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

by Blum, Howard

  The Hamburg-American Line piers in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  (Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress)

  Otto Wolpert, however, was less cooperative. He was a large, burly man with bright red hair and beard, and a drinker’s flushed face that was only a shade lighter. Tom realized he would need to push him into a confession.

  “Captain Wolpert,” he said, “don’t you think you’re doing Germany more harm than good by doing this sort of thing?”

  “Damn it!” Wolpert exploded. “But you’ve got to do what those bullheaded fellows tell you, haven’t you?”

  “Did you know Robert Fay, Captain?” Tom asked. He wanted to throw out his nets as widely as possible and see what he would trap.

  “Yes. I met him one time in Schimmel’s office with Rintelen.”

  Tom had no idea who Schimmel was. But he filed the name away while he chased after bigger prey. “You mean von Rintelen?” he challenged.

  “No!” shouted Wolpert, his face now as red as his beard. “Not von, damn him—Rintelen!”

  And Wolpert’s anger gave a new fluency to his words. He started talking, part confession, part vengeful payback to the man he felt was ultimately responsible for his arrest. He freely shared details about von Rintelen’s many activities. He even revealed that, using the alias Hansen, von Rintelen had accounts in a variety of New York banks that continued to fund the network.

  In time, Wolpert’s meandering yet exhaustive account mentioned a lawyer whom he had seen once or twice with von Rintelen—Bonford Boniface. Wolpert had no specific knowledge of Boniface’s role in the network, but Tom was eager to pursue any connection to von Rintelen. The unanswered questions that surrounded the assassination attempt on J. P. Morgan and, no less perplexing, the events surrounding Holt’s—or should he say Muenter’s?—death continued to eat at him. His orderly mind demanded answers. He wanted to know for sure who else had been involved. He needed to hear his suspicions about von Rintelen’s role in the conspiracy confirmed. He told his men to bring in Boniface.

  To Tom’s great disappointment, Boniface quickly made it clear that he knew nothing about the events surrounding the attempt on J. P. Morgan’s life. He had never discussed the incident with von Rintelen, he insisted. Tom wasn’t sure if he believed him, but he was willing to let the matter go for now. Instead, with no intimation of the sinister territory he was about to enter, Tom matter-of-factly turned the interrogation in another direction.

  When his men arrested Boniface, they had discovered two letters on the lawyer’s desk. One was postmarked Buenos Aires, and the other was from Holland. Both were signed “Karl Schimmel.” The text of the letters was banal, but Tom couldn’t help wondering if this was the same Schimmel whom Wolpert had mentioned, the man in whose office he had met Fay. He wanted to know what role Schimmel played in the network.

  Boniface talked freely, his lawyer’s mind already calculating the deal he’d negotiate with the district attorney in return for even further cooperation and testimony. He told Tom he had provided Schimmel with a weekly list of all steamships leaving New York for Europe.

  Tom asked where had he delivered the reports.

  In his office. At 51 Chambers Street.

  For the past three weeks, every day had been filled with endless interrogations; and in the course of this long ordeal, the wide-ranging activities of the German spy network in America had been fleshed out. Yet at this point in the process, with the mystery of the ship bombings solved, the chase had lost some of its urgency. An exhausted Tom had taken to poking about aimlessly. Now he followed his investigative instincts, and then waited to see what would turn up.

  Tom asked whom Boniface had seen in Schimmel’s office.

  The lawyer said that von Rintelen had been there once. But Boniface didn’t know what his business was.

  Anyone else?

  Boniface volunteered two names: Captain von Steinmetz and Herman Ebling.

  What did they do? Tom asked. These were new names to him, and he doubted that they could be significant. The question had shot out reflexively.

  Boniface hesitated.

  Suddenly alert, Tom sharply ordered him to continue.

  Von Steinmetz, Boniface stated with newfound gravity, had smuggled anthrax and glanders germs into America. Ebling had worked for him. They had inserted germ-coated sticks into the nostrils of horses that were about to be shipped overseas. They had hoped to cause an epidemic, but the cultures were weak. They didn’t work.

