Double Agent (19 page)

Since arriving in New York in October 1939, entering the country by way of a visa obtained through the personal intervention of an overly friendly Oggie Hammond and a passport furnished by Nazi spymasters eager to try another Mata Hari operation, she set up a beach-hat and beach-accessories business and hit the nightclubs in search of men who could whisper in her ear “about all sorts of war developments and deals in industry and finance,” as Sorau instructed her. “She was to my way of thinking a well-built, good-looking nymphomaniac with a good sense of humor,” said Agent Newkirk, who was part of a team that tapped her phone line and placed a recording device in her fireplace. During this, his second experience as an actor, Sebold told her to look upon him as a father figure rather than one of her boyfriends, someone she could, on a strictly platonic basis, share her concerns with about the confidential business of espionage. Which didn’t prevent her from seeking closer intimacy during a later get-together: She “then tried to make some subtle advances toward him,” according to the chaste language of the FBI report, “and among other things said, ‘Why is it you American men are always afraid of women?’ ”

At their following meeting, Stein revealed that Oggie Hammond was “a very patriotic American” with such a hatred of the Nazis that he would have her shot if he knew she was a spy. He was also a member of what one left-wing magazine called “official Washington’s first fascist family,” which included his father, a former US ambassador to Spain and outspoken supporter of Franco, and his brother-in-law, an Italian count who had served as an attaché in Mussolini’s embassy in Washington. Young Hammond was once overheard musing that he would’ve liked to fight on the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, according to one of his pampered peers, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. Yet his feelings about German militarism couldn’t have been unconflicted: both parents were aboard the British liner
Lusitania
when a U-boat struck on May 7, 1915, sinking the ship and killing 1,198 people, including his mother, Mary Picton Stevens Hammond. Stein told Sebold that Oggie had just returned from Europe and was planning to visit her in a few days, but she was more preoccupied with a subject that would come to dominate her talks with Sebold: her perpetual need for funds. She said she’d received no response from letters and telegrams she sent to Hamburg seeking more “Mary,” her code word for money, which she said she needed so she could socialize with gentlemen of a sufficiently elevated stature. Two days later, agents were listening in when Hammond arrived to ease her financial woes, handing over a $100 check and a gold watch. “The visit was seemingly social in nature and the conversation failed to indicate that he had any knowledge of her activities and interests,” according to the FBI. During Sebold’s next stop at the apartment, she struggled to rouse herself from bed, later admitting that she was recovering from an abortion that cost $100, but was well enough to pass along a tip from Hammond. He had told her there is “no chance of America getting into the war.”

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Next to make contact with Sebold was Colonel Duquesne, whom Hoover called “a particularly interesting element” of the case in a memo he sent to President Roosevelt four days after Sebold landed in the country. The Bureau provided a summary of Duquesne’s “colorful career and adventures,” describing him as an “excellent talker,” who, because of a partially paralyzed right leg, always carried a cane. (Actually, the paralysis was one of his old hustles: he could walk just fine.) The president may have been piqued by the revelation that “Duquesne has, on occasion, boasted of friendship with former President Theodore Roosevelt.” One of the episodes detailed in the short biography told of how Duquesne had briefly resided in the home of an H. A. Spanuth, president of the Commonwealth Film Company. He “was asked to leave, according to information subsequently furnished by Spanuth, when the latter’s wife informed Spanuth that she had fallen in love with Duquesne. Spanuth thereafter left New York and proceeded to Chicago, obtaining a divorce from his wife during 1918.” Duquesne was said to have an “intense hatred for England and apparently expressed strong sympathy for Germany and her Allies during the World War period,” the president was told. “No information, whatsoever, concerning the whereabouts and activities of Duquesne since June 6, 1932, is possessed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Sebold’s microfilm information enabled Bureau agents to begin surveillance of Duquesne’s front business, Air Terminals Co., which had moved from an East Forty-Second Street location to a thirty-four-story art deco skyscraper at 120 Wall Street on the East River waterfront. From his rented desk, Duquesne employed his greatest gift in service of the Reich, his brazen willingness to pretend he was someone he wasn’t. On a typical day in the office, he wrote a letter to the president of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Co. in Bethpage, New York, requesting photographs of the G-21 twin-engine seaplane for lectures he said he was delivering “on the art of docking planes at sea,” which were sent to him with warm regards. On another occasion, he mailed a note to the Mine Safety Appliance Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, asking for a component of its “M.S.A. All-Service Gas Mask, BURRELL type,” because “my own was destroyed by coming in contact with a live wire which fused the component parts,” part of his efforts to procure the latest protective gear for chemical warfare. “He was a go-getter with iron nerves, and he got what he wanted,” claimed Nikolaus Ritter. “When, for example, he read an item in the newspaper about a new military product, he did not hesitate to drop in at the office of the general manager of the company and boldly assert that he needed details for a lecture about future American weapons. He was rarely turned down, and his information promptly was passed on to Germany. Sometimes he also, without advance notice, dropped in at a factory and quite calmly demanded to see a certain product. Here again, he was mostly successful.”

