by Duffy, Peter
Four days after the speech, the Lend-Lease Act was introduced into Congress. It gave Roosevelt sweeping powers to provide American-produced aid to the now-broke British nation (or any country “whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States”) under the stipulation that the items (or something of equal value) would be returned at the end of the war, much as a man who borrows a neighbor’s hose to put out a fire gives it back once the job is done, as he said in a much-quoted remark to the press. While the legislation eliminated the “cash” portion of cash-and-carry, it still required non-American ships to cart the goods across the Atlantic Ocean in the face of the U-boat threat. The isolationists were theatrically aghast at what was indeed an unprecedented power grab by the executive. Senator Wheeler likened Lend-Lease to the New Deal agricultural policy of reducing crop surpluses (and thus raising prices) by “plowing under” a certain proportion of the acreage, saying that the president sought to “plow under every fourth American boy,” which became the title of an antiwar anthem written by the left-wing Almanac Singers of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Congressional opponents succeeded in attaching an amendment explicitly stating that “naval vessels of the United States” were not authorized by the legislation to protect the convoys of Allied merchant ships traveling across the Atlantic, an attempt to keep them from being fired upon and perhaps sunk, the quickest route to an American declaration of war. Hitler was also determined to avoid any action that would bring the Americans into the war before he could complete two quick campaigns scheduled for the spring of 1941. With Fascist Italy failing in its efforts to capture Greece and British possessions in North Africa, he’d decided to send troops to secure Germany’s southern flank before turning against his truest enemy, the Soviet Union, which was under the misapprehension that the Hitler-Stalin Pact was binding. Once the Communist leviathan was easily overrun in a massive surprise attack, the Nazi regime would then have the material resources to fight against both Great Britain and the United States, according to the Führer’s thinking. For now, he wanted to keep the Yanks out.
Among those sent south was Nikolaus Ritter, who no longer had day-to-day supervision of the ring that had been expanding ever since his peacetime trip to New York three years earlier. Fed up with Ast Hamburg’s internecine conflict, he was glad to embark on a special mission to North Africa, where he commanded a unit that made a failed attempt to extract a pro-Nazi Egyptian general from behind British lines. During this novelistic interlude, Ritter enjoyed an alliance with the Hungarian aristocrat and adventurer László Almásy (the model for the lead character in the film The English Patient) and survived nine hours on a life raft after his Heinkel He 111 plunged into the Mediterranean off the Cyrenaican shore. But he couldn’t help thinking about his spies in America and Great Britain. He wondered “if those behind could provide the personal control and contact on which the effectiveness of my ring of agents had thus far depended,” he wrote of his Ast Hamburg replacements. “I only hoped the new officers maintained the standards we had established.”
On the evening of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms address, the FBI recorded that Duquesne returned home “slightly drunk,” which was an apt description of his current manner as an espionage agent. Over many get-togethers now often held in City Hall Park (La Guardia’s Ranch, Duquesne named it) or a German restaurant called Van Axen’s on Gold Street, he was supplying Sebold with ample evidence of his eccentricity. Duquesne wanted it passed along that American intelligence in Europe was sending information to the United States “by engraving messages on spoons, pots, pans, camera parts, etc.” He asked Sebold to provide Germany with two articles written about him in 1925 (“Is Fritz Duquesne Alive?” and “Fritz Duquesne, the Sequel,” both from American Legion Weekly), which Sebold did. Duquesne produced (fake) photographs of a special specimen of gas shell, which he said he obtained by sneaking into the Du Pont plant in Wilmington, Delaware, and described visits to Hyde Park, where he was somehow privy to conversations involving President Roosevelt. He would thenceforth sign his letters, he announced in February, with the ink stamp of a cat. “My pussy,” he said. After complaining of gallstone trouble, he wondered if Germany still kept two beds at Lenox Hill Hospital for its stricken agents. (Er, no.) He declined Ast Hamburg’s offer to go to Africa (“I will be put up against a wall and shot”) and ignored its order to approach three high-society Nazi sympathizers (he said he was investigating them first). The FBI microphone in his apartment captured him more than once repeating the tall tale about how he was responsible for the death of Lord Kitchener, boasting to his girlfriend that he “was the unknown person who escaped on a raft” as the Hampshire was sinking. “The Duke was a very interesting talker but he always had to be the center of attention,” wrote Agent Newkirk, who was listening in the upstairs apartment. In a message to Hamburg, Sebold said, “I have a feeling that Dunn is a dud.” Yet he was regarded as astute enough in the ways of subterfuge to be kept away from the Forty-Second Street office, at least for the time being.
