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

by Duffy, Peter

  “These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” he said in his maiden speech as America’s most prominent isolationist. “There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend our white race.”

  With the Hitler-Stalin Pact marking the end of the Popular Front against Fascism, American Communists and those still willing to be fellow travelers came out against aiding the capitalistic imperialists of Britain and France, maintaining that fighting Fascism on behalf of a glorious future in Spain was one thing, but doing so in service of “so-called” democracies was another. Reactionaries such as Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick (whose paper portrayed the president as a puppet of Moscow) joined hands with progressives such as Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette Jr. (who regarded the New Deal as too moderate), united in their common belief, as La Follette said on the Senate floor, that the president would “inevitably” establish a wartime dictatorship that “will not evaporate into thin air after the war is over.”

  In New York, the FBI was monitoring the most extremist manifestation of antiadministration sentiment, an Irish German gang of Coughlinites that had graduated from street-corner demonstrations and meeting-hall harangues to devising a plan to bomb Jewish-controlled institutions (the Daily Worker newspaper, the US Post Office, the Flatbush branch of the American League for Peace and Democracy, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the New York Customs House, etc.), hoping to spark a violent reaction from the Jewish-controlled US government that would rouse the slumbering (anti-Semitic, they hoped) masses and create the chaos necessary for a Fascist counterrevolution, resulting in the seizure of the government and the slaughter of the Jews. The plotters (most of them Irish American members of the Christian Front with a few Germans connected to the Bundist movement) wanted to marry the tactics of the Irish Republican Army, which had been engaged in its “S-plan” bombing campaign against installations in English cities since January 1939, to a Nazi-like wave of street violence that would achieve the objective of “driving Judaism out of government.”

  Although Congress was deluged with a million pieces of protest mail, and antiwar rallies were held in towns and cities throughout the country, the new neutrality bill made it through both the House and Senate by early November. Passage was secured even though the press was full of stories about the sinking of Allied merchant and military ships, more than two hundred of which would go down by the end of 1939, seeming to prove cash-and-carry would bring the war at least as close as the New York piers. FDR was so fearful of arousing isolationist fury that he didn’t follow the signing ceremony with a public call for a more rapid increase in the capacity of the armed forces. The US Army included 227,000 men, just 80,000 of whom (five divisions) were equipped for duty, vastly inferior to the Polish Army, which had been annihilated with relative ease. The US Navy was mostly based in the Pacific to protect against the threat from Japan, which, not yet joined in a military alliance with Germany, boasted a naval force at least equal to our own. Of the Air Corps’ more than two thousand planes, only eight hundred could be deployed as first-line units. A bare fourteen of the B-17 Flying Fortresses intended to be America’s nation-conquerors had yet come off the factory floor.

  But the United States did have something to distinguish it from potential enemies, the Air Corps publicity staff was keen to inform selected correspondents. “The American bombsight is the envy of the entire world,” wrote Collier’s in its October 14, 1939, issue. “It is our most closely guarded military secret. It is used by our Air Corps, but really belongs to the Navy.” The “precious” instrument is “made in a small factory in the East, run by two civilian engineers who developed it,” an obvious reference to 80 Lafayette Street and Carl Norden and his partner, Ted Barth, who in fact left the technical matters to Mr. Norden. “Details of the shop’s location and name are not bandied around; yet recently it received a letter from the Japanese asking for a quotation on the bombsights in lots of 500!” In its October 23 edition, Time said the “new” American bombsight “makes U.S. aviators boast they can drop a bomb in a barrel from 18,000 feet.” The Navy’s Admiral W. R. Furlong demanded an end to the publicity, which “only makes foreign agents try harder to steal the sight from our various stations.”

