The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (30 page)

The most significant hiring that Van Deman still had to do was find someone who could run MI-8, his cryptological section, which he recognised as a critical component of military intelligence work, and something the US had never seriously practised, a lapse that Van Deman needed to repair with urgency. The obvious choice, Captain Parker Hitt, was needed for work in France. So too were the few other officers who knew a bit about the world of cryptology. Just as Van Deman was quickly exhausting his options, rescue came via a trolley car carrying a lowly code clerk from the State Department. But there was nothing lowly about Herbert Osborne Yardley in his own mind. He too had used all of his perseverance, careful methods of analysis, intuition and luck to get this meeting with Colonel Van Deman. And he was determined to come out of it as the man who could win the code war for the USA.

At the outset of America’s war Yardley was the US version of Room 40 almost by himself, but he’d had to use all his poker player’s wiles to convince the army to let him into the codebreaking game in the first place. Yardley, who had joined the State Department in December 1912 as a $900-a-month code clerk, had soon proved himself to have ‘cipher brains’ – a gift for solving codes. He had come to Washington from small-town Indiana, having been taught telegraphy by his father, a railroad station agent. He learned about codes and their decryption on his own, after digesting the US army’s only pamphlet for the solution of military ciphers – the one by fellow Indiana code genius Parker Hitt – and through his own robust initiative.

Though small and skinny, Yardley had played quarterback on his high school football team, starred in school plays, sung baritone in a quartet, and been president of his class. Popular and gregarious, he befriended clerks in other embassies, who gave him copies of their code and cipher communications, and he worked on solving them while doing his regular State Department work. He was good at mathematics and a gifted poker player, talents that combined to help him master a variety of code and cipher strategies and increase his desire to push himself further.

President Woodrow Wilson (right) and his confidant Colonel Edward House

When he heard that White House operative Colonel Edward House, then working on a secret peace initiative in Germany, was sending a telegram to President Wilson, Yardley made a copy as it came over the wire in the code room. He thought that solving it would be the ultimate test, for surely the President of the United States would use the most sophisticated code in the world. To his own astonished dismay, he cracked the 500-word communiqué in less than two hours. ‘This message had passed over British cables and we already knew that a copy of every cable went to the Code Bureau in the British navy. Colonel House must be the Allies’ best informant!’ Yardley marvelled. ‘Is it possible that a man sits in the White House, dreaming, picturing himself a maker of history, an international statesman, a mediator of peace, and sends his agents out with schoolboy ciphers?’

When war broke out, Yardley paid a call on the Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips to get a letter of release from the State Department. Phillips, a tall, polished, Harvard-educated patrician descended from the family that founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, tried to kill the five-foot-five, 127-pound balding scrapper from the Midwest with patronising kindness, offering him a cigarette and a raise, but also turned down his request, telling Yardley ‘the Department must function, even if there is a war’.

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 the 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’.