When Rintelen was not being Gibbons, he was being Frederick Hansen, in whose name he took another set of offices around the corner at 57 William Street, in the same building as the Transatlantic Trust Company, where his funds were deposited. As Hansen he carried on his designs against the munitions traffic, using as his headquarters the engine room of the Friedrich der Grosse, one of the interned German ships. Here, under his direction, a chemist named Dr. Scheele fabricated time bombs to be placed in the holds of ships carrying arms to the Allies. Several of these, successfully exploding in mid-ocean, were to provide the charge on which Rintelen was eventually tried and convicted.
Between being Gibbons and Hansen the inexhaustible Rintelen found time, in his own person, to rediscover old friends in the yacht basins of Long Island Sound and to attend to his main purpose—arranging for a war with Mexico through the restoration of General Huerta.
The American government, uneasy host to President Wilson’s least favorite character, had been watching Huerta from the moment of his arrival but did not know at first of German complicity in his plans. In May, Wilson took a step that was to enter yet another group of agents in the secret-service sweepstakes going on in New York. For some time Colonel House had been relaying information received from Captain Gaunt about German violations of neutral territory. The President had avoided pressing the issue because he wished to keep relations with the Germans reasonably smooth for the sake of the overriding goal on which his heart and mind were set: ending the war by American mediation. Then on May 7 the Lusitania was sunk and the country enjoyed a frenzy of horror over the crime of the Hohenzollerns. Some of the national anger rubbed off on the President. On May 14 he instructed Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, whose department controlled the Secret Service, to put a watch on German and Austrian embassy personnel to uncover any conduct unbecoming to diplomats.
“We rented an apartment,” testified Secret Service Chief William J. Flynn some years later, “and the telephone man led the wires in and hooked them up so that we had a telephone matching every telephone in the two embassies. When a receiver was taken down in the embassy a light flashed in the Secret Service apartment. When a phone bell rang in the embassy one rang in our apartment. Four stenographers worked in relays, all expert linguists.”
Each night Flynn received a stenographic report of all conversations of the previous twenty-four hours, copies of which were given to the State Department in a procedure known to the President. Among the interesting data furnished by these calls were Count von Bernstorff’s lively conversations with Washington ladies. No, he modestly protested to one caller, he really should not be compared to the title character of a current play called The Great Lover, because, unlike the play’s hero, he had “stopped.” “Perhaps you have taken a rest, but not stopped,” a female voice replied, adding in a sharper tone, “You needed a rest.”
In New York the even busier German wires were tapped with the cooperation of Police Commissioner Arthur Woods. Two of Flynn’s men were sent to trail the busy visits of German diplomats in New York, and the Bomb Squad of the Department of Justice, whose job was to track saboteurs, joined the proliferation of watchers. In the course of these duties both sets of American agents eventually picked up Rintelen’s trail, although they did not as yet connect him with General Huerta. Department of Justice agents, following saboteurs, spotted him as Frederick Hansen and reported that he had unlimited funds and was having some negotiations with a Mexican whom they mistakenly believed to be Villa’s representative. In July a State Department official learned from a lady informant that she recognized Hansen as her old friend, Captain Franz von Rintelen.
Meanwhile Rintelen had been conferring with Huerta again, both at the Hotel Manhattan and at an unnamed Fifth Avenue hotel, probably the Holland House, another favorite German meeting place, at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street. Upon one of these occasions he noticed two detectives who had frequently shadowed him and who now followed Huerta as he left the hotel. “Our interview,” Rintelen recalls dramatically in his memoirs, “had been observed!” Nevertheless, using the German naval code, he reported the substance of the meeting to Berlin. Huerta, he said, wanted funds for the purchase of arms in the United States, moral support, and U-boats to land weapons along the Mexican coast for his adherents who would rise when he crossed the border. On his part he would, after regaining power, take up arms against the United States. That Huerta, a hard-headed realist, intended seriously to make war on the United States is unlikely, but plotters who want something from each other are frequently generous with promises. It is also possible that Rintelen, carried away by the heroic role in which he saw himself personally engineering a war that would cut off American munitions, exaggerated the prospects to Berlin.
Whether Room 40 intercepted this message is not recorded. Communication between Berlin and Bernstorff’s embassy was coded variously in the diplomatic code, No. 13040, in another code, designated 5950, and in the naval cipher, VB 718, two of which—and possibly all three—Room 40 could read at this time. Two months later Admiral Hall was able to use one of the three codes to lure Rintelen himself into a trap.
Absorbed by his multifarious conspiracies, Rintelen now left further negotiations on the Mexican matter to Papen and Boy-Ed, and delegated practical preparations for the rising—purchase of arms, arrangements at the border, deals with the factions in Mexico—to Dr. Albert’s chief assistant, Carl Heynen, formerly Hamburg-American agent at Tampico, and to Frederico Stallforth, a prominent German banker in Mexico who had come up to New York to assist Huerta’s return. Stallforth and his brother Alberto, who handled the Mexican end, were focal points of Mexican intrigue whose many contacts opened as many possibilities of betrayal, and they were naturally closely watched by the Carranzistas. At some point during these weeks eight million rounds of ammunition were purchased in St. Louis, orders placed for a further three million in New York, and a preliminary sum of $800,000 deposited to Huerta’s account in the Deutsche Bank in Havana as well as $95,000 in a Mexican account. Arrangements were made with General Félix Díaz, nephew of the old dictator, to lead a rising in the south when Huerta should cross the border in the north. Papen, who knew the ground from earlier trips to Mexico in 1914, was now sent down to the border to study the terrain from the military point of view, to arrange for a sort of underground railway by which German reservists in the United States could enter Mexico, and to distribute funds for Huerta’s use in Brownsville, El Paso, and San Antonio.
Back in New York, Boy-Ed carried on the negotiations with Huerta. Driven by the embassy chauffeur, who was one of Voska’s men, he went to see Huerta at his hotel, the Ansonia, at Broadway and 72nd Street. A cautious answer had come through from Berlin, promising that further funds would be forthcoming and that U-boats and auxiliary cruisers would lend support when Mexico should enter upon hostilities with the United States. At further meetings with Boy-Ed, with Voska’s men listening in, Huerta was promised ten thousand rifles and a first credit of ten thousand dollars. By now deeply committed, Huerta, whose family had come from Spain to join him, moved forward to his destiny.
He could not have chosen a more frenzied moment. Americans had hardly recovered from the Japanese war scare over the presence of the Asama at Turtle Bay in April, when they were flung into a furor over the sinking of the Lusitania in May. Wilson issued condemnatory notes, Germany rejected his principles, Secretary Bryan resigned when Wilson’s further notes became too strong for his peace-loving soul, America and Germany moved to the verge of war, and the whole country was on edge.
In the midst of this furor, on Friday, June 25, General Huerta, after attending a baseball game, telling a census taker that he was not retired, and buying tickets to a policeman’s ball, boarded a westbound train, saying he was going to visit the Exposition at San Francisco. On Saturday afternoon Secretary Lansing, a man of precise and invariable habits, made his usual neat notation on his desk calendar, “half holiday,” and went home at one o’cloc
k. At eight that evening the Department called him with news that Huerta had changed trains at Kansas City and was expected at El Paso next morning at six-thirty. Cobb, the State Department agent at El Paso, was waiting for instructions. The moment for the return from Elba had come.
It was a moment touchy in the extreme. If Huerta crossed the border, Washington would be on the brink of another Veracruz. If there was anything Wilson did not want at that moment, when he was close to a crisis with Germany over the submarine question, it was another Veracruz. But Wilson had himself just left Washington the day before for a vacation in New Hampshire. Meantime Huerta’s train was speeding southward, and something had to be done. Lansing wired Cobb to cooperate with Department of Justice agents in the area and advise immediately. The eager Mr. Cobb took this to be authorization enough to act on his own responsibility, as he had already found out that the Justice men were without instructions. He had also found out that Huerta planned to leave the train at Newman, New Mexico, twenty miles from the border, where he was to be met by General Orozco, who would drive him to Mexico by car. After rounding up an Army colonel, twenty-five soldiers, and two deputy marshals, Cobb sped through the night to Newman, arriving on Sunday at dawn, just before the train.
