Double Agent (31 page)

After another day as tourists, they checked out of their hotel, returned to the airport, and took an 8:00 p.m. flight to La Guardia. The following week was full of downtime that allowed Ellsworth to spend two days escorting
Life
magazine photographer Ralph Morse to the principal locations of the story for the celebratory post-trial article. On Saturday, November 29, Ellsworth met with Harold Kennedy in Brooklyn. “He said he is through with Sebold and me so we can leave any time,” he wrote. “I feel like a kid all of a sudden.” On December 3, Ellsworth and the Sebolds boarded a train at Penn Station for a four-day journey to San Francisco. They arrived at 8:25 a.m. on December 7. “Bill is blooming like a flower with his freedom and lack of hiding attitude,” Ellsworth wrote.

In the afternoon, they learned that the world had changed. “Went to FBI office at 1 p.m. for a car and found [Special Agent in Charge Nat] Pieper and all agents on duty,” he wrote. “Japanese planes have just bombed our bases at Hawaii and at Philippine Islands and have sunk two battleships.” Agents were being dispatched to seize Japanese enemy aliens. “Newspapers are screaming WAR. Radios are almost exclusively war talk. We seem to be suddenly a united people—Senator Wheeler has even declared we should now go to war in earnest.

“I step off the train expecting to be in a land of quiet rest and anticipate a vacation with my family and a couple of hours later we are at war.”

On December 9, Ellsworth, his wife, Nell, and the Sebolds enjoyed a last meal together at a Chinatown nightclub with a floor show. On the next day, the two men parted. “Hard to realize I am leaving a man I have lived and worked with for nearly two years,” Ellsworth wrote. “This seems to be about the final chapter in another phase of my life.”

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On January 3, 1942, Judge Byers sentenced the thirty-three convicted spies before a courtroom crowded with their friends and relatives. “On account of the war I expect the judge to be harsh,” Duquesne had written to a friend. “I am innocent and that is what is driving me mad. I cannot believe it all and yet I
am
here.” Duquesne and Lang were each given eighteen years on the Espionage Act count and two years on the Foreign Agents Registration Act count, with the terms to be served concurrently. “He of all men knew the value of the Norden bombsight,” the judge said of Lang. “He of all men knew to what use it might be put by the ‘chivalrous’ powers of the Axis in waging their war against civilization.” Roeder got sixteen years on the Espionage Act violation; Stein received ten years for espionage and two on FARA. Franz “the baker” Stigler got sixteen and two; Paul “Fink” Fehse, fifteen and two; Leo Waalen, twelve and two; Erwin “the butcher” Siegler, ten and two; and Erich “the waiter” Strunck, ten and two. Of the less severe punishments, the DAB lecturer George Schuh, the bookstore clerk Max Blank, and the Little Casino owner Richard Eichenlaub each received eighteen months in prison and a $1,000 fine. “It was remarked by some of the court attachés who have followed the course of the long trial that the trip of the defendants across the Federal Building corridors last night did not reveal the jauntiness and confidence that marked their conduct throughout the trial,” wrote one reporter.

With the assistance of the Bureau, the Sebolds moved into a small house in Walnut Creek, California, a short ride from San Francisco. “I am a mechanic in a tank shop,” he wrote to Ellsworth on March 25, 1942. “I had my wish and I like it very much.” Like many in wartime America, Sebold heeded the government’s call to reduce pressure on food supplies. “I have everything planned and spaded for the Victory Garden,” he wrote. “We planted all kinds of vegetables and also sweet corn. The trees are in bloom now. You should see the place. I feel like a sauerkraut baron. I have two dogs—a black pinscher and big Alaskan husky, a real dog. I did a lot of remodeling on my garage, the chicken house, and the house.” He added, “When this emergency is over, I want to go into the ranching business.”

