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

by Blum, Howard

  The warehouse was eight stories high and spread out over an entire city block. Led by Barnitz, six of Tom’s men began the daunting search. They went one floor at a time, starting at the bottom and determined to work their methodical way up. Tom, meanwhile, went to call headquarters to report that they might have located the dynamite.

  The desk officer had a message for him. “Commissioner Woods just called and wants you to call him at the Harvard Club.”

  “Get that trunk as fast as you can and find out exactly what’s in it,” the commissioner said as soon as he came to the phone. “Washington just called me to say that Governor Colquitt down in Dallas just wired them. He says Holt’s wife got a letter from Holt dated July 2 that he’s put dynamite on a ship now at sea. It will sink on the seventh.”

  So that’s what would happen in two days: a ship would blow up! But which ship? And, just like Holt’s last operation, where the Capitol bombing preceded the assassination attempt on Morgan, would this explosion be the opening salvo in a two-part attack? But Tom understood that those questions would need to wait. First he needed to find the dynamite. And if something happened while they were opening the trunk, there’d be no need to call in a report to Woods. Sitting in the Harvard Club on Forty-Fourth Street, the commissioner would be rocked by the blast.

  More than two hours later they found the trunk in a dark corner of the fifth floor. There were a dozen other trunks on top of it, and they took care snaking it out of the pile and then carrying it down four flights of steep stairs. They wanted to open it in the well-lit ground-floor office.

  With a single, precisely aimed swing of an ax, Barnitz snapped off the lock. Tom lifted the cover slowly.

  Inside were, they counted, 134 sticks of 60 percent dynamite. The Glen Cove police had recovered 6 sticks.

  Which meant 60 sticks of 60 percent dynamite were still missing.

  As were the 200 sticks of 40 percent dynamite.

  Tom suddenly understood why Holt had decided to reveal the location of the trunk. Once again, he had provided only a small corner of the entire story. He had held on to the rest, guarding it. The location of the 260 sticks—enough TNT to take down a skyscraper or a factory or police headquarters—remained a mystery. Tom’s only hope would be to return to Mineola tomorrow and once again try somehow to get Holt to talk.

  New York commissioner of combustibles Owen Egan displays Muenter’s trunk of explosives in the aftermath of Tunney’s discovery.

  (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  He called the commissioner at the Harvard Club to report the discovery of the dynamite, and the disturbing fact that 260 sticks were unaccounted for.

  Woods listened, then invited him to come to the club. He said he expected that Tom could use a drink.

  Twenty minutes later, a welcome beer in front of him, Tom was seated in the high-ceilinged lounge across from Woods and Scull. Their talk was fixed on Holt. He remained a mystery, but they were determined to tug persistently away at the few sparse facts they had. The three police officers wanted to believe that a solution was possible if they put their minds to it. As they kept at it, a white-coated waiter came over and said the commissioner had a call.

  Woods got up, and Tom continued the meandering, inconclusive conversation with Scull.

  In a moment Woods returned. The color had drained from the commissioner’s face, and he appeared shaken. Then Woods spoke in a grave voice: “Holt is dead in Mineola.”

  Chapter 49

  There were two versions of Holt’s death, and each was official—at least for a while.

  Both accounts started with Jerry Ryan, the guard assigned to watch the prisoner during the evening shift. Ryan had arrived at 8:10 on the night of July 6 and taken up his post in a straight-backed wooden chair. From his seat, he could look directly into Holt’s cell.

  Holt immediately started talking to the guard. Tomorrow, July 7, was going to be “The Day,” he said. He was looking forward to it so much that he doubted he’d be able to sleep. “Oh, I want to sleep so bad,” he told the guard.

  Ryan watched the prisoner tossing about fitfully in his bunk and couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. No matter what the man was accused of, he at least deserved a good night’s sleep.

  Ryan told him to stop thinking about tomorrow. Get some sleep, he advised kindly.

