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

by Blum, Howard

  Von Bernstorff ran. It would be wiser to hide until the scandal passed, he decided, than to bluster through a response. Besides, the count had too much pride to embarrass himself with excuses when he knew there were none.

  The Secret Service informed the State Department that the German ambassador had taken refuge in the Adirondacks, where “he has been buried for the last ten days with his inamorata.” But while the federal agents simply viewed the randy diplomat with prissy disdain, Guy Gaunt, who knew a bit about peccadilloes, decided to make some mischief.

  He got hold of a photograph taken of von Bernstorff in the Adirondacks. The married ambassador, a leer on his face, was in a bathing costume, his right arm wrapped around the waist of one adoring bathing beauty, his left snuggled beneath the breast of another.

  Count von Bernstorff on vacation; photograph published in The Sketch on October 25, 1916.

  (Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmerman Telegram)

  Gaunt had the photo enlarged and then passed it on to the Russian ambassador, who had the compromising photo tastefully framed and, with a wicked vindictiveness, placed it prominently on his mantel. It attracted a good deal of snickering attention from the Washington diplomatic corps. When von Bernstorff returned from his self-imposed exile to resume his duties at the embassy, the photo began to appear in newspapers all over the country. Gaunt’s complicity in its distribution was never suspected.

  The kaiser, though, had no interest in how the photograph came to be reprinted in the American press. He was simply enraged. He had not rebuked Albert for riding on a subway with a trove of secret documents, but a strongly worded cable was sent to the head of his American spy network. His actions, the ambassador was bluntly informed, had embarrassed the German imperial government.

  STILL, WILSON’S PATIENCE WAS INEXHAUSTIBLE. He now wearily conceded to House that “the country is honeycombed with German intrigue and infested with German spies. The evidence of these things are multiplying every day.” Yet he refused to speak out against Germany’s covert activities in America, remaining reluctant to take any actions or make any statements that would push the nation closer to war.

  House, though, was alarmed. Prepared to jeopardize his invaluable friendship, he spoke bluntly, abandoning all his previous deference. The president was endangering the nation, he charged. The consequences of not directly confronting the German threat to the homeland would be grave and immediate: “Attempts will likely be made to blow up waterworks, electric lights and gas plants, subways and bridges in cities like New York.”

  The president was unmoved. Do not “oversimplify matters,” he warned sternly.

  As for Tom, he had dismissed the revelations in the Albert papers as a sideshow. They were, he said curtly, “fiscal shenanigans.” The scandal that had become known as “the Bathing Beauties Episode” was, similarly, just gossip. He had larger concerns. He had been fighting a war where blood and smoke were real, where ships were bombed and great men were targeted for assassination. It had been his maverick’s mission to defend the homeland, and the many battles in his long undeclared war had left him with a stubborn dread. He lived with the certain knowledge that an uncompromising enemy would unleash previously unimaginable acts of terror against an unsuspecting America. He feared what was yet to come.

  Chapter 51

  Anton Dilger.

  (Robert D. Koenig, The Fourth Horseman)

  Dr. Anton Dilger was coming home. The thirty-one-year-old physician had been born on an 1,800-acre farm spread across the green rolling hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. His father had ridden as a lieutenant in the Duke of Baden’s horse artillery and after immigrating to America had brought further honor to the family by winning the Medal of Honor for his service as an artillery captain in the Civil War. His mother, also a German immigrant, was the granddaughter of one of Germany’s most eminent physicians, Dr. Friedrich Tiedmann, celebrated in medical annals as “the great physiologist of Heidelberg.” Hoping to emulate his maternal grandfather, Dilger had gone to Germany as a teenager to study medicine.

  With impressive speed, the industrious Dilger launched a brilliant career. He passed his medical examinations at the University of Heidelberg in 1908 and then followed this up with graduate study in microbiology at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. A year later he returned to Heidelberg to take an assistant surgeon’s appointment in the university’s vaunted surgical clinic, and at the same time he began research on his thesis. Just two years later, in 1911, this thesis, “Concerning In Vitro Tissue Cultures: With Special Consideration of the Tissues of Adult Animals,” was published, garnering modest professional acclaim from the specialists in this newly emerging medical arena. When the war broke out, he left his practice in Heidelberg and, although still an American citizen, worked as a volunteer surgeon at a German field hospital. But now he was coming home.

