The Morning the Cable Was Cut

On the morning of August 5, 1914, in the English Channel. Just hours after declaring war on Germany, the British Post Office cable ship Alert had arrived at its designated location, lowered its grapnel, and began dragging the seabed. All morning, it pulled up cable after cable, cutting them one by one—five in total, all of which were German lines leading to Vigo, Tenerife, the Azores, and New York.

This was no spontaneous decision. Three years earlier, the Committee of Imperial Defence had included this action in its war plan: as soon as war was declared against Germany, the first action would be to cut all of Germany’s submarine cables.

The British Empire’s first offensive in this war was not a bombardment, but a disruption of communications—following the script to the letter.

One: A Network Woven from Insulation and Landing Points

To understand the significance of this action, one must first see what the British held in their hands.

In 1902, with the Pacific segment completed, the “All Red Line” was formed—a cable network encircling the Earth, with every landing point on British territory. By 1914, over half of the world’s submarine cable mileage was under British control. This monopoly was not due to the cables themselves, but to three layers of control: gutta-percha, the insulating material, was produced in Malaya and processed by British companies; most of the cable-laying ships in the world flew the Union Jack; and relay stations along the Empire’s coastline, from Porthcurno to Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, and Aden, formed a string of links. Channel dominance never grows on the channel itself, but in the layers of material, construction capability, and landing points.

Cutting cables was not an invention of the British—during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. military had cut Spanish cables in Manila and Cuba. The British uniqueness lay in the second step: cutting the five German lines was not to silence Germany, but to redirect its communications to places where the British could listen.

Two: Not a Single Telegram Was Lost

After the cables were cut, Germany had two options. One was the high-power radio station in Nauen—but radio was broadcast, and every word sent was recorded by the interception stations of the British, French, and Russians. The other was to use a detour: through Sweden’s diplomatic lines or the American “courtesy” channel—President Wilson had granted this special permission for Germany to send encrypted telegrams.

On the map, these two routes led to the other side of the ocean. In reality, their relay stations were all within the British network.

Sweden’s route had a twist. In 1915, Britain had protested Sweden’s relay of German telegrams. Sweden appeared to comply but actually rerouted the messages through Buenos Aires before sending them to Berlin. Britain discovered this and did not protest again. When an opponent reroutes, the best strategy is to make them believe the rerouting was successful. For the next two years, Germany’s most confidential communications traveled on this “safe” channel, naked and exposed.

Thus, on January 16, 1917, a telegram was sent. German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret message to Mexico: if the United States entered the war, Germany and Mexico would form an alliance, and Germany would help Mexico regain Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. This plot to stab the United States in the back, sent through American cables, turned Wilson’s peace courtesy into an arrangement for America’s funeral. It arrived in Washington at the same time it lay on the desk of the codebreakers in Room 40 at the Admiralty.

The following three weeks were a master class in channel power. Intelligence chief Hall held this bomb without detonating it immediately. He was solving the ultimate problem of channel holders: how to use a piece of intelligence without destroying the channel that produced it. To publicly reveal it would mean acknowledging two things: they were reading an ally’s diplomatic cables, and they had broken German codes—the former would offend the United States, which was about to enter the war, while the latter would render Room 40 obsolete overnight. The solution was to fabricate a point of leakage: British personnel obtained from the Mexico City telegraph office a copy of the telegram that had been retransmitted in an old code—one already fully broken—and the claim that “the leak occurred in the Americas” directed every eye to the far side of the Atlantic. In February, the copy was handed to the Americans; on March 1, it was on the front page of every American newspaper. More than a month later, the United States declared war on Germany. Fairly speaking, it was the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare that pushed the United States into the war, but the final blow that swayed American public opinion was this telegram.

Berlin’s post-mortem is equally worth noting: the Germans suspected Mexico of leaking, suspected internal traitors, but almost never suspected the code or the path. The Germans checked every detail of the letter, except the postman.

Notice the most easily overlooked aspect of this structure: from August 1914 to March 1917, not a single German telegram was lost. Each was encrypted and delivered on time—just with an extra reader. The highest form of channel power is not to cut it, but to keep it open and read it. Cutting five cables was meant to drive the traffic onto the one route Britain could read.

Three: The First Bill for the Winner

In 1919, at Versailles, Germany’s overseas cables were divided among the victorious powers. The five that were cut in 1914 never returned to Germany. British channel dominance seemed to have won everything.

The bill was on the way.

The first came from Washington. The Zimmermann affair made Americans realize, belatedly, where that telegram had been read—their own diplomatic cable had been lying in someone else’s reading room all along. Washington’s response was not to protest but to build its own road: in 1919, under the direct push of the Navy, General Electric acquired the American Marconi Company, forming RCA. The company’s bylaws capped foreign ownership, and military representatives sat on the board, with no secret about their goal: American transatlantic communications must be in American hands. The biggest customer of the channel hegemon learned the lesson not with gratitude, but with “never to use someone else’s road again.”

The second came from technology. In the 1920s, shortwave radio stations reduced the cost of transatlantic communication to a fraction of the cable’s cost—a channel that once required a fleet and an empire to lay now needed only two antennas. The Eastern Telegraph Company’s revenue collapsed, and in 1928, the British government was forced to merge the Empire’s entire cable and wireless assets into one company to survive.

From the Zimmermann Telegram to the monopoly’s collapse, it took only ten years. The invitation to the funeral of channel dominance is often sent by its most glorious victory. That victory made everyone see the cost of walking someone else’s road.