While agents were able to monitor his activities during working hours, they failed in their initial attempts to follow the elusive fantasist to his residence. “The Duke had been a spy all of his life and automatically used all the tricks in the book to avoid anyone following him,” wrote Agent Newkirk. “He would take a local train, change to an express, change back to a local, go through a revolving door and keep going on right around, take an elevator up a floor, get off, walk back to the ground, and take off in a different entrance of the building.” He was eventually discovered to be living in a studio apartment on the second-floor front of 24 West Seventy-Sixth Street. Now one of the most exclusive properties in the city, it was then merely a Renaissance Revival boardinghouse a half a block from Central Park operated by a Polish woman who hated the Nazis and was more than happy to permit the FBI to occupy a room above Duquesne’s apartment and put a microphone in his door buzzer. (He didn’t have a phone.) Agents learned that the apartment was rented by his girlfriend, Evelyn Clayton Lewis, an artsy Southerner more than twenty years his junior, a playwright, sculptress, and toy designer who knew full well what he was up to with the Germans. “I love you,” the FBI microphone overheard her telling him one day. “But I realize that you have things to do, that’s your job. You have to do it and that’s all there is to it.” The Bureau described both as “sexual perverts,” although the nature of their perversion is unexplained in the files.

When Sebold reached the Air Terminals desk in Room 17–18 on the thirty-first floor of 120 Wall Street, Duquesne handed him a pink slip of paper. “We will go out,” it said. “Cannot talk here.” They exited the building and walked crosstown for several blocks to the Automat at Broadway and John Street, where each purchased a coffee by dropping a nickel into the slot and watching as a spout filled the cup to the rim, participating in one of the early rituals of American fast food. Sebold sought to play upon Duquesne’s vanity, describing himself as a “greenhorn” who was eager for the old master’s tutelage. Duquesne obliged at great length, telling Sebold to always send the third carbon copy of any message he typed; to wear gloves when handling documents; to avoid all Germans, whom Duquesne regarded as “squealers”; to burn everything; to become a loud opponent of the Nazis so as to avoid suspicion; to never speak to the authorities “even though he is placed against the wall and shot down”; etc. Duquesne delved into his feelings about the Jewish people, noting “that this war is no war with England but a war of the Jews against Germany, and the English are fighting the Jews’ fight,” and that Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn was framed “by the Jews” and imprisoned “for nothing.” In a later session, Duquesne would repeat a favorite canard of the anti-Semitic right, describing President Roosevelt as “a darned Jew.” In the midst of the long talk, Sebold gave Duquesne an English-language translation of the instructions contained within Duquesne’s microphotograph and asked him to mail word when he wanted to schedule another session. “Intimate contact to be avoided for the time” was one of his orders, apparently a reference to sabotage, which was forbidden for now in accord with Hitler’s policy of encouraging US isolationism. “Remain exclusively in an auxiliary position.”

