The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918Jones, John Price
History
The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918
Jones, John Price
World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- Germany
"P. K." also had an incriminating book--a carefully prepared notebook
of his spies and of persons in New York, Boston and other cities
who were useful in furnishing him information. In another book he
kept a complete record of the purpose and cost of assignments on
which he sent his men. He listed in its pages the names of several
hundred persons--army reservists, German-Americans and Americans,
clerks, scientists and city and Federal employees--showing that his
district was large and that his range for getting information and for
supervising other pro-German propaganda was broad. For his own direct
staff he worked out a system of numbers and initials to be used in
communication. The numbers he changed at regular intervals and a system
of progression was devised by which each agent would know when his
number changed. He provided them with suitable aliases. These men had
alternative codes for writing letters and for telephone communication
to be changed automatically by certain fixed dates.
Always alert for spies upon himself, Koenig suspected that his
telephone wire was tapped and that his orders were being overheard.
So he instructed his men in various code words. If he told an agent
to meet him "at 5 o'clock at South Ferry" he meant: "Meet me at 7
o'clock at Forty-second Street and Broadway." His suspicions were
well-grounded, for his wire was tapped, and Koenig led the men who were
spying on him an unhappy dance.
For example: he would receive a call on the telephone and would direct
his agent, at the other end of the wire, to meet him in fifteen
minutes at Pabst's, Harlem. It is practically impossible to make the
journey from Koenig's office in the Hamburg-American Building to 125th
Street in a quarter of an hour. After a time his watchers learned that
"Pabst's, Harlem" meant Borough Hall, Brooklyn.
He never went out in the daytime without one or two of his agents
trailing him to see whether he was being shadowed. He used to turn a
corner suddenly and stand still so that an American detective following
came unexpectedly face to face with him and betrayed his identity.
Koenig would laugh heartily and pass on. Thus he came to know many
agents of the Department of Justice and many New York detectives. When
he started out at night he usually had three of his own men follow him
and by a prearranged system of signals inform him if any strangers were
following him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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