For the rest of the war, German, Japanese, and Italian nationals (along with a few Hungarians and Romanians) were rounded up by the FBI on suspicion of retaining loyalty to the Axis regimes of their native lands. They were brought without the right of legal representation before an Alien Enemy Control Unit hearing board, which was established by the Justice Department to sift evidence (often hearsay from spiteful neighbors or business rivals) and determine whether the arrestee posed enough of a threat to be interned. Five such boards were established in Manhattan. Active members of the Bund and the DAB, both of which shuttered operations upon the American declaration of war, were automatically eligible for confinement. “33 Aliens Seized in Yorkville Raids,” reported the
Times
in a story from March 5, 1942. Confiscated were “many cameras and short wave–equipped radios, one fine photographic enlarger, a modern, compact radio transmitting and receiving apparatus, sixteen rifles, five pistols, a blackjack, a vicious trench knife, a Sperry ‘marching compass,’ and chemicals capable of being compounded into explosives.” The Bureau’s sweeps increased in frequency following the capture of eight Nazi saboteurs who landed in two U-boats in Florida and Long Island in June 1942, a farcical mission that was made necessary by the convictions of so many potential bomb-planters in the Sebold case. During the month of July alone, 350 alleged Nazi supporters of Reich citizenship were arrested in the New York area.

In Los Angeles, Jim Ellsworth received a request from J. Edgar Hoover “to call on Bill Sebold at once and warn him to be very cautious as his life might be in danger as revealed to the Bureau by one of the eight saboteurs.” Ellsworth took the train to San Francisco, caught a cab, and rode out to Walnut Creek, where he spotted Sebold walking on the street. “Went home with him to his little country place and Helen and had a big German supper, talked about the spy case and old times and I got acquainted with his ferocious watchdog,” Ellsworth wrote in his diary. “I spent two days and nights with them and thoroughly enjoyed myself. They are being cautious and I hope no harm ever comes to them.” After trial by military commission, six of the saboteurs were electrocuted in the District of Columbia jail on August 8, 1942. The two others were spared because of the cooperation they provided to the FBI. One of them, George Dasch, later wrote a memoir that detailed how he was given a file on Sebold during his training period in Germany. “What do you think of that son of a bitch?” the Abwehr organizer asked. “I tell you, there is no stone big enough for him to hide under. We will get him.”

In total, 10,905 ethnic Germans were incarcerated in seven internment camps in five states during the war. Among them were a handful of the lesser spies from the Duquesne ring who, stripped of their US citizenship, needed somewhere to go following the completion of their terms. After fifteen months in the federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, Heinz Stade, the cellist in the Little Casino cabal who claimed to have knowledge of the (still-unsolved) World’s Fair bombing, was transferred to the facility in Crystal City, Texas. He became a music instructor there.

The government also initiated several high-profile prosecutions of prominent Nazi agitators of American citizenship who, it was charged, maintained the movement under the guise of German singing societies and sports clubs. Dozens of top officials of the Bund and the DAB were charged with violations of the FARA, the Selective Service Act, or the Alien Registration Act. In late 1942, twenty-nine Bundists were targeted for conspiracy to counsel resistance to the draft. The following year, twenty-seven DABers were accused of acting as American representatives of the German Labor Front, the Nazi workers’ organization. Prosecutors had little trouble in gaining convictions until the so-called Great Sedition Trial of 1944, which attempted to show that American rightists had joined with German Bundists in a Hitler-directed conspiracy “to interfere with, impair, and influence the loyalty, morale, and discipline” of the US armed forces and “to cause insubordination, mutiny, and refusal of duty.” The trial dragged on for months until the presiding judge died of a heart attack and a mistrial was ordered. In 1946, a federal appeals judge dismissed the charges, saying a new trial would be a “travesty of justice.”

In October 1943, when the federal prosecutor in Newark brought espionage charges against seven leaders of the DAB, he gave due credit to “Harry Sebold” for laying the groundwork. “For more than a year, the FBI knew of every move made by the enemy agents,” said US Attorney Thorn Lord during a press conference. “As a result of this knowledge, the activities of most of the defendants named in yesterday’s indictment came to the fore.” The most prominent of the convicted was the national director of the DAB, a malign figure named Fritz Schroeder, who was described as a close friend of Hermann Lang’s. “Now, Fritz Schroeder was not in the Duquesne case, was he?” a defense attorney asked an FBI agent during the trial. “He was under investigation at that time,” the agent responded. Although the FBI uncovered a handful of Nazi spies operating under Reich direction in the United States during the war, the Sebold investigation “placed a decisive check on German espionage operations, from which it has found it difficult to recover,” wrote the
Times
in February 1945. As early as October 1944, Hoover was boasting on CBS radio that “our Axis undercover enemies have been met and completely defeated.”

