Sigsbee stood still, his face blank. “What? Oh! . . . well, yes, I mean no, I haven’t.” Then he stopped, clearly forgetting the counter phrase. The poor fellow wasn’t used to the clandestine life. He peered at me intently, starting to see a resemblance to a naval officer he’d met before.
“Would you like to?” I prompted, wishing Sigsbee would just hand me the damn message. Neither of us needed to go any further through all Theodore’s ridiculous cloak and dagger stuff. After all, I knew who Sigsbee was, and I had given him the proper code to show him who I was.
“Yes, I would like to see one of those boa constrictors,” he said.
“Snakes?” interrupted Fitzhugh Lee, hovering nearby. “Stay away from them, myself. Adam learned that the hard way a long time ago! However did we get onto snakes?” He swung his bulk toward me. “You’re the Canadian journalist, aren’t you?”
I stuck out a hand. “Melville Brinson, of the Toronto Express, sir. We met at the French consul’s soirée here in Havana six months ago.”
“Oh, yes, quite right, of course, Mr. Brinson. I do recall our delightful conversation.”
I smiled at them both, then suddenly looked out the window, as if peering at something important. To his credit, Sigsbee took the hint and smoothly guided Lee to the window with his left hand, while retrieving something from a pocket with his right.
“Look at the grand view of the ocean, General Lee. Magnificent, isn’t it?” Sigsbee suggested.
Then, as everyone around him turned their faces toward the expanse of sea, Sigsbee edged close to me, sliding several small-sized papers into my coat pocket. He walked away with my report on the feasibility of using Isabela—Sagua Grande for an invasion target in his hand, quickly stuffing it into his trouser pocket. The entourage, including Maria and son, followed him out the door into the foyer with none the wiser.
At the portico, I said goodbye to some of the guests, but kept my distance from Maria. For an instant our eyes met and she gave the slightest of nods. Feeling considerably better about her safety, I wandered off to examine a huge yellow hibiscus flower, thence sauntered to a hedge of brilliantly purple bougainvillea.
Rork materialized from behind the bougainvillea. “How’d it go?”
“Maria was angry, but listened. She’s leaving tomorrow. Her priest son is evidently pro-Cuban independence now. Nothing else new from the meeting. It was all the standard diplo drivel.”
Upon returning to our slum lair, Rork went out to retrieve an important item. Kept heavily wrapped in oilcloth, it was hidden in a crevice inside the end of a sewage drain pipe, on the bank of a nearby gulley. This was a regrettable but necessary sacrilege, for it was an 1863 New Testament Bible in Danish—a gift from an Episcopal priest in Mississippi, of all places—and the code book for secret messages from Roosevelt. Specifically, it was the rare eighth edition of that particular Bible, which had been translated from the original Greek. Other editions, before and after 1863, had variations in the text, a seemingly minor but actually important factor. Theodore had an exact copy of it in his desk at Washington. Thus, we could use our two copies to form and decipher coded messages.
I spread out the other items required for the translation: the three pages given me by Sigsbee, a tiny English-Danish pocket dictionary, and a scrap of paper for figuring. It would take concentration and time to decipher Roosevelt’s message, so I turned to it with a will, anxious to discover when and how I was returning home to my wife.
26
Numbers
Havana, Cuba
Sunday afternoon
30 January 1898
The method of decipherment might be of interest to the reader of this memoir, so I will explain the process, the basics of which are commonly used by many of the world’s secret services.
The three sheets given me were each a different color, and each contained lines of numbers. They were intentionally disarrayed to render the numbers out of the proper sequence, the first layer of security. I put them in the right order, from lightest color to darkest color, with the three sheets not side by side, but columned. This provided a total of thirteen lines of numbers. Each line had thirteen numbers written boldly, appearing thus:
0169840132008
0246331028505
0521070491001
3747731762908
5122340837602
6323673234104
0617152778801
1820201099805
0093844531306
6201961712801
6252120389801
1792393556403
2128981821204
The numbers were without discernible patterns and designed to appear as standard European commercial telegraph code at initial glance, the second layer of security.
Then came the third layer of security: false numbers imbedded within each line—the fourth through sixth, and the ninth through eleventh digits. Eliminating the false numbers gave me this:
0160108
0241005
0520401
3741708
5120802
6323204
0612701
1821005
0094506
6201701
6250301
1793503
2121804
The fourth layer of security was the rare Bible in our possession. The first three digits of each line of numbers were page numbers of the Bible. The second two numbers represented which line of text down from the top of the page. The final two numbers were the ordinal of the word on the specific line.
Thus, the mathematical geography of the Bible verses produced a list like this:
Page 16, line 1, word 8—Matthew 5:43
Page 24, line 10, word 5—Matthew 9:1
Page 52, line 4, word 1—Matthew 18:5
Page 374, line 17, word 8—Acts 23:27
Page 512, line 8, word 2—Colossians 1:10
Page 632, line 32, word 4—Revelations 11:7
Page 61, line 27, word 1—Matthew 21:20
Page 182, line 10, word 5—Luke 10:7
Page 9, line 45, word 6—Matthew 3:9
Page 620, line 17, word 1—Revelations 3:12
Page 625, line 3, word 1—Revelations 6:11
Page 179, line 35, word 3—Luke 9:37
Page 212, line 18, word 4—Luke 19:14
The Bible was small, the type font was neo-Gothic. Therefore, the words were difficult to see with my aging eyesight, especially in the less than optimal light conditions of our hideout. Danish has a different alphabet than English, adding one more factor in the equation.
