Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America

by Blum, Howard

  Tom gave the Independence Day incidents considerable thought. It was clear that only luck had averted a disaster that would’ve shaken the nation. Yet Tom was a cautious man, and he waited until he felt certain about how the bomb squad should proceed before sending word to Commissioner Woods that he needed to talk.

  At the commissioner’s suggestion they met in the Harvard Club; Woods liked to get away from the hubbub of headquarters, and he also liked a whiskey at the end of the day. It was Tom’s first time in the university’s clubhouse on Forty-Fourth Street, and they sat, drinks in hand, across from one another in a dimly lit high-ceilinged room that to Tom’s eye seemed to stretch the length of a city block.

  Scattered about the large hall, men had settled into leather chairs, sipping their cocktails and holding decorous, muted conversations. The bustling city with all its tumult and woes might have belonged to another universe. Tom couldn’t help wondering what the Circle would have had to say about this cushy patrician sanctuary. For that matter, he found it all uncomfortably grand and ruling-class; at his roots he was still the rough-and-tumble Irish immigrant brought up on the West Side, the lad who’d left high school before graduation to bring home a paycheck.

  After a few moments of small talk, though, he shoved any unease from his mind and plunged ahead. He began to explain to the commissioner why he’d asked to meet.

  “Unrest is contagious,” he declared, according to the account he’d write of the conversation. “The anarchist likes disturbance as well as he dislikes order.” Although the botched attack against the Rockefeller family had resulted in the death of the three bomb makers and one arrest, in the minds of the Circle and its supporters, Tom explained, the very fact that the events had made headlines could be counted as success.

  Then Tom turned grave. In the low, quiet voice he fell into whenever there was bad news to share, he offered up a prediction that had been troubling him for days.

  It’s not over, he declared. The notoriety will bring more attacks. More bombs will explode. Only next time, it might not be the bombers who are the victims.

  “It’s our duty,” he said, “to make a careful investigation of the Brescia Circle.”

  The commissioner was a thoughtful man. He had been a master at the Groton School before joining the police department, and it was his pedagogical instinct to ask questions rather than summarily bark orders. He also respected Tom’s knowledge; a decade of policing the sidewalks of New York taught the sort of things not even imagined in the classrooms of Harvard and Groton. He asked Tom what would be the best way to proceed.

  Tom had a strategy; it had been clear in his mind before he’d arrived at the club. But he didn’t just blurt it out. He believed there was more to be gained by giving the commissioner a glimpse of how he’d come to his plan. He was, after all, well aware that the scope of the operation he was envisioning, one that could go on for costly month after month without producing results, was unprecedented. He needed the commissioner’s formal consent. If Tom overplayed his hand, Woods might dismiss the proposal as overly ambitious, at once both too risky and too expensive. Cautiously, Tom backed into his request.

  His first instinct, he began, was to recruit an informant from within the Circle. It would be the safest approach, he explained. The department would need to provide bribe money, but, he went on, none of its men would be in any danger.

  No sooner had Tom voiced this suggestion, however, than he went on to dismiss it. “I have always tried to avoid using stool pigeons,” he explained as if giving a lecture to a novice—which in fact was pretty much the situation. “He’s an uncomfortable ally on a case. You cannot be sure that a man who associates with criminals and is giving them away is not giving the case away at the same time.”

  The commissioner agreed that this seemed reasonable. He asked what alternative Tom was suggesting.

  “We insinuate a detective into the Brescia Circle itself,” Tom said.

  He swiftly outlined the scope of his plan: One man working on his own. Send him in with a new name, new family history. We even get him a place to live. We give him a completely invented identity. And we run the operation long. We let our man slowly work his way into the Circle. Let him take his time, and win their trust. Then, when the next bomb’s about to go off, he’ll know. And my squad will be able to stop it.

  Woods played with the idea in his mind. Tom worried that he’d been too bold, his scheme too grandiose. The New York Police Department had never before sent an officer off on such a deep, open-ended undercover operation.

