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THE GERMAN SECRET SERVICE IN AMERICA 1914-1918
[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_
Count Johann von Bernstorff, the responsible director of Germany's
secret policies in America]
THE GERMAN SECRET
SERVICE IN AMERICA
1914-1918
BY
JOHN PRICE JONES
AUTHOR OF "AMERICA ENTANGLED"
AND
PAUL MERRICK HOLLISTER
[Illustration: Logo]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1918,
BY SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
"It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary
insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no
self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights
as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The
military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They
filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators
and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf.
When they found they could not do that, their agents diligently
spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from
their allegiance--and some of these agents were men connected with
the official embassy of the German Government itself here in our own
capital. They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest
our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us
and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her--and that, not by
indirection but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office in Berlin.
They impudently denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly
executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our
people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our
own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their neighbors with
suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment and surprise whether
there was any community in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What
great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much
as we have desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice.
This flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we
withheld our hand."
--WOODROW WILSON, Flag Day Address
June 14, 1917
INTRODUCTION
A nation at war wants nothing less than complete information of her
enemy. It is hard for the mind to conceive exactly what "complete
information" means, for it includes every fact which may contain the
lightest indication of the enemy strength, her use of that strength,
and her intention. The nation which sets out to obtain complete
information of her enemy must pry into every neglected corner, fish
every innocent pool, and collect a mass of matter concerning the
industrial, social and military organization of the enemy which when
correlated, appraises her strength--and her weakness. Nothing less than
full information will satisfy the mathematical maker of war.
Germany was always precociously fond of international statistics. She
wanted--the present tense is equally applicable--full information of
America and her allies so as to attack their vulnerable points. She
got a ghastly amount of it, and she attacked. This book sets forth how
secret agents of the Teutonic governments acting under orders have
attacked our national life, both before and after our declaration of
war; how men and women in Germany's employ on American soil, planned
and executed bribery, sedition, arson, the destruction of property and
even murder, not to mention lesser violations of American law; how they
sought to subvert to the advantage of the Central Powers the aims of
the Government of the United States; how, in short, they made enemies
of the United States immediately the European war had broken out.
The facts were obtained by the writer first as a reporter on the
_New York Sun_ who for more than a year busied himself with no other
concern, and afterwards in an independent investigation. Some of
them he has cited in a previous work. This book brings the story of
Germany's secret agencies in America up to the early months of 1918.
Because the writer during the past six months has devoted his entire
time to the Liberty Loan, it became necessary for him to leave the
rearrangement of the work entirely in the hands of the co-author, and
he desires to acknowledge his complete indebtedness to the co-author
for undertaking and carrying out an assignment for which the full
measure of reward will be derived from a sharper American consciousness
of the true nature of our enemy at home and abroad.
So we dedicate this chronicle to our country.
JOHN PRICE JONES.
New York, June 1, 1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE ORGANIZATION 1
The economic, diplomatic and military aspects of
secret warfare in America--Germany's peace-time
organization--von Bernstorff, the diplomat--Albert, the
economist--von Papen and Boy-Ed, the men of war.
II THE CONSPIRATORS' TASK 19
The terrain--Lower New York--The consulates--The
economic problem of supplying Germany and
checking supplies to the Allies--The diplomatic problem
of keeping America's friendship--The military
problem in Canada, Mexico, India, etc.--Germany's
denial.
III THE RAIDERS AT SEA 28
The outbreak of war--Mobilization of reservists--The
Hamburg-American contract--The _Berwind_--The
_Marina Quezada_--The _Sacramento_--Naval battles.
IV THE WIRELESS SYSTEM 43
The German Embassy a clearing house--Sayville--German's
knowledge of U. S. wireless--Subsidized
electrical companies--Aid to the raiders--The _Emden_--The
_Geier_--Charles E. Apgar--The German code.
V MILITARY VIOLENCE 60
The plan to raid Canadian ports--The first Welland
Canal plot--Von Papen, von der Goltz and Tauscher--The
project abandoned--Goltz's arrest--The
Tauscher trial--Hidden arms--Louden's plan of invasion.
VI PAUL KOENIG 73
Justice and Metzler--Koenig's personality--von Papen's
checks--The "little black book"--Telephone codes--
Shadowing--Koenig's agents--His betrayal.
