The Dark Game

by Paul B. Janeczko

  The German Information Service (GIS) was what is known as a white propaganda agency. Such white groups operated within the limits of the law as they tried to derail any efforts of the U.S. government to enter the war. The GIS published a daily list of pro-German editorials and articles that would attract the attention of resident German aliens as well as German Americans.

  The most direct attempt by Germany to curtail the production of war supplies was its creation of the Bridgeport Projectile Company (BPC). In the language of the espionage establishment, BPC was a proprietary company, a front for their efforts to limit munitions that could be sent to the Allies. They ordered huge quantities of materials deemed essential to fight the war. For example, BPC placed orders for machine tools and hydraulic presses, thus making them unavailable for legitimate companies that needed such parts to produce war supplies. BPC also ordered five million pounds of gunpowder from Aetna Powder Company, an order so large that Aetna could sell no powder to the U.S. government.

  Merely ordering the parts created a shortage of machine parts that slowed down production of wartime necessities. German agents likewise tried to corner the market on chlorine, a poisonous gas that killed uncountable soldiers in the trenches on both sides. The Bridgeport Projectile Company offered inflated wages, thereby causing unrest among workers at other munitions plants. It gladly paid higher wages as part of its plan to upset manufacture of munitions by the United States. BPC did not necessarily even need to produce munitions that could be shipped to Germany. They only needed to keep war materials out of the hands of U.S. manufacturers. Any materials that were delivered were simply stored at the Bridgeport facility. Some were eventually destroyed.

  If Berlin hoped to sustain their enormously successful covert operations for an indefinite period of time, those hopes vanished because of a colossal blunder by one of their own, Dr. Heinrich Albert, a German commercial attaché and finance officer for the German espionage operation in the United States. As finance officer, he was responsible for paying operatives in this country. He chose the wrong time to become forgetful, and U.S. agents were there to take advantage of his error.

  William G. McAdoo, secretary of the treasury, authorized a covert operation, assigning Secret Service agents to follow several German and Austro-Hungarian attachés who were under suspicion of espionage. On July 24, 1915, the surveillance team of Special Agents William Houghton and Frank Burke followed George Sylvester Viereck, editor of The Fatherland, and Dr. Heinrich Albert, when they left Albert’s office in New York. The men boarded a Sixth Avenue elevated train, Houghton and Burke right behind them. Viereck got off the train at Twenty-third Street, with Houghton tailing him.

  From his seat right behind the attaché, Agent Burke studied Albert. A heavyset man, measuring about six feet tall, he bore crosscut saber scars on his right cheek. Burke also noted a briefcase beside the German. Albert opened a newspaper and was soon caught up in the news of the day before he nodded off. Startled by the sudden arrival at his station at Fiftieth Street, Albert bolted from his seat and hurried off the train. Burke knew he didn’t need to follow Albert any longer when he noticed that Albert had left his briefcase behind. A woman passenger called out to Albert, pointing to his briefcase. But before Albert could reenter the train, Agent Burke snatched the briefcase. As Albert pushed his way back into the car, Burke dashed out the other door of the car, with Albert close behind him. The chase was on until Burke leaped onto a streetcar. He told the conductor that the madman following him had caused a ruckus at the train station. The conductor took one look at Albert, running down the street, wildly waving his arms, and told the motorman not to stop at the next corner. The streetcar moved on, leaving Albert behind.

  The briefcase was jammed with telegrams from Berlin, communication for Albert’s spies and agents, and financial records. When Secretary McAdoo read the translated documents, he was astounded to learn about the workings of the Bridgeport Projectile Company and the German financing of The Fatherland. But he also realized that, as underhanded as the covert actions of the German agents were, he could see no federal law that had been violated. With the prospect of arrest and legal action against these agents improbable, McAdoo was determined to expose the treachery of German agents on U.S. soil in a way that would still put the agents out of business: publicity.

