by James Wyllie
Yardley refused to be deterred. As he didn’t go on duty until 4 p.m., he still had time to make himself appear indispensable to the War Department. He finagled his way into the Signal Corps, where an officer directed him to seek out Ralph Van Deman, whom Yardley found working with his two assistants. ‘He appeared old and terribly tired but when he turned his deep eyes to me I sensed his power.’
And after Yardley had told Van Deman about his own work in cryptography, America’s father of military intelligence sensed Yardley’s power to the point that he scribbled an order to get him commissioned into the army as fast as possible – and no Assistant Secretary of State would stand in the way. Herbert Yardley, the college dropout who loved history, now had the chance to make it: he was soon to become the first chief of MI-8.
In his comic poke at America’s neutrality in ‘The Military Invasion of America: A Remarkable Tale of the German-Japanese Invasion in 1916’ in the July 1915 edition of Vanity Fair magazine, no less a farceur than P. G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Wooster, conjured up the heroic American Boy Scout Clarence Chugwater, who took it upon himself to save the country from the foreign peril.
America’s defenders at this time were practically limited to the Boy Scouts and to a large civilian population, prepared at any moment to turn out for their country’s sake and wave flags. A certain section of these, too, could sing patriotic songs. It would have been well, then, had the Invaders, before making too sure that America lay beneath their heel, stopped to reckon with Clarence Chugwater.
There was some truth in Wodehouse’s psychic mockery, for the United States had been playing a massive game of catch-up since declaring war on Germany in April 1917. By the summer of that year, Van Deman was building his Military Intelligence Division and trying to counter the kind of domestic agency in-fighting that had hampered the creation of a proper US intelligence service to begin with.
The 400 agents of the Bureau of Investigation (BI), who were tasked with gathering counter-intelligence on domestic subversives, were run by A. Bruce Bielaski, a career civil servant with a law degree. The BI was in a state of war with the Secret Service, run by William Flynn, a New York Irishman who had distinguished himself by combatting the counterfeiting and extortion of Black Hand anarchists, and the rising American Mafia. The Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, who was responsible for the Secret Service, was not amused by the in-fighting, and appealed to his father-in-law, President Woodrow Wilson, to let him end this damaging bureaucratic rivalry by establishing a new centralised intelligence agency. Wilson said no.
Bielaski, stretched in both manpower and money, happily accepted intelligence help from the ‘largest company of detectives the world ever saw’ – the 250,000 volunteers making up the American Protective League (APL), founded by Chicago advertising executive Albert M. Briggs to counter the domestic perfidy wrought by the Germans. Astonishingly, these amateur detectives were each given a police shield badge, which read ‘American Protective League’ around the edge, and directly in the centre the words ‘Secret Service’. Indeed, this group of citizen vigilantes was allocated $275,000 from President Wilson’s $100 million emergency war fund, due to the zeal of Attorney General Thomas Gregory, who had been special counsel to the state of Texas. Gregory made his request for funds in a secretive memo, explaining that he’d reveal more ‘in person’.
Gregory called the APL a ‘powerful patriotic organisation’, but in reality they used America’s war to advance their own reactionary social and economic views by wrapping them in the flag. They burgled residences and offices, listened in on telephone conversations, intercepted and opened mail, and illegally arrested their fellow Americans. They also went to work chasing down spies and ‘slackers’ – men who were evading the draft that had come with the US declaration of war – and while they didn’t catch a single German agent, they did make insufficiently patriotic German-Americans kiss the US flag, and ferreted out school teachers who dared to express objectivity about the war in their classrooms and got them fired. Suddenly, the United States had gone from an officially neutral land of liberty to one where every citizen was under suspicion by private deputies of the state.
Woodrow Wilson wrote a letter to his Attorney General expressing, rather lamely, worry about the excesses of the APL, and wondering – astonishingly – ‘if there is any way in which we could stop it?’ He did not pursue this idea with any vigour because of the political optics of opposing a quarter of a million ‘patriots’, and he had his own security machine in operation: the Committee on Public Information, designed to spread the government’s official line on saving democracy via 75 million pamphlets distributed across the country, as well as vibrant poster art encouraging enlistment and war bond buying. The CPI also dispatched 75,000 ‘Four Minute Men’, fast-talking patriots who had to use ‘patent facts’ and ‘no hymn of hate’ to convince dubious Americans of the war’s logical virtue.
