by Blum, Howard
It was a vast organization; its ranks included more than a thousand agents and support personnel. Its power was immense. It answered to the kaiser, and he demanded only results; methods did not concern him. It worked in secret, yet, no doubt by shrewd design, tales about its shadowy activities and valuable accomplishments had swirled through the highest circles of government and Berlin society. Its name summoned respect and, in no less measure, suspicion, even fear.
It was known as Abteilung IIIB. It was the kaiser’s secret intelligence service. And Walter Nicolai was its supreme commander.
Now that Nicolai had the count’s attention, he went on without further prelude. Quickly, he made two pronouncements. The first came as a shock. But it was the second that left von Bernstorff completely undone.
There will be war, Nicolai said flatly. He added that it would be soon, before this summer was over.
As von Bernstorff struggled to come to terms with this grim news, Nicolai declared that the ambassador’s help was required. He had been selected to perform an important service for the kaiser and for the Fatherland. He would direct Abteilung IIIB’s operations in America.
IT WAS OTTO VON BISMARCK, Germany’s farseeing chancellor, who in his prudent and ruthlessly practical way first understood the need for a centralized organization to gather intelligence on his country’s foreign enemies. In 1861 he appointed Wilhelm Stieber, a former Berlin criminal investigator, to head the Central Intelligence Division, as it was originally known. Stieber, who had policed the streets of Berlin by establishing a network of informants, people in all walks of life who, for cash or a favor, would pass on information, brought a cop’s mentality to the task.
Knowledge, Stieber’s years in law enforcement had convinced him, was the key to power. As Germany’s first spymaster, he sent out a string of agents recruited from the police and military academies to cultivate informants all across Europe.
A half century later, when Nicolai took control, the methods had grown more sophisticated, but the service’s guiding principle had not changed: Know the enemy.
At a training school outside Berlin, novice agents went through two years of rigorous education. In addition to weapons instruction, sabotage techniques, and code writing, they studied topography, trigonometry, and draftsmanship so that the precise details of a military fortification, or a harbor, or a munitions factory could be accurately sketched. They became experts in European army and naval equipment, trained to identify at a glance whether the stockpiled shells were, say, for a 75-mm cannon, a 105-mm howitzer, or just a Stokes mortar, or whether the ship steaming off to sea was a destroyer or a light cruiser.
After graduation, Abteilung IIIB agents—and there were a fair number of women in each class—were sent abroad with the orders to find jobs at once. Good cover, Nicolai believed with a field man’s hard-won knowledge, was essential if you were to live in enemy territory and not arouse suspicions.
In small garrison towns, in waterfront neighborhoods surrounding naval bases, and along gilded thoroughfares of capital cities, agents opened tobacco shops, or grocery stores, or boardinghouses, or brothels. They worked as waiters, or teachers, or governesses, or whores. Whatever they saw or heard, hard facts and tantalizing rumors, was written down. They collected the names of journalists, of soldiers, of statesmen whose vices might allow their loyalty to be compromised. They made lists of immigrants whose family ties to Germany made them potential recruits.
All this information was stored in the long rows of files that filled the basement beneath the Königsplatz headquarters. It was a cave of secrets. By the summer of 1914, Nicolai controlled the largest and most efficient intelligence organization in the world. When war broke out, his operatives would already be in place, ready to move against the enemy.
Except that Nicolai, usually so meticulous, had made one miscalculation.
It was a dangerous error. In fact, it could, he had come to realize, cost Germany the war.
Germany had deployed all its operatives in Europe. It had buried agents deep in England, France, and Russia. It had focused on Germany’s traditional enemies—and it had ignored America.
In July 1914 Germany had only a single part-time agent in the entire United States—Dr. Walter Scheele, a timid, elderly New Jersey chemist who lacked the energy to poke about the factory where he worked, let alone fulfill his grandiose assignment of monitoring the entire American munitions and explosives industry.
Yet in the increasingly tense days following the archduke’s assassination, as the high command’s battle plans were taken from safes, as guns were loaded and the order to open fire drew closer, Nicolai reached a terrible conclusion: he had gotten it wrong. As head of the secret service, he was better able than most to evaluate Germany’s chances—and now, with an unnerving jolt, he suddenly understood the folly of his narrow view of the world.
Although separated from Europe by a wide ocean, a maturing, industrialized America had the power to change the course of the war.
It was vital that the United States stay out of the fight. With its potentially large army and vast resources, America could lead Germany’s enemies to victory.
Still, even if the U.S. government remained officially neutral, once war was declared, it was inevitable that Britain would blockade the Atlantic. Its mighty navy would very effectively prevent Germany from trading with the United States. It was crucial that the Allies also be prevented from receiving shipments of American munitions, arms, and food. The enemy armies must not be restocked by American supplies.
There were only two ways for Germany to cripple Atlantic shipping coming from America—U-boats and sabotage. The German navy, Nicolai knew, didn’t command enough submarines to patrol the shipping lanes effectively. Sabotage was the only alternative.
