Double Agent (17 page)

Another three weeks passed. Then on the evening of December 6, Sebold was startled awake by someone standing in the darkness of his hotel room. He was not charmed to hear the man say, “I am your uncle Hugo,” particularly since he had no such relative by that name. The man informed Sebold that it was now time to prepare for his departure for America. On the following morning, the two traveled to Siemens-Schuckertwerke, where Hugo flashed his credentials to the guard, who snapped to attention and identified him as
Hauptmann
(or Captain) Sandel. In the meeting that followed with the general manager of the factory and Sebold’s immediate superior, Uncle Hugo/Captain Sandel demanded that Sebold be honorably discharged from his job and provided with a letter of recommendation, which was promptly done. The two Sebolds then returned to the Handelshof for celebratory drinks. Uncle Hugo spun yarns about his adventures as a young traveler in America (“all of which, he, William Sebold, now thinks are false,” according to the FBI debriefing) and provided a clue about Sebold’s coming assignment. “He talked about the radio business, did I know something about radio, if I would be able to set up a radio station in the United States,” Sebold remembered. Yet after Uncle Hugo left early the next morning, Sebold heard nothing for the remaining three weeks of December, a period of increasingly frigid temperatures during which he tried to stay out of sight and became ever more anxious about his fate, an isolated figure toyed with by malign forces. “He also lost a great deal of weight and became very sick,” according to the FBI. Finally, he wrote a letter to Dr. Renken, demanding to know why he had been stranded without guidance or source of income. “I said something, why have they forgot all about me, I did not hear anything from them,” he said.

Dr. Renken speedily informed him that $200 was being deposited in an American Express account in Amsterdam, which enabled Sebold to make a reservation on a Holland America Line ship traveling from Amsterdam to New York. But the US consulate deemed it too dangerous for him to sail on a Dutch vessel that would be required to pass through the minefields of the English Channel. He was told his passport wouldn’t be issued until he switched to the United States Lines, which had just announced that two passenger liners (SS
Manhattan
and her sister ship, SS
Washington
) would begin service between New York and still-neutral Italy in accord with the neutrality law’s prohibition against American ships entering “war zones,” which encompassed the Northern European ports. Sebold booked on the
Manhattan,
scheduled to depart from Genoa on January 15, but Dr. Renken protested that this wouldn’t allow enough time to complete his training. Sebold then changed to the
Washington,
which would leave from the same Mediterranean port two weeks after the
Manhattan
. In Cologne, Sebold used the $200 wired to his account to purchase the ticket, which he took to the consulate in the hopes of finally receiving his passport. But he didn’t get it until the next day, apparently because the consulate had lost his photographs and he had to arrange to have new ones taken. During this, his final visit with US diplomatic officials before leaving Germany, he stated explicitly that he wanted to be met in New York by the FBI. “I said, ‘G-men,’ ” recalled Sebold, confirming that he had chosen sides.

He went to Hamburg, where he was registered at the Abwehr’s guest residence near the Alster River, the Pension Klopstock at Klopstock Strasse 2, later describing a pension to American interrogators as “a better class of boardinghouse.” At 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. on each of roughly seven days, Sebold was picked up by car and taken to a building on Glockengiesserwall next to the police presidium, as he remembered it. Under the supervision of Uncle Hugo, who kept an office on the fourth floor, Sebold was given lessons in the art of sending and receiving secret communications. He was offered a brief tutorial in using a radio key to tap out messages via Morse code, which he picked up so quickly that the old man who trained him said, “If you can do everything else that well, you are okay.” He was taught a coding system based upon the letter arrangements of a particular page (which would change each day) in the British edition of Rachel Field’s bestselling historical romance,
All This, and Heaven Too
. He was instructed in the operation of a Leica camera, which, when outfitted with a special lens and attached to a perpendicular rod as Hugo demonstrated, could reproduce a blueprint or document onto a postage-stamp-sized microphotograph readable only with a magnifying instrument. And he was shown how to operate a microscope to examine written letters for a speck known as a
Mikropunkt
(or microdot), about the size of a period, which could contain dispatches of about fifty words, “the enemy’s masterpiece of espionage,” J. Edgar Hoover would later exult. Uncle Hugo told him to watch out for such pencil-point marks in any communications he received from Germany.

Since Sebold was only occupied with his spy work for a total of ten hours, he had time to hang around the pension, which housed a roster of apprentice agents who mostly kept to themselves except for the occasional comment from one of them about just returning from Holland or Czechoslovakia. Sebold struck up a friendship with proprietor Georg Gut, who scrubbed the pots and pans while his wife answered the phone calls from Ast Hamburg. Gut informed Sebold that he “was disgusted with the whole matter” and admitted he wanted to sell the business and move to America, which revealed that Sebold may have had a natural ability to draw out seditious confessions whether he was trying to or not.

