The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (26 page)

Given 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?

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.’

The partially decoded telegram had revealed enough for de Grey to realise that the plan detailed within it would send America into bellicose fury. And even though it came from Germany, the plan to keep America out of the war in Europe involved the country that made the USA most nervous, the country right on its own border: Mexico.

Arthur Zimmermann knew about American paranoia toward Mexico, too. When he was appointed Germany’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs on 24 November 1916, the 52-year-old diplomat became the first non-aristocrat to hold that exalted post, getting there through his wits and cunning. Yet the amiable, forthright Zimmermann, with his bushy reddish-blonde moustache and his duelling scar, was hardly a peasant with a pitchfork who suddenly found himself as Germany’s steward of foreign affairs. Like the Junkers class who governed Germany, he too was from Prussia. After earning a doctorate in law and practising briefly, he joined Germany’s foreign service in 1893, when he was 29 years old. He was consul in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and wound up back in Berlin as Under Secretary of State in 1911. In 1914, as acting foreign secretary, he agreed with Kaiser Wilhelm and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that Germany must ally with Austro-Hungary after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and drafted the telegram announcing that intention. In 1916, he worked with Roger Casement to foment revolution in Ireland.

German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann

When his predecessor as foreign secretary refused to support a renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare, which had been suspended in late 1915, Zimmermann, a whole-hearted supporter of Germany’s military leaders, got his job. On 31 January 1917, US Ambassador James Gerard was summoned to his office to be officially informed of Germany’s decision. Zimmermann told Gerard that this strategy ‘was a necessity for Germany, and that Germany could not hold out a year on the question of food. He further said, ‘Give us only two months of this kind of warfare and we shall end the war and make peace within three months.’

Germany’s food situation was central to the desperate military decisions the country made during the winter of 1917–18. Shortly after the Germans resumed their U-boat free-for-all on the Atlantic, and the US responded by breaking off diplomatic relations, a member of the Prussian Diet rose in alarm to report to the assembly that ‘the mortality among elderly people is increasing at a terrible rate’. He also declared that epidemics were spreading among the weakened population, that suicides were increasing and that ‘parents are killing their children rather than see them suffer the pangs of unsatisfied hunger’. If the war lasted another year, Germany itself would die of famine.

Zimmermann’s incendiary telegram was then, in terms of war strategy, potentially brilliant – after all, the Germans had been using the US as their far western front since the beginning of the war. Rather than being a direct attack, Zimmermann’s note was to be delivered to the Mexican president only if the United States entered the war due to Germany’s unleashing of the U-boats on all Atlantic shipping. It called for an alliance between Mexico and Japan, heavily subsidised by Germany, to wage war on the USA, with the victory prize to be territories the United States had won from Mexico. Zimmermann could not have picked a country more likely to bring the US into the war.

Mexico had always been a problem for the United States, and vice versa, with territorial wars, skirmishes and horse trading resulting in the USA winning Texas as a state in 1845, and New Mexico and Arizona in 1912. Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson had sent American sailors and marines into Veracruz on a six-month campaign to prevent the German government from sending arms to the Mexican president, Victoriano Huerta, with the resulting violence killing 19 Americans and 129 Mexicans.

In 1915, Mexican raids had killed 21 Americans as part of the ‘San Diego Plan’, a manifesto drawn up in the small Texas town of San Diego by President Venustiano Carranza to create an extraordinary liberation army of Mexicans, African-Americans, aboriginals and Japanese. Under the red and white banner of ‘Equality and Independence’, this rainbow coalition would slaughter every Anglo male over the age of 16 in their quest to reclaim Texas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and California to create an independent republic. The raids – and the revenge plan – would be called off once the US government recognised Carranza as the legitimate president of Mexico, which it did in the summer of 1915. And that got General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa angry.

Francisco Villa had been born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, the son of poor peasants in the state of Durango. After his father died, Villa became a sharecropper, then abandoned that for the riches of banditry. He soon became part of a ‘super group’ of
bandidos
, and ironically, avoided execution upon capture because of the intervention of a powerful landlord to whom Villa had sold stolen goods.

His punishment was to serve in the federal army, but in 1903, he killed an officer and headed to the state of Chihuahua using the name of his paternal grandfather. The man ‘Francisco Villa’ had been born, and for the better part of the next decade would re-invent himself as a kind of Mexican ‘Robin Hood’, leading his
bandidos
on raids against the bad hacienda owners in the name of the oppressed people.

When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Villa was in the thick of it, fighting the dictator Porfirio Diaz with the pro-democracy forces, and winding up alongside General Huerta. Huerta, however, was jealous of Villa, and after accusing him of horse theft, insubordination and outright insurrection, Villa found himself standing in front of a firing squad. He was reprieved just in time – so the romantic story goes – by a telegram from Madero commuting Villa’s sentence to prison, from which Villa escaped in time to join the loathed Carranza in a war against the even more despised Huerta – now dictator of Mexico after the murder of Madero.

Villa fought with Carranza to depose Huerta, along the way getting himself elected governor of the state of Chihuahua in 1913. As governor, Villa printed his own currency, and such was his stature that it was accepted at par at banks in Texas. Villa ordered his paper money also to be taken at par with Mexico’s gold pesos, and in a move that would further cement his ‘Robin Hood of Mexico’ reputation, forced wealthy landowners to give loans – and land – so he could pay and feed his troops, and compensate their widows and children. He also took gold from banks, and true to his bandit origins, took wealthy hostages if the banks were less than forthcoming about where they kept the gold.

The gregarious, lavishly moustachioed Villa, a teetotaller who had honed his peasant intelligence by learning to read and write in prison, was as quick to laugh as to pull the trigger – once shooting dead one of his soldiers for being drunk and loud while Villa was giving a journalist an interview. Indeed, his larger-than-life persona attracted a Hollywood film crew who followed him around to document his exploits – though Hollywood wasn’t there to witness Villa’s atrocities that finally provoked the USA into action. On 11 January 1916, Pancho Villa’s men hauled 17 American mining engineers from a train in San Ysabel, lined them up and shot them (one man faked death and escaped), prompting the US to put El Paso, Texas, under martial law to prevent its enraged citizens from crossing the border to take revenge.

Two months later, while darkness still cloaked the dusty border town of Columbus, New Mexico, Pancho Villa launched a raid with 450 of his mounted soldiers, known as ‘Villistas’. For more than an hour the Villistas, hollering ‘
Viva Villa! Muerta a los gringos!
’, wreaked deadly havoc, setting fire to homes and businesses in the town of 700, and shooting people where they found them. Eighteen Americans and 80 Villistas would die in the attack, with four captured Villistas later hanged.

President Woodrow Wilson – who had successfully managed to avoid committing the US to a disastrous war in Europe – now did the very thing the Germans had always hoped he would do: get sucked in to Mexico and expend America’s military energies there. Wilson knew he had to take military action, especially in an election year, with high-profile people such as former president and pro-war agitator Teddy Roosevelt mocking his benighted pacifism in person and in print. Wilson’s response to Villa’s latest outrage would send American troops deep into Mexican territory under the command of the man who would eventually lead the US army in France. And it would give Germany one last desperate idea to keep America out of the war once and for all.

With the war in Europe generating death on an industrial scale but no clear victor, and given the enthusiasm of Germany for using the USA as a ‘third front’, it was no surprise that Villa’s attacks on the US were helped by German money. At least $340,000 of German money was funnelled by German agent Felix A. Sommerfeld from a bank account in St Louis to fund arms for Villa.

The war against Pancho Villa launched by the US in April 1916, known as the ‘Punitive Expedition’, sent more than 14,000 American troops 450 miles deep into Mexico in pursuit of a man who had recently been their trusted ally and receiver of US armaments. Indeed, his military tactics had been so admired by the US that not only did the army study them, but Villa had, in happier days, been invited to the army command centre at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, to meet John J. Pershing, the man who, unbeknownst to them both, would soon be hunting him down.

Pershing, tasked with the mission to disrupt and end Villa’s campaign, and either capture or, better still, kill him, was a 55-year-old career soldier with an iron jaw, ramrod posture and sharp, unsentimental eyes. He was nicknamed ‘Black Jack’ while teaching at West Point, due to his service with African-American Buffalo Soldiers first in the Indian Wars, and then again in the Spanish-American War – a nickname that had been softened from something far more offensive. Pershing’s mission in Mexico was highly sensitive. The USA had the tacit support of Mexican president Venustiano Carranza, but if Pershing’s forces pushed too hard, a total war could easily result, and the US wanted to punish Villa, not ignite the bone-dry tinder that was Mexico.

General John Pershing in France