“To see Wesendonck. He is a secretary for India of the German foreign office. He wanted to make plans for propaganda for the liberation of India from British rule.”
Chakravarty sat there and unfolded an amazing story. He touched gingerly upon his own part in it at first, then evidently sensed the fact that there were others in the plot guilty of perhaps no less reprehensible but more violent crimes, and the little doctor’s capture and confession not only gave clues to the authorities which enabled them to follow up the outstanding German-Hindu plots in America, but developed prosecutions of the first magnitude and the keenest general interest.
1. Franz Schulenberg 2. Ram Chandra
3. Ram Singh (on the left)
4. Dr. Chandra Chakravarty and Dr. Ernest Sekunna
5. Dr. Chandra Chakravarty in his Persian Dress
The enterprises must be recounted out of their actual sequence. The first he claimed to have had little part in—the project of an uprising in India which its sponsors hoped would repeat the Mutiny of 1857—but with a more successful outcome. Captain Hans Tauscher, the New York agent of the Krupp steel and munitions works, was in Berlin when war broke out. He reported for active duty to Captain von Papen, in New York, as soon as he could cross the Atlantic, and one of his earliest services was the purchase of a large quantity of rifles, field guns, swords and cartridges, which he stored in 200 West Houston Street, New York. On January 9, 1915, he shipped a trainload of arms and ammunition to San Diego, California. There it was loaded into a little vessel, the Annie Larsen, which had been chartered by German interests, and the Annie Larsen put to sea, ostensibly for Mexico, where revolutionary arms were in demand. Her real destination was a rendezvous off Socorro Island with the Maverick, a tank-ship which had been bought in San Francisco with German money. The Maverick was to trans-ship the arms, flood them with oil in her cargo tanks in case she might be searched, and proceed by way of Batavia and Bangkok to Karachi, a seaport in India which is the gateway to the Punjab. There she would be met by friendly fishing vessels who would land her cargo, and if all went well, there would be a massacre of the garrison of Karachi, and hell would break loose over India. The effect of such an uprising upon Great Britain’s sorely tried military condition of early 1915 would have been incalculable. The native troops in France who were helping to stop the breach until England’s great armies could be trained would have to be recalled, the semi-loyal tribes would have seen their opportunity, Germany would hardly have hesitated to throw a Turkish force at the northern passes, and altogether it would not have been pleasant for the integrity of the British Empire.
The Maverick and the Annie Larsen missed connections at Socorro. The Annie Larsen wandered about the Pacific for some weeks and eventually put into Hoquiam, Washington, where the United States seized the arms. The Maverick blundered from Socorro to San Diego, to Hilo, Hawaii, to Anjer, Java, by way of Johnson Island, then to Batavia, Java, where she was received with disappointment by a German agent and where she was finally sold. The filibuster ended in flat and costly failure: the arms cost not less than $100,000 and probably $150,000, the freight to the Pacific Coast some $12,000, the charter of the Annie Larsen $19,000, the purchase of the Maverick involved hundreds of thousands, not to mention the individual fees of the numerous agents employed.
We knew in a general way of this plot, though it remained for the tireless efforts of United States District Attorney John W. Preston in San Francisco to unearth the details. In a raid which had been made on the office of Wolf von Igel, von Papen’s secretary, at 60 Wall Street, New York, agents of the Department of Justice had found von Igel’s memoranda of correspondence in arranging the expedition through the San Francisco consulate. But Chakravarty said that the revolutionary end of the project had been handled by another Hindu, Ram Chandra, and denied that he was guilty of any part in it. Ram Chandra had negotiated with the German consuls in Seattle and San Francisco, and through them with Tauscher and von Papen. Chakravarty supplied the names of Hindus who had sailed on the Annie Larsen, said that there had been Filipinos and Germans aboard as well, and added that the Filipinos had been transferred to a German ship, and had later escaped from her in a motorboat while she was being pursued by a Japanese cruiser. But, he said, he had nothing to do with it—it was Ram Chandra who was the real agent.
It was this Ram Chandra who was editor of the Hindu revolutionary newspaper Ghadr (Mutiny) published at Berkeley, California. He succeeded to the editor’s chair in 1914 when his predecessor, Har Dayal, out on bail after an arrest for ultra-free speech, had fled across the continent and the Atlantic Ocean to Berlin. There Dayal established the Hindustani Revolutionary Committee, collaborating with, taking orders from, and financed by the German Government, under the direction of Herr Wesendonck of the Foreign Office. Ten million marks had been placed to their credit, and German consulates throughout the neutral world had instructions through their parent-embassies to render all possible assistance to the revolutionary project, and to spend whatever money might be necessary, charging it to the account of the Indian Nationalist Party. Three hundred thousand dollars was invested in China and Java. Hindus were sent through Persia and Afghanistan into India with German credit to foster unrest, and Afghanistan itself was full of spies trying to break the Amir’s promise, given to the British Government at the outbreak of war, that he would maintain strict neutrality. It was this same Har Dayal who conferred with Chakravarty when the latter made his visit to Berlin in December, 1915. The reason for this visit to Berlin came out very soon, and that will lead us in turn to the second of the German-Hindu plots hatched in America.
The Annie Larsen’s Cash Account Gupta’s Code Message