Not so Hermann Lang, who was invited up in early February and guided into a discussion of his 1938 trip to Germany. The FBI was still unsure exactly how he’d communicated the Norden data to the Germans.
“Must one take everything along in his head?” Sebold asked in German, referring to a previous hint from Lang that he passed along the bombsight details without the aid of blueprints.
Lang responded with a verbal shrug of his shoulders.
“Uh-huh,” he said, according to Agent Fellner’s testimony.
“You must be a master pirate,” Sebold said. “Did you have everything in your head? The whole story, and over there put it together from memory?”
“Uh-huh,” Lang repeated.
“Gee, that’s something marvelous,” Sebold said, before turning to other matters.
He was given one last try a month later when the two met for the final time. Sebold got him talking about his time in the Air Ministry in Berlin, which Lang described as “the most closely watched place in Germany.” He said “a man had to be very important to get in there.” Lang went on to praise Ernst Udet, whom he described as a “nice fellow” with an “excellent technical knowledge of airplanes.” But that was about all that Sebold could get out of him. The bombsight wasn’t mentioned.
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With the overwhelming support of the American people, the Lend-Lease bill easily passed both houses of Congress by early March and was promptly signed into law by President Roosevelt. The initial shipments were funded with a $7 billion appropriation, the first installment of almost $50 billion in Lend-Lease aid that would be delivered, mostly to Great Britain, during World War II. “Our blessings from the whole of the British Empire go out to you and the American nation for this very present help in a time of trouble,” Churchill said in a telegram to Roosevelt. The administration also asked for a vast increase in US military spending, which amounted to $13.7 billion for 1941, a figure that would only grow over the next four years as America mobilized itself out of the Depression. Two weeks after the enactment of Lend-Lease, Hitler sought to facilitate the invasion of Greece by coercing the leaders of Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact, which, after they did, sparked a coup d’état in Belgrade that removed them from power. Enraged, Hitler ordered Yugoslavia to be destroyed with “unmerciful harshness.” At dawn on Palm Sunday, April 6, German forces swept into Yugoslavia and Greece. Without the protection even of antiaircraft guns, Belgrade was subject to a vicious aerial assault from Luftwaffe bombers resulting in the deaths of an estimated seventeen thousand civilians. On the next day, the FBI recorded Else Weustenfeld telling Lilly Stein that “even though they may laugh at Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece at this time, nevertheless in four weeks he will be master of those countries.” Within three weeks, both countries had been conquered, which, coupled with General Erwin Rommel’s successes in North Africa, left Hitler free to plan his invasion of the Soviet Union. On April 23, the day Greece sign
ed an armistice with the Germans, Charles Lindbergh spoke before a raucous mass meeting of the America First Committee at the Manhattan Center on West Thirty-Fourth Street. “We have been led toward war by a minority of our people,” he said. “This minority has power. It has influence. It has a loud voice. But it does not represent the American people.” Among the ten thousand spectators in the hall—thousands more gathered outside in an atmosphere of vituperation that led to a few scuffles—were at least two of the Nazi agents under surveillance as part of the Sebold case.
