Double Agent (16 page)

During that same meeting, Sebold remembered that he underwent a cursory physical examination. “I did not have to take off my clothes, but they looked me over and said, ‘Well, this guy can’t hurt a fly,’ ” which may have contributed to a belief that Sebold didn’t have the inclination
or
the capability to turn against them. According to the FBI report, “This statement is probably well founded as by this time he was practically a physical wreck from worry about this matter.” On the following day, he collapsed and was admitted to St. Marien Hospital for what he described in one statement as a “nervous breakdown” and in another as a “physical breakdown.” Six days later, he had regained his strength enough to send an inquiry to Cologne about the procedure for obtaining a new passport and received a response that told him to arrive “in person to make affidavit explaining the circumstances of this case.”

After thirteen days in the hospital, Sebold was discharged on October 5, the same day that Hitler was reviewing his triumphant troops in Warsaw and directing reporters’ attention to the ruins that he promised to replicate in Paris and London. Sebold traveled to Cologne, where he filled out his passport application without mentioning his new life as a German spy. On the following day, as Hitler was offering a peace settlement to Britain and France that consolidated his gains and forswore any desire for further foreign conquest, Sebold returned to drop off the necessary photographs. Once he made it back to Mülheim, Sebold penned a note to Dr. Renken (at Rothenbaumchaussee 135, Hamburg), informing him that the consulate had assured him the passport would be forthcoming. Renken/Ritter responded in a letter the following day that asked Sebold to return to the consulate in two weeks to see if he could speed up the process. “The passport affair is indeed very regrettable, but it can’t be helped and I can only hope that you will succeed in getting out before America declares war on Germany,” the letter read. Renken reminded Sebold of the necessity of coming to Hamburg “so that I can show you around my plant and you can get to know the German methods of manufacture here.” Nine days later, Sebold received another letter from Dr. Renken, this one instructing him to visit the consulate to obtain a bulletin on the repatriation of American citizens. On the next day, October 17, Sebold did as requested, arriving at a time when the hysteria of the war’s early days had subsided. With Dr. Renken’s “German methods of manufacture” note in hand, he asked for a meeting with the American consul general, Alfred W. Klieforth. It was granted.

Sebold later testified that Klieforth was less than welcoming to an American citizen who was desperate for the assistance of his government. “He said, ‘Okay, let me see the letter,’ ” Sebold said. “I showed him that letter. And then he said, ‘Well, we cannot help you. You are in a bad spot. You have to know yourself what you are going to do. We have nothing to do with this. But I have to take this letter and copy it and send it to the State Department.’ ”

“Is that all he said?” Sebold was asked.

“That is all he said.”

Nine days later, on October 26, Klieforth offered his version in a dispatch to Washington. William Sebold “appeared at the consulate and related a story which may or may not be important,” he wrote. “Mr. Sebold claims that through a strange set of circumstances he is now at the mercy of certain German secret organizations interested in the production of American military aeroplanes.” Klieforth said Sebold was being forced to undergo training in Hamburg in preparation for service in the United States. “Mr. Sebold was interviewed by Vice Consul Parker and myself and impressed us with his integrity,” Klieforth wrote. “I take it that he involved himself in the beginning believing that the affair was harmless but now that it has reached a serious stage, he is in fear of his own life.” Klieforth passed along the news that Sebold “requests that he be met upon his arrival in New York by representatives of the State Department in order to convey his story to them by word of mouth.” Klieforth concluded, “I will report Mr. Sebold’s departure by telegraph to the Department.”

▪  ▪  ▪

The American public didn’t want to fight in the new war, but a
Washington Post
poll showed that 62 percent supported President Roosevelt’s proposed revision of the neutrality laws, which would repeal the arms embargo and allow Britain and France to obtain guns, ammunition, and planes from US private industry through a cash-and-carry arrangement that required payment up front and the use of non-American ships for the journey across the Atlantic. With his ear attuned to popular sentiment, FDR argued that cash-and-carry would
ensure
neutrality by giving the Allies the ability to purchase the tools necessary to defeat Germany on their own and also assist in the nation’s economic recovery by putting more Americans to work in the war industry. He made the solemn pledge that he had no intention of sending our boys overseas. Believing that the legislation was the first step to war, a third of the country opposed it, an unlikely coalition of libertarians, literary intellectuals, religious pacifists, Midwestern business leaders, left-wing revolutionaries, Anglophobes, concerned mothers, college students, and Hitler-sympathetic bigots and anti-Semites. Charles Lindbergh was granted time on all three national networks to urge Americans to resist the propagandistic emotionalism that would draw us into a fight against our racial equals.

