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

by Duffy, Peter

  But Herz was the instigator of one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

  “Did you say to me a minute ago, or did I misunderstand—did you say you agreed to become a spy because you had to give in?” he asked.

  “Well, they had me in a corner,” Sebold responded.

  “You mean they threatened to use physical violence?”

  “Well, they don’t do such things,” Sebold said. “They do that in a nice way.” He explained that explicitly stated threats weren’t necessary in a terror state such as Nazi Germany.

  “But you did agree to become a spy?” Herz asked.

  “Sure, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “All right, then you lie down and die, or goose-step for the rest of your life,” Sebold snapped.

  It was Sebold at his best. “He gets really good under fire and his mind seems to work better,” wrote Ellsworth. The defense attorneys “sought to belittle the former German army machine gunner with ridicule,” wrote the Mirror. “They attacked his veracity. They engaged in sharp argument with the court while attempting to refute Sebold’s claim to having been accepted by the Gestapo as an agent. But they failed to alter his story.”

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  On September 11, President Roosevelt made maximum use of the Greer incident, announcing that the US military would now protect convoys of merchant ships bound for Great Britain and, more provocatively, be permitted to “shoot on sight” at any Axis submarines or raiders operating in “waters which we deem necessary for our defense.” From this date forward, the United States and Nazi Germany engaged in what amounted to an undeclared war on the high seas of the Atlantic. Following FDR’s address, Charles Lindbergh took the stage at an America First event in Des Moines, Iowa, and discredited himself and his cause by stating plainly what he had long implied. He said “the Jewish” were one of three groups (also “the British” and “the Roosevelt administration”) pushing the country into war. He chillingly suggested that Jews would be subject to a violent backlash if the United States became involved, which can be heard as both a provocation and a threat. “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” he said. In addition to its anti-Semitism, Lindbergh’s speech was noteworthy for its defeatism, its sense that America wasn’t up to the task of confronting German industrial and military might. We are unprepared for a war “which cannot be won without sending our soldiers across the ocean to force a landing on a hostile coast against armies stronger than our own.”

  During the following week in Brooklyn, the nation was provided with a glimpse of the advanced techniques that were already being deployed against the enemy. After Agents Friedemann and Johnson testified about Duquesne’s single visit to the Forty-Second Street office—sound recordings were not admissible—Judge Byers made the following announcement: “Members of the jury, I am going to ask you to come over to the other side of the courtroom. You will occupy the seats on this side. It may not be possible for some of you to see from the chairs, some of you may have to stand. If you do not observe everything, please interrupt and tell us.” The courtroom was darkened and Johnson’s film was projected onto a five-foot screen behind the jury box. The American relationship with the hidden surveillance camera was born as the rapt audience watched twelve soundless minutes of Fritz Duquesne glancing throughout Room 627, sitting down opposite a partially obscured Sebold, reaching into his sock for his spy secrets, and conversing animatedly. When the lights came up, reporters noted that Duquesne had a broad grin on his face. “All my life I wanted to be in the movies, and when I made it, what do I do?” he said, according to Agent Newkirk. “Sit there and scratch my ass and pick my nose.” The Times scoffed at how the government “resorted” to “the use of motion pictures in open court.” Wrote Ellsworth, “I think Duquesne is convicted now.”

  The only serious obstacle remaining for Sebold was Hermann Lang. He spent days going over the “Lang notes” with Ellsworth, attempting to get straight just what had happened during each of the nine meetings. “Up early and had Bill give me his testimony on Lang,” Ellsworth wrote on September 23. “Seemed to be sure of himself.” During that day’s session, Sebold “did okay,” he wrote. In describing a visit to Queens on July 11, 1940, Sebold recalled asking Lang if a cousin of his who had just left the apartment knew “anything about his transactions.” Lang said the man didn’t. Lang was “the only man who knows the American secret.” Sebold had slightly flubbed the line. According to the FBI account, Lang had told Sebold of his exclusive knowledge of “the great American secret.” On the following day, Sebold had more stumbles during Herz’s cross-examination. “Bill did fairly well in the morning but got all mixed up on dates,” Ellsworth wrote. “In view of his confused condition when court adjourned for lunch, I did not go near Bill during recess but ate lunch at Joe’s Place with [Special Agent in Charge Thomas] Donegan and two Navy commanders. The first question Herz asked Bill at 2 p.m. was whether I had refreshed Sebold’s mind, etc., during the recess. So we outsmarted them. Bill did a lot better in the afternoon and got in good evidence on the bombsight information, on bombsight production at Norden’s factory, on new experiments, etc., which Lang had given him.”

