The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (12 page)

Von Rintelen made a great game of it, charming his captors and winning their sympathy. He even managed to survive the accusations of a Belgian waiter who used to work at the Hotel Bristol in Berlin, and who now recognised him during a tea break at the hotel in Ramsgate where he had been taken for questioning. Von Rintelen was released, and with happy thoughts of the Fatherland on his mind was being ferried back to the
Noordam
to resume his voyage when his luck ran out. He was recalled to land for one more interview. At Scotland Yard.

This time his interrogator was none other than Blinker Hall, who had brought with him Lord Richard Herschell, his private secretary and a key member of the Room 40 codebreaking team. At a heavy table to the left of the fireplace sat the bespectacled head of Special Branch, Sir Basil Thomson, a close friend of Hall. Von Rintelen knew that he had to play his best game yet if he hoped to evade the high-powered inquisition in front of him.

He thought he had succeeded in convincing Hall and his team that he really was a Swiss businessman, and was taken, as per his demand, to the Swiss legation for protection. While there, he heard his British minders talking about Blinker Hall’s canny decision to contact the Swiss authorities in Berne to see if Emile Gaché was at home, or if he could be found in London.

Von Rintelen quickly realised that if his ruse was uncovered, the British could send him back to America as a spy, in store for undoubtedly rough justice. On a rainy August night in London, he put his German uniform back on, so to speak, and demanded an audience with Blinker Hall, where he reintroduced himself by saying, ‘Captain Rintelen begs to report to you, sir, as a prisoner of war.’

Hall, appreciative of the theatrics but as ever one step ahead, congratulated von Rintelen on his subterfuge, and Lord Herschell made them all cocktails. Then the two men, in the guise of officers and gentlemen, took von Rintelen to their club for dinner before dispatching him to prison camp. It was during this dinner that the British showed just how deep their intelligence ran. As von Rintelen recalled in his memoir:

‘You need not have waited so long for that cocktail I gave you at the Admiralty, Captain,’ said Lord Herschell to Rintelen when they were seated in a comfortable corner of the club.

‘So long?’

‘We expected you four weeks ago. Our preparations had been made for your reception, but you took your time. Why did you not leave New York as soon as you got the telegram?’

Suddenly von Rintelen realised that the British had been reading German telegrams for as long as he had been in America. Just to drive home the point, Blinker Hall pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and read aloud the very message that von Rintelen had received from Boy-Ed calling him back to Germany. Indeed, the British had only lost track of von Rintelen when he had first brought the new code to New York.

‘You had hardly got there when they started using it,’ Hall told him, enjoying himself. ‘Of course, we had been informed that you were coming, that you were going to America and taking a new code over; all that had been telegraphed to New York, and we had read it. From that moment we were unable to decipher your people’s telegrams any longer, till we got hold of the new code too.’

As von Rintelen was driven off to prison camp, he was staggered that the British knew everything that was sent between the USA and Germany. But he also knew that he had left one other plan in place that hadn’t been telegrammed to anyone. It would be the Dark Invader’s fatal legacy.

On the warm afternoon of 24 July 1915, the publishing propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, editor of
The Fatherland
, departed the Hamburg America Line offices in Lower Manhattan in the company of another man. The duo caught the Sixth Avenue elevated train uptown, and, busily conversing in German, didn’t notice that they were being followed by Frank Burke, a wiry five-foot-seven bantamweight who was the head of the US Secret Service’s special section, quietly created by Woodrow Wilson in May 1915 in the wake of the
Lusitania
sinking. Burke’s brief was to ferret out spies among the millions of people in the USA with direct or distant connections to Germany and Austria – immigrants and US citizens alike.

Travelling with the 46-year-old Burke on that Saturday in July was agent W. H. Houghton, the two feds on a seemingly uneventful tail that would in fact turn out to be the first major intelligence victory by the USA in the war at home.

As Burke and Houghton followed Viereck and his companion, they couldn’t help but notice the deference with which Viereck spoke to the other man, who with his trim moustache and fat briefcase looked like an accountant. It was the sabre scars on the man’s cheeks, however, that were the catalyst for Burke to think hard about where he had seen that face before.

