s on capitol hill and have your say as events unfold on tv, radio and the web. next on american history tv author and journalist howard blum describes german espionage in the u.s. with a focus on the years 1915 to 1917. before america entered world war i. in his book become become 1915 germany's secret war on the hunt for the first terrorist cell in america he details how german spies engaged in sabotage germ warfare and assassination attempts in an effort to prevent the u.s. from entering the war. he also profiles nypd inspector tom cunning who helped develop a modern counterterrorism strategy. this event was hosted by the new york military affairs symposium. it's about an hour. good evening and welcome. i am pleased to welcome howard

blum, an investigative journalist and author of the new new york times best-seller become become as well as many other great books. he is currently a contributing editor at "vanity fair." while at the "new york times" he was twice nominated for a pulitzer prize for investigative reporting. several of his books were non-fiction best sellers including, among others "i pledge allegiance, the true story of the walkers, an american spy family" that was turned into a great mini series on cbs, perhaps some of you watched it in the past. "gang land" how the fbi broke the mob in 1993. "the eve of destruction." the untold story of the yom kippur war in 2003. "american lightning" terror of mystery and the birth of hollywood and the crime of the

century" in 2008. "a floor of heaven, a true tale of the last frontier and the yukon gold rush in 2011." i should also mention that warner brothers is preparing a film of "dark invasion" starring bradley cooper as tom, the hero of the book. please welcome, howard blum. 4$lu pick up a newspaper and just glance at the headline. check out the internet and read almost any post. there's news about terrorism anywhere and it's all very frightening. it will keep you up at night. one day they're saying new york city is a target. the next day is chicago. then las vegas, even the air force academy. the president tells us that we don't have to worry. isis is not going to attack the

homeland yet. then a republican presidential candidate comes out and says, well, maybe we do have to worry. our borders are very porous. but there's no doubt about it my children are growing up in a world of terrorism. terrorism has become part of the dna of the times in which we live. so consider this very harrowing scenario. a terrorist cell well-financed, covertly enters america. they set up their headquarters, and they begin bombing munitions factories, munitions depots. a bomb rocks the u.s. capitol building. the nation's richest man, a pillar of the complex is targeted in a bold assassination attempt. from a covert bio warfare lab just six miles from the white house, a bio warfare attack is launched on three american

cities. the president is told by his chief adviser this is a time of fear. we have to worry that bridges and subways and buildings all around the country are going to be attacked. and the government in response puts -- forms a task force to look for these terrorists. it's headed by a new york city policeman and he goes off and he, with just 12 men, tries bring these terrorists to justice. now, this scenario that i've outlined sounds like it's a movie, and it would make a pretty good movie, or it could be maybe a game that's played at the pentagon and they look as they try to figure out what the next terrorist attack is going to be made against the homeland. but in reality, all this happened. this happened in 1915. and it's a story i tell in "dark invasion" and a story i want to share a little about tonight.

the story begins really it's a time when the u.s. is still neutral while europe is at war. in germany, they've decided to target the united states. they decide that the only way to keep the united states out of the war is to bring terror to our shores. they decide that they need to stop the united states from sending arms and materiel to the allies who are fighting against germany. so they begin to target the united states. it's a time when the united states realizes that this is a nation full of targets. the cia in their in-house journal has looked back on this period and they point to this as the first defense of the homeland, and the man who is made in charge of it defense of the homeland captain tom tunney, and i'll speak about him, really is the first head of homeland security. he and his little 12-man squad are really the precursors of a

homeland security network which now has 40,000 people and an annual budget of $98.8 billion. it's also a time where we learn to live with fear. now, to understand where this story begins, i think we have to go back to two months before the war, before the war has broken out in europe. and we have to go to germany, berlin where walter nikolai, a major in the german army is head of the german secret service. and nikolai has served on the russian front. he's been a handler, he sent agents deep into russia. he sent up the german spies academies and they've sent agents into france, into england and as i said, into russia. but suddenly occurs to him, as war is about to begin, he knows in a couple of months, the germans have taken their battle plans out of the safe and dusted them off, he suddenly realized

we've forgotten about the united states. in the united states, as 1914, the summer of 1914 approaches, germany only has one agent in the entire country, a 70-year-old man who works in a munitions factory in new jersey and he's supposed to monitor the entire munitions industry of the united states. so nikolai realizes that something has to be done. if germany is going to win this war, which is about to break out, we have to keep the u.s. out of the war. we have to keep the u.s. military machine if it's ever built up from working against the germans, and we have to prevent the united states from sending, supplying the allies. so he decides that the only way we can do this the only way that germany can do this, is to set up a clandestine network. he he summons the u.s. ambassador, germany's ambassador to the united states, count johann van

berns dorff and he gets this mysterious summons to report back immediately to berlin for meetings. he's rather upset about all this because he has his whole summer planned. he has a rich american wife with an estate on the north shore and has a girlfriend with her house in newport rhode island. and he figures he'll spend part of the summer with his wife, because she has all the money, and then i'll high tail it off to newport to spend the rest of his summer with his girlfriend going to the parties up there. now he's been summoned back to berlin and it's a bit of an inconvenience. he hopes to get it over rather quickly. he goes off to berlin and he's brought down to nikolai's headquarters, really. it's a basement room underneath berlin and he's a little off. he's a count after all and ambassador and he's being lectured to by a major. but he listens and he's told that he's going to head the

german spy network in america. he's upset about this because he's a gentleman and a spy is little beneath him, but he realizes he's told what's at stake and then given a briefcase. briefcase. in the briefcase are $150 million in treasury notes. he's told to bring this money into the united states he is to travel back under an assumed name. if the ship is boarded by british sailors inspecting, don't let them get this money don't let them know what we're up to better to throw it into the sea than to let the british get their hands on it. so von bernstoff comes back to the united states, he brings the money with him and he begins to set up his organization. he during the day lives his cover as they say in the spy business very well. he's still going out to parties all around washington. he's still on the social circuit. he's going up to newport. but he also has sent his agents

his military and naval attaches to run this spy network. they are based in lower manhattan around wall street and they have also been able to recruit many assets to work with them. not only is there a large german population in new york, for example, who are sympathetic to the father land but also ships have been interred in new york harbor and also in hoboken and these are filled with german sailors that can't get back to germany because of the war. they have nothing to do and they are looking to help the father land in any way so this is an army which is really based in new york that's at germany's beck and call and they have $150 million to spend. so they start beginning sabotage sabotage, they set up a safe house in new york not too far from here on west 15th street. it's a bordello run by martha held, a former opera singer. they meet there late at night

and it's a great cover for planning terrorist activities, a bordello because@0l9 anyone who is watching it is not surprised to see men entering, coming and going all hours of the night. gb so they begin to do this and suddenly, ships are blowing up at sea, munitions factories are going up in smoke and the american authorities really don't know what's going on. is this a plague of industrial accidents, is this a labor protest? they really don't suspect that germany could be behind this. then the british share some information with us. the british since the start of the war have been intercepting germany's cables and they have broken the code they do it in the old admiralty building. they get a bunch of oxford and

cambridge dons and are able to brilliantly break the german code and they are reading germans' messages. they read them and they say oh, my gosh, they declared war even though there isn't a real declaration of war, against the united states. so they pass this on to the federal government. the man in charge of intelligence activities at that time is james polk a descendent of the president. he's an undersecretary of state. he has to do something about this. president wilson says well look into it, see what can be done. he really doesn't take it too seriously. so polk has to figure out what to do. the bureau of investigation, which is the precursor to the fbi, is really at this point a very feeble organization. the men aren't even allowed to carry guns. military intelligence, naval intelligence, with all respect to many members that might be here, was really not functioning

back in 1914 very well. so he decides because he went to grotton prep school up in new england and the new york city police chief went to grotton and his chief deputy went to grotton, they are all grotton and harvard men, to go to the old boy network. and he goes to them and he says maybe you can help me with this. he trusts them the way he doesn't trust people in the federal government. so arthur woods who is the new york city police chief, who taught at grotton for awhile after his graduation from harvard, he and his deputy, guy scull, decide they have just the man. he's an irish street cop tom tunney. at this point he's heading the bomb squad and the bomb squad in those days is really not concerned with defusing bombs but it's concerned with the people who make them, the various anarcist groups around

the city. tunney has just run a successful undercover operation one of the first ever in the history of the police department, an anarchist group was going to put a bomb in st. patrick's cathedral. he had one of his men infiltrate the group. they were able to while the bomb was left in the front of st. patrick's cathedral, they were able to grab the bomb and stop it from being -- stop it from exploding. this has given him a great deal of credibility with the department. so he's called to a secret meeting at the new york city police headquarters on center street a big domed building that's now luxury condominiums that go for several million dollars apiece. in the commissioner's private office, there's a back way in the back of the building. you go up a private elevator into wood-panelled room with a fire going and there is the commissioner and his deputy guy scull, and they are telling tunney we've got this mission for you.

we want you to in effect, be head of homeland security. they say we are going to give you a special office right across the way above a bar. you answer only to us. take the men you need, set up this group and figure out what is going on. so tunney looks at the problem and he really doesn't quite know where to begin. the first thing he's learned, he doesn't want married men in the unit. he's afraid this is going to be too dangerous and he's learning as he goes along. he's never done this before. he's never been a spy catcher. he then recruits people who speak german but then he decides well, i won't have any people who weren't born in this country. i don't want any german immigrants on my team because i can't trust them. then he looks for -- goes to the police shooting range which is in the basement of this

building, it's now an $8 million co- co-op, the police shooting range alone went for $8 million. he recruits a guy who had very good scores there, another guy who he describes as being as big as the woolworth building, which was the biggest building at the time. he gets men who are good at surveillance, men who are good at tapping phones, and he makes this 12-man team. and they are given this assignment to find out what's going on bring these terrorists, bring these germans to justice. at the same time in germany, major nikolai is not really happy with the progress of von bernstoff and his rag-tag group are doing. he is a professional spy and he knows we need a professional agent to really run this group. so he recruits a member from naval intelligence a man by the name of frans von ritlin.

von ritlin before the war worked in the united states and london, in london he learned how to dress, he discovered a tailor who made up outfits for him, and when he worked in new york as a banker, he added the von to his name. he really wasn't a member of german nobility. when he went back to germany, he just kept it. he thought it would be easier. he is given this mission to go to the united states and wage war as he puts it against america, against the 48 states. he describes himself as a dark invader. he comes to the united states under a pseudonym, bearing a swiss passport, calling himself emile gashe, a false tooth in his mouth. he has codes so he can communicate back with germany, and he establishes himself in the new york yacht club on 44th street. he gets a suite of rooms there and at night he's out on the

town in white tie going to parties, being a very successful banker but during the day, from an office down on wall street, he is running a sabotage campaign against the united states and a terror campaign. he is a spider spinning his web. and the web he's spinning is a very ingenius one. ultimately tunney and von ritlin are involved in a cat and mouse game, as was mentioned when i was introduced warner brothers is doing a movie about dark invasion and the crux of the movie as has been written and sort of taken my story which is true, taken some dramatic liberties, the script does work really well, is really a cat and mouse game between von ritlin and tom tunney between these two very complex personalities.

each one is ruthless and determined in their own way and it's a real battle. the plot that von ritlin spins in the united states, let me give you an idea of some of them. one of them is an ingenius invention to sabotage ships at sea as they leave the new york harbor after they have been loaded with munitions that are going to go to france or england or russia. one of his men invents what's called a cigar bomb. it's a piece of metal tubing about the size of a cigar. in the middle of it is a bit of copper plating. on the other side is a -- is acid that will eat through the plating in the middle in a number of days, so they throw this in the bales of sugar or explosives that are going off to sea. they enlist stevedores to help them do this.

many of the stevedores are irish. they do this because any enemy of england is their friend. they are willing to work with these german terrorists. they put them in the ships going off to sea and two days out at sea, the acid has eaten through and the ships blow up. the fires ignite and they never -- the evidence really doesn't exist anymore because it's all been combusted in the explosion. and tunney has to figure out how this is done. another plot he has to deal with is germ warfare. in 1907 in a former stables that turned into a veterinary clinic outside berlin the german government had begun experimenting with anthrax and glandris. when mustard gas begins being used in battlefields of europe, they decide why not bring

anthrax and glanders here to the united states. why not use that in america. the real target is war horses the corrals of horses gathered up and being shipped to the war that are so necessary for fighting in world war i. and they decide we'll poison these animals. but there are ancillary incidents and people die from germ warfare in the united states. the main agent who is doing this is a dr. anton dilger. anton dilger is this sort of enemy agent we still worry about today. he was born in the united states, then he goes off to germany, to study medicine. he's living in germany when the war breaks out and he volunteers to help the germans. but he has an american passport. his father, in fact, won the congressional medal of honor in the civil war. and now -- but he is also of german descent and they are

willing now to help germany so he comes to the united states, he is given money by nikolai and he sets up a germ warfare factory, in effect. he sets it up six miles from the white house in a house he's rented, in the basement and his sister lives upstairs for good cover and in the basement, he and his brother who used to run a brewery are brewing up vats or test tubes really of glanders and anthrax. he brought the cultures over with him from germany and now he is producing them. then they recruit in turn, seamen to spread them in the port of new york, in baltimore and in new orleans and there is a germ warfare attack on three american cities. people die as these germs are spread. there have been several deaths that only after the war did the u.s. authorities realize are being caused by germ warfare.

and tom tunney has to try to stop this. an attack on america that he does not quite understand. there's another plot a rather interesting assassination plot on j.p. morgan jr. j.p. morgan, jr. is now heading a consortium of banks that are lending over $900 million to the allies, to russia france and@#h largely, england, and walter nikolai and von ritlin they want to stop this. and the way to stop these loans which are funding the allied war is to get rid of j.p. morgan, jr. so that brings them to find the perfect person to do this which turns out to be a man by the name of eric munter. in 1906, eric munter is a

professor at harvard. he's teaching german there. and he is also expecting his second child but his wife is having a difficult pregnancy. he leaves his harvard office every day goes home to see her and he spoon feeds her every night this special broth that he's made to help her through this difficult pregnancy, and he's a very solicitous husband. the neighbors talk about how much he cares about his wife. their nurses are brought in. they say professor munter he cares so much about her, and despite her illness she is able to give birth seems okay but then four days afterwards she dies. and munter is filled with grief and he decides that he will bring the baby, the newborn baby and his other infant baby with him to his in-laws' house in chicago. they will bury his wife, leona

there, and he goes off to chicago with the nurses with the two babies. after the funeral, he tells his father-in-law i just need to think about things let me spend two days and then i'll be back. he never comes back and while he's away, the cambridge, massachusetts police come looking for him. it seems the autopsy on the organs that were taken out of his wife's body show that she was poisoned. the broth he was feeding her was arsenic. so this harvard professor is now on the lam and professor munter now reinvents himself as eric frankholt. he goes down to mexico, hangs out two years there he works as a bookkeeper for a mining company, then slowly begins to come back to the united states. he enrolls in really a cattle

college outside dallas meets his new wife there. her name is also leona. he finds another leona. and her father is a methodist minister in dallas, comes from a very respectable family, and he does very well. he graduates, becomes an itinerant teacher. by 1914 working his way back to cornell university, back to the ivy league. he's a professor there again under this assumed name. no one has noticed him, he has a new wife and he thinks everything is fine. when war breaks out in europe, he is overwhelmed by this. he decides what the united states is doing sending arms to the allies is not right. he has to do something about it. so when the term ends he sends his wife and their baby daughter down to dallas to see his father-in-law, the reverend, and he is going to go to new york to

do something about this. what he does in new york is pretty much like lee harvey oswald did when he went to the cuban embassy in mexico. he volunteers his services to the german cause. and he becomes really an agent for von ritlin. the details only come out after the fact but later, tom tunney, who becomes deeply involved in this case, is able to put things together. holt, who originally was munter comes down from cornell to new york city with only $5 in his possession. he is able to buy a car stay in a hotel, rent a cottage out in long island as he does reconnaissance of j.p. morgan's mansion out there. he is able to buy 178 pounds of dynamite and he also has a great cover identity.

he goes around as a member of the summer new york social register so he is able to get in all the great houses of long island because they all want to be listed in the social register, and he is able to do reconnaissance of j.p. morgan's mansion on the north shore. then he decides to launch his plot. first step in his plot is he plans -- goes up to washington on july 2nd 1915, and plants a bomb in the u.s. capitol building. this bomb goes off 10:00 at night. it does great damage to the u.s. capitol building and having accomplished this he then goes the next morning, takes a train back to new york and makes his way to j.p. morgan's mansion. he introduces himself as the reporter for the social directory but j.p. morgan's butler who has a great name, physic, physic says it doesn't

seem right because the guy looks a little weird and wild, so munter alias holt, takes out a revolver, forces his way in, and chases the butler down the great hall of the mansion. finally, sees j.p. morgan's children, grabs them and starts walking up the staircase. j.p. morgan's wife sees this man with a gun on her two children. she screams. that alerts morgan and he very courageously throws himself right in front of holt. holt shoots him once, then another time twice and then the gun jams. there are two bullet wounds to his abdomen, serious wounds, and then he falls on top -- he falls on top of the assassin while the butler and the rest of the crew come up and beat him unconscious. so tom tunney is brought in to do the questioning of this assassin, and the interrogation

i quote a lot of it because the transcripts were available, in my book are really also reminiscent of lee harvey oswald. again, he's an assassin who isn't saying anything except he's innocent and gives great many smirking replies to the interrogation. and tunney goes off to see what will happen and he tells the guards be careful put him under solitary confinement, make sure keep a guard on him at all times. but he's taken to the jail and while he's in the jail, the first report is there's a shot and he has been killed by a lone gunman, an assassin somehow stuck a rifle into the jail cell. the next day this is contradicted. it says that he got on top of his jail cell and jumped down and smashed his head open. but there's no autopsy. the district attorney says let's get this over with we don't need an autopsy, it was -- he committed suicide while in custody.

tunney can't believe it and neither can the new york newspapers. for the first two days, the "new york times" is running stories that this is impossible, there must be other people involved. police chief woods is saying there are more people involved. the bomb that he ignited in the capitol is a very sophisticated bomb and under his interrogation, he knew nothing about making or fabricating bombs. then mysteriously the story disappears. it just stops. and tunney becomes convinced that well, the u.s. government president wilson is just not prepared to go to war. they don't want america if this comes out america will have no choice to go to war and at this point, in 1915, america is just not ready for it. but within two years wilson's patience just -- president wilson's patience breaks away

and america goes to war. tunney and his men are drafted into the military intelligence. he becomes major tunney. his squad are now army officers and they are now policing the homeland. it would be wrong to say that one event made president wilson change his mind, convince the man who is so complex as wilson to go to war. there was black tom there was the zimmerman telegram that you will read about in "the guns of august" as was mentioned before. but to give some insight into what pushed the united states into war there's a flag day speech made in june 1917 just months after the declaration, and it's a very candid speech by president wilson. he seems deeply aggrieved. he has taken what the german ambassador has done, what the german spy network has done as

being very personal. he's still shocked that gentlemen would behave this way. he says if they would come into our homes as our friends and then betray this country what self-respecting nation should not go to war. so because of terrorism largely, america goes to war in 1917. now it's nearly a century later and terrorism as i said has become part of our lives. we still have to deal with it and yet what i find so troubling, so disturbing that one of the chief problems that tunney and police chief woods had to deal with in 1914, 1915, 1916 is still a problem here in the united states today. let me explain. after the war, chief -- police

chief arthur woods said america can never be caught napping again. our intelligence agencies must be federalized and ban together. but he also said what the last war taught us is that america and that new york city rather, could not count on the federal government to protect us. that's why ixa+ñ had to take a new york city policeman, that's why i had to take tom tunney and appoint him to protect this city. after 9/11 ray kelly former new york city cop, former marine he takes the job and he has the same reaction. he says it's all doom and gloom and we can't count on the feds to protect us. he makes his own intelligence network. he takes a former director of operations from the cia, brings him to new york city and then has him set up agencies representing new york in various capitals, 12 different capitals around the world so new york

will get the information it needs right away without having to rely on the federal government. and after the boston marathon bombing, commissioner kelly again raises the issue. the fbi knew about these two brothers. why didn't they pass it on to the police? so here we have this same concern, the same concern that was bothering police chief woods, captain tunney, is now bothering the people in charge of new york city and other cities today. intelligence is only valuable if it's shared. we have all the eyes and ears in the world listening to us. who knows who is listening to me speak tonight. but if this information is not shared with the people who are protecting our various cities it's really not helping the cause too much. what makes this particularly frightening is that while we have not cured this problem, our

enemies have gotten much more powerful. you think of german doctor sitting in his little lab in chevy chase six miles from the white house with his test tubes making anthrax. well, now there are more than 75 different killer biotoxins the government has identified that can be made in mobile labs anywhere, in the middle east and brought to the united states. we have to worry about that. we live in an open society where we have super bowls and stadium, baseball stadiums, shopping malls, office complexes, where anyone can enter. we think of our assassin, eric munter, walking in, he carried a little suitcase with a bomb into the capitol building. well, now you can have a suitcase or backpack filled with a tactical nuclear weapon. when you think about anthrax they worried about anthrax in

the subways in 1915. that was brought to president wilson's attention. in 1915, 375,000 people rode the new york city subways. today it's 4.3 million every day. this is scary stuff. and unless the people who are in charge of our security address the problems that tom tunney and police chief woods had to address in 1915 unless they5nñ address them today things are going to get scarier because the one thing history has taught us that"rpñ with a grim inevitability, the homeland will be a target again. let's hope we're prepared for when it happens. one way to prepare for it is to learn the lessons that tunney learned in 1915. thank you. [ applause ]

i will answer all the questions you have, or try to. >> thank you for the lecture. i read an expose just recently about the whole intelligence foul-ups before, during and after 9/11 and it seems even though kelly set up his intelligence unit, there was somebody -- one of the top people in it was from one of the national intelligence units and they didn't want to cooperate with him. some people didn't like him or they had problems with him and they didn't want to deal with it even though there was a problem festering they just didn't want to, you know cooperate. it's a whole mental thing with them. >> the lack of cooperation between intelligence agencies is the fatal flaw in any system. it happened here in 9/11. it happened in the middle east, in the october war in israel

where israel was taken by surprise. if the information is not shared with the correct agencies, all the fancy electronic intelligence gathering is just really not going to accomplish what they're meant for. >> thank you. two questions. the cigar bomb seems so small. how could they do so much damage when, you know to the munitions? tell us about the munitions that were affected. and also, who was targeted by the germ warfare? >> the first question, how could a cigar bomb so effective. if you place -- start a fire in a ship filled with munitions that are being shipped overseas, they are highly combustible. also, as tunney found out, which i didn't know until i read,

sugar is very inflammatory. it blows up. bales of raw sugar. they would put it in there too. so these were really fires that would break out and then spread. the black tom arsenal which was over new jersey, which wound up causing millions of dollars worth of damage and was felt it blew up in new jersey and the windows of the 42nd street library were blown out. that's how powerful the explosive -- explosion was. and it killed three people. that was also masterminded by von ritlin. he was sent the original plan for that and that was a more standard bomb. but the ingenius part of the cigar bomb is that it would disappear. you wouldn't see it. so for the first year that it was happening, they weren't sure if this was caused by a labor

dispute or an angry seaman or whatever. one other thing about the cigar bombs. von ritlin managed to convince the russians under his assumed identity of emile gashe that he would buy supplies for them. so he would take their money, millions of dollars to buy supplies and then he would say it was being loaded on to a ship. he would then have that ship blown up at sea so, a, the russians wouldn't get the supplies and b he was able to keep the money because he didn't even have to buy it. it was a very -- he was very ingenius and very ruthless. he wound up in the atlanta penitentiary for 15 years. your other part of the question i'm not quite sure? >> who was targeted for germ warfare? >> here in the united states? what they did is chemical factories first, the dupont factory, the factories in new jersey various fireworks factories, and every ship that

was leaving for sea, theype went up to van cortland park and did the horse corrals there war horses that were going off to europe. they did that also by the new york ports. they really wanted to stop war materiel from going over to the allies. that's how they then moved on to j.p. morgan, because he was the one who was supplying the money to buy it. >> one of the interesting things i note in your book is how this really didn't become like a hysterical attempt to crack down on all german-americans or kind of a witchhunt as later happened with the red scare around 1920. so i wonder why isn't that, they learned from tunney, we can do this small we can target just the right people, get them, and there's no need to round up thousands of people. >> i think -- well, i would disagree a bit, because they didn't realize what was

happening at the time. later when they figured out that these were german-americans who were working with the german government that led to the interment of japanese. this was brought up in congress as a rationale for the interment of japanese in world war ii the way german-americans acted in world war i. just that they didn't quite understand -- they were learning. tom tunney had become head of homeland security, had to understand everything and was a street cop who had a lot of guts and was inventive and tenacious, but he had to learn on the job. and also the press wasn't -- part of his edict was to keep this out of the press. and the press really wasn't brought into it until afterwards. >> on the security and freedom debate, what do the naysayers tell you at conferences and things? >> the naysayers who are against

security? well, back then or now? now. who are against security? well, it's a very delicate balance. as i said before, we live in an open society. we have to balance our freedom and our privacy against our protection. the classic example is do you want to be patted down before you go on an airplane or you want to take your chances. at the same time, my kids, i did a piece for the "wall street journal" several months ago called "generation lockdown." i have three kids in college and they have all experienced one way or another being locked down, having to live with different threats. they have grown up living through 9/11 and the boston bombing. you know, this is part of their dna. so you have to worry about the

freedoms that allow these children, my children, your children, to grow up and be who they want to be. at the same time we have to protect them. so again, it's a delicate balance. >> i'm interested in your vocabulary that goes through this fascinating story. you constantly use the word "terrorist" and "terrorism" and i'm interested in that. we usually use it to refer to events like 9/11, the london subway bombing, the madrid bombing, the bali bombing, all of which were primarily targeting civilians in order to spread terror among the civilian targets. these attacks were primarily i know there were some exceptions there's the morgan assassination attempt, but they are basically against war shipping, war

munitions, war horses. primarily the civilians tend to be more collateral damage. would you also use terrorism to describe the sabotage programs of the british s.o.e. or the american s.o.s. in world war ii, we ordinarily reserve terrorism for programs that primarily spread terror among civilians. >> you raise an interesting point. i'm using the vocabulary that's used by the cia. the cia in their in-house journal has referred to this as the first terrorist attack on america. i think it's too narrow to say that american citizens were not targeted. something like 54 people were just workers in the various munitions factory blew up. black tom, there were three deaths. these were all civilians. the people who were killed in

the ancillary anthrax attacks on the horses were civilians. this was basically an attack on our homeland. j.p. morgan, a civilian. i think when people come to our shores and we're not in a state of war, and try to do damage to american lives that's terrorism. that's how i would define it. and i think semantics are really not that important. it's the threat that america has to face and how we deal with it. >> could you discuss p.k.? because i would imagine he was the man they contacted when they wanted to find a murderer for what was his name in long island? >> i'm not quite sure -- who -- >> the guy who worked for the

german shipping company the german -- mr. koenig. >> oh, koenig worked for the hamburg american lines and he was a real brute of a man. he was their enforcer. the german-american line sort of ran the port of new york on the west side the west side ports, and he took his whole crew of tough guys with him to work for germany. he received a great deal of the money that german ambassador had to spread and tom tunney had to follow him around. ultimately, he gets the information on koenig and he discovers, he goes up to koenig's apartment up by columbia university and he has a secret diary where he's recorded in german and in english

meticulous prussian fashion,yx÷ how he spends his day, everyone who he meets with, all the things he wants to do that he's going to stop smoking, he's going to stop drinking and by the way, i'm also going to place a bomb on this ship on such and such a date. his key operatives, he gives code names to d 1, d 2, d 3 and part of the story that i tell in "dark invasion" is how tunney and his men track down these various operatives once they have this code book and how they, too, have to break this code and find these people. >> fdr was undersecretary of the navy, he had his own private force of enforcement investigators. i know that he was basically tracking down the immorality of

american naval people and got censured by the congress for doing this which was thought of as not important. i'm wondering when the war began, did he still maintain this investigatory squad hit squad, i would call them, or did that come at all into your -- >> no, it didn't. it does sort of come into the book i'm writing now which is a world war ii story and where fdr is now president and he is using his friends, really jacob astor, and vanderbilt, they have a group of very well-connected men that work out of a room that the vanderbilts own in a building on 63rd street, and they are an informal spy network before america goes to war, trying to put the pieces together for fdr, before pearl harbor. >> you mentioned one of the individuals, one of the german culprits and you said his father

was a civil war hero. >> congressional medal of honor winner. >> right. you said they were involved. was the father involved in this? >> the father was not involved. his brother and his sister were involved. his father had died. you pick up the papers today and the fear is that someone from isis will have an american passport, will be an american kid from detroit or wherever, and he has now gone to work with the enemy and will be able to just go right through security because he is an american. there's no way to stop him. well, that's what the germans did. they got anton dilger who was an american citizen had an american passport, and was able to come here didn't have to travel under an assumed name and he was able to bring with him in a little medical bag the cultures that were for aunnthrax and glanders and set up this covert lab six miles from the white house. >> right.

you mentioned the film that was made. i think i vaguely remember seeing it, just for nostalgia purposes, do you remember the stars who were starring in that? >> the film that i was referring to is the film that's going to be made of my book, that warner brothers is doing -- >> i think there was something similar made -- >> nothing similar. no way. >> there was something -- somebody was exploding certain things on ships. during the wartime. >> this will have bradley cooper dashing about. very excitingly. >> thank you. >> hello. you told us what has been done by this particular network. what's your interpretation how effective this was? obviously this brought -- this and other acts brought us into

the war against the germans with devastating effect. >> yes. you raise also a very good point. in many ways, while it was effective in the short term, in that it stops supplies going to europe, it resulted in deaths of about 100 americans tens of millions of dollars of damage, but in many ways it lost the war. it was a very narrow strategy for germany because it got the united states into the war it energized the united states and it's what our enemies think today. they think if they blow up the world trade center we are going to be coward and we will back down and a muslim caliphate will grow up and america will just be overwhelmed. they don't understand that the american character, the american character has a real streak of don't tread on me. and this energized america.

