Dark Invasion: 1915; Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America

Howard Blum

Combining the pulsating drive of Showtime's Homeland with the fascinating historical detail of such of narrative nonfiction bestsellers as Double Cross and In the Garden of Beasts, Dark Invasion is Howard Blum’s gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot—the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper. When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs—including an expert on germ warfare, a Harvard professor, and a brilliant, debonair spymaster—devise a series of “mysterious accidents” using explosives and biological weapons, to bring down vital targets such as ships, factories, livestock, and even captains of industry like J. P. Morgan. New York Police Inspector Tom Tunney, head of the department’s Bomb Squad, is assigned the difficult mission of stopping them. Assembling a team of loyal operatives, the cunning Irish cop hunts for the conspirators among a population of more than eight million Germans. But the deeper he finds himself in this labyrinth of deception, the more Tunney realizes that the enemy’s plan is far more complex and more dangerous than he suspected.

HistoryAmerican History · medium confidenceAmerican History81 signalsLlm Classifier: American History -> American HistoryGoogle Books: History -> HistoryKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryWorld War ICrime, Policing & ViolenceEnergy, Extraction & ResourcesFilm, Television & Popular Culture
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Tom Tunney72%
    Show lower-confidence suggestions

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • J. P. Morgan36%
  2. 02 Central places

    • New York78%
  3. 03 Suggested argument

    During World War I, Germany’s secret plan in the “neutral” United States uses saboteurs and biological weapons to cause “mysterious accidents,” which NYPD Inspector Tom Tunney must uncover and stop.

    Model confidence 70%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    28 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 86%.