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

by Blum, Howard

  Yellow jaundice was the official diagnosis. Poison was the widespread, and more persistent, rumor. Whatever the cause, the illness was fatal. General Huerta died on American soil. He could see the promised land through the window of his hospital bed, but he never returned.

  VON RINTELEN HEARD THE NEWS in New York. It was night, and he’d just left a dinner party. As he was standing on the street in evening dress, looking to hail a taxi, a man hurried by behind him.

  “You are being watched,” the unseen presence whispered in the background as he passed close enough to touch him. “Look out! Don’t wait for Huerta. He has been poisoned.”

  Von Rintelen summoned up all his discipline. He showed no emotion, focusing his attention on the taxi that had pulled up. But as he was getting in, his eyes darted up the block and he recognized the tall, lean figure of Boniface, the lawyer who had been his coconspirator in many schemes.

  Seated in the cab, the spy struggled to remain calm. Perhaps, he tried telling himself, Boniface was mistaken. But when he glanced with a contrived casualness out the rear window of the taxi, he saw that an ominous dark sedan was right behind him. It followed him all the way to the Yacht Club.

  The next day his fears received additional confirmation. Von Rintelen learned that Koenig had dispatched Boniface. Several of the security chief’s well-placed sources alerted him that the Huerta affair had blown von Rintelen’s cover, and he sent off the lawyer, a man unknown to the police, to warn the spy. A new caution, von Rintelen realized, was required.

  Chapter 36

  For von Rintelen, though, the game was too entertaining. Prudence was difficult. And he was always thinking. Sinister schemes would without warning snake their way into his thoughts. In that unexpected way, a routine reconnaissance trip to the New Jersey piers in search of abandoned sheds where stolen rifles might be stored inspired a new plan.

  Accompanied by Boniface and Weiser, he had marched up streets and lanes, crossed railroad tracks, sauntered through lots littered with debris, and continued on past dismal marshes until they found a derelict pier where a motorboat could be covertly tied. But no sooner had they made this discovery than von Rintelen’s eyes fixed on a nearby spit of land. It was, he decided at first sight, a “most valuable” target.

  It was long and oddly shaped, jutting out for more than a mile into the Jersey City harbor like, it had long ago been decided, a colossal sea creature’s head and neck. In spooky tribute to this forbidding shape, it had picked up the name Black Tom. These days Black Tom bustled with a grim activity that lived up to its monster’s name.

  It was the largest munitions depot in the country. Cargo trains from manufacturers all over America delivered shipments of shells, bombs, and ammunition straight to the series of piers that were lined up in an orderly row on one side of the spit. All day, sunrise to sunset, an army of workers unloaded this deadly cargo from freight trains and then onto the boats that would carry the lethal supplies to Europe.

  Von Rintelen stared at this nest of enemy activity, and one clear, powerful image took shape: a gigantic, ferocious explosion, billows of smoke and fire reaching far up into the sky. “Black Tom destroyed!”

  It would all be, he reasoned, so easy. There would be “little risk.” An impromptu plan materialized: “Some peaceful summer evening—all arrangements properly made—a powerful speedboat at hand for us to disappear into the vastness of the Hudson River—it was all so remote from observation, from possible harm that might be done to human life.”

  A more detailed operational strategy would need to be drawn up. Field agents would have to be recruited, then trained for the mission. But from his first sighting of the gigantic munitions depot, von Rintelen was determined to launch a mission that would reduce Black Tom to smoke and ashes.

  AS VON RINTELEN’S AMBITIOUS PLOTS unfolded with varying degrees of success, there was always one constant. His major offensive against America—the shipboard fires—continued with a vicious, and gratifying, effectiveness. A rhythm of constant, puzzling destruction pounded the harbor. “We continued to place bomb after bomb,” he boasted with a soldier’s pride.

  It had started as a makeshift attack, a ragtag group of German sailors and Irish longshoremen bringing the cigar bombs aboard any ship that caught their attention while it was being loaded in New York Harbor. But with the passing months, it had grown into a larger, well-organized national sabotage operation.