In the midst of Hitler’s call for a “merciless sea war” against British merchant shipping, the FBI was learning much from the leader of the marine spies, Paul Fehse, a determined soldier in the Kriegsmarine’s campaign to strangle the UK into submission. During his first session in Room 627, he didn’t deny a tale that Sebold had first heard from the butcher and the baker, the one about Fehse’s mingling among British sailors in Oslo and picking up intelligence that resulted in the sinking of four ships during the Norway campaign, which would make him “quite a boy,” said Sebold. (“Fehse replied that he would not lie to him,” recorded the FBI.) On January 25, 1941, Fehse introduced Sebold to the head chef of the SS America, who produced the ship’s blueprints and pointed out for the camera where the gun emplacements would be located when the liner was transferred to the US Navy, as was soon expected. On February 10, Fehse wondered if Sebold had ever heard of a courier named Walischefsky, which allowed agents to begin an investigation of one Adolf Henry August Walischewski, a steward on the SS Uruguay of the Moore-McCormack Shipping Line. On March 5, Fehse identified George Schuh, a Nazi ideologue who was a “commander” in the Hudson County, New Jersey, branch of the DAB. (He could be booked to give a talk titled “Cultural Decadence.”) On March 12, Fehse arrived with Heinrich Clausing, a vegetable cook on the SS Argentina, who sent messages to Germany through a mail drop in Brazil, and spoke of Richard Eichenlaub, the owner of the Little Casino Bierstube on Sebold’s block of East Eighty-Fifth Street, which turned out to be the rendezvous point for another ring of spies, the fourth. On March 19, Fehse went to Eichenlaub’s bar and returned to Sebold’s office with Heinz Stade, a cellist with a long-standing membership in the Bund who told Sebold he had been questioned in the World’s Fair bombing. Stade bragged that he refused to talk even though the police broke three of his ribs and hung him out of a window. (He would later tell Sebold that a Jewish detective had hit him over the head with a typewriter.) Two days later, Fehse walked through the door with Max Blank, a bookstore clerk who was about to be hired by the German Library of Information, the Nazi government’s propaganda publisher in New York. Speaking in German, Blank told Sebold that he had a “wonderful nose” for FBI men and Dies Committee investigators, able to “smell them right away.” You “must have a marvelous knowledge of human nature to be able to do that,” Sebold deadpanned.
But Fehse had been eager to return home since he’d first suspected that American investigators were on his trail. During an earlier meeting with Sebold, Fehse said that “he must have had an overdose of imagination in Germany when he accepted the job as a spy in America,” pointing out that “the Americans are much tougher than the Germans indicated.” On March 28, Fehse informed Sebold that he had signed on as a fry cook on the SS Siboney (which had replaced the SS Exochorda on the Lisbon run). He was planning to take the ship only as far as Portugal, from where he would jump ship and make his way back to the Reich. He couldn’t be swayed by Sebold’s comment that Fehse was “greatly needed here.” On the following day, the FBI had no choice but to arrest Fehse before he had the opportunity to sail. To protect the Sebold operation from exposure, he was charged in connection with an unstamped letter of shipping information intended for a mail drop in Italy that the US Postal Service had passed along to the FBI. Quickly pleading guilty to a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Fehse was sentenced to one year and a day in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The Times noted that he “wept silently” when Judge Edward A. Conger rendered the judgment. “It stinks,” said his loyal aide-de-camp, Leo Waalen, when he next visited the office, adding that he didn’t believe Sebold had been exposed by Fehse’s mishap.
