GERMAN SPIES AND THEIR METHODS

German spies who looked like “movie” detectives hung about and followed us on the journey from Berlin to Switzerland, France and Spain. There were even suspicious characters among the Americans with German accent who came on our special train from Germany to Switzerland.

Berne is now the champion spy centre of the world. Switzerland, a neutral country, bordering on Germany, France, Italy and Austria, is the happy hunting ground and outfitting point for myriads of spies employed by the nations at war. The Germans, however, use more spies than all the other nations together.

Bismarck said that there are male nations and female nations, and that Germany was a male nation certainly the German has less of that heaven-sent feminine quality of intuition than other peoples. The autocrat, never mingling with the plain people of all walks of life, finds the spy a necessity.

Spy spies on spy autocracy produces bureaucracy where men rise and fall not by the votes of their fellow citizens but by back stairs intrigue. The German office-holder fears the spies of his rivals. I often said to Germans holding high office during the war, “This strain is breaking you down, all day in your office. Take an afternoon off and come shooting with me.” The invariable answer was, “I cannot the others would learn it from their spies and would spread the report that I neglect business!”

While in Spain I met the then Premier, Count Romanones, a man of great talent and impressive personality. He told me of the finding of a quantity of high explosives, marked by a little buoy, in one of the secluded bays of the coast. And that day a German had been arrested who had mysteriously appeared at a Spanish port dressed as a workman. The workman took a first class passage to Madrid, went to the best hotel and bought a complete outfit of fine clothes. Undoubtedly the high explosive as well as the mysterious German had been landed from a German submarine. Whether the explosive was destined as a depot for submarines or was to help overturn the Spanish government was hard to guess, but Count Romanones was worried over the activity of the German agents in Spain.

It has been very easy for German agents in America to communicate with Germany through this submarine post from Spain to Germany, the letters from America being sent to Cuba and thence on Spanish boats to Spain.

At all times since the war the Germans have had a submarine post running direct from Germany to Spain. Shortly after our arrival in Spain Mrs. Gerard received mysteriously a letter written by a friend of hers, a German Baroness, in Berlin. This letter had undoubtedly been sent through the very efficient German spy system.

Sometime in 1915 a German soldier, in uniform, speaking perfect English, called one day at the Embassy. He said that his name was Bode and that he had at one time worked for my father-in-law, the late Marcus Daly. Of course, we had no means of verifying his statements and Mrs. Gerard did not remember any one of that name or recall Bode personally. He said that he was fighting on the East front and that he had a temporary leave of absence. I gave him some money and later we sent him packages of food and tobacco to the front, but never received any acknowledgment.

In Madrid one of my assistants, Frank Hall, while walking through the street, ran across Bode, who was fashionably attired. His calling cards stated that he was a mining engineer from Los Angeles, California. He told Hall a most extraordinary fairy story, saying that he had been captured by the Russians on the East front and sent to Siberia, that from Siberia he had escaped to China and from there he had gradually worked his way back to America and thence to Spain.

Of course, without any definite information on the subject it is impossible to say exactly what he was doing in Spain. But I am sure that it is far more likely he had landed from a German submarine on the coast of Spain and that he was posing as an American mining engineer for a particular purpose.

I told certain people in Spain about Bode and of his intention to visit the mining districts of Spain where numbers of men are employed. Bode must have suspected that I had given information about him, for Hall and I received several postcards of a threatening character, evidently from him.

My cables to and from the State Department passed through our legation at Copenhagen, and, of course, if the Germans knew our cipher these messages were read by them. On special occasions I made use of a super-cipher the key to which I kept in a safe in my bedroom and which only one secretary could use. The files of cipher cables sent and received were kept in a large safe in the Embassy. But before leaving Germany, knowing the Germans as I did, and particularly what they had done in other countries and to other diplomats, knowing how easy it would be for them to burglarise the safe after we left, when the Spaniards and Dutch were out of the building at night, I tossed all these despatches as well as the code books into a big furnace fire. Commander Gherardi and Secretary Hugh Wilson stood by and personally saw that the last scrap was burned. Of course, copies of all the cables are in the State Department.

German spies are adepts at opening bags, steaming letters all the old tricks. The easiest way to baffle them is to write nothing that cannot be published to the world.

For a long time after the beginning of war I was too busy to write the weekly report of official gossip usually sent home by diplomats. I suppose the Germans searched our courier bags for such a report vainly. Anyway, its absence finally got on the nerves of Zimmermann so much that one day he blurted out, “Don’t you ever write reports to your Government?”

Sealed letters are opened by spies as follows:

by inserting a pencil or small round object in the envelope, steamed a little, if necessary; the envelope is opened at the end flap and the contents pulled out without disturbing the seal, the contents are then read, put in their place again, the end flap re-inserted, a little gum used and the envelope is as intact as before.

