The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War

by James Wyllie

  Von Rintelen charmed and flattered the New York arms dealers, but to no avail: a sympathetic merchant of war showed him just how much the Italians were offering for the same explosives that he wanted to buy. Von Rintelen knew two depressing things: the Italians were going to join the war on the side of the Allies (they did so in May 1915), and his $500,000 wasn’t going to buy him much of anything in this market.

  Then luck walked in the door. Soon after setting up his shell company, von Rintelen had an unexpected visitor, sent by von Papen to provide lethal assistance. Dr Walter Theodore von Scheele had, until the outbreak of the war, been Germany’s secret weapon in America. He had studied pharmacology and chemistry in Bonn, and his middle-aged face bore the scars of student duels. He had served as a lieutenant in Germany’s Field Artillery Regiment 8, and in 1883 emigrated to the United States to pursue further research. His military leave came with a condition: he had to make himself available to Germany’s military attaché in Washington. Scheele was assigned to track and report on American discoveries in explosives and chemicals that could be used in war. He was paid an annual retainer of $1,500, and while living the life of a mild-mannered pharmacist with a shop in Brooklyn, his industrial espionage was so good that he was never recalled for military service to Germany, and indeed, rose in rank from lieutenant to major.

  When Scheele met von Rintelen, he was not only Germany’s longest-serving spy in the USA, but he had the perfect cover as president of the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company, which he’d created in 1913 in Hoboken under orders from von Papen. And by way of welcoming von Rintelen back to the US, he reached into his pocket and placed a cigar on the Dark Invader’s desk.

  Except this was not a cigar. It was a lead pipe the same shape and length as a good Cuban ‘torpedo’, and hollow within. Scheele had inserted a circular copper disc halfway down the pipe, and soldered it in place to create two separate compartments. One would hold picric acid, an explosive; the other an inflammable liquid such as sulphuric acid. The device was an ingenious time bomb: the thickness of the copper disc determined the speed at which the acids ate through it to unite in combustion. Best of all, it was easily portable. It could be placed on munition and supply ships in the harbour by sympathetic (or bought) dockworkers, timed to burst into ship-crippling flame somewhere out at sea, and so keep suspicion out to sea as well. All von Rintelen needed was a place to manufacture the bombs.

  Enter the shady waterfront lawyer Bonford Boniface, a tall, lean rogue whose ‘pince-nez … kept on slipping down his nose, and gave one on the whole the impression of a mangy hyena seeking its daily prey on the battlefield’. Boniface, who always smelled faintly of whisky, knew just the man to help with the cigar bomb plan: Captain Karl von Kleist, a 70-year-old retired German naval officer who lived in Hoboken. Von Rintelen was an old family friend of von Kleist, ‘a funny little old man who looked like a cartoon of the late Prussian eagle’. But von Kleist was no cartoon German. He knew the ways of the harbour, and the captains and officers of the interned German ships. And he had a brilliant idea that would help von Rintelen to create a munitions plant of his own, right under the noses of the US and British: ‘We were to transplant ourselves, with all our schemes, devices, and enterprises, on board one of the German ships and thus place ourselves in a most admirable situation. Germany within American territorial waters! What possibilities!’

  And so the interned ship SS Friedrich der Grosse became a bomb factory. Von Rintelen used the good offices of E. V. Gibbons to order bulk supplies of lead tubing and copper rods, along with the equipment to cut them. He then set up a shell-making operation on board the ship. Once the cigar tubes were cut, and the timing disc inserted, they were spirited under cover of darkness to Dr Scheele’s laboratory in Hoboken to be loaded with the explosive cocktail. Soon von Rintelen’s factory was making 50 cigar bombs a day.

  Towards the end of April 1915, the SS Cressington Court caught fire in the Atlantic, while two bombs were found in the cargo of the SS Lord Erne and another in the hold of the SS Devon – all of them Allied supply ships out of New York Harbor. In May, three more supply ships either caught fire or had bombs discovered on board, and explosions rocked a DuPont powder factory in New Jersey.

