The prisoner was docile. He said he knew he was caught and he wanted to help us round up the rest. I showed him the Kirkoswald bomb, and told him where it had been found. “Yes,” he said, “Captain Steinburg and Captain Bode came to the laboratory after they saw in the paper that the bomb had been found in Marseilles and they gave Dr. Scheele the devil because it had not gone off. It was supposed to explode within four days, but it didn’t explode in twelve.” “How many did you make?” I asked. “I don’t know how many,” the prisoner answered. The ones that were put on the Inchmoor and the Dankdale went off all right, and there were two fires on the Tyningham. “I gave one box of thirty of them to two Irishmen from New Orleans, O’Reilly and O’Leary. They took them down there to set fire to ships with them.”
“Did you give the rest to Becker?”
“Yes. And he gave them to Captain Wolpert. Wolpert is superintendent of the piers of the Atlas Line over in Hoboken. Captain Bode, he is also a superintendent, for the Hamburg-American Line. Captain Steinburg I don’t know much about, but he is in Germany now.”
Henry Barth, U. S. Army, who posed as the German Secret Service agent in the von Rintelen ship bomb cases
I thanked him for his information, and asked him if he would tell me everything about the plot, from its beginning up to the moment. He said he would; that he was going to help the United States now. I excused myself for a moment and left the room.
Von Kleist saw an electrician in a rough shirt and overalls repairing the lights in the room, and struck up a conversation with him. The electrician’s English carried a slight German accent, and von Kleist said:
“Sie sind deutsch, nicht wahr?” (You’re German?)
“Ja,” replied the workman.
Still using the mother tongue the prisoner asked the workman to do him a favor. “Deliver these notes for me, will you? I can’t go out of here, and I would like to send word to some people.” And he wrote on two messages, one addressed to Wolpert and Bode, the other to Schmidt and Becker. The substance of both was the same: “Beat it—I’m pinched.” Detective Senff had been disguised as an electrician and stationed in the room for the express purpose of getting any statement the prisoner made—a practice not usually necessary, but this was a serious case. Evidently von Kleist’s profession of transferred loyalty to the United States was only a scrap of paper. We locked him up.