by Duffy, Peter
CHAPTER EIGHT
“YOU ARE HARRY SAWYER”
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
On 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.
“I took a taxi to the city, took the subway (8th Avenue) to Chambers Street, and carried my suitcases over to Foley Square and the U.S. Courthouse,” he wrote in his diary of the case, which he composed a year and a half later. During a meeting with the SAC of the New York office on the sixth floor, Ellsworth was informed that he was being assigned as the double agent’s handler or body man, a heady role for his first spy case. “My job was to live with Sebold, check his story, see that he carried out German instructions, learn the code, and develop the case,” he wrote. “I am on an important matter that may keep me here weeks,” he told Nell in a letter that day. “I hope not. But if I make it, I’ll really be in big. Please telephone to heaven often for my success. I need it.”
Sebold was allowed to spend that evening with his wife, Helen, but was instructed to tell her nothing of his service with the FBI. “He at this time feels very badly about having to lie to his wife and tell her that he is employed as an electrical appliance salesman at $50 a week,” according to the FBI. “Undoubtedly some day he will let some information slip and she will become aware of his activities. Such an occurrence, of course, will have to be taken care of at the proper time.” Whatever the previous status of the relationship, it appears that Mrs. Sebold w
elcomed her husband home with love and support.
“Another agent and I were assigned to follow him the first night he went out,” wrote Agent Newkirk. “There were two entrances to the apartment he visited and the agent with me watched one door to the building and I watched the front door. The only place I could find partly out of the snow and cold was in the entrance of a church across the street. There was hardly anyone on the streets. After a while a priest entered the church and said hello as he went by. He came back out in a little while and asked me if there was anything he could do for me—did I want a cup of coffee, a sandwich, or anything?—and I told him no I was just waiting for a friend. In about an hour the priest came out again. He explained that he was a priest and if I were in trouble he would not inform the law and would help me in any way he could. I told him I was still waiting for my friend and was perfectly all right. He went back to his church, I’m sure, puzzled and hurt. Sebold came out later and went back to his room and I ended up in bed for a week with a mild case of pneumonia.”
Sebold returned to the Hotel Imperial at Broadway and Thirty-Second where the Bureau had reserved two adjoining rooms, one for him, the other for agents. On the following morning, Ellsworth met him for the first time. “As I was getting out of the shower in the hotel room, Sebold came in,” he wrote. “Franz introduced me to him. I found Sebold to be a tall (6'3"), thin (157 pounds) German. He was big-boned, brown-eyed, and had brown hair. He spoke English brokenly but as time went on he spoke English very well. He was very nervous and irritable and I saw at once that he did not get along with Franz.”
During their first day together, Sebold and Ellsworth took out a PO box in the Church Street Annex under the name Harry Sawyer (the first in a series of PO addresses Sebold would use) and paid the additional money ($108.30) owed on the Leica camera, soon returning to purchase the accessories necessary to create microphotographs. On February 15, they rented a typewriter from the American Typewriter and Adding Machine Company and reserved an apartment in Yorkville under the name of Harry Büchner, his wife’s maiden name, which was soon replaced by another Germantown residence taken out under his real name. But Sebold and Ellsworth didn’t live at either location, instead moving into separate rooms on the second floor of a German-run boardinghouse on the West Side. “Franz and I had previously looked the place over,” Ellsworth wrote. “Bill and I were the only tenants as the place had been remodeled and opened for business. I was hard put to meet Bill there casually so I walked over to his door and knocked just as the landlord came down the stairs—I walked in. The landlord said someone was in there and went to stop me but I saw Bill there and said my name was Endicott and I wanted to get acquainted. The landlord said okay and walked on. I had taken the room as J.C. Endicott. Bill had used the name assigned to him in Germany—Harry Sawyer.” But the FBI man couldn’t stand the dump. He complained in a letter to his parents about being attacked by bedbugs (“who left red lumps over one arm and all over my neck”), forced to bathe in rusty water (“you can’t see the bottom of the tub when the tub is full of fresh water”), tormented by the radiator (“the heat is on full force all the time so I suffocate with the windows closed, and the wind blows the room away when the windows are open”), and cramped by the too-short bed. “Last night I stacked the three couch pillows at the head end and put the bed pillow on them and thus made the thing long enough,” he wrote. After a week or two of slum living, they moved to the twentieth floor of the Manhattan Towers at Seventy-Sixth and Broadway, where Ellsworth lived as J. C. Elliott and Sebold as William Sutheor, an uncle’s last name. “We had to keep initials straight due to laundry and cleaning marks.” Ellsworth was pleased that the hotel was built over a Gothic-style church, which took up the first three floors of the building and hosted services by the Manhattan Ward of his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “The Mormons love it so I had an easy time getting to Sunday School and evening services,” he told his diary. “Some Sunday afternoons I also attended St. Bartholomew’s Church [on Park Avenue] at 4 p.m. as they had a swell choral group and organ music for an hour.”
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But Bill Sebold was not happy. Soon after his arrival from Germany, he informed Ellsworth that “he would not go through with this case; that he was not being treated right; that he was being kept under suspicion by the Bureau and that he did not have the full confidence of the agents,” wrote Percy “Sam” Foxworth, the SAC of the New York office, in a “personal and strictly confidential” message to the director. “He claimed to be unable to sleep or eat and said the nervous tension was becoming too great for him. He expressed a desire to talk over this situation with me and I had a long conversation with him.”
The lengthy talk convinced Foxworth that Sebold might not have the coolly duplicitous nature required to operate effectively as an undercover.
“Sebold has an honesty complex,” he wrote. “In fact, he is so honest that I am afraid some day he will give himself away because of his inability to act his part. He has a mania for doing just what he feels is right; for example, he says that if the German government really knew him they would never have entrusted him with the assignment which they gave to him, and that he took this assignment knowing that he would never go through with it, but knowing that he had to do something in order to get out of Germany alive.”
