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

by Duffy, Peter

  In total, 10,905 ethnic Germans were incarcerated in seven internment camps in five states during the war. Among them were a handful of the lesser spies from the Duquesne ring who, stripped of their US citizenship, needed somewhere to go following the completion of their terms. After fifteen months in the federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, Heinz Stade, the cellist in the Little Casino cabal who claimed to have knowledge of the (still-unsolved) World’s Fair bombing, was transferred to the facility in Crystal City, Texas. He became a music instructor there.

  The government also initiated several high-profile prosecutions of prominent Nazi agitators of American citizenship who, it was charged, maintained the movement under the guise of German singing societies and sports clubs. Dozens of top officials of the Bund and the DAB were charged with violations of the FARA, the Selective Service Act, or the Alien Registration Act. In late 1942, twenty-nine Bundists were targeted for conspiracy to counsel resistance to the draft. The following year, twenty-seven DABers were accused of acting as American representatives of the German Labor Front, the Nazi workers’ organization. Prosecutors had little trouble in gaining convictions until the so-called Great Sedition Trial of 1944, which attempted to show that American rightists had joined with German Bundists in a Hitler-directed conspiracy “to interfere with, impair, and influence the loyalty, morale, and discipline” of the US armed forces and “to cause insubordination, mutiny, and refusal of duty.” The trial dragged on for months until the presiding judge died of a heart attack and a mistrial was ordered. In 1946, a federal appeals judge dismissed the charges, saying a new trial would be a “travesty of justice.”

  In October 1943, when the federal prosecutor in Newark brought espionage charges against seven leaders of the DAB, he gave due credit to “Harry Sebold” for laying the groundwork. “For more than a year, the FBI knew of every move made by the enemy agents,” said US Attorney Thorn Lord during a press conference. “As a result of this knowledge, the activities of most of the defendants named in yesterday’s indictment came to the fore.” The most prominent of the convicted was the national director of the DAB, a malign figure named Fritz Schroeder, who was described as a close friend of Hermann Lang’s. “Now, Fritz Schroeder was not in the Duquesne case, was he?” a defense attorney asked an FBI agent during the trial. “He was under investigation at that time,” the agent responded. Although the FBI uncovered a handful of Nazi spies operating under Reich direction in the United States during the war, the Sebold investigation “placed a decisive check on German espionage operations, from which it has found it difficult to recover,” wrote the Times in February 1945. As early as October 1944, Hoover was boasting on CBS radio that “our Axis undercover enemies have been met and completely defeated.”

  German Americans were not subject to the virulent anti-Hun prejudice that infected America during World War I. Instead, the Japanese suffered from the taint of collective guilt. Without the slightest evidence that they constituted a fifth column, 120,000 Japanese residents living on the Pacific Coast (78,000 of them US citizens) were forcibly evacuated to “planned communities” under War Department supervision in an initiative that existed outside of the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit. Hoover voiced his opposition, believing that the problem of treacherous foreign agents should be handled case by case. He told Attorney General Biddle there was no evidence that Japanese Americans “have been associated with any espionage activity ashore or that there has been any illicit shore-to-ship signaling, either by radio or lights.” In 1988, the Congress issued a formal apology for actions that “were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

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  After working at the US Army’s Benicia Arsenal from March to September 1942, Sebold received a two-month leave of absence for educational training that was extended when he ran into health problems. He told Agent E. F. McCarthy of the San Francisco FBI office that pills prescribed to treat a thyroid problem had revived an old shoulder injury. “It might be stated also that Sebold was found to be in a rather nervous condition and it was determined by Agent McCarthy that Sebold is worried because he has not been able to go to drafting school or engineering school as he had planned and he still is on leave from the Benicia Arsenal without pay,” according to a report of November 10, 1942. “Sebold was advised by Agent McCarthy that he should cease worrying and that he should do everything possible to get himself into the proper frame of mind.” He didn’t go back to his job after his health improved because a copy of Reader’s Digest with an article that mentioned his name was being passed around the workplace. “The Bureau is of the opinion that in view of Sebold’s hesitancy to return to his employment at the Benicia Arsenal in view of the fact that several employees know of his true identity, he should not be required to return to that plant,” Hoover declared. On May 4, 1943, Sebold joined the staff of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. He spent the remainder of World War II as a gauge repairman in the instrument department.

  Unknown to his coworkers, he was the pseudonymous star of an FBI promotional newsreel about the case that was screened as a morale booster before spy movies across the country. “These pictures were taken at a busy New York street corner,” Hoover intoned over grainy black-and-white footage of Forty-Second Street and Broadway. “The man walking up and down the street is ‘Harry Sawyer,’ a naturalized German American citizen. Sawyer visited Germany in 1939, where he was approached by the Gestapo, who urged him to return to the United States as a spy. Before leaving Germany, he sent word to us. A spy trap was set. Sawyer was working for the FBI.” The bulk of the short feature was devoted to replaying portions of the Room 627 films that had so thrilled Judge Byers’s courtroom. Special attention was paid to Fritz Duquesne’s flamboyant visit. “He is describing to Sawyer the gas-operating principles of the M1 rifle,” Hoover said over shots of the gesticulating colonel, “a secret that might’ve made a difference in the lives of a lot of Americans if it had reached Germany at that time.” In light of the war in the Pacific, screen time is given to the Japanese agent Takeo Ezima, who made a single stop at the office and wasn’t mentioned in the indictment or the trial. “All of these pictures you must remember were taken before Pearl Harbor,” Hoover informs theatergoers. “But to the enemy the fighting in Asia and the fighting in France were already different fronts in a single war.”

  Omitted was any mention of Hermann Lang and the Norden bombsight, which was glorified in the early years of the war as our greatest advantage over the enemy. Hollywood played a leading role in the veneration. In Joe Smith, American (1942), Robert Young plays an employee of an armament factory who is assigned to work on “the only secret weapon in the world that this country has that no other country can get,” as one character describes it. He is promptly kidnapped and tortured by Nazi agents (“You will either draw that bombsight installation for us or we will kill you”) but escapes and contacts the FBI, which earns him a comparison with Nathan Hale. “Hero?” he responds. “Baloney. Nobody’s a hero in this country. All of us guys are the same. We’ve got homes, and wives, and kids. . . . And we don’t like people who push us around.” Bombardier (1943), starring Pat O’Brien and Randolph Scott, hammered home the idea that a B-17 Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator equipped with the masterpiece could deposit a bomb in a pickle barrel from twenty thousand feet. “Through this secret bombsight the world’s best bombardiers are aiming at Tokyo, Berlin, and all the Axis nerve-centers,” shouted the film’s trailer. “This is the story behind their deadly accuracy.”

  Stories spread that the bombsight’s (etched-glass) crosshairs were made with either black-widow spiderwebs or the delicate blond hair of one Mary Babnick of Pueblo, Colorado. Photographs were published of armed guards carrying a canvas case containing what airmen called the Blue Ox, or the football, along the tarmac to the waiting planes. “It is never left unguarded for a moment,” wrote John Steinbeck in his 1942 book about a bombe
r team, Bombs Away. “On the ground it is kept in a safe and under constant guard. It is taken out of its safe only by a bombardier on mission and he never leaves it. He is responsible not only for its safety but for its secrecy. And finally, should his ship be shot down, he has been instructed how quickly and effectively to destroy it.” The recommended method was with two rounds from a .45-caliber service pistol into the rate-end mechanism and another round through the telescope. Some trainees were required to recite the so-called bombardier’s oath, pledging to “keep inviolate the secrecy of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and in full knowledge that I am a guardian of one of my country’s most priceless military assets, do further swear to protect the secrecy of the American bombsight, if need be, with my life itself.”

  “The more I found out about the bombsight,” one of them told the New Yorker magazine, “the more ingenious and inhuman it seemed. It was something bigger, I kept thinking, than any one man was intended to comprehend. I ended up with a conviction, which I still have, that a bombardier can’t help feeling inferior to his bombsight.”

