However, all this subterranean
plotting and counter-plotting was but so much lost labor. It was
the decision on the policy of continuing or not continuing the
submarine campaign which finally turned the scale.

At the beginning of August one of these agents managed to steal a
portfolio of documents from Councillor Albert while he was traveling
on the New York elevated railway, and its contents were published
in the _World_ from the 15th of August onwards. We always thought
the perpetrator of this theft was an Entente agent, but it now
appears from Senator Frelinghuysen's evidence before the Senate
Committee of Enquiry on 13th July, 1919, that the guilty individual
was really a member of the American Secret Police. It would certainly
have been an unheard-of thing for an American agent to have robbed
a member of the diplomatic corps and sold the proceeds of his deed
to the Press. Probably what really happened was that the man was in
the pay of the Entente. The investigations at the Senate Committee
disclosed a number of cases of corruption and theft which the agents
of the Entente did not scruple to use in their efforts to compromise
and discredit the German Embassy; so this supposition is in itself
by no means improbable. The affair was merely a storm in a tea-cup;
the papers as published afforded no evidence of any action either
illegal or dishonorable; otherwise the American Government would
certainly have demanded the recall of Albert as they did later
in other cases. The Press manufactured a considerable sensation
out of the contents of the portfolio, but generally speaking the
efforts of the Entente in this affair proved completely without
effect.

The Entente agents, however, were more successful in their next
attack, to which the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador fell a victim.
Dumba had already in the winter of 1914-15 recommended to me the
American war correspondent James Archibald, who had been at the
Austro-Hungarian Front, as having German sympathies. Thereupon I
also recommended this gentleman in Berlin, where he was granted all
facilities. In the Summer of 1915 Archibald returned to America, to
lecture on his experiences. As he was anti-Entente, these lectures
brought us financial profit, and therefore we paid Archibald's
traveling expenses. At the beginning of September, 1915, he went
once more to Europe, and dined on the eve of his departure with
Dumba and myself on the roof-garden of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel