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

by Blum, Howard

  But the alternative would be to leave twenty-five pounds of TNT in a boardinghouse in the middle of the town of Weehawken. With a professional objectivity, Tom reminded himself that TNT was harmless without a proper detonator—most of the time. He also knew that accidents were possible. In certain circumstances—too much heat, a tight, airless space—it could combust.

  Tom weighed the possibilities in his mind: Fay’s going on the lam; or half of Weehawken going up in smoke.

  Losing Fay, Tom decided at last, was a risk he couldn’t take. He told Barnitz to leave the package.

  Yet no sooner had Tom made that difficult decision than once again his instincts were put to another hard test. Detectives Coy and Walsh, joined by James Sterett, had been staking out the Hotel Breslin, covering all the exits to make sure that Siebs did not suddenly disappear. After several uneventful hours of surveillance, they saw a man stop by the front desk, ask if Mr. Siebs was in, and then take the elevator to his floor.

  He was in his youthful thirties, with a bushy black mustache above an easy smile, and dressed in a sharply cut double-breasted brown suit. He was a handsome man, and the swagger in his walk suggested he was well aware of it.

  Walsh asked the hotel clerk who had rung Siebs if he had caught the visitor’s name.

  “A Mr. Fay,” said the clerk.

  Moments later Coy was on the phone with Tom. He needed to know if they should bring Fay in.

  Tom considered. If Fay was in custody, Tom could go one-on-one with him in the interrogation room. Most men would crack after a few slaps with a nightstick. But the signs pointed to Fay’s being a professional. There was a chance he’d take a beating, and all Tom would have to show for his efforts would be a bruised fist and a broken nightstick. Besides, Tom reminded himself, there was no guarantee Fay had anything to confess. Maybe he really was an inventor. Maybe he did need the TNT, as Wettig had been told, for “test purposes.”

  Yet if his men tailed Fay, the prospects were tantalizing. There was no telling where he’d take them, or what they’d find out. Fay might be the man who would lead them to the group behind the shipboard explosions.

  As long as, Tom realized with a sudden twist in his stomach, his men didn’t lose Fay. There was always the possibility that Fay would walk out of the Breslin and then disappear into the city, never to be seen again. Koenig, after all, had shown them how easily a professional could shake a tail in New York.

  “Follow him,” Tom ordered. “And if you lose him, don’t come back.”

  Chapter 32

  Lower Manhattan, New York City, with ferry in the foreground, circa 1912. Identified buildings include (from left) the Woolworth Building (with tower nearing completion) and the Singer Building.

  (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

  The open deck of the Forty-Second Street ferry didn’t offer many places to hide, so all the detectives could do was bury their heads in their newspapers. They hoped they looked like typical commuters, and that Fay, standing by the rail and looking straight across the Hudson to the New Jersey shoreline, didn’t notice them.

  When Fay left the Breslin a little more than a half hour ago, Coy, Walsh, and Sterett had been in pursuit. The three detectives followed him onto the ferry to Weehawken.

  After the ferry docked, they stayed with him as he walked up the steep hill into town and headed into the garage on Main Street. Fay remained in the garage long enough for the detectives to make new operational plans. Borrowing a car from the local police, they sat in it and waited.

  Hours passed, and they began to wonder what Fay was doing. Or if there was a back door to the garage they hadn’t spotted.

  But patience, they told themselves, was at the heart of every successful surveillance. Besides, all they could do was wait—unless they dared to telephone Captain Tunney and suggest there was a possibility that somehow Fay had escaped.

  Suddenly a dark sedan pulled out of the garage. Fay was at the wheel, and there was a husky, well-dressed passenger next to him in the front seat. Was this Scholz, the roommate the landlady had mentioned?

  The car drove through Weehawken and then headed north, taking a twisting route that ran along the cliffs of the Palisades. The police car kept its distance but never lost sight of the dark sedan.

  The road took them past large homes, brick villas newly built by Wall Street financiers to take advantage of the glorious sunsets shimmering across the Hudson, then a movie studio where D. W. Griffith had shot the outdoor scenes for his earliest dramas. Soon the countryside became wilder, a thick forest of scrub oak trees.

  Fay stopped the car, and both he and his passenger got out. They walked into the deep, dark woods.

  The detectives couldn’t decide what to do. They could follow the two men, but the likelihood of their traipsing through a pitch-dark forest undetected seemed slim. Besides, Fay had left his car at the side of the road. He must be coming back, they told themselves.

  They waited in the darkness, and it was as if they could hear the ominous ticking of each passing moment in their heads. What could he be doing in the woods for so long? They tried a variety of possibilities out on each other, but nothing in the end seemed reasonable. The longer they waited, the greater was their dread. How could the detectives explain to Captain Tunney that they had watched passively as Fay had walked off?

  Fay and his passenger returned, though. They drove directly to the boardinghouse. When the two men entered, the watchers breathed a sigh of genuine relief.

  The next day was Saturday, and at noon when Fay and his friend—they were now sure the big, dapper guy was Scholz—emerged from the boardinghouse, six detectives were in position up and down the block. Barnitz, on orders from Tom, had arrived before dawn to take charge.

  There were also, parked in a nearby car, two Secret Service agents. Tom had asked that the agents be there; New York cops had no power of arrest in another state, and Tom had decided that it was time to bring Fay in. The many cautious steps that set up the covert delivery of the TNT; the meeting with Siebs; the strange disappearance into the Jersey woods in the middle of the night—Tom wanted explanations for a growing list of questions.

  Still, Tom was willing to let Fay roam for a while longer. He wanted to see where he’d go, what he’d do. With the Secret Service agents, there were eight men on his tail. It was what watchers call a bandbox operation, cozy to the point of being airtight. There was no conceivable way Fay could suddenly vanish.

  They followed Fay as he and his companion got on board a Grantwood streetcar. One detective hopped on board, too, while the others followed in two unmarked cars.

  Fay and his friend rode the streetcar out of Weehawken and then continued on foot to the woods outside town. They walked at a leisurely pace, never looking back over their shoulders, never glancing about suspiciously. They seemed to be two friends out for a stroll. When they reached the spot where they had entered the woods on the previous night, they once again disappeared into the forest.

  Barnitz sent Sterett and Coy in after them. Careful, he warned. But stealth was impossible. Leaves crackled under their feet. Twigs snapped. They were only two men, but it sounded as if a cavalry brigade were riding through the woods.

  Fay turned around sharply and peered back. The two detectives froze.

  After a moment, Fay continued. The officers followed. But it wasn’t long before Fay came to a halt. He looked about nervously, suddenly suspicious. Fay finally moved on, and when he did, the detectives decided it would be prudent to return to the cars.

  The eight men waited. Hours passed. When it started to get dark and there was still no sign of Fay, Barnitz understood he had nothing left to lose. Let’s bring him in, he ordered, and the detectives and Secret Service agents went charging into the woods.

  It was nearly midnight when Tom picked up the ringing phone in his office. His mood was subdued. He had been waiting all evening for Barnitz’s call, and he knew that every passing minute was a cause for alarm. H
e’d had hours to prepare himself for the worst. Yet he had kept hoping.

  “We lost him,” Barnitz announced, his voice as pained as if he’d been shot in the gut. “Fay has vanished. No sign of him anywhere.”

  Chapter 33

  The police were coming for him. He could hear their muffled footsteps in the hallway as they got into position. He waited, panicked, not knowing what to do. Bang! They were pounding on the door, shouting, “Open up! This is the New York Police Bomb Squad! Open up!” He was completely frozen, unable to move, unable to think. The door crashed open. A team of detectives, big, fierce men, came charging in. And Thomas Tunney, full of menace, was staring him in the face.

  It was at this point in his dream that Franz von Rintelen would wake. He’d be shaking, and his body would be dripping with a cold sweat. Getting back to sleep was never easy; and anyway, he feared the nightmare would simply return.