  In the space of three months after his arrival in America, von Rintelen’s war machine was up and running, and the ‘most secret’ code that he had couriered to New York was still, as far as he knew, unbroken by Room 40. However, the codebreakers in Hall’s diplomatic section were actually getting close to deciphering it, while his agents in the US recognised the danger von Rintelen presented and were already on his trail. Even though he was in New York under a false name, von Rintelen had cut a swathe through New York’s social scene during his time as a banker, and he did not spend his evenings in Manhattan hiding from British agents. Still, he was proving difficult to pin down. And he was getting bolder.

  The men from Dougherty’s Detective Bureau received what seemed a gift when a German sailor with a fondness for drink was heard loudly boasting, falsely, in a tavern that he was the Captain Rintelen who put bombs on ships bearing war materiel for the Allies. In the kind of moment of farce that wars often produce, the real von Rintelen collided with this story while lying low at the seaside – and the teller of it was none other than Guy Gaunt, Hall’s spymaster in America.

  Though Gaunt’s position was officially diplomatic, he exulted in his role as espionage chief, which theoretically at least would have resulted in his expulsion should he be discovered by the neutral United States. He made the possibility of discovery even easier with a cocktail of naval swagger and colonial snobbery spiced with insecurity, all of which fermented into a blustering ego that enjoyed the attention of New York society ladies when hints about his involvement in the dark arts were dropped at city galas and summer homes.

  Franz von Rintelen, Gaunt’s equal in the self-promotion department, often repaired to a hotel near Stamford, Connecticut, and while enjoying the Atlantic air he met some fetching ladies who invited him to a party at an exclusive hotel. At the party, he found himself face to face with Guy Gaunt, the man who was hunting for him at that very moment. Rintelen, with reckless bravado, introduced himself as Commander Brannon, a fellow Englishman and naval officer.

  After pleasantries, Rintelen got down to finding out just what his pursuer knew. ‘We have heard so much in the last few weeks about acts of sabotage against our ships,’ he ventured. Guy Gaunt, showing remarkable naiveté (or perhaps Rintelen was showing a mastery of disguise or rhetoric, or both), replied, ‘There is a gang working in New York Harbor under the direction of a German officer. We even know his name. He is called Rintelen, and has been mentioned a number of times in wireless messages by the German embassy … He even admitted his identity once in a tavern, when he was drunk, and hadn’t a hold on his tongue. He did not give away any details concerning his activities, but it is certain that he owns a motorboat, and runs about in it for days together selling goods of all kinds to the ships in the harbour. I cannot tell you any more, Commander, but I can promise you that he soon will be in our hands.’

  Von Rintelen was elated by this news, as Gaunt’s intelligence, while essentially correct, was so misplayed by its conveyor that Rintelen believed he was actually safe. But he failed to register that the British had intercepted and read his wireless messages.

  While von Rintelen was devising acts of sabotage and sipping cocktails at the seaside, Emanuel Voska’s team was busy trying to crack the German war machine in New York, feeding information to Gaunt, who would pass it on to Blinker Hall and Room 40. Voska had in his service clerks, messengers, waiters, maids, chauffeurs, and the assistant chief clerk in the Austrian embassy. One of his female agents, through money and charm, had convinced an employee in Karl Boy-Ed’s office to steal the ‘most secret’ code. Von Rintelen didn’t know it, but the British had him and his sabotage in their sights.

  In the end, the Dark Invader was most likely brought down by a combination of v
on Papen’s carelessness when sending cables to Berlin, openly using Rintelen’s name and discussing his activities, and the extraordinary actions of a German-American. On Friday 2 July 1915, the beginning of the Independence Day long weekend, Erich Muenter planted a bomb in a place that should have been among the most secure in the land: the Senate wing of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. He had timed it to explode when the building was deserted. When the bomb detonated near a telephone switchboard, plaster was torn from the walls and ceilings, mirrors and chandeliers were shattered, doors were blown open – one of them a door into the vice president’s office – and the east reception room was destroyed.

