The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918. John Price Jones
port almost with impunity, and were gathered in by German raiders who had been informed from Washington of the location of their prey. But the defeat off Chile apparently was conclusive proof to England that Germany knew her naval code, and the events of November and December indicate that England changed her code.
It was while engaged in escort duty to the first transport fleet of the Australian Expeditionary Force that the Australian cruiser Sydney received wireless signals from Cocos Island shrieking that the Emden was near by. The Emden, having been deprived for some time of news of enemy ships, had gone there to destroy the wireless station, having in the past three months sunk some $12,500,000 of British shipping. Even while the island's distress signals were crashing out, the Emden had her own wireless busy in an effort to drown the call for help, or "jam" the air. On the following morning, November 9, the Sydney came up with the enemy. A sharp action followed. The Sydney's gunfire was accurate enough to cause the death of 7 officers and 108 men; her own losses were 4 killed and 12 wounded; the Emden fled, ran aground on North Keeling Island, one of the Cocos group, and ultimately became a total wreck.
In the same month the cruiser Geier fled the approach of the British and found refuge in Honolulu harbor. Her commander, Captain Karl Grasshof, made the mistake of keeping a diary. That document, which later fell into the hands of the Navy Intelligence Service, revealed a complete disrespect for the hospitality which the American government afforded the refugees. The Geier's band used to strike up for an afternoon concert, and under cover of the music, the wireless apparatus sent out messages to raiders at sea or messages in English so phrased as to start rumors of trouble between Japan and the United States. The Geier was the source of a rumor to the effect that Japanese troops had landed in Mexico; the Geier gave what circulation she could to a report that Germans in the United States were planning an invasion of Canada and was ably assisted in this effort by George Rodiek, German consul at Honolulu; the Geier caught all trans-Pacific wireless messages, and intercepted numerous United States government despatches. Captain Grasshof also spread a report quoting an American submarine commander as saying he would "like to do something to those Japs outside" (referring to the Japanese Pacific patrol) provided he (the American commander) and the German could reach an agreement. This report Grasshof attributed to von Papen, and later retracted, admitting that it was a lie. Grasshof's courier to the consulate in San Francisco was A. V. Kircheisen, a quartermaster on the liner China, a German secret service agent bearing the number K-17. Kircheisen frequently used the China's wireless to send German messages.
On December 8 occurred the engagement off the Falklands, which resulted in the defeat of the German fleet. The Karlsruhe within a short time gave up her aimless wanderings and disappeared. In February the Glasgow avenged herself on the Dresden, and the Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the Kronprinz Wilhelm fled into the security of Hampton Roads for the duration of war.
The United States' suspicions had been aroused by the activity of the German wireless plants, but the arm of the law did not remove at once the German operators at certain commercial stations. They were the men who despatched communications to Berlin and to the raiders. Interspersed in commercial messages they sprinkled code phrases, words, numbers, a meaningless and innocent jargon. The daily press bulletin issued to all ships at sea was an especially adaptable vehicle for this practice, as any traveler who has been forced to glean his news from one of these bulletins will readily appreciate. There were Americans shrewd enough, however, to become exceedingly suspicious of this superficially careless sending, and their suspicions were confirmed through the invention of another shrewd American, Charles E. Apgar. He combined the principles of the phonograph and the wireless in such a way as to record on a wax disc the dots and dashes of the message, precisely as it came through the receiver. The records could be studied and analyzed at leisure. And the United States government has studied them.
At three o'clock every morning, the great wireless station at Nauen, near Berlin, uttered a hash of language into the ether. It was apparently not directed to any one in particular, nor did it contain any known coherence. Unless the operator in America wore a DeForest audian detector, which picks up waves from a great distance, he could not have heard it, and certainly during the early part of the war he paid no attention to it. The United States decided, however, that it might be well to eavesdrop, and so for over two years every utterance from Nauen was transcribed and filed away, or run off on the phonograph, in the hope that repetition might reveal the code. Until the code was discovered elsewhere, the phonographic records told no tales, but then the State Department found that it had a priceless library of Prussian impudence.
The diplomatic code was a dictionary, its pages designated by serial letters, its words by serial numbers. Thus the message
"12-B-15-C-7"
signified the twelfth and fifteenth words on the second page, and the seventh word on the third page. This particular dictionary was one of a rare edition.
To complement the diplomatic code the Deutches Bank, the German Foreign Office, and their commercial representatives, Hugo Schmidt and Dr. Albert, had agreed upon an arbitrary code which proved one of the most difficult which the American authorities have ever had to decipher. Solution would have been impossible without some of the straight English or German confirmations which followed by mail, but as most of these documents were lost or destroyed, the deciphering had to be done by astute construction of testimony taken from Schmidt as late as the fall of 1917. He had made the work doubly difficult by burning the cipher key and most of his important papers in the furnace of the German Club.
Simple phrases, such as might readily pass any censor without arousing suspicion, passed frequently through Sayville station. The message "Expect father to-morrow" meant "The political situation between America and Germany grows worse. It is imperative that you take care of your New York affairs." "Depot" meant "Securities"; "Depot Pritchard" meant "Securities to be held in Germany"; "Depot Cooper" meant "Securities to be forwarded to some neutral country in Europe." Schmidt himself had the following aliases: "John Maley," "Roy Woolen," "Sidney Pickford," "George Brewster," "175 Congress Street, Brooklyn," "James Frasier," or "Andrew Brodie." Dr. Albert was mentioned as "John Herbinsen," "Howard Ackley," "Leonard Hadden," or "Donald Yerkes." James W. Gerard, the American ambassador at Berlin, was "Wilbur McDonald"; America was "Fremessi" or "Alfred Lipton." To throw any suspicion off the scent, the phrase "Hughes recovered" was translatable simply as "agreed," whereas "Percy died" meant "disagreed." Amounts of money were to be multiplied by one thousand.
This cipher code, so far as it had any system at all, showed a skilful choice of arbitrary proper names, than which there is nothing less suggestive or significant when the name is backed up by no known or discoverable personality. These names met two requirements: they carefully avoided any names of personages, and they sounded English or American. Following is a table of the commoner symbols used:
| Code | Translation |
| Alcott | Hugo Reisinger |
| Andeo | Payments are |
| John Hazel: Chapman; | |
| Thos. Hadley | G. Amsinck & Co. |
| Pythagoras Errflint | Argentine Finance Minister |
| Lawrence McKay | Austrian Ambassador at Washington. |
| John Hastings; Fred | |
| Holden; Wm. Lounsbury | |
| Flagside; Chas. Hall | Bankers Trust Co. |
| Henry Galloway | Belgium |
| Frenchlike; Blake |