Double Agent : The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring (9781451667974)

by Duffy, Peter

  But Agent Turrou was not through making a mess of the case. On the same day as the indictments were issued, and months before the trial was expected to begin, he quit the FBI, announcing he was exhausted from his duties and wanted to devote his full energies to writing “fully and without restriction” about the dangers of German espionage to America, a decision that was reported to cause “confusion in the local FBI office and in federal circles,” wrote one paper. The central witness for the prosecution in a major espionage trial would now be identified to jurors as an ex-FBI agent with a budding literary career and perhaps a pecuniary motive in hyping the threat. Then on June 22, just hours before the ringside bell was to sound in the Bronx, the Post hit the streets with the sensational news that it was preparing to run a multipart series authored by Turrou and reporter David A. Wittels, which would deliver “the most astounding revelation ever published by any newspaper.” Across a two-page advertisement on facing pages was the announcement “G-Man Bares German Conspiracy to Paralyze United States! The Man Who Cracked the Spy Ring Reveals How Nazi Spies and Traitors Sold Out the United States Army and Navy.” Beginning next day, the Post promised “amazing inside facts” would be delivered by “the ONE MAN who knows them—the Ace G-Man who, virtually single-handed, blasted the most vicious peacetime attack ever made upon this country!”

  US Attorney Lamar Hardy took one look at the paper, rushed before a federal judge, and obtained a court order to prevent the Post from publishing, alongside the boxing coverage in the next afternoon’s paper, sensitive material that might jeopardize his prosecution. The Post’s publisher, J. David Stern, a committed anti-Nazi liberal who also owned the Philadelphia Record and Camden, New Jersey, Courier-Post, blasted the “unprecedented attempt to erase the freedom of the press from the Constitution.” On the hangover morning after the “Brown Bomber” knocked out Hitler’s hero in 124 seconds, perhaps the most lopsided famous fight in boxing history, Lamar Hardy’s assistant argued before a judge in the federal courthouse at 40 Centre Street that the Post should be enjoined from publishing confidential information that could taint the jury pool in obstruction of justice. Further, Agent Turrou had broken the law in providing the information to the Post in the first place, since his resignation from government service wouldn’t become effective until September. “It is desirable for Turrou to make money,” prosecutor John W. Burke told the court. “I would like to see him make money. It is desirable for the Post to extend its circulation. But not at the expense of the federal court.”

  Lawyers for the Post and Mr. Turrou countered that it was a central tenet of First Amendment law that the government was forbidden from exercising prior restraint of controversial speech. And anyway, Turrou’s attorney charged, J. Edgar Hoover had achieved national fame by doing the same thing, publishing articles and books that used materials from the “secret files” of the FBI. “If it’s all right for Mr. Hoover to get his name in the papers and his picture in the papers, then it is all right for humble Mr. Turrou to do the same,” said lawyer Simon Rifkind. Understanding that he was being asked to render judgment on what could become a landmark press-freedom case, Judge Murray Hulbert threw up his hands and retreated to chambers, communicating the message that no decision would be forthcoming that day.

  On the next morning, June 24, a reporter asked President Roosevelt during a press conference around his desk in the Oval Office, “Any comment you care to make on the New York spy inquiry—espionage?”

  The president “sat silently considering the question, obviously aware of the significance that would be attached to his reply, and after a long pause he answered in the affirmative,” wrote the Times.

  “Yes, I think so,” he said, according to the transcript. “I have been a good deal disturbed by that because it raises a fundamental double question in relation to the press. Perhaps I should not say ‘the press’ because there is only one syndicate involved in this particular thing. The issue is, frankly and squarely, an issue of patriotism and ethics combined. As I understand the facts, a government employee, in the pursuance of his regular duty, unearthed a great deal of information relating to foreign spies in this country. Well, that is a pretty serious thing. It was information which seemed to call for criminal action on the part of the government. The Department of Justice undertook that criminal action. This government employee, having obtained all of the details on which the presentment to a grand jury would be based, and before the grand jury had taken any action and before the trial, resigned from the government services and within fifteen minutes signed a syndicate contract.”

  Press secretary Stephen Early interjected, “Not before the grand jury.”

  “Not before the grand jury,” FDR corrected himself, “but before the trial—thereby in a very serious case relating to the national defense possibly jeopardizing the criminal prosecution by the government.”

  The president continued, “I am not talking about the law of this case, I am talking about the patriotism and the ethics; first, of a government employee doing that, and secondly, any newspaper undertaking to syndicate information of that kind. I think that is the proper way to present this particular problem that faces the government of the United States today. I think that is all the comment that could be made.”

  After dodging a question about whether the US ambassador in Berlin would make a formal protest over the spy issue, President Roosevelt was asked whether “the Army and Navy and their intelligence units should have more money and more men for counterespionage.” The questioner was referring to the nearly moribund Military Intelligence Division and Office of Naval Intelligence.

  “Yes, I think so, frankly. Both the Army and Navy intelligence have been held pretty low on funds.”

  “Do you mean by that answer, sir, to approve activities of counterespionage?”

  “What do you mean?” FDR said. “Do you mean running down spies in this country? That is what I mean by counterespionage. I think we ought to have more money for that purpose.”

  With a presidential rebuke stinging in his ears, the Post’s FDR-supporting publisher caved. A few hours later, that afternoon’s edition carried a front-page notice announcing that the Turrou series had been postponed until after the trial. “The Post believes that nothing in this series of articles would have, in any way, interfered with the course of justice,” the notice read. “But it desires to avoid setting a precedent which might handicap the government in guarding itself against other spy activities.” The paper understandably focused the bulk of its coverage on the second part of the president’s comments, when he seemed to propose a new counterintelligence policy for the United States, which, the paper noted, was the whole point of the prosecution to begin with. “Roosevelt Asks Spy Hunt Fund,” read the banner across the top of the Post. But other papers also fronted with this angle. The New York Times began its page 1 article (“President Urges Fund to Fight Spies”) with the news that the president “favors larger appropriations for the Army and Navy Intelligence Services for the expansion of counterespionage activities within the United States.” The Los Angeles Times (“Counter Spy Fund Sought”) said more generally that FDR “came out in favor of more cash to detect and apprehend spies.”

  Hoover, who refused to accept Turrou’s resignation and instead fired him “with prejudice,” now set about ensuring that the FBI would lead the counterespionage initiative that the president had publicly committed himself to launching. Like the rest of the nation, he was now certain that many more Nazi spies were yet to be uncovered.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE

  What is America but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records, and Hollywood?

  —Adolf Hitler in conversation with his friend Ernst Hanfstaengl

  Wilhelm Gottlieb Sebold wanted nothing to do with the Aryan cause. He was a not-atypical German immigrant living in Yorkville who had experienced the horrors of the trenches and emigrated during the volatility of the Weimar era. If his early hist
ory had been characterized by anything, it was by a desire to forget all about the troubles that disfigured the Old Country. He saw his adopted homeland as “a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe may compel to seek happiness in other climes,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1817. “I came to America to forget all this,” Sebold said in less exalted language when asked his ideological views. “Don’t you talk to me about politics.”

  He was born in 1899, the eldest child of a beer-wagon operator who christened him in the name of the reigning monarch. Wilhelm quit school as a young teenager at about the time his father’s death left his mother as the sole supporter of his two brothers and sister. He began apprenticing as a mechanical draftsman in the heavy-metal works that defined his home city of Mülheim on the Ruhr River in a smoke- and soot-filled region near the French border often compared with the Monongahela Valley surrounding Pittsburgh. Over four years of rigorous instruction, Sebold gained a thorough grounding in machine sciences that would carry him through the rest of his life. At age seventeen, he was drafted into the Imperial Army and, in early 1918, sent to the Western Front in the Somme District. Later asked about technology that was used during the war, he responded, “I don’t know anything. We were only machine gunners.” He spent eight months suffering along with hundreds of thousands of others from the malnutrition, infectious diseases, and mustard-gas poisoning that helped spell the doom of the German war effort, marking the beginning of physical maladies that would also remain constant until his dying days. “Every soldier was gassed, to a certain extent,” he said.

  But Sebold neither surrendered nor deserted as so many did during the miserable final onslaught. Afflicted with the influenza that was ravaging the ranks, he was transported to a military hospital at Göttingen “a couple of days or a week” before the end of the fighting on November 11, 1918, which means that, like his fellow soldier Adolf Hitler in Pasewalk Hospital, he was recuperating from injuries when he was informed of the outbreak of nationwide revolution, dissolution of the House of Hohenzollern, declaration of a republic, and signing of the armistice. Sebold supported the Kaiser’s monarchy and was opposed to its usurpation. But his abiding purpose over the next three months at Göttingen was to recover his health with a steady regimen of medicine, nutrition, and sweat baths. “I was in the war, and a soldier is entitled to a rest,” he said.

  He returned to the Ruhr Valley, which, in keeping with its role as the nation’s industrial heartland, was in the midst of the proletarian uprising. In Mülheim, the municipal government had been taken over by a workers’ and soldiers’ council (or soviet), which was serious enough about seizing the means of production that it arrested the elderly August Thyssen, the steel magnate in slouch hat known around town as King Thyssen and to American journalists as the Rockefeller of the Ruhr. Sebold began his journey from the military hospital in Göttingen in February or March 1919, which means that he would’ve arrived at about the time a battalion of the Freikorps, the right-wing militia of fearsome reputation that was helping put down the revolution on behalf of the Social Democratic government, marched into town and arrested the council without the bloodshed then occurring in neighboring cities. He stayed close to home for the next three tumultuous years, working in a machine shop and helping his mother maintain a business she was operating, a difficult proposition in a municipality that was prominent enough in the Communist movement to serve as the command headquarters for the second regional uprising in March–April 1920. A self-proclaimed Red Army of the Ruhr, composed of at least fifty thousand combatants, occupied the main cities of the region for less than two weeks before the army and its Freikorps allies ended the takeover in a five-day campaign of slaughter that left more than a thousand Communists dead, most of them shot after they had been taken prisoner. The Ruhr Valley of the immediate postwar period was a nightmare of wildcat strikes, fiery public meetings, running street battles, and worsening employment prospects. Asked about the political beliefs he held at the time, Sebold said, “I did not have any complaint about President Ebert’s government, but in our industrial district we had a lot of Communists and there was a lot of shooting, and nobody knew what was what.”

