The Zimmermann Telegram Read online

  These were not long in coming. Voska’s invaluable agents discovered an American citizen acting as one of the couriers on whom the Central Powers, lacking cables, were forced to rely to eke out their crippled communications. Every neutral ship that sailed carried a courier protected by a neutral passport, and the Rotterdam, sailing from New York in the last week of August, carried one John J. Archibald. Alerted by the Voska-to-Gaunt-to-Hall signal, the British neatly picked him off when the ship touched their shores. A haul of 110 documents as full of plums as a fruitcake was taken from Archibald, including a report from Count Constantin Dumba, the Austrian Ambassador, to his government, describing strikes promoted among Hungarian munitions workers and other indiscreet efforts; seventeen reports from the German embassy to the German Foreign Office; canceled checks and payments to saboteurs and propagandists; sabotage progress reports by Papen and Boy-Ed; as well as a private letter from Papen to his wife, expressing his opinion of “these idiotic Yankees.” Boy-Ed’s dealings with Huerta figured in the correspondence, as did Papen’s visits to Mexico the year before for the purpose of organizing the German community there for “self-defense,” for which he was recommended for a medal.

  When Admiral Hall, sorting over the papers, discovered what he had netted, he took considerable pleasure in presenting the evidence, with Britain’s compliments, to Page, the American Ambassador. Page, passionately pro-Ally and sick with frustration over the blind side Wilson turned to him, was only too delighted to forward it to Washington. As a precaution the British, not quite trusting Wilson to become appropriately indignant, published the most incriminating of the documents in a Parliamentary White Paper in September.

  Rising reluctantly to the occasion, the President declared the Austrian Ambassador non grata and demanded his recall but took no action, as yet, against the German attachés. The real effect of the Archibald papers, coming on top of the Albert portfolio and the Rintelen-Huerta conspiracy, was more profound, if less public. At that moment the official temper was so irritated with Germany over the long-drawn-out Lusitania issue that the final rupture seemed to be at hand. The revelations of sabotage and plots woke the State Department with a shock of surprise to the fact that the Germans were dangerous. “A break may come before you get this letter,” wrote Colonel House in mid-September. Everybody took another look at America’s trouble spot, the Mexican border. Wilson’s Mexican policy came to a screeching halt, backed up, and reversed itself.

  Six

  Viva Villa!—Made in Germany

  FROM THE DAY CARRANZA HAD REPLACED Huerta he had been a disenchantment to Wilson, who complained, “I have never known a man more impossible to deal with.” His once admired “constitutionalism” took the form of decrees against foreign property, he proved no more amenable to American pressure than Huerta, and, really, it seemed that he differed from Huerta only in that he had not murdered his predecessor. (He made up for it by murdering General Zapata some years later.) Sorely tried, Wilson for a while considered that General Obregón might be “the man of the hour” but subsequently, abetted by Secretary Bryan, he had come to the remarkable conclusion that Pancho Villa, the illiterate marauder with the fat mustache and whirling eyes who controlled all northern Mexico and was Carranza’s chief opponent, was perhaps “the safest man to tie to.”

  Bryan, the grape-juice teetotaler, had decided that Villa was an “idealist” because he did not smoke or drink. In Bryan’s mind the idealist apparently remained uncontaminated by his command of a rabble that got drunk twice a day on tequila and smoked marijuana in between. But Bryan’s strong point was not logic. His and Wilson’s new candidate was a swaggering rooster who would far more readily shoot a man in the belly than shake hands with him. On one occasion, when annoyed by the yells of a drunken soldier while he was being interviewed by an American journalist, Villa casually pulled his pistol and killed the man from the window, without interrupting the conversation.

  Villa was delighted to consider the American President his amigo. On the American side, as late as August 9, 1915, Secretary Lansing, Bryan’s successor, was recommending support for Villa in order that the “appearance, at least,” of opposition to the vain and obstreperous Carranza would make Carranza more amenable.

