THE GERMAN SECRET
SERVICE IN AMERICA

CHAPTER I THE ORGANIZATION

The economic, diplomatic and military aspects of secret warfare in America—Germany's peace-time organization—von Bernstorff, the diplomat—Albert, the economist—von Papen and Boy-Ed, the men of war.

When, in the summer of 1914, the loaded dice fell for war, Germany began a campaign overseas as thoughtfully forecasted as that first headlong flood which rolled to the Marne. World-domination was the Prussian objective. It is quite natural that the United States, whose influence affected a large part of the world, should have received swift attention from Berlin. America and Americans could serve Germany's purpose in numerous ways, and the possible assets of the United States had been searchingly assayed in Berlin long before the arrival of "Der Tag."

The day dawned—and Germany found herself hemmed in by enemies. Her navy did not control the oceans upon which she had depended for a large percentage of her required food and raw materials, and upon which she must continue to depend if her output were to keep pace with her war needs. If surprise-attack should fail to bring the contest to a sudden and favorable conclusion, Germany was prepared to accept the more probable alternative of a contest of economic endurance. Therefore, she reasoned, supplies must continue to come from America.

Of importance scarcely secondary to the economic phase of her warfare in the United States was the diplomatic problem. Here was a nation of infinite resources, a people of infinite resource. This nation must be enlisted on the side of the Central Powers; failing that, must be kept friendly; under no circumstances was she to be allowed to enlist with the Allies. One fundamental trait of Americans Germany held too lightly—their blood-kinship to Britons—and it is a grimly amusing commentary upon the confidence of the German in bonds Teutonic that he believed that the antidote to this racial "weakness" of ours lay in the large numbers of Germans who had settled here and become Americans of sorts. But the German was alarmingly if not absolutely correct in his estimate, for upon the conduct and zeal of Germans in America actually depended much of the success of Germany's diplomatic tactics in America.

Her peace-time organization in America consisted of four executives: an ambassador, a fiscal agent, a military attaché, and a naval attaché. Its chief was the ambassador, comparable in his duties and privileges to the president of a corporation, the representative with full authority to negotiate with other organizations, and responsible to his board of directors—the foreign office in Berlin. Its treasurer was the fiscal agent. And its department heads were the military and naval attachés, each responsible in some degree to his superiors in matters of policy and finances, and answerable also to Berlin.

The functions of the chief were two-fold. Convincing evidence produced by the State Department has placed at his door the ultimate responsibility for executing Germany's commands not in the United States alone, but throughout all of the world excepting Middle Europe. Under his eyes passed Berlin's instructions to her envoys in both Americas, and through his hands passed their reports. He directed and delegated the administration of all German policy in the western world and the far east, and of course directed all strictly diplomatic enterprises afoot in the United States.

Germany could hardly have chosen an abler envoy than this latest of all the Bernstorffs, Johann, a statesman whose ancestors for generations had been Saxon diplomats. A glance at the man's countenance convinced one of his powers of concentration: the many lines of his face seemed to focus on a point between his eyebrows. And yet his expression was hardly grim. The modeling of his head was unusually strong, his features sensitive, with no trace of weakness. If there had been weakness about his mouth, it was concealed by the conventional ferocity of a Hohenzollern moustache, and yet those untruthful lips could part in an ingratiating smile which flashed ingenuous friendliness. His frame was tall and slender, his mannerisms suggested carefully bridled nervous activity. The entire appearance of the man may best be described by a much-abused term—he was "distinguished."

Count von Bernstorff, once his nation had declared war upon France and England, went to war with the United States. As ambassador, diplomatic courtesy gave him a scope of observation limited only by the dignity of his position. A seat in a special gallery in the Senate and House of Representatives was always ready for his occupancy; he could virtually command the attention of the White House; and senators, congressmen and office-holders from German-American districts respected him. Messengers kept him in constant touch with the line-up of Congress on important issues, and two hours later that line-up was known in the Foreign Office in Berlin. As head and front of the German spy system in America, he held cautiously aloof from all but the most instrumental acquaintances: men and women of prominent political and social influence who he knew were inclined, for good and sufficient reasons, to help him. One woman, whose bills he paid at a Fifth Avenue gown house, was the wife of a prominent broker and another woman of confessedly German affiliations who served him lived within a stone's throw of the Metropolitan Museum and its nearby phalanx of gilded dwellings (her husband's office was in a building at 11 Broadway, of which more anon); a third woman intimate lived in a comfortable apartment near Fifth Avenue—an apartment selected for her, though she was unaware of it, by secret agents of the United States. During the early days of the war the promise of social sponsorship which any embassy in Washington could extend proved bait for a number of ingénues of various ages, with ambition and mischief in their minds, and the gracious Ambassador played them smoothly and dexterously. Mostly they were not German women, for the German women of America were not so likely to be useful socially, nor as a type so astute as to qualify them for von Bernstorff's delicate work. To those whom he chose to see he was courteous, and superficially frank almost to the point of naïveté. The pressure of negotiation between Washington and Berlin became more and more exacting as the war progressed, yet he found time to command a campaign whose success would have resulted in disaster to the United States. That he was not blamed for the failure of that campaign when he returned to Germany in April, 1917, is evidenced by his prompt appointment to the court of Turkey, a difficult and important post, and in the case of Michaelis, a stepping-stone to the highest post in the Foreign Office.

Upon the shoulders of Dr. Heinrich Albert, privy counsellor and fiscal agent of the German Empire, fell the practical execution of German propaganda throughout America. He was the American agent of a government which has done more than any other to coöperate with business towards the extension of influence abroad, on the principle that "the flag follows the constitution." As such he had had his finger on the pulse of American trade, had catalogued exhaustively the economic resources of the country, and held in his debt, as his nation's treasurer in America, scores of bankers, manufacturers and traders to whom Germany had extended subsidy. As such also he was the paymaster of the Imperial secret diplomatic and consular agents.

You could find him almost any day until the break with Germany in a small office in the Hamburg-American Building (a beehive of secret agents) at No. 45 Broadway, New York. He was tall and slender, and wore the sombre frock coat of the European business man with real grace. His eyes were blue and clear, his face clean-shaven and faintly sabre-scarred, and his hair blond. He impressed one as an unusual young man in a highly responsible position. His greeting to visitors, of whom he had few, was punctilious, his bow low, and his manner altogether polite. He encouraged conversation rather than offered it. He had none of the "hard snap" of the energetic, outspoken, brusque American man of business. Dr. Albert was a smooth-running, well-turned cog in the great machine of Prussian militarism.

Upon him rested the task of spending between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000 a week for German propaganda. He spent thirty million at least—and only Germany knows how much more—in secret agency work, also known by the uglier names of bribery, sedition and conspiracy. He admitted that he wasted a half million or more. He had a joint account with Bernstorff in the Chase National Bank, New York, which amounted at times to several millions. His resources gave weight to his utterances in the quiet office overlooking Broadway, or in the German Club in Central Park South, or in the consulates or hotels of Chicago and New Orleans and San Francisco, to which he made occasional trips to confer with German business men.

His colleagues held him in high esteem. His methods were quiet and successful, and his participation in the offences against America's peace might have passed unproven had he not been engaged in a too-absorbing conversation one day in August, 1915, upon a Sixth Avenue elevated train. He started up to leave the train at Fiftieth Street, and carelessly left his portfolio behind him—to the tender care of a United States Secret Service man. It contained documents revealing his complicity in enterprises the magnitude of which beggars the imagination. The publication of certain of those documents awoke the slumbering populace to a feeling of chagrin and anger almost equal to his own at the loss of his dossier. And yet he stayed on in America, and returned with the ambassadorial party to Germany only after the severance of diplomatic relations in 1917, credited with expert generalship on the economic sector of the American front.