Foreshadowing another war nearly a century later, the CPI was sanitising things of German origin by renaming them, hence German measles became ‘Liberty measles’, sauerkraut became ‘Liberty cabbage’, and German shepherds became ‘police dogs’. In Cincinnati, Ohio, pretzels were removed from saloon counters lest they infect beer-drinking patrons with German ideas of sedition. Municipal judges frequently fined people who failed to stand for the US national anthem at public events, and movie producer Robert Goldstein was sentenced to ten years in prison for portraying the British in an unflattering light in The Spirit of ’76, his 1917 film about the Revolutionary War. Woodrow Wilson later commuted his sentence to three years.
With the 15 June passage of the Espionage Act, any kind of negative interference with the American military and support of the enemy – among other things – was punishable by 30 years in prison, or death. And sedition was much on the American mind in the summer of 1917, for finally American justice was going to be brought to bear on the enemy, in a San Francisco courtroom, thanks in great part to the efforts of British intelligence helping their American colleagues piece together a massive threat to the British Empire – one born in the USA
On 9 January 1915, Captain Hans Tauscher, the Krupp Industries man in New York, and a devoted operative of Franz von Papen, had set in motion a shipment of arms designed to do nothing less than free India from British rule – or exhaust Britain’s army in trying to stop the Indian rebellion. Or both.
Tauscher shipped ten railway carloads of freight containing 8,000 rifles and 4,000,000 cartridges to San Diego shipbrokers M. Martinez and Company. At the same time, Ram Chandra, editor of the newspaper Ghadr – or ‘revolution’ – which had been founded in 1913 as the mouthpiece of the eponymous Sikh-Hindu party intending to foment a rebellion in India, was working with Franz von Bopp, Germany’s consul in San Francisco, to procure a ship to sail the arms to India to kick off the revolution.
Indian nationalists were spread across the United States before the war, and British intelligence kept a watch on their movements. Robert Nathan of MI5, whose expertise lay in Indian sedition, had arrived in New York in March 1916 to work with fellow Cambridge man William Wiseman and Norman Thwaites and the agents of British intelligence in America.
Nathan had spent the pre-war years in the Indian Civil Service, successfully fighting Bengal sedition, and gaining the reputation of a man who could break open any plot against the state. He burnished that reputation in 1915, uncovering a German plot in Switzerland to use anarchists to assassinate Allied leaders.
Nathan’s mission in the USA was to stop the violent Indian nationalist movement then using the west coast of North America as its base to plot overthrow of British rule in India. Arms had recently been seized, but not yet the conspirators who hoped to use them to topple the British Raj. As with the Irish Rebellion, Britain was not only fighting a war against Germany and its allies, but also against movements within the Empire that wanted to see that empire destroyed. The United States, with its vast size and huge immigrant population, provided th
e perfect laboratory in which to concoct insurrection. The Indian nationalist movement was strongest among the Indian students at the University of California in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. Har Dyal, a postgraduate student, had founded Ghadr, and when war began, the Germans took notice of him as a potentially powerful ally. The British and Americans wanted him removed from his seditious post, but before he could be deported, he fled for Berlin, where he worked with Otto Gunther von Wesendonck, the secretary in charge of the Indian Section of Germany’s Foreign Office. The duo organised the Indian Independence Committee, with the German government providing ten million marks to promote Indian revolt against the British.
So, bankrolled by the German government in Berlin and with the full support of its agents in the USA, the Indian revolutionaries chartered a small ship, the Annie Larsen, which would sail with the arms of rebellion from San Diego to Socorro Island, just over 1,000 miles to the south-west. There it would rendezvous with the Maverick, a tanker ship that had been bought with German money. The plan was to hide the arms under oil in the Maverick’s cargo tanks in case of a sea search, and then to sail on to Karachi, at the time part of India and a gateway to the Punjab, home to Sikh revolutionaries. The Maverick was to be met by friendly fishing vessels, who would take her cargo ashore, and ‘if all went well, there would be a massacre of the garrison of Karachi, and hell would break loose over India’.
All did not go well, for the conspiracy had been infiltrated by British intelligence operatives – including Malcolm Reid, a ‘special immigration officer’ based in Vancouver, who ran informants along the Pacific Coast – and whose predecessor, William Hopkinson, had been killed by a Sikh assassin. The British also used the multiple talents of the occultist Aleister Crowley, who spoke several Indian dialects, made repeated trips to the West Coast, and who had already agitated on behalf of British intelligence as an Irish nationalist in New York since his arrival in the US in 1914.
When the Annie Larsen and the Maverick failed to rendezvous at Socorro Island, the arms-laden ship sailed north and on 1 July put in to port at Hoquiam, Washington, 200 miles south of the Canadian border. US agents, alerted by the British, seized the weapons, thereby inadvertently stopping another Indian plot arranged by Franz von Papen.
Germany’s military attaché had been visiting Seattle in May, where he made contact with German agent Franz Schulenberg and learned that there was a sizeable population of restive Indians just across the Canadian border in Vancouver. He had paid Schulenberg $4,000 to buy a ton of dynamite, as well as 50 guns with Maxim silencers, to send to one ‘Mr Singh’ in Sumas, Washington, situated right on the Canadian border. The idea was that the Indian revolutionaries would sabotage the Canadian railway system and cripple the shipment of vital men and materiel to the war. When the Americans seized the weapons on board the Annie Larsen, von Papen told Schulenberg to stand down for fear of being caught and exposing the German embassy’s nefarious reach.
It was Nathan who blew open the Hindu-German conspiracy, tipping off Inspector Tom Tunney of the NYPD that a person of interest was right under their noses. On 7 March 1917, Tunney’s men arrested Dr Chandra Chakravarty, a Ghadr leader, at his home in Harlem. After initially pretending to be someone else, the diminutive, fiery-eyed Chakravarty proved to be a fountain of detail, providing names and dates of conspirators in the plot to overthrow the British in India.
Tunney and his detectives went through Chakravarty’s papers, discovering that he had made $60,000 – or today’s equivalent of $1.2 million – over two years without doing very much overt work. The ‘little Hindu’, as Tunney called him, said he had inherited the money from his grandfather in India, and that ‘no less a personage than Rabindranath Tagore’, the Indian poet, had paid him, in December 1916, $25,000 of the $45,000 due from the estate’, with another $35,000 coming from a lawyer named Chatterji in March 1916.
Under further interrogation, Chakravarty revealed that the money had in fact come from Wolf von Igel, the right-hand man to Franz von Papen. ‘I spoke of the poet, Tagore, because he won the Nobel prize, and I thought he would be above suspicion,’ Chakravarty told Tunney, revealing that he had used the money to buy the house in Harlem, another house on 77th Street, where he planned to open a Hindu restaurant, and a farm at Hopewell Junction, 60 miles north of Harlem, as a meeting place for his fellow conspirators.
‘And when he had given us valuable information, and had appeared at the trial, and had been himself convicted and had served his sentence (a short term) in jail, and the smoke had cleared away, he was the owner of three nice parcels of real estate and a comfortable income,’ Tunney mused. ‘Dr Chakravarty, although a failure as a Prussian agent, fared pretty well as an investor of Prussian funds.’
The Hindu-German conspiracy trial, with which Chakravarty was so helpful, began on 19 November 1917 in San Francisco. It was the largest Indian revolutionary trial ever held outside of India, and finally saw the United States taking charge of the sedition and sabotage that had been going on within its borders since the war began, though Robert Nathan’s and British intelligence work and advice on legal strategy played a paramount role in its successful prosecution. Nearly 100 defendants were assembled before Judge William Van Fleet, including Franz von Bopp and his staff at the San Francisco German consulate, as well as the German consul at Honolulu, and 35 Indian students and revolutionaries, among them Chakravarty, Ram Chandra, and Ram Singh – a wealthy donor to the Ghadar party – and several members of a ‘shipping group’ who had been agents in the chartering and purchase of the Annie Larsen and the Maverick.
