Double Agent (12 page)

Upon entering the hall, spectators were greeted by a thirty-by-fourteen-foot likeness of George Washington behind an elevated speaker’s platform that was flanked on either side by star-spangled banners and swastika-adorned Bund flags with the letters
AV
(Amerikadeutscher Volksbund) on a red background. Large signs decorated the upper decks: WAKE UP AMERICA—SMASH JEWISH COMMUNISM; 1,000,000 BUND MEMBERS BY 1940; and STOP JEWISH DOMINATION OF CHRISTIAN AMERICANS. The evening began with a color guard parading down the aisles and up onto the stage accompanied by a fife-and-drum corps playing the “Badenweiler March,” Hitler’s traditional entrance theme. A young woman identified in the program as Marguerite Rittershaus sang the American national anthem. By the time the main part of the evening began, the Garden was filled to its capacity of nineteen thousand customers, who paid forty cents for the cheap seats and $1.10 for the ones closer to the spittle. The addition of three thousand “ushers” of the uniformed Ordnungsdienst (OD) pushed the attendance figure to twenty-two thousand, according to the
Times
’ estimate. In the rhetorical manner of Adolf Hitler, the speeches grew progressively more extreme as the evening went on. Talk of “the moral erosion and subsequent disintegration of our national unity” soon turned into paranoia about “the oriental cunning of the Jew Karl Marx-Mordecai!” Boos were heard at the mention of “President Rosenfeld,” “the international Rothschilds,” and “the Jewish Federal Reserve System.” Hitler, Mussolini, and Father Coughlin received loud cheers. When one Nazi spoke of the “Golden Rule to treat all human beings with a human face,” journalist Dorothy Thompson burst out in loud and sustained laughter, which caused angry Bundists sitting near the press box to demand her removal. “I was immediately seized by two policemen, whose salaries as a New York taxpayer I help to meet, and I was also set upon by a husky uniformed storm trooper, whose movement is following the detailed instructions of a foreign power,” she wrote. “I was roughly hustled to the door.”

Dressed in his Bund uniform with Iron Cross prominently displayed on the lapel, Fritz Kuhn delivered a belligerent keynote in broken English. The speech included a long disquisition on the history of Jewish crimes against America, beginning with the perfidious wire-puller who, he said, was responsible for Benedict Arnold’s treachery and ending with the perfidious wire-puller (financier Bernard Baruch) who was “set to drive the United States into a European war on any old pretext.” Near the end of the address, a young man in civilian clothes leapt from his seat and made a mad dash for the platform. “Down with Hitler!” shouted Isadore “Izzy” Greenbaum, a twenty-six-year-old plumber’s assistant from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Down with Nazism!” He came within a few feet of the Bundesführer before OD men tackled him, delivering a beating convulsive enough to tear his clothes from his body and cause a microphone to fall from the lectern. After a handful of NYPD officers carried him from the premises (“I’m no Communist!” he yelled on the way out), Kuhn described the nine items of the new Bund charter (which pledged to remove Jewish influence from various quarters of American life) and exhorted white gentiles of good character, patriotic zeal, and Aryan stock to consider filling out the membership application on an inside page of the program. “Free!” he thundered. “America!” the crowd responded. The chant was repeated two more times in imitation of the “Sieg”-followed-by-“Heil” routine indigenous to the Reich.

It was quite a showing. “There can be no doubt that the German-American Bund has by this massed demonstration scored a considerable success as regards organization,” wrote Hans Borchers, the Nazi consul general in New York, in his report to Berlin. “It has been to the advantage of the Bund that it has understood how to make good use of the general trends of thought of the American people, such as, for instance, Coughlinism, to further its aspirations, although, as a result of this, the former far more exclusively
volksdeutsch
character of its meetings has been not a little modified.” So appalling was the Bund’s triumph that the American public was nearly united in its condemnation. “There isn’t any sense in having these bunds in the country,” said Senator John Gurney, a Republican of South Dakota. “I don’t think we ought to allow it.” From the other side of the aisle, Senator John Bankhead, an Alabama Democrat, suggested establishing “concentration camps for those trying to spread un-American propaganda.” Martin Dies announced that the next session of his committee would devote renewed attention to the Bund. Even Father Coughlin distanced himself, suggesting that any of his followers who attended probably went out of curiosity’s sake. “The meeting was held,” said Mayor La Guardia upon his return home. “That’s that.” The mayor neglected to mention that he had devised a plan to take down Fritz Kuhn. He instructed his Department of Investigation to determine whether the Bund had paid all applicable sales and business taxes. At the same time, Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, the mustachioed thirty-seven-year-old who was such a preternaturally gifted scourge of racketeers that he was seen as a serious contender to challenge President Roosevelt in 1940, ordered his own investigation into the Bund’s fiscal affairs.

