The Black Tom explosion had been set off back in 1916 by German agents in conjunction with Communist activists who were also foreigners. The agents targeted a series of munitions warehouses on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor and ignited an explosion so big that it was heard in Maryland, hit 5.0 on the Richter scale, and created a crater that was over sixty-five thousand square feet.12 It took nearly a decade to figure it out, but it was Naval Intelligence that finally concluded that the United States had been attacked.
