negotiations should take place officially and papers signed
     through the embassies in Berlin and Peking. They want to know the
     attitude of the German Foreign Office as soon as possible so that
     they can set the ball rolling for necessary arrangements."


_Von Bernstorff to Zimmermann_


     "October 13, 1916--Chakravarty's reply is not sent; too long.
     Require at end of October a further $15,000. According to news
     which has arrived here Okechi has not received the $2000 and in
     the meantime left Copenhagen. Please withhold payment until
     Polish National Committee provides therefor.

     "BERNSTORFF."


_To Olifiers, Amsterdam, postmarked Washington_


     "November 21, 1916--Rabindranath Tagore has come at our suggestion
     and saw Count Okuma, Baron Shimpei Goto, Masaburo Suzuki, Marquis
     Yamanouchi, Count Terauchi and others; Terauchi is favorable
     and others are sympathetic. Rash Behari Bose is still there to
     see whether they can be persuaded to do something positive for
     our cause. S. Sekunna and G. Marsushita are doing their best.
     Yamatashimbun is strongly advocating our cause. D. Pal has not
     come. Benoy Sarkar is still in China. Lala is willing to go, but
     this passage could not be arranged. As soon as Tilak arrives he
     will be approached. Bapat is still free and writes that he has
     been trying his best, but for want of arms they have not been able
     to do anything. Received a note from Abdul Kadir and Shamshar
     Singh from Termes-Buchare that they are proceeding on slowly to
     their destination. Barkatullah is in Kabul; well received, lacks
     funds. Mintironakaono is here. Isam Uhiroi is in Pekin. Tarak
     has safely reached there. Our publication work is going on well.
     We have brought out seven pamphlets and one in the press. We are
     waiting for definite instructions as to the work in Trinidad and
     Damrara.

     "Wu Ting Fang has been now made the Foreign Minister. He has
     always been sympathetic with our cause. But the influence of Sun
     Yat Sen still persists in opposing us in that direction."


_Zimmermann to Bernstorff_


     "December 20, 1916--According to Chakravarty, the Indians were
     paid up to September 30 $30,000. Total credit for Indians, $65,000.

     "ZIMMERMANN."


_Zimmermann to Bernstorff_


     "January 4, 1917--very secret. The Japanese, Hideo Nakao, is
     traveling to America with important instructions from the Indian
     Committee. He is to deal exclusively with Chakravarty. Please,
     after consultation with Chakravarty, inform Imperial Minister
     at Peking and the Imperial Consulate at Shanghai that they are
     to send in Nakao's reports regularly. I advise giving Nakao in
     installments up to fifty thousand dollars in all for the execution
     of his plans in America and Eastern Asia. Decision as to the
     utility of the separate payments is left to your excellency and
     the Imperial Legation at Peking. Despatch follows.

     "(Signed) ZIMMERMANN."


On March 7, 1917, Guy Scull, deputy police commissioner in New York,
with eight detectives, called at 364 West 120th Street, found Dr.
Chakravarty clad in a loin cloth, and arrested him on a charge of
setting afoot a military enterprise against the Emperor of India.
With Sekunna, a German who had been writing tracts for him, he was
later transferred to San Francisco to stand trial. The typewriter in
the 120th Street house, whose characteristics--all typewriters are
as individual and as identifiable as finger-prints--had betrayed
the conspirators, lay idle for many months, but as late as March
18, 1918, a Hindu, Sailandra Nath Ghose, who had collaborated with
Taraknath Das in writing a propaganda work called "The Isolation
of Japan in world politics," was arrested there in company with a
German woman, Agnes Smedley. The two were accused of violating the
espionage act by representing themselves to be diplomatic agents of
the Indian Nationalist Party, and of having sent an appeal for aid in
the establishment of a democratic federated republic in India to the
Brazilian Embassy in Washington, to Leon Trotzky in Russia, and to the
Governments of Panama, Paraguay, Chile and other neutral nations.

In the course of the years 1916 and 1917 the Government built up an
unusually exhaustive and troublesome case for nearly one hundred
defendants, including the personnel of the San Francisco consulate,
the German consul at Honolulu (who had supplied the _Maverick_ in Hilo
Harbor[5]), a large group of Hindu students, a smaller group of war
brokers, and numerous lesser intermediaries. Their trial was one of
the most cumbersome and interesting cases ever heard in an American
court. It began on November 19, 1917, in San Francisco, with Judge
Van Fleet on the bench. Witness after witness recited his story of
adventure, each stranger than the last, and all stranger than fiction.
Lieutenant von Brincken, one of the San Francisco consulate, pleaded
guilty within a few weeks; his sentence was long deferred by the
prosecution on account, presumably, of evidence which he supplied the
Government. George Rodiek, the German consul in Honolulu, followed
suit and was fined heavily; Jodh Singh turned state's evidence and
presently his mind became diseased and he was committed to an asylum;
the procedure was interrupted from time to time with wrangles among the
defendants, and on one occasion Franz Bopp, the San Francisco consul,
shouted to one of his fellows, "You are spoiling the whole case!" When
the Government, through United States Attorney Preston, introduced
evidence from the Department of State, the Hindus attempted to subpoena
Secretary Lansing; when Bryan's pacifist tracts were introduced the
defendants sought Bryan. On April 18, 1918, Chakravarty confessed,
to the irritation of the other defendants. The climax in melodrama
occurred on the afternoon of April 23, 1918, when, with the case all
but concluded, Ram Singh shot and killed Ram Chandra in the courtroom.
A moment later Ram Singh lay dead, his neck broken by a bullet fired
over the heads of the attorneys by United States Marshal Holohan. That
afternoon Judge Van Fleet delivered his charge to the jury; that night
a verdict of guilty was returned against twenty-nine of the thirty-two
defendants who had not been dismissed as the trial proceeded.

Judge Van Fleet, on April 30, 1918, pronounced the following sentences:

Franz Bopp, German consul in San Francisco, two years in the
penitentiary and $10,000 fine; F. H. von Schack, vice-consul, the same
punishment; Lieutenant von Brincken, military attaché of the consulate,
two years' imprisonment without fine; Walter Sauerbeck, lieutenant
commander in the German navy, an officer of the _Geier_ interned in
Honolulu, one year's imprisonment and $2,000 fine; Charles Lattendorf,
von Brincken's secretary, one year in jail; Edwin Deinat, master of the
German ship _Holsatia_, interned in Honolulu, a term of ten months in
jail and a fine of $1,500; Heinrich Felbo, master of the German ship
_Ahlers_, interned in Hilo, Hawaii, six months in jail and a fine of
$1,000. These men may be described as the loyal German group.

Robert Capelle, agent in San Francisco of the North German Lloyd line,
fifteen months' imprisonment and a fine of $7,500; Harry J. Hart, a
San Francisco shipping man, six months in jail and a fine of $5,000;
Joseph Bley of the firm of C. D. Bunker & Co., customs brokers, fifteen
months in prison and a fine of $5,000; Moritz Stack von Goltzheim, a
real estate and insurance broker, six months in jail and $1,000 fine;
Louis T. Hengstler, an admiralty lawyer and professor in the University
of California and in Hastings Law College, a fine of $5,000; Bernard
Manning, a real estate, insurance and employment agent in San Diego,
nine months in jail and a fine of $1,000; and J. Clyde Hizar, a former
city attorney in Coronado and assistant paymaster in the United States
Navy, one year's imprisonment and a fine of $5,000. These gentlemen
constituted the so-called "shipping group" which was intimately
concerned with the affairs of the _Annie Larsen_ and the _Maverick_.

