by Duffy, Peter
By the end of the trial’s second week, with FDR continuing to mull Hoover’s proposal, the government’s case still appeared to be strong. On Thursday, October 27, the prosecution spent much of the day discussing how the spies had obtained plans for an experimental dive-bomber developed by Curtiss-Wright and a machine-gun sighting system for naval airplanes built by an unnamed contractor that enabled “a gunner to lead an enemy plane much as a duck hunter leads a bird,” testified Lieutenant Commander Daniel V. Gallery of the Bureau of Ordnance. A gasp filled the courtroom when an assistant prosecutor reached under a pile of newspapers and pulled out a large weapon equipped with such a sight, a stunt that “unquestionably made a profound impression on the jury,” wrote one reporter.
But the newspapers were more riveted upon Dr. Ignatz Griebl’s mistress, Kate Moog, who took the stand at 3:55 p.m. after arriving at the courthouse resplendent in a sailor cap and black velvet suit with silver-fox scarves draped around her neck. She described traveling with Naz to Germany, where they met with Abwehr officers impressed with her boasted acquaintances with Rear Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson, and President Roosevelt, for whom she had once served as a nurse. Over tea at the roof garden of the Hotel Eden, she had been asked if she would be interested in using her society connections to host a salon in Washington to instruct politicians, military men, reporters, and other DC players in the intimate glories of National Socialism, a barely disguised attempt to send her into the field as a new Mata Hari, the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and seductress executed by a French firing squad in 1917 for allegedly employing her sexual wiles on behalf of Imperial Germany. “He thought I could extend a gweat service to them if I could make social contacts for them,” she told jurors, according to the Daily News’ phonetically precise transcription. Although she testified that the proposal was an innocent ploy to improve relations between the two countries, the coverage in the next day’s papers made her out to be a dumb broad who was clearly being recruited as a femme fatale. “In the carefully modulated tone of a debutante trying out for a society play, a comely nurse told a jury in federal court yesterday that two ‘fine gentlemen’ she met at lunch in Berlin a year and a half ago wanted to cast her in the role of an American Mata Hari,” began the Times’ story.
When she returned to the witness stand on the next morning, she was a different woman. “The baby talk of Kate Moog Busch gave way to the ferocity of a tigress,” wrote the Daily News. In her rage, she claimed to have forgotten all about spy conversations she once said she’d heard in a Bremen nightclub. “There was a floor show!” she said. “I was going to dance, have a good time. I was going to be a lady, not listen to gentlemen’s talk.” She angrily denied the suggestion that she was having an affair with Dr. Griebl. “Didn’t you ever have a friend? If you ever had a good friend, then you know what a good friend means.” In a teary-eyed appeal to the judge, she wailed, “When I came home, everything was hotsy-totsy [thirties slang for “A-OK”]. There was nothing doing about the spy business. I didn’t know anything about the spy business until this investigation began.” As the courtroom roared with delight, Judge Knox banged his hand on the bench and shouted, “Stop that!” And she turned on Leon Turrou, who “acted like a mental case or something.” Asked during cross-examination if Turrou had informed Dr. Griebl that a subpoena was about to be issued for him, she said he did. And didn’t Dr. Griebl then leave the country? “Yes,” she said.
At this inopportune moment the trial was recessed for the weekend, and the government was forced to endure two days of speculation about whether the FBI’s lead investigator had assisted—“connived,” in the words of the papers—in the flight of a key figure in the ring. On Monday morning, Moog was guided through a lawyerly seeming-disavowal before the prosecution turned to other witnesses: “He never, at any time, told Dr. Griebl or me that we could leave the country or go anywhere,” she said of Turrou, which didn’t contradict her earlier testimony. “He told us we must stay right here.”