>> i have a second question. have you looked into the covert operations that the british were undertaking in america at the same time to get us into the war? i mean, they weren't exactly, you know playing hands-off. they put a massive propaganda and covert operation activity in to getting us into the war. >> from what i have been able to discover britain was very active in world war ii. before the united states was in the war and rockefeller center they set up the british security coordination unit, and that was really a propaganda operation and a spy operation. they ran british spies here in the united states, many of them with the knowledge of j. edgar

hoover and people in our government to try to help bring us into the war. in world war i, they weren't that organized in the sense they had a man who was running things under the cover of a film executive and he was trying to get propaganda out. they had a former naval captain, guy gaunt, who was a member of mi-6 he was based here in wall street, and he was in communication with arthur wood and tunney and he was providing information. at that point, the federal government was so eager to get information that they needed the british help. america might not have discovered for another two years really what was going on, that this was a german plot against america, if the british hadn't passed on the information they had gotten from breaking the german codes. but sure britain was determined to get the united states into the war and they succeeded. and they were effective in doing it, in both wars.

>> yes, i don't understand the relationship between bombing the capitol building and then trying to assassinate j.p. morgan jr. in what sounds like a very amateur assassination attempt. why would he, you know one day bomb the capitol and then -- i just don't understand the logic of it. >> the logic was one of terror, and terror has no logic in the sense the germans had this man who was their patsy. they could tell him what to do and if he wanted to put a bomb in the u.s. capitol building, he thought that would excite things and cause terror they provided him with the weapon. they said let's see what happens. he's not one of our professionals. we have a hands-off relationship with him, and then they could use him, this sort of guided weapon, to get j.p. morgan. if it works, great.

if it doesn't work, we'll see what happens next. >> von donhoff had an american wife who lived here. can you tell us about why these people didn't get or have american citizenship? what kind of issue that was in those days? >> von bernsdorf was a member of the german government. he was a german ambassador to the united states. he married -- he was here for 11 years, he was actually born in london. his father was the german ambassador to britain and he grew up in a very rarefied atmosphere in britain and germany and then here in the united states. one of their big scams that von ritlin runs when he first comes to the united states is making phony passports for people so

the sailors that are interred here can go back to europe and fight for germany. at that point passports were pretty easy to get. you just send in the secretary of state i think signed them all himself, and they would hire drunks from the bowery and have them pose for these passports and then give them to german seamen until that plot was uncovered. >> i read your book, i did enjoy it. >> thank you. >> what i always wonder is how the germans could have been so stupid. they say trust this probably psychotic psychopath that killed j.p. morgan and they're not afraid that just by hiring this guy, they are going to end up at war with the united states which was not, i don't think inevitable. at least they had to keep it off as long as possible. i just wonder why the germans

were so stupid and in a sense, naive. >> i think they were naive and i think they were desperate. you can look, why hire lee harvey oswald as a patsy. was he a lone gunman or was he recruited by some other country and would you hire someone who had gone to live in the soviet union who was so -- such a strange temperament, to say the least. it's very similar. people in intelligence agencies don't make the wisest decisions sometimes. but it almost worked. j.p. morgan, jr. was severely wounded. eric munter managed to get into his house. he managed to evade the authorities who were looking for him for over a decade for murdering his wife. he had a very successful spy. >> yes. i wouldn't say the germans were that stupid, but first of all, von pappen, there's a

three-tiered operation going on here. trying to prevent munitions ships from getting through and taking out morgan wasn't a bad idea, because his ties with the british were critical, and getting shot twice, they nearly succeeded. but there's also what you haven't mentioned is the indian conspiracy, from punjab in particular and also the irish connection too, all under von pappen, as i understand it. he was indicted later on but he got away with it because he was chancellor. you know, the incitement of rebellion in ireland and there was a rebellion or mutiny in india, the home base seems to be new york or at least the safe haven. so it's not a bad idea, what they're trying to do. obviously it kind of backfired a bit. but what they are initially trying to do makes perfect sense. >> the home base, from my understanding, would have been

berlin and walter nikolai sent out all his agents, pulling as many strings as he could. he was just trying to create confusion as best he could all over the globe, in ireland, in india and in new york. j.p. morgan was key. under j.p. morgan's imprimatur this consortium raised $950 million in 1915 dollars for the allies. with him gone, the consortium would have fallen apart. for awhile it looked like he was severely wounded but he did recover. if the gun hadn't jammed after the two bullets had entered his abdomen, he might have succeeded and he might have been killed and history might have been different. >> just a point of information for what -- one of your other answers. the british security coordinating commission which was led by sir william

stevenson, who was canadian whose wife was american, did not have as its primary objective to bring america into the war. it was coordinating espionage activities with actually colonel5% donovan and with the approval of fdr. >> i would respectfully disagree with you. stevenson mandate as it was given to him and as they made clear in the proviso of the british security coordination unit, was to bring america into the war. after america goes to war then they're working more hand-in-hand with donovan but before that they came from really, they had a different agenda. but i respectfully disagree. >> okay. >> you have a nice bibliography.

