By 1917, Providence Journal editor John R. Rathom was a national celebrity, nicknamed the spy-hunter for his sensational newspaper scoops about German propaganda and espionage in the US. There were two things nobody knew about Rathom. The first was that he got his amazing scoops from domestic and foreign spies, and through his relationships at the Bureau of Investigation, the agency we now call the FBI. The second thing was that Rathom was an imposter. America’s most-famous newsman lived under a fake name and a false identity invented to hide a secret in his past.
Late in the year, with America finally committed to WWI, the imposter took a victory lap on a national speaking tour, where he outrageously claimed that he got his remarkable stories by deploying his news reporters as a counter-intelligence force against the German Empire. Rathom’s lies grew ever bigger, until the US Department of Justice decided it was time to shut the newsman’s big mouth.
This excerpt is adapted from Chapter 15 of “The Imposter’s War,” by Mark Arsenault, which goes on sale Tuesday. It is reprinted here by permission of Pegasus Books.
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In the early evening of November 21, 1917, the elites of Boston society turned out in formalwear for a special banquet at the Boston City Club on Beacon Hill, next door to the dazzling golden dome of the Massachusetts State House. The Pilgrim Publicity Association, a trade group for the advertising industry, was sponsoring a dinner and speaking program headlined by the celebrity newsman and German spy hunter John R. Rathom.
Rathom’s talk that evening was titled “Three Years of Germany’s War against the United States.” A cartoon printed on tickets to the event depicted Rathom chasing a wild boar that sported the ridiculous upturned moustache of German Kaiser Wilhelm. Rathom’s arm is cocked back in the drawing, and he is about to spear the pig with a giant fountain pen.
The granite and redbrick City Club building had never seen a dinner crowd so large; perhaps as many as a thousand attendees. People shut out of the sold-out talk were offering bounties of $50, about $1,000 today, to anyone interested in scalping their ticket, which had a face value of $2.50. The head of the Pilgrim Association claimed demand was so overwhelming the group could have sold fifty thousand seats.
Dinner started at 6:30. From the head table, Rathom peered through the haze of tobacco floating up to the high ceiling and looked across a sea of penguin suits, crammed around round tables packed wall to wall throughout the long and narrow ballroom. The Harvard Glee Club entertained with songs. Reporters from the major Boston newspapers had pencils ready to cover the newsman who was always good copy.
John Rathom was approaching a new summit of his celebrity.
His speaking tour, which had begun that June in Toronto with an explosion of lies and exaggerations, had been an absolute smash. The American public was enthralled with the idea that a newsman had run his own private counterspy ops against the Germans. Rathom had delivered a speech in Philadelphia in October that drew five hundred people, along with national news coverage of Rathom’s alarming and entirely unsupported claim that “two officers of high rank” and “hundreds of men” in the US Army and Navy were known by the federal government to be spies for Germany. These men “are allowed their liberty,” Rathom said, cryptically, “for reasons best known to the Department of Justice.”
It was McCarthyism thirty years before McCarthy, and just as effective. The Philly crowd could hardly stop interrupting Rathom with applause, as he lied about how “a little group of common, garden-variety American reporters working for the Providence Journal outwitted the whole efficient Prussian secret service,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The week before his Boston engagement, Rathom had drawn “the largest group ever gathered” by the Canadian Club of New York, at the luxurious Hotel Biltmore on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The major New York papers all covered the speech, and the newswires had seeded Rathom’s spy mongering and heroic falsehoods around the world.
Invitations to speak were arriving faster than Rathom could respond. After Boston, he had major appearances planned for the Midwest.
And the capstone of his promotional tour was just becoming public.
Rathom had struck a deal with the prestigious New York magazine World’s Work, to write exclusive stories about his battle against enemy spies, which would run as a series over several editions and then be published as a book. The series was due to start in January 1918. World’s Work launched a subscription drive and national newspaper advertising campaign to pump the series. One ad showed a giant hand in the sky aiming a blinding flashlight on a German saboteur holding a bomb. The ad copy promised “The Biggest Story of the Year—John R. Rathom’s exposé of Germany’s plots.”
Rathom had exposed German propaganda and espionage in his newspaper. But not in the field as the commander of a counterspy ring, as he claimed in his speeches. The imposter had edited the adventures of the real spies who had fed him information, so that their thrilling stories starred John Rathom. Then he spun those yarns to the adulation of America.
The lies had started small, as they tend to do, with the occasional misdirection to protect his sources. Rathom believed lives would be at risk if his sources were revealed, and he may have been right. But the imposter went further. Rathom was playing a character, and nothing drives an actor like applause. Audiences lapped up his spy stories and begged for encores. A few tall tales were good for American morale, he told himself, so therefore good for the war effort. It was all so reckless. So over-the-top. Rathom’s falsehoods were like a Ponzi scheme. New ones had to be invented all the time to feed a hungry press. It was a dangerous game. He put his newspaper’s reputation on a knife’s edge. For an imposter with a secret to hide, the stakes were infinitely higher. But soon he was in too deep. With no way to step off his mountain of lies, he could only climb higher.
A former Massachusetts congressman introduced Rathom to the Boston crowd at 8:50 p.m. The audience erupted into “prolonged cheering,” like they had just seen the last out of a no-hitter at the new ballyard across town, Fenway Park.
Dressed in a black tuxedo with wide lapels, a snowy white high-collared shirt, and a vest buttoned low around his bulging middle, Rathom took the podium. “I feel as if the making of this little reputation was not half as hard as living up to it,” he said, in a bit of false modesty recycled from other speeches. “I am delighted to be with you tonight and delighted, I am glad to say, for more than one reason.” He looked down to several Providence Journal reporters in the audience. “I was surprised and very glad when I saw at a table before me a group of my own men, men to whom the larger part of the glory for what we have done should descend. I am proud to stand here tonight before you and tell them to their faces.”
The crowd burst into sustained applause.
Voices cried out, “Make them stand up!”
“Go ahead, stand up,” Rathom commanded his reporters, who knew nothing of how their mysterious boss had landed his scoops.
The reporters rose. The audience rose with them in thunderous ovation.
When the hall had calmed, Rathom continued. “During the first year of our work we lived in a constant hell, knowing, as we did, where our material was coming from, knowing that it was absolutely true in every respect—knowing that 90 percent of those who read it did not believe it. And we were in a most disheartened frame of mind, and it took all of our energy and all of our mental qualities to understand that we had to keep on.”
Over the next ninety minutes, the crowd hung on Rathom’s words “with almost breathless interest,” as he unfolded his greatest hits, the full portfolio of his inventions and exaggerations:
The Providence Journal intercepted and decoded German messages. The paper placed reporters undercover at jobs inside the German embassy in order to eavesdrop and steal documents. Germany’s naval attaché had unwittingly assigned an undercover Journal reporter to secure hotel rooms for a secret conference between German diplomats and Mexican dissidents, so Rathom could bug the room.
Rathom’s spy stories were intimately crafted, with quirky details that rang like real life. On this night he added a funny new tale about a German saboteur named Werner Horn, who had bombed a railroad bridge in Maine in 1915. Horn was arrested shortly after his bomb exploded and damaged the bridge. Journal reporters under Rathom’s command, he said, entirely making this up, shadowed Horn from New York to Maine, and then Rathom himself later debriefed the German in jail.
In preparing for his attack…
“Horn went down to West Street, New York, and bought a four-dollar suit of second-hand clothes and let his beard grow for a week; cut off his military moustache and put on a filthy old cotton shirt and cotton coat; and in that disguise went about the Merchant’s Limited train from New York to Boston. When they got his confession from him and I asked him why, after taking all these precautions he had come on the finest train in America, he said: ‘Sir, I am an officer and a gentleman, and I don’t travel any other way.’ "
The Journal outed spies, Rathom said, foiled bombings, uncovered a German passport fraud operation, gathered the evidence that led to the arrest of plotters who tried to dynamite Canada’s Welland Canal. Almost none of it was true, much of what he claimed was implausible, some hardly possible, and yet nobody seemed to question how the leader of such a busy counterspy operation could also publish two newspapers a day.
Hands mashed together in deafening tribute from the crowd.
One man in the audience, though, was not clapping. This man discreetly scribbled notes. He was in the front row, table number C8, directly in front of Rathom and practically close enough to smell the cigar smoke on him.
Unbeknownst to Rathom, the scribbler, a specialist in taking shorthand, was an agent for the Bureau of Investigation.
This agent had secret orders to create a verbatim transcript of Rathom’s address.
Everything Rathom said would be used against him.
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This story has been adapted from ”The Imposter’s War: The Press, Propaganda, and the Newsman who Battled for the Minds of America” by Mark Arsenault, which goes on sale April 5. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com. Follow him @bostonglobemark.