Further, Sebold’s feelings for America were unequivocal. “He states that an oath to him is a sacred thing and that when he swore to be loyal to the United States and a loyal United States citizen at the time he was naturalized, he considered that a sacred oath and he considers he renewed that oath at the time he was given a passport. He is of the opinion that if a man breaks faith with him in any respect whatever that man is not deserving of any further consideration with him. It is, therefore, apparent that if Sebold ever feels that the Bureau does not trust him or would fail to carry out any part of what he thinks is its contract with him, he would blow up and probably ruin the case.”
And he was just the type to blow up. “He admits that he has a violent temper which he claims to have inherited from his Swedish father,” Foxworth wrote. “It is sometimes difficult for him to control this temper and it is possible that in a moment of stress and anger he may say or do something in the presence of the subjects of this case which would give away his operations in connection with the Bureau.” Sebold beat up “a prankster in Mülheim during the past year in the office where he worked when the latter hit him on the head with a tomato.”
Foxworth said Sebold “cooled down considerably” when he assured him that “the Bureau knows his whole background and is now able to trust him and is confident that he is telling the truth. I told him we would see that he had proper medical care. This appeared to satisfy him and appropriate arrangements were made.”
Sebold was instructed to make an appointment with an expert in nervous disorders, Dr. Phillip Goodhardt, who was to be told nothing of his work with the FBI. According to Sebold’s account, the doctor “immediately diagnosed his case as being one of considerable nervous strain and told him he was in a very rundown condition; that his mind was overactive and that he had apparently recently been under severe nervous shock and strain.” Sebold said he told the doctor “that he had a terrible experience in Germany and had nearly lost his life there; that he had, however, succeeded in getting away to America and that he is now working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The doctor feared he was a few days away from a nervous breakdown. His recommendation was “a lot of rest and mental ease,” said Sebold.
According to Dr. Goodhardt’s account, which was provided to a Bureau agent, Sebold told him “he had lost 40 pounds in the past two years; that when he lies down his head twists so that it causes him considerable inconvenience; that he is quite worried and two years ago was operated upon for stomach ulcers at the Bellevue Hospital, New York City.” The doctor said he wasn’t sure “whether Sebold is a ‘paranoiac’ which is a person troubled with a chronic form of insanity with
delusions. However, the fact that he states he is not being followed at the present time would seem to indicate that this is not the case.” Dr. Goodhardt told the agent that he thought “Sebold was a German spy; that he appeared indiscreet to him in mentioning any connection at all with the federal government and, frankly, he had been turning over in his mind considerably the possibility that Sebold might be a ‘paranoiac’ as previously mentioned.”
In his own conclusion, Foxworth described Sebold as a “definitely eccentric” individual whose “usefulness to the Bureau is very definitely limited.” He wanted Hoover to be aware of Sebold’s “personal make-up as there is no way of telling what he might do to this case when he is outside the care of an agent and handling his contacts by himself.”
Of this episode, Jim Ellsworth makes only a brief mention in his diary. “We sent him to a nerve specialist who attested that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, prescribed rest, and plenty of good food,” he wrote in a line that suggests he didn’t believe Sebold’s state of mind would jeopardize the investigation. Now convinced of Sebold’s “honesty and desire to cooperate,” Ellsworth wrote, the Bureau allowed him to spend every evening and all day on Sundays with his wife. The case was going forward.
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On February 16, with the assistance of Ellsworth and another agent, Sebold typed out the letters that Hamburg wanted him to send to Everett Roeder (“I should be very much obliged to you if you would let me know by return mail when and where a meeting between us can take place”), to Colonel Duquesne (“I have had the pleasure of meeting your old friends Nicholas and Joy and they have asked me to get in contact with you”), and, in German, to Lilly Stein (“My dear Miss, I met your friend Heinrich and I have regards from Bachenkel and Grinzig to extend to you”). The first to respond was Ms. Stein, who sent a note seeking a meeting to “talk with you about our mutual acquaintances.” On February 19, Sebold called her from a phone booth in a drugstore on the corner of West Eighty-Sixth and Columbus and took a cab with Ellsworth to the vicinity of Stein’s building in the East Fifties. At 7:20 p.m., he rang her bell and was buzzed into the building. Answering the door of the ground-floor apartment was a twenty-four-year-old woman with hazel eyes and bushy brown hair, a seductive native of Vienna who was five foot four, of medium build, with “better than average looks” and a “Jewish appearance,” according to her FBI description. Sebold was so startled by her youth and beauty that he asked at least twice if she was indeed Ms. Stein. When he muttered his Hamburg-dictated introduction about “your friend Heinrich” and “regards from Bachenkel and Grinzig,” she responded, “I know. I know.” With little concern about Sebold’s identity, she blithely spoke of two of her contacts, one of whom she described as a well-known American diplomat. She also mentioned that she had received a payment of $200 without a problem but hadn’t heard a response to several letters she’d sent to Germany. When Sebold handed her the microphotograph that he had hidden in his hat, she extracted a powerful lens from her purse, placed it in a socket, and glanced at the message, which she could make out fine. Once the bothersome matter of spy business was concluded, she asked him to sit down, have a drink, get comfortable. Sebold declined, saying he didn’t want to get caught in her apartment, which he later described as “very luxuriously furnished.” As he was leaving, she pouted, “Now you are going and leave me all alone.” Waiting outside in the rain and sleet was Ellsworth, who, despite a red face, runny nose, and cracked lips, was thrilled at how well the case was going. “Everything is working out just lovely,” he told his wife in a letter the next day. “It reads like a novel and I am the ace in the hole so am enjoying it immensely.”