by Blum, Howard
This contrivance, however, threatened to fall apart when an officer from the Russian embassy telephoned to request an immediate conference. There was a new concern, he announced mysteriously. Mr. Gibbons apologized, but he was afraid a meeting would not be possible; he was very busy. The Russian insisted. Back and forth they went until von Rintelen, more out of curiosity than any desire to accommodate, wearily agreed that he would be available tomorrow morning.
Two huge Russians he had never met before arrived at his office precisely at the appointed time. It was imperative, they explained, that the contracts be fulfilled at once. They had been authorized to offer a substantial bonus for early delivery. To demonstrate the severity of the situation, they shared telegrams from the War Ministry. The supply shortages, the beseeching telegrams revealed, were dire. The Russian army was running out of bullets.
This was heartening news for von Rintelen. But he was also canny enough to understand that if the Russians couldn’t get what they needed from him, they would go to another purchasing agent. After all, money was not a problem; J. P. Morgan and his munificent loans had seen to that. And another agent might actually make sure that the goods arrived in Russia.
“What are the most important items?” he asked. His improvised plan was to suggest a compromise; or, more accurately, to let them think he was offering one.
The Russians held a hasty, whispered discussion, and then one spoke up. Tinned provisions and ammunition were essential, he stated. They were needed at once.
Gibbons promised to give them a definitive answer by that evening. And as soon as the Russians left, assisted by the resourceful Weiser, he went to work.
They telephoned brokers and, to both Weiser’s and von Rintelen’s astonishment, they were quickly able to obtain all the required tinned provisions and ammunition. Another miracle: the goods could be delivered to the docks the next day.
The Russians were ecstatic. They chartered a steamer that would leave without delay once the crucial goods were loaded.
But von Rintelen, of course, was not going to allow much-needed war matériel to reach the enemy. That night in the shadowy hold of the Friedrich der Grosse he gathered his sailors and dockhands and gave strict orders: he wanted no fewer than thirty of the cigar bombs carried on board along with the Russian supplies. Lay them in the wood shavings, he instructed. They’ll be more effective.
The fully loaded steamer headed out of New York Harbor, and, he recounted, “I waited for four days in a state of fever.” If the bombs didn’t ignite, if the crew managed to put out the fires, if any of a dozen too easily imaginable events occurred and the goods arrived in the port of Archangel, von Rintelen would not have been able to forgive himself. He’d have procured bullets for the Russian army that would be aimed at German troops. He worried that for once he had been too smart, his scheme too convoluted, its success contingent on too many factors beyond his control.
But on the fifth day he read in the Shipping News that the steamer had caught fire on the high seas. The blaze was so intense that the crew had to escape in lifeboats. They were rescued by a passing American merchant vessel, and from its deck they watched as their steamer disappeared beneath the waves.
The two Russians, pale and wringing their hands, soon appeared in Gibbons’s offices. Mr. Gibbons commiserated; he too was deeply upset. A tragic accident, he offered. But fear not, he went on. E. V. Gibbons, the count’s great friend, would not let them down. He would outfit another ship, no, two ships, with ammunition and tinned goods, services for which, naturally, he’d want an additional check and an additional bonus. And this time he would engage private detectives to ensure that there was no possibility of saboteurs sneaking on board.
Yet once again fires broke out at sea, and on both ships to boot. And once again the Russians were distraught. But it never occurred to them to suspect that their contractor had engineered the fires; after all, fires were occurring mysteriously on other ships, too.
The Russian embassy signed twenty-one contracts with E. V. Gibbons, Inc., and not a single shipment was delivered. When the Russian agents finally became belligerent, and possibly suspicious too, Mr. Gibbons responded to their harangue with stoic calm. When they grew abusive, he took his hat, offered a polite “Good day,” and left. By the time the enraged Russian embassy prepared legal papers, von Rintelen, using another alias, had set up new offices on William Street for the “Mexico North-Western Railway Company.” The firm of E. V. Gibbons no longer existed.
The principal of the defunct company, nevertheless, was cheered by an article he read on the front page of the New York Times. Russian minister Prince Miliukov had reported to the Duma that the consequences of the delay in the transport of munitions from America were becoming more and more serious. It was likely, the prince said, that the new offensive would need to be postponed.
Chapter 34
But there were just too many ships. Lavishly spending the fortune J. P. Morgan had conveniently provided, the Allies continued to buy supplies, and their boats continued to leave New York Harbor. It had become impossible, von Rintelen realized, to sabotage all of them. He needed to come up with an additional strategy.
He found his inspiration on the front page of the New York Times. The dockers had gone out on strike. But since the union had not sanctioned the action, the newspaper reported, port officials did not anticipate a lengthy disruption.
As he read the article, von Rintelen’s churning mind filled in the gaping holes in the Times’ brief account. The reason the work stoppage would be short-lived, he knew, was that the protesters had no chance of receiving strike pay to compensate for their lost wages. He also knew why that was: Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), wanted England to win the war. He’d never sanction strike benefits for men whose actions were impeding the Allied cause. And this, von Rintelen decided in his mounting fury, was further evidence that America’s neutrality was a sham.
