The Lusitania leaving the Hudson River on her last voyage
Her destruction would carry home to Germany news of heartening influence out of all proportion to the mere sinking of a large single tonnage. The German visible navy had, with the exception of scattering excursions into the North Sea, and the swiftly quenched efforts of the South Atlantic fleet, been of negligible—and irksome—consequence. To sink the mistress of the British merchant fleet would be to inform all the world that Britain was incapable of protecting her cargo and passenger vessels, to puncture the comfortable British boast of the moment that business was being performed "as usual," and to gratify the blood-letting instincts of the Junkers. So von Tirpitz, with his colleagues, undertook to sink the Lusitania, and to warn neutrals to travel in their own ships or stay ashore.
Early in December, 1914, the German agents who met nightly at the Deutscher Verein in Central Park South speculated on ways and means of bringing down this attractive quarry. Communication between Berlin and New York at that time was as facile as a telephone conversation from the Battery to Harlem. There were new 110-kilowatt transmitters in the German-owned Sayville wireless station, imported through Holland and installed under the expert supervision of Captain Boy-Ed, and memoranda issued in Berlin to the naval attaché were frequently the subject of guarded conversation in the German Club within a few hours after they had left the Wilhelmstrasse. Occasionally the conspirators found it more tactful to drive through the Park in a limousine during the evening, to discuss the project. Spies had made several trips to Liverpool and back again aboard the ship, under false passports, and Paul Koenig's waterfront henchmen supplied all necessary information of the guard maintained at the piers. All this was passed up to the clearing-house of executives, and their plans began to take shape.
Boy-Ed possessed a copy of the secret British Admiralty code, which explained his frequent trips to Sayville. He knew—and Tirpitz's staff therefore knew—the position of any British vessel at sea which had occasion to utter any message into the air. But before he conceived a use for this code other than as a source of information, he decided to try out a code of his own.
He arranged with Berlin a word-system whose theory was popular with Germany throughout the earlier years of her secret war communication: under the guise of apparently harmless expressions of friendship, or grief, or simple business, were transmitted quite definite and specific secret meanings. A message addressed by wireless from the Lusitania to a friend in England which read for example "Eager to see you. Much love" would scarcely arouse suspicion, especially as there was no word in it which might suggest military information. Yet in February, 1915, a message of that type was despatched from the eastward-bound Lusitania to a British station; it was intercepted and interpreted by a German submarine commander in the "zone" nearby, who presently popped up in the ship's wake and fired a torpedo. His information was better than his aim. The Lusitania dodged the steel shark, and fled to safety, her wireless informing the British naval world meanwhile of the presence of the U-boat.
The plotters had to reckon with her unequalled speed. The Lusitania and her sister ship, the Mauretania, had each rather prided herself in the past on reducing the other's fresh, bright passage-record from Queenstown to New York—a record of four days and a few hours! The submarine of 1915 knew no such speed, and it was necessary, if the liner was to be torpedoed, to select out of the vastness of the ocean one little radius in which the submarine might lie in wait for a pot-shot. But just how?
Spies had reported that it was customary as the Lusitania neared the Irish coast on her homeward voyage for her captain to query the British Admiralty for instructions as to where her convoy might be expected. They reported that under certain conditions German agents might be placed on board. And they reported that the wireless operator was susceptible to bribery. Those three facts formed the nucleus of the final plan.
Audacious as they were in their use of American soil as the base for their plans, the German Embassy had certain obligations to the United States Government, which they felt must be observed. The unspeakable falsifying which is sometimes called expediency, sometimes diplomacy, required that official America must know nothing of the intentions of which the Embassy itself was fully conversant and approving. Further, a palliative must be supplied to the American people in advance. Consequently Count von Bernstorff, under orders from Berlin, inserted in the New York Times of April 23, 1915, the following advertisement: