These images, via the National Archives’s Underwood and Underwood News Service collection, show the “brass tube bomb,” “magazine revolver of German make,” and assorted maps, disguises, and other sabotage gear found in October 1915 in the room occupied by one Robert Fay, “German spy, arrested by the Federal authorities for conspiracy to destroy ammunition ships in New York Harbor.”
Fay, a German national who worked for the Submarine Signal Company (now Raytheon) in Boston prior to the Great War, went back home in August 1914 to serve on the Western Front as a Lieutenant. However, following up on his special set of skills, he was dispatched back to America with a fake British passport under the name of H. A. Kearling, assigned German military attaché Franz von Papen as his handler, and went to work trying to organize acts of sabotage.
German anti-shipping bombs, 1915, including those used by both Fay and developed by Von Rintelen, via the circa 1918 ONI 40
The Fay ring, including brother-in-law Walter E. Scholz, the curious professor Herbert O. Kienzle, and Paul Daeche, would be rounded up within six months and Papen expelled– with the latter soon arriving on the Western Front himself, to take up command of an infantry battalion.
One of Fay’s more interesting attempts at freighter sabotage as detailed by ONI 40 was a 40-pound bomb made to disable a ship’s rudder.