Yet von Rintelen’s anger was also the impetus for what he admittedly described as a “fantastic” scheme: he’d form his own union. The more he played with the idea, the more persuasive and feasible it grew: “A union which was properly registered could proclaim a legal strike, and the law could not interfere. If, in addition, we could pay strike benefits, it might be possible to achieve something, and I certainly had the money to do so.”
So he set to work. In the course of a previous, abandoned adventure, Frederico Stallforth, a German citizen now working as a financier on Wall Street, had introduced him to David Lamar, notorious as “the Wolf of Wall Street.”
David Lamar, the “Wolf of Wall Street,” a con man and financier who worked with Germans, circa 1913.
(Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
Everything about the charming, wealthy Georgia native was false—including his charm, his wealth, and his southern accent. Lamar had cut his teeth on phony stock deals, been convicted of impersonating a Pennsylvania congressman, gone on to real estate scams where he’d promised to put up skyscrapers on land he never owned, and escaped one seemingly certain conviction after he hired the savage Eastman gang to beat the daylights out of a witness. Von Rintelen, who knew a bit about fabricating stories and coming up with inventive plots, was impressed.
But more than any of these bold crimes, what established Lamar’s credentials with the German spy was the fact that he’d worked for J. P. Morgan and succeeded in fleecing the company for well over $1 million. When the two men subsequently encountered each other on the street, an enraged Morgan slapped Lamar across the face and then stormed off. Any man who had pulled a fast one on Morgan—and in von Rintelen’s world the Anglophile financier was the devil incarnate—was his friend. And being slapped by the tycoon was as distinguished an honor as receiving the Iron Cross. Von Rintelen quickly decided Lamar would be the perfect front man for his union.
It was called Labor’s National Peace Council, and in addition to Lamar it attracted a collection of theologians,
university professors, members of Congress, and even a former attorney general, all united in their sincere opposition to the export of American munitions. Halls were rented, rallies were held, speakers were paid, petitions were sent to President Wilson. But none of the activists had any notion that they were, as von Rintelen merrily bragged, “in the service of a German officer.”
At the same time, Lamar was sent off to use his persuasive powers to enroll New York dockworkers in the new union. To help this recruitment drive along, von Rintelen, as generous as J. P. Morgan, gave Lamar nearly $400,000 for bribes and expenses.
But the Wolf of Wall Street became the Wolf of the Waterfront. Lamar pocketed Abteilung IIIB’s money as cavalierly as he’d pocketed J. P. Morgan’s funds. The $400,000 was spent on a lavish estate he was building in the Berkshires.
All along Lamar had given convincing assurances to von Rintelen that he’d made great inroads with the dockers. Hundreds of men, he guaranteed, would enroll in the union. When the long-planned recruitment rally was held, von Rintelen, brimming with confident expectations, waited eagerly in the back of the hall. Not a single recruit turned up. It didn’t take the spy long to discover that both his money and Lamar had vanished. But who was E. V. Gibbons to complain?
Instead, he hired a new front man, Frank Buchanan. A former president of the International Union of Structural Workers who’d recently been elected to Congress from a Chicago district, Buchanan was a gruff, fiery speaker, and an effective one, on the infrequent occasions when he wasn’t drinking.
Buchanan led the fight in Washington for embargo legislation, and von Rintelen sent the personable Captain von Kleist and the canny Weiser to the docks. Once von Kleist started handing out bulging packets of “strike pay,” dockers were lining up to join the new union. For some, it was a matter of conviction: they didn’t want to load munitions on Allied ships. For others, it was simply a practical decision: they’d be paid for not working.
When von Rintelen, still hidden away behind the scenes but always the decision maker, sent word that the time had come for a strike, nearly 1,500 dockers walked off the job. This success established the union’s credentials.
He dispatched his well-paid union executives to ports around the country, wiring fantastic sums to each new city; halls were hired, literature was printed, and longshoremen were recruited. As a result, a series of strikes broke out in ports throughout the United States. Dockers all across the country refused to load Allied transports. The National Peace union had quickly become an effective force.
The fortunes the armaments manufacturers had planned to make from the war in Europe were in jeopardy. And with their livelihoods at stake, they fought back with a clawing ferocity. Millions of dollars were poured into the treasuries of the older unions. Gompers was enlisted to travel around the country to persuade the dockers to come back into the AFL’s fold. Reporters were fed stories about the shady hidden powers behind the new union; “See Lamar’s Hand in ‘Labor’ Peace Move,” one headline in the New York Times revealed. A clique of friendly senators initiated an indignant federal investigation into “the operation of alleged lobbies to influence Congressional legislation” to prohibit arms shipments.
Yet as his union’s power lessened and members returned to the AFL, von Rintelen remained philosophical. “So the fight went on, and ground was lost and won again. Ultimate success would be a matter of money and nerves.”
Chapter 35
Von Rintelen’s mood was also steadied because, as he proudly put it, “I had a finger in so many ‘shady’ deals.” He even grandly plotted to provoke a war between the United States and Mexico. “If Mexico attacked her [America],” he reasoned with a statesman’s pragmatic logic, “she would need all the munitions she could manufacture, and would be unable to export any to Europe.”
