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 occasionally the defendants let the truth slip out. Late in the trial, Paul Scholz, the salesman at Germania Book and Specialty who was part of Carl Reuper’s ring, was called to the stand. “Scholz, when asked by the clerk Scotty to raise his hand to be sworn in, came to brisk attention and gave the Nazi salute, then realized what he had done and raised his hand high above his head and took the oath,” wrote Ellsworth.

  On Wednesday, December 3, the defense attorneys began their closing arguments. “The fact is that as much of an adventurer and as much as a wanderer Duquesne has been,” said Frank Walsh, “so also has been Sebold. Sebold went from San Francisco to South America to Germany, and back and forth all his life. His family life, as far as it has been developed in this case, has been almost negative.” Walsh argued that the German-born defendants were being targeted because they belonged to an ethnicity that was unfairly tarred by the broad brush of public opprobrium. “Where else as a German or German American living in New York, living in Manhattan, where else can he go when he has an hour off other than Yorkville? That is where they congregate. That is where they have these casinos and these Bräus, these beer places. That is the way these people enjoy themselves. Are you going to say merely because he lives in Yorkville, or he went to the German bookshop or some other place, that smacks of Hitler—Nazi? Why, that is not so.”

  Walsh concluded that Sebold was “a scoundrel.”

  Court adjourned for the weekend on Friday, December 5.

  On Sunday, December 7, the debate over American neutrality ended. Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

  That evening, President Roosevelt issued Proclamation 2525, which subjected Japanese nationals to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, giving the FBI the power to summarily arrest and detain the “potentially dangerous” noncitizens on its Custodial Detention List.

  On Monday at 12:30 p.m., FDR delivered his seven-minute “Day of Infamy” address to a joint session of Congress, asking for a declaration of war against Japan but making no mention of the other Axis nations. The vote was 82 to 0 in the Senate; 388 to 1 in the House. In the afternoon, he signed Proclamations 2526 and 2527, which extended the Alien Enemies Act to German and Italian nationals because of “threatened” invasion or “predatory incursion” from Germany and Italy. “I don’t care much about the Italians,” Roosevelt told Attorney General Biddle. “They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different, they might be dangerous.” Biddle telegraphed the news to J. Edgar Hoover, but the raids had already begun in German neighborhoods.

  “With Your Honor’s permission, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Foreman, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” began George Herz in Brooklyn federal court that morning. “There is almost a hushed silence that pervades our city and our country today, the silence that comes before a storm or before a hurricane. It seems as if a great deal has taken place since last weekend when we were here. There is a great deal on my mind today as an American besides the fate of Hermann Lang, and apparently there must be a great deal on your minds as Americans besides this case. But nevertheless, we as Americans are proud of our American heritage, as we have a duty here which we must face, and as Americans cannot shirk, and that duty, on my part, I propose to perform, and I know that you will also do your best.

  “It would be an easy thing for you to leave this courtroom and to come back within five minutes and say, ‘We find them all guilty,’ ” Herz continued. “That would be an easy thing. But that would not be the American thing to do, and that kind of act on your part would have a greater tendency to create hysteria throughout the country than anything else, because these men are entitled to their civil rights.”

  Herz attacked Sebold’s “ridiculous story” of how he was induced to become a spy in Germany and described Lang “as a dumb-witted, shy working man” who was the true victim here. But Herz knew his effort was doomed. As he told an interviewer in 1973, “I could see the hatred in the jury’s eyes. They were just literally manifesting their hatred for me because I had the nerve to get up there and speak on behalf of Lang.”

  After Herz finished on December 9, another of the defense attorneys rose to speak, Charles Oberwager, a German American civic leader who had advocated on behalf of the community during the bad old days of the Great War. He celebrated the patriotism of those “men of German flesh and German blood who helped lay the foundation of this country and who helped to defend it.” He spoke of Peter Muhlenberg, the Revolutionary War–era clergyman who “wore his robe on a Sunday, and after he delivered his sermon, as you will recall, in Virginia, on Sunday, he took his robe off, and beneath the robe was the uniform for which Americans stand today and stood then.” Oberwager likened the accused spies to “men like Carl Schurz, who after he was here eight or nine years became the American ambassador to Spain, sought a United States senatorship at Wisconsin, and became a major general in the Civil War—closely allied to that great president of blessed memory, Abraham Lincoln.” Oberwager urged the jurors to remember that “the mere place of birth, the mere speaking of a language, or the reading of foreign newspapers is not in itself an indication of one being any less loyal as an American citizen.” He sarcastically characterized Sebold as “the holy individual, the innocent man.”