  The destruction caused by Erich Muenter’s bomb in the Senate wing of the US Capitol Building, July 1915

  Muenter wrote a letter to a Washington newspaper protesting against munitions shipments to Germany from the USA, then took a night train to New York. There he transferred to a service taking him to Glen Cove, Long island, where J. P. Morgan Jr was breakfasting in his summer house with his esteemed guest Sir Cecil Spring Rice, British ambassador to the USA. Muenter burst in upon them brandishing a revolver and shot Morgan twice, seriously wounding him but not preventing the sturdy financier from tackling his smaller assailant and pinning him to the floor.

  In jail, Muenter withdrew his alias of ‘Frank Holt’ and confessed to being the fugitive professor of German at Harvard University who was wanted in connection with the murder by poison of his wife in 1906. He had acted for the Fatherland, he said. Alarm bells rang for the military intelligence strategists in Berlin. They thought that if Rintelen was behind this dangerous act of sabotage at the highest level of the US government, as well as a spectacularly public assassination attempt on America’s leading banker (while in the company of the British ambassador), then he’d clearly forgotten the covert nature of his mission.

  On the morning of 6 July, von Rintelen was enjoying breakfast at the New York Yacht Club when an attendant informed him there was a phone call for him. On the other end of the line was naval attaché Karl Boy-Ed, who told the Dark Invader to meet him on a street corner, where he handed over a terse telegram from HQ: von Rintelen was being recalled to Germany, effective immediately. Later that night, conveniently for everyone, Muenter walked out of his open jail cell and plunged head first to his death on a concrete floor below.

  Rintelen departed for his Berlin debrief as he had arrived in New York: under the Swiss passport of Emile Gaché. On the first night of the voyage he went to the dining room and ordered a bottle of wine, to find solace in the grape. There he found that he was recognised by a German aristocrat whom he had seen often in Berlin society. The man, the Count of Limburg Stirum, worried about von Rintelen’s safe passage; ever brazen, von Rintelen assured the man that he was a Swiss diplomat and had been thus when they’d met in Germany.

  For the rest of the voyage, von Rintelen dodged the count, worried that he’d eventually remember his real name and the details of their encounters. Finally, the chalk cliffs of England lay to port of the SS Noordam, and in the full day it took to sail past them von Rintelen ‘found it necessary to visit the bar at intervals to fortify myself’. On the morning of Friday 13 August, he was interrupted in his bath by news that British officers wanted a word.

  Von Rintelen made a great game of it, charming his captors and winning their sympathy. He even managed to survive the accusations of a Belgian waiter who used to work at the Hotel Bristol in Berlin, and who now recognised him during a tea break at the hotel in Ramsgate where he had been taken for questioning. Von Rintelen was released, and with happy thoughts of the Fatherland on his mind was being ferried back to the Noordam to resume his voyage when his luck ran out. He was recalled to land for one more interview. At Scotland Yard.

  This time his interrogator was none other than Blinker Hall, who had brought with him Lord Richard Herschell, his private secretary and a key member of the Room 40 codebreaking team. At a heavy table to the left of the fireplace sat the bespectacled head of Special Branch, Sir Basil Thomson, a close friend of Hall. Von Rintelen knew that he had to play his best game yet if he hoped to evade the high-powered inquisition in front of him.

  He thought he had succeeded in convincing Hall and his team that he really was a Swiss businessman, and was taken, as per his demand, to the Swiss legation for protection. While there, he heard his British minders talking about Blinker Hall’s canny decision to contact the Swiss authorities in Berne to see if Emile Gaché was at home, or if he could be found in London.

  Von Rintelen quickly realised that if his ruse was uncovered, the British could send him back to America as a spy, in store for undoubtedly rough justice. On a rainy August night in London, he put his German uniform back on, so to speak, and demanded an audience with Blinker Hall, where he reintroduced himself by saying, ‘Captain Rintelen begs to report to you, sir, as a prisoner of war.’

