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  My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent

  Horst Von Goltz

  MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN SECRET SERVICE AGENT

  BY CAPTAIN HORST VON DER GOLTZ

  Formerly Major in the Mexican Constitution-list Army, sometime Confidential Aide to Captain von Papen, Recalled Military Attaché to the Imperial German Embassy at Washington, German Secret Service Agent

  GASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

  London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

  1918

  FOREWORD

  I HAVE not striven to write an autobiography. This book is merely a summary a sort of galloping summary of the last ten years of my existence. As such, I venture to write it because my life has been bound up in enterprises in which the world is interested. It has been my fortune to be a witness and sometimes an actor in that drama of secret diplomacy which has been going on for so long and which in such a large way has been responsible for this World War.

  There are many scenes in that drama which have no place in this book many events with which I am familiar that I have not touched upon. My aim has been to describe only those things with which I was personally concerned and which I know to be true. For a full history of the last ten years my readers must go elsewhere; but it is my hope that these adventures of mine will bring them to a better understanding of the forces that have for so long been undermining the peace of the world.

  Inevitably there will be some who read this book who will doubt the truth of many of the statements in it. I cannot, unfortunately, prove all that I tell here. Wherever possible I have offered corroborative evidence of the truth of my statements; at other times I have tried to indicate their credibility by citing well recognised facts which have a direct bearing upon my contentions. But for the rest, I can only hope that this book will be accepted as a true record of facts which by their very nature are insusceptible of proof.

  So far as my connection with the German Government is concerned, I may refer the curious to the British Parliamentary White Papers, Miscellaneous, Nos. 6 and 13, which contain respectively my confession and a record of the papers found in the possession of Captain von Papen, former Military Attache to the German Embassy at Washington, and seized by the British authorities on January 2 and 8, 1916. There are also, in addition to the documents reproduced in this book, various court records of the trial of Captain Hans Tauscher and others in the spring of the same year. To German activities in the United States, the newspapers bear eloquent testimony. I have been concerned rather with the motives of the German Government than with a statement of what has been done. These motives, I believe, you will not doubt.

  But there is one point which I must ask my readers not to overlook. I have told that I became a secret agent through the discovery of a certain letter which contained very serious reflections upon one of the most important personages in the world. I have told, also, how the possession of that letter had an important bearing upon the course of my life how it led me to America, and how in the struggle for its possession I very nearly lost my life. This, I know, will be severely questioned by many. Before rejecting this part of my story, I ask merely that you consider the fate that overtook Koglmeier, the saddler of El Paso, whose only crime was that he had been partially in my confidence. I ask you to recall that another German, Lesser, who had been associated with me at the same time, mysteriously disappeared in 1915, shortly before von Papen left for Europe. No one has been able to prove why these men were treated as they were. And if I did not have in my possession something which the German Government regarded as highly important, why the surprising actions of that Government, actions none the less astonishing because they are well known and authenticated? Consider these things before you doubt.

  Finally, let me say that I have taken the liberty of changing or omitting the names of various people who are mentioned in these adventures, merely because I have had no wish to compromise them by disclosing their identity.

  NEW YORK, July 8, 1917.

  CONTENTS

  1. A MOMENTOUS DOCUMENT

  I find an old letter containing a strange bit of scandal -- Its contents draw me into the service of the Kaiser.

  2. DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND

  I impersonate a Russian Prince and steal a Treaty -- What the Treaty contained and how Germany made use of the knowledge.

  3. A BOTANIST IN THE ARGONNE

  Of what comes of leaving important papers exposed -- I look and talk indiscreetly, and a man dies.

  4. "CHERCHEZ LA FEMME!"

  I am sent to Geneva and learn of a plot -- How there are more ways of getting rid of a King than by blowing him up with dynamite.

  5. THE STRONG ARM SQUAD

  Germany displays an interest in Mexico, and aids the United States for her own purposes -- The Japanese-Mexican Treaty and its share in the downfall of Diaz.

  6. A HERO IN SPITE OF MYSELF

  My letter again I go to America and become a United States soldier -- Sent to Mexico and sentenced to death there I join Villa's army and gain an undeserved reputation.

  7. ENTER CAPTAIN VON PAPEN

  War -- I re-enter the German service and am appointed aide to Captain von Papen -- The German conception of neutrality and how to make use of it -- The plot against the Welland Canal.

  8. MY INTERVIEW WITH THE KAISER

  I go to Germany on a false passport -- Italy in the early days of the war -- I meet the Kaiser and talk to him about Mexico and the United States.

  9. MY ARREST AND CONFESSION

  In England, and how I reached there -- I am arrested and imprisoned for fifteen months -- What von Papen's baggage contained -- I make a sworn statement.

  10. GERMANY'S HATE CAMPAIGN IN AMERICA

  The German intrigue against the United States -- Von Papen, Boy-Ed and von Rintelen, and the work they did -- How the German-Americans were used and how they were betrayed.