  On December 10, Harold Kennedy began the prosecution’s summation. He defended his star witness as a patriot who, after he was pressured into the service of the Nazi state, refused to commit a single act on its behalf. “Sebold said, ‘They are getting me to do a dirty thing and I am going to get out of this country as quickly as I can, and when I get out, I am going to divulge it to the authorities.’ . . . Now, isn’t that the conduct of an honest man who is invited to stick a dagger in the back of his adopted country?” Kennedy pointed out that Sebold’s experience in Germany closely mirrored the (made-up) tale Lang had told about how he was harassed by Nazi agents in Hamburg and Berlin. “Now isn’t that so?” Kennedy said. “The only difference is this: that Sebold would not go along, and I will prove to you that Lang did. That is the difference.”

  Kennedy continued addressing the jury during the following day, December 11, as it was becoming known that Adolf Hitler had joined with his Japanese ally and declared war on the United States. Mussolini immediately followed the Führer’s lead. At just after noon, President Roosevelt sent a written message to Congress seeking two additional declarations of war. Both were passed with no dissenting votes and signed by his hand at a few minutes after 3:00 p.m. “Generally, it seemed, Yorkville will remain loyal to the United States,” wrote one of the reporters assigned to gauge the mood in the country’s most famous German enclave. “Here and there on the street, men and women were outspoken on this point. In other places the men were silent and looked sullen.” Employees at the two movie houses along Eighty-Sixth Street told the press that German-language films would no longer be shown. “Why do they stop the pictures?” a middle-aged woman wanted to know. “Let them take the Nazis, but not the pictures.” The Post took a photograph of the new message on the marquee of the Garden Theater: CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS. By this point, the FBI had seized 1,002 Reich citizens throughout the country.

  “Just think of the effect,” Kennedy told jurors of the possibility of acquittals. “Just think of the joy in Yorkville at what they can get away with on American jurors. You know, we haven’t got them all. We will, I think. We will get many of them. But just think of the rest of them sitting around, using the tactics that these people have used, and excused their conduct as these people have attempted to excuse it.”

  Judge Byers began his charge to the jury at 10:30 a.m. on the next day, December 12. He pointed out that a man “is entitled to believe that the German race is a superior race and that the world was created in order that the Germans might dominate it . . . so long as he does nothing to carry those views into effect, to the detriment of the United States of America.” Noting that twelve of the fourteen defendants were naturalized Americans, he remarked on the “sanctity of the citizenship oath, which requires t
hat an alien forswear ‘absolutely and forever’ allegiances to all governments but that of the United States.” The newly sworn American “does not agree that he will conduct himself as a hybrid citizen of two countries or more, nor does he, on taking the oath, agree to aid the country of his birth in its conduct of a war against another country while he poses as an American citizen.” Judge Byers seemed to foreclose the last possibility of acquittal when he informed the jurors that “the safety of Great Britain became a matter of the national defense of the United States” when the president signed the Lend-Lease bill into law on March 11, 1941, which meant the defendants couldn’t find succor in the claim that they were merely out to hurt the Brits.

  The jury was given the case at 1:00 p.m. After a lunch break, deliberations began at 2:30 p.m., lasting for four hours until dinner. Resuming at 8:20 p.m., the jury reached a decision at just before midnight. The Times recorded that Hermann Lang’s wife, Betty, was the only close relative of the accused in attendance. The verdict was never in doubt. They were all guilty. The United States had achieved its first success as a wartime power.

  And Bill Sebold had already disappeared.

  EPILOGUE

  Yes, such are their laws; the man who fights, and kills, and plunders, is honored; but he who served his country as a spy, no matter how faithfully, no matter how honestly, lives to be reviled, or dies like the vilest criminal.

