by Duffy, Peter
“Ed” Roeder, as he was known, was just fifteen when he enrolled at Cornell University’s prestigious engineering school and almost certainly became acquainted with fellow students Edward Sperry and Elmer Sperry Jr. The brothers were known talent-spotters for their father, Elmer Sperry, who had founded his company just a few years earlier, in 1910, on the strength of contracts from the US Navy. The elder Sperry was a pioneer in the development of instruments that harnessed the stabilizing properties of the gyroscope (the spinning wheel with a carnivalesque ability to maintain its position in space despite the forces attempting to displace it) to bring command, control, and thus lethality to the increasingly powerful ships traveling on the ocean and in the air. The gyrocompass utilized an electrically powered gyroscope aligned to the earth’s rotational axis to track true north, a marked improvement over the magnetic north of traditional compasses and a godsend in the age of the iron-hulled ship. The marine gyrostabilizer employed mammoth gyro wheels wired to the stabilizing fins in a ship’s hull to lessen the roll caused by the sea’s turbulence. The company’s airplane stabilizer, which sought to tame “that particular beast of burden which is obsessed with motions, side pressure, skidding, acceleration pressures, and strong centrifugal moments . . . all in endless variety and endless combination,” as Sperry described it, was the first autopilot, an avionic advancement that is probably second only to the Wright brothers’ original invention in its revolutionizing impact. Utilizing the technology of the airplane stabilizer, Sperry developed an aerial torpedo, or flying bomb, which, when it traveled a thousand yards without a human pilot in March 1918, became the first cruise missile in history, “an extremely significant engine of war” in Mr. Sperry’s accurate estimation.
At eighteen, Roeder quit Cornell to marry his pregnant girlfriend without the blessing of the church, committing an early act of fraud by providing the marriage bureau with a fake age (twenty-one) and a fake name (Edward Morgan Randolph), which would cause his wife many headaches with the Social Security Administration in later years. After surviving Elmer Sperry’s notoriously intensive interview process—only gifted engineers with a “mechanical touch” able to keep up with the torrent of his imagination were allowed in the door—Roeder joined Sperry Gyroscope around the time of his marriage in the first quarter of 1913, which means he was one of the first seventeen employees at a founding institution of the research and development branch of the military-industrial complex.
His arrival coincided with the armament boom that preceded and followed the outbreak of the Great War in Europe in August 1914, which led some of Sperry’s most talented employees to start their own ventures in service to specialized military requirements. Hannibal Ford, Sperry’s chief engineer, decamped to an industrial building in lower Manhattan and won the right to be the secret supplier of the US Navy’s fire-control system for battleships, the central plotting machine that used the gyrocompass’s reference line to guide a battery of long-range guns in the complex matter of tracking and hitting moving targets as far as ten miles away. Roeder, who had apparently shown promise during his two years at Sperry, was lured away to join him. There is no evidence that Ed Roeder committed espionage over the next four years of wartime employment with the Ford Instrument Co. He was merely a draftsman learning the skills that would make him as knowledgeable as anyone else in the country in the field of precision instruments for military application. His time was yet to come.
In the years after World War I, Roeder utilized his experience to become a kind of gyro-systems consultant, jumping from one start-up to another as a designer with a central role in developing the products each produced. But he always returned to Sperry. He rejoined the staff from 1922 to 1924, early 1928 to late 1928, 1930 to 1932, and returned again in 1933. Now employing a thousand workers in its imposing building at 40 Flatbush Avenue Extension within sight of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, Sperry Gyroscope had become the core business of a global enterprise officially known as Sperry Corporation (with executive offices at the new Rockefeller Center), but still referred to as “Sperry’s” by the average New Yorker. In 1933, when Wiley Post made history by piloting the first solo flight around the world, he gave all credit to the Sperry A-2 autopilot, “my robot,” which was “uncanny in the way it takes over the job of flying,” an endorsement that Sperry’s publicity department had no part in arranging. (On the other hand, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was equipped with a Sperry autopilot when it plunged into the Pacific in 1937, a fact unmentioned in company literature.) Aircraft manufacturers, merchant marines, and foreign militaries were permitted to purchase some of the company’s gyrocompasses, direction-finding radios, blind-flying instruments, gyro horizons, antiaircraft searchlights, rate-of-turn indicators, directional gyros, and ship stabilizers, but the most advanced versions of each product were always reserved for the Air Corps and the Navy, which, in addition, funded the development of weapons systems that were intended for no other contractor but the US military.
