by Duffy, Peter
On June 10, an Associated Press radiogram from Rio de Janeiro broke the news that the Robin Moor, which was clearly marked with Stars and Stripes insignia, had been sunk on May 21. A Brazilian steamship had picked up eleven survivors floating in one of the ship’s four lifeboats. They described how the Moor had been stopped in neutral waters about four hundred miles south of the Cape Verde Islands in the Middle Atlantic by a German U-boat, whose commander gave the crew and passengers thirty minutes to abandon ship. Once they did, U-69 sent a single torpedo into the Moor’s side, followed by a barrage of thirty-odd shells from the deck gun, a blatant violation of Hitler’s order to avoid any contact with American maritime traffic. It took twenty-three minutes for the Robin Moor to become the first American-flagged vessel to be sunk by a U-boat during World War II. “Auf Wiedersehen!” the German sailors could be heard shouting. President Roosevelt asked for judgment to be suspended until the details could be confirmed.
On June 13, the papers announced the official word: “Robin Moor Sunk by a U-boat, U.S. Asserts; Nazis ‘Undoubtedly’ Knew It Was an American Ship,” declared the front page of the Herald Tribune. The thirty-five passengers in the other three lifeboats were probably dead, said Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. On June 14, FDR froze all German and Italian assets in the United States, including those of Nazi fronts such as the DAB and the German American Bund. On the same day, word arrived from Cape Town that a British ship had rescued the missing thirty-five. Everyone had survived. “I’m so elated,” Alice Phillips of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the wife of the Robin Moor’s second assistant, told the Post. “I don’t know what to say. It’s such a pleasant shock.” On June 16, FDR ordered Nazi Germany to close its consulates and affiliated agencies, giving the 171 “German agents” attached to the Nazi institutions until July 10 to leave the country. That evening, Leo Waalen walked into Sebold’s office and asked about the arrest of Paul Fehse, apparently in the newfound belief that something other than Fehse’s carelessness was to blame. Sebold brushed him off by saying “he was probably picked up as a result of one of the letters he was sending to Germany.” Waalen mentioned nothing about the possibility that he had a role in the sinking of the Robin Moor.
The investigation was approaching its denouement. Two Justice Department officials arrived from Washington for a conference with Sebold to discuss the endgame. “Trouble was brewing everywhere,” Ellsworth wrote. On June 20, the FBI was forced to arrest the butcher (Erwin Siegler) and the baker (Franz Stigler), both of whom had signed onto ships that were preparing to take them out of American jurisdiction for good. In an attempt to prevent the case from coming undone in its final moments, the two were booked on charges of attempting to leave the country without notifying their draft boards and, in a move of dubious legality approved by acting attorney general Francis Biddle, prevented from appearing before a federal magistrate to hear the charges against them. Later that evening, Sebold was walking past the Little Casino when he bumped into Eichenlaub, who told him that Stade and Connolly were expected at the bar later. Sebold told him he was only interested in business matters and “did not want to be bothered with their personal opinions” of him. He didn’t go.
Then on June 22, Hitler launched the most spectacular invasion in the history of modern warfare. Three million German troops surged across a nineteen-hundred-mile front from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, overrunning an unprepared Red Army and quickly gaining control of eastern Poland, Belorussia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, lands with huge Jewish populations that would be subject to the most ferocious phases of the quest for an Aryan racial utopia. Hermann Göring had begged for a postponement to give his Luftwaffe a rest (“I’ve made up my mind!” Hitler responded), but at least his newest medium bombers could now conduct aerial bombardments equipped with their own Norden bombsight, the Lotfe 7D and its successor models, which the Germans would always claim was better than the American version. The Technical Office had finally succeeded in exploiting the technological innovations pioneered by Carl Norden to advance the regime’s ignoble goals.