What finally emerged from my analysis was this list of words, arranged in horizontal text in the English version of Danish lower case letters:
fjende skib og haer stigende krig snart forbliver indenfor stad indtil naeste besked
Using the Danish-English pocket dictionary was my final task. The translated message was not what I expected, so I calculated and read everything three more times, sure I had made a mistake. I hadn’t. Rork looked over my work, but he found it accurate. Then he swore a distinctly un-Biblical blue streak in Gaelic.
The message read:
Enemy ships and army increasing. War soon. Stay within city until next message.
The next morning, I sent a street boy to the telegraph office with a cable request to “Mr. Roald Fuglmand” in Montreal, from “Mr. Hopf.” It had the following numbers as the message: “4592732499845.” Page 459, line 24, word 5, which was in 2nd Corinthians 1:14, and meant: “Acknowledged.”
I dared not add my personal opinion.
27
The Invisible Functionary
Hotel Mascotte
Oficios and Luz streets
Havana, Cuba
Early February 1898
We still had to obtain the Havana defense plan
s and get them to Sigsbee, and receive the funding from him, but first we had to take care of a more immediate problem. Our rum smuggler charade was losing validity among our fellow denizens of the slum, and I judged it necessary to make a change in our base of operations. I chose a middle-class hotel in the nice area of the harbor front, Mascotte Hotel, named for the Plant Line passenger steamer which docked right in front of it. It was an ideal location: full of norteamericano tourists and businessmen, so Rork and I wouldn’t stand out. Facing the harbor from the corner of Luz and Oficios streets, it was close to the steamers to Key West, and the ferry which crossed the harbor to the town of Regla.
The reader may well question my decision, but the yacht club breakfast affair had given me new confidence in our aliases and changed outward appearances. Rork and I were much thinner, our faces were completely changed by spectacles, long hair, and beards, and we’d grown used to our new names and occupations. Maria and Sigsbee were the test. If my wife couldn’t recognize me at first look, I guessed most of Orden Publico wouldn’t either. In hindsight, I will admit my reasoning was influenced by the dismal food, lack of sleep, and aches and pains incurred from living in a crude hovel. That we were constantly surrounded by a menagerie of truly dangerous neighbors, any of whom would cut our throats for a dollar, was the tipping point. One can only fool them for so long.
When I suggested the change, Rork agreed. “Ooh, me weary ol’ bones’re mutinyin’ this sort o’ life, boyo. They’re hopin’ for somethin’ a bit more posh. If we’re goin’ to die in this hellhole, let’s die clean, well-rested, an’ damn well fed, with a wee touch o’ somethin’ decent to drink.”
And so Mr. Melville Brinson and Mr. Angus McGregor, Her Britannic Majesty’s loyal Canadian subjects, were installed in a comfortable corner suite on the hotel’s second floor. Our view was panoramic and perfect for our purposes, spanning from the Spanish admiral’s office two blocks north, the Maine at anchor in front of us, and the Spanish cruiser and German warship anchored to the south.
For the next week and a half we lived very well, with my intention being to spend all of our remaining original funds in maintaining an impressively lavish lifestyle. Rork said we more than deserved it. I countered it was operationally necessary to support our deception.
During this time, I would dutifully make the rounds of administrative Havana, seeking official information about the rebel war for my fictitious newspaper in Toronto. This was a predictably unsuccessful enterprise, since the Spanish authorities were well known for obfuscation and disinformation with members of the press, but it did provide cover for my real work, which was to find agent R8 and get the Havana defense plan from him.
Due to ongoing security concerns, because his enemies are still out there, I shall give R8 the nom de guerre of Vinatero, for his family had been vintners in Spain before relocating to Havana in 1762. The timing of their arrival was unfortunate, a month prior to the British occupation. He’d initially come into my employ in 1887 and was extremely valuable for me, for he was a senior copy clerk in the secretarial office of the captain-general’s staff.
Vinatero was a plodding bureaucrat, a droopy-eyed widower without family or friends. Like many of his peers, he was a forgotten functionary no one above his status would suspect had the gumption to do much of anything. But I recognized his potential. Vinatero had a servant’s unnoticed proximity to high level people in the army’s headquarters, with daily access to documents in the filing cabinets. And I knew sooner or later I would need one of those documents.
His motive was unknown to his superiors, and it furnished him with impressive gumption. A Freemason, he had an affinity to American-style liberal democracy and the rights of man. He also had brother Masonic friends among the Cuban rebels. Best of all, Vinatero had a long-standing but unexplained grudge against the Catholic Church, which was so closely allied with the Spanish government as to be almost synonymous.