  Decisions were now made by a group von Rintelen christened the Executive Committee. They met Saturday afternoons in the windowless back room of the Hofbrau House on Broadway and Twenty-Seventh Street. Seated around a table covered with a red-checked cloth, they hoisted steins of beer as they carefully selected targets and planned attacks.

  It was a small but dedicated group. There were Scheele, the chemist; Eno Bode, the wealthy superintendent of the Hamburg-American Line, who relished the opportunity to play the secret agent in his old age; and Otto Wolpert, the coarse, brutish pier superintendent of the Atlas Line, whose years on the waterfront had given him many invaluable contacts. The chief field officer was Erich von Steinmetz, a trained Abteilung IIIB operative.

  Von Steinmetz was a mystery to von Rintelen. They had met by prearrangment at Martha Held’s, and all von Steinmetz would reveal was that Nicolai had sent him months earlier to America on a most important mission. Von Rintelen pressed, but the Abteilung IIIB agent would not disclose the operation. It was top secret, he repeated. The most he would offer was that it had failed, but he had been exonerated. His new orders were to report to von Rintelen and assist the Manhattan Front.

  Under the Executive Committee’s guiding hand, the sabotage attacks spread around the country. Von Rintelen went to Baltimore, where with the help of Paul Hilken, the worldly, well-connected son of the local German consul, he recruited a network of field operatives from the local piers. Von Steinmetz was dispatched to New Orleans. A third team of agents went to San Francisco. Soon the Shipping News carried reports of ships sailing from ports throughout the country being engulfed by mysterious fires.

  There was a new recruit, too, who brought with him an invention that had the potential to be as effective as the cigar bombs. It was an ingenious device: a container holding TNT that attached to a ship’s rudder. With each turn of the rudder blade, a metal rod in the container would wind up a firing mechanism until the TNT detonated.

  Von Rintelen ordered a test. The young man took a motorboat out into the harbor one evening and drew up alongside the rudder of a large munitions transport. He jumped into the water with only a small splash and quickly fixed his device to the ship’s rudder. It took about a minute. Then he moved on to another munitions ship and repeated the stealthy procedure.

  Days later the Shipping News reported two disturbingly similar accidents. Two transports had their rudders torn away at sea. The damage to their sterns was so severe that its crew had to abandon one boat, while the other was towed back to harbor.

  Von Rintelen was ecstatic. “What the incendiary bombs could not achieve was reserved for . . . [the new] machines,” he rejoiced.

  The young inventor’s name was Robert Fay.

  IT WAS ALL GOING SO well. Yet with hard-nosed objectivity, von Rintelen found himself forced to concede that his operation was under attack. He now had definitive proof that the New York police were on his trail. The report from Koenig’s mole had sounded the alarm. And any hopeful doubts about this intelligence had been erased by his own observations: teams of watchers now often followed him openly around New York. His premature vision of Tunney bursting through the door could very well turn out to be prophetic.

  But, he also realized, there was no preemptive move he could make. He wasn’t going to abandon his mission and run back to Germany. There was nothing he could do other than proceed.

  Now that his nightmare had become a reality, his courage put to a genuine test, it was almost a relief. His dread had been a thousand deaths. The fact that his long-smoldering fears had proved true
brought an unexpected calm. He’d come at last to the place where he’d never wanted to be, and yet he was able to convince himself that he would prevail.

  So what if the New York police knew his name? His tradecraft had been meticulous. He was certain they had no “direct and clear proof.” He had left no tangible clues. The best they’d come up with, he assured himself, was “that Rintelen was often seen in society in evening dress and lived at the New York Yacht Club.” He was smarter, craftier, than any New York cop. Tunney would never catch Franz von Rintelen.

  Chapter 37

  Frank Holt’s arrival at Cornell was the end of a remarkable journey. It had, Holt told himself with delighted pride, proceeded precisely as he had planned it six years ago in the Mexican hill country.

  Leona was elated, too. The man she had met in a small-time Texas college that churned out farmers and cattlemen was now at an Ivy League university, writing a dissertation entitled “The Effect of the Work of Shakespeare on German and French Literature.”

