His superiors again instructed him to go to Cuba. He landed in Cuba on April 16th. There he reported to the German Minister, Count Verdy du Vernois, who passed him on to an attaché of the Legation with this strange result: that Dr. Scheele next found himself installed as a “guest” in the house of one Juan Pozas, under the name of James G. Williams, and in the character of a visiting American.
His strange and unexpected host appeared at first to be simply a wealthy Cuban merchant. His manner of life strengthened this impression. Dr. Scheele found himself comfortably installed in a large room in a magnificent house, surrounded by grounds of a city block square, in the suburb Guana Bacca of Havana. In reality, Pozas was the king of the Cuban smugglers. His splendid establishment and his social prestige rested upon a picturesque foundation of the work of silent men in little boats working in the dark of the moon along the tropical Cuban shore.
To Dr. Scheele, Pozas soon appeared to be not only host but jailer. Though he was treated with every courtesy and as a member of the family, he was not allowed outside the house for six months after his arrival. The confinement so told upon his health that he was finally permitted the freedom of the garden, and, to while away the time, he worked among the flowers, making at length a beauty spot of the whole place. At the same time, he was devoting other spare hours to covering the walls of the Pozas mansion with beautiful mural paintings. Again it may be noted that Dr. Scheele is a remarkable man.
In this strange retreat the doctor spent two years. Then suddenly, without warning, he was hurried hither and yon about the island, travelling under guard by automobile by night, and lying hidden by day in the houses of trusted German agents. He finally arrived at Mantanzas. Here, the man in whose house he was to stay hidden became fearful that he would be discovered there and the man himself get into desperate trouble. He, therefore, directed Dr. Scheele to a neighbouring hotel, but the doctor was unable to obtain accommodation, so that he spent the night sitting in a railroad station.
Simultaneously another German of Havana was taken into custody. He was implicated in the Scheele affair by reason of his payments to the doctor, besides being involved in numerous violations of the neutrality of Cuba, for which the Cuban Government meant to hold him responsible.
The close investigation of this man revealed much valuable data. A collection of papers had been buried by Dr. Scheele in the tropical garden he had built about the Pozas mansion. There they were unearthed by the agent of the Department of Justice of the United States who had gone to Cuba to bring him back. Taking a pick and shovel and digging among the flowers cherished by the doctor, he found these damning documents from Potsdam, containing their secret instructions for the working out of the industrial conquest of Vereinigten Staaten—These United States.
Another set of documents was obtained by a very clever piece of work by agents of the Department of Justice. These were papers left behind by Wolf von Igel when he left the United States—papers that he dared not risk having seized and read by the British authorities on his way to Germany. They were packed in a suitcase and were committed to the care of a German in Englewood, New Jersey. On instructions from the head office of the Department of Justice in Washington, agents in the New York office of the Department wrote out in German, on a typewriter, the letter telling this German to deliver the suitcase to the bearer and including in its message the magic password. This letter was entrusted to an agent who spoke German perfectly.
He executed the commission without a hitch. He called upon the German and introduced himself in low tones as a loyal subject of the Kaiser and asked to be taken into the house. There he presented his letter. When the German read it, he broke into a hearty laugh and said the password no longer really applied, because it referred to the coal pile. He had found, on account of the coal shortage, that at times he could not keep enough coal in the cellar to keep the suitcase covered, and that consequently he had had to conceal it elsewhere in the house. The caller joined him in laughter at this piece of humour, and the German excused himself and soon returned with the suitcase. It was not till several days later that he had the slightest inkling that the man he had entertained was an operative of the American Government.
The plot for which Dr. Scheele was brought to earth was only a detail in the vast scheme of Germany’s treachery, but it was one of the most dastardly and most dramatic of those details, and its detection and unravelling revealed the men at the head of the German system in this country and their mutual relationships. In a previous chapter I have told something of the career of Franz von Rintelen. At this point he appears as an agent of Germany seeking to destroy the ships bearing American supplies to the Allies. One day Dr. Scheele received a caller, Eno Bode, a captain in the service of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. Bode bore a card from Von Papen, ordering Scheele to execute any orders which Bode gave. Von Papen’s orders, in their turn, had come through Rintelen.