  It was early in October 1915, and as the Dutch passenger liner Noordam steamed into New York Harbor in the shadowy early-evening darkness, Dilger stood on deck. Tall and athletic, his thick jet-black hair brilliantined and combed straight back, with intense brown eyes and a perpetual smile on his handsome, chiseled face, Dilger carried himself with an easy, comfortable grace reminiscent of a leading man on the silent screen. A bit of a dandy, partial to well-cut vested suits and shirts that allowed him to flash the solid gold cuff links he’d received as a present from the king of Bavaria for his medical services, Dilger was well aware of the figure he cut. He was a charmer, too, convivial by nature and chivalrous in his affections.

  In his hand he clutched a small black case that, if any of his fellow passengers inquired, could have passed for a doctor’s medical bag. The bag was lined with a thick soft padding, and inside, wrapped for further protection in dark velvet like precious gems, were four glass test tubes, all firmly stoppered with a cork plug.

  Two of the vials had a large capital B marked on the glass—an abbreviation for bos, the Latin word for “ox” or “cow.” Each contained a brown gelatinous culture, the bacteria from which he would breed Bacillus anthracis: anthrax. The other vials were marked with a capital E, the first letter of equus, Latin for “horse.” Inside were the cultures for Pseudomonas mallei, the microbe that causes glanders in horses and mules.

  Abteilung IIIB had sent Dilger to America. Nicolai, encouraged by von Rintelen, had recruited the young physician to carry out von Steinmetz’s aborted mission. Dilger was returning to the land of his birth to spread a plague of destruction.

  THE HOUSE WAS PERFECT. IT was a cozy two-story brick cottage with a fireplace in the entry parlor and an ample living room that, if private matters needed to be discussed, could be closed off by a cherrywood sliding door; the two upstairs bedrooms opened onto a shaded roof terrace that could discreetly serve as an observation post to monitor the arrival of any unexpected visitors—the police? Secret Service?—coming up the road.

  The location, too, could hardly have been improved upon. It was on Thirty-Third Street, a quiet block just off Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase. This was a new, fast-growing neighborhood near the nation’s capital where developers were busily constructing comfortable family homes on what just a decade or so ago had been country fields. People were always moving in, delivery wagons constantly pulling up to front doors. No one would pay any attention to another new arrival, give a second thought to the loads of crates being delivered, or grow curious about the stream of craftsmen showing up to get a new home in order.

  It was a suburban neighborhood, but it was not remote. The tramline conveniently connected Chevy Chase with downtown Washington. The White House was only six miles—a pleasant fifteen-minute ride—away from the little house on Thirty-Third Street. And this, too, was what the Abteilung IIIB spymasters taught: hiding in plain sight was the shrewdest of covers.

  Most appealing of all, what had convinced Anton Dilger to rent the house after only a brief walk-through, was the basement. It was about twenty-five feet square, a bit small perhaps, but well lit; there was an
overhead electric bulb, and two rectangular casement windows let in daylight. And, an invaluable boost to operational security, it had its own private entrance. Just below the kitchen, a basement door opened into the backyard. Agents could arrive in the middle of the night to make pickups without any nosy neighbors growing suspicious.

  Dilger asked his older sister, Em, to move up from the family farm in Virginia to live with him. With tactless candor he told the forty-eight-year-old woman she had wasted too many years living an isolated, lonely life in the country. In Washington, he pointed out, there’d be new opportunities. Besides, there was nothing to keep her at the farm; both their parents were dead.

  Appealing shamelessly to the affection he knew Em felt for the brother she still called “my little Anton,” Dilger said he truly needed her. She could keep house and serve as hostess when anyone came calling. And, although he wisely left this unsaid, her presence would discourage gossip. Washington was southern and conservative; the neighbors would feel more comfortable knowing that a spinster sister was keeping a watchful, almost parental eye on her good-looking bachelor brother.

