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

by James Wyllie

  Satisfied, Hinsch paid Dilger and left the house in Chevy Chase with his boxes of lethal vials wrapped in brown paper tied up with string. The first and most modern use of biological weapons in the USA was about to begin, as Felton and his saboteurs fanned out to infect the remount depots along the eastern seaboard of the United States, using rubber gloves and needles. Horses and mules would fall ill and die, but the campaign never succeeded in destroying horses the way that the masterminds of Sektion IIIb in Berlin had hoped – and not nearly as effectively as the war itself had done.

  Dilger would return to Germany, and make one final visit to America before disappearing into Mexico under the nom de guerre ‘Delmar’. While his campaign of bio-terror had ended in the United States (the Germans launched others in Romania, Spain, Norway and South America), his accomplices Hinsch and Hilken had money and an army, and they would launch the biggest attack inside the United States that the country had yet seen.

  The networks of agents and sabotage operations established by the Germans, and particularly Franz von Rintelen – now interned by the British at Donnington Hall – exploded in New York City at the end of July 1916, when the Battle of the Somme was about to enter its second month of mass slaughter. It was an explosion that no amount of Room 40 monitoring of communications between Berlin and von Bernstorff could have revealed, for this German attack was the result of stealth planning and execution initiated by von Rintelen before he sailed into capture by the British.

  At 2.08 a.m. on 30 July 1916, it seemed to the people of New York City that the Battle of the Somme had landed on top of them in an attack so violent and vast that it would stand as the largest assault on American soil for nearly a century. Artillery shells burst over the Hudson River and bullets flew, reports later said, as if pumped out by a thousand machine guns when the Johnson 17, a barge carrying 100,000 tons of TNT and 25,000 detonators, exploded in New York Harbor with the force of an earthquake at 5.5 on the Richter scale.

  At 2.40 there was a second explosion, and as the one million pounds of ammunition now burst in the conflagration, with bullets landing a mile from where they exploded, New York City and those cities of New Jersey directly across the Hudson River thought they were under attack. Windows crashed from skyscrapers in Manhattan – including every window in J. P. Morgan’s headquarters – and were also blown out of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and from every shop along the chic shopping stretch of that avenue. Hotel patrons made their barefooted escape across shards of glass, or through the pools of water unleashed by a broken water main near Times Square.

  Ten fire trucks, all racing toward Armageddon, found themselves stuck at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, site of a massive traffic jam, while drivers motoring home from a Saturday night in the city across the Brooklyn Bridge swayed in terror with the shock waves that rippled the bridge. Passengers in the Hudson Tubes connecting Manhattan to New Jersey beneath the river feared they were about to be drowned, while prisoners in a jail in Hackensack thought it was being dynamited open. Phone lines between New York and New Jersey went dead, cemeteries saw gravestones and monuments tumble, and people in Philadelphia, nearly 100 miles to the south-west, thought their city had been hit by an earthquake.

  Tugboat captains bravely towed blazing barges out to sea. ‘Spouting geyserlike pyrotechnics, they drifted across the bay and down upon Ellis Island, sending terror to the hearts of immigrants there.’ At 3 a.m., 500 immigrants, many of them refugees from the war for which the ordnance now exploding around them was destined, were evacuated to Manhattan by ferry, their faces lit by the flames as they looked back at the main building on Ellis Island, itself nearly destroyed by the explosion.

  Alarm bells rang across Manhattan, and the police, thinking looters and thieves had been unleashed, soon found that it was the shock of the worst blast in the history of the United States that had tripped them. Blowing their whistles and commandeering taxi cabs, they headed downtown, towards the orange glow rising across the Hudson River. One flame that was no more, however, was that in the torch of the Statue of Liberty, just 2,000 feet from the explosion, extinguished to this day when shrapnel tore through Lady Liberty’s arm.

  When dawn broke and the fire subsided, people flocked to church, praying for the thousands of souls who had surely been lost in the massive explosion. ‘When I held mass at six o’clock the church was crowded to the doors,’ said Father A. J. Grogan, pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary in Jersey City, ‘and I can assure you there were many praying on their knees who had not been inside a place of worship in a long time.’ Ammunition would continue to pop and crack, like snipers shooting the wounded, for another three hours after Grogan began his service.

  Black Tom Island where the exploding barge was moored and munitions were stored, was really a peninsula, but had been an island once, allegedly named after a dark-skinned man once resident there, or because from the air it looked like a black tomcat with its back arched. In 1880, it was connected to Jersey City by a mile-long causeway, to facilitate its function as the terminus for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. When the First World War broke out and the United States started shipping materiel to the Allied cause, the major destination for all goods and munitions was the Black Tom depot, which consisted of 24 warehouses and seven piers. Black Tom housed an estimated one thousand tons of dynamite, TNT, shrapnel shells, nitrocellulose, gasoline and picric acid which would be loaded on to barges, to be hauled out to ships bound for the war.

  Workers sort munitions at the Black Tom depot in New York City’s harbour

  Miraculously, given the number of men who worked in the warehouses and on the barges of the principal munitions depot in the American northeast, as well as the hundreds of those who squatted on Black Tom, and given the titanic force of the blast, only five people were officially listed as killed, one of them Arthur Tosson, a ten-week-old infant who lived three miles from Black Tom and was thrown from his crib, later dying of shock. Another was Jersey City Patrolman James Daugherty, a 28-year-old cop who arrived on the scene with his partner just after the second explosion. Shrapnel punctured Daugherty’s jugular vein, and he was dead by the time he reached hospital. Cornelius Leyden, chief of the private railroad police force, was killed, as was the captain of the Johnson 17 barge. The body of an unidentified man was also washed up; he was thought to be a nightwatchman.

  On 4 August, the New York Times reported that a New York Sun reporter, 25-year-old Lloyd Wilson, had died of a chill he caught while covering the story on Black Tom Island, and on the 9th, the paper’s obituary section announced the death of 27-year-old Mary McGovern, a Jersey City public school teacher, who succumbed to injuries from the explosion. Nearly 100 people were injured, and many more may have died, given the number of undocumented people who were known to have lived on the island.

  The physical damage to Black Tom, in terms of lost buildings, infrastructure and goods, was estimated to be $20 million, or more than $450 million today. The first impulse was to call the incident a disaster, and blame the owners and operators of the depot. On Sunday evening, less than 24 hours after the explosions, Jersey City police arrested the superintendent of the National Dock and Storage Company, owners of the pier on Black Tom, as well as the agent for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The owner of the barge company turned himself in, and the next day arrest warrants went out for the bosses of the Lehigh Valley and Central railroads. All of them were arrested for manslaughter, the initial perception being one of negligence rather than sabotage.

  It took the media to focus attention on the possibility of enemy sabotage. On 31 July, the New York Times ran a piece reminding readers that there had been 42 explosions connected to munitions in the United States since the war began, and listed them all, as well as those that had occurred in Canada and Europe. On 10 August the paper reported that two Norwegians with pro-German sympathies and drawings of a ‘fast submarine’ had been arrested in connection with Black Tom. The path of enquiry among those looking into the explosion ha
d shifted, according to the Times, with investigators now chasing down information suggesting that the attack on Black Tom ‘was the work of alien plotters, acting in this country in the interest of a foreign government’.

  On 7 August there had been another explosion in a Lehigh Valley Railroad yard, and this time two men had been seen leaving the scene shortly beforehand, both of them well dressed and one of them wearing white spats. An even more compelling theory for Black Tom being the work of foreign saboteurs was a letter that had been intercepted by the British on its way from the US to Germany. Its author referred to explosions on board ships in Seattle in the spring of 1915, in which he told his parents he had a hand. ‘I only wish I could get another chance like that,’ wrote ‘Otto’. ‘I would not hesitate to risk it.’

  More than a year before Black Tom, on 15 May 1915, a barge laden with dynamite bound for Vladivostok and the Russian army fighting the Central Powers on the Eastern Front had exploded in Seattle harbour. Franz von Papen had been in the city shortly before that explosion, and had paid the German consul there $1,800.

