The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (11 page)

Von Rintelen liked the plan, but couldn’t immediately see how he could go shopping for detonators without attracting the wrong kind of attention. New York’s harbour had its share of pro-German supporters among the Irish dock workers, and certainly among the stranded German sailors, but that incendiary cocktail had not escaped the eyes of the Americans, nor the British, who had placed agents on the New York waterfront to watch out for saboteurs. Guy Gaunt had persuaded J. P. Morgan to hire men from Dougherty’s Detective Bureau and Mercantile Police, a well-connected business run by former New York deputy police commissioner George Dougherty and his brother Harry, to patrol the docks and protect shipments from sabotage – a cost that Morgan handed off to the British. British taxpayers were financing not only their American war goods, but also the muscle to make sure they arrived intact.

Bünz connected von Rintelen with German-American Max Weiser, an exporter whose business was hamstrung by the war. Together the duo set up the import-export firm of E. V. Gibbons (the same initials as on von Rintelen’s false passport) on Cedar Street, a pleasant stroll from von Papen’s War Intelligence Centre in Lower Manhattan. Von Rintelen filed the company with the Commercial Register, and he and Weiser started sending out letters inviting firms to ship ‘wheat, peas, shoe polish, glassware, rice, and similar goods. We posted piles of letters, so that our firm might present the appearance of a flourishing concern.’

Von Rintelen charmed and flattered the New York arms dealers, but to no avail: a sympathetic merchant of war showed him just how much the Italians were offering for the same explosives that he wanted to buy. Von Rintelen knew two depressing things: the Italians were going to join the war on the side of the Allies (they did so in May 1915), and his $500,000 wasn’t going to buy him much of anything in this market.

Then luck walked in the door. Soon after setting up his shell company, von Rintelen had an unexpected visitor, sent by von Papen to provide lethal assistance. Dr Walter Theodore von Scheele had, until the outbreak of the war, been Germany’s secret weapon in America. He had studied pharmacology and chemistry in Bonn, and his middle-aged face bore the scars of student duels. He had served as a lieutenant in Germany’s Field Artillery Regiment 8, and in 1883 emigrated to the United States to pursue further research. His military leave came with a condition: he had to make himself available to Germany’s military attaché in Washington. Scheele was assigned to track and report on American discoveries in explosives and chemicals that could be used in war. He was paid an annual retainer of $1,500, and while living the life of a mild-mannered pharmacist with a shop in Brooklyn, his industrial espionage was so good that he was never recalled for military service to Germany, and indeed, rose in rank from lieutenant to major.

When Scheele met von Rintelen, he was not only Germany’s longest-serving spy in the USA, but he had the perfect cover as president of the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company, which he’d created in 1913 in Hoboken under orders from von Papen. And by way of welcoming von Rintelen back to the US, he reached into his pocket and placed a cigar on the Dark Invader’s desk.

Except this was not a cigar. It was a lead pipe the same shape and length as a good Cuban ‘torpedo’, and hollow within. Scheele had inserted a circular copper disc halfway down the pipe, and soldered it in place to create two separate compartments. One would hold picric acid, an explosive; the other an inflammable liquid such as sulphuric acid. The device was an ingenious time bomb: the thickness of the copper disc determined the speed at which the acids ate through it to unite in combustion. Best of all, it was easily portable. It could be placed on munition and supply ships in the harbour by sympathetic (or bought) dockworkers, timed to burst into ship-crippling flame somewhere out at sea, and so keep suspicion out to sea as well. All von Rintelen needed was a place to manufacture the bombs.

Enter the shady waterfront lawyer Bonford Boniface, a tall, lean rogue whose ‘pince-nez … kept on slipping down his nose, and gave one on the whole the impression of a mangy hyena seeking its daily prey on the battlefield’. Boniface, who always smelled faintly of whisky, knew just the man to help with the cigar bomb plan: Captain Karl von Kleist, a 70-year-old retired German naval officer who lived in Hoboken. Von Rintelen was an old family friend of von Kleist, ‘a funny little old man who looked like a cartoon of the late Prussian eagle’. But von Kleist was no cartoon German. He knew the ways of the harbour, and the captains and officers of the interned German ships. And he had a brilliant idea that would help von Rintelen to create a munitions plant of his own, right under the noses of the US and British: ‘We were to transplant ourselves, with all our schemes, devices, and enterprises, on board one of the German ships and thus place ourselves in a most admirable situation. Germany within American territorial waters! What possibilities!’

And so the interned ship SS
Friedrich der Grosse
became a bomb factory. Von Rintelen used the good offices of E. V. Gibbons to order bulk supplies of lead tubing and copper rods, along with the equipment to cut them. He then set up a shell-making operation on board the ship. Once the cigar tubes were cut, and the timing disc inserted, they were spirited under cover of darkness to Dr Scheele’s laboratory in Hoboken to be loaded with the explosive cocktail. Soon von Rintelen’s factory was making 50 cigar bombs a day.

Towards the end of April 1915, the SS
Cressington Court
caught fire in the Atlantic, while two bombs were found in the cargo of the SS
Lord Erne
and another in the hold of the SS
Devon
– all of them Allied supply ships out of New York Harbor. In May, three more supply ships either caught fire or had bombs discovered on board, and explosions rocked a DuPont powder factory in New Jersey.

In the space of three months after his arrival in America, von Rintelen’s war machine was up and running, and the ‘most secret’ code that he had couriered to New York was still, as far as he knew, unbroken by Room 40. However, the codebreakers in Hall’s diplomatic section were actually getting close to deciphering it, while his agents in the US recognised the danger von Rintelen presented and were already on his trail. Even though he was in New York under a false name, von Rintelen had cut a swathe through New York’s social scene during his time as a banker, and he did not spend his evenings in Manhattan hiding from British agents. Still, he was proving difficult to pin down. And he was getting bolder.

The men from Dougherty’s Detective Bureau received what seemed a gift when a German sailor with a fondness for drink was heard loudly boasting, falsely, in a tavern that he was the Captain Rintelen who put bombs on ships bearing war materiel for the Allies. In the kind of moment of farce that wars often produce, the real von Rintelen collided with this story while lying low at the seaside – and the teller of it was none other than Guy Gaunt, Hall’s spymaster in America.

Though Gaunt’s position was officially diplomatic, he exulted in his role as espionage chief, which theoretically at least would have resulted in his expulsion should he be discovered by the neutral United States. He made the possibility of discovery even easier with a cocktail of naval swagger and colonial snobbery spiced with insecurity, all of which fermented into a blustering ego that enjoyed the attention of New York society ladies when hints about his involvement in the dark arts were dropped at city galas and summer homes.

Franz von Rintelen, Gaunt’s equal in the self-promotion department, often repaired to a hotel near Stamford, Connecticut, and while enjoying the Atlantic air he met some fetching ladies who invited him to a party at an exclusive hotel. At the party, he found himself face to face with Guy Gaunt, the man who was hunting for him at that very moment. Rintelen, with reckless bravado, introduced himself as Commander Brannon, a fellow Englishman and naval officer.

After pleasantries, Rintelen got down to finding out just what his pursuer knew. ‘We have heard so much in the last few weeks about acts of sabotage against our ships,’ he ventured. Guy Gaunt, showing remarkable naiveté (or perhaps Rintelen was showing a mastery of disguise or rhetoric, or both), replied, ‘There is a gang working in New York Harbor under the direction of a German officer. We even know his name. He is called Rintelen, and has been mentioned a number of times in wireless messages by the German embassy … He even admitted his identity once in a tavern, when he was drunk, and hadn’t a hold on his tongue. He did not give away any details concerning his activities, but it is certain that he owns a motorboat, and runs about in it for days together selling goods of all kinds to the ships in the harbour. I cannot tell you any more, Commander, but I can promise you that he soon will be in our hands.’

