This is the true story of a German Secret Agent at the outset of World War One as told by the agent.

I bought this at a garage sale for a dollar over the summer. I just did a little research and found that it sells for $170 on Amazon. Anyone interested in it can pick up an Penguin edition on Alibis.com for under $20. The edition that I have, was printed by Bookcraft (Bath) a British POD publisher that went belly up about five years ago. I don’t know where the $170 comes from. It certainly can’t be for the Introduction by Reinhard R. Dorries. I ordered the second book, Return of the Dark Invader (1935), which tells of his clashes with the Nazis and his move to England.

I have another hundred pages to go in The Dark Invader, but I am enjoying it. The CIA web site calls the book a lurid memoir, but this could not be farther from the truth.

Rintelen was a young naval officer who was sent to the U.S.A. in 1915 with the orders to attempt to buy up munitions in order create shortages. At the time the US was technically neutral, but sending large amounts of munitions and other supplies to the British, French and Russians. Rintelen had a good deal of experience in banking and spoke perfect unaccented English.

He soon found that the volume of munitions production was so prodigious that he had no chance of affecting US exports by buying up guns and ammunition. Instead, he resorted to good old fashioned sabotage. There are fairly detailed instructions in the book on building the small incendiary bombs that Rintelen’s agents placed in ships to great success.

Rintelen is intelligent and straightforward in his narrative. The motive for writing this memoir is to set the facts correctly as Rintelen saw them. His part in the sabotage and the events following it had been the subject of much speculation. I am sure the events in the book are edited to cast him in a more favorable light, but you get the feeling that he is an honorable man in his own way and really is trying to tell the true story. Of course, this was written in the early 1930s so Rintelen had to be careful naming names or admitting to further crimes.

It is interesting that he ordered that the bombs not be placed near explosives. He only wanted the ships to catch fire and eventually sink, but he tried to avoid unnecessary deaths. When one of his Irish agents placed two bombs on a passenger ship he had to bribe the officer in charge to get the bombs off the ship to prevent any deaths.

Rintelen was an extremely efficient, intelligent and energetic man. In the few short months he lived in New York, he organized labor to create chaos on the docks. He ran an extremely successful shipping company that he only started as a cover for other activities. He organized a whole underground of agents and spies. He built a bomb factory in a docked ship under the noses of the American CID. (The CID was sort of like the CIA back then).

It was undoubtedly his agents who placed the bombs that blew up the New Jersey Dock called Black Tom. He came up with the idea, but he was tricked into leaving New York on a Dutch ship before the plan was executed.

Rintelen was caught and eventually tried for organizing the Irish dock workers (not for espionage) and served 19 months in an American prison. He went back to Germany, but hated the Nazis and clashed with the government over his back pay and expenses. The Germans did not want to admit that they had spies and saboteurs in the US so they mostly disavowed him. The German government prevented him from publishing the book in Germany, and as a result a British publisher brought it out and it became an international best seller.

It is an excellent read. Rintelen starts out a little stiff, but you can see he loves telling stories, and he has a good time recounting his adventures. There are at least three good movie scripts in the book. If you zoom in on some his adventures, any one would make a good film. World War I was a very different war than the wars that followed. Rintelen was a gentleman soldier – a handsome and dashing figure who acted honorably, as a soldier. Today we might call him a terrorist, but he was clearly acting as a soldier when he attempted to stop the flow of arms to Germany’s enemies. After the war he suffered badly at the hands of his countrymen. His name appeared on Hitler’s list of those that would die if Germany successfully invaded England. He hated Nazis and all that they stood for and applied for British citizenship before he died in 1949.