The line we quoted above read:

“Li Yuen Hung is now the president of China”

After transmitting the proper-name in the second cipher (as the name of course would not have appeared in the dictionary code), Chakravarty had lapsed back into the first code, as being swifter.

Gupta, we observed, was harshly critical of Chakravarty. Let us see whether he was justified. Chakravarty said he had been commissioned to deal only with the broader propaganda. From captured reports which he transmitted through the German embassy as well as through the mails to Switzerland, he had been delegated to form a committee of five, with Ram Chandra as one of the other members, to handle Indian affairs here. They were to send an agent to the West Indies to stir up the Hindu coolies there, of whom there were estimated to be 100,000, and to send back to India all who would volunteer for revolution. The same policy was to be followed in British Guiana, Java, and Sumatra. From Ram Chandra’s Ghadr press were to be issued reams of propaganda in the various Indian dialects for circulation throughout the East and West Indies, in Hindustan itself, and even for German aviators to drop upon Hindu troops in France. Chakravarty was to procure letters of introduction to parties in Japan which would assure a safe welcome to an emissary to be sent there to carry out what Gupta had failed to do, and an envoy was to be sent to China for a similar purpose. It was a broad program, and the doctor set to work immediately upon his return to organize his staff.

In all his work he had the coöperation of von Bernstorff and the embassy at Washington. Chakravarty organized a Pan-Asiatic League as a blind, so that Hindus posing as its members could travel without exciting suspicion. His work was somewhat handicapped in the early spring by an automobile accident which took him to the hospital, and by the seizure of the military attaché’s papers in von Igel’s office. He hired a Chinaman named Chin as the delegate to China, and shipped him off on a Greek vessel from New York. Referred by Berlin to Houssain, the spy in Trinidad, Chakravarty established contact with him, and supervised the formation of an organization there. In July Chakravarty started for a tour of the West, in the course of which he visited two disloyal Hindus in Vancouver and determined upon a plan of action for that section. Then he swung down to San Francisco, where he called upon Ram Chandra, the western head of the committee. He conferred with friendly agents of Japanese newspapers who proposed to attack the Anglo-Japanese treaty. He conferred with W. T. Wang, private secretary to the new president of China, as the secretary was leaving for Peking, and learned that “some of the prominent people are quite willing to help India directly and Germany indirectly—on three conditions, those conditions being a secret treaty with Germany for military protection, to last five years after peace had been declared, and to be secured by giving China one-tenth of all the arms and ammunition which she would undertake to smuggle across the Indian frontier.” By the late autumn of 1916 Chakravarty was acting as the master-wheel in a most elaborate and complicated machine for disturbing British rule in almost all of her colonial holdings, and it is safe to say that if the Maverick affair had not roused shipping inspectors to unusual vigilance to prevent filibustering, the United States might have seen the bloody result of his work by March of 1917, when we arrested him. Even as it was, he was the general manager of a going concern.

It may be wondered how he was able to perfect an organization. The answer to that we found in Gupta’s safety deposit box—a list of two hundred or more members of an Indian society in the United States, a large proportion of whom were students in American colleges, sent here for education on scholarships, in the hope that they would return to their native country and uplift it. Some of them were influential agents, and they were scattered conveniently about the country. Add to this force the coöperation of almost innumerable German agents and pay it with a share of the $32,000,000 which Chakravarty said had been set aside in Berlin for anarchistic, race-riot and Hindu propaganda in the western world, and you have a real factor for trouble. It is perhaps surprising that the organization worked undiscovered as long as it did, but it is more surprising that having worked under cover for more than fourteen months it did not break out into a grave demonstration. Chakravarty’s arrest, however, came in time, and the authorities were on the whole satisfied that so much time had elapsed because it gave them more clues to work on and a larger group to round up.

And Chakravarty himself was pleased, I think. When he confessed his trip to Berlin, he was on the horns of a dilemma, for he feared the British would revenge themselves on him. I assured him that he would be protected as an American prisoner. He said, “Well, if I tell you about what I have done for the Germans, and they hear about it, they will kill me. And in any case my own people will kill me. You don’t know them!” I again quieted him and suggested that he tell me now where he got the money which he said had come to him from his estate in India.

“Von Igel gave it to me,” he answered. “I could not go to his office downtown, so I sent Sekunna. In all I got $60,000. I spoke of the poet, Tagore, because he won the Nobel prize, and I thought he would be above suspicion.” He had bought the house at 364 West 120th Street and equipped it comfortably as a residence. He bought a house in 77th Street to open a Hindu restaurant. He bought a farm at Hopewell Junction to use as a rendezvous for the plotters. And when he had given us valuable information, and had appeared at the trial, and had been himself convicted and had served his sentence (a short term) in jail, and the smoke had cleared away, he was the owner of three nice parcels of real estate and a comfortable income. Dr. Chakravarty, although a failure as a Prussian agent, fared pretty well as an investor of Prussian funds.

After a series of digressions which I hope have not led us too far from the path, we may return to the third of the Hindu-German projects in which we of the Bomb Squad were especially interested. Ever since Captain von Papen’s check-book had been captured by the British at Falmouth in January, 1916, students of the German plots in the United States had wondered why two of the stubs bore the entries:

“Feb. 2, 1915, German Consulate, Seattle (Angelegenheit)$1,300.
“May 11, 1915, German Consulate, Seattle (for Schulenberg)500.”