Final discussions were conducted in Uncle Hugo’s office on January 26, 1940. Sebold was handed two leather money pouches—one contained $500 in $5 bills to be used for the purchase of a Leica camera and “a radio transmitting outfit”; the other had $500 in $10 bills to be delivered to Everett Roeder of 210 Smith Street, Merrick, Long Island. Sebold was given five microphotographs of instructions, which were hidden within the innards of his watch, two for his own elucidation and one each for Roeder, Colonel Duquesne, and a woman, Lilly Stein, whose address was given as 127 East Fifty-Fourth Street, just to the east of Park Avenue. He was ordered to seek out an amateur broadcaster who could help him with radio transmittal work, to join the National Guard to learn about firearms developments, to find a job at an aircraft factory, and to refrain from any unnecessary contacts with Germans, with a particular admonition “to stay out of Yorkville.” Provided with three mail-drop addresses (in Shanghai, São Paolo, and Coimbra, Portugal), he was to establish himself under the undemonstrative all-American name Harry Sawyer, presumably a relation of Mark Twain’s Tom. Although he wasn’t aware of it yet, he had been bestowed with the code name Tramp, an obvious acknowledgment of his footloose life up until then that carried with it a hint of disdain.

During the meeting, Dr. Renken entered the room and revealed why Hermann Lang was not receiving a microphotograph like the others: his work was done. Renken/Ritter told Sebold to visit Lang at his Queens home, utter the words “Greetings from Rantzau, Berlin-Hamburg,” and ask him to prepare for an all-expenses-paid trip that would return him to the Reich by way of the Far East. In his memoir, Ritter said that Lang was being called home because of worries that his theft of the Norden bombsight would become known to the American authorities once a Luftwaffe bomber equipped with a Norden-like instrument was recovered by the Allies. Yet nothing of this was said to Sebold, who, quite by coincidence, took it upon himself to bring up the great secret that he had first learned about from Dr. Gassner.

“Up to that point the bombsight had never been mentioned definitely?” attorney George Herz later asked Sebold.

“Never; never anything, micros, nothing—only radio.”

“Exactly what was said to you? What did they say about the bombsight? Tell me as best you can recollect everything they said.”

“I said, ‘I might bring back the famous American bombsight and give it to you as a present.’ ”

“I want you to tell everything they said,” said Herz.

“That was all that was said about it,” responded Sebold. “He said, ‘Don’t bother about it. We already have it in our possession.’ ”

On the next morning, Sebold went by himself to the Hamburg-Altona railway station, wearing an old sheepskin-lined coat and tattered blue suit that made him look like the tramp that Ast Hamburg said he was. He arrived in Munich in the evening and changed for the sleeper that took him through the Alps via the Brenner Pass. He reached Milan at noon on January 28, switched trains again, and made it to Genoa in the late afternoon of the same day. He spent the night at the Hotel Britannia. On the following morning, he was one of 427 passengers who boarded the
Washington,
including Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty, Chicago construction engineer Hugh Rodman (who was returning after fourteen months of work in the Soviet Union), and three hundred Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Although Sebold thought of giving his spy materials to another traveler (and apparently did so briefly), absconding with the money and starting a new life, and even committing suicide, he decided to carry through with the plan in deference to the promise he’d made to the American consulate in Cologne. After all, he figured he probably wouldn’t be subject to any more than a few days of unpleasantness in New York.

Keep still your former face, and mix again

With these lost spirits; run all their mazes with them;

For such are treasons: find their windings out,

And subtle turnings; watch their snaky ways,

Through brakes and hedges, into woods of darkness

Where they are fain to creep upon their breasts

In paths ne’er trod by men, but wolves and panthers.

—from
Catiline His Conspiracy
(1611) by Ben Jonson

O
n February 8, 1940, the
Washington
made its first stop in American waters at the quarantine station at the entrance of Upper New York Bay, which enabled US officials to board and conduct required inspections before landfall. Arriving by Coast Guard cutter were State Department officer Hall Kinsey and FBI special agent Albert Franz, who sought out Sebold, heard a portion of his story, and asked if he would be willing to come to Foley Square for further discussions. He agreed. When the
Washington
docked at Pier 59 at the foot of West Eighteenth Street, reporters gathered around O’Flaherty, most famous as the author of
The Informer,
the tale of an Irish revolutionist who accepts twenty pounds to betray a comrade and suffers such torment for his violation of societal norms that death becomes his only redemption, which was made into a critically acclaimed film by John Ford in 1935. The papers that day carried prominent stories about the arraignment in the Brooklyn federal court of seventeen Coughlinites on charges of conspiring to steal munitions from National Guard armories and carry out a plot to overthrow the government, the result of a five-month investigation that represented the FBI’s first major sedition case since receiving expanded powers. J. Edgar Hoover had come to town to announce the arrests three weeks earlier, charging that a faction of the Christian Front wanted “to spread a reign of terrorism so that the authorities would become thoroughly demoralized” and “a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany,” a notion so ludicrous that it contributed to a growing sense among some that the FBI was using its new authority to transform into a state secret police. Hoover told the press that Bureau agents had employed the novel investigative tool of a motion-picture camera to record members of the group as they fired weapons at an upstate rifle range, which suggested a significant level of intimacy with the plot’s workings. “Is it possible that in this country there exists a movement of any appreciable size to reproduce a Hitlerian dictatorship by way of IRA methods?” wondered the
Herald Tribune,
which noted the Celtic and Germanic surnames among the defendants. “We shall have to wait on developments for the answer.”