  Germany had launched a germ warfare attack in America. Tom was stunned. All of his worst fears were suddenly becoming real.

  Where was von Steinmetz? Ebling? he demanded.

  Boniface said he didn’t know.

  Are they going to try again? Has a new shipment of germs been smuggled into the country? Tom pressed.

  Once again, Boniface said he didn’t know. Then he hesitated.

  Tom fiercely told him to answer the question.

  Boniface now spoke with the perfect calm of a man who has come to accept that the impossible is indeed true. He said that before von Rintelen had left the country, the agent had cabled his superiors. He had urged them to launch a new germ attack.

  Chapter 54

  Dilger was happiest when he was working. It had always been that way, whether it was in his Heidelberg surgery or in the field hospitals. He would throw himself into the task at hand and quickly become absorbed. And so that afternoon when he was in the basement lab monitoring his incubating cultures and heard the knocking on the front door, his instinct was to ignore it. He wasn’t expecting anyone; it was probably just a salesman or a neighbor. If he stayed in the lab, the visitor would go away.

  When the pounding on the door continued, an exasperated Dilger decided he’d better investigate. He peeled off his rubber gloves, carefully washed his hands, and then hurried up the stairs.

  He opened the door to a big, rough blond man, with the trapped look of a seaman in dry dock and a thief’s darting eyes. His outfit was exotic and marked him as a foreigner: a tweedy gray hiking suit with a jacket that ended at his ample waist; a green fedora with a small feather stuck in the band; and sturdy black boots that reached up nearly to his knees. On guard, Dilger said hello.

  The man answered in German. “I’m Captain Hinsch,” he said. “I think you have some packages for me.”

  Captain Frederick Hinsch, German operative and commander of the Neckar.

  (Henry Landau, The Enemy Within)

  At once Dilger relaxed: this was one of von Rintelen’s men. In Berlin, he had been told about the Baltimore network the secret agent had assembled. Its control—and paymaster—was Paul Hilken, who although in his early thirties was still, Dilger had been warily advised, very much his father’s pampered son.

  The senior Hilken was head of the local office of the North German Lloyd shipping fleet as well as Baltimore’s honorary German consul, and he freely used his wealth and position to cushion his son’s life. He had sent the youth to Lehigh University and then on to study graduate engineering at MIT, had bought him and his new wife a sprawling house in Baltimore’s posh Roland Park section, and, until the war broke out and the company’s shipping business came to a halt, had been grooming him to become the managing director of German Lloyd’s New York office.

  When von Rintelen decided to expand his sabotage operation south to the busy port of Baltimore, he had summoned the younger Hilken to the Ritz Hotel in Philadelphia. Hilken had been apprehensive; his father had already revealed that Captain von Rintelen was a spy. Father and son had also already agreed that it would be foolish for the young man to jeopardize his comfortable life by signing on for secret duties. However, the wily von Rintelen, first with charm and then with patriotism, won him over.

  The operation needed, the secret agent explained in a hushed voice as the two men sat opposite one another in the Ritz’s wood-paneled writing room, someone who knew about business, who had the respect of the community. The s
urvival of Germany’s frontline soldiers depended on men loyal to the Fatherland who had the courage to prevent shipments of American shells and bullets from reaching the enemy. And von Rintelen, without laboring the point, shrewdly hinted at another opportunity he was offering: here was the chance to escape a doting father’s broad shadow, to become his own man. Hilken signed on. He announced that he would do “all in my power to assist Germany.”

  Baltimore-based German operative Paul Hilken photographed here in Baltimore with Captain-Lieutenant Paul König (left) of the Imperial German Navy, who served as the commanding officer of the merchant submarine Deutschland, circa 1916.

