THE WIRELESS SYSTEM
The German Embassy a clearing house--Sayville--Germany's knowledge
of U. S. wireless--Subsidized electrical companies--Aid to the
raiders--The _Emden_--The _Geier_--Charles E. Apgar--The German
code.
The coördination of a nation's fighting forces depends upon that
nation's system of communication. In no previous war in the world's
history has a general staff known more of the enemy's plans. We look
back almost patronizingly across a century to the semaphore which
transmitted Napoleon's orders from Paris to the Rhine in three hours;
we can scarcely realize that if the report of a scout had ever got
through to General Hooker, warning him that a suspicious wagon train
had been actually sighted a few miles away, Stonewall Jackson's
flanking march at Chancellorsville would have been checked in its first
stages. In this greatest of all wars a British battery silences a
German gun within two minutes after the allied airman has "spotted" the
Boche. The air is "Any Man's Land." What lies beyond the hill is no
longer the great hazard, for the wireless is flashing.
If the Allied general staffs had been provided with X-ray
field-glasses, and had trained those glasses on a certain brownstone
house in Massachusetts Avenue, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Streets, in Washington, they would have been interested in the
perfection of the German system of communication. They would have
observed the secretarial force of the Imperial Embassy opening and
sorting letters from confederates throughout the country, many so
phrased as to be quite harmless, others apparently meaningless. The
Embassy served as a clearing-house for all German and Allied air
messages.
Long before the war broke out the German government had seen the
military necessity for a complete wireless system. Subsidies were
secretly granted to the largest of the German electrical manufacturers
to establish stations all over the globe. Companies were formed
in America, ostensibly financed with American funds, but on plans
submitted to German capitalists and through them to the German Foreign
Office for approval. Thus was the Sayville station erected. As
early as 1909 a German captain, Otto von Fossberg, had been sent to
America to select a site on Long Island for the station. "The German
government is backing the scheme," he told a friend, although the
venture was publicly supposed to be under the auspices of the "Atlantic
Communication Company," in which certain prominent German-Americans
held stock and office. In 1911 an expert, Fritz von der Woude, paid
Sayville a visit long enough to install the apparatus; he came under
strict injunctions not to let his mission become generally known.
Boy-Ed watched the progress of the Sayville station with close interest
and considerable authority, and his familiarity with wireless threw
him into frequent and cordial relationship with the United States
naval wireless men and the Department of Commerce. On one occasion
the Department requested a confidential report from a radio inspector
of the progress made by foreign interests in wireless; the report
prepared went to Germany before it came to the hands of the United
States government. Again: the German government was informed in 1914
by Boy-Ed in Washington that the United States intended to erect a
wireless station at a certain point in the Philippines; full details,
as the Navy Department had developed them, were forwarded, and the
German government immediately directed a large electrical manufacturer
in Berlin to bid for the work. The site the United States had selected
was not altogether satisfactory to Germany, for some reason, so the
German government added this delicious touch: a confidential map of the
Philippines was turned over to the electrical house, with orders to
submit a plan for the construction of the American station on a site
which had been chosen by the German General War Staff!
The _Providence Journal_ claims to have discovered an interesting
German document--probably genuine--which reveals the scope of the
Teutonic wireless project. It was a chart, bearing a rectangle labeled
in German with the title of the German Foreign Office. From this
"trunk" radiated three "branches," each bearing a name, and each
terminating in the words. "Telefunken Co." The first branch was labeled
"Gesellschaft für Drahtlose Telegraphie, Berlin"; the second, "Siemens
& Halske, Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Berlin"; the third, "Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, Berlin."
From each branch grew still further subdivisions, labeled with the
names of electrical firms or agents all over the world, and all subject
to the direction of the German government. These names follow:
From No. 1: Atlantic Communication Co. (Sayville), New York;
Australasian Wireless Co., Ltd., Sydney (Australia); Telefunken
East Asiatic Wireless Telegraph Co., Ltd., Shanghai; Maintz & Co.
(of Amsterdam, Holland), Batavia (Java); Germann & Co. (of Hamburg),
Manila; B. Grimm & Co., Bangkok; Paetzold & Eppinger, Havana;
Spiegelthal, La Guayra; Kruger & Co., Guayaquil; Brahm & Co., Lima; E.
Quicke, Montevideo; R. Schulbach, Thiemer & Co. (of Hamburg), Central
America; Sesto Sesti, Rome; A. D. Zacharion & Cie., Athens; J. K.
Dimitrijievic, Belgrade.
