Germany in WWI ran a sabotage campaign against American factories and shipping while America was still neutral. Franz von Papen infamously organized it out of the embassy from 1914, while President Wilson watched and officially did nothing.
Berlin by January 1915 had instructed the Secret War Council in New York to stop munitions reaching the Entente by any available means. Incendiaries went into freighter holds. Plants burned. One 1937 accounting put 43 American factories at explosions or fires of unexplained origin between early 1915 and spring 1917, alongside devices planted on roughly four dozen munitions ships. It was called a “holocaust” where German assets roamed.
Wilson knew, as he leveraged it for the false pretense to investigate left-wing leaders instead and target his political opposition, cynically enabling foreign enemies of the state as his personal allies.
The cover is the part worth studying. Franz von Rintelen spent half a million dollars standing up Labor’s National Peace Council, a false flag front built to generate strikes and slowdowns at munitions plants. He went after the actual labor organizer Samuel Gompers.
The design of the operation made German strategic sabotage read as American labor grievance, because a neutral country arguing with itself about wages and war profiteering looks nothing like a foreign operation against a supply line. The charge that eventually stuck to Rintelen at his trial was a conspiracy to restrain trade by inducing dockworkers to strike.
Only historians talk of the full context, because at the time nobody would accept evidence of German run influence operations undermining U.S. preparedness for war, as enabled by the “America First” President.
Labor and anarchism were the available flags in 1915. The history is useful today because climate and anti-militarism are the available flags in the news now. Both supply a real domestic constituency with real grievances about exactly the thing that a Russian operation wants stopped, and both hand investigators a “local politics” file to open instead of the more relevant counterintelligence one.
Germany has been running that mistake for fifteen years with zero convictions, if you wonder how well it’s been going.
The Netherlands and Poland agreed in December 2025 to deepen military mobility and logistics, moving troops through the Netherlands and Germany toward Poland. That builds on the January 2024 declaration among the Netherlands, Germany and Poland to run a corridor from the North Sea ports to the eastern flank, including priority for military trains over civilian traffic. On 11 September Dutch Defence moved 16 NS ICRmh carriages to the Vlasakkers military rail facility at Amersfoort, routed Arnhem to Deventer to Amersfoort. Those carriages become casualty evacuation trains. Medical evacuation capacity running west out of Poland not the kind of component in the corridor attracting public notice, while it is the one that Russia monitors as what NATO expects to need on the front.
Four days later pipes were fastened to the rails at Barneveld, Twello, Brummen, Putten, Lunteren, Ermelo, Veenendaal, Olst and Steenwijk. Barneveld sits on Amersfoort to Apeldoorn. Twello sits on Apeldoorn to Deventer. Brummen sits on the Arnhem to Zutphen approach to Deventer. Three points on the 11 September path. NOS mapped Amersfoort to Deventer as the one segment classified as probable sabotage rather than knock-on disruption.
The pipes bridge the rails and short the track circuit. The interlocking cannot distinguish a pipe from an axle, so it reports the section occupied and holds signals at danger. Integrity of the sensor input fails and availability of the corridor follows. ProRail knew which baanvak was reporting and not where the object sat, which put crews on foot across kilometres of track for hours.
Large metal pipes that cost almost nothing to source, placed by anyone, against a system that has no integrity check on its own input, has all the hallmarks of hybrid warfare intelligence operations.
German federal security services published the template in September 2025. Foreign intelligence, mostly Russian, recruits Wegwerf-Agenten through social media and messenger apps for small sums, and the BKA target list names transport and rail.
No claim of responsibility has been made yet. It seems the Dutch don’t yet have a Russian asset flying the “climate activism” or “anarchist” false flag of “local politics” before a proper counterintelligence investigation is done.
