The Zimmermann Telegram

  Germany was not satisfied with the footling self-limited Pershing expedition, and every night, reported Gerard, “fifty million Germans cry themselves to sleep because all Mexico has not risen against us.” To exacerbate matters, Germany, while nudging Villa with one hand, with the other offered one of the Díaz generals exiled in Cuba several million marks to start a counter-revolution. At the same time she redoubled her efforts to encourage the Carranza regime into a shooting war with the United States. Our consul in Veracruz, where Carranza had his headquarters, reported that a German agent in personal conference with Carranza had offered to lend the Mexican Army thirty-two officers in return for a grant of the San Antonio Lizardo peninsula, thirty miles south of Veracruz, which had an excellent natural harbor. This, with its implication of a possible submarine base, sent a chill through Washington and evoked from the presidential typewriter an order for immediate investigation.

  General Frederick Funston, in command of the Mexican border, was troubled by information from Monterrey that the German and Austrian Consuls there were financing a group of conspirators who were preparing an attack on Texas. All at once a number of sinister rumors began seeping in from Monterrey, referring to a mysterious “Plan of San Diego” and the interest therein of the German Consul, a prominent merchant named Pablo Burchard. He had surreptitiously visited a Carranzista officer, Colonel Miguel Guerrero, said to be leader of the Plan, after midnight. He had held frequent conferences with another of the leaders, Colonel Maurilio Rodríguez. He had presented a very handsome diamond ring to a third Mexican conspirator, Luis de la Rosa, who was sporting it around town. What was it all about? When the American Vice-Consul in Monterrey obtained the full details of the Plan of San Diego they left him gasping. Its aim was a revolution that was to be started by arms and manifestos in Texas, was to spread over New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, and Oklahoma and establish in this former Mexican territory an independent republic of Mexicans, Negroes, and Indians. Eventually it was to affiliate with Mexico and ultimately to assist the Negroes of six more American Southern states to revolt and set up a Negro state. Paranoid as it was, it dripped with the authentic hundred-year-old hate for the white-faced gringo. Possibly some report of the Plan of San Diego from Herr Burchard to his chief, Zimmermann, may have first planted in the Foreign Minister’s mind the idea of offering Mexico recovery of her lost states.

  Lansing, reading reports like these, was uneasy lest the passions engendered by the presence of American troops inside Mexico, especially with Germany stirring the brew, boil over in some incident committing America more deeply than ever. Mexico concerned him less than the need to keep clear to meet Germany. He and the new Secretary of War, Newton Baker, advised Wilson to withdraw Pershing now, with or without Villa, before something happened to make withdrawal impossible. While withdrawal was being considered, Consul Canada wired on June 18 that the German Minister, von Eckhardt, was doing everything possible to urge Carranza to make war on the United States and he feared that Carranza’s “impetuous generals may lead him into war.” Next day it was learned that German reserve and noncommissioned officers in the United States had been ordered to register at Mexican consulates, failing which they would be considered as deserters.

  The signs were ominous. Too long Carranza’s generals had listened to the German siren song. Two days later, on June 21, an American scouting party, ignoring a Mexican warning that Americans moving in any direction except north would be fired upon, was attacked by Carranza troops at Carrizal and suffered twelve killed and twenty-three captured. Too late had come the government’s thoughts of withdrawal; the country would not stand for it now. Interventionists bellowed more blood and thunder. The President, whose every effort to be the friend of Mexico had turned sour, now had to order out the National Guard to protect the border and send warships to both Mexican coasts.

  To Germany it seemed that America was satisfactorily embroiled at last. At last the years of plots and pressure and slush funds had paid off. Germany could not resist gloating. When the New York Times warned that Germany was behind Carranza’s turning against us, a Berlin paper replied, “We consider it not worth denying that Germany is egging Mexico into war in order to prevent the export of arms to the Allies. The fact that America’s profitable arms traffic with France and England will suffer through a war with Mexico is, to be sure, a consequence that will cause us no tears.”

  Indeed the Germans, impatiently waiting for the Americans to extend their operations into a war of annexation, could not understand why they were so slow about it. Neither could the itchy-fingered American business interests who thought a war with Mexico much more useful than mixing into Europe’s troubles. “Fate offers us a golden apple in Mexico and only bitter fruit in Flanders,” said the Chicago Tribune. “If we win a war with Mexico we know what we get out of it—a secure continent. And it is practically impossible for us to lose.” The Germans could not have agreed more. Their propaganda had pounded into Latin American heads the belief that America would try to annex all the territory between Texas and the Panama Canal, and as this, to the German mind, was the only logical thing to do, they became quite exasperated at America’s failure to grasp her opportunity.

  “It is perfectly silly of you Americans,” remarked Major Herwarth von Bittenfeld, an old expert in the business of provoking a United States–Mexican war, “to expect to control the canal without the territory in between.” Speaking to an American lady in Berlin, he became quite heated. “The canal is of no use to you strategically. You don’t own the land leading up to it. Imagine our holding the Kiel Canal without Schleswig-Holstein!”

  Yet Major Herwarth and Berlin’s other Latin American manipulators could congratulate themselves on Germany’s growing influence with the Carranza regime. Don Venus, behind his majestic appearance, was truculent but vain, ambitious but susceptible, and of slender intellectual equipment. The German net was slowly being drawn around him; he surely could be gathered in. With the right inducement he might even be persuaded to abandon neutrality and become an open ally. The prospect was luscious. Tampico’s oil would be cut off from Britain, U-boats could shelter in the Gulf of Mexico, America would be pinned down on the far side of the Atlantic, too busy to meddle, much less to fight, in Europe.

  A new Mexican Minister, Señor Zubarán, arriving in Berlin that summer, was invited to long conferences with Zimmermann and, ignoring diplomatic protocol, pointedly failed to call on the American Ambassador. In Mexico the Union of German Citizens was happy to report it now had twenty-nine local propaganda committees spreading the spirit of German Kultur with such zeal that “a great number of Mexicans have been convinced that we are in the right in our methods of conducting warfare and are now disposed to accept our communiqués.” With no less zeal the Iron Cross Society reported seventy-five branches with members engaged in every kind of enterprise in the country, some as clerks and bureau chiefs in the government, ten as officers in the Army, two at divisional level, and two with Villa. German money subsidized the press and published a special picture paper of war news for illiterate peasants. German agents fomented strikes among Tampico stevedores and anti-Americanism among Mexican laborers in Arizona and California. German banks extended their grip on the finances of Carranza’s government. German mining interests bribed the government to invent decrees enabling them to buy up the mines vacated during the enforced absence of Americans, which they did so efficiently that soon the incredible happened. A German firm, the Compañía Metallurgica de Torreón, actually exceeded the holdings of the Guggenheims’ American Smelting and Refining Company. Genuine horror speaks between the lines of the American agent reporting this awful development.

  Worse was Carranza’s flourishing intimacy with von Eckhardt, the German Minister, who conferred with him frequently in person, without a go-between. Eckhardt, driving his automobile to the National Palace to meet with the President in his own office, became a familiar sight. Carranza’s resentment of the United Sta
tes fed his favorite dream of a Pan-Hispanic union of Latin American nations strong and tall enough to look the Yankees in the eye. It was a fertile field for explorations with von Eckhardt, and together they schemed counter-revolutions to set up Mexican- (or German-) oriented regimes in various Central American states.

  Eckhardt, when he first reached Mexico to replace von Hintze, had found himself handicapped by the lack of telegraphic communication with Berlin. No transmitter existed in Mexico powerful enough to send messages across the Atlantic. Although German wireless messages could be received in Mexico, there was no assurance they would reach Eckhardt, because of a Mexican law forbidding the use of code by foreigners. When Eckhardt complained of this to Carranza, the Mexican Minister of Telegraphs, Señor Mario Méndez, was conveniently allowed to be bribed, at the rate of $600 a month paid by the German Citizens Union, to look the other way. This arrangement eased Eckhardt’s inter-American communication with other German envoys and secret agents but did not help in the matter of overseas telegrams.