  “I shall do everything I can to get some sleep,” he said.

  “Then I’ll do all I can to keep things quiet for you,” said Ryan.

  Ryan was soon relieved to see that Holt was sleeping.

  The door of the cell remained open. Warden William Hults had insisted. In case Holt tried to commit suicide, the warden wanted Ryan to be able to rush in without having to waste lifesaving time unfastening the three separate locks that normally secured the cell door.

  At 10:35, Ryan heard a noise coming from another cell. He decided to go off and investigate. He thought, he later explained, another prisoner needed assistance.

  He left Holt unguarded, and his cell door remained unlocked. He didn’t even bother to close it. Ryan figured it’d be an unnecessary precaution. He wasn’t going far, and anyway Holt was sleeping soundly.

  The next thing Ryan heard was a powerful explosion. He was certain it was a gunshot. A pistol. Or maybe a rifle. He couldn’t be sure; he knew only that the gun’s blast was sharp and distinct. He immediately called to another jailer to get Dr. Cleghorn. Holt had shot himself, he yelled as he ran back to the cell.

  Holt was lying facedown on the concrete floor outside the cell. A pool of blood spread around him.

  When Dr. Cleghorn came, the two men turned the body over on its back. “He must have had a gun because I heard an explosion,” Ryan told the prison physician. Cleghorn examined the corpse. Holt’s skull had been badly damaged, but he identified two specific wounds. He decided they were bullet holes. “It looks as though he had blown his nut off,” the doctor said.

  This was the story the commissioner had shared back at the Harvard Club. Before Tom left, Woods had also divulged that Holt had not shot himself: a German had shot him. Tom grimly realized that “the international consequences of the case, which had been hovering just out of reach for the past four days, now seemed certain. And if Holt had been shot by a German, it was more than likely that he had been killed to prevent a further confession which would implicate the imperial German Government.”

  On the urgent late-night ride that evening back across the Queensboro Bridge to Mineola, as Barnitz pushed the car as fast as it would go, Tom, his heart thumping wildly in his chest, mournfully anticipated what would happen next. The nation “would certainly not brook the violation of its Capitol and the assassination of one of its chief figures by a German agent.” War would be inevitable.

  But in the next day’s clarifying light, Tom was told to accept an entirely different story. Holt had not been shot at all.

  It seemed, according to the account prison officials now gave to the newspapers, the prisoner had scrambled up the crossbars of his cell and then dived headfirst twenty feet to the concrete floor. It was suicide. Cleghorn had been mistaken about the bullet wounds; apparently they were injuries Holt had received during his capture at Morgan’s home. And Ryan, after talking to the warden and giving the event some more thought, now said he was willing to accept the theory that the prisoner had committed suicide by plunging to his death; the noise he’d heard wasn’t a gunshot but the impact of Holt hitting the concrete floor. Anyway, the coroner had already given his permission for the body to be embalmed. The inquest was scheduled for tomorrow, but coroner Walker Jones had told the press he had no doubts it would be “perfunctory.”

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING HOLT’S death, Tom waited for the press to start asking questions about whether the professor had acted alone and to investigate further the confusing circumstances surrounding his death. And for a few gratifying days there was a flurry of thought-provoking stories.

  “Muenter’s Acid Bomb Myth,” read the tabloid headline on an article
suggesting that a Cornell language teacher did not have the expertise to fabricate the sophisticated device that had been detonated at the Capitol Building. A subsequent supporting story in the New York Times reported: “Experiments conducted in the laboratory of the George Washington University by Professor Charles E. Munroe have failed to show that a bomb such as Erich Muenter, alias Frank Holt, said he used to blow up the Capitol would have exploded.”

  Other articles focused on the still-missing dynamite and the questions this raised. The Times provocatively wrote that “the police are ready to believe that Muenter got two lots of dynamite, one in person and the other through a confederate. They are ready to believe also that if he bought two lots his plots were being financed by others, as his own funds are known to run low.”