With his toothbrush mustache and silver-rimmed spectacles, Roeder was one of an elite staff of a few dozen engineers (including Elmer Sperry Jr.) charged with coming up with innovations at least five years ahead of the current design, a collection of deep thinkers who were allowed to remain absent from the shop for weeks at a time while they mulled their ideas. Roeder was probably involved in the effort to perfect an antiaircraft-gun-directing system, which used data transmitters, a stereoscopic range finder, and tracking telescopes to enable its multiple human operators to feed information (about ground speed, wind, ballistics, airspeed) into an analog computer that determined where to aim a fusillade of artillery shells to destroy an approaching warplane. He likely also had a hand in an equally confidential product that made some of the same time-space calculations, Sperry’s S-1 bombsight, which the Air Corps had determined would be its second-string bomb-aimer behind the Norden.
In 1936, Roeder came to Germany’s notice through the efforts of a friend of his on the West Side who had connections with the Abwehr. Impressed, Ast Hamburg provided $300 to pay for Roeder’s passage to Germany, a major vote of confidence for a service that was eager to rely on the incidental support of Nazi devotees pledged to the greater glory of the Reich. Which appears not to have been Roeder’s main motivation. On his way to Germany during the summer of 1936, he stopped off in England, where he granted exclusive rights for an invention of his that “used as an emitter the cathode structure of a Coolidge tube” to determine the hardness of materials to a company that was a subsidiary of Vickers Ltd., the conglomerate that would play a significant role in rearming the British Army for World War II. With this success in hand, he continued on to Hamburg and the warm embrace of three Abwehr officers. The men quizzed him on the latest advances in high-intensity searchlights and autopilot systems for aircraft, both areas in which Sperry Gyroscope was a world pioneer. During off hours, he was plied with so many drinks that he couldn’t keep up and was even offered a woman, though he said he declined. Then he was taken to Berlin to meet with half a dozen technical experts, who provided him with a drafting board in his hotel room. Suitably awed by his handiwork, the Abwehr agreed to furnish him with a salary of $200 a month, not including bonuses for valuable deliveries, which made him Nazi Germany’s highest-paid agent in the United States.
Once he returned to New York, Roeder moved with his family to suburban Merrick, Long Island, where he registered his phone under a friend’s name and developed new acquaintances “so as not to arouse suspicion” and “to please the German authorities,” he later confided. He disappeared into his basement laboratory to continue experimentation on his own inventions, including a “speech secrecy system” that he was developing with a friend of his, a lieutenant commander in the US Navy who would later direct naval radio operations in the Panama Canal Zone. Instead of returning immediately to his work at Sperry, Roeder took a job in September or October 1936 at the Airplane and Marine Division Finder Company of Lindenhurst, Long Island, which p
roduced gyro-based guidance systems for air- and watercraft. He was chagrined when Abwehr couriers began showing up at his door to pick up his packages, disrupting the tranquillity of his sleepy block. He arranged for them to take the Long Island Rail Road out only as far as the Baldwin station, which was not the closest, or even second closest, stop to his home in Merrick. At the designated time, Roeder would be waiting in the parking lot in his Buick sedan. The Abwehr had a code name for him: Carr.