VII FALSE PASSPORTS 82
Hans von Wedell's bureau--The traffic in false
passports--Carl Ruroede--Methods of forgery--Adams'
coup--von Wedell's letter to von Bernstorff--Stegler--
Lody--Berlin counterfeits American passports--von Breechow.
VIII INCENDIARISM 100
Increased munitions production--The opening explosions--
Orders from Berlin--Von Papen and Seattle--July,
1915--The Van Koolbergen affair--The
Autumn of 1915--The Pinole explosion.
IX MORE BOMB PLOTS 117
Kaltschmidt and the Windsor explosions--The Port
Huron tunnel--Werner Horn--Explosions embarrass
the Embassy--Black Tom--The second Welland affair--Harry
Newton--The damage done in three years--Waiter
spies.
X FRANZ VON RINTELEN 138
The leak in the National City Bank--The _Minnehaha_--Von
Rintelen's training--His return to America--His
aims--His funds--Smuggling oil--The Krag-Joergensen
rifles--Von Rintelen's flight and capture.
XI SHIP BOMBS 154
Mobilizing destroying agents--The plotters in Hoboken--Von
Kleist's arrest and confession--The _Kirk
Oswald_ trial--Further explosions--The _Arabic_--Robert
Fay--His arrest--The ship plots decrease.
XII LABOR 171
David Lamar--Labor's National Peace Council--The
embargo conference--The attempted longshoremen's
strike--Dr. Dumba's recall.
XIII THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA 190
The mistress of the seas--Plotting in New York--The
_Lusitania's_ escape in February, 1915--The advertised
warning--The plot--May 7, 1915--Diplomatic
correspondence--Gustave Stahl--The results.
XIV COMMERCIAL VENTURES 203
German law in America--Waetzoldt's reports--The
British blockade--A report from Washington--Stopping
the chlorine supply--Speculation in wool--Dyestuffs
and the _Deutschland_--Purchasing phenol--The
Bridgeport Projectile Company--The lost portfolio--The
recall of the attachés--A summary of Dr. Albert's
efforts.
XV THE PUBLIC MIND 225
Dr. Bertling--The _Staats-Zeitung_--George Sylvester
Viereck and _The Fatherland_--Efforts to buy a press
association--Bernhardi's articles--Marcus Braun and
_Fair Play_--Plans for a German news syndicate--Sander,
Wunnenberg, Bacon and motion pictures--The
German-American Alliance--Its purposes--Political
activities--Colquitt of Texas--The "Wisconsin Plan"--
Lobbying--Misappropriation of German Red Cross
funds--Friends of Peace--The American Truth Society.
XVI HINDU-GERMAN CONSPIRACIES 252
The Society for Advancement in India--"Gaekwar
Scholarships"--Har Dyal and _Gadhr_--India in 1914--
Papen's report--German and Hindu agents sent to the
Orient--Gupta in Japan--The raid on von Igel's office--
Chakravarty replaces Gupta--The _Annie Larsen_
and _Maverick_ filibuster--Von Igel's memoranda--Har
Dyal in Berlin--A request for anarchist agents--Ram
Chandra--Plots against the East and West Indies--
Correspondence between Bernstorff and Berlin,
1916--Designs on China, Japan and Africa--Chakravarty
arrested--The conspirators indicted.
XVII MEXICO, IRELAND, AND BOLO 288
Huerta arrives in New York--The restoration plot--German
intrigue in Central America--The Zimmermann
note--Sinn Fein--Sir Roger Casement and the
Easter Rebellion--Bolo Pacha in America and France--A
warning.
XVIII AMERICA GOES TO WAR 320
Bernstorff's request for bribe-money--The President
on German spies--Interned ships seized--Enemy
aliens--Interning German agents--The water-front and
finger-print regulations--Pro-German acts since April,
1917--A warning and a prophecy.
APPENDIX 335
A German Propagandist.