It is a consolation of history that the German air force was unable to install its new bombsights into a fleet of long-range bombers able to conduct sustained strikes at the heart of a distant enemy’s strength. The simple bureaucratic failure to maintain sound and uninterrupted development of an aircraft such as the four-engine Heinkel He 177 meant that the Luftwaffe was unequipped to win a world war. Within months, Ernst Udet committed suicide with a gunshot to the head in the knowledge that the air fleet shaped to his technical specifications was doomed to failure. “In attacking the Soviet Union, the Luftwaffe left the relatively narrow confines of the European conflict and had to fight an intercontinental war against overwhelming material resources,” wrote Ernst Heinkel. “It never had the ghost of a chance.”
▪ ▪ ▪
Fritz Duquesne could be invited to the office at last.
Sebold told him to stop by because “he might need his presence and assistance from time to time inasmuch as he was more experienced than he in spy matters,” wrote the FBI. Making his entrance in the early evening of June 25, Duquesne conducted a minute examination of the interior that surely gave pause to the agents behind the two-way mirror. “Where are the mics?” he asked. He “opened the towel chest and looked in all the corners,” said the FBI. Sebold chattered about diesel motors for twenty or thirty minutes before his visitor was comfortable enough to talk. Like a real spy, Duquesne raised the leg of his trousers and pulled an envelope from his sock, a detail that would be much remembered in later years by the agents who worked the case. The package included seven items: a sketch and photograph of the M1 Garand automatic rifle; a sketch of an airplane described as a “new design accepted by government”; a drawing of a tank, the “latest model light tank for air transport”; a photograph of a model of a US Navy Mosquito boat; a photograph of a grenade projector; and a typed statement about Chrysler tanks he had observed “at West Point” and “Tennessee maneuvers.”
As he often did in his conversations with Sebold, Duquesne spent much time musing about sabotage techniques, describing a method of starting fires by hiding phosphorus in pieces of chewing gum and dropping the “candy bombs,” as the newspapers would later call them, at key points in a munitions factory through a hole in your pants’ pocket. He told Sebold that he would like to have a piece of slow-burning fuse “because he might be able to make use of it at the General Electric Plant in Schenectady, N.Y.” But before long, he was talking about his favorite subject, the old days. He (further) embellished the story about his 1902 escape from the Bermuda penal colony by claiming that he was transported from the scene “on the Vanderbilt yacht,” which was apparently fancier than the Bromo-Seltzer King’s vessel. He recalled an instance in prison when a German Canadian offered him 10 percent of $40 million to betray the Kaiser, a proposal he said he refused because he knew the man was a British counterspy. He would never turn his back on Germany, he vowed. And he devoted the requisite amount of time to complaining about poor pay. Back when he began working for the Nazis in the late 1930s, he said, he was regularly given impressive sums by a cabin boy on the SS Bremen. The money enabled him to throw cocktail parties at the Roosevelt Hotel attended by aircraft-industry types who, once they were sufficiently inebriated, divulged valuable tips about the latest advancements. He used to wear finely tailored suits. Now he was forced to wear “John David $29.50 clothes.”
The three-hour session ended with Duquesne reminding Sebold not to leave his sketches and photographs lying around to be discovered by the cleaning lady.
“The old devil sat there,” said Agent Johnson, “and told us the story of his life.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE TRUSTED MAN
Q: Would you lie under oath on this witness stand?
Sebold: I don’t lie.
Q: You would not lie under any circumstance?
Sebold: No, sir. I don’t lie.
—Brooklyn Federal Court,
September 10, 1941
On Friday, June 27, 1941, some 250 agents (about a fourth of the entire G-man corps in the country) gathered on the twenty-sixth floor of the federal building in Foley Square, where E. J. Connelly “outlined the squads, assigned the spies to be arrested, and gave detailed instructions about guards, searches, evidence, room assignments in the building,” wrote Ellsworth in his diary on the next day. “Plans were to start the raids about supper time tonight, June 28, 1941, Saturday. They would all be held and questioned Saturday night and Sunday. I told Sebold nothing of these plans. Tonight I covered him at his office, 152 W. 42nd Street. No one showed up. I met Bill down on 42nd Street, and put him in my car and headed with him to the radio station at Centerport, L.I. I then told him that right at that moment raids were under way. He said he had a feeling it was breaking. We went to Centerport for the night, away from any possible reprisals.”
