We made this out of it—that the prisoner then in the Tower to whom Fay referred was probably Franz Rintelen. He was a German of prominent station who had had a vision quite like Fay’s—a vision of interrupting American shipping, and so damming the flood of war supplies. In early 1915 he had come to America equipped with plenty of authority and a bank credit limited only by the resources of the German Empire, and had spent six months here trying to exercise that authority and spend the money in numerous ways. He had tried to buy rifles of the American government, he had fostered peace demonstrations, promoted strikes, lobbied for an embargo on munitions and made himself busily useless in numerous other ways, only to sail for home in the fall of the year—and fall into the hands of the British.
But the charges which I have just cited, and which are now fully confirmed against this man, were not then known to us, and Fay’s tip was too ambiguous to help us at the moment. Instead of ceasing after his arrest, the fires continued. The day after we caught Fay in the woods the steamer Rio Lages which had sailed a few days previously took fire out at sea. A week later a blaze started in the hold of the Euterpe. The Rochambeau, of the French line, caught fire at sea on November 6, and the next day there was an explosion aboard the Ancona. The Tyningham suffered two fires on her voyage east during early December. There was a maddening certainty about it all that suggested that every ship that left port must have nothing in her hold except hungry rats, parlor matches, oily waste and free kerosene. Never in the history of the port had so many marine fires occurred in a single year. Marine insurance was away up and our patience was away down.
The steamship companies put on special details of guards to watch the vessels from the moment they entered port until they sailed again. We resumed patrolling the river in various disguises. Fay’s swift motorboat had disappeared, but there were plenty of others, and the men of the Bomb Squad suffered real hardship in all sorts of inclement weather. It seemed as though every item of cargo was watched as it passed into the hold, and every stranger about the piers carefully followed, but there was absolutely nothing to excite suspicion. So we returned to our sugar theory and the Chenangoes.
I mentioned the fact that they were a floating tribe in more senses than one, and that the same man rarely came back twice for employment. A few familiar faces, however, could occasionally be spotted in the crowd at work loading the lighters. We made it our business to study these steady workers and found them for the most part a harmless lot of Scandinavians.
Those who came, worked once, and vanished, were of all nationalities, with a considerable German representation. Some of them used to come from Hoboken, and by a process of elimination we found that certain of the Hoboken delegation were sailors from the idle North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American ships. We followed them and asked enough questions about them to learn the entire history of any civilized people, but nothing in the form of legal evidence resulted. A friend who knew the methods taught in the Wilhelmstrasse for destroying property said it would be futile for us to follow those men anyway, for the destroying agent himself rarely knows the men higher up, the real conspirators. So it began to look as if even the arrest of a guilty Chenango would not supply the background necessary to picture the bomb system in its entirety.
On one of the early days of 1916 Detectives Barth, Corell and Senff reported for duty and were assigned to Hoboken. They were instructed to hang about the restaurants, saloons and hotels where the officers and petty-officers from the German ships were accustomed to gather, and posing as confidential German agents they were to fish about for whatever might take their bait. All three men are fine Americans of German descent, with an excellent command of the German language, so they got on well with the longshore folk they met in the “stubes” of Hoboken. They occasionally suggested in a vague way that they Were the picked servants of the Kaiser, and aroused some interest and no suspicion among their new acquaintances. Every man has more or less desire to be a “secret service man” and in looking back on the German antics in America during the war I think one may attribute as much of their activity to the dramatic instinct, as to their cupidity or their real patriotic zeal. (Paul Koenig is an exaggerated example of what I mean.) And so it was with those to whom the three Bomb Squad men talked: a nod here, and a wink there, a whisper and a wag of the head, and they took on some importance.
Copyright, by International Film Service, Inc.
Franz Rintelen
Their reward came when a German whom Barth had picked up suggested quietly that he knew a man who had been doing work for the government (German) and wouldn’t Barth like to meet him? Barth would. So with some ceremony Barth was introduced as one of von Bernstorff’s special agents to a funny little old man who looked like a cartoon of the late Prussian eagle. He was Captain Charles von Kleist of Hoboken. The three lunched together in Hahn’s restaurant, in Park Row, New York, and von Kleist found Barth agreeable. He was very glad to meet a real agent, for he had a grudge against a fellow over in Hoboken who said he was a member of the German secret service.