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

by Blum, Howard

  ONCE UPON A TIME, HE was living in Niagara Falls, New York, Fuchs began as if telling a fairy tale. He was sharing an apartment with his mother when Koenig and his wife came to visit.

  Fuchs played the gracious host to his relatives from the big city, giving them the full tour of the falls. But afterward, when the two men were alone, Koenig shared a secret: he hadn’t come up from New York City to see the falls. His real interest was the Welland Canal.

  That was when Fuchs knew. He had suspected something from the start; Koenig hadn’t seemed like a tourist on a holiday. Now he was certain. There was only one reason Koenig would want to inspect the busy shipping channel. His cousin was a saboteur.

  Fuchs could see where this was heading, and in his mind he was already counting the money he could make. Yet he realized that the harder Koenig had to work to make the deal, the more Koenig would value his services—and the more he’d pay. He let his cousin go on talking, hinting.

  Finally, Koenig asked if Fuchs would go over to Canada and take some snapshots of the locks for him. His tone was offhanded, as if he were suggesting Fuchs take pictures for his scrapbook.

  “Why don’t you go yourself?” Fuchs asked.

  “They would probably pick me up if I did,” he answered. There was no need to complete the thought: once Koenig’s ties to the Hamburg-American Line were discovered, he’d never be able to talk his way out of a jail sentence.

  “Well, that’s why I won’t take any camera over there with me,” Fuchs said with some vehemence. “But I’ll go if you want a report.”

  And so George Fuchs became a spy. He was following in the footsteps of another Abteilung IIIB agent, Horst von der Goltz, who a little more than a year earlier had been recruited by von Papen to destroy the canal.

  Using the cover name George Fox—Fuchs decided an American-sounding name would arouse less suspicion—he registered at the Welland House in Welland, Canada, a short walk from the waterway. The next morning he hiked to Port Colborne, the Lake Erie mouth of the canal, and followed the towpath north. As he walked, he made notes on the ship traffic, the construction of the locks, and where the guards were placed. The next day he made his way an additional twenty-seven miles to Lake Ontario, all the time gathering intelligence.

  As soon as he was back safely in Niagara Falls, he hurried to Koenig’s hotel room and shared what he had seen. Koenig was full of praise for his new operative, but he also wanted a written report. “Mail it to me at Post Office Box 840 in New York. Sign it just ‘George’—nobody would know who that was even if they did find it,” he instructed.

  Fuchs mailed off his report, and then waited. As the days passed without any word from Koenig, Fuchs realized that he very much wanted to hear from him. He had enjoyed the excitement of being a player in a secret high-stakes game, and the fact that he was being paid for having so much fun only made it even better. When Koenig finally wrote to offer him a job, Fuchs left the next day for New York.

  At the starting salary of $18 a week, he joined Koenig’s Bureau of Investigation, the name chosen by PK in an ironic tribute to the government’s organization. Together they went to work planning the attack on the canal. It was quickly decided that Fuchs would hire the men, locals from Buffalo, who’d row a boatload of dynamite across the upper Niagara River into Canada. Koenig had already signed on his assistant, Richard Leyendecker, and his secretary, Fred Metzler, to light the fuses that would blow a vital stretch of the canal to pieces. All that remained was for Koenig to set the date.

  While this was being worked out, Fuchs, the novice field man, was given a variety of assignments. He prowled the waterfront, observing which ships were being loaded with munitions, and then relayed the information to the office on lower Broadway. He did special guard duty at Albert’s office, never realizing that the safe across the room contained a fortune in cash. He was sent to Hoboken to confront a would-be German agent who, after being hired to do an errand for von Papen, was trying to blackmail the attaché for more money. Modeling his tough-guy manner on Koenig’s, Fuchs convinced the blackmailer he’d be making a dangerous mistake if he didn’t back off. The man was never heard from again.

  There were other assignments, too, all part of a rapid tutelage.

  Fuchs proudly felt he was becoming quite good at his new trade. But then he made the mistake of getting a cold.