Over the years he had supplied me with routine information, easily verifiable, and we continued our distant relationship, the payments to him being in the nature of a retainer for when I really needed him. Then, in August 1897, he sent word he could obtain a copy of the defense plans of Havana, if we wanted them. I didn’t hesitate in agreeing.
Because of the value of his position and the efficiency of the Spanish security apparatus, any communication with Vinatero was very circumspect and rare. In fact, there had been no communication from him, either by telegram or letter or courier, since his last to me in November, when he predicted he would have the plans in December or January. Vinatero was to send word they were ready to be handed over, but no word came.
Vinatero might assume that I or one of my men might be aboard Maine and that the three drop sites which we’d used many years earlier could still be used. With that optimistic thought in mind, every other day I did my rounds of them, varying my times and routes. A week went by, but no envelope was found. I feared the worst and told Rork the issue was probably moot.
The next day, on the tenth of February, I tried one last time. Nothing was found at the first two places, but the third yielded results. Behind loose bricks in the north wall of the alley behind Castillo de Farnes, a tavern and boarding house on the eastern side of the theater district, I found a battered old valise.
Inside the valise was a blue pouch. I smiled when I saw it, for though Vinatero worked for the army, he’d put the plans inside a small Spanish naval courier pouch. It was a clever red herring should the drop site be discovered by the authorities.
Leaving the valise in situ so anyone else checking the location would assume it had not been found, I put the pouch inside my coat and strolled off toward the west, the direction away from my hotel, after scanning for anyone watching. Two streets over, I discarded my recently obtained coat and put the pouch inside my shirt, then began a broad circumnavigation of the area to get to the hotel. Within a couple blocks of my destination, I ducked down an alley and into an alcove, and there I paused to look at what was in the pouch.
It was a map. But not just any map.
It was the latest update in the defense plans of Havana—an incredible coup. Noted as the ninth copy of a total of twelve, it was dated the first of February and signed by the chief of engineers. All Spanish installations and fortresses, their armament, and their units’ barracks and encampments were shown in detail.
I removed my undershirt, wrapped it around the map, and quickly reached up to cram it into a crevice of the ancient alley’s wall, about seven feet off the ground. I then stuffed the crevice with dirt to make it flush with the wall and hurried back to our room at the hotel to share the good news.
Rork asked, “Any mail?”
“Mail” was our euphemism for the plans. I replied with similar language, “Yes, some extraordinary mail, as a matter of fact. Now that we’ve delivered the Sagua tobacco assessment, the distraught lady departed, and this mail has arrived, I think our work here is nearly done. We just have to deliver the mail and we’ll be going home soon. I’m thinking first-class cabins on a Plant steamer.”
“Homeward bound . . . now me ears’re happy. This calls for a proper celebration!”
We celebrated very properly, enjoying a nice dinner of real lechon asado, a decent Tempranillo wine, and for a digestif, our favorite sipping rum, Matusalem. The conversation was suitably non-naval, centering on women we’d known, loves we’d lost, and dreams yet unfulfilled. I had the best sleep since I’d arrived in Cuba.
The next day, everything changed.
28
A Diplomatic Bombshell
Havana, Cuba
Friday
11 February 1898
The first salient event of the day was the delivery of a hundred copies of William Randolph Hearst’s February ninth issue of the New York Journal. They’d been rushed to Havana by a Plant Line steamer from Tampa, where they had been sent by special overnight express train from New York
. This was the fastest delivery of a newspaper from New York in Havana’s history. I got a copy five minutes after it was ashore, spending three times the cover price, and shook my head in disbelief at what it contained. Bad news does travel fast.
The Journal was dramatically headlined, “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.” The article detailed a letter which had come into the paper’s possession the day before. The article stated Enrique Dupuy de Lome, the Spanish ambassador to Washington, had written a private letter to a Spanish government friend who was visiting Havana. The letter was intercepted by the Cuban underground in Cuba and sent north, where it was passed by the Cuban junta to their friends in the New York press.
The ambassador’s letter—printed in its entirety for the entire world to see—was a bombshell and unintentional gift for the Cuban rebel cause. In just a few pages, de Lome managed to insult an incredibly wide variety of people.
De Lome’s letter said the Cuban insurgents fighting for independence would leave the field of battle, come over to the Spanish, and give up their fight: “Neither one nor the other class had the courage to leave in a body and they will not be brave enough to return in a body.” He angered the pacifists in Cuba, America, and Spain: “Without a military end of the matter nothing will be accomplished in Cuba. . . .” He castigated the press: “Nearly all the newspaper rabble that swarms in your hotels are Englishmen, and while writing for the Journal they are also correspondents of the most influential journals and reviews of London.” The British government was also a target of his wrath: “England’s only object is that the Americans should amuse themselves with us and leave her alone, and if there should be war, that it would stave off a conflict which she dreads. . . .” He also didn’t think much of the United States Congress: “Have a man of prominence sent hither, in order that I may use him here to carry on propaganda among the senators and others. . . .”
An Honorable War Page 13