  She was troubled that her husband was working too hard, often all through the night. And there were days on end when he wouldn’t speak a word to her. But Leona attributed all this to Frank’s diligence and the intensity of his focus. Who was she, she reprimanded herself, to question that sort of commitment?

  The other faculty members grew to appreciate the industrious Holt, too. Clark Northrup, a member of the English department who became a close friend, was one of many Cornell professors impressed with Holt’s “well-founded scholarship,” his “abilities as a teacher,” and his intelligence.

  The fiction had become the reality. In Holt’s mind it was as if he’d never had a previous, more complicated life with another Leona.

  Then in April 1914, a notice appeared in the German department office. All members of the department were expected to attend the annual Jacob H. Schiff Lecture “to promote the study of German culture.” This year’s distinguished speaker was Professor Kuno Francke. Of Harvard. And the man who eight years earlier had been Erich Muenter’s thesis adviser.

  Holt considered his predicament; and then he ran. He told Leona he had sudden business in New York and left that very afternoon. It was odd, but then her husband was often unpredictable, even impulsive. But weren’t all great thinkers that way? she consoled herself.

  Two days after the lecture, Holt returned to the Cornell campus. He had narrowly avoided a potentially damaging, perhaps even fatal, encounter, and his well-timed escape was only further proof of his shrewdness. Hadn’t he always been one step ahead of them all? The coroner? The police? His in-laws? He had outsmarted everyone.

  Then in one unexpected instant his luck seemed to have run out. On a bright fall day in 1914, a day when the leafy campus was painted in a bold blaze of autumnal colors, Holt was walking to the library when he saw Nathan Gould, a colleague during his days in the Harvard German department. Gould was coming toward him.

  It was too late to run, or even to attempt to conceal his face. Gould stared straight at him with an unmistakable look of shocked recognition.

  The two men stood opposite one another, only feet apart.

  Holt did not speak. He couldn’t find the will, and he didn’t know what to say. It was as if fissures were suddenly spreading through his carefully constructed world, breaking apart the invented life he had built.

  Gould continued to stare at him, his mind running wildly. “I did not know the man was guilty,” he’d later say, sharing the progression of thoughts cycling rapidly through his head at that icy moment. “Had never felt convinced of his guilt. Muenter, as I had known him, always was a good man. He seemed to be living right at Cornell, and was doing good work.”

  After a long moment, Gould walked on without a word.

  Holt rejoiced. His invincibility had once more been tested, and again he had triumphed. It was confirmation, he realized with excitement, that the time was swiftly approaching to move on to his next important secret mission.

  Part IV:

  Spinning the Threads

  Chapter 38

  Tom did not like Guy Gaunt. He was too glib, too much a dandy, and most annoyingly of all, the British agent kept too many secrets. But Tom was a professional, and he appreciated that Gaunt had resources and information that the police did not possess. When Gaunt, in his usual cryptic way, told him weeks ago about von Rintelen, Tom had listened.

  Tom was now simultaneously following two trails and two quarries—Robert Fay and Franz von Rintelen. He was uncertain if their activities were related. Or, for that matter, if either man would prove to be of any value to the main thrust of the case—solving the ship bombings. But, Tom reminded himself, in detective work there are blind alleys and main streets, and there’s no sure way of knowing which one you’re exploring until you get to the end. Determined, he pressed on.

  Still, even the memory of the meeting with Gaunt when he had first heard von Rintelen’s name left him simmering with irritation. At Gaunt’s urgent request, he had shown up at Station V’s downtown headquarters at four one afternoon, only to find the British agent in evening clothes. Either he was getting ready to go off for a night on the town, or, no less possible, Tom speculated, he had just returned from a long night that had stretched into the next day.

  Gaunt never bothered to explain, and Tom, whose entire life had passed without any occasion to suit up in white tie and tails, was not about to give him the satisfaction of asking. And the guarded conversation that followed, he complained to Barnitz, played out more like a coy dance of veils than an intelligence briefing.

