Double Agent (11 page)

At the White House, President Roosevelt was full of praise for US Attorney Hardy’s “perfectly amazing job in this spy trial in New York,” but cautioned that “the root of this thing, the roots go down pretty deep.” He explained to reporters that he didn’t want Congress to allocate funds for a secret police that would monitor the American people but one that would allow “our own people to watch the secret police of certain other nations, which is a very excellent distinction to make.” Questioned about the particulars of the new counterespionage plan that he said was already being put in place, FDR deemed the topic out of bounds: “That is one of the things I am not going to tell you, and I don’t think it ought to be asked about because, very obviously, if you run stories of the exact workings of the intelligence system you are going to destroy ninety percent of the value of that system.”

“You do not contemplate the establishment of a new agency?” a reporter asked anyway.

“No.”

“Has a coordinator been named?”

“There you go,” the president quipped as the Oval Office filled with laughter.

It wouldn’t remain a secret for long that J. Edgar Hoover was the only man for the job.

I began to look around for a man whom I could train as an agent with a secret transmitter.

—Nikolaus Ritter

O
n or about January 30, 1939, according to his FBI file, William G. Sebold applied for and was issued his American passport, the first, unwitting step in his bizarre journey to the heart of the Nazi espionage underworld in New York.

In the nearly three years since he had been solemnized as a US citizen, Sebold had led a curiously wayward existence. In the spring of 1936, he moved with his wife to Southern California, where he found his first job with a US military contractor, the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation of San Diego, which was known for its line of seaplanes, in particular the US Navy–commissioned PBY Catalina. He worked for the company on two separate occasions in the coming year, from May 27 to June 29, and August 3 to October 26, for a total of just less than four months. “My function was as a bumper,” he said. “Shaping things out of metal, out of aluminum.” According to his service record, his official job title was “hull assembler.” Then his health beckoned: “Well, I took sick and had to lay off and go back again.” Sebold had to “leave this climate due to poor health,” his employer stated.

Returning to New York, the couple moved into another Yorkville apartment, this time at 214 East Eighty-Fourth Street, and Helen resumed her maid duties with the Park Avenue family. In hopes of improving his lungs, Sebold obtained a summer job through an employment agency working as an on-site electrician/handyman for the Workmen’s Circle Camp on Sylvan Lake near Pawling, New York, which was operated by a Jewish fraternal order as a Yiddish-language experiment in Socialist immersion. According to the camp’s literature, children from the city were instructed in “Yiddish stories, names of Yiddish writers, incidents in the workers’ movement, biographies of people who fought for the freedom of mankind, and Yiddish folk-songs.” By his very willingness to accept a paycheck from the indoctrination mills of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, Sebold showed that he was telling the truth when he said he was uninterested in the doctrinal delusions of Nazi Germany.

But the upstate air didn’t cure him. Sometime in the winter of 1937, he was home with his wife when his stomach pain became so severe that he rushed to Bellevue Hospital. “The doctor looked me over and laid me on the table and knocked a couple times on my stomach and said, ‘You are okay,’ and gave me some drops. And I said, ‘I am not okay,’ and used some insulting language to the doctor, and he said, ‘Okay, now we have to keep you here and look you over,’ and they took me into the psychiatric ward.” Sebold was punished for displaying the flash of anger that was his characteristic response to being pushed too far. “I had a violent look on me,” he said. “I was aroused to anger.” After a stay of “twenty-one days, two weeks, I don’t remember,” in the psych ward, a senior doctor examined him, recognized the problem, and ordered that he undergo ulcer surgery without delay. He would later say that “half of his stomach” was removed. Upon his release in the early winter of 1938, Sebold set out alone for the warmer climes of Murrieta, California, where he spent a month chopping wood and selling the resulting stacks as firewood. After another six weeks working various odd jobs in Southern California, he returned home to New York.