  One Sunday Fuchs woke up with a fever. His body ached; his coughs left him shaking; and he couldn’t get out of bed. He missed a day’s work. And at the end of the week, his paycheck was a day short.

  He complained to Koenig. But Koenig could not be swayed. Always suspicious, he doubted that Fuchs had been too ill to work. But even if Fuchs had been sick, PK went on to argue with a tyrant’s logic, illness should never be allowed to interfere with service to the Fatherland. Koenig refused to pay for work that was not done.

  The relationship between the two relatives quickly degenerated. Fuchs held a grudge, and his gnawing resentment made him testy. Koenig, for his part, was not willing to tolerate anything less than total, subservient respect.

  He fired Fuchs, charging him with “constant quarrelling with another operative, drinking, and disorderly habits.” Never missing an opportunity to be vindictive, Koenig also announced that he was docking the ex-operative another day’s pay: $2.57.

  It was the indignity of the loss of $2.57 that had fueled Fuchs’s unrestrained anger. It had goaded him into making the angry calls. It had driven him to share the story that incriminated Paul Koenig. It had cost Abteilung IIIB a key operative in its American network. And it had given Tom the evidence he needed for an arrest.

  BUT TOM STILL DIDN’T HAVE any information on the explosions. That was why he’d originally launched the investigation into Koenig, why he’d followed PK and tapped his phones. Yet for all his work, for all his progress, Tom wasn’t any closer to an answer. He still didn’t know who was planting the bombs.

  If he arrested Koenig, the one potential lead he had would disappear. Koenig, he expected, was not a man who would talk; he’d happily go to his grave rather than reveal a secret to the enemy. Fuchs, however, didn’t know anything more than what he’d already shared. And there was no likelihood of his getting new information; he’d already been summarily shoved out of the network.

  So Tom made a tactical decision, and then ran it by Woods and Scull for approval.

  He explained his plan: We make a deal with Fuchs to buy his silence, while at the same time we let PK run free. We follow him. Here, there, everywhere. See where he takes us. We can scoop him up whenever we get nervous. We have him cold.

  Tom insisted that the most important mission was to stop the bombings. Arresting Koenig, he said, would be as futile as cutting the tail off a snake. The snake would still live. It’d wriggle off to strike again. They needed to “kill the snake,” Tom said.

  He believed that if his men continued their surveillance of Koenig, there was a good likelihood that in time they’d be led to the bombers.

  Woods agreed. “Kill the snake, Captain,” he ordered.

  Chapter 24

  No one was there. It was a bad enough start, but things soon got worse.

  Von Rintelen, like Tom but for quite different reasons, had the bombings on his mind as he stood with his valises on the New York pier where the Kristianiafjord had docked. He had been told that Malvin Rice, the DuPont board member, would be waiting to greet him. Straight off they were to go—“arm in arm,” Nicolai had teased—to the depot where Rice had stored the explosive powder von Rintelen would purchase.

  When he’d first heard the plan, von Rintelen had practical reservations. He doubted that significant quantities of valuable explosives would be kept from Allied purchasing agents waving bundles of cash simply on the promise that Rice had a mystery client who’d be around in a month or so to make a deal. He had considered sharing this concern with Nicolai, but he’d decided not to; for all he knew, the great spymaster’s faith had been predicated on machinations from wh
ich he was excluded. But now von Rintelen’s fears had been confirmed. There was no sign of Malvin Rice.

  He stood on the pier feeling entirely alone. His mission weighed on him. The rash pledge he’d made at the Foreign Office bound him to a perilous strategy: since he could not buy the munitions, he’d need to blow them up.

  Alone in enemy territory, the full impact of what he was setting out to do struck him with a nearly unnerving force. “Single-handedly,” he’d write, “I now ventured an attack against the forty-eight United States!”

  Von Rintelen considered his next move. One of the golden rules of tradecraft, he told himself in an attempt to calm the waves of apprehension crashing over him, was that nothing goes as planned. A field agent must take setbacks in stride. With that maxim in mind, he decided that Rice’s nonappearance was not worth worrying about. He’d move on to the other instructions he’d received in Berlin: the delivery of the new “most secret” codes hidden in the two capsules.

