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

by Blum, Howard

Von der Goltz, although still bitter, answered without hesitation: “In case of war—yes.”

  Two weeks later, a telegram arrived from the consul in El Paso. There was only one word: “Come.”

  In El Paso, von der Goltz was told, “Proceed to New York and place yourself at the disposal of Captain Fritz von Papen.”

  HE MET WITH VON PAPEN in the offices at 11 Broadway. They sat opposite one another in comfortable leather seats in a white-walled room so devoid of decoration that von der Goltz was convinced the military attaché had just moved in. With customary earnestness, von Papen spent no time on banter but launched straight into a lecture.

  “Washington’s neutrality is a fraud,” he declared. “America allows arms and food to be shipped to the Allies while our ships remain victims of the British blockade. J. P. Morgan and the other Wall Street bankers lend millions to England, France, and Russia. The American heart is with England, and it will be only a matter of time before their soldiers are fighting side by side with the British.”

  He had a bold plan, one that, he predicted with an ambitious soldier’s vanity, would favorably influence the course of the war. A small team led by von der Goltz would dynamite the Welland Canal. The target, he explained, was only a short distance across the border from Buffalo, New York, joining Lakes Ontario and Erie, and was a major waterway for Canadian shipping.

  “It is comparatively simple,” von Papen said, brimming with a novice controller’s irrepressible confidence. “If we blow up the links of their canal, the main railway lines of Canada and the principal grain elevators will be crippled. Immediately we shall destroy one of England’s chief sources of food supply as well as hamper the transportation of war matériel.”

  “It can be done,” von der Goltz agreed.

  AT FIRST VON DER GOLTZ was gung ho, eager to once again to be serving the Fatherland. The profession of espionage, of living the lies that shape a covert life, was familiar, enjoyable sport. Using the alias Bridgeman H. Taylor, he went on von Papen’s instructions to Baltimore to recruit men from the German ships docked in the Patapsco River.

  He found three volunteers, but these sailors, he soon came to realize, possessed neither the steady nerves nor the deep-rooted determination of clandestine saboteurs. They were full of bravado, especially after a night’s drinking. But with the hard objectivity of a man who had learned his sinister trade in Nicolai’s academy, von der Goltz realized that they couldn’t be counted on when the time came to put their lives on the line.

  He had no choice, though; an agent mounts the operation with the resources available. Resigned, he led the three men back to New York. Von Papen had three more recruits waiting, also bored sailors, volunteers taken off interned German boats in New York Harbor.

  Von der Goltz wearily accepted them onto his team without protest. But in his heart he felt the outcome was clear: this would be a suicide mission.

  One hundred pounds of dynamite were picked up by motorboat from a DuPont barge lying in the Jersey flats near the Statue of Liberty. There were two cases, each weighing about fifty pounds. The boat made its way across the Hudson to a dock on 146th Street. From there, a waiting car carried the explosives downtown to a three-story brownstone at 123 West Fifteenth Street.

  This was the network’s safe house. Funded by Albert, it was run by Martha Held, a large, bosomy woman somewhere north of fifty who decades earlier had been married to a count and had sung at opera houses throughout Europe. At Martha’s, there’d be mountains of food and rivers of beer, and night after night, the house would be crowded with a raucous assortment of the kaiser’s diplomats, covert operatives, army reservists, stranded seamen, and freelance thugs.

  And Martha provided the women: the house on West Fifteenth Street was also a bordello. Whorehouses had been a long-running operational cover favored by Abteilung IIIB. Spies and whores, the logic went, were natural accomplices; after all, both practiced professions grounded in lies. And in a world where prudent tradecraft required that every move must be accountable, a house of easy virtue nicely explained late-night comings and goings to any enemy surveillance team.

  That night the men stayed at Martha’s. The recruits joined the ongoing party; it was as if they were already celebrating their success. But von der Goltz couldn’t share their mood. His uneasy mind jumped back and forth between alternative fates, and each sparked a rush of terror: either he’d be blown sky-high when some reveler carelessly tossed a lit cigarette into the basement where the dynamite was cached, or he’d be shot by Canadian troops as his amateur band inched their way toward the canal with all the stealth of an armored division.