German Americans were not subject to the virulent anti-Hun prejudice that infected America during World War I. Instead, the Japanese suffered from the taint of collective guilt. Without the slightest evidence that they constituted a fifth column, 120,000 Japanese residents living on the Pacific Coast (78,000 of them US citizens) were forcibly evacuated to “planned communities” under War Department supervision in an initiative that existed outside of the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit. Hoover voiced his opposition, believing that the problem of treacherous foreign agents should be handled case by case. He told Attorney General Biddle there was no evidence that Japanese Americans “have been associated with any espionage activity ashore or that there has been any illicit shore-to-ship signaling, either by radio or lights.” In 1988, the Congress issued a formal apology for actions that “were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

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After working at the US Army’s Benicia Arsenal from March to September 1942, Sebold received a two-month leave of absence for educational training that was extended when he ran into health problems. He told Agent E. F. McCarthy of the San Francisco FBI office that pills prescribed to treat a thyroid problem had revived an old shoulder injury. “It might be stated also that Sebold was found to be in a rather nervous condition and it was determined by Agent McCarthy that Sebold is worried because he has not been able to go to drafting school or engineering school as he had planned and he still is on leave from the Benicia Arsenal without pay,” according to a report of November 10, 1942. “Sebold was advised by Agent McCarthy that he should cease worrying and that he should do everything possible to get himself into the proper frame of mind.” He didn’t go back to his job after his health improved because a copy of
Reader’s Digest
with an article that mentioned his name was being passed around the workplace. “The Bureau is of the opinion that in view of Sebold’s hesitancy to return to his employment at the Benicia Arsenal in view of the fact that several employees know of his true identity, he should not be required to return to that plant,” Hoover declared. On May 4, 1943, Sebold joined the staff of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. He spent the remainder of World War II as a gauge repairman in the instrument department.

Unknown to his coworkers, he was the pseudonymous star of an FBI promotional newsreel about the case that was screened as a morale booster before spy movies across the country. “These pictures were taken at a busy New York street corner,” Hoover intoned over grainy black-and-white footage of Forty-Second Street and Broadway. “The man walking up and down the street is ‘Harry Sawyer,’ a naturalized German American citizen. Sawyer visited Germany in 1939, where he was approached by the Gestapo, who urged him to return to the United States as a spy. Before leaving Germany, he sent word to us. A spy trap was set. Sawyer was working for the FBI.” The bulk of the short feature was devoted to replaying portions of the Room 627 films that had so thrilled Judge Byers’s courtroom. Special attention was paid to Fritz Duquesne’s flamboyant visit. “He is describing to Sawyer the gas-operating principles of the M1 rifle,” Hoover said over shots of the gesticulating colonel, “a secret that might’ve made a difference in the lives of a lot of Americans if it had reached Germany at that time.” In light of the war in the Pacific, screen time is given to the Japanese agent Takeo Ezima, who made a single stop at the office and wasn’t mentioned in the indictment or the trial. “All of these pictures you must remember were taken before Pearl Harbor,” Hoover informs theatergoers. “But to the enemy the fighting in Asia and the fighting in France were already different fronts in a single war.”

Omitted was any mention of Hermann Lang and the Norden bombsight, which was glorified in the early years of the war as our greatest advantage over the enemy. Hollywood played a leading role in the veneration. In
Joe Smith, American
(1942), Robert Young plays an employee of an armament factory who is assigned to work on “the only secret weapon in the world that this country has that no other country can get,” as one character describes it. He is promptly kidnapped and tortured by Nazi agents (“You will either draw that bombsight installation for us or we will kill you”) but escapes and contacts the FBI, which earns him a comparison with Nathan Hale. “Hero?” he responds. “Baloney. Nobody’s a hero in this country. All of us guys are the same. We’ve got homes, and wives, and kids. . . . And we don’t like people who push us around.”
Bombardier
(1943), starring Pat O’Brien and Randolph Scott, hammered home the idea that a B-17 Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator equipped with the masterpiece could deposit a bomb in a pickle barrel from twenty thousand feet. “Through this secret bombsight the world’s best bombardiers are aiming at Tokyo, Berlin, and all the Axis nerve-centers,” shouted the film’s trailer. “This is the story behind their deadly accuracy.”