Double Agent (22 page)

Each message was assigned a page of Rachel Field’s
All This, and Heaven Too,
which was determined by adding the date (10 for the tenth day of the month, 12 for December, for example) to an agreed-upon third number (20). Turning to page 42, Ellsworth and Sebold would look to the upper left-hand corner of text, along the left margin, and copy down the letters that began the first twenty lines of text. “That will be a mere jumble of letters, you see,” the prosecutor said. “Because it won’t form any sentence—
A,X,L,R
, and so forth.” The letters would be written horizontally across a sheet of paper. Below each of the letters, they would jot a number corresponding to the letter’s position in the alphabet. The first A among the twenty letters would be assigned the number 1. The second A would get a 2. If there were only two As, then the first B would be assigned the number 3. If there was only one B, then the first C would get the number 4.

Below the horizontal list of numbers, Ellsworth and Sebold would draw a rectangular grid of squares, twenty across and five down, with each vertical column corresponding to one of the twenty numbers determined from the twenty letters from page 42 of
All This, and Heaven Too.
They would write the message they wished to code into this twenty-by-five grid, one letter per box, working left to right horizontally. The resulting grid of letters would then be given to Price—not as horizontal rows, but as vertical columns, taken out of order and starting with the column marked 1, and continuing then with the column marked 2, then the column marked 3, and so on.

Ellsworth said of the procedure, “If the message was to be sent, I used the date of the sending of the message or the day we expected to send the message as the basis for preparing the code, and then prepared the square system, as explained by Mr. Sebold, and entered the message to be sent into that system of squares, and from that extracted a series of code groups of letters which I handed to Mr. Price for transmission.”

To decode Ast Hamburg’s messages, Ellsworth and Sebold would again turn to that day’s specified page of
All This, and Heaven Too,
draw a twenty-by-five rectangular grid of empty squares, and run the process in reverse. “Agent Price would hand us a series of code groups, letters arranged under a code system at that time existing, on the date of the receipt of that message,” Ellsworth said. “I would prepare a graph or chart using the system explained to me by Mr. Sebold. That series of code groups of letters which Mr. Price handed to us, I would then arrange into that system, and from that system extract the code message, and set it out either in German or in English, in whichever it was received. If it was received in the German language, I would work with Sebold on the translation of the German into English.”

In the first message tapped to Hamburg, “H.S.” told Station AOR that he had received $240 from the
Manhattan
. “Meet Roeder Monday. Shall I give him this money since he will not work longer without money.” The response came three days later, a veritable instant in the transatlantic spy business: “The money is for Roeder.” After Roeder received the cash during a ride-around in which he showed off a .357 Magnum and said he would “do a real job” if he ever decided to kill somebody, Roeder promised Sebold he would keep the secrets coming, soon producing a stream of intelligence that included the blueprints for the Lockheed Hudson, a light bomber and coastal reconnaissance aircraft that was being manufactured for the Royal Air Force.

When the
Manhattan
arrived back in New York from Genoa on June 10, the same day Mussolini’s balcony declaration ended the neutral ship’s journeys to the now-combatant port, it was overloaded with 1,907 passengers, nearly twice the capacity, “a confused and clamorous throng of many languages and diverse views,” wrote the
Herald Tribune
. “There were men and women who had lived for years on the Riviera, at Cannes, or Monte Carlo, Americans to whom America may seem strange. There were businessmen abandoning commercial claims they had staked out in Europe. There were needy refugees, the women shawled and blank-eyed, some of them Jews from Germany or the lands overwhelmed by Germany. There were nuns and priests and actors. There were refugees from Denmark and from Norway who had traversed the length of Europe to find a port from which an American vessel sailed. There were dogs and cats and canary birds.” And there were pro-Nazi travelers “who grinned and slapped each other on the back when the radio brought word of new German triumphs,” including the chief butcher and head pastry chef on a kitchen staff full of the naturalized Germans who were favored by the dowdy American liners because they added the European dash that sophisticated travelers expected in their ocean passage.

Over the next three weeks, as the
Manhattan
prepared to sail to its new destination of Lisbon in pro-Fascist but still neutral Portugal, Sebold met with the butcher (sharing a boozy evening at the Lorelei and Café Hindenburg on Eighty-Sixth Street in Yorkville, which was de rigueur for Nazi spies), the baker, and, during an introductory session partly conducted on the grass opposite the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, a thirty-year-old former fish cook on the
Manhattan
, Paul Fehse, who was serving as the chief of the “marine division.” Now living over the river in New Jersey with a fellow conspirator, Fehse (code name Fink) had graduated from a four-week training course at Ast Hamburg and returned to the United States via Genoa at about the time of Sebold’s arrival, which means their instruction periods at least partially overlapped. He showed himself every bit the would-be spymaster when he asked to visit the Long Island radio station, a request that Sebold deflected by saying he was working with a native-born American of venerable background who refused to allow anyone on the property “for fear of involving him in trouble and ruining the reputation of his family.” Sebold further asserted his supremacy when he informed the three that arrangements had already been made for the butcher and the baker to rendezvous with an Ast Hamburg contact at the Hotel Duas Nações on Rua Vitória in Lisbon, which would’ve been impossible to set up in the era before the radio. After uttering the phrase “Sesam greets Franz,” they were to hand over Sebold’s latest collection of micros containing reports from Roeder, Lilly Stein (now serving as a mail drop for a Nazi agent in Detroit code-named Heinrich), and Colonel Duquesne, who, operating out of a new office at 70 Pine Street in the Wall Street area, liked to confer with Sebold as they rode back and forth on the ferry between lower Manhattan and Jersey City. One day the old saboteur gazed upon the Hudson River docks and expressed his fond wish to blow them all up.

