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

by James Wyllie

  Decent information about what was actually happening on the Eastern Front, where vast armies ranged over hundreds and hundreds of square miles, retreating one minute, advancing the next, was extremely difficult to come by, with even commanders on the ground finding it hard to keep track of the fighting. So Northcliffe dispatched Tuohy to the Foreign Office to fill them in. They directed him to the War Office, where he was asked to join the Intelligence Corps. After a few months studying maps and being taught about the German army, he was sent to Ypres.

  Without listening sets of their own, officers like Tuohy were obliged to crawl up to the German lines under cover of darkness to try and overhear enemy chat. This rudimentary approach finally ended after the French developed a listening set comparable to the Moritz, which the British called ITOC. It could pick up German conversation some 500 yards from the front line. The sets were located in a dugout with wires leading out of it into no-man’s-land and operated by two interceptors, young men of ‘the clerical breed, experts in dialectical German … with telephone headpieces glued to their ears … pencil in hand’ ready to jot down any stray snatches of conversation. Tuohy would sift through the results, picking out from the ‘voluminous twaddle’ any useful titbits relating to matters of tactical concern.

  The fact was, German telephone procedures, established early and based on the belief that if they had listening devices then so must the Allies, were far more secure. Special codes, consisting of simple word substitutions, were introduced to reduce the risks of interception: ‘snake’ for ‘casualty’, ‘monkey’ for ‘prisoner’, ‘carp’ for ‘Frenchman’, ‘dried cod’ for ‘British soldier’, ‘walrus’ for ‘Russian’, etc., giving rise to sentences like ‘we had some snakes, but brought in several monkeys including a walrus, a carp and a dried cod’.

  Tuohy realised that ‘the enemy was obviously getting more vital results from Moritz than we had ever got from ITOC’. Where the ITOC sets came into their own was as ‘an instrument for policing the conversations of our own men’. What they revealed was that old habits died hard: too much pertinent information was still being bantered about. Over the course of one month, a single set heard 40 units referred to by name and talk relating to the movement of troops, operation orders and positions behind the line.

  At least now there was a way to keep track of the leaks, much to the resentment of the men, who felt spied on by their own side. The result was that ‘in due course a distinct hush fell over our front trench system’. This hush spread to the German lines, and by the end of 1917 there was precious little for the listening sets to overhear. By then Tuohy had played a vital part in establishing an interception system that for once was ahead of the Germans.

  While the daring, blind courage and glamour of the ace fighter pilots engaged in aerial combat grabbed the headlines, the real tactical value of the air force came from reconnaissance. Aside from the quantum leaps in photographic technology that produced ever more detailed images of the battle zones, wireless was employed by the spotter planes to register targets for the artillery and monitor events on the ground.

  In early 1915, the Royal Flying Corps, working in tandem with the Marconi Experimental Laboratory in Surrey, developed a lightweight transmitting set with a range of 20 miles. Pilots were taught by Marconi engineers how to operate it, and by 1918 this primitive radio was installed in 600 planes. Messages from the pilots to the ground were encoded using a clock-face system, with different segments relating to particular map references. Armed with this technology, flying low over the German lines, these planes greatly improved the accuracy and tactical efficiency of the artillery: counter-battery fire – shelling the enemy’s guns – relied almost exclusively on information coming from the air.

  The Germans had wireless in their planes too, and the British were soon intercepting messages sent by them. However, analysis of this material progressed slowly until Tuohy got involved. He described how, in the late summer of 1915, ‘a wireless set with a battery near the ramparts of Ypres’ was picking up the call sign of the enemy spotters, ‘a high pitched, quivering note’, as they communicated the position of British troops to their artillery. Tuohy quickly understood that if you could ‘connect given German wireless call sign with known … hostile batteries’, the British guns could then turn their sights on the German artillery that had been identified by the planes’ wireless signals ‘and crump its personnel back into the bowels of the earth’. Equally, the position of the German spotter planes could be tracked, leaving them vulnerable to the attentions of the British fighter squadrons.

