Let the scene shift from New York—whose defensive organization has been outlined—to the national judicial center at Washington, the seat of our intelligence system and of those courts of law which have in charge the national affairs. There, for many months, a few men have sat and watched pour into their offices such proofs of human perfidy and depravity as can never have been paralleled in the most Machiavellian days of the Dark Ages.
The daily press of the United States acted under a voluntary censorship during the war, even while it saw pass by such news as never before had it seen in America. Now and again something of this would break which obviously was public property and ought to be known—the notorious transactions of von Bernstorff, von Papen, Dr. Albert, Boy-Ed, Bolo; such crimes as the blowing up of the international bridge in Maine; the mysterious fires and explosions whose regularity attracted attention; the diplomatic revelations regarding Dumba and Dernburg and their colleagues, which finally resulted in the dismissal of the clique of high German officials whose creed had been one of diplomatic and personal dishonor.
The stories of German attempts to control several New York newspapers; their efforts to buy or subsidize some thirty other journals in all parts of the country; the well-known subsidizing of certain writers to spread propaganda in the press—all these things also necessarily got abroad to such an extent that the United States Government could not fail to take cognizance of it. At length, charges came out linking up a Washington daily with wealthy commercial interests of a supposedly pro-German nature, and a great deal of acrimonious comment appeared in all parts of the country. Washington resolved to investigate these charges. The process took the form, in the late fall of 1918, of the appointment of a sub-committee of the great Senate Judiciary Committee, which popularly was known as the Overman Committee.
The work of this committee, which summoned before it officers of the Attorney General’s establishment in New York, agents of the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, of Military and Naval Intelligence in Washington, and all the larger figures of the accused or suspected persons implicated in what now had become a wide-reaching national scandal, was continued over many weeks. The proceedings were made public regularly, and at last the readers of America began to get, at first hand, authentic ideas of what menace had been at our doors and inside our doors. It was before this Overman Committee that many of the great New York cases in which A. P. L. assisted passed to their final review.
Perhaps the most important single witness called before this Senate committee was Mr. A. Bruce Bielaski, Chief of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice at Washington. Mr. Bielaski was on the stand for days at a time, and his testimony came as a distinct shock to those of us who heretofore had known little or nothing about the way in which our covert forces of espionage were combating those of Germany. It will not be needful to follow the records of the committee from day to day throughout the long period of its sittings, but some of the more important revelations made by Mr. Bielaski first may be brought to notice.
It was brought into the record, for publication later by the State Department, that there was a regular system of secret messages between Count von Bernstorff of the Imperial German Embassy at Washington, and the Berlin Foreign Office, by way of South America and Stockholm. All this time the Imperial German Ambassador was posing as a great friend of America, while in reality he was the chief of the German spy system in America—an example of all that a nobleman should not be.
It was shown by Mr. Bielaski that the German consul in Chicago, Reiswitz, suggested as long ago as 1915 that German interests ought to buy the Wright aeroplane factories in Dayton, Ohio, in an attempt to stop the shipment of aeroplanes to the Allies. Something stopped the shipment—let us suppose that it was not the efficiency of Germany so much as our own inefficiency, deplorable as that admission must be.
Nothing came of this attempt, nor of the attempt to control the Bridgeport Projectile Works, in any very conclusive and satisfactory fashion for Germany. A year later von Bernstorff begins to complain that German propaganda has not been producing much result. He cuts free from the German publication, “Fair Play,” and declares that he would be glad to be well quit of George Sylvester Viereck’s “Fatherland.” He asks his imperial government to give him $50,000 more, with which he would like to start a monthly magazine in the United States. This was the beginning of those general revelations which exposed alike the clumsiness of German diplomacy, and the endeavor of German espionage as against our own.
Reiswitz was declared by Mr. Bielaski to have advised the continuance of the “American Embargo Conference,” which was set on foot to create opposition to our shipment of munitions to the Allies. He signified that this ought to be used as an influence to swing German voters in presidential elections. Mr. Bielaski brought into the record the “Citizens’ Committee for Food Shipments,” which was supported by Dr. Edmund von Mach of Cambridge. It had been organized in the home of a prominent New York citizen.
There was brought in the record also the name of a newspaper correspondent—more is the pity for that—who had letters from Count von Bernstorff and Captain von Papen, military attache, declaring that this man was in the service of Germany and Austria. The syndicate employing this man, as is well known, cancelled his contract as soon as his real character and his pro-German attitude were revealed.