by Jim DeBrosse
Meader and Stone could tell the ONI representatives only that an important secret project was at stake. Without being able to supply the details, they struggled to persuade the ONI that drastic action was needed, now.
WHEN JAMES AND Lillian Montgomery left their shift the following morning, plainclothes ONI investigators tailed the couple to their home in Franklin—a small paper-mill town hugging the Great Miami River twenty miles south of Dayton. The town and the surrounding areas in southwestern Ohio were home to thousands of recent migrants from the small farms and coal towns of eastern Kentucky; the parents of both Montgomerys were from Harlan County.
Montgomery completed tenth grade at the Dayton area’s Carlisle High School—far more schooling than his parents had ever achieved. But given his social background, his personality, and the Great Depression, he was virtually unemployed for more than three years after he quit school. During 1940 and 1941, all he could find was a series of menial, temporary, and underpaid jobs, at one point working as a driver for the wife of an executive at the Armco steel plant in nearby Middletown, where his father worked as a pipefitter.
James Jr.’s early life had been unstable and filled with tragedy. When he was six years old, his mother died at age thirty, from acute appendicitis and a massive infection. She had been seriously ill for more than ten days, but a doctor was not called until two days before her death, perhaps because of her family’s fundamentalist beliefs, which included faith healing and speaking in tongues. A year later, his father found another Kentucky woman, a divorced machinist named Martha Trent, who was willing to become a homemaker and gave much attention and affection to seven-year-old James and his two brothers. The family was just settling into the relationship when, in 1931, Martha died of typhoid fever.
The boys spent most of the next five years under the care of the elder Blantons, their mother’s deeply religious parents. Then, when James turned sixteen, a new stepmother appeared, but immediately she and the boys were at odds. By the time James was twenty, she had gotten her fill and disappeared from the scene without leaving a trace.
During those troubled teenage years, James pursued grand dreams for the future: he spent much of his spare time at the Middletown Public Library, where he read every book he could find on the rapidly growing fields of electrical engineering and electronics. Like young Joe Desch, he had tinkered at home and, in 1938, at the age of eighteen, was convinced that he had invented a revolutionary new type of electrical generator—an idea he tried in vain to sell to the U.S. government. He wrote to the governments of England, France, and Germany. Only Germany responded—with a rejection.
At age twenty, James Montgomery began courting eighteen-year-old Lillian Culbertson. Although the two were from the same background, Culbertson’s parents strenuously objected to Montgomery. He persisted, however, telling her of the bright future he planned, which included his own radio-repair business.
In October 1940, young Lillian, who had just graduated from high school the previous summer, ran away with Montgomery to Kentucky, where marriages without parental approval were easier to arrange. The newlyweds moved into an apartment with Montgomery’s uncle in Cincinnati. Despite his uncle’s help, Montgomery found little work, and the months there were stressful: Lillian became pregnant, her mother was fighting cancer, and Montgomery had the local draft board breathing down his neck.
Montgomery registered for the draft in October 1940. But how forthright he was with his draft board is open to question. His registration card had an incorrect birth date, his local employer’s name was misspelled, and the signature on the card does not appear to have been his own. Nevertheless, his card and information were accepted, and the board began to process him.
By early 1941, Montgomery and his wife had moved from Cincinnati and in with Lillian’s parents in Middletown, where Montgomery was still without a job. Perhaps his frustration and idleness were what led him to shift his library reading from electronics to espionage and, in January 1941, to write a second letter to the German embassy.
We don’t know the contents of Montgomery’s 1941 letter, which elicited the terse response discovered in his glove compartment, but its context was certainly different from his letter of 1938. By 1941, the United States was embroiled in a very public and heated debate over foreign policy because of the war raging in Europe and Japan’s brutal advances into China. The Midwest was a center of isolationism, and few of its residents could have avoided the debate over whether the United States should entangle itself in world war.
Where Montgomery lay in the political spectrum of the period is impossible to determine. He had been a loner most of his life, family members say, and seldom discussed his politics or his religion. According to the family, he “always kept to himself. . . . I just couldn’t communicate with him. Nobody could.” His family reported that, in his later years, Montgomery belonged to no political organizations and expressed no religious convictions, although it was clear that he had long ago come to abhor his mother’s and his grandparents’ severe brand of fundamentalism. “He hated those ministers, those Church of God ones,” one family member said.
The rejection letter from the German embassy apparently did not end his interest in espionage. He seemed to have kept track of news items and books about the subject through at least the early months of 1941. But with a child on the way, he could no longer focus on such matters. In March, despite his education, skills, and ambitions, he met the fate of most of his Appalachian neighbors, taking a manufacturing job with harsh working conditions. He began what became a two-year stint in the dust-filled filter room of a Miamisburg furniture company. He soon quit abruptly for an even lower-paying job at a local paper company.
He and Lillian had their first child, a boy, in July 1941. The prospect of being drafted and leaving a young bride and small child at home loomed over Montgomery until early 1942, when he was given a 3-A deferment based on family hardship. However, his two brothers, who had been classified as 1-A, were soon drafted.
