Double Agent (32 page)

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 bomber 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.”

In the years following the war, it would be revealed that the FBI had not prevented Communist spies from infiltrating the Manhattan Project, which developed the real-life Process 97. With secrets gathered from the likes of Klaus Fuchs, a wartime employee of the Los Alamos Laboratory who confessed to his crimes in 1950, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin was able to develop a successful atomic bomb much sooner than otherwise would have been possible.

Two months after the film opened, Sebold wrote a Christmas letter to Jim Ellsworth that mentioned nothing of the screen portrayal. “I had some spell with my shoulder again. But through the [FBI] office in San Francisco, I was recommended to some of the best doctors in S.F. The man took x-rays and found a broken right shoulder and a piece of bone that was broken off a long time ago. And surprisingly the man fixed me up and neck and shoulder pain are gone.” Sebold described his pleasure in decorating the couple’s small Christmas tree. “I get quite a kick out of doing this. That’s the second tree in Walnut Creek.” He was also full of enthusiasm for the poultry business. “The chickens are still laying and that means a lot. I improved the place some more. I bought the land which lays in back of the garage—about one acre with a lot of pine and almond trees. Now all I need is a horse to get around my place.”

At Bureau headquarters in Washington, memos were circulating about the necessity of learning the fate of Sebold’s mother, sister, and two brothers. “You will recall that just prior to the trial in this case some discussion was had as to whether William Sebold, the informant, would testify in view of the fact that to do so would in all probability endanger the position of his family still residing in Germany,” wrote assistant director D. M. Ladd. “Notwithstanding the safety of himself, he volunteered to testify and did a remarkably good job.”

In a letter to J. Edgar Hoover on December 17, 1945, Ladd delivered the FBI’s most explicit statement on Sebold’s achievement: “As you know, Sebold gave us the most outstanding case in the Bureau’s history. The ‘Ducase’ has been the basis for a terrific amount of publicity dealing with the Bureau’s success prior to and during World War II. This case opened the door to real knowledge of German espionage activities and it is impossible to describe the situation in which we might have found ourselves had not Sebold turned against the Germans in our favor. It is to be pointed out that unlike many other double agents Sebold turned against the Germans from a patriotic love for the United States and conducted himself always in absolute accord with the Bureau’s wishes. He has not sought personal notoriety and has never placed his personal wishes or fortune above the Bureau’s interests.”

Sebold’s next letter to Ellsworth, not written until the following summer, July 6, 1946, brought good news. He had independently learned that no retribution had been meted out against his family. “My mother is still alive, 74 years old. She was the only one left in the house during the war. Everyone else went to the country. She gave me quite a humorous story about it, and I had to laugh despite the drama. She went through plenty.” He said his sister Maria and brother Karl also survived. But his other brother, Hermann, and his wife were killed in an automobile accident. “They were buried on Christmas Day 1945. My Hermann was always a reckless wild boy but in a good way, a regular sportsman. I am sort of glad he was instantly killed and not crippled for the rest of his life.” Sebold told Ellsworth that he was thinking of leasing the chicken farm and going to Germany to see his mother, who was now living in the basement of her bomb-damaged home. “Besides I’m too young to bury myself in the country among a bunch of cackling chickens and griping mossbacks. It’s a nice life for a guy about 80 years old with gout in one foot,” but not for a healthy forty-seven-year-old such as him.