The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918. John Price Jones

      The German Embassy in Washington, headquarters and clearing-

       house of German intrigue in the world outside Mittel-

       Europa, 1914–1917

      The war, then, so far as the United States figured in Germany's plan, was economic and diplomatic. But it was also military. German representatives in the United States were bound by oath to coöperate to their utmost in all military enterprises within their reach. With a certain few notable exceptions, no such enterprises came within their reach, and if the reader anticipates from that fact a disappointing lack of violence in the narrative to follow, let him remember that "all's fair in war," and that every German activity in the United States, whether it was economic, diplomatic or military, was carried on with a certain Prussian thoroughness which was chiefly characterized by brutal violence.

      We have come to believe that thoroughness is the first and last word in German organization. Any really thorough organization must be promptly convertible to new activities without loss of motion. If these new activities are unexpected, the change is more or less of an experiment, and its possibilities are not ominous. But truly dangerous is the organization which transfers suddenly to coping with the expected. Germany had expected war for forty years.

      Her peace-time organization in America consisted of four executives: an ambassador, a fiscal agent, a military attaché, and a naval attaché. Its chief was the ambassador, comparable in his duties and privileges to the president of a corporation, the representative with full authority to negotiate with other organizations, and responsible to his board of directors—the foreign office in Berlin. Its treasurer was the fiscal agent. And its department heads were the military and naval attachés, each responsible in some degree to his superiors in matters of policy and finances, and answerable also to Berlin.

      The functions of the chief were two-fold. Convincing evidence produced by the State Department has placed at his door the ultimate responsibility for executing Germany's commands not in the United States alone, but throughout all of the world excepting Middle Europe. Under his eyes passed Berlin's instructions to her envoys in both Americas, and through his hands passed their reports. He directed and delegated the administration of all German policy in the western world and the far east, and of course directed all strictly diplomatic enterprises afoot in the United States.

      Germany could hardly have chosen an abler envoy than this latest of all the Bernstorffs, Johann, a statesman whose ancestors for generations had been Saxon diplomats. A glance at the man's countenance convinced one of his powers of concentration: the many lines of his face seemed to focus on a point between his eyebrows. And yet his expression was hardly grim. The modeling of his head was unusually strong, his features sensitive, with no trace of weakness. If there had been weakness about his mouth, it was concealed by the conventional ferocity of a Hohenzollern moustache, and yet those untruthful lips could part in an ingratiating smile which flashed ingenuous friendliness. His frame was tall and slender, his mannerisms suggested carefully bridled nervous activity. The entire appearance of the man may best be described by a much-abused term—he was "distinguished."

      Count von Bernstorff, once his nation had declared war upon France and England, went to war with the United States. As ambassador, diplomatic courtesy gave him a scope of observation limited only by the dignity of his position. A seat in a special gallery in the Senate and House of Representatives was always ready for his occupancy; he could virtually command the attention of the White House; and senators, congressmen and office-holders from German-American districts respected him. Messengers kept him in constant touch with the line-up of Congress on important issues, and two hours later that line-up was known in the Foreign Office in Berlin. As head and front of the German spy system in America, he held cautiously aloof from all but the most instrumental acquaintances: men and women of prominent political and social influence who he knew were inclined, for good and sufficient reasons, to help him. One woman, whose bills he paid at a Fifth Avenue gown house, was the wife of a prominent broker and another woman of confessedly German affiliations who served him lived within a stone's throw of the Metropolitan Museum and its nearby phalanx of gilded dwellings (her husband's office was in a building at 11 Broadway, of which more anon); a third woman intimate lived in a comfortable apartment near Fifth Avenue—an apartment selected for her, though she was unaware of it, by secret agents of the United States. During the early days of the war the promise of social sponsorship which any embassy in Washington could extend proved bait for a number of ingénues of various ages, with ambition and mischief in their minds, and the gracious Ambassador played them smoothly and dexterously. Mostly they were not German women, for the German women of America were not so likely to be useful socially, nor as a type so astute as to qualify them for von Bernstorff's delicate work. To those whom he chose to see he was courteous, and superficially frank almost to the point of naïveté. The pressure of negotiation between Washington and Berlin became more and more exacting as the war progressed, yet he found time to command a campaign whose success would have resulted in disaster to the United States. That he was not blamed for the failure of that campaign when he returned to Germany in April, 1917, is evidenced by his prompt appointment to the court of Turkey, a difficult and important post, and in the case of Michaelis, a stepping-stone to the highest post in the Foreign Office.

      Upon the shoulders of Dr. Heinrich Albert, privy counsellor and fiscal agent of the German Empire, fell the practical execution of German propaganda throughout America. He was the American agent of a government which has done more than any other to coöperate with business towards the extension of influence abroad, on the principle that "the flag follows the constitution." As such he had had his finger on the pulse of American trade, had catalogued exhaustively the economic resources of the country, and held in his debt, as his nation's treasurer in America, scores of bankers, manufacturers and traders to whom Germany had extended subsidy. As such also he was the paymaster of the Imperial secret diplomatic and consular agents.

      You could find him almost any day until the break with Germany in a small office in the Hamburg-American Building (a beehive of secret agents) at No. 45 Broadway, New York. He was tall and slender, and wore the sombre frock coat of the European business man with real grace. His eyes were blue and clear, his face clean-shaven and faintly sabre-scarred, and his hair blond. He impressed one as an unusual young man in a highly responsible position. His greeting to visitors, of whom he had few, was punctilious, his bow low, and his manner altogether polite. He encouraged conversation rather than offered it. He had none of the "hard snap" of the energetic, outspoken, brusque American man of business. Dr. Albert was a smooth-running, well-turned cog in the great machine of Prussian militarism.

      Upon him rested the task of spending between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000 a week for German propaganda. He spent thirty million at least—and only Germany knows how much more—in secret agency work, also known by the uglier names of bribery, sedition and conspiracy. He admitted that he wasted a half million or more. He had a joint account with Bernstorff in the Chase National Bank, New York, which amounted at times to several millions. His resources gave weight to his utterances in the quiet office overlooking Broadway, or in the German Club in Central Park South, or in the consulates or hotels of Chicago and New Orleans and San Francisco, to which he made occasional trips to confer with German business men.

      His colleagues held him in high esteem. His methods were quiet and successful, and his participation in the offences against America's peace might have passed unproven had he not been engaged in a too-absorbing conversation one day in August, 1915, upon a Sixth Avenue elevated train. He started up to leave the train at Fiftieth Street, and carelessly left his portfolio behind him—to the tender care of a United States Secret Service man. It contained documents revealing his complicity in enterprises the magnitude of which beggars the imagination. The publication of certain of those documents awoke the slumbering populace to a feeling of chagrin and anger almost equal to his own at the loss of his dossier. And yet he stayed on in America, and returned with the ambassadorial party to Germany only after the severance of diplomatic relations in 1917, credited with expert generalship on the economic sector of the American front.