Lillian decided that she needed to bring in a steady income for the family, despite her young baby. She learned that perhaps the best employer in the region, National Cash Register, had many war-related openings and in late April 1943 took a job with the innocuous title of “assembler” in Building 26. Then, some two months later, Montgomery also was hired as an assembler in Building 26. The couple’s two incomes enabled them to move into their own apartment for the first time—half of a small, one-story house near downtown Franklin, in the shadow of the levee.
The future for the family was at last looking up. Montgomery and his wife both had a foothold in a blue-chip company with a long tradition of taking care of its employees. *25
At NCR, Montgomery began working with advanced electronics. At last, his knowledge and his skills were being recognized by professional engineers, and he was soon moved to the inner sanctum of Building 26. He must have known he was involved in something very important to the war effort, quickly guessing that it had to do with codes and ciphers.
He could do more than just advance his career. He could do something that might change the course of history.
THE NAVY INVESTIGATORS who spent the day of November 7 parked outside 124 South River Street in Franklin observed nothing out of the ordinary. No visitors. No trips to the post office or even to the grocery store. Just a young couple with a toddler spending a quiet day at home. Investigators also talked with the local postmaster, the chief of police, and a former chief of police in Franklin. None was even aware of Montgomery, though his house sat just three blocks from the town’s Municipal Building.
Nevertheless, at 7:00 P.M., when they reported for work at NCR, Montgomery and his wife were immediately taken into custody by naval-security officers and placed under Marine guard inside Building 26. They were held there for questioning, without benefit of an attorney, for at least two days, and Montgomery may have been held there as long as a week, completely isolated from the outside world.
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sp; Rumors began to circulate in the building. “I remember they put him in a room there, across the hall from where I worked,” said Don Lowden, an NCR engineer, in an interview nearly sixty years later. Lowden never knew the identity of the man being held in the room, but there was talk “that he may have taken some special tubes from that machine,” which only the top managers knew was called a Bombe.
The WAVES working in the building were kept in the dark as well, but they soon felt the impact of the security crisis: an 11:00 P.M. curfew was imposed on their off-site activities for the next two weeks. Scores of WAVES, used to coming and going from the Sugar Camp complex as they pleased, staged a protest one evening by turning their black Navy ties into armbands and marching around the grounds. “Certainly, at the time, it didn’t do any good,” Evelyn Einfeldt said. “But it was probably all in fun anyway.”
In a move that stretched even the loose ethics of wartime command, Ralph Meader took the investigation into his own hands. He interrogated Montgomery one-on-one the night of November 7 and into the next day. According to Meader’s son, Bruce, his father slipped a tube into Montgomery’s pocket in hopes that its discovery would force the young man to confess to theft and other crimes. If he did not confess, there would be little chance that Montgomery would be set free, even for a few days pending trial.
With Montgomery’s permission, the Navy searched his car and, indeed, found the letter from the German embassy and the index cards.
Meader later informed his superiors that Montgomery had broken down and confessed during the two-day examination. According to Meader, Montgomery told him that he had been able to guess the nature of his top secret work at NCR, that he had stolen vital parts from the codebreaking machine, and that he was willing to offer his services and knowledge in any capacity to both the Germans and the Japanese.
If this was true, Meader faced a dilemma of unnerving proportions. How could the Montgomerys be arrested and prosecuted for espionage without alerting the press and blowing the lid off the top secret work at NCR? It seemed impossible. Yet if he let them go free, they would surely deliver the Ultra secret into the hands of the enemy. Worse, Montgomery’s skill with radios raised the specter that he could contact agents by shortwave.
Further heightening the tension for Meader and OP20G, a British delegation from Bletchley Park had arrived just a few days before in Washington, D.C., to work out the final details on sharing Ultra secrets. A major publicity leak or breach of security couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time.
Meader got on the phone to the assistant director of naval counterintelligence. He, in turn, suggested that Meader have Montgomery arrested on charges of theft of government property and immediately placed in jail. In that way, Montgomery could be locked up without tipping off local law-enforcement officials about the work at NCR.
But there were still the problems of what to do with Lillian Montgomery and of keeping Montgomery quiet while he was in jail. Every path seemed fraught with risk, yet Meader could no longer keep both Montgomery and his wife under wraps in Building 26 on just his own authority. No doubt the couple’s relatives, who were caring for their small son, were growing impatient for answers.
AT 3:00 P.M. on November 8, Meader reluctantly called the Cincinnati office of the FBI, launching a relationship between the bureau and OP20G that came to rival the U.S.-British collaboration on Ultra in uneasiness and complexity. Meader and Navy investigators had no doubt carefully rehearsed what they would tell the FBI agents: just enough about Montgomery’s threat to national security to be taken seriously, yet not so much that they would reveal the exact purpose of the NCR project or give away the Ultra secret.
Relations between the Navy and J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men had not been very cordial in the first years of World War II. Hoover had wanted a full place in American foreign intelligence and cryptanalysis during the war, but a compromise fashioned by the White House between the FBI and Navy intelligence leaders had left the FBI frustrated with a limited role and no clue about Ultra.