  McAdoo handed the documents over to the editor of the New York World. The headlines of the next edition screamed the news across page one: “How Germany Has Worked in the U.S. to Shape Opinion, Block the Allies, and Get Munitions for Herself Told in Secret Agent’s Letters.” Included in the front-page article, which nearly filled the entire page, were documents and a reproduction of two letters. Germany’s secrets were revealed for all Americans to read.

  Count Johann von Bernstorff, German ambassador to the United States, later called the affair “merely a storm in a teacup,” pointing out that there was no evidence to show that any law had been broken. True enough, but, as one historian observed, the publicity not only neutralized the “huge and expensive” covert psychological operation; it was also “made to backfire, dealing a devastating blow” to Germany. And, as Captain Franz von Papen, German military attaché in Mexico City, later admitted, “Our contracts [for war materials] were challenged, cancelled, or replaced by other ‘priority’ orders, and our scheme came to an end.” American munitions manufacturers were no longer wasting time and material filling phony orders for Germany. These supplies could now be used for legitimate U.S. orders.

  While the U.S. intelligence community could feel justifiable satisfaction in rolling up the German psychological and propaganda machine, they were not nearly as successful in preventing the sabotage operations carried out by German agents in the United States. German saboteurs targeted many plants, mostly in the northeast, that manufactured arms, munitions, and other supplies for the Allies. That the efforts of German agents were so successful is an indication of how the U.S. counterintelligence community was woefully unprepared.

  On November 11, 1914, the German General Staff approved “hiring destructive agents among agents of anarchist organizations.” About two weeks later, the German Intelligence Bureau of the High Sea Fleet General Staff put forth a similar order for all “destruction agents” to “mobilize immediately.” The General Staff was especially keen on agents in or near commercial operations and military bases “where munitions are being loaded on ships going to England, France, Canada, the United States of North America and Russia.”

  With orders issued, it wasn’t long before American plants and facilities were targeted. On New Year’s Day, a destructive fire of suspicious but unknown origin burned out a plant that manufactured wire cable in Trenton, New Jersey. Two days later, an explosion rocked the SS Orton, anchored in the Erie Basin in Brooklyn, New York. Other fires and explosions ripped through a number of New Jersey plants that produced weapons or gunpowder. In April a ship carrying arms caught fire at sea. Bombs were found on two others. But the worst was yet to come.

  The German consul in San Francisco, Franz von Bopp, ordered that time bombs be hidden on four ships at anchor in Tacoma, Washington. Filled with gunpowder and destined for Russia, the ships were a prime target. The saboteurs did their work well. Explosions rocked Tacoma and nearby Seattle, destroying all the powder. The U.S. still had no counterintelligence system that might have alerted them to such bomb-making operations.

  Two of the men who took part in the Tacoma sabotage, Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke, were sent east by von Bopp to work with a sabotage ring that was operating in the New York City–New Jersey area. The men had hoped to plant bombs along the way on trains carrying thousands of horses and mules east for shipment to Europe. An alternative to this plan was to infect the animals with anthrax cultures and an infectious disease called glanders. Fortunately, neither plan was carried out.

  The spring and summer of 1915 was a busy time for saboteurs, including Jahnke and Witzke. Eight arms ships caught fire at sea. Bombs were discovered on anoth
er five ships. In addition, explosions and fire destroyed arms and powder plants in Wallington, Carney’s Point (three times), and Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. The operatives also scored hits at similar plants in Wilmington, Delaware (twice); Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Acton, Massachusetts. An arms train was wrecked in New Jersey.

  Despite the success of the saboteurs, the German High Command was not satisfied with the work of their spy and sabotage operations. To direct what they hoped would be more destructive results, they sent Captain Franz von Rintelen, a junior member of the admiralty, to New York in 1915. His orders were clear. He was expected to do more to curtail the tons of war supplies, especially munitions, that were bound to Allied soldiers. Such supplies, Berlin believed, were prolonging the war. Von Rintelen felt confident that he would succeed. As he put it, “I’ll buy up what I can and blow up what I can’t.”

