Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service

by Hector C. Bywater

  ‘It is here, in print, in your native tongue, in a book published under your name. Did you write it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it true or untrue?’

  A pause. The German was breathing heavily.

  ‘I did not see it myself.’

  ‘Ah!’ The interrogator picked him up quickly. ‘Then your second-in-command, this Mr Gröning, saw it and reported it to you?’

  ‘No,’ the answer came reluctantly.

  ‘Then why did you say it?’

  ‘I was told it was so.’

  ‘On that particular day?’

  ‘No. On several occasions.’

  ‘But, you never saw, with your own eyes, British hospital ships carrying troops and guns?’

  There was a long, painful pause. The German stood up.

  ‘I never did,’ he said. ‘I was told it was so.’

  ‘You were told so by your propaganda department in order that you might include the lie in your book?’

  But to that question the Baron returned no answer.

  It was not really necessary. We had his confession that the whole story was fabricated. The conversation had been taken down verbatim by a concealed stenographer whose transcript was endorsed by hidden witnesses. We had no need of further evidence.

  The facts were promptly issued to the press of the entire world.

  There is an interesting pendant to this story.

  U-93 was not sunk. Severely damaged though she was, she remained watertight, and managed to limp home and report the loss of her captain and the others who had fallen overboard. It was inquiries for these men through the Red Cross a few weeks later that told us the Prize’s gallant effort had not ended the career of that particular submarine. But it had not been fruitless, since it enabled us to clear our good name by the personal testimony of the man who had sought to tarnish it with a lie.

  One would have supposed the hospital ship calumny to have been dead long ago, but ten years after the Armistice German writers on the naval campaign were still repeating it.

  That particular British naval officer had a flair for dealing with suspicious people and enemy prisoners. He was a most versatile actor. He could be the polished, easy, rather lackadaisical man-of-the-world. He could be the kindly, well-meaning, nervous, friendly sort of person, incapable of hurting a fly. And, when the need arose, he could outdo any Prussian drill sergeant at the game of brutal browbeating. One of his triumphs was the trapping of a suspect who had successfully run the gauntlet of four of our other examiners.

  This man, living in a certain neutral country, was, ostensibly, a citizen of another neutral country. We had long had our eye on him. We were as sure as we could be, without written proof, that he was not only a German agent, but a native-born German to boot. But there was nothing in the way he spoke the tongue of his adopted country to betray his origin, and he appeared to know no German.

  For a while we kept him under close observation in that neutral country where he was carrying on an innocent and legitimate business, which we were convinced was a mere cloak. Then, acting on instructions, we gave him a little more rope. But he still seemed to have difficulty in obtaining information of real value – or perhaps his aim all along was to come to England.

  Be that as it may, he finally booked a passage.

  His passport was in order, and our consulate gave him a visa.

  When he reached this side he successfully passed the examination officers. He got into the train and proceeded to London. And, all this time, the NID had been kept apprised of his movements.

  Half an hour before the boat train was due, the intelligence officer referred to above put on his overcoat and his uniform cap (he was a ‘brass hat’, and a very senior one at that) and went down to the station. He had made the necessary arrangements with the station authorities. In order to leave the station, all passengers by the boat train had to pass through a room where this officer was standing, and were required either to show their passports or declare their nationality to be British.

  It was a purely cursory examination – until our friend the ‘neutral’ came in. Whether the British intelligence officer acted on the spur of the moment, or whether he had made his plan beforehand, is not known. He would never say. If he had a plan, the ‘neutral’ played right into his hands. If he had none, his quickness of wit was wonderful.

  The ‘neutral’ handed in his passport, which was passed to the British officer, who was about to inspect it when the man thrust his hands in his trousers pockets and stood there nonchalantly.

  Quick as a rapier thrust, the British officer barked out in pure German:

  ‘How dare you stand like that before a superior officer?’

  The ‘neutral’ automatically brought his heels together with a click, and half-stiffened to attention. Then he suddenly relaxed, and tried to look as if he had not grasped the meaning of the words.

  ‘I was led to believe that you did not understand German, Herr Hauptmann,’ said the British intelligence officer, quietly slipping the passport into his overcoat pocket. ‘There is a car outside. Will you be good enough to come with me?’

  The German captain went. The game was up.

  Sharp eyesight and quick wits on the part of a boarding officer detailed to look out for German agents travelling from America to the Continent did us good service on another occasion.

  A certain Herr Boehm had got through to America by way of Holland in the autumn of 1914, and there became a very active member of Count Bernstorff’s group of secret service agents. We kept track of him fairly well in the United States, but he seemed to be a more or less useless person, who talked a great deal and apparently did very little. He considered himself to be occupied solely with the Higher Political Aspects (nothing but capitals will do justice to the importance of those words), and took no part in the terrorist campaign.

  Then, suddenly, we lost sight of him.