Viereck got off the train at 23rd Street and Houghton followed him. Burke stayed on the train to watch the man whom he now realised was Dr Heinrich Albert, Germany’s commercial attaché to the United States. A young woman came and sat next to Albert, who moved his briefcase and lost himself in a book. Or he fell asleep. Accounts vary, with some suggesting that Viereck, acting as a double agent, had drugged Albert so that he would nod off, and that the Czech agent Emanuel Voska was actually the one who slipped into the story and snatched his briefcase. The version that Frank Burke recalled with certainty when he was 73 years old was that Heinrich Albert nearly missed his stop at 50th Street. At the last minute, he leapt up and hurried off the train. The young woman called after Albert that he had forgotten his briefcase, but Frank Burke already had it in hand, and told her to relax, it belonged to him. Then he followed Albert off the train.

By the time Albert had realised what he had left behind, Burke – who could run 100 yards in ten seconds – had sprinted down the stairs to the street and on to a trolley car. Albert, desperate and sweating, ran after him, but Burke told the trolley conductor that the German was deranged, and the conductor moved the trolley onward. Albert could only watch as the secrets of Germany’s war in America rode off in the arms of the US Secret Service.

The papers in the briefcase included accounts of the pro-German stories that von Bernstorff had planted in the US newspapers. There were documents relating to how the American Correspondent Film Company had been set up to produce front-line propaganda for American audiences. There were accounts of monies paid to professors to write flattering books about Germany, and most incriminating of all, documents relating to the creation of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, a phoney arms manufacturer that would buy up munitions supplies and services solely in order to deprive the Allies of both.

The US government couldn’t admit that one of its agents had stolen the briefcase of a German diplomat – an Imperial Privy Councillor, no less, who enjoyed immunity from prosecution. So President Wilson’s trusted adviser and confidante, the obliging Colonel Edward House, leaked the documents to the press.

Heinrich Albert had placed newspaper ads to retrieve his lost briefcase, and on 15 August he was mortified to see that the newspapers had responded: splashed across the front page of the
New York World
was his damning correspondence. The newspaper, without revealing where it had obtained the evidence, itemised Germany’s spy crimes, and named von Bernstorff, von Papen and Albert – jokingly referred to thereafter as the ‘Minister Without Portfolio’ – as foremost in their perpetration.

Despite all this publicity, Woodrow Wilson still played the caution card, seeing himself as the world’s peacemaker, while Ambassador von Bernstorff coolly characterised the incident as some unsporting American trick and, moreover, not of any consequence: ‘The affair was merely a storm in a teacup; the papers as published afforded no evidence of any action either illegal or dishonourable.’ In fact, von Bernstorff was covering the fact that despite his position, he wasn’t privileged to know everything that German agents were getting up to in the US – von Papen and his crew used their own set of codes to communicate with Berlin, which the British intercepted but von Bernstorff did not.

Even so, the evidence was piling up. From the time of Albert’s lapse on the Sixth Avenue train to the middle of December, there were 23 acts of sabotage in the United States, or on ships sailing from her, as well as two in Canada carried out by German agents based in Detroit. Trains carrying munitions exploded, ships caught fire, munitions factories were destroyed by explosions or fires, and German agents were arrested and confessed, implicating Franz von Papen as the mastermind of their actions. The net was tightening.

On 19 August, another White Star passenger liner, the RMS
Arabic
, was torpedoed without warning by a U-boat, and sank in just nine minutes off the coast of Ireland, near the spot where the
Lusitania
had gone down three months earlier. Forty-four people died, including three Americans, and the United States was now confronting a crisis: if the Germans had sunk the
Arabic
deliberately, they would break off diplomatic relations, a prelude to war.

On the night that the
Arabic
went down, Count von Bernstorff was having dinner on the roof terrace of the Ritz-Carlton with Dr Constantin Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the US, and James Archibald, an American journalist. Archibald’s German sympathies had landed him on the payroll to write pro-German stories in American papers, deliver pro-German lectures, and courier sensitive documents through the British blockade to Germany and Austria.

