“Why don’t you go yourself?” Fuchs asked.
“They would probably pick me up if I did,” Koenig replied.
“Well, that’s just why I won’t take any camera over there with me,” Fuchs rejoined. “But I’ll go if you want a report.”
The bargain was closed. Fuchs, Koenig said, was the very man, as he was known on the Canadian side as George Fox, was an American by birth, and would not excite suspicion. So at 7 P. M. of September 30—slightly more than a year since Horst von der Goltz and Captain von Papen had made their first abortive attempt to destroy the Canal—“Fox” registered at the Welland House in Welland, close by the waterway. There he spent the night. The next morning he went to Port Colborne, the Lake Erie mouth of the Canal, and during the balance of the day followed its course northward, making mental notes of the shipping and the construction and guarding of the locks. By night he had reached Thorold, where he found a room, jotted down his observations, and spent the night. The next day he covered the balance of the 27 miles to Lake Ontario, noting the number of locks, and the fact that there were two or three armed soldiers on guard at each. With his head full of good ideas for bad plans he reached Niagara Falls again that night—October 2.
Koenig was enthusiastic over his report, but when Fuchs had written it down he decided that it would be hazardous to have such a document found on his person. “Mail it to me at Post Office Box 840 in New York. Sign it just ‘George’—nobody would know who that was even if they did find it.” He went back to New York. Fuchs heard nothing from him for a few days, except that action had been deferred. Then the country cousin began to importune the city cousin, and Koenig suggested that he come down to New York to work for him. Which Fuchs did, and on October 8 was placed on the payroll of the “Bureau of Investigation” at eighteen dollars a week. Koenig arranged that Fuchs was to hire men who would row a boatload of dynamite across the upper Niagara River to smuggle it into Canada, and he had meanwhile arranged with two others, Richard Emil Leyendecker, his chief assistant, and Fred Metzler, his secretary, to carry out a definite plan to sever the main artery of lake traffic by blowing it to pieces.
By Sunday, November 7, Fuchs had been occupied in several odd jobs for Koenig, such as spying on outward-bound cargoes along the waterfront, doing special guard duty at Dr. Albert’s office, and going over to Hoboken to frighten a poor German agent named Franz Schulenberg, who had come on from the west to collect money from von Papen. On that Sunday he was sick and did not report for duty. He asked for his regular pay, however, and Koenig refused it, doubting that Fuchs had really been too ill to report, and holding that illness should never interfere with service to the Fatherland. This created bad blood between the two. On November 22 Koenig discharged him for “constant quarrelling with another operative, drinking, and disorderly habits,” and announced that he would not be paid for his services of the previous day, when he had refused to go on duty in a river-launch. That $2.57 due Fuchs had poisoned his soul against Koenig, and he had grown so bitter that the result we already know—evidence was at last in our hands for an arrest.
It was a case for federal prosecution, obviously, so we called in Captain William Offley and Agent Adams, an able operative of the Department of Justice. A few hours later Koenig was placed under arrest. He resented the intrusion, and snapped to Barnitz: “Anyone who interferes with Germans or the German Government will be punished!” His house up-town was searched and that search disclosed, among other matters, an item which is unquestionably one of the richest prizes of the spy hunt in America.
It was Paul Koenig’s little black memorandum book—a loose-leaf affair, scrupulously typewritten, and brought down to within a day of his arrest. A fanatic on office efficiency might have conceived it, but none but a German would have kept it posted up. For it told the story of his Bureau of Investigation with a devotion to detail almost religious.
The Hamburg-American Line probably never thought that when they assigned a shrewd ruffian named Paul Koenig to investigate an alleged case of wharfage graft in Jersey City away back in 1912 they had established a “Bureau of Investigation.” But Paul Koenig knew better. He surrounded his lightest activities with an air of mystery and efficiency true to the best of amateur-detective tradition. He called his first case by a mystic number, he conferred the ominous alias of “xxx” upon himself, hired a man named Fred Metzler as his secretary, and convinced himself that he and Metzler were a bureau. In the light of the all-absorbing importance which his bureau held for him, we are not surprised (and we must not smile), when we see chronicled neatly in his little black book that on May 13, 1913, he rented a room at 45 Broadway for “new offices,” on May 24 his first private telephone was installed, on Nov. 19 a steel cabinet was purchased for the files of the department, on May 28 of 1914 the adjoining room was added to Room 82, and Room 82 was converted into a private office for the chief, and on July 14 a new safe was purchased and placed in the office. It may be that the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand had something to do with that last item, for it is certain that the Hamburg-American Line knew that war was coming well in advance of the declaration. At any rate, we find that on July 31, 1914, before England and Germany had actually gone to war, and on the same day that the director of the Hamburg-American in New York received instructions from Berlin that war was coming and that he was expected to supply German naval vessels in American waters—on that day Paul Koenig began his war duties by placing a special guard on all the piers and vessels of the Line in New York Harbor.
Up to this time the cases Koenig had handled were matters of shipping—stowaways, fires, steerage rates, charges against ships’ officers. On August 22 he became a German military spy. We find it entered in his own words: