Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters

Inspector Thomas J. Tunney leads New York City’s first dedicated bomb squad, formed in the summer of 1914 as war loomed overseas. With a small but determined team of men, he turns a routine police unit into a razor‑sharp force on the hunt for clandestine explosives, foreign agents, and anarchist agitators who threaten the city’s streets and factories. Their early investigations reveal a tangled web of German sympathizers and radical labor groups using sabotage, arson and hidden bombs to disrupt America’s fragile neutrality.

Drawing on street‑level intuition and close cooperation with fledgling federal agencies, Tunney’s squad maps out secret networks, follows whispered rumors and intercepts a handful of dangerous plots before they can erupt. The narrative offers vivid accounts of daring raids, painstaking surveillance, and the moral strain of policing a metropolis under the shadow of a world war. It also underscores the era’s urgent call for a unified intelligence effort, laying out lessons that still resonate in today’s fight against covert threats.