by Duffy, Peter
In January 1955, the San Francisco office conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Sebold’s status and determined that he “apparently cannot or will not work” and “appears on the verge of becoming a mental case.” Sebold “has complained of the pressure under which he is forced to live, stating that ‘the Gestapo would eventually liquidate him.’ ” The memo wondered if his future livelihood could be provided for by some form of congressional appropriation or perhaps by a book written “in a manner that would meet with the approval” of the Bureau. “While it is realized that Sebold has been and is a problem, that he is a hypochondriac and has developed a persecution complex, nevertheless the fact remains that this man has performed outstanding service to the Bureau and to this country. Everything considered, he was one of the most important factors in enhancing the Bureau’s reputation in the security field.” The Washington headquarters could find no outside funding for him and decided against putting him in touch with a writer.
In May 1955, Sebold was so fearful of Nazi reprisals that he was thinking of procuring a handgun. He told Agent Richard Nichols that “he had received telephone calls, one within the past two weeks, in which the caller asked, ‘Are you still there, Harry?’ which he implied referred to his former name of Harry Sawyer, which he used when he was an informant. He further pointed out that this name should not be known to anyone in this area. Sebold continued that within the recent past he had observed an individual loitering near his automobile and that upon seeing Sebold approach, the person had run away. Sebold stated that these incidents greatly perturbed him and that he had difficulty sleeping nights.” Agent Nichols told him that “he has no concrete basis to believe that any of the things which caused his fear are in fact related with the Nazis and that he might be building these incidents up in his own mind.” Nichols advised him against obtaining a firearm.
In July 1956, Sebold lost his job as a night watchman at the Vallejo docks after he became dizzy and slipped on a deck. The company doctor wouldn’t certify him for work because “he frequently had fainting spells and he might fall off the ship or down one of the holds and kill himself.” During the same month, Sebold revealed that Nazi phantoms were still chasing him. “He stated he went down to the Howard Terminal in Oakland, California, and studied the itinerary of ships of the North German Lloyd company; that while one ship from this company was in port, he received a threatening call and told the caller ‘to go back to his ship.’ Sebold stated that he has not since been bothered and mentioned this shows he was not just imagining things.” By January 1959, he appeared to be doing better, performing occasional jobs as a handyman and securing a position as a workman with the mothballed fleet of merchant and military ships at Suisun Bay. “Sebold seemed to be in excellent spirits and stated his health had improved and attributed this to the fact that he had recently had twenty-two teeth extracted.” But it wasn’t long before he stopped working altogether.
Sebold doesn’t appear in the files again until four years later. Now sixty-three, he “shows some of the effects of his many past illnesses,” wrote Agent Spencer after a visit to Walnut Creek on March 7, 1963. “He lives in his memories and appeared to be a bit unstable.” A month later, Sebold sent a short handwritten letter to Spencer. “After your last visit here something happened inside my neck: Later I remembered that since 1940 in New York I was asked by the government lawyers if I was willing to go through with them things and I agreed to everything. And [I] came to the conclusion that I have been a plain nuisance to pester anybody with my affairs.”
In September 1963, Sebold called the office to complain about The FBI Story by Don Whitehead, which was published by Random House seven years earlier, with a foreword written by J. Edgar Hoover. He said the author inaccurately reported that he agreed to work for the Abwehr because he had a Jewish grandfather and was thus especially vulnerable to Nazi blackmail. “He continued that the book has a red, white, and blue cover, which gives it an appearance of being highly official. He added that the book makes him out as a ‘louse,’ whereas all he did was his duty, according to his beliefs.” In April 1964, he called about another volume that mentioned his name, Spy and Counterspy by Phil Hirsch. “He stated that he considers this bad publicity for him because he likes to get jobs house painting and he feels he cannot advertise nor get a painter’s license because of his reputation, and this means he has difficulty getting painting jobs. One lady mentioned to him that after reading this book and seeing what he did for the country, she thought someone ought to write to Congress because it is a shame that Mrs. Sebold still has to scrub floors to maintain their living. Mr. Sebold had no further comment to make and just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Bureau.”
During late 1964 and early 1965, the San Francisco office attempted to determine whether Sebold, now “financially destitute,” could receive assistance from “the new anti-poverty program of President Johnson” or the Interagency Defector Committee, which provided support to Soviet émigrés. He was found ineligible for both. He was surviving on $37.50 a month from Social Security “plus a small income from his rental properties which are old and which he cannot afford to improve.”
On October 14, 1965, Helen Sebold called the office and “advised that her husband, William Sebold, was mentally ill; that he ran up a bill of $800.00 at a hardware store, ordered a fence for the home property costing $2,000.00, purchased a tape recorder for $226.00, an electric stove for $229.00 and numerous other items; and that he has no money to pay for these items. Mrs. Sebold stated that she canceled the order for the fence and returned most of the other items.”