  From the dock, he took a taxi to the German Club on Central Park South. He had been a member before the war, and, for the time being at least, he’d take a room. Most evenings, he’d been told in Berlin, he’d be able to find Captain Boy-Ed, the naval attaché, and Captain von Papen, the military attaché, holding court in the bar. His plan was to introduce himself and, when the moment was right, hand over the codes.

  The two diplomats were not pleased to see him. Days earlier they had received a cable from Berlin announcing von Rintelen’s imminent arrival, and they had been sulking ever since.

  As soon as von Rintelen sat down, they made it clear that they did not need his help. The network, they insisted haughtily, was running fine without von Rintelen’s interference. Boy-Ed was particularly disdainful. He wore more gold stripes on his sleeve than the junior naval officer, he pointed out, and therefore he had no intention of taking orders from him.

  Von Rintelen tried to deflate the hostile mood by sharing news he had brought from Berlin. In recognition of their service, Boy-Ed had been awarded the Order of the House of Hohenzollern and von Papen the Iron Cross. He might as well have informed them they’d received lumps of coal, so total was their indifference to anything he had to say.

  Von Rintelen realized he had no choice but to accept their ill humor. “I had anyhow not expected them to break out into whoops of joy when I made my appearance,” he recalled years later with a philosophical detachment made easier by the passage of time. After handing them the new codes, he quickly left the bar.

  He checked out of the German Club, too, and instead found a modest hotel on Fifty-Seventh Street. He didn’t want to be near the attachés; he was done with them. Anyway, it would be better tradecraft, he decided, to “disappear into obscurity.”

  His first day in New York had been measured out in failures. Still, he told himself as he settled into his new hotel room, he would persevere. He didn’t need Rice, or the two military attachés. He’d find his own assets, formulate his own plots. The Fatherland was counting on him, and he would get the job done. “It was,” he reminded himself with a steely resolve, “high time that something really was done.”

  Chapter 25

  Living in a familiar city gave von Rintelen a great sense of freedom. He openly inhabited two worlds, yet both were in their different ways aspects of the same operational cover.

  By day, using a variety of aliases and wearing rough clothes, he prowled the waterfront, a spy conducting reconnaissance. He saw the English, French, and Russian transports waiting to be loaded with munitions, and each ship became a tangible target that brought a pressing clarity and focus to his mission. He noticed the roving cliques of bored German seamen hanging about the harbor, and he recognized at once that they were invaluable assets waiting to be recruited. He observed that many of the stevedores were Irish, and when he heard them openly snarling about having to load a ship flying the Union Jack, the talent spotter in him rejoiced. This was a visceral hatred he would exploit. And he met with a brooding, suspicious Koenig who nevertheless arranged sit-downs with many of the security chief’s assets.

  Discovering that the men in the field had grown wary of von Papen and his incompetence, he jumped at the chance to be their savior. He announced that the days of “the Kindergarten,” as he had sneeringly dubbed the old network, were over. Berlin had sent a professional, not another diplomat dabbling in espionage. He would protect his agents, von Rintelen promised. He pledged to help them win many victories for the Fatherland. From now on, he stated with a persuasive finality, they worked for him.

  And at night he’d shed his shabby clothes and aliases and play Franz von Rintelen, the fun-seeking aristocrat. He went merrily around town in white tie, society’s newest handsome leading man.

  He had taken up residence in the gilded sanctuary of the New York Yacht Club, and invitations arrived for dances, dinners, and country weekends. He tried to accept them all, a man seemingly committed to nothing more than a good time. Hiding in plain sight, he believed, was often the best disguise.

  All the time, day and night, as he made his way about the city gathering intelligence and forging contacts, his confidence kept building. He had taken hold of the mission, and an operational plan was taking shape. America, he had discovered, was too soft, too trusting, too unprepared. He felt invincible.

