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

by Blum, Howard

  THE CODES WERE IN TWO capsules in his mouth, pressed against his cheek, to be swallowed at the first approach of a British cruiser. It was April 3, 1915, and von Rintelen was on the deck of the Kristianiafjord as it steamed toward New York Harbor.

  He was traveling under a Swiss passport, printed by one of Nicolai’s artists, that looked as good as the real thing. It was issued to Emile V. Gaché, a name that was von Rintelen’s contribution; a fellow naval officer in Berlin had married a Swiss woman, and von Rintelen had borrowed her brother’s identity. She had also filled him in about all the relations he had just acquired, a Swiss family Gaché crowded with nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles; given him a photograph to keep in his wallet of the little mountain cottage that was his new home; and tutored him on the intricacies of the Swiss civil code—because the last thing a good Swiss would want to do was break a law.

  Von Rintelen, scrupulous in his tradecraft from the start, had made sure that his new initials were sewn onto his linen. Then, taking another shrewd precaution, he’d had the items laundered so the monograms would not look new.

  He had been told that the British cruiser Essex was stationed just beyond the three-mile point delineating American waters. As the Kristianiafjord neared, he placed the two tiny capsules in his mouth. They contained the diplomatic codes he’d been instructed to deliver to the ambassador and his attachés. If enemy seamen boarded, the “most secret” codes would vanish with a quick gulp.

  But the steamer made its way without incident into New York Harbor. Looking out toward the city in the distance, von Rintelen felt as if whole new vistas of intrigue were opening up in front of him. He had all he needed: a righteous cause, an evil enemy, and a burning desire to succeed.

  He had come to establish what he proudly called the Manhattan Front. He would take charge of the entire misused and undisciplined network, and redirect the attack. He saw himself as “the Dark Invader,” making his way behind the lines, sneaking into enemy territory. A cold confidence swelled up inside him. He would make the city a battleground.

  Chapter 22

  In Mexico, Frank Holt decided that his past was finally past, that the crimes of a Harvard professor had been forgotten. The time had come to reclaim a bit of the life he had lived as Erich Muenter.

  During the long days and the even longer solitary nights, he had worked out a plan. As Frank Holt, he’d enroll in a small backwater college where there’d be no chance of encountering any of his former Harvard colleagues, and he’d start a fresh climb up the academic ladder. He had a new name and a new look, but, he assured himself, he still possessed a first-rate mind. With perseverance, he’d clear a path through the dismal thickets of academe and make his way back to its sunnier groves.

  He moved to Dallas and in 1908 enrolled in the Agricultural and Mechanical College at College Station, Texas. It was a rancher’s world away from the Ivy League, and Frank Holt disappeared into the crowd of new students. He studied for a degree in German language and became the department’s star pupil. His impressed professors marveled at his knowledge and the deftness of his mind. Upon graduation, they assured him, he’d head off to a promising academic career.

  In the bottom of his suitcase, Holt still kept a three-year-old clipping from a Chicago newspaper: “Lunatic Professor on the Loose.” But that sort of ignorant name-calling, he was convinced, belonged to another lifetime and, for all practical purposes, another person. Frank Holt was his own man.

  Then he met a new Leona.

  LEONA SENSABAUGH HAD THE SAME Christian name as the wife Muenter had poisoned, but that was all they had in common. This Leona was a bouncy blond coed at the college, a fun-loving young woman who spoke with a Texas twang and had a cowgirl’s playfulness.

  Her father was a prominent Methodist minister in Dallas, but the preacher’s daughter had her own rebellious soul. She dreamed of a sophisticated life in exotic, faraway places. She’d had her fill of cowboys and tumbleweeds. In Frank Holt, with his meticulous manners, his cosmopolitan airs, and his erudite talk, she saw a man who would take her to big cities and perhaps even one day to foreign lands.

  “Mon cher,” she called him; it was their lovers’ game to talk to each other in French, one more shared allegiance to a life beyond Texas. Meanwhile Holt, eager to win this new, impressionable Leona, wrote her poems. Yet even in love, he dwelt on death:

  When I am dead

  Will those with whom I have long toiled

  Thro’ burdened years and restless days,

  Stand round an upturned mound of earth

  And speak their hearts in tones of praise?

  It was a whirlwind courtship spurred on by his confident talk of a vague but distinguished academic future, and they were soon married. When Holt graduated in 1909, Leona bought him a gold pin engraved with the year ’09. Her intention was to commemorate her husband’s accomplishment. He attached the pin to his jacket lapel and wore it daily, a tacit symbol of his successful escape to another life.

  Holt became a college instructor. To any uninformed observer—say, his critical father-in-law the minister—Holt had joined the makeshift ranks of the itinerant academics, the untenured roving flock who moved from school to school whenever a suitable opening appeared. But Holt was following a more purposeful agenda. As he traveled about the country, he was shaping his new identity, constructing a new biography.

  There was a stint as assistant professor of German at the University of Oklahoma; “he speaks Spanish and French fluently, and has studied at the University of Berlin, and studied in Rome and Paris and has traveled over Europe,” the local paper reported, although with only a small smattering of truth, about the new faculty member. From there he moved on to teach French at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. A year later he was at Emory and Henry College in Virginia, as the school’s French and German instructor.

  Then finally, in 1913, he obtained a place in Cornell University’s PhD program; at the same time, the university hired him to teach undergraduate German and French. Holt had completed his long, diligent trip back to the Ivy League.

  Part III:

  The Manhattan Front

  Chapter 23

  Who was the caller? And why was he so furious with Paul Koenig? Those were the questions Tom felt he needed to answer if his meandering investigation was ever going to move into a new, more productive phase.

  He summoned his team, and the entire squad crowded like schoolboys around the rows of scuffed wooden desks in the big room. There was an unusual formality to the moment. It was not Tom’s style to make speeches; this, in fact, would be the first. His way was to lead by example, to throw himself into a case and expect his men to demonstrate an equal commitment. The sincerity of his diligence was their motivation.

  But today Tom believed a crucial moment, perhaps the crucial moment, in the investigation had arrived. For Tom, for every man in the room, the investigation had been a deeply disappointing quest. The files were jammed with incident reports, and still, as he had repeatedly complained, “the sum total of those reports was—nothing.” Now at last he had a scent, and his blood was rising.

  Tom stood facing his men, his broad back pressed against the glass door to his office, a large and impressive presence in his blue uniform with its shiny gold buttons. He did not raise his voice; his tone, by all accounts, was steady. But his usual flippancy deserted him, and his face was as grim as an undertaker’s. It was this demeanor—rigid, stolid, and authoritative—that affected the men as deeply as his words.

  It was a short speech by any standard. He began with a confession. For months Koenig had led them quite a chase. A disciplined quarry, he was so circumspect in his movements and speech that, Tom now divulged for the first time, he had despaired of ever latching on to a single incriminating clue. Finally, however, they had uncovered something of potential importance: Koenig had an enemy.

  Anger, Tom went on, his knowledge acquired firsthand in years of precinct house interrogations, could be a very effect
ive weapon. “It’s a knife waiting to be driven deep,” he said. He told his men he wanted to take the caller’s anger and make it work for the investigation. He wanted to give the caller a chance at revenge. But before that could happen, Tom said, he needed to know the caller’s identity.

  “Find him!” Tom concluded, the two words as much a prayer as a command.

  THE MEN WENT TO WORK. The first part of the investigation was, like so much of detective work, drudgery, but it soon produced results. An officer went to the telephone company central station on Cortlandt Street and, with no further official imprimatur than the authority of his uniform, received permission to sort through the records of the incoming calls to Koenig’s office on lower Broadway. The logs were not in any logical order, but the detective already knew the precise times and dates of the two acrimonious conversations. In short order, they were found.

