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

by Blum, Howard

  The incessant clatter made it difficult for Tom to think. But as he watched the refined sugar being bagged, he was struck by an idea: If I were a saboteur, that’s how I’d do it. I’d put the devices right into the bags.

  He made his way over to a long table where a half dozen workers were sewing closed the bags that had just been filled. He watched them work. It was all done by hand with fast, sure stitches, using thick red thread and a big needle.

  Without a word, he grabbed one of the sewn bags and ripped it open. It came apart easily.

  Startled workers jumped to their feet in anger. Tom showed them his badge and backed it up with a menacing look. They sat down immediately.

  He ordered one man to stitch the bag closed again.

  The worker was confused, but he didn’t dare disobey. It was done in moments, and when Tom examined the handiwork, he saw that it was impossible to tell that it had previously been opened.

  Tom moved on to the adjacent table. Here the tops of the heavy muslin bags were stitched closed by machines. He grabbed a bag and tried to repeat his previous experiment.

  It took several attempts, and a bit of muscle, before the machine stitches came undone. And when the bag was resewn, the new stitches were obvious.

  Lesson one, Tom told himself: The saboteurs most likely plant the devices in the hand-sewn bags. That should narrow the search considerably.

  But no sooner had Tom come to grasp this knowledge than he realized he was getting ahead of himself. He had skipped a crucial part of the process. The saboteurs wouldn’t plant the devices in just any hand-sewn bags of sugar. They’d target only orders bound for Allied boats.

  He quickly made his way to the shipping department and spoke to the clerk. He needed to learn how many people knew the final destination of a shipment when it left the refinery.

  The clerk said there were only two. He was one. The shipping clerk, he explained, knew the destination of every order. The other was the lighter captain. He would pick up the shipments from the clerk and pilot the barge carrying the sugar out to a specific ship.

  It was a short drive back to Centre Street, and all the while Tom’s thoughts were racing. Lesson two, he decided, with a mounting sense that he was getting closer to unraveling the mystery: the lighter captain inserts the bombs into the hand-sewn bags of sugar before he delivers the shipment to the boat.

  A strategy had settled in his mind before he even walked into the squad room. He’d order his men to begin surveillance of the waterfront lighter captains. He’d follow the seamen as they loaded their barges at the piers and then steered them out into the harbor to the Allied boats. And in the process, he’d find his saboteurs.

  Chapter 29

  With nightfall, curtains of gray mist and heavy shadows fell over the Hudson River. The silence grew thick and deep, too. Yet the lightering—the process by which barges brought cargo to vessels too large to be anchored at the port facilities—was done only at night on the empty, dark river. For month after taut month, it had been a particularly challenging surveillance for policemen more accustomed to the sidewalks of New York.

  There had been the night, for example, when something suspicious caught Detective Senff ’s eye, and he gave chase to a sailor by the West Forty-Fourth Street pier. Senff ran through a maze of shadows; and then suddenly he had fallen into the water, and the tide was carrying him away. Three beefy detectives dived in after him, and only after a frightening struggle were they able to pull him to shore.

  On other evenings, they’d chase after a barge in their police motorboats, only to realize that stealth was impossible: the sound of their barking engines might just as well have been a cannon barrage echoing through the silent night. They’d cut their engines and try to drift, but then the lighter barges would pull swiftly away. Or they’d stay back, trailing a distant blinking light as it headed out to sea, only to discover when at last they caught up that they’d been following the wrong boat all along.

  Yet after all the fruitless months, the team decided that they had finally found something. On several nights they’d watched as a motorboat stole up to a lighter. The detectives were a half mile or so off, and at night their binoculars were nearly useless, but each time the furtive shadows scurrying about the long barge suggested that some sort of covert transaction was taking place. Engines roaring, they’d charge toward the lighter, but by the time they arrived, the mysterious motorboat along with its crew would always have vanished.

  Tom was unable to get his proof, but still he was convinced: the devices were delivered to the lighter captains at sea. They’d arrive by motorboat, and then the bombs would be concealed in bags of sugar.

  It was the only time, he reasoned, that made sense. Once the barge pulled up to the vessel’s side, there’d be no opportunity. The stevedores would quickly hurl the cargo into the hold, and then the hatches would be sealed. Why else, he told himself with the brimming confidence of a man who felt he had solved a difficult problem, would the motorboats rendezvous at sea with the barges? They had to be dropping off a consignment of bombs.

  Tom set a trap, and this time, to ensure that it would succeed, he stationed his men on land. He realized that the mysterious motorboats not only went out to sea but also returned to shore. He’d catch them when they docked.

  Even as Tom shared his strategy with Barnitz, he knew it was a flimsy plan, its success at best improbable. For one thing, his men couldn’t cover the entire length of the New York waterfront; there were the entire East River and Hudson River shorelines to patrol, as well as the New Jersey side of the Hudson. And even if they did get lucky and spotted the motorboat coming in to tie up, there was always a strong chance that the crew would bolt, disappearing without a trace into the dark, twisting city streets that fanned out from the waterfront.

  But for once everything went as planned. Shortly after 2:00 a.m., a motorboat docked at a pier on the Lower West Side. A single man climbed out, and Tom’s detectives were able to follow him unnoticed. He walked slowly, seemingly without a care, and stopped in front of a brownstone building on Twenty-Third Street.

  Before he put his key into the front door, Barnitz had grabbed his arm, and Detective Corell snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Moments later, Barnitz gleefully radioed his boss that they were bringing the suspect in.

  Tom waited in his office at Centre Street to meet the saboteur. There were dozens of questions he wanted to ask. He looked forward to rounding up the rest of the network. Before the day was over, Tom was sure, he’d have the information that would put an end to the months of bombings.

  Tom soon got to ask his questions, but he didn’t get the answers he’d been expecting.

  The man was a crook, not an enemy agent. For the past four months he and his crew of river pirates had been motoring out to the barges under the cover of darkness to buy bags of stolen sugar from the lighter captains. He was making 400 percent profit on each bag he resold.

  He didn’t know anything about bombs.

  Tom’s men arrested five lighter captains that day. Very quickly, they all confessed—to selling sugar illegally. As for the shipboard explosions, they were as puzzled as Tom was. Mike Matzet, a burly seaman who was used to doing things his own way, even barked at Tom, “That’s why we thought there was no harm in selling the sugar. Take all you want, we told him. The damn ship will never get over anyway!”

  Tom had to agree that Captain Matzet was probably right. After four futile months following a seemingly promising trail, he was no closer to a solution than when he had started. And the morning paper, he saw, had reported another fire at sea.

  Chapter 30

  It was Tom who initiated the meeting, and he entered the commissioner’s office with the same grim resolve he’d summoned up as a boy reluctantly going off to confession. Only this admission of guilt, he knew, would be worse, much worse; so much more had been at stake than merely the fate of his own insignificant soul.

  It was the day after the arrests of the river pir
ates and the lighter captains, and in those twenty-four hours Tom was as low as he had ever been. He had barely eaten, and sleep had been impossible. His restless thoughts were filled with recurring visions of the many wasted nights he’d ordered his men to spend huddled in motorboats on the dark river. He had been so confident, and in the end so wrong. The nuns in county Cork had taught that arrogance was a deadly sin, but they had never hinted that his transgressions could harm innocent victims too. Yet a sorrowful Tom felt that his wrongheaded certainty—so much valuable time squandered!—left him personally culpable for any new damage the explosions caused. Atonement seemed impossible. And punishment—demotion? reassignment?—seemed probable.

  He marched into Woods’s office as gravely as a man going to his own funeral. The commissioner sat behind the Teddy Roosevelt desk, and Scull was in a leather side chair, puffing on a pipe.

  Tom saluted, and still at attention, he addressed the commissioner. I was wrong, he confessed stiffly. Without omitting any of the painful details or, for that matter, offering any excuses, he went on to explain how his theory linking the bombs and the sugar shipments had proved to be a mistake.

