Double Agent (26 page)

Waalen, a thirty-four-year-old German national who lived over a pork store on Second Avenue in Yorkville, now moved to the top position, regularly offering leads on new contacts and delivering reports on ships moving in and out of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey docks. He became “Sebold’s friend and messenger boy,” a defense attorney later sneered. Waalen’s work was of pressing consequence to the Nazi cause. In April 1941, U-boats sank 488,124 tons of Allied shipping, a 50 percent increase from the previous month. “A big British propaganda effort,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his dairy. “She is now forced to admit to 500,000 tons of shipping lost in April. The highest monthly total so far.” Ast Hamburg was eager for information, complaining that Sebold’s messages were not clear enough. They told him “only precise reports without the nonessentials are useful,” unaware that the US government was doing
something
to protect the hardy British crews that were regularly departing from the port of New York to face what Churchill called a “shapeless, measureless peril.” On April 28, Waalen brought up two items of nautical news that represented a typical haul for him. One was the arrival and departure information for eight ships. The notation for the last read “
‘Robin Moor’
(Robin) Capetown, June 2, Lourenço Marques [Mozambique], June 10, from New York, May 3.” His departure date was wrong by three days. The
Robin Moor,
a five-thousand-ton steamship under American registry with nine officers, twenty-nine crew members, eight passengers, and no war materials on board, left New York for Cape Town and Mozambique on May 6. The FBI had no intention of passing any of the details along to Germany.

While Fehse’s arrest caused concern among the spies who worked with him, none of his circle seemed distrustful of Sebold until an Irish member of the Little Casino group made a stop at the
Newsweek
building. He had been recommended by the musician Heinz Stade as one of a number of “Irish insurgents” who “would be good workers for the German cause” (and were responsible for the World’s Fair bombing, Stade claimed) and by bar owner Dick Eichenlaub as a maritime engineer who “used to turn in a lot of reports on ships which were very accurate” but lacked a means of getting the intelligence quickly across the ocean. On May 19, Sean Connolly settled into the visitor’s chair in 627 and told Sebold that he was inspired to work for the Reich because the British had hanged his father. When Connolly asked for instructions and expense money, Sebold responded that he needed approval from Hamburg before he could welcome him into the organization. In the meantime, he asked Connolly to come up with a list of potential saboteurs, providing his latest PO box address.

A few days later, Sebold called up Eichenlaub at the Little Casino and learned that a rumor was going around that Sebold had a microphone hidden in the office. Suspicions had been raised by the way he kept glancing at a desk drawer.

▪  ▪  ▪

On the evening of May 27, 65 million Americans (out of a population of 132 million) listened as President Roosevelt declared “an unlimited national emergency,” which required the “military, naval, air, and civilian defenses be put on the basis of readiness to repel any and all acts or threats of aggression directed toward any part of the Western Hemisphere.” Although he warned that U-boats were sinking merchant ships at more than three times the capacity of British shipyards to replace them, he did not announce the commencement of armed escorts. He merely said he was increasing “patrols” to alert British shipping to the presence of German warships. After the speech, Sebold visited the Little Casino, where he met with yet another conspirator, Paul Bante, a Bundist who had a cache of dynamite he was eager to deploy against the anti-Nazi congressman Samuel Dickstein and his supporters. Bante informed Sebold that the Irishman “started the rumpus” about the microphone, which led to a meeting attended by four of the spies to discuss the matter. Bante claimed he vouched for Sebold by noting his length of service to Germany and his strong relationship with the respected Paul Fehse.

On the next night, Sebold went to the bar and spoke with Stade, Eichenlaub, and Connolly, who was comfortable enough to provide the coordinates (which he wrote on the flap of an envelope) for Allied convoy routes in the North Atlantic. At the end of the discussion, Sebold brought up what he called the “microphone incident.” Connolly said that Sebold asked “too many funny questions.” Sebold countered that he “wants to know something about a man before he deals with him.” Although the three seemed satisfied with his explanation, Sebold left the Little Casino feeling that the matter wasn’t entirely resolved. He sensed that Eichenlaub, who spoke of connections to the Gestapo in Hamburg, was making an effort to report Sebold to the Nazi authorities.

On June 9, Stade and Connolly refused to meet Sebold at the Forty-Second Street office, instead asking him to come to the corner of Eighty-Sixth and Broadway on the Upper West Side, which he did. Connolly offered to hand over valuable details on convoy routes that he’d received from a Canadian who had made the crossing three or four times. The price was $200. Sebold said he would see what he could do. Later that evening, after receiving approval from Ellsworth to pay the money, Sebold met with Stade at the Little Casino. Sebold told him to send Connolly up to the office on the following day to receive payment. But the Irishman never showed.

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.”

Would you lie under oath on this witness stand?

I don’t lie.

You would not lie under any circumstance?

No, sir. I don’t lie.

—Brooklyn Federal Court, September 10, 1941

O
n 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.”