Authors: Howard Blum
Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (17 page)
The Russian embassy signed twenty-one contracts with E. V. Gibbons, Inc., and not a single shipment was delivered. When the Russian agents finally became belligerent, and possibly suspicious too, Mr. Gibbons responded to their harangue with stoic calm. When they grew abusive, he took his hat, offered a polite “Good day,” and left. By the time the enraged Russian embassy prepared legal papers, von Rintelen, using another alias, had set up new offices on William Street for the “Mexico North-Western Railway Company.” The firm of E. V. Gibbons no longer existed.
The principal of the defunct company, nevertheless, was cheered by an article he read on the front page of the
New York Times
. Russian minister Prince Miliukov had reported to the Duma that the consequences of the delay in the transport of munitions from America were becoming more and more serious. It was likely, the prince said, that the new offensive would need to be postponed.
B
ut there were just too many ships. Lavishly spending the fortune J. P. Morgan had conveniently provided, the Allies continued to buy supplies, and their boats continued to leave New York Harbor. It had become impossible, von Rintelen realized, to sabotage all of them. He needed to come up with an additional strategy.
He found his inspiration on the front page of the
New York Times
. The dockers had gone out on strike. But since the union had not sanctioned the action, the newspaper reported, port officials did not anticipate a lengthy disruption.
As he read the article, von Rintelen’s churning mind filled in the gaping holes in the
Times
’ brief account. The reason the work stoppage would be short-lived, he knew, was that the protesters had no chance of receiving strike pay to compensate for their lost wages. He also knew why that was: Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), wanted England to win the war. He’d never sanction strike benefits for men whose actions were impeding the Allied cause. And this, von Rintelen decided in his mounting fury, was further evidence that America’s neutrality was a sham.
Yet von Rintelen’s anger was also the impetus for what he admittedly described as a “fantastic” scheme: he’d form his own union. The more he played with the idea, the more persuasive and feasible it grew: “A union which was properly registered could proclaim a legal strike, and the law could not interfere. If, in addition, we could pay strike benefits, it might be possible to achieve something, and I certainly had the money to do so.”
So he set to work. In the course of a previous, abandoned adventure, Frederico Stallforth, a German citizen now working as a financier on Wall Street, had introduced him to David Lamar, notorious as “the Wolf of Wall Street.”
David Lamar, the “Wolf of Wall Street,” a con man and financier who worked with Germans, circa 1913.
(Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
Everything about the charming, wealthy Georgia native was false—including his charm, his wealth, and his southern accent. Lamar had cut his teeth on phony stock deals, been convicted of impersonating a Pennsylvania congressman, gone on to real estate scams where he’d promised to put up skyscrapers on land he never owned, and escaped one seemingly certain conviction after he hired the savage Eastman gang to beat the daylights out of a witness. Von Rintelen, who knew a bit about fabricating stories and coming up with inventive plots, was impressed.
But more than any of these bold crimes, what established Lamar’s credentials with the German spy was the fact that he’d worked for J. P. Morgan and succeeded in fleecing the company for well over $1 million. When the two men subsequently encountered each other on the street, an enraged Morgan slapped Lamar across the face and then stormed off. Any man who had pulled a fast one on Morgan—and in von Rintelen’s world the Anglophile financier was the devil incarnate—was his friend. And being slapped by the tycoon was as distinguished an honor as receiving the Iron Cross. Von Rintelen quickly decided Lamar would be the perfect front man for his union.
It was called Labor’s National Peace Council, and in addition to Lamar it attracted a collection of theologians, university professors, members of Congress, and even a former attorney general, all united in their sincere opposition to the export of American munitions. Halls were rented, rallies were held, speakers were paid, petitions were sent to President Wilson. But none of the activists had any notion that they were, as von Rintelen merrily bragged, “in the service of a German officer.”
At the same time, Lamar was sent off to use his persuasive powers to enroll New York dockworkers in the new union. To help this recruitment drive along, von Rintelen, as generous as J. P. Morgan, gave Lamar nearly $400,000 for bribes and expenses.
But the Wolf of Wall Street became the Wolf of the Waterfront. Lamar pocketed Abteilung IIIB’s money as cavalierly as he’d pocketed J. P. Morgan’s funds. The $400,000 was spent on a lavish estate he was building in the Berkshires.