  In the morning the house was still standing, and von der Goltz’s team packed suitcases with guns and dynamite and took the train upstate. They went to ground in Buffalo, renting rooms on Delaware Street.

  Over the next several days, von der Goltz’s concerns about his feckless team grew. Now that they were closer to the target, the men were more restrained. They talked about the mission as if it were some annoying chore they were hoping to avoid.

  Yet he pushed them forward. He led them to Niagara, New York, and a hotel room became their operational base. The next day they scouted the canal. The banks and locks were heavily guarded, armed squads of soldiers at seemingly every juncture.

  Nearly in a panic, the recruits complained that it was impossible.

  Von der Goltz agreed that the mission would be difficult. But, he insisted—all the time trying to convey the emphatic conviction of a man who believed the lie he was telling—it was not impossible.

  His new plan was to hire an airplane. He’d fly along the entire canal until he found an unguarded stretch where they could detonate their dynamite. The men were to wait in the Niagara hotel room until he returned. Might be a day, might be longer, he advised. He told them to lie low until he came back.

  He was gone two days, and when he returned, he found that his men had fled. The reality of a dangerous mission against heavy, deadly odds was not the adventure they’d imagined.

  Von der Goltz had no choice but to flee to New York, where he met with a furious von Papen. The military attaché raged and raged; if the one hundred pounds of dynamite had gone up all at once, von der Goltz couldn’t help thinking, the explosion would have paled in comparison with the captain’s booming tirade.

  For von Papen, such a pathetic ending for his first wartime mission was unacceptable. This was not how soldiers win medals, build illustrious careers. He stormed out of the room, and went straight to work drafting a cable, requesting that the incompetent von der Goltz be called home.

  Chapter 12

  The American network’s first attempt had ended in failure. Nevertheless, Nicolai soon ordered von Bernstorff to launch a new operation. He had little choice: the German army needed soldiers.

  The long, hot days of the war’s opening months had given way to the rain-soaked autumn of 1914, but the conflict’s fury charged on unabated. In just the first six months of savage fighting, Germany suffered 800,000 dead and wounded—nearly half the army that had initially marched off into the field. The valiant Prussian officers’ corps was a shambles. It had unflinchingly led the way into battle after battle, but its bravery had been proved with blood: 16 percent of the corps was lost or missing.

  And these were, the high command keenly understood, only the opening offensives. The merciless machinery of war would need to keep grinding. If the Fatherland were to fight on, and relentlessly on, to victory, it would need soldiers, especially trained officers.

  It was a daunting realization. However, as the generals grappled with this grim mathematics, the Foreign Office delivered news that contained a glimmer of a solution. The consulates in North and South America reported that thousands of reserve soldiers had flocked to their doors in the hope of being reunited with their units.

  The rush overwhelmed the consulates, and a practical decision was made to assist only the officers. Nearly one thousand members of the reserve officers corps r
eceived funds to finance journeys to New York and then on to Europe.

  Only now, Foreign Office diplomats announced with embarrassed resignation, there was a problem. Urged on by vociferous protests from the British and the French, the United States had changed its passport requirements. In August, before the fighting had started, obtaining an American passport had been a perfunctory process: ask, and it was yours. But over subsequent months the government had repeatedly added new requirements. Proof of U.S. birth, the names of the countries to be visited, and even a photograph—all these now were required and carefully scrutinized before the document would be forwarded on to the secretary of state for his signature. As a result, the sidewalks of New York were as close to the front lines as the frustrated German officers could get.

  Desperate, the high command still grasped at the tantalizing prospect of bringing the stranded officers into the war. Nicolai was promptly summoned, and his orders might just as well have been given to a sorcerer: make the men appear.

  The master spy had performed some impressive feats in his years of clandestine service, but he had little hope that this time he could simply wave his operational wand and conjure the soldiers to the battle lines. The hapless Welland Canal operation had undermined his already shaky faith in the von Bernstorff network, but with no alternative, Nicolai reached out to them again.

  A cable went on to Washington, outlining the problem at some length. Then, in a single short sentence that betrayed none of the tempest of doubts swirling about the offices in Königsplatz, it demanded a solution.

  The day von Bernstorff received the cable, he left straightaway for New York. He met with both von Papen and Boy-Ed in the comfortable privacy of the German Club on Central Park South. No record exists of what was said, then or when the trio later made their way downtown to the never-ending party at Martha Held’s. But in the course of that long evening a plan was set in motion to commit a singular crime on a scale not previously envisioned in American history—the mass forgery of U.S. passports.

  A forged passport given to Horst von der Goltz under the alias Bridgeman H. Taylor, circa 1914.

  (John Price Jones and Paul Merrick Hollister, The German Secret Service in America)

  THEY SET UP SHOP IN a grimy storefront on a twisting street in lower Manhattan perpetually shaded by the looming ironwork of the Brooklyn Bridge. A large table was placed at one end of the small room like an altar, and it was piled high with a stack of papers. The sheets were all identical—Form 375, the single-page application required for an American passport.

  Each day the storefront was jammed. It was very likely the busiest passport bureau in Manhattan. But the long lines had been expected: each applicant was paid to fill out the form.

  Hans von Wedell was the agent running this crucial operation. He’d been handpicked by von Papen, and his selection was enthusiastically endorsed by the ambassador. A tall, well-dressed aristocrat, the nephew of a count who held a lofty position in the Foreign Office, von Wedell spoke engagingly. Even his most casual conversations were sprinkled with a lively wit or a scholar’s erudition, and when he was intent on persuasion, he was formidable. Still, he was an unfortunate choice.

  Hans von Wedell was by profession and instinct a con man, but that was certainly no disqualification from earning his keep as a spy. His real failing was that he wasn’t very successful at fraud. Or, for that matter, at anything else he had tried.

  At various times in his vagabond life he’d been a reporter, a lawyer, and a small-time thief. When those trades had ended in embarrassed failure, he had gone into “finance,” a business that amounted to little more than fleecing widows out of their nest eggs. Over tea or an intimate dinner, the aristocratic seducer solicited investments that, in their convoluted way, all led back to companies that existed only on paper and of which he was the sole beneficiary. The authorities were already breathing down von Wedell’s neck when von Papen approached him. He gladly—and quickly—folded up shop and went into the passport business.

  From the start, trade was booming. He spread the word to Bowery bums and the residents of fleabag hotels throughout the city: they could earn a munificent $20 for just minutes of easy work. All they’d have to do was allow their photograph to be taken and then sign a document. Von Papen provided the money, and soon the lines were snaking out into the street.

  Von Wedell did the rest; and, to his credit, the operation worked smoothly. He’d send off the application and wait three or four days for the official U.S. passport to come in the mail.

  The Great Seal of the United States would be impressively stamped on the passport photograph when the document arrived, but this State Department precaution was easily circumvented. One of his cohorts would later breezily explain how it was done:

  “We wet the photograph [on the passport] with a damp cloth,” he boasted with larcenous pride, “and then we affix the picture of the man who is to use it. The new photograph also is dampened, but when it is fastened to the passport there still remains a sort of vacuum in spots between the new picture and the old because of the ridges made by the seal. So we turn the passport upside down, place it on a soft ground—say a silk handkerchief—and then we take a papercutter with a dull point, and just trace the letters of the seal. The result is that the new photograph dries exactly as if it had been stamped by Uncle Sam. You can’t tell the difference.”

  Hundreds of reserve officers successfully used these phony passports to get on ships leaving New York for Italy, Holland, and Scandinavia. Once they were on the Continent, border crossings, particularly in wartime Europe, were perfunctory affairs, and it was short work to get to Germany.

