by Blum, Howard
A routine developed. Schleindl would wait until the end of the week, then gather up all the cables and contracts that had come in over the previous five days. On Friday night he’d meet with his control, and Woehler would have the documents copied in time for Schleindl to replace them early Monday morning before anyone knew they had been borrowed.
And Koenig would have crucial information to pass on to von Rintelen. The contracts and cargo manifests enabled cigar bombs to be placed on the ships where they would do the most damage to the Allies. Shipments to the Allies were closely guarded secrets, but the cigar bombs unerringly targeted the correct ships. Now Tom knew how this had been accomplished.
But as he diligently went back over the many documents that Schleindl had passed on to Koenig, something caught Tom’s eye. And another, more momentous mystery began to unravel.
It was the shipping contract for several thousand magnetos needed to power the ignition systems of Allied trucks and automobiles at the front. They had been loaded into hold 2 of the steamship Minnehaha: the same steamship on which an explosion had erupted in the number 2 hold on July 7, 1915. The same date that Erich Muenter/Frank Holt had told Tom an explosion would take place.
Ever since that blast, Tom had wondered how a Cornell professor knew to plant his bomb on the one ship in New York Harbor that day heading off with vital war matériel. Muenter had died before Tom had a chance to ask him. Perhaps, Tom had tried not very successfully to convince himself, Muenter had just made a lucky guess. After all, only the executives at the magneto factory and the officers of the bank would have seen the bill of lading.
Now Tom understood. Schleindl had passed the bill of lading to Koenig, who had given it to von Rintelen, who had passed the information on—there was no other logical explanation!—to Muenter.
His long, brooding suspicion that Muenter had not acted alone, he felt, was confirmed. Tom had no doubt that when Muenter placed the bomb in the U.S. Capitol Building and shot J. P. Morgan, he had been acting with the assistance of the German secret service.
BUT THIS REALIZATION GAVE TOM little comfort. Instead, it only served to remind him of the cruel nature of the enemy he was pursuing. Once a line has been crossed, Tom knew, anything becomes possible. Terror was very much a matter of habit. Tom had no doubt that the unprincipled adversary who had planted bombs and sent out assassins would not hesitate to attack America with germs.
Chapter 58
The man was dying. He was forty-seven years old and had previously enjoyed good health, but three weeks earlier he had entered Bellevue Hospital in New York complaining that he felt weak, tired, and feverish. Now he was in a coma. His organs were shutting down. The doctors did not understand why.
As they struggled to make a diagnosis, they kept returning to two possible clues. The first was his job. He worked on ships transporting warhorses to Europe, feeding the animals and mucking out the stalls. The other clue was on his body. His face was scarred with ugly sores, and inflamed nodules about the size of nickels covered his legs and feet.
Most of the doctors assumed the skin irritations were a rash caused by his work with horses, but they were not convinced these epidermal abrasions were directly connected to the disease that was killing him. Several of the physicians had an entirely different diagnosis. In his trips overseas, the patient had contracted a previously unknown strain of foreign measles; that would explain both his illness and the condition of his body.
The doctors went back and forth, and during the patient’s second week of hospitalization, the nodules began to swell. They burst, and a dark yellow pus spewed out. The patient’s fever rose precipitously. Then he became delirious.
Twenty-one days after admission, he fell into a coma. Two days later he was dead. The doctors still did not know the cause.
With the patient’s death, the doctors intensified their investigation. A new theory held that it might have been a case of plague. If that were true, the entire city would need to be put on alert and rigorous precautions taken. So blood was taken from the corpse and injected into guinea pigs. The excreted pus was also applied to the lab animals.
Within days, the animals became ill. Soon they were dead. And the anxious doctors made a diagnosis. This was not plague, but glanders. The patient, it was now decided, most probably had come in contact with an infected horse, or had simply changed the sick animal’s water or cleaned its stall. The autopsy confirmed this. “Glanders invasion of the liver and lungs” was listed as the cause of death.
Not until nine years after the war was over, as lawyers seeking reparations for Germany’s sabotage activities in the United States conducted their investigations, would Dilger’s culturing of the glanders pathogen in his basement become known. And then this death would take on a new significance. Doctors suspected it was ground zero: the first known human fatality in the contagion caused by Germany’s germ warfare attack.
WEEKS AFTER THE DEATH IN New York, in Newport News, Virginia, John Grant, a stevedore from Baltimore, crouched outside the animal pens at the Breeze Point wharf. It was dark and cold, with a harsh December wind coming off the James River, but Grant did not hurry. He waited and watched.
His boss, Ed Felton, said he had paid the night watchman to stay in his office, but Grant still worried about the British remount officers. They normally left at the end of the day, yet if one happened to be around, he’d shoot an intruder on sight. Grant was getting paid $10 for his work. It was good money, and it was a lot easier than lifting crates on the docks. But he had no intention of risking his life.
He listened to the night sounds: distant voices coming off the transport ships anchored in the harbor; the whinnies and neighs of the animals in the pens; the steady shuffling of hooves. When he was satisfied there were no patrolling guards, Grant removed a pair of rubber gloves from his back pocket and pulled them on.
He made sure they fitted tightly, then turned his attention to the package lying by his feet. Grant removed the brown paper wrapping. Inside was a wooden container, and he unscrewed its top. There was a layer of cotton, and after he pushed it aside, he saw the two glass vials. They were about two inches long, and stoppered with pieces of cork.
Now came the dangerous part, he knew. If he wasn’t careful, Felton had warned, he could die. Grant could not let the yellow liquid in the vials touch his skin.
He pulled the cork out very slowly. With two fingers, he grasped the steel-tipped syringe inside, and extracted it. Inadvertently, he let drops of the yellow liquid fall onto the ground, but, after a moment’s panic, he decided that none had touched his clothes or his skin. With the syringe raised in his hand like a dagger, he hurried to the first mule corral.
He stabbed the needle deep into the haunch of a mule. The animal immediately went wild. It kicked and brayed savagely. As Grant struggled to pull the needle out of the mule’s thick hide, the animal turned its neck and tried to bite him. Grant finally managed to remove it, but now all the animals in the pen were braying, snorting. In their collective fury, they banged into each other and kicked at the corral fence.
Alarmed, Grant grabbed his package and rushed toward a wooden storage shed. He leaned against it, hiding in the shadows, waiting for the animals to quiet. His instinct was to run, to throw the vials into the James River and escape before a British soldier came to see what was causing the commotion. But he knew Felton would be angry. And if Felton told Captain Hinsch that he’d run, the consequences would be as bad as being caught. No, he decided, they’d be worse.
After a while, when the mules had grown silent, Grant returned to the corral. He worked quickly, stabbing as many animals as he could. When there wasn’t enough of the yellow liquid remaining in the vial to refill the syringe, he emptied the contents into water basins and food troughs.
He uncorked the second vial and moved on to the horse corral. As soon as he stabbed the first horse, the animals started neighing and racing about. But Grant was determined to complete his mission and get off the wharf. H
e did his best to calm the horses, and then, working rapidly, jabbed one animal after another.
His work completed, he went to the banks of the James River. He pulled off his gloves and tossed them one at a time into the shadowy, fast-moving water. He watched as the current took them downstream. He threw the vials into the water, too, and after a moment they sank. Then he hurried off the wharf. He was already looking forward to the morning when he’d take the train back to Baltimore.
As with the glanders case in New York, it would not be until years later, after the lawyers in the postwar reparations case had interviewed Grant and doctors had studied the transcripts, that the full significance of the stevedore’s activities that night was understood.
Too many years had passed to allow the doctors to be sure when the ground-zero moment had occurred. It might have been when droplets of yellow liquid fell onto the ground outside the mule corral. Or when the gloves and vials were tossed into the James River. Or, as with the Bellevue patient, perhaps people had simply come in contact with the animals or their water and food. But they now believed with great certainty that they had found the cause of four mysterious deaths, accompanied by anthraxlike symptoms, during the winter of 1915–16 in Virginia. And they wondered how many more deaths caused by the German Secret Service’s anthrax attack had gone undiagnosed.
TOM WORKED IN A VACUUM. He had no knowledge of the deaths in New York and Virginia. All he had driving him, goading him on, was his instincts. And his fears. He was certain Germany would launch a second germ attack.
Yet he might as well have been chasing after an elusive ghost; his pursuit was a hunt for intangibles. He had no suspects. No clues. The lethal weapon he so feared struck with deadly silence, leaving behind only hints of its terrible efficacy. He lay awake at night wondering if the attack had already begun and he didn’t know it. Would the doctors, he asked himself anxiously, even be able to identify an outbreak? Would they be able to treat it? Facing such an invisible, powerful threat, what could he do?
Still, it was not in Tom’s nature to surrender. He made sure the guards were doubled at the New York horse corrals. He sent his men up and down the waterfront to warn about enemy agents intent on poisoning animals. And he implored Woods and Scull to reiterate to their many friends in Washington that the threat of a germ attack was very real.
Tom was attempting something he had never done before in his career. He was no longer the indefatigable detective tracking down the culprits. Instead, he was trying to prevent a crime. And although he would not know all that happened until years later, he succeeded.
Chapter 59
In the cruel winter months, the Jersey shore was a cold and lonely destination. Waves swelled, gusts blew, and the beachfront cottages remained shuttered. But it was precisely this isolation, Hilken decided, that made it the ideal location for an emergency meeting. He ordered the two main conspirators in his operation to meet him at a beachfront bungalow he had hastily rented not too far from Atlantic City. And he warned them to make sure they were not followed.
Hinsch drove his Model T; Dilger took the train and then a taxi. Hilken was waiting when they arrived. He greeted them warmly, hospitably served beers, but it was clear to Dilger that the young man was out of sorts. He was nervous, trying to hide his anxiety but not succeeding.
Hilken did not possess the spy’s special courage, the ability to stand up to what his imagination was shouting was about to happen and still find the nerve to go on as if nothing at all was wrong. Hilken had bad news to deliver, and its implications had left him undone.
