Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb PlottersTunney, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph)
History
Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters
Tunney, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- Germany
“No, I haven’t got it all, but I can get it. I’ll pay you a hundred
dollars now as a guarantee, and I’ll give you the balance at noon
to-morrow.”
Barnitz called two of the other men. “Get this,” he said, and turning
to Fay: “All right, where’s your money?” Fay paid him. Then they
took him to the Weehawken headquarters, guilty at least of attempted
bribery, and Barnitz turned in the cash as Exhibit A.
We suspected that he had something more than the possession of
explosives to conceal, and so he had, for a search of his rooms and the
garage brought to light the parts for a number of thoroughly ingenious
mechanical contrivances which, although they were of a new type, we
immediately recognized as bombs. In a packing case at the storage
warehouse were four bombs finished and ready to fill. He had apparently
intended to manufacture them on a large scale, for in addition to his
trial quantity of TNT Fay had twenty-five sticks of dynamite, 450
pounds of chlorate of potash, four hundred percussion caps, and two
hundred bomb cylinders. Apparently, too, he had German sympathies, for
we found in his rooms a regulation German army pistol, loaded. The
discovery of a chart of New York harbor, and the information, which
we soon got, that he had a motorboat in a slip opposite West 42nd
Street, pointed the finger of guilt toward the waterfront--which after
all those months of waiting was the direction in which we were most
interested.
Fay told his story. He was a lieutenant of the German Army, detached
for special secret service. He ascribed his detachment from his command
to his own brilliant realization, as he was on the fighting front in
France, that if all the American shells that were being fired at him
from French seventy-fives and British eighteen-pounders could be sunk
before they reached France they would not cause his countrymen so
much annoyance, and also that pushed to its capacity that idea would
probably influence the outcome of the war. The fact is that Fay’s
career, training, education, languages and character were well known
to the secret service in Berlin, and that when they wanted to assign a
reliable and desperate man to Captain von Papen in New York, they sent
him. They knew that Fay had spent years in America, and that he was
trained in mechanics. They gave him $4,000 and a plan of campaign, and
said: “Go west.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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