Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (9 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
I
n the first hours of the war a British trawler slipped into the rough waters off the North Sea Dutch islands, and in the dawn mist its crew methodically went to work. Sturdy grappling irons splashed into the sea and hauled up their heavy bounty—a German transatlantic cable. Once it was on deck, industrial-strength saber-toothed saws cut the thick, slimy cable; then, like a catch not worth keeping, the jagged pieces were thrown back into the sea.
By day’s end, all five of Germany’s transatlantic cables had been severed. The nation was effectively sealed off from direct cable communication with its embassies outside continental Europe and its ships at sea.
The Germans still operated, however, a powerful wireless station at Nauen, just miles from Berlin. Its strong signal continued to transmit messages to all parts of the world.
Germany realized the enemy could intercept the radio communications it sent to its outposts. But the wireless station at Nauen chattered on incessantly without a pang of concern: the messages were encoded, translated into a text—letters, arbitrary words, or numbers—that was incomprehensible without the codebook upon which the sender had based his message. Additionally, the cautious Germans often enciphered the code, wrapping the coded text in another layer of disguise where letters or groups of letters or numbers represented something entirely different according to an intricate prearranged pattern.
The Germans had absolute confidence in their carefully constructed inventions. After all, the Teutonic mathematicians who had devised the ciphers were, by training if not merely birth, the world’s best.
Nevertheless, the fledgling British Cryptographic Service, a hastily recruited group of amateur cryptologists, mathematicians, and linguists, was determined to decipher the stream of messages its forests of antennae were intercepting. Working out of “40 O.B.”—the secret designation of Room 40, a small warren in the Old Admiralty Building—the team went to work.
Room 40 quickly grew crowded with treatises on ancient codes requisitioned from the stacks of university libraries and the storerooms of the British Museum. Desks were piled high with recondite texts that delved into the esoteric domains of Playfair and Vigenère squares, alphabet frequencies, and word wheels. But most helpful was the mounting inventory of German intercepts. With typical Prussian thoroughness, these often included several readily comparable versions of the same message in different codes.
It was a painstaking, meticulous chase, long, futile days and nights, relieved by small eureka moments. They made remarkable progress. In a short time they succeeded in reconstructing several of the German ciphers.
In addition, British agents in Belgium and the Middle East had managed to get their hands on German diplomatic codebooks—including one for Code 13040, one of the two codes used to send important messages from the Foreign Office in Berlin to the embassy in Washington, and from there to German missions throughout the western hemisphere. The men in Room 40 now had the key to open stacks of previously locked top-secret diplomatic intercepts.
THE TROUBLE WITH SECRETS, THOUGH,
is that they lose a good deal of their value once they are revealed. They are like capital that is to be hoarded, appreciated, but not spent. If the enemy knows you’re reading his mail, he’ll stop posting letters. The door to even greater revelations will be nailed shut.
But the information Room 40 was gathering was too consequential to ignore. Lives were at stake. The course of the war, it could be argued with convincing reason, could be affected. Something had to be done.
This was the dilemma that weighed heavily on the man known throughout Whitehall simply as C. This single letter with its magisterial, intentionally dramatic brevity was the code name of Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the head of London’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or, to those with higher clearance, MI6), then operating under the War Office as M11c. The cables Room 40 had deciphered revealed Abteilung IIIB’s activities in America.
It was intelligence that, if shared with President Wilson, could help nudge an enraged America into war on the Allies’ side. Or its disclosure could alert Wilhelmstrasse, and put an abrupt end to Britain’s ability to read Germany’s secrets.
C weighed the alternatives. In the end he wrote out a carefully crafted message by hand; signed it, as was his custom, in green ink with the letter
C
; and then ordered that it be flash-wired to “Head, Section V.”
Captain Guy Gaunt, CMG, RN, the British naval attaché to Washington who also served as the head of Section V.
(Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland)
G
uy Gaunt was the head of Section V, and he was also the unidentified man with the military bearing and the raffish mustache sitting that morning in the commissioner’s office.
Gaunt had been born in Australia. His family was comfortable and distinguished—a brother an admiral, a sister a novelist of some reputation. And Gaunt had lived his own adventures, leading a ragtag native fighting force in the jungles of Samoa that became celebrated as “Gaunt’s Brigade,” and then going on to command battleships and cruisers in the Royal Navy. As war clouds darkened European skies, Captain Gaunt had been sent to America. His official title was British naval attaché, and he was given an impressive suite of rooms in the embassy in Washington. But the title and office were bits of cover stretched to disguise his real job. Working out of the consulate office in downtown Manhattan at 44 Whitehall Street, he ran Britain’s spy network in America.
