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we always begin muddling through, this gentleman had been inadvertently assigned to the 
Intelligence Department. 
When he saw the report in the New York Times, he wrote to me about it. I knew he would not talk. I 
knew he would not blunder. I wrote back explaining my position, with he immediately understood 
and approved. But intelligence such as his is a rare accident in an Intelligence Department. He could 
not authorize me to go ahead without appealing to his superiors. He put the case before them. They 
were quite unable to understand that I was merely in a position to get into the full confidence of 
the Germans if I had the right sort of assistance. They idiotically assumed that I already possessed a 
knowledge of the enemy's secrets and they sent me a test question on a matter of no importance --- 
did I know who, if anybody, was passing under the name of so-and-so? I was not going to risk my 
precarious position asking questions. The official English idea of a secret agent seemed to be that 
he should act like 
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a newspaper reporter. The result was that the negotiations came to very little, though I turned in 
reports from time to time.1 
There was a Temporary Gentleman named H...d in the British Military Mission with whom I had such 
dealings as is possible with the half-witted. He thought that he detected hostility in my attitude 
towards him, whereas it was merely the University Manner. It was this poor thing whom our secret 
service sent to interview me. I told him that I could find out exactly what the Germans were doing 
in America. I also told him that I had the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the 
German secret service --- that I could go to Germany in the character of an Irish patriot and report 
on the conditions of the country. (There was desperate need of accurate information as to 
Germany's resources at this period.) He said, with the air of one detected in the act of adultery by 
sixteen separate sleuths, to say nothing of being doomed by the Black Hand, "But how do I know 
that you won't go straight to Viereck and tell him I have been to see you?"!!! I am loath to record 
accents of human speech so eloquent of mental undevelopment. I said to him, "What harm would 
that do? How would that save Bloody Bill from his predestined doom?" He did not know the answer 
to that. But then, he did not know the answer to anything else. 
I must now return to the main subject of this report. Partially baffled by the failure of the British to 
apply common sense to my proposals, I was compelled to go on playing a lone hand. It was 
necessary to persuade the Germans that arrogance and violence were sound policy, that bad faith 
was the cleverest diplomacy, that insult was the true means of winning friendship, and direct injury 
the proper conjuration to call up gratitude. I could not have succeeded had they not been hardened 
by temporary success, duped by the rigidity of their own logic, and rendered arrogant by the 
conviction of their own uprightness. 
But it succeeded. Von Bernstorff's superficiality could not estimate America. He was too much a 
gentleman. He knew indeed the unhappy truth that Wilson had been elected because he had kept 
America out of the war. I drummed it into both his donkey ears. But he was deceived by the humbug 
of "the world kept safe for democracy". The people ruled --- the people had voted against war. One 
can almost envy him his simple creed. Such a man might trust his wife and live happy ever 
afterwards. 
He did not see that "the people" in America are salves who count for nothing in the minds of their 
masters. But America had lent fabulous sums to the Allies, and would get nothing if Germany won 
the war but the kicks which so much pusillanimity and selfishness deserved. He did not see that 
America wanted a pretext for calling the conduct of Germany intolerable. The scabby old camel, 
almost ready to start for its trip through dryness, was looking wistfully for the last straw. 
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1. WEH note: There is a file of this correspondence in British Intelligence.