Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (33 page)

A Note on Sources

O
n the fourteenth floor of the redbrick police headquarters building in lower Manhattan, the commissioner meets every morning just after nine with the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and the deputy commissioner for intelligence. The sessions take place in the Executive Command Center, a big room whose walls display video screens showing news broadcasts from all over the world, live videocasts of traffic from streets and highways, images from helicopters outfitted with radiation detection devices (RDDs) hovering above the piers and harbors, and recent crime reports from precincts.

The purpose of the meetings is to discuss any terrorist threats that have developed over the past twenty-four hours. As soon as the two commissioners are seated at the long table in the center of the room, they address what Police Chief Raymond Kelly, a flinty, hard-minded former street cop and marine, has called “the New York question.” The commissioner wants to know what is happening anywhere in the world that could affect the safety of the city and its people.

I have been allowed to attend one of these Command Center briefings, given a seat in a straight-backed plastic chair against the wall underneath a video showing a live feed of Wall Street traffic. With rapt attention, I hear a chilling inventory of concerns: a possible bomb attack on a Port Authority train or tunnel at rush hour; a suspect in Virginia who may or may not be developing a biological weapon to use on subways; a cell in Jordan that quite possibly has ties to a group in Queens that has been taking photographs of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges; and an al-Qaeda website that promises an attack on New York will come soon.

Yet as I listen, in my mind I find myself stripping away all the technology and nonessentials, and I realize that what is happening in this cloistered tower room is not all that different from what occurred nearly a century ago when Tom would take the private elevator up into the commissioner’s mahogany-paneled office. Those meetings, too, were driven by brooding suspicions and gnawing fears.

And as I sit in this command post, it becomes clearer to me that in one large and affecting way, little has changed over the past one hundred years for the officers who are responsible for defending our sprawling republic. Like Tom with his victories over the ship bombers, von Rintelen, Fay, and Koenig, the homeland’s new protectors have slain their dragons and made the country a safer place. Yet for them too there is always tomorrow, and with it comes the dread that someone is out there plotting, preparing, getting closer and closer to striking.

It was these thoughts that stayed prominent in my mind as I researched and wrote this book. The relevance of Tom Tunney’s activities to today’s headlines was a constant reminder to me that, as Faulkner observed, “the past is never past.” It is one reason why I am drawn to history, and why I wanted to tell this story.

At the same time, my writing of this book was also influenced and inspired by the two other nonfiction tales I published immediately preceding this one.
American Lightning
, an account of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times Building that left twenty-one people dead, was at its dramatic core a story about the war between labor and capital that gripped the nation at the turn of the century.
The Floor of Heaven
was another story about the country at a turning point as the nineteenth century came to a close: with the West won, intrepid cowboys and pioneers set off to find new frontiers to conquer. And
Dark Invasion
is a story of the United States finding the will, the commitment, and the strength to become a world power.

Each of these three books tells an independent story, propelled by its own cast of real-life characters. However, together they form a sort of trilogy. And although the first book’s narrative is shaped as a detective story, the next as a western, and this one as a spy tale, a bold central character unites and dominates these three self-contained histories: turn-of-the-century America. Each of these books focuses on a different and transforming aspect of the story of a young country struggling to come of age and assume its place in the world.

These are true stories. There are no inventions in my accounts. I have tried to re-create events as they happened, and with as much objectivity as possible. I have searched for intersecting circumstances and ideas, and then presented them in a way that made informed sense to me.

In order to write what the heroes and villains in this spy story were saying, doing, feeling, and even thinking accurately as well as vividly, I have relied on firsthand accounts and memoirs, in addition to contemporaneous newspaper stories, government documents, legal papers, and a tall stack of histories. Therefore, when quotation marks bracket any dialogue, this is an indication that at least one of the principals was the source. Further, when a character reveals what he is thinking or feeling, I found this too in a memoir, a letter, or a previously published interview.

Particularly valuable, then, in putting together this determinedly firsthand account were the papers and documents—1,032 cubic feet of them!—stored at the Foreign Affairs Branch of the National Archives in Washington. These archives contain the extensive files compiled by the Mixed Claims Commission of the United States and Germany, investigating the Black Tom explosion and the activities of the German spy network in the United States in the years preceding America’s entry into the war, including testimony about Abteilung IIIB’s germ warfare program; transcripts of German government messages intercepted by the British; papers relating to the workings of British intelligence in America prior to the United States’ entry into the war; testimony of witnesses and members of the German secret service; and biographies of the saboteurs.

A roughly equivalent resource, providing German documents and testimony by government officials, was published in two volumes by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1923:
Official German Documents Relating to the World War: The Report of the First and Second Subcommittee of the Committee Appointed by the National Constituent Assembly to Inquire into the Responsibility for the War
.

My understanding of President Wilson’s evolving mind-set (as well as the government’s mercurial positions regarding neutrality) was facilitated by the State Department’s
Papers
Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States
, and
Supplements, World War, 1914–1918
, published by the Government Printing Office.

Similarly, Tom Tunney’s candid postwar testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee provided insight into his nascent role in counterintelligence:
Report and Hearings Before the Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary
, 66th Cong., 1st sess., doc. 62 (1919). And a good overview of the entire fledgling American intelligence operation is provided by the many officials who testified in
Espionage and Interference with Neutrality: Hearings on H.R. 291 Before the Committee on the Judiciary
, 65th Cong., 1st sess. (1917).

I got an informed sense of the efficacy of J. P. Morgan Jr.’s. extensive machinations to influence aid for the Allies from reading the often acerbic testimony in
Investigation Relative to the Treaty of
Peace with Germany: Hearings Before the U.S. State Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
, 66th Cong., 1st sess. (1919), as well as
Hearings Before the Special U.S. Senate Committee Investigating
the Munitions Industry
, 74th Cong., 2nd sess. (1937).

