WORLD WAR I

United States

Q - Z

Rodman, Burton. "The Intelligent 27." Cavalry Journal 44, no. 189 (1935): 31-36. [Petersen]

Russell, Charles Edward. True Adventures of the Secret Service. New York: Burt, 1923. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924.

Petersen: "AEF intelligence and counterintelligence."

Scott, Paul R. "The Birth of the 2's: Combat Intelligence in the American Expeditionary Force." Military Intelligence 6 (Jul.-Sep. 1980): 25-26.

Smythe, Donald. "The Ruse at Belfort." Army Magazine 22, no. 6 (1972): 34-38. [Petersen]

Spence, Richard B. "K.A. Jahnke and the German Sabotage Campaign in the United States and Mexico, 1914-1918." Historian 59, no. 1 (1996): 89-112. [Calder]

Spence, Richard B. "Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-1917." Intelligence and National Security 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1995): 92-121.

This is a highly speculative -- as much about Reilly remains -- article that links Reilly with a mixed bag of skulduggery, including the explosions at Black Tom Island, NJ, and Kingsland, NJ. The author suggests that these acts of sabotage may have even been encouraged by more official British agents, to help push the United States into the war. I am sure Spence enjoyed putting this piece together, and it certainly seems to add to the already considerable reputation of Reilly. Nevertheless, it is so highly circumstantial that it must be read with extreme caution.

Trask. David F. The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917-1918. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Travers, I&NS 10.4, notes that there is little emphasis on the intelligence side of the AEF's operations. "However, from time to time, Trask highlights the impact of Intelligence." The main contribution of this book is to revise "the beliefs of an earlier generation of AEF historians" by putting AEF operations into a 1918 perspective.

Tunney, Thomas J., and Paul Merrick Hollister. Throttled: The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters in the United States. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1919.

U.S. Army Security Agency. The History of Codes and Ciphers in the United States During World War I. Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1979.

Constantinides comments that this work, prepared after World War II, draws the main outline of the cryptanalytic effort against the Germans.

U.S. Army. Signal Corps. Report of the Chief Signal Officer to the Secretary of War: 1919. Washington, DC: GPO, 1919. [Petersen]

U.S. War Department. Report of Code Compilation Section, General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces, December 1917-November 1918. Washington, DC: 1935.

U.S. War Department. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Final Report of the Radio Intelligence Section, General Staff, General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces. Washington, DC: 1935. [Petersen]

Voska, Emanuel Victor, and William Irwin. Spy and Counterspy. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940. London: Harrap, 1941.

According to Constantinides, Voska ran a Czechoslovak-based counterintelligence organization in the United States prior to the U.S. entry into World War I. He placed his organization at the disposal of British intelligence, and after 1915 cooperated with the FBI as well. See also, Willert, The Road to Safety (1952).

Warner, Michael. "Protecting the Homeland the First Time Around: The Kaiser Sows Destruction." Studies in Intelligence 46, no. 1 (2002): 3-9.

"Few today remember the Black Tom explosion or the Kingsland fire, but incidents like these made a deep and lasting impression on the minds of two generations of American leaders."

Weber, Ralph E. "State Department Cryptographic Security, Herbert O. Yardley, & President Woodrow Wilson's Secret Code." In In the Name of Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Walter Pforzheimer, eds. Hayden B. Peake and Samuel Halpern, 543-596. Washington, DC: NIBC Press, 1994.

The author provides a brief, but nonetheless detailed, history of U.S. State Department codes and ciphers preparatory to surveying some of circumstances surrounding Yardley's breaking a message from Colonel House to President Wilson (revealed 15 years after the fact).

Wheeler, Douglas L. "Spy Mania and the Information War: The Hour of the Counterspy 1914/15." American Intelligence Journal 14, no. 1 (Autumn-Winter 1993): 41-45.

Wild, Max. Secret Service on the Russian Front. New York: Putnam, 1932. [Chambers]

Witcover, Jules. Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989.

O'Toole, Encyclopedia, pp. 71-72: "At 2:08 a.m. on July 30, 1916 more than two million pounds of munitions stored on Black Tom Island in New York harbor exploded.... The explosion and the resultant fire did some $14 million in damage and killed three men and a child. The munitions ... were awaiting shipment to Russia for use against Germany in the First World War, which the United States had not yet entered. The incident was suspected to be one of sabotage by German agents. Although considerable evidence was later adduced implicating Lothar Witzke and Kurt Jahnke, both German Secret Service agents, German responsibility for the explosion was never proved."

Kitchen, I&NS 6.3, says that Witcover "gets a great deal" of his story wrong and "makes a number of tiresome errors" in his account of some of the major events during this period of time. In general, the author "has great difficulty in distinguishing between fact and fiction, conjecture and substantiated evidence."

See Spence,"Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-1917," I&NS 10.1 (Jan. 1995), for a suggestion that Reilly may have been involved in the Black Tom explosion.

Wood, Eric Fisher. The Note-Book of an Intelligence Officer. New York: Century, 1917. [Chambers]

Yardley, Herbert O. "Achievements of Cipher Bureau: MI-8 during the First World War." Cryptologia 8, no. 1 (Jan. 1984): 62-74.

Yardley, Herbert O. The American Black Chamber. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931. London: Faber & Faber, 1931. [Reprint] New York: Ballantine, 1981. [Reprint, hb. & pb.] Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1992. [Reprint] Mattituck, NY: Amereon, 1999.

Clark comment: Yardley headed MI8 during World War I and the famous U.S. Black Chamber until 1929 when that entity was dismantled by order of Secretary of State Stimson. For a first-rate biography of Yardley, see David Kahn, The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert Yardley and the Birth of American Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

Surveillant 2.4 sees The American Black Chamber as "worthy of being placed back in print.... Some have suggested that this work contains exaggerations and inaccuracies, but they are quite minor." For Pforzheimer, the "book's importance ... cannot be denied." According to Peake, AIJ 15.1/88, "[n]o book written since has revealed as many technical secrets as Yardley's did." Constantinides reminds us that one of the consequences of the publication of this book was "the passage of the law in 1933 known popularly as the Yardley Law protecting cryptologic matters."

See David Kahn, "The Annotated The American Black Chamber," Cryptologia 9, no. 1 (Jan. 1985), 1-37. Lowenthal views this article as an "[i]mportant corrective to Yardley..., based on notations by ... William F. Friedman." See also, Louis Kruh, "Who Wrote The American Black Chamber?" Cryptologia 2, no. 3 (1978), 130-133.

Zimmer, George F., and Burke Boyce. K-7: Spies at War. New York: Appleton-Century, 1934.

Return to WWI - U.S. Table of Contents

Return to Main Table of Contents