Wiseman could see that [President] Wilson and America would not join the war unless their moral indignation was aroused sufficiently against Germany. Acts of German sabotage, real and imagined, had moved American sentiment in the ‘right’ direction, and Wiseman could logically assume that further outrages would continue this trend.48
Further outrages did indeed occur. Within six months of Black Tom, residents of New York City once again heard the thunderous roar of exploding munitions. On the afternoon of 11 January 1917, 500,000 three-inch shells ignited at the Canadian Car & Foundry Company’s shell assembly plant in Kingsland, New Jersey, some ten miles from New York Harbour. Thankfully, the shells were not primed with detonating fuses and none of the 1,400 workforce was killed or injured. However, for some four hours those living in northern New Jersey and New York listened to the ongoing explosions as fire engulfed the entire Kingsland plant.49
Spence asserts that Jahnke led the German sabotage team responsible for the Kingsland explosion, and states ‘again, Reilly could provide the means to breach the plant’s security’.50 As investigation records clearly demonstrate, however, there was no need for anyone to covertly effect an entry into the plant. The official verdict was that one Fiodor Wozniak, who was working in Building 30 where the blaze began, was responsible for starting the fire that led to the plant’s destruction. Indeed, the foreman in Building 30, Morris Chester Musson, later testified that ‘Wozniak had quite a large collection of rags and that the blaze started in these rags. I also noticed that he had spilled his pan of alcohol all over the table just preceding that time’.51 Wozniak was questioned during an internal company enquiry, and although he denied any involvement, he did admit that he was not Russian, as he had stated when he entered the company’s employment, but was instead Austrian. He further revealed that he had served in the Austrian army and police force. After questioning he was shadowed by private detectives, but disappeared without trace.
Three months after Kingsland, on 10 April 1917, an explosion occurred at the Eddystone Works in Pennsylvania, killing 132 men at the plant. Richard Spence draws attention to the fact that some weeks before the explosion, managing director Samuel Vauclain had been in negotiation to sell the plant to the US government. Reilly, in Spence’s words, was ‘cut out completely’52 from the deal. Was the explosion, asks Spence, Reilly’s revenge?53 Again, not a shred of evidence was produced to connect Reilly or indeed anyone else with the catastrophe at Eddystone. Indeed, while Spence rightly states that sabotage was suspected, it was, in fact, never proven or established.
The whole thesis is somewhat fanciful and an example of the conspiracy theory at its worst. Reilly was without doubt a ruthless man who would stop at little to meet his ends. The foundations which support this theory are somewhat shaky, however. The earlier meetings and coincidental journeys by train and ship clearly could not have taken place. As for the acts of sabotage themselves, it seems evident that some were quite simply tragic accidents. Others, such as Black Tom and Kingsland, did not require the kind of covert role attributed to Reilly – poor security and a lack of employee vetting is explanation enough for the ease with which German saboteurs were able to carry out their objectives unhindered.
By 1917, Reilly’s cumulative earnings from war munitions contracts were well over $3 million.54 He was now occupying an entire suite at one of New York’s most expensive and luxurious hotels, the Saint Regis on 5th Avenue and East 55th Street. While his fortunes had never looked better, back on the Eastern Front the tide of the war was turning against Russia. Two and a half years of conflict had confirmed that Russia was neither strong enough militarily or economically to meet the challenge of all-out war. Heavy defeats quickly made conditions worse at home, triggering a wave of strikes. These developed into a general strike which began on 9 March.55 Two days later the Tsar mobilised army units, but they sided with the strikers. On 15 March, under pressure from all sides, Tsar Nicholas abdicated on behalf of himself and his son and a Provisional Government took power.
Closer to home, a telegram from the German Foreign Minister to the German Ambassador in Washington was intercepted and decoded by British Naval Intelligence. The telegram instructed the ambassador to approach the President of Mexico with a view to them joining the war on Germany’s side and launching an invasion of the United States. When the story became public, President Wilson frantically tried to find an alternative to war, but the Germans sealed their own fate by commencing a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in March. After three American merchant ships had been sunk, Wilson asked the Congress for a Declaration of War on 2 April, and got it four days later. America’s entry into the war would, in due course, turn its direction decisively in the Allies’ favour.
As these dramatic events unfolded on the world stage, Reilly was, according to virtually everyone who has ever written about him, working behind German lines as a British agent. According to Pepita Bobadilla, who Reilly would later marry, he:
…undertook the difficult and hazardous task of entering Germany (usually by aeroplane via the front line) in quest of military information. His services in this direction were of the utmost value and his exploits in Germany have become legendary.56
Reilly told his first wife, Margaret, a similar story.57 Robin Bruce Lockhart asserts that Reilly enlisted in the German Army and, disguising himself as a colonel, bluffed his way into the headquarters of the German High Command and sat in on a briefing attended by the Kaiser.58 In the 1992 revised edition of Ace of Spies, Lockhart challenged John Major’s Conservative government to ‘open a window on the past’ in order that Reilly’s ‘amazing’ exploits in Germany could be made known.59 The Official Secrets Act aside, no government could do this, for the reality is that Reilly’s work behind enemy lines was nothing more than a fanciful fabrication on his part. Throughout the Allied offensives at Messines, Passchendaele and Ypres, Reilly was comfortably billeted at the Saint Regis Hotel on 5th Avenue. The only action he saw on the Western Front was in the newsreels shown in Manhattan’s picture palaces.
With America now at war with Germany, the US Bureau of Investigation was charged with the responsibility of tracking down and apprehending any American citizen or alien who might be an enemy spy. Aided and abetted by the Office for Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division, they avidly set about investigating possible enemy agents and sympathisers. Within days of America’s declaration of war, Roger Welles, director of Naval Intelligence, received a report from Agent Perkins of the US Bureau of Investigation concerning an individual suspected of enemy sympathies.60 As a result of reading the report, he immediately ordered an investigation into the subject of Perkins’ report, one Sidney George Reilly.
SEVEN
CONFIDENCE MEN
Those regarded as dangerous aliens had always been the responsibility of the Labor Department’s Immigration Bureau, but in early 1917 the US Congress introduced new immigration legislation making it easier to deport undesirables. The Immigration Bureau now found it had neither the time, the manpower, nor the resources to conduct the investigations that would be prompted by the new law.
Two competing civil agencies, the Secret Service, which came under the US Treasury Department, and the US Bureau of Investigation, which came under the Justice Department, carried out domestic security investigations. As America entered the war they were also joined in this endeavour by the Military Intelligence Division and the American Protective League. The APL was a voluntary association of patriotic citizens created on 22 March 1917 as an auxiliary to the Bureau of Investigation.