Ah, yes. Another infamous piece of wartime "investigative" literature: half-truths (usually spoon-fed by the the British NID), hear-say and outright fabrication.

Just a few remarks on this and the pages you referred to:

Count von Bernstorff was the German ambassador to the US. If anything, he was considered a "dove" by the standards of the German foreign ministry. He was neither responsible nor indeed did he take an interest in the details of agent work or military matters.

Those tasks fell to his military attaché, Colonel von Papen - a hawkish imbecile - and Captain Boy-Ed - just an imbecile. Contrary to the assertions made in Jones' book, the pair faced a number of critical problems that gradually strangled German secret activities in the US until they virtually stopped in 1918 (the time when the U-cruisers appeared off the US coast).

Those problems revolved around two issues: communications and cryptography. Once the British had cut the German ocean cables, all communications to and from the US had to go through the UK or UK-controlled cables. Bernstorff, through his good relations with Wilsons's ADC, Colonel House, managed to make use of US government telegraphy installations on the promise that no military matters were to be passed on and that the traffic should be in plain text. The German embassy broke that trust and were denied from further using US telegraphy facilities from 1916 onwards (this episode involves the "civilian" code Jones mentions in his book).

Let me be clear: at no point are we talking about wireless comms here, because technically this just wasn't in the cards. The other problem that beset the German embassy in the US was, that they couldn't get the monthly cipher updates (naval and diplomatic) from Germany (they could hardly be sent by cable through the UK and the Royal Navy intercepted all suspicious passengers - ie messengers - bound on ships to the US). That alone precluded them from talking to anyone but themselves.

For these reasons and through Papen's and Boy-Ed's carelessness in using whatever cipher and code material was available, the British soon read all message traffic to an from German diplomatic missions world-wide. That's by the way how they intercepted the infamous Zimmermann telegram. All this has been made available by UK archives only as late as the 1970s, so Jones wouldn't have known most of that. I've been through most of the transcripts that cover the message traffic beteween the embassy in Washington and Berlin. There's not even a hint that any agents in the US might have received instructions directly, and certainly not through any wireless messages.

That takes care, in my opinion, of any lingering suspicions that there might have been a form of guidance for the agents in the US from abroad or, conversely, that commerce raiders were guided from the embassy in Washington (or that the embassy was even aware of the ships' whereabouts). Just as an example of Jones's ignorance of how pedestrian the German "secret service" in the US really was, take the loss of the light cruiser Karlsruhe off South America in 1914:

The Karlsruhe disappeared without a trace in the middle of a very successful war patrol off the South American coast in November 1914. Both the German Admiralty and the British, who were chasing her, were mystified. A couple of weeks later 11 German sailors turned up in New York where a German agent, Captain von Rintelen, was running a sabotage operation against allied ammunition transports. The sailors were from the Karlruhe and had been rescued by a captured British collier and they reported that the ship had been lost in early November 1914 from an internal explosion in the forward torpedo handling room. However, those news did not reach Germany until another bunch of rescued sailors made it through to Germany on a different vessel in December 1914.

I hope that this information is helpful to you.

Dirk