  The country could also boast the elimination of the gifted organizer with a demonstrated ability to mobilize thousands on behalf of Nazism. It can literally be said that Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn was brought down for the love of a woman. During a three-week trial in General Sessions Court in downtown Manhattan, Assistant District Attorney Herman J. McCarthy devoted the bulk of his case to proving that Kuhn stole from his membership by spending $717.02 in Bund funds to pay for the transportation of the furniture of a Mrs. Florence Camp of California, who was one of two Kuhn mistresses named during the proceedings. (The other, Virginia Cogswell, was a former beauty queen and minor celebrity known to the papers as the “Marrying Georgia Peach” for her seven—or was it nine?—ex-husbands.) The Daily News spoke for many in finding it “difficult to imagine a smitten damsel stroking his rocklike jaw and murmuring, ‘Whose itsie bitsie Nazi is ’oo.’ ” The papers ran long excerpts from three love letters that the “flirtatious Fuehrer,” “Teutonic two-timer,” and “hotsy-totsy Nazi” wrote to Mrs. Camp, which obscured the news that the judge had now dismissed seven of twelve charges for lack of evidence, meaning that Kuhn was alleged to have stolen $1,217.02 rather than the original $14,548.59.

  On November 29, a jury of twelve businessmen, all non-Jews, deliberated for about eight hours before finding Kuhn guilty of two counts of grand larceny in the matter of Mrs. Camp’s furniture and three counts of larceny and forgery in the unexplained disappearance of $500 earmarked for a Bund lawyer, concluding that his dictatorial powers over the organization (attested to by a parade of Bundist witnesses) didn’t permit him to spend its money however he wished. On December 4, Judge James G. Wallace delivered a sentence of two and a half to five years, sending him away “as an ordinary small-time forger and thief and not because of any gospels of hate or anything of that sort.” Two days later, Kuhn was hauled off to Sing Sing, where an AP photographer captured him crossing the threshold, his left wrist handcuffed to a burly deputy sheriff and his right to two fellow prisoners. It must’ve pained the avatar of racial purity that one of them was an African American. Back in town, Deputy Bundesführer G. Wilhelm Kunze was elevated to the top spot, pledging to continue cultivating the pro-Nazi sentiment that was still apparent in the German American community. When poet W. H. Auden went to view a German film in Yorkville at almost exactly the moment of Kuhn’s incarceration, he was stunned by the vile shouts of moviegoers incited to bloodlust by a Reich-produced newsreel of the invasion. “Every time a Pole appeared on the screen,” he told a friend, “the audience shouted, ‘Kill him!’ ”

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  In the six weeks since he’d told the American government of his agreement to work for the German espionage service, William Sebold had heard nothing from Ast Hamburg. It was his own version of the lull that had settled over Europe, called variously the phony war, the drôle de guerre, the twilight war, the bore war, or the Sitzkrieg, as the Allies launched no attack against the German mainland and Hitler kept postponing his move against the West (even while the Battle of the Atlantic continued and the Soviet Union launched its brutal “winter war” against Finland).

  In hopes perhaps that the Germans would never contact him again, Sebold tried to raise his own funds for a one-way ticket to New York. On November 6, Consul General Klieforth sent a telegram to the State Department in Washington, requesting that a message be delivered to Mrs. Sebold, who could be contacted at her employer’s address, M. Hilders, 993 Park Avenue. On November 7, Helen Sebold received a note signed by none other than the secretary of state of the United States, Cordell Hull. “Telegram from American Consul Cologne transmits the following message for you QUO
TE Telegraph $200 my account American Express Company Rotterdam, William Sebold. UNQUOTE,” it read. The response eventually came back from Washington: “Wife unable assist Sebold. Government funds not available.” With the consulate unwilling to issue a US passport until he had a ticket in hand, Sebold was left with no choice but to write a letter to Dr. Renken in mid-November, reminding him of his existence and asking for help in paying his travel costs. Dr. Renken didn’t respond, probably because he was immersed in training spies to be placed in the British Isles and Western Europe, a more pressing priority.