  Germany, however, worked out a way to leap over the wireless gap. Her overseas messages to and from the Americas, most of which were channeled through Bernstorff, were getting through in some manner which, until now, Room 40 had been unable to trace. A puzzling dead spot in the air between Washington and Berlin had blocked the efforts to listen in. The interceptors could not discover what route the messages took.

  Originally these messages had been sent over what was known as the “main line” between Nauen, the German wireless station a few miles outside of Berlin, and Sayville, the station on Long Island. In the summer of 1915 the United States had put Sayville under naval censorship on the ground that the Germans were using it to inform their submarines of ship locations, thus making neutral territory a base for naval warfare. Thenceforward the Germans were supposed to use Sayville for cipher messages only if the cipher was filed with the American government. In fact the censorship was ineffective because the Germans simply circumvented it by sending messages ostensibly signed by German steamship and other commercial firms, which were really Bernstorff’s in code.

  American restrictions, however, hampered them enough to evoke their repeated and bitter complaints about their supposed inability to communicate directly with Berlin. Unfair, unfair, Bernstorff was constantly telling the State Department, while in Berlin, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and Zimmermann periodically called in Ambassador Gerard to listen to their wounded feelings on the same theme. These complaints were part of a deliberate campaign to acquire telegraph routes with neutral connivance. It succeeded.

  Admiral Hall was baffled. “We have traced nearly every route,” he wrote to Captain Gaunt, “and I am really reduced to the following: he sends them down to Buenos Aires and thence across to Valparaiso.” So far Hall was right, but after Argentina and Chile the track vanished. “From there I cannot make out where they are sent,” he told Gaunt, “whether via China or Russia through the connivance of a neutral legation or not.” Now, in the last quarter of 1916, a clue picked up in Mexico supplied the solution.

  One of the most noisily pro-German members of the diplomatic corps in Mexico City was the Swedish chargé d’affaires, Herr Folke Cronholm. Lately, it had been noticed by a certain inquisitive Englishman, Herr Cronholm had been frequenting the telegraph office more often than the routine and limited relations of Sweden with Mexico would seem to warrant. The Englishman was inquisitive with a purpose, for he was acting as an agent of Admiral Hall. Designated only as H., his identity remains secreted in Room 40’s files.

  Had Cronholm been more discreetly neutral his visits might have gone unremarked, but his admiration for the German cause being notorious, his traffic in telegrams became provocative. Mr. H. took note of it, wondered, and reported his observations to Admiral Hall with a promise to investigate further.

  Some time later Admiral Hall found himself reading an intercept from Eckhardt to Berlin asking for a reply to an earlier request for a decoration for his Swedish colleague, Herr Cronholm. Although the German passion for collecting and bestowing decorations was an understood thing in the Europe of that day, Hall’s sensitive antenna twitched on reading Eckhardt’s request. Why should a Swedish chargé in Mexico City want or deserve a German decoration? Admiral Hall did not like unanswered questions. He looked up H.’s reports and reread the mention of Cronholm’s unusual frequenting of the telegraph office. Subsequently H., having with some ingenuity discovered that Cronholm’s telegraph bills far exceeded his government’s allowance for that purpose, had suggested a disquieting explanation. Was it possible that Sweden—granted that she was admittedly pro-German—could have so far violated her official neutrality as to be secretly sending Germany’s messages for her?

  So far this was only a suspicion, but now circumstantial evidence turned up to confirm it. A letter from Eckhardt to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg containing Eckhardt’s first request for a decoration for Cronholm came into Room 40’s possession. It told why Cronholm deserved German gratitude. “He arranges the conditions,” Eckhardt wrote, “for the official telegraphic traffic with Your Excellency.” On each occasion “he goes personally, often late at night, to the telegraph office to hand in the dispatches.” Herr Cronholm did not have a Swedish order but only a Chilean one. (How naked his Swedish chest must have felt when compared, for example, with that of General Maximilian Kloss, highest German officer in the Mexican Army, who wrote proudly home to his parents, “I now have nine decorations and three high orders to pin on my tunic and the Cross of Honor to wear around my neck.”) Could not Germany show her appreciation, Eckhardt asked, by conferring upon Cronholm the Kronenorden, Second Class, privately of course, with no official announcement until after the war so as not to arouse the enemy’s suspicions?