Von Rintelen was elated by this news, as Gaunt’s intelligence, while essentially correct, was so misplayed by its conveyor that Rintelen believed he was actually safe. But he failed to register that the British had intercepted and read his wireless messages.

While von Rintelen was devising acts of sabotage and sipping cocktails at the seaside, Emanuel Voska’s team was busy trying to crack the German war machine in New York, feeding information to Gaunt, who would pass it on to Blinker Hall and Room 40. Voska had in his service clerks, messengers, waiters, maids, chauffeurs, and the assistant chief clerk in the Austrian embassy. One of his female agents, through money and charm, had convinced an employee in Karl Boy-Ed’s office to steal the ‘most secret’ code. Von Rintelen didn’t know it, but the British had him and his sabotage in their sights.

In the end, the Dark Invader was most likely brought down by a combination of von Papen’s carelessness when sending cables to Berlin, openly using Rintelen’s name and discussing his activities, and the extraordinary actions of a German-American. On Friday 2 July 1915, the beginning of the Independence Day long weekend, Erich Muenter planted a bomb in a place that should have been among the most secure in the land: the Senate wing of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. He had timed it to explode when the building was deserted. When the bomb detonated near a telephone switchboard, plaster was torn from the walls and ceilings, mirrors and chandeliers were shattered, doors were blown open – one of them a door into the vice president’s office – and the east reception room was destroyed.

The destruction caused by Erich Muenter’s bomb in the Senate wing of the US Capitol Building, July 1915

Muenter wrote a letter to a Washington newspaper protesting against munitions shipments to Germany from the USA, then took a night train to New York. There he transferred to a service taking him to Glen Cove, Long island, where J. P. Morgan Jr was breakfasting in his summer house with his esteemed guest Sir Cecil Spring Rice, British ambassador to the USA. Muenter burst in upon them brandishing a revolver and shot Morgan twice, seriously wounding him but not preventing the sturdy financier from tackling his smaller assailant and pinning him to the floor.

In jail, Muenter withdrew his alias of ‘Frank Holt’ and confessed to being the fugitive professor of German at Harvard University who was wanted in connection with the murder by poison of his wife in 1906. He had acted for the Fatherland, he said. Alarm bells rang for the military intelligence strategists in Berlin. They thought that if Rintelen was behind this dangerous act of sabotage at the highest level of the US government, as well as a spectacularly public assassination attempt on America’s leading banker (while in the company of the British ambassador), then he’d clearly forgotten the covert nature of his mission.

On the morning of 6 July, von Rintelen was enjoying breakfast at the New York Yacht Club when an attendant informed him there was a phone call for him. On the other end of the line was naval attaché Karl Boy-Ed, who told the Dark Invader to meet him on a street corner, where he handed over a terse telegram from HQ: von Rintelen was being recalled to Germany, effective immediately. Later that night, conveniently for everyone, Muenter walked out of his open jail cell and plunged head first to his death on a concrete floor below.

Rintelen departed for his Berlin debrief as he had arrived in New York: under the Swiss passport of Emile Gaché. On the first night of the voyage he went to the dining room and ordered a bottle of wine, to find solace in the grape. There he found that he was recognised by a German aristocrat whom he had seen often in Berlin society. The man, the Count of Limburg Stirum, worried about von Rintelen’s safe passage; ever brazen, von Rintelen assured the man that he was a Swiss diplomat and had been thus when they’d met in Germany.

For the rest of the voyage, von Rintelen dodged the count, worried that he’d eventually remember his real name and the details of their encounters. Finally, the chalk cliffs of England lay to port of the SS
Noordam
, and in the full day it took to sail past them von Rintelen ‘found it necessary to visit the bar at intervals to fortify myself’. On the morning of Friday 13 August, he was interrupted in his bath by news that British officers wanted a word.