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.

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 Rintelen’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.

When Rintelen was not being Gibbons, he was being Frederick Hansen, in whose name he took another set of offices around the corner at 57 William Street, in the same building as the Transatlantic Trust Company, where his funds were deposited. As Hansen he carried on his designs against the munitions traffic, using as his headquarters the engine room of the Friedrich der Grosse, one of the interned German ships. Here, under his direction, a chemist named Dr. Scheele fabricated time bombs to be placed in the holds of ships carrying arms to the Allies. Several of these, successfully exploding in mid-ocean, were to provide the charge on which Rintelen was eventually tried and convicted.

Between being Gibbons and Hansen the inexhaustible Rintelen found time, in his own person, to rediscover old friends in the yacht basins of Long Island Sound and to attend to his main purpose—arranging for a war with Mexico through the restoration of General Huerta.

The American government, uneasy host to President Wilson’s least favorite character, had been watching Huerta from the moment of his arrival but did not know at first of German complicity in his plans. In May, Wilson took a step that was to enter yet another group of agents in the secret-service sweepstakes going on in New York. For some time Colonel House had been relaying information received from Captain Gaunt about German violations of neutral territory. The President had avoided pressing the issue because he wished to keep relations with the Germans reasonably smooth for the sake of the overriding goal on which his heart and mind were set: ending the war by American mediation. Then on May 7 the Lusitania was sunk and the country enjoyed a frenzy of horror over the crime of the Hohenzollerns. Some of the national anger rubbed off on the President. On May 14 he instructed Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, whose department controlled the Secret Service, to put a watch on German and Austrian embassy personnel to uncover any conduct unbecoming to diplomats.

“We rented an apartment,” testified Secret Service Chief William J. Flynn some years later, “and the telephone man led the wires in and hooked them up so that we had a telephone matching every telephone in the two embassies. When a receiver was taken down in the embassy a light flashed in the Secret Service apartment. When a phone bell rang in the embassy one rang in our apartment. Four stenographers worked in relays, all expert linguists.”

Each night Flynn received a stenographic report of all conversations of the previous twenty-four hours, copies of which were given to the State Department in a procedure known to the President. Among the interesting data furnished by these calls were Count von Bernstorff’s lively conversations with Washington ladies. No, he modestly protested to one caller, he really should not be compared to the title character of a current play called The Great Lover, because, unlike the play’s hero, he had “stopped.” “Perhaps you have taken a rest, but not stopped,” a female voice replied, adding in a sharper tone, “You needed a rest.”

In New York the even busier German wires were tapped with the cooperation of Police Commissioner Arthur Woods. Two of Flynn’s men were sent to trail the busy visits of German diplomats in New York, and the Bomb Squad of the Department of Justice, whose job was to track saboteurs, joined the proliferation of watchers. In the course of these duties both sets of American agents eventually picked up Rintelen’s trail, although they did not as yet connect him with General Huerta. Department of Justice agents, following saboteurs, spotted him as Frederick Hansen and reported that he had unlimited funds and was having some negotiations with a Mexican whom they mistakenly believed to be Villa’s representative. In July a State Department official learned from a lady informant that she recognized Hansen as her old friend, Captain Franz von Rintelen.

Meanwhile Rintelen had been conferring with Huerta again, both at the Hotel Manhattan and at an unnamed Fifth Avenue hotel, probably the Holland House, another favorite German meeting place, at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street. Upon one of these occasions he noticed two detectives who had frequently shadowed him and who now followed Huerta as he left the hotel. “Our interview,” Rintelen recalls dramatically in his memoirs, “had been observed!” Nevertheless, using the German naval code, he reported the substance of the meeting to Berlin. Huerta, he said, wanted funds for the purchase of arms in the United States, moral support, and U-boats to land weapons along the Mexican coast for his adherents who would rise when he crossed the border. On his part he would, after regaining power, take up arms against the United States. That Huerta, a hard-headed realist, intended seriously to make war on the United States is unlikely, but plotters who want something from each other are frequently generous with promises. It is also possible that Rintelen, carried away by the heroic role in which he saw himself personally engineering a war that would cut off American munitions, exaggerated the prospects to Berlin.

Whether Room 40 intercepted this message is not recorded. Communication between Berlin and Bernstorff’s embassy was coded variously in the diplomatic code, No. 13040, in another code, designated 5950, and in the naval cipher, VB 718, two of which—and possibly all three—Room 40 could read at this time. Two months later Admiral Hall was able to use one of the three codes to lure Rintelen himself into a trap.

