by Theo Emery
Scheele packed his satchel and left on March 5, 1918. Holed up in a Havana hotel, he tried desperately to contact a fellow German for assistance and money, to no avail. Finally, he fled to Matanzas, where he tried to catch a boat for Mexico. There, the Rural Guard swooped in, bayonets lowered, and took him into custody on March 7, acting on a tip from one of the men Scheele thought was a friend. One imprisonment had ended when Scheele left de Pozas’s house, and now a new one had begun. In a solitary cell deep inside the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta, a fortresslike military prison on Havana Harbor, the chief of the Cuban army’s Military Intelligence Division began to question Scheele.
The U.S. Department of Justice had no idea that Scheele was in custody, but its investigation had progressed, tracing Scheele’s remittances to his wife back to Havana banks. By late February, Bureau of Investigation chief A. Bruce Bielaski was confident enough that Scheele was in Cuba to send a man to find him.
The man he chose to send to Havana was Richmond Levering. In spring of 1918, the oilman ended up at the heart of the manhunt for Scheele. After his ignominious departure from the American Protective League and the U.S. Department of Justice the previous fall, he had resumed running his companies and overseas concerns. Whenever he went abroad, he typed up reports on the political situation and sent them back to Bielaski at the Justice Department. Though he had no official title, his reports nonetheless sufficiently impressed Chief Bielaski that he considered it worthwhile to maintain ties with Levering.
In late February, Levering was about to depart for Havana on a business and pleasure trip when he received a letter from Bielaski asking him to help locate Scheele in Cuba. Bureau agents based in Key West had periodically scoured the island for Scheele, to no avail. Why Bielaski sent Levering instead of an agent is unclear, but the bureau’s resources were stretched thin across the country, and Levering had well-developed political connections in Cuba through his business ventures. Bielaski wired Key West and the U.S. counsel general in Havana: Levering would proceed to Cuba to find Scheele. Once again, Levering was in the right place at the right moment, and he was thrust back into the good graces of the U.S. government.
Levering’s boat arrived in Havana on March 11. That night, he learned from a high-level Cuban official that a man matching Scheele’s description was being interrogated in military custody. Levering rushed to a meeting with Cuba’s president, Mario García Menocal, to explain his mission, and the president pledged to help. In the morning, Levering and the U.S. military attaché in Havana, Captain Thomas F. Van Natta Jr., met with the military intelligence chief, Captain Jacinto Llaca, who had been interrogating Scheele. The situation, Llaca told them, was complicated. Several men had been arrested in the government sweep—Scheele; a second German man named Richard Guttman, who was Scheele’s paymaster in Cuba; and a third man who was Cuban. All three were being held in the castillo where Llaca had been vigorously questioning Scheele and the other men for several days. The Americans could take Scheele back to the United States, Llaca told Levering, but on one condition: because the Cuban authorities would be presenting their case against the two other men, and Scheele had evidence in those cases, the chemist would have to return temporarily to Havana before the Americans could have him for good. Levering agreed.
Darkness had fallen over Havana when Levering’s ship, a freighter called the SS Flagler, pulled up alongside the rock wall of the castillo. Levering stepped from the boat onto the pier, mounted the prison bulwarks above the quay, and peered toward the gloom of the prison. A group of men approached, members of the Cuban Rural Guard, escorting two men who wore alpine hats. One was Scheele; the other was Guttman. A Cuban army colonel signed a receipt for the two prisoners. The two sides traded salutes, then handshakes, and the Americans slipped handcuffs around the beefy wrists of the two Germans. The Americans reboarded the boat with the two prisoners, as well as Captain Llaca and a U.S. embassy official. The boat cast off, turned its prow north, and slipped into the gulf toward Key West.
Havana fell into the distance as the Flagler steamed across the Straits of Florida. It was the first time in almost two years that Scheele had left Cuba. Many hours later, the Flagler reached the deserted pier at Key West. Agents met the boat and brought the German men to waiting automobiles. Levering and the agents took them to Fort Taylor. The cars drove into the fort’s courtyard, where agents helped the handcuffed Germans from the cars. Levering and the agents brought Scheele to a room deep in the interior of the fort.
