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

by Blum, Howard

  IT ALMOST WAS. BARTH HAD been cultivating a petty officer for nearly a week. He met him in a Hoboken bar, and over the nights that followed Barth drank an ocean of beer and listened with feigned interest to a long saga that kept returning with a drunken logic to the petty officer’s unrequited love for his older brother’s wife. In the rare pauses in the petty officer’s tale, Barth would fill the silence with subtle hints that he lived a secret life and that his orders came directly from powerful men on Wilhelmstrasse.

  They had just drained one more tankard dry and were waiting for the next round to be brought to the table when the petty officer leaned in close. It was the night of the sixth day of this new friendship, and a weary Barth assumed he was about to hear another whispered fantasy about what the petty officer would like to do with his brother’s wife. Instead, he heard an altogether different sort of revelation.

  The petty officer confided that he knew someone else who’d been doing secret work for Germany. He asked if Barth would like to meet him.

  THE ARRANGEMENTS TOOK SEVERAL DAYS. Barth suggested one place to meet, only to learn the next evening that the petty officer’s mysterious German friend considered anywhere in Hoboken unsafe even for a clandestine sit-down. The agent, the petty officer explained, believed the city was crawling with undercover policemen. Ridiculous, Barth responded with what he hoped was convincing indignation. Any cops around here, he said, he would’ve spotted them.

  But after some perplexing back-and-forths that left Tom wondering if the petty officer was simply playing with his detective, they finally settled on a restaurant in Manhattan. Hahn’s was on Park Row, the kind of place that German immigrants were quick to establish anywhere, with steaming wursts, platters of pickled herring, and heavy beer on tap.

  Barth approached the table, and before he could sit, the man next to the petty officer rose. With exuberant formality, he pumped the detective’s hand as if they were celebrating the signing of a treaty. To Barth’s wary eye, he didn’t have the sinister demeanor of a German agent. Tom, in fact, would later describe him as “a funny little old man who looked like a cartoon of the late Prussian eagle.”

  He introduced himself as Charles von Kleist. And although Barth’s instincts offered him no hint of the enormous prize within his grasp, this was the same Captain von Kleist who had worked hand in hand with von Rintelen.

  For a sullen Barth, the meal played out as a disappointment. The old man kept telling blatantly absurd sea stories, and the petty officer kept ordering more rounds of beer. Barth sat there saying very little and wondering how he was going to justify the cost of the lunch to Captain Tunney.

  It was after dessert had been served that von Kleist fixed Barth with another of his wide, happy smiles. He was very glad to meet a real agent, he said respectfully.

  Why is that? Barth asked. He was just playing along; days ago, or so it seemed to the bored detective, he had lost any real interest in the conversation drifting about the table.

  Von Kleist explained that he had a grudge against a man in Hoboken who claimed he was a member of the German secret service.

  “You can’t be too careful of those fellows,” Barth said with knowing authority. “There are a lot of fakes around. What’s he done to you?”

  “This Scheele, he has a laboratory, where he has been doing work, making some things. I was his superintendent now for a long time, and he owes me several hundred dollars, but he does not pay me. I think Captain von Papen ought to know about it.”

  “So do I,” said Barth, his sympathy unflinching. “I’ll see that it gets to him.”

  The detective waited a moment. He didn’t want to sound too eager. He wanted to make sure his voice did not betray the excitement he was feeling. “What was it you were doing over there?” he asked innocently.

  Von Kleist proceeded to tell him. He spoke laboriously, with a Prussian exactitude. As he saw it, he was a wronged agent reporting a formal grievance to a superior.

  Dr. Walter T. Scheele, von Kleist began, had been employing him in his laboratory in a factory at 1133 Clinton Street, Hoboken. The ostensible business was the manufacture of agricultural chemicals. The real business was the manufacture of bombs. Ernst Becker, the chief electrician on the Friedrich der Grosse, and Carl Schmidt, its chief engineer, fabricated containers out of sheet metal on the liner. The seamen would deliver them to the laboratory, and he worked with Scheele to fill them with explosives. Then Becker would take them away and distribute the bombs to the men who planted them on the ships. It was a very effective operation.