  Also left unmentioned was what he’d be doing. His sister had no idea that her brother was a German agent.

  Accompanied by Em, Dilger moved into the house on Thirty-Third Street on a crisp October day in 1915. He listed his name and new address in the Washington, D.C., directories and gave his occupation as “physician.” But Dilger had no license to practice medicine in America, and he had no intention of accepting patients. Instead, he went to work turning his basement into a germ warfare laboratory.

  IN HEIDELBERG, DILGER’S LABORATORY HAD been spacious and gleaming, full of the most modern medical equipment. It was inspired by a visit he made to the impressive facility in Berlin where Dr. Robert Koch had done the pioneering work in bacteriology that had won him the Nobel Prize. While still a graduate student, mastering the techniques he’d need to propagate pure cultures of bacteria for his thesis, Dilger had always aspired to work one day in his own well-equipped lab. The lab in Heidelberg was the fulfillment of this dream, a research center where he’d be able to conduct the organ-transplant experiments that would one day save lives and earn him acclaim.

  He had more modest ambitions for the lab in the small, square basement in Chevy Chase. Here he needed no sophisticated equipment. This room would have a single purpose: to produce germ cultures—deadly, highly effective killing machines.

  Just as he had recruited his sister to help set up his household, Dilger enlisted his older brother to assist in the lab. Family, the Abteilung IIIB maxim had it, offered the most reliable guarantee against betrayal.

  Carl Dilger was neither a medical doctor nor a scientist, but he was amply suited to help. He had worked at the Heurich Brewery in Washington and then set up his own brewery in Montana that had, until it went bust, produced a thick, creamy German lager. He had acquired the brewer’s patient talent for propagating yeast and fermenting vats of beer; the lab technician’s skill necessary for growing germ cultures would come easily to him. And when Dilger confided the nature of his secret mission, Carl had no misgivings. He was eager to assist the German terrorist plot.

  But first they needed to turn an empty white-walled basement into a medical laboratory. The two brothers visited medical supply stores in the area and, freely spending Nicolai’s money, ordered an incubation oven, a sterilizing machine, cases of petri dishes, and dozens of glass vials. Shipments of guinea pigs arrived, and so did small wire cages. Under Anton’s direction machines were set up, shelves and worktables built, and guinea pigs housed in their cages. The two brothers worked in unison and with great smoothness; it was almost as if they were young boys again, doing chores on the farm.

  For Carl, who was thirty-six and had not had a paycheck for a while, the opportunity to earn a weekly salary, even if he was taking orders from his younger brother, brought with it a renewed sense of accomplishment. For Anton, the activity involved in setting up the lab killed any lingering doubts he had about the ethics of his lethal work.

  As a doctor, Dilger had pledged to do no harm. In Berlin and on his journey to Washington, there had been unsteady nights when he struggled with the distance his new life as a terrorist would take him from his heartfelt, life-affirming vocation. But the long days working with his brother, as the basement room was transformed into what they both proudly called “Tony’s lab,” brought him a new appreciation for the practical challenges he would soon be facing. These thoughts overwhelmed the occasional stabs of uncertainty. His focus centered only on the mission. He was ready to initiate the next stage of his attack on America.

  A SINGLE BREATH COULD BE dangerous. Even lethal. Dilger worked with extreme care, each movement assured and deliberate. Wearing surgical gloves, he removed the stopper from the vial labeled “B” that he had brought from Berlin, containing the gelatinous culture for Bacillus anthracis, the anthrax microbe. A stale odor filled the small white-walled room. He knew it was the smell of death.

  He stood the vial upright in a test-tube rack and began sterilizing a thin wire loop by holding it over a high flame. When the wire had cooled, he inserted it into the vial. It was a slow, painstaking procedure. Steady, he told himself. A rushed movement, a sudden jerk of his arm, would have disastrous consequences.

  The petri dish marked “I” had already been prepared with a dark, soupy mix of beef broth and blood. This was the growth medium.

