Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (6 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
T
he British sailors boarded the
Noordam
as it approached Dover. Europe was at war, and the British navy ruled the sea. Von Bernstorff had no choice but to join the other passengers when the order was given to line up on deck. He went topside with the briefcase that held $150 million in treasury notes in his hand.
On deck, he slowly edged closer and closer to the rail. He moved without apparent purpose, a restless passenger absently stretching his legs. To his surprise, he felt calm, almost at peace. Ever since his meeting with Nicolai he had wondered what he would do, how he would act under stress. Now he knew.
Summoning up a deliberate nonchalance, he leaned absently on the rail. The sharp, crisp smell of the ocean filled the air. If he was challenged, he would toss the briefcase into the water before the sailors could reach him. One hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of notes were as heavy as a brick; the briefcase would sink in an instant to the bottom of the sea. He was prepared.
Von Bernstorff waited. A British sailor fixed his gaze on him from across the deck. The count did not smile; instinct told him that little would be gained by appearing eager to ingratiate himself. Yet at the same time, he tightened his grip on the briefcase. With the sailor’s first step toward him, it would fly into the Atlantic.
The sailor moved on. No one said a word to von Bernstorff; he was ignored. And within the hour the
Noordam
was steaming on to New York Harbor.
There had been no drama, no crisis. But a lesson had been learned. Von Bernstorff discovered not only that he could play his secret role but also that he enjoyed its sharp edge of danger. From that moment on he no longer had any qualms, any doubts, about his double life. He would be Germany’s spymaster in America. He would lead his country’s attack in an undeclared war.
WHEN TOM WANTED TO THINK,
or simply escape from the pressures of his job, he’d take off on long, solitary runs. He’d begun running when he first joined the force to train for the annual Police Field Day; in his twenties, he was unbeatable in the hundred-yard dash, and then, older, he won medals in long-distance races. These days, though, he ran only to get his thoughts in order.
With his captain’s salary, he’d recently bought a newly built two-story brick house on the corner of Fuller Place in Brooklyn. It had a bay window and a narrow front porch, and both, with a craning of the neck, offered grassy views of Prospect Park.
It was not long after the conclusion of the Circle case that Tom took a loping jog through the park. He had long legs, and he ran easily, without effort or, it seemed, exhaustion.
As he ran that afternoon, he recalled the lengthy, tense operation that had just been put to rest. He felt a sense of pride in what he and his squad had accomplished. Both Abarno and Carbone had been convicted, and would be off the streets for at least the next six years. The Brescia Circle had slowly disbanded; its members had begun to suspect each other of being police spies. Other radical groups throughout the city were also in disarray, their anxious leaders slinking off, wondering if Tunney and his men were on to them, too. Most gratifying of all, as soon as the chiefs fled, the bombings stopped. Months had passed without an incident.
A terrifying threat had been, he wanted to believe, extinguished. And with its end, he told himself, his short-lived career as a handler, mentor, shepherd, friend, and even father to the men he’d dispatch on dangerous covert missions was also, thankfully, over. His harried squad could look forward to a well-deserved rest. His secret life could at last be given a proper burial. The city, he decided, was safe.
Frank Abarno, twenty-two, and Carmine Carbone, eighteen, who were accused and convicted of an anarchist plot to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, appear in court on March 20, 1915.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
E
rich Muenter was on the run. The Harvard professor and wife murderer had boarded a train to California in the aftermath of the somber burial service in Chicago. He had left behind his two children, the two doting nurses he’d cajoled into accompanying him on the tearful journey from Cambridge, his grieving and still supportive in-laws, and any encumbering pangs of guilt.
A steady barrage of headlines in the
New York Times
trumpeted “Harvard Teacher Still at Large” and “Muenter Not Yet Found,” but Muenter traveled west like a man without a concern in the world and, in his own mind, a blameless one too. He’d only done what he felt he needed to do. His motive for poisoning his wife, he explained in a rambling letter to a Cambridge friend written on his way to Los Angeles, had its roots in revenge. Therefore, he insisted, with a logic that was purely his own tautological invention, the act was quite legal.