  It was an ingeniously simple operation, and it might have played on for months and months had von Wedell been content to serve only the Fatherland. But—lacking even a spy’s provisional integrity—he remained loyal only to himself. Before long his greed did him in, and the entire passport scheme collapsed in the process.

  The end came in one swift act of vengeance. It had been well known among the down-and-out clientele of the Mills Hotel No. 3, a transient establishment near Thirty-Sixth Street, that the going rate for signing Form 375 and allowing your photograph to be taken was $20 cash. For anyone whose pockets were empty, this loomed as a fortune. New arrivals at the hotel couldn’t believe their luck. But several months into the scam, as a handful of eager applicants from the Mills Hotel appeared at the Bridge Street storefront, von Wedell casually announced that the going rate for their cooperation was now a meager $5.

  Expectations were dashed, and for days there was a good deal of brooding about the additional $15 applicants should have received. Once the $5 had been spent, the intensity of the gripes escalated to the fury of a vendetta. An angry rumor started running through the hotel that von Wedell was pocketing the $15 that should have been theirs.

  The rumor was true. Von Wedell continued to receive $20 from von Papen to pass on to whoever signed the form, but he had decided to keep three-quarters of the fee for himself.

  They’re bums. Give them more money, they’ll only buy more whiskey, he reasoned with a self-serving logic. What’s the harm?

  He soon found out. A vindictive contingent from the Mills, their anger rubbed raw by the injustice done to them, went to the authorities. If von Wedell was going to scam them, then they owed him no allegiance. Once they made their bitter report, the entire operation came tumbling down.

  Von Wedell escaped to Cuba. The shrewd von Bernstorff, whose many years of dealings with Wilhelmstrasse’s frock-coated princelings had taught him volumes about self-preservation, quickly sent off a coded telegram to Berlin. He assured his superiors that while the passport operation had “unfortunately become known,” there was no cause for alarm: “There is no reason to fear that the Embassy will be compromised.”

  Chapter 13

  Still, despite its two bungled operations, the network didn’t have long to wait for its next chance. On November 28, 1914, new marching orders arrived fro
m Berlin. A secret cable instructed: “It is necessary to hire through third parties who stand in no relations to the official representatives of Germany agents for arranging explosions on ships bound for enemy countries.”

  Von Bernstorff coolly passed the cable on to von Papen with no further instructions; none were necessary. The ambassador’s orders were clear: handle this however you think best, but make sure this time the job gets done.

  The military attaché was elated. He had been moping since the aborted Welland Canal and passport fiascos; this operation would be his vindication. The high command would take new measure of his talents. He’d make his mark, win medals.

  In a repeat of the cautious tradecraft that had led him to Horst von der Goltz, he decided that he’d need a professional to direct the team in the field. Only this go-around, his handpicked operative was another sort of man entirely.

  THE MAZE OF NARROW COBBLESTONE streets leading to Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront was a no-man’s-land. This was menacing territory, a makeshift community on the fringe of the city crawling with its own shivery dangers. It was home to bullish longshoremen, knife-packing sailors, desperate whores, and a motley assortment of wharf rats who had long ago cast off the small traces of conscience with which they’d been born. On its dank blocks were run-down hotels that rented rooms for the hour and seedy bars where beer and whiskey flowed, and where heroin or opium could be scored in the back room. A shiv driven into the back, brass knuckles slamming into a mouthful of teeth, a straight razor slashing the jugular—blood flowing on the streets was not uncommon. During the day, when ships were loading or docking, the hustle of activity created an illusion of safety. But with the darkness of night, any doubts vanished: this was a savage land.

  Paul Koenig ruled this underworld like the prince of darkness. For years he’d been the detective superintendent of the Atlas Line, a shipping subsidiary of the Kaiser’s Own, as the Hamburg-American Line, thanks to its intricate ties to the imperial government, was commonly known. He rode roughshod over a dozen burly men, and each day they marched about the waterfront like the emperor’s troops in a savage colonial port, getting the goods on sailors, dockhands, or anybody else foolish enough to think he could put one over on Hamburg-American.