Their Ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff; their military attaché,
Capt. Franz von Papen; their naval attaché, Capt. Karl Boy-Ed; their
financial agent, Dr. Heinrich Albert, were the diplomatic and social
spies who engineered and supplied with necessary information the
vicious under-agents of the spy system of which sedition and violence
were the shameful instruments.
With patient diligence, John Price Jones, a newspaper man, attached to
the New York _Sun_, collected—from documentary evidence, from Secret
Service officials and by means of his own investigation over a period
of eighteen months—a vast amount of valuable and exact information, the
vital part of which Small, Maynard and Company subsequently published
in book form, under the title _The German Secret Service in America_.
The information in that book, substantiated by governmental and other
evidence, is authoritative, and we are indebted to it for much of the
matter in this article.
Of the organization of the spy system he says:
“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.