Absorbed by his multifarious conspiracies, Rintelen now left further negotiations on the Mexican matter to Papen and Boy-Ed, and delegated practical preparations for the rising—purchase of arms, arrangements at the border, deals with the factions in Mexico—to Dr. Albert’s chief assistant, Carl Heynen, formerly Hamburg-American agent at Tampico, and to Frederico Stallforth, a prominent German banker in Mexico who had come up to New York to assist Huerta’s return. Stallforth and his brother Alberto, who handled the Mexican end, were focal points of Mexican intrigue whose many contacts opened as many possibilities of betrayal, and they were naturally closely watched by the Carranzistas. At some point during these weeks eight million rounds of ammunition were purchased in St. Louis, orders placed for a further three million in New York, and a preliminary sum of $800,000 deposited to Huerta’s account in the Deutsche Bank in Havana as well as $95,000 in a Mexican account. Arrangements were made with General Félix Díaz, nephew of the old dictator, to lead a rising in the south when Huerta should cross the border in the north. Papen, who knew the ground from earlier trips to Mexico in 1914, was now sent down to the border to study the terrain from the military point of view, to arrange for a sort of underground railway by which German reservists in the United States could enter Mexico, and to distribute funds for Huerta’s use in Brownsville, El Paso, and San Antonio.

Back in New York, Boy-Ed carried on the negotiations with Huerta. Driven by the embassy chauffeur, who was one of Voska’s men, he went to see Huerta at his hotel, the Ansonia, at Broadway and 72nd Street. A cautious answer had come through from Berlin, promising that further funds would be forthcoming and that U-boats and auxiliary cruisers would lend support when Mexico should enter upon hostilities with the United States. At further meetings with Boy-Ed, with Voska’s men listening in, Huerta was promised ten thousand rifles and a first credit of ten thousand dollars. By now deeply committed, Huerta, whose family had come from Spain to join him, moved forward to his destiny.

He could not have chosen a more frenzied moment. Americans had hardly recovered from the Japanese war scare over the presence of the Asama at Turtle Bay in April, when they were flung into a furor over the sinking of the Lusitania in May. Wilson issued condemnatory notes, Germany rejected his principles, Secretary Bryan resigned when Wilson’s further notes became too strong for his peace-loving soul, America and Germany moved to the verge of war, and the whole country was on edge.

In the midst of this furor, on Friday, June 25, General Huerta, after attending a baseball game, telling a census taker that he was not retired, and buying tickets to a policeman’s ball, boarded a westbound train, saying he was going to visit the Exposition at San Francisco. On Saturday afternoon Secretary Lansing, a man of precise and invariable habits, made his usual neat notation on his desk calendar, “half holiday,” and went home at one o’clock. At eight that evening the Department called him with news that Huerta had changed trains at Kansas City and was expected at El Paso next morning at six-thirty. Cobb, the State Department agent at El Paso, was waiting for instructions. The moment for the return from Elba had come.

It was a moment touchy in the extreme. If Huerta crossed the border, Washington would be on the brink of another Veracruz. If there was anything Wilson did not want at that moment, when he was close to a crisis with Germany over the submarine question, it was another Veracruz. But Wilson had himself just left Washington the day before for a vacation in New Hampshire. Meantime Huerta’s train was speeding southward, and something had to be done. Lansing wired Cobb to cooperate with Department of Justice agents in the area and advise immediately. The eager Mr. Cobb took this to be authorization enough to act on his own responsibility, as he had already found out that the Justice men were without instructions. He had also found out that Huerta planned to leave the train at Newman, New Mexico, twenty miles from the border, where he was to be met by General Orozco, who would drive him to Mexico by car. After rounding up an Army colonel, twenty-five soldiers, and two deputy marshals, Cobb sped through the night to Newman, arriving on Sunday at dawn, just before the train.

At sunrise, as the train slowed to a stop at Newman, General Orozco drove up in his car, General Huerta descended from his Pullman, and Mr. Cobb, followed by his escort, stepped from behind a baggage crate, made his arrest, and took both generals in custody to El Paso. There Huerta was released on a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond when his embarrassed captors found that news of his arrest by Americans had excited the Mexican populace of whatever faction in his favor. Washington sent Cobb a telegram of congratulations, but he worriedly reported back that business sentiment was strong for Huerta, the Mayor of El Paso had agreed to be his attorney, partisans were giving him ovations, the town was full of former Huerta officers and henchmen, the border restless. Huerta could buy out the garrison of Ciudad Juárez across the river any time he wanted, ten thousand mercenaries assembled by Orozco were waiting to rally to him, if he got a foothold Villa would collapse, the way to the capital would be open. The American Army had agreed to arrest him the moment he crossed the border but in the meantime had invited him to dinner at Fort Bliss. As long as he remained in El Paso, poised on the edge of Mexico, agitation would grow. Cobb begged Washington to get Huerta away from the border quickly.

