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

by Duffy, Peter

  During follow-up meetings conducted over the next few weeks, Sebold recorded how Roeder brandished his German Walther automatic pistol and boasted of his “several very fine guns,” gave a tour of the Suffolk Republican Club (where he was a member in good standing), asked numerous questions about the unsettling ordeal of Guenther Rumrich and Dr. Griebl, expressed concern about the possibility of arrest, made several informed suggestions regarding the establishment of radio contact with Germany, pledged to smuggle something “big” out of the Sperry building, and, finally, became so angry over Germany’s failure to pay him his just wages that he decided to retire. “Roeder says that you owe him $1,500; that he was promised $200 a month,” Sebold wrote in a coded letter to Uncle Hugo. “Yesterday he said, ‘They will send me money within a month or I will quit this business.’ He has promised me some important drawings within two weeks. He is experimenting with a bombing device.” In truth, Sebold would’ve been content to allow Roeder to take that nonmunitions job in Pennsylvania that he kept saying would pay him better than Sperry. “Roeder had Bill very nervous because he always carried guns with him and often took Bill for long rides out on the Island where, if he had been suspicious, he could have killed Bill and dumped his body,” wrote Ellsworth.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Finally, Sebold approached Hermann Lang, the Abwehr’s man at Norden.

  Sebold mailed to the address that had been provided to him by Hamburg, 59-36 Seventieth Avenue, Woodridge, New York. Since there was no such municipality in New York State, the US Post Office sent the letter to Woodridge, New Jersey, which bounced it back to Sebold’s PO box as undeliverable. A little detective work determined that Woodridge obviously meant “Ridgewood,” the German neighborhood of the outer boroughs, which led Sebold to travel out to the Seventieth Avenue apartment building that Lang hadn’t lived in since returning from his triumphant visit to Hamburg and Berlin during the bombsight summer of 1938. A janitor sent him upstairs to talk to a friend of Lang’s, a Mrs. Foster, who was hesitant at first but agreed to provide the forwarding information when Sebold said in German that he knew Hermann. On a cold Saturday three days later, Sebold returned to the neighborhood on the elevated subway train, walked over to 74-36 Sixty-Fourth Place on the other side of Myrtle Avenue in Glendale, and rang the buzzer at a few minutes after noon. Agent Ellsworth was watching from a safe distance. Lang descended the stairway and opened the door. Sebold asked if he was Mr. Lang. He said he was and invited Sebold upstairs.

  “Well, he walked around me, didn’t say anything, just stared at me all the time,” said Sebold.

  Sebold was invited to sit down in the living room.

  “I said, ‘I have been in Germany, I met some friends of yours, I give you greetings from Rantzau, Berlin, Hamburg, and you should return by way of Japan and Russia to Germany.’ And his expense would be repaid, and he would get a pretty good job over there.”

  Lang responded that he was now a naturalized American citizen and had no desire to return to Germany.

  When Sebold suggested that Lang had previously “sent over” plans from Carl Norden Inc. (where he admitted he worked), Lang denied that he had any hand in such dealings.

  Professing to be confused by the whole situation, Sebold said he would contact Hamburg once the radio was in working order and return when he had clarified Lang’s position with the organization.

  “He said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with you,’ ” Sebold recalled.

  He left before he could be kicked out.

  “Today I talked to your client and gave him the greetings Rantzau, Berlin, Hamburg,” Sebold wrote to Ast Hamburg in a coded letter sent through China. “He said he doesn’t know anything about your business and does not want to travel. I will not deal any more with him until further advice.” He concluded the message with the words “Otherwise business okay,” which was another way of saying that the deception operation was off to an impressive start.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A VILE RACE OF QUISLINGS

  Knox brought up the question of the bombsight and the president indicated that his information indicated that the Germans already had it.

  —Secretary of War Henry Stimson, writing in his diary, July 16, 1940

  By the middle of March 1940, with the ongoing “phony war” encouraging a belief among many that maybe a great European conflagration wasn’t in the offing, J. Edgar Hoover was coming under such sustained attack from those who felt he was accruing too much power in the face of a perhaps-overblown threat that he feared for the future of his directorship. “No one outside the FBI and the Department of Justice knew how close they came to wrecking us,” he later said. During testimony before Congress, he had revealed the existence of a General Intelligence unit, which “has now compiled extensive indices of individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in subversive activities, in espionage activities, or any activities that are possibly detrimental to the internal security of the United States.” If “we enter into the conflict abroad we would be able to go into any of these communities and identify individuals or groups who might be a source of grave danger to the security of this country.”