Dr. Chakravarty, who had been delegated by no less a personage than
Zimmermann of Berlin to handle all Indian intrigue in America, received
a crushing sentence of sixty days in jail and a fine of $5,000.
Bhagwan Singh, the "poet of the revolution," was sentenced to eighteen
months in the penitentiary; Taraknath Das, the author and lecturer, to
twenty-two months' imprisonment; Gobind Behari Lal, the University
of California student, to ten months in jail. The smaller fry of the
University of California-_Ghadr_ group were disposed of as follows:
Nandekar to three months in jail, Ghoda Ram to eleven months, Sarkar,
who had been in Japan with Gupta, to four months, Munshi Ram (of the
_Ghadr_ staff) to sixty days, Imam Din to four months, Nerajan Das to
six months, Singh Hindi to nine months, Santokh Singh to twenty-one
months in the penitentiary, Gopalm Singh to one year and a day, and
Nidhan Singh to four months.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Dr. Chakravarty (on the right), the accredited agent of Germany in the
Hindu-German intrigues in America. With him is Ernest Sekunna, also a
German agent, arrested with Chakravarty]

Those defendants who remained had not been allowed at large on bail,
thanks to the vigilance of Preston. Yet in spite of all precautions,
the proceedings frequently threatened to get out of control. The United
States had been at war for a year; the Federal Court was trying both
alien enemies of military status and alien enemies who had engaged in
and stood convicted of conspiracy, as well as conspirators against the
rule of Britain in India who had revolution quite definitely in mind.
Great Britain, for six months before the trial began, had been our
ally and, in spirit at least, a traitor to Great Britain was a traitor
to the United States. In spirit, but not in the letter of the law:
the worst punishment which any existing statutes could impose on any
single defendant found wholly and completely guilty of the charge was
_two years' imprisonment and a fine of $10,000_. For such conviction,
and for such punishment of the United States' military enemies, the
prosecution clambered about through the tangle of civil procedure; we
had been six months at war and laws had not been supplied to facilitate
the swift justice due such enemies, nor have laws been supplied as
this is written. More than eighty "court days" were consumed, the
shorthand reporting alone cost more than $35,000. A court commissioner
released four important witnesses "for want of evidence." (One of them
was indicted in New York and the commissioner was himself dismissed.)
Gupta, arrested in New York, was released on bail and swiftly fled
across the Mexican border to continue his propaganda. Trying as the
case was to all who were concerned in it, expeditiously as it was
handled by the authorities, and informative as it proved to be, it was
monumental in its confession that civil courts cannot act with the
warning vigor and speed made necessary by war conditions.

The evidence introduced pointed clearly to the conclusion that the
German-Hindu plot, complex as it is to us as critics, was unfruitful
even to Berlin. Perhaps its very breadth made it awkward to manage.
Nearly four years of war passed, and there was no mutiny in India. The
stewards of the Indian domain knew anxious moments, but they found some
solace in the realization that half way around the world, in the United
States, there was a pair of eyes to watch every pair of mischievous
hands, and that the conspiracy directed against the Orient could not
take effect while those eyes were open.

It requires no special gift of prophecy to predict that secret
conspiracies will continue unless those eyes are more vigilant than
ever. The United States Attorney announced as the conspirators were
being sentenced that he felt that the court might well instruct their
dark associates to "cut out their propaganda," and that their _Gahdr_
presses were even then turning out "barrels and bales of seditious
literature." To this Judge Van Fleet gravely responded:

"The people are going to take the law into their own hands, as much
as we regret it. The citizens of this country are going to suppress
manifestations hostile to our allies."

FOOTNOTE:

[5] The _Maverick_ was lost in a typhoon off the Philippines in August,
1917.




CHAPTER XVII

MEXICO, IRELAND, AND BOLO

     Huerta arrives in New York--The restoration plot--German intrigue
     in Central America--The Zimmermann note--Sinn Fein--Sir Roger
     Casement and the Easter Rebellion--Bolo Pacha in America and
     France--A warning.


Germany learned during President Roosevelt's administration that
the Monroe Doctrine was not to be tampered with. The United States
stood squarely upon a policy of "hands off Latin America." But both
commercial and diplomatic Germany were attracted by the bright colors
of the somewhat kaleidoscopic political condition of the Central
and South American nations. In political confusion, Mexico, at the
outbreak of war, led all the rest. This suited Germany's purpose
perfectly--provided that at least one faction in Mexico might be
susceptible to her influence. The first three years of war proved
to the satisfaction of the most skeptical that Mexican unrest would
trouble the United States, and it was upon this theory that Germany
long before 1914 baited her hook for Mexico.

Propagandists in our neighbor republic added fuel to the already
brisk flame of native hostility to the Yankee. A considerable German
commercial colony grew up, assimilated the language and customs of
Mexico, and bade fair to be a strong competitor in the development of
the huge natural resources waiting there for foreign capital. By 1914
Germany had evidently expected to be in a position sufficiently strong
to enlist Mexico on her side in case the United States gave trouble.
The reader will recall that Admiral von Hintze in the summer of 1914
had recommended Captain von Papen for a decoration for having organized
a fair military unit of the Germans in Mexico. That same summer,
however, saw Mexico with troubles of her own, and German efforts
against the United States through Mexico had to be postponed.

Early in 1914 General Huerta, an unscrupulous, powerful and dissolute
factionist, had executed a _coup d'etat_ which placed him in the
president's chair. He at once advertised for bids. The United States
had no intention of protecting him, and in order to stop at its source
any trouble which might prove too attractive to a foreign power,
placed an embargo upon the shipment of American arms into Mexico. The
American fleet was despatched to Vera Cruz to see that the order was
carried out. The steamship _Ypiranga_, with a cargo of arms, succeeded
in eluding the fleet, and under orders from the German admiral, and the
direction of Karl Heynen, the arms were landed.

Huerta had promised the presidency to Felix Diaz. In order to get him
out of the way he sent Diaz to negotiate a Japanese understanding. The
United States gently diverted Señor Diaz from his mission. Huerta began
to lose the grip he held; three other factionists, Villa, Carranza
and Zapata, each at the head of an army, were aiming at his head, and
shortly before the world went to war the old rogue fled to Barcelona.

There Rintelen negotiated with him in February, 1915, and out of their
conferences grew a plan to restore him to the Mexican presidency.
This plan would have meant war between Mexico and the United States,
which was precisely what von Rintelen and his Wilhelmstrasse friends
desired: American forces would have to be mobilized at the Rio Grande,
and American munitions, destined for the Allies, would have to be
commandeered and diverted to Mexico.

The aged general arrived in New York in April, and was interviewed
and photographed. He told the public through the newspapers that he
proposed to acquire an estate on Long Island and the public considered
it not inauspicious that the veteran warrior should have come to pass
the remainder of his stormy life in the world's most peaceful country.
Fortunately for the peace of the United States not every one believed
him.

Within a week of his arrival von Rintelen slipped into New York. He
placed in the Havana branch of the Deutsches Bank and in banks in
Mexico City some $800,000 to Huerta's credit, and within a short time
the political jackals who lived on foreign subsidy began to prick up
their ears. Von Papen and Boy-Ed had made trips to the Mexican border,
arranging through their consular agents in the Mexican towns across the
river the mobilization of Germans in Mexico, the storing of supplies
and ammunition, and the deposit of funds in banks at Brownsville, El
Paso, San Antonio and Douglas. Not all Mexicans in the United States
were Huertistas, however, and one Raphael Nieto, Assistant-Secretary of
Finance to Carranza, was quite as eager to follow Huerta's activities
as were the agents of the United States. The Carranzistas joined forces
with the Secret Service and found out that the plot had already begun
to develop.

During the month of May, Huerta frequently met a member of the German
Embassy at the Hotel McAlpin. Von Rintelen was clever enough not to
negotiate in person, but he dined frequently with the Embassy member.
Much of what had occurred at these conferences in the McAlpin was known
to government agents, who had been concealed where they could take
notes on the conversation. On June 1, 1915, General Huerta, with Jose
Ratner, his "financial adviser," held a conference in the Holland House
with a former Huertista cabinet minister, a son of the Mexican general,
Angeles, and certain other personages who purposed to take part in
the revolution for the sake of this world. One of the men present was
a Carranza spy, and through him it became known that Huerta outlined
that he had ten millions of dollars for immediate use in a plot to
restore him to his former position, twice that sum in reserve, and that
more would be forthcoming if necessary. Arms and ammunition, he said,
would be shipped into Mexico secretly, supplies would be accumulated
at certain border towns, and envoys had already been sent to incite
desertion from the armies of Carranza and Villa.

Rintelen did not know that the Carranzistas had sold out to the
authorities. Rintelen had already purchased some $3,000,000 worth of
arms and cartridges, and he was prepared to see the enterprise to a
successful conclusion. Incidentally he was quietly supplying six other
Mexican factions with funds in case Huerta's measure of success should
prove too intoxicating.

Because he was a figure of considerable international notoriety and
indisputable news interest, the press had been following Huerta's
movements with strict attention. Affairs at the border were not
reassuring and there persisted the feeling that Huerta in the United
States held promise of Huerta once more in Mexico. In July, his
agent, Ratner, issued the following frank though apparently ingenious
statement:

"General Huerta and those of us associated with him are confident that
the whole Mexican situation will be cleared up within ninety days. We
believe that to rule the country is a one-man job. And in that time
we expect that one man to come forward and unite the country. General
Huerta does not care to indicate the man he has in mind, but he is from
our viewpoint a true patriot, and naturally that excludes both Carranza
and Villa.