  “Let’s do it,” the commissioner announced at last.

  IT DIDN’T WORK.

  The officer went to the Circle’s Sunday meetings. He spent long evenings hanging around the 106th Street basement headquarters. But he was never accepted into the group. And he didn’t speak Italian; he couldn’t eavesdrop when the huddled conversations in dark corners quickly switched from English.

  Perhaps, then, it was his frustration that made him try even harder to ingratiate himself. Whatever the reason, the Circle grew suspicious. On two occasions he was accused of spying and brought before a Circle tribunal. Each time he was acquitted. But when he was singled out a third time, Tom grew fearful for the man’s safety. He ordered the operation terminated.

  Chapter 3

  Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, German ambassador to the United States, 1915.

  (Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)

  Like Tom’s, Count Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht von Bernstorff’s plan had also fallen apart. The imperial German ambassador to America had counted on spending the summer with his mistress in Newport, Rhode Island. But in the last week of June 1914, he was ordered without warning back to Germany “for consultation.”

  And so on July 12 von Bernstorff, black silk top hat on his head and a chestful of medals and jeweled orders glittering on his black tailcoat, sat glumly in the back of an open carriage riding through the stifling streets of Berlin. The ambassador was certain his summons home had been unnecessary, an overreaction to a trivial event. Gottlieb von Jagow, the foreign minister, a silly, gloomy little man with an ungentlemanly stub of a mustache, had simply panicked.

  The horses’ hooves clip-clopped against the asphalt as the carriage proceeded down Unter den Linden on its way to 76 Wilhelmstrasse, the rambling rococo palace—once the home of the doe-eyed Italian dancer who was Frederick the Great’s mistress—that was the headquarters of the Foreign Office. Tall trees lined both sides of the boulevard, spreading a leafy canopy, but the shade could not cool the ambassador’s temper. He often quoted Bismarck’s dismissive appraisal of Berlin as “a desert of bricks and newspapers,” and baking in the hot summer sun, the city appeared even more stolid and gray than usual.

  It was certainly empty. No one—at least none of the hoffähig, the people suitable to be invited to court—was in town. They would be at Kiel on their yachts or, like the kaiser, who had escaped to his grandiose palace in Potsdam, at their country estates. Von Bernstorff wanted to get his meeting with the irritating von Jagow over and done with as quickly as possible. He’d suffer through the no-doubt perfunctory briefing, and then he too could leave Berlin. He’d take the first liner back to New York, dutifully spend a day or two with his American-born wife at their summer estate on the north shore of Long Island, and then, after inventing a suitable excuse, hurry to Newport, where the season was in full swing, the starry nights were crowded with gay parties, and his mistress was waiting. The order to report “with all deliberate speed” to the Foreign Office, he felt with a simmering resentment, had been damned inconvenient.

  Only two weeks ago he had been dining with the Spanish ambassador, a lively, erudite aristocrat who shared his appreciation for a well-turned ankle, in the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., when the news spread through the dining room. The archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir apparent, had been assassinated by Serbian nationalists. At once people began gathering around v
on Bernstorff’s table, wanting to know what the German ambassador thought, whether he believed the murder of a royal in some obscure European city would have any larger consequences.

  Peace in Europe, he’d explained that night in his faultless English, had been successfully maintained for years by an intricately woven web of diplomatic and military alliances. Treaties committed Germany to stand by Austria-Hungary. Russia, with its colossal army, had vowed to defend its weaker Slavic cousins. France would immediately retaliate for any attack on Russia. And England, although beleaguered by its problems with the rebellious Irish, had vowed to respond to any aggression against France.

  It was as if the European rulers had locked themselves into a giant chess game, he went on genially, using one of his favorite metaphors. A move by one player was guaranteed by treaty to provoke a response.

  Therefore, he insisted with total certainty, no one would dare move a single pawn. Common sense, as well as self-interest, dictated that the players continue to contemplate the board with pensive concentration, sitting around the table in an apparent stalemate rather than doing anything to risk upending the game and sending all the pieces flying.

  The ambassador agreed that the murder of the archduke was a tragic event. But he assured his audience that it would be quickly forgotten, recalled, if at all, as only a small, irrelevant footnote to the larger concerns of the times. And with that the conversation moved on to the club bar, where, over cigars and brandy, the talk focused on the stock market, the grim rumors about the rapidly declining health of President Wilson’s wife, and the upcoming weekend’s parties.

  Von Bernstorff was both surprised and annoyed when the flash cable arrived just three days later instructing him to return to Berlin at once. Nevertheless, a product of his rigid Saxon upbringing, he accepted an order as an order. On July 7 he was on board the Vaterland, the newly commissioned jewel of Germany’s passenger liner fleet, as it left New York Harbor.

  Despite his put-upon mood, it had been a pleasant voyage. His six successful years as ambassador to the United States had earned him a good deal of acclaim, and the other first-class passengers vied to have the count at their table.

  And he never disappointed. He was always charming and amusing, moving effortlessly from English (he had been born in London while his father was serving as ambassador) to German or to French to suit the preferences of his fawning dinner companions. The ladies found him quite dashing—tall, lithe, with a waxed upturned mustache like the kaiser’s, deep blue eyes, and an aristocrat’s elegant confidence and precise manners. When he waltzed them across the dance floor with a well-practiced grace, they were enthralled. The men, over cigars and the occasional game of poker, found him good company too. He’d almost managed to forget his annoyance at having to interrupt his summer’s plans and rush to Germany.

  But on this oppressive, hot day, as the carriage stopped in front of the Foreign Office building on Wilhelmstrasse and the liveried footman hurried to open the door, the count’s simmering temper had once more taken firm hold. He rushed up the long stone steps, his mood as sharp as a Prussian officer’s sword, eager to see von Jagow and then be on his way.

  HE WAS KEPT WAITING. A soldier in a scarlet dress uniform had escorted the count to the second floor, where the foreign minister kept his office. But almost at once a frock-coated aide appeared from behind a closed door and asked if the ambassador would be so good as to take a seat. The foreign minister would be with him momentarily.

  Directed to a plush settee in a small paneled room, von Bernstorff waited mutely for his summons, back straight as a cavalryman’s, his white-gloved hands folded in front of him. Yet each passing moment ratcheted up his impatience another notch. Finally, when an official entered the salon to greet him, it was not the foreign minister, but rather the undersecretary, Arthur Zimmermann.

  From left: Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, undersecretary of state Arthur Zimmermann, and secretary of state Gottlieb von Jagow in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, circa 1915.

  (akg-images / Imagno)

  The count bristled. Over the years he had come to the conclusion that von Jagow was an annoyance, a narrow-minded, jumpy bureaucrat. But Zimmermann, he deeply felt, was a much more dangerous sort. The fat, red-faced bachelor with his hearty, back-slapping gemütlichkeit was the grinning embodiment of a precedent that could, he had little doubt, undermine both the distinction and the effectiveness of the German foreign service.

  For generation after generation, the highest diplomatic positions had gone to the Junker class, the ruling elite who by breeding and instinct knew what was best for the Fatherland. Yet Zimmermann, a son of the middle class who had started in the lowly consular service, had somehow bounded up the foreign service ladder all the way to the second-highest rung. It was most inappropriate. Worse, the count feared for his country if its burghers, a crass and unsophisticated lot, would soon be strutting through ministry hallways and seated at fashionable dinner tables.

  Zimmermann, effusive, offered apologies for the delay, but the count brushed them off. According to an account of the testy exchange that would become Foreign Office lore, he insisted that he see the foreign minister at once.

  His tone flat and direct, Zimmermann said that would not be possible.

  Von Bernstorff insisted that he had been instructed to come all the way from America to meet with Herr von Jagow.