  Armed with a mass of material, Tuohy attempted to break the codes used by the German planes. Sitting up all night ‘bent over fragmentary wireless hieroglyphics’, he laboured for months ‘trying every conceivable juggling of lettering based on German colloquialisms’ until, after much guesswork and deduction, he solved their letter code. A parallel numerical code continued to defy him until a downed plane was recovered with its wireless set and code book intact.

  By early 1916, the British army had what it needed to gain a real advantage. But it failed to act: ‘GHQ got everything we had, yet we got little in return.’ Tuohy put the unforgivable delay down to the intractability of the system: ‘minds were warped by a departmental outlook’ and ‘mountainous documentary files came into being in which the vital end to be achieved was lost, submerged’. Meanwhile, ‘British soldiers were dying in thousands as a direct result’.

  Six months later, and only because the desperate situation on the Somme demanded it, this system of analysing messages sent by German planes was finally given its due. Every evening Tuohy briefed General Hugh Trenchard, head of the RFC, on the aeroplane wireless activity of that day.

  The impact of these measures was felt immediately by the German army. As the number of prisoners and abandoned dead and wounded mounted, so did the volume of letters, diaries and documents acquired by British intelligence. A common theme was the ever-present threat posed by the RFC. One soldier complained that ‘the English are always flying over our lines, directing artillery fire, consequently getting all their shells … right into our trenches’. Another noted in his diary that ‘once a battery has been located it can result in it attracting 2,000–3,000 shells’, while an officer admitted that ‘whenever the slightest movement was visible in our trenches … a heavy bombardment of that section took place’.

  By the time Tuohy left France for pastures new, he was delighted to see ‘a network of 14 wireless intelligence posts established’. By the end of the war there were a thousand, manned by 18,000 staff. Between October 1916 and March 1917, they successfully decoded messages from more than two-thirds of the flights made by enemy spotter planes. During that year, 50–60 per cent of the Germans’ infantry divisions and artillery formations were pinpointed thanks to the methods advanced by Tuohy.

  Yet despite all the effort and innovation, coupled with the undoubted improvements that wireless intelligence brought with it, victory remained an ever-receding prospect. The blood of nations was draining into the mud, yet the staggering casualties suffered by all sides did not appear to be bringing the end any nearer.

  Chapter 13

  THE FAR WESTERN FRONT: AMERICA

  Given that all the combatants were under tremendous strain and getting ever closer to breaking point, the role of America became increasingly crucial to the outcome of the war. It had always been Germany’s contention that by giving the Allies so much financial and material support, America was effectively a belligerent power, a status that justified action against it. The secret, and often not so secret, war that Germany was waging on US soil would reach a terrifying climax thanks to the machinery of terror constructed by Franz von Rintelen, the self-styled Dark Invader.

  Before his unscheduled departure from America and subsequent arrest by Blinker Hall, von Rintelen had laid the groundwork for a campaign of death and destruction that included bomb factories, ingenious explosive devices and, ultimately, biochemical weapons.
Though Room 40 knew about von Rintelen’s subversive actvities in the USA, the most spectacular and destrictive attack on American soil would also display that no matter how far the reach of Room 40 went in fighting the intelligence war, Blinker Hall’s team of codebreakers could not prevent acts of sabotage against the United States for which they had no intelligence – in part a function of a large number of isolated German cells communicating internally, and the absence of any kind of effective national security force in the USA.

  Von Rintelen’s sabotage network was nothing if not ambitious. One destructively simple invention came to him courtesy of Robert Fay. When the war began, the 33-year-old Fay had been called into action as a lieutenant in a German infantry battalion that saw heavy action in the Vosges mountains and Champagne. As a mechanical engineer, Fay took special interest in the quality of the Allied shells that were trying to kill him. He devised a way to stop them at source, and with $4,000 and a neutral passport from Military Intelligence, Sektion IIIb, he sailed for New York City in April 1915, arriving there shortly after von Rintelen.