From No. 2: Siemens Bros. & Co., Ltd., London; Siemens & Halske,
Vienna; Siemens & Halske, Petrograd; Siemens & Halske (K. G. Frank),
New York; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Sofia; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke,
Constantinople; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Dansk Aktsielskab),
Copenhagen; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Denki Kabushiki Kaishe), Tokio;
Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Companhia Brazileira de Electricidade), Rio
de Janeiro; Siemens-Schuckert, Ltd., Buenos Ayres; Siemens-Schuckert,
Ltd., Valparaiso.
From No. 3: A. E. G. Union Electrique, Brussels; Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, Basel; A. E. G. Elecktriska Aktiebolaget,
Stockholm; A. E. G. Electricitats Aktieselskabet, Christiania; A. E. G.
Thomson-Houston Iberica, Madrid; A. E. G. Compania Mexicana, Mexico;
A. E. G. Electrical Company of South Africa, Johannesburg.
The German manufacturers evinced a keen interest in the project of
a wireless plant in Nicaragua, laying special stress on the point
that "permanent stations in this neighborhood" would be valuable "if
the Panama Canal is fortified." From Sayville station the German
plan projected powerful wireless plants in Mexico, at Para, Brazil;
at Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; at Cartagena, Colombia, and at Lima,
Peru. A point in which Captain H. Retzmann, the German naval attaché
in 1911, was at one time interested was whether signals could be
sent to the German fleet in the English Channel from America without
England's interference. German naval wireless experts supervised the
construction, and although the stations were nominally civilian-manned,
and purely commercial, in reality the operators were often men of
unusual scientific intellect, whose talents were sadly underpaid if
they received no more than operators' salaries.
Gradually and quietly, Germany year by year spread her system of
wireless communication over Central and South America, preparing
her machinery for war. Over her staff of operators and mechanics
she appointed an expert in the full confidence of the Embassy at
Washington, and in close contact with Captain Boy-Ed. To the system of
German-owned commercial plants in the United States he added amateur
stations of more or less restricted radius, as auxiliary apparatus.
When the war broke out, and scores of German merchantmen were confined
to American ports by the omnipresence of the British fleet at sea, the
wireless of the interned ships was added to the system. Thus in every
port lay a source of information for the Embassy. The United States
presently ordered the closing of all private wireless stations, and
those amateurs who had been listening out of sheer curiosity to the
air conversation cheerfully took down their antennae. Not so, however,
a prominent woman in whose residence on Fifth Avenue lay concealed
a powerful receiving apparatus. Nor did the interned ships obey the
order: apparatus apparently removed was often rigged in the shelter
of a funnel, and operated by current supplied from an apparently
innocent source. And the secret service discovered stations also in
the residences of wealthy Hoboken Germans, and in a German-American
"mansion" in Hartford, Connecticut.
The operators of these stations made their reports regularly through
various channels to the Embassy. There the messages were sorted,
and it is safe to say that Count von Bernstorff was cognizant of the
position of every ship on the oceans. He was in possession of both the
French and British secret admiralty codes. In the light of that fact,
the manoeuvres of the British and German fleets in the South Atlantic
and Pacific became simply a game of chess, Germany following every move
of the British fleet under Admiral Cradock, knowing the identity of his
ships, their gun-power, and their speed. When she located the _Good
Hope_, _Monmouth_, _Glasgow_ and _Otranto_ off Coronel, Berlin, through
von Bernstorff, gave Admiral von Spee the word to strike, with the
results which we have observed: the sinking of the _Monmouth_ and _Good
Hope_, and the crippling of the _Glasgow_ and _Otranto_.
Throughout August, September and October, 1914, the system operated
perfectly. Bernstorff and Boy-Ed were confronted with the problem of
keeping the German fleet alive as long as possible, and inflicting as
much damage as possible on enemy shipping. Allied merchantmen left
port almost with impunity, and were gathered in by German raiders who
had been informed from Washington of the location of their prey. But
the defeat off Chile apparently was conclusive proof to England that
Germany knew her naval code, and the events of November and December
indicate that England changed her code.
It was while engaged in escort duty to the first transport fleet of the
Australian Expeditionary Force that the Australian cruiser _Sydney_
received wireless signals from Cocos Island shrieking that the _Emden_
was near by. The _Emden_, having been deprived for some time of news
of enemy ships, had gone there to destroy the wireless station, having
in the past three months sunk some $12,500,000 of British shipping.