  (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

  Von Rintelen, a born talent spotter, had quickly sized up that power: the soft, well-connected young man would function effectively as the network’s banker. But, as he explained with careful tact to Hilken, a different set of skills was required in the field. He needed to find an agent who could recruit assets from the Baltimore waterfront, a hard case who could keep the undisciplined stevedores and sailors in line, a man whose very menace was a constant warning that betrayal would be a death sentence. Hilken promptly said he knew such a man.

  The meeting took place a month later, in May 1915, in Hilken’s home. As the maid set the table in the dining room with the heavy silver for Sunday lunch, in the basement office Hilken introduced von Rintelen to Frederick Hinsch.

  Captain Hinsch was a burly old salt. He said he was in his early forties, and even if it clearly wasn’t true, no one was prepared to contradict him. He commanded the Neckar, a German Lloyd cargo ship, and had just steamed out of the port of Havana when the war started. For nearly a month, he’d found good sport in fearlessly dodging British warships, but then there was engine trouble and he was forced to take sanctuary in Baltimore Harbor. The Neckar had now been tied up at Pier 9 for over a year, and each day had been a stiff sentence for its landlocked captain. He was bored, restless, and dangerous.

  Von Rintelen, whose survival depended on his snap judgments, quickly took the seaman’s measure and happily decided that young Hilken had been right. Hinsch, he appraised, “was made of good stuff.” And Hinsch proved it. For months he had engineered the planting of cigar bombs on ships leaving Baltimore.

  Standing at the open door, Dilger understood that the time had come for his mission to move forward to the next operational stage. The orders he had received in Berlin were clear: Deliver the deadly vials to Hinsch. The captain would direct the actual attacks.

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d show up,” he told Hinsch.

  DILGER POURED TWO BEERS IN the kitchen, and they carried them into the front salon. As the captain took a seat on the sofa, Dilger slid the cherrywood door shut in case his sister returned home unexpectedly from her visit to relatives in Washington.

  The men drank their beers and talked about the war. Dilger spoke of his nephew Peter, who had been killed in France. His father, he recounted proudly, had ridden with the Duke of Baden and then served in the Union Army. Hinsch said that many of his old shipmates, merchant officers, were now in the imperial navy. But in all their earnest talk about the fighting and Germany’s prospects, both men left unsaid a thought they could not bring themselves to articulate: they were soldiers in a different sort of war, and what they were setting out to do would forever change how wars were fought.

  Their glasses drained, Dilger led the way down into the basement.

  On the shelves in two neat rows were the dark vials containing the cultures he had grown. The vials in the front row were labeled “1”; this was, he told the captain, anthrax. The vials marked “2” contained the glanders germs.

  Hinsch looked at the inventory with a critical eye. “Always keep 24 to 36 bottles on hand,” he instructed. From now on, he said, you can expect that either I or one of my men will come at least once, maybe twice a week to pick up the cultures.

  Dilger assured Hinsch that he could keep them well supplied.

  Hinsch questioned him about the quality, and there was an unmistakable challenge in his words. Dead bacterial cultures, he added pointedly, had caused von Steinmetz’s mission to fail. He wanted to be certain he and his men wouldn’t have a similar experience.

  Dilger explained that he was a doctor. He knew what he was doing.

  Then he pointed to the cages filled with guinea pigs. The small animals lay there, inert and listless. They had been fed pellets laced with the germs, he explained. “They will be dead soon,” he said.

  Hinsch was satisfied, so Dilger began to pack the cultures. He put the two-inch-long vials into two round wooden medical containers. The vials had been stoppered with corks, and as a further precaution he cushioned the interior of the containers with a layer of cotton. As he wrapped the wooden containers with brown paper and then tied them with string, he gave Hinsch instructions.

  No one should touch the germs, he warned sternly. Always wear rubber gloves. That was most important, he said. Your life will depend on it. He asked if Hinsch understood.

  Hinsch said solemnly that he did.

  Dilger continued. The bacteria in the vials marked “2” should be inserted directly into the horses’ nostrils or emptied into their feed or water troughs. The “1” cultures should ideally be administered to the horses like shots with syringes.

