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

by Duffy, Peter

  On June 15, with the European continent all but mastered by Hitler, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire called for an investigation after a thinly sourced radio report claimed a captured German plane in France was discovered to possess a bombsight that was suspiciously similar to America’s own. And on June 19, Sebold made his third visit to Hermann Lang’s Queens apartment, where he handed over the second message sent by Germany to establish the legitimacy of his mission—“Further References for Lang are Beier, Eberhardt, and Aplohn Pop Sohn,” the last phrase referring to his Norden coworker Fritz “Pop” Sohn, who had introduced Lang into the spy business.

  “I said I couldn’t make it out,” testified Sebold, “and I said, ‘Tell me the meaning of it, this something like Aplakson.’ He said it was right, there was a fellow by the name of Sohn who worked with him in the Norden bomb plant and returned to Germany about a year ago.”

  It was enough to convince Lang to engage in a conversation that took for granted he had committed the larceny but didn’t touch upon his method. Asked if his knowledge of the Norden was currently helpful to the Reich, Lang said it wasn’t because the bombsight had been in German hands for two years, which meant 1938, the year he made the visit with his wife to Germany.

  “I said, ‘Don’t you feel very important to have done such a thing for Germany?’ ” Sebold said. “ ‘How much did you get for it? How much did they pay you for it?’ ”

  Lang said he worked for no payment except “a promise to be taken care of.”

  “Then I said, ‘Aren’t you afraid of being cheated out of this promise by Germany?’ ”

  Lang said he wasn’t because of his personal relationship with Hitler from the early days of the movement in Bavaria.

  “You didn’t think Lang was kidding, did you?” Sebold was later asked in reference to the Hitler comment.

  “No. He is not a kidder.”

  Conceding that it would be difficult to leave his job on the sixteenth floor in the midst of such heightened watchfulness, Lang nonetheless asked Sebold to send a radio message asking for the best advice in escaping the country. “Lang feels secure,” he wanted the statement to read.

  On June 20, Hoover broke the news to the White House. “Without making any specific admission, Lang did indicate that two years ago he prepared a complete model of the United States secret bombsight or secured all of the details with regard to this bombsight (the informant is not entirely clear as to just what Lang indicated in this regard), and sent the data to Germany,” the memo read. On the following day, isolationist Senator Gerald Nye took to the floor of the Senate and made headlines by repeating an unfounded rumor that Secretary of War Harry Woodring, who had just resigned at FDR’s request because of his continued opposition to providing military aid to Great Britain, was let go specifically because he refused to give up “national defense secret number one—that all-valuable bombsight that every member of this Senate has been assured for months is being guarded with the utmost secrecy.” The Senate majority leader, Alben Barkley, was required to step forward and say he spoke to Air Corps chief Hap Arnold, who told him “at no time or under any conditions has any consideration ever been given to revelation of any secret bombsight.”

  But President Roosevelt was looking for creative ways to respond to Churchill’s pleas for help in preventing what many regarded as a distinct possibility, the fall of Britain. On July 1, FDR mentioned nothing of the Lang revelation when he told the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, that he would provide the Norden to the RAF if it could be proved that the Germans were using a bombsight that “was more or less equivalent in efficiency.” In fact, the British didn’t have such proof: the recent examination of a Heinkel He 111 shot down on the Yorkshire coast revealed that it was equipped with a Lotfe 7B bombsight, which “is not adapted for high altitude precision bombing of ground targets and certainly not of moving ships,” according to the RAF report. The truth was, the Luftwaffe’s mismanaged Technical Office, long in possession of Hermann Lang’s plans for the Norden, was still in the midst of developing a gyro-stabilized bombsight for installation in its medium bombers.