I frequently consulted the myriad official government position papers and presidential speeches issued during the years leading to America’s joining the Allies. The complete text of these was found at Brigham Young University’s World War I Document Archive, available online at http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.

Books about World War I fill entire libraries, and over the four years I spent researching this book, my workroom became a daunting obstacle course littered with waist-high stacks of several hundred volumes. But rather than listing all the titles I consulted, as one would in an academic history, let me point the way for the curious general reader to those books that I found most valuable in telling this story.

Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters
, by Inspector Thomas J. Tunney with Paul Merrick Hollister, is a lively and very personal account of the investigations conducted by the man who, while he didn’t have the title, was the nation’s first head of homeland security. And reading Tunney’s story in conjunction with Franz von Rintelen’s two-volume memoir,
The Dark Invader
and
Return of the Dark Invader
, conveys a gripping sense of the cat-and-mouse game the two men were playing. Additionally, my knowledge of Tunney’s career was greatly facilitated by photostats of his original New York Police Department service records, made available to me by Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of public information, NYPD, who also made it possible for me to attend the commissioner’s daily intelligence briefing.

Other memoirs that effectively detail—although too often with melodramatic embellishments that strain credulity—what it was like to be a German agent behind the lines in enemy territory include the anonymously written
German Spy System from Within, by an Ex-Intelligence Officer
; Armgaard Karl Graves,
The Secrets of
the
German War Office
; “M.,”
My Experiences in the German Espionage
; Edward Myers,
Adventures of a Former Agent of the Kaiser’s Secret Service
; Horst von der Goltz,
My Adventures as a German Secret Agent
; and Eric Fisher Wood,
The Note-Book of an Intelligence Officer
.

Memoirs by diplomats are frequently more self-serving rewritings of history than factual accounts. Nevertheless, for the way they helped to evoke the frantic hustling through the corridors of power in Washington, New York, and Berlin as the war raged in Europe and was fought more covertly in America, I found useful the memoirs by James W. Gerard,
My Four Years in
Germany
and
Face to Face with Kaiserism
; Robert Lansing,
War Memoirs
; Walter Nicolai,
The German
Secret Service
; Johann von Bernstorff,
My Three Years in America
and
Memoirs of Count Bernstorff
; and Franz von Papen,
Memoirs
.

Additionally, while they are neither memoirs nor full-blown biographies, two affectionate histories give unique insight into two complicated men (and, in Case’s book, reveal a bit about Tom Tunney too): Henry Jay Case,
Guy Hamilton Scull
; and Joseph P. Tumulty,
Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him
.

In piecing together the full scope of the German spy network’s attack on America, I found some journalistic book-length accounts written in the aftermath of the initial revelations of the enemy operations to be essential models of detailed, if not always objective, reporting: George Barton,
Celebrated Spies and Famous Mysteries of the Great War
; John Price Jones and Paul Merrick Hollister,
The German Secret Service in
America, 1914–1918
; Henry Landau,
The Enemy Within
; and French Strother,
Fighting
Germany’s Spies
.

This is territory that has been covered in more recent histories too. Jules Witcover’s
Sabotage at Black Tom
is an important and very readable account of Germany’s secret war in America. In
The
Fourth Horseman
, Robert Koenig does groundbreaking original research into the first biowar against the nation; my account of Dilger and his activities is greatly indebted to Koenig’s inventive and tenacious work. Chad Millman’s well-documented and absorbing tale
The Detonators
puts particular emphasis on the Black Tom explosion. Barbara W. Tuchman’s elegantly written
Zimmermann Telegram
provides insights into both the British and German spy operations in America. And the most comprehensive accounts of how both the federal government and the New York Police Department attempted to deal with enemy operatives in the years leading up to the war are Thomas A. Reppetto’s
Battleground, New York
City
and, written with James Lardner,
NYPD: A City and Its Police
. Mr. Reppetto is the foremost authority on the history of the New York Police Department, and he graciously supplemented the information in his books during the course of several spirited and entertaining conversations.

The books to which I most often turned to provide context on the world historical events that swirled around and influenced Tom Tunney’s very personal quest included Herbert J. Bass, ed.,
America’s Entry into
World War I
; Justin D. Doenecke,
Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I
; Richard Holmes,
The Oxford Companion to Military History
; John Keegan,
A History of Warfare
and
The First World War
; the first volume of John Bach McMaster,
United States in the World War
; Marc B. Powe,
The Emergence of the War Department Intelligence Agency, 1885–1
918
; Charles Seymour
, Woodrow Wilson and the World War
; David Stevenson,
Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy
; and A. Willert,
The Road to Safety: A Study in Anglo-American Relations
.

Finally, I kept rereading several monographs, linchpins that both grounded and shaped my narrative. The ones I consulted most frequently included Tom Montalbano, “The Station Agent and the Anarchist,”
Syosset
Jericho
Tribune
, March 19, 2010; Frank J. Rafalko, “Imperial Germany’s Sabotage Operations in the U.S.,” in
A Counterintelligence Reader: American Revolution to World War II
; Richard Spence, “Englishmen in New York: The SIS American Station, 1915–21,”
Intelligence and National
Security
; Michael Warner, “The Kaiser Sows Destruction: Protecting the Homeland the First Time Around,” in
Studies in Intelligence
; Douglas Wheeler, “A Guide to the History of Intelligence, 1800–1918,”
Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies
; and, indispensably, Daniel E. Russell,
The Day Morgan Was Shot
.