List of Illustrations
Count Johann von Bernstorff _Frontispiece_
PAGE
The German Embassy in Washington 2
Captain Franz von Papen 12
Captain Karl Boy-Ed 16
William J. Flynn 22
Thomas J. Tunney 26
Dr. Karl Buenz 32
Passport given to Horst von der Goltz 64
Paul Koenig 74
Hans von Wedell and his wife 84
Franz von Rintelen 138
Robert Fay 166
Dr. Constantin Dumba 184
The _Lusitania_ 190
Advertisement of the German Embassy 194
Checks signed by Adolf Pavenstedt 230
George Sylvester Viereck 234
Letter from Count von Bernstorff 236
Check from Count von Bernstorff 238
Letter-paper of "The Friends of Peace" 250
Dr. Chakravarty 284
Jeremiah A. O'Leary 302
Paul Bolo Pacha 310
THE GERMAN SECRET SERVICE IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
THE ORGANIZATION
The economic, diplomatic and military aspects of secret warfare in
America--Germany's peace-time organization--von Bernstorff, the
diplomat--Albert, the economist--von Papen and Boy-Ed, the men of
war.
When, in the summer of 1914, the loaded dice fell for war, Germany
began a campaign overseas as thoughtfully forecasted as that first
headlong flood which rolled to the Marne. World-domination was the
Prussian objective. It is quite natural that the United States, whose
influence affected a large part of the world, should have received
swift attention from Berlin. America and Americans could serve
Germany's purpose in numerous ways, and the possible assets of the
United States had been searchingly assayed in Berlin long before the
arrival of "Der Tag."
The day dawned--and Germany found herself hemmed in by enemies. Her
navy did not control the oceans upon which she had depended for a large
percentage of her required food and raw materials, and upon which she
must continue to depend if her output were to keep pace with her war
needs. If surprise-attack should fail to bring the contest to a sudden
and favorable conclusion, Germany was prepared to accept the more
probable alternative of a contest of economic endurance. Therefore, she
reasoned, supplies must continue to come from America.
Of importance scarcely secondary to the economic phase of her warfare
in the United States was the diplomatic problem. Here was a nation of
infinite resources, a people of infinite resource. This nation must
be enlisted on the side of the Central Powers; failing that, must be
kept friendly; under no circumstances was she to be allowed to enlist
with the Allies. One fundamental trait of Americans Germany held too
lightly--their blood-kinship to Britons--and it is a grimly amusing
commentary upon the confidence of the German in bonds Teutonic that he
believed that the antidote to this racial "weakness" of ours lay in the
large numbers of Germans who had settled here and become Americans of
sorts. But the German was alarmingly if not absolutely correct in his
estimate, for upon the conduct and zeal of Germans in America actually
depended much of the success of Germany's diplomatic tactics in America.
[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_
The German Embassy in Washington, headquarters and clearing-house of
German intrigue in the world outside Mittel-Europa, 1914-1917]
The war, then, so far as the United States figured in Germany's
plan, was economic and diplomatic. But it was also military. German
representatives in the United States were bound by oath to coöperate
to their utmost in all military enterprises within their reach. With a
certain few notable exceptions, no such enterprises came within their
reach, and if the reader anticipates from that fact a disappointing
lack of violence in the narrative to follow, let him remember that
"all's fair in war," and that every German activity in the United
States, whether it was economic, diplomatic or military, was carried on
with a certain Prussian thoroughness which was chiefly characterized by
brutal violence.
We have come to believe that thoroughness is the first and last word in
German organization. Any really thorough organization must be promptly
convertible to new activities without loss of motion. If these new
activities are unexpected, the change is more or less of an experiment,
and its possibilities are not ominous. But truly dangerous is the
organization which transfers suddenly to coping with the expected.
Germany had expected war for forty years.
Her peace-time organization in America consisted of four executives:
an ambassador, a fiscal agent, a military attaché, and a naval attaché.
Its chief was the ambassador, comparable in his duties and privileges
to the president of a corporation, the representative with full
authority to negotiate with other organizations, and responsible to his
board of directors--the foreign office in Berlin. Its treasurer was
the fiscal agent. And its department heads were the military and naval
attachés, each responsible in some degree to his superiors in matters
of policy and finances, and answerable also to Berlin.
The functions of the chief were two-fold. Convincing evidence
produced by the State Department has placed at his door the ultimate
responsibility for executing Germany's commands not in the United
States alone, but throughout all of the world excepting Middle Europe.
Under his eyes passed Berlin's instructions to her envoys in both
Americas, and through his hands passed their reports. He directed
and delegated the administration of all German policy in the western
world and the far east, and of course directed all strictly diplomatic
enterprises afoot in the United States.