The only safe way to seal an envelope is thus:

Even then a clever spy can open the letter, read the contents and seal it again. This is done by cutting through the seals with a hot razor the divided seals are then united by pressing the hot razor against each side of the cut and then pressing the two parts of the cut seal together. This is, however, a very delicate operation and doesn’t always work.

From the outbreak of war we sent and received our official mail through England, and couriers carried it between Berlin and London through Holland via Flushing and Tilbury.

On account of the great volume of correspondence between Ambassador Page and myself on the affairs of German prisoners in England and English prisoners in Germany, there were many pouches every week. These were leather mail bags opened only by duplicate keys kept in London and Berlin and, for the American mail, in Berlin and Washington. Our couriers did their best to keep the numerous bags in their sight during the long journey but on many occasions our couriers were separated, I am sure with malicious purpose, from their bags by the German railway authorities and on some occasions the bags not recovered for days.

Undoubtedly at this time the Germans opened and looked over the contents of the bags. Later in the war our courier while on a Dutch mail boat, running between Flushing and England, was twice captured with the boat by a German warship and taken into Zeebrugge. Undoubtedly here, too, the bags were secretly opened and our uncoded despatches and letters read.

German spies were most annoying in Havana and one of them, a large dark man, followed me about at a distance of only six feet, with his eyes glued on the small bag which I carried from a thick strap hanging around my shoulder. I brought it from Germany in that way. I never let it out of my hands or sight.

What was in that bag? Among other things were the original telegrams written by the Kaiser in his own handwriting, facsimiles of which appear in my earlier book, “My Four Years in Germany,” and the treaty which the Germans tried to get me to sign while they held me as a prisoner. Under the terms they proposed the German ships interned in America were to have the right in case of war, to sail for Germany under a safe conduct to be obtained from the Allies by the United States. Somewhat of a treaty! And quite a new, bright and original thought by some one in the Foreign Office or German Admiralty. There were also in this mysterious bag many other matters of interest that may some day see the light.

Poisonous propaganda and spying are the twin offspring of Kaiserism.

There is in Mexico, for instance, one force that never sleeps, the German propaganda. It is the same method as that used by the Teutons in every country, the purchase or rental of newspaper properties, bribing public men and officers of the army and the insidious use of Germans who are engaged in commerce. This propaganda is backed by enormous sums of money appropriated by the German government which directs how all its officers and agents, high and low, shall participate in the campaign.

In the long run a paid propaganda always fails. It is like paying money to blackmailers. The blackmailer who has once received money becomes so insatiable that even the Bank of England will not satisfy him in the end. Sometimes the newspapers which are not bought, but are equally corrupt, become vehement in their denunciation of the country making the propaganda in the hope of being bought and in the hope that their bribe money will be in proportion to their hostility. Corrupted public men who are not bribed often become sternly virtuous and denunciatory with a similar hope. Those who have received the wages of shame, on the other hand, become more insistent in their demands, crying, “Give! Give!” like the daughter of the horse-leech.

The blows of war must be struck quickly. Delays are dangerous and the temporary paralysis of one country by propaganda may mean the loss of the war. The United States has been at a great disadvantage because our officials have not had the authority, the means or the money to fight the German propaganda with effective educational campaigns, both offensive and defensive.

Bernstorff in this country disposed of enormous sums for the purpose of moulding American public opinion. I, in Berlin, was without one cent with which to place America’s side before the German people. It is a conflict of two systems. In Berlin I did not even have money to pay private detectives and on the rare occasions when I used them as, for instance to find out who was connected with the so-called American organisation, the League of Truth, which was engaged in a violent propaganda against America inside Germany, I was obliged to bear the expense personally.

South of the Rio Grande the Germans are working against us, doing their best to prejudice the Mexicans against the United States, playing upon old hatreds and creating new ones and, in the meantime, by their purchase of properties and of mines creating a situation that will constitute for us in the future a most difficult and dangerous problem.

The Germans cannot understand why we do not take advantage of conditions in Mexico in order to conquer and hold that unfortunate country. They could not believe that we were actuated by a spirit of idealism and that we were patiently suffering much in order really to help Mexico. They could not believe that we were waiting in order to convince not only Mexico but the other States of Central America and the great friendly republics of South America, that it was not our policy to use the dissensions and weakness of our neighbours to gain territory.

On one occasion before the war I and several other Ambassadors were dining with the Kaiser and after dinner the conversation turned to the strange sights to be seen in America. One of the Ambassadors, I think it was Cambon, said that he had seen in America whole houses being moved along the roads, something of a novelty to European eyes where the houses, constructed of brick and stone, cannot be transported from place to place like our wooden frame house. The Emperor jokingly remarked: “Yes, I am sure that the Americans are moving their houses. They are moving them down towards the Mexican border.”