"General Huerta may or may not return to Mexico some day, and may or
may not hold office there again. At present he is giving himself up
wholly to an agreeable and home life in this city (New York)."

Whether or not General Huerta was to "return to Mexico some day"
depended upon the temper of the United States. He knew that when he
authorized the statement. He did not know--or else he was incredibly
bold--that the Government was in possession of the whole story, and
that orders had been issued from the highest source in the country
not to let him return. One day in the late summer he slipped away,
ostensibly to visit the San Francisco Exposition. Government agents
shadowed him and let him make his own pace. He took the southern route,
and traveled so quietly that his flight was not publicly marked until
he had passed through Kansas City. As he approached the border he
became as eager as a boy at the prospect of his 'return from Elba';
then, as he was almost in sight of the soil from which he had been
exiled, he was arrested on a technical charge and jailed.

In August Rintelen fled the country. The _Providence Journal_ had just
published an irritating charge that Boy-Ed was carrying on negotiations
with Mexico; the German Embassy denied the charge, although Boy-Ed
with his knowledge of Mexico had assisted ably in the plot; and the
excitement of official interest in Huerta's recent connections made von
Rintelen nervous. When he was captured at Falmouth by the British, his
man-Friday, Andrew V. Meloy, confessed that he had inadvertently tipped
over the plot when he had innocently telephoned a Carranzista to find
out, for safety sake, whether the Carranza party suspected Huerta. It
was this Carranzista who made a few inquiries of his own, and succeeded
in planting the spy in the Holland House meeting.

The aged general, although he was transferred to a more comfortable
prison, took his confinement bitterly. His dream had been bright
indeed, and it had been bluntly interrupted. As the autumn came on his
health showed signs of failing, and his career of dissipation began
to total the final reckoning. The illness became grave, and after
two surgical attempts to save his life, he died in January, 1916,
heartbroken.

Von Eckhart, the minister to Mexico City, was to Mexico what
Bernstorff was to the United States and he employed faithfully the
familiar tactics of his superior: revolution, editorial propaganda,
filibustering and double dealing. In the fall of 1916 the fine German
hand could be seen prompting a note sent by Mexico to the United
States urging an embargo on the shipment on munitions and foodstuffs
to the warring nations (Mexico had neither foodstuffs nor munitions to
supply). And in December, 1916, Eckhart was robbed of the achievement
of a conspiracy of fantastic proportions.

In order to appreciate the fantasy, one must bear in mind the
temperament of a Central American. Eckhart and his colleague, Lehmann,
German minister to Guatemala, proposed to harness that temperament to
a German wagon and drive the Latin republics to the formation of "the
United States of Central America," which presumably would have borne a
Prussian eagle in the field of its ensign.

Carranza disliked Cabrera of Guatemala; so, too, did Dr. Irias, a
Nicaraguan liberal. Certain factions in Honduras disapproved of their
president; certain factions in Guatemala could be counted on to support
revolution against Cabrera; Dr. Irias, the defeated candidate, disliked
Emiliano Chammorra, the President of Nicaragua, enormously. What more
natural than that they combine forces and with German money and arms
kindle not one revolution but a series of them, with an invasion thrown
in for good measure? Accordingly they conferred with a Salvadorean
politician, a Cuban revolutionist, and an associate of the Costa
Rican minister of war. The cast complete, they planned to assemble
revolutionary forces, with German military advisers, on the coast of
Salvador. Using Salvador as a base, attacks were to be made upon
Nicaragua and Guatemala, and at the proper time Carranza was to invade
Guatemala from the north. Colombia's services were to be enlisted
by the promise of restoration of the Republic of Panama--originally
a Colombian province. As soon as the combined revolutionaries had
succeeded in overthrowing their governments, they were to form the
United States of Central America, with Irias as president, and William
of Hohenzollern as counsel.

Our levity is pointed not at the Central American temperament and
political instability, but rather towards the grotesquely serious
objective of the German plotters. If their military forces had been
Prussian shock troops they would certainly have succeeded. The use
of a Mexican gunboat to transport German officers with an airplane
and wireless apparatus from Mexico to Salvador exposed the plan.
President Cabrera of Guatemala had a small but effective force of
thirty thousand men, and a well-equipped artillery, armed--and he
was prepared for attack from either frontier. He also enjoyed the
confidence of Washington, and he informed Washington at once what was
afoot. The answer arrived presently in the shape of the American fleet,
on a peaceful expedition to survey the Gulf of Fonseca, its newly
acquired Nicaraguan naval base. The revolutions failed for want of
revolutionists, the German enterprise failed for want of revolutions,
and of the conspirators only one, Tinoco of Costa Rica, succeeded in
capitalizing the unrest by a _coup d'etat_ which made him president.
The plot never reached maturity in Colombia or Panama.

Before dismissing it from consideration, however, it is worth a
moment's analysis. With any degree of success it would have distracted
the United States, and perhaps have involved her marine corps as well
as her navy. It contained possibilities of war between Mexico and the
United States. It projected a blow at the Panama Canal. It concerned
a territory in which commercially as well diplomatically the United
States had definite concern and in which Germany had already shown a
greedy interest. Incidentally it reveals--in its offer to Colombia--the
same diplomatic technique as that which was shortly to startle the
United States into the last step towards war, the so-called "Zimmermann
note."

At 3 A. M. (Berlin time) on January 19, 1917, the following message was
sent by wireless to Count von Bernstorff from the Foreign Office:


     "BERLIN, January 19, 1917.

     "On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare
     unrestricted. In spite of this it is our endeavor to keep neutral
     the United States of America.

     "If this is not successful we propose an alliance on the following
     basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together
     shall make peace. We shall give general financial support and it
     is understood that Mexico is to recover the lost territory in
     New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The details are left to you for
     settlement.

     "You are also instructed to inform the president of Mexico of the
     above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain there
     will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that
     the President of Mexico on his own initiative should communicate
     with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan; at the same
     time offer to mediate between Germany and Japan.

     "Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the
     employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel
     England to make peace in a few months.

     "(Signed) ZIMMERMANN."


This document was decoded from the official dictionary cipher and laid
in the hands of President Wilson almost immediately following the
rupture of diplomatic relations. It was made public on February 28,
when the public temper was at whitest heat. Mexico did not repudiate
the note at once, and four days later despatched a denial of having
received any such proposal as Zimmermann had suggested. Eckhart
was forcing Carranza's hand with the lure of the projected Central
American enterprise already outlined. (Eckhart had had Carranza so
completely under his influence at one time that when the United States
despatched to Mexico a friendly note warning her of the presence of
German submarines in the Gulf, Mexico retorted--at Eckhart's literal
dictation--that the United States might do well to ask the British
Navy why it did not prevent German undersea craft from approaching the
Americas.) The month of March fled by, and America went to war; since
that date no official expression except one of praise for Mexico's
attitude of amiable neutrality has issued from Washington.

Just as the proximity of Mexico to the United States had for a number
of years past carried with it the possibility, almost the certainty, of
differences between the two countries, rising out of the temperamental
differences of their peoples, so for a longer period had Ireland and
England suffered for their contiguity. It is a truism to remark that
the Irishman cherishes his national grievances, but that characteristic
accounts for a further phase of German intrigue on American soil.
Hatred of England sent many thousands of Irish to the United States in
the past fifty years. They found it a country to their liking, which
England was not, and although they had become indissolubly attached
to their adopted land, there were in America in 1914 (and there are
in 1918) numerous Irish who had no dearer wish than that England come
off second best in the great war. Allies after Germany's own heart
they were, therefore. They had been cultivated long since: in 1909,
when plans were being made for a centenary celebration in 1914 of
the peace that had reigned between the United States and England,
German-American and Irish-American interests began to raise a structure
of their own, exploiting the prominence which certain Germans, such
as Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz, had enjoyed in the construction of
the nation. The programme of these interests included the erection of
elaborate memorials over the graves of prominent German Americans,
the dissemination of legends of German heroes in America, and more
practically the frustrating of the projected Peace Centenary.

