The Poison Tide

by Andrew Williams

  Anxious not to be discovered beside the body, I slipped out of the hospital and returned to the embassy where I sent a coded signal with the news of Dilger’s death to Director MI 1[c] at the SS Bureau and DNI at the Admiralty. The following day (October 18) Dilger was buried in a mass grave for victims of the influenza virus in one of the city’s cemeteries.

  (signed)

  Commander Sebastian Wolff RN Retd

  Historical Note and Sources

  The plot of The Poison Tide is drawn from real events and the lives of those who took part in them, a story of what was and might have been. For those who like to pull the threads of the history from the fiction, here is a brief outline of the unvarnished facts and some of my sources.

  As the armies of the European powers marched into battle in the summer of 1914, Irish leaders in America met the German Ambassador and his military attaché to discuss support for a rebellion. The former British diplomat and humanitarian campaigner Sir Roger Casement was present at some of their meetings. Since leaving government service he had become a prominent supporter of Home Rule for his native Ireland.

  With the intention of pressing Ireland’s cause in person, Casement left America in the autumn of 1914 and took passage to Germany. Adler Christensen travelled with him as his valet. Slipping through the British blockade of the Atlantic they reached Christiania, as Norway’s capital Oslo was called at that time. During their short stay in the city Christensen approached the British Legation and offered to betray Casement. He spoke to the minister at the Legation, Mansfeldt Findlay, and presented him with confidential papers including a German cipher for which he was paid a small amount. From their conversation with Christensen the British inferred his relationship with Casement was probably of ‘an improper character’. It was the first suggestion they received that Roger Casement was engaged in a homosexual relationship, an offence punishable with imprisonment at the time.

  Christensen would later tell Casement and the German authorities that the British had taken him from a hotel lobby and interrogated him but he had refused to give them any information. For many details of Casement’s life, love and politics I drew on Brian Inglis’ biography, Roger Casement. Reinhard Doerries’ books Prelude to the Easter Rising and Imperial Challenge were a source for the German-Irish connection, as were My Three Years in America, the memoirs of the German ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff.

  In Berlin, Casement’s principal intelligence contact was Count Rudolf Nadolny of the General Staff. As the head of Section P, Nadolny was charged with masterminding covert operations against British and French interests in America and elsewhere around the world. Although the papers relating to Section P’s activities were destroyed at the end of the war, we know from coded telegrams sent to the German Embassy in Washington that Casement furnished the count with the names of Irish republicans who would be prepared to assist with ‘far-reaching sabotage in the United States’. In return Casement was allowed to visit prisoners of war in Germany and recruit his Irish Brigade, much as I relate in The Poison Tide.

  Casement arrived in Berlin with great hopes, confident the Germans were ‘fighting for European civilisation at its best’. But isolated from comrades and decision-making in Ireland and America, and cast down by his inability to persuade his countrymen in the camps to join his brigade, he suffered an emotional collapse. In December 1915 he wrote with characteristic humanity that, ‘it is dreadful to think of all the world beginning the New Year with nothing but Death – killing and murdering wholesale, and destroying all that makes life happy . . . I feel very sad, and it has been the most unhappy Christmas I have ever spent.’ By then he had learnt from his friends in America that his ‘treasure’, Adler Christensen, had been spending money raised for their living expenses on a girlfriend.

  Robert Monteith’s Casement’s Last Adventure offers a first-hand account of Casement’s time in Germany and his attempts to recruit an Irish Brigade. His friend, the Princess Blücher, wrote of Casement’s visits to her in An English Wife in Berlin. At the other end of the social scale Madeleine Doty’s Short Rations is a vivid account of the effect of the British blockade on the lives of the ordinary Berliners that she knew.

  The news that a date had finally been set for a rising in Ireland reached Berlin on 17 February 1916. A telegram from the German Ambassador in Washington announced ‘revolution shall begin Easter Sunday’. The Irish requested up to 50,000 rifles, machine guns, field artillery and German officers. Count Nadolny offered only 20,000 rifles. Casement was landed from a U-boat on 20 April and arrested after only a few hours ashore. The trawler carrying his guns was intercepted by the Royal Navy. He was tried in London and condemned to death. To undermine the case of those seeking his reprieve, Captain Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, circulated salacious extracts from his diaries with details of payments made for sexual services and his descriptions of breathless encounters with young men he had met on diplomatic missions for His Majesty’s Government. For accounts of Casement’s execution at Pentonville Prison and the opinion of the public at home and abroad, I drew on newspaper reports, in particular the coverage of the New York Times.

  The aristocrat at the heart of the German–Irish intrigue had lost patience with Casement long before the Easter Rising. By the spring of 1916 Count Nadolny’s principal concern was the sabotage campaign he was orchestrating against Allied interests in neutral America and on three other continents.

