One

A Telegram Waylaid

THE FIRST MESSAGE OF THE MORNING WATCH plopped out of the pneumatic tube into the wire basket with no more premonitory rattle than usual. The duty officer at British Naval Intelligence twisted open the cartridge and examined the German wireless intercept it contained without noting anything of unusual significance. When a glance showed him that the message was in non-naval code, he sent it in to the Political Section in the inner room and thought no more about it. The date was January 17, 1917, past the halfway mark of a war that had already ground through thirty months of reckless carnage and no gain.

On duty that morning in the inner room, the most secret in Whitehall, were two civilians diverted to cryptographic work masked under the guileless name of Room 40. One was the Reverend William Montgomery, a tall gray-haired scholar of forty-six, and the other Nigel de Grey, a young publisher of thirty-one borrowed from the firm of William Heinemann. Neither knew they were about to midwife a historic event. De Grey spread open the intercept, revealing rows of numerals arranged in four- and five- and a sprinkling of three-figure groups. Mute and passive on the paper, they gave forth no hint that a key to the war’s deadlock lay concealed in their irregular jumble. De Grey noticed only that the message was of unusual length; more than a thousand groups, he estimated.

The gray morning was cold as Britain’s fortunes, dingy as her hopes in this third winter of the war. The ghastly losses on the Somme—sixty thousand British casualties in a single mad day, over a million Allied and enemy losses in the five-month battle—had been for nothing. The Hindenburg Line was still unbreached. The whole war had been like that, regiments of lives spent like water, half a million at Verdun alone, without either side’s winning a strategic advantage, but only being riveted together like two fighting elks who have locked horns. Now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Allied side, already ruined and overrun.

The enemy was no better off. Germans were living on a diet of potatoes, conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the army, gumming up the cracks that were beginning to appear in the authority of Kaiserdom with ever harsher measures. The German offer a few weeks before to negotiate a peace had been a mere pretense, designed to be rejected so that the General Staff could wring from the home front and faltering Austria yet more endurance and more sacrifice. Room 40 suspected it must have an ulterior purpose, for there was no evidence so far that the German leaders were any less obstinately fixed on total victory than the Allies.

England had fortitude left, but no money and, what was worse, no ideas. New commanders stumbled forward in the old rut, not questioning whether to assault the Western Front again, but merely where along its wall to bang their heads. No prospect of any end was visible.

Montgomery and de Grey examined the close-packed groups of numerals they were supposed to transform into verbal intelligence, expecting no more than another piece in the prolix correspondence they had been intercepting lately between Berlin and Washington about a negotiated peace. This was President Wilson’s cherished goal. Bent on stopping the war, he quested after a compromise peace between mental blinkers, blind to both combatants’ utter unwillingness to compromise at all. Berlin kept him talking in order to keep him neutral. The talk exasperated the Allies. It was not mediation they wanted from America but her great, fresh, untapped strength. Nothing else could break the war’s deadlock. Arms, money, ships, men—everything the exhausted Allies needed was waiting in America, but Wilson would not budge. He remained unmoved behind his eyeglasses, lecturing both sides how to behave. It seemed there was nothing that would bring in the Americans before Europe exhausted itself beyond recovery.

De Grey’s eye caught the top group of numerals in the message, 13042, and recognized it as a variant of 13040, title number of the German diplomatic code. He pointed it out to Montgomery, who unlocked the safe and took from it a book which he handled as he might have a bottle labeled POISON! If there was no visible skull and crossbones on the book’s cover, there was more than one in its history, for the sea-bottom had been scraped and blood and life and honor spilled to assemble it. It was a reconstruction of the German code book for Code No. 13040. With it Montgomery took out another book that contained all that Room 40 had collected on the variants of the code. Through painstaking filing and collation of hundreds of intercepts, they had progressed toward a solution of the variants and so had built up a partially reconstructed key to use in cases like the present one.

The decoders tried first for the signature, which might give them a lead as to the nature of the message. A group in the 90000 range, 97556, appeared as the last group but two in the last row. High numbers such as this were usually reserved by the encoders for names or special words of infrequent use which were added as a supplement after the body of the code was made up. Working from earlier reconstructions in the code book, Montgomery and de Grey concentrated upon 97556. Obediently, as if tapped by a wand, it transformed itself into a name they knew well, “Zimmermann,” the German Foreign Secretary.

Going back to the beginning, they searched for the addressee, but instead of a name the first words to emerge were “Most secret,” and then they made out, “For Your Excellency’s personal information.” As the message was directed to Washington, the Excellency in question must be the German Ambassador there, Count von Bernstorff.

Routine so far, they were just about to decide, when an unexpected word appeared—“Mexico.” Wondering what the Germans could be saying about Mexico, they worked on with added interest, decoding the word “alliance” and farther on, to their astonishment, “Japan,” which was repeated in a phrase that came out as “us and Japan.” The decoders looked at each other with a wild surmise. Was it possible that Japan, one of the Allied powers, was changing sides? Urgently now they renewed the attack, their muttering dying away into concentrated silence as their scribbling speeded up. The code book pages flipped back and forth with an agitated rustle while sheets of paper filled up with words tested and discarded, with more words fitted together until, after two hours and in spite of many gaps in the sequence, an intelligible version had come clear.

It fell into two parts, for the intercept contained two separate telegrams. The first and longer one, addressed to Bernstorff, informed him of Germany’s intention to resume “unrestricted” submarine warfare on February 1, a decision expected and dreaded by the Allies for many months. “Unrestricted” meant that the U-boats were to be permitted to sink without warning all neutral as well as enemy merchant shipping found in the war zones. Bernstorff was instructed not to deliver the notice to the United States government until February 1, the very day the torpedoes would be let loose. Preparing for the belligerency that they believed would be America’s answer to the U-boat, the Germans had added another telegram. It consisted of 155 code groups and was headed, “Berlin to Washington. W 158. 16 January, 1917. Most Secret. For Your Excellency’s personal information and to be handed on to the Imperial Minister in Mexico by a safe route.”

The message for the Imperial German Minister in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, was headed “No. 1” and, in the incomplete version so far decoded, read:

We propose to begin on February 1 unrestricted submarine warfare. In doing this however we shall endeavor to keep America neutral … (?) if we should not (? succeed in doing so) we propose (? Mexico) an alliance upon the following basis: (joint) conduct of war, (joint) conclusion of peace … your Excellency should for the present inform the president* secretly (? that we expect) war with the U.S.A. (possibly) … (Japan) and at the same time negotiate between us and Japan … please tell the president that … our submarines … will compel England to peace within a few months. Acknowledge receipt. Zimmermann.

The significance of the message the decoders could hardly let themselves believe. Zimmermann had given Room 40 the lever with which to move the United States. Mexico was both America’s chief foreign investment area and chief trouble spot, where twice in the last three years American troops had gone in shooting and where, at that moment, twelve thousand men under General Pershing were deeply engaged. The United States was also exceedingly jumpy about Japan. In the circumstances, Zimmermann’s spectacular proposal, picked out of the endless whispering in the air, must surely dynamite the Americans out of their neutrality.

In the telegram there was a blank passage of thirty groups from which the decoders had been unable to pry any meaning whatever. They could not guess that it contained the most explosive material of all. Only after weeks of patient, unrelenting effort were they able to reconstruct this portion of the code and discover that the missing passage contained Germany’s promise to assist Mexico “to regain by conquest her lost territory in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.”

Enough was at hand to require immediate action. This was a matter for the DNI, otherwise Admiral Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence. Montgomery hurried out of the room to fetch him. He returned, preceded through the door by a small ruddy man with authority in his step and an admiral’s gold stripes on his sleeve. The physical presence of Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall frequently nerved in men an impulse to do something heroic. For once de Grey, as he stood up and silently handed the scribbled sheets to the admiral, felt equal to the moment.

“Zimmermann, eh?” said Admiral Hall while his eyes darted over the pages. As he read, the intermittent eyelid twitch for which he was nicknamed “Blinker Hall” quickened, the compact little figure seemed, if possible, to stiffen, the brilliant blue eyes to blaze almost literally, and the tufts of white hair to bristle around the bald pink head until he looked like a demonic Mr. Punch in uniform.

Hall knew instantly that he held in his hands notice of what was at once a deadly peril and a possible miracle. Only the miracle of America’s entrance into the war could outweigh the peril of the unrestricted submarine, which, once let loose, might well accomplish what the Germans hoped—cut the Allies off from their source of supplies before the Americans had time to mobilize, train, and transport an army to help them. That was the stake the Germans were playing for.

Hall had known for months it would have to come to this, for the submarine was never designed for the gentlemanly role President Wilson seemed to think proper. To demand that it rise to the surface to warn before sinking, making itself a sitting duck in case its prey should shoot first, made nonsense of its function. He knew the Germans had accepted Wilsonian restrictions not because of the moral force of the President’s notes tapped out on his private typewriter, but only because they had not enough U-boats on hand to force the issue. Since then, he knew too, Kiel’s machine shops had been burning day and night, forging U-boats as fast as they could toward the goal of the two hundred Germany needed before letting loose a massive naval Verdun she hoped would bring Britain to her knees. Today’s telegram was the signal that the two hundred must be nearly ready.

“Two weeks,” Hall said aloud. In two weeks it would be February 1, the date staring up at him from Zimmermann’s dispatch, when Britain’s war effort, already hanging by its thumbs from Persia to the Channel on a lifeline of sea-borne supplies, would meet its greatest test. “Compel England to peace within a few months,” Zimmermann’s closing words had boasted. Hall knew it was no idle boast.

His mind racing ahead, Hall tried to think like a German. They had taken a desperate gamble, knowing unrestricted warfare might flush the reluctant dragon in the White House out of his cave. Obviously they must have made up their minds that the U-boats could sink ships faster than the Americans could mobilize, and it was even possible the Americans might not mobilize at all, in which case the gamble would pay off. But here in Hall’s hands was a persuader, thoughtfully provided by Herr Zimmermann himself, that should help to make up the American mind.

Hall understood well enough why Zimmermann had sent the telegram. In case America should answer the U-boat threat by declaring war on Germany, he wanted to arrange enough trouble for her to keep her busy on her own side of the Atlantic. It was the shrewd, the clever thing to do—and he had done it, aiming straight for Mexico and Japan, the two whose long hostility to the United States gave most promise of readiness to jump to the attack. How right and proper! How correct!

Ah, yes, the Germans were clever, thought Hall with an inner smile, but just that fatal inch short of being clever enough to suspect that their enemy might be clever too. Sublimely confident that their code was as nearly perfect as human minds could devise—was it not scientific? was it not German?—they had used it unchanged since the first day of the war, assuming its inviolability. In war, never assume anything, Hall reflected, in the happy knowledge that every German wireless message was being grasped out of the ether and read in Room 40.

As Hall headed back to his own room he was reminded of a duty. He would have to inform the Foreign Office, and the thought dimmed his satisfaction. He hated sharing news of Room 40’s coups with anybody, lest even a whisper get abroad to warn the Germans. Now he was seized by the agonizing problem that always haunts the cryptographer: how to make use of his information without revealing that he knows the code.

Faced with such a problem, armies have been known to avoid warning their own men of enemy movements when such a warning would show knowledge that could have been gained only by possession of the enemy code. How, Hall asked himself, could the Zimmermann telegram be revealed to the Americans without revealing how it had been obtained? They would never believe it on the mere say-so of the Foreign Office. They would ask inconvenient questions. If the Germans discovered Room 40 had solved their code they would never use it again, and a whole delicate listening apparatus, carefully constructed, wire by wire, over two and a half years, would go dead. A new code might take years to break, as it had taken years, the genius of a few men, the lives of others, the long, patient months of plugging, to break this one. Hall could not risk disclosure.

Room 40 had sprung from an act done in the first hours of the war. England had declared war at midnight on August 4, and before the sun rose the next morning a ship moved slowly through the mist over the North Sea until she reached a point some miles off Emden, where the Dutch coast joins the German. In the half-darkness she began to fish in a manner that was strangely clumsy yet purposeful. Heavy grappling irons were plunged into the water, dragged along the bottom, and hauled up, bringing with them an eel-shaped catch, dripping mud and slime, that clanged against the ship’s side with a metallic sound. Several times the maneuver was repeated, and each time the eel-like shapes were cut and cast back into the sea.

They were the German transatlantic cables. Five of them ran through the English Channel, one to Brest in France, one to Vigo in Spain, one to Tenerife in North Africa, and two to New York via the Azores. The English cable ship Telconia cut them all. She had no need to move on to the Mediterranean, for the cables there were English-owned, but a few days later she returned to the North Sea and, to exclude any possibility of repair, wound up the severed cable ends on her drums and carried them back home. It was England’s first offensive action of the war and was to have results more lethal than were dreamed of when the Committee of Imperial Defense planned the action back in 1912. For two years an order authorizing the cable-cutting had lain dormant in Admiralty files, until the morning of August 4, 1914, when the German Army, glistening in spiked helmets and polished boots, marched into Belgium. Someone, on that day that ended a world, remembered the order, dug it out of the files, and dispatched it to the General Post Office. By midnight, when England’s ultimatum on Belgian neutrality officially expired, the Telconia was already on her way.

