Double Agent (13 page)

Once he returned to New York, Roeder moved with his family to suburban Merrick, Long Island, where he registered his phone under a friend’s name and developed new acquaintances “so as not to arouse suspicion” and “to please the German authorities,” he later confided. He disappeared into his basement laboratory to continue experimentation on his own inventions, including a “speech secrecy system” that he was developing with a friend of his, a lieutenant commander in the US Navy who would later direct naval radio operations in the Panama Canal Zone. Instead of returning immediately to his work at Sperry, Roeder took a job in September or October 1936 at the Airplane and Marine Division Finder Company of Lindenhurst, Long Island, which produced gyro-based guidance systems for air- and watercraft. He was chagrined when Abwehr couriers began showing up at his door to pick up his packages, disrupting the tranquillity of his sleepy block. He arranged for them to take the Long Island Rail Road out only as far as the Baldwin station, which was not the closest, or even second closest, stop to his home in Merrick. At the designated time, Roeder would be waiting in the parking lot in his Buick sedan. The Abwehr had a code name for him: Carr.

On May 10, 1937, Roeder was hired back at Sperry (for the fifth time in his career), quickly winning the promotions necessary to return to the top tier of the design department. He would later say that he rejoined Sperry at the express wishes of the “organization in Germany.” He maintained his cover even as the company’s staff came under scrutiny during the Turrou investigation. Gus Rumrich had told investigators of a drunken evening he spent in Yorkville with a courier—they started at the Café Hindenburg nightclub before stumbling across Eighty-Sixth Street to the famously rowdy
Brauhaus
Maxl’s—who flashed an envelope containing two $1,000 bills meant for a prized agent that Rumrich thought worked for a
periscope
company in Brooklyn “or something like that.” The comment led agents to apprehend four German Americans working in the assembly and inspection divisions at Sperry, including an old-timer who had been accused of spying for the Kaiser during World War I. All four were released without charge. At trial, Rumrich didn’t clear things up when he said he believed the unnamed agent was being handsomely rewarded for delivering plans that “were for some sort of gyroscope made in a submarine factory in Brooklyn.” Roeder was lucky he was never questioned.

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But Nikolaus Ritter’s ring was deemed insufficient to handle the more expansive responsibilities that would be required in the event of the outbreak of war. Efforts were redoubled to recruit new agents to be sent to the city. “While we were trying to figure out how we could step up our work over there, I was summoned to Berlin, and I was asked whether I was ready personally to return to the United States in order, in case of war, to lead an organization there,” Ritter wrote. “I did not really like the idea. But when I talked about this with my wife and she offered to come with me, I decided to go along.” He says the couple underwent training in the telegraphic language of Morse code, which would be an essential component of Ast Hamburg’s communications operation once the Atlantic Ocean was transformed into a battle zone, constricting the effectiveness of the courier and mail-drop systems and requiring a speedier transfer of information. A wireless telegraphy (or W/T) station was established in a handful of rooms in a baronial estate in the Hamburg suburb of Wohldorf, which would soon include a few dozen radio sets and a busy staff of cryptologists.

Not long after his training commenced, Ritter began to have doubts about embarking on an assignment that would be more difficult than his previous one in 1937, when he was able to travel under his own name in the confident belief that the Americans weren’t paying much attention to foreign spies. Although he doesn’t say so in his memoir, he was in the midst of a court battle to win custody of his two American-born children from his ex-wife, Aurora Evans, the Alabama woman he had cast aside (in a strange country ruled by a foreigner-loathing dictator) in favor of his Abwehr secretary, the kind of subplot that isn’t usually included in spy thrillers. In his book, Ritter says he declined the mission to America when he learned that it would require him to resign from the military. Still, the problem remained: Who could be sent in his place to serve as an “informant and contact man with our agents in the United States”? “As I gave up the idea of going to the United States myself I began to look around for a man whom I could train as an agent with a secret transmitter.”

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Nine days after the
Deutschland
left New York Harbor, on February 2, 1939, Bill Sebold landed in Germany, surely one of the few bearers of American citizenship seeking entry into a war-eager Third Reich. He described what happened next: “Well, when I arrived at Hamburg, there was a passport police, and I had to present my American passport, and as I showed my American passport there were two civilians, two men in civilian clothes, that took me in a nearby room and questioned me about my activities in the United States.”

Sebold said he was specifically asked if he had ever worked at an airplane factory. He believed that his interrogators knew to ask this because he had been talking a little too freely with some Hitler Youth during the trip over. He told the men about his (brief) service at Consolidated Aircraft Corporation of San Diego, California. He was asked how long he intended to remain in Germany. He responded that he didn’t know. Finally, he was asked for the address where he would be staying. Sebold provided them with his mother’s, Duisburger Strasse 147, Mülheim-Ruhr.

“And then you were told they would get in touch with you sometime later in the event they needed you?” he was later asked.

“No.”

Sebold said they told him, “You will hear from us.”

The Führer had to come in order to hammer into all of us the fact that the German cannot choose and may not choose whether or not he will be German but that he was sent into this world by God as a German, that God thereby had laid upon him as a German duties of which he cannot divest himself without committing treason to providence.

—Gauleiter Ernst Bohle, leader of the
Auslandsorganisation
(Foreign Countries’ Organization) of the Nazi Party

I
n the four months after his arrival in Nazi Germany, Bill Sebold did little more than quietly pass the time in his mother’s home on Duisburger Strasse. He was free to recuperate from his stomach surgery of the previous year and follow the propaganda campaign that was preparing the German people for the coming struggle.

In the second week of March, Nazi newspapers began “reporting” that evil Czechs were launching attacks against the small number of Germans living within the borders of what was now known as Czecho-Slovakia, the rump Czech state that included the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Carpatho-Ukraine, and Slovakia. In a move of genuine tactical cunning, Hitler coerced the leaders of Slovakia into declaring independence on March 14, which led Neville Chamberlain to announce in the Commons that Great Britain wouldn’t honor its obligation to defend Czecho-Slovakia since the “frontiers we had proposed to guarantee” at Munich had been dissolved by Slovakia’s action. In the early morning hours of March 15, Hitler met with Czech president Emil Hácha in the Reich Chancellery and told him that the German military was preparing to launch an invasion within hours. When Hácha hesitated to sign a surrender document that had been prepared for him, Hermann Göring added that “half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing within two hours, and that this would only be the beginning,” a threat of such horrendous imagining that the sixty-six-year-old president fainted. Revived by an injection from the needle of Hitler’s personal physician, Hácha agreed to order his military and civilian leadership to stand down, giving the specter of the Luftwaffe a central role in another victory for Nazism. German troops confronted severe winter weather rather than armed resistance when they crossed the border at 6:00 a.m. There were no cheering crowds when Hitler swept into Prague in the early evening and assumed control of a nation populated mostly by non-Germans, his first truly foreign conquest. After a night’s rest in the Hradschin Castle, he presided over the creation of the new Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia became a puppet republic, and Carpatho-Ukraine was given to the pro-Nazi rulers of Hungary.

Hitler decided to quickly seize two German-majority communities on the Baltic Sea that had been excluded from Germany by the Versailles Treaty. On March 20, Lithuania was informed that an aerial bombardment would be forthcoming unless the port of Memel was granted to the Reich, which was done without delay. In response to the annexation of the Memelland, the Polish government made the provocative decision to partially mobilize its army and concentrate troops around the other object of Hitler’s desire, Danzig, the “free city” created by Versailles to provide Poland with access to a seaport, which was administered under the suzerainty of the League of Nations and separated from Germany by what was known as the Polish Corridor. The DNB News Agency duly reported that attacks against German women and children “are accumulating to a regrettable degree” in the Polish Corridor. Albert Forster, the ambitious former bank clerk who presided as gauleiter over the Nazi organization in Danzig, was granted personal access to the Führer to discuss the proper levels of “quasi-revolutionary” activity that should be fomented to facilitate German war aims.

