Double Agent (27 page)

Spies were pulled from ships, roused from beds, escorted out of bars. Erich Strunck (the waiter) was seized in a room in Milwaukee. Heinz Stade (the musician) was taken off the bandstand at Geide’s Inn on Route 25A in Centerport, of all places. Lilly Stein was busy with a gentleman caller, who was permitted to complete his visit before the FBI entered her apartment. “Well, I’ll say one thing, you sure got an earful,” she said after learning that her place had been bugged. Later, she propositioned one of the agents. “A real Aryan type,” said Agent Friedemann. “It was the great incident of the night.” A party was going on at Ed Roeder’s home at 210 Smith Street in Merrick to celebrate the upcoming marriage of his son when the FBI knocked on the door. Roeder “requested that nothing be done to disturb the said party and willingly signed a waiver permitting his home to be searched at a later time.”
Newsday
reported that a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition were found in his basement.

Hermann Lang and his wife were spending the weekend at Bell’s Wellington Farms Cabins, a summer gathering spot for members of the DAB located a few miles outside Coram, Long Island. “As we drove up, he came to an open window and asked who was there,” testified Agent Reuben Peterson. “I approached the window and identified myself and asked him if he would come to the door. He opened the door, and I advised him that I had a warrant for his arrest, and he was taken into custody.” Fritz Duquesne thought nothing of it when he answered the door and found Agent Newkirk standing in the hallway, believing him to be “Ray McManus,” the upstairs neighbor he had spoken to a number of times over the past year. “Knowing me, Duquesne invited me in and I told him I had some friends with me and he said bring them on in,” Newkirk wrote. “Although armed, none of us drew a gun. I informed Duquesne we were FBI agents and that he and Miss Lewis were under arrest. Two agents took Duquesne and another agent and I took Miss Lewis to FBI headquarters in separate cars for questioning. The Duke never spoke to me again.”

Thirty men and three women were arrested. They were organized into roughly four separate rings—the original I-L spies (Duquesne, Lang, Roeder, and Stein); the marine division (composed of some fifteen stewards, cooks, waiters, etc.); the Carl Reuper group (whose leader only met with Sebold once); and the Little Casino faction. Of the few suspects who operated more or less as lone wolves, the most prominent was the Detroit-based agent (“Heinrich”) who used Lilly Stein’s East Fifty-Fourth Street address as a mail drop for letters crammed with aviation data, which were intercepted by agents before they could reach Germany. Edmund Carl Heine was a former executive with Ford and Chrysler who boasted of a ten-year friendship with Henry Ford, the automotive pioneer and celebrated author of
The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem
(1920), a favorite tome of Nazi Germany. (While he was under FBI surveillance, Heine placed a phone call to Ford and asked to return to the company. “Mr. Ford told him that he could have a job in the factory, but that he believed that he was in the United States for no good and was, in fact, a spy,” wrote the Bureau.) Only one suspect eluded capture, the wily Sean Connolly. At the request of the State Department, two Japanese agents identified by the investigation were not apprehended. (Both would be out of the country by August.) Of the thirty-three, twenty-eight were born in Germany, twenty-two of whom were naturalized citizens of the United States. Of the other naturalized Americans, one was born in Latvia, another in France, and a third in South Africa (Duquesne). Two of the accused were native-born Americans: Evelyn Lewis and Ed Roeder. Just six of the spies were
not
citizens of the United States. Meanwhile, the Bureau continued to investigate an entire constellation of other individuals uncovered by Sebold’s efforts.

