Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum Page B
Authors: Howard Blum
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throughout the western hemisphere. The men in Room 40 now had the key to open stacks of previously locked top-secret diplomatic intercepts.
THE TROUBLE WITH SECRETS, THOUGH, is that they lose a good deal of their value once they are revealed. They are like capital that is to be hoarded, appreciated, but not spent. If the enemy knows you’re reading his mail, he’ll stop posting letters. The door to even greater revelations will be nailed shut.
But the information Room 40 was gathering was too consequential to ignore. Lives were at stake. The course of the war, it could be argued with convincing reason, could be affected. Something had to be done.
This was the dilemma that weighed heavily on the man known throughout Whitehall simply as C. This single letter with its magisterial, intentionally dramatic brevity was the code name of Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the head of London’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or, to those with higher clearance, MI6), then operating under the War Office as M11c. The cables Room 40 had deciphered revealed Abteilung IIIB’s activities in America.
It was intelligence that, if shared with President Wilson, could help nudge an enraged America into war on the Allies’ side. Or its disclosure could alert Wilhelmstrasse, and put an abrupt end to Britain’s ability to read Germany’s secrets.
C weighed the alternatives. In the end he wrote out a carefully crafted message by hand; signed it, as was his custom, in green ink with the letter C ; and then ordered that it be flash-wired to “Head, Section V.”
Chapter 16
Captain Guy Gaunt, CMG, RN, the British naval attaché to Washington who also served as the head of Section V.
(Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland)
G uy Gaunt was the head of Section V, and he was also the unidentified man with the military bearing and the raffish mustache sitting that morning in the commissioner’s office.
Gaunt had been born in Australia. His family was comfortable and distinguished—a brother an admiral, a sister a novelist of some reputation. And Gaunt had lived his own adventures, leading a ragtag native fighting force in the jungles of Samoa that became celebrated as “Gaunt’s Brigade,” and then going on to command battleships and cruisers in the Royal Navy. As war clouds darkened European skies, Captain Gaunt had been sent to America. His official title was British naval attaché, and he was given an impressive suite of rooms in the embassy in Washington. But the title and office were bits of cover stretched to disguise his real job. Working out of the consulate office in downtown Manhattan at 44 Whitehall Street, he ran Britain’s spy network in America.
It was Gaunt who had received C’s memo. While careful not to reveal or even hint that the German codes had been broken, the secret service head had established in alarming detail that the German secret service was directing a campaign of sabotage against America.
As ordered, Gaunt promptly shared this intelligence with his liaison in the Wilson administration, Franklin Polk.
A DESCENDANT OF THE ELEVENTH president, another Groton old boy (although unlike the two policemen he had gone on to Yale), Polk was a former Wall Street lawyer who now worked as a counselor at the State Department. The president had also—in a deliberately informal way, since the whole notion of spies struck Congress as more appropriate for decadent European states with their histories of intrigues—selected him to coordinate the nation’s nascent security operations.
It was Polk who had to make the decision about what, if anything, to do with Gaunt’s extraordinary intelligence. The information, he recognized with a cautious, lawyerly prudence, remained unconfirmed. No names were provided, no operational specifics offered. Yet the implications of a secret war being fought by Germany against the nation, and on American soil no less, were staggering. It was an attack on the
THE TROUBLE WITH SECRETS, THOUGH, is that they lose a good deal of their value once they are revealed. They are like capital that is to be hoarded, appreciated, but not spent. If the enemy knows you’re reading his mail, he’ll stop posting letters. The door to even greater revelations will be nailed shut.
But the information Room 40 was gathering was too consequential to ignore. Lives were at stake. The course of the war, it could be argued with convincing reason, could be affected. Something had to be done.
This was the dilemma that weighed heavily on the man known throughout Whitehall simply as C. This single letter with its magisterial, intentionally dramatic brevity was the code name of Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the head of London’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or, to those with higher clearance, MI6), then operating under the War Office as M11c. The cables Room 40 had deciphered revealed Abteilung IIIB’s activities in America.
It was intelligence that, if shared with President Wilson, could help nudge an enraged America into war on the Allies’ side. Or its disclosure could alert Wilhelmstrasse, and put an abrupt end to Britain’s ability to read Germany’s secrets.
C weighed the alternatives. In the end he wrote out a carefully crafted message by hand; signed it, as was his custom, in green ink with the letter C ; and then ordered that it be flash-wired to “Head, Section V.”
Chapter 16
Captain Guy Gaunt, CMG, RN, the British naval attaché to Washington who also served as the head of Section V.
(Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland)
G uy Gaunt was the head of Section V, and he was also the unidentified man with the military bearing and the raffish mustache sitting that morning in the commissioner’s office.
Gaunt had been born in Australia. His family was comfortable and distinguished—a brother an admiral, a sister a novelist of some reputation. And Gaunt had lived his own adventures, leading a ragtag native fighting force in the jungles of Samoa that became celebrated as “Gaunt’s Brigade,” and then going on to command battleships and cruisers in the Royal Navy. As war clouds darkened European skies, Captain Gaunt had been sent to America. His official title was British naval attaché, and he was given an impressive suite of rooms in the embassy in Washington. But the title and office were bits of cover stretched to disguise his real job. Working out of the consulate office in downtown Manhattan at 44 Whitehall Street, he ran Britain’s spy network in America.
It was Gaunt who had received C’s memo. While careful not to reveal or even hint that the German codes had been broken, the secret service head had established in alarming detail that the German secret service was directing a campaign of sabotage against America.
As ordered, Gaunt promptly shared this intelligence with his liaison in the Wilson administration, Franklin Polk.
A DESCENDANT OF THE ELEVENTH president, another Groton old boy (although unlike the two policemen he had gone on to Yale), Polk was a former Wall Street lawyer who now worked as a counselor at the State Department. The president had also—in a deliberately informal way, since the whole notion of spies struck Congress as more appropriate for decadent European states with their histories of intrigues—selected him to coordinate the nation’s nascent security operations.
It was Polk who had to make the decision about what, if anything, to do with Gaunt’s extraordinary intelligence. The information, he recognized with a cautious, lawyerly prudence, remained unconfirmed. No names were provided, no operational specifics offered. Yet the implications of a secret war being fought by Germany against the nation, and on American soil no less, were staggering. It was an attack on the
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