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

by Blum, Howard

  The horses were healthy. A trip the next day to the waterfront corrals provided similar intelligence. The horses sauntered about with playful energy, their eyes bright, their coats shiny.

  What had gone wrong? von Steinmetz wondered in sudden panic. He knew his Abteilung IIIB superiors would demand an explanation; and he also knew his life depended on whether they believed him.

  With his anxiety mounting, his fate hanging in the balance, he decided to make a bold move. It was utterly reckless, but at the time von Steinmetz felt he had nothing to lose. If he couldn’t provide Nicolai with a satisfactory explanation for his failure, he’d be executed. At least if his new scheme went bad, the Americans would give him a trial before they hanged him for espionage.

  Posing as a scientist, he brought the remaining germ cultures to New York’s Rockefeller Institute, a renowned scientific research facility. Blithely, he explained that he had obtained the cultures for “experimental purposes.” He now wondered whether the organisms were still viable.

  The Rockefeller scientist asked how long von Steinmetz had had the cultures. He spoke absently, without suspicion. He had already taken a sample and started to prepare a slide for examination under the microscope.

  Von Steinmetz answered truthfully: it had been four months, maybe longer.

  The scientist stopped his preparations. There was no longer, he said, any need to look at the specimens. He explained that after a month glanders cultures lose their potency. They become harmless.

  Von Steinmetz sighed with relief. The mission had been a failure, but he had the explanation that would save his life.

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, von Rintelen found himself playing the conversation with von Steinmetz back over and over in his mind. It was all very new to him, even strange, and he found it difficult to grasp.

  In time, however, he grew certain that von Steinmetz had been involved in an operation of immense strategic importance. It didn’t matter that it had not succeeded. As a military man, he could see that its potential effectiveness was enormous. It could change everything: germ warfare could sneak up on the enemy, quiet, unseen, unsuspected, until it struck with lethal force. Once targeted, a terrorized America would never find the resolve to fight in a European war.

  His heart was pounding with excitement as he drafted the cable to Nicolai. It was imperative, he urged the spymaster, that he send an operative to America to take up von Steinmetz’s aborted mission.

  Chapter 42

  There had been much to keep Holt busy during his final term at Cornell. He taught two classes of undergraduate French while also finishing, in marathon writing sessions that had him going without sleep for days, his doctoral thesis.

  Life at home was no less exhausting. He was now the father of two children, the older only a little more than two years old. To his wife’s great joy, he had accepted a professorship to teach Romance languages at Southern Methodist University in her hometown of Dallas, Texas. He’d start in the fall, and they had somehow managed to find time to plan the dream house they’d soon start building close to campus on a lot they’d purchased sight unseen for $600.

  Rippling with restless, manic energy, Holt also kept up his hobby—collecting stories on murder and insanity. He maintained a thick scrapbook crammed with neatly clipped reports. “The Rare Case of the Insane,” “Suffers for Brother’s Crime,” “Admits Killing Stepchild,” “Slain in Defense of Woman”—he’d found hundreds of similarly themed articles while obsessively going through newspapers and magazines from all over the country.

  And still, with all that was crowding his professional and personal life, Holt, the curious and loyal friend, had made time to read Hugo Munsterberg’s new book, The War and America.

  His former Harvard colleague’s book was a revelation. It was a proudly combative argument that insisted on nearly every page that Germany occupied the moral and legal high ground in the European war. The book was dedicated “to all lovers of fair play,” and in chapter after unyielding chapter it continued to reiterate that America’s prejudicial treatment of Germany was “a baffling injustice.”

  The professor’s irrefutable proof of America’s “anti-German sentiment” was the nation’s continued shipments of arms and munitions to the Allies. “It is a sin against the spirit of fair play,” he argued, that Allied soldiers went into battle firing American bullets while the British blockade prevented the Fatherland’s troops from receiving supplies.