  But did the Germans really have the Norden bombsight? In Washington that week, the US Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance sent a confidential message to the undersecretary of the navy, “Necessity for Safeguarding Security of the Norden Bombsight,” which delivered the official view of Lang’s theft in its final paragraph: “The Bureau of Ordnance does not believe that Hermann Lang, the alleged spy now on trial in New York, was able to impart sufficient information to Germany when he visited that country on vacation from the Norden company in 1938, to enable the Germans to duplicate the bombsight. Supporting this belief are the fact that a German bombsight manufactured in 1939 and turned over to us by the British does not possess the features of the Norden sight, and the fact that German horizontal bombing of ships at sea is very poor and shows no improvement since the beginning of the war.” During a press conference, Secretary of War Harry Stimson didn’t help the prosecution when he said there was “no reason to believe” the Germans had obtained the details of the Norden, which led George Herz to raise a noise about calling Stimson to appear as a witness on behalf of Lang. “I think it would be an idle trip for me,” Stimson told reporters, “and I hope I will not have to make it.” He didn’t. The accepted view among “authoritative” sources, according to the Associated Press reporter covering the trial, was that the Germans “weren’t able to steal enough information about the Norden to manufacture it properly.” After the trial, Norden president Ted Barth told the papers that Lang was a “fool” who was watched day and night and couldn’t have snuck “so much as a piece of scrap paper” past plant security.

  The United States would enter World War II with the myth of its secret bombsight fully intact.

  On the evening of October 16/17, a U-boat fired three torpedoes at the USS Kearny, which was escorting a merchant convoy about 350 miles south and west of Iceland. This time one of them struck. Initial reports indicated no casualties. On the next day, the House of Representatives passed legislation that permitted US merchant ships to be outfitted with guns, which President Roosevelt hoped would be amended in the Senate to allow US merchant ships (thus armed) to transport war materials into combat zones and belligerent ports, ending the “carry” portion of the Neutrality Act. Then on October 19, the US Navy announced that eleven of the Kearny’s sailors were “missing.” They would soon be confirmed as the first US combat deaths of the war. “America has been attacked,” Roosevelt said in a radio address. “The USS Kearny is not just a Navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman, and child in this nation. Illinois, Alabama, California, North Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arkansas, New York, Virginia—those are the home states of the honored dead and wounded
of the Kearny. Hitler’s torpedo was directed at every American, whether he lives on our seacoasts or in the innermost part of the nation, far from the seas and far from the guns and tanks of the marching hordes of would-be conquerors of the world.”

  After another week of testimony and films focused on a parade of other spies, the prosecution began debating how to finish its part of the case. Charles Appel, a handwriting expert from the FBI Lab in Washington, suggested bringing up Leo Waalen’s attempt to send information to Germany about the Robin Moor, which would be a convenient way to remind jurors that the defendants were in league with the U-boat assassins now openly warring with the US Navy. Later in the day, Waalen’s list of eight sailings, given to Sebold in the Forty-Second Street office on April 28, was duly introduced into evidence. But the merchant ship was not mentioned until a defense attorney, David Kumble, picked up the document and began reading aloud from it. When he came to the words “S.S. Robin Moor,” Harold Kennedy “could not contain himself and blurted out, ‘What?’ ” wrote Ellsworth. The entire defense table jumped up and demanded a mistrial. “That was the boat that was torpedoed and sunk, and the jury knows it,” one of the lawyers protested. “It was done intentionally by Mr. Kennedy to inflame the minds of the jurors.” But the judge said he hadn’t heard a thing. “There was a big scene,” wrote Ellsworth. “Judge Byers refused a mistrial and we had our climax.”

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  It was now time for Fritz Duquesne to perform one last strut on the public stage. “When were you born?” he was asked upon taking the stand in his own defense. “In 1877 or 1878,” he responded, setting the tone. He spoke of matriculating at the elite École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr in France; visiting the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 as a cadet observer (not a combatant); receiving an appointment to the Belgian Congo Army by King Leopold; searching for rubber plantations in South America; attempting to convince Washington politicians to introduce hippos in the United States as a food source; working as publicity man for former ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s film company, Robertson-Cole. He was not a spy, he said. He was an inventor—of “a vaginal device, a medical instrument, for the use of the natives in the Congo”; “a means of keeping airplane engines warm so they could make a quick takeoff”; “a method of catching animals doing away with the cruelty in the way I saw them caught in my childhood”; “a submarine mine called a magnetic mine to use in war”; and a “float dock for pontoon airplanes.” After his arrest by the FBI, he claimed he was “cross-questioned, bulldozed, and bully-razed”; examined by a doctor who “inserted a steel arrangement in me”; invited to commit suicide with a pistol; forced to drink washing soda that made him “so sick that I nearly went mad”; asked “all sorts of questions about my sexual relations”; marched naked past Sebold; required to read verses of Shakespeare; and accused of being “a leader of the German spies in America.”

  “I stayed there for some time,” he said of the office where he was questioned. “I don’t know how long because I was very sick. In the room was a mattress covered over with blood or excrement, sheets of hardness on it, and I stayed there, and these men returned later and they interrogated again along the same lines. It is hard for me to go on with this thing.”

  “It would be,” said Kennedy.

  Duquesne called Sebold a “very dangerous lunatic” who tried to convince him to contribute Nazi money (to be supplied by Sebold) to the America First Committee and plant dynamite (supplied by Sebold) in President Roosevelt’s church in Hyde Park. He claimed that Sebold once flashed “French pornographic pictures” of Lilly Stein during a meeting in City Hall Park “and spoke in laudatory remarks about her capacity as a sweetheart.”

  Asked about the hard-to-refute footage from Forty-Second Street, this son of the nineteenth century had a difficult time coming up with an explanation. “They were not my activities,” he claimed. “They were fake activities.”

  Of the famous sock incident, he said, “As I sat down the bandage on my leg slipped over my shoe and I pulled it up. While I was pulling it up a bunch of things I had in my pocket fell out of my pocket and I picked them up. The taking of anything out of my stocking never happened.”

  “There is no use saying anything to the witness or his lawyer,” Kennedy told the judge at one point, “but it seems to me that the jury should be instructed that these picturesque words that he slips in are improper, and the jury should know it.”

  “His talks are so fantastic,” wrote Ellsworth. “I hope the jury realizes he is a liar.”

  Hermann Lang left an entirely different impression during his turn in the witness chair. He spoke so softly that George Herz repeatedly asked him to speak up. “Will you please get—sort of mad and talk as loud as you can.” The Times described Lang as “sad-faced.” The AP said he was “mild and clerkish.” In his demure manner, he denied participating in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, knowing Adolf Hitler or Ernst Udet, or joining a pro-Nazi organization in the United States. (He told the FBI that the DAB “was just more for pastime, playing games, having parties.”) His alibi was this: Yes, his Norden coworker Fritz “Pop” Sohn introduced him to Nikolaus Ritter during the latter’s recruitment trip to the United States, which conforms with Ritter’s postwar story, but Ritter never spoke to him about the Norden bombsight, which doesn’t. Lang said he went to Germany in the summer of 1938 because of his wife’s poor health and was horribly abused by Nazi officials upon his arrival at Hamburg. “When I got down from the steamer and went to the custom agent—(the witness at this point cried),” according to the transcript. Court was recessed for five minutes while he regained his composure. When he returned, he described how he and his wife were segregated from the other passengers, had their baggage closely checked, and were threatened with imprisonment in Dachau if they complained. Allowed to continue to Berlin, he registered with the authorities as required by the law. He soon received a letter from Ritter, who asked to meet him on a street corner. From there, the two went to the Air Ministry, where Lang was browbeaten for information about the Norden. He said that no amount of threatening would induce him to give up the great American secret.

  But the story ran on page 27 in the New York Times (“Mechanic Denies Bombsight Sale”) because of what happened in the North Atlantic in the hours before Lang took the stand. U-552 delivered a single torpedo into the USS Reuben James, which was one of five American destroyers protecting a British merchant convoy of more than forty ships in the waters near Iceland. The old tin can sank within minutes, becoming the first US military vessel lost during the war. “Fear ‘Heavy’ Loss of Life on Destroyer,” reported the Daily News on its front page. “Well, a hundred men went down in that dark watery grave,” sang the Almanac Singers, who had been converted to the interventionist cause by Stalin’s sudden alliance with the Western democracies. “When that good ship went down only forty-four were saved.” A total of 115 sailors were killed in a blatant act of war, but the president didn’t feel that public opinion was outraged enough to markedly alter American policy. Congress responded by barely passing the amended revision of the Neutrality Act that allowed armed merchant ships to carry munitions to combatant nations. In the Senate, the vote was 50–37; in the House, 212–194. Apparently only a truly spectacular act would jolt America into greater engagement. Few expected that it would come from the increasingly belligerent and expansionist Empire of Japan.

  On the Monday following the Reuben James attack, Lang testified about his contacts with Sebold, saying he agreed to meet with him because he wanted to protect his family back in the Bavarian village of Schwarzenbach am Wald. “He said, ‘Well, if you don’t want to work, we know a nice way to make you work if I report it to the other side,’ ” Lang said. “And he told me, ‘You have relatives out there. It will not be so good for you and for them.’ ” The plan was “to kid him along.” Lang concocted a tale about Sebold’s offering Lilly Stein up for Lang’s carnal delectation. “He said, ‘Are you interested? I
could make an appointment for you. If you are interested and want to have a nice time, why, I could fix it up.’ So I looked at him and said, ‘What ideas you got? You know I am married and what I am interested in another girl?’ ”

  Ellsworth admitted that Lang’s previous testimony about his trip to Germany was somewhat convincing, “but he lied consistently today about his meetings with Sebold so now I can’t believe any of his story. He must have been very deeply involved with Ritter and his crowd in Germany.”

  All that was left of the defense case, Ellsworth wrote, were “lies, lies, lies.” Franz Stigler, the baker, repeated the popular story about Sebold’s threatening behavior. “Look at the English Americans—they go up and down the street, doing everything for their side,” he quoted Sebold as saying. “But you guys, when you get your citizenship papers, you’d go over to Germany and shoot your own mother.” Leo Waalen said Sebold promised to “make it hard” for his parents in Danzig if he refused to provide intelligence on Allied ships. In fact, Sebold often made a point of warning the spies against participating in the conspiracy. “I said, ‘You might go to jail for ten to twenty years, you better look out,’ ” Sebold said in reference to a conversation with Waalen. “He said, ‘I am going up. I can paddle my own canoe.’ ” The other principal accusation was that Sebold was a Communist, which was presumably enough to sow doubts about his character. Duquesne said Sebold was a true believer who only agreed to work for the Nazi regime when “they poured hot water in his bowel through a funnel.” A defense attorney suggested Sebold was once known in New York by a Russian name, Siebufsky. Erich Strunck, the waiter, said Sebold spoke to him about the glories of the workers’ struggle as they listened to soapbox orators in Columbus Circle. “If you are interested in Communism, I can fix you up with the party,” he claimed Sebold told him. “Whenever you lose your job on the ship, they take care of you. They give you a job and everything. I am an old-timer myself.” In a postwar interview, Agent Johnson said the FBI never uncovered a bit of evidence that Sebold was a Red.