Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

World War I editor tells tall tales of espionage

John R. Rathom, the editor of The Providence Journal during World War I, made fantastic claims that Journal agents had been stationed in German and Austrian embassies to collect information. Here are two versions of the same story, told by Rathom under different circumstances:

"One day one of our young women who . . . had been put in the office of the Austrian Consul General, Von Nuber, in New York City, as a stenographer, informed us that a large packing box was being prepared to be sent on the Oscar II, through Falmouth to Stockholm and from there down to Germany. This box contained a tremendous lot of evidence of the plots that had been carried out against our country and our munition plants with the actual sums of money that it cost to pay the men that committed these deeds.

"The day this box was to be finally nailed up, this young woman, under instructions, stayed and ate her luncheon in the office. There were only two or three people left in the office during the lunch hour; one of them was Captain Von Papen, the German military attaché, a man with a weakness like that of a good many of us, for beauty and talent in feminine form. This young lady answered that description and Captain Von Papen proceeded to make love to her, sitting on this box, a packing case some three or four feet square.

"We could not possibly stop the box on this side so the only thing we cared about was to identify the box by marking it so that the British officers in the first port of call could get it from among the hundreds of other articles in the hold of that ship.

"This young lady, taking out a heavy red crayon pencil, and listening to Papen's advances, drew sentimentally two large red hearts on the top of that box -- and it was Captain Von Papen himself who took the pencil and put the arrow through the hearts. The British authorities informed us, and we have their word for it, that that was the method of identification of that box when it reached Falmouth."

-- From Rathom's public speech before The Empire Club of Canada, June 15, 1917.

"My source of information with respect to the 'hearts' story was a set of circumstantial reports made to me through the Slavic channels above referred to, and the person referred to who made the markings on the box was a young Croatian woman, a stenographer in the employ of Consul-General Von Nuber, who was secretly aiding the British Government."

-- From Rathom's secret confession to federal authorities, Feb. 12, 1918.