The report continues:
“According to Mrs. Sebold, she had her husband committed to the Martinez County Hospital, Martinez, California, for observation and hearing to determine if he should be committed to a state mental institution.” The hearing was scheduled for the following morning at 10 a.m. “Mrs. Sebold related that her husband had informed the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office of his past cooperation with the FBI and, therefore, she desired to have someone from the FBI present at the hearing.” The agent declined to attend “but told Mrs. Sebold that if the sheriff’s office or the doctor desired a verification of Mr. Sebold’s cooperation with the FBI they should feel free to contact the FBI.”
Eight days later, Mrs. Sebold reported that her husband had been committed to Napa State Hospital “for an indefinite period of time.”
“The San Francisco office has maintained close contact with the Sebolds,” according to a memo from October 29, 1965, which effectively closed the case. “For a number of years he has been in dire financial straits with very little income. Every feasible effort was made to find him employment and to assist him in receiving increased retirement income. In view of his commitment, there appears to be little possibility of rendering him assistance at this time.”
Sebold spent the last five years of his life at Napa. “My dad and mom often went to visit him on Sundays,” said one of his nieces, Christel Little. “Sometimes my dad picked him up and brought him to our house for Sunday dinner and then took him back.” Another niece, Shirley Camerer, recalls him as “a silent man with deep grunts to acknowledge you” who “usually had a warm look in his eyes so you knew he was teasing.” The young relatives would’ve never imagined that their Uncle Bill was a man of formidable moral and physical courage who led one of the great spy missions of American history, a landmark figure deserving of a place among the nation’s most honored war heroes. “When I first heard about it, I was totally shocked,” said Little. “I believed that there had to be another William/Wilhelm Sebold from Mülheim, Germany. That is what I thought for years.” During an interview in 2011, Sebold’s ninety-seven-year-old sister-in-law suggested that his accomplishment was a family secret because of a belief that he’d caused harm to fellow Germans. In her thick accent, she spoke of how Sebold “did things bad for the German people and good for the American people.”
Sebold died of a heart attack a
t Napa State Hospital in the early hours of February 16, 1970. His death certificate says he suffered from manic depression. “We went to the cemetery after the services in the mortuary chapel,” said Camerer. “There were some old friends there, not many and I can’t remember who. Afterwards we went to Aunt Helen Sebold’s house. After a meal we all went home. Very quiet and very nice service.” Mrs. Sebold picked out a gray-black headstone that left space for a second inscription. IN GOD’S CARE was the simple message along the lower border. The local press made no mention of his passing.
Jim Ellsworth, who’d left the FBI sixteen years earlier to join the banking business, had fallen out of touch. He wasn’t among the small group gathered at the graveside in the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Lafayette. But he never forgot his old friend. When his daughter moved to Walnut Creek seven years later, he asked her to look up Sebold’s name in the telephone book. “I doubt he is alive,” he wrote on July 25, 1977. On a subsequent visit, Ellsworth placed a call to Helen, who told him the news. “I listened to the conversation and, of course, don’t remember it all,” said Mary Pletsch, the youngest of the Ellsworths’ five children. “But I remember Dad’s voice being very friendly like he was talking with someone familiar.”
Ellsworth never sought public acclaim for his part in the historic case, but he could be persuaded to tell the story before community and church groups, where he displayed a remarkable memory for the smallest of details. He wrote about Bill Sebold one last time in a postretirement journal, narrating the tale of an immigrant who so honored the democratic ideals of his adopted homeland that he was prepared to stand in its defense. “He told me that he had found everything in this country wonderful,” Ellsworth recalled. “He could go from city to city without registering with the police as he had to in Germany. He could follow any occupation that he pleased. He had all the personal liberties which he had missed in Germany. And so when he took the oath of allegiance, he really meant it and made up his mind that if ever he could prove his devotion to the country he would do so.”
THE DIRECTOR—In 1938, in response to public fears about Nazi spies active in the United States, J. Edgar Hoover was granted the authority by President Franklin Roosevelt to protect “the internal security of the United States against foreign enemies,” as Hoover put it. “The techniques of advanced scientific crime detection that had proved indispensable in conquering home-bred banditry were now set to work uncovering the enemy.”
THE IDEOLOGUE—Hermann Lang, pictured at far left, entering Brooklyn federal court on July 1, 1941, was a Bavarian-born resident of Queens who provided the Nazi regime with the plans for the most precious instrument created for the American military before World War II, the Norden bombsight, which enabled planes to drop bombs with unprecedented accuracy. “We have just one secret,” President Roosevelt said during a private meeting with congressional leaders in 1939, “and that is the question of the bombsight.”
HITLER’S SPYMASTER—The United States had no counterespionage system in place when Nikolaus Ritter, an English-fluent Luftwaffe officer assigned to the Abwehr, the German military’s espionage service, visited the United States in late 1937 and recruited the founding members of his ring, Hermann Lang and Fritz Duquesne. In early 1940, he sent William G. Sebold to New York as an “informant and contact man,” unaware that Sebold had already communicated with a newly empowered FBI.
