The Department of Justice met the situation, so far as it could under existing law, by a great enlargement of its Bureau of Investigation, and by the creation of a legal division devoted entirely to problems arising out of the war. Congress substantially supplied the deficiency in the laws by the passage of appropriate statutes. Under the powers obtained in these two directions the Department proceeded vigorously to the suppression of sedition, the internment of enemy aliens, and the prosecution of German agents. Its success is, I feel, attested by the absence of disorder in this country under war-time conditions. Open German activities have long since ceased here and the more subtle operations have been driven so far under cover as to be ineffective. In this work the Department of Justice has had the efficient and loyal aid of private citizens, who have responded generously to a patriotic impulse, through the agency of the American Protective League and similar organizations. Mr. Strother’s narrative covers some of the more outstanding cases of the period when German plotting was at its height. The failure of these plots and the retribution visited upon the evil-doers are evidences, not merely of governmental efficiency, but of that of old, age-old, substantive laws of morality, which Germany as a nation has undertaken to flout--as we now know, in vain--both here and elsewhere. T. W. GREGORY Attorney-General. Washington, D. C. August 14, 1918. FIGHTING GERMANY’S SPIES FIGHTING GERMANY’S SPIES CHAPTER I THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PASSPORT FRAUDS AND THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF WERNER HORN When Carl Ruroede, the “genius” of the German passport frauds, came suddenly to earth in the hands of agents of the Department of Justice and unbosomed himself to the United States Assistant District Attorney in New York, he said sadly: “I thought I was going to get an Iron Cross; but what they ought to do is to pin a little tin stove on me.” The cold, strong hand of American justice wrung that very human cry from Ruroede, who was the central figure (though far from the most sinister or the most powerful) in this earliest drama of Germany’s bad faith with neutral America--a drama that dealt in forgery, blackmail, and lies that revealed in action the motives of greed and jealousy and ambition, and that ended with three diplomats disgraced, one plotter in the penitentiary, and another sent to a watery grave in the Atlantic by a torpedo from a U-boat of the very country he had tried to serve. This is the story: