by Blum, Howard
(Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)
Chapter 60
Moored German submarines, circa 1914–1915. Second from left in the front row is U-20, which sank the RMS Lusitania.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
At last, Woodrow Wilson gave in to his long-building fury. With a statesman’s lofty philosophy and the patience of a would-be saint, he had tried to ignore or, when that was not possible, rationalize all of Germany’s many provocations. Then, with the nation’s anger already ratcheted up by the catastrophic Black Tom explosion, the conduct of the kaiser’s government toward the United States became even more intolerable.
On February 1, 1917, Germany announced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Its U-boats would sink without warning any neutral ships in a designated zone around Great Britain, France, and Italy. The United States was told to surrender its sovereign right to trade and travel across the high seas, or its ships would be torpedoed. As one indignant paper huffed, the kaiser had declared that henceforth freedom of the seas would exist only for “icebergs and fish.”
His resolve inching closer to a once unthinkable decision, the president responded by severing diplomatic relations with Germany. Von Bernstorff, the German ambassador and head of the Abteilung IIIB network in America, was ordered home along with Albert and the rest of the embassy’s officials.
Guy Gaunt sent his superiors a triumphant telegram: “Bernstorff goes home. I get drunk tonight.” And then he did just that, with Tom, Woods, and Scull in the Harvard Club bar.
British intelligence, however, was too busy plotting its next move to celebrate. The team of wranglers in Room 40 had decoded an intercepted cable signed by Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, to Heinrich von Eckhardt, the imperial minister in Mexico.
The Zimmermann telegram as received by the German ambassador to Mexico.
(National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives Identifier 302025)
The Zimmermann telegram, decoded.
(National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives Identifier 000302022)
Von Rintelen’s sly scheming with Huerta, and von Papen’s reconnaissance trips to Mexico, had offered tantalizing hints of Germany’s intentions. But this telegram was solid, undeniable proof of official imperial government policy. It proposed an alliance with Mexico and Japan in a joint war against the United States, and solemnly promised to help Mexico “regain by conquest her lost territory in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.”
Once again managing to protect the powerful secret that the team in Room 40 had broken the German diplomatic code, the British had a copy of the bombshell telegram delivered to Wilson. This time it was the president who instructed that the cable be shared with the press.
Eight-column headlines stretched across newspapers all over the country on the morning of March 1, 1917. The Washington Post shouted: “German Plot to Conquer United States with Aid of Japan and Mexico Revealed.” The New York Times trumpeted: “Germany Seeks Alliance Against U.S., Asks Japan and Mexico to Join Her.”
Over the days that followed, the president wrote his speech himself, typing out the words in the Oval Office. Then, on the rainy evening of April 2, an army cavalry unit riding alongside his car, Wilson drove down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building. As he stood at the lectern in the crowded House chamber and prepared to begin his address to a joint session of Congress, an unprecedented ovation broke out. It lasted a full two minutes. Then President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany.
What prompted this irrevocable decision by a president who only three months earlier had agonized that going to war would be a “crime against civilization”? It would be a brash conceit to assign a single motive to such a complicated, thoughtful man. And it would be no less of a mistake to identify a single event as the final straw that broke an indomitable patience.
President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war on April 2, 1917.
(AP Photo)
Rather, more than anything else, a fundamental change of heart had gripped this most idealistic of men. It had come slowly, gradually. With his growing awareness of Germany’s extensive secret operations against America, Wilson had been forced to rethink how he looked at the world.
He had become president believing that both men and nations were required to act in certain well-understood, honorable ways. With a naïveté fostered as much by wishful thinking as by moral doctrine, he found it difficult to accept that a state would knowingly flout these standards of behavior. So he had been puzzled. He could not fully believe the reports that were being passed on by the New York police. Bomb plots, assassinations, germ warfare, subversion—all of it seemed quite impossible, even as, at the same time, he knew the evidence was undeniable.
It took time for his benevolent, hopeful notions to wear thin. A fierce internal struggle had raged inside him. Yet as the unnatural became undeniable, his shock hardened into the resigned anger of someone who now understood he had been coldly deceived.
As the nation prepared to go to war, Wilson’s Flag Day speech of June 1917 made it clear that a more distrustful worldview had become anchored in his mind. “It is plain enough how we were forced into the war,” he said, with the firm confidence of a convert who had permanently turned his back on false gods. “They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found they could not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance—and some of these agents were men connected with the official embassy of the German government itself here in our own capital. They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. . . . What great nation in such circumstance would not have taken up arms?”
For three years, Abteilung IIIB’s relentless operations in America had kept banging and banging against Wilson’s faith until finally all his heartfelt beliefs were shattered. Stripped of his illusions and his innocence, a different man from the one who’d taken office five years ago, the president led the nation into war.
TOM HAD NO ILLUSIONS, AND certainly no innocence, about the nature of the enemy. His concerns centered on his own country.
