Double Agent (14 page)

▪  ▪  ▪

J. Edgar Hoover responded to the German aggression overseas by sending an urgent letter (on the day after the Czech takeover) to the new attorney general, ex–Michigan governor Frank Murphy, telling him that the FBI’s secretly granted authority “to ascertain the identity of persons engaged in espionage, counter-espionage, and sabotage,” given to Hoover by the president during their train ride from Washington to New York, was being infringed upon by “other governmental agencies, including the State Department, which are attempting to literally chisel into this type of work.” Hoover asked Murphy, an ascetic liberal nicknamed Saint Francis, to persuade President Roosevelt to take appropriate action to end “continual bickering,” which was not helpful “in view of the serious world conditions which are hourly growing more alarming.”

At a press conference a few days later, Murphy strengthened Hoover’s position against his bureaucratic enemies by going public with information about counterespionage policy that FDR had declared off-limits during his talk with reporters four months earlier. “In times like these, there should be central control and not a confused direction. It should be in the Department of Justice and under Mr. Hoover,” Murphy said, with his use of the word
should
indicating that the matter hadn’t fully been resolved within the government. “We should be able to keep abreast of the situation so that it cannot take hold. We are working toward this. It is a good thing for the country to know of the new awareness of the situation and the new preparedness.”

It was a good thing because the release of
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
, which opened nationwide on April 28, 1939, was calculated to inflame filmgoers into believing that German agents were everywhere; this impressed the critics (who raved about the film’s verisimilitude) more than it did the viewing public (still accustomed to going to movies to escape). The studio’s promotional department provided theaters with flyers claiming Nazi reprisals would be meted out to anyone who went to the film and posters that encouraged Americans to question the motives of the man next door: “Where does he get his orders? To whom does he report? How many others like him are there in the United States . . . spying, stealing, taking photographs, betraying America?” Although
Confessions
was only a moderate box office success, it was a widely noted emblem of the culture; attacked as a Jewish conspiracy by Father Coughlin; protested by sometimes vandalizing Nazi sympathizers in Milwaukee and other cities; banned by any country that sought friendly relations with the Reich; and garlanded with honors, including best English-language picture from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, beating out
Wizard of Oz
and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
.

On June 5, Attorney General Murphy delivered an FBI-prepared memo to President Roosevelt, asking him to issue confidential instructions to his cabinet that would end State Department interference onto Hoover’s turf and affirm that the FBI and its two subordinate partners, military and naval intelligence, were the
only
agencies of the government allowed to look “into cases involving actually or potentially espionage, counterespionage, or sabotage.” Before the president could act, the US Senate Naval Committee issued a report alleging “widespread evidence of espionage not only in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone and on the Pacific Coast, but also on the Atlantic Coast and in the Gulf States as well,” a headline-producing revelation that required a response from the attorney general of the United States. Frank Murphy once again went public on behalf of the director, informing reporters on the day the report was released that J. Edgar had taken swift action to contain a situation that he admitted was worsening in light of “worldwide conditions.” The headline over the
Herald Tribune
story was “Anti-Spy Work Centered Under J. Edgar Hoover.” Ten days later, President Roosevelt issued a three-paragraph directive to his cabinet (but not the public), announcing his “desire” that “no investigations should be conducted by any investigative agency” but the FBI or its allies in military and naval intelligence. “The directors of these three agencies are to function as a committee to coordinate their activities,” and they would meet each week at Hoover’s office in the Department of Justice building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. On July 17, the FBI began its first in-service training session instructing selected special agents in such novel matters as “document identification, electrical equipment and sound recording; methods of concealing messages; secret codes and secret writings; detection of secret inks; photographic aspects of espionage work; technical equipment usages in espionage work . . .”

▪  ▪  ▪

On June 1, 1939, Bill Sebold was well enough to join the German war economy by taking a position with the Siemens-Schuckertwerke (formerly Thyssen) steam-turbine machine plant, an indication that he had no immediate plans to return to his wife in New York.

