The German Spy in America / The Secret Plotting of German Spies in the United States and the Inside Story of the Sinking of the Lusitania

by John Price Jones

“But how can you use these passports with these pictures on them?” asked the agent, curiously.

“Oh, that’s easy,” answered Ruroede. “Come into the back room and I’ll show you.” The agent followed the German, who immediately soaked one of the passports with a damp cloth and with adhesive paste fastened a photograph of another man over the original upon which the imprint of the United States seal had been made.

“We wet the photograph,” said Ruroede, “and then we affix the picture of the man who is to use it. The new photograph also is dampened, but when it is fastened to the passport, there still remains a sort of vacuum in spots between the new picture and the old, because of ridges made by the seal. Well, turn the passport upside down, place it on a soft ground made with a silk handkerchief, and then, taking a paper cutter with a dull point, just trace the letters on the seal. The result is that the new photograph looks exactly as if it had been stamped by Uncle Sam. You can’t tell the difference.”

Through the work of Adams, four Germans, one of them an officer of the German reserves, were arrested on the Norwegian-America liner Bergensfjord, outward bound to Bergen, Norway. They had passports issued to them through Ruroede’s bureau under the American names of Howard Paul Wright, Herbert S. Wilson, Peter Hansen and Stanley F. Martin. Their real names were Arthur Sachse, Pelham Heights, N.Y., who was returning to Germany to become a lieutenant in the German Army; Walter Miller, August R. Meyer, and Herman Wegener, who had come to New York from Chile, on their way to the Fatherland. Ruroede pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in Atlanta, Ga., prison. The four Germans, also pleading guilty, protested they had taken the passports out of patriotism and were fined $200 each.

Von Wedell, himself, was a passenger on the steamer Bergensfjord, but when he was lined up with the other passengers, the Federal agents, who did not have a description of him, were deceived, and let the vessel proceed. He was taken off the ship by the British and placed in prison.

The arrest of Ruroede exposed the New York bureau, and made it necessary for the Germans to shift their base of operations; but it did not put an end to the fraudulent passport conspiracies, as will be shown. In the face of the exposures, so daring were the German agents that they continued to commit fraud upon the United States, and to put in danger every honest American travelling in Europe with an American passport.

FOMENTING REVOLTS

Captain von Papen was a supervisor and a promoter of sedition. His headquarters in Wall Street were the centre of lines running out to British and French colonies, where Germany planned at critical moments to start revolutions, if it would help her interests.

One of the enterprises which Captain von Papen, acting under orders from Berlin, supervised in the United States, was a revolt against British rule in India. Preparations for this insurrection had been in the making for years, and, in the course of all of them, German agents were working with the Hindus and also with the German-Irish in America, the latter organization being really headquarters for many Hindus travelling from Germany to England, then to United States, on their way back to India. There has been for years a sort of understanding between pro-German Irish and certain members of an American society interested in India. In this organization, prior to the war, were men who were plotting a revolution in India, who were in touch with German agents and who received German money.

Immediately after the outbreak of the war, von Papen and his agents poured more money into Hindu pockets, and made arrangements to supply arms and ammunition to Hindus. For the promotion of this German-Hindu conspiracy, two other centres were established. One was fathered by Germans in San Francisco, and another was at Shanghai, China. Confessions by men, who were active in the enterprise, tell how Hindus in sympathy with the sedition plots conferred with certain German officials in Berlin, that they came to New York—this in the course of the war—where they met certain pro-German-Irishmen and were aided financially. From New York they journeyed to Chicago, where more money was handed to them, and then to San Francisco, where they had talks with Hindu revolutionists—whose openly avowed aim is in rousing the people of India to celebrate the year 1917, “the diamond jubilee of the mutiny of 1857,” by a general and universal rising against British rule in India.