  Holt read these words and felt as if Munsterberg were once again talking directly to him, urging him on. Years ago the psychologist had provided Erich Muenter with the secret faith that he could get away with murder. Now the Harvard professor’s words were a call to action for Holt, the man Muenter had become.

  Since the outbreak of the war, Holt’s emotions had been with the Fatherland, but in only an instinctive, native son’s way. The professor’s book reinforced these airy sentiments with girders of steely intellectual rigor. Holt now understood that this was a crucial moment in history. An epic battle between good and evil raged in Europe. A German defeat would be a blow to the future of civilization.

  The tighter the professor’s argument gripped his thoughts, the clearer it became that once again Munsterberg was imploring him to make a contribution. It was incumbent on men like him, men who dared to have the necessary moral courage, to act. It was his duty to force America to realize its mistakes. He would restore fair play in the world.

  When the term ended in June, Holt gave his wife nearly all the money he had saved, almost $400, and sent her and the children off to Dallas. They would live, it was agreed, with her father until he joined them. In the meantime, he would go to New York. He needed to do, he explained, “some special research.”

  With only $20 and some loose coins in his pocket, he took the train to Manhattan. He had no plan, and no resources. Yet he was confident that he had embarked on a secret road that would lead to glory.

  Part V:

  The Walk-In

  Chapter 43

  A walk-in always put those in the spy trade on edge. One fear was that the stranger volunteering his services was too good to be true. He might be a double, an operative sent by the opposition to infiltrate and gather intelligence. Another concern, also quite probable, was that the amateur showing up at the door, his head full of big ideas and grandiose schemes, would be impossible to control. Every professional had heard too many hand-wringing stories about how a single loose cannon had brought down an entire network.

  As a consequence, the general rule was not to recruit anyone who made the initial approach. Yet when this would-be asset had something tantalizing to offer, rules could be broken. When the balance between risk and opportunity was not clear, a decision had to be made about which way to jump.

  That was the dilemma dividing the case officers of the Abteilung IIIB network in New York when Frank Holt approached them. During the weeks when Tom was grappling with the enigma of von Rintelen, trying to understand whether the suave financier was who he claimed to be, they were tugging at their own riddle.

  Holt had presented a bold plan. It was nothing less than a way of putting a definitive end to the American munitions and supply shipments.

  For the past year, the network’s attacks had been sporadic, their effectiveness short-lived. Cigar and rudder bombs targeted single vessels; no sooner had one ship gone up in smoke than another sailed off in its place.

  This operation would be much more ambitious. With a single daring act, it would destroy the enemies’ ability to outfit their armies. It would cut off the unending flow of money that paid for the Allies’ orders. And at a time when von Rintelen had already railed to associates that “Morgan ought to be put out of the way,” it held the promise of not just retribution but a wish fulfilled.

  There were nevertheless many reasons to reject the walk-in’s proposal. Holt would fail, and once captured he’d trade the valuable secrets he had acquired while serving the cause—names, locations, tradecraft—i
n return for leniency. Or Holt would succeed, and the audacity of his act would so infuriate the American president that Wilson would at last find the resolve to lead the nation into war. Either way, the consequences for Germany would be disastrous.

  There was, however, a way of limiting the risk. Keep the walk-in at arm’s length—semiconscious was the specific jargon in the secret world—and deniability would be possible. Supply him with money, guns, dynamite, whatever resources he required. Even share a bit of operational guidance. Then let him go off and do the rest on his own.

  The walk-in’s fanaticism would be an operational blessing. There was no need to wind Holt up; he couldn’t get any tighter. One conversation, and it was obvious Holt was a time bomb set to explode. His crazed zeal, in fact, painted the entire mission with a natural cover: Holt was the perfect fall guy.

  People would see only the marionette prancing about wildly onstage; the strings of the puppet masters would go unobserved. Blame would fall on the unbalanced lone gunman; there’d be no compelling reason to look any further. When the operation was considered in that shadowy light, the decision to go forward was an easy one.

  Or that was what Tom, trying to put all the disparate pieces together in the aftermath of headline-making events, would later imagine had happened. He had spent a detective’s rigorous lifetime boiling cases down to the hard facts, the times when, he said, “two and two makes four.” But this was another sort of investigation entirely. The web of conspiracy had been woven too tightly. The entirety of the plot could never be known, and, Tom grudgingly conceded, it would therefore be “valuable in speculating on what probably happened.” “A flight of imagination,” he went on, was required to fit the tangible pieces into a fully assembled puzzle.

  As for the initial pass, Tom could only speculate on how it had played out. One theory got its inspiration from an undercover sting Barnitz had run.

  That June, Madison Square Garden hosted a week of pro-German rallies. On almost every night that same month speakers also crowded Herald Square, bellowing passionately about the Fatherland and providing earnest justifications for the kaiser’s decision to go to war. When Felix Galley, hoarse and exhausted, finally stepped down from his soapbox one evening at Herald Square and headed up Broadway on his way home, a man from the crowd followed.

  It was unnerving, footsteps echoing on the sidewalk, a solitary presence trailing behind him in the darkness. Galley prepared himself, ready for a fight.

  Yet when Harry Newton caught up, he burst out with a fervent declaration: “I want to help Germany win the war!” To prove his commitment, he was prepared to dynamite the Brooks Locomotive Works in Dunkirk, New York. And that was for starters. He was also ready to place bombs in the federal building and police headquarters. Would Galley, he implored, introduce him to a German official who’d know how to make use of his services?

  Galley agreed to consult “the chief.” But he was secretly shocked by the intrigues the stranger had suggested; and Newton’s jittery intensity had only added to his sense that this was someone to avoid. Galley was a loyal supporter of the Fatherland, yet the chief he rushed to speak to was the chief of police.

  The case was passed on to Tom, who assigned Barnitz to investigate. Playing the role of a burly, formidable German agent, Barnitz met with Newton in the man’s narrow, white-walled crib of a room at the Mills Hotel No. 3 on Thirty-Sixth Street.

  “I’m in a hurry,” Barnitz, the busy spy, began brusquely. He immediately offered the walk-in $5,000 if he’d “smash the Welland Canal or blow up the Brooks Locomotive Works.” Newton was gung ho. In fact, he revealed, he already had the necessary equipment. He’d left a suitcase packed with bombs he’d built in the baggage room of the New York Central Railroad.

  “Fine,” said Barnitz. “You are under arrest.”

  Holt’s initial approach could have gone down very much like that, Tom suspected. A sidling up to a speaker at the Garden or Herald Square, and a whispered name passed to the would-be agent. Only instead of Barnitz, the sit-down would have been with a genuine Abteilung IIIB hood.

  Although, Tom also hypothesized, it was no less possible that the walk-in had simply marched into the German Club on Central Park South or, for that matter, the German consulate on lower Broadway and announced that he wanted to offer his services. Someone would’ve passed his name on to Koenig.

  Within days, the security chief would’ve sent word to the prospect scheduling a meeting at any of a dozen clandestine spots he used around town—say, for example, the Turkish Bath up in Harlem. Once the higher-ups had made their decision, Koenig, dusting off one of his many aliases, would have run the asset, pushing him forward, guiding him as he went off on his mission.

  But while many of the particulars remained beyond Tom’s grasp, it was undeniable that days after a nearly penniless Frank Holt arrived from Ithaca and checked into a thirty-cents-a-night room at the Mills Hotel, he embarked on a well-financed, operationally sophisticated mission of murder and destruction that shook America.

  Chapter 44

  Later, after much detective work, Tom succeeded in reconstructing many of the events that kept Holt busy as he moved around New York during the final three weeks of June 1915. Each new revelation left him convinced the case “was becoming more interesting every minute.” Still, he also couldn’t help feeling that for all his efforts he had uncovered only part of the tale, the iceberg’s proverbial tip. And what remained forever submerged, he believed, concealed a powerful corollary story. The substantiated facts, however, were these.

