There was a school of instruction for new operatives in this district in which new men are taught the elements of the League work, the elements of espionage laws, and other war measures. They were instructed, also, in the fundamentals of shadow work; the details of the selective service regulations; the principles of law and evidence, and other subjects proper to the activities of the League. There were seven words taught to every operative, applying equally well to complaints and to reports—guide words in investigations. If these seven words were borne in mind at the time of making complaint or investigations, or in writing up the report, an operative would be fairly well assured of embodying the information desired. These words are: “Who,” “Which,” “What,” “Why,” “When,” “How,” and “Witnesses.”
Every care was exercised by the operative not to approach the subject himself or to allow him to know he was being investigated. There were countless Chicago Germans and pro-Germans investigated, ticketed, tabulated, and filed away, who to this day do not know that they ever told anybody anything about themselves. Many of these Prussianized Chicagoans to-day wear heavy frowns and look aggrieved.
In order to save his time, each operative was taught how to use the regular city channels of information. If he got a name without any address, he was taught to go to the nearest telephone directory or city directory. Sometimes a telephone number was known and the name of the party unknown. Reference to the numerical telephone directory sometimes covered this. Sometimes the business of the subject might be known and his address unknown, in which case it might be found by reference to the classified business telephone directory, or the city directory. A subject might be doing business in the city and living in the suburbs. Countless suburban telephone directories were always in the central office for such reference.
In every great city a directory gives a concise arrangement of the personnel of the various departments of the U. S. Government; state and federal officials, their titles, their room numbers, their buildings, can be found in this way. In this way, also, all the officers of the city government can be found; the rooms where the court of this or that judge are located, etc. The state offices, including hospitals, etc., can be found in these directories.
A wide range of useful information concerning the city and its environs was given to novitiate operatives in this Central District. This information was of incalculable benefit to new members of the League when once their active investigating work began. The A. P. L. training school was a very important cog in the Chicago machine, and made it possible for the district to do more work per capita and better work than would otherwise have been possible. Indeed, the training for an operative was not bad training for a newspaper reporter. What is said regarding this work in the Chicago district might apply in very considerable part also to the work in other large communities.
Operatives were obliged to take all sorts of roles. At times they acted as waiters or clerks, and sometimes they impersonated lawbreakers themselves. One of them succeeded in impersonating an I. W. W. so well that at a meeting he was covering he was asked to contribute to the I. W. W. cause—and did so! Another ingratiated himself into the good offices of the I. W. W.’s so well that he was permitted to take notes at one of their meetings with the understanding that he was a newspaper man representing one of their own papers.
The Southwest Division in Chicago is only another corner of darkest Europe. In this section, however, were located a good many foreign-born operatives, who affiliated well in that region and did their work thoroughly until the closing days of the war. Their grist included some curious and interesting cases.
There was, for instance, a certain person called Panco, the Fry Cook, long wanted by the Department of Justice for anarchistic and seditious utterances. The Department had been hunting Panco for months but could not find him. Four Southwest A. P. L. operatives went after Panco. Two of them became members in a waiters’ union in which Panco was known to belong. They could not find their man, who did not seem to report often at the headquarters of that union; so they gave out reports everywhere that Panco was a dead beat and would not pay his union dues! This came to Panco’s ears. He showed up at headquarters to deny this impeachment. He got thirty years.
A Lithuanian lecturer was described as about to deliver a seditious harangue in the village of Cicero, near Chicago. The Southwest Division sent out several motor cars with picked men ready for trouble. They found a hall crowded with foreigners who were listening to a much bewhiskered man, clad in shabby tweeds, who was demonstrating at a blackboard on a platform, and was speaking in some unknown tongue. At last one of the operatives who had been taken along as an interpreter began to laugh and said, “Let’s go home, fellows; we’ve got the old bird wrong. He ain’t talking anarchy; he’s giving a lecture on sex control!”
An unusual amount of shrewdness should be credited to some of these operatives. It was a mere guess, for instance, on the part of such a man that the figure “8”—the final figure on a foreign birth certificate—had been changed to a “5”. If this were true, it meant that the suspect would come within the draft age, although otherwise his story was perfectly straight. Suspicion is not evidence, so the Department of Justice was about to release this man. The latter had remarked to someone that his father lived in Indiana. The operative went to the phone and pretended to call up the father in this town personally, with the intention of inducing the suspect to eavesdrop on the phone conversation in the next room. After a while the operative turned to the suspect, his hand over the receiver, and said: “Well, we’ve got the information we wanted. What have you got to say?” Completely fooled, the suspect confessed! He was inducted into the army.