My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent

Formerly Major in the Mexican Constitution-list Army, sometime Confidential Aide to Captain von Papen, Recalled Military Attaché to the Imperial German Embassy at Washington, German Secret Service Agent

GASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

1918

FOREWORD

I HAVE not striven to write an autobiography. This book is merely a summary a sort of galloping summary of the last ten years of my existence. As such, I venture to write it because my life has been bound up in enterprises in which the world is interested. It has been my fortune to be a witness and sometimes an actor in that drama of secret diplomacy which has been going on for so long and which in such a large way has been responsible for this World War.

There are many scenes in that drama which have no place in this book many events with which I am familiar that I have not touched upon. My aim has been to describe only those things with which I was personally concerned and which I know to be true. For a full history of the last ten years my readers must go elsewhere; but it is my hope that these adventures of mine will bring them to a better understanding of the forces that have for so long been undermining the peace of the world.

Inevitably there will be some who read this book who will doubt the truth of many of the statements in it. I cannot, unfortunately, prove all that I tell here. Wherever possible I have offered corroborative evidence of the truth of my statements; at other times I have tried to indicate their credibility by citing well recognised facts which have a direct bearing upon my contentions. But for the rest, I can only hope that this book will be accepted as a true record of facts which by their very nature are insusceptible of proof.

So far as my connection with the German Government is concerned, I may refer the curious to the British Parliamentary White Papers, Miscellaneous, Nos. 6 and 13, which contain respectively my confession and a record of the papers found in the possession of Captain von Papen, former Military Attache to the German Embassy at Washington, and seized by the British authorities on January 2 and 8, 1916. There are also, in addition to the documents reproduced in this book, various court records of the trial of Captain Hans Tauscher and others in the spring of the same year. To German activities in the United States, the newspapers bear eloquent testimony. I have been concerned rather with the motives of the German Government than with a statement of what has been done. These motives, I believe, you will not doubt.

But there is one point which I must ask my readers not to overlook. I have told that I became a secret agent through the discovery of a certain letter which contained very serious reflections upon one of the most important personages in the world. I have told, also, how the possession of that letter had an important bearing upon the course of my life how it led me to America, and how in the struggle for its possession I very nearly lost my life. This, I know, will be severely questioned by many. Before rejecting this part of my story, I ask merely that you consider the fate that overtook Koglmeier, the saddler of El Paso, whose only crime was that he had been partially in my confidence. I ask you to recall that another German, Lesser, who had been associated with me at the same time, mysteriously disappeared in 1915, shortly before von Papen left for Europe. No one has been able to prove why these men were treated as they were. And if I did not have in my possession something which the German Government regarded as highly important, why the surprising actions of that Government, actions none the less astonishing because they are well known and authenticated? Consider these things before you doubt.

Finally, let me say that I have taken the liberty of changing or omitting the names of various people who are mentioned in these adventures, merely because I have had no wish to compromise them by disclosing their identity.