  The instructions, Zimmermann agreed, were to return home at once. But not, he said pointedly, to meet with the foreign minister.

  Von Bernstorff said he did not understand.

  But Zimmermann did not explain. He simply gave the count an address on Königsplatz. They are expecting you, he said.

  Von Bernstorff began to protest feebly.

  Zimmermann repeated that the count was expected. At once. Then he walked off, leaving the bewildered von Bernstorff standing alone in the room.

  Chapter 4

  The building on Königsplatz was squat and dingy, and there was neither a footman to open the count’s carriage door nor a uniformed doorman at the entrance.

  Once inside, though, von Bernstorff had to pass through a series of locked doors, each guarded by an armed soldier in field gray battle dress. This was, he decided, some sort of military command post, and clearly a most secret one.

  He had known that clandestine government offices were hidden throughout Berlin, but these were small, discreet salons where the kaiser or the privy councillor could hold meetings in utmost secrecy, without even the comings and goings of the participants observed by curious glances. This building was a fortress, however, and a very busy one. Soldiers streamed through the long corridors and disappeared behind guarded doors. It was all very efficient, and very mysterious.

  But for now, all the ambassador’s racing mind could do was wonder what happened behind all the closed doors, and about the identity of the person in charge, an individual so powerful that even the Foreign Office had bowed to his authority. And wonder why this man had summoned him so urgently from America.

  Before he could say a word, a soldier approached and instructed Herr Count von Bernstorff to follow him. A door opened onto a long hallway. Midway, a narrow, twisting staircase curved down and down, finally ending in the basement. Von Bernstorff couldn’t help having the whimsical feeling that he was being taken to the wine cellar. But that lighthearted moment passed in an instant. He knew only too well that he hadn’t been brought to this heavily guarded basement deep beneath the streets of Berlin to discuss vintages.

  ONLY A SINGLE OVERHEAD LAMP lit the windowless subterranean room, yet its glare illuminated the man sitting behind the desk as effectively as a spotlight. He was short, compact, middle-aged, with a head of close-cropped dark hair and a hard, unforgiving face. He sat confidently, staring directly at the count, as unsmiling and purposeful as any interrogator. He wore a major’s uniform, and that only added to von Bernstorff’s growing unease. It seemed most irregular that a mere major would be in command, or th
at an officer of such rank could summon an imperial German ambassador.

  But as soon as the officer introduced himself, von Bernstorff understood.

  “I am Major Walter Nicolai,” he said.

  The count had heard of Nicolai, but until that moment he had seriously wondered whether the celebrated officer was a living, breathing person or simply a myth. Berlin was in many ways a small city, but no one in von Bernstorff’s circle, people who lived with an intimate connection to power and privilege, had ever seen Nicolai. He remained a shadow, a mystery.

  According to the legend that had become attached to Nicolai’s name, for years he had directed the penetration of Russia by the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), the Supreme Army Command. From an army outpost in Königsberg, he’d recruited and then run a network of agents who infiltrated deep into the czar’s army and government.

  Yet Nicolai, who commanded an infantry regiment early in his career, had not been a cloistered deskman. Admiring stories had him serving side by side with his agents on the front line inside Russia as their guide, their confidant, their protector, sharing their constant terror, their gnawing anxiety that they’d been uncovered and the czarist police were about to pound down the door. And the plunder, if the accounts could be believed, had been extraordinary. The German general staff, it was whispered, now had copies of many of the czarist army mobilization plans as well as certain Russian diplomatic codebooks.

  With the success of his Russian operations, the OHL had two years ago brought Nicolai back to Berlin. He was made head of the Sektion Politik des Generalstabes.

  The name was misleading. This command did not primarily concern itself with politics. It was an intelligence agency. Its purpose was to conduct espionage: to learn by any means necessary what was happening around the world. And to conduct covert operations: to launch secret missions in foreign lands that would undermine the enemies of imperial Germany.