how did you get your hands on this stuff and could you have done it 10, 20 years ago? >> i was raising my kids 10, 20 years ago but so much of -- one of the things that is interesting to me when i try to tell these stories and talking about what i've done, i did a book on the yukon gold rush about a detective i did a book called "american lightning" about the bombing the "l.a. times" and these are sort of history that are true stories yet they are written with drama and suspense. and the way to do this is you have to be able to tell what the characters are thinking. so i look for subjects where there are diaries, where there are memoirs, where there are actual people who talked about what they did so i can say what's in their mind. tunney for example, wrote a book called "throttled" which is about his career as a policeman. so i'm able to say what he felt about. so all this information is out there. the internet makes it really easy. you can sit in your room and you can pull up all these books right on your screen and read them and it's like being brought

back to the times themselves. so it is all out there. it's finding a way of putting it together finding the characters who will drive you through this narrative. >> one of the little adventures you haven't talked about today is the rudder bomb which i found fascinating. i wonder if you could say something on that. >> the rudder bomb was another ingenius device, and it was used against allied shipping. what happened was a german engineer was on the front in europe in france and the shells are falling. he thinks to himself i've got to get out of here how can i get out of the front, how can i get out of this, this is too dangerous, i'm not going to survive this war. so he is an engineer by training and he comes up with this device which he then is able to show to the intelligence officer of his unit, makes his way to berlin, it's sent to the united states and it's a rudder bomb.

it attaches you go underwater to a ship in port you attach this little bomb to the rudder, and it gets sort of charged up cranked as the man steers the boat out of the harbor he's really putting the fuse into the bomb, and it explodes when it goes out to sea. that was the rudder bomb. and he worked out of a boardinghouse in new jersey and tunney and his men track him down. >> i'm going to assume that the germans knew about the academic's real identity not just his new identity? >> it's an interesting question. i would like to think they did but one never knows. the man was all over the place. and i think they saw that here's a chance, we can take this guy who is out of control, we can

pull the strings but we can pull them from a distance and we can send him out, we can have him do our bidding, but we won't get the blame, because what they were doing, if germany was involved in the assassination of j.p. morgan that would have brought the united states into war. that's why he had to be eliminated. that's why there has been -- when my book came out, the "dallas morning news" did a this is lee harvey oswald all over again, they said this is why oswald had to be eliminated because we couldn't really trace back to whom he was really working for. there are many mysteries that haven't been solved yet. >> i have a question about how the germans chose their agents. one has the impression of people coming to the german embassy and knocking on the door and saying

i want to work for germany. how did they sort through these people? how did they[4#z know some of them weren't double agents? how did they pick and choose? because i'm planning my own second career. i need to work for an unnamed foreign power. thank you. >> what would happen many times was there was a german club on central park south and the german military attache the naval attache, would hold court there. people would come up to them at night. when word got out, von ritlin was working under the pseudonym of emile gashe down atp/)ñ wall street, people would come to his office and he would see, in the course of the day, maybe 20, 30 people who all had fantastic schemes and most of them, he would send away. but every now and then he would find someone who had something to offer and that's how he found the cigar bomb. so they didn't really worry

about double agents because america wasn't that sophisticated yet. but they were worried about crackpots, people who would give things away, would really be caught and spill the beans. >> there was a strange transition between 1918 to 1920 where a lot of these agents who were formerly working for the german government started to work for the soviet as communists and apparently die-hard communists. but there is -- it is very odd that it's particularly down in lower manhattan that that's where it all seemed to come to fruition. >> well, that's where the power was. that's where wall street was. that's where the germans set up their bases and that's where the hamburg american line had their headquarters, and that's where

they rented the offices. and as you say, after world war ii, the german agents also went off and worked for other nations, too. and after the fall all these plans fefnefarious plans, it's. ended up with the zimmerman telegram, the germans when it gets intercepted by the british. you know they're trying to convince the mexicans to come in against the united states so they could have, you know -- and it remind me of some of the stuff that you know other powers, including ourselves, have done. some really nitwit things. where is the mental thing on some of this? you don't want to irritate the -- some of these major powers. where does the mental ideas

come? the thinking? >> far be it for me to get in the mind of what makes spy master things to convince mexico to go to war against the united states and it works, but it becomes, as always has taught us, a great deal of arrogance of people in power and they think -- arrogant people think they can do whatever they want. they can change the course of history. and sometimes they do. thank you very much. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> you've been watching american history tv on c-span3. we want to hear from you. follow us on twitter twitter @cspanhistory. connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/cspanhistory where you can leave comments and check out upcoming programs on our website at c-span.org/history. every sunday night at 8 p.m. and midnight eastern a special look at the u.s. presidency learning

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