The Zimmermann Telegram

  He took his mission seriously, for, unlike the Berlin officials, he justly estimated, from his personal knowledge, the weight the United States might eventually throw in the balance, and he believed the war would be won not on the battlefields of Europe but in America. According to boasts overheard in the course of his exploits here, he hoped to add to his official mission the pleasure of personally “telling Wilson what’s what” about his heinous munitions traffic. In this trade, the Germans, who had sold arms in the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, and the Russo-Japanese war, found something particularly criminal and had worked themselves up to a foam of rage against Americans that far exceeded at this time the local and sporadic indignation against Germans in America.

  Rintelen arrived in New York on April 3, 1915, to be followed ten days later by General Huerta, who arrived on April 13. Their chances of success were by no means unlikely. “Poor Mexico,” Porfirio Díaz once lamented, “so far from God and so near the United States.” That indeed was her tragedy. It was not only Germans who smelled profit in a counter-revolution in Mexico. Mexico’s anarchy was then America’s number-one foreign problem, and the sound of shooting from over the border made more noise in American ears than the shooting in Europe. American oil interests led by Doheny and Senator Fall (the future Teapot Dome twins), Guggenheim copper and other mining and railroad interests were heavily invested there. That was the day of the tycoon in Mexico, and almost to a man the tycoons would have been happy to see Huerta restored. Within Mexico, conditions were begging for a strong man’s coup. The country, as Wilson had to admit, was “starving and without a government.” Carranza’s rule was in chaos; the First Chief himself, chased out of the capital, was operating from Veracruz while the raffish Pancho Villa and fiery-eyed Zapata looted Mexico City and clowned in the throne room of the National Palace. Along the roads rotting bodies swung from the trees, crops and cattle were stolen by galloping bandits draped in cartridge belts, black smallpox and typhus prowled the cities, fields lay unsown, railroads and bridges were wrecked, firing squads outnumbered food lines, death was as common as dirt, and the peon, the “submerged 85 per cent” in whose name the revolution had been launched, huddled in the dust of deserted villages.

  Any one of the warring factions, regardless of ideology, might be induced to sell out to Huerta, and there were of course generals, landowners, científicos, and other powers of the old regime ready to rally to him at the first signal. Most of the more prominent ones were already in New York, busily engaged in intriguing for the exile’s return with American groups and Mexican factions.

  Rintelen therefore had plenty to work with. And he had ready-made channels of German influence in Mexico through the German Minister, German consuls, German commercial agents, a German community of some four thousand, German-subsidized newspapers, German wireless operators whom Huerta before his fall had installed in Mexico’s receiving station, a German officer, General Maximilian Kloss, who was director general of Mexico’s munitions and ordnance manufacture, and some fifty naturalized Germans who held commissions in the Mexican Army.

  Unfortunately, the one thing Rintelen and Huerta did not find in New York was a decent privacy for the maturing of their plot. From the moment of their arrival several varieties of secret-service agents began to converge upon them, tripping over one another as they sniffed in and out of New York hotels on the scent of the conspirators. The scent was the stronger because of the stew of jealousy and intrigue stirred up among German embassy personnel by Rintelen’s advent. Particularly he was resented by a future Chancellor of the Reich, Major Franz von Papen, then a dapper military attaché who, being accredited to Mexico as well as to Washington, regarded Rintelen as an intruder upon his private province. Papen’s affinity for diplomatic espionage was to continue over a career of thirty years until his last post as Hitler’s Ambassador to Turkey in World War II, but at this time he was just embarked upon those more informal duties of a diplomat that were to get him expelled before the year was over. When Rintelen moved in on him with his I’ll-take-over air and his tactless announcement that the General Staff had sent him to “do something positive” about the munitions traffic, he made an enemy inside his own camp who immediately began scheming for his removal. And the odds were on Papen, who was far more wily and subtle than Rintelen and would, as his future was to show, manage always to fall on his feet on the side of the ins, never the outs—whether it was the monarchy, the Weimar Republic, or the Third Reich. Today he is living comfortably in Germany, the only one of all the actors in this story still alive.

  Papen’s colleague, Captain Boy-Ed, the naval attaché, a strong, silent half-Turk with the eyes of a fanatic, equally resented Rintelen as presuming to take precedence over him upon the higher orders of the Admiralty. There were at this time numbers of German ships interned in Atlantic ports, which together with their idle crews provided ready-made headquarters and personnel for carrying out sabotage. Rintelen’s claim that these ships and crews were now under his orders annoyed Papen and Boy-Ed, who were doing their best as hard-working diplomats in a neutral country to arrange for the blowing up of piers, canals, railroad bridges, and other objectives. Whether they were responsible for any of the troubles that soon began to enmesh their new colleague is not proved, but Rintelen always believed they were and carried on a lively feud with them for years after the war.

  Another colleague was the commercial attaché, Heinrich Albert, whom Wilson described as “the directing and most dangerous mind in all these unhappy intrigues.” As paymaster of all German undercover activities in the United States, Dr. Albert was not pleased by Rintelen’s command of independent funds.

  Albert’s chief, the suave Count von Bernstorff, found all these matters very distressing. Elegant, aristocratic, intelligent, Ambassador and son of an Ambassador, Count Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht von Bernstorff was a cosmopolitan, born in England, whose six years as envoy to the United States had been adorned by social éclat and honorary degrees from five universities, including Wilson’s Prince-ton. Knowing America, he understood better than anyone at home that Germany, despite all her initial victories, would not be able to withstand the addition of the United States as an active enemy. He channeled all his efforts toward one goal only: to keep America from joining the Allies. Although bound to comply with Berlin’s orders, he deplored the use of tactics that could give America cause for irritation against his country and upset the nervous balance of neutrality. No ambassador ever had a more tact-demanding task or was more fitted to perform it. His charm, his candor, his easy adaptability, the sweetness of his manners, the hint of deference in his tone so different from the usual Prussian bluster, opened all avenues to him. He won ladies with his waltzing and warm blue eyes, men with his golf and poker, and newspapermen by giving orders to embassy guards to admit any gentlemen of the press who called. He spoke and wrote flawless English and French and, though on occasion a brilliant talker, he could sit for hours through dinners and over cigars with the men, letting others do the talking while he listened with an understanding smile kept in constant play over what was otherwise an oddly baffling countenance. The secret of his success, it was said, was his willingness to be bored.

  As the ranking German diplomat in the Western Hemisphere, Bernstorff was responsible for carrying out German schemes in that area; all instructions to and reports from envoys went through him, and on him lodged the blame when extra-legal acts were uncovered. The bellows and blunders emanating from Berlin did not help his efforts to keep America neutral. He was in the position of a cultivated young man whose wooing of a Puritan maiden of the most sensitive morals is hampered by the social solecisms of his coarser relatives.

  Rintelen’s arrival did not ease Bernstorff’s task; but Rintelen had come under the highest auspices, and after avoiding him for some weeks the Ambassador summoned him to a conference at his New York headquarters in the Ritz-Carlton, and shortly afterward communicated with the General Staff concerning Rintel
en’s mission. Besides the suite the Ambassador kept at the Ritz, each of the German embassy personnel maintained separate offices in New York, Papen at 60 Broadway, Boy-Ed in the German Consulate at 11 Broadway facing the Customs House on Bowling Green, and Dr. Albert in the Hamburg-American building at 45 Broadway. All used the German-American Club at 112 Central Park South as a meeting place and held frequent conferences in the Hotel Manhattan at 42nd Street and Madison Avenue.

  Into this hotel one afternoon strolled Rintelen. As he waited, nonchalantly poking at the potted palms with his cane, a black limousine drew up at the entrance and discharged into the lobby the shrewd, tight-lipped Indian in pince-nez, General Huerta, attended by an escort of émigré Mexican plutocrats in velvet-collared overcoats. The group, joined by Rintelen, disappeared upstairs. None of them was aware that the rooms flanking their suite had been engaged by several gentlemen who kept watch there around the clock. To be introduced to them we must take a long jump back to London in the early weeks of the war.

  Wickham Steed, foreign editor of the Times, on leaving his house one morning, met on the doorstep a thick-set Slavic individual of medium height, unshaven, grimy, and close to exhaustion, who said simply, “I’m Voska. The Professor sent me.” The Professor, Steed knew from long acquaintance with Balkan politics, was Thomas Masaryk, one day to be Czechoslovakia’s first president, but he had no idea who Voska was until the tired man explained that he was head of the Bohemian Alliance in America. He had just come with his daughter from five days’ travel across Europe, bringing secret documents prepared by Masaryk on the Austro-Hungarian war potential. Some of them he had sewn inside the soles of his shoes before leaving Prague; the rest were rolled up and inserted in place of the bones of his daughter’s corset. Neither shoes nor corset had been removed during the journey, father and daughter having slept in their clothes for five days. This seems to have been the first piece of espionage performed by a man who, as a volunteer, was to become the most valuable secret agent of the Allies in the United States.

  Expelled as a youth from his native Bohemia by the Austro-Hungarian government on charges of socialist activity, Voska had emigrated to the United States, where he had prospered, acquired a Kansas marble quarry, and was now devoting the wealth gained from it to organizing the Czech colony in the United States for the nationalist cause. He had gone to Prague early in 1914 and after Sarajevo had been chosen by Masaryk to arrange a courier service and liaison between the Czech nationalists—whose hopes depended, of course, upon the collapse of Austria-Hungary—and the Allies.

  Voska, having completed his arrangements with the British, returned to the United States with a letter from Steed to the Times man in Washington. His first coup was to secure from a Czech patriot serving as mail clerk in the Austrian consulate a list of German and Austrian reservists who, with neutral passports bought from unemployed seamen, were planning to sail within the next few days, disguised as Dutch or Swiss or Swedes, to rejoin their regiments. Through the Times the list was made available to the British embassy. Voska, uncertain whether the man who had given him the list was really a Czech patriot or an agent provocateur, waited nervously for results. Within a week Madame Gruich, wife of a Serbian diplomat, invited him to tea and told him “a man” wanted to meet him secretly. He was to go to an address on the Upper West Side, where he would find an apartment house, take the elevator to the fourth floor, open the first door on the right, which would be unlocked, enter, and wait until somebody came.

  Voska followed instructions, pushed the door open, found a furnished apartment with no one in it, and sat down to wait in the silent room, wondering nervously who would appear. Fifteen minutes went by. Suddenly the door opened to admit a slender, smartly dressed young man who bounced cheerfully in, locked the door quickly behind him, introduced himself as Captain Guy Gaunt, British naval attaché in charge of Naval Intelligence. He complimented Voska on the list of pretended neutrals, all of whom had been duly caught and interned. “Splendid work, my dear chap, splendid!”

  Like his opposite number, Captain Boy-Ed, though rather more discreetly, Captain Gaunt was doubling in secret service and reporting directly to Admiral Hall of Naval Intelligence. He now proposed to Voska that the members of the Bohemian Alliance be utilized as the Allies’ counter-espionage wedge in the United States. Speaking the German they had been forced to learn at school as their second language, they had held many sensitive posts under Austria-Hungary, which never realized the strength of the passion for freedom in its Czech and Slovak subjects. Britain, Gaunt said, had only two or three agents in the United States, France and Belgium had none, and the Russians, who always traveled in a cloud of secret agents, could not be trusted because too many of them were Baltics of German blood and sympathy.

  The two men worked out their plans. By the time Rintelen arrived in America, Voska had recruited a band of compatriots who had infiltrated most of the missions and offices of the Central Powers. One of his agents was Countess von Bernstorff’s personal maid; one was assistant chief clerk in the Austrian embassy; four were in the Austrian consulate; two were in the Hamburg-American Office; one was chauffeur at the German embassy; one was an operator at the Sayville wireless station on Long Island, which was used by the Germans for communication overseas. Others, eventually to the number of eighty, were clerks or waiters or messengers or scrubwomen in German clubs, commercial firms, consulates, and German-American newspapers throughout the country. Voska’s home on East 86th Street in the Yorkville district was headquarters of the organization, a hive of hurried visits and oral reports, of telephones, papers, conferences, and photostat machines going day and night copying documents brought in on stolen time. Every day the faithful mail clerk who had started it all came in his lunch hour and sat munching a sandwich while letters he brought were photostated; they were then returned by him to be delivered as newly arrived mail.

  The material gathered by Voska, passed on by Captain Gaunt to the American government, gave the government its first authentic evidence of German intrigues and violations of neutral soil. Nor was Captain Gaunt reluctant to have the revelations reach the American public. In the Australian-born and English-educated editor of the Providence Journal, John R. Rathom, he found a willing collaborator whose paper soon exhibited a startling and intimate acquaintance with German secrets. By prearrangement, Rathom’s exposés appeared simultaneously in the New York Times, whose opening line, “The Providence Journal will say this morning …” soon became famous.

  It was Voska’s men, of course, who were listening in the room next to the German suite in the Hotel Manhattan. One of them, employed in the German embassy, had, in fact, arranged the meeting place. He had come up the day before, accompanied by a man carrying a black bag. The man was a master electrician and a passionate Czech who had performed many remarkable services for Voska. He prowled through the suite, studied a large round table in the sitting room; decided this was where the talk would take place; pushed the table a little nearer to the window, which was hung with heavy drapes, inner curtains, and shades; concealed his Dictaphone behind the hangings; and ran the wire through the window frame to the room next door, where he connected it with a pair of headphones. Voska himself lunched in the hotel for two days and sat afterward in the lobby, ostensibly reading a newspaper. There he saw the tall German and the party of Mexicans meet and disappear together upstairs.

  Huerta’s arrival in the United States had naturally alarmed both Carranza and Villa, who immediately howled for the arrest of this “ruffian,” this “monster shame of humanity,” or for his deportation or, hopefully, for his extradition to Mexico on the old charge of Madero’s murder. Carranzista agents shadowed Huerta and everyone he talked with. That made two sets of agents keeping watch on the plot, and when they were joined later on by a third there were enough spies in the Hotel Manhattan to start a convention. The third set was American. Department of Justice Agents had picked up Rintelen’s trail through his sabotage activities. Unlike Huerta,
Rintelen had entered the country pseudonymously on a forged Swiss passport under the alias Emil V. Gasche. The name was borrowed from his sister Emily, who had married a Swiss named Gasche. In New York he transformed himself into the E. V. Gibbons Co., listed as an importing and exporting firm and representative of the Mexican Northwest Railway, with offices at 55 Liberty Street. From here he was to pour out half a million dollars to organize a group called Labor’s National Peace Council, designed to cause strikes and slowdowns among longshoremen and munitions workers. His agent in this business, which was to come under Senate investigation, was a character known as the “Wolf of Wall Street,” otherwise David Lamar, who fed Rintelen extravagant reports of the Peace Council’s progress while pocketing the larger share of Rintelen’s money.