After the Telconia’s work was done, only one cable remained open to Germany; this was one that ran between West Africa and Brazil and was largely American-owned. For a short time Germany was able to wireless messages to Africa and have them sent on from there in safety to South America and thence to the United States. When the British government, unwilling to risk American displeasure, refused to touch this cable, Hall’s predecessor, Admiral H. F. Oliver, took his problem directly to Eastern Telegraph, the company that owned the Mediterranean cables. The company quietly pulled cousinly wires and was delighted to inform Admiral Oliver a few weeks later that the matter was satisfactorily arranged: they had thirty miles of the Liberial-Brazil cable in their tanks.

From that moment on, for the duration of the war, Germany was sealed off from direct cable communication with the overseas world, and the burden of communication fell on Nauen, the powerful German wireless station a few miles outside Berlin. Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air—and nothing did. In England, Room 40 was born.

When intercepts in code began pouring over the desk of the Director of Naval Intelligence, at that time Admiral Oliver, the painful discovery was made that no one had been trained to deal with them. For two years the rumble of approaching war had been heard, but the Senior Service, never doubting its mastery of the seas, had prepared for it in the spirit that often governs play rehearsals: “It will be all right on the night.” Harassed and sleepless in the frantic first hours of the war, Admiral Oliver thought of a soft-spoken Scot named Alfred Ewing, a former professor of Mechanical Engineering who was Director of Naval Education. Ewing, he remembered, had made a hobby of constructing ciphers. Oliver sent for him and handed him a bundle of intercepts. Under shaggy eyebrows the blue eyes of the little Scot brightened with interest as he agreed to see what he could make of them. Relieved, Admiral Oliver gave orders that henceforth all intercepts were to be delivered to Mr. Ewing, and turned his attention to other matters.

Ewing found himself surrounded by ciphers and codes and was soon blissfully absorbed in an occupation he had followed ever since as a small boy he had won a newspaper prize for solving an acrostic puzzle. As the intercepts piled up around him, Ewing was obliged to call for help from one or two discreet friends who were amateur cryptographers like himself or had a knowledge of German. This was how Montgomery was recruited from the Presbyterian ministry, for, besides being an authority on St. Augustine, he was a gifted translator of theological works from the German. No work, it was said, had ever been so idiomatically and yet so faithfully rendered as Montgomery’s translation of Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1914. He and Ewing’s other recruits studied code books at the British Museum, collected commercial codes from Lloyds and the G.P.O., plunged themselves into the intricacies of Playfair and Vigenère squares, alphabet frequencies, single and double substitutions, grilles, and word wheels.

All the while German submarines and other fleet units were constantly chattering with one another and with Berlin, while the wireless station at Nauen, conducting policy over the air, issued streams of instructions around the world. To catch this verbal outpouring, four new listening stations were set up along the English coast with direct wires to the Admiralty basement; amateur wireless operators who were picking up unintelligible signals on their sets increased the flow of intercepts. Soon they were coming in at the rate of two hundred a day, overwhelming the staff Ewing had increased to five. He recruited more assistants—university dons, barristers, linguists, accountants with a flair for mathematical pattern, all men who went into battle against the ciphers with a zest for the intellectual challenge.

Cipher differs from code in that it is constructed upon a systematic method in which one letter or group of letters (or number or group of numbers) represents another letter or group according to some prearranged pattern. Code, on the other hand, is based on arbitrary substitution in which the substitutions are listed in a code book made up by the encoder. Sometimes a word is substituted for another word or idea—as, for example, in its simplest form, “Overlord” in 1944 was the code word for “Invasion of Normandy.” Or, as in the case of the Zimmermann telegram, a code can be based on the substitution of an arbitrary group of numerals for a word as, for example, in the telegram 67893 represented “Mexico.” Generally, although not always, when the Germans used code they wrapped it inside an extra covering of cipher; that is, they enciphered the code. The key to the encipherment they changed frequently—as time went on, every twenty-four hours. But, being orderly Germans, they changed it according to an orderly system which, once solved by the cryptanalysts of Room 40, could be solved again each time by progressing according to a constant pattern. For some reason still obscure, the Zimmermann telegram, when it was sent, was not put in enciphered code.