  On July 16, with the Luftwaffe conducting the raids against coastal installations and shipping lanes that represented the opening phase of the Battle of Britain, President Roosevelt informed the newest cabinet members—Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, both Republicans and interventionists—that the gossips were correct. “Knox brought up the question of the bombsight and the president indicated that his information indicated that the Germans already had it,” wrote Stimson in his diary. “He said that of course if that was true, we certainly ought to give it to the British at once. He mentioned a number of striking facts which indicated carelessness on our part in the preservation of that bombsight from the work of the Fifth Column agents,” confirmation of FDR’s familiarity with the discoveries of Bill Sebold. But the president couldn’t overcome a jittery military leadership that had just convinced him to shelve his idea of giving the Brits twelve (out of the Air Corps’ current fifty-two) B-17 Flying Fortresses as an unconscionable breach of national security. Besides, the revelation that he had handed away our most valuable secret would be certain to hurt his now-active campaign against the tousled-haired utilities executive unexpectedly nominated by the Republicans, Wendell Willkie, who, like FDR, was an interventionist wary of doing or saying anything that might upset the isolationists now coalescing around a newly formed organization, the America First Committee. It is a measure of British desperation that Churchill approved a plan (which he initially regretted) to send a technical mission to the United States to reveal the UK’s greatest innovations without an explicit promise that the bombsight the RAF had long sought would be made available in return. The delegation soon arrived with a large black metal deed box containing Britain’s own holiest of holies, the resonant cavity magnetron tube, which was better than the Sperry Gyroscope–developed klystron tube at increasing the range of microwave radar and would prove an essential component of the Allied victory in World War II. The Norden had not yet been tested in combat and was already worth all the money spent in its development.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AND YOU BE CAREFUL

  I noticed the beautiful dog that was following you on 42nd Street yesterday. I was very interested in it and a friend of mine wondered if you had it for sale or kept it for a companion. If you do neither, he will not be offended.

  —Fritz Duquesne in a letter to Sebold, August 9, 1940

  J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have been more pleased with the progress of his premier case. In a memo to the White House, he crowed that the Bureau “has undercover agents actually participating in a German espionage group in such a manner as to enable the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to know the entire activities of this ring,” the only specific investigation mentioned in the nine-page letter. “. . . Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as members of this German espionage group actually maintain and operate a short-wave radio station which is in daily contact with Germany, and through this station pass the messages of a number of German agents. All messages, of course, are surreptitiously submitted to the State, War, and Navy Departments prior to the time they are transmitted to Germany and, of course, information and instructions received from Germany are transmitted to interested agencies.” During a gathering of 175 law enforcement officials, Hoover boasted of the depth of the Bureau’s infiltration of secret networks of spies and saboteurs, explaining that the news media would be informed (and “honor and glory to all” duly accorded) when the evidence was ready for presentation in court. “The enemy does not know our actions,” he said, “and cannot anticipate a time when he might plan his devious task with a minimum chance of detection.”

  Determined to prevent a repeat of the Turrou embarrassment, Hoover assigned one of his best men, Earl J. Connelly, who had led the celebrated raid on kidnapper Kate “Ma” Barker’s Florida hideout in 1935,
to relocate to the city and assume control from the New York office, probably at about the time he was promoted to assistant director in June. “They brought Froelich in from Pittsburgh to start a filing and index system on it,” Ellsworth wrote. “Maxwell Chayfitz read and coordinated reports.” A small team of stenographers and clerks was assembled. German-fluent agents such as Joseph Fellner, an Austrian-born graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, and William Gustav Friedemann, an Oklahoman with an LLB from George Washington University, arrived to work as interpreters. New men were assigned to follow the growing list of suspects, which was done clumsily in the case of Paul “Fink” Fehse, who noticed suspicious figures following him on the subway and parked out front of his house, prompting him to lie low for a while. Agents took jobs at Sperry Gyroscope and Norden Inc., went undercover on the SS Manhattan, initiated a twenty-four-hour watch on Hermann Lang’s home to guard against his flight, and relaxed in the nicest of bars while Lilly Stein was charmed by her latest suitors. And just as E. J. Connelly began holding weekly conferences to discuss how to cope with unfamiliar challenges—“What do you fellows suggest?” Friedemann remembered the senior men asking. “What should we do here?”—a providential lesson came from Brooklyn in the form of the collapse of the Christian Front prosecution. Despite the Bureau’s (grainy) motion pictures, (scratchy) sound recordings, and (untrustworthy) cooperating conspirator, the jury returned exactly zero convictions for the simple reason that the Coughlinite defendants hadn’t done much in furtherance of their violent plan to turn America into a concentration camp. “An ill-timed arrest invariably will do more harm than good,” Hoover now believed, according to a newspaper op-ed he wrote headlined, “Is There a Spy Menace?” (“The answer is emphatically, Yes!”) “The real test of successful counterespionage, and that is our task, is locating the spy, ascertaining his contacts and methods of communication—and then closing off his sources of information.”

