For this, links established between Indian and Irish residents in Germany (including Roger Casement) and the German Foreign office were used to tap into the Indo-Irish network in the United States.
Oppenheim also convinced Indian revolutionary Har Dayal of the feasibility of the project and was able to establish contact with the Ghadar Party in the United States.
In an October meeting of the Imperial Naval Office, the consulate in San Francisco was tasked to make contact with Ghadar leaders in California.
At the same time $200,000 worth of small arms and ammunition was acquired by the German military attaché Captain Franz von Papen through a Krupp agent by the name of Hans Tauscher.
However, Charles Martinez, a customs official who had arranged the shipment to San Diego, was not told of the true destination, and hired the schooner Annie Larsen.
J. Clyde Hizar, a Colorado attorney in charge of placing the arms on board the Annie Larsen, posed as a representative for the Carranza Faction.
[5][6] For this purpose, Jebsen established a fake company to hide the true ownership of the ship, taking his attorney Ray Howard as partner.
Page's real identity was L. Othmer, the captain of the German bark Atlas, which had earlier been interned by the U.S. government in San Francisco.
They carried with themselves large amounts of Ghadarite literature, and were tasked by Ram Chandra to establish contacts with Indian revolutionaries and arrange for the arms to be transported inland.
[6][8] However, awaiting the Maverick for nearly a month, the Annie Larsen ran out of fresh water and, without a condenser on board, was forced to head for the mainland of Mexico.
However, in adverse weather, this attempt failed as well, and after twenty-two days Scheultzer gave up, choosing to make for the northern port of Hoquiam, Washington.
[12] Following this, a number of approaches were adopted, including instituting a "Native" Indian intelligence officer to infiltrate the movement, as well as the use of the famous American Pinkerton's detective agency.
[12] An Irish double agent by the name of Charles Lamb is said to have passed on the majority of the information that compromised the conspiracy and ultimately helped the construction of the prosecution.
An Indian operative, codenamed "C" and described most likely to have been Chandra Kanta Chakraverty (later the chief prosecution witness in the trial), also passed on the details of the conspiracy to British and American intelligence.
[9] Additionally, some of the plans involving the Indian Berlin Committee leaked out through Czech revolutionaries and spy networks who were in touch with their counterparts in the United States.
Voska, being pro-American, pro-British and anti-German, on learning of the plot from the Czech European network, spoke of it to Tomáš Masaryk, who then passed the information to the American authorities.
In May 1917, eight Indian nationalists of the Ghadar Party were indicted by a federal grand jury on a charge of conspiracy to form a military enterprise against Britain.
Further, Spring Rice was particularly wary of the political commitments of American President Wilson's government,[18] especially given that the Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had eight years previously written the highly critical pamphlet British Rule in India.
Although the new secretary of state Robert Lansing was initially as uncooperative as Bryan, the first investigations of the conspiracy opened with the raid of the Wall Street office of Wolf von Igel.
In particular, HMS Laurentic seized German and Turkish passengers on the American vessel China at the mouth of the Yangtze, the British government accusing them of planning to foment an armed uprising in India.
The China prisoners were released that month, but relations did not improve before November that year, with a number of exchanges[clarification needed] through the rest of 1916.
The issue was ultimately addressed by William Wiseman, head of British intelligence in the US, who bypassed diplomatic channels to give details of a bomb plot directly to the New York police.