  Realizing that so much of the war supplies passed through New York Harbor from docks and warehouses in Manhattan and New Jersey, von Rintelen decided that his base of operations should be there. Why travel the country looking for munitions factories to blow up, he reasoned, when his band of operatives could focus on the shipping in New York Harbor and, in a sense, have the munitions come to them?

  Von Rintelen promptly converted one of the German merchant ships quarantined in New York Harbor into a bomb factory. He enlisted the help of Dr. Walter T. Scheele, a German chemist, who’d been in the country for a long time (such a person is called a sleeper agent) and Charles Schmidt, the chief engineer of the ship. Together they designed a device that would wreak havoc on munitions ships on the high seas. The bomb-making teacher began by cutting tubing into pieces seven inches or so long, about the size of a large cigar, then dividing the “cigar” into two watertight chambers, separated by a thin copper disk. The cigar bombs were then moved to Dr. Scheele’s laboratory in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he filled one chamber with sulfuric acid, the other with the highly explosive picric acid. The copper disk that separated the two acids needed to withstand the caustic effects of the acid for a sufficient period of time to allow the ship on which it was hidden to move out of the harbor and begin steaming toward England.

  When a ship carrying Dr. Scheele’s “cigars” was on the high seas, the copper disk would corrode, allowing the acid in both chambers to mix, igniting a fire that was intense enough to melt the wax plugs on each end of the cigar. When the wax plugs melted, the fire received more oxygen, allowing it to burn more fiercely. Left undetected in a ship’s cargo hold, the fire would quickly spread, often destroying the cargo and even the ship itself. Before too long, the bomb factory was producing as many as fifty “cigars” each day. Von Rintelen set up similar bomb factories in the U.S. port cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

  Von Rintelen’s first success was aboard the SS Phoebus, which was hauling artillery shells to Russia. The cigars did their work, causing a fire that was discovered before it had destroyed all the shells. However, to put out the flames, the captain flooded the hold, turning the shells into useless hunks of metal. About half the ships with the hidden firebombs, sometimes as many as thirty “cigars,” made it safely to port, more than likely because the bombs failed to ignite. Nonetheless, the string of mysterious cargo fires aboard U.S. ships continued through the spring.

  With the success of von Rintelen’s sabotage operations at a new high — the U.S. government had been unable to detect or infiltrate the spy rings — he was ready for a bigger challenge, and it didn’t take him long to find it. He would go after the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company’s huge terminal located on Black Tom Island, a point of land that juts out from Jersey City, New Jersey, across New York Harbor’s Upper Bay from Brooklyn, New York. The huge terminal was located at the southern end of what is today called Liberty State Park. It was, in fact, the busiest wartime port on the East Coast. Because federal law allowed munitions to be stored on Black Tom for only twenty-four hours, it was very busy. Ships of all sorts — tugs, barges, freighters — came and went all day. Inside the terminal, trains were in constant motion as they delivered war supplies — mostly munitions — then reversed direction to be refilled.

  According to reports in the New York Times, there was plenty of fire power at the terminal on July 30: “11 [railroad] cars of high explosives, 17 of shells, 3 of nitro-allulos, 1 of TNT, and 2 of combination fuses; in all a total of 2,132,000 pounds of explosives.” In addition, “ten barges were tied up, most of them loaded with explosives,” which they’d taken on at other terminals and piers around New York Harbor.

  The chain reaction of disaster began with a fire. One of the private detectives hired to guard the terminal remembered it this way: “The fire had started in the center of the string of cars on shore near the land end of the pier. The flames had gotten too good a start for us to do anything.” Of course, the shells soon began to “cook,” and shrapnel shells of smaller caliber began to explode. An investigation of the explosions found that an incendiary device — perhaps something like Dr. Scheele’s cigar bombs — had been hidden among the boxcars and probably on at least one of the munitions barges. Evidence indicated that the saboteurs had been paying off some of the terminal guards for intelligence about work schedules. Some investigators felt that the guards under suspicion likely looked the other way when the German agents arrived that night to do their damage.