  After the Manhattan returned from Lisbon in late July—“Passengers Assert Many of Stewards are Pro-Hitler and Ship’s Paper is ‘Defeatist’ ” was the subheadline on the Times’ story—Sebold met with the butcher, who gave him a gray paper package containing $1,350 to pay the salaries of the active I-L spies and $1,500 to purchase a bombsight other than the Norden, which further confirmed that the Germans had no need for the dream weapon the whole country was talking about. The butcher told Sebold that the Manhattan was ending its Lisbon run (because it was deemed too dangerous to have such a large passenger ship skirting the war zone in the manner of the Lusitania), and he and Stigler were taking senior kitchen jobs on the new SS America, which would be plying between New York and four ports in the Caribbean, a less propitious journey for Nazi espionage efforts. No worries about maintaining a courier connection to Europe, though. During a subsequent evening on the town, which ended with the butcher and the baker escorting a couple of young ladies to an Eighth Avenue flophouse, Sebold learned about a new man who was willing to make his first trip for the Abwehr, a waiter on the SS Exochorda, one of the four small ships of the American Export Lines still on the Lisbon passage, each with a capacity for just 130 passengers.

  A naturalized German American of small stature and thinning blond hair who (like Ed Roeder) was blind in the right eye, Erich Strunck was something of a legend among the marine spies for maintaining his loyalty to Hitler even though he underwent three months of rough interrogation in a Hamburg jail, where he was serving time for a currency scam that defrauded refugees attempting to get their money out of the Reich. He was “a very tough fellow who refused to talk,” said the butcher, who was incarcerated alongside him. When ringleader Fehse later asked Sebold if he was impressed with the waiter’s “gallant” willingness to serve his native land even in the face of such Fertigmachen abuse, Sebold responded, “No, I think he is dumb to take such treatment.”

  After gathering up new materials and informing Ed Roeder of Germany’s desire for the Sperry bombsight, Sebold met Strunck in Columbus Circle and handed him a brown manila envelope for delivery via the Exochorda. It was all going a little too well for Duquesne, who appears to have alerted Ast Hamburg to his belief that Sebold was an amateur who had been made by the authorities. “Friend reports you are under surveillance,” according to a radio communication received from Germany. “Caution. You must stay off the air for two weeks.” In response, Agent Price sent out a message insisting that “Dunn,” one of Duquesne’s code names, was actually the careless one, undeserving of his reputation as a master spy. “He might have seen me with Bill,” wrote Ellsworth in his diary, citing the “beautiful dog” letter that Duquesne mailed to Sebold. “Lately it had appeared Duke was getting jealous because Bill was now in direct contact with Germany, handling all the spies, sending over all the materials etc. So he probably was trying to cut Bill out of the picture and place himself in control of the spy ring.” The crisis passed when Hamburg responded, “Don’t let Dunn make you nervous too, and you be careful.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  On August 12, Ast Hamburg radioed its desire “to receive from you and friends regular accurate details” about aircraft deliveries from North America to England, which was now coming under more sustained attack as the Luftwaffe began its all-out effort to destroy the capacity of the RAF and establish the blanket of air superiority necessary for a cross-Channel landing. The invasion of Great Britain was code-named Operation Sea Lion and planned for the middle of September. Yet it was soon apparent that the Hurricanes and Spitfires, aided by radar installations lining the coast, cryptologists at Bletchley Park who had cracked the Germans’ Enigma code, and binocular-wielding civilian spotters of the Royal Observer Corps, were more than a match for a German air force operating at the limits of its speed and range, haunted now by the failure to develop a four-engine heavy bomber with the capacity to readily traverse British airspace. “I never really thought there would be a war with Britain,” complained the Technical Office’s Ernst Udet, whose beloved Ju 87 dive-bombers, the scourge of the Continent, were shot down in such numbers that they were pulled from the battle within a week.