Many of the organizations thus united for a practical purpose found a
clearing-house in the American Truth Society, of which Jeremiah O'Leary
was the head. Although the Centennial Celebration itself was rudely
interrupted by the advent of war, the German-Irish acquaintanceship
was nourished by the German propagandists in America. They observed
with pleasure the circulation by the Clan-na-Gael of cards informing
the Irish in America that troops from Erin were being assigned to the
most dangerous posts and the bloodiest attacks and subjected to the
most severe enemy fire in France, and that the hated British were
dragging Irish boys from their homes to fill up the ranks. Between
September, 1914, and April, 1915, funds amounting to $80,000 for the
purchase of arms and the printing of seditious papers and leaflets
were forwarded from America to Dublin banks, and then mysteriously
were withdrawn. An inflammatory publication known as _Bull_, published
by O'Leary, and not barred from the mails until September, 1917, went
broadcast over the United States, inciting bitterness against England,
and found a greedy circle of readers in the German-American population.
John Devoy, a Sinn Feiner of standing in America, fanned the flame
with a newspaper known as the _Gaelic American_, published in New
York, and it is this American-printed sheet which furnished the Irish
revolutionists with material for a part of the plot which they were
preparing for fruition in the year 1916.

[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Jeremiah A. O'Leary]

In 1916 Sir Roger Casement, an Irish knight, made his way into Germany.
He was permitted to visit the prison camp at Limburg where some 3,000
Irish prisoners of war were quartered, and he moved about among them
attempting to obtain enlistments in an army which was to effect a
coup in Dublin to overthrow the British government in the Castle and
to proclaim an Irish Republic. He circulated numerous copies of the
_Gaelic American_ to arouse the men. He was variously received. Some
of the prisoners held their release worth treason--but only fifty-odd.
The greater majority rejected Sir Roger's offer, and some even chose
to curse and spit at the suggestion that they break their oaths of
allegiance to Great Britain. He succeeded, however, in enlisting German
financial assistance, and in early April, 1916, a cargo of captured
Russian arms and ammunition was forwarded to Kiel and loaded into the
German auxiliary steamship _Aud_.

Some 11,000 revolutionists were in a state of mental if not martial
mobilization in Ireland by this time. There were in Dublin some 825
rifles. But so cleverly were the volunteers' orders passed from
member to member, that Sir Matthew Nathan, Under-secretary of State
for Ireland, testified later that he did not know until three days
before the outbreak occurred that German interests were coöperating.
Evidently, however, sympathizers in America knew it full well, for in
the von Igel papers captured in von Papen's office in New York was
found the following message to von Bernstorff:


     "NEW YORK, April 17, 1916.

     "Judge Cohalan requests the transmission of the following remarks:

     "The revolution in Ireland can only be successful if supported
     from Germany, otherwise England will be able to suppress it,
     even though it be only after hard struggles. Therefore, help is
     necessary. This should consist primarily of aerial attacks in
     England and a diversion of the fleet, simultaneously with Irish
     revolution. Then, if possible, a landing of troops, arms, and
     ammunition in Ireland, and possibly some officers from Zeppelins.
     This would enable the Irish ports to be closed against England
     and the establishment of stations for submarines on the Irish
     coast and the cutting off of the supply of food for England. The
     services of the revolution may therefore decide the war.

     "He asks that a telegram to this effect be sent to Berlin."


Presumably such a telegram was sent, although on April 17 Sir
Roger, with his recruits, was at Kiel. Three days before the Berlin
press bureau had authorized the issuance of a despatch through
the semi-official Overseas News Agency that "political rioting in
Ireland is increasing." On the same day a news item was published in
Copenhagen stating that Sir Roger had been arrested in Germany to
allay any suggestion that he was engaged in any other enterprise. On
the afternoon of Thursday, April 20, a German submarine stuck its
conning tower out of water off Tralee, on the Irish coast. Three men
presently emerged, unfolded a collapsible boat, and rowed ashore in it.
The three were Casement and two of his henchmen, come home to Ireland
to spread the news that German arms and German aid were at hand. Off
the southwest coast the patrol ship _Bluebell_ of the British Navy
sighted, on Good Friday morning, a ship flying the Norwegian flag, and
calling herself, in answer to the _Bluebell's_ hail, the _Aud_, out of
Bergen for Genoa. Under the persuasive effect of a warning shot from
the _Bluebell_ the _Aud_ followed her as far as Daunt's Rock, where
her crew of German sailors set fire to her, hoisted the German naval
ensign, abandoned ship, and then surrendered under fire. The _Aud_
sank, carrying the arms for Irish revolution with her. Sir Roger was
arrested in hiding, and on Easter Sunday Dublin broke out in revolt. On
Monday a cipher message reached O'Leary, telling him of the uprising
hours before the British censor permitted the news story to cross the
ocean. John Devoy burst out in a heated charge in the _Gaelic American_
that--

"The sinking of the German ship loaded with arms and ammunition
... was the direct result of information treacherously given to the
British Government by a member of the Washington Administration ...
Wilson's officials obtained the information by an act of lawlessness, a
violation of international law and of American law, committed with the
deliberate purpose of helping England, and it was promptly put at the
disposal of the British Government...."

This charge was denied at once from Washington. The specific "violation
of international law and of American law" to which Devoy referred was
generally supposed to be the seizure of the von Igel papers, for the
accusation is the same as that which von Igel made when his office was
raided. How Devoy knew that the von Igel papers contained information
of the proposed expedition from Kiel to Ireland is a question which
Devoy has no doubt had to answer to the Government of the United States
since then. He and O'Leary, with Dennis Spellisy, who had collected
large sums of money for the Sinn Fein cause, were loud in their
protests against the execution of the ringleaders of the revolt on May
3rd, which put a sharp end to the endeavors of the revolutionists. That
O'Leary was known to the German system of secret agents in America
needs no further substantiation. To credit him with generalship,
however, would be doing him too great honor and the Irish-American
population injustice; O'Leary was bitterly pro-German, but so were
hundreds of more prominent and influential Irish-Americans: one could
find the names of several New York Justices upon the roster of the
Friends of Peace. Sir Roger Casement petitioned for a Philadelphia
lawyer at his trial for treason, and Sir Roger's sister attempted
unsuccessfully to reach President Wilson, through his secretary, Joseph
P. Tumulty, in an effort to bring about intercession in the doomed
knight's favor. (Mr. Tumulty was approached more than once by persons
whom he had reason to suspect of alloyed motives who desired to "set
forth a case to the President.") The link between the old country and
the new is close, the future of Ireland is one of more than usual
interest and concern to the United States, and the fact that the great
majority of Irish-Americans have subordinated their insular convictions
to the greater conviction of loyalty to their adopted land is at once a
fine augury of ultimate solution of the Irish question, and a dignified
rebuke to the efforts which Germany has made through America to exploit
Ireland.

On Washington's Birthday, 1916, there came to New York one who posed
as a French publisher and publicist. He brought excellent letters of
recommendation, and was well supplied with money. He was personable,
and well sponsored, and he was correspondingly well received. Within
a month he left the United States for France, with appropriate
expressions of his appreciation of American hospitality.

In April, 1918, that same man faced a French firing squad, guilty of
having attempted to betray his country, and of having traded with the
enemy.

He was Paul Bolo Pacha, Paul Bolo by common usage, Pacha by whatever
right is vested in a deposed Khedive to confer titles. Born somewhere
in the obscurity of the Levant, he came as a boy to Marseilles. He was
successively barber's-boy, lobster-monger, husband of a rich woman who
left him her estate, then café-owner and wine-agent. Then he drifted to
Cairo, and into the good graces of Abbas Hilmi, the Khedive. Abbas was
deposed by the British in 1914 as pro-German, and went to Geneva; Bolo
followed.

Charles F. Bertelli, the correspondent in Paris of the Hearst
newspapers, naïvely related before Captain Bouchardon, a French
prosecutor, the circumstances of his acquaintanceship with Bolo, which
led to the latter's cordial reception at the hands of Hearst when he
arrived in New York. " ... Jean Finot, Directeur of _La Revue_, ... had
sent him a letter of introduction to Mr. Hearst and had requested me to
accredit him with Mr. Hearst. He had said to me: 'Occupy yourself with
the matter, Bolo has very great political power; he is the proprietor
of _Le Journal_ and it would be well that Hearst should know him.'
... I made the voyage with Bolo.... I spoke of Bolo to Hearst and the
latter said to me, 'If he is a great proprietor of French newspapers,
I should be very glad to....' As a compliment to Hearst, Bolo gave a
grand dinner at Sherry's.... Bolo had two personal guests: Jules Bois
and the German, Pavenstedt...." We need draw on Bertelli no further
than to introduce the same Adolph Pavenstedt in whose offices Papen
and Boy-Ed had sought refuge at the outbreak of war in 1914; Adolph
Pavenstedt, head of the banking house of G. Amsinck & Co., through
which the attachés paid their henchmen for attempts at the Welland
Canal, the Vanceboro bridge, and at America's peace in general. Bolo
had made Pavenstedt's acquaintance in Havana in 1913.

