The Zimmermann Telegram

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Wilson, having refused to go beyond breaking relations, was shut up in the White House, where, as Ambassador Page fumed in his diary, “He engaged in what he called ‘thought’ and the air currents of the world never ventilated his mind.” The comment was that of a hurt and frustrated man but not without justice. Wilson still would not heed the plain fact that the belligerents did not want him to mediate and would fight to the end rather than settle for less than victory. In his speech to Congress announcing the break with Germany, he had said that Americans were sincere friends of the German people and would not believe that “they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it.” He was still determined to keep the United States free of the struggle, in a position to make peace, withstanding all provocation short of the “overt act.” He did not expect one to come out of Mexico.

  Rear-Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall (Russell, London)

  Arthur Zimmerman (from Herbert Bayard Swope’s Inside the German Empire)

  Ten

  “The Most Dramatic Moment in All My Life”

  ZIMMERMANN’S OVERT ACT STILL LAY, like an unthrown hand grenade, inside Admiral Hall’s safe. When the DNI read the terms of Wilson’s speech announcing the break with Germany, he realized that his heartfelt “Thank God!” on first hearing the news had been premature. The Americans were not coming in after all. Their President was still clutching neutrality with his eyes squeezed shut against Germany’s explicit hostility. “Unless and until we are obliged to believe it.” Was it possible the man could still be in doubt? It looked as if it might be up to Admiral Hall to oblige him to believe it. All he had to do was pull the pin on the hand grenade and toss it in the American lap—yet he did not. He could not move until certain arrangements he was making to conceal Room 40’s possession of the code were complete.

  Meanwhile Britain’s situation was daily growing worse. U-boats were making a cemetery of the sea approaches to the British Isles. The limit of Britain’s financial resources had already been reached. Having used up her negotiable securities, she could now offer only government credit to finance the $10,000,000 a day of war supplies she was purchasing in the United States. Would the American government allow loans on that basis? America’s economy was now deeply tied to British purchases, but Wilson’s attitude was disquieting. He showed signs of wanting to use Britain’s indigence to force her into a negotiated peace. Only if the United States entered the war could that danger be dispelled and credit unlimited and ships unlimited be obtained.

  After Wilson’s discouraging speech Admiral Hall no longer felt justified in keeping the existence of the Zimmermann telegram a secret from his government. On February 5 he unlocked his safe, took out the telegram, marched across the Horse Guards Parade to the Foreign Office, where he handed the fateful document to Lord Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary. It was still incomplete and garbled in places because Montgomery and de Grey had not entirely succeeded in solving the variations of the code, but enough was available to show that Room 40 had got hold of the greatest coup of the war.

  Lord Hardinge did not like it. As a civil servant trained to proceed according to protocol, he could not help regarding a decoded intercept as something slightly shady and the idea of the British government’s using such an instrument to influence a neutral state as distasteful. Admiral Hall explained that he was not ready to use it until certain requirements had been satisfied and the decoding perfected, but he wished Mr. Balfour to know of the telegram’s existence so that he might in the meantime consider how best to handle it.

  The requirement Admiral Hall had set himself was to secure a copy of the telegram as sent by Bernstorff to Mexico. This, he reasoned, would have small but significant differences in dateline, address, and signature from the original as sent by Zimmermann to Bernstorff. If such a copy were the one to be published, the Germans would spot the differences and infer from them that the interception had been accomplished somewhere on the American continent. Cocksure of the inviolability of their code, they would persuade themselves that an already decoded copy of the telegram had been betrayed or stolen after reaching its destination. They would blame it on carelessness or perfidy or spies inside their own embassies in Washington or Mexico. Room 40’s role would remain unsuspected. This predicted behavior the Germans were obligingly to carry out to the last step.

  Casting about for a way to obtain a transatlantic copy of the telegram, Hall had thought of the indispensable Mr. H. in Mexico, the man who had tracked Herr Cronholm. Some three weeks later Mr. H. was able, through a most fortuitous set of circumstances, to supply Hall with what he needed.