  Here at last was the answer to the problem that had baffled Room 40 for so long. Germany’s overseas messages were being transmitted by Sweden! Proof was easily secured, for Swedish cablegrams touched at England in passing over the Atlantic cable. Hall had only to call for copies of the Swedish government code telegrams, and a brief examination showed the truth. After a few Swedish code groups, the characteristic German code appeared, and the rest of the friendly arrangement was not hard to reconstruct. German envoys abroad gave their messages in German code to their Swedish colleagues, as Eckhardt was giving them to Cronholm, and the Swedes transmitted them by cable, along with their own, to the Foreign Office in Stockholm. The Foreign Office gave them to the German Minister in Stockholm, who sent them on to Berlin. Outgoing telegrams took the reverse route. They went from Berlin via Stockholm to Swedish envoys in foreign capitals, who delivered them to their German colleagues. Most of the correspondence with Washington and Mexico went via Buenos Aires.

  This, as it became known in Room 40, was the Swedish Roundabout. Once in possession of it, Hall could listen in not only on Eckhardt but on Bernstorff, whose intelligence service gave more insight into Wilson’s intentions, policies, and peace maneuvers than anything else coming out of Washington, including the cloudy communiqués of the peregrinating Colonel House. Bernstorff used the Sayville-Nauen route, which, being operated under American naval censorship, was risky, and the Swedish Roundabout, which was slow. When he continued to complain—to Colonel House—about the difficulty of communicating with his government, he was granted a concession, one of such simple grandeur that for us to accept it requires what the poets call a willing suspension of disbelief. Colonel House’s arrangement will appear in due time.

  It was now November 1916. Deadlock and discouragement hung in the air as thick as a coal-smoke fog. Half humanity was starving or sickening or dying in the trenches. When American relief was urged for Poles and Belgians and typhus-stricken Serbs, Bethmann-Hollweg looked helpless and shrugged. “What do these compare with the hecatomb of lives lost on the Somme?”

  Relentlessly, every few minutes, the intercepts still dropped into the wire baskets at Room 40. They warned Hall that a dreaded danger, the letting loose
of the U-boats, was looming closer. Von Eckhardt’s wooing had prospered to the point where, in October, he had reported, “Carranza, who is now openly friendly to Germany, is willing, if it becomes necessary, to support German submarines in Mexican waters to the best of his ability.” After intercepting this message, Hall had quickly passed it on to the United States. Lansing had sternly warned Carranza that such a violation of Mexican neutrality, if true, could only have “the most disastrous results” and compel “drastic action” by Great Britain. Carranza had hesitated. Berlin began to push. On November 12, Eckhardt was informed in Headquarters’ most momentous tones that the imperial government was about to resume unrestricted use of the U-boat as “the most efficacious means of annihilating its principal enemy.” This would include operations in American waters, and “it would be very valuable to have bases to assist the work of the submarines both in South America and Mexico.” In a first feeler toward an alliance with Mexico, von Eckhardt was instructed to ask what “suitable advantages” Germany could grant in return for permission to use Mexican territory for submarine bases.

  What would Carranza do? The longer American troops remained inside his borders, galling Mexican pride, the greater was the chance of his succumbing to Germany. U-boats operating from Mexican bases could cut off supplies from America. Worse, all Tampico’s oil was at stake. Above all, what would Wilson do?

  In America four-fifths of the regular Army was tied up inside or along the borders of Mexico. Pershing’s twelve thousand troops were still vainly chasing Villa through the hills of Chihuahua. The possibility of Japan’s taking advantage of Mexican resentment to woo her into an accord disturbed Washington. Officials were harassed by more than the usual number of reports from government agents and from agitated citizens about Japanese colonists and Japanese fishing fleets and Japanese wireless and Japanese deals with Villa, and had to investigate each one. The specter of the secret Japanese treaty walked again, not threadbare from repeated appearance but healthier than ever.