Double Agent : The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring (9781451667974)

by Duffy, Peter

  With the reluctant blessing of the Abwehr chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, obtained during a face-to-face meeting in Berlin, Ritter was assigned to “build up an organization on the spot,” a task he believed he could accomplish better than any other operative since American counterintelligence authorities were “not particularly active,” he wrote. In this, he was right: The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was so small it could barely complete routine work. The Military Intelligence Division (also known as G-2) had a single officer and two assistants protecting the entire Second Corps Area (New York, New Jersey, and Delaware) from spy infiltration. J. Edgar Hoover, then forty-two, had received verbal instructions from President Roosevelt to monitor Fascist and Communist groups to obtain “a broad picture of the general movement and its activities as may affect the economic and political life of the country as a whole,” a pivotal step in restoring subversion-hunting powers that had been stripped from him after the lawless excesses of the Palmer or Red Raids of two decades earlier. But the FBI was rarely permitted to open up a specific counterespionage investigation in the absence of a request from the Army, Navy, or State Department, which meant that Hoover’s special agents, celebrated as remorseless defenders of the nation’s honor trained in the new science of forensic analysis and outfitted in the smartest of suits and snap-brim hats, had little incentive to develop expertise in the detection and apprehension of spies. In simple fact, the United States was doing next to nothing to protect itself from foreign espionage on the day Nikolaus Ritter arrived in the port of New York.

  Yet in the seconds after he reached the two-story passenger terminal at Pier 86 at West Forty-Sixth Street on the Hudson River, Ritter thought his covert career had come to a premature end. As he was making his way through the entry process, he heard his name being shouted: “Ritter!” It was not an officer of the law preparing to haul him to the detention facility on Ellis Island, he was relieved to discover, but an acquaintance of his, a reporter for the Staats who was present to get a quote or two from disembarking notables. After an inspector spent many excruciating moments trying to determine whether a prescription drug found in his luggage could be carried into the US—it couldn’t—he was asked to hand over his umbrella cane, which was of a type that was “not at all well-known in America at that time,” he wrote. The inspector removed the casing, performed a careful examination, and announced that it would make “an excellent hiding place.” Ritter joked, “I’m sorry that I have to disappoint you.” Permitted to enter the United States of America at last, he hopped a cab bound for the Taft Hotel, the two-thousand-room behemoth at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-First Street, with the expectation that he would blend into its clientele of travelers from throughout the world.

  Over the next few days, he acted the part of a legitimate businessman, constructing an alibi by loudly speaking to would-be clients over the lobby telephone. He reserved a room at the Wellington Hotel, four blocks to the north, under the name “Alfred Landing,” and then mailed two postcards to his fictitious creation, one sent to the Wellington, the other to a nearby post office, general delivery, as he explained in his book. After checking out of the Taft as Ritter, he registered at the Wellington as Landing, where he was given the postmarked item that had earlier arrived for him and which he took to the post office and used as identification to receive the postcard waiting there. With his new identity given recognition by a branch of the US government, he gathered up all of his Ritter-related documents and stuffed them into a safe-deposit box, giving the key to a friend who would hold it until he was ready to return to Germany. Wearing a new felt hat he purchased on Broadway, his old gray overcoat from Hamburg, and an American pair of nickel eyeglasses, Ritter was now Alfred Landing, on the hunt for agents to work for Hitler.

  His first stop was to see “Pop,” Friederich Sohn, whom he described as a “stocky, middle-aged man in shirtsleeves.” Sohn was an employee of Carl L. Norden Inc., the US military contractor in lower Manhattan that produced what Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, chief of staff of the US Army Air Corps, called “the most important military secret project under development.” Known to the Navy as the Mark XV bombsight and to the Army as the M-9 or M-series bombsight, the “Norden bombsight,” as it would eventually be known to the culture, was a mechanical-electrical-optical apparatus roughly the size of a watermelon. It weighed fifty pounds, boasted at least thirty-five patentable features, was interlaced with upward of two thousand minutely calibrated parts, had a single motor-driven, wide-angled telescope, and was stabilized with two servo-connected gyroscopes spinning at seventy-eight hundred revolutions per minute. Most significant, the bombardier wasn’t required to hit the release button. When the axis of the sighting telescope and the pointer on the range bar clicked into alignment, the bombs fell automatically, sent along their path by the ingenious resolution to a problem of advanced mathematics, ballistics, electrical engineering, optics, and aeronautics.