  He had been having this dream for weeks. It had started not long after he’d observed plainclothes detectives poking about the waterfront, watching the Allied ships being loaded and asking questions. A conversation with Koenig, who paid an officer at headquarters, detective Otto Mottola of the warrant squad, $25 a week to keep him informed, had provided more specifics. The detectives, Koenig had learned, were members of Captain Tunney’s bomb squad. They had been assigned to investigate the ship fires.

  As for Tunney, the mole Koenig was running reported the captain had a reputation as “a bulldog,” a fierce and relentless cop. And once von Rintelen had a name, Tunney became the personification of all his mounting fears. In his agitated mind, Tunney loomed as a constant, stalking adversary.

  Von Rintelen grew so troubled, he would later confess, that it wasn’t only his dreams that were a source of torment. He suffered “hallucinations that every knock at the door, during the day or during the night, was an invasion of the Bomb Squad of the New York Police.” Or he’d be having a drink at the Yacht Club bar and he’d become convinced that he “was being watched.” To lose the surveillance team, he’d take a taxi “to a remote quarter of the town”—but they’d be there, too. “I was still being shadowed,” he’d recall. He felt skewered by every stranger’s glance.

  Yet the ubiquitous watchers were not Tom’s men. Tom had still not connected any names directly to the network mounting the bombings. They weren’t British agents either. While Room 40’s wranglers had decoded Wilhelmstrasse’s cables announcing the imminent arrival of von Rintelen in Manhattan, Section V, the SIS’s New York station, was not yet sufficiently concerned to be watching his every move.

  In truth, there was no basis for von Rintelen’s fears. His skittish mood was that of any field agent behind the lines. A galloping internal terror was part of the mission.

  At the same time, his fears, real or imagined, sharpened his edge. They drove him forward. He consoled himself by proving his bravery each new day. He would not allow himself to be deterred. He threw himself with an almost manic energy into a variety of outlandish schemes. Nothing seemed too ambitious, too far-fetched. He was a proud patriot answering his country’s call to battle.

  A driven man, he launched many plots.

  ONE BRASH AND HIGHLY EFFECTIVE operation had its roots in a Russian count’s love of claret. It was the long, sobering spring of 1915, when the Russian army was on the march. They had pushed back the Austro-German forces, charged through Galicia and Austria, and were now advancing through the Carpathian Mountains. As the German general staff made preparations for a retaliatory counterstrike, von Rintelen soberly calculated that although he was far from the front lines, he could do his bit too. With an impressive ingenuity, as well as some shrewdly manipulative psychology, he went on the attack.

  His opening gambit focused on Count Nicolai Ignatieff, the Russian military attaché in Paris. Ignatieff was an aristocrat and a soldier, a distinguished gentleman who by virtue of both his noble birth and his martial accomplishments wielded great power in the ruling czarist circles. The count was also a man who paid great attention to the cut of his clothes, the paintings that hung in his houses, and the horses in his stables. But his greatest passion, and most famous indulgence, was the care with which he stocked his cellars. He was renowned as a connoisseur of wines, a man whose “nose” was respected even by sophisticated Parisian oenophiles.

  With cunning dexterity, von Rintelen went straight for the count’s vanity. For assistance, he recruited a wellborn German American woman whose sympathies remained bound to the Fatherland. Now living on Fifth Avenue, she had frequented Parisian society before the war and knew the count well. Von Rintelen dictated the letter she was instructed to send, and she took down every word in an ornate, flowing cursive:

  My dear Count, a good friend, a Mr. E. V. Gibbons, hopes to import the finest claret into America. It would be an invaluable assistance if Monsieur le Count, with his extraordinary knowledge, could help select the choicest vintages and recommend the most esteemed vineyards.

  The count’s reply was quick: I would be delighted to help Mr. Gibbons; please have him contact me directly. And now that the introduction had been made, the wellborn lady vanished and Max Weiser, the sly importer-exporter whose presence in the front room gave von Rintelen’s operation a veneer of legitimacy, took over.

  In a flurry of letters and telegrams, Weiser, acting on behalf of E. V. Gibbons, Inc., wrote first to the count and then to the vineyards that the Russian, after much consideration, had selected. With the count’s imprimatur helping the deal to move swiftly along, a large consignment of the finest bottles of claret was soon shipped to the E. V. Gibbons company in New York.