Dumba gave Archibald a packet of documents to take across the Atlantic, but the British knew he was coming because of the messages that Blinker Hall’s team was now decoding with the help of Germany’s no longer ‘most secret’ code, which had been delivered to von Bernstorff and company in April 1915. On 1 September, Archibald was hauled off the ship at Falmouth, and British agents searched for his briefcase containing the documents from Dumba. They even tore out wall panels in the saloons and lounges, but couldn’t find it. There was one place left to look: the captain’s safe, a sacrosanct spot staunchly defended by the ship’s skipper. Blinker Hall’s response to a naval protocol that he knew so well was unsentimental. He sent a squad of sailors and a couple of locksmiths on board to issue an ultimatum: if the captain didn’t open his safe, they’d open it for him. The captain opened the safe.

In Archibald’s briefcase, the British found documents from the Austrian ambassador and his government planning to launch strikes and labour unrest at American munitions plant, with von Papen’s approval. In one letter Dumba disparaged President Wilson, and in another, from von Papen to his wife, the United States was the target: ‘I always say to these idiotic Yankees that they should shut their mouths and better still be full of admiration for all that heroism.’

Despite the secret agreement between Germany and the USA that the Germans would no longer torpedo passenger liners, and German insistence that the sinking of the
Arabic
was an accident, Woodrow Wilson had finally seen enough, relatively speaking. He ordered an investigation into the activities of the German military and naval attachés in the United States, which produced more evidence of the secret war waged from within by von Papen and Boy-Ed. Wilson demanded their expulsion, and the duo were declared
personae non gratae
and recalled to Germany, despite von Bernstorff’s protests of persecution: ‘both [von Papen] and Captain Boy-Ed were constantly attacked in the anti-German press, and accused of being behind every fire and every strike in any munition factory in the United States’.

It was the returning Franz von Papen that Blinker Hall now had in his sights. When his ship appeared off the coast of England, a British boarding party paid a visit. Even though von Papen was travelling under an American guarantee of safe conduct, this did not include all the incriminating documents, enciphered and not, that he carried in his steamer trunk. In his possession was a chequebook showing deposits of more than $3 million from the secret war’s paymaster Heinrich Albert, as well as stubs bearing the names of suspected or already subpoenaed German saboteurs. Hall released details of his haul to the newspapers, hoping that this further proof of German treachery would bring America’s warriors to the Allied side.

It was not yet to be.

Back in Berlin, von Papen and Boy-Ed were decorated and dispatched back into service, with von Papen winding up a battalion commander and seeing action at the Somme and Vimy Ridge before promotion to the general staff and transfer to Palestine. Boy-Ed resumed work with German naval intelligence. The expulsion of two major players in Germany’s campaign in America would seem to have been a winning blow for the Allied cause, though the Germans were far from defeated in the USA. But now the Americans were starting to fight back.

Despite the efforts of Blinker Hall’s men to help the country they hoped would soon become their ally by gathering intelligence the US could not, Germany’s subversion and sabotage campaign benefited immensely from the primitive and unwieldy state of the USA’s secret services. When war broke out in August 1914, the United States had no national security service it could command to ensure that it didn’t become a North American front for a European conflict. As a result, it relied on the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (which would add the prefix ‘Federal’ in 1935), the Secret Service of the Department of the Treasury, and local police forces, abetted by private contractors such as the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the venerable private investigation firm formed in 1850 that had been personal bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War. The Pinkertons, along with Dougherty’s agency, buttressed the paltry 300 federal agents collecting and countering intelligence for the USA in 1914. As far as German sabotage and spying in the United States went, the Americans still looked at it through the lens of police work.

This meant that Captain Thomas Tunney, leader of the New York City Police Department’s bomb squad, had his work cut out. Tunney, with his trim moustache and gimlet cop’s eye, had joined the NYPD in 1897, when he was 24 years old. As an Irish Catholic serving in a police force with a formidable Irish Catholic presence, Tunney’s intelligence, integrity and diligence – more than his tribal identity – propelled his career forward.