"After having studied at Liverpool I was to go to London and make an investigation of the Thames and its shipping. From there I was to proceed to Holland and work my way to the German border. While my passport did not include Germany, I was to give the captain of the nearest regiment a secret number which would indicate to him that I was a reservist on spy duty. By that means I was to hurry to Eisendal, head of the secret service in Berlin."
Stegler did not make the trip because his wife learned of the enterprise and begged him not to go. He too had run afoul of the vigilant Adams, and was placed under arrest in February, 1915, shortly after he decided to stay at home. In his possession were all the letters and telegrams exchanged between him and Boy-Ed, and one telegram from "Winkler," Captain Boy-Ed's servant.
Stegler also said that he had been told by Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, one of Dr. Albert's assistants, that Boy-Ed previously had sent to England Karl Hans Lody, the German who in November, 1915, was put to death as a spy in the Tower of London. Lody had been in the navy, had served on the Kaiser's yacht and then had come to this country and worked as an agent for the Hamburg-American Line, going from one city to another. Shortly after the war started Lody had gone on the mission of espionage which cost him his life.
Captain Boy-Ed authorized the commander of the German cruiser Geier, interned in Honolulu, to get his men back to Germany as best he could, by providing them with false passports. Still another of Boy-Ed's protégés was a naval reservist, August Meier, who shipped as a hand on the freighter Evelyn with a cargo of horses for Bermuda. On the voyage practically all of the horses were poisoned. Meier, however, was arrested by the Federal authorities on the charge of using the name of a dead man in order to get an American passport. In supplying passports and in handling spies, Captain Boy-Ed was more subtle than his colleague, von Papen. Nevertheless the Government officials succeeded in getting a clear outline of his activities. The exposure of Boy-Ed's connection with Stegler made it necessary for the German Government to change its system once more.
The Wilhelmstrasse had a bureau of its own. Reservists from America reported in Berlin for duty in Belgium and France, and their passports ceased to be useful, to them. The intelligence department commandeered the documents for agents whom they wished to send back to America. Tiny flakes of paper were torn from the body of the passport and from the seal, in order that counterfeiters might match them up. On January 14, 1915, an American named Reginald Rowland obtained a passport from the State Department for safe-conduct on a business trip to Germany. While it was being examined at the frontier every detail of the document was closely noted by the Germans. Some months later Captain Schnitzer, chief of the German secret service in Antwerp, had occasion to send a spy to England. He chose von Breechow, a German whom von Papen had forwarded from New York, and who had his first naturalization papers from the United States. To Breechow he gave a facsimile of Rowland's passport identical with the original in every superficial respect except that the spy's photograph had been substituted for the original, and the age of the bearer set down as 31—ten years older than Rowland.
Von Breechow passed the English officials at Rotterdam and at Tilbury. He soon fell under suspicion, however, and his passport was taken away. When the British learned that the real Rowland was at home in New Jersey, and in possession of his own passport, they sent for it, and compared the two. Breechow's revealed a false watermark, stamped on in clear grease, which made the paper translucent, but which was soluble in benzine. The stamp, ordinarily used to countersign both the photograph and the paper in a certain way, had been applied in a different position. With those exceptions, and the suspicious Teutonic twist to a "d" in the word "dark," the counterfeit was regular.
The Rosenthal case was the first to bring to light the false passport activities in Berlin. Rosenthal, posing as an agent for gas mantles, traveled in England successfully as a spy under an emergency passport issued by the American Embassy in Berlin. Captain Prieger, the chief of a section in the intelligence department of the General Staff, asked Rosenthal to make a second trip. The spy demurred, doubting whether his passport might be accepted a second time. The Captain turned to a safe, extracted a handful of false American passports, and said: "I can fit you out with a passport in any name you wish." Rosenthal decided to employ his own. He was arrested and imprisoned in England.
As the State Department increased its vigilance the evil began to expire. It was further stifled by concerted multiplication by the Allies of the examinations which the stranger had to undergo. But during its course it made personal communication between Berlin and lower Broadway almost casual.