Spies were pulled from ships, roused from beds, escorted out of bars. Erich Strunck (the waiter) was seized in a room in Milwaukee. Heinz Stade (the musician) was taken off the bandstand at Geide’s Inn on Route 25A in Centerport, of all places. Lilly Stein was busy with a gentleman caller, who was permitted to complete his visit before the FBI entered her apartment. “Well, I’ll say one thing, you sure got an earful,” she said after learning that her place had been bugged. Later, she propositioned one of the agents. “A real Aryan type,” said Agent Friedemann. “It was the great incident of the night.” A party was going on at Ed Roeder’s home at 210 Smith Street in Merrick to celebrate the upcoming marriage of his son when the FBI knocked on the door. Roeder “requested that nothing be done to disturb the said party and willingly signed a waiver permitting his home to be searched at a later time.” Newsday reported that a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition were found in his basement.
Hermann Lang and his wife were spending the weekend at Bell’s Wellington Farms Cabins, a summer gathering spot for members of the DAB located a few miles outside Coram, Long Island. “As we drove up, he came to an open window and asked who was there,” testified Agent Reuben Peterson. “I approached the window and identified myself and asked him if he would come to the door. He opened the door, and I advised him that I had a warrant for his arrest, and he was taken into custody.” Fritz Duquesne thought nothing of it when he answered the door and found Agent Newkirk standing in the hallway, believing him to be “Ray McManus,” the upstairs neighbor he had spoken to a number of times over the past year. “Knowing me, Duquesne invited me in and I told him I had some friends with me and he said bring them on in,” Newkirk wrote. “Although armed, none of us drew a gun. I informed Duquesne we were FBI agents and that he and Miss Lewis were under arrest. Two agents took Duquesne and another agent and I took Miss Lewis to FBI headquarters in separate cars for questioning. The Duke never spoke to me again.”
Thirty men and three women were arrested. They were organized into roughly four separate rings—the original I-L spies (Duquesne, Lang, Roeder, and Stein); the marine division (composed of some fifteen stewards, cooks, waiters, etc.); the Carl Reuper group (whose leader only met with Sebold once); and the Little Casino faction. Of the few suspects who operated more or less as lone wolves, the most prominent was the Detroit-based agent (“Heinrich”) who used Lilly Stein’s East Fifty-Fourth Street address as a mail drop for letters crammed with aviation data, which were intercepted by agents before they could reach Germany. Edmund Carl Heine was a former executive with Ford and Chrysler who boasted of a ten-year friendship with Henry Ford, the automotive pioneer and celebrated author of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920), a favorite tome of Nazi Germany. (While he was under FBI surveillance, Heine placed a phone call to Ford and asked to return to the company. “Mr. Ford told him that he could have a job in the factory, but that he believed that he was in the United States for no good and was, in fact, a spy,” wrote the Bureau.) Only one suspect eluded capture, the wily Sean Connolly. At the request of the State Department, two Japanese agents identified by the investigation were not apprehended. (Both would be out of the country by August.) Of the thirty-three, twenty-eight were born in Germany, twenty-two of whom were naturalized citizens of the United States. Of the other naturalized Americans, one was born in Latvia, another in France, and a third in South Africa (Duquesne). Two of the accused were native-born Americans: Evelyn Lewis and Ed Roeder. Just six of the spies were not citizens of the United States. Meanwhile, the Bureau continued to investigate an entire constellation of other individuals uncovered by Sebold’s efforts.
