Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (20 page)

Glumly, Tom had to concede that while Fay’s arrest had prevented scores of Allied ships from foundering at sea, it had done nothing at all to stop the outbreak of fires that had originally provoked his investigation. His hunt, he despaired, had led him down another alley. “It was high time,” he declared, “we got back into Main Street.”

Fay, he had come to accept, “was not the one we wanted most.” He was not the German agent orchestrating the waterfront campaign against Allied shipping. He was not one of the “great people” leading Germany’s secret attack on America. And when Tom tried to put a name and a face on the master spy, he found himself recalling the image of a dapper man-about-town strolling down a midtown street outside the New York Yacht Club with the rigid, parade-ground bearing of a German officer.

Chapter 41

T
he windowless back room of the Hofbrau House was dark and narrow, only big enough for a single long table. But von Rintelen felt at ease in this tight, shadowy space.

At the German Club there was always the annoying possibility of running into von Papen and Boy-Ed. Berlin had ordered that von Rintelen keep the two diplomats informed of his activities, but he drew the line at socializing with them.

He also felt uneasy about Martha Held’s. There were too many strangers, too many drunks. And he didn’t trust the pretty women; he had little doubt they’d sell the secrets they overheard to the highest bidder. The entire establishment, he felt, was operationally insecure.

Sitting at the table in the long back room of the Hofbrau House, a stein of beer in his hand, he felt comfortable. He could have a conversation without being constantly on guard. He could, as he put it, play the wily spider, continuing to “spin my threads.”

And so one Saturday afternoon, after a planning session with the Executive Committee, he was in no hurry to go. Everyone else had left except for Erich von Steinmetz, and the two men continued drinking and talking.

It was a meandering discussion, two professionals sharing war stories. The beer, the camaraderie, the mutual respect, the implicit recognition that they could talk candidly to one another—all worked to keep the conversation going. And this time when von Rintelen pressed his friend to tell him about the “important, top secret mission” that had brought him to America, von Steinmetz felt there was no longer any reason to hold back.

Still, von Steinmetz did not tell the whole story. Von Rintelen suspected that the agent had omitted anything that would reflect poorly on his own conduct in the field. But he heard enough that afternoon to begin thinking about the secret war against America in an entirely new way.

THE SOFT WARTIME ROUTE FROM
Germany to New York favored by the kaiser’s spies was overland to Scandinavia, then a berth on a ship heading across the Atlantic. But an apprehensive Erich von Steinmetz, according to the account he had shared with von Rintelen in the back room, had chosen a less direct, and intentionally more covert, itinerary. He made his slow way east traveling by foot, horseback, and train through the enemy wilderness of Siberia.

Upon his arrival at the bustling Russian port city of Vladivostok, von Steinmetz went shopping. He bought a brunette wig, a wardrobe of dresses, and pots of makeup. Then he went to work transforming a tall, middle-aged naval officer into an apparently convincing woman.

Disguised as a hefty Frau Steinberg, he purchased a ticket on a steamer heading across the Pacific to San Francisco. From there, still playing the broad-shouldered widow, he boarded a train traveling east to New York. Throughout the entire long, uneasy journey, from Berlin to a hotel on Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, a small dark suitcase rarely left his hand.

It was the extraordinary contents of this valise that had caused him to take such nerve-racking and inventive operational precautions. At all costs, his Abteilung IIIB masters had instructed, their sharp words more a threat than advice, this treasure must be kept out of enemy hands.

It contained what the spy liked to refer to simply as “cultures.” Each of the corked vials was, however, a deadly weapon. The glass tubes held bacteria for glanders, anthrax, and meningitis. Von Steinmetz had come to attack America with germs.

BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS WERE NOT NEW
to warfare. The Hittites had turned plague victims loose in enemy cities. Persian archers, recorded Herodotus, had shot arrows tipped with manure into enemy ranks. A British captain had traded smallpox-tainted blankets to Indians during the French and Indian War. In the Civil War, both Union and Confederate horse soldiers accused each other of sneaking into cavalry corrals and poisoning mounts with viruses. And in Berlin, at 27 Hannoversche Strasse in a redbrick former stable, scientists at the Military Veterinary Academy had discreetly been stockpiling supplies of glanders and anthrax cultures since 1907, with the resigned expectation that one day the Fatherland would need a bioweapon.