Waalen, a thirty-four-year-old German national who lived over a pork store on Second Avenue in Yorkville, now moved to the top position, regularly offering leads on new contacts and delivering reports on ships moving in and out of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey docks. He became “Sebold’s friend and messenger boy,” a defense attorney later sneered. Waalen’s work was of pressing consequence to the Nazi cause. In April 1941, U-boats sank 488,124 tons of Allied shipping, a 50 percent increase from the previous month. “A big British propaganda effort,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his dairy. “She is now forced to admit to 500,000 tons of shipping lost in April. The highest monthly total so far.” Ast Hamburg was eager for information, complaining that Sebold’s messages were not clear enough. They told him “only precise reports without the nonessentials are useful,” unaware that the US government was doing something to protect the hardy British crews that were regularly departing from the port of New York to face what Churchill called a “shapeless, measureless peril.” On April 28, Waalen brought up two items of nautical news that represented a typical haul for him. One was the arrival and departure information for eight ships. The notation for the last read “‘Robin Moor’ (Robin) Capetown, June 2, Lourenço Marques [Mozambique], June 10, from New York, May 3.” His departure date was wrong by three days. The Robin Moor, a five-thousand-ton steamship under American registry with nine officers, twenty-nine crew members, eight passengers, and no war materials on board, left New York for Cape Town and Mozambique on May 6. The FBI had no intention of passing any of the details along to Germany.
While Fehse’s arrest caused concern among the spies who worked with him, none of his circle seemed distrustful of Sebold until an Irish member of the Little Casino group made a stop at the Newsweek building. He had been recommended by the musician Heinz Stade as one of a number of “Irish insurgents” who “would be good workers for the German cause” (and were responsible for the World’s Fair bombing, Stade claimed) and by bar owner Dick Eichenlaub as a maritime engineer who “used to turn in a lot of reports on ships which were very accurate” but lacked a means of getting the intelligence quickly across the ocean. On May 19, Sean Connolly settled into the visitor’s chair in 627 and told Sebold that he was inspired to work for the Reich because the British had hanged his father. When Connolly asked for instructions and expense money, Sebold responded that he needed approval from Hamburg before he could welcome him into the organization. In the meantime, he asked Connolly to come up with a list of potential saboteurs, providing his latest PO box address.
A few days later, Sebold called up Eichenlaub at the Little Casino and learned that a rumor was going around that Sebold had a microphone hidden in the office. Suspicions had been raised by the way he kept glancing at a desk drawer.
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On the evening of May 27, 65 million Americans (out of a population of 132 million) listened as President Roosevelt declared “an unlimited national emergency,” which required the “military, naval, air, and civilian defenses be put on the basis of readiness to repel any and all acts or threats of aggression directed toward any part of the Western Hemisphere.” Although he warned that U-boats were sinking merchant ships at more than three times the capacity of British shipyards to replace them, he did not announce the commencement of armed escorts. He merely said he was increasing “patrols” to alert British shipping to the presence of German warships. After the speech, Sebold visited the Little Casino, where he met with yet another conspirator, Paul Bante, a Bundist who had a cache of dynamite he was eager to deploy against the anti-Nazi congressman Samuel Dickstein and his supporters. Bante informed Sebold that the Irishman “started the rumpus” about the microphone, which led to a meeting attended by four of the spies to discuss the matter. Bante claimed he vouched for Sebold by n
oting his length of service to Germany and his strong relationship with the respected Paul Fehse.
On the next night, Sebold went to the bar and spoke with Stade, Eichenlaub, and Connolly, who was comfortable enough to provide the coordinates (which he wrote on the flap of an envelope) for Allied convoy routes in the North Atlantic. At the end of the discussion, Sebold brought up what he called the “microphone incident.” Connolly said that Sebold asked “too many funny questions.” Sebold countered that he “wants to know something about a man before he deals with him.” Although the three seemed satisfied with his explanation, Sebold left the Little Casino feeling that the matter wasn’t entirely resolved. He sensed that Eichenlaub, who spoke of connections to the Gestapo in Hamburg, was making an effort to report Sebold to the Nazi authorities.
On June 9, Stade and Connolly refused to meet Sebold at the Forty-Second Street office, instead asking him to come to the corner of Eighty-Sixth and Broadway on the Upper West Side, which he did. Connolly offered to hand over valuable details on convoy routes that he’d received from a Canadian who had made the crossing three or four times. The price was $200. Sebold said he would see what he could do. Later that evening, after receiving approval from Ellsworth to pay the money, Sebold met with Stade at the Little Casino. Sebold told him to send Connolly up to the office on the following day to receive payment. But the Irishman never showed.