From the beginning, the Germans, heaping the air with their messages, ignored the possibility of their codes and ciphers being solved because they considered the enemy unequal to such intellectual exercise. The very number they sent out, often in duplicate and triplicate over two or three different routes, greatly facilitated Ewing’s task by giving him several versions of the same message, and it was not long before his band of amateurs, with the aid of technical methods and machines they had improvised, were reading Berlin’s messages more quickly and correctly than the German recipients. One wizard, working upon a series of numerals extracted out of the air over Macedonia, was able to transform the cipher into words which he himself could not read but which turned out to be the instructions of the Bulgar General Staff in Bulgarian.

To the ordinary mind it seems impossible that a code based on substitutions arbitrarily chosen by the encoder can be solved—or, as the cryptographers say, reconstructed—by a person not in possession of the code book. Yet in time, with a sufficient number of messages to compare, with ingenuity, endless patience, and sparks of inspired guessing, it can be done. One has only to imagine the infinite difficulty of the process to realize the worth of the short-cut provided when a copy of the enemy code book is captured.

On October 13, 1914, came one such extraordinary windfall. In response to a call from the Russian Embassy, Admiral Oliver and Ewing hurried over and were conducted to a private room where they were introduced to a staff officer of the Russian Admiralty who handed them a small, rather heavy package. Opening it, Oliver and Ewing could hardly believe their luck; under their eyes was the German naval code book, lined in lead for quick jettison overboard in case of need.

“Magdeburg” was the one-word explanation offered by the Russian officer. Oliver remembered a German light cruiser of that name that had been lost in the Baltic in August. She had been escorting mine layers in the Gulf of Finland, the Russian officer told them, when she ran aground in a fog off the island of Odensholm. Through a break in the fog her captain had seen two Russian cruisers bearing down upon him. Quickly he ordered his signalman to fetch the code book, row out to deep water, and throw it overboard. Just as the dinghy was being lowered, a shot from the Russian guns tore into it and, in his moment of death, the signalman’s arms clutched the code book to his body. The Russian cruisers, closing in, destroyed the Magdeburg and proceeded methodically to the rescue of the German sailors floundering in the water. Someone spotted a floating body, which was hauled aboard with the living; it was the dead signalman, still clasping the code book in his arms.

The Russian Admiralty at St. Petersburg, exhibiting rare good sense, had decided the code could best be used by the British Admiralty and, with even rarer generosity to an ally, had sent it by fast cruiser to London. Oliver and Ewing found in the Magdeburg’s salt-soaked relic not only the word columns on which the naval code was based but also a key to the cipher system according to which the code was varied from time to time. This gave them a clue to German cryptography which was the root and fundament of all that followed.

In November, upon the promotion of Admiral Oliver to Chief of Staff, a crackling breeze blew through Admiralty corridors with the advent of Captain William Reginald Hall, fresh from the bridge of a battle-cruiser, as the new DNI. The new Director was known as a precedent-breaker. In 1913, sniffing war in the air, Hall had put his ship, for greater alertness, on eight-hour watches instead of the traditional twelve, and ordered gunnery practice for the crew instead of leaving the gun mounts with their paint unmarred, as was customary. His innovations outraged the Mandarins, as the naval Colonel Blimps were called, but Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship’s efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.

His first act as DNI was made on the same principle. On finding the Intelligence staff overflowing its original space, he moved out of the main Admiralty building into a quiet backwater next door known as the Old Building. Here, set apart from bustle and visitors, was an isolated suite of rooms giving off Number 40. Although the staff later moved again to larger quarters, the name Room 40, O.B., so noncommittal that it stirred no curiosity, stuck to the operation throughout the war, as it has in the halls of cryptographic fame ever since. By the time the Zimmermann telegram was intercepted, Room 40 employed eight hundred wireless operators and seventy or eighty cryptographers and clerks.