That time had come. As terrorized battlefield soldiers on both sides in World War I choked on harsh, suffocating waves of chlorine and phosgene gases, as troops charged through sheets of mustard gas that blanketed the ground with an oily residue that burned on contact like the fires of hell, the increasingly desperate Abteilung IIIB flung aside one more civilizing restraint. The decision was made to launch a secret campaign of germ sabotage in America.

The primary targets were horses.

The war, it had become frustratingly apparent to the German general staff, was destined to sputter forward as a battle of attrition, a long-running stalemate where supplies would be as crucial to victory as the soldiers in the field.

Horses were a particularly vital resource; an estimated 6 million would serve. The animals galloped through storms of flying bullets and exploding shells in cavalry attacks. They trudged through knee-high rivers of mud and pounded over rutted, rocky terrain, pulling ammunition wagons, field kitchens, and ambulances.

This was rough, perilous service. Exhaustion, disease, bullets, shells, and gas caused hundreds of thousands of equine deaths. The four-legged combatants, like the two-legged soldiers, were being killed off at a horrific rate. Yet as the war dragged on, hardened generals on both sides conceded that the loss of a single warhorse was of greater tactical concern than the loss of a single soldier. The path to victory, the generals knew, was on horseback.

In Germany, 715,000 horses were mobilized during the first weeks of the war. After two years of fighting, an estimated half million of these animals, victims of battles and attrition, were not in the field.

The German army, which depended on horses and mules to haul artillery pieces and supplies, replaced some of this stock by conquest. More than 375,000 animals were summarily commandeered from the occupied territories, another 140,000 from the Ukraine.

But this was not sufficient. The general staff’s great fear was that if the fighting kept on, the day would inevitably come when the army would run out of horses to pull the supply wagons, and the Fatherland’s brave troops would be left stranded on distant battlefields without cannons, bullets, and food.

For the Allies, the reserves of horses at the start of the war were far less than those in the Central Powers’ stables. Britain’s entire horse population consisted of not more than 80,000 mounts. The French possessed perhaps five times that number.

Yet the Allies could buy what they did not have from America. It was costly; the British Remount Department would ultimately spend £36.5 million on the purchase and delivery of North American horses and mules to the front. Still, endless herds of animals were available from the United States. A 1910 census counted 21 million horses on farms throughout the country.

These animals were suddenly as valuable as oil. Ranchers made fortunes shipping horses across the Atlantic. The demand was constant. Even tired, stumpy mounts were drafted as warhorses. They arrived at the front lines at the rate of 1,000 animals a day. By the war’s end, more than 1 million American-bred horses had been sold to fight in Europe for the Allies.

Germany, too, could buy all the American horses it could afford. But the nation was victimized by the same problem that affected all American supplies—it could not transport the animals across the ocean. The powerful British navy controlled the sea. The kaiser’s U-boats were a menace, but the submarine fleet was too small to be effective. Submarines couldn’t succeed in opening up the Atlantic sea lanes for German trade. Germany was stymied.

Enter Nicolai. Resourceful, imaginative, and coolly pragmatic, he proposed to the general staff a spy’s strategy to undermine the Allies’ advantage. Abteilung IIIB would dispatch an operative to America to poison the corralled animals as they waited to be shipped overseas.

Of course, he acknowledged, it was quite possible, perhaps even inevitable, that Americans would die too as the viruses spread to humans. But they would be casualties of war. That the war was still undeclared and the victims civilians were minor concerns, dismissed as not really worth considering.

PSEUDOMONAS MALLEI
WAS THE SPECIES
classification for the glanders bacteria; the Latin word
mallei,
meaning “mallet” or “hammer,” was chosen by Aristotle, who had witnessed the pounding the infection delivered. It attacked the nasal passages, searing them with deep ulcers that spread through the horse’s upper respiratory tract. Long, hard ropes of burning nodules appeared under the skin. Fever quickly spiked to 106 degrees. And after a tortured few days the animals, if they were lucky, would die. Many, though, lingered painfully for agonized weeks.

