by Duffy, Peter
But Hermann Lang, described as “sehr ruhig, verschwiegen, und zuverlässig” (very quiet, discreet, and reliable), was given the highest honors. Since 1937, he had provided intelligence that was “important and decisive in the prosecution of the war.” To support this weighty conclusion, the letter included two paragraphs submitted by Ernst Udet’s Technical Office: “As a result of delivery by the V.-Mannes [Vertrauensmann, literally “trusted man”] of technical drawings and design elements of a bombsight accompanied by insightful explanations, it was possible to reconstruct the implement,” the memo said, which confirmed that Lang did, in fact, convey blueprints to Germany. “. . . Considerable research expenses have been saved by the delivery of these items. In actual tests of the device it was revealed that the principle realized therein reacted favorably for the projected bomb drop. Accordingly, the items concerning the bombsight delivered from the USA by the Abwehr have successfully influenced the development of the German bombsight.”
His crime was thus described: Hermann W. Lang had played a pivotal role in the creation of the new Luftwaffe bombsight that was then operational over the Soviet Union.
“The success of the secret military intelligence service which is confirmed again and again by our military offices,” concluded Canaris, “sufficiently proves that the structure of the intelligence network or the selection of agents in and for USA have been necessary and correct.”
Which was written before the regime knew about the treachery of Bill Sebold.
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America was hovering between war and peace that summer. President Roosevelt sent four thousand troops to occupy Iceland, attempting to prevent the Nazis from gaining a stepping-stone on the way to the Western Hemisphere, but Congress barely passed an eighteen-month extension of the Selective Service Act. The count in the House of Representatives was 203–202, an indication of just how far federal legislators were from voting for a declaration of war. Roosevelt met with Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland to codify Anglo-American objectives for a postwar world after “the final destruction of Nazi tyranny,” but FDR rebuffed the British leader’s hope that the United States would immediately pick up arms and join the still-standing Soviet Union in the nascent Grand Alliance. Instead, “he would become more and more provocative,” according to Churchill’s account. “If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. Everything was to be done to force an incident.” FDR told Churchill (but not the American public) that US Navy vessels would begin escorting British merchant ships as far as Iceland on September 1, which was just the action that might instigate such an incident.
The double agent was safely ensconced in the bucolic isolation of Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island. “Sebold wanted his wife with him in hiding out until the trial started and did not want her to be the only woman around,” wrote Ellsworth. “He asked me to have my wife Nell with us. I took it up with Mr. Connelly who authorized the procedure.” One cabin in the woods was for the Sebolds, one for the Ellsworths and their two children, and a third for a team of agents. “We lived well, close to the earth, had no bath but the lake, no toilet but the old style outhouse in back with its rank odors, and cooked on a kerosene burner,” Ellsworth wrote. “But we loved it.” In later years, he would recall how removed they were from the world’s troubles: “At this location we had wild blueberries along the roadside and often would pick a bucket of berries, wash them, put them in a bowl covered with sugar and eat blueberries and cream.” They tossed horseshoes and darts, listened to Brooklyn Dodgers games on the radio (a pennant year!), played cards, and went swimming in the lake. Home movies capture Ellsworth as a Clark Kent look-alike with ramrod posture and navel-level bathing trunks while Sebold is seen (literally) standing in the shadows, smoking a cigarette and chatting with his wife and his wife’s sister, Rosie Wien.
In Brooklyn, where the case was to be tried, some of the spies began pleading guilty to the two-count indictment, which charged them with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (maximum penalty of two years) and the Espionage Act (up to twenty years). The latter outlawed the communication of “information respecting the national defense” to be “used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Lilly Stein made no attempt to deny her guilt. “I have said all that I think is important in this whole case and only ask whom it may concern that they may have some mercy with me even if I have done things which I myself should have judged as wrong,” she declared in the first of several statements to the FBI. “While she was in jail, she would often ask the warden to call us as she had some information for us,” wrote Agent Newkirk. “All she actually wanted to do was to get out of jail for a few hours to vary the monotony. When we had time we would have her brought to our office and talk to her. Also, while she was in jail she knitted several hats which she gave to various agents she liked to give to their wives.” Walter Winchell devoted an item in his newspaper column to the fears that her arrest had caused among the fashionable set. “Many New York men-about-town are quaking,” he wrote.