After the two parted, Duquesne sent a telegram informing Sebold that he believed they had been under surveillance, which they were—by six agents: INVESTMENT DANGEROUS. FOLLOWED AFTER MEETING. STOCK BAD POSITION. HOLD OFF. S. FRANK. Sebold responded with a telegram to Air Terminals: I AM HOLDING STOCK. HARRY. At their next appointment, which was mostly conducted at a downtown Automat (this one at Chambers and West Broadway) and on the corner of Fulton and Broadway (where they remained for “perhaps an hour,” said the FBI), Duquesne spent much time obsessing in a low voice about the “Pinkerton detectives and FBI agents” he was certain were watching him. He spoke of how he could pick out G-men by the way they walked, “sort of pigeon-toed and with a peculiar halting step,” which he figured was a method taught to them at the academy so they could be identifiable to each other. He told Sebold he went up to one of his pigeon-toed antagonists and demanded that he stop tracking him, a story confirmed by Agent Newkirk, who wrote of how an “inexperienced but quick-witted” agent responded to the provocation by grabbing Duquesne by the lapels and telling him “that he had heard about queers approaching people on the street but never had the experience of being approached before and he had a good mind to knock the Duke’s block off,” which brought forth a stream of obsequious beg-your-pardons from the chastened spy.

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Then came word from Ed Roeder, who was among the most esteemed members of a Sperry Corporation workforce that had doubled in size over the last two years, from 1,594 in 1938 to the current 3,345, and was in the midst of a hiring spree that would increase that number to 5,582 by January 1, 1941, which was just the beginning. “Operations in Sperry Gyro’s 11-story Brooklyn plant are romantically secret,” wrote
Time
magazine in an article upon the outbreak of the European war that noted the company was already enjoying record profits. “Sperry employees (all US citizens) wear colored badges (a different color for each division), come and go under the vigilant eyes of watchmen. Except for a few top officials, no Sperry employee knows much about what is going on outside his own division. In a spy-fearing industry, most of them would rather have it that way.” Now forty-five, Roeder had a role in one of the US military’s most important projects, the attempt to perfect an autopilot system that could be connected to a plane’s bombsight, which in effect turned the
entire aircraft
into a bombing platform during the sighting run and further removed the unstable human element from the munitions-delivery process. “In 1939–1940, the writer, while employed by the Sperry Gyroscope Company, designed an electro-hydraulic servo unit for use with the U.S. Army Air Corps Type A-5 Gyro Pilot,” he later wrote from prison, referring to the advanced mechanism that the Air Corps considered linking not merely to the Sperry bombsight but also to the Norden bombsight. Roeder’s life revolved around marksmanship. He was an avid weapons collector and gun-club member who in his spare time developed an electrical timer unit for skeet shooting that he sold to the Remington Arms Company, which was earning him royalties. “Roeder maintains a shop in the basement of his residence, filled with tools, guns, et cetera, and his activities have been viewed with suspicion by his landlord for some time,” according to the FBI memo written to President Roosevelt. He cultivated his love of aiming and firing despite (or perhaps because of) an inability to see out of his right eye, “which gives it a peculiar stare,” the Bureau wrote of a malady that may have been caused by injury.

As he apparently did with previous messengers from Germany, Roeder asked Sebold to take the 7:17 p.m. Long Island Rail Road commuter train from Penn Station to the Baldwin stop on the Babylon Line, where Roeder would be waiting in the parking lot in his dark green 1939 Buick sedan, license number 5R 1698. “I drove out in a Bureau car with another agent, Birch O’Neal,” wrote Ellsworth in his diary. “Franz drove another car and an agent followed Bill on the train. I parked at the Baldwin station and at about 7:50 p.m. saw a Buick sedan drive up with license 5R 1698. The train came in at 7:59 p.m. and Bill got off, walked up the platform, saw the car, entered it, and immediately they drove off eastward on Sunrise Highway to Merrick, where they parked for an hour.”

The first words out of Roeder’s mouth were “You are Harry Sawyer.” Getting the hang of things, Sebold asked to see Roeder’s identification before the discussion could proceed and later assured him he was an expert at “ditching” people he thought were following him. He performed his appointed tasks, handing over the microphotograph and $500 in $10 bills, which Roeder didn’t regard as an impressive amount. He said he hadn’t been paid in months and was owed no less than $2,000. Yet he wasn’t dissuaded from conferring his own gift, a black briefcase with a nickel lock and nickel metal corners containing a handful of documents that he thought would be “of interest to the other side.” Sebold said he would make micros of the items and mail them off to Hamburg, neglecting to mention that a committee in Washington would first conduct a review to determine whether national security would be compromised by the release. After a visit of about an hour and fifteen minutes, Roeder let Sebold off in front of a bar in Merrick, giving him the opportunity for a fortifying drink before catching the LIRR back into the city.