Sebold was escorted unnoticed past reporters and driven downtown as two cars of FBI men trailed close behind. He spent the next two days explaining all that had befallen him in Germany, which was passed on to Hoover, who shared it directly with President Roosevelt. “The story, to say the least, seemed preposterous,” wrote an agent assigned to the case, Raymond Newkirk, in his unpublished memoirs. “To send a head spy to the U.S. who did not want to be a spy in the first place and give him information as to the other spies in the U.S. did not show good sense.” On February 10, Sebold was “asked whether or not he would be willing to follow the instructions given him in Germany and assist the Federal Bureau of Investigation in making an investigation concerning this matter,” the offer to become the first counterspy in FBI history. (The phrase
double agent
was not yet in common currency.) All we know is that he agreed. “Was there an arrangement made whereby you were to cooperate with the FBI? Just say yes or no,” he was asked in court. “Yes,” he said without elaboration. He was offered a salary of $50 a week plus reimbursement for expenses. He would later receive a raise to $60 a week.

On the next day, he followed his Hamburg orders and sent a Western Union telegram to Mr. Hugo Sebold c/o Pension Klopstock, delivering the requested message that indicated he didn’t believe he was being followed. “Arrived safe. Had pleasant trip. Bill.” (If he feared trouble, he was to say, “Am in doctor’s care.”) On February 12, he went to Abe Cohen’s Exchange at 142 Fulton Street (“The House of Photographic Values”) and placed a $20 down payment on a Leica camera. “Easy terms arranged,” promised the store’s newspaper ad.

At 11:30 a.m. on the following morning, a Trans World Airways red-eye from the West Coast arrived at the newly opened La Guardia Airport, carrying James Claridge Ellsworth, a thirty-one-year-old special agent from the Los Angeles office who was recovering from a bout of airsickness suffered over Pittsburgh. A devoted family man with two young children and a profound commitment to his Mormon faith, he had gained fluency in German during his thirty-four months of missionary service in the late Weimar Republic from 1927 to 1929. He was so faithful to his religion’s strictures that he dutifully sought repentance after once drinking from a barrel of iced tea to fend off dehydration during shooting practice at Quantico, violating a Mormon commandment against the consumption of coffee and tea. “He never wanted to be out of favor with God or with God’s Church,” according to one of his sons. “He never wanted to be disloyal to his employer, nor disappoint. In every case he would do everything he could to do what was ‘right.’ And if he made a mistake, he’d do everything he could to make it right.” Lacking a bachelor’s or graduate degree or seemingly any applicable work experience (as the manager of a beauty-products company), he was hired by the FBI at the urging of a fellow Mormon and close friend, the legendary G-man Reed Vetterli, whose name is etched in Bureau lore as one of three survivors of the Kansas City Massacre, the bullet-ridden attempt by Pretty Boy Floyd and his criminal associates (or so it was initially claimed) to free bank robber Frank Nash from federal custody outside Union Station, resulting in the death of Nash and four law enforcement officers, including one FBI agent. Ellsworth and Vetterli’s friendship was such that Ellsworth and his wife, Nell, were dinner guests of the Vetterlis on the evening of the shoot-out. “I know this applicant to be a morally clean individual and think he can be relied upon to be a conscientious, ambitious worker and will be amenable to discipline and the division will never have any trouble with him,” wrote Vetterli, who, in his capacity as special agent in charge (SAC) of the Indianapolis office, interviewed Ellsworth and recommended his appointment. In his five years with the Bureau, Ellsworth had risen to assistant SAC in Los Angeles. He was described in his most recent evaluation as “alert, intelligent, well-acquainted with the Bureau’s work, and well-qualified to handle general assignments,” but lacking “a sufficiently pleasing personality to be a good salesman,” which wasn’t regarded as a hindrance to administrative advancement. When he touched down in New York, Ellsworth had completed all of five days of espionage training at the Washington headquarters.