“These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” he said in his maiden speech as America’s most prominent isolationist. “There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend our white race.”

With the Hitler-Stalin Pact marking the end of the Popular Front against Fascism, American Communists and those still willing to be fellow travelers came out against aiding the capitalistic imperialists of Britain and France, maintaining that fighting Fascism on behalf of a glorious future in Spain was one thing, but doing so in service of “so-called” democracies was another. Reactionaries such as
Chicago Tribune
publisher Colonel Robert McCormick (whose paper portrayed the president as a puppet of Moscow) joined hands with progressives such as Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette Jr. (who regarded the New Deal as too moderate), united in their common belief, as La Follette said on the Senate floor, that the president would “inevitably” establish a wartime dictatorship that “will not evaporate into thin air after the war is over.”

In New York, the FBI was monitoring the most extremist manifestation of antiadministration sentiment, an Irish German gang of Coughlinites that had graduated from street-corner demonstrations and meeting-hall harangues to devising a plan to bomb Jewish-controlled institutions (the
Daily Worker
newspaper, the US Post Office, the Flatbush branch of the American League for Peace and Democracy, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the New York Customs House, etc.), hoping to spark a violent reaction from the Jewish-controlled US government that would rouse the slumbering (anti-Semitic, they hoped) masses and create the chaos necessary for a Fascist counterrevolution, resulting in the seizure of the government and the slaughter of the Jews. The plotters (most of them Irish American members of the Christian Front with a few Germans connected to the Bundist movement) wanted to marry the tactics of the Irish Republican Army, which had been engaged in its “S-plan” bombing campaign against installations in English cities since January 1939, to a Nazi-like wave of street violence that would achieve the objective of “driving Judaism out of government.”

Although Congress was deluged with a million pieces of protest mail, and antiwar rallies were held in towns and cities throughout the country, the new neutrality bill made it through both the House and Senate by early November. Passage was secured even though the press was full of stories about the sinking of Allied merchant and military ships, more than two hundred of which would go down by the end of 1939, seeming to prove cash-and-carry would bring the war at least as close as the New York piers. FDR was so fearful of arousing isolationist fury that he didn’t follow the signing ceremony with a public call for a more rapid increase in the capacity of the armed forces. The US Army included 227,000 men, just 80,000 of whom (five divisions) were equipped for duty, vastly inferior to the Polish Army, which had been annihilated with relative ease. The US Navy was mostly based in the Pacific to protect against the threat from Japan, which, not yet joined in a military alliance with Germany, boasted a naval force at least equal to our own. Of the Air Corps’ more than two thousand planes, only eight hundred could be deployed as first-line units. A bare fourteen of the B-17 Flying Fortresses intended to be America’s nation-conquerors had yet come off the factory floor.

But the United States did have something to distinguish it from potential enemies, the Air Corps publicity staff was keen to inform selected correspondents. “The American bombsight is the envy of the entire world,” wrote
Collier’s
in its October 14, 1939, issue. “It is our most closely guarded military secret. It is used by our Air Corps, but really belongs to the Navy.” The “precious” instrument is “made in a small factory in the East, run by two civilian engineers who developed it,” an obvious reference to 80 Lafayette Street and Carl Norden and his partner, Ted Barth, who in fact left the technical matters to Mr. Norden. “Details of the shop’s location and name are not bandied around; yet recently it received a letter from the Japanese asking for a quotation on the bombsights in lots of 500!” In its October 23 edition,
Time
said the “new” American bombsight “makes U.S. aviators boast they can drop a bomb in a barrel from 18,000 feet.” The Navy’s Admiral W. R. Furlong demanded an end to the publicity, which “only makes foreign agents try harder to steal the sight from our various stations.”