With the newspapers publishing clarifying stories that described Hermann Lang of Norden and Everett Roeder of Sperry as the true “brains” of the outfit (rather than the more copy-worthy Fritz Duquesne), Roeder decided to give up the fight, pleading guilty to the Espionage Act count. “Compared with the other individuals involved in this investigation,” wrote the FBI in a postwar summation, “Roeder was probably the greatest producer of detailed technical data relating to national defense materials and production.” Winchell crowed that his oft-broadcast warnings about such nefarious figures lurking within Sperry Gyroscope Co. had been proven correct. “It has taken more than a year to confirm these allegations,” he wrote. Roeder’s conviction ensured that his son wouldn’t be permitted to serve overseas with the US Army. His father, Carl Roeder, the esteemed Juilliard professor who saw himself as “a preacher of righteousness,” made no comment on the family disgrace.
On Wednesday, September 3, 1941, a jury of nine men and three women was selected in three hours and twenty-five minutes to sit in judgment of the sixteen spies who had pleaded not guilty. (The number would drop to fourteen by the end of the trial.) “Any prejudice because defendant was born in Germany, became a naturalized citizen and is now charged with conspiring to convey defense secrets to the German Reich?” was one of the jury qualification questions. “Have any of you had relatives in European countries who have fled or become refugees from said country?” was another.
On the following day, the American destroyer Greer was traveling with mail and supplies to the new US Marine garrison in Iceland when a British plane alerted it to the presence of a U-boat in the vicinity. The Greer located U-652 with the aid of sonar-detection equipment and passed along its location to the RAF, which flew to the spot and dropped depth charges at 10:32 a.m. “The Greer continued tracking the submarine until at 12:40 p.m., the U-boat ceased fleeing, turned on the Greer, and fired a torpedo that missed,” according to the official account from the chief of naval operations. It was the first Nazi shot fired at the US military. “The Greer counterattacked with depth charges and the U-boat responded with torpedoes.” Neither vessel was hit. Although the Greer was clearly the instigator of the confrontation, President Roosevelt was determined to tell a different story more in line with his foreign policy objectives. On Saturday, September 6, the White House announced that he would be delivering a speech of “major importance” on the following Monday. It would be broadcast on all three national networks and translated into fourteen languages for rebroadcast throughout the world. When the president’s mother died on Sunday night at age eighty-six, the speech was postponed until Wednesday.
Early on the morning of Monday, September 8, Ellsworth and Sebold, accompanied by four agents, traveled from their temporary quarters in Brooklyn Heights to the courthouse on Washington Street for a final conference with the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Harold Kennedy. “Then I had the agents keep Sebold in
the petit jury room just off the courtroom on the third floor,” Ellsworth wrote. “I got Bill into the courtroom and let him try out the witness chair. He was very nervous and had given me a real scare recently when he refused to testify unless we guaranteed his people in Germany would not be endangered as a result and unless he had a status other than that of informer with us. I took him to Mr. Connelly who explained all we could do was help him get his folks to America after the war if they wanted to come. We also assured him that he is not an informer but a counterspy of the FBI. He agreed to go ahead with the trial.”