  It was quite possible he was up to mischief somewhere in the United States. Or he might be on his way home. Anyway, the ports were warned.

  One day a neutral steamer came into harbour to drop passengers for Britain. Passports were, of course, examined, whether the passengers were landing here or not.

  Among those going on to a continental port was a certain Mr Thrasher. His accent was pure American. His clothes were American. His passport was American. He corresponded to the description on it, even down to the spectacles.

  The boarding officers cross-examined him in the usual way, but were unable to shake his story. One of them, however, noticed that Mr Thrasher’s spectacles seemed to bother him. It looked as if he were not used to wearing spectacles.

  Quite conversationally and sympathetically, the boarding officer asked him about his eyesight – who was his oculist, what was the disability with his eyes, and so on.

  Mr Thrasher became confused. His replies were muddled and contradictory. He didn’t seem to know much about his own eyesight. So he was politely but firmly taken ashore for more cross-examination, and ultimately admitted that he was the missing Herr Boehm. He spent the rest of the war in a British internment camp, because, after all, he had done no spying in this country, and we had no evidence that he had ever sent any information to Germany.

  There was an amusing sequel to the capture of Herr Boehm. A few months later some papers of Count Bernstorff fell into our hands, among them a report from the German Military Information Bureau dated March 1916. It dealt with the activities of Herr Boehm, and suggested, not too delicately, that he was too free with his tongue for the good of his service! He was recommended for recall.

  That, then, was why he had left America so secretly.

  CHAPTER 16

  FIGHTING THE WRECKERS IN AMERICA

  THE LATE PRESIDENT Wilson, in his address to Congress in 1915, devoted all the opening passages to a denunciation of certain ‘citizens of the United States, I blush to think, born under other flags’, who had devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the cause of
Germany by running a guerrilla war of their own in the United States.

  ‘They have formed plots to destroy property,’ the President said. ‘They have entered into conspiracies against the neutrality of the government. They have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the government.’

  The indictment was fully deserved. The lawlessness of the modern gunmen is almost mild compared with the reign of terror initiated by the anti-Ally gangs in the United States as soon as the war began.

  In the early months, as the American authorities themselves subsequently admitted, the methods of dealing with this outbreak of organised outrage were lax. At that time it fell to the lot of the British ID to take a hand in the work in defence of British interests. It was a difficult and delicate task, of course, but it was done so diplomatically, and the evidence gathered and placed before the American authorities was so strong, that before long four or five departments, including the police, were actively on the trail. It was no uncommon thing for a suspect who had been denounced by the British ID agents to be shadowed by men from four US departments at once!

  This was publicity with a vengeance – and even where no case could be made out for an arrest, the ‘silent pressure’ of the watching was generally enough to drive the delinquent into retirement.

  The names of Captain von Papen and Captain Boy-Ed, of Paul Koenig, Dr Albert, and Dr Dernburg are notorious throughout the world. It is perhaps worth pointing out, as a testimony to the discretion with which the British intelligence system was worked in the United States, that not a single name of any of our men has ever been mentioned in any paper, either with bouquets or with abuse. And yet American papers in 1915 stated that there were then more than 200 British secret service agents at work all over the states, countering the machinations of von Papen’s satellites.

  They had all sorts of different crimes to keep under observation. There was the forging of passports, which if it had not been watched very carefully would have given us endless trouble in Europe. That this forging was personally supervised by Boy-Ed so long as he was in the United States formed part of the indictment by the Federal Grand Jury in 1916, and the faking was very ingeniously done. Fortunately we had a man working in the ‘passport factory’ – as we had at the heart of most of the other German activities – and were therefore able to trace most of the fakes that were in circulation.

  Thus we came into possession of a list of German reservist officers living in America who were to be shipped to the fatherland by whatever means offered, and for whom forged passports were to be provided by the factory.

  The attempts to bribe labour leaders and to foment strikes in the munition works and other establishments making war material for the Allies were almost ceaseless for the first year of the war. These were so much a domestic affair of the American government’s, however, that beyond gathering all the information we could and passing it to the proper authorities, we took only a small part in dealing with that branch of the German campaign.

  The maintenance of a watch on the interned German ships was our most difficult task. It is a great testimony to the work of those who were engaged in this task that so few German ships got away at all. There was the case of the Sacramento, which escaped from San Francisco in the autumn of 1914 and served as a supply ship to von Spee’s Squadron until she was sunk after the Battle of the Falklands. But even in this case we had our revenge, for all the necessary evidence was collected to bring about the indictment of those who plotted the escape.

  In another case we brought together the evidence necessary to indict the American managing director of the Hamburg–Amerika line, with his purchasing agent and a superintendent, for conspiring to supply false clearance papers to vessels that were to slip out with supplies for the German warships still at large during 1914. This was one of the schemes of Captain Boy-Ed, run from his secret office at No. 11, Broadway, New York.