  —James Fenimore Cooper from The Spy (1821)

  He’d always loved the town he called Frisco.

  By the middle of November, with the trial entering its final weeks, Sebold was preparing to become the first participant in an early version of the witness protection program. With Hoover’s approval, Ellsworth was assigned to pack up the Sebolds’ belongings and escort them to a new life on the West Coast.

  But first they had to travel to Washington to complete necessary paperwork for the move. On November 21, Ellsworth, another agent, and Bill and Helen were four of six passengers on an American Airlines flight from Newark to the just-opened National Airport. “That airport is a dream and beyond my powers of description,” wrote Ellsworth in a letter to his wife and parents. “We took a cab into town and drove to the Dodge Hotel up near the Union Station and next to the Capitol grounds.” After settling into connecting rooms on the third floor, the group walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Bureau offices. “Bill and Helen were all eyes at the immense government buildings all along the way.” During a tour of the FBI facilities, Sebold was allowed the use of a Thompson submachine gun in the basement shooting range. “He was shaking all over with excitement when he had fired twenty shots,” Ellsworth wrote. “Then in the gym I put him on an electric horse and shook the stuffings out of him, then put him on an electric bicycle which runs your legs and at the same time sways your body back and forth at the waist. He was worn out after that.”

  They devoted the following day, a Saturday, to sightseeing. “Bill was entranced with the quietness, the calmness of people while eating, the leisure of the waitresses, the clear air, the lack of elevated, street car, taxi, noises, etc., and started one of his health and good living lectures,” Ellsworth wrote. They visited the new Supreme Court building and the US Capitol. “Congress was not in session but we enjoyed it all the same. Bill said he was beginning to understand America a little now. The history and art surprised him.” Then they drove out to George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon. “Here was Bill’s outstanding item of the trip,” Ellsworth wrote. “He admired the simple mansion, the outhouse organization, that is a building for the kitchen, one for the spinning, one for the tools, one for the smoke house, the green house, the laundry, etc., each with its living quarters for the slaves doing the work there. We spent much time there and Bill said that was the kind of a life he wanted—a little kingdom not dependent on anyone for its existence.”

  After another day as tourists, they checked out of their hotel, returned to the airport, and took an 8:00 p.m. flight to La Guardia. The following week was full of downtime that allowed Ellsworth to spend two days escorting Life magazine photographer Ralph Morse to the principal locations of the story for the celebratory post-trial article. On Saturday, November 29, Ellsworth met with Harold Kennedy in Brooklyn. “He said he is through with Sebold and me so we can leave any time,” he wrote. “I feel like a kid all of a sudden.” On December 3, Ellsworth and the Sebolds boarded a train at Penn Station for a four-day journey to San Francisco. They arrived at 8:25 a.m. on December 7. “Bill is blooming like a flower with his freedom and lack of hiding attitude,” Ellsworth wrote.

  In the afternoon, they learned that the world had changed. “Went to FBI office at 1 p.m. for a car and found [Special Agent in Charge Nat] Pieper and all agents on duty,” he wrote. “Japanese planes have just bombed our bases at Hawaii and at Philippine Islands and have sunk two battleships.” Agents were being dispatched to seize Japanese enemy aliens. “Newspapers are screaming WAR. Radios are almost exclusively war talk. We seem to be suddenly a united people—Senator Wheeler has even declared we should now go to war in earnest.

  “I step off the train expecting to be in a land of quiet rest and anticipate a vacation with my family and a couple of hours later we are at war.”

