The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (9 page)

By chance, Blinker Hall bumped into a young naval officer who told him about the Wassmuss affair. He wasted no time getting the books out of storage. Alistair Denniston remembered how one day in April Hall ‘produced a fresh line of goods – a treasure trove in Persia’.

Hall immediately formed a diplomatic section that was independent from the rest of Room 40, giving him sole control of its activities. He headhunted George Young, a very experienced Foreign Office official who’d worked in Washington, Athens and Constantinople, and was based in Lisbon at the outbreak of war, and placed him in charge. To make up the rest of the team, he pinched Nigel de Grey and the Reverend Montgomery from Room 40, and brought in Benjamin Faudel-Phillips, a City man.

The diplomatic code books yielded crucial intelligence concerning communications between Berlin and the German embassy in Madrid, which was acting as a clearing house for messages to their spies in America, where an extensive sabotage operation was being planned: before the code book was discovered, 170 German messages had passed via neutral cables to Count Johann von Bernstorff, the larger-than-life German ambassador in America.

However, because of the risks of having their ambassador oversee a covert war on US turf, the Germans provided von Bernstorff with plausible deniability in the form of like-minded associates. The German embassy had an executive staff of four, who would in effect become the general command of the German war effort in North America, and have at their disposal an army of lethal patriots and rogues who saw the US financing and supply of the Allied war effort as a legitimate reason to wage war on America.

Heinrich Albert, the German commercial attaché in the USA and sabotage ‘money man’

The first was Germany’s commercial attaché in the US, Privy Councillor Dr Heinrich Albert, a 40-year-old lawyer. Albert was paymaster for the German diplomatic corps in the US – and the eventual paymaster to Germany’s espionage and sabotage, holding a massive joint account with Ambassador von Bernstorff at Chase National Bank. He was popular with his American banking colleagues, and conveyed an air of discreet competence despite the vicious duelling scars that creased his face. From his office deep in New York’s financial community, at the Hamburg America Building in Lower Manhattan, Heinrich exerted great influence with New York bankers as a man of prudence and principle. Yet in truth his wartime activities for the Fatherland characterised him, in a later Senate investigation, as ‘the Machiavelli of the whole thing … the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat’.

The German military attaché in the US was also an aristocrat, Captain Franz von Papen. The eldest son of a wealthy, noble and Catholic landowning family in Westphalia, the 35-year-old von Papen was an officer of an Uhlan cavalry regiment, and had recently finished a stint as a military attendant to the Imperial Palace when he was dispatched as attaché to the United States and Mexico in 1913. Tall, powerfully built and with a sculpted, strong-jawed face that gave him an air of both vigour and sneering arrogance, he, like von Bernstorff, had married money. His wife’s fortune, as the daughter of an Alsatian pottery manufacturer, gave von Papen social standing in Washington DC, which he used to pursue other women for reasons personal and political, though he was more often than not to be found in his redoubt at 60 Wall Street in the heart of New York’s financial district, which became known as the Bureau of the Military Attaché – or more nakedly, the War Intelligence Centre.

Franz von Papen, Germany’s military attaché in the USA

Rounding out the quartet was Germany’s naval attaché, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, who had joined the navy at the age of 19 and seen action around the world. He witnessed the brutal American invasion of the Philippines in 1898, and was a secret agent for the Kaiser’s brother shortly before the Boxer War in China, where his mission was to measure the strength of the Chinese navy. Boy-Ed’s origins were more exotically bohemian than those of his von-prefixed colleagues in Germany’s American war office. He was born in the important (and intellectually vibrant) German seaport of Lubbock, on the Baltic coast, where his father was a merchant of Turkish ancestry, and his progressive, intellectual mother was a journalist and novelist who nurtured the career of Thomas Mann, a frequent guest in the Boy-Ed household.

Tall and built like a rugby prop, Boy-Ed was worldly, well read and funny, with a compelling combination of charm and diligence that made him popular among the Washington crowd when he took up his diplomatic post in 1913. When war came in 1914, he too set up his office in New York City, at 11 Broadway, close to the New York Customs House. And like von Papen, he was within easy walking distance of Heinrich Albert’s counting house.

New York City was the perfect North American front line for the Germans’ secret war. With a population of 5.3 million people, it was the largest city in the world. Better still, many of the 12 million immigrants who had landed on Ellis Island between 1900 and 1915 stayed where they’d arrived. About one million residents of New York City were foreign born, largely Irish and German, with no love lost for England.

And the city itself was a marvel of modernity. At 7.30 p.m. on 24 June 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed an electric switch in the White House, and on the corner of Broadway and Park Row in Manhattan, 200 miles up the road, the 80,000 lights of the new 60-storey Woolworth Building blazed out to ships 40 miles out to sea that the world’s largest skyscraper was open for business in a city whose new epicenter – Times Square – called itself the crossroads of the world. Ezra Pound, the American poet then living in London, visited the city and was moved to remark, ‘No urban nights are like nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on magical powers. Squares and squares of flame set and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled the stars down to our will.’ With 500 miles of shoreline, the city’s five boroughs were connected to each other and the rest of the country by ferry, tunnel and bridges spanning a harbour that was the busiest in the world, funnelling goods into the American heartland and out to the world beyond.