‘The trial of these men was one of the most picturesque ever conducted in an American court,’ remarked an observer. ‘The turbaned Hindus lent an Oriental atmosphere. Among the evidence were publications in six Indian dialects, also coded messages, all of which called for constant translation by interpreters and cryptographers. Witness after witness recited his amazing story of adventure. The action shifted quickly between the three focal points, Berlin, the United States, and India, with intermediate scenes laid in Japan, China, Afghanistan, and the South Seas as witnesses laid out the vast international plot.’
One of the Americans called to testify at the trial was William Friedman, a legendary American codebreaker who would be commissioned a major in the US army in May 1918 and join the cryptanalysis department. Before he was seconded into the army, Friedman and his colleagues at wealthy eccentric George Fabyan’s codebreaking compound outside Chicago had – when not trying to help Fabyan prove that Francis Bacon had written the plays of William Shakespeare – assisted Ralph Van Deman’s fledgling MI-8 unit decoding intercepts given to them by the British, by using the ‘frequency’ method – of some words being more popular than others. Friedman had determined that the Indians were using a dictionary to encode their messages, and as he explained his methods to the San Francisco courtroom, the accused, reported an observer, ‘glowered at one another. Had one of them sold out this secret?’
Tom Tunney, now a major in the army after his NYPD unit was drafted into intelligence service in December 1917, also testified as to the circumstances of Chakravarty’s arrest. His policeman’s eye noticed that the Indian defendants ‘did not seem altogether fond of each other … forever whispering, wagging their heads, stuffing notes down each other’s necks and when the testimony of one of their number grew too truthful they squirmed and scowled. Chakravarty’s life was threatened during the trial.’
But it wasn’t Chakravarty’s life that ended on 23 April 1918, the final day of the trial, when Judge Van Fleet adjourned to his chambers to prepare his charge to the jury. Ram Singh, seething at a perceived betrayal by Ram Chandra, pulled out an automatic pistol that he had procured during a recess and fired three bullets into Chandra, the fatal one entering his heart. United States Marshal James Holohan, sitting by the jury box and a ‘man of great stature … shot once with his arm high over his head, so that the bullet should clear nearby counsel. The shot broke R
am Singh’s neck.’
When order was restored, 29 of the defendants were convicted, with Franz von Bopp and his vice consul receiving the stiffest sentences, of two years each in a federal penitentiary, and fines of $10,000 (or $200,000 today). The sentences of the 13 Indian revolutionaries and students ranged from 22 months to 60 days, with Chakravarty – in thanks for his help – receiving 30 days in jail and a fine of $5,000, which he could easily pay off, as Tunney noted, with one of his German-financed New York properties.
‘The punishment is wholly inadequate to the crime,’ said Judge Van Fleet. ‘The German defendants represent a system that the civilised world cannot tolerate.’ British intelligence and the nascent American intelligence forces had triumphed at home, but the war in Europe, after another year of mass slaughter and the fall of the tsar, was at a critical point. With America mobilising its forces and beginning the process of packing them off to Europe, those in charge of that system realised that it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed on the Western Front. The Germans’ best hope of forcing a quick end to the war lay with their U-boat fleet.
Chapter 17
U-BOAT MENACE
The entry of the USA into the war put even more pressure on the German U-boats to deliver a knockout blow as quickly as possible. By inflicting severe losses on Britain’s Atlantic trade, the Germans hoped to render it unable to feed or equip its armies, reduce the civilian population to starvation, and force it to capitulate. With Britain gone, and Russia succumbing to revolution, France would surely seek peace, making America’s declaration of war irrelevant, given it would take them until 1918 to reach Europe in any numbers.
The German naval Chief of Staff calculated that ‘in five months, shipping from England will be reduced by 39 per cent’, with the result that ‘England will not be able to stand it’. Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the fleet during the Battle of Jutland and then in charge of the Anti-Submarine Division, shared this view, warning that the Germans ‘will win the war unless we can stop these losses – and stop them quickly’.