Four days after he landed in New York, and before the Hearst dinner
(which was incidental to the plot) Bolo had progressed with his
negotiations to betray France to a point where von Bernstorff sent the
following message to the Foreign Office in Berlin:


     "Number 679, February twenty-sixth.

     "I have received direct information from an entirely trustworthy
     source concerning a political action in one of the enemy countries
     which would bring about peace. One of the leading political
     personalities of the country in question is seeking a loan of one
     million seven hundred thousand dollars in New York, for which
     security will be given. I was forbidden to give his name in
     writing. The affair seems to me to be of the greatest possible
     importance. Can the money be provided at once in New York? That
     the intermediary will keep the matter secret is entirely certain.
     Request answer by telegram. A verbal report will follow as soon as
     a trustworthy person can be found to bring it to Germany.

     "BERNSTORFF."


[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_

Paul Bolo Pacha (on the right)]

Herr von Jagow felt that even at that date peace with any belligerent
was worth $1,700,000. He cabled back:


     "No. 150, February twenty-ninth.

     "Answer to telegram No. 679:

     "Agree to the loan, but only if peace action seems to you a really
     serious project, as the provision of money in New York is for us
     at present extraordinarily difficult. If the enemy country is
     Russia have nothing to do with the business, as the sum of money
     is too small to have any serious effect in that country. So too
     in the case of Italy, for it would not be worth while, to spend so
     much.

     "(Signed) JAGOW."


The plan approved, the next step was to pay Bolo. Bernstorff's
cablegram of March 5, Number 685, pleaded for the money.


     "Please instruct Deutsches Bank to hold 9,000,000 marks at
     disposal of Hugo Schmidt. The affair is very promising. Further
     particulars follow."


The next day Hugo Schmidt, American representative of the Deutsches
Bank, sent the following wireless through the station at Sayville to
the Deutsches Bank Direktion, Berlin:


     "Communicate with William Foxley (the Foreign Office) and
     telegraph whether he has placed money at my disposal for Charles
     Gladhill (Count von Bernstorff)."


The reply came three days later. It read:


     "Replying your cable about Charles Gladhill (von Bernstorff) Fred
     Hooven (the Guaranty Trust Company of New York) will receive
     money for our account. You may dispose according to our letter of
     November 24, 1914, to Fred Hooven."


On March 11, Schmidt, who was working night and day to consummate the
deal, wirelessed again to Berlin:


     "Your wireless received. Paid Charles Gladhill (von Bernstorff)
     $500 (which signified $500,000) through Fred Hooven (the Guaranty
     Trust Company). Gladhill requires further $1,100 ($1,100,000)
     which shall pay gradually."


Bolo's affairs were promising well. He had brought with him from
Paris a letter of introduction to the New York manager of the Royal
Bank of Canada, stating that he was the publisher of _Le Journal_,
which required a large quantity of news print paper every day, and
that he had been commissioned by all of the other large newspaper
publishers in Paris to arrange a contract for 20,000 tons monthly. Bolo
confirmed his intention to perform this mission when he deposited in
the Royal Bank of Canada $500,000 which Hugo Schmidt had drawn from
the German government deposits in the National Park Bank and had given
to Pavenstedt, who in turn checked it over to the French traitor. It
was not the purchase of print paper which interested him, however, but
the perversion, through purchase, of as many French newspapers as he
could lay his slimy hands on; once in his possession, they could be
made to carry out a sinister propaganda for a separate peace between
France and Germany. Germany had offered, through Abbas Hilmi, to yield
Alsace-Lorraine in return for certain French colonies, and to evacuate
the occupied portions of French soil, and by painting such a settlement
in bright colors to the people of France Bolo could have served
Germany's ends effectively either by actually accomplishing some such
settlement, or by weakening the morale which was so largely responsible
for holding the German drive against Verdun, then in the first stages
of its fury.

On March 17, the Deutsches Bank wirelessed to Schmidt:


     "You may dispose on Fred Hooven (the Guaranty Trust Company) on
     behalf Charles Gladhill (von Bernstorff) $1,700 (which meant
     $1,700,000)."


Bolo had his million and three-quarters, which he had asked. He had
made disposition of it through the Royal Bank, setting a portion aside
to his wife's credit, depositing another portion to the credit of
Senator Charles Humbert (part-owner with Bolo of _Le Journal_) and
holding a reserve of a million dollars in the Royal Bank subject to his
call. Then he took ship for France.

His final arrangements with Pavenstedt prompted von Bernstorff to send
the following message on March 20 to the Foreign Office:


     "No. 692, March 20.

     "With reference to telegram No. 685 please advise our Minister
     in Berne that some one will call on him who will give him the
     password Sanct Regis who wished to establish relations with the
     Foreign Office. Intermediary further requests that influence may
     be brought to bear in France so far as possible in silence so that
     things may not be spoiled by German approval.

     "(Signed) BERNSTORFF."


Von Bernstorff had been cautious enough during Bolo's sojourn in the
United States to negotiate with him only through Pavenstedt, in order
that the Embassy might not be compromised in an exceedingly hazardous
undertaking if any suggestion of Bolo's real designs leaked out. He
was fully prepared in such an event to repudiate Pavenstedt, and to
state honestly that he had never seen or heard of Bolo, for until
the day before he left, when Pavenstedt asked the Ambassador for the
telegram of introduction quoted above, Bernstorff did not know Bolo's
name. That he did know it then, and that he discussed Bolo with Berlin
during April and May is evident from the following cable, sent from the
Foreign Secretary to the Embassy at Washington on May 31:


     "Number 206. May 31st. The person announced in telegram 692 of
     March 20th has not yet reported himself at the Legation at Berne.
     Is there any more news on your side of Bolo?

     "JAGOW."


There was not, although Bolo was keeping the cables hot with messages
directing the further transfer of the nest-egg of $1,700,000 which he
had acquired in his month in New York. He wanted the money credited
to the account of Senator Humbert in J. P. Morgan & Co., then through
Morgan, Harjes & Co. of Paris he directed the remittance of his
funds to Paris, then cancelled those instructions and directed that
his million be credited to him in Perrier & Cie., in which he was
interested. What twists and turns of fate occasioned the juggling of
these funds after he returned to France is not known, but certainly
no bag of plunder ever passed through more artful manipulation. The
explanation of its hectic adventures may lie in the fact that the
spectacle of Bolo, commissioned to go to the United States to spend
money for news print, and returning with nearly two millions of
dollars, would have interested the French police.

For more than a year he covered his tracks. Shortly after his return
the _Bonnet Rouge_, the declining publication which served ex-Premier
Joseph Caillaux as mouthpiece, began to attract attention for its
discussion of peace propaganda. A strain of pessimism over the conduct
of the war began to make itself apparent in other journals. The arrest
of Duval and Almereyda of the _Bonnet Rouge_ disclosed certain of
Bolo's activities and a search of his house in February revealed papers
covering certain of his financial transactions in America. The United
States was requested to investigate, and refused, as the affair was
considered political, and it was not until we joined France in the war
that the request was repeated, this time with better success.

Attorney-General Merton Lewis of New York State conducted an
investigation which revealed every step of Bolo's operations in New
York. His search of the records of the banks involved indicated that
a fund of some $50,000,000 in cash and negotiable securities lay on
deposit in America which the Deutsches Bank could place at the disposal
of von Bernstorff and his fellow conspirators at any time for any
purpose, and which was adequate as a reserve for any enterprise which
might present itself. The evidence against Bolo was forwarded to Paris,
and he was arrested. On October 4, 1917, Secretary Lansing made public
the correspondence which the State Department had intercepted.