  Another three weeks passed. Then on the evening of December 6, Sebold was startled awake by someone standing in the darkness of his hotel room. He was not charmed to hear the man say, “I am your uncle Hugo,” particularly since he had no such relative by that name. The man informed Sebold that it was now time to prepare for his departure for America. On the following morning, the two traveled to Siemens-Schuckertwerke, where Hugo flashed his credentials to the guard, who snapped to attention and identified him as Hauptmann (or Captain) Sandel. In the meeting that followed with the general manager of the factory and Sebold’s immediate superior, Uncle Hugo/Captain Sandel demanded that Sebold be honorably discharged from his job and provided with a letter of recommendation, which was promptly done. The two Sebolds then returned to the Handelshof for celebratory drinks. Uncle Hugo spun yarns about his adventures as a young traveler in America (“all of which, he, William Sebold, now thinks are false,” according to the FBI debriefing) and provided a clue about Sebold’s coming assignment. “He talked about the radio business, did I know something about radio, if I would be able to set up a radio station in the United States,” Sebold remembered. Yet after Uncle Hugo left early the next morning, Sebold heard nothing for the remaining three weeks of December, a period of increasingly frigid temperatures during which he tried to stay out of sight and became ever more anxious about his fate, an isolated figure toyed with by malign forces. “He also lost a great deal of weight and became very sick,” according to the FBI. Finally, he wrote a letter to Dr. Renken, demanding to know why he had been stranded without guidance or source of income. “I said something, why have they forgot all about me, I did not hear anything from them,” he said.

  Dr. Renken speedily informed him that $200 was being deposited in an American Express account in Amsterdam, which enabled Sebold to make a reservation on a Holland America Line ship traveling from Amsterdam to New York. But the US consulate deemed it too dangerous for him to sail on a Dutch vessel that would be required to pass through the minefields of the English Channel. He was told his passport wouldn’t be issued until he switched to the United States Lines, which had just announced that two passenger liners (SS Manhattan and her sister ship, SS Washington) would begin service between New York and still-neutral Italy in accord with the neutrality law’s prohibition against American ships entering “war zones,” which encompassed the Northern European ports. Sebold booked on the Manhattan, scheduled to depart from Genoa on January 15, but Dr. Renken protested that this wouldn’t allow enough time to complete his training. Sebold then changed to the Washington, which would leave from the same Mediterranean port two weeks after the Manhattan. In Cologne, Sebold used the $200 wired to his account to purchase the ticket, which he took to the consulate in the hopes of finally receiving his passport. But he didn’t get it until the next day, apparently because the consulate had lost his photographs and he had to arrange to have new ones taken. During this, his final visit with US diplomatic officials before leaving Germany, he stated explicitly that he wanted to be met in New York by the FBI. “I said, ‘G-men,’ ” recalled Sebold, confirming that he had chosen sides.

  He went to Hamburg, where he was registered at the Abwehr’s guest residence near the Alster River, the Pension Klopstock at Klopstock Strasse 2, later describing a pension to American interrogators as “a better class of boardinghouse.” At 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. on each of roughly seven days, Sebold was picked up by car and taken to a building on Glockengiesserwall next to the police presidium, as he remembered it. Under the supervision of Uncle Hugo, who kept an office on the fourth floor, Sebold was given lessons in the art of sending and receiving secret communications. He was offered a brief tutorial in using a radio key to tap out messages via Morse code, which he picked up so quickly that the old man who trained him said, “If you can do everything else that well, you are okay.” He was taught a coding system based upon the letter arrangements of a particular page (which would change each day) in the British edition of Rachel Field’s bestselling historical romance, All This, and Heaven Too. He was instructed in the operation of a Leica camera, which, when outfitted with a special lens and attached to a perpendicular rod as Hugo demonstrated, could reproduce a blueprint or document onto a postage-stamp-sized microphotograph readable only with a magnifying instrument. And he was shown how to operate a microscope to examine written letters for a speck known as a Mikropunkt (or microdot), about the size of a period, which could contain dispatches of about fifty words, “the enemy’s masterpiece of espionage,” J. Edgar Hoover would later exult. Uncle Hugo told him to watch out for such pencil-point marks in any communications he received from Germany.

