by Blum, Howard
After much disciplined effort, he even managed to disguise the lingering traces of his German accent. Now when he spoke, it was with the hesitant sibilance of a lisp.
There were gaps and obscurities in his new autobiography, but these were deliberate; nothing should be made too easy or too clear for new acquaintances. If he appeared to be trying too hard, that in itself could provoke suspicions.
Reinvented, he decided the time had come to settle down. Early in 1907 he made his way to El Oro, a dusty town about a hundred miles northwest of Mexico City; walked into the local mining company; and asked for work. His qualifications, he stated with for once not an iota of invention, were that he could read, write, and speak several languages fluently. He was hired as a stenographer.
James Dean, who had a desk across the room, would later recall that Muenter had “proved an excellent stenographer, but kept aloof from everyone in the company.” “He had a worried look and frequently gazed abstractedly into space for a long time.”
Still, his demeanor, however odd, didn’t attract much comment. Most Americans who wound up south of the border in the remote hills of El Oro were running away from something. It was a community of expatriates who knew better than to ask too many questions, and their own rough experiences had tempered their tendency to judge.
For the next two years Muenter seemed to settle with a monklike devotion into his quiet new life. All the while, though, he was waiting, biding his time.
Part II:
The Network
Chapter 10
There are men who never take to the secret life, but von Bernstorff, in many impressive ways, was a natural. From the start he understood that deniability is a primary rule of the covert world and that he was the beneficiary of a bit of beginner’s luck: his job gave him the perfect cover.
Upon his return to Washington, the count threw himself into his public role as ambassador. He rushed about the corridors of federal power, urging that America remain neutral. He went out of his way to meet with reporters and editors to share an ardent plea—off the record, of course—that President Wilson must be encouraged to broker a peace settlement. And with a happy-go-lucky energy that surpassed even his own previous immersion in the city’s social whirl, he made it a point to be seen out and about at cocktails, dinners, or weekend house parties, always the elegant and charming aristocrat with the mischievous roving eye. As the professionals at Abteilung IIIB would have said with admiration, von Bernstorff lived his cover.
Yet all the while he was also, with no less admirable Prussian efficiency, building his network. He established an organization structured as rigidly as a military unit to recruit and run the agents who’d fight on the front lines. From his wood-paneled office in the German embassy, he’d issue the orders and approve the battle plans. But when the attacks began, when the foundations of bridges shook or factories were rocked by mysterious blasts, von Bernstorff would be another shocked, although not very innocent, bystander.
To insulate himself—and the Washington embassy—further, he gave orders that the network’s operational base be established in New York. New York had always been a good city to be German, and with the outbreak of war it became an even better place for German spies. There was the busy Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville, where an agent could disappear into the beery gemütlichkeit; private associations like the German Club on Central Park South, where, in cozy smoke-filled rooms decorated with stags’ heads, secrets could be whispered without fear of who else was listening; and crowded restaurants like Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street, where, as brimming steins were raised and hearty platters of sauerbraten were devoured, all sorts of plots could be gaily hatched. Working behind the lines in New York City was a stroll through friendly territory. And in a collection of offices in high towers grouped in lower Manhattan, in convenient proximity to both Wall Street and New York Harbor, von Bernstorff’s handpicked senior field officers set up shop.
Heinrich Albert, the embassy’s commercial attaché, served as paymaster. For three years as Germany’s chief fiscal officer in America, he had wined, dined, and developed mutually beneficial working relationships with a long and impressive list of bankers. In this cutthroat world of backslappers and blatantly ambitious financiers, people were struck by Dr. Albert’s relative youth—he was in his late thirties and looked a boyish decade younger—and a reserve that bordered on diffidence. He’d arrive in a somber frock coat, bow low in greeting, listen with deferential attentiveness, and offer up a terse yet unfailingly polite comment only if asked a direct question. The single clue to a hidden, more aggressive nature was the dueling scar that cut across his cheek like a lightning bolt.
Heinrich Friedrich Albert served as commercial attaché to Ambassador von Bernstorff and acted as the chief fiscal officer for German espionage and sabotage operations in the United States.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
In Albert, the network had a shrewd and dedicated man who quickly became familiar with the exacting ways to fund a secret army. He opened accounts in banks all over the country, transferred money in a bewildering succession of deposits, and then, for good measure, further washed the money through legitimate companies run by German American businessmen. From his office high above Broadway, he looked out across the harbor toward the Statue of Liberty, and efficiently dispensed a fortune of nearly untraceable funds. It would later be estimated that in the first year alone of this secret war he distributed $30 million to ragtag cells of agents to fuel their clandestine operations.