“They’re on to us,” he announced flatly. He had been contacted by Koenig, now free on $50,000 bail after his arrest. Koenig said that New York police were swarming about the harbor, asking questions about plots to poison the horses awaiting shipment to the Allies. Koenig had also learned that there were more guards at the corrals. They’re on alert, waiting to catch someone, he said.
Hilken continued, now edging dangerously close to panic. He had been summoned to meet with Wolf von Igel, the German diplomat who had replaced Captain von Papen in New York. Von Igel had delivered a message from von Bernstorff. The ambassador, Hilken said, was furious with them.
“Don’t those imbeciles understand the potential consequences of their actions?” the ambassador had demanded, according to the report von Igel gave to Hilken. Von Bernstorff had already been informed that the authorities suspected Germany was engaged in germ warfare. But if the Americans could prove it, the ambassador had lectured, it would be the final outrage that would push the country into the war. Any tactical advantage gained by poisoning animals would be more than outweighed by American troops being sent to Europe. The ambassador wanted the operation to stop immediately.
Dilger objected. He didn’t take his orders from von Bernstorff, he said; he was assigned to Abteilung IIIB, and he received his orders from them.
As if on cue, Hilken handed him a cable. He was to return to Berlin as soon as possible “for discussions.” It was signed, Dilger recognized, with one of Nicolai’s work names.
On January 29, 1916, using a new passport that the State Department had issued so that he could work, or so he had claimed, as a surgeon at a German Red Cross hospital in Heidelberg, Dilger boarded the Norwegian passenger liner Kristianiafjord. As the ship crossed the Atlantic, Hinsch, who would continue to participate in sabotage operations until he fled to Germany, dismantled “Tony’s lab.”
Dilger would never return to America. After being briefed in Berlin, he was sent on a secret mission to Spain. In Madrid, he was infected by the Spanish influenza virus sweeping through the world’s population, and died. The doctor who had propagated germs had become their victim.
Tom, without at the time realizing the effectiveness of his actions or the lives he’d saved, had won a great victory. Over the past two years, he had slowly come to learn that he was engaged in an entirely new sort of conflict, one where the action took place in the shadows, where the investigative goal often was to prevent crimes before they happened. However, he had not yet begun to appreciate the hard wisdom that drove counterintelligence work: triumphs often went unheralded or even unrecognized, while defeats always made headlines.
AS FOR HILKEN, DESPITE HIS tightly wound nerves, the secret life continued to pull him back in. The thrill of being a clandestine actor with the power to influence world historical events was too grand an experience to abandon. He could not return to a life lived only as his father’s dutiful son. He had discovered that he enjoyed performing on a bigger stage.
He would be involved with other plots, his role in which would not be uncovered until after the war. Working once again with Hinsch, he helped plan and then finalize a mission code-named Jersey.
The idea had originated with von Rintelen, who first decided to give Black Tom, the largest munitions and gunpowder shipping center in America, “a sound knock on the head.” He’d diagrammed where the saboteurs should land their boats and the barges they should target, only to receive the telegram ordering him back to Germany. Hilken and Hinsch inherited the mission.
Since the target was across the Hudson, most of the final planning was done in New York in the boozy, good-time safety of Martha Held’s town house. Sitting there, the easy friendship of Martha’s pretty women available to him, surrounded by his fellow conspirators, Hilken felt he had at last become the equal of the man who had recruited him. Like von Rintelen, he was a master spy. Like the cause he worked for, he was invincible.
ON SUNDAY, JULY 30, 1916, at 12:24 a.m., the first fire started at the terminal. Two hours later, Black Tom had become a great white light illuminating the night sky. Stockpiled shells exploded, and stored bullets flew about wildly. There was a tremendous, awful, sustained boom, powerful enough, it seemed, to shake the planet down to its core.
Far across the river in Manhattan the windows in the library at Forty-Second Street were blown out, water mains broke, downtown streets flooded, and people, certain that the world was
coming to an end, rushed from their apartments and hotel rooms and into the street. By the end of the week, newspapers estimated the damage to New York and New Jersey warehouses, railroads, and businesses at a staggering $20 million. And the bodies of five victims were recovered.
In Brooklyn that evening, Tom was pulled from his sleep and hurried to his window. The sky was lit with an unnatural glow: high noon in the middle of the night. Although he did not yet know the cause (and it would be litigious decades before the blame was officially resolved), he had no doubts about the perpetrators, or the consequences. Other people might not be certain whether the explosion was an accident or sabotage, but he was. Germany had gone too far. The nation would demand revenge.
At that moment, the nighttime quiet destroyed, the wooden planks in his bedroom floor shaking beneath his feet, Tom knew that his long, solitary war was about to come to an end. A new fight would soon begin. He’d battle on, but he’d no longer be wearing a policeman’s blue uniform. He’d be marching off alongside tens of thousands of other Americans on a common mission.
Workers sorting shells at the Black Tom munitions plant in Jersey City, New Jersey.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
View of the aftermath of a series of massive explosions at the Black Tom munitions facility on July 30, 1916. The explosion, which resulted from the detonation of a train car full of dynamite and subsequent explosions of other munitions, leveled the facility.