by Duffy, Peter
Sebold made a “nationalistic impression”: “Jürgen Thorwald: Die unsichtbare Front. Das Tagebuch von OKW/Abwehr enthüllt den Einsatz des deutschen Geheimdienstes,” Stern, March 15, 1953. Thorwald was assisted in his reporting by Stern reporter Günter Peis.
Hitler was reviewing his triumphant: Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 23.
Klieforth offered his version in: William Sebold, 10/26/39, Confidential File 862.20211/2249, Surveillance of William Sebold by Agents of the German Government, and William Sebold, 11/6/39, File 340.1115/8207, Welfare and Whereabouts of American Citizen in Europe, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.
“These wars in Europe are”: Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 259.
“will not evaporate into thin”: Quotations from La Follette’s speech, Daily Worker, October 13, 1939.
“driving Judaism out of government”: “Guardsmen Accuse Capt. Prout in Plot,” New York Times, May 7, 1940.
more than two hundred of: Nathan Miller, War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II (New York: Scribner, 1995), 534.
FDR was so fearful of: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 203.
The US Navy was mostly: Robert W. Love Jr., History of the U.S. Navy (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1992), 1:616.
Of the Air Corps’ more: Bernard C. Nalty, general ed., Winged Shield, Winged Sword: A History of the United States Air Force (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997), 1:162.
A bare fourteen of the: Thomas H. Greer, The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm, 1917–1941 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, US Air Force, 1985), 101.
“only makes foreign agents try”: Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange, 45.
pledging to continue cultivating the: Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 333.
“Every time a Pole appeared”: Nicholas Jenkins, “Goodbye, 1939,” New Yorker, April 1, 1996.
On the next morning, Sebold: James C. Ellsworth diary.
CHAPTER EIGHT: “YOU ARE HARRY SAWYER”
Sebold was escorted unnoticed past: From an interview with former special agent William G. Friedemann conducted by author Art Ronnie, November 29, 1974. Special thanks to Mr. Ronnie for providing a copy of the interview notes. The principal sources for the narrative of the investigation are the Duquesne case FBI file and the trial transcript.
Newkirk, in his unpublished memoirs: Agent Newkirk’s unpublished memoir was provided to the author courtesy of the Newkirk family.
after once drinking from: From a privately published booklet entitled “Memories of Jim and Nell Ellsworth,” 17.
dinner guests of the Vetterlis: “That night Nell and I were dinner guests of the Vetterlis in their apartment and Reed of course was still very upset,” Jim Ellsworth wrote in a postretirement journal. “During the evening he took me aside and said, ‘Jim, I have been in 3 shooting scrapes now and have had men knocked down all around me but I have never been touched. I attribute this to the fact that I always wear my garments. You would never catch me day or night without my garments on. I have every faith in their protective power.’ ” Vetterli was referring to a type of underwear worn by Mormons.
“alert, intelligent, well-acquainted with”: James C. Ellsworth FBI file.
his diary of the case: The diary was provided to the author courtesy of the Ellsworth family.
“He at this time feels”: Sebold personal FBI file.
“he would not go through”: Ibid.
both of her late parents: Stein family genealogy provided to the author by a distant relation of Ms. Stein’s, Alice Ra’anan.
“official Washington’s first fascist family”: “Official Washington’s First Fascist Family,” Friday magazine, March 21, 1941.
in a memo he sent: J. E. Hoover memo to Brigadier General Watson, OF 10-b, Justice Department, FBI Reports, 1939–40, 34, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.
workforce that had doubled in: Sperry Gyroscope Company Papers, Series II, Box 35, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.
Time magazine in article upon: “Profits and Secrets,” Time, September 4, 1939.
he later wrote from prison: Copies of Everett Roeder’s prison writings were provided to the author courtesy of the Roeder family.
CHAPTER NINE: A VILE RACE OF QUISLINGS
“Knox brought up the question”: Henry L. Stimson Diaries, vols. 29–34, 1939–41, Reel 6, entry for July 16, 1940, 14–15, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.
“No one outside the FBI”: Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 212.
The New Republic wondered if: Francis MacDonnell, Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2004), 172.
“what appears definitely to be”: Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2000), 357.
$2.2 billion for the year: Laurence S. Seidman, Automatic Fiscal Policies to Combat Recessions (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 212.
“authorize the necessary investigative agencies”: Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI, 87–88.
“to have more guts”: Organization—German American Bund, Fiorello La Guardia Papers, Municipal Archives of New York City, Roll 0150.
“so unbelievable as to be”: Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3.
wrote Richard L. Millen, a: Agent Millen’s essay on the establishment of the radio station was provided to the author courtesy of Mr. Millen’s son, Jim.
“the same old song and”: Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001), 52.
“the article mentioned might fall”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, F.D.R.: His Personal Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947–50), 2:1036–37.
“Without making any specific admission”: J. E. Hoover memo to Brigadier General Watson, OF 10-b, Justice Department, FBI Reports, 1939–40, 153, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.
“is not adapted for high”: Sperry Gyroscope Company Papers, Series III, Box 32, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.
