The Wireless Treacheries
The Sayville Wireless Station on Long Island was for a long time a successfully controlled medium for the direction of spy and propaganda work in this country as well as for communication with wireless stations in Germany, in Central and South America, with wireless ships interned, etc., etc. To this and the other German-owned commercial plants in the United States Capt. Boy-Ed added amateur stations of more or less extended radius as auxiliaries. But owing to complaints of frequent interference with regular messages, the “United States presently ordered the closing of all private wireless stations, and those amateurs who had been listening out of sheer curiosity to the air conversation cheerfully took down their antennæ. Not so, however, a prominent woman in whose residence on Fifth Avenue lay concealed a powerful receiving apparatus. Nor did the interned ships obey the order: apparatus apparently removed was often rigged in the shelter of a funnel, and operated by current supplied from an apparently innocent source. And the secret service discovered stations also in the residences of wealthy Hoboken Germans, and in a German-American ’mansion’ in Hartford, Connecticut.”
Later suspicions were aroused by the activities of the German wireless, but the German operators were not at once removed. The United States began taking down the seemingly meaningless jargon that came every morning from the Nauen Station near Berlin. It was two years later, however, that a key to the jumble was discovered and the code revealed. Two codes in fact were found.
“The chief significance of the discovery of the two codes is their conclusive proof that while von Bernstorff was protesting to the American government that he could not get messages through to Berlin, nor replies from the Foreign Office, he was actually in daily, if not hourly, communication with his superiors. Messages were sent out by his confidential operators under the very eyes of the American naval censors. After the break of diplomatic relations with Berlin, in February, 1917, the authorities set to work decoding the messages, and the State Department from time to time issued for publication certain of the more brutal proofs of Germany’s violation of American neutrality. The Ambassador and his Washington establishment had served for two years and a half as the ‘central exchange’ of German affairs in the western world. After his departure communication from German spies here was handicapped only by the time required to forward information to Mexico; from that point to Berlin air conversation continued uninterrupted.”
It may be noted in passing that Captain Karl Grasshof of the cruiser Geier, that took refuge from the British by tying up in Honolulu harbor, gave high proof of the German nice sense of honor in respect of hospitality. He instituted a series of afternoon concerts by the ship’s band, that the music might drown out the noise of the wireless apparatus as he sent messages to raiders at sea or threw off false reports in English, the purpose of which was to make trouble between the United States and Japan. He said at one time that von Papen inspired this peculiar treachery, but afterwards denied it.