On Sunday evening, June 29, J. Edgar Hoover allowed his pal Walter Winchell to break the story on his popular radio program (“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships and clippers at sea,” he began in his rat-a-tat-tat style) while a press conference was held downtown to give the story to the rest of the media. Hoover described the investigation as “the greatest of its kind in the nation’s history” and “the largest since the enactment” of the Espionage Act of 1917. Perhaps in a calculated attempt to draw attention away from Hermann Lang and the sensitive matter of his theft of the Norden, he described Fritz Duquesne as the most important member of the ring. “Under his direction the group paid particular attention to aircraft and tank work,” Hoover said, even though Duquesne supervised no other operative but himself. Hoover revealed that Lilly Stein, an “artists’ model,” was the unnamed foreign agent whom press accounts had connected with the State Department’s Ogden Hammond Jr. When sought for comment, Hammond, who failed in his legal attempt to be reinstated with the government, ungallantly called her “a pathetic little creature.” Hoover said the Little Casino was the “principal” gathering spot for the spies, which sent reporters out to East Eighty-Fifth Street to detail its “bright German beer mugs and jukebox which plays German records,” wrote the
Post
. Dick Eichenlaub’s wife said, “Just friendly people come in here. I recognize the pictures of some of those arrested, but they looked so dumb. They couldn’t be spies.” Hoover mentioned nothing of the radio station, the Forty-Second Street office, or William Sebold.

It may have been the greatest moment of Hoover’s career. In the afterglow of the triumph, the powerful Capitol Hill journalist Drew Pearson, who wrote the Washington Merry-Go-Round column for United Features Syndicate, celebrated the director’s capture “of the biggest spy ring in our history” and lauded the democratic, humane, and discreet manner with which he was handling his new responsibilities as the nation’s protector from foreign intrigue. Pearson’s fantasy version of Hoover, so unrecognizable to even the most tendentious reading of the historical record, nabs malefactors without wiretaps in deference to the Supreme Court’s rulings. He believes “there must be no politics in the FBI.” He “will drop nothing because of political pressure. Nor will he investigate a Congressman, Senator or newspaperman without written orders from the Attorney General himself.” Further: “No suspect gets his reputation ruined by having his name splashed in the headlines unless Hoover has the goods on him. There are no raids on the private or political files. Hoover is tough, but respects the rules—especially fundamental liberties.” Pearson concluded, “The nation is lucky to have him on the job.”

Yet the column, which included details about the case that were clearly leaked from deep within the FBI, was an obvious part of Hoover’s campaign against his emerging rival for counterespionage supremacy. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the World War I hero and Wall Street lawyer who had been serving as a personal envoy for the president, had just been named to head the office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), which became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after it. The national-security state was in its foundational phase, with the FBI retaining the responsibility for enemy spies operating within the domestic sphere while the OSS/CIA was handed the task of combating them overseas.

The Germans were livid. The chargé d’affaires in Washington, Hans Thomsen, wrote a blistering telegram to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin on July 7: “Most, and probably all, of the persons involved in this affair were totally unqualified for operations of this kind, according to everything the Consulate General had heard about them. To give themselves importance, these people kept hinting all the time among their acquaintances that they had been given such missions and were carrying them out. It can be assumed that the American authorities had long known all about the network, which certainly would not have been any great feat, considering the naïve and sometimes downright stupid behavior of these people.” Thomsen concluded, “Such poorly organized operations by irresponsible and incompetent agents, which most likely have not benefited our conduct of the war, may cost us the last remnants of sympathy which we can still muster here in circles, whose political opposition is of interest to us.”

Thomsen’s accusation that the spy ring had done nothing for Germany was passed through the bureaucracy to Admiral Canaris, who, on July 23, signed his name over a five-page response stamped
Geheime Reichssache
(or “secret Reich matter”) that argued strenuously for the importance of several of the captured spies. Ed Roeder “delivered valuable technical material in the original, including remote-control machine-gun sight, bombsights, blind-flight instruments, Sperry’s course indicator, speech scrambler, radio equipment on Guenn-Martin [
sic
] airplanes from Russia. Most items delivered were designated as ‘valuable,’ some as ‘very valuable,’ and ‘of great importance.’ ” Since 1937, Fritz Duquesne “delivered valuable reports and important technical material in the original, including US gas masks, radio-control apparatus, leakproof fuel tanks, television instruments, small bombs for airplanes versus airplanes, air separator, and propeller-driving mechanism. Items delivered were labeled ‘valuable,’ and several ‘good’ and ‘very good.’ ”