  The United States went to war believing that its four-engine heavy bombers, equipped with the world’s best bombsights (the Norden chiefly and the Sperry secondarily), could achieve victory by dropping relatively few bombs on a small number of high-value targets, a futuristic aerial assault conducted during daytime hours that would strike with pinpoint accuracy. Collier’s magazine ran a cartoon of a bombardier turning to his pilot and asking, “Was that address 106 Leipzigerstrasse, or 107?” The American conception of “strategic” bombing (as opposed to the “tactical” support of ground forces) called for the exclusive targeting of “vital centers” or “choke points,” which would sap the will of the enemy not by the incineration of its citizens but by the disabling of inanimate structures such as power stations and armament factories.

  Which, of course, is not how the Allies emerged victorious. By the time the US Army Air Corps (renamed the US Army Air Forces) arrived in Europe, the RAF had determined that the best way to hasten the defeat of Germany was to pummel its cities under the cover of darkness. According to a British directive of February 14, 1942, the “area” (or terror) bombing of Germany “was focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers.” The Allied plan was for the RAF to maintain its “city-busting” or “dehousing” assaults during the evenings while the USAAF conducted precision strikes against select targets during the day. “We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man on the street,” said Brigadier General Ira Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force. Let the Brits do the dirty work. US warplanes would spare average Germans.

  But USAAF leaders quickly learned that theories formulated at the Air Corps Tactical School couldn’t survive first contact with the enemy. The great bombers weren’t able to soar above the Messerschmitt fighters and antiaircraft flak and penetrate without hindrance into German airspace, a problem that wasn’t rectified until the introduction of long-range fighters such as the P-51 Mustang in January 1944 and the subsequent achievement of air superiority by the time of D-day in June 1944. (The frightful casualty rates for bomber crews proved that the loftiest modern aircraft weren’t protected from the horrors of warfare.) Even if the planes remained unharried long enough for the bombsights to lock into the targets, bombardiers often couldn’t see through the smoke, dust, and/or clouds, forcing the USAAF to order “blind bombing” or “overcast bombing technique,” which guaranteed off-target strikes against civilians. The fatal flaw of the Norden bombsight was that it was a line-of-sight aiming instrument. “I could see bombs bursting ten miles behind American lines,” said newsman Hughes Rudd of poor-visibility missions at the Battle of Monte Cassino during the Italian campaign. “They were dropping all over the fucking landscape. Maybe it was true that they could hit a pickle barrel with that Norden bombsight, but there were no pickle barrels in the Liri Valley that day.”

  By early 1945, the USAAF was continuing its attempts against the industrial and transportation hubs of Germany while also countenancing attacks on cities and towns in an attempt to demoralize the populace. Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle called the recourse to terror bombing a violation of “the basic American principle of precision bombing of targets of strictly military significance for which our tactics were designed and our crews trained and indoctrinated.” Although historians have long debated how essential the British-American air campaign was to Nazi Germany’s defeat, which was only achieved with the arrival of ground forces in Berlin, the material fact is that Allied raids struck more than a hundred towns and cities, destroyed 3.5 million homes, and killed 600,000 civilians. The industrial Ruhr Valley, the home region of Bill Sebold, was targeted mercilessly.

  On May 13, five days after V-E Day, Sebold wrote a note to Ellsworth that seemed to commemorate the end of hostilities in the European theater. “Today is Sunday morning. I am all by myself and Helen is still snoring. And feel like writing to you.” Sebold said he was no longer working at the naval shipyard. He’d had it with the long commute and “sitting in one place all day.” Instead, he had “remodeled the place in the back” and was now in the chicken business “up to my neck.” He had joined the Poultry Producers of Central California. “I am in the egg business, too, but in a moderate way. . . . I am not making a big profit. But I am breaking even and that is a very good thing for a beginner like me.” He said he was getting “a tremendous kick out of all this and this reminds me of my father’s business and his struggles.” Helen, he said, has a “Park Avenue complex.” Every so often she “kicks like a mule and wants to go back to New York. And I cannot see anything in it. I don’t want to see the smelly place again.”