On Tuesday, J. Edgar Hoover was asked by the White House to board the president’s train in a day’s time to discuss a matter of importance during the trip from Washington to Hyde Park. FDR aide Stephen Early didn’t specify the purpose of the meeting nor indicate whether it would last until the end of the line. According to a memo Hoover wrote several days later, Roosevelt wanted to talk spies. “He stated that he had approved the plan which I had prepared and which had been sent to him by the Attorney General,” Hoover wrote. FDR told him that he had just ordered his budget director to quietly allocate an increase in funds “to handle counterespionage activities,” as suggested by the memo, although Hoover was disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t receive all the money he requested (at least yet). But that’s about all Hoover revealed of a momentous encounter that allowed the FBI to vastly expand the scope of its investigative responsibilities. What we do know is that the president issued his fiat in an atmosphere of such secrecy that he hadn’t squared the matter with other branches in the government, especially the State Department, which was bound to protest the loss of its ability to shape policy regarding foreign spies. The discussion of what was essentially a private deal appears to have lasted all the way to Penn Station. Hoover wrote that the “special train was held until the conference with the President was concluded and I left the train at New York.”
At the same time, Agent Turrou was appearing for a second day on the witness stand downtown, facing a barrage of hostile questions from defense attorney George C. Dix, who had traveled to the Reich in September and obtained a seventeen-thousand-word deposition from a gleefully vindictive Dr. Griebl. Turrou was forced to deny that the entire investigation was concocted “to serve the American Public for breakfast a sensational ‘spy case’ with highly interesting Anecdotes,” as Griebl wrote in a letter proclaiming his innocence. “What these G-men, including Mr. Turrou, assert sounds like an interesting spy romance, which exists only in his brain, but never occurred. These little fellows are making themselves ridiculous.” Over the remaining three weeks of the trial, Turrou would angrily deny a series of “damnable lies” that accused him of coercing confessions and assisting escapes. The most bizarre moment in the character-assassination campaign came when an elderly Russian landlord testified that Turrou lived under the name Leon Petroff in his house on Douglass Street in Brooklyn more than twenty years earlier. “One day Petroff say, ‘I kill myself,’ ” the man recalled in his accented English. “I say, ‘Listen, you no kill yourself in my house.’ So he started to drink something from a bottle so I run for police. Police go for doctors. Doctors put ice in mouth. So they took him to hospital.” Was it Kings County Hospital? George Dix wondered. “Yes,” the Russian said, “that’s the hospital for crazy people.”
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But at this point in world events, the spy trial had become of less pressing interest. The public was focusing its attention on a shocking act of Nazi criminality that caused even the most disinterested observer to concede that Hitler was truly a menace: the pogrom against the Jewish population of the newly expanded Reich that the Times’ correspondent in Berlin, Otto D. Tolischus, described on page 1 as “a wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years’ War” of 1618 to 1648. During the night of November 9 and into the morning of November 10, Nazi hordes set fire to more than a thousand synagogues and destroyed at least seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses, smashing their Belgian plate-glass windows with such fervor that the night would be forever known as Kristallnacht. Jewish homes and apartments were ransacked, and thirty thousand Jewish men, “especially rich ones,” were incarcerated in concentration camps. Jews were cursed at, slapped, spat upon, beaten, murdered. The official death toll was ninety-one, but the actual number, which should include the hundreds who died in the camps before most inmates were released, was many times higher. The violence was followed by a spate of legal measures that all but ended the possibi
lity of a Jewish existence in the Third Reich. German Jews were ordered to pay a billion-reichsmark fine and robbed of their businesses, land, stock, jewels, and artworks in a process known as Aryanization. They were banned from collecting welfare payments, holding driver’s licenses, owning carrier pigeons, attending German schools, publishing Jewish newspapers, possessing precious metals or stones, and visiting most public places. During a conference of high-ranking officials that discussed the restrictions, Hermann Göring joked about confining animals that resembled Jews to certain sections of forests (“the elk has a crooked nose like theirs”) and mused to no one in particular, “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.” Yet Hitler didn’t go so far as to require Jews to wear special badges on their clothing or force them to live within exclusionary ghettos, probably in the belief that the German people were still unprepared for a radicalism that recalled not the great war of the seventeenth century but the dark era of the Middle Ages. Although it wasn’t easy for Jews to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy or gain access to the necessary funds, the official policy of Nazi Germany was to induce them to emigrate, in the hopes, according to a Foreign Ministry circular, of increasing anti-Semitism in Western countries and thus producing sympathy for Germany’s plight.
Few outside of the ideologically blinkered believed that the night of horrors was a spontaneous eruption of what Goebbels called the “healthy instinct” of the German people. “The foreign press is very bad,” he confided to his diary. “Mainly the American.” George Gallup found that 94 percent of Americans now disapproved of Nazi policy toward Jews, “a vote of condemnation so nearly unanimous as to constitute one of the most decisive expressions of opinion in any of the more than 800 surveys conducted by the organization in the last three years,” he said. In New York, more than five thousand sign-carrying protesters (YOUR SILENCE EMBOLDENS HITLER, KEEP NAZI SPY SHIPS OUT OF NEW YORK HARBOR) jeered and hooted as the Bremen pushed off from Pier 86 with only 381 passengers on board. “The ship was kept brilliantly illuminated so that no attacker might approach unseen,” wrote the Herald Tribune. A group of women in black veils conducted a silent vigil in front of the German consulate at 17 Battery Place. Such figures as the author of The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett), the Irish Republican Army veteran now leading the union representing subway workers (Mike Quill), the eminent German exile teaching at Union Theological Seminary (Paul Tillich), and the president of the Harlem Bar Association (Albert G. Gilbert) were on the rostrum during a packed-to-overflowing event at Madison Square Garden that called for a complete cessation of US trade with Germany.
The US government was not unresponsive to public opinion when it refused to alter existing policy to make it easier for the Reich’s Jews to enter the United States. “That is not in contemplation,” said FDR. “We have the quota system.” The percentage of Americans opposed to relaxing immigration restrictions actually increased from 75 percent at the time of the Anschluss to 83 percent in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. Yet President Roosevelt was shaken by events in Germany. On November 14, he ordered the return of the US ambassador from Berlin, which, while short of a formal recall or a severing of diplomatic relations, was seen as a move of considerable significance. On the same day, he met with senior military and economic advisers and railed about the need to transform the low-output American aircraft industry into a juggernaut of mass production that could build an air fleet to frighten Adolf Hitler in just the way the Luftwaffe had worked on the Western democracies at Munich. “A new regiment of field artillery, or new barracks at an Army post in Wyoming, or new machine tools in an ordnance arsenal, he said sharply, would not scare Hitler one blankety-blank-blank bit!” recalled Army Air Corps general Henry “Hap” Arnold of the president’s language. “What he wanted was airplanes! Airplanes were the implements that would have an influence on Hitler’s activities!” Although Roosevelt’s hopes of increasing the number of US planes from a mostly unimpressive fleet of eighteen hundred to a strike force of at least ten thousand would be scaled back and balanced with the needs of ground forces by the time he unveiled his new national defense program in January, FDR had laid the groundwork for the scaling up of an industry that would construct far more aircraft than any other world power after 1940. “A battle was won in the White House that day which took its place with—or at least led to—the victories in combat later, for time is a most important factor in building an air force,” wrote General Arnold in his memoirs. On the next afternoon, November 15, Roosevelt took the unusual step of reading a prepared statement to the press about the anti-Jewish actions in Germany, which he pointedly noted was for direct quotation. The third of its four sentences would be the most widely reproduced: “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”
Two weeks later, a jury of ten men and two women found compelling reasons to deliver guilty verdicts again the spy defendants. On December 3, Judge Knox sentenced Gus Rumrich and his Air Corps friend to two years, providing leniency to Rumrich for his cooperation and to his pal for his near innocence. Even though Judge Knox didn’t believe the Europa hairdresser/courier merited more than a deportation order, he gave her two years as a warning to any other employees of the German passenger liners who might wish to participate in “a system that cannot be tolerated.” The technician from Seversky Aircraft, a man “inspired by a dream of Deutschland über alles,” was sentenced to a mere six years. In his closing oration, Judge Knox boasted that he was offering a lesson in the mercies of a just democracy to the emissaries of a cruel totalitarianism. On the same day in Berlin, the Reich issued a response of sorts. It executed two soldiers of the Wehrmacht, Bruno Trojaner and Berthold Koehne, dropping the blade of the guillotine upon them for “revealing military secrets to unnamed foreign powers,” according to the Associated Press. The AP dispatch noted that both men had deserted their units and fled abroad to serve a foreign espionage organization, although it didn’t detail how they had been returned to the care of Germany. The formal charge against them was treason.