The country could also boast the elimination of the gifted organizer with a demonstrated ability to mobilize thousands on behalf of Nazism. It can literally be said that Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn was brought down for the love of a woman. During a three-week trial in General Sessions Court in downtown Manhattan, Assistant District Attorney Herman J. McCarthy devoted the bulk of his case to proving that Kuhn stole from his membership by spending $717.02 in Bund funds to pay for the transportation of the furniture of a Mrs. Florence Camp of California, who was one of two Kuhn mistresses named during the proceedings. (The other, Virginia Cogswell, was a former beauty queen and minor celebrity known to the papers as the “Marrying Georgia Peach” for her seven—or was it nine?—ex-husbands.) The
Daily News
spoke for many in finding it “difficult to imagine a smitten damsel stroking his rocklike jaw and murmuring, ‘Whose itsie bitsie Nazi is ’oo.’ ” The papers ran long excerpts from three love letters that the “flirtatious Fuehrer,” “Teutonic two-timer,” and “hotsy-totsy Nazi” wrote to Mrs. Camp, which obscured the news that the judge had now dismissed seven of twelve charges for lack of evidence, meaning that Kuhn was alleged to have stolen $1,217.02 rather than the original $14,548.59.

On November 29, a jury of twelve businessmen, all non-Jews, deliberated for about eight hours before finding Kuhn guilty of two counts of grand larceny in the matter of Mrs. Camp’s furniture and three counts of larceny and forgery in the unexplained disappearance of $500 earmarked for a Bund lawyer, concluding that his dictatorial powers over the organization (attested to by a parade of Bundist witnesses) didn’t permit him to spend its money however he wished. On December 4, Judge James G. Wallace delivered a sentence of two and a half to five years, sending him away “as an ordinary small-time forger and thief and not because of any gospels of hate or anything of that sort.” Two days later, Kuhn was hauled off to Sing Sing, where an AP photographer captured him crossing the threshold, his left wrist handcuffed to a burly deputy sheriff and his right to two fellow prisoners. It must’ve pained the avatar of racial purity that one of them was an African American. Back in town, Deputy Bundesführer G. Wilhelm Kunze was elevated to the top spot, pledging to continue cultivating the pro-Nazi sentiment that was still apparent in the German American community. When poet W. H. Auden went to view a German film in Yorkville at almost exactly the moment of Kuhn’s incarceration, he was stunned by the vile shouts of moviegoers incited to bloodlust by a Reich-produced newsreel of the invasion. “Every time a Pole appeared on the screen,” he told a friend, “the audience shouted, ‘Kill him!’ ”

▪  ▪  ▪

In the six weeks since he’d told the American government of his agreement to work for the German espionage service, William Sebold had heard nothing from Ast Hamburg. It was his own version of the lull that had settled over Europe, called variously the phony war, the
drôle de guerre,
the twilight war, the bore war, or the Sitzkrieg, as the Allies launched no attack against the German mainland and Hitler kept postponing his move against the West (even while the Battle of the Atlantic continued and the Soviet Union launched its brutal “winter war” against Finland).

In hopes perhaps that the Germans would never contact him again, Sebold tried to raise his own funds for a one-way ticket to New York. On November 6, Consul General Klieforth sent a telegram to the State Department in Washington, requesting that a message be delivered to Mrs. Sebold, who could be contacted at her employer’s address, M. Hilders, 993 Park Avenue. On November 7, Helen Sebold received a note signed by none other than the secretary of state of the United States, Cordell Hull. “Telegram from American Consul Cologne transmits the following message for you QUOTE Telegraph $200 my account American Express Company Rotterdam, William Sebold. UNQUOTE,” it read. The response eventually came back from Washington: “Wife unable assist Sebold. Government funds not available.” With the consulate unwilling to issue a US passport until he had a ticket in hand, Sebold was left with no choice but to write a letter to Dr. Renken in mid-November, reminding him of his existence and asking for help in paying his travel costs. Dr. Renken didn’t respond, probably because he was immersed in training spies to be placed in the British Isles and Western Europe, a more pressing priority.