  “But what good does it do me,” he complained, “if I don’t get any pay?”

  “You wait,” assured Barth. “I’ll get you fixed up. I know a man. I’ll have him meet you. If what you say is true, you certainly have something coming to you. Wait till I get this other man.”

  Von Kleist reached out and once again pumped the detective’s hand effusively. He was very pleased. He said he knew his new friend would be able to help.

  WHAT SHOULD TOM DO?

  Barth’s report brought the promise of the end of his long quest.

  But, he reminded himself, he had been fooled before: first by the lighter captains who had turned out to be common thieves; and then by Fay, who had proved to be a different sort of saboteur. How could he be certain the ship bombs were being manufactured in the Hoboken lab? Or that the sailors on the Friedrich der Grosse were also involved? What proof did he have besides the story told by an old man, who, Tom had subsequently discovered, was famous all over Hoboken for telling tall tales?

  He considered raiding the Hoboken factory and seeing what that would yield, but he also wondered if von Kleist had told the entire story. If Tom acted now, would he be hauling in only minor players while the key operatives escaped and the bombings continued? It certainly seemed possible that the old sea captain had embroidered his role in the conspiracy. Perhaps, in fact, the whole operation was another of his yarns. And Tom’s raid would be one more embarrassment, one more dead end. He’d find nothing but vats of agricultural chemicals.

  In the end Tom decided that Barth, in an inspired moment, had provided him with an opportunity. It was a way to get the confirming evidence his tidy mind needed before making any move. Barth had promised von Kleist he “knew a man.” Well, Tom would make sure the sea captain got to meet him.

  ONCE AGAIN THEY GOT TOGETHER at Hahn’s, only now Barth brought with him a Herr Deane, a big man with a hard, no-nonsense face. An unlit cigar was stuck in the corner of his mouth as if he had been born with it.

  “Herr Deane doesn’t speak German,” Barth announced jovially. “But he’s a good man nonetheless.”

  A trace of suspicion crossed von Kleist’s face.

  “We have to use all kinds of people to fool these stupid Yankees, see?” Barth quickly confided, a professional sharing a bit of tradecraft.

  Von Kleist relaxed, flattered that an Abteilung IIIB agent would share operational secrets with him. He never suspected that Herr Deane was Detective Sergeant Barnitz.

  As the meal continued, von Kleist once more laid out his angry case against Scheele. He was determined to convince Herr Deane to persuade the people at the top to pay him the money he was due. “If you want any more proof, I’ll show you,” he volunteered. “Come to my house.”

  They took the ferry to Hoboken, and von Kleist found a shovel in his ramshackle garage. He started digging in a muddy corner of his yard while the two detectives watched in silence. They exchanged bewildered looks as the old man’s hole grew deeper. They had no idea what was buried.

  Von Kleist lifted a box out of the ground. Dusting the dirt off the top, he said, “This is one of them—and I have filled dozens like it.”

  He opened the box.

  Inside was an exact duplicate of the cigar bombs that had been found on the Kirkoswald.

  Chapter 53

  Let’s go for a ride,” Barth suggested. Now that the two detectives had seen the cigar bomb, he was eager to get von K
leist out of Hoboken and back to New York, where they had the authority to make an arrest. But he didn’t want to spook his prey. Barth wanted the old man to go back willingly across the Hudson. And he wanted von Kleist to keep on talking.

  “We can go down to Coney Island and have supper,” he said. “The hotel has opened up, and we’ll talk things over,” he went on, taking care to soft-pedal every step of the way.

