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

by Blum, Howard

  A Dual System of Rapid Transit map, dated between 1913 and 1919, that shows New York City’s existing subway lines, the new IRT line, and some planned extensions not yet built.

  (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

  But this new threat to the subways, to the people of New York, was much greater. Now the number 350,000 took on an even more ominous prominence in Tom’s thoughts. When Tom learned that Germany had already instigated a failed biological attack and that no less an adversary than von Rintelen had urged his superiors to try again, he’d been left shaken. The prospect of anthrax germs being released in a crowded subway car, of a virulent disease spreading through the city, had sent currents of alarm, anger, and disgust charging through him. An entirely new scale of mayhem could soon be unleashed.

  Still, what could he do? He increased the number of guards at all the city’s horse corrals, but he also understood that this was small security when measured against the power of a terror he did not entirely understand. He intensified his search for von Steinmetz, only to discover to his frustration that the spy had returned to Germany. He had men combing the waterfront for Ebling, but even as he pressed that hunt, he knew that a lowly dockhand would not be privy to any intelligence regarding a new plot. Lengthy, troubled discussions with Woods and Scull inevitably ended with all three men gloomily acknowledging their helplessness should a terror attack take place.

  This time when Scull brought the unsettling news about germ warfare to Polk, Polk didn’t even bother to go to his ally House. Regardless of the messenger, he had no faith that the president would listen to the news and then act decisively.

  With so much in the balance, Polk instead went on his own to see von Bernstorff. His outrage seething through his diplomat’s manners, Polk warned the German ambassador that an attack on the New York subways would not be “mysterious.” The nation would know who to blame. The ambassador protested vehemently, insisting that Germany would never be party to or condone such activities. Polk had expected this response, but at least, he told himself, he had the small satisfaction of doing what little he could.

  In the end, though, it all came down to Tom. Polk, Woods, and Scull counted on Captain Tunney to prevent the outbreak of a plague that would creep in deadly silence across America, spreading from horses to people with its own mystifying virulence. He had apprehended the men behind the ship bombings, and the fires had abruptly stopped. He would once again protect the homeland.

  Tom, though, didn’t know where to begin. This was a new, baffling sort of investigation, totally unlike the ship fires. In that case, he had been called in after the ships had started burning. The crime had been committed. But now he was being sent off to stop something before it even happened. And he understood why: in the aftermath, it would be too late. The death toll would be unthinkable.

  Yet just as he was searching unsuccessfully for an angle of attack, he suddenly received help. It came from the most unexpected source: President Woodrow Wilson.

  THE PRESIDENT, ALTHOUGH THIS WAS unknown to Tom, was in truth only the final link on a long, rattling chain.

  The instigator was a patriotic waiter on the roof terrace of the Ritz-Carlton in New York. He was serving dinner to von Bernstorff; Constantin Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States; and a third guest whom he recognized as John Archibald, a well-known American reporter. As the waiter was clearing the plates, he saw Dumba cautiously pass a sheaf of papers to Archibald.

  The next day the waiter reported this exchange to the Secret Service. The federal authorities had long been suspicious of Archibald. For many years before the war he had been based in Berlin, and the articles he now published in papers throughout the country were decidedly pro-German. It was suspected that he was on Albert’s payroll, and that both von Bernstorff and Dumba used him as a courier to deliver confidential documents to Germany. When they discovered that Archibald was scheduled to sail, just days after the rooftop dinner, to England while en route to Germany, the Secret Service notified Guy Gaunt, the British intelligence station chief based in New York. Immediately, Gaunt wired his superiors in London.

  When Archibald’s ship docked at Falmouth, British sailors searched his suitcase. It was crammed with papers the reporter had intended to deliver to the officials at Wilhelmstrasse.

  The documents—one hundred and ten of them—were a remarkable and varied inventory of Germany’s covert acts against America. There were plans to foment strikes at Bethlehem Steel Company plants; canceled checks to saboteurs and propagandists; reports signed by von Papen and Boy-Ed, detailing the progress of sabotage operations; and summaries of Boy-Ed’s arrangements with Huerta, as well as von Papen’s visits to Mexico and the American border towns to organize the local German community for “self-defense.” There was also a mean-spirited letter from von Papen to his wife, in which the military attaché took snippy aim at “these idiotic Yankees.”

  Archibald was formally charged as “an enemy courier,” and the gleeful British authorities delivered this packet of goodies to Walter Page, the American ambassador. Page, who’d been futilely urging the president to bring America into the war on the Allied side, quickly sent them on to Washington. By the time Wilson read the pages, however, they were public knowledge. Wary that Wilson’s agile mind would find some convoluted new reason not to respond to this damning evidence, British intelligence had forced the president’s hand: they published the documents in a parliamentary white paper. Gaunt then made sure they were brought to the attention of the American press.

  Just months after the contents of Albert’s briefcase had made news, the new revelations about Germany’s covert activities in America once again caused banner headlines. An already enraged public grew further incensed. And even the president’s slow-simmering temper started to boil.

  He was, after all, still exchanging unsatisfying diplomatic notes with Germany over the Lusitania attack. And it had become increasingly difficult to ignore the secret reports he had been receiving from the New York police. Each brought a new grievance to what had become a devastating list: von Rintelen’s many plots, Fay’s rudder bombs, the ship fires, Germany’s scheme to restore Huerta to power, the attempted assassination of J. P. Morgan, and the failed attempt to poison warhorses. When a seething Colonel House suggested that America send home “the obnoxious underlings,” this time Wilson agreed.

  On December 3, 1915, Secretary of State Lansing summoned von Bernstorff to the State Department. The president, he stated with taut formality, considered Captains Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed personae non gratae. Their recall was demanded.

  Four days later, Wilson addressed Congress. He seemed changed, more forceful, a newfound resolve fortifying his words. Yet, as was so often the case with this sensitive, thoughtful man, his candor was disarming. The address was a public apology. He spoke not simply as the president of the United States but as an aggrieved man, frankly acknowledging that his own stern morality had prevented him from suspecting that other people lived by a less rigorous code:

  There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags . . . who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue. . . .

  A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible.

  Because it was incredible, we made no preparations for it. We would have been almost ashamed to prepare for it as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our own comrades and neighbors!

  But the ugly and incredible thing has actually come to pass and we are without federal laws to deal with it. . . .

  Such creatures of passion, disloyalty must be crushed out.

  Berlin promptly responded to the president’s words with a bewilderment as hollow as it was contrived: “Apparent
ly the enemies of Germany have succeeded in creating the impression that the German government is in some way morally or otherwise responsible for what Mr. Wilson has characterized as anti-American activities. . . . This the German government absolutely denies.”

  At the same time, the Foreign Office took private solace in the fact that von Bernstorff had not been recalled. “You are in no way included in this episode,” Lansing told the ambassador, according to the cable von Bernstorff sent to the Foreign Office. “We should look upon it with extreme regret were you to leave us.” The president, it seemed, still had the wishful notion that the ambassador could help him persuade the kaiser to negotiate a peace settlement.

  But von Papen and Boy-Ed had no choice but to make preparations to leave. On a snowy evening in mid-December, von Papen had a farewell dinner with Paul Koenig at the German Club on Central Park South in New York. He thanked Koenig for running the bureau. “It is a comfort,” he told his security chief, “to know that you will still be at work when I am gone.”

  Von Papen’s words, however, were premature. A team of Tom’s watchers had followed Koenig through the snow-covered streets to the club. The next morning, when Tom read their surveillance report, he started thinking. The president had already moved against the two military attachés; the long-running investigative strategy predicated on Koenig’s somehow providing the leads needed to document their roles in the network had been superseded.

  It was more important—vital even, Tom told himself—to discover what Koenig knew about Germany’s germ warfare program. Perhaps he had information about where Ebling was hiding. Did his files contain the proof that a new biological attack had become operational? Tom desperately needed answers to these large questions.

  The time had come, Tom decided, to arrest Paul Koenig.

  Chapter 56

  Anyone who interferes with Germans or the German Government will be punished!” Koenig growled as Tom’s men raided his office. Barnitz responded to the threat by snapping a pair of handcuffs firmly onto his wrists.

  Once in custody Koenig, as Tom had predicted, was uncooperative.

  He bellowed curses and stared down probing questions with a defiant silence. Tom was beginning to wonder if the arrest had been precipitate, if continuing the surveillance on Koenig would have been more productive than this unsatisfying interrogation. But that was before Barnitz, a self-satisfied grin on his face, rushed into the room.

  The detective held a small black loose-leaf notebook. There were hundreds of pages, all neatly typed. It had been found in Koenig’s West Ninety-Fourth Street apartment, in a locked desk drawer. When Koenig saw it, he burst out with a savage, desperate volley of protests. “That’s private property,” he shouted. “You have no right to touch it. I insist you return it to me at once.” Yet even as he screamed the words, Koenig realized that it was too late.

  The notebook was, Tom would soon say, “unquestionably one of the richest prizes of the spy hunt in America.”

  It was an operational history of the Abteilung IIIB’s network in America, and at the same time it was the intriguing personal diary of a self-styled master spy. The pages, all in fluent English, meticulously documented Koenig’s varied activities from August 22, 1914, when, according to the notebook, he became “a German military spy,” until his farewell dinner with von Papen.

  Compiled with a comparable thoroughness, there were also pages of carefully thought-out rules and regulations. Some involved tradecraft: “A street number in Manhattan named over the telephone means that the meeting will take place five blocks further uptown than the street mentioned. Pennsylvania Railroad Station means Grand Central Depot. Kaiserhof means the General Post Office in front of P.O. Box 840. Hotel Ansonia means café in Hotel Manhattan (basement). Hotel Belmont means at the bar in Pabst’s, Columbus Circle.”

  Others involved personal security: “In order to safeguard the secrets and affairs of the department prior to receiving a caller, hereafter my desk must be entirely cleared of all papers except those pertaining to the business in hand.” Or “All persons related to me, however distant, will be barred from employment with the Bureau of Investigation. This does not apply to my wife.”