  When he was done, Tom girded himself for what would happen next. He was a proud man, but even more painful was the prospect of leaving his job when there was so much more to do.

  Woods’s face did not betray any emotion. He simply ordered Tom to take a seat.

  The commissioner waited until Tom had settled into the chair. Then he asked, “Where do we go from here, Captain?”

  Tom would always remember that Woods’s tone was not malicious. There was no lash of criticism. And Tom would always be grateful, especially since it was a kindness he felt he did not deserve.

  “I’m not sure,” Tom admitted truthfully.

  So Woods, still at heart the Groton master, offered a parable. “When you are bound on a long trip,” he began, as Tom would later relate the conversation, “and you mislaid your ticket, it is second nature to go through your pockets one by one knowing full well that it is not in any of them, for you ‘just looked there.’ Then you find it in one of the pockets where you knew it could not be.”

  Tom understood. He left the commissioner’s office determined to go back through his pockets.

  THE INVESTIGATION RETURNED TO THE piers, and this time Tom ordered his men to focus on the Chenangoes, as the stevedores who loaded the shipments of sugar onto the lighters were called. Perhaps, he now wanted to believe, they were the accomplices who concealed the devices in the bags.

  Stevedores on a New York dock loading barrels of corn syrup onto a barge on the Hudson River, circa 1912.

  (© Corbis)

  A dingy second-floor room that looked straight out on the pier was rented in a nearby flophouse, and this became the team’s observation post. Watchers with binoculars monitored whether any of the Chenangoes lingered among the bags of sugar or carried any suspicious packages to the job. After three weeks of surveillance, a despondent Tom admitted, “The wickedest thing we ever found was an occasional pint flask on the hip.”

  So, digging still deeper into his pockets, Tom went back to the bombs themselves. He decided to investigate sales of chlorate of potash and sulfuric acid—the two ingredients listed in the French report. His men examined reams of sales receipts from explosives and chemical manufacturers and tracked down dozens of people who had bought the chemicals in commercial drugstores. In the end, Tom was forced to concede, the team “found nothing of consequence.” None of the purchases had even provoked a lingering suspicion.

  Tom had reached the point where he had to accept that his pockets were indeed empty. He had racked his mind, but no clue, as far as he could tell, had been overlooked. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to search. Worse, the investigation had dragged on futilely for so long that he feared for his men’s morale. His squad had grown callous; they now accepted that more bombings were inevitable. And Tom, too, was suffering through his own cruel internal struggle. Resigning himself to live with defeat did not come easily to him.

  Then one morning Tom’s phone rang, and a revitalizing energy was brought to the case. The caller was Robert Martyn, the French military attaché, and as Scull would later be quick to point out, this was the second time France had come to the investigation’s rescue.

  With a deferential politeness, Captain Martyn wanted to know if Captain Tunney would perhaps be interested in information that had come his way. It involved, he said obliquely, someone seeking to purchase a quantity of explosives.

  “What kind?” Tom barked. He’d received too many reports of people buying nothing worse than firecrackers to show any immediate concern. And, he’d later admit, the prospect of dealing once again with the French chafed him.

  The attaché explained that it was trinitrotoluene.

  The more common name, Tom knew, was TNT.

  “Yes,” Tom said. “We would be interested.”

  Chapter 31

  The attaché’s information set Tom and his men off on a confusing, circuitous, and dangerous trail. It started with a war exporter named Carl Wettig, an acquaintance of the French diplomat. Wettig had been approached by a friend of a friend who wanted to buy a small quantity of TNT for, he explained to Wettig, “test purposes.”

  The prospective purchaser lived at the Hotel Breslin in downtown Manhattan and, Tom quickly discovered, was known to the hotel management as Paul Siebs, yet he often used the name Karl Oppegaarde. A man with an alias trying to buy TNT gave Tom some concerns, and the instructions to Wettig that he should deliver the dynamite to an address in New Jersey where the exporter would finally receive payment only added to them.

  Tom could have ordered Wettig to walk away from the deal; if Siebs (aka Oppegaarde) didn’t get his TNT, then Tom would no longer need to worry about what he’d planned to do with it. But all his instincts told Tom that diligence would be rewarded. He decided to let Wettig get the dynamite, and then they’d, as he put it to his squad, “play follow the explosive.”

  With Detective Barnitz glued to his side as a burly chaperone, Wettig went to a munitions store in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Twenty-five pounds of TNT were bought and then carried back across the Hudson and handed to Mr. Siebs, as he was calling himself that day.

  The Hotel Breslin, at the southeast corner of West Twenty-Ninth Street and Broadway, still stands today. This photo is circa 1910–1915.

  (Collection of the New-York Historical Society, neg#9356)

  Tom had been waiting at the Hotel Breslin, too, and as soon as the dynamite was delivered, he pounced. He immediately asked what Siebs intended to do with twenty-five pounds of TNT.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Siebs shot back.

  Tom raised a beefy hand. He could have slapped Siebs for such impertinence and never given it a second thought. But before he could land a blow, Siebs, now shaking with fear, began to talk.

  Dr. Herbert Kienzle, a German clock maker whom he knew only in passing, he explained hurriedly as if speed would make it all seem more logical, had first approached him with the proposition that led him, through another friend, to Wettig. The clock maker had instructed that the TNT be delivered to a garage on Main Street in Weehawken, New Jersey. A Robert Fay would be waiting at the garage, and he would pay Siebs for both the dynamite and his services.

  Tom asked him about Fay. He wanted to know why Fay needed the dynamite.

  If Siebs was tempted to answer, “I don’t have the slightest idea,” he wisely stopped himself. Instead, he plaintively insisted that he really, truthfully, didn’t know.

  Tom believed him. The whole complex tale of, as he put it, “passing the TNT” was so improbable that Tom felt it had to be true. His head was swimming with all the names and connections, but at the same bewildering time he felt he was on to something promising. Employing a small army of cutouts—from Fay to Kienzle to Siebs aka Oppegaarde to Wettig—was the behavior of a professional concerned with operational security. But what was this operative truly
trying to hide?

  With his renewed sense of the chase, his spirits lifted, too, and Tom set out to find Fay. He wanted to discover who this mystery man was, and why he had asked a German clock maker to get him twenty-five pounds of TNT.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY TOM MADE two operational decisions, and each was a gamble that, he knew full well, could end badly. But Tom felt he didn’t have much choice. He had reached that desperate juncture in a case when gambles and hunches were all he had left in his arsenal.

  The first occurred when detectives George Barnitz and James Coy, playing the roles of sturdy deliverymen hired by Wettig, brought the twenty-five pounds of TNT to the Weehawken garage. There was no sign of Fay, but Barnitz appealed to one of the workers. He told the man that they wouldn’t be paid unless the package was delivered directly to Fay. Could he help them out?

  The worker gave them the address of Fay’s boardinghouse on Fifth Street. Fay wasn’t there, either, but the landlady was chatty. She invited the two men in.

  “Mr. Fay,” she told them, was “a real gentleman.” Paid his bills, even subscribed to a magazine. Sociable, too. He had a roommate, a Mr. Scholz. Then, her voice dropping to nearly a whisper because she knew she really shouldn’t be saying so much, she revealed that Fay was an inventor. She admitted that she didn’t know that for a fact. But he had a table in his room where he was always drawing some kind of plans, and so she had figured out that was his profession. Finally, she told them they could leave the package; she’d make sure that Fay would get it.

  Covert operative Robert Fay, inventor of the rudder bomb.

  (John Price Jones, The German Secret Service in America)

  That’s when Barnitz went off to telephone Tom. He asked if he should give the landlady the package.

  Tom knew Fay had been expecting the dynamite, and Wettig had promised it would be delivered. And Fay’s intricate precautions suggested he was a suspicious sort. Any deviation from the arrangements, Tom suspected, could make him bolt.