Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America

by Blum, Howard

  Guy 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.”
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  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.

  Chapter 17

  We teach him how to fight,” Commissioner Woods boasted with proud good spirit. “How to take on whatever trouble may come to the city.”

  The occasion was the police training academy graduation ceremony, and the commissioner, standing on a platform erected at one end of the long gymnasium on the top floor of the headquarters building, was making the commencement address. He was a forceful speaker, and his words this morning were meant to reassure New York mayor John Purroy Mitchel and the other officials in the audience. He wanted them to know that the new officers would be up to the task of protecting New York.

  Tom, though, wasn’t so sure. Sitting in the crowd, he had half a mind to jump to his feet and challenge Woods. But neither insubordination nor drama was Tom’s style.

  Still, he was in a shaky mood. It was not long after Woods and Scull had sent him off to fight a secret war, and in the frustrating opening battles his confidence had been the first casualty. How can you claim to teach officers to take on whatever trouble may come when you have no notion what that trouble will be? he wanted to scream. What good is teaching men to fight if they don’t know whom to fight?

  It was a time when, Tom would recall with a shudder, “I was being kept grimly busy.” Only he had nothing to show for all his activity. Not a single clue. Growing tired and dispirited, Tom lived day and night with a great secret: he was beginning to doubt whether this was a war he could win.

  But he was not ready to surrender. Years of walking a beat had reinforced an important truth: a copper never knows what’s waiting around the next corner. There was always the chance, however faint, that if he kept at it, he’d stumble onto something that would help him track down the men responsible for the bombings.

  In the first harried weeks, Tom had started handpicking a new team for this new mission. It already included many of the bomb squad veterans, detectives like George Barnitz, Amedeo Polignani, and Patrick Walsh who had proved themselves in the Brescia Circle case. But the unexpected twists and turns of that investigation, all the “cloak-and-dagger stuff,” as he described it with a deadly seriousness, had also driven home a few operational realities.

  He would need officers who could work undercover, side by side with the unsuspecting targets, and for this mission that meant detectives who spoke German. No less essential—and this Tom had learned from Polignani’s masterly performance—he required men who could find their own way through sinister worlds, who could work alone for weeks or months with little more than their wits, ingenuity, and steely courage for protection.

  Tom was looking for something else, too. The commissioner had said the training academy taught recruits to fight, but that was not enough. Tom needed men who wanted to fight. Men who wouldn’t back down, who wouldn’t hesitate to throw the first punch or fire the first shot. He wanted officers who had the grit to stand up to the kaiser’s well-trained spies.

  It was the search for men with these qualities that had brought Tom to the academy graduation. The precincts, he was aware, had hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of German-speaking cops on their rolls. But most long-serving officers were, he suspected, immigrants, men who had been born in Germany.

  Tom didn’t want to go into battle with doubts about his own troops. He wanted to know where, if his officers were pressed to make difficult choices, their allegiances lay. Tom’s cautious instincts told him it’d be better to recruit from a younger generation, men who’d been raised in German-speaking homes but born in America.

  His brief stint as an agent runner had also provided another piece of hard-learned knowledge, and even now just the memory brought back a familiar sinking feeling. The responsibility of sending men off on dangerous missions had left him very uneasy.

  His own life, by disciplined choice, had so far been lived without a wife. Why should he complicate it with sickening worries about other men’s wives and children? He didn’t want to have to endure the concerns that had tormented him when he’d sent Polignani, a young husband and father, into the enemy camp. This time he was determined to select unmarried operatives, and it stood to reason that he’d be more likely to find single men among the fresh, still-young recruits.

  A week earlier, Tom had spoken with the training academy instructors. He outlined his requirements, but was vague about the actual mission; and the instructors, all longtime cops, had known better than to ask for details. In the end, h
e had a list of seventeen potential members for his squad.

  Each of the candidates had been notified to report immediately following the swearing-in ceremony to an office on the second floor, adjacent to Deputy Commissioner Scull’s. Tom wanted to move quickly, before the men had a chance to settle into the precincts and there’d be loose talk about the German-speaking team Captain Tunney was assembling. The last thing Tom wanted was for some inquisitive reporter on the police beat to get a hint that something was up and rush into print with his scoop. Headlines would only force his prey to burrow down deeper.

  Tom made swift work of the interviews. He didn’t try to test the candidates’ ability to speak German; in truth, he didn’t know enough, as he would joke, to order a beer in a Yorkville bar. Instead, he asked a few perfunctory questions and then let the men talk. They spoke about their childhood, their ambitions, why they’d joined the force. He listened, and observed.

  Just as when he had selected an officer to infiltrate the Brescia Circle, he was convinced that it was best to work solely on instinct. There’s no test, he’d say, that’ll tell you whether you can count on your partner when you’re outnumbered and an angry mob is circling. But Tom, who had been in that very situation, believed he could take the measure of a man and know whether he’d want him by his side in a fight.

  Before the day was over, he’d picked three men. Valentine Corell and Henry Senff were easy choices. Corell, who had grown up in the Bronx, had a street kid’s swagger and a Romeo’s toothy smile. Tom imagined he’d charm his way even into a nest of spies. Senff was a bruiser, over six feet tall and built, it seemed, by the same firm that had put up the Woolworth Building. Another plus: he’d scored high marks on the academy’s shooting range.

  Detective Henry Barth.

  (Thomas J. Tunney, Throttled!)