![]() ![]() “Hall had become adept at operations to influence opinion in the United States, and he used his expertise to the hilt in the way that he chose to disclose the telegram,” Boghardt writes. As Historian Thomas Boghardt notes in his book “The Zimmermann Telegram,” releasing the letter would have not only revealed to the Germans that their codes were broken, it would have also tipped off the Americans that the British were snooping on their diplomatic communications. “For the present not a soul outside this room is to be told anything at all.” Hall had several reasons for biding his time. “This may be a very big thing, possibly the biggest thing of the war,” he told de Grey. Protocol demanded that Room 40 immediately share its intelligence with the British foreign office, but Captain Hall chose to keep the Zimmermann Telegram under wraps for several weeks. Recognizing its strategic value, he immediately strode into the office of Room 40’s chief, Captain William Reginald “Blinker” Hall, and asked him a question: “Do you want to bring America into the war?” On January 17-two days before the telegram arrived in Washington-a British cryptanalyst named Nigel de Grey decoded the note. ![]() When the Zimmermann Telegram was transmitted, it was easily snatched up by the Admiralty’s “Room 40,” an office of cryptographers, mathematicians and language experts who specialized in cracking German codes. state department’s transatlantic cables since early in the war. Unbeknownst to the Americans, British intelligence had been secretly tapping into the U.S. The United States had unwittingly helped deliver a message that posed a grave threat to its own security, yet the Zimmermann Telegram didn’t cross the Atlantic undetected. By January 19, Eckardt had received it in Mexico City. From there, it was transmitted to London and then to the German embassy in Washington, D.C. ![]() Oblivious to its content, he dutifully wired it to Copenhagen. With this in mind, on January 16, 1917, Zimmermann’s office handed their coded telegram off to the U.S. Germany had been left with no private communications link between Berlin and North America, but in the interest of promoting peace, the neutral United States had agreed to send encrypted German messages in exchange for a promise that they only contained run-of-the-mill diplomatic instructions. Earlier in the war, the British Royal Navy had successfully severed the Germans’ transatlantic telegraph cables. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” Along with working to seal a German-Mexican partnership, Eckardt was also instructed to use the Mexican president as an intermediary to flip Japan to the side of the Central Powers.Ĭonsidering the Zimmermann Telegram’s scandalous contents, the Germans used an unlikely method to transmit it abroad. “We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. “We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare,” the telegram read in part. In exchange for launching an attack on the United States, Mexico would be free to annex a chunk of the American Southwest. The note informed Eckardt that if the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies, he was to begin backchannel negotiations to strike up a military partnership with the Mexicans. In January 1917, German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann dispatched a secret letter to Heinrich von Eckardt, the German minister to Mexico. ![]() No one in the United States knew it at the time, but before declaring unrestricted submarine warfare, the Germans had also set a now-infamous diplomatic scheme in motion. ![]()
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