My Adventures as a German Secret Agent
9781465683557
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
On March 29th, 1916, the steamer Finland was warped into its Hudson River dock and I hurried down the gang plank. I was not alone. Agents of the United States Department of Justice had met me at Quarantine; and a man from Scotland Yard was there also—a man who had attended me sedulously since, barely two weeks before, I had been released under rather unusual circumstances from Lewes prison in England; the last of four English prisons in which I had spent fifteen months in solitary confinement waiting for the day of my execution. My friend from Scotland Yard left me very shortly; soon after, I was testifying for the United States Government against Capt. Hans Tauscher, husband of Mme. Johanna Gadski, the diva. Tauscher, American agent of the Krupps and of the German Government, was charged with complicity in a plot to blow up the Welland Canal in Canada during the first month of the Great War. During the course of the trial it was shown that von Papen and others (including myself) had entered into a conspiracy to violate the neutrality of the United States. I had led the expedition against the Welland Canal and I was telling everything I knew about it. Doubtless you remember the newspapers of the day. You will remember how, at that time, the magnitude of the German plot against the neutrality of the United States became finally apparent. You will remember how, in connection with my exposure came the exposure of von Igel, of Rintelen, of the German Consul-General at San Francisco, Bopp, and many others. With all of these men I was familiar. In the activities of some of them I was implicated. It was I, as I have said, who planned the details of the Welland Canal plot. I shall tell the true story of these activities later on. But first let me tell the story of how I became to be concerned in these plots—and to do that I must go back over many years; I must tell how I first became a member of the Kaiser’s Secret Diplomatic Force (to give it a name) and incidentally I shall describe for the first time the real workings of that force. I have been in and out of the Kaiser’s web for ten years. I have served him faithfully in many capacities and in many places—all over Europe, in Mexico, even in the United States. I served the German Government as long as I believed it to be representing the interests of my countrymen. But from the moment that I became convinced that the men who made up the Government—the Hohenzollerns, the Junkers and the bureaucrats—were anxious merely to preserve their own power, even at the expense of Germany itself, my attitude toward them changed. That is why I write this book—and why I shall tell what I know of the aims and ambitions of these men—enemies of Germany as well as of the rest of the world. I was not a spy; nor was I a secret service agent. I was, rather, a secret diplomatic agent. Let me add that there is a nice distinction between the three. A secret diplomatic agent is a man who directs spies, who studies their reports, who pieces together various bits of information, and who, when he has the fabric complete, personally makes his report to the highest authority or carries that particular plan to its desired conclusion. His work and his status are of various sorts. Unlike the spy, he is a user, not a getter, of information. He is a free lance, responsible only to the Foreign Office; a plotter; an unofficial intermediary in many negotiations; and frequently he differs from an accredited diplomatic representative, only in that his activities and his office are essentially secret. Obviously men of this type must be highly trained and reliable; and their constant association with men of authority makes it necessary that they, themselves, be men of breeding and education. But above all, they must possess the courage that shrinks at no danger, and a devotion, a patriotism that knows no scruples.