  Fortuitously, both had been made from the same number. A quick search of phone company records revealed its location—a public booth in a saloon on the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

  Tom heard the report, and at once his hopes collapsed. How many men must traipse into the saloon each day to grab a beer and use the phone? More than likely the caller, taking his lead from the security-conscious Koenig, had intentionally chosen a busy public phone. He must have known a well-trafficked location would make any attempt to identify him difficult, if not impossible. Tom decided that he was reading the handwriting of another well-trained professional. His only lead appeared to have taken him to another very dead end.

  But, as Tom would later recall, “crucial events can almost always be traced to some trivial circumstances.” The triviality that kept this crucial case alive was that his officer found New York’s only, or so it seemed to an amazed Tom, “bartender with a good memory.”

  Perhaps business was slow, and that gave the bartender plenty of time to stare out across the room with rapt attention. Or possibly the bartender had been nursing a long-running grudge, since the man apparently entered the saloon only to use the phone, never reaching into his pocket to buy a beer. Then again, it was no less likely that the bartender was one of those rare sorts who truly never forget a face. But whatever the reason, when the detective went through the perfunctory motions of asking the bartender if by any chance he remembered a fellow who showed up in the late afternoon on a couple of occasions to use the phone, the bartender shot back that he did.

  “Yes, he came in once in a while,” the bartender went on breezily. “Don’t know his name, but I’m pretty sure he lives in the neighborhood. Around the corner, I think.”

  The detail in the bartender’s description was no less miraculous: about five feet ten inches; thin; sparse dark hair; and, he added snidely, “a bit mousy.”

  Within the hour, half a dozen detectives were combing the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking discreet questions. It didn’t take them long to find their man: George Fuchs, an unemployed German immigrant.

  TOM SUGGESTED TO BARNITZ THAT they could bring Fuchs in for questioning.

  Barnitz nodded. His years working with Tom had taught him that the boss was not asking for his advice. In time, Tom would work things out in his own mind. The sergeant’s role was purely rhetorical, the mute audience whose silence spurred the thinking on.

  After a while, Tom spoke up again. He explained that even if Fuchs was arrested and given the third degree, there was still no guarantee he’d talk.

  Once again Barnitz agreed.

  There was more silence. Then, just as Barnitz was growing uncomfortable, Tom shared an idea. He would put an operative close to Fuchs. Someone Fuchs would trust and confide in.

  Sourly, Barnitz asked Tom how he intended to do that.

  Once again Tom didn’t respond. He sat across from Barnitz, but it was as if he’d left to go to some distant, private place. And when he finally spoke, Tom had it all pretty much figured out.

  His plan was to give the unemployed Fuchs a job. That is, Tom went on, we get Fuchs to think we’re giving him one. That way we become his new best friend. After all, he asked, what man wouldn’t trust someone coming to his rescue with a paycheck? Tom predicted that if they played it right, Fuchs would talk.

  THE OFFICIAL-LOOKING LETTERHEAD BORE THE name of a wireless telegraph company that existed only in Tom’s imagination. The address was a building near police headquarters; the landlord was quite willing in the unsteady times to rent an empty suite of offices for a week.

  As for the letter itself, Tom dictated it on the fly, and Barnitz took it down; another detective did the typing.

  “Dear Sir,” it began, according to Tom’s imprecise memory of the text he had deliberately crafted to be both vague and at the same time full of promise. “There is a position immediately available in our company and it has come to our attention that you would be the proper man for this job. We would be pleased if you would call at the office of the company next Tuesday at 10 a.m. to discuss work and wages. Yours Sincerely,” and here Tom, with what he hoped looked like an executive’s self-important flourish, signed one of the many cover names he had used in the course of his long career. The envelope was stamped, and then, a sign of Tom’s recognition of how much was riding on this ploy, hand-delivered to the post office so there’d be no reason to worry about its being picked up as scheduled from the local mailbox.

  At ten on the designated Tuesday, Detective Corell, dressed in a double-breasted business suit and looking, he hoped, like a prosperous telegraph company executive, sat waiting behind a desk in the rented suite. Tom had cast Corell because even when not playing a carefully scripted role, the detective was a hail-fellow, personable sort, a man who wore an ingratiating smile perpetually frozen on his handsome face. Also, of no less operational value, Corell spoke German fluently. It was a tacit bond with Fuchs that Tom hoped would be useful in cementing a budding friendship.

  Down the hall from Corell, hidden behind a closed door but still near enough to hear a summons for help, were Barnitz and a few other men. They’d burst through the door if Fuchs became suspicious and showed signs of running. But Tom deeply hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  For a while, though, it looked as if it wouldn’t come to anything. Ten o’clock came and went without any sign of Fuchs. And so did ten thirty. Tom had remained on Centre Street, and the reports being telephoned in from the watchers casually loitering in the building’s lobby were a growing concern.

  What if, it suddenly occurred to Tom for the first time, Fuchs had already found a job? For all Tom knew, he had ripped up the letter after just a glance. Or maybe Fuchs had come to the building at ten as specified, only to turn suspicious. Had Tom stationed too many men in the lobby? Had Fuchs felt he was walking into a trap? Whatever the reason, as it grew later and later, Tom began to lose any hope that Fuchs would appear.

  Then, just minutes after eleven, his phone rang: Fuchs had taken the bait. He was on the elevator, heading up to the telegraph company office.

  Tom’s lurching world began to steady itself. Now it would be up to Corell.

  The job interview began with an apology. Fuchs explained that he’d overslept, and his candor struck Corell as an encouraging sign. Either the man was naive, or he was simply stupid; and either trait, or both for that matter, would make him susceptible to being played.

  With an equanimity that might have sounded the alarm in a more suspicious mind, Corell insisted it didn’t matter. Could happen to anyone, he said affably. In fact, he confessed with a laugh, he was always late.

  The interview continued along in this breezy, good-humored fashion. But it wasn’t long before Corell, with a playful clap of his hands that signaled the end of the formalities, announced that there really was nothing further to discuss. The telegraph company was looking for someone who spoke German, and George Fuchs was certainly the right man for the job.

  Why don’t we get out of here and get lunch? Corell suggested. He made it clear that it would be the company’s treat. They could eat, hav
e a beer or two, and work out when Fuchs would start and what office he’d like.

  An elated Fuchs agreed that that was a good plan.

  CORELL WAS MASTERFUL. THE TEAMS of watchers at the adjacent tables were unanimous in their praise. He did not hurry, and he kept the pitchers of beer arriving at the table.

  The two men talked about their families, their shared German roots. And with a conspiratorial wink, Corell confided that Fuchs was getting a cushy job. A man could saunter in most days after having slept late and the dumb bosses would be none the wiser.

  Fuchs raised his glass in happy anticipation of working in such an undemanding environment, took a healthy swallow, and then chimed in with obvious delight, “Be a nice change from my last job.”

  “Who did you say you were working for?” Corell asked. His tone did not betray anything. It was as if it were the most casual of questions between two drinking buddies. But Tom would later say the entire case was riding on Fuchs’s answer.

  “That bullheaded Westphalian Dutchman,” Fuchs said, nearly spitting out the words. “He is some relative of my mother’s. She was a Prussian, though, Gott sei Dank!”

  Corell offered a sympathetic laugh, while at the same time he did his best to disguise any evidence of the excitement Fuchs’s words had ignited. He felt that if he did not rush things, he’d soon learn why Fuchs was so angry.

  “This bullheaded Westphalian Dutchman,” Corell asked absently, “he have a name?”

  “Paul Koenig.”

  As the pitcher was drained dry, Corell, with deliberate caution, steered the conversation away from Koenig. But the meal ended with an appointment for lunch again the next day. They had dinner together the evening after that, too. Fuchs began to think of his generous new employer as a friend. And as the beer flowed, in time the rest of the story followed.