  With great delicacy, he removed the wire from the vial and then ran it lightly through the rich, fertile soup in the petri dish. In time virulent new anthrax microbes would germinate. In about a week, petri dish I would contain enough germs to start a toxic plague.

  Propagating the germs in the second set of vials, marked “E,” for equus, was trickier. These contained Pseudomonas mallei, the glanders microbe. Working with Carl, Dilger had earlier prepared the growth medium—ragit-agar glycerin. This was a dried culture produced by a German chemical firm, and it had to be mixed with boiled water and then left to gel. The process took several days, and there was always a concern that the delicate mixture would be contaminated. Dilger had taken great care to make sure the gel had hardened in a completely sterile environment.

  Using another preheated metal loop, he inserted the glanders microbe into the chemical gel. Incubation would take possibly a week—this was not an exact science—and the temperature would need to be constantly monitored; too much heat or sunlight would kill the bacteria. If all went well, in a few days a yellowish paste that resembled curdled milk would form on the surface of the glycerin mix. After several more days it would molt into a brighter yellow, and then turn a muddy brown: the glanders germ.

  For now, all Dilger could do was wait. One afternoon Em had several neighbors from down the block come by. They sat in the sun-filled living room, where she served coffee in the heirloom china cups she had brought up from the farm in Virginia, and a large plate filled with cookies she had baked that morning. Her brother told amusing stories about his years in Germany. As they talked and laughed, in the basement the lethal germs silently grew to life.

  Chapter 52

  Little Bremen was what people had taken to calling Hoboken, New Jersey, and with good reason. Its port was home to two major German steamship lines, packs of German sailors stranded by the British blockade prowled its waterfront, street-corner newsboys hawked German-language newspapers, the bars echoed with rowdy choruses of “Ach! Du Lieber Augustine,” and on Sundays Lutheran ministers delivered sermons in German to crowded congregations. In its proud and boisterous way, this town on the Hudson River felt as much a part of the Fatherland as the one on the banks of the Weser. And it was in Hoboken, as von Rintelen was interned in an English prison camp (later he would be extradited to the United States and spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta) and Dilger set up his base six miles from the White House, that Tom now decided to refocus his exasperating, seemingly unending search for the ship bombers.<
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  It was another strategy Tom had settled on largely by default. In the days after Fay was caught red-handed in the Jersey woods and the initial optimism that the case would soon be reaching a climax had proved false, Tom found himself going back over old ground. “We resumed patrolling the river in various disguises,” he recalled with weary frustration. When that uncovered “absolutely nothing to excite suspicion,” in his desperation he “returned to our sugar theory and the Chenangoes.” But this second go-round was not an iota more productive than the first. Once again, the inquiries were time-consuming and futile.

  Searching for an entirely new investigative street to travel, Tom decided to try Hoboken. Without any hard evidence to bolster his suspicions, he felt it was a city bristling with the wildest sort of pro-German sympathies. He had walked its beery streets, hearing German openly spoken without shame wherever he went, and in his mind he could see the legions of restless sailors and their officers goose-stepping to their battleships if they were given the chance.

  He settled on a plan, but even he would be the first to concede it was simply a fishing expedition. He chose Detectives Barth, Corell, and Senff, three men who had grown up in immigrant households and whose German was as good as their English, and sent them across the river to Hoboken. They were instructed to troll the restaurants, saloons, and hotels where the officers and petty officers from the German ships gathered to pass their vacant time. As for bait, Tom told the detectives to dangle the vague suggestion that they had ties to the German secret service.

  Don’t egg them on with contrived cloak-and-dagger stories, Tom warned. Hints, he knew, would be more enticing than even the most exciting lies. Let them decide to swallow the hook. The secret world was an exotic playground, especially to men far from home with nothing but more humdrum days in their future. “A nod here, and a wink there, a whisper and a wag of the head”—that’d be all it would take, Tom told his undercovers. “Fish about,” he said with a playful confidence, all the time silently praying it would be as easy as he had promised.