The Spy Net (28 page)

But the Lehigh Valley Railroad officials were not convinced. To them the strange story of Kristoff was not that of a crazy man but that of a man attempting to cover up his tracks. They felt that in his clumsy evasions he had admitted some truths. Factories were being blown up all over the country, and Graentnor and his two suitcases filled with blueprints sounded real.

From the payroll records of the Tidewater Oil Company in Bayonne, where Kristoff had been employed prior to his work at the Eagle Oil Works, they discovered that he had been absent for five work-days in January 1916. Subsequently he had left the employ of the company on 29 February 1916, and had not returned to work until 19 June. After working there for a month he had transferred his services to the Eagle Oil Works. In addition, Mrs Chapman later made an affidavit to the effect that while cleaning Kristoff's room one day shortly before the Black Tom explosion she had found an un-mailed letter to a man named ‘Grandson' or ‘Graentnor' in which he had demanded a large sum of money. The Lehigh Valley Railroad therefore hired Alexander Kassman, an employee of the W. J. Burns Detective Agency, to shadow him.

For almost a year Kassman lived in close contact with Kristoff; they worked at the same chocolate factory and met nightly. Kassman posed as an Austrian anarchist, took Kristoff to anarchists' meetings, and thus won his confidence. At regular intervals Kassman reported to the Burns Agency. A perusal of these reports shows that Kristoff on numerous occasions admitted to Kassman that he had assisted in blowing up Black Tom.

In May 1917 Kassman lost track of Kristoff. Records discovered long afterwards revealed, however, that he employed a well-known ruse to divert attention from himself: on 22 May 1917 he enlisted in the United States Army. A later entry in his army record shows that he was discharged on 12 September 1917 because of tuberculosis and for having enlisted under false enlistment papers.

Kristoff now vanished completely until the spring of 1921, when he was located in prison at Albany, New York, where he had been committed for larceny under the name of ‘John Christie',

Once again the Lehigh Valley attempted to get from him further information about Black Tom. Through the co-operation of the county officials of Albany County, a detective of the Washington detective bureau was placed in a cell next to Kristoff, and together with him was assigned to work in the prison bakery. The detective remained there nineteen days, but Kristoff was on the defensive when approached about Black Tom. He was well aware that a murder charge was involved. He repeated the same story about Graentnor and the blueprints which he had told to the Bayonne police five years previously; and, although he refused to make any admission that he had blown up Black Tom, he did admit that he had been working
with a German group for several weeks and that they had promised him a large sum of money.

Shortly after this he was released from prison and for the time being disappeared.

Of the various investigations which were conducted at the time by the Department of Justice, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the local authorities, and the owners, none was successful. It was not until after 1922, when the Mixed Claims Commission was established, that the American lawyers employed by the owners gradually began by exhaustive investigations to lift the curtain of mystery which surrounded the destruction of Black Tom, and by piecing the intricate clues together began to build up their case against Germany. The story of their dogged fight against the German secret service and their immense difficulties in collecting the evidence is told elsewhere. The evidence they collected led the American investigators to the conviction that Graentnor was Hinsch or at least that Hinsch knew a Graentnor whose name he borrowed as an alias; that Jahnke and Witzke rowed across to Black Tom from the New York side to assist Kristoff in blowing up the terminal; and that two of the Dougherty guards were paid agents of Koenig's.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of 11 January 1917 New York City once again heard the thunderous roar of exploding munitions. For four hours northern New Jersey, New York City, Westchester, and the western end of Long Island listened to a bombardment in which probably half a million 3-inch, high explosive shells were discharged. This explosion took place in the shell-assembling plant of the agency of the Canadian Car & Foundry company, near Kingsland, New Jersey, about 10 miles from the docks in New York harbour. A fire originated suddenly and inexplicably in one of the assembling sheds, Building 30, to be exact; and within a few minutes the whole plant was ablaze. As the flames reached each case of shells and exploded the projection charges, the missiles shot high up in the air and then rained down in the vicinity of the factory.

Luckily the shells were not equipped with detonating fuses; therefore they fell as so much metal without exploding. Kingsland and Rutherford were soon filled with hundreds of refugees who had fled from their homes. Fortunately there were no casualties. The 14,000 workers in the plant and all others nearby, mindful of the danger, fled in a mad rush at the first peal of the fire alarm, escaping only just in the nick of time. The entire plant was destroyed. Here the material damage amounted to $17,000,000.

To understand events it is necessary to know something about the plant at Kingsland and the history of the company.

The war had been in progress but a few months when enormous munitions orders started pouring in to the Canadian Car & Foundry company in Montreal. Large contracts were signed both with England and Russia for the delivery of shells. The Canadian factory was working to capacity when, in the spring of 1915, the company secured an $83,000,000 contract from the Russian government for 5 million shells. In order to fulfil this contract the parent company in Canada formed a separate agency and incorporated it under the laws of New York. In March 1916 the huge plant of the agency was erected close to Kingsland, in Bergen County, New Jersey. Shells, shell-cases, shrapnel, and powder were shipped to Kingsland from over 100 different factories and there assembled for shipment to Russia. At the time of the fire the plant was turning out three million shells per month – it was a worthy objective for the German saboteur. The company was well aware of this, and as a safeguard had erected around the plant a 6 ft fence which was patrolled night and day by guards. None of the 1,400 workers were allowed to enter without a preparatory search, and
it was strictly forbidden for any of them to carry matches on his person.

