But Scheele himself, now grown old—for he was a major when he came to America twenty-five years ago—is to-day a pleasant man of genial manner. He used to visit the home of one of his guards—to whom he stuck very close in his walks on the street, the guard having told him he would kill him on his first step toward escape—and there he always was kind to the children. “He was such a nice man,” said the guard’s wife—“so courtly.” He is a very egotistical man, and it requires a certain playing up to his vanity to get him to talk freely. Yet he has talked freely, and has given much valuable information to the United States. The men who accompany him in his city walks would dearly love to drop him out a high window or see him try to escape. They do not love him.
But Scheele loves himself. Asked one time as to some statement he had made, he took offense at suspicion of his veracity. He, twenty-five years a spy in America, a state’s-evidence man at last against his original country which he thus betrayed in turn, at this imputation slapped himself on the chest and said: “On my honor as a German officer!” Great God!
In his statements he was not often found tripping. For instance, when he said that 200,000 rifles for German revolutionists were stored in a German club in New York, its searchers did find evidence that rifles had earlier been stored there, but later removed. Scheele was taken from Washington to New York to point out these rifles. He would not go with less than four men as a guard. He is always afraid some German will kill him. Oh, yes, he is still alive. The secret men of the United States know where he is. He can be seen. He will talk. He is an elderly, kindly-looking man now—a man who speaks of his “honor as a German officer!”
The story of Scheele’s ferreting out is of itself a strange and absorbing tale, which shows how our own men were on their guard. To begin with, his cigar bombs did not work infallibly—perhaps the motion of the ship would slop the acid away from the tin partition so it would not cut through quite on schedule. One or two bombs were found on shipboard. One or two were found unexploded in the coal when ships were unloading at Bordeaux. The bombs were traced back to New York. Dock laborers had been bribed to put them aboard ships sometimes—and sometimes were ashamed to do so and dropped them into the water instead. Men who can decipher code can run a trail like this. Scheele soon was located.
But Scheele had fled long before. Why? Whither? The Imperial German Government knew Scheele was going to be caught. The large spies of the German embassy promised to pick Scheele up at Cuba—where he had taken temporary residence under the practically German custody of a Spaniard who kept him in a castle which also was a prison. And so it came to pass that when the embassadorial train of the Imperial German Government was kicked out of America and all these big spies were named openly, and all the news of that big spy system began to break, von Bernstorff, von Papen and company sailed for Germany—but they did not take any chances. They did not stop at Cuba.
Scheele was abandoned by his people—he was an actual prisoner in Cuba. He was bitter. He might talk under a third degree. An A. P. L. man of New York Division, Richmond Levering, now Major Levering, U. S. A., went to Cuba, got access to Scheele, took him to Key West, took him back again to Cuba—but took him back to an actual prison. Then, finding he had no place in the world, and no friend whose protection he could not buy, he sold his “honor of a German officer” to the United States, and in return, he is still alive, having paid as the price of life the full story, so far as he knows it, of the German Imperial spy system from Wilhelmstrasse to Brooklyn Bridge.
And there you have a spy, a real one, a man who planned murder and arson on the high seas, death to unknown hundreds of men, women and children; the man who invented the mustard gas that tortured and killed our boys and those of our allies on the line in France, and whose perverted intellect did none may know what else of subtle crime “on the honor of a German officer.”
Scheele made many revelations which never heretofore have been made public, because they were humiliating and shocking to us, and showed how completely we had been befooled for years. He said: “We knew all you had, everything, and we used all you had. You invented the submarine—and we used it, not you. You invented the airplane—and we used it, not you.” (Which is true, as our boys in the Argonne battle would testify.) “If you had had new gases, we’d have got them. We had four men for years in your Patent Office, and you never knew it. We knew every invention useful to us. We had a man in your army secrets, one in your navy.”
“But how could you do such things—how could you have men inside of our Government in that way?” interrupted the man to whom he was unburdening himself.
“Good God!” said Scheele, “we’ve got them in your Congress, haven’t we?”