  11. MISCHIEF IN MEXICO

  More about the German intrigue against the United States -- German aims in Latin America -- Japan and Germany in Mexico -- What happened in Cuba?

  12. THE COMPLETE SPY

  The last stand of German intrigue -- Germany's spy system in America -- What is coming?

  MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN SECRET SERVICE AGENT

  CHAPTER I

  A MOMENTOUS DOCUMENT

  I find an old letter containing a strange bit of scandal, and its contents draw me into the service of the Kaiser.

  ON March 29, 1916, the steamer Finland was warped into its Hudson River dock and I hurried down the gangway. I was not alone. Agents of the United States Department of Justice had met me at Quarantine; and a man from Scotland Yard was there also a man who had attended me sedulously since, barely two weeks before, I had been released in rather unusual circumstances from Lewes prison in England; the last of four English prisons in which I had spent fifteen months in solitary confinement waiting for the day of my execution.

  My friend from Scotland Yard left me very shortly; soon afterwards I was testifying for the United States Government against Capt. Hans Taiischer,- husband of. Mine. Johanna Gadski, the diva. Tauscher, American agent of the Krupps and of the German Government, was charged with complicity in a plot to blow up the Welland Canal in Canada during the first month of the Great War. During the course of the trial it was shown that von Papen and others (including myself) had entered into a conspiracy to violate the neutrality of the United States. I had led the expedition against the Welland Canal, and I was telling everything I knew about it. Doubtless you remember the newspapers of the day.

  You will remember how, at that time, the magnitude of the German plot against
the neutrality of the United States became finally apparent. You will remember how, in connection with my exposure, came the exposure of von Igel, of Rintelen, of the German Consul-General at San Francisco, Bopp, and many others. With all these men I was familiar. In the activities of some of them I was implicated. It was I, as I have said, who planned the details of the Welland Canal plot. I shall tell the true story of these activities later.

  But first let me tell the story of how I came to be concerned in these plots and to do that I must go back over many years; I must tell how I first became a member of the Kaiser's Secret Diplomatic Force (to give it a name) and incidentally I shall describe for the first time the real workings of that force.

  I have been in and out of the Kaiser's web for ten years. I have served him faithfully in many capacities and in many places all over Europe, in Mexico, even in the United States. I served the German Government as long as I believed it to be representing the interests of my countrymen. But from the moment that I became convinced that the men who made up the" Government the Hohenzollerns, the Junkers and the bureaucrats were anxious merely to preserve their own power, even at the expense of .Germany itself, my attitude towards them changed. That is why I write this book and why I shall tell what I know of the aims and ambitions of these men enemies of Germany as well as of the rest of the world.

  I was not a spy; nor was I a secret service agent. I was, rather, a secret diplomatic agent. Let me add that there is a nice distinction between the three. A secret diplomatic agent is a man who directs spies, who studies their reports, who pieces together various bits of information, and who, when he has the fabric complete, personally makes his report to the highest authority or carries that particular plan to its desired conclusion. His work and his status are of various sorts. Unlike the spy, he is a user, not a getter, of information. He is a freelance, responsible only to the Foreign Office; a plotter; an unofficial intermediaiy in many negotiations; and frequently he differs from an accredited diplomatic representative only in that his activities and his office are essentially secret. Obviously men of this type must be highly trained and trustworthy; and their constant association with men of authority makes it necessary that they, themselves, should be men of breeding and education. But above all, they must possess the courage that shrinks at no danger, and a devotion, a patriotism that know no scruples.

  This, then, was the calling into which I found myself plunged, while still a boy, by one of the strangest chances that ever befell me, whose life has been full of strange happenings.

  As I recall my adolescence I realise that I was a normal boy, vigorous,^wilful, fond of sport, of horses, dogs and guns, and I know that but for the chance I speak of, I should have grown up in the traditions of our family Cadet School the University later a lieutenancy in the German Army and to-day, perhaps, death "somewhere in France."

  And yet, in that boyhood that I am recalling, I can remember that there were other interests which were far greater than the games that I loved, as did all lads of my age. Mental adventure, the matching of wits against wits for stakes of reputation and fortune, always exercised an uncanny fascination over my mind. That delight in intrigue was shown by the books I read as a boy. In the library of my father's house there were many novels, books of poems, of biography, travel, philosophy and history; but I passed them by unread. His few volumes of Court gossip and so-called "secret history "I seized with avidity. I used to bear off the memoirs of Marechal Richelieu, the Cardinal's nephew, and read them in my room when the rest of the household was asleep.

  I recall, too, that there was another tendency already developed in me. I see it in my dealings with other boys of that day. It was the impulse to make other people my instruments, not by direct command or appeal, but by leading them to do, apparently for themselves, what I needed of them.

  Such was I, when my aunt, who had cared for me since the death of my parents some years before, fell ill and later died. I was disconsolate for a time and wandered about through the halls and chambers of the house, seeking amusement. And it was thus that one day I came upon an old chest in the room that had been hers. I remembered that chest. There were letters in it letters that had been written to her by friends made in the old days when she was at Court. Often she had read me passages from them bits of gossip about this or that personage whom she had once known occasionally, even, mention of the Kaiser.

  Doubtless, too, I thought, there were passages which she had not seen fit to read to me: some more intimate bits of gossip about those brilliant men and women in Berlin whom I then knew only as names. With the eager curiosity of a boy I sought the key, and in a moment had unlocked the chest.

  There they lay, those neat, faded bundles, slightly yellow, addressed in a variety of hands. Idly I selected a packet and glanced over the envelopes it contained, lingering, in anticipation of the revelations that might be in them. I must have read a dozen letters before my eye fell upon the envelope that so completely changed my life.

  It lay in a corner of the chest, as if hidden from too curious eyes a yellow square of paper, distinguished from its fellows by the quality of the stationery alone, and by its appearance of greater age. But I knew, before I had read fifty words of it, that I was holding in my hands a document that was more explosive than dynamite!

  For this letter, written to my aunt years before, by one of the most exalted personages in all Germany, contained statements which, had they been made by anyone else, would have been treason to utter.

  Those of you whose memories go back tc the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, will readily recall the notorious ill-feeling that existed between Wilhelm II. and his mother, Victoria, the Dowager Empress Friedrich. Stories have so often been told of this enmity, culminating in the virtual banishment from Berlin of the Queen Mother, that I need not do more than mention them. But what is not so generally known is the small esteem in which Victoria was held by the entire German people. During the twenty years of her married life as the wife of the then Crown Prince Friedrich, she was treated by Berlin Society with the most thinly veiled hostility. Even Bismarck made no attempt to conceal his dislike for her, and accused her to quote his own words of having "poisoned the fountain of Hohenzollern blood at its source."

  Victoria, for her part, although she seems to have had no animosity towards the German people, certainly possessed little love for her eldest son, and did her best to delay his accession to the Imperial throne as long as she could. When in 1888 Wilhelm I. was dying, she tried her utmost to secure the succession to her husband, who was then lying dangerously ill at San Remo. "Cancer," the physicians pronounced the trouble, and even the great German specialist, Bergmann, agreed with their diagnosis. There is a law that prevents anyone with an incurable disease, such as cancer, from ascending the Prussian throne; but Victoria knew too well the attitude of her son, Wilhelm, towards herself, not to wish to do everything in her power to prevent him from becoming Emperor so long as she could. In her extremity she appealed to her mother, Queen Victoria of England, who sent Sir Morell Mackenzie, the great English surgeon, to San Remo to report on Friedrich's condition.

  Mackenzie opposed Bergmann and said the disease was not cancer; and the physicians inserted a silver tube in the patient's throat, and in due course he became Emperor Friedrich III.

  But in spite of Mackenzie and the silver tube, Friedrich III. died after a reign of ninety-eight days and he died of cancer.

  Now what was the reason for this hostility between mother and son and between Empress and subjects? There have been many answers given Victoria's love for England, her colossal lack of tact, her impatient unconventionality. Berlin whispered of a dinner in Holland years before, when Victoria had entertained some English people she met there people she had never seen before and had finished her repast by smoking a cigar. That in the days when the sight of a woman smoking horrified the German soul! And Berlin hinted at worse unconventionalities than this.

  As for the animosity of the Kaiser
, this was attributed to the fact that he held her responsible for his withered left arm.

  Plausible reasons, all of these, and possibly true. But consider, if you will, the rumours that followed Victoria all her life the story of an early attachment to the Count Seckendorf, her husband's associate during the Seven Weeks' War of 1866 the reports, sometimes denied but generally believed, of her marriage to the Count not long before her death. True or not, these stories what does it matter?

  But what to do with this letter to which I attached so much importance? Something impelled me not to speak of it to my family. But who else was there?

  In my perplexity I did an utterly foolish thing. I put my whole confidence in a man's word. There was, serving at a nearby fortress, a Major-General von Dassel, who was in the habit of coming to our house quite regularly. To him I went, and under pledge of silence I told him my story. Of course, he broke the pledge and left immediately for Berlin. All doubts, if I had any, as to the importance of the document, vanished with him. And if I had any misgivings concerning my own importance they quickly vanished, too. Back from Berlin, with Major- General von Dassel came an agent of the Chancellor. He did not come to our house; instead von Dassel sent for me to go to his headquarters in the fortress. I met there a solemn frockcoated personage who, so he said, had come down from Berlin especially to see me. Imagine my elation! I was in my element; what I had hoped for had at last happened. The pages of Richelieu and of my secret histories were coming true. Another man and I were to lock our wits in a fight to the finish that pleasure I promised myself. He was a worthy opponent, an official, a professional intriguer. As I looked into his serious, bearded face, I built romances about him.