Even while the island's distress signals were crashing out, the _Emden_
had her own wireless busy in an effort to drown the call for help, or
"jam" the air. On the following morning, November 9, the _Sydney_ came
up with the enemy. A sharp action followed. The _Sydney's_ gunfire was
accurate enough to cause the death of 7 officers and 108 men; her own
losses were 4 killed and 12 wounded; the _Emden_ fled, ran aground on
North Keeling Island, one of the Cocos group, and ultimately became a
total wreck.
In the same month the cruiser _Geier_ fled the approach of the British
and found refuge in Honolulu harbor. Her commander, Captain Karl
Grasshof, made the mistake of keeping a diary. That document, which
later fell into the hands of the Navy Intelligence Service, revealed a
complete disrespect for the hospitality which the American government
afforded the refugees. The _Geier's_ band used to strike up for an
afternoon concert, and under cover of the music, the wireless apparatus
sent out messages to raiders at sea or messages in English so phrased
as to start rumors of trouble between Japan and the United States.
The _Geier_ was the source of a rumor to the effect that Japanese
troops had landed in Mexico; the _Geier_ gave what circulation she
could to a report that Germans in the United States were planning an
invasion of Canada and was ably assisted in this effort by George
Rodiek, German consul at Honolulu; the _Geier_ caught all trans-Pacific
wireless messages, and intercepted numerous United States government
despatches. Captain Grasshof also spread a report quoting an American
submarine commander as saying he would "like to do something to those
Japs outside" (referring to the Japanese Pacific patrol) provided he
(the American commander) and the German could reach an agreement. This
report Grasshof attributed to von Papen, and later retracted, admitting
that it was a lie. Grasshof's courier to the consulate in San Francisco
was A. V. Kircheisen, a quartermaster on the liner _China_, a German
secret service agent bearing the number K-17. Kircheisen frequently
used the _China's_ wireless to send German messages.
On December 8 occurred the engagement off the Falklands, which resulted
in the defeat of the German fleet. The _Karlsruhe_ within a short
time gave up her aimless wanderings and disappeared. In February the
_Glasgow_ avenged herself on the _Dresden_, and the _Prinz Eitel
Friedrich_ and the _Kronprinz Wilhelm_ fled into the security of
Hampton Roads for the duration of war.
The United States' suspicions had been aroused by the activity of
the German wireless plants, but the arm of the law did not remove at
once the German operators at certain commercial stations. They were
the men who despatched communications to Berlin and to the raiders.
Interspersed in commercial messages they sprinkled code phrases, words,
numbers, a meaningless and innocent jargon. The daily press bulletin
issued to all ships at sea was an especially adaptable vehicle for this
practice, as any traveler who has been forced to glean his news from
one of these bulletins will readily appreciate. There were Americans
shrewd enough, however, to become exceedingly suspicious of this
superficially careless sending, and their suspicions were confirmed
through the invention of another shrewd American, Charles E. Apgar.
He combined the principles of the phonograph and the wireless in such
a way as to record on a wax disc the dots and dashes of the message,
precisely as it came through the receiver. The records could be studied
and analyzed at leisure. And the United States government has studied
them.
At three o'clock every morning, the great wireless station at Nauen,
near Berlin, uttered a hash of language into the ether. It was
apparently not directed to any one in particular, nor did it contain
any known coherence. Unless the operator in America wore a DeForest
audian detector, which picks up waves from a great distance, he
could not have heard it, and certainly during the early part of the
war he paid no attention to it. The United States decided, however,
that it might be well to eavesdrop, and so for over two years every
utterance from Nauen was transcribed and filed away, or run off on the
phonograph, in the hope that repetition might reveal the code. Until
the code was discovered elsewhere, the phonographic records told no
tales, but then the State Department found that it had a priceless
library of Prussian impudence.
The diplomatic code was a dictionary, its pages designated by serial
letters, its words by serial numbers. Thus the message
"12-B-15-C-7"
signified the twelfth and fifteenth words on the second page, and the
seventh word on the third page. This particular dictionary was one of a
rare edition.
To complement the diplomatic code the Deutches Bank, the German Foreign
Office, and their commercial representatives, Hugo Schmidt and Dr.
Albert, had agreed upon an arbitrary code which proved one of the most
difficult which the American authorities have ever had to decipher.
Solution would have been impossible without some of the straight
English or German confirmations which followed by mail, but as most
of these documents were lost or destroyed, the deciphering had to be
done by astute construction of testimony taken from Schmidt as late
as the fall of 1917. He had made the work doubly difficult by burning
the cipher key and most of his important papers in the furnace of the
German Club.