  But then came the Albert and Archibald shocks, the full revelation of German designs behind Huerta, and the deepening crisis over the U-boats. It was in expectation of an imminent break with Germany that the Mexican reversal took place. In October 1915 the United States, with a jerk that startled the world, suddenly recognized Carranza as President of Mexico. Villa, ditched by his amigo, was maddened; everybody else was mystified, but the reasoning was clear. Lansing wrote it down in his diary:

  Germany desires to keep up the turmoil in Mexico until the United States is forced to intervene; therefore, we must not intervene.

  Germany does not wish to have any one faction dominant in Mexico; therefore, we must recognize one faction as dominant in Mexico. …

  It comes down to this: Our possible relations with Germany must be our first consideration; and all our intercourse with Mexico must be regulated accordingly.

  Immediately the new policy went into action. The Americans made a deal whereby Carranza’s northern commander, who was expecting attack by Villa’s forces at Agua Prieta, was enabled to bring in reinforcements, bypassing the mountains, on American railroads across American territory. When early in November the unsuspecting Villa charged down from the hills, his force was decimated. The battle of Agua Prieta broke his power and forced him into a winter retreat over the snowbound sierras that left him with nothing but a barefoot, frost-bitten, half-starved remnant and a maniacal rage for revenge upon the gringos who had betrayed him. That was to be unfortunate.

  On November 7 the torpedoing of another merchantman, the Ancona, exacerbated relations with Germany. Wilson wished to take some action sterner than notes, which would make America’s displeasure unmistakable. Could we not send home “the obnoxious underlings”? suggested Colonel House. We could. The evidence of the Archibald papers against Papen and Boy-Ed was dug out and their recall stiffly demanded. It made a sensation. All the papers began printing everything they could get hold of on German plots, while the government, for added emphasis, carefully leaked much of the information collected by the four sets of secret agents during the previous summer. Now for the first time the public learned the full details of the German conspiracy to restore Huerta and of Rintelen’s directing role in it. The Times trumpeted the scandal on December 8: UNCOVER GERMAN PLOT TO EMBROIL U.S. WITH MEXICO. VON RINTELEN CAME HERE, BACKED BY MILLIONS, FOR THAT PURPOSE, GOVERNMENT LEARNS. ESPOUSED HUERTA’S CAUSE. NEW REVOLUTION WOULD DIVERT FROM ALLIES THE FLOW OF MUNITIONS.

  Thirty million dollars had been appropriated by the Germans to finance Huerta’s counter-revolution, said the Times. Twelve million had already been spent for arms and preparations. Department of Justice agents had traced the funds and located enough stores of rifles and ammunition “to equip a formidable expedition.” Papen and Boy-Ed had journeyed to the border to prepare the ground. Félix Díaz was ready to march on the capital from the south. Rintelen was revealed as the master mind, and columns were devoted to his dealings with Huerta and the Wolf of Wall Street.

  In fact the Department of Justice had built up a card file of every man Rintelen had seen, every hotel he had visited, every phone call made, every telegram sent or received, and nearly every dollar spent of the five hundred thousand he had personally deposited in the Transatlantic Trust Company. He had gone through it all in four months, with little more to show for the expenditure than a few bombs placed in cargo vessels, which any mechanic could have made for ten dollars apiece.

  In the furor the only person to remain unruffled was Bernstorff. Privately he wired home, “Convinced Rintelen was principal reason for recall of attachés. His immediate disavowal absolutely necessary.” But when called in to see Lansing, Bernstorff seemed “very much surprised and said he knew nothing about it.” Lan
sing told him he had very good proofs and certainly was convinced that Captain Boy-Ed had seen Huerta several times at both the Hotel Manhattan and the Hotel Ansonia. Coolly the Ambassador denied any knowledge of the affair, insisted that the Secretary of State should repudiate the accusations, and himself announced publicly that he had been instructed to disavow Rintelen.

  Papen tried to brave it out by taking the same tone. It was all “utterly false,” he said in a formal protest to the Secretary of War, and neither he nor Boy-Ed “had directly or indirectly approached any Mexican government, faction, individual, or sets of individuals for any such purpose.” His aplomb was thin, however, and, along with Boy-Ed, he had to go. Treading lightly around every trap, Bernstorff alone remained, not because the government had not got plenty to incriminate him but because he was indispensable to Wilson’s hope of negotiating a peace.