It’s unclear how he spent the remainder of 1938, a period during which the actions of Nazi Germany emerged as a central issue in American foreign policy. He may have been thinking about his employment prospects when he decided to return to Mülheim in early 1939. The press was forever writing about how Hitler’s military and industrial mobilization campaign had brought full employment to Germany. He could’ve been worried about the possibility of a repressive campaign against German Americans, a concern prevalent enough to inspire Hermann Göring to issue orders following
Kristallnacht
giving “all possible preferential treatment such as free passage, tax exemption for one year, and so on” to those “agricultural workers, skilled artisans, engineers, and technicians” of German descent in America willing to work in the fatherland. Sebold read about the Munich Conference in the
Daily News
and the
Journal-American,
he said, but didn’t see how it mattered to him. Perhaps he chose to go back to Germany because he was having troubles with his wife, from whom he had been separated for months at a time over the past two years. Maybe he was worried about the welfare of his family—just as he was when he went home and assisted during the French occupation of the Ruhr in the early 1920s. Or he could’ve been telling the whole truth when he claimed he just wanted to relax in the warm confines of his mother’s house. “I was run-down and not fully recuperated from my operation,” he said.

“Did you hesitate to return to the Hitler Germany?” he was later asked.

“No, I had nothing to do with Hitler,” Sebold said.

“Weren’t you aware of the nature of the regime?”

“But Hitler could not touch me. I was an American citizen. I had nothing to do with the government, with Germany. My hometown, my people lived there.”

“You knew there were critical times abroad?”

“There always were in Europe, for hundreds of years.”

“So that you went to Germany to take a rest, absolutely oblivious to conditions that existed there?”

“Yes, sir. Just a rest, a good long rest.”

“Fully confident that you were protected and surrounded by the blanket of American citizenship?”

“Sure.”

His passport in hand, he boarded the Hamburg America liner
Deutschland
on February 2, 1939, carrying a single suitcase and a package. He did not know he was walking into a trap.

▪  ▪  ▪

Leon Turrou’s long-delayed articles about the infamous German spy case were published in the
New York Post
in twenty installments from December 5, 1938, to January 4, 1939, concluding on the same day President Roosevelt began a public campaign to bolster national defense and revise neutrality legislation, a campaign aimed directly at containing Germany. “A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted,” FDR said during his State of the Union that evening, “but it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured.” Congress was receptive to his plans for a military buildup but unmoved by his comment that neutrality restrictions forbidding the sale of American armaments to combatant nations “may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim.” On January 12, Roosevelt asked for $525 million to fund an “emergency program for the strengthening of the defense of the United States,” with $300 million to be directed to the US Army Air Corps for the purchase of a minimum of three thousand new aircraft. “I suggest that $50 million of the $300 million for airplanes be made immediately available in order to correct the present lag in aircraft production due to idle plants,” he said, which promised an increase in work for contractors involved in every aspect of a warplane’s function. The isolationists were supportive just as long as FDR was prevented from finding a way to draw America into a European fight that would allow him to assume autocratic powers. He “cares no more for what may happen to us in a war than the man in the moon,” said Senator Hiram Johnson of California. “He has developed a dictator complex.” When a newly developed Douglas medium bomber crashed in California with a French military observer aboard, an obvious breach of neutrality, the outrage was so overwrought that the entire Senate Military Affairs Committee tramped over to the White House for a private conference with the president, who stated forthrightly that the future of our civilization depended on ensuring the military strength of the Allies. “It is not a question of secrecy,” he told them. “We have just one secret, and that is the question of the bombsight, and that has not been disclosed to the French and won’t.” The thought would’ve never occurred to him that the Nazis already had it.