  This was his resilient, self-assured mood when he received a letter summoning him to a meeting with von Bernstorff. He went to the suite at the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue suspecting that the ambassador would reiterate the attachés’ offhand dismissal of his services. He was not disappointed. There was not even a pretense of polite conversation.

  Von Bernstorff immediately demanded to know why he had come to America. His abrupt tone made it clear that he felt von Rintelen was not needed.

  Von Rintelen, however, was no longer the man the military attachés had confronted, the novice operative who had literally just gotten off the boat. Unyielding, he stated that he was a soldier sent by the highest authorities in Berlin. His mission, he announced emphatically, was clear: “America is the unseen enemy,” he said, and he would do whatever was necessary to save German soldiers from its shells.

  The count bristled. The kaiser’s ambassadors were not accustomed to receiving presumptuous lectures from junior officers. Indignant, he started to reprimand von Rintelen.

  Unintimidated, von Rintelen reached into his pocket and, with deliberate drama, placed the Kaiserpass on the table.

  “ ‘Alle meine Behörden und Beamten sind nunmehro gehalten . . . ,’ ” he quoted: all the kaiser’s subjects were to offer the holder whatever assistance he requested.

  “Even an ambassador,” von Rintelen said stiffly. Then with great formality he excused himself, walking out of the room like a soldier on parade.

  Chapter 26

  The Manhattan Front’s headquarters was a newly rented two-room office suite on Cedar Street in the throbbing heart of New York’s financial district. Emblazoned on the door was “E. V. Gibbons, Inc.”—the two initials appropriated from von Rintelen’s Swiss pseudonym—and below it, the words “Importers and Exporters.”

  In one room was the cover staff—Max Weiser and his secretary. A longtime legitimate exporter, Weiser not only knew his way around the waterfront but also came recommended by the German consul. At any one time he had several legitimate business deals going, but even when things were slow, his secretary was under orders to keep typing busily throughout the day. In the humble back office, von Rintelen set up shop.

  Now that the whispered word was out around the German neighborhoods and meeting places, someone was always hoping for an audience with Mr. Gibbons. A procession of imperial navy sailors, assets who had previously performed tasks for Koenig’s network, as well as a variety of shady characters eager to get backing for improbable schemes traipsed through the offices. Von Rintelen met with them all, showing most of them the door after only the briefest of interviews.

  One afternoon Dr. Walter Scheele appeared witho
ut an appointment.

  He had been Abteilung IIIB’s lone agent in America before the war, and he arrived with a letter of strong recommendation from von Papen in his outstretched hand and a new invention hidden in his pocket.

  Von Rintelen read the letter and then offered the wizened, elderly man a seat. Clearly nervous, Scheele began by explaining that he was a chemist by profession, president of the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company, but decades ago he had served as a lieutenant in the German field artillery and still remained a loyal son of the Fatherland. He had come, he said hesitantly, because he had created an invention that Mr. Gibbons might be interested in acquiring.

  “You can trust me,” von Rintelen assured him, moving his chair conspiratorially closer to his guest. “I am the most discreet man in New York.”

  Scheele waited, gathering his courage. At last he pulled his invention from his pocket and placed it on the desk.

  It was the size and shape of a cigar, and it appeared to be made of solid lead. Von Rintelen stared at it with bewilderment.

  If Scheele noticed a derisive glance, he chose to ignore it. Instead, with a confident professionalism, he explained how his “lead cigar” worked.

  The interior of the lead tube was divided in two by a copper disc he had soldered into place, Scheele began. In one compartment was picric acid; the other held sulfuric acid. Wax plugs placed at both ends made the cigar airtight.

  Von Rintelen was confused. He still didn’t understand the device’s purpose.

  His puzzled look seemed to amuse the chemist. As if it were entirely obvious, Scheele explained that the two acids would eat their way through the copper disc—and when they did, their mingling would result in an intense flame.

  The disc, he went on, was merely a timing device. It could be thick or thin, and depending on its size, the inevitable combustion caused by the merging of the two acids would occur in either days or weeks. But best of all, Scheele revealed—a performer saving his best routine for last—as the fire burned, the lead casing would melt away. No clue would be left behind.