That night, FBI and Navy investigators, including Meader, drove to Montgomery’s home in Franklin and conducted a thorough search. They believed they didn’t need a warrant: Lillian Montgomery had given them written permission and agreed to accompany the investigators. But she must not have had any idea what her husband had hidden beneath her nose.
In the couple’s tiny bedroom, wrapped in a large sheet, Meader said he found sketches of assemblies that would reveal the purpose of the machines and electronic tubes—“of such nature that they couldn’t be used [for] . . . any other purpose than on the project.” That tube was likely the four-diode device developed specifically for the Bombe, said Don Lowden. Only two-diode tubes were available at that time on the open market.
Montgomery had lifted mundane items from NCR as well, including several neon glow lamps, one condenser, and two circuit sketches, plus several electrical items that could have been purchased on the open market, at least in peacetime.
Meader and the FBI soon held a “discussion” with Montgomery about the most secret tube. They instructed the young man to testify that he had stolen only three of the nonspecial tubes, for a total market value of less than thirty-five dollars.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, November 9, the FBI fingerprinted Montgomery and took him out of Meader’s control. All the more frightening for Meader and his superiors, the FBI released Lillian, insisting there was no evidence that she had stolen anything or even knew about the items hidden in the house. She seems to have been too naïve or too frightened to think of contacting a lawyer for her husband.
But the Navy’s dilemma was far from resolved. Even if convicted in a secret trial and locked away until the end of the war, how could Montgomery be kept from revealing his secrets to other inmates? Meader wrote to Earl Stone in a secret telegram earlier in the day, “His admitted readiness to serve the enemy, together with his knowledge of certain parts of our machine, makes him potentially extremely dangerous.”
FBI Special Agent Belmont wasn’t convinced that the Navy had made its case for espionage. Under FBI questioning, Montgomery denied having told Meader that he planned to offer his services to the Japanese and Germans. As for the electronic parts he had stolen from NCR, Montgomery told the agents the items were intended for use in his radio-repair shop and that he had stolen them a month before his arrest, on October 8—a date that happened to coincide with his birthday. Belmont was certain they could file a charge of theft of government property against Montgomery, who seemed “very scared and he will probably take a plea,” according to a November 9 FBI memo.
Belmont took his case that day to the U.S. attorney in Dayton.
IF EVER THERE was a prosecutor with a history of standing up to outside pressure, it was U.S. Attorney Calvin Crawford. A feisty and eloquent Democrat of independent views and incorruptible integrity, he had grown up in Greenville, Ohio, and had gone on to graduate from Ohio’s Miami University and Harvard Law School. In 1944, when former governor James M. Cox—then the national Democratic Party boss—refused to back his reappointment, Crawford very publicly blew the whistle on Cox’s strong-arm tactics in the very newspaper Cox owned, the Dayton Journal Herald. “I am by no means the only object of his [Cox’s] displeasure,” Crawford was quoted as saying by the paper. “All of us together whom he has sought to banish make up quite a goodly company. For it is his habit to decree the defeat of party leaders and candidates who do not chance to please him.”
Although he was sensitive to the Navy’s demand that the affair be restricted to a small circle of security-conscious officials, Crawford felt the need to contact the attorney general’s office in Washington for advice on how to proceed. He turned to Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark, the Justice Department’s specialist in security matters.
At age forty-four, Clark was on his way to becoming the U.S. Attorney General and, later, a justice of the Supreme Court. By 1943, his government service had included not only steering several espio
nage cases but orchestrating the questionable legalities of relocating thousands of Japanese families on the West Coast to detention camps and helping then-senator Harry Truman investigate the war industries. Clark already had a taste of what was in store in the Montgomery case, having been involved in the handling of a newspaper reporter’s leak concerning the top secret atomic-bomb project. Clark had advised Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, not to press charges against the reporter since the Constitution forbade secret civilian trials and the project could only be hurt by a public trial.
Clark also knew that the overreaction to threats of espionage and treason during World War I had led to a tightening of laws and procedures after the war. Civil libertarians had made it much more difficult to secure convictions against American citizens, restricting the use of secret indictments and trials to foreign agents and those in the military.
Clark, Crawford, and the FBI evidently dismissed Meader’s claim that Montgomery had confessed to him alone on the night he was seized. Besides, Crawford feared, even a secret indictment for espionage might be enough to trigger the interest of the press.
Crawford and Clark no doubt scoured the overlapping and often redundant U.S. Code for applicable sections and found one perfectly suited to the crisis: section 100, title 18, “Embezzling public moneys or other property.” The law made no mention of the value of the government property embezzled—it could be any amount, even a mere thirty-five dollars—while its penalty allowed for jail time of up to five years. Certainly, the FBI could make an embezzlement charge stick—hadn’t Montgomery been employed in a position of trust with the Navy?
On the same day, November 9, that Montgomery was taken into FBI custody, he was arraigned in federal court on charges of government embezzlement and held in jail on five thousand dollars’ bond—not surprisingly, an amount too high for his family to afford.