Germany could hardly have chosen an abler envoy than this latest of all
the Bernstorffs, Johann, a statesman whose ancestors for generations
had been Saxon diplomats. A glance at the man's countenance convinced
one of his powers of concentration: the many lines of his face seemed
to focus on a point between his eyebrows. And yet his expression
was hardly grim. The modeling of his head was unusually strong, his
features sensitive, with no trace of weakness. If there had been
weakness about his mouth, it was concealed by the conventional ferocity
of a Hohenzollern moustache, and yet those untruthful lips could
part in an ingratiating smile which flashed ingenuous friendliness.
His frame was tall and slender, his mannerisms suggested carefully
bridled nervous activity. The entire appearance of the man may best be
described by a much-abused term--he was "distinguished."
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. During
the early days of the war the promise of social sponsorship which any
embassy in Washington could extend proved bait for a number of ingénues
of various ages, with ambition and mischief in their minds, and the
gracious Ambassador played them smoothly and dexterously. Mostly they
were not German women, for the German women of America were not so
likely to be useful socially, nor as a type so astute as to qualify
them for von Bernstorff's delicate work. To those whom he chose to
see he was courteous, and superficially frank almost to the point of
naïveté. The pressure of negotiation between Washington and Berlin
became more and more exacting as the war progressed, yet he found time
to command a campaign whose success would have resulted in disaster
to the United States. That he was not blamed for the failure of that
campaign when he returned to Germany in April, 1917, is evidenced
by his prompt appointment to the court of Turkey, a difficult and
important post, and in the case of Michaelis, a stepping-stone to the
highest post in the Foreign Office.
Upon the shoulders of Dr. Heinrich Albert, privy counsellor and
fiscal agent of the German Empire, fell the practical execution of
German propaganda throughout America. He was the American agent of
a government which has done more than any other to coöperate with
business towards the extension of influence abroad, on the principle
that "the flag follows the constitution." As such he had had his
finger on the pulse of American trade, had catalogued exhaustively
the economic resources of the country, and held in his debt, as his
nation's treasurer in America, scores of bankers, manufacturers and
traders to whom Germany had extended subsidy. As such also he was the
paymaster of the Imperial secret diplomatic and consular agents.
You could find him almost any day until the break with Germany in a
small office in the Hamburg-American Building (a beehive of secret
agents) at No. 45 Broadway, New York. He was tall and slender, and
wore the sombre frock coat of the European business man with real
grace. His eyes were blue and clear, his face clean-shaven and faintly
sabre-scarred, and his hair blond. He impressed one as an unusual young
man in a highly responsible position. His greeting to visitors, of whom
he had few, was punctilious, his bow low, and his manner altogether
polite. He encouraged conversation rather than offered it. He had none
of the "hard snap" of the energetic, outspoken, brusque American man of
business. Dr. Albert was a smooth-running, well-turned cog in the great
machine of Prussian militarism.
Upon him rested the task of spending between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000
a week for German propaganda. He spent thirty million at least--and
only Germany knows how much more--in secret agency work, also known
by the uglier names of bribery, sedition and conspiracy. He admitted
that he wasted a half million or more. He had a joint account with
Bernstorff in the Chase National Bank, New York, which amounted at
times to several millions. His resources gave weight to his utterances
in the quiet office overlooking Broadway, or in the German Club in
Central Park South, or in the consulates or hotels of Chicago and New
Orleans and San Francisco, to which he made occasional trips to confer
with German business men.
His colleagues held him in high esteem. His methods were quiet and
successful, and his participation in the offences against America's
peace might have passed unproven had he not been engaged in a
too-absorbing conversation one day in August, 1915, upon a Sixth Avenue
elevated train. He started up to leave the train at Fiftieth Street,
and carelessly left his portfolio behind him--to the tender care of
a United States Secret Service man. It contained documents revealing
his complicity in enterprises the magnitude of which beggars the
imagination. The publication of certain of those documents awoke the
slumbering populace to a feeling of chagrin and anger almost equal to
his own at the loss of his dossier. And yet he stayed on in America,
and returned with the ambassadorial party to Germany only after the
severance of diplomatic relations in 1917, credited with expert
generalship on the economic sector of the American front.
Germany's military attaché to the United States was Captain Franz
von Papen. His mission was the study of the United States army. In
August, 1914, it may be assumed that he had absorbed most of the useful
information of the United States army, which at that moment was no
superhuman problem. In July of that year he was in Mexico, observing,
among other matters, the effect of dynamite explosions on railways.
