Its Diplomatic Aids
Their Ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff; their military attaché, Capt. Franz von Papen; their naval attaché, Capt. Karl Boy-Ed; their financial agent, Dr. Heinrich Albert, were the diplomatic and social spies who engineered and supplied with necessary information the vicious under-agents of the spy system of which sedition and violence were the shameful instruments.
With patient diligence, John Price Jones, a newspaper man, attached to the New York Sun, collected—from documentary evidence, from Secret Service officials and by means of his own investigation over a period of eighteen months—a vast amount of valuable and exact information, the vital part of which Small, Maynard and Company subsequently published in book form, under the title The German Secret Service in America. The information in that book, substantiated by governmental and other evidence, is authoritative, and we are indebted to it for much of the matter in this article.
Of the organization of the spy system he says:
“Count von Bernstorff, once his nation had declared war upon France and England, went to war with the United States. As ambassador, diplomatic courtesy gave him a scope of observation limited only by the dignity of his position. A seat in a special gallery in the Senate and House of Representatives was always ready for his occupancy; he could virtually command the attention of the White House; and senators, congressmen and office-holders from German-American districts respected him. Messengers kept him in constant touch with the line-up of Congress on important issues, and two hours later that line-up was known in the Foreign Office in Berlin. As head and front of the German spy system in America, he held cautiously aloof from all but the most instrumental acquaintances: men and women of prominent political and social influence who he knew were inclined, for good and sufficient reasons, to help him. One woman, whose bills he paid at a Fifth Avenue gown house, was the wife of a prominent broker and another woman of confessedly German affiliations who served him lived within a stone’s throw of the Metropolitan Museum and its nearby phalanx of gilded dwellings (her husband’s office was in a building at 11 Broadway, of which more anon); a third, woman intimate lived in a comfortable apartment near Fifth Avenue—an apartment selected for her, though she was unaware of it, by secret agents of the United States.