  Make sure, Dilger added, that the package is always kept upright. If it falls, if the vials break, do not in any circumstances open the wooden containers. The contents are lethal. Bury them underground immediately.

  There was one final bit of business. Hinsch pulled out his wallet and counted out several thousand dollars, the money in hundred-dollar bills. He had received it from Hilken, who had taken the funds out of an account von Rintelen had opened in New York to subsidize the Baltimore network. For expenses, the sea captain explained as he handed Dilger the money.

  Dilger led the way up from the basement, and Hinsch followed. In the captain’s arms were two packages wrapped in plain brown paper. He held them carefully; he understood that his life depended upon their not being damaged.

  They said their good-byes at the front door. Hinsch had parked his Model T Ford on Thirty-Third Street, and he carried the packages to the car. With great delicacy, he positioned them on the floor by the passenger seat.

  He drove off slowly down Livingston Street, trying not to stare at the packages lying only a foot or so away on the car floor, all the time praying that the road to Baltimore would not be bumpy.

  HANSA HAUS LOOKED AS IF it had been plunked down in bleak downtown Baltimore as the scenery for a production of a Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. The building had been lovingly modeled after a sixteenth-century courthouse in the ancient German town of Halderstadt, and was quaintly decorated with half-timbered corbels and rows of brightly colored armorial shields. The first two floors were home to the city’s German consulate and the local offices of the German shipping lines. Its dormered attic was the operational headquarters of Baltimore’s Abteilung IIIB spy network.

  Hinsch parked the Ford on Redwood Street in front of Hansa Haus. As had been arranged, Ed Felton was waiting on the street to meet him.

  Felton was a black stevedore whom the captain had recruited months ago. Hinsch had been paying him between $150 and $200 a week—the size of the payments depended upon the number of dockhands Felton assembled—to place the cigar bombs on ships carrying supplies to the Allies. He was devoted to Hinsch, completely loyal. In turn, the captain felt that “Ed Felton was a smart fellow, always on the job from morning to night.” That was high praise in Hinsch’s demanding world.

  Hinsch directed Felton to take one of the packages from the floor of the car. Be very careful, he told the stevedore. Don’t drop it.

  When they were in the attic, Hinsch told Felton to put the package on a wooden table in the center of the room. He placed his own down gently next to it. Then he made sure the door was locked. Finally, he turned to Felton.

  He said that he
had a special mission. He wanted Felton to assemble a group of dockhands, men he could trust. There’d be extra pay. But they had to understand that they could never discuss what they were doing. If they did, they’d have to answer to him. And, he warned, they wouldn’t like that. He asked Felton if he understood.

  Yes, said Felton gravely.

  The packages, Hinsch revealed, contained germs. The plan was for Felton and his men to travel to the port cities where horses were corralled before being loaded onto French and British transport ships. They were to go to Newport News, Baltimore, Norfolk, and New York. They were to poison as many horses as they could; Hinsch would show Felton how it was done, and Felton would then instruct his men. They were to spread the poisonous germs in cities all along the East Coast.

  Chapter 55

  Three hundred and fifty thousand! That was the estimated number of people, Tom had learned, who rode the New York subways each day. For the past uneasy year he had lived with the fear of a bomb going off in a subway station or on a crowded subway car. If the German secret service’s goal was to convince America that it would be more prudent to focus on troubles at home than to sail off across a wide ocean to take up arms in a foreign war, a mysterious explosion on a New York subway would be horribly persuasive.

  Tom had shared this nightmare vision with Woods and Scull, and they agreed it was a disheartening possibility. Scull, in fact, had traveled down to Washington to meet with Franklin Polk. With bombs going off nearly every day in factories and on ships, the administration’s chief adviser on intelligence matters did not have to be pressed into believing that an “unexplained” explosion on a subway was a very real threat.

  Polk met that day with Colonel House, and the result was the colonel’s anxious letter to the president, predicting a devastating attack by German agents on the New York subways—the letter that President Wilson, still determined to stay out of the war, had stiffly chosen to ignore.