Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (31 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
W
ith a renewed sense of urgency, Tom went back to the notebook. Koenig’s alias in D-Case 343 was Woehler. As for the agent, his aliases kept changing. At first, he was identified as Operative #51. Then as Agent C.O. And still later as Agent B.I. Were they all the same person? Or were there a number of field agents in this operation? The mystery kept growing.
Backtracking through the notebook, Tom saw an earlier reference to Woehler’s meeting with a Friedrich Schleindl. Tom read it slowly. Then, just to be certain, he read it again. When he’d finished, Tom knew he had it. Koenig had slipped up.
This was, he understood in a moment of sudden perception, a record of Koenig’s initial meeting with his agent. He had, as good tradecraft required, used his work name, but he had not yet assigned an alias to his agent.
Why? Tom asked, and then excitedly answered his own question: because Koenig at this first sit-down didn’t know if the new recruit’s intelligence would be of any value. He didn’t know if there’d be a subsequent meeting. Koenig had no inkling of the agent that Schleindl would become. And after the recruit had blossomed into a key operative, Koenig had never thought to thumb back through the notebook to edit his account of their first encounter.
Friedrich Schleindl, the bank clerk and German spy exposed in Koenig’s notebooks.
(© Bettmann/Corbis)
By going backward, then reading forward, Tom found that the notebook revealed a clear trail: calling himself Woehler, Koenig had met Schleindl, and it was Woehler who continued as the handler of Operative #51, then Agent C.O., and finally Agent B.I.
Certain that he would soon have his first real intelligence about Germany’s germ warfare program, he gave the order to find Friedrich Schleindl.
IT TOOK ONLY A CHECK
of the city’s telephone directories for the team to locate Schleindl. And after he was brought in, he did help solve a mystery. But it was not the one Tom had anticipated.
When the war started, according to the story Tom easily drew out of the terrified prisoner, Schleindl was a clerk in the City National Bank. He was also a German reservist, having been born in Bavaria, and he reported to the German consulate for duty. Months passed without further communication from the consulate, but then he received a call instructing him to meet a Herr Woehler at the Manhattan Hotel. “You’ll find him in the bar,” he was told.
Woehler—or, as Tom knew him, Koenig—bought the young man a beer and led him to a secluded table where they could talk. “Tell me more about yourself,” Woehler said when they were seated.
It was more an interrogation than a casual conversation. As it continued, Woehler made an important discovery. Schleindl’s job gave him access to daily cables from Allied governments to the bank, arranging the purchase and shipment of war supplies.
That first night, Woehler made his pitch. He offered Schleindl $25 a week to steal all the orders cabled by the Allies, together with copies of contracts showing when the goods would be delivered to the piers for shipment, as well as the detailed descriptions of the purchases. Schleindl agreed. He was a patriot, and, he added candidly to Tom, the extra $25 nearly doubled his clerk’s salary.
A routine developed. Schleindl would wait until the end of the week, then gather up all the cables and contracts that had come in over the previous five days. On Friday night he’d meet with his control, and Woehler would have the documents copied in time for Schleindl to replace them early Monday morning before anyone knew they had been borrowed.
And Koenig would have crucial information to pass on to von Rintelen. The contracts and cargo manifests enabled cigar bombs to be placed on the ships where they would do the most damage to the Allies. Shipments to the Allies were closely guarded secrets, but the cigar bombs unerringly targeted the correct ships. Now Tom knew how this had been accomplished.
But as he diligently went back over the many documents that Schleindl had passed on to Koenig, something caught Tom’s eye. And another, more momentous mystery began to unravel.
It was the shipping contract for several thousand magnetos needed to power the ignition systems of Allied trucks and automobiles at the front. They had been loaded into hold 2 of the steamship
Minnehaha
: the same steamship on which an explosion had erupted in the number 2 hold on July 7, 1915. The same date that Erich Muenter/Frank Holt had told Tom an explosion would take place.