Paradoxically, these troubling thoughts occurred to him at a time when he should have been enjoying his accolades and celebrating his triumphs. Just weeks after Congress voted to declare war, Commissioner Woods had rewarded the squad’s work by promoting him to inspector and the loyal Barnitz to lieutenant. Yet today, December 17, 1917, he felt troubled by the Times report on the next giant step in his career. “City’s Bomb Squad Goes to the Army,” read the tiered headline. “Tunney, Head of Noted Organization, Will Be a Major—Men to Enlist. Will Pursue Plotters.”
The article below was no less flattering:
The famous Bomb Squad of the New York Police Department, which, under the command of Inspector Thomas Tunney, has won for itself a national reputation in bringing to justice German spies, has been taken over by the War Department. . . . The entire squad will be assigned to duty with the Army Intelligence Service in the New York district.
The new step taken by the Government was characterized by Federal officials as of far-reaching importance, and was cited as proof of the intention of the authorities to handle the Teuton spy and plot situation vigorously.
Tom, though, reading the newspaper report, found that he was unable to summon up any of its optimism. The nation, he knew only too well, had shown little inclination to deal with espionage “vigorously.” In the course of his three-year hunt, he had grown convinced that the United States was dangerously unprepared for the injuries a clandestine enemy could inflict on the homeland. We are a trusting nation, and that has made us a vulnerable one, he decided. A complacent America has developed neither the intelligence capabilities to collect information on our adversaries’ plans nor the resources to stop te
rrorist attacks from happening.
The well-funded German secret service had destroyed, Tom knew, over $150 million in property during the past three years. Ships had foundered at sea. Factories had gone up in flames. Munitions depots had exploded. Assassins had been deployed. Germs had been spread. The sabotage had caused more than one hundred deaths.
The Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, Military Intelligence—all the supposedly vigilant resources the republic had assembled to guard its towns and cities—were feuding, disorganized, and ineffective. They did not gather information about the enemy agents quietly prowling the nation’s streets. They were ignorant of the sinister aspirations of the forces preparing to attack, and of their frightful weapons.
In the end, it had been left to Tom and his small group of men to protect the homeland. Thrown into a war for which they were largely unprepared, in the course of its many battles they had succeeded in acquiring the ingenuity, tenacity, and self-sacrifice that this invisible conflict required of its secret soldiers. Their victories made the nation safer.
Still, this achievement was insufficient. Tom feared for the future. The nation had been exposed: it was a land of targets. Already the Capitol Building had been bombed, and anthrax deployed. Grim precedents had been established. In the years to come, what new terrors would strike his city, his country? Just as the saboteur’s cigar bomb had been superseded by the ingenuity of the explosive rudder device, it was in the cruel nature of man to fabricate more destructive weapons, to perfect more effective ways to disseminate germs.
And then what?
Tom could only wonder.
A Note on Sources
On the fourteenth floor of the redbrick police headquarters building in lower Manhattan, the commissioner meets every morning just after nine with the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and the deputy commissioner for intelligence. The sessions take place in the Executive Command Center, a big room whose walls display video screens showing news broadcasts from all over the world, live videocasts of traffic from streets and highways, images from helicopters outfitted with radiation detection devices (RDDs) hovering above the piers and harbors, and recent crime reports from precincts.
The purpose of the meetings is to discuss any terrorist threats that have developed over the past twenty-four hours. As soon as the two commissioners are seated at the long table in the center of the room, they address what Police Chief Raymond Kelly, a flinty, hard-minded former street cop and marine, has called “the New York question.” The commissioner wants to know what is happening anywhere in the world that could affect the safety of the city and its people.
I have been allowed to attend one of these Command Center briefings, given a seat in a straight-backed plastic chair against the wall underneath a video showing a live feed of Wall Street traffic. With rapt attention, I hear a chilling inventory of concerns: a possible bomb attack on a Port Authority train or tunnel at rush hour; a suspect in Virginia who may or may not be developing a biological weapon to use on subways; a cell in Jordan that quite possibly has ties to a group in Queens that has been taking photographs of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges; and an al-Qaeda website that promises an attack on New York will come soon.
Yet as I listen, in my mind I find myself stripping away all the technology and nonessentials, and I realize that what is happening in this cloistered tower room is not all that different from what occurred nearly a century ago when Tom would take the private elevator up into the commissioner’s mahogany-paneled office. Those meetings, too, were driven by brooding suspicions and gnawing fears.
And as I sit in this command post, it becomes clearer to me that in one large and affecting way, little has changed over the past one hundred years for the officers who are responsible for defending our sprawling republic. Like Tom with his victories over the ship bombers, von Rintelen, Fay, and Koenig, the homeland’s new protectors have slain their dragons and made the country a safer place. Yet for them too there is always tomorrow, and with it comes the dread that someone is out there plotting, preparing, getting closer and closer to striking.