All along Lamar had given convincing assurances to von Rintelen that he’d made great inroads with the dockers. Hundreds of men, he guaranteed, would enroll in the union. When the long-planned recruitment rally was held, von Rintelen, brimming with confident expectations, waited eagerly in the back of the hall. Not a single recruit turned up. It didn’t take the spy long to discover that both his money and Lamar had vanished. But who was E. V. Gibbons to complain?
Instead, he hired a new front man, Frank Buchanan. A former president of the International Union of Structural Workers who’d recently been elected to Congress from a Chicago district, Buchanan was a gruff, fiery speaker, and an effective one, on the infrequent occasions when he wasn’t drinking.
Buchanan led the fight in Washington for embargo legislation, and von Rintelen sent the personable Captain von Kleist and the canny Weiser to the docks. Once von Kleist started handing out bulging packets of “strike pay,” dockers were lining up to join the new union. For some, it was a matter of conviction: they didn’t want to load munitions on Allied ships. For others, it was simply a practical decision: they’d be paid for not working.
When von Rintelen, still hidden away behind the scenes but always the decision maker, sent word that the time had come for a strike, nearly 1,500 dockers walked off the job. This success established the union’s credentials.
He dispatched his well-paid union executives to ports around the country, wiring fantastic sums to each new city; halls were hired, literature was printed, and longshoremen were recruited. As a result, a series of strikes broke out in ports throughout the United States. Dockers all across the country refused to load Allied transports. The National Peace union had quickly become an effective force.
The fortunes the armaments manufacturers had planned to make from the war in Europe were in jeopardy. And with their livelihoods at stake, they fought back with a clawing ferocity. Millions of dollars were poured into the treasuries of the older unions. Gompers was enlisted to travel around the country to persuade the dockers to come back into the AFL’s fold. Reporters were fed stories about the shady hidden powers behind the new union; “See Lamar’s Hand in ‘Labor’ Peace Move,” one headline in the
New York Times
revealed. A clique of friendly senators initiated an indignant federal investigation into “the operation of alleged lobbies to influence Congressional legislation” to prohibit arms shipments.
Yet as his union’s power lessened and members returned to the AFL, von Rintelen remained philosophical. “So the fight went on, and ground was lost and won again. Ultimate success would be a matter of money and nerves.”
V
on Rintelen’s mood was also steadied because, as he proudly put it, “I had a finger in so many ‘shady’ deals.” He even grandly plotted to provoke a war between the United States and Mexico. “If Mexico attacked her [America],” he reasoned with a statesman’s pragmatic logic, “she would need all the munitions she could manufacture, and would be unable to export any to Europe.”
For months this inchoate political strategy had been taking shape in his always active mind, but when he read that General Victoriano Huerta was in New York, von Rintelen decided to put it into action. The general was the deposed ruler of Mexico, and he’d been moping in Barcelona as he plotted the military coup that would return him to control. Now, like Lenin at Finland Station, Huerta was passing through New York on the way back, he hoped, to his homeland and to power. Von Rintelen was determined to help the general realize their mutual ambitions. But he needed to find a way to get to him.
In the end, he ambushed the general. As Huerta, surrounded by a retinue of Mexicans in velvet-collared overcoats, made his way out of a black limousine and bounded into the lobby of the Manhattan Hotel, von Rintelen pounced. Jumping up from the seat where he’d passed tedious hours poking at the potted palms with his cane as he waited, he confronted the general.
Mexican military officer Victoriano Huerta (1854–1916), who was president of Mexico from 1913 to 1914, with members of his cabinet. Huerta is seated on the right.
(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
Huerta was wary, and his men moved threateningly toward the stranger. But von Rintelen was bold. He looked Huerta in the eyes and, with all his self-possessed authority, announced that he was a German officer. “I would like to do all I can to help you reclaim what is rightfully yours,” he declared.
The meeting that took place that afternoon in Huerta’s suite was a long and careful negotiation. The agreed-upon terms left each man feeling as if he’d won a great victory: German U-boats would deliver covert shipments of weapons along the Mexican coast; Germany would provide significant sums to outfit a Mexican rebel army; and once Huerta was restored to power, his troops would attack the United States and be assured of Germany’s complete support.
When the meeting concluded, von Rintelen hurried off to send a cable to Berlin. And in the adjacent hotel room, Section V’s listeners waited impatiently until they could retrieve the Dictaphone that had recorded the entire discussion and send a cable to London. Their target had been Huerta, but to their surprise and excitement, they had also snared a German agent.
