Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (8 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
S
till, despite its two bungled operations, the network didn’t have long to wait for its next chance. On November 28, 1914, new marching orders arrived from Berlin. A secret cable instructed: “It is necessary to hire through third parties who stand in no relations to the official representatives of Germany agents for arranging explosions on ships bound for enemy countries.”
Von Bernstorff coolly passed the cable on to von Papen with no further instructions; none were necessary. The ambassador’s orders were clear: handle this however you think best, but make sure this time the job gets done.
The military attaché was elated. He had been moping since the aborted Welland Canal and passport fiascos; this operation would be his vindication. The high command would take new measure of his talents. He’d make his mark, win medals.
In a repeat of the cautious tradecraft that had led him to Horst von der Goltz, he decided that he’d need a professional to direct the team in the field. Only this go-around, his handpicked operative was another sort of man entirely.
THE MAZE OF NARROW COBBLESTONE
streets leading to Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront was a no-man’s-land. This was menacing territory, a makeshift community on the fringe of the city crawling with its own shivery dangers. It was home to bullish longshoremen, knife-packing sailors, desperate whores, and a motley assortment of wharf rats who had long ago cast off the small traces of conscience with which they’d been born. On its dank blocks were run-down hotels that rented rooms for the hour and seedy bars where beer and whiskey flowed, and where heroin or opium could be scored in the back room. A shiv driven into the back, brass knuckles slamming into a mouthful of teeth, a straight razor slashing the jugular—blood flowing on the streets was not uncommon. During the day, when ships were loading or docking, the hustle of activity created an illusion of safety. But with the darkness of night, any doubts vanished: this was a savage land.
Paul Koenig ruled this underworld like the prince of darkness. For years he’d been the detective superintendent of the Atlas Line, a shipping subsidiary of the Kaiser’s Own, as the Hamburg-American Line, thanks to its intricate ties to the imperial government, was commonly known. He rode roughshod over a dozen burly men, and each day they marched about the waterfront like the emperor’s troops in a savage colonial port, getting the goods on sailors, dockhands, or anybody else foolish enough to think he could put one over on Hamburg-American.
Once Koenig found a suspect, his method of interrogation was direct. He’d methodically beat the daylights out of his victim. He’d always get a confession, and sometimes it was even true.
Regardless, Koenig—or PK, as he was universally known on the waterfront with a respect entirely rooted in abject fear—loved his work. He was a thug and a bully, and he enjoyed hurting people. He was built for the job, too—a thick-bodied, bull-necked man with long, drooping arms and iron fists that could seem as hell-bent as a runaway trolley car when they were pounding away at your skull. He had sleepy, hooded eyes and a weasel’s narrow mustache, and he never smiled, since that would indicate weakness. When you saw him coming, guilty or innocent, the instinct was to run.
Paul Koenig, the employee of the Hamburg-American Line who worked as a German operative in the United States, circa 1919.
(Thomas J. Tunney,
Throttled!
)
Von Papen summoned PK to his office in lower Manhattan and, after only the briefest of interviews, offered him a job. If Koenig accepted, the military attaché explained crisply, he would ostensibly continue his work for the Atlas Line, but his real occupation would be to carry out covert assignments for Abteilung IIIB.
Koenig considered. It would be another hostile world, and therefore familiar territory. Even better, he realized, the stakes would be more consequential, and that would make his battles more satisfying. “Yes,” he said, “I think that would be very much to my liking.”
HE WAS A MAN WITH
a mission, and he went to work without delay. From the downtown offices of the Hamburg-American Line, PK set up a squad culled from the toughest men on his security team, grandly dubbing them his
Geheimdienst
, or secret service division. The unit was an all-purpose tough-guy squad, providing bodyguards for von Bernstorff and the other officials; surveillance work at docks, hotels, and Wall Street banks; and muscle whenever a dose of persuasion was needed. However, the
Geheimdienst
’s primary operational role was sabotage.
Through the fall and then on into the uncommonly cold winter of 1914–15, bombs exploded. They were crude devices, rudimentary dynamite bombs. Koenig enlisted stevedores to plant them on ships. He found factory workers who for $25—a week’s pay—were willing to leave a satchel underneath a workbench and not ask any questions. It was a loosely organized, haphazard attack. But it was effective. Week after week, the ominous cadence of destruction boomed on.
In New Jersey, the DuPont powder mill at Pompton Lakes blew up mysteriously in the middle of the night. Five days later, three workers died when the Wright Chemical Works was shaken to its foundations by a blast. Next, a fire raced through the Pain Fireworks Display Company, leaving several people dead. Four people died in Jersey City at the Detwiller and Street munitions factory.