The French public became hysterically interested in the case. Senator
Humbert promptly refunded the 5,500,000 francs which he had received
from Bolo for 1,600 shares in _Le Journal_. Almereyda of the _Bonnet
Rouge_ committed suicide in prison; his death dragged Malvy, Minister
of the Interior under Ribot, out of office under suspicion of trading
with the enemy; the editor of a Paris financial paper was imprisoned
on the same charge; "Boloism" became a generic term, and the French
government, feeling a growing restlessness on the part of the public,
encouraged the new diversion of spy-hunting which resulted in the
exposure of negotiations between Caillaux and German representatives in
Buenos Aires. Russia had been dissolved by similar German propaganda,
Italy, after vigorous advances into Italia Irridenta, had had her
military resistance sapped by another such campaign as Bolo proposed
for France, and had retreated to the Po valley; the sum total of
"Boloism" during the autumn and winter of 1917-1918 was an increased
conviction on the part of the Allied peoples that the line must be held
more firmly than ever, while the rear was combed for prominent traitors.

Thus, a year before she entered war, the United States supplied the
scene of one of the outstanding intrigues of the war. How voluble was
Adolph Pavenstedt in confessing his services as intermediary for the
Kaiser; Pavenstedt was interned in an American prison camp ... a rather
comfortable camp. Hugo Schmidt, who on his own testimony was the
accredited manipulator of enormous sums for the German government, was
ingenuous to a degree in his denial of any knowledge of what the money
paid Bolo was to be used for; Schmidt was interned. Bolo was shot.

Revolution in India, a battle royal on the Central American isthmus, a
revolution in Mexico, uprisings in the West Indies, a separate peace in
France--these were ambitious undertakings. For three years they were
cleared through Washington, D. C. We must accept that fact not alone
with the natural feeling of chagrin which it evokes, but with an eye
to the future. We should congratulate our smug selves that our country
was concerned only with the processes of these intrigues, and was not
subject directly to their results. And then we Americans should ask
ourselves whether it is not logical that, our country having served as
the most fertile ground for German demoralization of other nations, we
should be on our guard for a similar plot against ourselves.

That plot will not come noisily, obviously. It will be no crude effort
to suggest that "American troops are suffering at the hands of the
French high command." It will not be phrased in terms which reek of
the Wilhelmstrasse--earnest, plodding, grotesque German polysyllables.
The German knows that an army must depend upon the hearts of its
people, and he reasons: "I shall attack the hearts of the people, and
I believe that if it is a good principle to attack my enemy from the
rear through his people, it is also a good principle to attack his
people from the rear. The heart is as near the back as it is the front,
_nicht wahr_?" The plot will seem, in its early stages, part and parcel
of our daily life and concern; we shall not see the German hand in it;
the hand will be so concealed as not even to excite the enthusiasm
of the German-American, often a good danger-signal. It will involve
institutions and individuals whom we have trusted, and we shall take
sides in the controversy, and we shall grow violently pro-this and
anti-that. We shall grow sick of the wretchedness of affairs, perhaps,
and we shall lose heart. That is precisely what Germany most desires.
That is what Germany is striving for. That is why the nobility of our
citizenship carries with it the obligation of vigilance. It is in the
hope that each one of us Americans may learn how Germany works abroad,
that we may be better prepared for her next step here, that this
narrative has been written.




CHAPTER XVIII

AMERICA GOES TO WAR

     Bernstorff's request for bribe-money--The President on German
     spies--Interned ships seized--Enemy aliens--Interning German
     agents--The water-front and finger-print regulations--Pro-German
     acts since April, 1917--A warning and a prophecy.


On January 22, 1917, President Wilson set forth to the Senate of the
United States his ideas of the steps necessary to secure world peace.
On the same day Count von Bernstorff sent his Foreign Office this
message:


     "I request authority to pay out up to $50,000 (Fifty thousand
     dollars) in order, as on former occasions, to influence Congress
     through the organization you know of, which perhaps can prevent
     war. I am beginning in the meantime to act accordingly. In the
     above circumstance a public official German declaration in favor
     of Ireland is highly desirable in order to gain the support of
     Irish influence here."


The money did not have the desired soothing effect. Nine days later
Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare as her immediate
future policy and the head of the German spy system in America received
his passports for return to Germany. He was succeeded by the head of
the German spy system in America.

The real name of this successor is not known to the authorities at
this date. If it were he would be arrested, and punished according to
whatever specific crime he had committed against a set of American
statutes created for conditions of peace. Then, with the head of the
German spy system in America in prison, he would be succeeded, as
Bernstorff was, by the head of the German spy system in America.

And so this absurd progression would go on, until finally there would
be no more spies to head the system on the American front. How much
the system would be able to accomplish during the painstaking pursuit
and capture of its successive heads would depend upon America's
swiftness in pursuit and capture. Who the individual in authority over
the system is, and what is his structure of organization, cannot be
answered here. But it is vitally necessary for every citizen who has
the free existence of this republic at heart to decide, basing his
judgment on certain events since the declaration of war, what measure
of accomplishment the German spy system shall have, and what it has
already effected against a nation with which it is now openly and
frankly at war.

Let him first recall that in his Flag Day speech of June 14, 1916,
President Wilson said in part:

"There is disloyalty in the United States, and it must be absolutely
crushed. It proceeds from a minority, a very small minority, but a very
active and subtle minority.... If you could have gone with me through
the space of the last two years and could have felt the subtle impact
of intrigue and sedition, and have realized with me that those to whom
you have intrusted authority are trustees not only of the power but
also of the very spirit and purpose of the United States, you would
realize with me the solemnity with which I look upon the sublime symbol
of our unity and power."

Let him then refer to the President's Flag Day address of one year
later (quoted at the beginning of the book). With those admirable
expressions in mind, let him recapitulate the activities of German
sympathizers or agents since February, 1917.

Ninety-one vessels flying the German flag were in American harbors.
Their displacement totalled nearly six hundred thousand tons--the
equivalent of a fleet of seventy-five of the cargo carriers on which
the United States later began construction to offset the submarine.
Months in advance of the severance of diplomatic relations, orders had
been issued from the Embassy to the masters of all these vessels in
case of war between Germany and the United States to <DW36> the ships.
With the break in relations imminent, German agents slipped aboard
the vessels and gave the word: the great majority of the ninety-one
ships were then put out of commission by the 368 officers and 826
men aboard. The damage was performed with crowbars and axes. Vital
parts had been chalk-marked weeks in advance, so that the destruction
might be effected swiftly: delicate mechanisms were mashed beyond
recognition, important parts removed and smuggled ashore or dropped
overboard, cylinders cracked, emery dust introduced in the bearings
of the engines, pistons battered out of shape, and the machinery of
the ships generally destroyed as only skilled engineers could have
destroyed them. Out of thirty ships in New York harbor, thirty ships
were damaged--among them the liners, _Vaterland_, of 54,000 tons,
the _George Washington_, of 25,000 tons, the _Kaiser Wilhelm_, the
_President Lincoln_, and the _President Grant_, of about 20,000 tons
each. In the harbor of Charleston, S. C., lay the _Liebenfels_, of
4,525 tons; her crew, led by Captain Johann Klattenhoff, scuttled
her on February 1, in the navigating channel of Charleston Harbor;
Klattenhoff, with Paul Wierse, a Charleston newspaper man, and eight
of the _Liebenfels'_ crew were tried and convicted of the crime, fined
and sentenced to periods averaging a year in Atlanta. The discovery
of the damage forced the Government to take over the vessels at once.
The Department of Justice hastened on February 2 to notify all of its
deputies "to take prompt measures against the attempt at destruction or
sinking or escape of such ships by their crews" which those crews had
already done; and the customs authorities who boarded the ships in San
Francisco, Honolulu, New York, Boston, Manila, and every other American
port came ashore with rueful countenances. The combined damage served
to tie the vessels up for at least six months more, and to require
expensive repair. To return to the comparison: a fleet of seventy-five
8,000 ton cargo vessels, such as have since been built, would have been
able to make, during those six months, at least four round trips to
France each, or 300 voyages.

When the German fleet put into neutral American ports of refuge in
1914 the personnel of its ships totalled 476 officers and 4,980 men.
When the ships were seized in 1917, there were 368 officers and 826
men aboard. Of those who had been discharged or allowed indefinite
shore leave a considerable number were active German agents, by far
the great majority were German citizens, and the United States was
on the horns of a dilemma: either each of the sailors ashore must be
watched on suspicion, or else each was free to go about the country as
he pleased. Thus more than 4,000 potential secret agents from an active
auxiliary arm of the German navy were dumped on the hospitality which
our neutrality entailed. When war was declared those men came within
the troublesome problem of the status of the enemy alien.