What was he avenging? Here the teacher turned perplexingly vague. He hinted that his anger at his spouse was grounded in sexual dissatisfaction; neither harmony nor pleasure existed in their shared intimate moments, he suggested, without providing any of the raw and apparently gnawing details. But a torrent of even more fiercely vituperative paragraphs raged on about the unfairness of his being burdened with a wife and children. Her pregnancies, he implied, were all his cunning wife’s mischief. Perhaps this was why Muenter felt he had a legal right to condemn her to a slow and painful death.
Above all, though, the letter worked hard in its sputtering way to make the fantastic case that specific reasons were unnecessary. Leona Muenter had been executed—that was how her husband saw it—for the crimes she had committed. She deserved to die. Erich Muenter, a man who understood the unarticulated laws that governed the universe, had the right—no, the duty—to end her life.
Once in sunny Los Angeles, Muenter, with the discipline of a veteran secret agent, set about reinventing himself. With a pang of regret, he shaved off his mustache and his artfully cultivated Vandyke, but took appreciative measure of the suddenly youthful face staring back at him in the mirror.
The frayed tweed suit that had served as his Harvard uniform was packed into a suitcase, and he bought a pair of shiny khaki pants, a blue shirt, and a deep-pocketed rust-colored jacket at a haberdashery that did a brisk business in secondhand clothes. His gentleman’s black derby was discarded too, and replaced by a more plebeian brown felt hat that he set at a rakish angle.
He couldn’t disguise, however, his distinctive tubercular gait, and that was a concern; the description widely circulated by the Cambridge police described the fugitive murderer as a “loose-jointed walker.” Prudence, he decided, required that he leave the country.
MUENTER TRAVELED SOUTH ON A
vagabond route through Mexico. It was an aimless yearlong journey, but it gave him the time to fit a cover story snugly around his incriminating past. He christened himself Frank Holt, born in Wisconsin, parents long dead and without any siblings. Anyone who asked was told he’d picked up his knowledge of German—and perhaps, he’d concede pleasantly, some foreign mannerisms—during years employed as tutor to the children of a wealthy midwestern family as they traveled in high style through Europe.
After much disciplined effort, he even managed to disguise the lingering traces of his German accent. Now when he spoke, it was with the hesitant sibilance of a lisp.
There were gaps and obscurities in his new autobiography, but these were deliberate; nothing should be made too easy or too clear for new acquaintances. If he appeared to be trying too hard, that in itself could provoke suspicions.
Reinvented, he decided the time had come to settle down. Early in 1907 he made his way to El Oro, a dusty town about a hundred miles northwest of Mexico City; walked into the local mining company; and asked for work. His qualifications, he stated with for once not an iota of invention, were that he could read, write, and speak several languages fluently. He was hired as a stenographer.
James Dean, who had a desk across the room, would later recall that Muenter had “proved an excellent stenographer, but kept aloof from everyone in the company.” “He had a worried look and frequently gazed abstractedly into space for a long time.”
Still, his demeanor, however odd, didn’t attract much comment. Most Americans who wound up south of the border in the remote hills of El Oro were running away from something. It was a community of expatriates who knew better than to ask too many questions, and their own rough experiences had tempered their tendency to judge.
For the next two years Muenter seemed to settle with a monklike devotion into his quiet new life. All the while, though, he was waiting, biding his time.
T
here are men who never take to the secret life, but von Bernstorff, in many impressive ways, was a natural. From the start he understood that deniability is a primary rule of the covert world and that he was the beneficiary of a bit of beginner’s luck: his job gave him the perfect cover.
Upon his return to Washington, the count threw himself into his public role as ambassador. He rushed about the corridors of federal power, urging that America remain neutral. He went out of his way to meet with reporters and editors to share an ardent plea—off the record, of course—that President Wilson must be encouraged to broker a peace settlement. And with a happy-go-lucky energy that surpassed even his own previous immersion in the city’s social whirl, he made it a point to be seen out and about at cocktails, dinners, or weekend house parties, always the elegant and charming aristocrat with the mischievous roving eye. As the professionals at Abteilung IIIB would have said with admiration, von Bernstorff lived his cover.
Yet all the while he was also, with no less admirable Prussian efficiency, building his network. He established an organization structured as rigidly as a military unit to recruit and run the agents who’d fight on the front lines. From his wood-paneled office in the German embassy, he’d issue the orders and approve the battle plans. But when the attacks began, when the foundations of bridges shook or factories were rocked by mysterious blasts, von Bernstorff would be another shocked, although not very innocent, bystander.
To insulate himself—and the Washington embassy—further, he gave orders that the network’s operational base be established in New York. New York had always been a good city to be German, and with the outbreak of war it became an even better place for German spies. There was the busy Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville, where an agent could disappear into the beery gemütlichkeit; private associations like the German Club on Central Park South, where, in cozy smoke-filled rooms decorated with stags’ heads, secrets could be whispered without fear of who else was listening; and crowded restaurants like Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street, where, as brimming steins were raised and hearty platters of sauerbraten were devoured, all sorts of plots could be gaily hatched. Working behind the lines in New York City was a stroll through friendly territory. And in a collection of offices in high towers grouped in lower Manhattan, in convenient proximity to both Wall Street and New York Harbor, von Bernstorff’s handpicked senior field officers set up shop.
Heinrich Albert, the embassy’s commercial attaché, served as paymaster. For three years as Germany’s chief fiscal officer in America, he had wined, dined, and developed mutually beneficial working relationships with a long and impressive list of bankers. In this cutthroat world of backslappers and blatantly ambitious financiers, people were struck by Dr. Albert’s relative youth—he was in his late thirties and looked a boyish decade younger—and a reserve that bordered on diffidence. He’d arrive in a somber frock coat, bow low in greeting, listen with deferential attentiveness, and offer up a terse yet unfailingly polite comment only if asked a direct question. The single clue to a hidden, more aggressive nature was the dueling scar that cut across his cheek like a lightning bolt.
Heinrich Friedrich Albert served as commercial attaché to Ambassador von Bernstorff and acted as the chief fiscal officer for German espionage and sabotage operations in the United States.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
In Albert, the network had a shrewd and dedicated man who quickly became familiar with the exacting ways to fund a secret army. He opened accounts in banks all over the country, transferred money in a bewildering succession of deposits, and then, for good measure, further washed the money through legitimate companies run by German American businessmen. From his office high above Broadway, he looked out across the harbor toward the Statue of Liberty, and efficiently dispensed a fortune of nearly untraceable funds. It would later be estimated that in the first year alone of this secret war he distributed $30 million to ragtag cells of agents to fuel their clandestine operations.
A short stroll downtown from Albert’s office in the Hamburg-American Building, in a tower at 11 Broadway high above Bowling Green and the Custom House, Karl Boy-Ed established his new offices. Captain Boy-Ed had been the naval attaché at the Washington embassy, and on von Bernstorff’s instructions he too had promptly relocated to New York.
Boy-Ed was the son of a German mother and a Turkish father, but he was every inch a Prussian naval officer. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a neck like a fence post, a booming voice, and the rigid, stiff-backed demeanor of a man who’d just jumped to attention, he wore his blue uniform and its chestful of medals with an intimidating authority.
Captain Karl Boy-Ed, naval attaché to Ambassador von Bernstorff.
(Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
While assigned to the embassy, he had studied the American navy, becoming familiar with its ship power, its personnel, its strategies, and its coastal defenses. In his new covert wartime role, he was determined to put all the intelligence that his obliging American hosts had so freely offered to operational use.
Franz von Papen was the network’s third senior field officer, and, since boldness and audacity can become virtues in wartime, the most dangerous. In 1913, when he was assigned as the military attaché to the embassy, Captain von Papen had been sorely disappointed. The United States was a backwater posting, a position so minor to the German general staff that it had cavalierly been expanded to include Mexico.
Yet in von Papen’s own mind, he was a man suited for a brilliant military career. Through his wife, the daughter of a fabulously wealthy Alsatian pottery manufacturer, he had the necessary funds; and through his parents, descendants of a long, if somewhat tattered, strand of Westphalian nobility, he had the social standing needed to climb to the top ranks of the German army. And he certainly had the look—a cavalry officer’s confident, deliberately insouciant slouch; a firmness of features further distinguished by a hawk’s nose; and a snappy military mustache. He also possessed—and this might explain his exile to such an insignificant post—an intolerable, overbearing personality. His arrogance crackled through even the most desultory conversations. He was a man who was always right, and who never hesitated to share his unflinching certainty.
When the ambassador assigned him to recruit and direct an army of spies and saboteurs in a clandestine attack against both America and Canada, von Papen saw the path to his future glory. He set up offices for this War Intelligence Center, as he grandly christened the operation, on the twenty-fifth floor of 60 Wall Street, and at once began plotting.
Captain Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen—military attaché to Ambassador von Bernstorff—who would go on to become chancellor of Germany in 1932 and vice chancellor under Adolf Hitler in 1933–1934.
(Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
THE FIRST TASK, THOUGH, FOR
any head of station is to recruit agents to send off into the field. From the start, these three men were emboldened by their shared conviction that this would be easy work. They fervently believed in the rightness of Germany’s cause, and felt they were surrounded by battalions of potential recruits whose loyalties also bound them to the kaiser.
Over eight million people—nearly a tenth of America’s entire population—had been born in Germany or had a German parent. Even more promisingly, their allegiance to the ancestral homeland, to their German identity, remained strong. Why, von Papen was constantly pointing out, the National German-American Alliance, a fraternal organization that lovingly embraced the Fatherland, had three million members.
Across the country in cities like New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were neighborhoods so proudly and visibly Germanic that they were known as Kleines Deutschland. And there were about five hundred German-language newspapers published throughout the United States, with a combined circulation of 1.75 million. In New York alone the
Staats-Zeitung
, an impressively produced and edited paper that vociferously cheered for Germany’s victory in the war, sold about seventy thousand copies each day.
In addition to these sympathetic citizens, a large number of German military reservists had found themselves stranded in America when the war broke out. Many of them were eager to fight for the kaiser, but they were soldiers without an army. In their frustration, all they could do was march in boisterous parades, waving their flags with frantic enthusiasm, their hoarse voices singing “Deutschland über Alles.” The German foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, went so far as to challenge the American ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, with a provocative threat: “You will find there are five hundred thousand German reservists in your country ready to take up arms for their mother country. . . . The United States will be engaged in a civil war.”
Gerard, a wealthy New Yorker whose instincts were more combative than diplomatic, shot back, “There are five hundred thousand lampposts in my country and . . . every German residing in the United States who undertakes to take up arms against America will swing from one of those five hundred thousand lampposts.”
Another source for recruits was America’s large Irish population. It’s a pragmatic axiom of both life and war that any enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Germany was eager to exploit Irish antipathy to Britain’s rule over the Emerald Isle. There were 4.5 million Irish Americans, and the strains of Irish nationalism ran deep. A common enemy, the New York station heads believed, would furnish volunteers for a common cause.
However, it was President Wilson’s neutrality policy that, in its unintentional way, serendipitously created the most effective sources of manpower. According to the president’s strict interpretation, neutrality meant that any ship docked in the United States at the outbreak of the war would not be allowed to join the hostilities. As a result, East Coast ports were filled with German vessels—merchant ships, luxury liners, steamers—for the duration of the war.
And more kept coming. From all corners of the Atlantic, German ships at sea raced away from the guns of the mighty British navy and rushed to the safety of American harbors—where they were promptly interned. Within weeks, more than eighty German ships were lined up in an orderly row along the Hudson River docks, all tied together by strong ropes and watched by U.S. Navy patrol boats. It quickly got so crowded that newly arriving German vessels had to be towed across the Hudson to New Jersey.