  Since Sebold was only occupied with his spy work for a total of ten hours, he had time to hang around the pension, which housed a roster of apprentice agents who mostly kept to themselves except for the occasional comment from one of them about just returning from Holland or Czechoslovakia. Sebold struck up a friendship with proprietor Georg Gut, who scrubbed the pots and pans while his wife answered the phone calls from Ast Hamburg. Gut informed Sebold that he “was disgusted with the whole matter” and admitted he wanted to sell the business and move to America, which revealed that Sebold may have had a natural ability to draw out seditious confessions whether he was trying to or not.

  Final discussions were conducted in Uncle Hugo’s office on January 26, 1940. Sebold was handed two leather money pouches—one contained $500 in $5 bills to be used for the purchase of a Leica camera and “a radio transmitting outfit”; the other had $500 in $10 bills to be delivered to Everett Roeder of 210 Smith Street, Merrick, Long Island. Sebold was given five microphotographs of instructions, which were hidden within the innards of his watch, two for his own elucidation and one each for Roeder, Colonel Duquesne, and a woman, Lilly Stein, whose address was given as 127 East Fifty-Fourth Street, just to the east of Park Avenue. He was ordered to seek out an amateur broadcaster who could help him with radio transmittal work, to join the National Guard to learn about firearms developments, to find a job at an aircraft factory, and to refrain from any unnecessary contacts with Germans, with a particular admonition “to stay out of Yorkville.” Provided with three mail-drop addresses (in Shanghai, São Paolo, and Coimbra, Portugal), he was to establish himself under the undemonstrative all-American name Harry Sawyer, presumably a relation of Mark Twain’s Tom. Although he wasn’t aware of it yet, he had been bestowed with the code name Tramp, an obvious acknowledgment of his footloose life up until then that carried with it a hint of disdain.

  During the meeting, Dr. Renken entered the room and revealed why Hermann Lang was not receiving a microphotograph like the others: his work was done. Renken/Ritter told Sebold to visit Lang at his Queens home, utter the words “Greetings from Rantzau, Berlin-Hamburg,” and ask him to prepare for an all-expenses-paid trip that would return him to the Reich by way of the Far East. In his memoir, Ritter said that Lang was being called home because of worries that his theft of the Norden bombsight would become known to the American authorities once a Luftwaffe bomber equipped with a Norden-like instrument was recovered by the Allies. Yet nothing of this was said to Sebold, who, quite by coincidence, took it upon himself to bring up the great secret that he had first learned about from Dr. Gassner.

  “Up to that point the bombsight had never been mentioned definitely?” attorney George Herz later asked Sebold.

  “Never; never anything, micros, nothing—only radio.
”

  “Exactly what was said to you? What did they say about the bombsight? Tell me as best you can recollect everything they said.”

  “I said, ‘I might bring back the famous American bombsight and give it to you as a present.’ ”

  “I want you to tell everything they said,” said Herz.

  “That was all that was said about it,” responded Sebold. “He said, ‘Don’t bother about it. We already have it in our possession.’ ”

  On the next morning, Sebold went by himself to the Hamburg-Altona railway station, wearing an old sheepskin-lined coat and tattered blue suit that made him look like the tramp that Ast Hamburg said he was. He arrived in Munich in the evening and changed for the sleeper that took him through the Alps via the Brenner Pass. He reached Milan at noon on January 28, switched trains again, and made it to Genoa in the late afternoon of the same day. He spent the night at the Hotel Britannia. On the following morning, he was one of 427 passengers who boarded the Washington, including Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty, Chicago construction engineer Hugh Rodman (who was returning after fourteen months of work in the Soviet Union), and three hundred Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Although Sebold thought of giving his spy materials to another traveler (and apparently did so briefly), absconding with the money and starting a new life, and even committing suicide, he decided to carry through with the plan in deference to the promise he’d made to the American consulate in Cologne. After all, he figured he probably wouldn’t be subject to any more than a few days of unpleasantness in New York.