The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (24 page)

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.

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.