For months this inchoate political strategy had been taking shape in his always active mind, but when he read that General Victoriano Huerta was in New York, von Rintelen decided to put it into action. The general was the deposed ruler of Mexico, and he’d been moping in Barcelona as he plotted the military coup that would return him to control. Now, like Lenin at Finland Station, Huerta was passing through New York on the way back, he hoped, to his homeland and to power. Von Rintelen was determined to help the general realize their mutual ambitions. But he needed to find a way to get to him.
In the end, he ambushed the general. As Huerta, surrounded by a retinue of Mexicans in velvet-collared overcoats, made his way out of a black limousine and bounded into the lobby of the Manhattan Hotel, von Rintelen pounced. Jumping up from the seat where he’d passed tedious hours poking at the potted palms with his cane as he waited, he confronted the general.
Mexican military officer Victoriano Huerta (1854–1916), who was president of Mexico from 1913 to 1914, with members of his cabinet. Huerta is seated on the right.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
Huerta was wary, and his men moved threateningly toward the stranger. But von Rintelen was bold. He looked Huerta in the eyes and, with all his self-possessed authority, announced that he was a German officer. “I would like to do all I can to help you reclaim what is rightfully yours,” he declared.
The meeting that took place that afternoon in Huerta’s suite was a long and careful negotiation. The agreed-upon terms left each man feeling as if he’d won a great victory: German U-boats would deliver covert shipments of weapons along the Mexican coast; Germany would provide significant sums to outfit a Mexican rebel army; and once Huerta was restored to power, his troops would attack the United States and be assured of Germany’s complete support.
When the meeting concluded, von Rintelen hurried off to send a cable to Berlin. And in the adjacent hotel room, Section V’s listeners waited impatiently until they could retrieve the Dictaphone that had recorded the entire discussion and send a cable to London. Their target had been Huerta, but to their surprise and excitement, they had also snared a German agent.
When Huerta checked into the Manhattan Hotel earlier in the week, Guy Gaunt, the British station chief in New York, had dispatched a team with orders to put a recording device in the general’s suite. They surveyed the rooms and decided formal conferences would most likely be held around a large round table in the middle of the sitting room. So they moved the table closer to a window framed by flowing curtains, concealed a Dictaphone in the folds of the heavy fabric, and trailed a connecting wire out the window and over the ledge to the room next door.
Headphones on, a British agent was able to listen to every incriminating word between the man they now knew was a German spy and the would-be ruler of Mexico. When the Mexicans left for dinner, the SIS agents would retrieve the recordings from the target room and deliver them downtown to the Section V field office for transcription.
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, Huerta continued on his tour of America, and von Rintelen waited anxiously for a response from Berlin. Yet all the while, the German agent also kept busy; “I had plenty to do in the meantime,” he boasted.
Unknown to von Rintelen, though, his activities were at last being monitored. Section V was now on his tail.
Without disclosing his sources or precisely what activities had been discovered, Gaunt had also suggested to Tom that the New York police should keep an eye on von Rintelen too. However, even if the British agent had provided more details of von Rintelen’s discussion with the Mexican general, Tom would still have needed stronger evidence to arrest the German spy.
There was no specific law against espionage. The closest statute was the Defense Secrets Act of 191l, which made it a crime to deliver national defense information to a person who was “not entitled to it.” Previous state secrecy laws had even vaguer language, and these federal statutes were largely concerned with treason, unlawful entry into military facilities, and the theft of government property. Not until America declared war would Congress, after much contentious debate, pass the Espionage Act of 1917. This law made it a
specific crime to spy on or to interfere with American military operations. But in the days of this covert war, as the network of German spies established itself in New York, Tom’s power to make an arrest was severely restrained. He needed to catch the spies in an act of sabotage, or at least firmly establish that they were planning one.
WHEN BERLIN’S RESPONSE TO VON Rintelen finally arrived, it was enthusiastic. Even better, the Foreign Office swiftly reinforced its words with action. Eight million rounds of ammunition were purchased in St. Louis, awaiting shipment to Huerta’s men; another three million rounds were on order. An initial payment of $800,000 was deposited into Huerta’s personal account in the Deutsche Bank in Havana; $95,000 went into a Mexican account that was also in his name. And von Papen, who had spent time in Mexico before the war, was sent down to the Texas-Mexico border to draft plans for the invading army’s attacks on Brownsville, El Paso, and San Antonio.
An elated Huerta received these reports, cut short his stay in San Francisco, and sped south by train. His plan was to disembark at Newman, New Mexico, twenty miles from the border. General Pascual Orozco and his well-armed men would meet him, and this honor guard would drive him triumphantly into the country that would soon be his once more. But as Huerta descended from his Pullman, a U.S. Army colonel backed by twenty-five soldiers and two deputy marshals arrested the general. The charge was sedition.
He was incarcerated in El Paso, then released on bail. Ordered to remain in America until the charges were adjudicated, he was invited to a dinner at Fort Bliss. The general saw the invitation as a conciliatory gesture. Perhaps it was, but a day later he took sick.