Free The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War by James Wyllie, Michael McKinley Page A

Montgomery from Room 40, and brought in Benjamin Faudel-Phillips, a City man.
    The diplomatic code books yielded crucial intelligence concerning communications between Berlin and the German embassy in Madrid, which was acting as a clearing house for messages to their spies in America, where an extensive sabotage operation was being planned: before the code book was discovered, 170 German messages had passed via neutral cables to Count Johann von Bernstorff, the larger-than-life German ambassador in America.
    However, because of the risks of having their ambassador oversee a covert war on US turf, the Germans provided von Bernstorff with plausible deniability in the form of like-minded associates. The German embassy had an executive staff of four, who would in effect become the general command of the German war effort in North America, and have at their disposal an army of lethal patriots and rogues who saw the US financing and supply of the Allied war effort as a legitimate reason to wage war on America.

    Heinrich Albert, the German commercial attaché in the USA and sabotage ‘money man’
    The first was Germany’s commercial attaché in the US, Privy Councillor Dr Heinrich Albert, a 40-year-old lawyer. Albert was paymaster for the German diplomatic corps in the US – and the eventual paymaster to Germany’s espionage and sabotage, holding a massive joint account with Ambassador von Bernstorff at Chase National Bank. He was popular with his American banking colleagues, and conveyed an air of discreet competence despite the vicious duelling scars that creased his face. From his office deep in New York’s financial community, at the Hamburg America Building in Lower Manhattan, Heinrich exerted great influence with New York bankers as a man of prudence and principle. Yet in truth his wartime activities for the Fatherland characterised him, in a later Senate investigation, as ‘the Machiavelli of the whole thing … the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat’.
    The German military attaché in the US was also an aristocrat, Captain Franz von Papen. The eldest son of a wealthy, noble and Catholic landowning family in Westphalia, the 35-year-old von Papen was an officer of an Uhlan cavalry regiment, and had recently finished a stint as a military attendant to the Imperial Palace when he was dispatched as attaché to the United States and Mexico in 1913. Tall, powerfully built and with a sculpted, strong-jawed face that gave him an air of both vigour and sneering arrogance, he, like von Bernstorff, had married money. His wife’s fortune, as the daughter of an Alsatian pottery manufacturer, gave von Papen social standing in Washington DC, which he used to pursue other women for reasons personal and political, though he was more often than not to be found in his redoubt at 60 Wall Street in the heart of New York’s financial district, which became known as the Bureau of the Military Attaché – or more nakedly, the War Intelligence Centre.

    Franz von Papen, Germany’s military attaché in the USA
    Rounding out the quartet was Germany’s naval attaché, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, who had joined the navy at the age of 19 and seen action around the world. He witnessed the brutal American invasion of the Philippines in 1898, and was a secret agent for the Kaiser’s brother shortly before the Boxer War in China, where his mission was to measure the strength of the Chinese navy. Boy-Ed’s origins were more exotically bohemian than those of his von-prefixed colleagues in Germany’s American war office. He was born in the important (and intellectually vibrant) German seaport of Lubbock, on the Baltic coast, where his father was a merchant of Turkish ancestry, and his progressive, intellectual mother was a journalist and novelist who nurtured the career of Thomas Mann, a frequent guest in the Boy-Ed household.
    Tall and built like a rugby prop, Boy-Ed was worldly, well read and funny, with a compelling