Von Papen’s first instinct, however, was to look further afield and attack Canada, which, as a self-governing dominion of Great Britain, had gone to war along with Britain and was now a vital source of soldiers and supplies for the war in Europe, sending 30,000 soldiers to England in October 1914 – 5,000 more than London had rather extravagantly hoped for in such a short time. Canada’s military training centre at Valcartier, Quebec, 500 miles north of New York City, was within easy striking distance, but for the German saboteurs in the USA, the entire country, as a key part of the British Empire’s war machine, was a target.

The Canadian attack plan had come to von Papen via a German soldier of fortune named Holst von der Goltz, who had attained the rank of major while serving with Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army in Mexico. The baby-faced von der Goltz was really Franz Wachendorf, born in Koblenz in 1884, who already boasted a shadowy career in intelligence, having stolen a document from a Mexican finance minister he had chloroformed in Paris. The purloined document revealed a top-secret agreement between Japan and Mexico, which von der Goltz then leaked to the US in February 1911, who responded by sending their fleet to the Gulf of Mexico, and 20,000 troops – two-thirds of the US army at the time – to the Mexican border.

The following year von der Goltz was in Mexico too, fighting the revolution. That adventure ended once Germany was at war. He heeded the call for all German soldiers and reservists located outside Europe to muster in the United States, and headed to New York to pay a call on Franz von Papen.

On 22 August 1914, von der Goltz appeared at 11 Broadway, and in a little room in the Imperial German consulate he and von Papen hatched a plan to strike at Britain through its dominion of Canada. Von Papen produced a letter he had received from a German who worked on a farm in Oregon suggesting that the Germans should attack Canada’s Great Lakes cities with machine guns mounted on motorboats. The two men agreed that the plan was good, but that it could also be a trap, and so von Papen, with the same kind of shrewd thoroughness that would later see him rise to vice chancellor of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, had the letter-writer investigated.

In the meantime, the duo hatched a scheme to use German reservists in the United States to invade British Columbia via Washington State, with support from German warships in the Pacific. That plan was rejected too, partly because of the lack of artillery backup, but mainly because Ambassador von Bernstorff thought it the kind of ‘wild-cat scheme’ that would inflame Germanophobia and ultimately fail.

After next making serious plans to attack the British Empire by invading the soft target of Jamaica, which would soon send men and supplies to Europe once the appalling Allied casualties on the Western Front overcame British military prejudices of giving black men guns, von der Goltz and von Papen decided instead to blow up the Welland Canal, a major Canadian shipping route between Lakes Ontario and Erie that bypasses Niagara Falls. A successful attack on the Welland Canal system would cripple Canadian shipping and food supplies and create panic among the public, who would demand that troops destined for the war in Europe be stationed at home to prevent invasion by the German horde to the south.

Von der Goltz was promoted to captain and acquired a US passport in the name of Bridgeman Taylor as well as 300 pounds of dynamite and 45 feet of fuse. He purchased the explosives package through the offices of Captain Hans Tauscher, an agent of Krupp, the German steel and armament juggernaut, via the DuPont Powder Company, for $534.37.

After picking up the dynamite and fuse himself by motorboat from a DuPont company barge in the Hudson River, von der Goltz transported it in suitcases in a careening New York taxi first to the German Club on the south side of Central Park, where Karl Boy-Ed lived, and which became such a centre for German diplomats, sympathisers and saboteurs that the US government finally seized the building in 1918. From there he went to the safe house run by Martha Held, a buxom, blue-eyed opera singer who had emigrated from Germany in 1912. With her raven hair, diamond earrings and the elaborate Victorian costumes that camouflaged her middle-age spread, Held trilled arias into the Manhattan night from her rented brownstone at 123 West 15th Street, an easy address to remember for the German sailors, officers and spies – and even von Bernstorff – who were regular visitors.

Once the explosive was safely stowed, von der Goltz and his hand-picked team of German sailors whom he had liberated from their involuntary residence in American ports headed north to strike a blow for Germany. However, not only had the Canadians figured out that such an important shipping lane might be a target for saboteurs and guarded it accordingly, by the time von der Goltz and his fellow conspirators arrived in Niagara Falls, New York, they learned that Canadian troops had left their base at Valcartier for England. So instead, they exchanged impotent telegrams with Mr Steffens (von Papen’s code name) and talked loudly about their German patriotism for all and sundry to hear. Von der Goltz claimed that it was to distract their American surveillance team from the other unit of German saboteurs heading into Canada, but the truth was that the Germans were going to have to come up with a better plan than this if they hoped to win the war on the North American front.

On 3 January 1915, an enciphered telegram arrived at Ambassador von Bernstorff’s Washington office, with orders from Berlin:

Secret. The General Staff is anxious that vigorous measures should be taken to destroy the Canadian Pacific in several places for the purpose of causing a lengthy interruption of traffic. Captain Boehm who is well known in America and who will shortly return to that country is furnished with expert information on that subject. Acquaint the military attaché with the above and furnish the sums required for the enterprise.