Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (26 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
The first day’s inspection passed without incident. On the morning of the second day there was a knock on his stateroom door. The steward didn’t wait for von Rintelen to answer before he called through the door, “Some British officers wish to have a word with you.”
The steward sounded uneasy. But von Rintelen was not disturbed; he was confident he could talk his way out of any problem. He pulled himself out of the tub, put on his silk bathrobe, and opened the stateroom door.
There were two officers and ten sailors. The sailors had their bayonets leveled at his chest.
“You are Mr. Gaché?” a British officer asked.
“Yes. What can I do for you?”
“We have orders to take you with us.”
“I have no intention of disembarking here. I am going to Rotterdam,” he insisted bravely.
“I am sorry. If you refuse, we have orders to take you by force.”
It was at that moment, staring at the bayonets, that von Rintelen understood that the telegram had not been sent from Berlin. It was a forgery, sent by someone who had knowledge of the German diplomatic code—someone who had led him into a trap. And as he was marched off the boat, surrounded by armed soldiers, he could not help suspecting that the long arm of Tom Tunney had reached across the Atlantic and finally taken hold of him.
I
n retrospect, the only concession that Heinrich Albert would make was that perhaps he should not have been so concerned about saving money. But as the infuriated Abteilung IIIB spymasters judged it, the German commercial attaché’s entire conduct on that hot July afternoon in the summer of 1915 was a series of blunders, colossally poor decisions, and a total disregard for even the most elemental tradecraft. And as for economy, avoiding the $1.75 taxi fee was really not much of a savings, considering that it jeopardized a $40 million network.
At the very least, they argued, Albert, as paymaster for the German secret service in America, should have had a heightened sense of operational security. Especially after the sinking of the
Lusitania
.
TEN WEEKS EARLIER, ON MAY
7, 1915, a German U-boat off the south coast of Ireland shot a torpedo without warning into the Cunard passenger liner
Lusitania
. The bow of the fastest and largest steamer traveling the Atlantic, a gilded floating palace, began to dip precariously; the big gleaming boat started to heave; and then quite quickly it disappeared under the dark, rolling waves. The toll: 1,198 lost, including 124 Americans.
The nation was shocked. Germany had unleashed a cold-blooded attack against defenseless citizens, including women and children, of a neutral country. In retaliation, the outraged American press hurled volleys of indignant adjectives at the Hun: “savage,” “villainous,” “barbaric,” “unspeakable,” “homicidal.” Even Edward House, the Texas militia honorary colonel who held court in the smoke-filled back rooms of Washington because of his role as the president’s closest adviser, predicted the country would soon be firing off more than mere words. “We shall be at war with Germany within a month,” he confidently stated.
An illustration made for the
New York Herald
and the
London Sphere
shows the RMS
Lusitania
as a second torpedo hits behind a gaping hole in the hull.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
Germany responded stiffly to the uproar. The government expressed “deepest sympathy at the loss of American lives,” but at the same time noted uncompromisingly that the
Lusitania
was a blockade runner. The bulk of its freight was contraband: 4,200 cases of Remington rifle cartridges, 1,250 cases of empty shrapnel shells, and a large shipment of foodstuffs. Von Bernstorff’s stance was even more defiant. With a cold and unforgiving logic, he wrote that “the victims of the submarine campaign were far less numerous than the women and children killed by the English blockade, and . . . death by drowning was no more dreadful than slow starvation.”
Six days after the sinking, President Wilson officially responded to the attack. His diplomatic note to the kaiser’s government was another of his desperate attempts to tread the thin tightrope that stretched over the chasm between war and peace. The former professor pedantically lectured “that if a belligerent cannot retaliate against an enemy without injuring the lives of neutrals . . . a due regard for the dignity of the neutral powers should dictate that the practice be discontinued.” Yet the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces presented neither an ultimatum nor a threat if his request was ignored.