There was no time, however, for squads of trained operatives to infiltrate the United States; getting agents in place, constructing believable covers, was a long and delicate process. And when the wartime travel restrictions went into effect, the smuggling of even a single Abteilung IIIB spy into the country would owe as much to luck as to tradecraft.
Nicolai had survived by not being impulsive. He had built his career on his measured, reflective habits, mulling all the facets of a problem before deciding on a course of action. Yet the proximity of war forced him to act with uncharacteristic swiftness. There were no other realistic options, he soberly concluded; and then he had von Bernstorff summoned. The ambassador to America would have to do.
SITTING NOW IN HIS BASEMENT office across from the count, Nicolai, understandably, didn’t share the mental journey that had led to this meeting. He was not a man to offer confidences. He simply gave von Bernstorff his instructions.
The count, while pursuing his normal and very public diplomatic duties as ambassador, would in total secrecy also direct and develop a network of intelligence agents in America.
Their mission was twofold: first, to keep America out of the war; and second, to prevent munitions and other goods from leaving America and reaching the enemy. Von Bernstorff was to return to the United States as soon as possible to begin his assignment.
There was one further thing, Nicolai added before the meeting ended. He wanted to make sure the count fully understood the importance of his clandestine mission. Von Bernstorff and his agents were to use any means necessary to accomplish their objectives.
Chapter 5
As Tom Tunney, meanwhile, struggled to find a way to get his stalled investigation of the Brescia Circle back on track, the bombings continued. A device placed in the aisle of a Queens church exploded in the middle of services. The worshippers fled in panic, but injuries were only minor. The next day a bomb went off at midnight outside a priest’s home in Brooklyn. The blast shattered all the windows in the house, as well as those of the building next door. But once again luck held: no one was hurt.
Tom, however, knew the odds were piling up against the city. It would be only a matter of time before someone was killed. He deci
ded he’d no choice but to try again. He’d place another man inside the Circle.
The blame for the failure the first go-around, Tom confessed in a rare display of feelings to Commissioner Woods, was all his. He had picked the wrong man.
The subtle craft of running an agent—being his only lifeline to the world he’d left behind—was new to Tom. Like the commissioner, he too would need to get his education while on the job. But Tom was determined to learn from his previous mistakes.
He sent word to precinct houses throughout the city that the bomb squad was looking for an Italian-speaking volunteer. It would be a special operation. It would be dangerous. No officer should apply unless he was willing to accept the risk.
Tom received the names of eighteen candidates. After reviewing their service records, he “reached out,” as the department euphemistically referred to a summons by a superior officer, to six of them. They appeared for interviews at the squad’s second-floor office across from headquarters on Centre Street.
New York Police Department headquarters at 240 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. The offices of Tunney’s bomb squad were located in a loft across from the building.
(George P. Hall and Son / Museum of the City of New York)
The sessions were one-on-one, Tom interrogating a single candidate at a time; and the questions he posed were, he’d admit, as irrelevant as the answers. He was searching for a type, and Tom let his instincts guide him.
He finally decided on Amedeo Polignani. He was a darkly handsome detective, just twenty-seven, with a high pompadour of jet-black hair, a weightlifter’s burly physique, and a warm, ready smile so bright it nearly glowed. What Tom liked best about Polignani, though, was the way the detective carried himself—quiet, confident, and unassertive. He was the sort of good-natured young man whom people found easy to like—even those, Tom was gambling, who were angry enough to want to blow up the city.
His instructions to his new operative were succinct.
“Your name from now on is Frank Baldo,” Tom said with the authority of a magician waving his wand. “Forget you’re a detective. You can get a job over in Long Island City. You are an anarchist. Join the Brescia Circle and any other affiliated group, and report to me every day.”
Tom would be his sole handler. There would be no cutouts; he was to call Tom directly. A special telephone line was installed in Tom’s office, and Polignani—or was it now Baldo? Tom wondered—was instructed to call this number at specific hours. Make sure, Tom told his operative, to call from a pay phone. Choose a store with only one phone booth; someone in an adjoining booth might overhear. The older members of the group will be suspicious, he warned; they’ll follow you. He insisted that Polignani should not call unless he was certain he was alone or not being watched.
There was one final bit of advice, and Tom, the novice agent runner, repeated it like a mantra. “Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut,” he said firmly. “Eyes open. Mouth shut.”
Then it was time. Tom was as anxious as if he were the one going off behind enemy lines, yet he did his best to act as if this were not an extraordinary occasion for both of them. He knew there would be emergencies, situations they hadn’t planned for, hadn’t discussed. All he could do, though, was trust that the man he’d chosen would find the ingenuity to deal with them.
Tom shook his hand. Polignani responded with a sharp salute, a flash of his hundred-watt smile; and then Frank Baldo went off to start his new life.
Chapter 6
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, shown here circa 1910–1915.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
In Europe events unfolded with an increasingly bleak and bellicose momentum. In the shadows, a tense von Bernstorff hurried about Berlin, making the final preparations for his own war.