  The bombsight was the creation of Carl Lukas Norden, a Dutch citizen with a mechanical engineering degree from the prestigious Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, who spent eight years in solitary experimentation (often in the sanctuary of his mother’s home in Switzerland) before the Navy offered him a production contract in 1928, allowing for the formation of a corporation with his partner, Ted Barth, and the opening of a small production facility at 80 Lafayette Street. “Old Man Dynamite,” as Norden was nicknamed for his feared explosions of temper, wouldn’t countenance the production of any more than about a hundred bombsights a year between 1931 and 1938, ensuring that Norden Inc. was more a secret workshop of artisanal craftsmen than a war factory of low-skilled workers.

  As a dedicated believer in the superiority of Northern European craftsmanship—he thought anyone too exposed to sunlight was mentally deficient—Norden favored German Americans who had been schooled in the apprentice system in Europe, which he felt gave them the necessary rigor to construct an instrument able to function in accord with his finely wrought mathematical formulas. According to an internal history, “Mr. Norden was so critical of each piece as it was turned out, that, when a part did not suit him, he had a habit of saying, ‘That is not good—throw it out the window.’ ” Although several of the employees had arrived in New York during the Weimar years with an outward sympathy toward Nazism, the company’s highly Germanic institutional culture was undisturbed by such ideological proclivities, especially at a time when few imagined the possibility of America’s getting into another confrontation with Germany.

  The Norden bombsight was designed to revolutionize armed conflict. It was the crown jewel of an American aerial doctrine that imagined the next war could be won by a few high-flying airplanes delivering a handful of precision strikes against the industrial and infrastructural hubs essential to the modern war-making effort. Carl Norden’s handiwork would ensure that the American bombing campaign of the brave future would be so surgical that civilians wouldn’t have to die, an attractive concept in a Depression-wracked nation uninterested in returning to the trenches and captivated by the increasingly fantastic feats achieved by contemporary aircraft. “My dear, we are a humane country,” he later told a reporter. “We do not bomb women and children.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  During their first meeting in the living room of his Queens apartment, Pop Sohn informed Ritter about a colleague of his whom he identified as “Paul,” one of the select workers at 80 Lafayette Street working on the sixteenth floor, where the completed bombsights were assembled. Ritter knew that “our own bombsights did not meet expectations” and “everybody was feverishly working on improvements for the aiming instruments” but that “so far nobody had solved the problem successfully.” He was electrified by the possibility of addressing a vital dilemma for the Luftwaffe. Attempting to conceal his excitement, Ritter expressed a wish to meet “Paul” in person, and Sohn offered to arrange a meeting at his place for a few days hence.

  On a Sunday, Ritter wrote, he entered into the rarefied
presence of a man he instantly recognized as a pure-hearted hero of the National Socialist movement, an embodiment of what Hitler called in Mein Kampf “the highest humanity.” Hermann W. Lang, a native of a Bavarian mountain village who lived among his landsmen in an apartment building in Ridgewood, had “pleasant facial features and blue eyes that exuded so much openness that, when I shook his hand, I involuntarily felt well disposed toward him.” A longtime Nazi who had been sanctified by his involvement in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Lang arrived in New York in 1927 and found short-term employment here and there as a machinist. In February 1929, he was hired to work at Norden as a lowly benchhand. Over the next several years, he proved to be a respected member of the staff with a high mechanical intelligence and discreet manner, taking the subway in each day from the Forest Avenue stop and accruing the plaudits necessary to be promoted to be one of four assistant inspectors. Now thirty-six, he was unapologetic enough about his political beliefs to join the labor affiliate of the Bund, the German-American Vocational League or Deutsche Amerikanische Berufsgemeinschaft (DAB), which described itself as a “united workers’ league of Germans abroad parallel with the league of German workers in the old homeland, which is united in a common front under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” The DAB included “technicians occupying responsible posts, many of them in defense plants,” which made it “the most dangerous of Nazi organizations in the United States,” the Justice Department would later say.

  Speaking “rather modestly,” Lang described how he secreted the bombsight plans out of the Norden plant at the end of the workday, made copies by hand on his kitchen table while his wife slept, and then returned the originals before anyone noticed the next morning. Asked by Ritter why he would take such a risk, Lang delivered a patriotic oration that could’ve been written by Joseph Goebbels: “I am a German, and I love Germany. I know that Germany is trying to be free and strong again. I know that Germany is diligent, and I also know that Germany is poor. . . . When I got my hands on these drawings, I said to myself, ‘If you can bring this kind of instrument to Germany, then Germany will be able to save millions and lots of time. And then you have done something for the land of your forefathers.’ ” This was “an idealist,” a man of “genuine conviction” with “strong nerves” whose unwavering loyalty was “simply incomprehensible,” Ritter wrote.

  When Ritter made the mistake of bringing up payment, Lang dismissed the suggestion as beneath his dignity. “I hope that was just a figure of speech,” he said. All that mattered to him was that his materials be safely delivered to Germany, where “your experts will know what they’re dealing with.” Ritter had a plan for that. He left Pop Sohn’s apartment with a sketch which, along with an additional one he received from Lang a week later, was slipped past US Customs at Pier 86 curled inside an umbrella cane carried by one of the Abwehr couriers working on a German liner. The courier wasn’t using Ritter’s cane but a cheap one purchased at the ship’s store; Ritter got the idea from the inspector, he wrote. Yet the method was deemed too risky. Subsequent Norden copies would be cut up into numbered bands and inserted into the pages of a newspaper to make it past pier scrutiny. “Before I left New York for my own trip through a part of the United States, a second set of the bombsight drawings, subdivided into strips, was on the way to Hamburg and from there to Berlin,” Ritter wrote.

  He then traveled to Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago, meeting with two defense-plant technicians, a stamp collector who agreed to serve as a routing station (a mail drop, live letter box, or cutout in counterintelligence parlance) for other agents’ letters, and an unnamed industrialist who wanted Hitler to know that he would “outfit an entire infantry division for Germany personally at my expense if he starts an open battle against Bolshevism.” The idea never went anywhere but it proved to Ritter “what some of the powerful Americans were thinking.” Back in New York, he made contact with the remarkable character later to be misidentified as the ringleader of his spies. He was a master yarn-spinner with an exotic accent and a monocle, a South African–born swashbuckler who had planted bombs for Imperial Germany during the Great War and whose claim to be the greatest covert agent to serve Kaiser Wilhelm had been given wide airing in a recent biography. “My old acquaintance,” Ritter called him.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne was the grandest and most peculiar figure in the clique of self-appointed “colonels” and “commanders” who reclined in stodgy haunts such as the University Club on West Fifty-Fourth Street. Now sixty years old, he could go on for hours about how he took up arms on behalf of his people, the Boers, against the British Army during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), becoming a guerrilla fighter with a claim to planting explosives at important junctures of the conflict that is unverified by South African history books. His life was given its great cause, he would tell his listeners, when troops commanded by Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener destroyed the Duquesne farmstead at Nylstroom as part of a scorched-earth campaign that targeted civilian support for the Boer commandos, resulting in a horrible end for his sister, mother, and blind uncle Jan (who was hanged from a telephone pole with a cow rope). “I will wreck that bastard land, that bastard empire, to the last foul inch of its stolen possessions,” he boasted of announcing to a British court that charged him with plotting with several others to set off bombs in Cape Town. He evaded the firing squad by agreeing to turn over (falsified) Boer secret codes and was transported to the penal colony on Burt’s Island in Bermuda. There he escaped with the assistance of a pretty young woman of refinement who resided near the prison (said to be Alice Wortley, who later became his wife), swam across a mile and a half of shark-infested waters while dodging bullets from the guards’ guns, survived in the wild for three weeks on little more than onions, obtained a seaman’s uniform by drugging a tipsy sailor, and stowed away as a crew member on a yacht owned by Isaac Emerson, the “Bromo-Seltzer King,” who was headed back to America. Some of which may even be true. Duquesne had the “superlative gift of oriental storytelling—a form of entertainment where the dividing line between fact and fiction is never confused by the native,” according to an acquaintance.

  Then he hit New York—ah, New York—where he was lavished with attention from newspaper and magazine editors eager to feed the public appetite for tales about the fantastical dangers of the African backcountry. Writing under the byline Captain Fritz Duquesne, he proved to be a hardworking redoubt of the yellow press, spending the next several years on staff at papers such as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and writing commissioned pieces for an array of travel and adventure magazines. “Tracking the Man-Killer” was one of his contributions to Everybody’s Magazine. He was respected enough as a purveyor of Africana to be invited to the White House on January 25, 1909, where he offered President Theodore Roosevelt advice on his upcoming postpresidential safari in east Africa. (“Suppose an elephant charges me, what should I do to distract its attention?” the president asked.) The connection did such wonders for his career—when he expressed fears for Roosevelt’s safety, the story made page 1 of the Washington Post—that Duquesne sought to capitalize on the ex-president’s subsequent journey into the Brazilian jungle in 1913. Carrying film equipment to shoot motion pictures for an intended lecture series, Duquesne set out for the tropics a few days after becoming a US citizen in December 1913. But his plans apparently changed once the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914 and the Kaiser’s representatives in port cities began recruiting “agents for arranging explosives [explosions] on ships bound for enemy countries, and for arranging delays, embroilments, and confusion during the loading, dispatch, and unloading of ships,” according to a German government directive. Although Duquesne would boast of sinking twenty-two British ships, setting another hundred afire, and burning two waterfront towns, he was credibly accused of working with a gang of local conspirators to pack sixteen containers of timed explosives (probably encased within his film
materials) on a British merchant steamer. Six days after the SS Tennyson left the Brazilian port of Bahia (now Salvador), a massive blast destroyed much of the commercial cargo and killed three British sailors but did not sink the ship. One of the conspirators admitted to Brazilian authorities that Duquesne “directed all operations connected with cases shipped by Tennyson,” according to a British intelligence report. Whatever else we know about Fritz Duquesne and his grandiosity, we know this: he was entirely capable of murder.

  Wanted by British authorities, he probably arranged for the New York Times to print a story (“Captain Duquesne Is Slain in Bolivia”) on April 27, 1916, that reported how the “noted adventurer and soldier of fortune” had been killed in a battle with Indians on the Bolivian frontier. “His expedition was looted by the attacking band,” it said, crediting the information to a “brief cablegram” sent to the paper. Duquesne resurrected himself on May 8, when the Associated Press printed a follow-up (under one of Duquesne’s aliases) that detailed how he “has been found by troops at Rio Pilcomayo in a badly wounded state.” The AP reported that the explorer was expected to recover. Why would Duquesne go to such lengths to concoct two contradictory stories? wondered a Duquesne biographer, Art Ronnie. “Speculation would suggest that he regretted the first story announcing his death even though its effect had been the desired one: to put a halt to the intensive manhunt for him,” Ronnie wrote. “He might’ve feared that if he were ‘dead,’ he would never be able to return to America, Alice, and the good life.”