Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America

Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America

Howard Blum

Language: English

Pages: 496

ISBN: 006230755X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum’s gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot—the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper.

When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs—including an expert on germ warfare, a Harvard professor, and a brilliant, debonair spymaster—devise a series of “mysterious accidents” using explosives and biological weapons, to bring down vital targets such as ships, factories, livestock, and even captains of industry like J. P. Morgan.

New York Police Inspector Tom Tunney, head of the department’s Bomb Squad, is assigned the difficult mission of stopping them. Assembling a team of loyal operatives, the cunning Irish cop hunts for the conspirators among a population of more than eight million Germans. But the deeper he finds himself in this labyrinth of deception, the more Tunney realizes that the enemy’s plan is far more complex and more dangerous than he suspected.

Full of drama and intensity, illustrated with eight pages of black and-white photos, Dark Invasion is riveting war thriller that chillingly echoes our own time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

suspicious caught Detective Senff ’s eye, and he gave chase to a sailor by the West Forty-Fourth Street pier. Senff ran through a maze of shadows; and then suddenly he had fallen into the water, and the tide was carrying him away. Three beefy detectives dived in after him, and only after a frightening struggle were they able to pull him to shore. On other evenings, they’d chase after a barge in their police motorboats, only to realize that stealth was impossible: the sound of their barking

engines might just as well have been a cannon barrage echoing through the silent night. They’d cut their engines and try to drift, but then the lighter barges would pull swiftly away. Or they’d stay back, trailing a distant blinking light as it headed out to sea, only to discover when at last they caught up that they’d been following the wrong boat all along. Yet after all the fruitless months, the team decided that they had finally found something. On several nights they’d watched as a

that afternoon to begin thinking about the secret war against America in an entirely new way. THE SOFT WARTIME ROUTE FROM Germany to New York favored by the kaiser’s spies was overland to Scandinavia, then a berth on a ship heading across the Atlantic. But an apprehensive Erich von Steinmetz, according to the account he had shared with von Rintelen in the back room, had chosen a less direct, and intentionally more covert, itinerary. He made his slow way east traveling by foot, horseback, and

Especially after the sinking of the Lusitania. TEN WEEKS EARLIER, ON MAY 7, 1915, a German U-boat off the south coast of Ireland shot a torpedo without warning into the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania. The bow of the fastest and largest steamer traveling the Atlantic, a gilded floating palace, began to dip precariously; the big gleaming boat started to heave; and then quite quickly it disappeared under the dark, rolling waves. The toll: 1,198 lost, including 124 Americans. The nation was

modern medical equipment. It was inspired by a visit he made to the impressive facility in Berlin where Dr. Robert Koch had done the pioneering work in bacteriology that had won him the Nobel Prize. While still a graduate student, mastering the techniques he’d need to propagate pure cultures of bacteria for his thesis, Dilger had always aspired to work one day in his own well-equipped lab. The lab in Heidelberg was the fulfillment of this dream, a research center where he’d be able to conduct the

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