  On June 8, Holt checked into the Mills Hotel No. 3 (the same low-cost barracks, Tom noted with interest, where Barnitz had bagged the would-be saboteur and where the German passport scam had, for $20 a head, recruited its stooges). He’d arrived alone, having walked from the train station carrying one small valise and a typewriter. The hotel was crowded, nearly all its 1,875 rooms booked, but the clerks would remember Holt.

  Three days into his stay, the letters started arriving. The Mills was the sort of down-and-out establishment where the occupants usually didn’t get mail, so when the envelopes addressed to Mr. Frank Holt began coming in, sometimes three or four delivered throughout a single day, the clerks took notice. Someone—or several persons, for all the clerks knew—was staying in constant touch with this guest. Then the police came.

  During his years at Cornell, Holt had played the mild-mannered, bookish academic. His time in Texas too, as well as at the succession of colleges where he’d taught, had passed without any public outbursts of anger. But during his second week in New York, his discipline snapped. All the control he’d previously summoned to help conceal the secrets of his past was abandoned. Never a man known to throw a punch, let alone the first blow in a fight, Holt suddenly began pummeling another guest.

  Critical comments about Germany were the ostensible provocation. There had been only a few words, but they ignited a blazing rage. Holt was all over the helpless man, punching and kicking wildly. The police were called, and when the victim refused to press charges, they let Holt off with a stern warning.

  But an incident report was filed. And it was the evidence many authorities would later cite to demonstrate that during his stay in New York Holt’s carefully constructed persona had begun to unravel. Or it could just as well have been, Tom found himself suspiciously thinking, a deliberate attempt by the enemy secret service to get it on the record that Holt was a violent pro-German lunatic.

  Yet while his mood might have been unsteady, Holt’s attention was focused. He spent those three weeks in June busily obtaining supplies and conducting reconnaissance for his mission. The professor worked with the skill and the resourcefulness of a professional, and money was suddenly no object.

  He went to Jersey City, where he found a hardware dealer who sold guns. How a Cornell professor found his way across the Hudson to a New Jersey gun shop and how he got the money for the trip, not to mention the gun and ammunition, were never clarified. He studied t
he glass case filled with rows of rifles, but a .38-caliber Iver and Johnson revolver caught his eye. Does it come with a guarantee to “work every time”? he asked the clerk.

  John Menagh frowned. Revolvers don’t come with a warranty, he grumbled.

  Nevertheless, Holt purchased the gun along with a box of cartridges. Then he decided that he’d better buy another revolver, too.

  The .38 was the last handgun in the store, so Menagh suggested he go across the street to Joseph Keechan’s pawnshop. There he bought a used .32-caliber revolver. Adding a new alias to his growing list, he signed “C. Hendricks” on the sales slip.

  The next day, Holt was out in the Long Island North Shore farm country, poking around a bucolic community then known as Central Park but soon to be incorporated as the town of Bethpage. Only now the previously destitute college teacher was calling himself Mr. Patton, driving a black Ford, and giving the impression to Louis Ott, a local real estate broker, that he was a man of means.

  His physician, Patton explained gravely, had ordered him to move to the country for his health. He was looking for a quiet place, off the beaten track, where he could rest.

  Ott found him a secluded two-room bungalow, far from the main road and hidden by a stand of tall trees. Just what I’m looking for, Patton decided at once. He paid a month’s rent in cash. He would still keep his room at the Mills, but the bungalow would be his operational headquarters, a place where he could lie low, hide his weapons, and plan his attacks.

  But first he needed dynamite. He made inquiries in New York, and when those were unproductive, his hunt took him to New Jersey and then on to Pennsylvania. He finally found a company on Long Island that could sell him the explosives he needed, he volunteered to the salesman, to “get rid of some tree stumps.” He asked that the shipment be freighted to the train station at Syosset, a town near Central Park; he’d pick it up at the railroad freight office.