  On December 9, Ellsworth, his wife, Nell, and the Sebolds enjoyed a last meal together at a Chinatown nightclub with a floor show. On the next day, the two men parted. “Hard to realize I am leaving a man I have lived and worked with for nearly two years,” Ellsworth wrote. “This seems to be about the final chapter in another phase of my life.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  On January 3, 1942, Judge Byers sentenced the thirty-three convicted spies before a courtroom crowded with their friends and relatives. “On account of the war I expect the judge to be harsh,” Duquesne had written to a friend. “I am innocent and that is what is driving me mad. I cannot believe it all and yet I am here.” Duquesne and Lang were each given eighteen years on the Espionage Act count and two years on the Foreign Agents Registration Act count, with the terms to be served concurrently. “He of all men knew the value of the Norden bombsight,” the judge said of Lang. “He of all men knew to what use it might be put by the ‘chivalrous’ powers of the Axis in waging their war against civilization.” Roeder got sixteen years on the Espionage Act violation; Stein received ten years for espionage and two on FARA. Franz “the baker” Stigler got sixteen and two; Paul “Fink” Fehse, fifteen and two; Leo Waalen, twelve and two; Erwin “the butcher” Siegler, ten and two; and Erich “the waiter” Strunck, ten and two. Of the less severe punishments, the DAB lecturer George Schuh, the bookstore clerk Max Blank, and the Little Casino owner Richard Eichenlaub each received eighteen months in prison and a $1,000 fine. “It was remarked by some of the court attachés who have followed the course of the long trial that the trip of the defendants across the Federal Building corridors last night did not reveal the jauntiness and confidence that marked their conduct throughout the trial,” wrote one reporter.

  With the assistance of the Bureau, the Sebolds moved into a small house in Walnut Creek, California, a short ride from San Francisco. “I am a mechanic in a tank shop,” he wrote to Ellsworth on March 25, 1942. “I had my wish and I like it very much.” Like many in wartime America, Sebold heeded the government’s call to reduce pressure on food supplies. “I have everything planned and spaded for the Victory Garden,” he wrote. “We planted all kinds of vegetables and also sweet corn. The trees are in bloom now. You should see the place. I feel like a sauerkraut baron. I have two dogs—a black pinscher and big Alaskan husky, a real dog. I did a lot of remodeling on my garage, the chicken house, and the house.” He added, “When this emergency is over, I want to go into the ranching business.”

  For the rest of the war, German, Japanese, and Italian nationals (along with a few Hungarians and Romanians) were rounded up by the FBI on suspicion of retaining loyalty to the Axis regimes of their native lands. They were brought without the right of legal representation before an Alien Enemy Co
ntrol Unit hearing board, which was established by the Justice Department to sift evidence (often hearsay from spiteful neighbors or business rivals) and determine whether the arrestee posed enough of a threat to be interned. Five such boards were established in Manhattan. Active members of the Bund and the DAB, both of which shuttered operations upon the American declaration of war, were automatically eligible for confinement. “33 Aliens Seized in Yorkville Raids,” reported the Times in a story from March 5, 1942. Confiscated were “many cameras and short wave–equipped radios, one fine photographic enlarger, a modern, compact radio transmitting and receiving apparatus, sixteen rifles, five pistols, a blackjack, a vicious trench knife, a Sperry ‘marching compass,’ and chemicals capable of being compounded into explosives.” The Bureau’s sweeps increased in frequency following the capture of eight Nazi saboteurs who landed in two U-boats in Florida and Long Island in June 1942, a farcical mission that was made necessary by the convictions of so many potential bomb-planters in the Sebold case. During the month of July alone, 350 alleged Nazi supporters of Reich citizenship were arrested in the New York area.

  In Los Angeles, Jim Ellsworth received a request from J. Edgar Hoover “to call on Bill Sebold at once and warn him to be very cautious as his life might be in danger as revealed to the Bureau by one of the eight saboteurs.” Ellsworth took the train to San Francisco, caught a cab, and rode out to Walnut Creek, where he spotted Sebold walking on the street. “Went home with him to his little country place and Helen and had a big German supper, talked about the spy case and old times and I got acquainted with his ferocious watchdog,” Ellsworth wrote in his diary. “I spent two days and nights with them and thoroughly enjoyed myself. They are being cautious and I hope no harm ever comes to them.” After trial by military commission, six of the saboteurs were electrocuted in the District of Columbia jail on August 8, 1942. The two others were spared because of the cooperation they provided to the FBI. One of them, George Dasch, later wrote a memoir that detailed how he was given a file on Sebold during his training period in Germany. “What do you think of that son of a bitch?” the Abwehr organizer asked. “I tell you, there is no stone big enough for him to hide under. We will get him.”