But Hermann Lang, described as
“sehr ruhig, verschwiegen, und zuverlässig”
(very quiet, discreet, and reliable), was given the highest honors. Since 1937, he had provided intelligence that was “important and decisive in the prosecution of the war.” To support this weighty conclusion, the letter included two paragraphs submitted by Ernst Udet’s Technical Office: “As a result of delivery by the
V.-Mannes
[
Vertrauensmann,
literally “trusted man”] of technical drawings and design elements of a bombsight accompanied by insightful explanations, it was possible to reconstruct the implement,” the memo said, which confirmed that Lang did, in fact, convey blueprints to Germany. “. . . Considerable research expenses have been saved by the delivery of these items. In actual tests of the device it was revealed that the principle realized therein reacted favorably for the projected bomb drop. Accordingly, the items concerning the bombsight delivered from the USA by the Abwehr have successfully influenced the development of the German bombsight.”

His crime was thus described: Hermann W. Lang had played a pivotal role in the creation of the new Luftwaffe bombsight that was then operational over the Soviet Union.

“The success of the secret military intelligence service which is confirmed again and again by our military offices,” concluded Canaris, “sufficiently proves that the structure of the intelligence network or the selection of agents in and for USA have been necessary and correct.”

Which was written before the regime knew about the treachery of Bill Sebold.

▪  ▪  ▪

America was hovering between war and peace that summer. President Roosevelt sent four thousand troops to occupy Iceland, attempting to prevent the Nazis from gaining a stepping-stone on the way to the Western Hemisphere, but Congress barely passed an eighteen-month extension of the Selective Service Act. The count in the House of Representatives was 203–202, an indication of just how far federal legislators were from voting for a declaration of war. Roosevelt met with Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland to codify Anglo-American objectives for a postwar world after “the final destruction of Nazi tyranny,” but FDR rebuffed the British leader’s hope that the United States would immediately pick up arms and join the still-standing Soviet Union in the nascent Grand Alliance. Instead, “he would become more and more provocative,” according to Churchill’s account. “If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. Everything was to be done to force an incident.” FDR told Churchill (but not the American public) that US Navy vessels would begin escorting British merchant ships as far as Iceland on September 1, which was just the action that might instigate such an incident.

The double agent was safely ensconced in the bucolic isolation of Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island. “Sebold wanted his wife with him in hiding out until the trial started and did not want her to be the only woman around,” wrote Ellsworth. “He asked me to have my wife Nell with us. I took it up with Mr. Connelly who authorized the procedure.” One cabin in the woods was for the Sebolds, one for the Ellsworths and their two children, and a third for a team of agents. “We lived well, close to the earth, had no bath but the lake, no toilet but the old style outhouse in back with its rank odors, and cooked on a kerosene burner,” Ellsworth wrote. “But we loved it.” In later years, he would recall how removed they were from the world’s troubles: “At this location we had wild blueberries along the roadside and often would pick a bucket of berries, wash them, put them in a bowl covered with sugar and eat blueberries and cream.” They tossed horseshoes and darts, listened to Brooklyn Dodgers games on the radio (a pennant year!), played cards, and went swimming in the lake. Home movies capture Ellsworth as a Clark Kent look-alike with ramrod posture and navel-level bathing trunks while Sebold is seen (literally) standing in the shadows, smoking a cigarette and chatting with his wife and his wife’s sister, Rosie Wien.

In Brooklyn, where the case was to be tried, some of the spies began pleading guilty to the two-count indictment, which charged them with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (maximum penalty of two years) and the Espionage Act (up to twenty years). The latter outlawed the communication of “information respecting the national defense” to be “used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Lilly Stein made no attempt to deny her guilt. “I have said all that I think is important in this whole case and only ask whom it may concern that they may have some mercy with me even if I have done things which I myself should have judged as wrong,” she declared in the first of several statements to the FBI. “While she was in jail, she would often ask the warden to call us as she had some information for us,” wrote Agent Newkirk. “All she actually wanted to do was to get out of jail for a few hours to vary the monotony. When we had time we would have her brought to our office and talk to her. Also, while she was in jail she knitted several hats which she gave to various agents she liked to give to their wives.” Walter Winchell devoted an item in his newspaper column to the fears that her arrest had caused among the fashionable set. “Many New York men-about-town are quaking,” he wrote.