At 10:30 a.m., the proceedings began, presided over by Judge Mortimer W. Byers, a silver-haired eminence with an officious manner who was eager to keep things moving. The German defendants mispronounced his name as “Judge Bias,” which Duquesne decided was the perfect nickname for him. “A diagram has been prepared of the defendants as they are sitting in the courtroom,” the judge said, “and copies will be submitted to the jury to simplify matters.” Although the rumor mill was full of speculation about a surprise witness, Kennedy mentioned nothing during his forty-five-minute opening statement, which detailed how the spy plot relied on what the Times described as “such out-worn movie props as complicated radio codes, contained in the pages of best-seller novels; micro-photographs of documents and blueprints, telegraphy, and mail drops scattered from China to South America.” Fritz Duquesne was characterized as a “spy for forty years” who was so brazen that he concluded a letter to the Chemical Warfare Service in Washington by writing, “Don’t worry if this information is confidential, because it is in the hands of a good citizen.” Hermann Lang “furnished the particulars about the design” of the Norden bombsight during his 1938 visit to Germany, Kennedy said, pointing to the $3,000 that had been placed in a German bank account as compensation. “Whether the motive of these men was money, hatred of one country, or love of another country, the fact is that they transmitted information which affected our national defense,” he said.
After Kennedy was finished, each of the several defense attorneys delivered brief opening remarks. The most fiery was Duquesne’s attorney, a Coughlinite activist named Frank Walsh, who made the (inaccurate) argument that the accused were within their rights to provide defense information to Germany “if it does no harm to America,” as he said. “We were not at war with Germany in 1936 when this conspiracy allegedly began. We are not at war now. Nothing has been shown to indicate anything transmitted by these defendants affected the United States. They may have affected Britain and others, but not this country.” He blamed the whole thing on an unnamed “informer” and “out-and-out double-crosser.” This shadowy individual “was the one who schemed, he planned this, he developed, and when the situation became slow, he coerced, he coerced these individuals day by day. ‘You have to go out and help Germany.’ ‘I want this, go and get me this, bring me that.’ ”
The first witness was a State Department official who testified that none of the sixteen had registered as agents of a foreign government as required by the law.
The second was Bill Sebold, now revealed as an actor of consummate skill who had been fooling them all along. The Herald Tribune called him “a powerful six-footer who speaks with a heavy German accent and wears an ominous expression.” A female court spectator complained to the Brooklyn Eagle that he “never smiles and he looks and wears his good clothes kinda sloppily, like my dad.” Fritz Duquesne said that he and his fellow spies “were just suckers for a German wharf rat.”
Prosecutor Kennedy walked Sebold through the events of his early life before turning to the main story, his journey to his mother’s house in Nazi Germany to recover from stomach surgery in early 1939, his coercion into the espionage service, his training in Hamburg, and his departure for the United States equipped with the tools to be a coordinating figure in Ast Hamburg’s New York operation. “His testimony was a sensation,” wrote Ellsworth. “The court was packed. The newspapers ate it up. I have a full file of news clippings on the case. Bill was worn out. I was proud of him.” The Times’ front-page story on the trial was headlined, “U.S. Bomb Sight Sold to Germany, Spy Jury Is Told.” The Herald Tribune’s headline was “Spy Trial Hears Nazis Got Secret U.S. Bombsight.” The Daily News wrote, “Trapped by the Gestapo during a trip to his native Germany, a naturalized American citizen was forced under threat of death to act as a Nazi spy in America.” According to the Eagle, the “Gestapo” employed “the gangster ‘or else’ threat,” a nod perhaps to the much-discussed murder trial of mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter that was about to begin in nearby Kings County Courthouse. “Hitler Couldn’t Scare Sebold, Spy Trial Star,” the Boston Globe said. “So He Helped F.B.I. Round Up Nazi Agents in U.S.A.”
Nikolaus Ritter was preparing to travel to a new assignment in Rio de Janeiro, from where he would continue his work against the United States, when he received a phone call ordering him to Berlin. Arriving at the Abwehr headquarters at Tirpitzufer 72–76, he says he was presented with a copy of the Times. “ ‘That sonofabitch,’ I said. ‘That traitor.’ ” His Abwehr superior, Hans Pickenbrock, responded, “But Ritter, according to your own rules, ‘Tramp’ was no traitor, not even a spy. He was a man who worked for his new Fatherland.” Ritter’s career as a spymaster was over.