On Sunday evening, June 29, J. Edgar Hoover allowed his pal Walter Winchell to break the story on his popular radio program (“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships and clippers at sea,” he began in his rat-a-tat-tat style) while a press conference was held downtown to give the story to the rest of the media. Hoover described the investigation as “the greatest of its kind in the nation’s history” and “the largest since the enactment” of the Espionage Act of 1917. Perhaps in a calculated attempt to draw attention away from Hermann Lang and the sensitive matter of his theft of the Norden, he described Fritz Duquesne as the most important member of the ring. “Under his direction the group paid particular attention to aircraft and tank work,” Hoover said, even though Duquesne supervised no other operative but himself. Hoover revealed that Lilly Stein, an “artists’ model,” was the unnamed foreign agent whom press accounts had connected with the State Department’s Ogden Hammond Jr. When sought for comment, Hammond, who failed in his legal attempt to be reinstated with the government, ungallantly called her “a pathetic little creature.” Hoover said the Little Casino was the “principal” gathering spot for the spies, which sent reporters out to East Eighty-Fifth Street to detail its “bright German beer mugs and jukebox which plays German records,” wrote the Post. Dick Eichenlaub’s wife said, “Just friendly people come in here. I recognize the pictures of some of those arrested, but they looked so dumb. They couldn’t be spies.” Hoover mentioned nothing of the radio station, the Forty-Second Street office, or William Sebold.
It may have been the greatest moment of Hoover’s career. In the afterglow of the triumph, the powerful Capitol Hill journalist Drew Pearson, who wrote the Washington Merry-Go-Round column for United Features Syndicate, celebrated the director’s capture “of the biggest spy ring in our history” and lauded the democratic, humane, and discreet manner with which he was handling his new responsibilities as the nation’s protector from foreign intrigue. Pearson’s fantasy version of Hoover, so unrecognizable to even the most tendentious reading of the historical record, nabs malefactors without wiretaps in deference to the Supreme Court’s rulings. He believes “there must be no politics in the FBI.” He “will drop nothing because of political pressure. Nor will he investigate a Congressman, Senator or newspaperman without written orders from the Attorney General himself.” Further: “No suspect gets his reputation ruined by having his name splashed in the headlines unless Hoover has the goods on him. There are no raids on the private or political files. Hoover is tough, but respects the rules—especially fundamental liberties.” Pearson concluded, “The nation is lucky to have him on the job.”
Yet the column, which included details about the case that were clearly leaked from deep within the FBI, was an obvious part of Hoover’s campaign against his emerging rival for counterespionage supremacy. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the World War I hero and Wall Street lawyer who had been serving as a personal envoy for the president, had just been named to head the office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), which became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after it. The national-security state was in its foundational phase, with the FBI retaining the responsibility for enemy spies operating within the domestic sphere while the OSS/CIA was handed the task of combating them overseas.
The Germans were livid. The chargé d’affaires in Washington, Hans Thomsen, wrote a blistering telegram
to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin on July 7: “Most, and probably all, of the persons involved in this affair were totally unqualified for operations of this kind, according to everything the Consulate General had heard about them. To give themselves importance, these people kept hinting all the time among their acquaintances that they had been given such missions and were carrying them out. It can be assumed that the American authorities had long known all about the network, which certainly would not have been any great feat, considering the naïve and sometimes downright stupid behavior of these people.” Thomsen concluded, “Such poorly organized operations by irresponsible and incompetent agents, which most likely have not benefited our conduct of the war, may cost us the last remnants of sympathy which we can still muster here in circles, whose political opposition is of interest to us.”
Thomsen’s accusation that the spy ring had done nothing for Germany was passed through the bureaucracy to Admiral Canaris, who, on July 23, signed his name over a five-page response stamped Geheime Reichssache (or “secret Reich matter”) that argued strenuously for the importance of several of the captured spies. Ed Roeder “delivered valuable technical material in the original, including remote-control machine-gun sight, bombsights, blind-flight instruments, Sperry’s course indicator, speech scrambler, radio equipment on Guenn-Martin [sic] airplanes from Russia. Most items delivered were designated as ‘valuable,’ some as ‘very valuable,’ and ‘of great importance.’ ” Since 1937, Fritz Duquesne “delivered valuable reports and important technical material in the original, including US gas masks, radio-control apparatus, leakproof fuel tanks, television instruments, small bombs for airplanes versus airplanes, air separator, and propeller-driving mechanism. Items delivered were labeled ‘valuable,’ and several ‘good’ and ‘very good.’ ”