  In the Prologue to The Poison Tide, Count Nadolny echoes German Staff thinking that the war would be unprecedented in its reach, fought not just by soldiers but by the people. ‘It will,’ the War Book of the German General Staff predicted, ‘destroy the total moral and material resources’ of the enemy. The conflict was framed in terms of a Darwinian struggle. ‘War gives a biologically just decision . . .’ the influential German general Friedrich von Bernhard wrote, ‘. . . not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilisation.’ Or, as Count Nadolny predicts in my story, ‘victory will be secured by those who prove the fittest’. If victory was a ‘moral obligation’ then the means used to secure it were of little consequence. The British First Sea Lord, Admiral John Fisher, put it like this: ‘the essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.’ And in this Total War everyone would play a part – scientists and doctors too.

  Preparations for a German biological weapons programme seem to have begun in early 1915. Count Nadolny directed its operations for the General Staff, while Professor Carl Troester was responsible for the culturing of anthrax and glanders bacilli at the Military Veterinary Academy in Berlin. How and when Anton Dilger was recruited and why he agreed to risk his life serving German interests in his native America are matters of speculation. His involvement in the campaign, the help he received from his family, the house in Chevy Chase and the network of Albert, Hinsch and Hilken was much as I relate in The Poison Tide. To help my story I have changed the chronology of his activities in the United States, some of his family relationships, but above all the target of the campaign. There is no evidence to suggest Anton Dilger and his associates were intending to attack Allied soldiers or civilians, only the horses, mules and cattle they needed for the waging of the war.

  The German General Staff did consider using biological weapons against soldiers and civilians. On 7 June 1916 the naval attaché in Madrid, Commander Krohn, sent a telegram suggesting the contamination of rivers with cholera bacilli, but his proposal was rejected. A few months later the Staff was presented with another, this time for the spreading of plague. A military doctor, Oberstabsarzt Winter, argued the dropping of plague bacilli from Zeppelins on English ports would infect local populations and cause general panic. The idea seems to have interested the new Chief of the General Staff, General Ludendorff, but it was categorically ruled out by the Surgeon General. ‘If we undertake this step,’ he wrote, ‘we will no longer be worthy to exist as a nation.’

  There were m
any rumours of German biological attacks on both Allied soldiers and civilians. In 1917 the British Home Office instructed the police to take precautions against anthrax. A few months later civil servants reported information from a French source, ‘that the enemy had inoculated a large number of rats with plague, and they intended to let them loose in the United Kingdom from submarines and aeroplanes.’

  The General Staff considered the infection of horses and other livestock as an attack on military supplies and a legitimate act of war. Nadolny’s biological warfare programme grew in scope and reach with Section P agents operating not just in the United States but against Allied interests in Rumania, Spain, Norway and South America, too. This campaign is covered in detail in Thomas Boghardt’s book, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War.

  Culturing and then infecting the animals required more effort than many German agents were prepared to make. After the war scientists in Britain and elsewhere were able to mill anthrax spores to something like a dust that could be used more effectively in a high explosive device. In 1925 Winston Churchill wrote of ‘pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast . . . Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts – such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.’ No doubt this thought was in the mind of Prime Minister Churchill when in 1942 he authorised the testing of an anthrax bomb that might be dropped on Nazi Germany. But it was the Japanese War Ministry that was to invest the most money and time in the development of a biological warfare programme during the Second World War. Within the walls of its Pingfan Institute, three thousand scientists, technicians and soldiers worked on a range of diseases to be used in an offensive, including typhus, typhoid, cholera, plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, glanders and anthrax. They concluded that anthrax bombs would be the most effective and more than two thousand were developed and tested experimentally.

  Anthrax is still regarded as one of the most potent biological threats. The accidental release of anthrax spores from a weapons facility in Sverdlovsk in the former Soviet Union in 1979 resulted in seventy-nine cases of anthrax infection and sixty-eight deaths. Scientists are particularly concerned about the release of spores in an aerosol by a terrorist group or in a dirty explosion. Colourless and odourless, the spores might travel many miles before disseminating. In 1993 a report by the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated the release of 100 kilograms of anthrax spores upwind of Washington, DC, would result in anything from to 130,000 to three million deaths – a death rate that would match the impact of a hydrogen bomb on the district.

  For the effects of anthrax and the history of its use I consulted a number of books and medical papers, and I am grateful to Professor Alastair Hay of Leeds University who spared time to go over some of these areas with me. More on the secret history of chemical and biological warfare can be found in A Higher Form of Killing by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman.

  ‘A higher form of killing’ was the epithet Fritz Haber used to describe his invention of poison gas. Although there is no evidence to suggest Haber met Anton Dilger, he did have some contact with Count Nadolny. In The Poison Tide Haber expresses his firmly held view that in war the scientist belongs to his country and must bend his efforts to victory. The Anton Dilger of my story stands shoulder to shoulder with him in contending talk of a humane death is nonsense and there is no ethical difference between blowing a man to pieces in no-man’s-land and poisoning him in a gas attack. Clara Haber’s opposition to her husband’s work is well documented and is believed to have been the significant factor in her decision to commit suicide at their home in Berlin, just days after the first German gas release on the Western Front.

  Dr Anton Dilger died in Madrid of complications associated with Spanish influenza a few weeks before the end of the war. By the autumn of 1918, the State Department in Washington was actively seeking his arrest with a view to indicting him for treason. Carl Dilger always believed his brother was murdered by German intelligence ‘because he knew too much’. The most valuable source for the little that is known of Dilger’s life and death is Robert Koenig’s biography The Fourth Horseman: One Man’s Mission to Wage the Great War in America.

  Captain Franz von Rintelen enjoyed a longer and more peaceful life. After three years’ imprisonment in America, he returned first to Germany then to England, where he died in 1949. The story of the espionage network he built using the personnel and contacts of the German shipping lines, his unholy alliance with Irish America, Black Tom and his campaign of sabotage can be found in his own colourful but self-serving memoir The Dark Invader. Many characters who appear in The Poison Tide are also there, including his contact to the Irish on the docks, Paul Koenig, and Dr Walter Scheele, the inventor of the cigar bomb the network used against British ships and American munitions factories. Another valuable source for the activities of the saboteurs was Captain Thomas Tunney’s account of his time as the head of the New York Police Department Bomb Squad, Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters. Chad Millman’s The Detonators offers a good general account of the campaign and the post-war attempt to bring the German agents and their American collaborators to justice. From all of these books I took as much as was useful for my story.

  The Poison Tide is set at a time of some confusion in both the British and German intelligence services with rival agencies competing for influence and resources. Today, the British Secret Intelligence Service – or MI6 – is the principal body responsible for the gathering of information from overseas, providing, in its own words, ‘the global covert capability to promote and defend the national security and economic well-being of the United Kingdom’. But at the beginning of the First World War it was just one among a number of intelligence agencies.

  Founded as the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, its first chief was the redoubtable Commander, later Captain, Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy. It was Cumming’s habit of initialling classified documents in green ink as ‘C’ that gave rise to the tradition of the head of the Service being referred to as C. By 1914 the ‘SS Bureau’ or ‘Secret Service’ was operating from a large flat at 2 Whitehall Court in the centre of London, a short distance from the Admiralty and the War Office. Its cramped premises at the top of a mainly residential block reflected its lowly status. Cumming had to fight to prevent the SS Bureau being swallowed up by the War Office’s Military Intelligence Directorate. During the war years it was referred to variously as the ‘SS Bureau’, the ‘Secret Service’, the ‘Special Intelligence Service’, even ‘C’s Organisation’, and its official designation was MI 1(c). For simplicity I elected in The Poison Tide to refer to MI 1(c) as the ‘Secret Service Bureau’, the ‘Bureau’ or the ‘Service’, and to Cumming and ‘Blinker’ Hall of Naval Intelligence by their final ranks of captain and admiral respectively. More details of the foundation of the Service and its early operations can be found in the official history written by Keith Jeffery: MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949; Christopher Andrew’s Secret Service; and Alan Judd’s The Quest for C: Sir Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the British Secret Service.

  Nowhere was the rivalry between competing intelligence agencies sharper than in America. Until the winter of 1915 British efforts to counter the German sabotage campaign were led by the aggressive and flamboyant naval attaché, Captain Guy Gaunt. He did not welcome the arrival of C’s new station chief, Sir William Wiseman, or acknowledge his presence to be necessary. But Wiseman and the agents who worked with him brought a new professionalism to British espionage operations. It was a time when old secrets were a little less closely guarded, and in the years after the war some of C’s best agents published their own accounts of the ‘New York Front’. Norman Thwaites wrote the memoir Velvet and Vinegar, and the old spy and Germany hand, Hector Bywater wrote of ‘trade craft’ and his service in Ameri
ca in Strange Intelligence. Captain Guy Gaunt’s autobiography The Yield of the Years was also a useful source. A more scholarly account of Section V’s work in America can be found in the article by Richard B. Spence, ‘Englishmen in New York: The SIS American Station 1915–21’ (Intelligence and National Security, vol. 19, no. 3).

  For my hero Sebastian Wolff, I drew from the background of another of C’s spies, the Anglo-Dutchman, Henry Landau. Born and brought up in South Africa, Landau was fluent in German, Dutch and French. In 1916 he was recruited by C to direct the Service’s network in occupied Belgium. Landau’s account of his war was published as Secrets of the White Lady.

  For all the efforts of spies like Landau, the single most valuable source of intelligence on the German war effort was gathered in a room measuring twenty feet by seventeen in the Old Building at the Admiralty in London. Room 40 was the home of the Naval Intelligence Division’s code-breakers. Within four months of the start of the war they were reading all the German navy’s principal codes. German Foreign Office signals proved harder to crack, but in the spring of 1915 a copy of its diplomatic codebook was captured in Persia. Through 1915 and 1916, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Hall, was able to read telegrams from the German Embassy in Washington. Room 40 intercepted at least thirty-two signals relating to German assistance for the Irish, including confirmation in February 1916 that there was going to be a rising against British rule at Easter. It was from the code-breakers in Room 40 that Hall learned of the activities of Agent Delmar and the German biological warfare programme. My source for the work of the code-breakers was Patrick Beesly’s Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18.

  More of the background to the story, features, profiles and photographs, can be found on the website www.andrewwilliams.tv