Asked by the Foreign Office for explanation, Admiral Canaris claimed that suspicions had been aroused by some of Sebold’s radio messages but emphasized that agents in the United States had been thwarted in their work by the German embassy and consulates, which provided “neither financial support nor the use of diplomatic couriers for transmittal of information.” During a 1945 interrogation with American officials, General Erwin Lahousen, a senior Abwehr official tried at Nuremberg, described how Canaris would talk up “one man in the USA who apparently turned out well, and by whom bombsight was delivered,” referring to Hermann Lang. “Canaris constantly emphasized this success particularly, especially in dealing with the Luftwaffenführungsstab [Air Force Operations Staff],” probably at a time when the Luftwaffe was losing the war and the spy chief was trying to prove that he was a faithful servant of the regime. He wasn’t. He was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945.
On September 9, Sebold continued his narrative up to the point when the Centerport radio station made contact with Hamburg, which dominated the coverage in the next day’s papers. The Times called the communications link “probably the greatest hoax perpetrated on the vaunted Nazi military intelligence to date.” The Daily Mirror said the FBI played “Nazi espionage heads in Germany for a bunch of suckers.” A total of 468 messages—301 from Centerport to Hamburg; 167 from Hamburg to Centerport—were exchanged via a cipher system based on Rachel Field’s novel that left everyone befuddled. “Neither the jury or the spectators seemed able to fully understand the code method after it was outlined,” said the Herald Tribune.
During the afternoon session, the prosecutor paused in his questioning of Sebold to allow defense attorneys to begin cross-examination. Hermann Lang’s counsel, George W. Herz, a German-speaking attorney based in Ridgewood, emerged as Sebold’s principal antagonist. Herz went after him for initially entering the country illegally when he jumped ship at Galveston in 1922 (“Did the thought ever occur to you that perhaps you were violating the laws of the United States by remaining in the country without notifying some American immigration official?”); for once working at a Communist-affiliated summer camp in the Catskills (“Did you have to sign any pledge of allegiance to the Communist Party before you got the job?”); and for returning to Germany at a time when it was universally regarded as an outlaw nation (“And by that time you were able to read the New York newspapers and understand what was in them?”). Sebold grew angry when Herz asked for the “names and addresses” of his relatives back in Germany. “I do not think I have to tell that in the presence of all these people,” he said. The judge agreed, eventually castigating Herz for persisting in a line of questioning that is “nothing more tha
n an attempt to intimidate him by fear of reprisals.” Ellsworth wrote, “Very trying day but Bill is over a bad hump.”
Yet on the following day, the grilling continued. Herz made a point of noting that Sebold’s wife did not travel with him to Germany in 1939, explaining to the judge, “I am interested in showing that this man did not lead a normal family life. I have that right. And if I can show that he went from place to place without his wife, the jury has a right to draw such inferences of the circumstances under which he lived as they may see fit.” Herz brought up the time Sebold went to Bellevue Hospital complaining of stomach trouble and was admitted to the psych ward after arguing with a doctor, which was gleefully picked up by Duquesne’s counsel, Frank Walsh. After a stay of “twenty-one days, two weeks, I don’t remember,” Sebold said, he was examined by “a big doctor there, from Brooklyn, Professor Dr. Koenig. He laid me out and touched my stomach and he said, ‘That man has a terrific adhesion on the stomach, he has to be operated on immediately,’ and I went up to the surgical ward.”
“In the interest of clarity or accuracy,” Walsh asked, “would you mind telling me how long you were in the psychiatric ward before you were released and declared not to be feebleminded?”
“I object on the ground that question is not proper,” Kennedy interjected.
“The objection is sustained,” responded Judge Byers. “And I warn you not to ask any such question as that.”