  This was better than von Kleist had expected. Not only was Herr Deane going to get him the money Scheele owed him, but his two new friends were going to treat him to a meal at the Shelburne. He had never been to the restaurant in the Brighton Beach hotel near Coney Island. It wasn’t the kind of place he could afford. But he hoped there’d be the strong salty smell of the sea wafting through the dining room, and with the evening ocean breezes coming in from the Atlantic an old sailor could pretend he was back at the helm with the deck pitching and rolling beneath his feet. Let’s go, he agreed eagerly.

  The three men had made their ravenous way through huge steaks, and Herr Deane was about to light up an after-dinner cigar when, match in hand, he paused. “How about,” he said to von Kleist as if the idea had just occurred to him, “I write out a statement of the services you told me you performed for this Scheele? This is just for the sake of regularity, you understand. I have to have a written report to give to the chief, or else you won’t get yours. You can sign this as your formal statement.”

  Von Kleist suspected nothing. Herr Deane was his champion. He’d sign the statement, and the chief would read it and then set things right. “All right,” he agreed.

  Herr Deane pulled out a memo pad and a pencil and started to write. With impressive accuracy, he recounted everything just as von Kleist had told it. When he was done, the old sea captain quickly read the three handwritten pages and then signed his name at the bottom of the final page with a flourish.

  “How long do you think it will be before I could get some money?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that part of it,” Barth said reassuringly. “I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll all go up to see the chief now. I want him to meet you anyhow, and you can supply any more facts that we may not have put down.”

  The three men drove back into Manhattan, chatting all the way. It was only as Barth pulled the car up in front of the domed headquarters building on Centre Street that von Kleist realized he had been deceived.

  “I see now why you have been so good to me,” he said with forlorn resignation.

  EVERY INTERROGATION WAS BUILT AROUND a strategy of deceptions. Tom sized up the docile old man and decided that he’d proceed with unflagging geniality. He’d flatter von Kleist with respectful curiosity and an almost deferential responsiveness. He’d lull the saboteur into thinking he had been apprehended by stolid, by-the-book policemen, and not very astute ones at that.

  Captain Charles von Kleist.

  (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

  Tom began at precisely the point where he had ended with Robert Fay. He displayed the Kirkoswald bomb and said it had been found on board the ship when it had docked in Marseille.

  “Yes,” von Kleist agreed obligingly, “it was supposed to explode within four days, but it didn’t explode in twelve.”

  “How many did you make?” Tom asked. His tone was blunt and professional. He was very conscious that it would be a mistake to reveal his realization that his long, winding investigation had at last gotten on track. Or his growing sense of triumph.

  “I don’t know how many,” the prisoner said. But, as if to apologize for his faulty memory, he quickly added, “The ones that were put on the Inchmoor and Bankdale went off all right. And there were two fires on the Tyningham. I gave one box of thirty of them to two Irishmen from New Orleans, O’Reilly and O’Leary. They took them down there to set fires to ships with them.”

  Tom paused for a moment to consult the statement Barnitz had written and von Kleist had obediently signed. Ernst Becker, the chief electrician on the Friedrich der Grosse, had played a key role in the operation. It was worth a try, he decided. “Did you give the rest to Becker?” he guessed.

  “Yes. And he gave them to Captain Wolpert. Wolpert is the superintendent of the piers of the Atlas Line over in Hoboken. Captain Bode, he is also a superintendent, for the Hamburg Line.”

  Tom was experiencing an incredible night. The prisoner was talking easily, providing confirming details, giving up names. All Tom’s previous mistakes, all the false scents, no longer mattered. “Will you tell me everything about the plot, from its beginning up to the moment?” Tom asked.

  Von Kleist said he would. He was now going to help the United States, he pledged.

  Captain Otto Wolpert (center) stands on the right of Ernst Becker.

  (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

  Only Tom could not believe it was going to be this easy. He suspected that despite all the evidence of von Kleist’s eager cooperation, the prisoner was holding back. There was more the old man knew, and more he wasn’t telling.

