Werner Horn was captured after the Vanceboro international bridge bombing. In 1916, his wife was involved in blackmail plot by a former German spy, Armgaard Karl Graves. In 1915, Bernstorff also helped organise what became known as the Great Phenol Plot, an attempt to divert phenol from the production of high explosives in the United States, which would end up being sold to the British, and to prop up several German-owned chemical companies that made aspirin and its precursor, salicylic acid. In September 1915, his agents attempted to influence the negotiations between American banks and the Anglo-French Financial Commission but failed to prevent an agreement from being reached. In July 1916, the Black Tom explosion was the most spectacular of the sabotage operations. Some of Bernstorff's other activities were exposed by the British Secret Service, which had obtained and distributed to the press a photograph of him "in a swimming costume with his arms around two similarly dressed women, neither of whom was his wife". Bernstorff was returned home on 3 February 1917, when US President Woodrow Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany after the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. Upon receiving the news, Colonel Edward M. House wrote to him, "The day will come when people in Germany will see how much you have done for your country in America". In 1910, Brown University had conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on Bernstorff. At the school's commencement in 1918, while the war was going on, University President William Faunce read a resolution of the board of fellows revoking the degree because "while he was Ambassador of the Imperial German Government to the United States and while the nations were still at peace, [Bernstorff] was guilty of conduct dishonorable alike in a gentleman and a diplomat". Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire He assumed his position as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1917. Bernstorff conceded that the Ottoman policy against the Armenians was one of exterminating the race. Bernstorff provided a detailed account of the massacres in his memoirs, Memoirs of Count Bernstorff. In his memoirs, Bernstorff recounts a conversation with Talat Pasha after the massacres had been concluded: "When I kept on pestering him about the Armenian question, he once said with a smile: 'What on earth do you want? The question is settled, there are no more Armenians.'" Weimar Republic Bernstorff was proposed as Foreign Minister in