  The announcement was bound to stir up memories of the period immediately after World War I when America’s anti-enemy anxiety shifted from ethnic Germans to radical leftists, many of them foreign-born and living in the big cities, who were instrumental in a wave of strikes, riots, and terrorist bombings seen as a prelude to a Bolshevik revolution. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer appointed Hoover, then twenty-four, to lead the first iteration of the office, the General Intelligence Division (or GID), which was responsible for the infamous raids of November 1919 to January 1920. The Bureau’s agents arrested from five thousand to ten thousand alleged subversives in cities and towns across the country, ransacking their homes and meeting places without proper search warrants and holding them in pitiful conditions without access to legal counsel until they could be shipped “back where they came from.” Initially lauded as a necessary curtailment of civil freedoms at a time of national crisis, public opinion quickly turned against the anti-Red drive. The Labor Department released the majority of the arrestees, arguing that there was little evidence they were intending to stage an uprising, and consented to the deportation of some 350 of them. An influential report issued by twelve prominent lawyers (including the dean of the Harvard Law School and a future Supreme Court justice) decried the “present assault” by the Bureau “upon the most sacred principles of our Constitutional liberty.” Upon being named director in 1924, Hoover agreed to shutter the office under the orders of then Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, who determined that the Bureau shouldn’t be involved in monitoring “political or other opinions of individuals.”

  In the aftermath of Hoover’s statements to Congress, the New Republic wondered if he was the best person to lead the FBI “in view of his background and experience during its blackest period.” The magazine recalled how he had once overseen “wholesale raids on thousands of defenseless and innocent citizens and aliens, the breaking up of strikes, and the violation of the most sacred civil rights.” The Philadelphia Inquirer worried that “what we are heading into is the wanton rule of a bludgeoning spy system, arrogant and menacing, such as has been developed by the totalitarian governments of Europe.” Hoover’s greatest antagonist was Senator George Norris, a seventy-nine-year-old liberal Republican from Nebraska, who openly mocked the director as “the greatest hound for publicity on the North American continent” and “one of the greatest men who ever lived and who now held the future life of our country in the palm of his mighty hand.”

  Nothing seemed to exemplify Hoover’s overreach like the FBI’s practice of wiretapping suspects’ telephone lines in violation of a congressional ban that had twice (in 1937 and 1939) been upheld by the US Supreme Court. Adding to Hoover’s woes was a new attorney general who appeared inclined to be a greater friend of civil liberties than the pliant Frank Murphy, now an associate justice of the
Supreme Court. Asked at a press conference whether “he found anything in Mr. Hoover’s record that might justify his dismissal,” the new man, Robert Jackson, later a Supreme Court justice himself and the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, gave the chilling reply that he had “not studied his record.” For a brief moment, it appeared Hoover was on his way out. “The case of J. Edgar Hoover suggests that our No. 1 G-man may become the first American political casualty of World War No. 2,” wrote one Washington correspondent in a story headlined “FBI’s Difficulties Traced to Spy Scare.”

  But President Roosevelt wasn’t interested in losing such a gifted and loyal snooper, especially with an impending reelection campaign inspiring him to think anew about his political opponents. Instead, the hounds were fed with Attorney General Jackson’s announcement that the FBI “shall conform to the decisions of the Supreme Court in recent cases, which have held interception and divulgence of any wire communication to be forbidden by the terms of the Communications Act of 1934,” which Jackson delivered on March 17. The director was shrewd enough to ensure that all the stories said the new rule was his idea, as the front-pager in the Times credulously proclaimed, “Justice Department Bans Wire Tapping; Jackson Acts on Hoover Recommendation.”

  The public’s generosity toward enemies in its midst began to recede following Germany’s invasions of Denmark and Norway on April 9, surprise acts of aggression that overwhelmed both neutral countries so quickly that it was universally believed that something more than the arriving military forces were at work. The world was introduced to the loathsome figure of Vidkun Quisling, the leader of Norway’s tiny Fascist party, who took advantage of the flight of the country’s leadership to the mountains to commandeer the radio airwaves, announce (with Hitler’s approval) that he was assuming power, and insist that all resistance to the invaders cease. It didn’t much matter that Hitler only allowed him to rule for six days (at least initially), and Norway, aided by Anglo-French land and sea counterattacks that at least succeeded in inflicting real damage on the Kriegsmarine destroyer and cruiser force, wouldn’t officially capitulate until June 10. “Major Quisling,” wrote the Times of London, “has added a new word to the English language.” Peace-loving nations were now menaced by what Winston Churchill called a “vile race of Quislings,” who are “hired to fawn upon the conqueror, to ‘collaborate’ in his designs, and to enforce his rule upon their fellow countrymen while groveling low themselves.” A famous report by Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News, which was noteworthy for its breathlessness, wide distribution, and inaccuracy, alleged that Norway was felled “by means of a gigantic conspiracy which must undoubtedly rank among the most audacious, most perfectly oiled political plots of the last century.” Through “bribery and extraordinary infiltration on the part of Nazi agents and by treason on the part of a few highly placed Norwegian civilian and defense officials,” the German state “built a Trojan Horse inside of Norway. Then, when the hour struck, the German plotters spiked the guns of the Norwegian navy and reduced its formidable fortresses to impotence.” Stowe was seeking to explain “How a Few Thousand Nazis Seized Norway,” according to the headline over the eleven-page package devoted to his story in Life magazine.

