Read Online Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum - Free Book Online

artfully cultivated Vandyke, but took appreciative measure of the suddenly youthful face staring back at him in the mirror.
    The frayed tweed suit that had served as his Harvard uniform was packed into a suitcase, and he bought a pair of shiny khaki pants, a blue shirt, and a deep-pocketed rust-colored jacket at a haberdashery that did a brisk business in secondhand clothes. His gentleman’s black derby was discarded too, and replaced by a more plebeian brown felt hat that he set at a rakish angle.
    He couldn’t disguise, however, his distinctive tubercular gait, and that was a concern; the description widely circulated by the Cambridge police described the fugitive murderer as a “loose-jointed walker.” Prudence, he decided, required that he leave the country.
     
    MUENTER TRAVELED SOUTH ON A vagabond route through Mexico. It was an aimless yearlong journey, but it gave him the time to fit a cover story snugly around his incriminating past. He christened himself Frank Holt, born in Wisconsin, parents long dead and without any siblings. Anyone who asked was told he’d picked up his knowledge of German—and perhaps, he’d concede pleasantly, some foreign mannerisms—during years employed as tutor to the children of a wealthy midwestern family as they traveled in high style through Europe.
    After much disciplined effort, he even managed to disguise the lingering traces of his German accent. Now when he spoke, it was with the hesitant sibilance of a lisp.
    There were gaps and obscurities in his new autobiography, but these were deliberate; nothing should be made too easy or too clear for new acquaintances. If he appeared to be trying too hard, that in itself could provoke suspicions.
    Reinvented, he decided the time had come to settle down. Early in 1907 he made his way to El Oro, a dusty town about a hundred miles northwest of Mexico City; walked into the local mining company; and asked for work. His qualifications, he stated with for once not an iota of invention, were that he could read, write, and speak several languages fluently. He was hired as a stenographer.
    James Dean, who had a desk across the room, would later recall that Muenter had “proved an excellent stenographer, but kept aloof from everyone in the company.” “He had a worried look and frequently gazed abstractedly into space for a long time.”
    Still, his demeanor, however odd, didn’t attract much comment. Most Americans who wound up south of the border in the remote hills of El Oro were running away from something. It was a community of expatriates who knew better than to ask too many questions, and their own rough experiences had tempered their tendency to judge.
    For the next two years Muenter seemed to settle with a monklike devotion into his quiet new life. All the while, though, he was waiting, biding his time.

Chapter 10
    T here are men who never take to the secret life, but von Bernstorff, in many impressive ways, was a natural. From the start he understood that deniability is a primary rule of the covert world and that he was the beneficiary of a bit of beginner’s luck: his job gave him the perfect cover.
    Upon his return to Washington, the count threw himself into his public role as ambassador. He rushed about the corridors of federal power, urging that America remain neutral. He went out of his way to meet with reporters and editors to share an ardent plea—off the record, of course—that President Wilson must be encouraged to broker a peace settlement. And with a happy-go-lucky energy that surpassed even his own previous immersion in the city’s social whirl, he made it a point to be seen out and about at cocktails, dinners, or weekend house parties, always the elegant and charming aristocrat with the mischievous roving eye. As the professionals at Abteilung IIIB would have said with admiration, von Bernstorff lived his cover.
    Yet all the while he was also, with no less admirable Prussian efficiency, building his network. He