The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective LeagueHough, Emerson
History
The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective League
Hough, Emerson
American Protective League; Propaganda, German; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- United States
The story of Scheele’s ferreting out is of itself a strange and
absorbing tale, which shows how our own men were on their guard. To
begin with, his cigar bombs did not work infallibly—perhaps the motion
of the ship would slop the acid away from the tin partition so it
would not cut through quite on schedule. One or two bombs were found
on shipboard. One or two were found unexploded in the coal when ships
were unloading at Bordeaux. The bombs were traced back to New York.
Dock laborers had been bribed to put them aboard ships sometimes—and
sometimes were ashamed to do so and dropped them into the water
instead. Men who can decipher code can run a trail like this. Scheele
soon was located.
But Scheele had fled long before. Why? Whither? The Imperial German
Government knew Scheele was going to be caught. The large spies of
the German embassy promised to pick Scheele up at Cuba—where he had
taken temporary residence under the practically German custody of a
Spaniard who kept him in a castle which also was a prison. And so it
came to pass that when the embassadorial train of the Imperial German
Government was kicked out of America and all these big spies were named
openly, and all the news of that big spy system began to break, von
Bernstorff, von Papen and company sailed for Germany—but they did not
take any chances. They did not stop at Cuba.
Scheele was abandoned by his people—he was an actual prisoner in Cuba.
He was bitter. He might talk under a third degree. An A. P. L. man of
New York Division, Richmond Levering, now Major Levering, U. S. A.,
went to Cuba, got access to Scheele, took him to Key West, took him
back again to Cuba—but took him back to an actual prison. Then, finding
he had no place in the world, and no friend whose protection he could
not buy, he sold his “honor of a German officer” to the United States,
and in return, he is still alive, having paid as the price of life the
full story, so far as he knows it, of the German Imperial spy system
from Wilhelmstrasse to Brooklyn Bridge.
And there you have a spy, a real one, a man who planned murder and
arson on the high seas, death to unknown hundreds of men, women and
children; the man who invented the mustard gas that tortured and killed
our boys and those of our allies on the line in France, and whose
perverted intellect did none may know what else of subtle crime “on the
honor of a German officer.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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