At sunrise, as the train slowed to a stop at Newman, General Orozco drove up in his car, General Huerta descended from his Pullman, and Mr. Cobb, followed by his escort, stepped from behind a baggage crate, made his arrest, and took both generals in custody to El Paso. There Huerta was released on a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond when his embarrassed captors found that news of his arrest by Americans had excited the Mexican populace of whatever faction in his favor. Washington sent Cobb a telegram of congratulations, but he worriedly reported back that business sentiment was strong for Huerta, the Mayor of El Paso had agreed to be his attorney, partisans were giving him ovations, the town was full of former Huerta officers and henchmen, the border restless. Huerta could buy out the garrison of Ciudad Juárez across the river any time he wanted, ten thousand mercenaries assembled by Orozco were waiting to rally to him, if he got a foothold Villa would collapse, the way to the capital would be open. The American Army had agreed to arrest him the moment he crossed the border but in the meantime had invited him to dinner at Fort Bliss. As long as he remained in El Paso, poised on the edge of Mexico, agitation would grow. Cobb begged Washington to get Huerta away from the border quickly.
But in Washington the anxious question was, how? Remembering the horrid consequences of the affair of the salute only a year ago, no one in Wilson’s administration cared to risk another too precipitate brush with the foxy Aztec that might provoke another incident. Wilson’s attention was momentarily engaged in New Hampshire by a growing acquaintance with his daughters’ new friend, the delightful Mrs. Galt. While Lansing held one conference after another with the Secretary of War, the Chilean Ambassador, the Attorney-General, and other colleagues, Cobb harried him daily with telegrams pleading for action to get Huerta away “before the night passes.” Then, on July 2, Orozco escaped to Mexico, and Washington, unable to delay longer, ordered Huerta rearrested and lodged in the county jail. But he was hot property, and every means was tried of persuading him to vanish painlessly away. He was threatened with deportation as an alien, he was wheedled with offers of liberty if he would only leave the border and consent to live in the northern part of the United States. But Huerta, stubborn as in the old days when he had refused to fire the salute, now refused to disembarrass Washington, refused to go away, refused to post higher bail, refused to accept any conditions in exchange for his freedom. “I will leave this jail only if I leave it unconditionally,” he said. “I will agree to no compromise. I will stay in my cell rather than accept terms for my liberty.” He took to studying English from a child’s primer and complained only that the ice water his jailer brought him was “a little thin.” Sadly he told reporters, “I have not had a drink these one-two-three-four days”—but even for brandy he would not make terms.
Cobb’s telegrams now waxed frantic: “Orozco gathering forces in the mountains,” he reported, “movement very thorough and strong.” In Washington the benefits Germany expected to reap from an explosion in Mexico were being made all too clear by reports coming in from the agents in New York. Holding Huerta in the county jail was like holding on to a stick of dynamite with the fuse lit. On July 9 the War Department ordered Huerta transferred to military prison at Fort Bliss. Gasping with relief, Cobb wired, “This solves the problem.”
He was wrong, for Huerta did not cease to be a problem until he was dead, and that was not yet.
A footnote was Bernstorff’s characteristic washing his hands of the affair. While still under civil arrest, Huerta had wired him asking for the protection of the German government for his wife and children because the American officers “do not let them sleep or eat and search my house at will.” Bernstorff blandly forwarded the message to Lansing with a covering note saying he had neither answered the note nor taken any notice of it. Shown to the President, Bernstorff’s note elicited Wilson’s one-line comment, “This is truly extraordinary.”
Rintelen too was now about to come to the end of his usefulness. On July 6, two days after Huerta’s arrest, he had received a telegram in the German Admiralty code, recalling him on the ground that his activities were becoming known and he was in danger of arrest. Once again traveling as Emil Gasche, he sailed on the neutral Holland-America liner Noordam on August 3, just four months after arriving in New York. When the Noordam touched at England she was boarded by an armed search party which took an unusual interest in the Swiss citizen Mr. Gasche. Declaring themselves dissatisfied with his identity, the search party took him off the ship and, despite his indignant protests, escorted him to London for further examination. Carefully rehearsed in the details of the real Gasche’s life, Rintelen was so convincing in his first interview at Scotland Yard that his interrogators’ confidence in a certain tip they had received was shaken. They agreed to his demand to be taken before the Swiss Minister, who, equally convinced by his story, vouched for him. As a last precaution before apologetically releasing the Swiss gentleman, the Yard decided on one more interview, to which the man who had given the original tip was invited.
When Rintelen, still indignantly Swiss, entered the room, he at once felt fixed upon him the gaze of a newcomer in naval uniform, a short, pink-cheeked admiral. While an aide questioned him in German, the admiral, from beneath intermittently blinking eyelids, watched him unwaveringly, like a cat. Why not, suggested the admiral, speaking for the first time, ask the English legation in Berne to ascertain whether it was possible for Emil Gasche to be in London? The presumed Swiss knew he would not be Swiss much longer. Preferring to be held as a prisoner of war in England, rather than as a criminal in America, he admitted his identity as Captain von Rintelen of the Imperial German Navy. Admiral Hall nodded, having known Rintelen’s identity from the beginning. Either, as some have suggested, he himself sent the telegram recalling Rintelen from America, or he intercepted a genuine telegram of recall. For the next twenty-one months Rintelen remained in a prisoner-of-war camp in England.*
His departure from America had not finished the story. On August 4, the day after he sailed from New York, Gaunt’s mouthpiece, the Providence Journal, using evidence obtained from Voska, published an exposé of the German plot to restore Huerta and provoke war with Mexico. It did not mention Rintelen but ascribed the conspiracy to Bernstorff and Boy-Ed, whom it was more to England’s interest to discredit. Bernstorff, whose invariable rule was to deny knowledge of anything nefarious any of his subordinates might be accused of, repudiated the newspaper story; but even as he spoke, another exposé—the famous affair of the Purloined Briefcase—was in preparation.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of July 24, Dr. Albert and George Sylvester Viereck, the American propagandist who worked for the Germans, had left Albert’s office at 45 Broadway, followed by an American Secret Service agent, Frank Burke. Of the tw
o, Burke recognized only Viereck, but he noticed that Viereck treated his companion with deference and that this man fitted a description of Albert as a man of fifty, six feet tall, with a face marked by dueling scars, and further that he carried a heavily stuffed briefcase. The two men took the Sixth Avenue El at Rector Street, and when Viereck got off alone at 23rd Street, Burke stuck with his companion. Albert fell asleep but woke just as the El doors were opening for the 50th Street station. He jumped up and hurried out, forgetting his briefcase, which Burke promptly laid hold of and, seeing Albert rushing back, got off at the far end of the car. While Albert looked frantically around for the person who could have taken his briefcase, Burke flattened himself against the wall of the platform, pretending to light a cigar. Albert dashed down to the street; Burke took the other stairway and jumped on a moving trolley just as Albert spotted him. Burke told the conductor that the wild-eyed man running alongside was a “nut” who had just created a disturbance on the El. The conductor told the motorman; the motorman obligingly passed up the next stop. At 53rd Street, Burke changed to a downtown trolley and rode it all the way to the carbarn, where he immediately telephoned his chief, Flynn. Flynn came up, examined the contents of the briefcase, sent off a wire to Secretary McAdoo, who was vacationing in Maine, and took the portfolio up to him the same evening.
The Albert papers, though not supplying evidence of illegality sufficient for prosecution, were a revelation of the various kinds of German undercover activity. The government, deciding they could best be handled by public exposure, gave the papers to the New York World, which accorded them half the front page on August 15. It was a midsummer sensation and the World kept it going with serial publication of all the incriminating documents. Bernstorff, adept at avoiding the scandals his subordinates got themselves into, retired to the Adirondacks, where, the State Department was informed, “he has been buried for the last ten days with his inamorata,” while the unfortunate Albert became famous as the “Minister without Portfolio.” Rintelen’s name still did not appear, but the public, made aware by the Albert portfolio that German plots were no respecters of American soil, was more disposed to accept further revelations.
The Zimmermann Telegram Page 9