THE “LUSITANIA” GOES DOWN
Then the Lusitania was torpedoed. Americans who were connected with von Rintelen’s schemes to ship supplies to Denmark and to buy the Krags, became alarmed over the prospect of war with Germany. They cut off negotiations with him and fearing possible government investigations, they began to talk. Part of the activities of a mysterious German of the name of Meyer and Hansen reached both the Government officials and newspapers. A reporter on the New York Tribune who got a “tip” of the real facts and who hunted for von Rintelen, frightened the German agents from the office of the E. V. Gibbon Company. Steinberg skipped back to Germany disguised as a woman carrying a trunk full of reports showing the necessity of concerted action to prevent the Allies from getting American war materials.
Von Rintelen slipped away to an office in the Woolworth Building. On disclosing something of his schemes to men there, he was quickly ordered out. He moved to the offices, in the Liberty Tower, of Andrew M. Meloy, who had gone to Germany hoping to interest the German authorities in a scheme having the same purpose as von Rintelen’s. In Meloy’s office he posed as E. V. Gates—still retaining the initials of E. V. G. So effective was von Rintelen’s “getaway,” that he was reported to have gone abroad as a secretary. Those newspaper stories again gave von Rintelen cause to chuckle over his cleverness and his elusiveness, and encouraged him to still more reckless projects. He was reporting meantime to Berlin by means of apparently innocuous commercial messages sent by wireless, and also by cablegrams via England and Holland.
Von Rintelen, always scheming to prevent arms and ammunition from going to the Allies, reached into Mexico to use that country as another angle from which to harass the United States. He planned—and this project was a part of his vast campaign—to embroil Mexico and this country in war, or to cause such a jumble of revolutions within the Mexican borders that the United States would be compelled to intervene. He pictured this country in war with Mexico, a mobilization of the regular army and the militia, an assembling of the American fleet. That would require a large part of the output of the munition factories. The horses that were being shipped to the Allies, the arms, the clothing for soldiers, the shoes and the hundreds of other things which American factories were busily turning out, would be required for a large American army moving south of the Rio Grande.