BLACK TOM ISLAND: The Origins of Tactical Espionage

EPILOGUE

The story has reached its end, so I think it's time for me to step in.

As I said from the trailer of the story, it's been months since I stumbled upon a video on the subject on the internet.

It brought this event to my attention and I thought a story could come out of it.

It's absolutely unbelievable, I must say, how something like this went unnoticed.

The huge explosion sent shards of glass all over the city. The biggest landmark in New York, the Statue of Liberty was hit.

Before that point, the torch of the statue was open to the public. This is also one reason why so many people can remember being all the way up to the torch even if it has been closed to the public since 1916.

Even if international espionage was a thing long before that point, in those days there were no established agencies to take care of the problem, no FBI, no CIA, no nothing, so the enemies had a lot of liberties.

The actual blast could be felt in other cities like Philadelphia and Maryland.

Black Tom Island was obliterated that night. There were 5 confirmed deaths following the event, and 20 million dollars in property damage, which today would go up to half a billion.

What happened during that night was a total mystery.

Investigations followed, but eventually it was determined that the explosion happened because of smudge pots.

Since it was summer, mosquitoes were a huge problem so people would use big pots where they would light fires and smoke would spread, making all the mosquitoes disappear.

Clearly, they made a connection since what they had inside those buildings could blow up every second.

Nothing happened for a very long time regarding the investigation, because Black Tom Island was seen as a case of huge negligence. At the beginning there was no suspicion of sabotage and only two people were arrested for manslaughter.

After a very long time, some information came out about some German representative that could've been involved, yet nothing was clear.

Even with things still not being clear, a year after the incident, in 1917, the U.S. cut ties with Germany and stopped supplying them, also entering the war officially at that point.

By that point they did nothing, since the war was happening in Europe, the Americand thought they would be safe since they would be isolated from the battlefront by miles and miles of ocean.

Even if they took some decisions to take action against Germany at that point, it wasn't until 1939, 22 years later, that the U.S. officially declared Germany responsible for the events at Black Tom Island.

It took so long because nothing like this had ever happened until then. No one was equipped for an investigation of that scale.

That was a clear sign that there was a need for counter espionage methods in times of peace and war.

The German sabotage campaign set the stage for the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917.

This not only changed the fate of the war, since America joined in, but also set the stage for the creation of counter espionage agencies.

Since no one expected anything of this scale at that time, and since the investigations went nowhere, as much as this became a turning point in history, it was very quickly forgotten.

In those times, America wasn't in the best position globally, but with the armament industry booming, it took them out of a tight spot.

After that America became a global power, and with the events from Black Tom behind them, they learned their lesson.

After that point nothing went unnoticed. It is now clear why exactly, keeping tabs on everything, is so important in American culture.

So... not only the war, but the world of today is now changed because of what happened in 1916.

Since we know how the world looks today, it's almost shocking to think that such a big act of sabotage that produced an explosion, that at the time was the equivalent of a 5 degrees earthquake, could go absolutely under the radar.

So... after all this, if you didn't know... now you know.

What is most important here is that it made me think. Now we can all take a look at things, back in the history of this world and understand that this was bad, but from where those people stood, for them, this was the right thing to do.

This makes it all clear. It doesn't matter how we can see something, there is always someone to see it differently.

It might be the worst thing in the world, but for some reason, as fucked up as it is, someone will see it to be their good, even if it's the collective bad.