Britain's Deadly Peril: Are We Told the Truth?Le Queux, William
History
Britain's Deadly Peril: Are We Told the Truth?
Le Queux, William
Secret service -- Germany; Spies; World War, 1914-1918
Could Germany's unscrupulous methods go farther than the scandal
exposed in America, in the late days of February, of how Captain
Boy-Ed, Naval Attaché of the German Embassy at Washington, and the
Kaiser's spy-master in the United States, endeavoured to induce the
man Stegler to cross to England and spy on behalf of Germany? In this,
Germany is unmasked. Captain Boy-Ed was looked upon as one of the
ablest German naval officers. He is tall and broad-shouldered, speaks
English fluently, and in order to Americanise his appearance has
shaved off his "Prince Henry" whiskers which German naval officers
traditionally affect. When he took up his duties at Washington he
was a man of about forty-five, and ranked in the German navy as
lieutenant-commander. But his career of usefulness as Naval Attaché,
with an office in the shipping quarters of New York, has been
irretrievably impaired by the charges of Stegler, whose wife produced
many letters in proof of the allegation that the attaché was the
mainspring of a conspiracy to secure English-speaking spies for service
to be rendered by German submarines and other German warships on the
British side of the Atlantic.
The plot, exposed in every paper in the United States, was a low
and cunning one, and quite in keeping with the methods of the men
of "Kultur." Mrs. Stegler, a courageous little woman from Georgia,
saw how her husband--an export clerk in New York--was being drawn
into the German net as a spy, and she stimulated her husband to give
the whole game away. To the United States police, Stegler, at his
wife's suggestion, was perfectly frank and open. He exposed the whole
dastardly plot. He stated that Captain Boy-Ed engineered the spy-plot
that cost Lody his life, and declared that in his dealings with the
attaché the matter of going to England as a spy progressed to a point
where the money that was to be paid to his wife for her support while
he was in England was discussed. Captain Boy-Ed, Stegler went on to
say, agreed to pay Mrs. Stegler £30 a month while he was in England,
and furthermore agreed that if the British discovered his mission and
he met the fate of Lody, Mrs. Stegler was to receive £30 a month from
the German Government as long as she lived!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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