Ever since that blast, Tom had wondered how a Cornell professor knew to plant his bomb on the one ship in New York Harbor that day heading off with vital war matériel. Muenter had died before Tom had a chance to ask him. Perhaps, Tom had tried not very successfully to convince himself, Muenter had just made a lucky guess. After all, only the executives at the magneto factory and the officers of the bank would have seen the bill of lading.
Now Tom understood. Schleindl had passed the bill of lading to Koenig, who had given it to von Rintelen, who had passed the information on—there was no other logical explanation!—to Muenter.
His long, brooding suspicion that Muenter had not acted alone, he felt, was confirmed. Tom had no doubt that when Muenter placed the bomb in the U.S. Capitol Building and shot J. P. Morgan, he had been acting with the assistance of the German secret service.
BUT THIS REALIZATION GAVE TOM
little comfort. Instead, it only served to remind him of the cruel nature of the enemy he was pursuing. Once a line has been crossed, Tom knew, anything becomes possible. Terror was very much a matter of habit. Tom had no doubt that the unprincipled adversary who had planted bombs and sent out assassins would not hesitate to attack America with germs.
T
he man was dying. He was forty-seven years old and had previously enjoyed good health, but three weeks earlier he had entered Bellevue Hospital in New York complaining that he felt weak, tired, and feverish. Now he was in a coma. His organs were shutting down. The doctors did not understand why.
As they struggled to make a diagnosis, they kept returning to two possible clues. The first was his job. He worked on ships transporting warhorses to Europe, feeding the animals and mucking out the stalls. The other clue was on his body. His face was scarred with ugly sores, and inflamed nodules about the size of nickels covered his legs and feet.
Most of the doctors assumed the skin irritations were a rash caused by his work with horses, but they were not convinced these epidermal abrasions were directly connected to the disease that was killing him. Several of the physicians had an entirely different diagnosis. In his trips overseas, the patient had contracted a previously unknown strain of foreign measles; that would explain both his illness and the condition of his body.
The doctors went back and forth, and during the patient’s second week of hospitalization, the nodules began to swell. They burst, and a dark yellow pus spewed out. The patient’s fever rose precipitously. Then he became delirious.
Twenty-one days after admission, he fell into a coma. Two days later he was dead. The doctors still did not know the cause.
With the patient’s death, the doctors intensified their investigation. A new theory held that it might have been a case of plague. If that were true, the entire city would need to be put on alert and rigorous precautions taken. So blood was taken from the corpse and injected into guinea pigs. The excreted pus was also applied to the lab animals.
Within days, the animals became ill. Soon they were dead. And the anxious doctors made a diagnosis. This was not plague, but glanders. The patient, it was now decided, most probably had come in contact with an infected horse, or had simply changed the sick animal’s water or cleaned its stall. The autopsy confirmed this. “Glanders invasion of the liver and lungs” was listed as the cause of death.
Not until nine years after the war was over, as lawyers seeking reparations for Germany’s sabotage activities in the United States conducted their investigations, would Dilger’s culturing of the glanders pathogen in his basement become known. And then this death would take on a new significance. Doctors suspected it was ground zero: the first known human fatality in the contagion caused by Germany’s germ warfare attack.
WEEKS AFTER THE DEATH IN
New York, in Newport News, Virginia, John Grant, a stevedore from Baltimore, crouched outside the animal pens at the Breeze Point wharf. It was dark and cold, with a harsh December wind coming off the James River, but Grant did not hurry. He waited and watched.
His boss, Ed Felton, said he had paid the night watchman to stay in his office, but Grant still worried about the British remount officers. They normally left at the end of the day, yet if one happened to be around, he’d shoot an intruder on sight. Grant was getting paid $10 for his work. It was good money, and it was a lot easier than lifting crates on the docks. But he had no intention of risking his life.
He listened to the night sounds: distant voices coming off the transport ships anchored in the harbor; the whinnies and neighs of the animals in the pens; the steady shuffling of hooves. When he was satisfied there were no patrolling guards, Grant removed a pair of rubber gloves from his back pocket and pulled them on.