After about a month and half on the job, he received a mysterious letter in the mail. “The contents of the letter were like this, written in German,” remembered Sebold. “It said, ‘My dear friend, I would like to see you . . . in the Hotel Duisburger Hof’ ” on the following Sunday. “He said he would like to go over old times with me in the United States. He learned my address through a friend of his.” The letter was written by a “Dr. Gassner,” who gave his return address as Kotterhamer Strasse 25, Solingen, a city thirty miles to the south of Mülheim. It was signed with a
G
written through the “Heil Hitler” valediction. “I showed the letter to some friends of mine and they looked the letter over and said, ‘It is very phony. You had better see the Gestapo about that; there is something phony about this because you are a stranger; you come out of America, and you never know what they might cook up.’ I went to the Gestapo with the letter and showed it to them, and they said, ‘Okay, you go there; we will cover you. We will see who is approaching you.’ ”

Sebold bicycled to nearby Duisburg for the meeting, but Dr. Gassner was not waiting at the hotel as arranged. Returning home, Sebold wrote a note expressing his displeasure at being stood up. “I said it was very mysterious, I would not deal with people who did not sign letters.” Dr. Gassner responded by apologizing for his behavior and asking for notice of when and where they could try again. Sebold ignored him. Several days later, Gassner sent a letter that included a threat. “It said he is sick and tired of me, something like that, tired of being chased around by me, and he wanted to get results, and if I didn’t meet him, he wanted to ask the assistance of the state, or something, to make me meet him.”

Sufficiently moved, Sebold replied by inviting Dr. Gassner to his mother’s place in Mülheim. “I said he could come to my home in case he wanted to deal with me.”

On August 1 or thereabouts, Dr. Gassner showed up as scheduled and the two went to a nearby restaurant to talk. According to a later FBI report, he asked Sebold about “bombing plans, coast patrol boats, the equipment used, bombsights, bombing racks and similar matters, apparently being aware of the fact that Sebold had previously been employed in the aircraft industry in the United States.” The suggestion is that the dockside officials who had quizzed Sebold upon his arrival at Hamburg had communicated his qualifications to Dr. Gassner, who, according to postwar testimony, was an Abwehr official working on behalf of the Luftwaffe. Sebold said he was asked if he’d ever laid eyes on an actual bombsight, which appeared to be a device of interest to Dr. Gassner. “I told him no, but I had seen a great big contraption, I says, like a stool, where the bombsight goes on—which is a lie,” he said.

Apparently impressed with Sebold’s boasts, Dr. Gassner suggested that he travel to the United States as an espionage agent of
“unsere Gesellschaft”
—our society. Sebold says he demurred. “If you want to find out, go there yourself, it is a wide-open country,” he quoted himself as responding. Dr. Gassner then issued a verbal threat. “He referred to the funeral clothes they’d give me when I was stretched out there.”

Although Sebold didn’t mention it in his subsequent testimony, he may have been confronted with the accusation that he was a part-Jewish ex-con now living under an assumed Aryan identity, a story that would become conventional wisdom in Abwehr circles. “His real name was Debrovsky,” wrote Nikolaus Ritter in his memoir. “He had a prior criminal record, he had changed his name, and his name now was William Seebold [
sic
].” Of his brush with the law, Sebold later told the FBI of an incident that occurred after he returned “from the strain and the confinement” of his World War I service. “He stated that he was singing on the streets when two policemen grabbed him by both arms and put screw chains on his wrists and began to tighten them,” wrote the Bureau. “He claims to have swung at the two policemen, smashing their faces together. He was sent to prison for this act.” It matters little to Sebold’s predicament that the Debrovsky story was pure bunk. The birth certificate on record in the Mülheim archives shows that he was born to Adolf Sebold, a Protestant, and Maria Sebold, a Catholic. His marriage license in the New York City Clerk’s office reveals that his mother’s maiden name was Rohé. Whatever else was said in that restaurant in Mülheim, Sebold was now in fear for his life. “There was the
Fertigmachen,
‘make you ready,’ ” he said, referring to a term used by the Nazis (and apparently Gassner) to describe the terrorizing conducted prior to execution in concentration camps. “And anybody who knows Germany now knows what that means, and I know it, too.” He asked for time to think the offer over. Dr. Gassner gave him the thirty-one days of August 1939.