Sixteen days after the disintegration of Czecho-Slovakia, Prime Minister Chamberlain stood before Parliament and delivered a speech that all but promised war if Hitler sought to overrun Danzig and the Polish Corridor: “In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish government all support in their power,” he said. “They have given the Polish government an assurance to that effect. I may add that the French government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter.”

Events were now moving rapidly and almost uniformly in Hitler’s favor. In the final days of March, Franco’s Fascists captured Madrid and declared victory in the Spanish Civil War. After gaining Hitler’s permission, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania, conquering the nation within days and opening up an Axis path to southeastern Europe, causing France and Britain to issue security guarantees to Greece and Romania. On April 3, Hitler told his generals to draw up a plan for a surprise attack on Poland that “can be carried out at any time from September 1, 1939, onward.” On April 28, Hitler announced the cancellation of his nonaggression pact with Poland and naval agreement with Great Britain. Even though Benito Mussolini believed his armed forces wouldn’t be ready to fight a major conflict for another three years, he agreed to an upgraded military alliance, the Pact of Steel, that obligated Italy to side with Germany upon the outbreak of hostilities. On May 3, Stalin signaled his openness to an alliance with Nazi Germany by appointing Vyacheslav Molotov as his new foreign minister in place of Maxim Litvinov, the personification of the Popular Front policy of cooperating with anti-Fascists abroad, who was excoriated as “the Jew Finkelstein” in the Nazi press. On May 23, the Führer told his generals he was determined to make war on Poland “at the first suitable opportunity.” Danzig would be the pretext for “expanding our living-space in the East and making food supplies secure.” If the French and British decide to intervene, he vowed, the Reich would then conquer Holland and Belgium, from where attacks could easily be mounted against France and Britain.

In America, the isolationists retained their hold over American foreign policy by refusing FDR’s request to repeal the arms-embargo portion of the neutrality laws, which would allow the United States to announce its intention to supply Britain and France in the event of war and thus perhaps deter Hitler from launching the attack on Poland in the first place. “No one can foretell what may happen,” said Senator William Borah, the venerable Lion of Idaho, who was so uninterested in entangling alliances that he had never set foot out of the United States. “But my feeling and belief is that we are not going to have a war. Germany isn’t ready for it.” Congress did promptly pass its version of the president’s national defense program, which now included $300 million for the US Army Air Corps to purchase not the three thousand planes FDR had originally requested in January but up to fifty-five hundred of them, with the isolationists ever watchful that the administration didn’t fritter away national defense gains on the Western democracies that might soon be fighting for their lives. Which was bad news for the British military officials who witnessed a demonstration of the Norden bombsight at Fort Benning, Georgia. Three waves of B-17 heavy bombers and B-18 medium bombers, all equipped with the device, scored direct hits on the outline of a battleship on the ground. “The first B-17 was due to drop its bombs at 1:27 p.m.,” wrote George Pirie, the British air attaché to Washington. “At about 1:26 p.m. everyone started to look and listen for it. Nothing was seen or heard. At 1:27 while everyone was still searching the sky six 300-pound bombs suddenly burst at split second intervals on the deck of the battleship, and it was at least thirty seconds later before someone spotted the B-17 at 12,000 feet.” The British estimated that the Norden was three or four times superior to the RAF’s sight. Ordered to do everything “humanly possible” to win one for the Crown, the officials were dismayed to learn that the Americans wouldn’t let them anywhere near the marvel. Air Commodore Arthur Harris, later known as Bomber Harris for leading the RAF’s onslaught against German cities in the closing stages of the war, wrote that he was “resolutely prevented from catching even a surreptitious glimpse of it.”