But in Washington the anxious question was, how? Remembering the horrid consequences of the affair of the salute only a year ago, no one in Wilson’s administration cared to risk another too precipitate brush with the foxy Aztec that might provoke another incident. Wilson’s attention was momentarily engaged in New Hampshire by a growing acquaintance with his daughters’ new friend, the delightful Mrs. Galt. While Lansing held one conference after another with the Secretary of War, the Chilean Ambassador, the Attorney-General, and other colleagues, Cobb harried him daily with telegrams pleading for action to get Huerta away “before the night passes.” Then, on July 2, Orozco escaped to Mexico, and Washington, unable to delay longer, ordered Huerta rearrested and lodged in the county jail. But he was hot property, and every means was tried of persuading him to vanish painlessly away. He was threatened with deportation as an alien, he was wheedled with offers of liberty if he would only leave the border and consent to live in the northern part of the United States. But Huerta, stubborn as in the old days when he had refused to fire the salute, now refused to disembarrass Washington, refused to go away, refused to post higher bail, refused to accept any conditions in exchange for his freedom. “I will leave this jail only if I leave it unconditionally,” he said. “I will agree to no compromise. I will stay in my cell rather than accept terms for my liberty.” He took to studying English from a child’s primer and complained only that the ice water his jailer brought him was “a little thin.” Sadly he told reporters, “I have not had a drink these one-two-three-four days”—but even for brandy he would not make terms.

Cobb’s telegrams now waxed frantic: “Orozco gathering forces in the mountains,” he reported, “movement very thorough and strong.” In Washington the benefits Germany expected to reap from an explosion in Mexico were being made all too clear by reports coming in from the agents in New York. Holding Huerta in the county jail was like holding on to a stick of dynamite with the fuse lit. On July 9 the War Department ordered Huerta transferred to military prison at Fort Bliss. Gasping with relief, Cobb wired, “This solves the problem.”

He was wrong, for Huerta did not cease to be a problem until he was dead, and that was not yet.

A footnote was Bernstorff’s characteristic washing his hands of the affair. While still under civil arrest, Huerta had wired him asking for the protection of the German government for his wife and children because the American officers “do not let them sleep or eat and search my house at will.” Bernstorff blandly forwarded the message to Lansing with a covering note saying he had neither answered the note nor taken any notice of it. Shown to the President, Bernstorff’s note elicited Wilson’s one-line comment, “This is truly extraordinary.”

Rintelen too was now about to come to the end of his usefulness. On July 6, two days after Huerta’s arrest, he had received a telegram in the German Admiralty code, recalling him on the ground that his activities were becoming known and he was in danger of arrest. Once again traveling as Emil Gasche, he sailed on the neutral Holland-America liner Noordam on August 3, just four months after arriving in New York. When the Noordam touched at England she was boarded by an armed search party which took an unusual interest in the Swiss citizen Mr. Gasche. Declaring themselves dissatisfied with his identity, the search party took him off the ship and, despite his indignant protests, escorted him to London for further examination. Carefully rehearsed in the details of the real Gasche’s life, Rintelen was so convincing in his first interview at Scotland Yard that his interrogators’ confidence in a certain tip they had received was shaken. They agreed to his demand to be taken before the Swiss Minister, who, equally convinced by his story, vouched for him. As a last precaution before apologetically releasing the Swiss gentleman, the Yard decided on one more interview, to which the man who had given the original tip was invited.

When Rintelen, still indignantly Swiss, entered the room, he at once felt fixed upon him the gaze of a newcomer in naval uniform, a short, pink-cheeked admiral. While an aide questioned him in German, the admiral, from beneath intermittently blinking eyelids, watched him unwaveringly, like a cat. Why not, suggested the admiral, speaking for the first time, ask the English legation in Berne to ascertain whether it was possible for Emil Gasche to be in London? The presumed Swiss knew he would not be Swiss much longer. Preferring to be held as a prisoner of war in England, rather than as a criminal in America, he admitted his identity as Captain von Rintelen of the Imperial German Navy. Admiral Hall nodded, having known Rintelen’s identity from the beginning. Either, as some have suggested, he himself sent the telegram recalling Rintelen from America, or he intercepted a genuine telegram of recall. For the next twenty-one months Rintelen remained in a prisoner-of-war camp in England.*

His departure from America had not finished the story. On August 4, the day after he sailed from New York, Gaunt’s mouthpiece, the Providence Journal, using evidence obtained from Voska, published an exposé of the German plot to restore Huerta and provoke war with Mexico. It did not mention Rintelen but ascribed the conspiracy to Bernstorff and Boy-Ed, whom it was more to England’s interest to discredit. Bernstorff, whose invariable rule was to deny knowledge of anything nefarious any of his subordinates might be accused of, repudiated the newspaper story; but even as he spoke, another exposé—the famous affair of the Purloined Briefcase—was in preparation.