  Hall, appreciative of the theatrics but as ever one step ahead, congratulated von Rintelen on his subterfuge, and Lord Herschell made them all cocktails. Then the two men, in the guise of officers and gentlemen, took von Rintelen to their club for dinner before dispatching him to prison camp. It was during this dinner that the British showed just how deep their intelligence ran. As von Rintelen recalled in his memoir:

  ‘You need not have waited so long for that cocktail I gave you at the Admiralty, Captain,’ said Lord Herschell to Rintelen when they were seated in a comfortable corner of the club.

  ‘So long?’

  ‘We expected you four weeks ago. Our preparations had been made for your reception, but you took your time. Why did you not leave New York as soon as you got the telegram?’

  Suddenly von Rintelen realised that the British had been reading German telegrams for as long as he had been in America. Just to drive home the point, Blinker Hall pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and read aloud the very message that von Rintelen had received from Boy-Ed calling him back to Germany. Indeed, the British had only lost track of von Rintelen when he had first brought the new code to New York.

  ‘You had hardly got there when they started using it,’ Hall told him, enjoying himself. ‘Of course, we had been informed that you were coming, that you were going to America and taking a new code over; all that had been telegraphed to New York, and we had read it. From that moment we were unable to decipher your people’s telegrams any longer, till we got hold of the new code too.’

  As von Rintelen was driven off to prison camp, he was staggered that the British knew everything that was sent between the USA and Germany. But he also knew that he had left one other plan in place that hadn’t been telegrammed to anyone. It would be the Dark Invader’s fatal legacy.

  Chapter 7

  HOMELAND SECURITY

  On the warm afternoon of 24 July 1915, the publishing propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, editor of The Fatherland, departed the Hamburg America Line offices in Lower Manhattan in the company of another man. The duo caught the Sixth Avenue elevated train uptown, and, busily conversing in German, didn’t notice that they were being followed by Frank Burke, a wiry five-foot-seven bantamweight who was the head of the US Secret Service’s special section, quietly created by Woodrow Wilson in May 1915 in the wake of the Lusitania sinking. Burke’s brief was to ferret out spies among the millions of people in the USA with direct or distant connections to Germany and Austria – immigrants and US citizens alike.

  Travelling with the 46-year-old Burke on that Saturday in July was agent W. H. Houghton, the two feds on a seemingly uneventful tail that would in fact turn out to be the first major intelligence victory by the USA in the war at home.

  As Burke and Houghton followed Viereck and his companion, they couldn’t help but notice the deference with which Viereck spoke to the other man, who with his trim moustache and fat briefcase looked like an accountant. It was the sabre scars on the man’s cheeks, however, that were the catalyst for Burke to think hard about where he had seen that face before.

  Vie
reck got off the train at 23rd Street and Houghton followed him. Burke stayed on the train to watch the man whom he now realised was Dr Heinrich Albert, Germany’s commercial attaché to the United States. A young woman came and sat next to Albert, who moved his briefcase and lost himself in a book. Or he fell asleep. Accounts vary, with some suggesting that Viereck, acting as a double agent, had drugged Albert so that he would nod off, and that the Czech agent Emanuel Voska was actually the one who slipped into the story and snatched his briefcase. The version that Frank Burke recalled with certainty when he was 73 years old was that Heinrich Albert nearly missed his stop at 50th Street. At the last minute, he leapt up and hurried off the train. The young woman called after Albert that he had forgotten his briefcase, but Frank Burke already had it in hand, and told her to relax, it belonged to him. Then he followed Albert off the train.

  By the time Albert had realised what he had left behind, Burke – who could run 100 yards in ten seconds – had sprinted down the stairs to the street and on to a trolley car. Albert, desperate and sweating, ran after him, but Burke told the trolley conductor that the German was deranged, and the conductor moved the trolley onward. Albert could only watch as the secrets of Germany’s war in America rode off in the arms of the US Secret Service.

  The papers in the briefcase included accounts of the pro-German stories that von Bernstorff had planted in the US newspapers. There were documents relating to how the American Correspondent Film Company had been set up to produce front-line propaganda for American audiences. There were accounts of monies paid to professors to write flattering books about Germany, and most incriminating of all, documents relating to the creation of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, a phoney arms manufacturer that would buy up munitions supplies and services solely in order to deprive the Allies of both.