  The Abteilung IIIB paymasters were furious. Von Rintelen had insubordinately used funds originally intended to buy munitions to purchase cases of wine. Didn’t he realize there was a war on? This sort of indulgence was close to treason.

  But von Rintelen was unapologetic. He explained that the transaction had helped to establish two important principles. First, E. V. Gibbons was a reputable firm that promptly paid its bills. And second, it forged a relationship with the influential Count Ignatieff.

  Once tempers had been calmed, he also brought another beneficial consequence to the spymasters’ attention: Germany had made money on the deal. The cases of wine had all been sold in just two days for a heady profit.

  With the powers in Königsplatz appeased, von Rintelen made his next move. A letter from E. V. Gibbons, Inc., to the count suggested that the Russian army employ the long-established and well-capitalized firm to act as its purchasing agent in America. It would be a mutually advantageous alliance: the Gibbons company was in a position to obtain whatever the troops needed, and the Russian army would be dealing with a firm they could count on. Gibbons would like, the letter concluded, to negotiate a significant contract for the purchase of military equipment.

  Once again, the well-mannered count responded with alacrity. Based on his experience, he would be only too glad to recommend Mr. Gibbons and Gibbons’s distinguished firm to the Russian purchasing agents already in New York. To expedite the process, the count listed their names and addresses.

  Playing the role of Mr. Gibbons, a successful American-born exporter, von Rintelen met with one of the Russian agents in the lobby of the man’s hotel. The Russian, an infantry captain, was not impressed. He barely had time for Mr. Gibbons, summarily announcing that all the necessary army purchases had already been consigned to other firms. Abruptly, he rose from his chair, prepared to escort Mr. Gibbons to the door.

  Von Rintelen did not move. He remained seated, relaxed, even slouching a bit as if to emphasize that he was not intimidated. The Russian glowered. Von Rintelen returned his stare with an easy smile, and offhandedly noted that this decision would “sadden a very good friend.”

  The Russian ignored this news. Instead, he said he was in a hurry. With an imperious wave of his hand, he summoned a bellboy to fetch his hat and coat.

  Von Rintelen still did not budge. But now with a great casualness, as if it
were the most uncalculated of remarks, he asked the captain if by any chance he happened to know his good friend Count Ignatieff, the military attaché. He said he would be most grateful if the next time the captain was in Paris, he could convey his warmest regards.

  Now the captain hesitated, and von Rintelen pounced. He withdrew the count’s laudatory letter from his pocket with a proud flourish, and passed it on to the Russian.

  It was as effective in its way as a Kaiserpass. The Russian had only to start reading the letter before he began apologizing profusely. Full of embarrassment, he said that it was quite possible that he’d been too hasty. Perhaps Mr. Gibbons would like to accompany him to his room, where they could discuss the possibility of a purchasing contract in depth.

  “Amazing” was how von Rintelen, with customary modesty, described the twelve contracts that were subsequently negotiated and then signed by the imperial Russian embassy in Washington. The Gibbons firm was to provide saddles, tinned meat, bridles, mules, horses, field kitchens, boots, shoes, underwear, gloves, and small-arms ammunition.

  It was a large and varied order that vastly exceeded Weiser’s legitimate manufacturing connections. The old man worried that the Gibbons company would be unable to obtain the items that had been ordered. But von Rintelen was not concerned. He never had any intention of delivering the supplies to the Russians.

  Nevertheless, von Rintelen did not hesitate to take the contracts to his New York bank. With the agreements as collateral, he received a $3 million loan from the impressed bankers. He thanked them, and then deposited the funds in an account he’d opened under another alias at a different bank.

  All in all, von Rintelen felt it had been a fairly successful scheme. He had diverted orders of Russian army supplies using a dysfunctional company, and at the same time he’d made $3 million. The goods weren’t to be delivered for another forty-five days, so he figured he had plenty of time before he would need to invent an excuse for the “unanticipated further delay.” His sincere regrets, he hoped, would buy another month or so.