On May 10, 1937, Roeder was hired back at Sperry (for the fifth time in his career), quickly winning the promotions necessary to return to the top tier of the design department. He would later say that he rejoined Sperry at the express wishes of the “organization in Germany.” He maintained his cover even as the company’s staff came under scrutiny during the Turrou investigation. Gus Rumrich had told investigators of a drunken evening he spent in Yorkville with a courier—they started at the Café Hindenburg nightclub before stumbling across Eighty-Sixth Street to the famously rowdy Brauhaus Maxl’s—who flashed an envelope containing two $1,000 bills meant for a prized agent that Rumrich thought worked for a periscope company in Brooklyn “or something like that.” The comment led agents to apprehend four German Americans working in the assembly and inspection divisions at Sperry, including an old-timer who had been accused of spying for the Kaiser during World War I. All four were released without charge. At trial, Rumrich didn’t clear things up when he said he believed the unnamed agent was being handsomely rewarded for delivering plans that “were for some sort of gyroscope made in a submarine factory in Brooklyn.” Roeder was lucky he was never questioned.
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But Nikolaus Ritter’s ring was deemed insufficient to handle the more expansive responsibilities that would be required in the event of the outbreak of war. Efforts were redoubled to recruit new agents to be sent to the city. “While we were trying to figure out how we could step up our work over there, I was summoned to Berlin, and I was asked whether I was ready personally to return to the United States in order, in case of war, to lead an organization there,” Ritter wrote. “I did not really like the idea. But when I talked about this with my wife and she offered to come with me, I decided to go along.” He says the couple underwent training in the telegraphic language of Morse code, which would be an essential component of Ast Hamburg’s communications operation once the Atlantic Ocean was transformed into a battle zone, constricting the effectiveness of the courier and mail-drop systems and requiring a speedier transfer of information. A wireless telegraphy (or W/T) station was established in a handful of rooms in a baronial estate in the Hamburg suburb of Wohldorf, which would soon include a few dozen radio sets and a busy staff of cryptologists.
Not long after his training commenced, Ritter began to have doubts about embarking on an assignment that would be more difficult than his previous one in 1937, when he was able to travel under his own name in the confident belief that the Americans weren’t paying much attention to foreign spies. Although he doesn’t say so in his memoir, he was in the midst of a court battle to win custody of his two American-born children from his ex-wife, Aurora Evans, the Alabama woman he had cast aside (in a strange country ruled by a foreigner-loathing dictator) in favor of his Abwehr secretary, the kind of subplot that isn’t usually included in spy thrillers. In his book, Ritter says he declined the mission to America when he learned that it would require him to resign from the military. Still, the problem remained: Who could be sent in his place to serve as an “informant and contact man with our agents in the United States”? “As I gave up the idea of going to the United States myself I began to look around for a man whom I could train as an agent with a secret transmitter.”
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Nine days after the Deutschland left New York Harbor, on February 2, 1939, Bill Sebold landed in Germany, surely one of the few bearers of American citizenship seeking entry into a war-eager Third Reich. He described what happened next: “Well, when I arrived at Hamburg, there was a passport police, and I had to present my American passport, and as I showed my American passport there were two civilians, two men in civilian clothes, that took me in a nearby room and questioned me about my activities in the United States.”
Sebold said he was specifically asked if he had ever worked at an airplane factory. He believed that his interrogators knew to ask this because he had been talking a little too freely with some Hitler Youth during the trip over. He told the men about his (brief) service at Consolidated Aircraft Corporation of San Diego, California. He was asked how long he intended to remain in Germany. He responded that he didn’t know. Finally, he was asked for the address where he would be staying. Sebold provided them with his mother’s, Duisburger Strasse 147, Mülheim-Ruhr.
“And then you were told they would get in touch with you sometime later in the event they needed you?” he was later asked.
“No.”
Sebold said they told him, “You will hear from us.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN THIS SOLEMN HOUR
The Führer had to come in order to hammer into all of us the fact that the German cannot choose and may not choose whether or not he will be German but that he was sent into this world by God as a German, that God thereby had laid upon him as a German duties of which he cannot divest himself without committing treason to providence.
—Gauleiter Ernst Bohle, leader of the Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Countries’ Organization) of the Nazi Party
In the four months after his arrival in Nazi Germany, Bill Sebold did little more than quietly pass the time in his mother’s home on Duisburger Strasse. He was free to recuperate from his stomach surgery of the previous year and follow the propaganda campaign that was preparing the German people for the coming struggle.