But even as the president struggled to, as he desperately put it, “do nothing that might by any possibility involve us in the war,” he continued to read the dispatches from New York police commissioner Woods about the activities of German spies and saboteurs in America. The confidential summaries of Captain Tunney’s reports filled him with a high-minded moral outrage. It had become increasingly obvious that Germany was fighting an undeclared war on American soil. And the death of American civilians on the
Lusitania
worked further to close the divide in his mind between the war in Europe and the war at home. National security, Wilson decided, required that a covert counterattack must be mounted against Germany’s agents.
The day after he sent his patient, circumspect diplomatic note to Berlin on the
Lusitania
sinking, behind the scenes Wilson took more authoritative action. He instructed secretary of the treasury William McAdoo, whose department ran the Secret Service, to begin surveillance of German and Austrian embassy personnel.
“We rented an apartment,” William Flynn, the head of the Secret Service, revealed years later, “and the telephone man led the wires in and hooked them up so that we had a telephone matching every telephone in the two embassies. When a receiver was taken down in the embassy a light flashed in the Secret Service apartment. When a phone bell rang in the embassy, one rang in our apartment. Four stenographers worked in relays, all expert linguists.”
While in New York, the Secret Service eavesdroppers piggybacked on the wires Tom was already running. And teams of federal agents joined the ranks of Tom’s watchers, supplementing the number of pavement artists following the suspected members of the German network about the city.
A horrified nation had clamored for action, but only in the shadows, in the heavily veiled secret war, did a new operational phase begin.
ALBERT WAS NOT CONCERNED. THE
sinking of the
Lusitania
neither put him on alert nor suggested any need for greater caution. His disdain for an enemy led by a president who had ludicrously proclaimed in a recent speech that he was “too proud to fight” convinced him that there was no need to be suspicious. Or edgy. He was as safe in the streets of New York as he would be on the streets of Berlin.
To a small, if ultimately not very consoling, degree, his analysis was correct. Albert was not the watchers’ target, or at least not the primary one. On July 24, 1915, it was George Sylvester Viereck, an American who was editor of the
Fatherland,
an unflinchingly pro-German newspaper, who was being followed.
When Viereck, a dandy with a bushy blond pompadour who had boasted that he’d gathered up the violets strewn on Oscar Wilde’s grave and lovingly preserved those treasures in a glass jar, entered 45 Broadway in lower Manhattan, the Secret Service agent on his tail became concerned. In this building were the offices of the Hamburg-American Line, and there was no telling if Viereck would come out alone or with another potential suspect. W. H. Houghton decided he’d better not take any chances. He called over to the agency’s operational headquarters on the top floor of the nearby Custom House and asked Frank Burke to join him.
Burke refused. It was Saturday and a scorcher; besides, he had plans to go to a baseball game. But Houghton insisted, and at three o’clock a resigned Burke was at his side when Viereck left the building. The editor was accompanied by another man—tall, older, his face bearing the dueling scars of a Prussian officer, a brown briefcase held as portentously as a sheathed saber at his side. Even more intriguingly to the agents, Viereck treated this unknown individual with smarmy deference. It was only later that the agents would deduce that they were staring at Dr. Albert, the German commercial attaché.
As the four men stood in separate pairs on the downtown city street, two seemingly small decisions were made that would have enormous consequences. The first was Albert’s. He decided that there was no need to hail a cab to take him to his suite at the Ritz-Carlton uptown on Madison Avenue. Locked in his office safe he had $7 million in cashable drafts that he’d recently received from Berlin, but the skinflint banker in him thought a $1.75 taxi ride would be too unseemly an extravagance. On this hot afternoon, accompanied by Viereck, he walked to Rector Street and then up the long flights of stairs to the Sixth Avenue El train.
At the same time, the two federal agents quickly improvised a plan. They’d follow the two men; if the targets went off in different directions, Houghton would stick with the editor, while Burke would tail the man with the bulging brown briefcase.
At Twenty-Third Street, Viereck got off the train alone. Houghton gave his fellow agent a small, almost imperceptible nod, and then followed.
As the El continued uptown, the midsummer’s humid heat washed over Albert and the steady, lulling motion of the moving train rocked him like an infant in a crib. He started to doze, and from his seat across the aisle Burke watched with amusement. He had been warned by Captain Tunney that some of these Germans were “slippery fish.” They’d be on to you the moment you picked them up. Perhaps, but this one, whoever he was, didn’t have a clue. He was sleeping.