He made sure they fitted tightly, then turned his attention to the package lying by his feet. Grant removed the brown paper wrapping. Inside was a wooden container, and he unscrewed its top. There was a layer of cotton, and after he pushed it aside, he saw the two glass vials. They were about two inches long, and stoppered with pieces of cork.
Now came the dangerous part, he knew. If he wasn’t careful, Felton had warned, he could die. Grant could not let the yellow liquid in the vials touch his skin.
He pulled the cork out very slowly. With two fingers, he grasped the steel-tipped syringe inside, and extracted it. Inadvertently, he let drops of the yellow liquid fall onto the ground, but, after a moment’s panic, he decided that none had touched his clothes or his skin. With the syringe raised in his hand like a dagger, he hurried to the first mule corral.
He stabbed the needle deep into the haunch of a mule. The animal immediately went wild. It kicked and brayed savagely. As Grant struggled to pull the needle out of the mule’s thick hide, the animal turned its neck and tried to bite him. Grant finally managed to remove it, but now all the animals in the pen were braying, snorting. In their collective fury, they banged into each other and kicked at the corral fence.
Alarmed, Grant grabbed his package and rushed toward a wooden storage shed. He leaned against it, hiding in the shadows, waiting for the animals to quiet. His instinct was to run, to throw the vials into the James River and escape before a British soldier came to see what was causing the commotion. But he knew Felton would be angry. And if Felton told Captain Hinsch that he’d run, the consequences would be as bad as being caught. No, he decided, they’d be worse.
After a while, when the mules had grown silent, Grant returned to the corral. He worked quickly, stabbing as many animals as he could. When there wasn’t enough of the yellow liquid remaining in the vial to refill the syringe, he emptied the contents into water basins and food troughs.
He uncorked the second vial and moved on to the horse corral. As soon as he stabbed the first horse, the animals started neighing and racing about. But Grant was determined to complete his mission and get off the wharf. He did his best to calm the horses, and then, working rapidly, jabbed one animal after another.
His work completed, he went to the banks of the James River. He pulled off his gloves and tossed them one at a time into the shadowy, fast-moving water. He watched as the current took them downstream. He threw the vials into the water, too, and after a moment they sank. Then he hurried off the wharf. He was already looking forward to the morning when he’d take the train back to Baltimore.
As with the glanders case in New York, it would not be until years later, after the lawyers in the postwar reparations case had interviewed Grant and doctors had studied the transcripts, that the full significance of the stevedore’s activities that night was understood.
Too many years had passed to allow the doctors to be sure when the ground-zero moment had occurred. It might have been when droplets of yellow liquid fell onto the ground outside the mule corral. Or when the gloves and vials were tossed into the James River. Or, as with the Bellevue patient, perhaps people had simply come in contact with the animals or their water and food. But they now believed with great certainty that they had found the cause of four mysterious deaths, accompanied by anthraxlike symptoms, during the winter of 1915–16 in Virginia. And they wondered how many more deaths caused by the German Secret Service’s anthrax attack had gone undiagnosed.
TOM WORKED IN A VACUUM.
He had no knowledge of the deaths in New York and Virginia. All he had driving him, goading him on, was his instincts. And his fears. He was certain Germany would launch a second germ attack.
Yet he might as well have been chasing after an elusive ghost; his pursuit was a hunt for intangibles. He had no suspects. No clues. The lethal weapon he so feared struck with deadly silence, leaving behind only hints of its terrible efficacy. He lay awake at night wondering if the attack had already begun and he didn’t know it. Would the doctors, he asked himself anxiously, even be able to identify an outbreak? Would they be able to treat it? Facing such an invisible, powerful threat, what could he do?
Still, it was not in Tom’s nature to surrender. He made sure the guards were doubled at the New York horse corrals. He sent his men up and down the waterfront to warn about enemy agents intent on poisoning animals. And he implored Woods and Scull to reiterate to their many friends in Washington that the threat of a germ attack was very real.
Tom was attempting something he had never done before in his career. He was no longer the indefatigable detective tracking down the culprits. Instead, he was trying to prevent a crime. And although he would not know all that happened until years later, he succeeded.