  Then he turned to the headlines. “I certainly feel better since the war is over in Germany now. I only hope my people are still there. I would like to get them over here so we could all live and work together. What do you think about fat Goering, you know old Hermann? The guy has a lot of nerve. I hope we turn him over to the Russians. Wouldn’t it be a thrill if I could see my dear ‘Uncle Hugo’ and some of his companions in this country? Well, I got my satisfaction in one way, although it is not very nice to think that way, but justice is justice.”

  Sebold signed off by acknowledging that the war wasn’t yet over. After victory in the Pacific, he promised, he’d visit the Ellsworth home in Los Angeles. “You can count on that.”

  The USAAF had even less use for the Norden bombsight during its final-stage assault on Japan. (The US Navy, with its wartime emphasis on dive-bombing, even lesser still.) After the capture of the Mariana Islands in November 1944, formations of the new B-29 Superfortress began high-altitude daylight missions against the Japanese home islands. But after four months of indifferent results, the decision was made to lay waste to Japan’s wood-constructed cities with low-altitude firebombing attacks at nighttime. On the evening of March 9, 1945, nearly three hundred B-29s dropped two thousand tons of jelled-gasoline incendiaries into the center of Tokyo, setting an inferno that killed upward of a hundred thousand people. By summer 1945, more than 150 square miles of Japanese cities had been decimated by fire without any indication that the Imperial command was ready to capitulate. With US leaders forced to contemplate the unpleasant prospect of a land invasion, the decision was made to deploy the newest wonder weapon, the one that would cause everyone to forget all about the purported glories of the Norden bombsight. On August 6, 1945, a single B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, another B-29, Bock’s Car, released a second bomb over Nagasaki. Carl Norden’s son said his father never knew that both planes discharged their cargo with assistance of the Norden bombsight, which he had spent more than two decades developing in the utopian belief that victory could be achieved without the massive loss of life. “It would have destroyed him,” his son said. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender in a
radio address, the first time his subjects had heard his voice.

  Within six weeks of V-J Day, Twentieth Century–Fox presented J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men with Hollywood’s version of a Medal of Honor. “Vigilant. Tireless. Implacable,” begins the voice-over for The House on 92nd Street, released in late September with the Bureau’s full cooperation. “The most silent service of the United States in peace or war is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau went to war with Germany long before hostilities began. No word or picture could then make public the crucial war service of the FBI. But now it can be told.” The film tells the story of William Dietrich (William Eythe), the American-born son of German parents who is studying diesel engineering at “a Midwestern university not far from Columbus, Ohio,” a white-bread version of Sebold without a hint of foreignness. Emissaries from the Nazi regime approach him during a break from his training with the track team. He immediately informs the FBI. “When the meaning of the German invitation was explained to him, Dietrich offered his services to the Bureau,” according to the voice-over.

  “Dietrich” travels to Germany, is trained (rather than merely lodged) at the Pension Klopstock and sent to New York with microfilm instructions. Under the guidance of the FBI, Dietrich meets Elsa Gebhardt (a chaste Lilly Stein with a snarl and the unlikely code name of Mr. Christopher), Colonel Hammersohn (who turns Duquesne into a slow-witted English butler), and Charles Ogden Roper (an amalgam of Everett Minster Roeder and Hermann Lang with the brainpower to play “fourteen games of chess at the same time”). Our hero is portrayed as a handsome naïf who would be lost without Bureau guidance while faceless FBI men are seen dutifully operating a gadget-filled radio station in the wilds of New Jersey and making movies from behind a two-way mirror in Dietrich’s Columbus Circle office. After a shoot-out at the titular residence in Yorkville, the spy headquarters, the Bureau and its ur–double agent succeed in preventing the Germans from stealing the US military’s greatest treasure, Process 97. As Dietrich nurses a bruised jaw suffered in the climactic battle, the narrator delivers the conclusion: “Elsa Gebhardt, alias Mr. Christopher, was no more successful than other foreign espionage agents. Process 97, the atomic bomb, America’s top war secret, remains a secret.”