Re: Telegram Azerbaycan
Cherrie Patete
The Zimmermann Telegram (or Zimmermann Note or Zimmermann Cable) was a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military contract between the German Empire and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany. With Germany's aid, Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by British intelligence.
Revelation of the contents enraged Americans, especially after German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann publicly admitted on March 3, 1917, that the telegram was genuine. It helped to generate support for the American declaration of war on Germany in April 1917.[1]
The decryption has been described as the most significant intelligence triumph for Britain during World War I[2] and it marked one of the earliest occasions on which a piece of signal intelligence influenced world events.[3]
The message came in the form of a coded telegram dispatched by Arthur Zimmermann, the Staatssekretr (a top-level civil servant, second only to their respective minister) in the Foreign Office of the German Empire on January 17, 1917. The message was sent to the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt.[4] Zimmermann sent the telegram in anticipation of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany on February 1, which the German government presumed would almost certainly lead to war with the United States. The telegram instructed Eckardt that if the United States appeared certain to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for military alliance with funding from Germany. The decoded telegram was as follows:[5]
Fr den Fall, da dies nicht gelingen sollte, schlagen wir Mexico mit folgender Grundlage Bndnis vor; Gemeinsame Kriegfhrung,gemeinsamer Friedensschlu. Reichliche finzanzielle Untersttzung und Einverstndnis unsererseits,da Mexiko in Texas, Neu Mexiko, Arizona frher verlorenes Gebiet zurckerobert. Regelung im einzelnen Euer Hochwohlgeboren berlassen.
Euer pp. wollen Vorstehendes Prsidenten streng geheim erffnen, sobald Kriegsausbruch mit Vereinigten Staaten feststeht und Anregung hinzufgen, Japan von sich aus zu fortigem Beitritt einzuladen und gleichzeitig zwischen uns und Japan zu vermitteln.
On February 1 we intend to begin submarinewarfare without restriction. In spite of this it is ourintention to endeavour to keep the United Statesneutral. If this attempt is not successful, we proposean alliance on the following basis with Mexico:
That we shall make war together and togethermake peace; we shall give general financial support,and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquerher lost territory of New Mexico, Texas andArizona. The details are left to you for settlement.
You are instructed to inform the President ofMexico of the above in the greatest confidence assoon as it is certain that there will be an outbreakof war with the United States, and suggest that thePresident of Mexico shall on his own initiative communicatewith Japan suggesting the latter's adherenceat once to this plan, and at the same timeoffer to mediate between Germany and Japan.
Germany had long sought to incite a war between Mexico and the United States, which would have tied down American forces and slowed the export of American arms to the Allies.[7] The Germans had aided in arming Mexico, as shown by the 1914 Ypiranga incident.[8] German Naval Intelligence officer Franz von Rintelen had attempted to incite a war between Mexico and the United States in 1915, giving Victoriano Huerta $12 million for that purpose.[9] The German saboteur Lothar Witzke, who was based in Mexico City, claimed to be responsible for the March 1917 munitions explosion at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in the San Francisco Bay Area,[10] and was possibly responsible for the July 1916 Black Tom explosion in New Jersey.
The German provocations were partially successful. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the military invasion of Veracruz in 1914 in the context of the Ypiranga incident and against the advice of the British government.[12] War was prevented thanks to the Niagara Falls peace conference organized by the ABC nations, but the occupation was a decisive factor in Mexican neutrality in World War I.[13] Mexico refused to participate in the embargo against Germany and granted full guarantees to the German companies for keeping their operations open, specifically in Mexico City.[14]
The Zimmerman Telegram was part of an effort carried out by the Germans to postpone the transportation of supplies and other war materials from the United States to the Allies, which were at war against Germany.[16] The main purpose of the telegram was to make the Mexican government declare war on the United States in hopes of tying down American forces and slowing the export of American arms.[17] The German High Command believed that it could defeat the British and French on the Western Front and strangle Britain with unrestricted submarine warfare before American forces could be trained and shipped to Europe in sufficient numbers to aid the Allies. The Germans were encouraged by their successes on the Eastern Front to believe that they could divert large numbers of troops to the Western Front in support of their goals.[citation needed]
Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assigned a military commission to assess the feasibility of the Mexican takeover of their former territories contemplated by Germany.[18] The generals concluded that such a war was unwinnable for the following reasons:
The Carranza government was recognized de jure by the United States on August 31, 1917, as a direct consequence of the Zimmermann Telegram to ensure Mexican neutrality during World War I.[20][21] After the military invasion of Veracruz in 1914, Mexico did not participate in any military excursion with the United States in World War I.[13] That ensured that Mexican neutrality was the best outcome that the United States could hope for even if it allowed German companies to keep their operations in Mexico open.[14]
Zimmermann's office sent the telegram to the German embassy in the United States for retransmission to Eckardt in Mexico. It has traditionally been understood that the telegram was sent over three routes. It went by radio, and passed via telegraph cable inside messages sent by diplomats of two neutral countries (the United States and Sweden).
Direct telegraph transmission of the telegram was impossible because the British had cut the German international cables at the outbreak of war. However, Germany could communicate wirelessly through the Telefunken plant, operating under Atlantic Communication Company in West Sayville, New York, where the telegram was relayed to the Mexican Consulate. Ironically, the station was under the control of the US Navy, which operated it for Atlantic Communication Company, the American subsidiary of the German entity.
Also, the United States allowed limited use of its diplomatic cables with Germany to communicate with its ambassador in Washington. This privilege was supposed to be used for messages connected with Wilson's peace proposals. The Swedish diplomatic message holding the Zimmerman Telegram went from Stockholm to Buenos Aires over British submarine telegraph cables, and then moved from Buenos Aires to Mexico over the cable network of a United States company.
However, that put German diplomats in a precarious situation since they relied on the United States to transmit Zimmermann's note to its final destination, but the message's unencrypted contents would be deeply alarming to the Americans. The Germans persuaded US Ambassador James W. Gerard to accept it in coded form, and it was transmitted on January 16, 1917.[22]
Disclosure of the telegram would sway American public opinion against Germany if the British could convince the Americans that the text was genuine, but the Room 40 chief William Reginald Hall was reluctant to let it out because the disclosure would expose the German codes broken in Room 40 and British eavesdropping on United States diplomatic traffic. Hall waited three weeks during which de Grey and cryptographer William Montgomery completed the decryption. On February 1, Germany announced resumption of "unrestricted" submarine warfare, an act that led the United States to break off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3.[22]
Hall passed the telegram to the British Foreign Office on February 5 but still warned against releasing it. Meanwhile, the British discussed possible cover stories to explain to the Americans how they obtained the coded text of the telegram and to explain how they obtained the cleartext of the telegram without letting anyone know that the codes had been broken. Furthermore, the British needed to find a way to convince the Americans the message was not a forgery.[26]
For the first story, the British obtained the coded text of the telegram from the Mexican commercial telegraph office. The British knew that since the German embassy in Washington would relay the message by commercial telegraph, the Mexican telegraph office would have the coded text. "Mr. H", a British agent in Mexico, bribed an employee of the commercial telegraph company for a copy of the message. Sir Thomas Hohler, the British ambassador in Mexico, later claimed to have been "Mr. H" or at least to have been involved with the interception in his autobiography.[27] The coded text could then be shown to the Americans without embarrassment.
Moreover, the retransmission was encoded with the older code 13040 and so by mid-February, the British had the complete text and the ability to release the telegram without revealing the extent to which the latest German codes had been broken. (At worst, the Germans might have realized that the 13040 code had been compromised, but that was a risk worth taking against the possibility of United States entry into the war.) Finally, since copies of the 13040 code text would also have been deposited in the records of the American commercial telegraph company, the British had the ability to prove the authenticity of the message to the American government.[3]
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