  Then there were “Health Rules”: “I have decided to refrain from chewing tobacco in the office as it disagrees with my health thereby interfering with my work.” “I shall drink no more whiskey.”

  But it was what Koenig called his “D-cases” that Tom kept returning to over and over again. These were operations conducted by the Geheimdienst, or secret service division, and they made up a catalog of the network’s most covert missions. The problem, however, was that they were recorded in a code known only to Koenig. The specifics were disguised by aliases, false locations, random numbers, and seemingly meaningless phrases.

  Four pages from Paul Koenig’s notebook.

  (Thomas J. Tunney, Throttled!)

  And Koenig refused to cooperate. He enjoyed Tom’s fruitless struggle to make sense of his notebook. Despite his arrest, Koenig convinced himself that he was having the last victorious laugh.

  Still, Tom was undeterred. He wanted to believe that among the D-cases was a record of the German germ warfare campaign, the secrets of von Steinmetz’s mission. It would outline, he predicted with bitter conviction, the details of the new biological attack that von Rintelen had urged. These suspicions kept him focused on the D-cases with an urgent attention. He could not put the pages down.

  But of all the many cases, it was D-Case 343 that day after day occupied his thoughts. It was so significant that Koenig, displaying a level of caution rare for even this most scrupulous of case officers, had given it its own set of rules: “Beginning with Nov. 6 no blue copies are to be made of reports submitted in connection with D-Case 343, and the original reports will be sent to H.M.G. instead of duplicates, as formerly.”

  H.M.G., Tom had managed to decipher, was von Papen. But what could have been so secret that the military attaché himself needed to keep the original reports?

  Rule 2 was further testimony to the importance of the operation: “In order to accomplish better results in connection with D-Case 343, to shorten the stay of the informing agent at the place of the meeting, it has been decided to discontinue the former practice of dining with this agent prior to receiving his report. It will also be a rule to refrain from working on other matters until the informant in this case has been fully heard, and all the data taken down in shorthand.”

  Clearly, Tom was beginning to appreciate, these debriefings had been accorded a special operational significance. Security required that the agent not be allowed to linger. And Koenig would occupy himself with no other business until the agent had completed his report. Who was this agent? What was his secret mission? The more Tom pondered these questions, the more he grew convinced that the answers involved the germ warfare program. What else, he asked himself, would require such unprecedented secrecy and caution?

  Chapter 57

  With a renewed sense of urgency, Tom went back to the notebook. Koenig’s alias in D-Case 343 was Woehler. As for the agent, his aliases kept changing. At first, he was identified as Operative #51. Then as Agent C.O. And still later as Agent B.I. Were they all the same person? Or were there a number of field agents in this operation? The mystery kept growing.

  Backtracking through the notebook, Tom saw an earlier reference to Woehler’s meeting with a Friedrich Schleindl. Tom read it slowly. Then, just to be certain, he read it again. When he’d finished, Tom knew he had it. Koenig had slipped up.

  This was, he understood in a moment of sudden perception, a record of Koenig’s initial meeting with his agent. He had, as good tradecraft required, used his work name, but he had not yet assigned an alias to his agent.

  Why? Tom asked, and then excitedly answered his own question: because Koenig at this first sit-down didn’t know if the new recruit’s intelligence would be of any value. He didn’t know if there’d be a subsequent meeting. Koenig had no inkling of the age
nt that Schleindl would become. And after the recruit had blossomed into a key operative, Koenig had never thought to thumb back through the notebook to edit his account of their first encounter.

  Friedrich Schleindl, the bank clerk and German spy exposed in Koenig’s notebooks.

  (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  By going backward, then reading forward, Tom found that the notebook revealed a clear trail: calling himself Woehler, Koenig had met Schleindl, and it was Woehler who continued as the handler of Operative #51, then Agent C.O., and finally Agent B.I.

  Certain that he would soon have his first real intelligence about Germany’s germ warfare program, he gave the order to find Friedrich Schleindl.

  IT TOOK ONLY A CHECK of the city’s telephone directories for the team to locate Schleindl. And after he was brought in, he did help solve a mystery. But it was not the one Tom had anticipated.

  When the war started, according to the story Tom easily drew out of the terrified prisoner, Schleindl was a clerk in the City National Bank. He was also a German reservist, having been born in Bavaria, and he reported to the German consulate for duty. Months passed without further communication from the consulate, but then he received a call instructing him to meet a Herr Woehler at the Manhattan Hotel. “You’ll find him in the bar,” he was told.

  Woehler—or, as Tom knew him, Koenig—bought the young man a beer and led him to a secluded table where they could talk. “Tell me more about yourself,” Woehler said when they were seated.

  It was more an interrogation than a casual conversation. As it continued, Woehler made an important discovery. Schleindl’s job gave him access to daily cables from Allied governments to the bank, arranging the purchase and shipment of war supplies.

  That first night, Woehler made his pitch. He offered Schleindl $25 a week to steal all the orders cabled by the Allies, together with copies of contracts showing when the goods would be delivered to the piers for shipment, as well as the detailed descriptions of the purchases. Schleindl agreed. He was a patriot, and, he added candidly to Tom, the extra $25 nearly doubled his clerk’s salary.