  So Tom told von Kleist he had to make his report to Chief Woods. He’d return when he was done.

  VON KLEIST SAT ALONE IN the room. As the minutes slowly passed, the gravity of his predicament pressed down on him. He now inhabited a much darker world than he had only hours ago. He needed, he realized, to get word to his friends in the network. He needed to warn them.

  He also needed their help. With nowhere else to turn, he convinced himself that they were his salvation. With their assistance, somehow he might extricate himself from an impossible future.

  His troubled thoughts were suddenly interrupted as the door to the room opened. A man in a work shirt and overalls, a ladder in his hands, entered. Von Kleist watched as the workman set up the ladder and began to change the overhead lightbulbs.

  He worked in silence, paying no attention to the prisoner.

  Von Kleist, by nature, was gregarious. And his harrowing situation only reinforced his need for a moment’s diversion. Without thinking too much about it, he struck up a conversation with the janitor, asking him about his job, what it was like to work in police headquarters.

  When the worker responded, von Kleist realized his words carried a slight German accent.

  “Sie sind Deutsch, nicht wahr?” he asked excitedly.

  “Ja,” said the janitor. He was German.

  After all the solitary time he’d spent searching for a bit of clarity, for a clever way to spring himself free from the trap he’d walked into, von Kleist suddenly understood he had been presented with a fortuitous opportunity. Speaking in German, he asked the workman if he’d be willing to do a fellow countryman a favor.

  “Ja,” the man responded enthusiastically.

  “Deliver these notes for me, will you?” von Kleist went on, a revitalized man. “I can’t get out of here, and I would like to send word to some people.”

  Fearful that at any moment Captain Tunney would return, he quickly scribbled four terse notes. The messages were identical: “Run! I’m in custody.” He addressed one to each of the conspirators whose names he’d earlier revealed, and then handed the four slips of paper to the workman. They’ll reward you, he promised.

  The workman put the notes in the pocket of his overalls and then shook the prisoner’s hand as if to seal the arrangement. He closed the door behind him as he left the room.

  For the first time since he had been led into police headquarters, von Kleist was beginning to think that not all was lost. He had warned his compatriots, and they would not let him down. Germany would repay his loyalty and service by finding a way to get him out of this mess.

  Then Tom came into the room. And with him was the workman—only now he was wearing a policeman’s uniform. “I’d like to introduce you to Detective Senff,” Tom said.

  At that low moment, von Kleist knew there was no escape. He had no choice but to tell all he knew. Nothing could save him.

  IN THE EXULTANT DAYS THA
T followed, Tom refused to rest or even pause for a moment to enjoy his victory. He immediately swooped into action. One team of men burst into the offices of Atlas Line and Hamburg-American Line in New Jersey and invited the superintendents “to come to headquarters to consult with us in a little waterfront investigation we’re carrying out.” Senff snared Becker, the chief electrician on board the Friedrich der Grosse, by posing as a messenger. He delivered a whispered warning in German: “Von Kleist wants to see you. Trouble.” Becker grabbed his hat, and a dutiful Senff led him off to meet von Kleist—at police headquarters. With guns drawn, Tom led his men in a charge up the gangplank of the Friedrich der Grosse. He took into custody the engineers who had made the bombs and the sailors who had delivered them to the ships embarking for Allied ports. They raided the factory in Hoboken, climbed through the trapdoor into Scheele’s secret laboratory, and discovered a dangerous trove of explosives and chemicals. Scheele, though, had run. It would be another two years before he was arrested by the Cuban police in Havana and extradited to New York.

  But the other conspirators were in custody, and most of them were talking. Becker, thin, ghostly pale, and surprisingly young, confessed that he had fabricated several hundred bomb containers, including the ones found on the Kirkoswald. He said Carl Schmidt, the chief engineer, had helped, and that they had delivered them to Captain Wolpert in his offices at the Atlas Line.