The Zimmermann Telegram

  Von Hintze carried these ideas with him when he went to China to establish contact with Japan. But first he had to get there. It was not with the intention of going to the Far East that he had left Mexico when the war broke out, but of resuming active service in the Navy. Having publicly stated his intention, however, he could not obtain safe conduct as a diplomat and had to make his way home secretly. This accounts for his mysterious behavior on Wall Street. Disguised as a steward, he got across the ocean on a Norwegian steamer without allowing the dirty dishes and smells that disturbed his fastidious tastes to give him away. Enjoying his own bravado, he took a day’s stroll through London and, undetected, continued on to Berlin via Rotterdam. His Majesty, on hearing von Hintze’s account of his adventures, said, “If you can do it once, you can do it again. I shall send you to China.”

  Peking, then neutral, was a place where enemy envoys, if need be, could discreetly meet. Who better fitted to be sent there than von Hintze?—a man of experience and finesse with first-hand knowledge of both Russia and Mexico, in both of which countries Japan was deeply interested. Besides, as a naval officer he might be expected to appeal to the Japanese. But how was he to reach Peking? He could not, of course, cross Russia, and if he went via the United States and the Pacific he would have to run the gantlet of the Japanese, who dominated the sea approaches to China.

  Admiral von Hintze felt himself equal to the challenge. On his behalf Berlin asked the American government to request a safe conduct from Japan, but von Hintze did not bother to wait for the answer. He had already crossed the United States and reached San Francisco, where he booked passage on an American steamer, when word came from the Japanese Ambassador that the Imperial Japanese Government regretted its inability to entertain the request for a safe conduct for Admiral von Hintze. For some reason Secretary Bryan let a week go by before passing on this information, but von Hintze picked up the hint in San Francisco. He canceled his passage on the American steamer, which was due to call at three Japanese ports on her way to Shanghai, and then he dropped out of sight.

  Meanwhile the German bugle was loudly sounding the Yellow Peril, hoping its shrill note would scare the Americans into keeping their arms at home. Daily in Berlin, all during the winter of 1914, highly placed German visitors called upon United States Ambassador Gerard to whisper the great danger that threatened America from Japan and relay confidential reports that Mexico was full of Japanese colonels and America full of Japanese spies. In Washington the German press attaché, Baron von Schoen, transferred from Tokyo when Japan joined the Allies, publicly proclaimed upon his arrival in September that Japan’s intense hatred for the United States, coupled with her strong pro-Mexican feeling, made war “unavoidable.” His remark prompted the President to suggest that it was “not only desirable but imperative” that this gentleman should not remain here. He was shortly followed by a more discreet colleague, Dr. Carl A. Fuehr, who also came from Tokyo, where he had been Germany’s commercial attaché. He gave no interviews but was deputized, according to an American Military Intelligence report, “to foment trouble between the United States and Mexico with Japan as a side line.” A few weeks later the West Coast became excited by a wave of rumors that Japanese troops had landed in Mexico. Long afterward, when the diary of a German commander came into the hands of United States Naval Intelligence, these rumors were traced to the German cruiser Geier, which had taken refuge from the British Navy in Pearl Harbor and sent the rumors out over its wireless while its band played afternoon concerts to cover the sound.

  Next was heard, through the courtesy of the Hearst press, which made a specialty of the Yellow Peril, Professor Ludwig Stein, billed as a great German expert on the Orient, who warned America, “Today, because of the Panama Canal, your geographical and moral position as the forepost of the White Race against the Yellow Race imposes upon you a great duty: to hold back the East.” It might have been Willy advising Nicky.

  But among the synthetic phobias and the rumors were some hard facts. In December 1914, while von Hintze was on his way to the Far East, the commander of a Japanese warship visited Mexico City, which at that time was occupied by General Pancho Villa, who had momentarily displaced Carranza. Villa was then at the height of his power and was having himself photographed sprawling in the golden chair of state with a smirk on his face as if to say, “Look who’s sitting here now!” This was at a time when, Wilson having become disillusioned in Carranza and veering toward Villa, it looked as if that enterprising bandit might soon control the whole country. What would be Mexico’s attitude, the Japanese envoy asked General Villa, in the event of war between Japan and the United States? He went on to say, as Villa recounted it to his amigo General Hugh Scott, American commander at the border and later Chief of Staff, that Japan was greatly grieved against the United States and that she had been preparing for war with us for three years and would be ready in two years more. Having said this, he put out his feeler as to possible joint action. Villa, basking then in an American friendship he did not know was soon to be withdrawn, told the Japanese inquirer that his forces would always be at the disposal of the United States in any foreign war she might get into.