Within three months, Dewey’s office had charged the Bundesführer with six counts of first-degree grand larceny, four counts of second-degree grand larceny, and two counts of third-degree forgery. Kuhn was accused of embezzling $14,548.59 in Bund funds, including $8,907.35 raised by the Madison Square Garden rally.

▪  ▪  ▪

For all its elements of farce, the Turrou investigation had succeeded in destroying the Nest Bremen part of Germany’s spy operation in New York, forcing its most experienced couriers off the Atlantic route and causing the flight or imprisonment of valuable in-country figures. The German passenger liners were livid at the besmirching of their reputation in the eyes of paying customers, who were less willing than ever to be associated with the swastikas flying at the West Side piers. The Foreign Ministry was predictably incensed that the task of keeping Americans from taking sides against the Reich had been made even harder. Nest Bremen’s spymaster was able to convince Admiral Canaris that he didn’t deserve to be punished for the debacle, but his career directing operations against the United States was effectively over. “The Nest was reduced to making a fresh start with new couriers buying magazines and newspapers in New York,” according to the British postwar report.

The Abwehr’s principal operation in the city was in the hands of Nikolaus Ritter, who, as the head of Ast Hamburg’s office responsible for procuring air force intelligence, boasted a small cadre of agents whose most important members were Hermann Lang at Norden; “Colonel” Fritz Duquesne, the South African–born fraudster and veteran spy who was posing as a “consulting aeronautical engineer” under the banner of a front business, the Air Terminals Co.; and a high-level engineer at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. of Brooklyn who had been supplying technical data to Nazi Germany for nearly three years.

Everett Minster Roeder, forty-four, grew up as the brainy delinquent of an old-line German American family from the Bronx, a gun enthusiast and poker player who horrified his relatives by driving his pollution-emitting motorcycle into the kitchen, according to family legend. His father was Carl Roeder, a celebrated piano instructor who kept a studio at Carnegie Hall, taught at the Juilliard School of Music, and could be found every Sunday behind the organ at the Alexander Avenue Baptist Church. Young Everett did not have the musical precocity of his sister Dorothy, who was hailed in the pages of
Musical America
(“Piano Teacher’s Young Daughter Surprises Hearers by Exceptional Talent”) when she was nine years old. Instead, his ability lay in the intricacies of a draftsman’s blueprints.

“Ed” Roeder, as he was known, was just fifteen when he enrolled at Cornell University’s prestigious engineering school and almost certainly became acquainted with fellow students Edward Sperry and Elmer Sperry Jr. The brothers were known talent-spotters for their father, Elmer Sperry, who had founded his company just a few years earlier, in 1910, on the strength of contracts from the US Navy. The elder Sperry was a pioneer in the development of instruments that harnessed the stabilizing properties of the gyroscope (the spinning wheel with a carnivalesque ability to maintain its position in space despite the forces attempting to displace it) to bring command, control, and thus lethality to the increasingly powerful ships traveling on the ocean and in the air. The gyrocompass utilized an electrically powered gyroscope aligned to the earth’s rotational axis to track true north, a marked improvement over the magnetic north of traditional compasses and a godsend in the age of the iron-hulled ship. The marine gyrostabilizer employed mammoth gyro wheels wired to the stabilizing fins in a ship’s hull to lessen the roll caused by the sea’s turbulence. The company’s airplane stabilizer, which sought to tame “that particular beast of burden which is obsessed with motions, side pressure, skidding, acceleration pressures, and strong centrifugal moments . . . all in endless variety and endless combination,” as Sperry described it, was the first autopilot, an avionic advancement that is probably second only to the Wright brothers’ original invention in its revolutionizing impact. Utilizing the technology of the airplane stabilizer, Sperry developed an aerial torpedo, or flying bomb, which, when it traveled a thousand yards without a human pilot in March 1918, became the first cruise missile in history, “an extremely significant engine of war” in Mr. Sperry’s accurate estimation.

At eighteen, Roeder quit Cornell to marry his pregnant girlfriend without the blessing of the church, committing an early act of fraud by providing the marriage bureau with a fake age (twenty-one) and a fake name (Edward Morgan Randolph), which would cause his wife many headaches with the Social Security Administration in later years. After surviving Elmer Sperry’s notoriously intensive interview process—only gifted engineers with a “mechanical touch” able to keep up with the torrent of his imagination were allowed in the door—Roeder joined Sperry Gyroscope around the time of his marriage in the first quarter of 1913, which means he was one of the first seventeen employees at a founding institution of the research and development branch of the military-industrial complex.