The train ground to a stop at the Fiftieth Street Station, jerking Albert from his nap. Abruptly awake, he saw that the doors were open and this was his stop. He hurried from the train. In his groggy haste, he left the bulging briefcase on the adjacent seat.
Burke stared at it. He had no intimation that it contained anything of consequence. For all Burke knew, it held the man’s lunch. He simply saw the briefcase lying there and, in an instant, made up his mind. He took it because he could. With the briefcase tucked under his arm like a football, he started to make his way to the rear door of the train.
Don’t run, Burke told himself. Don’t attract attention. But then he turned and saw that the man with the dueling scars had returned. He was rushing down the length of the car, his eyes darting wildly over each seat, an obvious panic lurching through him.
Burke dashed out of the car and hid behind a pillar, a commuter ostensibly lighting a cigar. He watched as the man whose briefcase he’d taken hurried, frantic, down a flight of stairs to the street. Full of a false calm, determined to act as if it were the most natural of journeys, Burke joined the bustle of people walking toward the other end of the platform. He continued along, not too fast, not too slow, and then descended the stairs.
On the street, an uptown trolley was passing, and Burke jumped onto the running board. He was silently congratulating himself when he heard the shouts. “Stop! Thief! That man has my briefcase!” He turned and saw the man with the dueling scars chasing frantically after the trolley. He was running swiftly, gaining on the slow-moving streetcar. Burke realized that when the streetcar pulled up at its next stop, the man would be waiting to jump on board.
“That guy’s a nut,” Burke told the conductor. He pointed to the agitated man trailing after the car, his pleading words made indistinct by the din of the city traffic. With just a glance, the conductor immediately confirmed the passenger’s assessment: a lunatic was chasing his trolley. He had caused a disturbance on the train, too, Burke added.
The conductor hurried to the front of the car and told the motorman not to stop. A madman was after them.
The trolley continued uptown. Albert gave pursuit, his arms waving imploringly, his hoarse shouts insisting that the streetcar stop. But as Burke watched, the frantic man became an increasingly distant figure, and after several more blocks he had vanished from sight altogether.
After a while, Burke got off and, making sure no one was on his tail, switched to a downtown trolley. He rode it all the way to the carbarn, the briefcase—his furtive treasure—hidden beneath his suit jacket.
As soon as he got off, Burke found a telephone and called his boss, William Flynn. The two men rendezvoused at the Secret Service office in the Custom House down by the Battery.
It was Flynn who opened the briefcase. Inside were files crammed with papers, and fortunately, most were in English. He started to read, but as he quickly realized what he had, he stopped, too excited to continue. He knew what he had to do.
He sent a wire to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, who was at his summer home in North Harbor, Maine. “Must meet immediately on matter of utmost urgency,” he wired. Without waiting for a reply, Flynn boarded a train to Maine that evening, the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Burke, now armed, accompanied him.
Albert, in the meantime, had gone to the German Club on Central Park South. Pulling himself together, reclaiming the bearing of a haughty diplomat, he sought out Boy-Ed and von Papen and confessed to a carefully edited version of the afternoon’s events.
A thief, he said with as much dignity as he could muster, had stolen his briefcase. It contained, he feared, documents that would be embarrassing to the imperial government if they fell into the wrong hands. What should they do?
Boy-Ed wanted to know if Albert was certain the culprit was a mere thief.
Yes, Albert assured him. He was convinced that no one else would be interested in his briefcase.
Boy-Ed agreed. He too was certain the enemy had no idea about the commercial attaché’s clandestine activities. They decided the loss of the briefcase was just an annoyance, the sort of inconvenience that could happen to anyone riding a New York subway. The thief would discover the files inside, curse his bad luck, and then toss them into the trash.
Still, an aide was sent to the offices of the
New York Evening Telegram
to place a classified ad:
Lost: On Saturday, on 3:30 Harlem Elevated Train, at 50th St. Station, brown leather bag, containing documents, deliver to G. H. Hoffman, 5. E. 47th St., against $20 reward.