It was these thoughts that stayed prominent in my mind as I researched and wrote this book. The relevance of Tom Tunney’s activities to today’s headlines was a constant reminder to me that, as Faulkner observed, “the past is never past.” It is one reason why I am drawn to history, and why I wanted to tell this story.
At the same time, my writing of this book was also influenced and inspired by the two other nonfiction tales I published immediately preceding this one. American Lightning, an account of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times Building that left twenty-one people dead, was at its dramatic core a story about the war between labor and capital that gripped the nation at the turn of the century. The Floor of Heaven was another story about the country at a turning point as the nineteenth century came to a close: with the West won, intrepid cowboys and pioneers set off to find new frontiers to conquer. And Dark Invasion is a story of the United States finding the will, the commitment, and the strength to become a world power.
Each of these three books tells an independent story, propelled by its own cast of real-life characters. However, together they form a sort of trilogy. And although the first book’s narrative is shaped as a detective story, the next as a western, and this one as a spy tale, a bold central character unites and dominates these three self-contained histories: turn-of-the-century America. Each of these books focuses on a different and transforming aspect of the story of a young country struggling to come of age and assume its place in the world.
These are true stories. There are no inventions in my accounts. I have tried to re-create events as they happened, and with as much objectivity as possible. I have searched for intersecting circumstances and ideas, and then presented them in a way that made informed sense to me.
In order to write what the heroes and villains in this spy story were saying, doing, feeling, and even thinking accurately as well as vividly, I have relied on firsthand accounts and memoirs, in addition to contemporaneous newspaper stories, government documents, legal papers, and a tall stack of histories. Therefore, when quotation marks bracket any dialogue, this is an indication that at least one of the principals was the source. Further, when a character reveals what he is thinking or feeling, I found this too in a memoir, a letter, or a previously published interview.
Particularly valuable, then, in putting together this determinedly firsthand account were the papers and documents—1,032 cubic feet of them!—stored at the Foreign Affairs Branch of the National Archives in Washington. These archives contain the extensive files compiled by the Mixed Claims Commission of the United States and Germany, investigating the Black Tom explosion and the activities of the German spy network in the United States in the years preceding America’s entry into the war, including testimony about Abteilung IIIB’s germ warfare program; transcripts of German government messages intercepted by the British; papers relating to the workings of British intelligence in America prior to the United States’ entry into the war; testimony of witnesses and members of the German secret service; and biographies of the saboteurs.
A roughly equivalent resource, providing German documents and testimony by government officials, was published in two volumes by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1923: Official German Documents Relating to the World War: The Report of the First and Second Subcommittee of the Committee Appointed by the National Constituent Assembly to Inquire into the Responsibility for the War.
My understanding of President Wilson’s evolving mind-set (as well as the government’s mercurial positions regarding neutrality) was facilitated by the State Department’s Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, and Supplements, World War, 1914–1918, published by the Government Printing Office.
Similarly, Tom Tunney’s candid postwar testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee provided insight into his nascent role in counterintelligence: Report and Hearings Be
fore the Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary, 66th Cong., 1st sess., doc. 62 (1919). And a good overview of the entire fledgling American intelligence operation is provided by the many officials who testified in Espionage and Interference with Neutrality: Hearings on H.R. 291 Before the Committee on the Judiciary, 65th Cong., 1st sess. (1917).
I got an informed sense of the efficacy of J. P. Morgan Jr.’s. extensive machinations to influence aid for the Allies from reading the often acerbic testimony in Investigation Relative to the Treaty of Peace with Germany: Hearings Before the U.S. State Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 66th Cong., 1st sess. (1919), as well as Hearings Before the Special U.S. Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, 74th Cong., 2nd sess. (1937).
I frequently consulted the myriad official government position papers and presidential speeches issued during the years leading to America’s joining the Allies. The complete text of these was found at Brigham Young University’s World War I Document Archive, available online at http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.
Books about World War I fill entire libraries, and over the four years I spent researching this book, my workroom became a daunting obstacle course littered with waist-high stacks of several hundred volumes. But rather than listing all the titles I consulted, as one would in an academic history, let me point the way for the curious general reader to those books that I found most valuable in telling this story.
Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters, by Inspector Thomas J. Tunney with Paul Merrick Hollister, is a lively and very personal account of the investigations conducted by the man who, while he didn’t have the title, was the nation’s first head of homeland security. And reading Tunney’s story in conjunction with Franz von Rintelen’s two-volume memoir, The Dark Invader and Return of the Dark Invader, conveys a gripping sense of the cat-and-mouse game the two men were playing. Additionally, my knowledge of Tunney’s career was greatly facilitated by photostats of his original New York Police Department service records, made available to me by Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of public information, NYPD, who also made it possible for me to attend the commissioner’s daily intelligence briefing.