A short stroll downtown from Albert’s office in the Hamburg-American Building, in a tower at 11 Broadway high above Bowling Green and the Custom House, Karl Boy-Ed established his new offices. Captain Boy-Ed had been the naval attaché at the Washington embassy, and on von Bernstorff’s instructions he too had promptly relocated to New York.
Boy-Ed was the son of a German mother and a Turkish father, but he was every inch a Prussian naval officer. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a neck like a fence post, a booming voice, and the rigid, stiff-backed demeanor of a man who’d just jumped to attention, he wore his blue uniform and its chestful of medals with an intimidating authority.
Captain Karl Boy-Ed, naval attaché to Ambassador von Bernstorff.
(Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
While assigned to the embassy, he had studied the American navy, becoming familiar with its ship power, its personnel, its strategies, and its coastal defenses. In his new covert wartime role, he was determined to put all the intelligence that his obliging American hosts had so freely offered to operational use.
Franz von Papen was the network’s third senior field officer, and, since boldness and audacity can become virtues in wartime, the most dangerous. In 1913, when he was assigned as the military attaché to the embassy, Captain von Papen had been sorely disappointed. The United States was a backwater posting, a position so minor to the German general staff that it had cavalierly been expanded to include Mexico.
Yet in von Papen’s own mind, he was a man suited for a brilliant military career. Through his wife, the daughter of a fabulously wealthy Alsatian pottery manufacturer, he had the necessary funds; and through his parents, descendants of a long, if somewhat tattered, strand of Westphalian nobility, he had the social standing needed to climb to the top ranks of the German army. And he certainly had the look—a cavalry officer’s confident, deliberately insouciant slouch; a firmness of features further distinguished by a hawk’s nose; and a snappy military mustache. He also possessed—and this might explain his exile to such an insignificant post—an intolerable, overbearing personality. His arrogance crackled through even the most desultory conversations. He was a man who was always right, and who never hesitated to share his unflinching certainty.
When the ambassador assigned him to recruit and direct an army of spies and saboteurs in a clandestine attack against both America and Canada, von Papen saw the path to his future glory. He set up
offices for this War Intelligence Center, as he grandly christened the operation, on the twenty-fifth floor of 60 Wall Street, and at once began plotting.
Captain Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen—military attaché to Ambassador von Bernstorff—who would go on to become chancellor of Germany in 1932 and vice chancellor under Adolf Hitler in 1933–1934.
(Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
THE FIRST TASK, THOUGH, FOR any head of station is to recruit agents to send off into the field. From the start, these three men were emboldened by their shared conviction that this would be easy work. They fervently believed in the rightness of Germany’s cause, and felt they were surrounded by battalions of potential recruits whose loyalties also bound them to the kaiser.
Over eight million people—nearly a tenth of America’s entire population—had been born in Germany or had a German parent. Even more promisingly, their allegiance to the ancestral homeland, to their German identity, remained strong. Why, von Papen was constantly pointing out, the National German-American Alliance, a fraternal organization that lovingly embraced the Fatherland, had three million members.
Across the country in cities like New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were neighborhoods so proudly and visibly Germanic that they were known as Kleines Deutschland. And there were about five hundred German-language newspapers published throughout the United States, with a combined circulation of 1.75 million. In New York alone the Staats-Zeitung, an impressively produced and edited paper that vociferously cheered for Germany’s victory in the war, sold about seventy thousand copies each day.
In addition to these sympathetic citizens, a large number of German military reservists had found themselves stranded in America when the war broke out. Many of them were eager to fight for the kaiser, but they were soldiers without an army. In their frustration, all they could do was march in boisterous parades, waving their flags with frantic enthusiasm, their hoarse voices singing “Deutschland über Alles.” The German foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, went so far as to challenge the American ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, with a provocative threat: “You will find there are five hundred thousand German reservists in your country ready to take up arms for their mother country. . . . The United States will be engaged in a civil war.”
Gerard, a wealthy New Yorker whose instincts were more combative than diplomatic, shot back, “There are five hundred thousand lampposts in my country and . . . every German residing in the United States who undertakes to take up arms against America will swing from one of those five hundred thousand lampposts.”
Another source for recruits was America’s large Irish population. It’s a pragmatic axiom of both life and war that any enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Germany was eager to exploit Irish antipathy to Britain’s rule over the Emerald Isle. There were 4.5 million Irish Americans, and the strains of Irish nationalism ran deep. A common enemy, the New York station heads believed, would furnish volunteers for a common cause.
However, it was President Wilson’s neutrality policy that, in its unintentional way, serendipitously created the most effective sources of manpower. According to the president’s strict interpretation, neutrality meant that any ship docked in the United States at the outbreak of the war would not be allowed to join the hostilities. As a result, East Coast ports were filled with German vessels—merchant ships, luxury liners, steamers—for the duration of the war.
