Read Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America for Free Online

went on without further prelude. Quickly, he made two pronouncements. The first came as a shock. But it was the second that left von Bernstorff completely undone.
    There will be war, Nicolai said flatly. He added that it would be soon, before this summer was over.
    As von Bernstorff struggled to come to terms with this grim news, Nicolai declared that the ambassador’s help was required. He had been selected to perform an important service for the kaiser and for the Fatherland. He would direct Abteilung IIIB’s operations in America.
     
    IT WAS OTTO VON BISMARCK , Germany’s farseeing chancellor, who in his prudent and ruthlessly practical way first understood the need for a centralized organization to gather intelligence on his country’s foreign enemies. In 1861 he appointed Wilhelm Stieber, a former Berlin criminal investigator, to head the Central Intelligence Division, as it was originally known. Stieber, who had policed the streets of Berlin by establishing a network of informants, people in all walks of life who, for cash or a favor, would pass on information, brought a cop’s mentality to the task.
    Knowledge, Stieber’s years in law enforcement had convinced him, was the key to power. As Germany’s first spymaster, he sent out a string of agents recruited from the police and military academies to cultivate informants all across Europe.
    A half century later, when Nicolai took control, the methods had grown more sophisticated, but the service’s guiding principle had not changed: Know the enemy.
    At a training school outside Berlin, novice agents went through two years of rigorous education. In addition to weapons instruction, sabotage techniques, and code writing, they studied topography, trigonometry, and draftsmanship so that the precise details of a military fortification, or a harbor, or a munitions factory could be accurately sketched. They became experts in European army and naval equipment, trained to identify at a glance whether the stockpiled shells were, say, for a 75-mm cannon, a 105-mm howitzer, or just a Stokes mortar, or whether the ship steaming off to sea was a destroyer or a light cruiser.
    After graduation, Abteilung IIIB agents—and there were a fair number of women in each class—were sent abroad with the orders to find jobs at once. Good cover, Nicolai believed with a field man’s hard-won knowledge, was essential if you were to live in enemy territory and not arouse suspicions.
    In small garrison towns, in waterfront neighborhoods surrounding naval bases, and along gilded thoroughfares of capital cities, agents opened tobacco shops, or grocery stores, or boardinghouses, or brothels. They worked as waiters, or teachers, or governesses, or whores. Whatever they saw or heard, hard facts and tantalizing rumors, was written down. They collected the names of journalists, of soldiers, of statesmen whose vices might allow their loyalty to be compromised. They made lists of immigrants whose family ties to Germany made them potential recruits.
    All this information was stored in the long rows of files that filled the basement beneath the Königsplatz headquarters. It was a cave of secrets. By the summer of 1914, Nicolai controlled the largest and most efficient intelligence organization in the world. When war broke out, his operatives would already be in place, ready to move against the enemy.
    Except that Nicolai, usually so meticulous, had made one miscalculation.
    It was a dangerous error. In fact, it could, he had come to realize, cost Germany the war.
    Germany had deployed all its operatives in Europe. It had buried agents deep in England, France, and Russia. It had focused on Germany’s traditional enemies—and it had ignored America.
    In July 1914 Germany had only a single part-time agent in the entire United States—Dr. Walter Scheele, a timid, elderly New Jersey chemist who lacked the energy to poke about the factory where he worked, let alone fulfill his grandiose assignment of