Germany's military attaché to the United States was Captain Franz von Papen. His mission was the study of the United States army. In August, 1914, it may be assumed that he had absorbed most of the useful information of the United States army, which at that moment was no superhuman problem. In July of that year he was in Mexico, observing, among other matters, the effect of dynamite explosions on railways. He was quite familiar with Mexico. According to Admiral von Hintze he had organized a military unit in the lukewarm German colony in Mexico City, and he used one or more of the warring factions in the southern republic to test the efficacy of various means of warfare.

The rumble of a European war sent him scurrying northward. From Mexico on July 29 he wired Captain Boy-Ed—of whom more presently—in New York to

" ... arrange business for me too with Pavenstedt,"

which referred to the fact that Boy-Ed had just engaged office space in the offices of G. Amsinck & Company, New York, which was at that time a German house of which Adolph Pavenstedt was the president, but which has since been taken over by American interests. And he added:

"Then inform Lersner. The Russian attaché ordered back to Washington by telegraph. On outbreak of war have intermediaries locate by detective where Russian and French intelligence office."

The latter part of the message is open to two interpretations: that Boy-Ed was to have detectives locate the Russian and French secret service officers; or that Boy-Ed was to place German spies in those offices.

Captain von Papen reported to his ministry of war anent the railway explosions:

"I consider it out of the question that explosives prepared in this way would have to be reckoned with in a European war...."

a significant opinion, which he changed later.

What of the man himself? He was all that "German officer" suggested at that time to any one who had traveled in Germany. His military training had been exhaustive. Though he had not seen "active service," his life, from the early youth when he had been selected from his gymnasium fellows for secret service in Abteilung III of the great bureau, had been unusually active. He had traveled as a civilian over various countries, drawing maps, harking to the sentiment of the people, and checking from time to time the operations of resident German agents abroad. His disguises were thorough, as this incident will illustrate: In Hamburg, at the army riding school where von Papen was trained, young officers are taught the French style. Yet one fine morning in Central Park he stopped to chat with an acquaintance who had bought a mare. Von Papen admired the mount, promptly named its breed, and told in what counties in Ireland the best specimens of that breed could be found—information called up from a riding tour he had made over the length and breadth of Ireland. It is commonly said that horsemen trained in the French style cling to its mannerisms, but a cavalier revealing those mannerisms in Ireland, where the style is exclusively English, would have attracted undue attention. So he had disguised even his horsemanship!

A man who moves constantly about among more or less unsuspecting peoples seeking their military weakness becomes intolerant. Tolerance is scarcely a German military trait, and in that respect Captain von Papen was consistently loyal to his own superior organization. "I always say to those idiotic Yankees they had better hold their tongues," he wrote to his wife in a letter which fell later into the hands of those same "bloedsinnige" Yankees. He was inordinately proud of his facility in operating unobserved, arrogant of his ability, and blunt in his criticism of his associates. He telegraphed Boy-Ed on one occasion to be more cautious. The gracious colleague replied, in a letter:

"Dear Papen: A secret agent who returned from Washington this evening made the following statement: 'The Washington people are very much excited about von Papen and are having a constant watch kept on him. They are in possession of a whole heap of incriminating evidence against him. They have no evidence against Count B. and Captain B-E (!).'"

And Boy-Ed, a trifle optimistically, perhaps, added:

"In this connection I would suggest with due diffidence that perhaps the first part of your telegram is worded rather too emphatically."

Von Papen was a man of war, a Prussian, the Feldmarschal of the Kaiser in America. In appearance he bespoke his vigor: he was well set up, rawboned, with a long nose, prominent ears, keen eyes and a strong lower jaw. He was energetic in speech and swift in formulating daring plans. In those first frantic weeks after the declaration of war he reached out in all directions to snap taut the strings that held his organization together—German reservists who had been peaceful farmers, shopkeepers or waiters, all over the United States, were mobilized for service, and paraded through Battery Park in New York shouting "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles!" to the strains of the Austrian hymn, while they waited for Papen's orders from a building near by, and picked quarrels with a counter procession of Frenchmen screaming the immortal "Marseillaise." Up in his office sat the attaché, summoning, assigning, despatching his men on missions that were designed to terrorize America as the spiked helmets were terrorizing Belgium at that moment.