▪  ▪  ▪

The month began uneventfully. Neville Chamberlain was fishing for trout in Scotland, clad in waders and an anti-gnat helmet, while Hitler was ensconced in his Bavarian retreat, enjoying the mountain air and plotting to take Poland before the muddy conditions of the autumn slowed the progress of his ground forces. By the second week, the world’s media were filled with reports about the instability in and around Danzig fomented by Nazi forces in service to the Little Hitler of the moment, Albert Forster. “In this solemn hour,” Forster told a crowd of Danzig Nazis after flying back from an audience with Hitler at the Berghof, “we can do nothing better than pledge ourselves to hold together come what may, to beat off any attack on this wholly German soil with all the means at our disposal and to carry out every order of our Führer, Adolf Hitler.”

German newspapers were competing with each other to tell more lurid tales about the savagery committed against ethnic Germans in a wide range of Polish territory. “German houses broken into with axes—Terrorized by Poles for weeks—Hundreds of refugees are arrested by Poles.” On August 14, Victor Klemperer of Dresden wrote in his diary, “The same tension for weeks, always growing and always unchanged. Vox populi: He attacks in September, partitions Poland with Russia, England-France are impotent. Natscheff and some others: He does not dare attack, keeps the peace, and stays in power for years. Jewish opinion: bloody pogrom on the first day of the war. Whichever of these three things may happen: Our situation is desperate. We go on living, reading, working, but in an ever more depressed state.” Then on August 23, the monumental news was announced that the Soviet Union had reached a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, joining together the two most savage political leaders of modern history in an alliance that prophesied imminent bloodletting. On August 25, Hitler ordered the war against Poland to begin on the following morning, but a postponement was issued when he learned in the early evening that Mussolini refused to commit his military in abrogation of the Pact of Steel (at least for now), and Great Britain proclaimed a formal treaty with Poland confirming its intention to fight upon outbreak.

On the same day, Hitler’s naval high command assumed control of all German merchant ships, whose captains were instructed to return immediately to Germany or the nearest nonbelligerent port to avoid the possibility of being sunk by the British Navy following a war declaration. It marked the end of an era when the
Europa
turned around before docking at Southampton and steamed back to her berth in Bremerhaven, joining the other swastika-flagged passenger liners in the North Sea ports that were to be transformed into troop transports or auxiliary cruisers for military use. Farther along on the route across the Atlantic, the
Bremen
decided to continue to New York, where Captain Adolf Ahrens planned to quickly refuel and find safe passage back home. The ship was held at Pier 86 for two days under orders from President Roosevelt, who wanted a thorough search conducted to determine if armaments were hidden within the massive confines. A rumor was going around about a false bottom in the swimming pool. “I want to know whether
Bremen
is carrying guns or not,” FDR said.

When clearance papers were finally issued, the ship was tugged out into the Hudson with none of the gaiety that once marked such occasions. At just after 6:00 p.m. on August 30, the great liner “slipped almost furtively down the river, with every light extinguished except the running lights required for navigation,” wrote the
Times
. “But the band kept playing, loudly enough to be heard from the pier-end behind. It played first a march known to Germans as the
‘Hohenfriedberge,’
and then
‘Deutschland über Alles,’
a band piece known to every passenger who has walked a German deck. Then, as the American shore receded, strains of the Nazi
‘Horst Wessel’
song came across the blue-gray water.”

Back in London, Neville Chamberlain took time away from mobilizing the nation’s defenses, and making final attempts to reach a settlement with Hitler, to send “an urgent personal request” to President Roosevelt “because Great Britain today faces the possibility of entering on a tremendous struggle, confronted as she is with a challenge to her fundamental values and ideals.” Under the scrawled salutation “My Dear Mr. President,” the typed letter of three short pages asked for the “new type of automatic air bombsight known as the Norden bombsight,” which “I understand is the most efficient instrument of its kind in existence.” Chamberlain said the gift would allow the Royal Air Force to avoid committing civilian casualties, pledging that his country would not resort to terror bombing of the sort made famous by the Luftwaffe bandits in Spain. “Air power is, of course, a relatively new weapon which is so far untried on a large scale; there is the danger of unrestricted air attack which we for our part would never initiate,” he wrote with a certitude that history would mock. “I am however most anxious to do all in my power to lessen the practical difficulties which may arise in operations even against legitimate military targets, and I feel that in air bombardment accuracy and humanity really go together. For this reason again I am certain that you would render the greatest service if you could enable us to make use of the magnificent apparatus which your services have developed.”