  Several stores of arms were collected in various parts of the United States to German order. Some of these, there is no doubt, were intended for despatch to the German Army, but as that became less and less possible, the German plotters turned their attention to exporting them to disaffected people in the British Empire. Thus there was a store in West Houston Street, New York, with arms and munitions enough for 10,000 men. One item was 2,500,000 rounds of rifle cartridges. These were to have been shipped in the autumn of 1915, and plans were most carefully laid for the secret embarkation of the whole consignment.

  Our ID men knew all about it. They had had their eyes on that store for quite a long time – in fact, ever since it came into existence in the early summer. And quite suddenly, a day or two before the Germans had arranged to send the stuff afloat, there was a marked concentration of British cruisers off New York. It was so noticeable that all the American papers commented on it, and wondered what on earth it was all about.

  The Germans knew, and those munitions were never shipped. They were seized by the United States authorities about four months later.

  It will be remembered that in one of Count Bernstorff’s letters, found among the von Papen papers seized at Falmouth and deciphered in the famous Room 40 at the admiralty, there was a reference to ‘arms stored to our account in New York and the state of Washington, which were intended for India.’

  The fomenting of rebellion in India, Ireland, and other parts of the empire was carried on very vigorously by the officials of the German embassy in Washington. They spent a lot of money on it, all to no purpose, and we were on their trail pretty well all the time. Their association with Sir Roger Casement and the Easter Rebellion in Dublin is now a matter of history, and need not be retold here.

  One of the things that, when it became known, caused the most bitter feeling against the plotters among genuine Americans, was the extent to which German officials were involved in the dastardly plot for firing liners at sea by means of incendiary bombs. In 1917 the United States government Public Information Committee issued a pamphlet with photographic copies of documents inculpating Captain Koenig and Captain von Papen in the plot. But it was the British secret service that collected the evidence on which the Americans were able to act.

  Altogether some forty-one cases of fire breaking out in ships that had left New York were listed by the Federal Grand Jury in the ultimate indictment of the villains of the piece.

  Two men actively connected with that foul business were Kleist and Scheele. Their names are probably forgotten by the world at large by now, but at the time of the trial they were headlines in the news.

  The inner story of the detection of the bomb factory and its ramifications did not come out at the trial, but it is worth putting on record.

  One day the head of the British intelligence service in New York was rung up on the telephone and heard a voice, of distinctly Teutonic accent, speaking in a very nervous tone.

  Did Captain ------ want some information of great importance to Britain? said the Voice. If so, would he send someone who spoke German to an address in Hoboken?

  The voice was invited to come to New York, but flatly declined. Hoboken or nowhere was his ultimatum.

  One of our men who spoke German like a native was sent to the rendezvous, but was warned to be on his guard, for the whole thing reeked of a trap. Count Bernstorff’s minions were very active at that time.

  Down in Hoboken, near the Hamburg–Amerika piers, our man found the address he had been given, a small German café. At the door he was met by an obvious German-American who seemed to expect him, and directed him upstairs to the first floor. The ID man had his hand on his gun all the time. The position looked more and more dangerous.

  And it was no better when he met his informant – a weedy, terrified youth, who might really have been the tethered goat in a trap for a tiger. This youth gave his name, the same as that mentioned on the telephone, and suggested that they should go into a private room.

  The ID man was not falling into that trap. He suggested a corner in the public refreshmen
t room. There was less scope for an ‘unfortunate incident’ there – and, anyway, it was he who sat with his back to the wall.

  The informant told part of his tale. A clever German chemist had enlisted a gang of men to make and place incendiary bombs in Allied merchant ships sailing from American ports. And for the names of the plotters the youth asked $2,000 (£400).

  The ID man was not such a fool as to carry that amount of money on him in Hoboken, and he wanted more evidence before he paid. He produced a $20 bill as evidence of good faith, and promised more if the youth would bring him one of the bombs next day.

  He did so. It was a leaden case, 4 inches long by 1 inch in diameter, with a smaller cylinder of zinc inside it. A corrosive acid was contained in this, which would ignite the other ingredients in the lead container when it had eaten its way through the inner cylinder. The time it took to do that depended on the thickness of the zinc.

  The youth would part with no more information without his price. So he got it – but by that time the Bomb Squad of the New York Police, under the famous Inspector Tunney, was in the game. The youth was arrested with the dollars on him, and asked to account for them.

  Mr Tunney had a way of asking questions that somehow compelled answers. So the youth came out with the whole story. The chemist was a Dr Walter Scheele, his chief assistant was Kleist, and the bomb factory was actually on board the interned German liner Friedrich der Grosse.

  Most important of all, the trail led to more information incriminating Wolf von Igel, the pseudo ‘advertising agent’ of Wall Street, and one of the leaders of the German terrorist organisation.

  All our countering of German activities in the United States, of course, had to be done by guile. We could not use force, and, in the early months at any rate, we could not call in the law. But guile served us very well, as Dr Albert has good reason to know.