Four: February 24, 2022: The Dawn of a Repeated Script

This script did not stay in the era of telegrams.

On February 24, 2022, about an hour before the invasion began, a cyberattack rendered tens of thousands of Viasat modems unusable, causing Ukraine’s satellite communications to fail at the outset of the war. The attack also blinded the remote monitoring of more than 5,000 German wind turbines: channel weapons are never selective. U.S. and European officials later attributed the attack to Russia. Hide the date, and it reads like August 5, 1914: the first blow of war is to cut the network, exactly as the script prescribes. One hundred and eight years later, the script had not changed by a single word.

Ukraine’s backup came swiftly: tens of thousands of Starlink terminals flooded in, supporting front-line communications. Then, a new role emerged from the 1914 script—private channel lords. In September 2022, a Ukrainian unmanned surface vessel raid on Sevastopol was aborted: there was no Starlink coverage in the Crimean direction. According to multiple public accounts—details vary, but the core is consistent—Elon Musk refused to extend coverage. An army’s operational radius was bounded by the judgment of a private company’s founder. The Committee of Imperial Defence at least had to convene; today, a single person can shut the gate.

The Pentagon’s response was textbook: starting in 2023, they incorporated Starlink services into military procurement contracts and pushed for the development of a military version—turning channels from favors into contracts, and contracts into redundancies. These three steps, each gained at the cost of battlefield passivity, are the price of channel power.

During the same period, pipelines and data cables beneath the Baltic Sea were damaged one after another, with anchor marks scattered across the seabed; attribution remains contested. The second half of the channel war is transitioning to the gray zone—channel attacks in the dam era no longer even need a signature.

One lesson must be honestly recorded. Many comfort themselves: today’s deeply embedded channels make a cut-off self-destructive, so no one will really do it. Ukraine’s war answered: the 1914 cable-cutting had almost no self-destruction, while the 2022 network cut-off was highly destructive—yet, on the morning of the war, no one was deterred by the arithmetic. Embedding can raise the price of a cut-off, but it can never cancel the option.

Five: Mechanisms: Three Laws of Channel Power

Arranging these cases side by side reveals the operation of channel power.

First Law: Channel power is invisible in peacetime but becomes apparent when used—thus, it is always underestimated until the first cut-off. Channels are infrastructure in peacetime and weapons in wartime, switching requires only one morning. A colder fact: Ukraine had read the 1914 script—reading the script does not mean having a backup.

Second Law: Dams and water meters—cutting is a one-time power, reading is a compound power. The power of a cut-off is immense, but it immediately signals danger to the world. Taxation and reading can be sustained for years, provided there is restraint and concealment. Britain would rather let countless intelligence reports rot in drawers to preserve Room 40; once used for the Zimmermann telegram, a whole system of cover had to be built. The size of channel benefits is proportional to the holder’s restraint.

Third Law: Channel power is a depreciating asset, losing value with each use—because it teaches all adversaries to build their own paths. The ten-year bill from the previous section is evidence: from RCA to shortwave radio, the funding for alternative channels comes from the channel dominator every time they wield it. The moat of a channel is landing points and network effects—“not a quick fix, but never impossible.” Channel power sells not a ban, but a time difference. Clever holders know they are selling a perishable commodity.

Thus, the proposition of this chapter: Whoever controls the channel can decide how long someone’s war can last—while the highest form of channel power is making users believe it is just a channel.

Six: For the Age of Compute: Draw Your Channel Map

Today’s “All Red Line” list is not hard to compile: advanced process nodes and lithography machines, high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging, submarine cables and their landing stations, cloud platforms and model APIs, the US dollar clearing network, app stores, and recommendation algorithms. Over the past few years, each has been cut off at least once.

Discipline in drawing analogies requires noting the differences in this round: first, after end-to-end encryption, reading loses value while denial of access gains it—channel power is regressing from a water meter to a dam, and its exercise will become more brutal and public, with anchor marks in the Baltic Sea as a preview. Second, content may be unreadable, but metadata still exists: who, when, and how much was used—Room 40 in the API era reads usage curves rather than telegrams.

Four actionable self-check actions:

1. Draw your channel map. List every channel on your supply side (chips, clouds, model APIs, payments) and distribution side (platforms, stores, search recommendations), and answer: who has the unilateral ability to cut off? How many months can you sustain after a cut-off? If you can’t answer the duration, it means you have never seriously thought about it.
2. Assume the channel is being read. Design your business as if the data you pass through others’ APIs and clouds are visible to them. Be wary of cheap and convenient: free channels are always charged in some other way—Wilson’s gift lines were free for Germany.
3. Ascend the three steps: favors, contracts, and redundancies. Inventory the status of your key channels: those maintained by relationships are favors; those with SLAs and default clauses are contracts; those that can be switched at any time are redundancies. Ukraine’s failed nighttime raid in September 2022 bought an upgrade from favors to contracts—do it with one tabletop exercise. Remember Germany’s lesson: the backup at Nauen Radio existed but was lacking in capacity, encryption, and coverage—a backup you cannot switch to is just rubber sitting in a warehouse.
4. If you own a channel: decide whether to be a dam or a meter. A cut-off brings one-time shock and a competition for alternatives; taxation and observation bring compound returns but test restraint. Whichever you choose, remember Law Three: every use depreciates. Every swing of the gate funds the adversary’s alternative.

On March 3, 1917, Zimmermann admitted the telegram was real. Historians debate why he admitted it—the plainest and most credible explanation is that he could not imagine where else the encrypted telegram could have leaked from.

On his map, cables were simply cables.