At three o’clock on the afternoon of July 24, Dr. Albert and George Sylvester Viereck, the American propagandist who worked for the Germans, had left Albert’s office at 45 Broadway, followed by an American Secret Service agent, Frank Burke. Of the two, Burke recognized only Viereck, but he noticed that Viereck treated his companion with deference and that this man fitted a description of Albert as a man of fifty, six feet tall, with a face marked by dueling scars, and further that he carried a heavily stuffed briefcase. The two men took the Sixth Avenue El at Rector Street, and when Viereck got off alone at 23rd Street, Burke stuck with his companion. Albert fell asleep but woke just as the El doors were opening for the 50th Street station. He jumped up and hurried out, forgetting his briefcase, which Burke promptly laid hold of and, seeing Albert rushing back, got off at the far end of the car. While Albert looked frantically around for the person who could have taken his briefcase, Burke flattened himself against the wall of the platform, pretending to light a cigar. Albert dashed down to the street; Burke took the other stairway and jumped on a moving trolley just as Albert spotted him. Burke told the conductor that the wild-eyed man running alongside was a “nut” who had just created a disturbance on the El. The conductor told the motorman; the motorman obligingly passed up the next stop. At 53rd Street, Burke changed to a downtown trolley and rode it all the way to the carbarn, where he immediately telephoned his chief, Flynn. Flynn came up, examined the contents of the briefcase, sent off a wire to Secretary McAdoo, who was vacationing in Maine, and took the portfolio up to him the same evening.

The Albert papers, though not supplying evidence of illegality sufficient for prosecution, were a revelation of the various kinds of German undercover activity. The government, deciding they could best be handled by public exposure, gave the papers to the New York World, which accorded them half the front page on August 15. It was a midsummer sensation and the World kept it going with serial publication of all the incriminating documents. Bernstorff, adept at avoiding the scandals his subordinates got themselves into, retired to the Adirondacks, where, the State Department was informed, “he has been buried for the last ten days with his inamorata,” while the unfortunate Albert became famous as the “Minister without Portfolio.” Rintelen’s name still did not appear, but the public, made aware by the Albert portfolio that German plots were no respecters of American soil, was more disposed to accept further revelations.

These were not long in coming. Voska’s invaluable agents discovered an American citizen acting as one of the couriers on whom the Central Powers, lacking cables, were forced to rely to eke out their crippled communications. Every neutral ship that sailed carried a courier protected by a neutral passport, and the Rotterdam, sailing from New York in the last week of August, carried one John J. Archibald. Alerted by the Voska-to-Gaunt-to-Hall signal, the British neatly picked him off when the ship touched their shores. A haul of 110 documents as full of plums as a fruitcake was taken from Archibald, including a report from Count Constantin Dumba, the Austrian Ambassador, to his government, describing strikes promoted among Hungarian munitions workers and other indiscreet efforts; seventeen reports from the German embassy to the German Foreign Office; canceled checks and payments to saboteurs and propagandists; sabotage progress reports by Papen and Boy-Ed; as well as a private letter from Papen to his wife, expressing his opinion of “these idiotic Yankees.” Boy-Ed’s dealings with Huerta figured in the correspondence, as did Papen’s visits to Mexico the year before for the purpose of organizing the German community there for “self-defense,” for which he was recommended for a medal.

When Admiral Hall, sorting over the papers, discovered what he had netted, he took considerable pleasure in presenting the evidence, with Britain’s compliments, to Page, the American Ambassador. Page, passionately pro-Ally and sick with frustration over the blind side Wilson turned to him, was only too delighted to forward it to Washington. As a precaution the British, not quite trusting Wilson to become appropriately indignant, published the most incriminating of the documents in a Parliamentary White Paper in September.

Rising reluctantly to the occasion, the President declared the Austrian Ambassador non grata and demanded his recall but took no action, as yet, against the German attachés. The real effect of the Archibald papers, coming on top of the Albert portfolio and the Rintelen-Huerta conspiracy, was more profound, if less public. At that moment the official temper was so irritated with Germany over the long-drawn-out Lusitania issue that the final rupture seemed to be at hand. The revelations of sabotage and plots woke the State Department with a shock of surprise to the fact that the Germans were dangerous. “A break may come before you get this letter,” wrote Colonel House in mid-September. Everybody took another look at America’s trouble spot, the Mexican border. Wilson’s Mexican policy came to a screeching halt, backed up, and reversed itself.