THE GRIFTER—Guenther “Gus” Rumrich, who volunteered to become a Nazi spy because he found life as a dishwasher “quite a strain,” was arrested on a Manhattan street corner in early 1938, which led to blanket coverage in the press about the failure of the United States to protect itself from foreign intrigue.
THE GLORY HOUND—FBI special agent Leon G. Turrou, right, botched the investigation that followed Gus Rumrich’s arrest, which didn’t prevent him from writing a bestselling book about the expansiveness of Nazi operations in the United States that served as the source material for Warner Bros.’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson, left. The 1939 film was calculated to inflame the public into believing that German agents were everywhere.
THE PIONEER—Everett M. Roeder, second from right, was a high-level engineer at the Sperry Gyroscope Co., where he first began developing precision weapons systems in 1913. When Sebold first met him in a train station parking lot on Long Island in 1940, he’d been passing information to the Nazi regime for four years. Roeder was blind in his right eye, “which gives it a peculiar stare,” wrote the Bureau.
THE CAPITAL OF GERMAN AMERICA—East Eighty-Sixth Street between Second and Third Avenues was the heart of the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville, a favorite rendezvous point for German spies and tourists in search of rowdy beer gardens.
THE BUNDESFÜHRER—Fritz Kuhn, second from left, was the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund, the proud face of National Socialism in the United States. The Bund and its affiliates had enough public support to fill Madison Square Garden in February 1939. Within a year, Kuhn was convicted of embezzling from his own membership and sent to Sing Sing.
THE DOUBLE AGENT—Wilhelm “William” Gottlieb Sebold, a native of Mülheim in the Ruhr Valley, was a peripatetic soul who became a US citizen in 1936. During a visit to his mother in Germany in 1939, he was coerced into the Abwehr but never carried out a single act on its behalf because he regarded his oath of allegiance to America as “a sacred thing.” He is pictured with his wife, Helen, also an American of German birth.
The photo attached to Sebold’s “Declaration of Intention” to become a US citizen.
THE HANDLER—Special Agent Jim Ellsworth, pictured with his wife, Nell, was assigned to be Sebold’s handler or body man, responsible for shadowing his every move during the sixteen-month investigation. “It reads like a novel and I am the ace in the hole so am enjoying it immensely,” Ellsworth wrote in a letter to Nell.
A RADIO STATION—The two-room cottage in Centerport on the north shore of Long Island housed the shortwave transmitter set up by the FBI to establish a communications link with Hamburg. A total of 468 messages—301 from Centerport to Hamburg; 167 from Hamburg to Centerport—were exchanged via a cipher system based on the letter arrangements in a bestselling novel, All This, and Heaven Too by Rachel Field.
Special Agent Richard Millen, right, was brought in from Washington to help launch the station.
THE FEMME FATALE—A Jewish native of Vienna with connections among European high society, Lilly Stein was assigned by the Abwehr to hit Manhattan nightclubs in search of men who could whisper in her ear “about all sorts of war developments and deals in industry and finance,” as she later admitted. When Sebold spurned her amorous advances, she said, “Why is it you American men are always afraid of women?” At left, an FBI surveillance photo captures Stein walking near her midtown apartment with Sebold, whose face was obscured by the Bureau.
THE MAN WHO “KILLED” KITCHENER—“Colonel” Fritz Duquesne was a South African–born adventurer who dined out for years on tales of his spy exploits during the Boer War and World War I. His claim that he was responsible for the death of Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener during the Great War was unsupported by evidence, but the British government believed he had a hand in the explosion on the SS Tennyson that killed three British seamen on February 21, 1916. He told Sebold that he could pick out FBI men by the way they walked, “sort of pigeon-toed and with a peculiar halting step.”
THE COUP DE GRCE—In the final phase of the Sebold investigation, the FBI rented three rooms in the Newsweek building at the corner of Broadway and Forty-Second Street in Times Square, transforming Room 627 into the office of WILLIAM G. SEBOLD DIESEL ENG. The double agent met with a procession of spies who were unaware that they were being filmed behind a two-way mirror by a Bureau agent. When the films were shown in court, the American experience with hidden motion-picture footage was born.
Fritz Duquesne made a single visit to the office on June 25, 1941, just days before the arrests. At one point, he raised the le
g of his trousers and pulled an envelope from his sock, a cloak-and-dagger detail that would be much remembered in later years by the agents who worked the case. During the trial, this son of the nineteenth century claimed it was all an optical illusion. “The taking of anything out of my stocking never happened,” he said.
Paul Fehse, left, and his sidekick Leo Waalen wandered the Manhattan and Brooklyn docks picking up information about British merchant ships that were being loaded with goods in preparation for running the U-boat gauntlet. They submitted such detailed reports that Sebold admonished them to provide only the most essential information for transmittal to Germany.
Erwin W. Siegler, the chief butcher of the SS Manhattan, later transferred to the SS America, was one of several German-born spies working on the kitchen staffs of American-flagged liners, who were hired because they produced the European dishes that sophisticated travelers expected during their transatlantic passage. Siegler bragged that he was “the biggest whoremaster in Hamburg.”