Hall knew nothing about cryptography, but he instantly saw the absorbing opportunities for thwarting the Germans that were being opened by Ewing’s cracksmen. The war had just become world-wide, spilling over the Middle East when the Turkish Empire joined the Central Powers a few days before Hall arrived in Whitehall. Hall soon jumped the original horizon of Naval Intelligence and arrogated to himself the task of counter-plotting against German intrigues anywhere in the world. He began at once to penetrate into every cranny of espionage, until no man’s pie was free of his ambitious finger. Scotland Yard, tracking German spies, found Hall helping them; the censorship bumped up against him; so did the Blockade Bureau, the War Department, the Secret Service. Wherever intelligence was being gathered and turned against the enemy, there was Hall; wherever was a spot from which trouble might come, there he placed an agent or established contact with an Allied sympathizer. Like God in the British national anthem, Hall was ready to confound the politics and frustrate the knavish tricks of Britain’s enemies. He was ruthless, sometimes cruel, always resourceful. His piercing eye, his unrelenting drive, his magnetism could get anything he wanted out of anybody. Wherever Germans were plotting, Hall was listening and, like dogs who can hear high-pitched sounds that never reach the human ear, Hall could hear intrigues hatching anywhere in the war. The more Room 40 decoded, the more came into his net: Indian revolutionaries and Irish rebellions, Sir Roger Casement and Mata Hari, German-fomented strikes and German sabotage. But all this activity was carefully masked by a bland pretense of ordinariness that implied that Naval Intelligence was no more than it was supposed to be, a lot of chaps busily tracking German fleet movements, locating U-boats by intercepted wireless signals, and charting mine fields. As this, in fact, was just what Room 40’s outer group was doing, it provided the perfect cover for the activities of the inner group.

Leaving cryptography in Ewing’s charge, Hall himself directed the efforts to acquire the German code books. Sooner or later any whisper or hint of a code picked up by Army, Navy, diplomatic, or other agents found its way to him. In December 1914 an iron-bound sea chest was delivered to Room 40 and identified as having come from one of a group of four German destroyers that had been sighted, chased, and sunk by the English on October 13. For two months the chest had lain on the bottom until by chance it was hauled up in the net of an English fish-ing trawler. Among the charts and confidential papers it contained, Room 40 found a code book whose use remained obscure for some time. After months of bafflement, comparison with certain intercepts proved it to be the code used by Berlin for communicating with German naval attachés abroad.

In the meantime, two strange dramas, a tragedy and a frontier adventure, were being enacted simultaneously, one in Brussels and one in Persia, each to have its denouement in Room 40.

When the Germans occupied Brussels on August 20, 1914, they found there a powerful wireless sending station that had gone out of order, and a twenty-year-old university student of wireless engineering who, it was said, could fix it. The young man, whose name was Alexander Szek, was of dual nationality by virtue of British birth and Austro-Hungarian parentage. He had grown up in England with his parents, but two years before the war he had moved with his father to Brussels, where he remained to study while the father went back to Vienna to live. Someone of Szek’s family, either his mother or a sister, had remained in England. (The facts in this part of the Szek case are fuzzy, so we do not know exactly who it was.) The Germans naturally chose to consider young Szek an Austrian citizen and, as the alternative to sending him to Vienna for military service, commandeered his services for the Brussels station. Working there, he had access to the code.

Intercepts from the repaired Brussels station were soon streaming into Room 40 in a code no one could make out. Reasoning from this failure that Brussels was using the German consular or diplomatic code, Ewing requested extramural help. Allied Intelligence had contact via neutral Holland with a Belgian agent in Brussels, and, after careful reconnaissance in the Rue de la Loi, where the wireless station was located, the agent was able to report back the interesting fact that a trusted code clerk in the German employ could be claimed as a British subject, having been born in Croydon, just outside London. With this clue, Szek’s sister—or mother—was located in England, acting as a governess. She was half Austrian, and her sympathies, like those of not a few full Austrians, were anti-German; she was without great difficulty persuaded to write a letter to her brother—or son—urging him to work for the country of his birth.

Even with this letter the Belgian agent was hard put to overcome Szek’s fears and reluctance; but at last, early in 1915, he agreed to steal the code. His initial proposal, however, to escape outright with it to England was worse than useless, as the Germans would then have known that the code had been taken. More persuasion was required to convince the trembling clerk he must copy it bit by bit. Painfully, half a column or a column at a time, he began to do it, taking three months before it was completed. At the beginning he passed on the slips to the agent as they were completed, but, becoming increasingly nervous, he grew balky and at the last moment refused to hand over the rest of the code. With it on his person as his only assurance against being left behind, he insisted that he and the agent leave together.

It was then April 1915. What happened next no one knows for certain, but Szek was never seen alive after the war. The copied sheets of code, however, did reach an English Intelligence agent in Holland, who forwarded them to their proper haven in Room 40. As to Szek, some have claimed that the Germans captured and shot him, but Szek’s father, after the war, accused the English of having done away with him in order to prevent the Germans from ever finding out that the code was taken. All we know is that his life was the cost of a code which the English got, which reached Room 40, and which the Germans went right on using.