  Fay’s invention was simple and effective: he had designed a self-detonating bomb to destroy the rudders of ships sailing to Europe with supplies for the Allies. Von Rintelen dispatched Fay and some of his own sea captain confederates to buy a well-hidden plot of land far from nosy neighbours where they could test a prototype. The sailors built the stern of a ship out of wood, and attached an actual rudder. Fay applied a detonator, on the tip of which was a needle-nosed pin connected to the rudder shaft. The idea was that as the shaft turned, the pin turned with it, with the sharp end boring into the detonator until it made contact with the explosive, and blew up the rudder.

  Robert Fay, the designer of the ingenious ‘rudder bomb’

  Fay demonstrated his prototype to the sea captains, observing from a respectful distance, but after an hour of turning the rudder, nothing had happened. Then suddenly fragments from the wooden stern of the ship were flying at the captains, and Fay himself was flying up in the air, landing hard and injuring his ribs. Trees were blown away and the assembled spectators had to put out a fire, after which, as von Rintelen drily related, ‘they then got into the car and returned to New York to report to me that the invention had functioned efficiently’.

  Fay drove a motorboat into New York Harbor to attach his first set of rudder bombs. After a spot of engine trouble, which he managed to repair, he completed his mission and awaited the results. Shortly afterward, two ships mysteriously lost their rudders at sea. Fay was now in the rudder bomb business. However, his success, and the concern it had generated in the media, meant that his subsequent sabotage had to be more covert. His solution was to mount his rudder bombs on cork platforms and swim them out to their targets under cover of darkness. More success followed, and von Rintelen franchised the rudder bomb to other crews along the eastern seaboard.

  In May 1915, the same month in which the Lusitania was sunk, a German naval officer visited the bomb-making factory in Hoboken, New Jersey, of one of von Rintelen’s key collaborators, Dr Walter Scheele. The visitor that day, Erich von Steinmetz, had brought with him a powerful weapon inside a suitcase, and along with it a rollicking adventure tale with an unexpectedly feminine twist. Steinmetz had carried his weapon from Romania across Russia, and then through Siberia to Vladivostok, where he set sail for San Francisco, taking the train to New York. As he journeyed through high-testosterone war zones and twitchy checkpoints, he purchased women’s dresses to disguise himself as a modest and harmless female. Once in New York, he went straight to von Papen’s war office at 60 Broadway, and was duly sent to see Germany’s longest-serving American spy.

  Dr Walter Scheele took one look at what was inside von Steinmetz’s well-travelled suitcase and knocked the visitor down with a swift punch. Despite having no qualms about bombing ships at sea, or ruining shipments of cornmeal with blue methylene dye that he concocted in his lab, Scheele’s loyalty to the Fatherland, whom he had been serving as Germany’s ‘eyes’ in America since 1883, would not entertain a venture into chemical warfare, even though his countrymen had used chlorine gas to international outrage at the Second Battle of Ypres in April and May of 1915. And von Steinmetz was, to Scheele’s mind, presenting something even worse: biochemical war in the form of a culture of pathogens to poison horses destined for the Allied cause.

  From pulling artillery guns, to bearing reconnaissance riders and providing transport over muddy and rough terrain, to hauling wagons laden with equipment, horses were used extensively by all combatants. The British Remount Service’s largest American horse depot, in Newport News, Virginia, saw nearly 500,000 horses shipped to the Allies during the war. The American Expeditionary Force used 182,000 horses and mules during their campaign, of which more than 63,000 died. And in Germany, the horse population was reduced by 1.3 million during the war.

  The importance of the horse was not in doubt to anyone, and the German High Command understood that torpedoing ships transporting men and horses was not the only way of eliminating critical Allied stock. When von Steinmetz’s deadly pathogens turned out to be duds, likely due to his mishandling of them during his cross-dressing odyssey to America, they turned to a man who knew what he was doing, and who had decided to betray the land of his birth.