What was an enemy alien? The United States, on April 6, declared war
against Germany. "Meanwhile," reads the report of the Attorney-General
for 1917, "prior to the passage of the joint resolution of Congress
of April 6, 1917, elaborate preparation was made for the arrest of
upward of 63 alien enemies whom past investigation had shown to
constitute a danger to the peace and safety of the United States if
allowed to remain at large." These "alien enemies" were male Germans.
Not Austrians, for the United States did not go to war with Austria
until December 7. Not Bulgars, nor Turks, for the United States has not
declared war upon Bulgaria or Turkey. Not female Germans, in the face
of the full knowledge of the predilections of Bernstorff, Boy-Ed, and
von Papen for employing women in espionage. Of the thousands of Germans
in the United States whose sympathies were presently to be demonstrated
in numerous ways against the successful prosecution of America's war,
sixty-three had been deemed worthy of arrest. By June 30 this number
had risen to 295, and by October 30 to 895. "Some of those, interned,"
continues the report, "have been paroled with the necessary bonds and
restrictions." Although the United States went to war on April 6, Karl
Heynen, who managed the Bridgeport Projectile Company for Bernstorff
and Albert, and who had previously earned the good will of the United
States by gun-running in Mexico, was not arrested until July 6, in his
offices in the Hamburg-American Line at 45 Broadway. At the same time
F. A. Borgemeister, former adviser to Dr. Albert, and latterly Heynen's
lieutenant, was arrested. Both were interned at Fort Oglethorpe and
during December, Borgemeister was allowed three weeks' liberty on
parole. Rudolph Hecht, confidant of Dr. Albert, who had sold German
war loan bonds for the Kaiser, and who had also been interned, was
released for a like period of liberty in December. G. B. Kulenkampf,
who had secured false manifest papers for the supply-ship _Berwind_ in
August, 1914, was arrested on May 28, 1918, more than one year after
America had entered the war; on the same day Robert J. Oberfohren, a
statistician employed by the Hamburg-American, was arrested and in
his room were captured compiled statistics covering the exports of
munitions from the United States during the two years past: Oberfohren
said he expected to turn the figures in to the University of Munich
after the war.

Bernstorff himself left an able alien enemy in the Swiss Legation in
Washington. He was Heinrich Schaffhausen, and had been one of the
brightest attachés of the German Embassy. As a member for three months
of the Swiss Legation he might readily have sent (and no doubt did
send) information of military value to his own people in code, under
protection of the Swiss seal. The State Department on July 6 ordered
his deportation. Adolph Pavenstedt was arrested on January 22, 1918,
in the Adirondacks, after having enjoyed nine months' immunity; Otto
Julius Merkle was not interned until December 7; Gupta, the Hindu, was
finally caught in New York in 1917, gave bail, and escaped; Dr. John
Ferrari, alias F. W. Hiller, a German officer who had escaped from a
British detention camp in India and had joined the German intrigue
colony, was interned in January, 1918; Baron Gustave von Hasperg was
arrested only after he had displayed undue interest in the National
Army cantonment at Upton in the same month; Franz Rosenberg, a wealthy
German importer, convicted in 1915 of having attempted to smuggle
rubber in cotton bales into Germany, and fined $500 for that offense,
was allowed at liberty until February 9, 1918; in a round-up which
took place in January, 1918, the Federal authorities collected such
celebrities as Hugo Schmidt, Frederick Stallforth, and Baron George von
Seebeck (the son of General von Seebeck, commander of the Tenth Corps
of the German army).

The cases cited are picked at random out of a mass. They illustrate
the breathing periods given to Germans who had been active under
Bernstorff in disturbing America's peace and defying her laws. They
serve also to illustrate the contrast between the methods employed
by the United States, and those adopted by her Allies, from whom she
has taken other lessons in the business of warfare. France gave alien
enemies forty-eight hours in which to leave the soil of the country,
and any such person found at large after that date was to be interned
in a detention camp. To have interned all of the Germans in the United
States would have been impossible and the Government took some time to
find a second best method. By May 2 the Department of Justice was in a
position to announce that it had plans for internment camps for three
classes of aliens: prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and detained aliens,
and it announced on that date there were some 6,000 in those classes
already detained. By February 17, 1918, however, there were actually
no more than 1,870 aliens interned under the war department and under
military guard at Forts McPherson, Oglethorpe and Douglas, and some
2,000 at Hot Springs, North Carolina, in the Department of Labor's
detention camp.

At both camps the prisoners were fed and housed at the expense of the
Government, and it was not until the early spring of 1918 that they
were put to work.

From April 6 to July 10, 1917, an enemy alien could be employed by any
shipbuilder, tug-boat captain, lighterage firm or steamship line; he
could go about any waterfront at will, provided he did not enter the
so-called "barred zones" in the vicinity of Government military or
naval property, and he could make unmolested such observations as his
eyesight afforded of the shipping upon which the United States depends
for its share in this war. After that date he was forbidden such
employment, and denied approach to all wharves and ships. On July 9 the
Government discharged from its employ 200 German subjects who for weeks
past had been loading transports at the docks in an "Atlantic port." A
raid on the Hoboken waterfront in the following winter rounded up 200
more enemy aliens who had calmly ignored the "barred zone" regulations.

The Government was confronted with a stupendous problem. How to handle
with its normal peace-time police force the great unwieldy flow of
the alien population presented a constantly baffling question, yet it
was absolutely essential to the control of internal affairs that the
Government know the comings and goings of the enemies within its gates.
The date of February 13, 1918, was eventually set as the last on which
citizens of enemy countries living in the United States might set down
their finger prints and names and file their affidavits of residence
and condition.

What facilities had the United States provided for transacting this
great volume of additional protective duty? There existed, first of
all, the Department of Justice, whose chief function in peace-time
had been the enforcement through its investigators and prosecutors
of acts of Congress, such as the so-called Mann "White Slave" Act,
and the Sherman "Anti-Trust" Act. There was the United States Secret
Service, a bureau of the Treasury Department, whose chief function had
been the detection of smuggling and counterfeiting and the protection
of the person of the President. There was the Intelligence Bureau
of the War Department, and a similar Bureau of the Navy Department,
both undermanned, as was every other branch of our military forces
at that time. The advent of war brought a complicated necessity for
coordination of these four branches and of several other Federal
investigating bureaus.

The German did not wait for coordination. He inspired food riots among
the poorer classes of the lower East Side in New York. He opposed the
draft law, rallying to his support the Socialist, the Anarchist, and
the Industrial Worker of the World, under whose cloak he hid, not too
well concealed. He celebrated the declaration of war by blowing up a
munitions plant at Eddystone, Pa., on April 10, 1917, and killing 112
persons, most of whom were women and girls. He sneaked information into
Germany through the Swedish legation. He tried to promote strikes in
Pittsburg, but his agent, Walter Zacharias, was arrested. He tried
to dynamite the Elephant-Butte dam on the Rio Grande, but his agent,
Dr. Louis Kopf, was caught. He caused a serious revolution in Cuba
until his agents were expelled. He tried to block the Liberty Loans,
in vain. He tried to obstruct the collection of Red Cross funds. He
caused strikes in the airplane-spruce forests of the Northwest. He
assisted Lieutenant Hans Berg of the captured German prize _Appam_ to
escape from Fort McPherson with nine of his crew in October, 1917. He
erected secret wireless stations at various points, to communicate to
Berlin via Mexico, whither thousands of his army reservists had fled
on false passports at the outbreak of war. He smuggled information
of military importance in and out of the country in secret inks, on
neutral vessels, and even wrote them (on one occasion) in cipher
upon the shoulder of a prima donna. He burned warehouses and shell
plants. He sawed the keel of a transport nearly through. He placed a
culture of ptomaine germs in the milk supply of the cadets' school
at Fort Leavenworth. He invented a chemical preparation which would
cause painful injury to the kidneys of every man who drank water in a
certain army cantonment. He received Irish rebellionists and negotiated
with them for further revolution. He made his way into our munitions
plants and secured data which he forwarded to Berlin; he worked in our
aeroplane plants and deliberately weakened certain vital parts of the
tenuous construction so that our aviators died in training; he kept
track of our transports, and of the movements of our forces, and passed
them on to the Wilhelmstrasse. He sold heroin to our soldiers and
sailors. He supplied men for the motor boat _Alexander Agassiz_ which
put to sea from a Pacific port to raid commerce. In short, he continued
to carry out, with multiplied opportunity, the same tactics he had
employed since August, 1914.