On January 27, Random House released Turrou’s
Post
series in a swastika-bedecked hardcover under the title
Nazi Spies in America
. The public seemed receptive to the former G-man’s self-glorifying account of how he “grilled” various evildoers until they “broke” under the pressure of his investigative brilliance, although the book revealed little more (and sometimes less) about the workings of the spy ring than had already been broadcast at trial. “There is evidence that for every spy we exposed, dozens more lurk hidden here,” he and his uncredited coauthor (David Wittels) wrote in the concluding pages. The book quickly sold out its first printing. A British edition was released as
The Nazi Spy Conspiracy in America
. The
New York Times
raved that Turrou’s “intensely interesting” tale served as a warning to the country that “the business of spying is not finished, by any means!” while the
Los Angeles Times
worried that “hysterical accusations” would only cause us “to grow blind to our immediate danger from foreign agents.”

The hysterical accusations—Dr. Griebl’s fraudulent assertion that the German espionage system had embedded agents in
every
armament factory and shipyard in the United States—inspired the title of the film that Warner Brothers was rushing into production,
Confessions of a Nazi Spy,
which the studio’s bosses intended as a new kind of Hollywood movie. It would be a pseudodocumentary exposé that would serve the dual function of performing well at the box office while delivering a propagandistic broadside against an actually named menace. In the first American film to utter the words
Adolf Hitler,
the foe would be identified as Nazi (pronounced “nazzy”) spies who spoke in cartoonish accents, traveled on German passenger liners, plotted in an unidentified German neighborhood in New York, listened to raving speeches at “Nazi Bund” rallies and summer-camp outings, stole secrets from US defense installations, and
didn’t
obsess about the Jews, whose plight goes unmentioned in apparent deference to audience sensibilities. Edward G. Robinson, who had become famous playing Italian American mobster Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello in
Little Caesar
(1931) but was born Emanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, begged one of the producers to cast him in the “international spy ring story you are going to do.” Robinson said, “I want to do that for my people.”

As filming began on a soundstage in California, Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn was in the midst of planning for the last great act of public Nazism in the United States. He hoped a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism” in Madison Square Garden would inspire the anti-Semites of America to join a German-led fight to end the Jewish defilement of the nation’s ideals. Denied the right to represent the whole of German America, he offered himself as the leader of a multiethnic Fascist movement that pledged itself as loyal to one country and one country only. “The Bund is an Organization of American Citizens unequivocally committed to the Defense of the Flag, Constitution, and Sovereignty of these United States,” according to a handbill promoting the event, “and therefore to the Defense of the right and duty to proportionate representation in the conduct of the Nation of the more than 100,000,000 Aryan (WHITE GENTILE) Americans, as being the ONLY means of preserving the Independence and the Christian Culture and Civilization of this our Country!” The message was directly aimed at the Nazis’ newest ally on the streets of New York, the followers of the country’s most prominent non-German supporter of Hitler’s racial policies, the noxious radio priest Father Charles Coughlin (pronounced “cawg-lin” or “cog-lin”). The Christian Front was a thuggish band of (mostly) Irish Americans from neighborhoods in upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, an anti-Semitic hate group that shouted slurs at highly trafficked intersections, picketed Jewish-owned businesses, aggressively hawked copies of the priest’s 250,000-circulation weekly newspaper, and looked to start fights with anyone who dared challenge them.

On February 19, the rally’s eve, a note was delivered to City Hall warning that three time bombs would be detonated if the Nazis were allowed to speak, which led to security sweeps within and around the Garden, then situated at its third location on Eighth Avenue between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Streets, just to the west of the bustle of upper Times Square. In the hours before the event, a NYPD deployment that would grow to 1,745 cops, said to be the largest in the city’s history up to that point, began closing off streets immediately surrounding the arena. “So strict were the police that even persons living and working within the guarded area were banned unless they could convince the police of their identity,” wrote one reporter. “This caused some grumbling among residents of the area. Many spurious press cards were torn to pieces by the police and their bearers escorted back to the police lines.” With Mayor Fiorello La Guardia out of town, acting mayor Newbold Morris took to the radio airwaves at 6:00 p.m., urging the citizenry “to shun this assemblage as one would a pestilence.” All told, about ten thousand protesters gathered for an evening of picketing and sloganeering that included several attempts to break through barricades manned by cops who were unafraid to use physical force.