Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum
Authors: Howard Blum
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married. That, and never having found a woman who seemed more important than his work.
Tom did not know the other man seated across from the commissioner. He had a soft brown mustache that curled up toward his cheeks like the wings of a bird in flight, and he sat straight in his chair with a soldier’s rigid formality.
Woods directed Tom to the remaining leather chair positioned in front of his desk, but even before Tom sat, the commissioner offered an apology.
You were right, he told Tom.
AT THE POLICE TRAINING ACADEMY, detectives were taught not to guess, but rather to be patient, to roll up their sleeves and chase after clues until they led to the solution. Induction, the instructors lectured, was the time-tested method for solving crimes: ascertain the facts, and then follow them like signposts to the only possible destination. Hunches, extrapolations, inferences—those were the lazy sleuth’s dubious shortcuts. Even worse, they’d never stand up in court.
It was a cautious, methodical approach that, for his nearly two decades on the job, had served Tom well. But recently he’d strayed from this careful philosophy. There was, he felt with a shiver of concern, no time to lose.
“Every person was seeing events of unheard violence and magnitude pass him pell-mell, giving no warning,” he would say in partial explanation for his impetuosity. Merchant ships were bursting into flames not long after they left New York Harbor. Chemical and munitions factories from New Jersey to California were rocked by fatal explosions. It was a time of swirling confusion and building mysteries.
After each new act of violence, theories took shape and suspicions flourished. Were unions the culprits? Anarchists? Antiwar activists? Yet there was no evidence to connect any group, any individual, to this campaign of destruction.
In fact, there was no proof that the events were deliberate. Perhaps the fires and explosions were accidents, a string of coincidences precipitated by a slippery disregard for safety as greedy American shippers and factory owners hurried to make a profit from the war in Europe.
Yet all along, Tom, the bomb squad veteran, knew. “There was a maddening certainty about it all,” he had decided. In his policeman’s mind, “it took no superhuman amount of reasoning to combine the abnormal destruction of property in New York with the strong suspicion of German activity.”
But he had no proof. Not even a single clue. “The sum total of these reports was,” he conceded with a gloomy resignation, “nothing.”
Nevertheless, Tom, after weighing his options, had gone to see the commissioner. On that occasion, about four months before, he had walked in the front door and with no less directness shared his suspicions. Tom began by acknowledging that he had no facts to bolster his theory, only instincts forged by two decades on the job. But he was convinced that just as the Brescia Circle bombings were politically motivated, so were the shipboard fires and munitions plant explosions. He suspected that German agents, either American sympathizers or possibly even members of the kaiser’s secret service, were responsible. He asked Woods’s permission to begin an investigation.
Woods refused. For one thing, he didn’t trust Tunney’s motives. Perhaps the captain’s unspoken intention was to unearth a scandal that would help push America into the war on the side of the Allies. It wasn’t the role of the New York Police Department to manipulate foreign policy, especially when the department’s activities might very well be contrary to the official government position of strict neutrality.
And even if Tunney’s allegations had some merit, Woods viewed this sort of investigation as a federal matter, something the War Department should pursue. His men chased criminals, not spies.
But he didn’t share all these thoughts with Tunney. He simply ordered Tom to put the matter aside. Tom and his men were expressly
Tom did not know the other man seated across from the commissioner. He had a soft brown mustache that curled up toward his cheeks like the wings of a bird in flight, and he sat straight in his chair with a soldier’s rigid formality.
Woods directed Tom to the remaining leather chair positioned in front of his desk, but even before Tom sat, the commissioner offered an apology.
You were right, he told Tom.
AT THE POLICE TRAINING ACADEMY, detectives were taught not to guess, but rather to be patient, to roll up their sleeves and chase after clues until they led to the solution. Induction, the instructors lectured, was the time-tested method for solving crimes: ascertain the facts, and then follow them like signposts to the only possible destination. Hunches, extrapolations, inferences—those were the lazy sleuth’s dubious shortcuts. Even worse, they’d never stand up in court.
It was a cautious, methodical approach that, for his nearly two decades on the job, had served Tom well. But recently he’d strayed from this careful philosophy. There was, he felt with a shiver of concern, no time to lose.
“Every person was seeing events of unheard violence and magnitude pass him pell-mell, giving no warning,” he would say in partial explanation for his impetuosity. Merchant ships were bursting into flames not long after they left New York Harbor. Chemical and munitions factories from New Jersey to California were rocked by fatal explosions. It was a time of swirling confusion and building mysteries.
After each new act of violence, theories took shape and suspicions flourished. Were unions the culprits? Anarchists? Antiwar activists? Yet there was no evidence to connect any group, any individual, to this campaign of destruction.
In fact, there was no proof that the events were deliberate. Perhaps the fires and explosions were accidents, a string of coincidences precipitated by a slippery disregard for safety as greedy American shippers and factory owners hurried to make a profit from the war in Europe.
Yet all along, Tom, the bomb squad veteran, knew. “There was a maddening certainty about it all,” he had decided. In his policeman’s mind, “it took no superhuman amount of reasoning to combine the abnormal destruction of property in New York with the strong suspicion of German activity.”
But he had no proof. Not even a single clue. “The sum total of these reports was,” he conceded with a gloomy resignation, “nothing.”
Nevertheless, Tom, after weighing his options, had gone to see the commissioner. On that occasion, about four months before, he had walked in the front door and with no less directness shared his suspicions. Tom began by acknowledging that he had no facts to bolster his theory, only instincts forged by two decades on the job. But he was convinced that just as the Brescia Circle bombings were politically motivated, so were the shipboard fires and munitions plant explosions. He suspected that German agents, either American sympathizers or possibly even members of the kaiser’s secret service, were responsible. He asked Woods’s permission to begin an investigation.
Woods refused. For one thing, he didn’t trust Tunney’s motives. Perhaps the captain’s unspoken intention was to unearth a scandal that would help push America into the war on the side of the Allies. It wasn’t the role of the New York Police Department to manipulate foreign policy, especially when the department’s activities might very well be contrary to the official government position of strict neutrality.
And even if Tunney’s allegations had some merit, Woods viewed this sort of investigation as a federal matter, something the War Department should pursue. His men chased criminals, not spies.
But he didn’t share all these thoughts with Tunney. He simply ordered Tom to put the matter aside. Tom and his men were expressly
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