  It happened that an Englishman who operated a printing press in Mexico City had returned to his shop unexpectedly one Saturday afternoon when his Mexican workmen were taking their half-day off. On the workbench he noticed some unfamiliar plates and upon examining them found to his horror that they were plates for printing forged currency. Near them was neatly stacked a pile of forged cartones, a form of substitute currency which had come into use in Mexico during the successive revolutions when each new regime declared the currency of its predecessor valueless and issued one of its own. So many forgeries flourished under this system that President Carranza had recently decreed the death penalty for forgers.

  Understandably the English printer was terrified. If there was one thing the Mexicans were proficient at, it was ordering executions and carrying them out. The printer scooped up the evidence, locked it in his safe, slipped out of his office as inconspicuously as he could, and dashed to a friend’s house for advice. In his absence the workman who had made the forgeries returned and, finding his plates and cartones gone, became terrified in his turn. He too saw himself facing a firing squad at dawn and decided to clear himself by accusing his employer, who, he rightly guessed, had found the forgeries. He went to the authorities, who promptly arrested, tried, and convicted the printer, all on the same Saturday, and condemned him to be shot on Monday.

  Rescue arrived in the person of Mr. H. He was an acquaintance of the friend whom the printer had consulted before his arrest. On being told of the affair, Mr. H. went to the British Minister, who, although it was Sunday, obtained a reprieve for the unfortunate printer and eventually, when the real forger was found out, his release. The printer was happy to have his life, the friend was happy to be freed of suspicion, and Mr. H. was happy because he had acquired a grateful ally in the heart of the Mexican Telegraph Office. That, it turned out, was where the printer’s friend worked. He was only too glad to produce copies of any telegrams in which his benefactor, Mr. H., might be interested.

  There was one in particular, and it was found. On February 10, Admiral Hall received from Mexico a copy of the Zimmermann telegram as received by Eckhardt from Bernstorff. It contained just those small textual differences he had hoped it would.

  Meantime Room 40 had intercepted and decoded Zimmermann’s second telegram, instructing Eckhardt to contract the alliance, including Japan, “even now.” Japan’s possible infidelity had been troubling the Allied consciousness like an aching tooth for some time. Besides this, Britain had reason enough of her own to worry about Mexico. Without Tampico’s oil the British Navy would soon come to a halt. Protection of the foreign oil properties was in the hands of the Indian Manuel Peláez, a kind of bandit war lord who sold protection on the squeeze principle, but a determined German-led assault might break through his guard. Or Carranza, once under the German thumb, might, as he was always threatening, cancel the foreign concessions and take back the subsoil oil rights on behalf of Mexico. So far, it had paid Mexico better to accept the foreign royalties than to kill the goose that laid them, but it was impossible to say what the capricious Carranza might do with a German alliance to nerve him.

  On February 13, Carranza revealed his closeness to the Germans when he issued a call to all the neutrals to embargo war supplies to the belligerents. This, in effect, would have cut off supplies to the Allies, since Germany was already blockaded. News
paper cartoons pictured Carranza as a wooden puppet manipulated by a spike-helmeted Prussian who chortled with sinister glee as he made the puppet squeak, “Embargo everything!” Next day a German-inspired revolt in Cuba broke out, and the continued influx of German reservists from North and South America into Mexico was becoming alarming. Agents reported them active in the Tampico area, and three hundred German officers were said to have gathered in Mexico in recent weeks. When the German embassy in Washington closed down, two of its personnel, instead of returning to Germany, went to Mexico. One of them was the Japanese expert Baron Wilhelm von Schoen, who long ago had annoyed Wilson with his tactless prediction that America would have to fight Japan. His reassignment to Mexico was apparently in pursuit of the same goal. At the same time the Mexican Minister to Berlin, Rafael Zurbarán, came home, reportedly bringing with him the draft of Carranza’s embargo proposal, which was generally believed to have been written in Berlin. All this converging of Germans and German influence upon Mexico City pointed to some imminent and remarkable development.