  He sought escape to a more peaceful land. At age twenty-three, he signed on as a junior engineer on a Schindler Oil tanker that plied between Hamburg and Galveston, Texas, although he only stayed aboard long enough to reach American soil. “When I left Germany, I had in mind never to go back,” he said. He jumped ship with five dollars in his pocket, using three or four of them to take the train from Galveston to Houston, where he sauntered over to the fire department. “I did not get a steady job, but I made a dollar or two a day cleaning engines and carrying the lunches for the firemen,” he said. A German American member of the force, part of an ethnic community that had been represented in significant numbers in the state since the nineteenth century, suggested he travel to the Texas panhandle, where the member’s father owned a ranch. Sebold was hired there as a mule tender, giving him an opportunity to become conversant in the English language, his own version of a work-study program.

  After six months, he moved on to Brenham, a city in east-central Texas with a sizable German and Bohemian population, where he spent another half year or so toiling at a furniture store, a funeral home, and a cotton mill. Then a letter from Mülheim alerted him to trouble on the home front. In the midst of the hyperinflation crisis, French and Belgian troops had occupied the Ruhr in an attempt to pry delinquent reparation payments owed under the Treaty of Versailles out of German industry. So young Willy Sebold, who had pledged himself to a lifetime of exile, agreed to come home to help. “My people were losing their homes in the inflation in Germany,” he said. “I went back to see what I could do to save them.” With the $150 he’d earned in Texas, he stowed away on a thousand-ton tramp steamer, the Hans, hiding in the chain box until he was discovered three days out and forced to work his way to Hamburg. Upon his return to Mülheim, Sebold opened a bicycle shop that enabled him to pay off the mortgage on his mother’s home. He remained for a year until the government introduced a new currency to stabilize the economy and foreign troops began their withdrawal from the Ruhr. A lesson had been learned: Sebold could be counted on when it mattered.

  Around Christmas 1924, he secured work on the SS Rhodopis, bound for South America. He jumped ship in the Antofagasta region of Chile, enticed ashore by a German saloon owner from the Ruhr looking for someone to fill a bartender job. He spent five or six months slinging drinks for the workers in the mining camps, who were extracting profits from the region’s nitrate deposits on behalf of European and American companies. “I did not like it,” he said. “I wanted to go to work at my profession.”

  He saved up 150 pesos, enough to get him to the coastal town of Iquique, Chile, where he was hired by a German company as a specialist in the diesel engines that were bringing greater automation to the processing plants. “I worked in the saltpeter mines there,” he said. He was soon lured away, given the title of diesel foreman with an American concern, the Anglo-Chilean Consolidated Nitrate Co., based in Tocopilla, Chile. He gained such a firm understanding of diesel technology that he took a short trip to Oakland, California, in 1927, in an unsuccessful attempt to interest the Atlas Imperial Manufacturing Company in an innovation he had devised. He returned to South America for another two years, following his boss from Anglo-Chilean to a new position with a company over the border at Callao, Peru, where he was paid $250 a month. But his health problems emerged again: he was struck by typhoid fever that probably was exacerbated by the internal injuries he’d suffered in the trenches of the Great War. Two months of hospitalization would be required before he was healthy enough to return to work.

  In 1929, Sebold boarded the Cuzco for San Francisco. On February 13, 1929, just a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday and less than a year before the stock market crashed, he entered the United States as a legal immigrant. His route to New York was typically wayward. He was employed for several mont
hs at a gold-dredging company in Alaska and another several at various regional outposts of the Bucyrus-Erie Steam Shovel Company of Milwaukee, which laid him off in the early days of the Depression. Like any good German, he set out for Yorkville, where he struck up a friendship with a butcher, Victor Wien. Victor was married to a roundish fashion plate from northern Bavaria, Rosa “Rosie” Büchner, who was employed as one of a team of servants for a wealthy family on Park Avenue. Rosie had a demure younger sister, Lena (or Helen, in the Americanized form), also a maid on the Hilders family staff, responsible for tending to the particular needs of a daughter.

  During a social evening sponsored by a German club, according to the story told in the family, “William” Sebold, captured in photographs during these days as tall and thin with jug ears and a vibrant grin, was introduced to Helen Büchner, who with her strong jawline and unfussed-over bob seemed the picture of Bavarian constancy. They were married with little fanfare on May 2, 1931, at the German Catholic church on East Eighty-Seventh Street, St. Joseph’s, located just around the corner from the apartment on Eighty-Eighth near First Avenue that they might have been sharing before Monsignor Gallus Bruder formalized the union. Sebold was such an indifferent Catholic that he could remember neither the name of the church (“St. John’s?” he ventured) nor the identity of its pastor when the subject came up a decade later. “And did you meet Father Bruder?” No, he said, although he insisted he attended the church “several times.”