Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (32 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
I
n the cruel winter months, the Jersey shore was a cold and lonely destination. Waves swelled, gusts blew, and the beachfront cottages remained shuttered. But it was precisely this isolation, Hilken decided, that made it the ideal location for an emergency meeting. He ordered the two main conspirators in his operation to meet him at a beachfront bungalow he had hastily rented not too far from Atlantic City. And he warned them to make sure they were not followed.
Hinsch drove his Model T; Dilger took the train and then a taxi. Hilken was waiting when they arrived. He greeted them warmly, hospitably served beers, but it was clear to Dilger that the young man was out of sorts. He was nervous, trying to hide his anxiety but not succeeding.
Hilken did not possess the spy’s special courage, the ability to stand up to what his imagination was shouting was about to happen and still find the nerve to go on as if nothing at all was wrong. Hilken had bad news to deliver, and its implications had left him undone.
“They’re on to us,” he announced flatly. He had been contacted by Koenig, now free on $50,000 bail after his arrest. Koenig said that New York police were swarming about the harbor, asking questions about plots to poison the horses awaiting shipment to the Allies. Koenig had also learned that there were more guards at the corrals. They’re on alert, waiting to catch someone, he said.
Hilken continued, now edging dangerously close to panic. He had been summoned to meet with Wolf von Igel, the German diplomat who had replaced Captain von Papen in New York. Von Igel had delivered a message from von Bernstorff. The ambassador, Hilken said, was furious with them.
“Don’t those imbeciles understand the potential consequences of their actions?” the ambassador had demanded, according to the report von Igel gave to Hilken. Von Bernstorff had already been informed that the authorities suspected Germany was engaged in germ warfare. But if the Americans could prove it, the ambassador had lectured, it would be the final outrage that would push the country into the war. Any tactical advantage gained by poisoning animals would be more than outweighed by American troops being sent to Europe. The ambassador wanted the operation to stop immediately.
Dilger objected. He didn’t take his orders from von Bernstorff, he said; he was assigned to Abteilung IIIB, and he received his orders from them.
As if on cue, Hilken handed him a cable. He was to return to Berlin as soon as possible “for discussions.” It was signed, Dilger recognized, with one of Nicolai’s work names.
On January 29, 1916, using a new passport that the State Department had issued so that he could work, or so he had claimed, as a surgeon at a German Red Cross hospital in Heidelberg, Dilger boarded the Norwegian passenger liner
Kristianiafjord
. As the ship crossed the Atlantic, Hinsch, who would continue to participate in sabotage operations until he fled to Germany, dismantled “Tony’s lab.”
Dilger would never return to America. After being briefed in Berlin, he was sent on a secret mission to Spain. In Madrid, he was infected by the Spanish influenza virus sweeping through the world’s population, and died. The doctor who had propagated germs had become their victim.
Tom, without at the time realizing the effectiveness of his actions or the lives he’d saved, had won a great victory. Over the past two years, he had slowly come to learn that he was engaged in an entirely new sort of conflict, one where the action took place in the shadows, where the investigative goal often was to prevent crimes before they happened. However, he had not yet begun to appreciate the hard wisdom that drove counterintelligence work: triumphs often went unheralded or even unrecognized, while defeats always made headlines.
AS FOR HILKEN, DESPITE HIS
tightly wound nerves, the secret life continued to pull him back in. The thrill of being a clandestine actor with the power to influence world historical events was too grand an experience to abandon. He could not return to a life lived only as his father’s dutiful son. He had discovered that he enjoyed performing on a bigger stage.
He would be involved with other plots, his role in which would not be uncovered until after the war. Working once again with Hinsch, he helped plan and then finalize a mission code-named Jersey.
The idea had originated with von Rintelen, who first decided to give Black Tom, the largest munitions and gunpowder shipping center in America, “a sound knock on the head.” He’d diagrammed where the saboteurs should land their boats and the barges they should target, only to receive the telegram ordering him back to Germany. Hilken and Hinsch inherited the mission.
Since the target was across the Hudson, most of the final planning was done in New York in the boozy, good-time safety of Martha Held’s town house. Sitting there, the easy friendship of Martha’s pretty women available to him, surrounded by his fellow conspirators, Hilken felt he had at last become the equal of the man who had recruited him. Like von Rintelen, he was a master spy. Like the cause he worked for, he was invincible.
ON SUNDAY, JULY 30, 1916
, at 12:24 a.m., the first fire started at the terminal. Two hours later, Black Tom had become a great white light illuminating the night sky. Stockpiled shells exploded, and stored bullets flew about wildly. There was a tremendous, awful, sustained boom, powerful enough, it seemed, to shake the planet down to its core.
Far across the river in Manhattan the windows in the library at Forty-Second Street were blown out, water mains broke, downtown streets flooded, and people, certain that the world was coming to an end, rushed from their apartments and hotel rooms and into the street. By the end of the week, newspapers estimated the damage to New York and New Jersey warehouses, railroads, and businesses at a staggering $20 million. And the bodies of five victims were recovered.
In Brooklyn that evening, Tom was pulled from his sleep and hurried to his window. The sky was lit with an unnatural glow: high noon in the middle of the night. Although he did not yet know the cause (and it would be litigious decades before the blame was officially resolved), he had no doubts about the perpetrators, or the consequences. Other people might not be certain whether the explosion was an accident or sabotage, but he was. Germany had gone too far. The nation would demand revenge.
At that moment, the nighttime quiet destroyed, the wooden planks in his bedroom floor shaking beneath his feet, Tom knew that his long, solitary war was about to come to an end. A new fight would soon begin. He’d battle on, but he’d no longer be wearing a policeman’s blue uniform. He’d be marching off alongside tens of thousands of other Americans on a common mission.
Workers sorting shells at the Black Tom munitions plant in Jersey City, New Jersey.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
View of the aftermath of a series of massive explosions at the Black Tom munitions facility on July 30, 1916. The explosion, which resulted from the detonation of a train car full of dynamite and subsequent explosions of other munitions, leveled the facility.
(Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)
Moored German submarines, circa 1914–1915. Second from left in the front row is U-20, which sank the RMS
Lusitania
.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
A
t last, Woodrow Wilson gave in to his long-building fury. With a statesman’s lofty philosophy and the patience of a would-be saint, he had tried to ignore or, when that was not possible, rationalize all of Germany’s many provocations. Then, with the nation’s anger already ratcheted up by the catastrophic Black Tom explosion, the conduct of the kaiser’s government toward the United States became even more intolerable.
On February 1, 1917, Germany announced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Its U-boats would sink without warning any neutral ships in a designated zone around Great Britain, France, and Italy. The United States was told to surrender its sovereign right to trade and travel across the high seas, or its ships would be torpedoed. As one indignant paper huffed, the kaiser had declared that henceforth freedom of the seas would exist only for “icebergs and fish.”
His resolve inching closer to a once unthinkable decision, the president responded by severing diplomatic relations with Germany. Von Bernstorff, the German ambassador and head of the Abteilung IIIB network in America, was ordered home along with Albert and the rest of the embassy’s officials.
Guy Gaunt sent his superiors a triumphant telegram: “Bernstorff goes home. I get drunk tonight.” And then he did just that, with Tom, Woods, and Scull in the Harvard Club bar.
British intelligence, however, was too busy plotting its next move to celebrate. The team of wranglers in Room 40 had decoded an intercepted cable signed by Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, to Heinrich von Eckhardt, the imperial minister in Mexico.
The Zimmermann telegram as received by the German ambassador to Mexico.
(National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives Identifier 302025)
The Zimmermann telegram, decoded.
(National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives Identifier 000302022)
Von Rintelen’s sly scheming with Huerta, and von Papen’s reconnaissance trips to Mexico, had offered tantalizing hints of Germany’s intentions. But this telegram was solid, undeniable proof of official imperial government policy. It proposed an alliance with Mexico and Japan in a joint war against the United States, and solemnly promised to help Mexico “regain by conquest her lost territory in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.”
Once again managing to protect the powerful secret that the team in Room 40 had broken the German diplomatic code, the British had a copy of the bombshell telegram delivered to Wilson. This time it was the president who instructed that the cable be shared with the press.
Eight-column headlines stretched across newspapers all over the country on the morning of March 1, 1917. The
Washington Post
shouted: “German Plot to Conquer United States with Aid of Japan and Mexico Revealed.” The
New York Times
trumpeted: “Germany Seeks Alliance Against U.S., Asks Japan and Mexico to Join Her.”
Over the days that followed, the president wrote his speech himself, typing out the words in the Oval Office. Then, on the rainy evening of April 2, an army cavalry unit riding alongside his car, Wilson drove down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building. As he stood at the lectern in the crowded House chamber and prepared to begin his address to a joint session of Congress, an unprecedented ovation broke out. It lasted a full two minutes. Then President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany.
What prompted this irrevocable decision by a president who only three months earlier had agonized that going to war would be a “crime against civilization”? It would be a brash conceit to assign a single motive to such a complicated, thoughtful man. And it would be no less of a mistake to identify a single event as the final straw that broke an indomitable patience.