In the second week of March, Nazi newspapers began “reporting” that evil Czechs were launching attacks against the small number of Germans living within the borders of what was now known as Czecho-Slovakia, the rump Czech state that included the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Carpatho-Ukraine, and Slovakia. In a move of genuine tactical cunning, Hitler coerced the leaders of Slovakia into declaring independence on March 14, which led Neville Chamberlain to announce in the Commons that Great Britain wouldn’t honor its obligation to defend Czecho-Slovakia since the “frontiers we had proposed to guarantee” at Munich had been dissolved by Slovakia’s action. In the early morning hours of March 15, Hitler met with Czech president Emil Hácha in the Reich Chancellery and told him that the German military was preparing to launch an invasion within hours. When Hácha hesitated to sign a surrender document that had been prepared for him, Hermann Göring added that “half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing within two hours, and that this would only be the beginning,” a threat of such horrendous imagining that the sixty-six-year-old president fainted. Revived by an injection from the needle of Hitler’s personal physician, Hácha agreed to order his military and civilian leadership to stand down, giving the specter of the Luftwaffe a central role in another victory for Nazism. German troops confronted severe winter weather rather than armed resistance when they crossed the border at 6:00 a.m. There were no cheering crowds when Hitler swept into Prague in the early evening and assumed control of a nation populated mostly by non-Germans, his first truly foreign conquest. After a night’s rest in the Hradschin Castle, he presided over the creation of the new Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia became a puppet republic, and Carpatho-Ukraine was given to the pro-Nazi rulers of Hungary.
Hitler decided to quickly seize two German-majority communities on the Baltic Sea that had been excluded from Germany by the Versailles Treaty. On March 20, Lithuania was informed that an aerial bombardment would be forthcoming unless the port of Memel was granted to the Reich, which was done without delay. In response to the annexation of the Memelland, the Polish government made the provocative decision to partially mobilize its army and concentrate troops around the other object of Hitler’s desire, Danzig, the “free city�
�� created by Versailles to provide Poland with access to a seaport, which was administered under the suzerainty of the League of Nations and separated from Germany by what was known as the Polish Corridor. The DNB News Agency duly reported that attacks against German women and children “are accumulating to a regrettable degree” in the Polish Corridor. Albert Forster, the ambitious former bank clerk who presided as gauleiter over the Nazi organization in Danzig, was granted personal access to the Führer to discuss the proper levels of “quasi-revolutionary” activity that should be fomented to facilitate German war aims.
Sixteen days after the disintegration of Czecho-Slovakia, Prime Minister Chamberlain stood before Parliament and delivered a speech that all but promised war if Hitler sought to overrun Danzig and the Polish Corridor: “In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish government all support in their power,” he said. “They have given the Polish government an assurance to that effect. I may add that the French government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter.”
Events were now moving rapidly and almost uniformly in Hitler’s favor. In the final days of March, Franco’s Fascists captured Madrid and declared victory in the Spanish Civil War. After gaining Hitler’s permission, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania, conquering the nation within days and opening up an Axis path to southeastern Europe, causing France and Britain to issue security guarantees to Greece and Romania. On April 3, Hitler told his generals to draw up a plan for a surprise attack on Poland that “can be carried out at any time from September 1, 1939, onward.” On April 28, Hitler announced the cancellation of his nonaggression pact with Poland and naval agreement with Great Britain. Even though Benito Mussolini believed his armed forces wouldn’t be ready to fight a major conflict for another three years, he agreed to an upgraded military alliance, the Pact of Steel, that obligated Italy to side with Germany upon the outbreak of hostilities. On May 3, Stalin signaled his openness to an alliance with Nazi Germany by appointing Vyacheslav Molotov as his new foreign minister in place of Maxim Litvinov, the personification of the Popular Front policy of cooperating with anti-Fascists abroad, who was excoriated as “the Jew Finkelstein” in the Nazi press. On May 23, the Führer told his generals he was determined to make war on Poland “at the first suitable opportunity.” Danzig would be the pretext for “expanding our living-space in the East and making food supplies secure.” If the French and British decide to intervene, he vowed, the Reich would then conquer Holland and Belgium, from where attacks could easily be mounted against France and Britain.