  The countries believed next on Hitler’s list began targeting Germans and Austrians within their borders. Belgium placed several thousand in detention camps, and Holland declared a state of emergency that empowered police to deal “sternly” with supporters of Anton Mussert’s Dutch Nazi party. The French had already instituted mass internment of enemy aliens, and the British were considering a policy of similar stringency, which would be adopted within weeks as the home isles became more directly threatened. “The French feel that many innocent refugees undoubtedly are suffering internment unnecessarily,” wrote a European correspondent, but “the task of dividing the sheep from the goats is such a big job” that extraordinary precautions were required. The US branch of the Quisling movement was represented by the Christian Front cabal, which, as revealed by the ongoing trial in Brooklyn, had been betrayed by a disaffected plotter who allowed the FBI to place recording devices in the attic of his home, catching a junior führer advocating sabotage because it’s just as well that they be “killed here as in a foreign war instigated by international Jewish bankers.” J. Edgar took advantage of the changing mood to write to Attorney General Jackson, informing him that the Bureau’s surveillance of “what appears definitely to be the real center of organized German espionage in the United States” had been “materially retarded” by the wiretapping ban, which must count as an exaggeration since Bill Sebold was in such a good position to know the mind of the (actual) Hitler operatives in New York. Robert Jackson was unmoved.

  Then came Germany’s historic onslaught against Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, which was launched on May 10, the same day Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister and emerged as the principal representative of anti-Nazi resistance with “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Besieged by airborne troops that had been dropped behind the front by parachute or landed via transport plane, Holland held out until several dozen Heinkel He 111 medium bombers destroyed the center of Rotterdam on May 14, a deliberate act of terror that nonetheless killed far fewer civilians (814, according to the Dutch government figure offered at Nuremberg) than the initially reported 100,000. Just as responsible for the swift defeat, or so went the prevalent thinking, were the ethnic Germans and Nazi sympathizers among the population who had waited for the decisive moment to become active. These apparitions disguised themselves as farmers, train conductors, policemen, mail carriers, priests, and even nuns, handed out poison-spiked chocolates, cigarettes, and drinking water, used light signals to direct German bombers to their targets, scrawled messages on public walls about Dutch troop movements, and spread false rumors about such things as defective air-raid sirens.

  The New York Times reported that refugees, “from Queen Wilhelmina down, have told amazing stories of the manner in which thousands of apparently innocent Germans turned out to be advance agents of the Nazi regime.” On the same day as the Rotterdam bombing, the fate of European democracy was all but sealed when the panzer forces that had navigated through the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes north of the Maginot Line smashed through a French Army force that had been tormented by Stuka dive-bombers and began the rapid dash to the Channel that would trap a sizable Anglo-French force (including the whole of the British Expeditionary Force) in a pocket at the northern French port of Dunkirk. In statistically the worst moment of Royal Air Force history, seventy-one RAF light bombers were sent in to swoop low and destroy the pontoon bridges over the Meuse River that were facilitating the advance. At least forty of them were shot down by antiaircraft fire and Messerschmitt fighters, a national disgrace that caused the air marshal commanding the British air fleet in France to break down in tears when he heard the news.

  On May 16, with the Allied armies in disarray and French diplomats burning documents in the gardens of the Quai d’Orsay, President Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress, requesting a massive increase in rearmament spending (eventually pushing defense appropriations to $2.2 billion for the year) to fund the creation of a “two-ocean” Navy and a US aerial fleet of fifty thousand planes, pointedly asking legislators “not to take any action which would in any way hamper or delay the delivery of American-made planes to foreign nations.” In surveying the “brutal force of modern offensive war” that was currently on display, he made a point of highlighting “the use of the ‘fifth column’ by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation.”

  Four days later, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau learned from Hoover that the FBI was still unable “to listen in on spies by tapping the wires” and so brought his concerns to the president, who on the following day ordered Attorney General Jackson to ignore the Supreme Court and “authorize the necessary investigative
agencies that they are at liberty to secure information by listening devices . . . of persons suspected of subversive activities against the government of the United States, including suspected spies.” The FBI would rely on this authority to conduct wiretaps for the next quarter century. During a fireside chat on May 26, FDR pledged the government’s vigilance in combating the foe that everyone believed was hiding in the shadows. “The Trojan horse,” he said over the crackling connection. “The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy. With all of these we must and will deal vigorously.”

  The country was gripped with panic. “Now, just a minute,” began a column by Westbrook Pegler. “Wait a minute!” Rural Pennsylvanians were plotting how to defend against parachute troops, National Guardsmen in western New York started patrols along the Canadian border, Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City announced that he would “exterminate all un-American plots and plotters,” and Washington politicians secured easy passage of the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (or Smith Act), which set severe penalties for advocating the overthrow of the government and required data on all 3.6 million noncitizens thought to be living in the country, 1.1 million of them estimated to reside in New York City. One of the fifteen questions on the registration form, to be filled out at the nearest post office and forwarded along with fingerprint samples to the FBI, asked whether the foreign national had been “affiliated with or active in” any organization “devoted in whole or in part to influencing or furthering the political activities, public relations or public policy of a foreign government.”