The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918. John Price Jones
In no previous war in the world's history has a general staff known more of the enemy's plans. We look back almost patronizingly across a century to the semaphore which transmitted Napoleon's orders from Paris to the Rhine in three hours; we can scarcely realize that if the report of a scout had ever got through to General Hooker, warning him that a suspicious wagon train had been actually sighted a few miles away, Stonewall Jackson's flanking march at Chancellorsville would have been checked in its first stages. In this greatest of all wars a British battery silences a German gun within two minutes after the allied airman has "spotted" the Boche. The air is "Any Man's Land." What lies beyond the hill is no longer the great hazard, for the wireless is flashing.
If the Allied general staffs had been provided with X-ray field-glasses, and had trained those glasses on a certain brownstone house in Massachusetts Avenue, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets, in Washington, they would have been interested in the perfection of the German system of communication. They would have observed the secretarial force of the Imperial Embassy opening and sorting letters from confederates throughout the country, many so phrased as to be quite harmless, others apparently meaningless. The Embassy served as a clearing-house for all German and Allied air messages.
Long before the war broke out the German government had seen the military necessity for a complete wireless system. Subsidies were secretly granted to the largest of the German electrical manufacturers to establish stations all over the globe. Companies were formed in America, ostensibly financed with American funds, but on plans submitted to German capitalists and through them to the German Foreign Office for approval. Thus was the Sayville station erected. As early as 1909 a German captain, Otto von Fossberg, had been sent to America to select a site on Long Island for the station. "The German government is backing the scheme," he told a friend, although the venture was publicly supposed to be under the auspices of the "Atlantic Communication Company," in which certain prominent German-Americans held stock and office. In 1911 an expert, Fritz von der Woude, paid Sayville a visit long enough to install the apparatus; he came under strict injunctions not to let his mission become generally known.
Boy-Ed watched the progress of the Sayville station with close interest and considerable authority, and his familiarity with wireless threw him into frequent and cordial relationship with the United States naval wireless men and the Department of Commerce. On one occasion the Department requested a confidential report from a radio inspector of the progress made by foreign interests in wireless; the report prepared went to Germany before it came to the hands of the United States government. Again: the German government was informed in 1914 by Boy-Ed in Washington that the United States intended to erect a wireless station at a certain point in the Philippines; full details, as the Navy Department had developed them, were forwarded, and the German government immediately directed a large electrical manufacturer in Berlin to bid for the work. The site the United States had selected was not altogether satisfactory to Germany, for some reason, so the German government added this delicious touch: a confidential map of the Philippines was turned over to the electrical house, with orders to submit a plan for the construction of the American station on a site which had been chosen by the German General War Staff!
The Providence Journal claims to have discovered an interesting German document—probably genuine—which reveals the scope of the Teutonic wireless project. It was a chart, bearing a rectangle labeled in German with the title of the German Foreign Office. From this "trunk" radiated three "branches," each bearing a name, and each terminating in the words. "Telefunken Co." The first branch was labeled "Gesellschaft für Drahtlose Telegraphie, Berlin"; the second, "Siemens & Halske, Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Berlin"; the third, "Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, Berlin."
From each branch grew still further subdivisions, labeled with the names of electrical firms or agents all over the world, and all subject to the direction of the German government. These names follow:
From No. 1: Atlantic Communication Co. (Sayville), New York; Australasian Wireless Co., Ltd., Sydney (Australia); Telefunken East Asiatic Wireless Telegraph Co., Ltd., Shanghai; Maintz & Co. (of Amsterdam, Holland), Batavia (Java); Germann & Co. (of Hamburg), Manila; B. Grimm & Co., Bangkok; Paetzold & Eppinger, Havana; Spiegelthal, La Guayra; Kruger & Co., Guayaquil; Brahm & Co., Lima; E. Quicke, Montevideo; R. Schulbach, Thiemer & Co. (of Hamburg), Central America; Sesto Sesti, Rome; AD Zacharion & Cie., Athens; J. K. Dimitrijievic, Belgrade.
From No. 2: Siemens Bros. & Co., Ltd., London; Siemens & Halske, Vienna; Siemens & Halske, Petrograd; Siemens & Halske (K. G. Frank), New York; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Sofia; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Constantinople; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Dansk Aktsielskab), Copenhagen; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Denki Kabushiki Kaishe), Tokio; Siemens-Schuckert-Werke (Companhia Brazileira de Electricidade), Rio de Janeiro; Siemens-Schuckert, Ltd., Buenos Ayres; Siemens-Schuckert, Ltd., Valparaiso.
From No. 3: A. E. G. Union Electrique, Brussels; Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, Basel; A. E. G. Elecktriska Aktiebolaget, Stockholm; A. E. G. Electricitats Aktieselskabet, Christiania; A. E. G. Thomson-Houston Iberica, Madrid; A. E. G. Compania Mexicana, Mexico; A. E. G. Electrical Company of South Africa, Johannesburg.
The German manufacturers evinced a keen interest in the project of a wireless plant in Nicaragua, laying special stress on the point that "permanent stations in this neighborhood" would be valuable "if the Panama Canal is fortified." From Sayville station the German plan projected powerful wireless plants in Mexico, at Para, Brazil; at Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; at Cartagena, Colombia, and at Lima, Peru. A point in which Captain H. Retzmann, the German naval attaché in 1911, was at one time interested was whether signals could be sent to the German fleet in the English Channel from America without England's interference. German naval wireless experts supervised the construction, and although the stations were nominally civilian-manned, and purely commercial, in reality the operators were often men of unusual scientific intellect, whose talents were sadly underpaid if they received no more than operators' salaries.
Gradually and quietly, Germany year by year spread her system of wireless communication over Central and South America, preparing her machinery for war. Over her staff of operators and mechanics she appointed an expert in the full confidence of the Embassy at Washington, and in close contact with Captain Boy-Ed. To the system of German-owned commercial plants in the United States he added amateur stations of more or less restricted radius, as auxiliary apparatus.
When the war broke out, and scores of German merchantmen were confined to American ports by the omnipresence of the British fleet at sea, the wireless of the interned ships was added to the system. Thus in every port lay a source of information for the Embassy. The United States presently ordered the closing of all private wireless stations, and those amateurs who had been listening out of sheer curiosity to the air conversation cheerfully took down their antennae. Not so, however, a prominent woman in whose residence on Fifth Avenue lay concealed a powerful receiving apparatus. Nor did the interned ships obey the order: apparatus apparently removed was often rigged in the shelter of a funnel, and operated by current supplied from an apparently innocent source. And the secret service discovered stations also in the residences of wealthy Hoboken Germans, and in a German-American "mansion" in Hartford, Connecticut.
The operators of these stations made their reports regularly through various channels to the Embassy. There the messages were sorted, and it is safe to say that Count von Bernstorff was cognizant of the position of every ship on the oceans. He was in possession of both the French and British secret admiralty codes. In the light of that fact, the manœuvres of the British and German fleets in the South Atlantic and Pacific became simply a game of chess, Germany following every move of the British fleet under Admiral Cradock, knowing the identity of his ships, their gun-power, and their speed. When she located the Good Hope, Monmouth, Glasgow and Otranto off Coronel, Berlin, through von Bernstorff, gave Admiral von Spee the word to strike, with the results which we have observed: the sinking of the Monmouth and Good Hope, and the crippling of the Glasgow and Otranto.
Throughout August, September and October, 1914, the system operated perfectly. Bernstorff and Boy-Ed were confronted with the problem of keeping the German fleet alive as long as possible, and inflicting as much damage as possible on enemy shipping. Allied merchantmen left