Meanwhile, far away in Mesopotamia in February 1915, a man very different from Szek embarked in a small boat to sail down the Tigris on a grandiose mission—no less than to bring Persia into the war on the German-Turkish side. For years the Kaiser had hankered after his Berlin-to-Baghdad dream, and now his empire-builders saw themselves ending Anglo-Russian domination of Persia, swinging all Islam behind the Central Powers, bringing in Afghanistan after Persia, and ultimately marching triumphantly into India. More immediate strategy required the cutting of the Anglo-Persian pipeline.

The man in the boat who was to accomplish all this was Wilhelm Wassmuss, for many years German Vice-Consul at Bushire on the Persian Gulf. Like Lawrence over in Arabia, Wassmuss was part mystic, part fanatic, part charlatan, with a dash of hero. Like Lawrence, who was similarly trying to swing Turkey’s Arab subjects over to the British, Wassmuss fancied himself as the destined liberator of desert tribes whose flowing robes both he and Lawrence liked to wear and be photographed in. At Constantinople he had been briefed on the proposed mission (or more likely proposed it himself), and he was on his way back to Persia now, armed with several bundles of propaganda leaflets and an intimate knowledge of the country and its people.

Wassmuss left the Tigris forty miles below Kut-al-Imara, and crossed secretly into Persia. His first objective was the Bakhtiari tribes through whose territory ran the Anglo-Persian pipeline. On February 5 the pipeline was cut, though it seems doubtful if it was at the instigation of Wassmuss, for he would hardly have arrived in the area by then. Shortly afterward he passed through the market towns of Dizful and Shushtar, conferring with tribal chieftains and distributing his pamphlets inciting them to a jihad or holy war against Britain as the enemy of Islam’s Caliph, the Sultan of Turkey.

“Jihad! Jihad!” the whisper flashed through the bazaars, and from then on Wassmuss’s progress was about as secret as that of a fox in a henyard. A pounce upon his party by local gendarmes at Shushtar was foiled when he was warned and fled in time, but a hundred miles farther south, where he next appeared, at Behbehan, the local Khan decided to make his fortune by presenting Wassmuss to the British. First he invited Wassmuss to his home as his guest, then, with something less than traditional Moslem hospitality, locked him up under armed guard and sent off a messenger to the British at Bushire. The messenger, meeting a British detachment on the road, excitedly urged them forward to take his master’s prisoner into custody. The mounted officers of the detachment galloped into Behbehan, spent precious minutes exchanging the politenesses of Eastern protocol with the beaming Khan and arranging his reward, turned to take their prisoner, and found him gone. Rushing to the roof, they saw only a flurry of dust in the distance marking the escape, but down in the courtyard they found assorted bundles and baggage left behind.

These were dejectedly carried back with them to Bushire, where, when the pamphlets were read, the British blew loudly for the hunt. Because of Persia’s neutrality, a full-scale expedition was impossible, and Wassmuss again slipped through the hands of a small party that ran him to earth in a mud village. He made his way to Shiraz, the provincial capital, where he cut a wide swath of trouble, including a raid that resulted in the murder of the British Vice-Consul and the arrest and rather rude removal of the Consul and entire British colony to the coast.

In the course of these activities, one thing that marked Wassmuss’s progress was a seemingly disproportionate irritation over the loss of his baggage. Witnesses reported his bursts of anger, how he “lashed the tribesmen into transports of rage over the seizure of his pamphlets,” how he demanded to see the Governor at Shiraz, to whom he presented a formal protest and a claim for the return of his baggage. Since by now his purposes were known to all Persia as well as to the British, who had in the meantime raided the German consulate at Bushire and found in its files the full plans for his mission, his rage would appear to have been pointless unless the baggage contained something of extraordinary value known only to him. In any event, the baggage was beyond his reach, the British in Bushire having sent it on to London.

In London late that summer, Admiral Hall was listening to the account of a naval officer invalided home from the Persian Gulf. Naturally the tale of Wassmuss’s hairbreadth escapes and depredations figured largely. A private buzzer sounded inside Hall’s mind, and as soon as his visitor had left he sent aides scurrying through Whitehall, discreetly inquiring for the Wassmuss baggage. The day was ending when a call came through from one of the searchers, saying the baggage had been located in the cellar of the India Office, not three minutes’ walk away. It had not been touched since it came from Persia. Hall had it brought over, and, blinking like a semaphore, cut the rope holding it together. Carefully separating the papers, he found in their midst, as his sixth sense had told him he would, the German diplomatic code book, Code No. 13040.

