Not that the entrance of the United States into the war put a stop to the activities of the Squad. I have already cited those who entered the national service. Their presence in the Naval and Military Intelligence, their close relations with those whom they left behind in headquarters, with such men as Commander Spencer Eddy and Lieutenant Albert Fish of the Navy, Colonel Biddle and Major Potter of the Army, and with the Corps of Intelligence Police, made possible a degree of coöperation in spy-hunting in New York which would have been impossible to develop within a short time with any other set of men, and which went far towards preserving our domestic security.

II
WESTPHALIAN EFFICIENCY

The trend of events in early 1915 made it apparent that the Bomb Squad would be called upon to handle more and more cases of attempted violation of neutrality. Anyone who remembers our national mind at that time will recall that it was not yet made up and very liable to attacks of brainstorm. Every person was seeing events of unheard of violence and magnitude pass him pell-mell, giving no warning, and not waiting for comment, and he was too dazed to watch any single event with any high degree of balanced judgment or reasoning partisanship. It was a troubled hour, and one in which it behooved us of the Police Department to keep our heads cool and our eyes open. The Bomb Squad had to act as a safety valve.

By the summer of 1915 war orders placed by the Allied governments in the autumn and winter of 1914 were being filled and shipped overseas in great quantities. By this time, too, the German navy showed no more sign of coming out of Kiel in force than it had shown for a year past. The task of delaying, diverting or destroying those shipments devolved upon the Germans in America. It took no superhuman amount of reasoning to combine the abnormal destruction of property in New York with the strong suspicion of German activity and to arrive at a decision to check up wherever it was humanly possible the sources and agencies of destruction.

Late in the autumn, in our work on the waterfront, we found a man who, we decided, was worth watching. We learned gradually that Paul Koenig was a pretty well-known figure along both banks of the Hudson, and that he carried, as chief detective for the Hamburg-American Line, a certain amount of authority. That steamship line, which within a week of the outbreak of war had attempted to send ships to sea under false cargo manifests to supply the German naval raiders, now had more time than business on its hands as its entire fleet was tied up in Hoboken. And yet in spite of the dull times which we knew had been thrust upon them, their man Koenig was curiously busy, and we became busily curious to find out why.

We were more curious than successful at first. We assigned men to follow him and observe his habits and haunts. This was not as easy as it might have been with another man, for the Department of Justice had already tried it and had come to the conclusion that he was not worth following.

Now a good shadow is born, not made. The moment the man followed realizes or even suspects that he is being followed, he becomes a problem and either gets away or conducts himself in a way which disarms suspicion and sometimes embarrasses the pursuit. Koenig, a man of keen animal senses, was unusually quick in discovering his shadower. It used to confuse certain agents considerably to have him disappear around a corner, and when the agent quickened his pace and swept around the same corner after him, to have Koenig pop out of a doorway with a laugh for his pursuer which meant that the day’s work had gone for nothing. I have known men who were excellent detectives and poor shadows. Sometimes they were too large and conspicuous, sometimes they were over-zealous, sometimes they excited suspicion by being over-cautious; rare enough was the combination of artlessness and skill which made a man a good shadow, told him when to saunter away in the opposite direction, when to pass his man, and how to efface himself. It is, I think, the instinct of the good fisherman who knows just how much line to run out, and just when to exert the pressure. For Koenig was a slippery fish.

Copyright, International Film Service