Page:The web (1919).djvu/86

 CHAPTER VII

THE GERMAN SPY CASES

The Great Spy Cases—Details of German Propaganda—Finances and Personnel of German Forces in America—The Diplomatic Fiasco—Notorious Figures of Alien Espionage Uncovered—The Senate Judicial Investigation.

To gain any adequate idea of the amount of the activities which centered in New York would mean the following out of countless concealed threads leading all over the world and covering the United States like a net. We never knew until we were well into this war that, long before we dreamed of war, our country was infested by vast numbers of the paid spies of Germany; that these worked under a well-established, and now well-known, organization; that the highest German diplomatic representatives were a part of the system; that leading financial figures of New York were figures in it also, and that the whole intricate machine was differentiated like a great and well-ordered business undertaking. It was an elaborate organization for the betrayal of a country; and that organization, like the armed forces of Germany in the field, was beaten and broken only by the loyal men of America, resolved once more that a government of the people should not perish from the earth.

Let the scene shift from New York—whose defensive organization has been outlined—to the national judicial center at Washington, the seat of our intelligence system and of those courts of law which have in charge the national affairs. There, for many months, a few men have sat and watched pour into their offices such proofs of human perfidy and depravity as can never have been paralleled in the most Machiavellian days of the Dark Ages.

The daily press of the United States acted under a voluntary censorship during the war, even while it saw pass