It was Gaunt who had received C’s memo. While careful not to reveal or even hint that the German codes had been broken, the secret service head had established in alarming detail that the German secret service was directing a campaign of sabotage against America.
As ordered, Gaunt promptly shared this intelligence with his liaison in the Wilson administration, Franklin Polk.
A DESCENDANT OF THE ELEVENTH
president, another Groton old boy (although unlike the two policemen he had gone on to Yale), Polk was a former Wall Street lawyer who now worked as a counselor at the State Department. The president had also—in a deliberately informal way, since the whole notion of spies struck Congress as more appropriate for decadent European states with their histories of intrigues—selected him to coordinate the nation’s nascent security operations.
It was Polk who had to make the decision about what, if anything, to do with Gaunt’s extraordinary intelligence. The information, he recognized with a cautious, lawyerly prudence, remained unconfirmed. No names were provided, no operational specifics offered. Yet the implications of a secret war being fought by Germany against the nation, and on American soil no less, were staggering. It was an attack on the homeland that could not be ignored.
Yet whom could he—no, the nation—trust to conduct such an important, yet politically delicate, investigation? Who could effectively hunt down the culprits, and also be relied on not to create a storm of indignant, warmongering headlines as they reeled in the enemy spies?
There was the Secret Service, but a wary Congress had curtailed the agency’s activities. In 1908, after a disreputable clique of public officials was implicated in a land fraud investigation, Congress quickly passed a law relegating the service’s agents strictly to Treasury Department duties. Agents could pursue counterfeiters and had official authorization to guard the president, but the worried, self-protective federal lawmakers made sure that this was about all they could legally do.
The Bureau of Investigation (nearly three decades later its name would officially be changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) was President Theodore Roosevelt’s retaliatory gambit. After the Secret Service had been stripped of its investigative powers, he slyly proposed the creation of a bureau of investigation, which would be part of the Department of Justice.
Congress grasped the president’s shrewd game, and it was not about to establish another agency that might soon be scrutinizing its creators. It refused to authorize the bureau. Fuming, Roosevelt bided his time until Congress adjourned, and then had the last laugh: he established the Bureau of Investigation with an executive order.
But the agency that emerged from such manipulations was, perhaps inevitably, a hollow force. Bruce Bielaski, a plodding career civil servant with a night-school law degree, served as its passive, low-key head. Its men were not authorized to carry firearms, and, as an additional handicap, they had no official power to make arrests. The agents flashed shiny badges, but the humiliating reality was that they had not much more law enforcement authority than any citizen.
Bruce Bielaski, head of the Bureau of Investigation, which was a precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
(Courtesy Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Then there were the military intelligence agencies. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), established in 1882, kept track primarily of the daunting advances the European powers were making in their warships. A studious team of a dozen junior officers pored over foreign technical journals, while intelligence officers serving on U.S. ships in overseas ports slunk about harbors and shipyards with discerning eyes. An inventory of informative reports grew rapidly. But the ONI agents were sailors, and they had neither interest in nor the detective abilities to investigate nonmaritime matters.
The Military Intelligence Division (MID), set up by the army three years after its sister service was created, was less reliable. It functioned, when it functioned at all, as a tangled, ineffective bureaucracy. Even the colonel who ran the division felt he had a duty to alert the army chief of staff not long after Germany had marched into Belgium that “information on hand is now so old as to be practically worthless.”
Ripening the prospect of future failures, the intelligence budgets of both the army and the navy had been repeatedly slashed over the past two years. Their activities had been deemed unnecessary now that peace-loving President Wilson was in office.
The president was committed to neutrality. It was a stance that grew in large part out of a deep-rooted, almost spiritual pacifism. “We will not ask our young men to spend the best years of their lives making soldiers of themselves,” Wilson had pledged.
Yet at the same time, Polk knew, the president’s neutrality was a farseeing practical political strategy. Wilson believed that an America that stayed out of self-destructive fighting, that energetically worked instead to broker peace, would emerge at the end of the war as a powerful player on the world stage, possibly
the
world power.
And, not least, Wilsonian neutrality made good economic sense. Business was booming. The European war had revitalized a stagnant America. Full employment had returned. Allied governments were placing colossal, unprecedented orders for raw materials and manufactured goods. The steel industry thrived. Farmers had markets that would voraciously buy all the crops they could harvest. Cotton prices shot up. The United States was no longer a borrower of international capital; in fact the National City Bank and the Morgan firms were lending huge amounts of money to the Allies, sums that would soon total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The scales weighing the balance of international trade had tipped disproportionately in the United States’ favor, too. Before the start of the war, American exports to Europe exceeded imports by $500 million. Over the next two years the advantage would grow to $3.5 billion. Neutrality was making America rich.
An investigation that might uncover convincing reasons for the country to go to war, that could put an end to these boom times, needed, Polk realized, to be pursued with a quiet caution.
Still, at the core of Wilson’s neutrality there was a shaky, though less publicly articulated, ambivalence of which Polk, the Washington insider, was also well aware. The president, a proud and moralistic man, was prepared to lead the nation into war if he felt he had no justifiable alternative.
At the same time, Wilson engaged in all manner of philosophical contortions and rationalizations to avoid coming to that fateful realization. The president was quite happy to remain in denial.
When, for example, the outlines of the passport scheme had become known, the president quickly went to work to bury an inconvenient problem. The trail, it had become swiftly apparent, could conceivably be traced back to the German embassy, but Wilson didn’t want to be forced to deal with the consequences of such a provocative discovery.
“I hope that you will have the matter looked into thoroughly,” he wrote to his attorney general without any steel of conviction, “but that, at the same time, you will have all possible precautions taken that no hint of it may become public until it materializes into something upon which we have no choice but to act.”
Or, as the president dexterously reasoned in a letter to an old friend: “The opinion of the country seems to demand two inconsistent things, firmness and the avoidance of war, but I am hoping that perhaps they are not in necessary contradictions and that firmness may bring peace.”
Polk dutifully weighed all these considerations. He appraised the abilities of the various investigative agencies and, with no less rigor, thought long and hard about a president who wanted both peace and secrecy until “we have no choice but to act.” In the end, a proud product of his class, he decided to approach people he knew he could trust.
Polk had served as New York corporation counsel, the municipal government’s top lawyer, and therefore he had some professional history with Woods and Scull. Better still, they’d all come of age on the playing fields of Groton. They belonged to the same clubs, sat across the table from each other at dinner parties. They were heirs to the same traditions, to the same public-spirited concepts of duty and service. They were men of the same mind.
Polk arranged for Gaunt to meet with his old friend Guy Scull. After the deputy commissioner understood the importance of what was being discussed, he asked Woods to join them.
The British agent’s revelations cracked like gunshots in the night. The commissioner listened, and an odd mix of anger and trepidation swept over him as he envisioned what lay ahead. Finally, he made a late-night call. He summoned Tom Tunney to a clandestine meeting the next day.
AFTER THE INTRODUCTIONS HAD BEEN
made, Woods turned his attention to Tom. Just as C had not told Gaunt all he knew, and the SIS agent had not revealed everything to the policemen, Woods did not disclose to Tom all that had already been uncovered or discussed. That information still remained classified; and Woods also wanted his trusted man to move forward unencumbered by the preconceived notions of a British intelligence agent who no doubt had his own agenda.
This was a job, Woods strongly believed, that only a New York cop would know how to do. “Although city police forces did not usually take upon themselves to do such distinctly federal work,” Woods later explained, “we felt it was necessary because of the commanding position of New York as the greatest city and the greatest harbor in the country containing thousands of people of different nationalities.” The threat to New York had been confirmed, and Woods saw it as a personal attack. He would not rely on any other service to protect
his
city.
And he had an officer already in place who had experience in running undercover operations, who had successfully infiltrated terrorist groups. He had a man whose judgment and dedication he knew could be trusted.
He instructed Tom to pick a team of men and begin his hunt. The name of his command would henceforth be officially amended: the Bomb and Neutrality Squad. At the same time, Tom and his men were to tread quietly. It was crucial that their inquiries be kept secret. A public rush to judgment would not be in the national interest.
In the end, Woods candidly warned, wiser and more powerful men than those in this room would be making the decisions. Some secrets might remain hidden forever, he conceded with a gloomy prescience. But for now, Tom was to select the men he needed and begin his pursuit. He was to go wherever the clues would take him.
When Woods finished, Tom saluted. The others remained, but he left at once. The private elevator took him down to the first floor, and his solitary footsteps echoed against the marble as he made his way through the shadowy narrow corridor to the huge wooden door. Stepping out of the darkness into a city already transformed in his mind into a war zone, he set out to follow a new, devious trail.
