On April 19, 2017, Middleburg's Tony Wells gave the Keynote Address aboard HMS Victory (Nelson's flagship) in Her Majesty's Naval Base, Portsmouth, England, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Zimmermann Telegram, an event critical to understanding America's evolving attitudes toward Germany and the War in 1917. The following is a summary of those remarks:

Between January and March 1917, Admiral Sir Reginald "Blinker" Hall achieved the most remarkable triumph, unimpeded by anyone in the British Admiralty, the Foreign Office, or indeed within the Cabinet Office. What did Hall get up to between January and March 1917 that will forever live in the annals of any intelligence organization worldwide? The Americans were not in the war in January 1917. The Germans were planning on restarting unrestricted U-boat warfare from February 1, 1917, in an attempt to bring the British economy to its knees by attacking its most vital national interest, seaborne trade. Remember that in the United States in 1917 anti-British sentiment ran high, with a volatile and outspoken Irish-Americana and German-American population. Second, on January 11, 1917, the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, presented an encoded telegram to the US Ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, who agreed to transmit the telegram in its coded form. The American Embassy transmitted this telegram on January 16, 1917, five days later.

Why would the German Foreign Ministry be using the American Embassy to send its messages, in this case (the Zimmermann Telegram) via Washington DC to the German Ambassador in Mexico City, Heinrich von Eckhardt? The British had clandestinely cut the German transatlantic cable at the beginning of the war in 1914. The US was neutral in 1914 and permitted limited German use of its Europe to US transatlantic cable mainly because President Woodrow Wilson was encouraging peace talks and wanted to ensure that Berlin could talk with the US diplomatically.

Zimmermann's telegram was instructing the German Ambassador in Mexico City to inform the Mexican President, Carranza, that if the US entered the war against Germany then Germany would support Mexico financially in fighting a war against the US to regain territory lost to Mexico in the wars with the United States, a bombshell of enormous proportions if made aware to the US government and people.

Hall's Room 40 was reading all the American traffic, (that ran via cable from the US embassy in Denmark), and including all German traffic, encrypted or otherwise, that was forwarded from the US Embassy in Berlin. The US cable went via the UK, and the intercept point was at a relay station at Porthcurno, near Land's End. Hall's civil-ian cryptographers brilliantly decrypted the Zimmermann telegram the following day after an interception by the British, January 17, 1917.

The Americans may well think that this was all a devious British plot to bring the United States into the war. The telegram was brutally explicit in two regards: On February 1, 1917, the Germans would resume unrestricted U-boat warfare, and a German-Mexican military alliance was proposed, with Germany as the funding source. Hall needed a cover story for his knowledge of the German codes and avoid the Americans knowing that Room 40 was reading theirs and others mail, while at the same time convincing Woodrow Wilson and his government that the telegram was real, not a British forgery. Hall then decided on his "Deception Plan." Hall knew one key fact: The German Embassy in Washington DC, once it received the telegram, would have to transmit it to the German Embassy in Mexico City. Hall knew that they used a commercial telegraph company. Hall's agents bribed a Mexican telegraph employee to yield the cipher, thereby enabling Hall to inform the Americans that this had come directly from the Mexican Telegraph company from Washington DC. Simple, but brilliant. Hall also took another quite remarkable action, by great timing, by doing nothing until the Germans announced unrestricted U-Boar warfare on February 1, 1917, after which the US broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917.

Hall met with the US Ambassador in London on February 20 and handed him the telegram. Later the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, on Hall's quite emphatic advice, gave the American Ambassador a copy of the stolen Mexican cipher text and the English translation of the full Zimmermann Telegram. In Washington, President Wilson was convinced. He went ahead and released the telegram to the US press on February 28, 1917, and this immediately inflamed American public opinion against both Germany and Mexico. Wilson and his top aides also realized that they had to protect the British "Mexican Cipher" and British code-breaking capabilities.

The United States Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, President Wilson having asked for this Declaration on April 2, 1917.