  The last and central figure of the whole affair was soon to go. At the Mexican border General Huerta was dying. In Fort Bliss he had sickened mysteriously; yellow jaundice was the diagnosis, but rumors that he was being poisoned got about. It would not look well if General Huerta were to die in American custody, and so in November he was released in the care of his family, who had followed him to El Paso. But the indomitable Indian refused once more to do the convenient thing; instead of dying he got well, whereupon he was promptly pulled back into Fort Bliss. Again his malady returned, and again the Americans, hastening to unburden themselves of a prisoner in extremis, released him, just after Christmas. Up in Hot Springs, Virginia, the President was enjoying a two weeks’ honeymoon over the holidays with the new Mrs. Wilson. Did he know that his old opponent was dying at last? There is no record of whether he knew, or cared. But even dying, Huerta was not allowed to do without American intervention. Day and night American soldiers were stationed at his bedside and removed only when he fell into a coma. On January 14, 1916, on alien soil within sight of his unrecovered country, he died.

  Neither his death nor Rintelen’s removal halted Germany’s unrelenting effort to provoke war between the United States and Mexico. Where Huerta had been, now there was Villa, a new enemy raised up by the United States herself. To Germany, Villa now appeared to offer a better prospect than ever of embroiling the United States with Mexico. And the appearance was soon borne out. On January 10, at Santa Ysabel in the province of Chihuahua, a band of Villistas waylaid a train carrying seventeen American mining engineers, lined them up, stripped them, and shot them down one after another. One man, Thomas H. Holmes, lay on the ground, still breathing. After the bandits rode off, he crawled through the night and stumbled, gasping and bleeding, into Chihuahua City at seven next morning with the news of the deaths of all his companions.

  The Massacre of Santa Ysabel, as it was immediately labeled, threw the country into an uproar and evoked a thunderous demand for intervention. Angry protest meetings and citizens’ petitions shrieked for action to avenge “this foul and brutal murder.” El Paso, whose citizens went out looking for Mexicans with guns, had to be put under martial law. A volunteer posse of a thousand mining and cattle men threatened to rush the border, hunt down the bandits, and take vengeance into their own hands unless the army was called out. Congressmen, especially Texans, perorated about murder, rapine, and pillage, about American women outraged, fates worse than death, American lives and sacred honor. Senators from the border states fumed that the only murder that had ever mattered to Wilson was the murder of Madero. Business interventionists declared it no longer safe for any American to enter Mexico while Wilson was president. Ex-president Roosevelt, receiving a petition from the border, called for the regular Army to march into Mexico at once.

  Wilson, home from his honeymoon barely a week, was not to be moved. Deep within him was shame as an American over the first Mexican War, overlaid by the stain of his own foray upon Veracruz. Never, he declared to a friend through shut teeth, would he be forced into a war with Mexico that could possibly be avoided. He closed his ears to epithets of cowardice that the nation flung at him and held on tight to the lines of Lansing’s memorandum: Germany wants us to go to war with Mexico, therefore we must not go to war with Mexico; what we do in Mexico must be governed by the state of our relations with Germany. He knew well what a voice from an unexpected source—the Governor of Texas—pointed out, that it would be the wildest folly to act precipitately when the United States was totally unprepared for war with anybody, even ravaged Mexico.

  Villa, spoiling for a fight, with Germany whispering encouragement in his ear, danced up and down the border like an enraged rooster trying to provoke the rush of a large dog. He saw himself, since Venustiano Carranza had received the American nod, facing oblivion, his power withering, his followers slipping away, and he believed his only hope lay in forcing an American invasion that would rally the peons in an anti-American rising behind his banner. Then he, not Carranza, would be the national hero. “Viva Villa!” would resound again from Sonora to Yucatán in one great battle cry that would sweep vain old “Don Venus” Carranza into the dust pile and leave nothing but his long white whiskers to make a hatband for valiant Pancho. This suited Germany perfectly. She did not believe Carranza likely to be ousted, but if Villa, chasing that dream, could be helped to suck the Americans into armed conflict in Mexico, German strategy would be freed of a great weight.