  In London, Balfour had seized upon Hall’s news of the Zimmermann telegram with eagerness. Untroubled by Lord Hardinge’s compunctions, he was impatiently awaiting the moment when the telegram could be discreetly leaked to stimulate the Americans. How to present it so as to convince the Americans, without revealing its source, was a dilemma which was still being thrashed out at the Foreign Office in almost daily conversation with Admiral Hall.

  From the beginning the greatest fear—and one that was to prove valid—was that the Americans would pronounce it a hoax unless full information about how Britain had obtained it was given them. And then there was that question of the intentions of the inscrutable ally in the Far East. If Japan were really to join the enemy, nothing would so certainly induce the Russians to back out and make a separate peace—a calamity that the Allies were straining to prevent. With this on his mind, Balfour requested the honor of a visit from the Japanese Ambassador. Politely he endeavored to sound him out on Japan’s relations with Mexico, and as suavely the Ambassador replied that there were no relations of any interest. Japan was only anxious, the Ambassador said, to quiet American suspicions and had no ambitions in Mexico. Mr. Balfour did not come away greatly enlightened.

  Three days later, on February 19, the men in Room 40, after working for five weeks on a solution of the code for the missing passages, completed their decryptment of Zimmermann’s telegram. Admiral Hall informed Balfour that the moment had come, and it was decided between them that Hall himself should make the revelation to the American embassy.

  In the embassy at that moment the mood was despairing. “I am now ready to record my conviction that we shall not get into the war at all,” Ambassador Page wrote in his diary on February 19. The President, he went on, had no understanding that the Allies could not accept a peace without victory without becoming vassals of Germany. “He is constitutionally unable to come to the point of action. That much seems certain to me.”

  To Page the let-down after Wilson’s break with Germany was almost more agonizing than the years of frustration before it. He had thought that at last he was going to be able to shed the official mask of neutrality he had so unwillingly worn, but that wonderful moment which he had anticipated, when he could face his English friends with pride, had never come. Instead Wilson had backed away again. Page could not understand him. He had known Wilson since they were both in their twenties. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly and later as founder and editor of World’s Work, he had invited and published Wilson’s articles, encouraged his bent toward politics, told all his friends to “Watch that man!”, believed in his destiny as a leader of a new era in public life. But from the beginning of the war he believed the policy of neutrality to be pernicious. How could Wilson, whom he knew to be as steeped in England’s literature and constitutional traditions as he was himself, fail to see that the principles they both believed in were dependent on an Allied victory? Yet Wilson persisted in trying to pressure the Allies into what he called a “peace between equals.”

  To represent a policy that equated the Allies and the enemy was a torment to Page. The duty of conveying complaints against British blacklists, the pain and humiliation of acting for a country that hung back from the fight, caused him genuine suffering. Sir Edward Grey thought him the most convinced believer in democracy he had ever known, and democracy to Page was so unmistakably the central issue of the war that neutrality seemed to him almost like treason. His heart was with the Allies, and the heart of this warm, impressionable, winning man was concealed from no one. It spoke out in his vivid, illuminating letters, letters that were like eager talk, letters that, before they disagreed with him, Wilson described as “the best I ever read.”

  But Wilson was Chief Executive and Page his envoy, and the President had soon become irritated by Page’s constant criticism of his declared policy and even more by Page’s tendency to blunt its edges when transmitting it to England. He stopped reading the Ambassador’s letters, discarded him mentally, and left it to Colonel House to concoct all sorts of clever tricks to bypass him. In the summer of 1916 they had decided to bring Page home on leave to “get some American atmosphere in him,” but when he arrived Wilson refused to talk to him about the war. Only when Page stubbornly declined to go away did Wilson finally consent to a serious discussion. Although they talked all one morning, they were worlds apart and the interview was empty and sad. As he left, Page put a hand on the President’s shoulder and saw Wilson’s eyes fill with tears. They parted and never met again.

  Page had returned to London, and after the President’s reelection in November he offered to resign. His offer remained unanswered for some months, and only when he pressed for a reply was he told to stay on, while, behind his back, the President offered the post to Cleveland H. Dodge, who turned it down. The offer, made on February 6, three days after the break with Germany, is evidence of how seriously the President still intended to pursue neutrality.

