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

told, “Proceed to New York and place yourself at the disposal of Captain Fritz von Papen.”
     
    HE MET WITH VON PAPEN in the offices at 11 Broadway. They sat opposite one another in comfortable leather seats in a white-walled room so devoid of decoration that von der Goltz was convinced the military attaché had just moved in. With customary earnestness, von Papen spent no time on banter but launched straight into a lecture.
    “Washington’s neutrality is a fraud,” he declared. “America allows arms and food to be shipped to the Allies while our ships remain victims of the British blockade. J. P. Morgan and the other Wall Street bankers lend millions to England, France, and Russia. The American heart is with England, and it will be only a matter of time before their soldiers are fighting side by side with the British.”
    He had a bold plan, one that, he predicted with an ambitious soldier’s vanity, would favorably influence the course of the war. A small team led by von der Goltz would dynamite the Welland Canal. The target, he explained, was only a short distance across the border from Buffalo, New York, joining Lakes Ontario and Erie, and was a major waterway for Canadian shipping.
    “It is comparatively simple,” von Papen said, brimming with a novice controller’s irrepressible confidence. “If we blow up the links of their canal, the main railway lines of Canada and the principal grain elevators will be crippled. Immediately we shall destroy one of England’s chief sources of food supply as well as hamper the transportation of war matériel.”
    “It can be done,” von der Goltz agreed.
     
    AT FIRST VON DER GOLTZ was gung ho, eager to once again to be serving the Fatherland. The profession of espionage, of living the lies that shape a covert life, was familiar, enjoyable sport. Using the alias Bridgeman H. Taylor, he went on von Papen’s instructions to Baltimore to recruit men from the German ships docked in the Patapsco River.
    He found three volunteers, but these sailors, he soon came to realize, possessed neither the steady nerves nor the deep-rooted determination of clandestine saboteurs. They were full of bravado, especially after a night’s drinking. But with the hard objectivity of a man who had learned his sinister trade in Nicolai’s academy, von der Goltz realized that they couldn’t be counted on when the time came to put their lives on the line.
    He had no choice, though; an agent mounts the operation with the resources available. Resigned, he led the three men back to New York. Von Papen had three more recruits waiting, also bored sailors, volunteers taken off interned German boats in New York Harbor.
    Von der Goltz wearily accepted them onto his team without protest. But in his heart he felt the outcome was clear: this would be a suicide mission.
    One hundred pounds of dynamite were picked up by motorboat from a DuPont barge lying in the Jersey flats near the Statue of Liberty. There were two cases, each weighing about fifty pounds. The boat made its way across the Hudson to a dock on 146th Street. From there, a waiting car carried the explosives downtown to a three-story brownstone at 123 West Fifteenth Street.
    This was the network’s safe house. Funded by Albert, it was run by Martha Held, a large, bosomy woman somewhere north of fifty who decades earlier had been married to a count and had sung at opera houses throughout Europe. At Martha’s, there’d be mountains of food and rivers of beer, and night after night, the house would be crowded with a raucous assortment of the kaiser’s diplomats, covert operatives, army reservists, stranded seamen, and freelance thugs.
    And Martha provided the women: the house on West Fifteenth Street was also a bordello. Whorehouses had been a long-running operational cover favored by Abteilung IIIB. Spies and whores, the logic went, were natural accomplices; after all, both practiced professions grounded in lies. And in a world where prudent