President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war on April 2, 1917.
(AP Photo)
Rather, more than anything else, a fundamental change of heart had gripped this most idealistic of men. It had come slowly, gradually. With his growing awareness of Germany’s extensive secret operations against America, Wilson had been forced to rethink how he looked at the world.
He had become president believing that both men and nations were required to act in certain well-understood, honorable ways. With a naïveté fostered as much by wishful thinking as by moral doctrine, he found it difficult to accept that a state would knowingly flout these standards of behavior. So he had been puzzled. He could not fully believe the reports that were being passed on by the New York police. Bomb plots, assassinations, germ warfare, subversion—all of it seemed quite impossible, even as, at the same time, he knew the evidence was undeniable.
It took time for his benevolent, hopeful notions to wear thin. A fierce internal struggle had raged inside him. Yet as the unnatural became undeniable, his shock hardened into the resigned anger of someone who now understood he had been coldly deceived.
As the nation prepared to go to war, Wilson’s Flag Day speech of June 1917 made it clear that a more distrustful worldview had become anchored in his mind. “It is plain enough how we were forced into the war,” he said, with the firm confidence of a convert who had permanently turned his back on false gods. “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. . . . What great nation in such circumstance would not have taken up arms?”
For three years, Abteilung IIIB’s relentless operations in America had kept banging and banging against Wilson’s faith until finally all his heartfelt beliefs were shattered. Stripped of his illusions and his innocence, a different man from the one who’d taken office five years ago, the president led the nation into war.
TOM HAD NO ILLUSIONS, AND
certainly no innocence, about the nature of the enemy. His concerns centered on his own country.
Paradoxically, these troubling thoughts occurred to him at a time when he should have been enjoying his accolades and celebrating his triumphs. Just weeks after Congress voted to declare war, Commissioner Woods had rewarded the squad’s work by promoting him to inspector and the loyal Barnitz to lieutenant. Yet today, December 17, 1917, he felt troubled by the
Times
report on the next giant step in his career. “City’s Bomb Squad Goes to the Army,” read the tiered headline. “Tunney, Head of Noted Organization, Will Be a Major—Men to Enlist. Will Pursue Plotters.”
The article below was no less flattering:
The famous Bomb Squad of the New York Police Department, which, under the command of Inspector Thomas Tunney, has won for itself a national reputation in bringing to justice German spies, has been taken over by the War Department. . . . The entire squad will be assigned to duty with the Army Intelligence Service in the New York district.
The new step taken by the Government was characterized by Federal officials as of far-reaching importance, and was cited as proof of the intention of the authorities to handle the Teuton spy and plot situation vigorously.
Tom, though, reading the newspaper report, found that he was unable to summon up any of its optimism. The nation, he knew only too well, had shown little inclination to deal with espionage “vigorously.” In the course of his three-year hunt, he had grown convinced that the United States was dangerously unprepared for the injuries a clandestine enemy could inflict on the homeland. We are a trusting nation, and that has made us a vulnerable one, he decided. A complacent America has developed neither the intelligence capabilities to collect information on our adversaries’ plans nor the resources to stop terrorist attacks from happening.
The well-funded German secret service had destroyed, Tom knew, over $150 million in property during the past three years. Ships had foundered at sea. Factories had gone up in flames. Munitions depots had exploded. Assassins had been deployed. Germs had been spread. The sabotage had caused more than one hundred deaths.
The Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, Military Intelligence—all the supposedly vigilant resources the republic had assembled to guard its towns and cities—were feuding, disorganized, and ineffective. They did not gather information about the enemy agents quietly prowling the nation’s streets. They were ignorant of the sinister aspirations of the forces preparing to attack, and of their frightful weapons.
In the end, it had been left to Tom and his small group of men to protect the homeland. Thrown into a war for which they were largely unprepared, in the course of its many battles they had succeeded in acquiring the ingenuity, tenacity, and self-sacrifice that this invisible conflict required of its secret soldiers. Their victories made the nation safer.
Still, this achievement was insufficient. Tom feared for the future. The nation had been exposed: it was a land of targets. Already the Capitol Building had been bombed, and anthrax deployed. Grim precedents had been established. In the years to come, what new terrors would strike his city, his country? Just as the saboteur’s cigar bomb had been superseded by the ingenuity of the explosive rudder device, it was in the cruel nature of man to fabricate more destructive weapons, to perfect more effective ways to disseminate germs.
And then what?
Tom could only wonder.