The effects of the bacteria, however, did not concern von Steinmetz. Now living the long night of an agent working behind the lines, he was simply eager to proceed on his mission. Just days after checking into his hotel, he took his suitcase and rode the elevated train line to the Bronx.

Under the cover of darkness, he hurried about the network of stables and corrals adjacent to Van Cortlandt Park that held hundreds of horses soon to be sent overseas. His battle plan was direct: he’d insert a stick coated with the curdled, liverish yellow glanders bacteria into the nostrils of every third horse, and then hope the infection would spread to the others.

He worked with precision, full of focus and concentration. Still, it was a tense, dangerous assignment. Unaccustomed to foreign objects being jammed up their nostrils, the horses kicked, neighed, and stomped in rageful self-defense. By the time von Steinmetz was done, he was exhausted and shaking.

The next evening he went down to reconnoiter the West Side docks. A few desultory guards patrolled the waterfront corrals with clockwork regularity; it would not take much ingenuity to time their rounds and work around them.

The previous night, however, had left him unnerved; the roar of high-pitched neighs was still echoing in his memory. Jittery, he decided it would be more secure to insulate himself. He hired a pier superintendent to find an interned German sailor who, out of loyalty to the kaiser as well as for a hefty fee, would go off and do the dirty work.

The following evening von Steinmetz gave the superintendent the sticks coated with glanders. The superintendent, in turn, instructed the seaman: “Shove them up the nose of every third or fourth horse in the stockades and along the ships of the waterfront.”

For days von Steinmetz waited to see headlines announcing the mysterious plague ravaging the warhorses. He read the papers with great care, then went over each page again, fearing that he had missed the article. But the story never appeared.

Perhaps, he came to decide, the horse breeders had conspired to keep the outbreak secret. A glanders epidemic would be bad for business. Not even the desperate British buyers would want to buy a horse that might infect the entire stock.

Yet he needed a definitive answer. After a week spent pacing in puzzlement about his hotel room, von Steinmetz realized he would have to investigate the matter himself. He took the elevated line back to the Bronx and walked to the stables.

The horses were healthy. A trip the next day to the waterfront corrals provided similar intelligence. The horses sauntered about with playful energy, their eyes bright, their coats shiny.

What had gone wrong? von Steinmetz wondered in sudden panic. He knew his Abteilung IIIB superiors would demand an explanation; and he also knew his life depended on whether they believed him.

With his anxiety mounting, his fate hanging in the balance, he decided to make a bold move. It was utterly reckless, but at the time von Steinmetz felt he had nothing to lose. If he couldn’t provide Nicolai with a satisfactory explanation for his failure, he’d be executed. At least if his new scheme went bad, the Americans would give him a trial before they hanged him for espionage.

Posing as a scientist, he brought the remaining germ cultures to New York’s Rockefeller Institute, a renowned scientific research facility. Blithely, he explained that he had obtained the cultures for “experimental purposes.” He now wondered whether the organisms were still viable.

The Rockefeller scientist asked how long von Steinmetz had had the cultures. He spoke absently, without suspicion. He had already taken a sample and started to prepare a slide for examination under the microscope.

Von Steinmetz answered truthfully: it had been four months, maybe longer.

The scientist stopped his preparations. There was no longer, he said, any need to look at the specimens. He explained that after a month glanders cultures lose their potency. They become harmless.

Von Steinmetz sighed with relief. The mission had been a failure, but he had the explanation that would save his life.

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED,
von Rintelen found himself playing the conversation with von Steinmetz back over and over in his mind. It was all very new to him, even strange, and he found it difficult to grasp.

In time, however, he grew certain that von Steinmetz had been involved in an operation of immense strategic importance. It didn’t matter that it had not succeeded. As a military man, he could see that its potential effectiveness was enormous. It could change everything: germ warfare could sneak up on the enemy, quiet, unseen, unsuspected, until it struck with lethal force. Once targeted, a terrorized America would never find the resolve to fight in a European war.

His heart was pounding with excitement as he drafted the cable to Nicolai. It was imperative, he urged the spymaster, that he send an operative to America to take up von Steinmetz’s aborted mission.