Building 30, where the fire originated, was entirely devoted to cleaning out shells. The building was furnished with forty-eight workbenches, along which stood the workers. On the bench in front of each worker was a pan of petrol and a small rotating machine operated by a belt. The cleaning process consisted, first, in dusting out the shell with a brush; then, in order to clean out the thin coating of grease with which the shell had been covered on shipment from the factory, a cloth, moistened in the pan of petrol, was wrapped around a piece of wood about a foot long and, after the shell had been fitted on to the rotating machine, inserted into the shell as it slowly turned; finally, a dry cloth was wrapped around the stick, and the shell was dried in a similar manner. It was in the vicinity of one of these machines that the fire was first noticed.

So rapidly did it spread from building to building that within a few minutes the whole mammoth plant was ablaze. Four hours later all that was left of it was a smouldering mass of ruins. 275,000 loaded shells, 300,000 cartridge cases, 100,086 detonators, 439,920 time fuses, large stores of TNT, and more than one million unloaded shells that were either in the shops, or waiting shipment to Russia, were completely destroyed.

Immediately after the fire, the officers of the company commenced an investigation to determine the cause of the blaze. Various workmen were called in and examined by Mr Cahan, one of the directors of the company. It was quickly established that the fire had broken out at the bench of Fiodore Wozniak, one of the workers. A gang foreman, Morris Chester Musson,
who was at the end of the building when the fire originated, described what he saw as follows in an affidavit:

Thomas Steele, another workman, described his observations as follows:

Mr Cahan also gave his impressions of an interview he had with Wozniak:

G. W. A. Woodhouse, who acted as interpreter for Mr Cahan at some of his interviews with Wozniak and who also interviewed Wozniak, separately stated:

Wozniak said that, though he had entered the company’s employ as a Russian, he was actually an ‘Austrian Galician’; he admitted
that he had served his time in the Austrian Army and that he had at one time been an Austrian gendarme.

Wozniak was told by Mr Cahan that he would be needed in New York in connection with further investigations regarding the fire and that he would be kept on the company’s payroll during that period. Detectives were then employed to watch Wozniak. He went to live at the Russian Immigrant Home on Third Street, New York; but shortly thereafter he eluded the detectives and disappeared.

Other investigations by the owners and the police proved abortive; the disaster was left unexplained as yet another mystery of the war. The insurance companies paid out several million dollars in claims, and the owners had to bear the rest of the loss.

The years rolled by, and it was not until after 1922, when the Mixed Claims Commission was formed and the owners of Kingsland filed a claim against Germany for recovery, that the mystery of the fire was largely dispelled. The American investigators finally produced the evidence which they believe proves conclusively that Hinsch procured the services of Wozniak, and that Wozniak, acting under instructions of Herrmann, fired Kingsland, either by the use of incendiary pencils or rags saturated with phosphorus dissolved in some solvent. On the other hand, the Germans claim it was an industrial accident.

The Mixed Claims Commission met on 18 September 1930 at The Hague to render a judgment on the evidence presented by Germany and the United States in the Black Tom and Kingsland cases.

The umpire was the Honourable Roland W. Boyden; the Honourable Chandler P. Anderson was the American commissioner;
and the German commissioner was Dr Wilhelm Kiesselbach. On behalf of the government of the United States there appeared: the Honourable Robert W. Bonynge, American Agent, and Mr H. H. Martin, Counsel to the American Agent. On behalf of Germany: Dr Karl von Lewinski, German agent; Dr Wilhelm Tannenberg, counsel to the German agent; and Mr T. J. Healy, assistant counsel.

After making appropriate reference to the Peace Palace in which they were assembled, an edifice dedicated by the donor, Andrew Carnegie, to the cause of peace and the settlement of international controversies by judicial tribunals, Mr Bonynge outlined the charge:

He then went on to point out the difficulties which Germany had set up in the way of the American investigators to prevent their obtaining information, and quoted the numerous instances of obstruction and lack of co-operation, and stressed specific instances.

What the outcome of the Black Tom and Kingsland cases will be, no one yet knows. It is one thing to feel convinced that
Germany is guilty in both cases; it is another thing to prove it in an international court of law, which almost inevitably is inclined to believe the word of a government as against that of individual witnesses. Furthermore, German agents did not stand on street corners and advertise what they were doing. By 1916 Germany’s sabotage directors in the United States had become veterans in the field and were sufficiently well versed in secret service methods to cover up their tracks. A Hinsch would not reveal his identity to a Kristoff. He would employ just the methods that Graentnor used.

Starting out on a cold trail nearly six years after the destruction of Black Tom and Kingsland, and after most of the German agents and officials involved had scattered to the four corners of the globe, the American investigators have had an almost superhuman task. Precious years had been lost during which many of the contemporary clues had disappeared. The Germans had also been given a breathing spell; and by 1924, the period when the investigation really got under way, the German secret service had once again come to life, the backbone of the German government had been stiffened, and both were ready to fight tooth and nail.

Had the American investigators been on the scene in Berlin just after the Armistice their task would have been simple. They could have demanded and would have received the sabotage documents which the German government has since either destroyed or secreted. Proof that the German secret service files were intact at the period was furnished by a British officer attached to the Inter-Allied Control Commission, who examined the archives and took the Edith Cavell file, which he still has in his possession.

It has also been especially difficult for the American lawyers to convince the three judges of the Mixed Claims Commission that a sovereign country such as Germany would resort to fraud and trickery; yet such artifices are the stock-in-trade of all secret services; and in the Black Tom and Kingsland cases the American claimants have had to cross swords with the German secret service. The German government is the façade; it is her secret service which has supplied the organisation which has kept a close eye, not only on all the German wartime sabotage agents involved, but also on the movements of the American investigators. In the opinion of this author, who spent several years of his life combating the German secret service, the methods it has employed fighting the American claimants run true to form.