  Despite the fact that von Papen, von Rintelen and Karl Boy-Ed had long been back on the other side of the Atlantic when Black Tom exploded in July 1916, their fingerprints were all over the incident. Von Rintelen had scouted the location himself, part of his expeditions to check out the docks, where he would measure distances and determine mooring spots and escape routes for the saboteurs’ motorboats, with inquisitive dockyard guards proving remarkably receptive to paper persuasion: ‘wherever a night watchman passed by, or took the liberty of objecting, a few dollar bills gently slipped into his hand … rendered him as silent as the grave’.

  When von Papen had been expelled, he had left his assistant, Wolf von Igel, in charge of dispensing funds for sabotage, but von Igel had been arrested in April in connection with the plot to bomb the Welland Canal. After this, the German agents in Baltimore, Frederick Hinsch and Paul Hilken, became critical to mobilising Germany’s war from within.

  Hinsch had recruited the slow-witted Slovak immigrant Michael Kristoff while scouting for malleable talent in New York’s Penn Station in January 1916. The impoverished and hungry Kristoff, skeletal at six foot three and 147 pounds, readily fell in with the large and intimidating Hinsch, who made him an astonishing offer: he would pay Kristoff $20 a week to watch his bags while Hinsch travelled round the country on business. At the end of the trip, he would get Kristoff a factory job. Hinsch’s business was blowing up munitions plants and chemical factories, and upon their return to New York, the factory job he obtained for Kristoff was at the Eagle Iron Works, on the stretch of road leading to Black Tom Island.

  Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke, two of the deadliest saboteurs in US history, had come to the enterprise via sabotage on the west coast. Jahnke, ‘pimply faced with blonde hair and small weasel eyes’, had emigrated from his native Germany to the United States in 1899 as a 17-year-old, and served with the US Marines in their scorched-earth war in the Philippines. By the time the First World War began, he was a naturalised US citizen, and he became one of the principal agents of Germany’s consul in San Francisco, Franz von Bopp.

  Using his job at the Morse Patrol and Detective Agency as cover, Jahnke provided intelligence on the west coast. Coming under suspicion himself for a massive explosion in November 1915 at a San Francisco munitions factory, he walked into the office of the Secret Service in San Francisco in February 1916 and announced in his German-accented English that he knew about a plot to blow up Mare Island Navy Yard north of the city. The astonished Secret Service agents didn’t bite at this cunning offer to become a US operative, and Jahnke left. The following year, Mare Island blew up, and Jahnke was gone.

  Lothar Witzke was Jahnke’s protégé. Born in 1895, he had been a lieutenant serving on the speedy German cruiser Dresden when she was sunk by the British off the coast of Chile in March 1915. Despite having a broken leg, Witzke swam to shore, and was interned in Valparaiso until he escaped early in 1916 and made his way to report for duty to von Bopp in San Francisco. With his naval pedigree, the blonde and dashing Witzke, who took advantage of San Francisco’s wine and women, observed ship movements and cargoes while also studying bomb-making with a chemist across the bay in Berkeley.

  On the evening of 28 July 1916, the night before the attack on Black Tom, a group of German sailors and spies convened at their regular meeting point, the home of the opera singer Martha Held at 123 West 15th Street, Manhattan. Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke were there too.

  A young woman in attendance, Mena Reiss, who was a model for Eastman Kodak and friendly with von Papen and Boy-Ed, later recalled talk of the ‘Jersey Terminal’, and explosions. She also saw photos and maps of the eventual target. Instead of reporting her fears to the authorities, she took a train to spend the weekend on the New Jersey shore with a friend, where she and her hostess would be jolted awake by the thunderous blast, the plans for which had been finalised in her presence.