The German spy in America continues to attack our armies in the rear.
He is here in force. A word to him may mean that within twenty-four
hours Kiel will know of another transport embarking with certain forces
for France. He is here to take the lives of Americans just as certainly
as his kinsman is firing across a parapet in Lorraine for the same
purpose. Whatever provision will save those lives must be made swiftly.
The Departments, already overtaxed with the magnitude of their task,
ask simply that they be given the weapons to make their splendid battle
on the American front successful.

Whatever aid and comfort the enemy may find in this recitation of
his disgraceful achievements and graceless failures, he may have and
welcome. He has imposed upon the hospitality of the United States, has
dragged his clumsy boots over the length and breadth of their estate,
has run amuck with torch and explosive, and has earned a great deal of
loathing contempt, hardly amounting to hatred. But no fear--and that
is what he sought. The spectacle of what the disloyalists of America
have done, and the easily conjurable picture of what they would do if
Germany should win, are graphic enough for loyal America. The United
States must proceed with incisive vigor to cut out this poisonous
German sore. And the United States will remember the scar. It is so
written.




APPENDIX

A GERMAN PROPAGANDIST


In 1915 Fritz von Pilis came to America. He had been a member of the
colonization bureau of the German Government maintained to Prussianize
Poland, and later an emigration agent of the North German Lloyd.

He posed here as an anti-German Austrian who desired to give the
American public the "true facts" of Germany's intentions in the war.
He approached the _Sun_, offering it the following brief of a volume
written in late 1914 by a Prussian Pan-German, provided he (von Pilis)
be allowed to write a commentary to accompany the outline. His offer
was not accepted, for the _Sun_ saw him in his true light of Prussian
propagandist sent here to spread the gospel of might which is preached
in the book.

The brief is offered here as an authoritative platform of Germany's
aims by conquest as the Pan-German party saw them after a few months of
war. Many of these aims have already been achieved.


(The phraseology and spelling is von Pilis'.)

_Denkschrift, etc._

_General War Goal._ Weakening of foes: discard all "world citizen"
sentiment and dangerous objectivity in favor of strangers. We want
peace terms based solely on our interests.

Severity: Let's hear no more of "considerations of humanity,"
"cultural demands." Must impose indemnities on foes and take land in
Europe and overseas to lessen political power:

(a) In Europe for healthy colonization.

(b) Colonial: to supply raw materials and take finished products.

(c) Indemnities to be devoted to common social betterment of German
people.

_Internal._ Rehabilitation of farmer class by providing ample land.
Combat city evils.

(1) Opportunity provided by fate in this attack by our foes.

(2) France and Russia must cede land near our gates as punishment;
estates to German farmers.

(3) City evils to be remedied by better housing conditions; by war
indemnities, not single tax. (Cheap rents, tenants become owners.)
(Gift of fate through foes.) Old age pensions larger and at lower
period of age (65 years instead of 70).

_Overseas._ Take over colonies and settle by Germans to give economic
independence for imports and exports. This will give opportunities to
eliminate "intelligent proletariat" by use elsewhere.

_Belgium._ Conspiracy and conduct of people and Government show Belgium
not entitled to independence.

(1) All well-informed people in Germany say: "Belgium must cease to
exist."

(2) Impossible to take into German people with equal rights.

Rather leave with indemnity which must pay anyway. But we need the
coast against England.

Belgium to be property of Empire, Kaiser its Lord:

Belgium to lose its name.

Belgium to be divided into 2 parts: Walloons and Flemish.

Kaiser's officials to govern as dictators of province.

Belgians taken into Empire to have no political rights. All who object
may emigrate. Walloons unworthy of being "Germanized."

_France._ Must "bleed it white" so as never to be attacked again:

(1) i.e., indemnity and land. Land from Switzerland via Belfort,
Moselle, Epinal, Toul, Meuse, Verdun, Sedan, Charleville, St. Quentin
to Somme and Channel at Cayeux.

(2) France to take over and indemnify the present inhabitants. We get
the land sans dangerous people. Such expulsion immoral? Retribution.
Not bricht eisen! France'll be thankful for the population. Needs it.

(3) Ceded area to become military frontier, administered by dictator.
To be settled by Germans: discharged soldiers or war veterans' families.

(4) Toulon and environs to be made impregnable fortress on land and
seaside for base on the Mediterranean.

Rather forego all French territory than take with it the hostile
French population. Walloons to be kept in land only to furnish mass of
laborers, lest new German settlers become industrial laborers again.

_England._ Its world-rule must be ended! Can't formulate demands until
naval warfare decided. _Build ships with all your might!_

_Japan._ Must be punished for white race. Revenge.

_Russia._ Must be put _hors de combat_ by permanent weakening. We must
forcibly once more turn Russia's face towards East by curtailing its
frontiers as before Peter I's time. Then its pressure vs. Asia.

(1) A new Poland (off G. territory) including Grodno, Minsk and part
of Mohilen to Dnieper. Probably a kingdom with personal connection to
Hapsburg House.

(2) G. to seize hegemony of Baltic; take Kniland, Livona, Esthonia and
Lithuania safeguarded by territories to rivers that were frontiers of
R. before Peter.

(3) To take Suwalki and military strip of Poland to strengthen Thorn
and Silesia, Soldau, Wloclanek Kolo.

(4) Finland to be independent or go to Sweden?

(5) R. to lose most of Black Sea coast.

(6) Ukraine Empire under Hapsburg for "Small Russia." Bessarabia to
Rumania. Austria to get good part of Serbia and Montenegro.

How avoid clash of nationalities in newly formed territories? Ans.: By
forced migration. No home feelings in Russian farmer; R's precedents
Siberia. Exchange of G. settlers in New Russia for R's in new G.
(several years). Possibly so exchange Poles in Posen too? Lithuanians
may readily be incorporated into Poland and Letts and Esthonians to be
left or transferred to Russia according to treatment of G's in this
war. R. Jews unthinkable in G. Empire: Bar their migration westward.
Remedy (1) Bind R. to remove restrictions vs. Jews and then Jews back
there.

(7) Zionism: Palestine to be ceded through G. and A-Hung. influence.
This--safe wall vs. Jews and stimulate migration of Jews to Russia.

Prussia to get New Territory in East or else form "Marks" for
Germanization.

Tenants to be settled by public grant in return for enhanced realty
values.

We must never be without enemies strong enough to compel defensive
militia. Fr. and Eng. made powerless, let R. always threaten us and be
our foe; that'll be our luck.

_The Colonies._ French Morocco, Senegambia & Congo.

Egypt freed from England; England's colonies in Africa depend on
developments.

Tunis to Italy.

Bizert and Damietta (with Italy's and A-H's consent), Djibuti, Goa,
Ceylon, Sabang, Saigon, Azores, Caperdon (?), Isls, Madagascar.

_Austria-Hungary._ Heavy indemnity from Russia.

New Poland and Ukraine Empire personally united to A-H. North half
of Serbia. South 1/2 to Bulgaria. Guarantees to be given to Germanic
minority by Slavs. West Galicia to Poland. East Galicia to Ukraine
Empire. German to be Reichsprache?

_The Neutrals._ Luxemburg to win G. Statehood (too weak to control B.
Luxemburg).

Holland. Avoid pressure politically. Not to receive Flemish Belgium.
These need strict masters.

Italy, if neutral, Corsica, Lower Savoy, Nizzia, Tunis.

Rumania: Bessarabia (Odessa, if she joins G. in war).

Bulgaria: South 1/2 of Serbia (more if she joins G. in war).

Turkey, if enters war, heavy indemnity and land in Caucasus. Integrity
guarantees by G. and A-H: spheres of influence economically.

Sweden may get Finland if both willing.

Economic unity of territories and G. and A-H., Switzerland, Holland,
Italy, Scandinavia, Rumania and Bulgaria probably join.

Offensive and Defensive Germanic Alliance: Scandinavia. Maybe and
voluntarily restore settlements of N. Schleswig to Denmark, if
necessary. New Germanic blood needed to make good war losses.

_Special Demands._ Exclusion of all East people from G. soil; rights to
expel Letts, Esthonians and Lithuanians for 25 years.

No <DW52> person on G. soil.

G. high schools for G's and foreigners of G. descent; special
exceptions.

Only allied officers to be in G. army.

Only mature and fortified G. youth to study abroad.

Only G. language, G. fashions, G. Geographical names.

Steady supply of grain.

Subsidies to married officers out of war indemnity.

G. nobles to marry only Germans.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The German Secret Service in America
1914-1918, by John Price Jones and Paul Merrick Hollister

*** 