And he, too, failed. Although von Papen marshaled his consuls, his reservists, his thugs, his women, and his skilled agents, for a programme of violence the like of which America had never experienced, the military phase of the war was not destined for decision here, and there is again something ironical in the fact that the arrogance of Captain von Papen's outrages hastened the coming of war to America and the decline of Captain von Papen's style of warfare in America.

The Kaiser's naval attaché at Washington was Karl Boy-Ed, the child of a German mother and a Turkish father, who had elected a naval career and shown a degree of aptitude for his work which qualified him presently for the post of chief lieutenant to von Tirpitz. He was one of the six young officers who were admitted to the chief councils of the German navy, as training for high executive posts. In the capacity of news chief of the Imperial navy, Boy-Ed carried on two highly successful press campaigns to influence the public on the eve of requests for heavy naval appropriations, the second, in 1910, calling for 400,000,000 marks. He spread broadcast through cleverly contrived pamphlets and through articles placed in the subsidized press, a national resentment against British naval dominion. His duties took him all over the world as naval observer, and he may be credited more than casually with weaving the plan-fabric of marine supremacy with which Germany proposed in due time to envelop the world.

So he impressed diplomatic Washington in 1911 as a polished cosmopolite. Polished he was, measured by the standards of diplomatic Washington, for rare was the young American of Boy-Ed's age who had his cultivation, his wide experience, and his brilliant charm. He was sought after by admiring mothers long before he was sought after by the Secret Service; he moved among the clubs of Washington and New York making intimates of men whose friendship and confidence would serve the Fatherland, cloaking his real designs by frivolity and frequent attendances at social functions. His peace-time duties had been to study the American navy; to familiarize himself with its ship power and personnel, with its plans for expansion, its theories of strategy, its means of supply, and finally, with the coast defenses of the country. He had learned his lesson, and furnished Berlin with clear reports. On those reports, together with those of his colleagues in other countries, hinged Germany's readiness to enter war, for it would have been folly to attempt a war of domination with America an unknown, uncatalogued naval power. (It will be well to recall that the submarine is an American invention, and that Germany's greatest submarine development took place in the years 1911-1914.)

And then, suddenly, he dropped the cloak. The Turk in him stood at attention while the German in him gave him sharp orders—commands to be carried out with Oriental adroitness and Prussian finish. Then those who had said lightly that "Boy-Ed knows more about our navy than Annapolis itself" began to realize that they had spoken an alarming truth. His war duties were manifold. Like von Papen, he had his corps of reservists, his secret agents, his silent forces everywhere ready for active coöperation in carrying out the naval enterprises Germany should see fit to undertake in Western waters.

America learned gradually of the machinations of the four executives, Bernstorff, Albert, Papen and Boy-Ed. America had not long to wait for evidences of their activity, but it was a long time before the processes of investigation revealed their source. It was inevitable that they could not work undiscovered for long, and they seem to have realized that they must do the utmost damage at top speed. Their own trails were covered for a time by the obscure identities of their subordinates. The law jumps to no conclusions. Their own persons were protected by diplomatic courtesy. It required more than two years of tedious search for orthodox legal evidence to arraign these men publicly in their guilt, and when that evidence had finally been obtained, and Germany's protest of innocence had been deflated, it was not these men who suffered, but their country, and the price she paid was war with America.

A hundred or more of their subordinates have been convicted of various criminal offenses and sent to prison. Still more were promptly interned in prison camps at the outbreak of war in 1917. The secret army included all types, from bankers to longshoremen. Many of them were conspicuous figures in American public life, and of these no small part were allowed to remain at large under certain restrictions—and under surveillance. Germany's army in the United States was powerful in numbers; the fact that so many agents were working destruction probably hastened their discovery; the loyalty of many so-called German-Americans was always questionable. The public mind, confused as it had never been before by the news of war, was groping about for sound fundamentals, and was being tantalized with false principles by the politicians. Meanwhile Count von Bernstorff was watching Congress and the President, Dr. Albert was busy in great schemes, Captain von Papen was commanding an active army of spies, and Captain Boy-Ed was engaged in a bitter fight with the British navy.

CHAPTER II THE CONSPIRATORS' TASK

The terrain—Lower New York—The consulates—The economic problem of supplying Germany and checking supplies to the Allies—The diplomatic problem of keeping America's friendship—The military problem in Canada, Mexico, India, etc.—Germany's denial.

The playwright selects from the affairs of a group of people a few characters and incidents, and works them together into a three-hour plot. He may include no matter which is not relevant to the development of his story, and although in the hands of the artist the play seems to pierce clearly into the characters of the persons involved, in reality he is constructing a framework, whose angles are only the more prominent salients of character and episode. The stage limits him, whether his story takes place in the kitchen or on the battlefield.

The drama of German spy operations in America is of baffling proportions. Its curtain rose long before the war; its early episodes were grave enough to have caused, any one of them, a nine-days' wonder in the press, its climax was rather a huge accumulation of intolerable disasters than a single outstanding incident, and its dénouement continued long after America's declaration of war. In the previous chapter we have accepted our limitations and introduced only the four chief characters of the play. It is necessary, in describing the motives for their enterprises, to appreciate the problems which their scene of operations presented.

The world was their workshop. Plots hatched in Berlin and developed in Washington and New York bore fruit from Sweden to India, from Canada to Chili. The economic importance of the United States in the war needs no further proof than its vast area, its miles of seacoast, its volume of export and import, and its producing power. As a diplomatic problem it offered, among other things, a public opinion of a hundred million people of parti-colored temperament, played upon by a force of some 40,000 publications. As a military factor, the United States possessed a strong fleet, owned the only Atlantic-Pacific waterway, was bounded on the south by Mexico and the coveted Gulf, and on the north by one of Germany's enemies. There was hardly a developed section of the nation which did not require prompt and radical German attention, or one which did not receive it in proportion to its industrial development. Washington, as the governmental capital, and New York as the real capital became at once the headquarters of German operations in the western world.

Count von Bernstorff directed all enterprises from the Imperial Embassy in Washington, and from the Ritz-Carlton in New York. An ambassador was once asked by an ingenuous woman at a New York dinner whether he often ran counter of European spies. "Oh, yes," he replied. "I used to stop at the ——, but my baggage was searched by German agents so often that I moved to the ——. But there it was just as bad." "Didn't you complain to the management?"—the lady wanted particulars. "No," the diplomat answered naturally, "for you see every time Bernstorff stops at the —— I have his baggage searched, too!"

The strands of intrigue focussed from every corner of America upon the lower tip of Manhattan. In a tall building at 11 Broadway, which towers over Bowling Green and confronts the New York Custom House, Captain Boy-Ed had his office. A long stone's throw to the northward stood the Hamburg-American building; there Dr. Albert carried on much of his business. Captain von Papen had offices on the twenty-fifth floor of No. 60 Wall Street. If we regard 11 Broadway as the tip of a triangle, with Wall Street and Broadway forming its right angle and 60 Wall Street as its other extremity, we find that its imaginary hypotenuse travels through the building of J. P. Morgan & Company, chief bankers for the Allies; through the New York Stock Exchange, where the so-called "Christmas leak" turned a pretty penny for certain German sympathizers in 1916; through the home of the Standard Oil Companies, as well as through several great structures of less strategic importance. There is more than mere coincidence in this geometrical freak—Germany held her stethoscope as close as possible to the heart of American business. Fortunately, however, the offices of Chief William J. Flynn—until January, 1918, head of the United States Secret Service—were in the Custom House near by.

After business hours these men met their subordinates at various rendezvous in the city; the hotels were convenient, the Manhattan was frequently appointed, and the Deutscher Verein at 112 Central Park South was the liveliest ganglion of all the nerve centers of a system of communication which tapped every section of the great community.