  This Japanese overture was one fact. Mexico’s geography was another. The American General Staff’s plans assumed that if ever Japan undertook to invade the United States it would be by way of Mexico into the Mississippi Valley, with the object of splitting the country in two. Mexico’s network of railways, which met the American border at regular intervals and had terminals on both the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf, provided a perfect transportation system for moving up troops and supplies in any invasion of the United States. “Every European and Asiatic General Staff which has studied a possible war with this country,” said one of General Pershing’s staff, “recognizes the great advantage of an alliance with Mexico.”

  While the Japanese were taking this advice to heart and calling upon General Villa, a small Norwegian tramp steamer, the Christian Bors, departing from San Francisco, was chugging slowly westward across the immense expanse of the Pacific. She reached Shanghai on January 9, 1915, and disembarked a passenger who registered at the Astor House under the modest signature of “Mr. V. Heintze.” In Shanghai’s waterfront bars word quickly got around that the captain of the Christian Bors had been paid one thousand dollars in gold by this modest gentleman to proceed to Shanghai without touching at any Japanese port. By the time inquiries had been made, the modest gentleman had vanished. In Peking a week later Admiral Paul von Hintze, with the cherished von duly restored in place of the inglorious V, presented his credentials as Germany’s Minister.

  He felt sanguine about the feelers to Japan he had been instructed to initiate, for he quite agreed with the Kaiser and the other thinkers of Berlin that Japan’s alliance with the Allies was a brittle affair—as, in fact, it was. Lacking any real community of interest, the alliance was an artificial arrangement which the Japanese had entered into for the sake of the gains on the Asiatic mainland which they hoped to exploit from it. Their war role was outlined with gloomy foreknowledge by President Yüan Shih-k’ai of China at the outset: “Japan is going to take advantage of this war to gain control of China.” Within a few months, while her allies and enemies were too busy battling to interfere, Japan had got her foot well inside the door of Chinese sovereignty when she wrung from China acceptance of the Twenty-one Demands. The rest she intended to get by assuring herself a front place at the winners’ peace table and, until that happy day, by every now and then notching up her price for staying loyal.

  Since her loyalty was doubtful and her contribution small, her only value to the Allies was the negative one of her not being allied to Germany. But this was vital. Because of the effect a Japanese switch of sides would have had on Russia, it was essential to keep Japan out of the German embrace. Japan, aware of the nature of her value, was not at all reluctant to let it be known that Germany was wooing her. Whenever Germany whispered tempting offers it was quite remarkable how
quickly judicious hints of them reached Allied ears.

  That, for all his finesse, was to be the fate of Hintze’s overtures. He had begun sounding out the Japanese immediately upon his arrival in Peking. He assured the Japanese Ambassador there that he was voicing the personal views of the Kaiser in suggesting an alliance, and he repeated the proposal in a private talk with the correspondent of a leading Tokyo newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun. He said Germany would let Japan keep Tsingtao and the Pacific islands after the peace and would assure her a freer hand in China than would ever be allowed her by the Allies. He suggested the possibility of German financial support for Japan’s expansion in China. In Stockholm too—another neutral capital where the envoys of opposite sides could meet—the Japanese Ambassador found himself suddenly popular. In March and April 1915 he was visited variously by the German, Austrian, and Turkish envoys, each bearing on behalf of the Central Powers a proposal echoing von Hintze’s. The Japanese listened attentively to the overtures and leaked them discreetly to Russia. No one knows to this day whether they seriously considered accepting them, but the Russian Ambassador in Peking was worried enough to believe they might.

  Just at this moment, in April 1915, Americans were swept up in a first-class, genuine Japanese war scare by the news that a Japanese battle cruiser, the Asama, was mysteriously maneuvering in Turtle Bay on the coast of Mexican Lower California. The Hearst press screamed, admirals and generals scurried in and out of the State Department, military intelligence reported Turtle Bay had been used for months by Japanese warships, Japanese radio signals were picked up, and Admiral Howard of the Pacific Fleet asked for reinforcements.