  Germany’s campaign opened with Theodore Roosevelt’s bugle call to arms, which, unknown to him, was a German plant. An alert agent discovered that two German businessmen of El Paso, Edgar Held and Louis Hess, had circulated the petition addressed to Roosevelt and had been loudest in their denunciations of Wilson’s failure to act. As a leading Hun-hater, T.R. would not have relished being a German tool, but he was fortunately spared that embarrassment when his summons thudded dully against the stone wall of Wilson’s resistance.

  But even that wall cracked under the impact of Villa’s next blow. For Pancho came back. On the night of March 9, 1916, the little town of Columbus, New Mexico, was shattered out of its sleep by four hundred Mexican horsemen who galloped through the streets, shrieking and shooting, killed a score of residents, burned houses, sacked stores, and disappeared back over the border at dawn. This time, no matter what the counsels of caution and policy, America had to hit back. Bitterly, against every better judgment, Wilson for the second time in his administration found himself forced to order attack in Mexico, the one act he had wished above all things to avoid. Moving as circumspectly as he could, he first obtained Carranza’s edgy consent to the entry of American troops, “for the sole purpose of capturing the bandit Villa.” After searching vainly for some saving alternative that never came, when he could no longer help it, Wilson gave the command for a punitive expedition under General Pershing to cross the frontier.

  It was a prolonged and famous fumble. Within a month Pershing, with 6600 men, was 300 miles inside Mexico, getting closer to a clash with Carranza and no nearer to Villa every day. In Washington the General Staff, preparing for the worst, drew up plans for a full-scale invasion. Ten, twenty, unnumbered times Villa was reported dead, captured, run to earth, beheaded, hung by his own men, caught by Carranzistas, until it seemed as if his face grinned at the scorched Americans out of every cactus only to vanish like the Cheshire cat.

  Berlin’s press was ecstatic and, harking back to an old theme, suggested the Japanese were secretly backing Villa. Our ambassador, James Gerard, telegraphed, “Am sure Villa’s attacks are made in Germany.” Everyone wondered where they were made, for the bravado of the Columbus raid, with its lack of apparent goal, was puzzling. Even in Mexico they called it Pancho’s delirio de grandeza. Many Americans, including the President, believed it to have been inspired by the oil and metal greed of American business, while others, such as the Collier’s correspondent, deduced a “certain European nation now at war whose interest is to keep the United States very busy.”

  Evidence of Germany’s complicity, though in fact filtering in constantly, was kept very hush-hush in Washington,
because the government, plunged at this moment into a new crisis over the torpedoing of the Sussex, did not want to provide the public with additional reasons for getting into war with Germany. But every few days through May and June, Lansing’s desk diary bristled with notes of Secret Service reports: “reputed German officer at Tampico,” “German plots in N. Mexico,” “Justice reports of Germans on Mexican border.” Enterprising as ever, Agent Cobb, who had once gone after Huerta with such avidity, now wired Lansing asking for permission to employ extra operatives to help him investigate “all the Germans who are mixing into our Mexican troubles.” Although the Department had to blush when several of Cobb’s suspicious characters turned out to be War Department agents following the same trails, enough other evidence was coming in to cause anxiety. Voska’s men discovered that the arms Rintelen had bought for Huerta were now going to Villa, transported over the border in cheap coffins or shipped in sealed casks in chartered oil tankers whose tanks were then filled with oil, which was drained on reaching Mexican ports so the munitions could be lifted out intact.

  Other German connections were evident. Why was it that Max Weber, the German Consul in Juárez, always smiled knowingly when people brought in new rumors of Villa’s capture and, from some private source, was able to refute them? Why was it that only the German firms, with names sounding like the drill commands of a Prussian sergeant—Krakauer, Zork & Moye, Ketelson & Degetau—were passed by when the Villistas ransacked every other store and warehouse in Chihuahua City and again in Parral?