  Gaunt had begun portentously, announcing that a man named Franz von Rintelen was a German agent.

  Tom grudgingly conceded that he had never heard the name, so Gaunt provided a few details. Von Rintelen was a former naval officer, a banker, and a man-about-town who lived at the New York Yacht Club.

  Tom listened, then asked Gaunt to explain how he’d reached the conclusion that this high-society banker was a spy.

  Stiffly, Gaunt refused. The transcript of von Rintelen’s meeting with Huerta was in the safe across from his desk, but he was under orders not even to suggest it existed, let alone share it.

  Tom tried another approach. He asked if there was evidence of von Rintelen’s involvement in any crimes.

  Gaunt answered that he could not respond to the question.

  Tom persisted. He asked if Gaunt would at least identify the man’s associates. Could he share any names?

  The intelligence officer conceded that he had no knowledge of any associates. At last speaking with complete truthfulness, he explained that this was the reason he was asking for Tom’s help.

  Asking, but not giving. That’s what the Brits call cooperation, Tom thought, the Irish in him stirring dangerously.

  But no sooner had he returned to his office on Centre Street than he assigned a team to watch von Rintelen. With the ship bombings still his priority, the best he could do was spare two men. And they covered von Rintelen only on random days; there were other, more pressing leads that still needed to be pursued. Nevertheless, their orders were clear. See where he goes, whom he speaks to, Tom instructed them.

  In this haphazard way, on his tail for a day and then off for two or three and sometimes even four, they had been at it for weeks, and had nothing definitive to show for their efforts. Maddeningly, the watchers’ reports could be used as evidence to bolster either of two conflicting hypotheses: von Rintelen was a frivolous socialite making his fun-loving way about New York, or he was an Abteilung IIIB professional living his cover with scrupulous discipline.

  Depending upon the day and his moods, Tom’s opinion vacillated. But he was not about to call off his men. There was something about von Rintelen’s nonchalance, the way he didn’t try to lose the surveillance team, that struck him as a bit too deliberate. Same for his partying; it too seemed almost diligent, part of a disguise.

  The exterior of the New York Yacht Club on West Forty-Fourth Street, 1913.

  (A
rthur Vitols / Byron Company / Museum of the City of New York)

  Wanting to get his own feel for the prey, Tom had sat lookout one afternoon in a car across from the Yacht Club. As he watched von Rintelen walking up the block, Tom was certain he detected the parade-ground stiffness of a Prussian military officer in his stride. All Tom’s policeman’s instincts screamed to him that von Rintelen was more than he appeared to be. But try telling that to a judge, Tom thought. For now, all Tom could do was watch. And wait.

  Chapter 39

  And Robert Fay was still missing. When the mystery man with the stash of TNT had suddenly vanished from the New Jersey woods, Tom, pounding his desk like a drum in his fury, ordered all his available men into the field.

  They were split into two teams. Under Barnitz’s steady command, one group staked out the boardinghouse on Fifth Street in Weehawken, where Fay and his friend Scholz lived. The other spread out along Park Place in lower Manhattan, their eyes focused on the front door of the Kienzle Clock Company, the offices of Dr. Herbert Kienzle, the elderly German clock maker who had originally ordered the dynamite for Fay.

  Tom, the resolute commander, waited impatiently at his desk. So much, he felt, depended on their finding Fay. If Fay had made the surveillance team and bolted from the woods—and there was no reason to think that wasn’t the case—then Tom might never discover what the German intended to do with the explosives. Or whom he worked for. Of course, it was also possible that Fay was just one more cutout in the lengthy chain. He could already have passed on the TNT, and the next news would be the report of a ship on fire or a munitions factory going up in smoke.

  Tom tried to persuade himself that his doubts had gotten the better of him. Wasn’t it just as reasonable to believe that Fay had strolled into the woods along one path and, on little more than a whim, simply taken another way out? But it wasn’t a very likely proposition, he had to concede. And the longer Tom stared at his silent phone, the smaller and smaller, he was forced to admit, the likelihood became.