He was quite familiar with Mexico. According to Admiral von Hintze he
had organized a military unit in the lukewarm German colony in Mexico
City, and he used one or more of the warring factions in the southern
republic to test the efficacy of various means of warfare.
The rumble of a European war sent him scurrying northward. From Mexico
on July 29 he wired Captain Boy-Ed--of whom more presently--in New York
to
" ... arrange business for me too with Pavenstedt,"
which referred to the fact that Boy-Ed had just engaged office space in
the offices of G. Amsinck & Company, New York, which was at that time
a German house of which Adolph Pavenstedt was the president, but which
has since been taken over by American interests. And he added:
"Then inform Lersner. The Russian attaché ordered back to
Washington by telegraph. On outbreak of war have intermediaries
locate by detective where Russian and French intelligence office."
The latter part of the message is open to two interpretations: that
Boy-Ed was to have detectives locate the Russian and French secret
service officers; or that Boy-Ed was to place German spies in those
offices.
Captain von Papen reported to his ministry of war anent the railway
explosions:
"I consider it out of the question that explosives prepared in
this way would have to be reckoned with in a European war...."
a significant opinion, which he changed later.
What of the man himself? He was all that "German officer" suggested at
that time to any one who had traveled in Germany. His military training
had been exhaustive. Though he had not seen "active service," his life,
from the early youth when he had been selected from his gymnasium
fellows for secret service in Abteilung III of the great bureau, had
been unusually active. He had traveled as a civilian over various
countries, drawing maps, harking to the sentiment of the people, and
checking from time to time the operations of resident German agents
abroad. His disguises were thorough, as this incident will illustrate:
In Hamburg, at the army riding school where von Papen was trained,
young officers are taught the French style. Yet one fine morning in
Central Park he stopped to chat with an acquaintance who had bought a
mare. Von Papen admired the mount, promptly named its breed, and told
in what counties in Ireland the best specimens of that breed could
be found--information called up from a riding tour he had made over
the length and breadth of Ireland. It is commonly said that horsemen
trained in the French style cling to its mannerisms, but a cavalier
revealing those mannerisms in Ireland, where the style is exclusively
English, would have attracted undue attention. So he had disguised even
his horsemanship!
[Illustration: _Copyright, International News Service_
Captain Franz von Papen]
A man who moves constantly about among more or less unsuspecting
peoples seeking their military weakness becomes intolerant. Tolerance
is scarcely a German military trait, and in that respect Captain
von Papen was consistently loyal to his own superior organization.
"I always say to those idiotic Yankees they had better hold their
tongues," he wrote to his wife in a letter which fell later into the
hands of those same "bloedsinnige" Yankees. He was inordinately proud
of his facility in operating unobserved, arrogant of his ability, and
blunt in his criticism of his associates. He telegraphed Boy-Ed on one
occasion to be more cautious. The gracious colleague replied, in a
letter:
"Dear Papen: A secret agent who returned from Washington this
evening made the following statement: 'The Washington people
are very much excited about von Papen and are having a constant
watch kept on him. They are in possession of a whole heap of
incriminating evidence against him. They have no evidence against
Count B. and Captain B-E (!).'"
And Boy-Ed, a trifle optimistically, perhaps, added:
"In this connection I would suggest with due diffidence that
perhaps the first part of your telegram is worded rather too
emphatically."
Von Papen was a man of war, a Prussian, the Feldmarschal of the Kaiser
in America. In appearance he bespoke his vigor: he was well set up,
rawboned, with a long nose, prominent ears, keen eyes and a strong
lower jaw. He was energetic in speech and swift in formulating daring
plans. In those first frantic weeks after the declaration of war he
reached out in all directions to snap taut the strings that held
his organization together--German reservists who had been peaceful
farmers, shopkeepers or waiters, all over the United States, were
mobilized for service, and paraded through Battery Park in New York
shouting "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles!" to the strains
of the Austrian hymn, while they waited for Papen's orders from a
building near by, and picked quarrels with a counter procession of
Frenchmen screaming the immortal "Marseillaise." Up in his office sat
the attaché, summoning, assigning, despatching his men on missions
that were designed to terrorize America as the spiked helmets were
terrorizing Belgium at that moment.
