Double Agent (10 page)

By the end of the trial’s second week, with FDR continuing to mull Hoover’s proposal, the government’s case still appeared to be strong. On Thursday, October 27, the prosecution spent much of the day discussing how the spies had obtained plans for an experimental dive-bomber developed by Curtiss-Wright and a machine-gun sighting system for naval airplanes built by an unnamed contractor that enabled “a gunner to lead an enemy plane much as a duck hunter leads a bird,” testified Lieutenant Commander Daniel V. Gallery of the Bureau of Ordnance. A gasp filled the courtroom when an assistant prosecutor reached under a pile of newspapers and pulled out a large weapon equipped with such a sight, a stunt that “unquestionably made a profound impression on the jury,” wrote one reporter.

But the newspapers were more riveted upon Dr. Ignatz Griebl’s mistress, Kate Moog, who took the stand at 3:55 p.m. after arriving at the courthouse resplendent in a sailor cap and black velvet suit with silver-fox scarves draped around her neck. She described traveling with Naz to Germany, where they met with Abwehr officers impressed with her boasted acquaintances with Rear Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson, and President Roosevelt, for whom she had once served as a nurse. Over tea at the roof garden of the Hotel Eden, she had been asked if she would be interested in using her society connections to host a salon in Washington to instruct politicians, military men, reporters, and other DC players in the intimate glories of National Socialism, a barely disguised attempt to send her into the field as a new Mata Hari, the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and seductress executed by a French firing squad in 1917 for allegedly employing her sexual wiles on behalf of Imperial Germany. “He thought I could extend a gweat service to them if I could make social contacts for them,” she told jurors, according to the
Daily News
’ phonetically precise transcription. Although she testified that the proposal was an innocent ploy to improve relations between the two countries, the coverage in the next day’s papers made her out to be a dumb broad who was clearly being recruited as a femme fatale. “In the carefully modulated tone of a debutante trying out for a society play, a comely nurse told a jury in federal court yesterday that two ‘fine gentlemen’ she met at lunch in Berlin a year and a half ago wanted to cast her in the role of an American Mata Hari,” began the
Times
’ story.

When she returned to the witness stand on the next morning, she was a different woman. “The baby talk of Kate Moog Busch gave way to the ferocity of a tigress,” wrote the
Daily News
. In her rage, she claimed to have forgotten all about spy conversations she once said she’d heard in a Bremen nightclub. “There was a floor show!” she said. “I was going to dance, have a good time. I was going to be a lady, not listen to gentlemen’s talk.” She angrily denied the suggestion that she was having an affair with Dr. Griebl. “Didn’t you ever have a friend? If you ever had a good friend, then you know what a good friend means.” In a teary-eyed appeal to the judge, she wailed, “When I came home, everything was hotsy-totsy [thirties slang for “A-OK”]. There was nothing doing about the spy business. I didn’t know anything about the spy business until this investigation began.” As the courtroom roared with delight, Judge Knox banged his hand on the bench and shouted, “Stop that!” And she turned on Leon Turrou, who “acted like a mental case or something.” Asked during cross-examination if Turrou had informed Dr. Griebl that a subpoena was about to be issued for him, she said he did. And didn’t Dr. Griebl then leave the country? “Yes,” she said.

At this inopportune moment the trial was recessed for the weekend, and the government was forced to endure two days of speculation about whether the FBI’s lead investigator had assisted—“connived,” in the words of the papers—in the flight of a key figure in the ring. On Monday morning, Moog was guided through a lawyerly seeming-disavowal before the prosecution turned to other witnesses: “He never, at any time, told Dr. Griebl or me that we could leave the country or go anywhere,” she said of Turrou, which didn’t contradict her earlier testimony. “He told us we must stay right here.”

On Tuesday, J. Edgar Hoover was asked by the White House to board the president’s train in a day’s time to discuss a matter of importance during the trip from Washington to Hyde Park. FDR aide Stephen Early didn’t specify the purpose of the meeting nor indicate whether it would last until the end of the line. According to a memo Hoover wrote several days later, Roosevelt wanted to talk spies. “He stated that he had approved the plan which I had prepared and which had been sent to him by the Attorney General,” Hoover wrote. FDR told him that he had just ordered his budget director to quietly allocate an increase in funds “to handle counterespionage activities,” as suggested by the memo, although Hoover was disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t receive all the money he requested (at least yet). But that’s about all Hoover revealed of a momentous encounter that allowed the FBI to vastly expand the scope of its investigative responsibilities. What we do know is that the president issued his fiat in an atmosphere of such secrecy that he hadn’t squared the matter with other branches in the government, especially the State Department, which was bound to protest the loss of its ability to shape policy regarding foreign spies. The discussion of what was essentially a private deal appears to have lasted all the way to Penn Station. Hoover wrote that the “special train was held until the conference with the President was concluded and I left the train at New York.”

At the same time, Agent Turrou was appearing for a second day on the witness stand downtown, facing a barrage of hostile questions from defense attorney George C. Dix, who had traveled to the Reich in September and obtained a seventeen-thousand-word deposition from a gleefully vindictive Dr. Griebl. Turrou was forced to deny that the entire investigation was concocted “to serve the American Public for breakfast a sensational ‘spy case’ with highly interesting Anecdotes,” as Griebl wrote in a letter proclaiming his innocence. “What these G-men, including Mr. Turrou, assert sounds like an interesting spy romance, which exists only in his brain, but never occurred. These little fellows are making themselves ridiculous.” Over the remaining three weeks of the trial, Turrou would angrily deny a series of “damnable lies” that accused him of coercing confessions and assisting escapes. The most bizarre moment in the character-assassination campaign came when an elderly Russian landlord testified that Turrou lived under the name Leon Petroff in his house on Douglass Street in Brooklyn more than twenty years earlier. “One day Petroff say, ‘I kill myself,’ ” the man recalled in his accented English. “I say, ‘Listen, you no kill yourself in my house.’ So he started to drink something from a bottle so I run for police. Police go for doctors. Doctors put ice in mouth. So they took him to hospital.” Was it Kings County Hospital? George Dix wondered. “Yes,” the Russian said, “that’s the hospital for crazy people.”

▪  ▪  ▪

But at this point in world events, the spy trial had become of less pressing interest. The public was focusing its attention on a shocking act of Nazi criminality that caused even the most disinterested observer to concede that Hitler was truly a menace: the pogrom against the Jewish population of the newly expanded Reich that the
Times
’ correspondent in Berlin, Otto D. Tolischus, described on page 1 as “a wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years’ War” of 1618 to 1648. During the night of November 9 and into the morning of November 10, Nazi hordes set fire to more than a thousand synagogues and destroyed at least seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses, smashing their Belgian plate-glass windows with such fervor that the night would be forever known as
Kristallnacht
. Jewish homes and apartments were ransacked, and thirty thousand Jewish men, “especially rich ones,” were incarcerated in concentration camps. Jews were cursed at, slapped, spat upon, beaten, murdered. The official death toll was ninety-one, but the actual number, which should include the hundreds who died in the camps before most inmates were released, was many times higher. The violence was followed by a spate of legal measures that all but ended the possibility of a Jewish existence in the Third Reich. German Jews were ordered to pay a billion-reichsmark fine and robbed of their businesses, land, stock, jewels, and artworks in a process known as Aryanization. They were banned from collecting welfare payments, holding driver’s licenses, owning carrier pigeons, attending German schools, publishing Jewish newspapers, possessing precious metals or stones, and visiting most public places. During a conference of high-ranking officials that discussed the restrictions, Hermann Göring joked about confining animals that resembled Jews to certain sections of forests (“the elk has a crooked nose like theirs”) and mused to no one in particular, “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.” Yet Hitler didn’t go so far as to require Jews to wear special badges on their clothing or force them to live within exclusionary ghettos, probably in the belief that the German people were still unprepared for a radicalism that recalled not the great war of the seventeenth century but the dark era of the Middle Ages. Although it wasn’t easy for Jews to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy or gain access to the necessary funds, the official policy of Nazi Germany was to induce them to emigrate, in the hopes, according to a Foreign Ministry circular, of increasing anti-Semitism in Western countries and thus producing sympathy for Germany’s plight.