It was all a great cause for concern. Workplace safety rules, fire department authorities sternly admonished, would need to be enforced with greater diligence.
Then fires began to break out in ships at sea. The SS
Knutford
had sailed out of New York Harbor with a cargo hold loaded with food bound for England when, quite spontaneously it seemed, a devastating fire started belowdecks. The SS
Samland
, also out of New York and on its way to Liverpool, was the next ship to burst into flames in the middle of the Atlantic. When the SS
Devon City
caught fire off the coast of Nova Scotia, the mystery only deepened.
A labor dispute? Disgruntled crew members? A single longshoreman pursuing his own highly personal vendetta? Insurance scams? There were all sorts of theories. At Martha Held’s, though, there were finally victories to toast.
T
he shriek of the telephone woke Tom Tunney from a deep sleep, but he picked up the receiver on the first ring, instantly alert and expecting to hear Barnitz or, just as likely, an excited precinct sergeant reporting a new explosion. He was wrong. The caller was the police commissioner. And if that weren’t surprising enough, Woods’s instructions certainly were.
Tom hung up the phone and lay in bed, trying to imagine what could be so important that Arthur Woods, not an aide, would call at nearly midnight to summon him to a meeting in the morning. And why had the commissioner wanted to make sure Tom wouldn’t be seen coming to his office?
Suddenly sleepless, Tom lay there wondering. Yet he couldn’t repress a nagging fear that he knew what was to be revealed, and that his troubled instincts had been correct all along.
In the morning, Tom followed the PC’s directions. The usual path to Woods’s office at 240 Centre Street, the grandly domed Beaux Arts palace that was the new police headquarters, was straight up the broad limestone stairs to the second floor; left across acres of marble; a slow march through a gauntlet of uniformed aides and civilian deskmen; and finally to a pair of huge mahogany doors that, only on a lieutenant’s command, opened up into the commissioner’s private lair.
Today Tom traveled a decidedly more covert route.
The ornate headquarters had been squeezed onto a triangle of land, and a curving driveway, just wide enough for a single car, led to the rear of the building, near the triangle’s peak. As ordered, Tom followed this drive on foot to a heavy wooden door that looked as if it might lead to a dungeon. A stone terrace jutting out from the floor above served as a canopy and, not unintentionally, also obscured the entrance.
The door was locked, as Tom was told it would be, and he knocked. He waited, and as he did he could hear the rumble of gunfire rising up from the shooting range in the building’s basement. Before Tom could knock again, a uniformed officer he recognized as the commissioner’s chauffeur opened the door.
The officer saluted and then led Tom to a wood-paneled elevator not much roomier than a coffin. The officer took a key chain from his pocket, inserted the key into the control panel, gave it a twist, and the elevator was engaged. He pulled a lever, and it started to rise.
The door of the elevator opened up directly into the commissioner’s office, and Tom immediately inhaled the strong, comforting aroma of tobacco. It was a large, very formal room, a space designed to convey the position and power of its occupant. The walls were paneled in a forest of somber mahogany. An Oriental rug of a predominantly deep blue hue lay across the floor. The heavy curtains were drawn, the fireplace was unlit, and the golden wall sconces provided only faint illumination.
The commissioner sat like a king on his throne behind the mile-long wooden desk that Tom knew had been Teddy Roosevelt’s when, seventeen eventful years earlier, the soon-to-be president had served as PC. Across from Woods in high-backed leather chairs were two men in civilian clothes.
Tom recognized one of them, and he was, as always, glad to see him. Guy Scull, like the commissioner who’d recruited him to serve as his deputy, was another Groton and Harvard man, and, also like Woods’s, his pedigree seemed apparent at first glance.
He was old Boston and old money, a slender, wiry slice of a man who, with his chiseled features and punctilious demeanor, struck many in the department as aloof, if not entirely unapproachable. “My God,” exclaimed one dumbfounded sergeant when told that Scull would be the deputy commissioner of detectives, “he looks like a portrait hanging in a museum. Not a cop.”
But Tom had worked with Scull and had come to appreciate the soft-spoken deputy commissioner as, he would say, “a born detective” and, no less praise in Tom’s striver’s universe, “a workhorse.” During the course of a still unsolved murder investigation that started back when Tom had worked out of a precinct in Brooklyn, he had spent a few evenings drinking with Scull. In those long nights, he’d learned a good deal about the man that he’d never have expected, and still had difficulty accepting.
The seemingly demure Protestant aristocrat was in his secret heart a raging adventurer: Scull had galloped up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders; gone off to the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent; moved on to cover the Boxer outbreaks in China; fought marauding Mexicans along the border with the Texas Rangers; and also sailed to the Caribbean in search of the fabulous treasure that had sunk over a century ago along with the Spanish galleon
Good Faith
.
Tom had read somewhere that Scull had gotten married last summer, and he could not help wondering if married life had reined him in. It was one reason, Tom told himself, that he had never married. That, and never having found a woman who seemed more important than his work.
Tom did not know the other man seated across from the commissioner. He had a soft brown mustache that curled up toward his cheeks like the wings of a bird in flight, and he sat straight in his chair with a soldier’s rigid formality.
Woods directed Tom to the remaining leather chair positioned in front of his desk, but even before Tom sat, the commissioner offered an apology.
You were right, he told Tom.
AT THE POLICE TRAINING ACADEMY,
detectives were taught not to guess, but rather to be patient, to roll up their sleeves and chase after clues until they led to the solution. Induction, the instructors lectured, was the time-tested method for solving crimes: ascertain the facts, and then follow them like signposts to the only possible destination. Hunches, extrapolations, inferences—those were the lazy sleuth’s dubious shortcuts. Even worse, they’d never stand up in court.
It was a cautious, methodical approach that, for his nearly two decades on the job, had served Tom well. But recently he’d strayed from this careful philosophy. There was, he felt with a shiver of concern, no time to lose.
“Every person was seeing events of unheard violence and magnitude pass him pell-mell, giving no warning,” he would say in partial explanation for his impetuosity. Merchant ships were bursting into flames not long after they left New York Harbor. Chemical and munitions factories from New Jersey to California were rocked by fatal explosions. It was a time of swirling confusion and building mysteries.
After each new act of violence, theories took shape and suspicions flourished. Were unions the culprits? Anarchists? Antiwar activists? Yet there was no evidence to connect any group, any individual, to this campaign of destruction.
In fact, there was no proof that the events were deliberate. Perhaps the fires and explosions were accidents, a string of coincidences precipitated by a slippery disregard for safety as greedy American shippers and factory owners hurried to make a profit from the war in Europe.
Yet all along, Tom, the bomb squad veteran, knew. “There was a maddening certainty about it all,” he had decided. In his policeman’s mind, “it took no superhuman amount of reasoning to combine the abnormal destruction of property in New York with the strong suspicion of German activity.”
But he had no proof. Not even a single clue. “The sum total of these reports was,” he conceded with a gloomy resignation, “nothing.”
Nevertheless, Tom, after weighing his options, had gone to see the commissioner. On that occasion, about four months before, he had walked in the front door and with no less directness shared his suspicions. Tom began by acknowledging that he had no facts to bolster his theory, only instincts forged by two decades on the job. But he was convinced that just as the Brescia Circle bombings were politically motivated, so were the shipboard fires and munitions plant explosions. He suspected that German agents, either American sympathizers or possibly even members of the kaiser’s secret service, were responsible. He asked Woods’s permission to begin an investigation.
Woods refused. For one thing, he didn’t trust Tunney’s motives. Perhaps the captain’s unspoken intention was to unearth a scandal that would help push America into the war on the side of the Allies. It wasn’t the role of the New York Police Department to manipulate foreign policy, especially when the department’s activities might very well be contrary to the official government position of strict neutrality.
And even if Tunney’s allegations had some merit, Woods viewed this sort of investigation as a federal matter, something the War Department should pursue. His men chased criminals, not spies.
But he didn’t share all these thoughts with Tunney. He simply ordered Tom to put the matter aside. Tom and his men were expressly prohibited from making any inquiries.
Tom obeyed. The mysterious attacks continued. More property was destroyed. More lives were lost. By the spring of 1915 the tally of devastation was unsettling: over seventy fires and explosions, thirty-eight deaths, and an estimated $22 million in damages. Yet the tacit police department policy was one of studied indifference. “Keep our heads cool and our eyes open” was the rule, Tom moaned. And it left Tom stewing.
He perceived the dangers and knew there would be more destruction. He had theories, but he wasn’t quite there. He couldn’t prove who was responsible. Still, in his policeman’s soul, Tom, the hunter, knew. Yet he was forbidden to act.
All that was about to end, though. And that morning next to Commissioner Scull sat the man in large measure responsible for the change: the head of Section V, the British secret service’s New York station.