  Had the Asama really run aground, or was she pretending? What was she doing in Turtle Bay anyway? Reports said she had been there since December, that she was caught fast on a rock, or, alternatively, that she was only stuck in the mud and could easily be pulled off in a week. In that case, why were three other cruisers and several supply ships hovering around? Government agents rushed down from Los Angeles, and the cruiser New Orleans was sent out to investigate. The press frenziedly recalled all the Japan-in-Mexico alarms of recent years: the secret treaty of 1911; Japan’s alleged attempt to buy Magdalena Bay in 1912; the rumors that Japan had been giving Huerta credit for arms, then Carranza credit for arms; that Japanese officers were in Huerta’s army, in Carranza’s army, even in Villa’s army. New reports proliferated that Japan was planting coaling stations at Santiago Bay and fishing colonies at Manzanillo Bay, and peopling Mexico with fishermen who spoke two or three languages and, instead of rods and nets, carried surveyors’ apparatus.

  Japan’s spokesmen abjured all evil intentions and said the Turtle Bay story was fabricated by German agents. The German press retorted that Japan was certainly establishing a naval base in Mexico and wistfully suggested that, if this should lead to war with the United States, Germany would not find it hard to reconcile herself to America’s misfortune.

  Japan was not displeased by the universal suspicion of her intentions. The greater the doubts of her loyalty, the higher the price the Allies would pay to keep her loyal. She did not mind letting it be known to the Allies that she had been approached by the enemy. Admiral Hall heard about it in London. The State Department heard about it in Washington. In June 1915, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the neurasthenic British Ambassador, hurried over in his most harassed manner to say that relations with Japan were exceedingly bad at present, in fact could hardly be worse, and he was confident that Japan would join forces with Germany after the war. Although Sir Cecil was a perennial worrier, on this occasion his forebodings were taken seriously and set official pens to scratching gloomily in diplomatic diaries. Chandler P. Anderson, Counselor of the State Department, to whom Sir Cecil had voiced his belief that Japan would join Germany, noted in his diary, “I had already independently formed the same conclusion.” Colonel House wrote in his diary that if Germany and Japan linked fortunes “it would be a serious day for the United States.” The new Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who had just replaced Bryan, was even more explicit. “I think,” he wrote in one of his careful memoranda, “that if German militarism and autocratic government survive the war, they will renew the attack on democracy and the two powers they will approach will be Russia and Japan, equally autocratic and expansionist.”

  Disparaged Lansing, though “meticulous, metallic and mousy,” as Secretary Daniels called him, had a way of sizing up matters correctly. In this instance he was wrong in only one respect: the Germans were not waiting until after the war; they were approaching Japan and Russia already, in pursuit of that great natural triple alliance of the three autocracies that was their dream and the Allies’ nightmare. Together, von Hintze openly told a Japanese correspondent, Germany and Japan and Russia would form an invincible combination that would “dominate the two hemispheres and ensure world peace.” He had sympathetic listeners among Japan’s military leaders, who always believed Germany would prevail in the war and said so loudly and often. The Japanese government made no attempt to silence these sentiments. It found them useful in leading on both Germany and the Allies to expect that Japan might succumb to the German temptation. Throughout the war the German hope and the Allied fear that Japan might one day apostasize were never absent.

  Of course Japan obligingly adhered to the London Pact pledging each of the signatories not to make a separate peace, but this did not seem to set anyone’s mind at rest. Washington nerves were not soothed when Ambassador Gerard wired from Berlin late in 1915, “I suspect the Germans and Japanese of getting together,” and a week later picked up new evidence that von Hintze was still trying to come to an understanding with both Japan and Russia. In April 1916 Germany sent her giant of industry, Hugo Stinnes, to Stockholm, as if on some labor of Hercules, to wrestle for a separate peace. He had many interviews with the Japanese Ambassador but, mortal after all, came home empty-handed.

  Although the Allies were dutifully informed by Japan of the bids she was receiving, they could never altogether quell an uneasiness that one day she might turn around and accept them. The uneasiness was fully shared in Washington, where officials knew that, with Europe’s attention absorbed, the moment was as opportune as might come again in a long time for a Japanese adventure against the United States via Mexico. Here the facts are difficult to separate from the imaginings of people who looked through yellow glasses and saw the Peril wherever they looked. Whether Japan was actually planning an attack at this time it is impossible to say because few, if any, Westerners have had free access to Japanese archives. But it can be said without question that most people, including responsible people, in Germany, in the rest of Europe, as well as in America, believed that Japan was planning and might undertake at any time some action in Mexico aimed at the United States.

  German propagandists in the United States as well as the Hearst press and similarly minded interests were forever alerting the public to the danger of a Japanese attack by way of Mexico. Hearst’s film company produced a serial movie starring Irene Castle, in whose idolized person American womanhood was made to suffer the cinematic perils of a Japanese-Mexican attempt to conquer the United States. In ten weekly episodes she struggled and escaped and battled for her virtue against Japanese who, led by a villainous samurai at the head of the Emperor’s secret service, invaded California, committing appropriate atrocities as they went.

  Japan’s real intentions in Mexico at this time were probably opportunist; she was ready to take advantage of favorable circumstances but not ready for open aggression. Whatever the purpose of the Asama’s mission to Mexico, it is unlikely that she ran aground in Turtle Bay by accident or through careless seamanship, and the possibility of a Japanese reappearance in Mexico remained wide open. In the same month—April 1915—that the Asama lay stuck in the mud, surrounded by Japanese fleet units so unaccountably awkward in their attempts to pull her off, two other visitors arrived on the opposite coast of the American continent. They too had a secret mission in Mexico. br />
  Five

  “Von Rintelen Came Here, Backed by Millions …”

  SINCE 1914 General Huerta had been waiting in Barcelona, like Napoleon at Elba, for the moment of return. Germany had brought him out of Mexico, and Germany now proposed to put him back. To him came an envoy in February 1915, Captain Franz von Rintelen, a German naval officer in mufti who offered to back a military coup that would restore Huerta to power in Mexico, win him sweet revenge on Wilson—and incidentally, it was hoped, provoke a war with the United States that would conveniently absorb American munitions now going to the Allies.

  A comeback for Huerta staged by Germany could be counted on to make Wilson lower his head and charge blindly into another misadventure in Mexico more disastrous than Veracruz. He was now tangled in a worse mess than ever amid the wrangles of the revolution below the Rio Grande. Begun by Madero, interrupted by Huerta’s brief reign, renewed by “First Chief” Carranza and his furiously battling rivals, the revolution had in the past year reduced Mexico to a bleeding ruin roamed by the pistol-happy private armies of Generals Villa, Zapata, Pascual Obregón, and other competing chieftains, while Generals Félix Díaz and Álvaro Orozco, adherents of Huerta, marshaled their forces for the counter-revolution. In this murderous tangle Wilson was hopelessly lost. Each Mexican faction had its own set of American supporters and detractors trying to pressure Washington this way or that. American property-owners and bandit-harassed border residents were screaming for intervention; the liberals were screaming against it. No wonder the German High Command hoped, by reintroducing Huerta into the turmoil, to explode a situation that would keep United States energies fully occupied on her own side of the Atlantic.

  Rintelen, the man whom the High Command selected to carry out the mission, was the possessor of intelligence, daring, and that streak of megalomania, characteristic of Wassmuss too, that may be the secret agent’s most important qualification. With a self-confidence no less sublime than that of his counterpart in Persia, Rintelen determined to open an American front in Mexico. As a side effort he planned to buy out Du Pont’s munitions works and tie up the remaining arms output by strikes and sabotage. He was thirty-eight at this time, a tall, prepossessing, well-born, well-tailored man who spoke excellent English and knew the United States, Mexico, and South America at first hand. After early service with the Navy and some years with the Deutsche Bank, he had first come to America in 1906 as representative of Germany’s second biggest bank, the Disconto Gesellschaft. Three years’ residence in New York had given him wide acquaintance in business and banking circles, not to mention the New York Yacht Club, on whose exclusive roster he had acquired membership. He had lived at the Yacht Club, had his office with the solid banking firm of Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co., had made himself a delightful bachelor guest at dinner tables from Southampton to Newport, and left sorrowing friends when he departed for Mexico in 1909. There and in South America he spent a year extending banking connections, returned to Germany in 1910, married a lady of wealth, fathered a daughter, and upon the outbreak of war rejoined the Navy, serving out of uniform as financial adviser to the Admiralty General Staff.