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 B

combination of charm and diligence that made him popular among the Washington crowd when he took up his diplomatic post in 1913. When war came in 1914, he too set up his office in New York City, at 11 Broadway, close to the New York Customs House. And like von Papen, he was within easy walking distance of Heinrich Albert’s counting house.
    New York City was the perfect North American front line for the Germans’ secret war. With a population of 5.3 million people, it was the largest city in the world. Better still, many of the 12 million immigrants who had landed on Ellis Island between 1900 and 1915 stayed where they’d arrived. About one million residents of New York City were foreign born, largely Irish and German, with no love lost for England.
    And the city itself was a marvel of modernity. At 7.30 p.m. on 24 June 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed an electric switch in the White House, and on the corner of Broadway and Park Row in Manhattan, 200 miles up the road, the 80,000 lights of the new 60-storey Woolworth Building blazed out to ships 40 miles out to sea that the world’s largest skyscraper was open for business in a city whose new epicenter – Times Square – called itself the crossroads of the world. Ezra Pound, the American poet then living in London, visited the city and was moved to remark, ‘No urban nights are like nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on magical powers. Squares and squares of flame set and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled the stars down to our will.’ With 500 miles of shoreline, the city’s five boroughs were connected to each other and the rest of the country by ferry, tunnel and bridges spanning a harbour that was the busiest in the world, funnelling goods into the American heartland and out to the world beyond.
    Von Papen’s first instinct, however, was to look further afield and attack Canada, which, as a self-governing dominion of Great Britain, had gone to war along with Britain and was now a vital source of soldiers and supplies for the war in Europe, sending 30,000 soldiers to England in October 1914 – 5,000 more than London had rather extravagantly hoped for in such a short time. Canada’s military training centre at Valcartier, Quebec, 500 miles north of New York City, was within easy striking distance, but for the German saboteurs in the USA, the entire country, as a key part of the British Empire’s war machine, was a target.
    The Canadian attack plan had come to von Papen via a German soldier of fortune named Holst von der Goltz, who had attained the rank of major while serving with Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army in Mexico. The baby-faced von der Goltz was really Franz Wachendorf, born in Koblenz in 1884, who already boasted a shadowy career in intelligence, having stolen a document from a Mexican finance minister he had chloroformed in Paris. The purloined document revealed a top-secret agreement between Japan and Mexico, which von der Goltz then leaked to the US in February 1911, who responded by sending their fleet to the Gulf of Mexico, and 20,000 troops – two-thirds of the US army at the time – to the Mexican border.
    The following year von der Goltz was in Mexico too, fighting the revolution. That adventure ended once Germany was at war. He heeded the call for all German soldiers and reservists located outside Europe to muster in the United States, and headed to New York to pay a call on Franz von Papen.
    On 22 August 1914, von der Goltz appeared at 11 Broadway, and in a little room in the Imperial German consulate he and von Papen hatched a plan to strike at Britain through its dominion of Canada. Von Papen produced a letter he had received from a German who worked on a farm in Oregon suggesting that the Germans should attack Canada’s Great Lakes cities with machine guns mounted on motorboats. The two men agreed that the plan