“Knox brought up the question”: Stimson Diaries, previously cited.
the revelation that he had handed: Tizard Diary, August 25, 1940, entry, Papers of Sir Henry Tizard, Imperial War Museum, London. “The President was very nice, a most attractive personality,” wrote Sir Henry. “He said he was going to get his draft bill for conscription through Congress but it would probably lose him the election in November. However that ‘didn’t matter.’ He talked generalities, except that he explained that the withholding of the Nordem ?? [sic] bombsight was largely political and that if he could get any evidence that the Germans had it, or something like it, he would release it to us.”
that Churchill approved a plan: Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange, 70, 82.
the resonant cavity magnetron tube: Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 182.
CHAPTER TEN: AND YOU BE CAREFUL
“has undercover agents actually participating”: McJimsey, Documentary History of Roosevelt Presidency, 32:112–20.
“What do you fellows suggest?”: Friedemann quote from Art Ronnie interview, November 29, 1974.
The months-long bombardment campaign: Irving, Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, 106–7; and Richard Overy, The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 95.
“This is nasty business,” Berle: Odgen Hammond folder, Box 57, Adolf Berle Papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.
Hans Ritter, the
affable younger: Hans Ritter would flee the United States before the FBI had gathered enough evidence to hold him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ROOM 627
via this method totaling $16,500: All told, Sebold received some $22,000 from Ast Hamburg.
The first visitor was the: It was the first of eighty-one meetings hosted by Sebold in Room 627. Batvinis, Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, 249.
His gang included: Among the German-born aircraft technicians that Carl Reuper sought to recruit was Walter Nipkin, who promptly informed the FBI and became the second double agent in the case (and in the history of the Bureau). As it happens, Nipkin was a native of Mülheim, Germany. Asked at the trial if he had met Sebold, he said he had. They had played together as children but hadn’t seen each other since.
He neglected to mention that: Batvinis, Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, 207–25.
Fed up with Ast Hamburg’s: Saul Kelly, The Lost Oasis: The Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura—The True Story Behind The English Patient (Boulder, CO: Westview Books, 2002), 160–74.
in America and Great Britain: Of his spies in Great Britain, the record was not good. Operation Lena, Ast Hamburg’s attempt to insert agents in preparation for Sea Lion, was an unmitigated disaster. “Of the twenty-five German spies sent to Britain between September 3 and November 12, 1940, all but one was caught (the lone evader shot himself); five were executed; fifteen were imprisoned; and four became double agents, the first recruits of what would grow into a substantial army of deceivers.” Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (New York: Crown, 2012), 36.
“Our blessings from the whole”: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 476.
prevented from appearing before a: Batvinis, Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, 252–53.
at least his newest medium bombers: Corum, Luftwaffe, 269; and Horst Boog, “German Air Intelligence in the Second World War,” in Intelligence and Miltary Operations, ed. Michael Handel (London and Portland, OR: F. Cass, 1990).
“In attacking the Soviet Union”: Heinkel, Stormy Life, 200.
“The old devil sat there”: From an interview with former special agent Richard L. Johnson conducted by Art Ronnie, November 25, 1974.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE TRUSTED MAN
“of the biggest spy ring”: Published in the Daily Mirror on July 12, 1941.
Thomsen, wrote a blistering telegram: Documents on German Foreign Policy, series D, 8:98–99.
a five-page response stamped: Document #270473-77, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin.
Lang had played a pivotal: In his memoir, Ernst Heinkel writes that the problem of German horizontal bombers’ hitting “the target with any degree of accuracy” was “solved only in 1938–39 when a German fitter who worked for the Norden factory in New York betrayed the secret of the bombsight to the Luftwaffe.” Heinkel, Stormy Life, 162
On May 9, 1945, the day after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, US occupation forces interviewed Herbert Kortum, the chief bombsight engineer for the Carl Zeiss company, which provided precision instruments for the Luftwaffe. “He answered the questions put to him but actually volunteered very little information of his own accord,” wrote a Captain James Harris. Kortum, an ideological Nazi who was a member of the SS for a time, denied any knowledge of a German effort to duplicate the Norden bombsight. Headquarters Air Technical Service Command in Europe, Director of Technical Services, APO 633, report of visit to the Carl Zeiss Factory at Jena, Germany, May 9, 1945, submitted by Captain James Harris to the Director of Intelligence, Headquarters USSTAF; Dolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 134.
“The Greer continued tracking the”: Donald E. Schmidt, The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898–2005 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2005), 174.
“were just suckers for a”: Ronnie, Counterfeit Hero, 308.
“one man in the USA”: Statement by General Major Lahousen, 109/51, Record Group 226, National Archives, College Park, MD.
“Necessity for Safeguarding Security”: General Records of the Department of the Navy, Secretary of the Navy/CNO Formerly Classified Correspondence, Box 254, Record Group 80, National Archives, College Park, MD.
Agent Johnson said the FBI: From an interview with former special agent Richard L. Johnson conducted by Art Ronnie, November 25, 1974.
“I don’t care much about”: Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (London; Boulder, CO; and Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 32.
EPILOGUE
“On account of the war”: Ronnie, Counterfeit Hero, 308.
Alien Enemy Control Unit hearing: Krammer, Undue Process, 31–37.
In total, 10,905 ethnic Germans: Ibid., 34.
“Now, Fritz Schroeder was not”: Case File 2017C: U.S. v. Fritz Schroeder, et. al., Criminal Case Files, US District Court for the District of New Jersey, Newark Term, Record Group 21, National Archives at New York City.
Although the FBI uncovered: See David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
“our Axis undercover enemies have”: MacDonnell, Insidious Foes, 182.
“have been associated with any”: Charles McClain, ed., The Mass Internment of Japanese Americans and the Quest for Legal Redress (New York: Garland, 1994), 39.
After working at the US Army’s: Sebold personal FBI file.
Stories spread that the bombsight’s: Albert L. Pardini, The Legendary Secret Norden Bombsight (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1999), 274–79.
The recommended method was with: McFarland, America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 155.
Collier’s magazine ran: Stephen Budiansky, Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II (New York: Viking, 2004), 286.
“We should never allow the”: McFarland, America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 168.
“the basic American principle of”: Ibid., 184.
“It would have destroyed him”: Ibid., 209.
the likes of Klaus Fuchs: John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 333.
“framed up by a dirty”: Ronnie, Counterfeit Hero, 313.
“the tragedy and suffering which”: Ibid., 316.
“I would certainly like to”: Ibid., 320, 325.
“the irresponsibility and untrustworthiness” of: Folder 16, Box 423, William Langer Papers, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota.
of Germany’s popular newsweekly Stern: One of the reporters on the Stern piece was Günter Peis, who published a chapter about the Sebold case in Hitler’s Spies and Saboteurs: Based on the German Secret Service War Diary of General Lahousen (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 19–41. The book was cowritten with Charles Wighton. The authors claim that Canaris and Lahousen were summoned to Hitler’s side following the announcement of the arrests in the Duquesne case. “There was the usual preliminary shouting and weeping,” they write. “Then Hitler, working up to the climax of his rage, demanded to know how Canaris ‘explained this treachery of a German-American.’ ”
“How is it possible, Herr Admiral?” screamed Hitler, the authors claimed. “How could it occur? I demand an explanation.”
Sebold was appalled: The Bureau quotations for the remainder of this chapter come from Sebold personal FBI file.
PHOTO CREDITS
The Director: FBI
The Ideologue: Brooklyn Public Library—Brooklyn Collection
Hitler’s Spymaster: Katharine R. Wallace
The Grifter: FBI
The Glory Hound: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., All Rights Reserved
The Capital of German America: Associated Press
The Pioneer: Diana Schuman
n
The Bundesführer: Associated Press
The Double Agent: Shirley Camerer; Sebold’s Declaration of Intention: National Archives
The Handler: Ellsworth family
The Radio Station: Jim Millen; Special Agent Richard Millen: Jim Millen
The Femme Fatale: FBI
The Man Who Killed Kitchener: FBI
The Coup de Grâce: All four photos FBI
The Ring: FBI
Bill and Helen Sebold: Shirley Camerer
INDEX
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 18
Abwehrstelle (Ast) Hamburg office, 13, 15, 21, 22, 37, 39, 44, 96, 100, 102, 132, 136, 138, 150, 161, 174, 175, 177, 179, 188, 189, 191, 192, 196, 201, 204, 205, 210, 231, 311n, 318n, 319n
Ahrens, Adolf, 116
Airplane and Marine Division Finder Company, 101
Air Terminals Co., 96, 153, 155, 156
Albania, 107
Alien Enemies Act, 245
Alien Enemy Control Unit, 255, 258
Alien Registration Act, 170, 256
All This, and Heaven Too (Field), 135, 176, 233
Almanac Singers, 203, 242
Almásy, László, 204
America First Committee, 184, 207, 235, 240
American League for Peace and Democracy, 17, 129
American Protective League, 122
Amerikadeutscher Volksbund (AV). See German American Bund
Anglo-Chilean Consolidated Nitrate Co., 63
anti-Semitism, 35, 50, 81, 91, 128, 129, 151, 155–56, 235, 288n, 304n
Appel, Charles, 239
Arnold, Henry “Hap,” 82–83, 182
Associated Press (AP), 32, 84, 132, 213, 238, 241, 292n
Association of the Friends of the New Germany, 287n, 289n, 291–93n, 304n, 306n, 307n
Ast (Abwehrstelle) Hamburg office, 13, 15, 21, 22, 37, 39, 44, 96, 100, 102, 132, 136, 138, 150, 161, 174, 175, 177, 179, 188, 189, 191, 192, 196, 201, 204, 205, 210, 231, 311n, 318n, 319n
Astor, Vincent, 180
Athenia (ship), 120–21
Auden, W. H., 132
Austria
Hitler’s annexation (Anschluss) of, 43, 46, 50, 151