  And when Commissioner Woods was asked if Muenter had accomplices, he was prominently quoted as conceding that “it would be very dangerous to say no to that question. . . . There would be no development in this case so startling that it would surprise me.”

  Meanwhile in Mineola, Jerry Ryan, who had been assigned to guard the prisoner, was once again equivocating. “I refuse to be made the goat in this,” he told reporters. “I have never decided,” he went on dramatically, “whether Muenter jumped to his death, or was shot, or shot himself.” And a follow-up article in the Times observed that “there was a window facing the cell. . . . An assassin would have to fit through two sets of bars.”

  In response to Ryan’s statement and the Times story, the town’s board of supervisors met with district attorney William Smith and then issued a widely reported statement: “The District Attorney is doing everything in his power to investigate and find out who is directly responsible for the act and will lay the whole thing before Sheriff Petitt . . . and if the facts warrant, further action will be taken and the persons responsible dealt with according to the law.”

  Tom read this and rejoiced. At last, he felt, there was going to be an official investigation into whether Muenter had been shot, and if so, how a gunman could have entered the jail.

  But no sooner were his hopes raised than they were dashed. The next day a stern District Attorney Smith stated that the board of supervisors was “creating false impressions.” He was not investigating a possible shooting. “What is all the fuss about?” he asked with a dismissiveness that Tom found infuriating. “There is no question that there has been negligence. We all know that.”

  And just as the promised Mineola investigation had come to a sudden halt, so did the appearance of probing stories in the press. Articles about Muenter, the circumstances of his death, the existence of possible accomplices, were apparently no longer newsworthy. It was all very strange. It was as if, Tom couldn’t help feeling, the reporters had been told to let the story die, to stop raising questions.

  Tom wondered if the editors were simply following orders. Perhaps, he speculated, the wealthy, well-connected men who owned the papers had been informed that a more aggressive pursuit of this story could very well have an irreparable consequence: the nation would have no choice but to go to war. Was it patriotism, some shared concept of what was in the national interest, that had led to the apparent embargo on what had previously been a provocative, headline-making story?

  Tom had no answers. Yet he found himself acting more and more like a man in mourning. And when he thought about it, he realized he was grieving the loss of his case: it would never have a satisfactory conclusion. When Woods had given him command of his special task force, the commissioner had warned that some secrets might never be revealed. The circumstances surrounding Holt’s death, he now suspected, were among them.

  He felt utterly helpless. But he knew for certain that once the coroner ruled that it had been a suicide, “there went our case.”

  Which left him with only his suspicions.

  He wondered where Holt had gotten the money for his mission, funds to travel to Washington, to Philadelphia, to rent a bungalow, to buy four hundred sticks of dynamite. He wondered who had suggested to the college professor that he pose as a representative of the Society Summer Directory. Who had made the bomb, provided the mysterious black Ford that Holt drove across Long Island? Where were the missing 260 sticks of dynamite, and would they become the core of new bombs? Had Holt traveled alone to Washington, to Glen Cove? Had someone helped plan his mission? And Tom couldn’t stop wondering if Holt had been killed to make sure there would never be any answers to these questions, to keep the conspiracy a tight, guarded secret.

  “If Holt was a German agent,” Tom soberly conceded, “he died with his secret.” Tom’s sense of shame was palpable. It was his case, and he had allowed it to come completely apart. The conspirators—and he knew with all his well-honed cop’s intuition that Holt had accomplices—had fled. They had sent their patsy off on a mission, and while Holt had paid for it with his life, they had escaped.

  But there was nothing Tom could do. Or so he thought until two events helped to channel his disparate suspicions—and a living, breathing target became centered in his crosshairs.

  First, his squad received a reliable report that “a woman appeared at the offices of J. P. Morgan on July 2, and attempted to warn the financier.” She had come to inform him of “something that was going to happen the next day.” Morgan did not see her.

