Free Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum

über Alles.” The German foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, went so far as to challenge the American ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, with a provocative threat: “You will find there are five hundred thousand German reservists in your country ready to take up arms for their mother country. . . . The United States will be engaged in a civil war.”
    Gerard, a wealthy New Yorker whose instincts were more combative than diplomatic, shot back, “There are five hundred thousand lampposts in my country and . . . every German residing in the United States who undertakes to take up arms against America will swing from one of those five hundred thousand lampposts.”
    Another source for recruits was America’s large Irish population. It’s a pragmatic axiom of both life and war that any enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Germany was eager to exploit Irish antipathy to Britain’s rule over the Emerald Isle. There were 4.5 million Irish Americans, and the strains of Irish nationalism ran deep. A common enemy, the New York station heads believed, would furnish volunteers for a common cause.
    However, it was President Wilson’s neutrality policy that, in its unintentional way, serendipitously created the most effective sources of manpower. According to the president’s strict interpretation, neutrality meant that any ship docked in the United States at the outbreak of the war would not be allowed to join the hostilities. As a result, East Coast ports were filled with German vessels—merchant ships, luxury liners, steamers—for the duration of the war.
    And more kept coming. From all corners of the Atlantic, German ships at sea raced away from the guns of the mighty British navy and rushed to the safety of American harbors—where they were promptly interned. Within weeks, more than eighty German ships were lined up in an orderly row along the Hudson River docks, all tied together by strong ropes and watched by U.S. Navy patrol boats. It quickly got so crowded that newly arriving German vessels had to be towed across the Hudson to New Jersey.

    German ocean liners interned during the war in Hoboken Harbor, New Jersey.
    (Getty Images)
     
    Along with this flotilla of interned ships traveled a navy of German sailors. An unsuspecting America put no meaningful restrictions on these foreign sailors; they were free to roam about New York, to enjoy their escape from the war. But many of them remained loyal sons of the Fatherland. They were eager to find any opportunity to get back into the fighting.
     
    AS SUMMER TURNED INTO FALL, the network took operational shape with surprising speed. The senior officers finalized their strategies. The talent spotters went off to make their first tentative approaches to recruits. The covert attack against America was ready to be launched. Yet von Bernstorff, perhaps out of caution, perhaps out of a well-bred reluctance to strike against the hospitable country that had been his home for the past six years, hesitated.
    But in the middle of September 1914 an event shook Germany’s confidence so severely, so unexpectedly, that it overrode any previous misgivings. In the stunned aftermath, no rationale for delicacy any longer existed, and wariness rooted in fear became irrelevant.
    The war had turned. Throughout August, column after column of spit-polished German troops had pounded relentlessly forward, hammering their way across France until they were at the outskirts of Paris. Then in one bloody week, as a monstrous offensive proceeded along the Marne River—when the enormity of the dead and maimed falling in a single savage day added up to a city of thirty thousand men, when the German army alone would mourn a staggering 220,000 casualties over seven days of fighting—the war became something entirely different.
    Not only was the vaunted German army pushed into retreat, but it became apparent that the war would not be a short conflict. The fighting would go on and on. The kaiser had sent