  Ignorant of the effort to supplant him, Page was happy enough to continue as Ambassador, despite his total lack of sympathy with the policies he was supposed to represent, for the hope would not down that events would sooner or later force Wilson to abandon neutrality. He continued alternately pouring out brave accounts of the Allies’ struggle and succumbing to fits of depression.

  Back home, in February 1917, although the country was apathetic as a whole, impatience equal to Page’s was being voiced by many, most vociferously of all by former President Theodore Roosevelt. Writhing like a bound Prometheus against the confines of American pacifism, he raged against Wilson’s failure to “lead” and to “act.”

  “I don’t believe Wilson will go to war unless Germany literally kicks him into it,” he burst out in a letter to Senator Lodge on February 12. Even kicking Wilson wouldn’t be enough, he decided a few days later. “If anyone kicks him he brushes his clothes and utters some lofty sentence.” And again a few days after that: “He is evidently trying his old tactics; he is endeavoring to sneak out of going to war under any conditions.” “Yellow all through” was at this time Roosevelt’s favorite epithet for the man who reigned in his place. It seemed to him the only way to explain Wilson’s failure to fight against the menace of a German triumph. He believed that if Germany won she would move into the Caribbean, invade Cuba, threaten the Panama Canal, and probably enter into alliance with Japan, thus making possible simultaneous attacks on both coasts of the United States. Elihu Root, who had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, believed a victorious Germany would take Britain’s colonies and dominions, including Canada, and America would find herself staring at the Kaiser across her northern frontier.

  Inside the administration, Lansing felt “depressed and anxious” at the President’s inaction, believing, as he fervently did, that “we can no longer refuse to play our part … in favor of Democracy against Absolutism.” The situation in Washington, wrote home the British Ambassador in that last week of February, was like a
bottle of champagne after the wire has been cut but before the cork has been exploded.

  In England, Admiral Hall was in the process of exploding the cork in conversation with Mr. Edward Bell of the American embassy. Bell, whose job was to maintain liaison with the various intelligence offices of the British government, was well known to the DNI. It was to him Hall had given the Archibald papers in 1915 when, mistrusting the slow bureaucracy of his own Foreign Office, he wanted to make sure of their exposure in the United States. When Bell came to Room 40 and was shown a copy of Zimmermann’s telegram (in the text obtained in Mexico with Bernstorff’s alterations), he became the first of a long line of Americans whose immediate reaction was to pronounce the thing a fraud out of simple disbelief that anyone in his right mind would dare propose giving away a slice of the continental United States. Upon his receiving Hall’s assurances, his reaction changed to fury and then slowly to satisfaction as he realized the possibilities. Publication of the telegram, he told Hall, would certainly mean war.

  Warned by Bell’s initial incredulity, Hall was anxious to reveal the telegram in a way that would combine the greatest assurance of authenticity with the least exposure of Room 40. Without having agreed upon a method, he and Bell moved over to Grosvenor Square to inform the Ambassador. How Page took the news we do not know, because for some reason—maybe Hall enjoined secrecy even upon diary writing—he kept no record of it. We do know he spent the rest of the day in conference with Hall and Bell and Irwin Laughlin, First Secretary of the embassy, trying to work out a foolproof method of handling the decoded dynamite. As a first step they decided that Mr. Balfour should officially give the telegram to Ambassador Page, because, as Page put it, “that would be the British government giving it to our government.” Page would cable the text to Washington—but then, what if Wilson demanded proof? After prolonged wrestling with this problem, they hit upon a scheme which they hoped, rather nervously, would be proof against unexpected pitfalls. The Americans would be told that they could locate in their own files the incoming cable to Bernstorff or his forwarding telegram sent via Western Union to Eckhardt. This would of course still be in German code, but the code groups could be wired to Bell in the London embassy, where, on what was technically American soil, he could personally decode it with the help of de Grey, who would be allowed, for that occasion only, to bring over the code book from Room 40. Through this maneuver the American government, if challenged, would be able to say that the telegram had been decoded by Americans on American territory. Exhausted but relieved, the four gentlemen congratulated one another and went to bed.*