  Work had stopped at 5 p.m. on Saturday 29 July on Black Tom Island, and, astonishingly, there was no US National Guard or US Marine battalion to protect this major munitions depot, a function again of American neglect and naiveté when it came to realising the country, like it or not, was already at war by virtue of being the main financier and materiel supplier for the Allies. Instead of an armed force of soldiers, only five security guards watched over Black Tom’s rail cars and barges loaded with munitions. Two of the guards, Barton Scott and Jesse Burns, worked for the Dougherty Detective Agency, paid for by British taxpayers to guard the docks. Scott and Burns were double agents, also working for Germany’s Bureau of Investigation head Paul Koenig, their names later discovered in the coded black book found after his arrest by the NYPD, helped by Room 40’s intelligence.

  Michael Kristoff left his aunt’s house in Bayonne, New Jersey, at 11 p.m., telling her that he was going to pick up his pay from work, something she thought odd given the hour. In fact Kristoff was going to walk through the gate to the Black Tom pier and plant an explosive on a rail car.

  Jahnke and Witzke were in a dinghy, having launched from the side of a German merchant ship, rowing toward the barges anchored at Black Tom. By half past midnight, the trio had planted their explosives and made their escape. Fifteen minutes later, a barge captain returning from a night out was chatting with Jesse Burns when the bribed detective noticed flames in a rail car. The greatest act of sabotage in US history had begun its fatal trajectory.

  On 4 August 1916, Paul Hilken threw a celebration for the Black Tom plotters at Hotel Astor, just off Times Square. Hilken, who funnelled money to German agents, and Hinsch, who planned their attacks, enjoyed the summer air of the restaurant’s roof-top garden. Hilken tried to pry details out of Hinsch as to who planted the bombs, and how, but Hinsch, revealing just how difficult it would be to catch any dedicated network that maintained radio silence, told Hilken that it was ‘better that you don’t know too much’. Hilken’s agreement lay in the two $1,000 dollar bills he handed to Hinsch as his take for a job well done. It would take the United States more than two decades to make the case for just who and what was behind the Black Tom explosion, which they did with the help of Blinker Hall’s private papers from Room 40, which he unsealed especially for the American prosecutors in 1925. Room 40 had not intercepted anything explicity stating the sabotage plan at the time, but intercepts of messages sent from German agents in North America to Berlin in 1918 established that German operatives were involved in planning and staging the attack. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, President Woodrow Wilson’s mind was on his re-election campaign, the slogan for which was ‘He Kept Us Out of War’ and despite the calls for war, the US response was to blame the transporters of the goods, and then, in September, to convene a public hearing at the direction of the Secretary of War Newton Baker, to reposition munitions barges in New York Harbor, in new locations, and ‘the distance such explosive carrying barges should be kept apart’.

  G
iven the attacks on the United States from within and at sea, the question of just how long Wilson’s neutral stance could remain was bigger and more pressing to the Allies than ever. While Blinker Hall and his team had certainly worked to bring the USA to join the Allied cause, they had not suppressed foreknowledge of Black Tom to speed up the Americans’ entry into the war. Yet, if a massive attack on America’s nascent ‘capital city of the world’ wouldn’t spur President Wilson to action, just what would it take to bring America to the fight, now that the conflict had been so fatally brought to America?

  Chapter 14

  THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM

  Very early on the morning of 17 January 1917, hope for the Allied cause appeared in the form of a telegram handed over to Nigel de Grey and Dilly Knox, who were manning the night watch in Room 40. They quickly realised that the message was encoded in the German diplomatic code 0075, which they had begun intercepting between Berlin and the US embassy in November 1916.

  The duo worked on the telegram for hours, identifying the message’s recurring groups and then cobbling together the beginnings of a decode. De Grey, whose German was better than Knox’s, realised that this note destined for Mexico – to be sent via Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the USA – from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, was Room 40’s version of the Holy Grail.

  Though the message was only partially decoded, the slender, aristocratic de Grey ran all the way down the corridor and into the office of his boss, Blinker Hall.

  ‘Do you want to bring America into the war, sir?’ he asked.

  It was a question of pure rhetoric, for everyone in Room 40 knew that American military muscle was the Allies’ greatest, and perhaps last, hope of victory. When Hall acknowledged the obvious, de Grey produced his triumph: ‘I’ve got the telegram that will bring them in if you give it to them.’