When Huerta checked into the Manhattan Hotel earlier in the week, Guy Gaunt, the British station chief in New York, had dispatched a team with orders to put a recording device in the general’s suite. They surveyed the rooms and decided formal conferences would most likely be held around a large round table in the middle of the sitting room. So they moved the table closer to a window framed by flowing curtains, concealed a Dictaphone in the folds of the heavy fabric, and trailed a connecting wire out the window and over the ledge to the room next door.
Headphones on, a British agent was able to listen to every incriminating word between the man they now knew was a German spy and the would-be ruler of Mexico. When the Mexicans left for dinner, the SIS agents would retrieve the recordings from the target room and deliver them downtown to the Section V field office for transcription.
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED,
Huerta continued on his tour of America, and von Rintelen waited anxiously for a response from Berlin. Yet all the while, the German agent also kept busy; “I had plenty to do in the meantime,” he boasted.
Unknown to von Rintelen, though, his activities were at last being monitored. Section V was now on his tail.
Without disclosing his sources or precisely what activities had been discovered, Gaunt had also suggested to Tom that the New York police should keep an eye on von Rintelen too. However, even if the British agent had provided more details of von Rintelen’s discussion with the Mexican general, Tom would still have needed stronger evidence to arrest the German spy.
There was no specific law against espionage. The closest statute was the Defense Secrets Act of 191l, which made it a crime to deliver national defense information to a person who was “not entitled to it.” Previous state secrecy laws had even vaguer language, and these federal statutes were largely concerned with treason, unlawful entry into military facilities, and the theft of government property. Not until America declared war would Congress, after much contentious debate, pass the Espionage Act of 1917. This law made it a specific crime to spy on or to interfere with American military operations. But in the days of this covert war, as the network of German spies established itself in New York, Tom’s power to make an arrest was severely restrained. He needed to catch the spies in an act of sabotage, or at least firmly establish that they were planning one.
WHEN BERLIN’S RESPONSE TO VON
Rintelen finally arrived, it was enthusiastic. Even better, the Foreign Office swiftly reinforced its words with action. Eight million rounds of ammunition were purchased in St. Louis, awaiting shipment to Huerta’s men; another three million rounds were on order. An initial payment of $800,000 was deposited into Huerta’s personal account in the Deutsche Bank in Havana; $95,000 went into a Mexican account that was also in his name. And von Papen, who had spent time in Mexico before the war, was sent down to the Texas-Mexico border to draft plans for the invading army’s attacks on Brownsville, El Paso, and San Antonio.
An elated Huerta received these reports, cut short his stay in San Francisco, and sped south by train. His plan was to disembark at Newman, New Mexico, twenty miles from the border. General Pascual Orozco and his well-armed men would meet him, and this honor guard would drive him triumphantly into the country that would soon be his once more. But as Huerta descended from his Pullman, a U.S. Army colonel backed by twenty-five soldiers and two deputy marshals arrested the general. The charge was sedition.
He was incarcerated in El Paso, then released on bail. Ordered to remain in America until the charges were adjudicated, he was invited to a dinner at Fort Bliss. The general saw the invitation as a conciliatory gesture. Perhaps it was, but a day later he took sick.
Yellow jaundice was the official diagnosis. Poison was the widespread, and more persistent, rumor. Whatever the cause, the illness was fatal. General Huerta died on American soil. He could see the promised land through the window of his hospital bed, but he never returned.
VON RINTELEN HEARD THE NEWS
in New York. It was night, and he’d just left a dinner party. As he was standing on the street in evening dress, looking to hail a taxi, a man hurried by behind him.
“You are being watched,” the unseen presence whispered in the background as he passed close enough to touch him. “Look out! Don’t wait for Huerta. He has been poisoned.”
Von Rintelen summoned up all his discipline. He showed no emotion, focusing his attention on the taxi that had pulled up. But as he was getting in, his eyes darted up the block and he recognized the tall, lean figure of Boniface, the lawyer who had been his coconspirator in many schemes.
Seated in the cab, the spy struggled to remain calm. Perhaps, he tried telling himself, Boniface was mistaken. But when he glanced with a contrived casualness out the rear window of the taxi, he saw that an ominous dark sedan was right behind him. It followed him all the way to the Yacht Club.
The next day his fears received additional confirmation. Von Rintelen learned that Koenig had dispatched Boniface. Several of the security chief’s well-placed sources alerted him that the Huerta affair had blown von Rintelen’s cover, and he sent off the lawyer, a man unknown to the police, to warn the spy. A new caution, von Rintelen realized, was required.