His arrival coincided with the armament boom that preceded and followed the outbreak of the Great War in Europe in August 1914, which led some of Sperry’s most talented employees to start their own ventures in service to specialized military requirements. Hannibal Ford, Sperry’s chief engineer, decamped to an industrial building in lower Manhattan and won the right to be the secret supplier of the US Navy’s fire-control system for battleships, the central plotting machine that used the gyrocompass’s reference line to guide a battery of long-range guns in the complex matter of tracking and hitting moving targets as far as ten miles away. Roeder, who had apparently shown promise during his two years at Sperry, was lured away to join him. There is no evidence that Ed Roeder committed espionage over the next four years of wartime employment with the Ford Instrument Co. He was merely a draftsman learning the skills that would make him as knowledgeable as anyone else in the country in the field of precision instruments for military application. His time was yet to come.

In the years after World War I, Roeder utilized his experience to become a kind of gyro-systems consultant, jumping from one start-up to another as a designer with a central role in developing the products each produced. But he always returned to Sperry. He rejoined the staff from 1922 to 1924, early 1928 to late 1928, 1930 to 1932, and returned again in 1933. Now employing a thousand workers in its imposing building at 40 Flatbush Avenue Extension within sight of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, Sperry Gyroscope had become the core business of a global enterprise officially known as Sperry Corporation (with executive offices at the new Rockefeller Center), but still referred to as “Sperry’s” by the average New Yorker. In 1933, when Wiley Post made history by piloting the first solo flight around the world, he gave all credit to the Sperry A-2 autopilot, “my robot,” which was “uncanny in the way it takes over the job of flying,” an endorsement that Sperry’s publicity department had no part in arranging. (On the other hand, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was equipped with a Sperry autopilot when it plunged into the Pacific in 1937, a fact unmentioned in company literature.) Aircraft manufacturers, merchant marines, and foreign militaries were permitted to purchase some of the company’s gyrocompasses, direction-finding radios, blind-flying instruments, gyro horizons, antiaircraft searchlights, rate-of-turn indicators, directional gyros, and ship stabilizers, but the most advanced versions of each product were always reserved for the Air Corps and the Navy, which, in addition, funded the development of weapons systems that were intended for no other contractor but the US military.

With his toothbrush mustache and silver-rimmed spectacles, Roeder was one of an elite staff of a few dozen engineers (including Elmer Sperry Jr.) charged with coming up with innovations at least five years ahead of the current design, a collection of deep thinkers who were allowed to remain absent from the shop for weeks at a time while they mulled their ideas. Roeder was probably involved in the effort to perfect an antiaircraft-gun-directing system, which used data transmitters, a stereoscopic range finder, and tracking telescopes to enable its multiple human operators to feed information (about ground speed, wind, ballistics, airspeed) into an analog computer that determined where to aim a fusillade of artillery shells to destroy an approaching warplane. He likely also had a hand in an equally confidential product that made some of the same time-space calculations, Sperry’s S-1 bombsight, which the Air Corps had determined would be its second-string bomb-aimer behind the Norden.

In 1936, Roeder came to Germany’s notice through the efforts of a friend of his on the West Side who had connections with the Abwehr. Impressed, Ast Hamburg provided $300 to pay for Roeder’s passage to Germany, a major vote of confidence for a service that was eager to rely on the incidental support of Nazi devotees pledged to the greater glory of the Reich. Which appears
not
to have been Roeder’s main motivation. On his way to Germany during the summer of 1936, he stopped off in England, where he granted exclusive rights for an invention of his that “used as an emitter the cathode structure of a Coolidge tube” to determine the hardness of materials to a company that was a subsidiary of Vickers Ltd., the conglomerate that would play a significant role in rearming the British Army for World War II. With this success in hand, he continued on to Hamburg and the warm embrace of three Abwehr officers. The men quizzed him on the latest advances in high-intensity searchlights and autopilot systems for aircraft, both areas in which Sperry Gyroscope was a world pioneer. During off hours, he was plied with so many drinks that he couldn’t keep up and was even offered a woman, though he said he declined. Then he was taken to Berlin to meet with half a dozen technical experts, who provided him with a drafting board in his hotel room. Suitably awed by his handiwork, the Abwehr agreed to furnish him with a salary of $200 a month, not including bonuses for valuable deliveries, which made him Nazi Germany’s highest-paid agent in the United States.