Because Room 40’s records have never, with a few exceptions, been made public, and because Admiral Hall was refused permission to publish the autobiography he began in 1932, some dates are necessarily imprecise. Sometime between June and September 1915 can be fixed as the time when both the Szek and the Wassmuss codes reached Room 40. Whether the code obtained through Szek was also the diplomatic code, or another, has never been made clear. But in any event, Ewing’s staff now went to work on certain boxes of intercepts hitherto set aside as belonging to some category unknown but recognizably non-naval. No. 13040 was discovered to be one of the two codes used for communication between Berlin and Washington and, with Washington as the transferral point, between Berlin and all German missions in the Western Hemisphere.

With 13040 in his possession Admiral Hall could listen in on a remarkable correspondence—the uniquely informative reports from Washington of Ambassador Bernstorff to his government in Berlin. Since November 1916 these had centered on Wilson’s efforts to bring the combatants to terms, revealing to Hall how obstinately set the American President was on preserving his country for the role of mediator, not belligerent. Without American belligerency, he well knew, the Allies could never win, would, in fact, despite all public protest to the contrary, soon be forced to negotiate.

Back at his desk, with the Zimmermann telegram in his hand, Hall believed he held the instrument that would puncture American neutrality—if it could be used. That “if” was his problem. He looked out across the open space of the Horse Guards Parade to the Renaissance bulk of the Foreign Office. His eyes picked out the second-story window that was the Secretary’s room, where he could picture Arthur Balfour at that moment, slouched back in his chair, his long legs stretched out beneath the table in the deceptively sleepy pose caricaturists had made famous through three governments. No one had ever seen Balfour animated off the tennis court. During the past year, when Balfour had been First Lord of the Admiralty, Hall had learned that very little ever ruffled the tall, cool, skeptical man who had once been Prime Minister, who cheerfully accepted any post and cared for none, and who, when escorted to the front, nonchalantly admired the bursting shells through his pince-nez. But Hall knew how desperately Balfour needed what Room 40 had found. Behind that serene façade he must be despairing of the waiting game he was forced to play with the United States, trying always suavely, imperceptibly, to nudge them over the edge of neutrality, yet without ever seeming to interfere.

At that moment Balfour’s need was urgent. England was spending £5,500,000 a day on the war, and cash and credit were as low as they could go. Six weeks ago the American Federal Reserve Board had warned its member banks against making long-term loans to belligerent governments or even short-term loans that were liable for renewal. It was Wilson’s way of trying to pressure the belligerents into a negotiated peace. Britain would never negotiate on any terms Germany could offer. But if the loan embargo was maintained, the collapse of the Allies would be a matter of months.

Admiral Hall was still staring fixedly at Balfour’s window. To go over there now and give Balfour the telegram to use as he liked in Washington would be to stake all on the likelihood that it would indeed bring the Americans in. But suppose it did not; he would have gambled the code and gained nothing. Personally he could not see how the Mexican-Japanese threat could fail of its effect, but if that mulish fellow in the White House remained still “too proud to fight,” he might sidestep it somehow. Hall had to be sure. He knew, as the Admiralty’s former First Lord, Winston Churchill, was to say later, that United States action depended solely on the workings of this one man’s mind. But who in England understood how that mind worked?

Hall wished desperately that he knew half as much about the White House as he did about the Wilhelmstrasse. To release the telegram meant risking the code; but to withhold the telegram meant throwing away the greatest triumph possession of the code could bring. He was in an agonizing dilemma. But he was determined to find a way out. Already half-formed schemes were tickling at the back of his mind, but they would take time, and time was running thin. He still had two weeks’ grace, for when the German order to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1 became known, the United States might come in of its own accord, sparing him the necessity of using the Zimmermann telegram. If not, the telegram would have to be published, but in the meantime he might be able to cover Room 40’s tracks.

He hesitated, still held by the window opposite. Had he the right to keep this knowledge from his government? Years on the bridge had not only disciplined him to lonely decisions but given him a positive taste for them. He relished the responsibility of sole command. Turning his back on the window, he locked the dispatch—and with it two weeks of his country’s life—inside his private safe.

Then Admiral Hall sat down to work out a plan and to wait.

In Berlin they were waiting too—for the answer of Mexico and Japan. The league of these two nations in alliance with Germany was no last-minute makeshift but a plan that had evolved over many years since the moment when one of the most meddlesome sovereigns in history sat down in his palace to paint a picture.