On July 27 Kaiser Wilhelm abandoned his summer holiday in Potsdam and returned to the steamy streets of Berlin to confer with his generals and ministers. He strode about meetings in the royal palace in military uniform, saber dangling from his belt, as though he expected at any moment to give the order to charge. The prospect of leading the nation into war, of crushing the enemies who encircled the Fatherland, thrilled him.
The following day, Austria, having been reassured of Germany’s “faithful support” even if her actions were to provoke the great Russian Bear, declared war on hapless Serbia. Its booming guns bombarded Belgrade with impunity. In outraged response, armies throughout Europe began mobilizing. The kaiser’s envoys in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg delivered earnest ultimatums, demanding that forces stand down. These pleas for restraint, however, were ignored.
Orders went out for two million German soldiers to begin making preparations for war. “Let your hearts beat for God, and your fists on the enemy,” the kaiser, now a warlord, thundered to his troops. In Berlin crowds swelled the streets, their fervent patriotic voices rising up to sing “Deutschland über Alles.”
Across the map of Europe, the row of dominoes leaned precariously. A wanton push would send them all crashing into one another.
On August 1 a German infantry company crossed the border into neutral Luxembourg. The troops occupied a small cobblestoned town on the slopes of the Ardennes, Troisvierges. In the chagrined parliaments of Europe it seemed clear that the choice of this village was an implicit warning, and that the next two virgins to be violated by German troops would be Belgium and France. The dominoes tottered, and war was a certainty.
VON BERNSTORFF’S WORLD WAS ALSO tottering. He was having difficulty coming to terms with his mission. He was no stranger to deceit; he was a diplomat, after all. But he could not contemplate the treachery demanded by his new clandestine role without feeling soiled.
Gentlemen were not spies. They did not slink about trying to learn other gentlemen’s secrets. They did not betray friends, and in his six pleasant years in America he had made many friends. He was being ordered to trample over his own Junker concept of honor.
Yet this was war. The Fatherland had asked for his help. In his agonized mind, class and country struggled for his loyalty. He remained unsure which would ultimately win.
On August 2, the same day that German troops completed their occupation of Luxembourg, von Bernstorff left for America on the Noordam, a Dutch liner. This voyage would not at all resemble the trip that had brought him to Germany.
The Noordam was a creaking relic, old and tarnished, and soon to be retired. Yet von Bernstorff hardly noticed. He traveled furtively and anonymously, having conspired to keep his name off the passenger list. He ate his meals in the seclusion of his tiny stateroom. When he ventured on deck, he scrupulously avoided conversations. And everywhere he went, day or night, he clutched the handle of a black briefcase in his right hand as firmly as if his life depended on it.
Inside was a fortune—$150 million in German treasury notes.
It was the initial funding for his secret mission in America.
A German Empire banknote with a value of twenty marks (Reichsbanknote Zwanzig Mark), 1915.
(ullstein bild / The Granger Collection, NYC)
On the count’s last day in Berlin, Nicolai had handed him the package containing the money without ceremony. It might have been a letter he was asking the count to post. His terse instructions, however, left no doubt about its importance.
Under no circumstances, Nicolai lectured, was von Bernstorff to let the package out of his sight. In the event that war was declared before the ship reached New York and British sailors came on board to seize the vessel, von Bernstorff was to toss the package into the Atlantic. It would be better, the spymaster said, to have the treasury notes on the ocean floor than for the British to begin asking questions about why the imperial German ambassador was transporting $150 million to America.
On board the Noordam, von Bernstorff remained vigilant. His manner stiffened, and he stayed alert. The briefcase in his clenched hand was a constant reminder of his mission. The habit of caution was taking hol
d. Apprehension filled his thoughts. As the long days at sea passed, he began to learn what it was to lead a secret life.
ON THE FOURTH DAY OF August 700,000 German troops, their spiked helmets glistening in the sun, marched in smart, orderly column after column into Belgium. That same morning the kaiser, hand resting on his sword hilt as if he were already posing for a victory statue, stood in front of his throne at the palace and addressed the assembled deputies. “We draw the sword with a clear conscience and with clean hands,” he declared with all the self-righteous piety of a man who had neither.
Hours later, his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, spoke to a cheering Reichstag, giving a more candid, but equally guiltless, rationale for Germany’s firing the first shots: “Our invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law but the wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing we will make good as soon as our military goal has been reached.”
Europe was at war.
IN WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON was informed of the outbreak of fighting as he sat at his dying wife’s bedside. Already in mourning, this emotionally battered, deep-thinking man with a pacifist’s heart and a statesman’s optimistic vision heard the news and offered his help. He quickly wrote out an ardent message and asked that it be sent to the leaders of the warring nations: “I should welcome an opportunity to act in the interest of European peace, either now or any other time that might be more suitable, as an occasion to serve you all and all concerned in a way that would afford me lasting cause for gratitude and happiness.”
Two days later, his wife died. He was bereft. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” he cried out to the heavens as he turned in anguish from her inert body—his heartfelt words an eerie echo of the master actor Muenter’s contrived grief.