Few outside of the ideologically blinkered believed that the night of horrors was a spontaneous eruption of what Goebbels called the “healthy instinct” of the German people. “The foreign press is very bad,” he confided to his diary. “Mainly the American.” George Gallup found that 94 percent of Americans now disapproved of Nazi policy toward Jews, “a vote of condemnation so nearly unanimous as to constitute one of the most decisive expressions of opinion in any of the more than 800 surveys conducted by the organization in the last three years,” he said. In New York, more than five thousand sign-carrying protesters (YOUR SILENCE EMBOLDENS HITLER, KEEP NAZI SPY SHIPS OUT OF NEW YORK HARBOR) jeered and hooted as the
Bremen
pushed off from Pier 86 with only 381 passengers on board. “The ship was kept brilliantly illuminated so that no attacker might approach unseen,” wrote the
Herald Tribune
. A group of women in black veils conducted a silent vigil in front of the German consulate at 17 Battery Place. Such figures as the author of
The Maltese Falcon
(Dashiell Hammett), the Irish Republican Army veteran now leading the union representing subway workers (Mike Quill), the eminent German exile teaching at Union Theological Seminary (Paul Tillich), and the president of the Harlem Bar Association (Albert G. Gilbert) were on the rostrum during a packed-to-overflowing event at Madison Square Garden that called for a complete cessation of US trade with Germany.

The US government was not unresponsive to public opinion when it refused to alter existing policy to make it easier for the Reich’s Jews to enter the United States. “That is not in contemplation,” said FDR. “We have the quota system.” The percentage of Americans opposed to relaxing immigration restrictions actually increased from 75 percent at the time of the
Anschluss
to 83 percent in the aftermath of
Kristallnacht
. Yet President Roosevelt
was
shaken by events in Germany. On November 14, he ordered the return of the US ambassador from Berlin, which, while short of a formal recall or a severing of diplomatic relations, was seen as a move of considerable significance. On the same day, he met with senior military and economic advisers and railed about the need to transform the low-output American aircraft industry into a juggernaut of mass production that could build an air fleet to frighten Adolf Hitler in just the way the Luftwaffe had worked on the Western democracies at Munich. “A new regiment of field artillery, or new barracks at an Army post in Wyoming, or new machine tools in an ordnance arsenal, he said sharply, would not scare Hitler one blankety-blank-blank bit!” recalled Army Air Corps general Henry “Hap” Arnold of the president’s language. “What he wanted was airplanes! Airplanes were the implements that
would
have an influence on Hitler’s activities!” Although Roosevelt’s hopes of increasing the number of US planes from a mostly unimpressive fleet of eighteen hundred to a strike force of at least ten thousand would be scaled back and balanced with the needs of ground forces by the time he unveiled his new national defense program in January, FDR had laid the groundwork for the scaling up of an industry that would construct far more aircraft than any other world power after 1940. “A battle was won in the White House that day which took its place with—or at least led to—the victories in combat later, for time is a most important factor in building an air force,” wrote General Arnold in his memoirs. On the next afternoon, November 15, Roosevelt took the unusual step of reading a prepared statement to the press about the anti-Jewish actions in Germany, which he pointedly noted was for direct quotation. The third of its four sentences would be the most widely reproduced: “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”

Two weeks later, a jury of ten men and two women found compelling reasons to deliver guilty verdicts again the spy defendants. On December 3, Judge Knox sentenced Gus Rumrich and his Air Corps friend to two years, providing leniency to Rumrich for his cooperation and to his pal for his near innocence. Even though Judge Knox didn’t believe the
Europa
hairdresser/courier merited more than a deportation order, he gave her two years as a warning to any other employees of the German passenger liners who might wish to participate in “a system that cannot be tolerated.” The technician from Seversky Aircraft, a man “inspired by a dream of
Deutschland über alles
,” was sentenced to a mere six years. In his closing oration, Judge Knox boasted that he was offering a lesson in the mercies of a just democracy to the emissaries of a cruel totalitarianism. On the same day in Berlin, the Reich issued a response of sorts. It executed two soldiers of the Wehrmacht, Bruno Trojaner and Berthold Koehne, dropping the blade of the guillotine upon them for “revealing military secrets to unnamed foreign powers,” according to the Associated Press. The AP dispatch noted that both men had deserted their units and fled abroad to serve a foreign espionage organization, although it didn’t detail how they had been returned to the care of Germany. The formal charge against them was treason.