  Tom tracked her down, but he could not get her to state categorically that she’d had prior knowledge of the shooting. She said that it was too late to change things. It didn’t matter anymore, she argued.

  Yet it mattered to Tom. So he kept at it. And it didn’t take him much digging to establish that the woman spent a good deal of time in the company of Franz von Rintelen.

  Then, on July 7, an explosion occurred in the hold of the Minnehaha, a steamship carrying munitions to France. The boat was in mid-ocean, and the blast was so intense that it had ripped out a section of the upper deck.

  Holt’s prophecy had been fulfilled. And its realization riveted Tom’s attention. Was it just an accident, pure luck, that Holt had succeeded in targeting a boat leaving New York during the first week in July, carrying war supplies? Since the fires had started, that sort of information had been carefully guarded. Another question: How had Holt, a stranger to the waterfront, succeeded in getting his bomb aboard the ship?

  Tom had no proof, or at least not the sort of evidence he could take to the district attorney. But he no longer had any doubts that Holt had not been alone. He had joined up with a well-organized network of conspirators—the very group that was responsible for the ship fires. And Tom felt with equal certainty that Holt’s handlers had received their orders from the man he’d seen walking down the block from the New York Yacht Club with a professional soldier’s stiff-backed formality.

  Tom made up his mind to do something. Ever since the British Section V station chief first told him about von Rintelen, Tom had suspected that Gaunt had a good deal more information than he was sharing. Tom, who had given the matter some thought, also had a notion about how the British had managed to know so much. It was, he’d deduced, the only answer that made sense.

  He went to Guy Gaunt and asked for his help.

  A WHITE-COATED ATTENDANT HURRIED ACROSS the sunlit breakfast room of the New York Yacht Club on the morning of July 19 and handed Franz von Rintelen a sealed envelope. Tearing it open, von Rintelen saw that there was no name, only an unfamiliar telephone number—and instructions to call it as soon as possible.

  He left the room immediately to make the call, and was surprised to hear Karl Boy-Ed, the naval attaché, at the other end of the line. Boy-Ed curtly told von Rintelen to meet him in half an hour on a street corner.

  As soon as von Rintelen arrived, the naval attaché handed him a cable from Berlin. It had already been decoded, and von Rintelen read:

  To the Naval Attaché at the Embassy. Captain Rintelen is to be informed unobtrusively that he is under instructions to return to Germany.

  Von Rintelen was shocked. He had previously instructed headqu
arters in Berlin not to use his name in any cables, and not to send him messages through the embassy. He believed that communications between Wilhelmstrasse and Washington were not secure.

  And why would they want him back now, just when his schemes were making genuine progress? “The Irish were relying on me, our strikes had begun to boom again, and we were still placing bombs on the transports. All this would now come to an end,” he would complain years later, the frustration and puzzlement still raw in his mind. Why, he wondered, had they sent this telegram?

  But he had no choice but to obey. He was an officer in the German navy. Once again using the Swiss passport in the name of Emile V. Gaché, on August 3 he boarded the SS Noordam sailing from New York for Rotterdam.

  Nine days later the Noordam approached the English coast. There would be a few days’ routine delay as British sailors boarded the ship to check passports and inspect the cargo. Von Rintelen was not apprehensive; he took the inspection in stride. Still, “nobody who had done what I considered it my duty to do in America, and was in possession of a forged passport, would have been anxious to converse with British officers opposite the white cliffs of England,” he later admitted.

  The first day’s inspection passed without incident. On the morning of the second day there was a knock on his stateroom door. The steward didn’t wait for von Rintelen to answer before he called through the door, “Some British officers wish to have a word with you.”

  The steward sounded uneasy. But von Rintelen was not disturbed; he was confident he could talk his way out of any problem. He pulled himself out of the tub, put on his silk bathrobe, and opened the stateroom door.

  There were two officers and ten sailors. The sailors had their bayonets leveled at his chest.

  “You are Mr. Gaché?” a British officer asked.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”