  With the prospect of an easy invasion looking less likely by the day, President Roosevelt made two politically risky decisions that brought the United States closer to open hostility with the Axis powers, which, following the signing of the Tripartite Pact, now included Imperial Japan. Bypassing Congress, he used his executive authority to give Great Britain fifty World War I–era destroyers that had been certified by Navy admiral Harold R. Stark (at FDR’s demand) to be militarily insignificant, exchanging them for leases on several British military installations from Newfoundland to British Guiana, which was hailed by the public as a shrewd deal that gave America the means to repel an invasion from Europe. And FDR threw his full support behind the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in the nation’s history, which earned the pivotal support of Willkie and made it through Congress in the face of hyperbolical warnings from the likes of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, who said the bill would “slit the throat of the last democracy still living.”

  By early September, with Hitler having second thoughts about Operation Sea Lion, the Luftwaffe was ordered to pivot away from eliminating the RAF as a prelude to invasion and begin pounding in and around cities in the hope that a collapse of British morale would force a capitulation. The months-long bombardment campaign that would come to be known as the Blitz began on the afternoon of September 7, when three hundred bombers accompanied by six hundred fighters spent hours dropping incendiaries upon the densely populated dock areas of London’s East End, killing several hundred civilians at a minimum. Yet the daylight raids were too costly for the Luftwaffe, which lost 298 aircraft during the first week, forcing Göring to switch to nighttime sorties, less susceptible to fighter interception and perhaps more conducive to inducing panic in the British people. “The decisive thing is the ceaseless continuation of air attacks,” Hitler said. In his cigarette-enriched basso profundo, CBS
’s Edward R. Murrow assured the American people that the plan wasn’t working. “Today I saw shop windows in Oxford Street covered with plywood,” he said in one of his “This Is London” broadcasts, which sometimes featured the sound of air-raid sirens and antiaircraft bursts in the background. “In front of one there was a redheaded girl in a blue smock, painting a sign on the board covering the place where the window used to be. The sign read OPEN AS USUAL.”

  On September 3, Lilly Stein informed Sebold that British factories were producing a thousand airplanes a month, a piece of intelligence that she could’ve obtained from a prominent English cricketer and military officer she was consorting with, Captain Hubert Martineau. She was not far off. The actual number was 1,601 for August and 1,341 for September, which, one of the major reasons for the RAF’s resilience, exceeded the output of a German aircraft industry that was a victim of the Technical Office’s misguided schemes, impossible demands, and increasingly unstable director. (Udet was now drinking heavily and taking Pervitin methamphetamine tablets.) Alas, Stein’s information was never communicated to the Luftwaffe, then in the midst of fatally underestimating the ability of British plants to keep up with the rates of attrition. Probably sick of her constant demands for money in the face of her inability to come up with anything significant from diplomat Ogden Hammond Jr., Ast Hamburg ordered Sebold to stop seeing her. “Lilly should be careful and report in writing” were the instructions. “You personally will please sever connections as instructed.” Also: “As reasons say that you don’t work for us anymore.” On September 11, Sebold let Stein talk awhile about an English gentleman she’d met at the Hotel Pierre before passing along a note that included a new contact address in Cologne, where Hermann Sandel (aka Heinrich Sorau and Uncle Hugo) had been transferred.