And more kept coming. From all corners of the Atlantic, German ships at sea raced away from the guns of the mighty British navy and rushed to the safety of American harbors—where they were promptly interned. Within weeks, more than eighty German ships were lined up in an orderly row along the Hudson River docks, all tied together by strong ropes and watched by U.S. Navy patrol boats. It quickly got so crowded that newly arriving German vessels had to be towed across the Hudson to New Jersey.
German ocean liners interned during the war in Hoboken Harbor, New Jersey.
(Getty Images)
Along with this flotilla of interned ships traveled a navy of German sailors. An unsuspecting America put no meaningful restrictions on these foreign sailors; they were free to roam about New York, to enjoy their escape from the war. But many of them remained loyal sons of the Fatherland. They were eager to find any opportunity to get back into the fighting.
AS SUMMER TURNED INTO FALL, the network took operational shape with surprising speed. The senior officers finalized their strategies. The talent spotters went off to make their first tentative approaches to recruits. The covert attack against America was ready to be launched. Yet von Bernstorff, perhaps out of caution, perhaps out of a well-bred reluctance to strike against the hospitable country that had been his home for the past six years, hesitated.
But in the middle of September 1914 an event shook Germany’s confidence so severely, so unexpectedly, that it overrode any previous misgivings. In the stunned aftermath, no rationale for delicacy any longer existed, and wariness rooted in fear became irrelevant.
The war had turned. Throughout August, column after column of spit-polished German troops had pounded relentlessly forward, hammering their way across France until they were at the outskirts of Paris. Then in one bloody week, as a monstrous offensive proceeded along the Marne River—when the enormity of the dead and maimed falling in a single savage day added up to a city of thirty thousand men, when the German army alone would mourn a staggering 220,000 casualties over seven days of fighting—the war became something entirely different.
Not only was the vaunted German army pushed into retreat, but it became apparent that the war would not be a short conflict. The fighting would go on and on. The kaiser had sent his troops off to the front in the first week of August with the assurance, “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” After the defeat at the first Battle of the Marne on September 12, 1914, there were the inevitable cruel whispers that the kaiser was, of course, referring to Germany’s pine trees.
Now that a long, protracted conflict was a certainty, now that it was apparent that the German high command’s concept of a short war had been little more than wishful pride, America’s strategic importance intensified. In a war of attrition, the United States held the key to victory: the side that had access to the American marketplace had a significant advantage.
The warships of the British navy made it impossible for Germany to receive shipments of food, munitions, explosives, and other vital supplies. Von Bernstorff’s network would have to make sure that Germany’s enemies also could not obtain shipments from America.
A flurry of flash-coded cables, approved by an anxious Nicolai, went out from the Foreign Office to the Washington embassy:
“It is indispensable to recruit agents to organize explosions on ships sailing to enemy countries, in order to cause delays in the loading, the departure, and the unloading of these ships.”
Then: “In United States sabotage can reach all kinds of factories for war deliveries . . . under no circumstances compromise Embassy.”
And another: “We draw your attention to the possibility of recruiting . . . agents among the anarchist labor organizations.”
And still another: “Secret. General staff desires energetic action in regard to proposed destruction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad at several points, with a view to complete and protracted interruption of travel.”
With this persistent drumbeat of cables in his heart and mind, von Bernstorff had no choice but to go to war.
Chapter 11
Determined to make his mark, the ambitious von Papen desperately wanted to mount the sort of derring-do operation that would attract the high command’s attention. But the murky pool of available freelance talent gave him little confidence. The military attaché found the man he was looking for in Mexico, on the run from the federales after breaking out of a Chihuahua jail.
Horst von der Goltz was a Nicolai-trained professional who had taken to the Great Game as if
it were truly just merry sport. In rapid succession there were missions to steal a treaty from the home of a Russian prince, a tense adventure in the back streets of Madrid, and a long-running operation in Paris where he’d blackmailed an army captain with a gambling problem on the French general staff.
His next assignment to Mexico was much less successful. The authorities were on to him from the start, and after a brutal interrogation, he wound up in a Chihuahua penitentiary. He endured two hard months that tested his resolve. When he finally managed to escape, he took with him a lingering resentment against a German secret service that had done nothing to rescue him. Upon arriving in Mexico City, he sent a terse telegram to the headquarters at Königsplatz, announcing his resignation.
Von der Goltz was a freelance soldier of fortune, fighting against the federales with whatever Mexican rebel band would pay the highest price for his services, when he was approached in a cantina. A disheveled-looking man in a dingy white suit came to his table and portentously announced that he’d been sent by the German consul in El Paso, Texas.
“The consul wishes to ask you one question, and the answer is yes or no,” the man went on with an officiousness that made von der Goltz bristle. “In case your government wanted your services again, could she expect to receive them?”
