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
The trend of events in early 1915 made it apparent that the Bomb
Squad would be called upon to handle more and more cases of attempted
violation of neutrality. Anyone who remembers our national mind at that
time will recall that it was not yet made up and very liable to attacks
of brainstorm. Every person was seeing events of unheard of violence
and magnitude pass him pell-mell, giving no warning, and not waiting
for comment, and he was too dazed to watch any single event with any
high degree of balanced judgment or reasoning partisanship. It was a
troubled hour, and one in which it behooved us of the Police Department
to keep our heads cool and our eyes open. The Bomb Squad had to act as
a safety valve.
By the summer of 1915 war orders placed by the Allied governments in
the autumn and winter of 1914 were being filled and shipped overseas
in great quantities. By this time, too, the German navy showed no more
sign of coming out of Kiel in force than it had shown for a year past.
The task of delaying, diverting or destroying those shipments devolved
upon the Germans in America. It took no superhuman amount of reasoning
to combine the abnormal destruction of property in New York with the
strong suspicion of German activity and to arrive at a decision to
check up wherever it was humanly possible the sources and agencies of
destruction.
Late in the autumn, in our work on the waterfront, we found a man who,
we decided, was worth watching. We learned gradually that Paul Koenig
was a pretty well-known figure along both banks of the Hudson, and that
he carried, as chief detective for the Hamburg-American Line, a certain
amount of authority. That steamship line, which within a week of the
outbreak of war had attempted to send ships to sea under false cargo
manifests to supply the German naval raiders, now had more time than
business on its hands as its entire fleet was tied up in Hoboken. And
yet in spite of the dull times which we knew had been thrust upon them,
their man Koenig was curiously busy, and we became busily curious to
find out why.
We were more curious than successful at first. We assigned men to
follow him and observe his habits and haunts. This was not as easy as
it might have been with another man, for the Department of Justice had
already tried it and had come to the conclusion that he was not worth
following.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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