Levering warned Scheele that his crimes were so grave that only full cooperation with the Americans would save his life. Scheele was happy to oblige. During his stay at the military prison in Havana, he had been held in solitary confinement, and Llaca had been a forceful interrogator. Now in American hands and facing execution for his treachery, Scheele promised to reveal everything he knew about German weapons. He told Levering he had wanted to give himself up long ago, but de Pozas wouldn’t allow him to. Since his capture, he had reflected on his situation and decided to try to right the wrongs he had committed. He also said he wanted to eke out a sliver of revenge for his abandonment by the German government after a lifetime of loyalty.
Levering was satisfied. “He has promised us that he would give us every ounce of his remaining power if we would spare his life,” Levering reported. “This was not promised [but] continuance of life was based upon the importance of his revelations and absolute truthfulness in detail.”
Scheele began to talk. The interrogations stretched all day and into the early morning, in a room packed with intelligence officers, Department of Justice agents, customs officials, immigration officials. Thomas Edison came to interrogate Scheele and brought his chemist, Bruce Silver, to listen and determine the veracity of his statements; Scheele held nothing back—he revealed the composition of the chemical bombs that went onto the merchant ships, who the paymasters were, who received the money. He described how the Germans used oxygen cooled and condensed into a liquid as an explosive or a propellant. He talked about how the Germans were able to shell Paris from a distance of sixty miles. How a German spy had smuggled germs into the United States in the hopes of unleashing a bacteriological plague to wipe out livestock. He described a German plan to invade Canada. He described a way to make aerial gas bombs that could be dropped from airplanes.
Astonished, Levering listened to Scheele for hours, then dashed off a wire to Washington citing how Bruce Silver confirmed Scheele’s facts. Even in the dry language of the report, Levering’s awe was obvious. “So far Mr. Silver states that all formulae for gas, liquid air use and other devices seem reasonable or practical from the chemical combination standpoint… some of the gases are considered to be the most devilish combination ever heard of by Mr. Silver.” Copies of the interrogation reports also went to the chief of staff’s office at the War Department.
Silver questioned Scheele closely, poking and prodding at his statements about chemical processes and compounds, and had the doctor demonstrate his cigar-bomb compound in front of him. He came away convinced that Scheele was telling the truth. “I would therefore, recommend that, if possible, he be given the opportunity, in a well-equipped laboratory, to demonstrate experimentally such devices and formulae as he describes. I firmly believe that his information regarding German chemical development since the outbreak of the war will be of material value to our government.” Even Thomas Edison himself said that he “was much impressed” with what Scheele had to say.
Everything Scheele knew about chemistry and gas warfare would now be in the service of the Americans. Information about incendiary bombs, poison gas, liquid fire. Everything he knew, the Americans would know. The agents knew the importance of the asset they had gained. They also knew what a political powder keg they had in their hands. A German spy who had plotted to kill Americans would be working for the U.S. government. The country was in an ugly mood toward anyone believed to be a traitor. Rage against Germans erupted in violence in Illinois, where a
mob lynched a coal miner accused of being disloyal. The mob dragged him from police protection, draped him in an American flag, and hung him from a tree. In New York, police had to hold back an angry crowd in Pennsylvania Station that threatened to hang German spies and internees who were being transferred from the Tombs to prison in Georgia.
“Please keep his presence [in] this country absolute secret and code any messages you may send,” one of Levering’s superiors wrote to Bielaski in a telegram. Bielaski, in turn, cautioned the U.S. attorney in Newark, where Scheele would be brought before a federal grand jury, to do the same. “We are keeping the information that Scheele has given us, and the fact that he is aiding us at all, confidential,” Bielaski wrote.
The message streaked through federal intelligence and law-enforcement agencies: Speak nothing of Scheele. But keeping the arrest under wraps was difficult—within a day or two, at least three newspapers carried stories about his arrest, including a detailed New-York Tribune account of his cooperation and grand jury testimony. The new Bureau of Investigation chief in New York City, Charles DeWoody, proved to have an alarmingly loose tongue, revealing Scheele’s arrest in an interview with the New York Times.