Simple phrases, such as might readily pass any censor without arousing
suspicion, passed frequently through Sayville station. The message
"Expect father to-morrow" meant "The political situation between
America and Germany grows worse. It is imperative that you take
care of your New York affairs." "Depot" meant "Securities"; "Depot
Pritchard" meant "Securities to be held in Germany"; "Depot Cooper"
meant "Securities to be forwarded to some neutral country in Europe."
Schmidt himself had the following aliases: "John Maley," "Roy Woolen,"
"Sidney Pickford," "George Brewster," "175 Congress Street, Brooklyn,"
"James Frasier," or "Andrew Brodie." Dr. Albert was mentioned as "John
Herbinsen," "Howard Ackley," "Leonard Hadden," or "Donald Yerkes."
James W. Gerard, the American ambassador at Berlin, was "Wilbur
McDonald"; America was "Fremessi" or "Alfred Lipton." To throw any
suspicion off the scent, the phrase "Hughes recovered" was translatable
simply as "agreed," whereas "Percy died" meant "disagreed." Amounts of
money were to be multiplied by one thousand.
This cipher code, so far as it had any system at all, showed a skilful
choice of arbitrary proper names, than which there is nothing less
suggestive or significant when the name is backed up by no known or
discoverable personality. These names met two requirements: they
carefully avoided any names of personages, and they sounded English or
American. Following is a table of the commoner symbols used:
CODE TRANSLATION
Alcott Hugo Reisinger
Andeo Payments are
John Hazel: Chapman;
Thos. Hadley G. Amsinck & Co.
Pythagoras Errflint Argentine Finance
Minister
Lawrence McKay Austrian Ambassador at
Washington.
John Hastings; Fred
Holden; Wm. Lounsbury
Flagside; Chas. Hall Bankers Trust Co.
Henry Galloway Belgium
Frenchlike; Blake Berlin
Flammigere Bethlehem Steel Co.
Percy Bloomfield Reichsbank
Gobber Milbank or
John Childs Capt. Boy-Ed
George Mallery British Ambassador at Washington
Charles Thurston:
Caffney Richard British Government
Ernest Whiskard Central Bank of Norway
Frederick Chappell, The Submarine _Deutschland_
Walter Harris; Edmund
Hutton Chase National Bank
Mills Edgar Dr. Dernberg
Albert Hardwood Empire Trust Co.
Herbert Hastings,
Langman Howard,
Luckett Ernest Equitable Trust Co.
Eversleigh New York
Sidney Farmer and others Speyer & Co.
Francis Hawkins Farmers Loan & Trust Co.
Francis Manuel;
Edward Gary German Government
Fleshquake Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
Clarence Hadden First National Bank
Floezanbel George J. Gould
Floezuise J. P. Morgan
Wm. Gerome J. P. Morgan & Co.
Fluitkoker Wm. Barclay Parsons
Fleuxerimus High Official of Bethlehem
Steel Co.
Fogarizers Chas. M. Schwab
John Hayward Norwegian Government
Franklin Giltrap Hamburg-American
Line
Theodore Hooper Capt. von Papen
15 Code names represented
the Guaranty Trust Co.
Paul Overton; Robt.
Hopkins Hanover Nat. Bank
George Hedding Standard Mercantile
Agency
Hugh Sturges Paul Hilken (_Deutschland_)
Clarence Marsh Japanese Ambassador at
Washington
Howard Howe Irving Nat. Bank
Herbert Miller President of U. S.
Andrew Mills Secretary of Commerce and
Labor
Theodore Mitchell Secretary of Agriculture
Robert Moffatt Secretary of State
Frank Monroe Secretary of Treasury
Walter Montgomery Secretary of Navy
Dolling London
Robert London North German Lloyd
Steven Morgan United States Congress
Frank Mountcastle The name of the Deutsches
Bank is not to be mentioned
Steven Lawson Royal Bank of Canada
Gafento Toluol (High explosive)
The chief significance of the discovery of the two codes is their
conclusive proof that while von Bernstorff was protesting to the
American government that he could not get messages through to Berlin,
nor replies from the foreign office, he was actually in daily, if not
hourly, communication with his superiors. Messages were sent out by
his confidential operators under the very eyes of the American naval
censors. After the break of diplomatic relations with Berlin, in
February, 1917, the authorities set to work decoding the messages,
and the State Department from time to time issued for publication
certain of the more brutal proofs of Germany's violation of American
neutrality. The ambassador and his Washington establishment had served
for two years and a half as the "central exchange" of German affairs in
the western world. After his departure communication from German spies
here was handicapped only by the time required to forward information
to Mexico; from that point to Berlin air conversation continued
uninterrupted.