And he, too, failed. Although von Papen marshaled his consuls, his
reservists, his thugs, his women, and his skilled agents, for a
programme of violence the like of which America had never experienced,
the military phase of the war was not destined for decision here, and
there is again something ironical in the fact that the arrogance of
Captain von Papen's outrages hastened the coming of war to America and
the decline of Captain von Papen's style of warfare in America.
The Kaiser's naval attaché at Washington was Karl Boy-Ed, the child
of a German mother and a Turkish father, who had elected a naval
career and shown a degree of aptitude for his work which qualified
him presently for the post of chief lieutenant to von Tirpitz. He was
one of the six young officers who were admitted to the chief councils
of the German navy, as training for high executive posts. In the
capacity of news chief of the Imperial navy, Boy-Ed carried on two
highly successful press campaigns to influence the public on the eve of
requests for heavy naval appropriations, the second, in 1910, calling
for 400,000,000 marks. He spread broadcast through cleverly contrived
pamphlets and through articles placed in the subsidized press, a
national resentment against British naval dominion. His duties took him
all over the world as naval observer, and he may be credited more than
casually with weaving the plan-fabric of marine supremacy with which
Germany proposed in due time to envelop the world.
So he impressed diplomatic Washington in 1911 as a polished
cosmopolite. Polished he was, measured by the standards of diplomatic
Washington, for rare was the young American of Boy-Ed's age who had
his cultivation, his wide experience, and his brilliant charm. He was
sought after by admiring mothers long before he was sought after by the
Secret Service; he moved among the clubs of Washington and New York
making intimates of men whose friendship and confidence would serve
the Fatherland, cloaking his real designs by frivolity and frequent
attendances at social functions. His peace-time duties had been to
study the American navy; to familiarize himself with its ship power and
personnel, with its plans for expansion, its theories of strategy, its
means of supply, and finally, with the coast defenses of the country.
He had learned his lesson, and furnished Berlin with clear reports.
On those reports, together with those of his colleagues in other
countries, hinged Germany's readiness to enter war, for it would have
been folly to attempt a war of domination with America an unknown,
uncatalogued naval power. (It will be well to recall that the submarine
is an American invention, and that Germany's greatest submarine
development took place in the years 1911-1914.)
[Illustration: _Copyright, International News Service_
Captain Karl Boy-Ed (on the right)]
And then, suddenly, he dropped the cloak. The Turk in him stood at
attention while the German in him gave him sharp orders--commands to
be carried out with Oriental adroitness and Prussian finish. Then
those who had said lightly that "Boy-Ed knows more about our navy than
Annapolis itself" began to realize that they had spoken an alarming
truth. His war duties were manifold. Like von Papen, he had his corps
of reservists, his secret agents, his silent forces everywhere ready
for active coöperation in carrying out the naval enterprises Germany
should see fit to undertake in Western waters.
America learned gradually of the machinations of the four executives,
Bernstorff, Albert, Papen and Boy-Ed. America had not long to wait
for evidences of their activity, but it was a long time before the
processes of investigation revealed their source. It was inevitable
that they could not work undiscovered for long, and they seem to have
realized that they must do the utmost damage at top speed. Their own
trails were covered for a time by the obscure identities of their
subordinates. The law jumps to no conclusions. Their own persons were
protected by diplomatic courtesy. It required more than two years
of tedious search for orthodox legal evidence to arraign these men
publicly in their guilt, and when that evidence had finally been
obtained, and Germany's protest of innocence had been deflated, it was
not these men who suffered, but their country, and the price she paid
was war with America.
A hundred or more of their subordinates have been convicted of various
criminal offenses and sent to prison. Still more were promptly interned
in prison camps at the outbreak of war in 1917. The secret army
included all types, from bankers to longshoremen. Many of them were
conspicuous figures in American public life, and of these no small
part were allowed to remain at large under certain restrictions--and
under surveillance. Germany's army in the United States was powerful
in numbers; the fact that so many agents were working destruction
probably hastened their discovery; the loyalty of many so-called
German-Americans was always questionable. The public mind, confused
as it had never been before by the news of war, was groping about for
sound fundamentals, and was being tantalized with false principles by
the politicians. Meanwhile Count von Bernstorff was watching Congress
and the President, Dr. Albert was busy in great schemes, Captain von
Papen was commanding an active army of spies, and Captain Boy-Ed was
engaged in a bitter fight with the British navy.