At the White House, President Roosevelt was full of praise for US Attorney Hardy’s “perfectly amazing job in this spy trial in New York,” but cautioned that “the root of this thing, the roots go down pretty deep.” He explained to reporters that he didn’t want Congress to allocate funds for a secret police that would monitor the American people but one that would allow “our own people to watch the secret police of certain other nations, which is a very excellent distinction to make.” Questioned about the particulars of the new counterespionage plan that he said was already being put in place, FDR deemed the topic out of bounds: “That is one of the things I am not going to tell you, and I don’t think it ought to be asked about because, very obviously, if you run stories of the exact workings of the intelligence system you are going to destroy ninety percent of the value of that system.”
“You do not contemplate the establishment of a new agency?” a reporter asked anyway.
“No.”
“Has a coordinator been named?”
“There you go,” the president quipped as the Oval Office filled with laughter.
It wouldn’t remain a secret for long that J. Edgar Hoover was the only man for the job.
CHAPTER SIX
TO LEAD AN ORGANIZATION THERE
I began to look around for a man whom I could train as an agent with a secret transmitter.
—Nikolaus Ritter
On or about January 30, 1939, according to his FBI file, William G. Sebold applied for and was issued his American passport, the first, unwitting step in his bizarre journey to the heart of the Nazi espionage underworld in New York.
In the nearly three years since he had been solemnized as a US citizen, Sebold had led a curiously wayward existence. In the spring of 1936, he moved with his wife to Southern California, where he found his first job with a US military contractor, the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation of San Diego, which was known for its line of seaplanes, in par
ticular the US Navy–commissioned PBY Catalina. He worked for the company on two separate occasions in the coming year, from May 27 to June 29, and August 3 to October 26, for a total of just less than four months. “My function was as a bumper,” he said. “Shaping things out of metal, out of aluminum.” According to his service record, his official job title was “hull assembler.” Then his health beckoned: “Well, I took sick and had to lay off and go back again.” Sebold had to “leave this climate due to poor health,” his employer stated.
Returning to New York, the couple moved into another Yorkville apartment, this time at 214 East Eighty-Fourth Street, and Helen resumed her maid duties with the Park Avenue family. In hopes of improving his lungs, Sebold obtained a summer job through an employment agency working as an on-site electrician/handyman for the Workmen’s Circle Camp on Sylvan Lake near Pawling, New York, which was operated by a Jewish fraternal order as a Yiddish-language experiment in Socialist immersion. According to the camp’s literature, children from the city were instructed in “Yiddish stories, names of Yiddish writers, incidents in the workers’ movement, biographies of people who fought for the freedom of mankind, and Yiddish folk-songs.” By his very willingness to accept a paycheck from the indoctrination mills of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, Sebold showed that he was telling the truth when he said he was uninterested in the doctrinal delusions of Nazi Germany.
But the upstate air didn’t cure him. Sometime in the winter of 1937, he was home with his wife when his stomach pain became so severe that he rushed to Bellevue Hospital. “The doctor looked me over and laid me on the table and knocked a couple times on my stomach and said, ‘You are okay,’ and gave me some drops. And I said, ‘I am not okay,’ and used some insulting language to the doctor, and he said, ‘Okay, now we have to keep you here and look you over,’ and they took me into the psychiatric ward.” Sebold was punished for displaying the flash of anger that was his characteristic response to being pushed too far. “I had a violent look on me,” he said. “I was aroused to anger.” After a stay of “twenty-one days, two weeks, I don’t remember,” in the psych ward, a senior doctor examined him, recognized the problem, and ordered that he undergo ulcer surgery without delay. He would later say that “half of his stomach” was removed. Upon his release in the early winter of 1938, Sebold set out alone for the warmer climes of Murrieta, California, where he spent a month chopping wood and selling the resulting stacks as firewood. After another six weeks working various odd jobs in Southern California, he returned home to New York.