  The blasts were spectacular, rocking communities in New Jersey and New York. In fact, the tremor of the blast was felt as far away as Philadelphia, one hundred miles south. Windows shattered twenty-five miles from the blast. In Jersey City, a hunk of shrapnel rocketed into the clock tower of the Jersey Journal building, stopping the clock at exactly 2:13. The Statue of Liberty, on Bedloe’s Island, was only about 650 yards from Black Tom. The force of the explosion popped about a hundred of Lady Liberty’s rivets and her copper skin was pelted with shrapnel. (After inspection of the monument, no tourists were allowed in the torch.) The explosion also damaged Ellis Island, about a mile from the blast site. The high vaulted ceiling of the main hall collapsed, nearly every window shattered, and sections of the roof were damaged. All the while, of course, the sky was filled with a dangerous shower of shrapnel, shells, and burning debris.

  Remarkably, when the fires were extinguished and people were accounted for, there were but seven fatalities in the explosions and inferno. This relatively low number of deaths is remarkable considering that almost five hundred people were aboard the ships tied up at the piers and anchored nearby. Scientists believe that the blast was about a 5.0 on the Richter scale. In comparison, the collapse of the World Trade Center north tower on September 11, 2001, registered a 2.3, according to a seismic observatory in New Jersey.

  Initially investigations determined that the explosion and fire at Black Tom had been an accident exacerbated by carelessness of the owner of the facility. But further inquiry into the cause of the events of that July 30 led to two experienced saboteurs, Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke. They had apparently teamed up with Michael Kristoff, described as a “mentally deficient Hungarian immigrant,” who lived and worked in the area. Jahnke and Witzke eased a small boat alongside one of the piers, where they met Kristoff and carried out their sabotage.

  Although the catastrophe at Black Tom Island was by far the largest act of sabotage on American soil to that point, it was, according to the New York Times, one of fifty such acts of sabotage in the United States in the first two years of the war, from 1914 until the summer of 1916. Over half of the attacks (twenty-eight of fifty) took place in the New York–New Jersey area.

  AFTER BENEDICT ARNOLD, there is probably no other name that people associate with spying more than that of Mata Hari. But, while Arnold’s reputation for spying and treachery is based on facts, Mata Hari’s seems to be more fiction than fact. Did she spy for France and Germany in World War I? She did. But her spying was minor in nature, rather than anything resembling the legendary feats and betrayal that are attributed to her.

  The D
utch-born Margaretha Zelle began her career as an exotic dancer in Paris; her stage name, Mata Hari, derived from a Malay word meaning “sun” or “dawn.” For seven years she was a resounding success in many of the capitals of Europe, which gave her the opportunity to meet men of power. As she approached the age of forty, and the end of her dancing career, she developed “intricate, affectionate, and sometimes exclusive relationships, with men who supported her in elegant style.” Many of these men were involved in the highest levels of government and would readily share state or military secrets with her as a boastful sign of their importance.

  Some historians believe that she met the German intelligence chief Walther Nicolai in 1916. The meeting was not an accidental encounter. Baron von Mirbach, an intelligence officer in Kleve, in western Germany, remembered seeing Mata Hari dance and felt she would make a good spy. Mirbach believed that German intelligence could take advantage of Mata Hari’s popularity with men who had access to information that might help the German war effort. Nicolai flattered her and put her up in a fancy Hamburg hotel, and she began her spy training. She was schooled on how to make meaningful observations, write reports in invisible ink, and send them to an address in Antwerp.

  As it turned out, however, she wrote only a few letters, and they offered no significant intelligence, nothing more than rumors and bits of information that were generally well known. German intelligence decided that this amateur spy was a bigger liability than an asset and that she therefore had to be eliminated. But rather than do the deed themselves, they planned to maneuver the French into doing it for them.