Before Scheele could be brought to Washington or New York, he had to make the promised return to Havana. The group set out on March 16 on one of Thomas Edison’s boats, but a storm forced it to return to Key West. Afraid that Edison’s boat would be too recognizable, they switched to the SS Flagler and set out again the following day. This time, the weather was fair and the seas calm, and the prisoners posed for photographs on the deck, an American flag snapping in the breeze and the gulf waters stretching to the horizon.
After Captain Llaca was done with Scheele in Havana, the spy returned to the United States for good. On the morning of March 20, a Cuban naval vessel brought Scheele and Levering to Key West. The following evening, they boarded a train for Washington.
When the train pulled into Union Station, Levering and the two agents hustled Scheele from the train car to the platform. Another bureau agent greeted them. From the station, they rushed him to the Bureau of Investigation to see Chief Bielaski. Scheele spent the day there, then was escorted to his quarters: a jail cell in a police precinct.
Over the next few days, agents escorted him to American University, where the technical men from the Bureau of Mines and the Ordnance Department gathered to watch his demonstrations of chemical processes. In the evenings, the agents would return him to the jailhouse and lock him into his cell. Just before midnight on April 1, agents brought Scheele onto a northbound train to Jersey City, not far from his former chemical factory in Hoboken, then on to Newark, where Scheele testified to a federal grand jury about the ship-bomb case. From there, they went to Levering’s office in Manhattan. After agents spirited Scheele up to the twentieth floor, Levering and Bureau of Investigation agents spent hours interrogating Scheele more. When the discussion ended, an agent took the men to a hotel, where they slept for a few hours and then returned to the train station. They caught a 1:18 a.m. train back to the capital for one last meeting with Washington’s chemical warriors.
Burrell and the other chemists in Manning’s office on April 4 recognized that Scheele was a highly trained scientist, albeit one who had been an enemy until a few days ago. As they listened to Scheele and the accounts of what he had done at the experiment station, they believed what he was telling them. His expertise and his knowledge of chemistry were sound. He had demonstrated his proficiency with experimentation. The only question, then, was how to tap this unexpected wellspring of information.
The first decision was where to put him. Keeping him at American University would have been too dangerous. There were too many opportunities for word to leak out from the chatty chemists and the many civilian employees there. Levering had a solution. Levering & Company had a subsidiary, the American Potash Corporation, which had a plant across the Hudson River from Peekskill, New York, about fifty miles north of New York City. It was a remote location, far from the press and prying eyes. Scheele could conduct experiments there while closely monitored and guarded at all times. His work would be reported back to the Ordnance Department, the Bureau of Mines, and the navy.
The Justice Department approved the plan. Back in New York on April 7, Scheele ducked into one of Levering’s cars in downtown Manhattan. Warren Grimes, a bureau agent who had been at Scheele’s elbow throughout his time in Washington, was behind the wheel. They went up the Hudson Valley, through Yonkers and Sleepy Hollow and Ossining. In Peekskill, Grimes turned onto Main Street and stopped outside the Eagle Hotel, a grand, four-story inn. After they lugged their bags from the trunk of the car into the lobby, Grimes registered with the clerk as Warren White. Scheele registered as Dr. Walter Smith. Then they went to the riverfront.
At the landing, one of Levering’s boats waited for them. The Hudson River was wide at that point, almost a mile. The shoreline fell away as the boat puttered across the river toward Jones Point, a knob of bottomland jutting out into a bend in the Hudson. Buildings came into view: Levering’s plant, the American Potash Corporation, and another subsidiary of Levering’s, the Kaolin Products Company. Rail tracks hugged the riverbanks, and behind the six-acre campus, the forest rose steeply toward high, wooded hills and, farther on, Bear Mountain.
The vice president and the foreman of the plant met the boat as it pulled up to the dock. They were expecting Levering’s newest employee, this Dr. Smith with the scars and the German accent, but none of the plant employees knew the true identity of the chemist delivered to the plant. The man with the policemen glued to his side, whose presence required a tall fence around the laboratory and a new system of passes and codes. The man they could never talk about, who held Germany’s chemical secrets in his head.
As Walter Scheele arrived at Jones Point, Companies C and D of the gas and flame regiment were settling into new quarters in France. In late February, the chaplain, Addison, was thrilled to learn that orders had finally arrived at Fort Myer that the getaway drills in the snow would be ending. Hundreds of men celebrated that night in the gymnasium, listening to the company orchestra and watching a vaudeville spectacle that included singers, dancers, and a minstrel show that were “uniformly as poor as they could be,” Addison sniffed. On the Sunday before his departure, Addison delivered a sermon, then rushed into Washington to spend his final night with Margaret. They said a wrenching goodbye in the morning, knowing he might never come back, and then Addison taxied to Fort Myer to finish packing.
At 3:30 p.m. on February 25, the five hundred men formed ranks for roll call and then marched to Rosslyn, Virginia, to board a train. Addison, in a comfortable Pullman car with other officers, had a supper of sandwiches and chocolate before the motion of the train lulled him to sleep. He awoke at 2:30 a.m., about fifteen minutes away from Jersey City. Four hours later, the regiment disembarked and boarded a ferry up the river to Hoboken. A stiff breeze blew down the river as the men crowded the decks, the rising sun blazing behind a bank of clouds and Manhattan silhouetted against the sky. After the ferry docked, the regiment stood in line as ladies from the Red Cross served them coffee and buns. The USS Agamemnon loomed over them, a vast four-funnel steamship, 706 feet from stem to stern, that could carry more than thirty-five hundred soldiers. The hours wore on, the line inched forward. Finally, the Hellfire Boys boarded in groups of ten. The seized ship was the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor’s favorite vessel, and as Addison made his way through the decks, he passed signs in German still hanging from the walls. Addison’s stateroom was spacious but dark, the two portholes painted over to snuff out light during the passage. After dinner, he fell asleep in his berth, curled up in the much-too-short sofa bed.
At 6:30 p.m. the next day, tugs towed the Agamemnon out into the Hudson River. The night was clear and cold, moonlight spilling down across the decks and stars bright overhead. Addison remained on deck, watching Manhattan and the Battery slide slowly behind the ship. He crossed to the
starboard side for a view of the Statue of Liberty, her torch bright against the night sky. Starlight illuminated the ship’s path as it cruised east guarded by its flagship, the USS Mount Vernon, and another transport, the USS America, while Addison slept.
During the two-week passage, Addison’s days filled with abandon-ship drills, long discussions in the stateroom, laps around the deck, and queasy days in bed as the ship pitched in the uneasy sea. On March 9, a convoy of destroyers slid up alongside the Agamemnon. The next morning, a Sunday, Addison strolled on deck before sunrise, the ocean placid, the sky above clear, with the morning star glimmering above a crescent moon. During his Sunday service, Addison delivered a sermon on Paul’s admonitions to help the weak. He ended right on time, just before the usual 1:00 p.m. abandon-ship drill.
The drill never came. When Addison stepped onto the deck, he saw fishing boats bobbing in the waves and, in the distance, a ribbon of land. A plane circled overhead, and a dirigible kept pace with the ship. Soon he saw green hills, coastal forts, a wireless tower, and rolling forests. Buskers in dinghies scudded around the Agamemnon, playing music for coins tossed from the soldiers crowding the decks. In the afternoon, a rowboat bumped up alongside the Agamemnon, and Secretary of War Baker clambered aboard. Unbeknownst to Addison, he had been a passenger in the convoy all along, on the USS Seattle.
The next day, Addison and the other men disembarked to a British freighter. As the ship ferried them to shore, the rooftops and spires of Brest grew closer. The boat tied up to the pier, and at 2:15, Addison and Company C lined up in formation. They marched through the city to a busy central square, then up the hillside. No young men were to be seen, only old men, mournful women, and children. Everywhere Addison looked, the town’s inhabitants wore black.
Three days of train travel brought the chaplain closer to the front. “The Ides of March,” Addison jotted in his diary as the train wound through the French countryside. In the early morning of March 16, the train pulled into the station at Langres. The companies formed ranks and marched on the chalky tree-lined roads toward their destination, Humes, a village about seventeen miles southeast of the AEF general headquarters at Chaumont. Addison was assigned to a small house with a young mother and two boys; their father was at the front. His room was a good-sized one, with a window looking out on a stream and the hillsides. He had a grand supper later in the evening with other officers. Stationed in the quiet village, with its red-roofed stucco homes and picturesque church, he had a hard time believing that they were there to kill Germans.