  Anton Dilger was born in the horse country of Virginia in 1884, the tenth child of Elise, a spiritualist, and Hubert, a German hero of the US Civil War. He spent the first few years of his life in a mansion on Greenfield Ridge Farm, speaking more German than English, hearing stories of the glories of the Fatherland from his maternal grandfather, and immersing himself in the world of horses around him. When he was ten years old, his sister married a wealthy German businessman and took young Anton to live with them in Mannheim. There he stayed, becoming increasingly German as school gave way to university, where the handsome and intelligent young man studied medicine at the prestigious University of Heidelberg.

  Dilger graduated as a doctor with a specialty in surgery and microbiology, having studied the microbial origins of wound infections and how to prevent them. With the coming of war he joined the German army as a surgeon. While performing his duties at the German Red Cross hospital in Karlsruhe – just 50 miles from the Western Front – a terrible tragedy occurred that turned his mixed feelings about the Allies into implacable hatred.

  On the holiday afternoon of 22 June 1916, French planes attacked the city. They had been aiming for the train station, but using outdated maps instead bombed the Hagenbeck Circus, filled with children still in their white procession robes after earlier celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi in this predominantly Catholic city. Dilger was on hand when scores of wounded children, their white robes stained with blood, were rushed into his hospital. He had been awake for 48 hours, and the sight of dead children and the primal wailing of the mortally injured (and their parents) caused him to break down. The bombing killed 120 people, including 71 children, and injured another 169. It would come to define Dilger’s mission against the country of his birth.

  Once back in America, Dilger established his bio-terror factory – known as ‘Tony’s Lab’ to his confederates – in the basement of a house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just six miles from the White House, and there propagated anthrax and glanders. Assisted by his older brother Carl, a brewer, he concocted his poisonous cultures with the greatest of professional caution. He knew what an accidental dosage of anthrax could do to a man’s lungs. He needed a careful delivery system to transit the poisons to the equine population of America without starting a mass infection in humans. And such a system had been put in place a year earlier by none other than the now imprisoned Dark Invader Franz von Rintelen, who had travelled to Baltimore to enlist soldiers in his covert war.

  The port of Baltimore was an important conduit for shipping war materiel to the British and French, and it was there that von Rintelen had found two exceptionally well-connected Germans. Henry Hilken had emigrated to the US in 1866, married an American
, and prospered. He was the honorary German consul in Baltimore, and local head of the Norddeutscher Lloyd, Germany’s largest shipping fleet. His son Paul, in his mid thirties, with a moustache and rakish swept-back hair, was his father’s trusted lieutenant, and lived with his wife and young daughter in a big house in the exclusive Roland Park neighbourhood.

  Von Rintelen found Paul Hilken eager to help his father’s Fatherland (an act that would cause a lifelong breach between father and son). He would act as von Rintelen’s Baltimore paymaster, and he had the perfect operative to carry out a southern version of Rintelen’s cigar-bombing project.

  Frederick Hinsch was a huge, blonde, hard-drinking sea dog in his mid forties, the feared captain of the SS Neckar, a ship in the Norddeutscher line that was interned in Baltimore by the war. A commander of men through both cunning and brawn, Hinsch soon ran a bomb-planting team of stevedores, led by Eddie Felton, an African-American dockworker who saw the $150–200 a week that he received to run his largely black crew of saboteurs as fair compensation for his so-called freedoms in the land of the free.

  When Hinsch first met Dilger in his basement lab, the German sea captain was keen to ascertain that the poisons Dilger was cultivating actually worked. Dilger opened the cage where he kept infected guinea pigs and showed Hinsch that the animals were almost dead. He had cultivated deadly cultures in vials labelled #1 and #2. The #2 vial should be rubbed in horses’ nostrils or poured into their feed and water troughs, while the #1 poison should be injected with a syringe.