With the aid of the radio, Sebold and his FBI associates were able to gain solid proof that the Germans
had
stolen what everyone knew as “the secret bombsight,” the miraculous invention that was entering the nation’s folklore (although not yet publicly associated with the name Norden) at the same time that rumors about its theft were becoming widespread among the Washington–New York elite. In the brief period between the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway and the start of the operation against France and the Low Countries, Universal Pictures released
Enemy Agent,
which portrayed initially inept G-men getting their act together to prevent Euro-accented spies from making off with the “Wallis bombsight,” which was “so accurate that a plane can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from five miles up,” says one character.

Just before the Nazis’ offensive on the west, President Roosevelt asked a wealthy distant relation, Vincent Astor, to look into cocktail-party chatter that the Germans had gotten hold of the Norden, and Astor responded a few days later by ridiculing “the same old song and dance which has cropped up repeatedly in the past,” a figment of the imagination of “the sort that [pseudonymous gossip columnist] Cholly Knickerbocker calls Café Society.” On May 24, as the Germans were completing the encirclement of Dunkirk, the
Toronto Globe and Mail
urged the United States to release the sight to the Allies. “The immediate physical advantage to be gained from its possession would be numerous, but the moral effect on the German people, who through their spies have repeatedly tried to steal this bombsight, would be of equal if not greater value,” the paper wrote in a front-page editorial. On the day before the evacuation ended, June 3, President Roosevelt dashed off a note to a supporter who made the same argument, telling her that the problem was “the article mentioned might fall into the hands of the enemy and help them more than our friends.”

On June 15, with the European continent all but mastered by Hitler, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire called for an investigation after a thinly sourced radio report claimed a captured German plane in France was discovered to possess a bombsight that was suspiciously similar to America’s own. And on June 19, Sebold made his third visit to Hermann Lang’s Queens apartment, where he handed over the
second
message sent by Germany to establish the legitimacy of his mission—“Further References for Lang are Beier, Eberhardt, and Aplohn Pop Sohn,” the last phrase referring to his Norden coworker Fritz “Pop” Sohn, who had introduced Lang into the spy business.

“I said I couldn’t make it out,” testified Sebold, “and I said, ‘Tell me the meaning of it, this something like Aplakson.’ He said it was right, there was a fellow by the name of Sohn who worked with him in the Norden bomb plant and returned to Germany about a year ago.”

It was enough to convince Lang to engage in a conversation that took for granted he had committed the larceny but didn’t touch upon his method. Asked if his knowledge of the Norden was currently helpful to the Reich, Lang said it wasn’t because the bombsight had been in German hands for two years, which meant 1938, the year he made the visit with his wife to Germany.

“I said, ‘Don’t you feel very important to have done such a thing for Germany?’ ” Sebold said. “ ‘How much did you get for it? How much did they pay you for it?’ ”

Lang said he worked for no payment except “a promise to be taken care of.”

“Then I said, ‘Aren’t you afraid of being cheated out of this promise by Germany?’ ”

Lang said he wasn’t because of his personal relationship with Hitler from the early days of the movement in Bavaria.

“You didn’t think Lang was kidding, did you?” Sebold was later asked in reference to the Hitler comment.

“No. He is not a kidder.”

Conceding that it would be difficult to leave his job on the sixteenth floor in the midst of such heightened watchfulness, Lang nonetheless asked Sebold to send a radio message asking for the best advice in escaping the country. “Lang feels secure,” he wanted the statement to read.

On June 20, Hoover broke the news to the White House. “Without making any specific admission, Lang did indicate that two years ago he prepared a complete model of the United States secret bombsight or secured all of the details with regard to this bombsight (the informant is not entirely clear as to just what Lang indicated in this regard), and sent the data to Germany,” the memo read. On the following day, isolationist Senator Gerald Nye took to the floor of the Senate and made headlines by repeating an unfounded rumor that Secretary of War Harry Woodring, who had just resigned at FDR’s request because of his continued opposition to providing military aid to Great Britain, was let go specifically because he refused to give up “national defense secret number one—that all-valuable bombsight that every member of this Senate has been assured for months is being guarded with the utmost secrecy.” The Senate majority leader, Alben Barkley, was required to step forward and say he spoke to Air Corps chief Hap Arnold, who told him “at no time or under any conditions has any consideration ever been given to revelation of any secret bombsight.”

But President Roosevelt was looking for creative ways to respond to Churchill’s pleas for help in preventing what many regarded as a distinct possibility, the fall of Britain. On July 1, FDR mentioned nothing of the Lang revelation when he told the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, that he would provide the Norden to the RAF if it could be proved that the Germans were using a bombsight that “was more or less equivalent in efficiency.” In fact, the British
didn’t
have such proof: the recent examination of a Heinkel He 111 shot down on the Yorkshire coast revealed that it was equipped with a Lotfe 7B bombsight, which “is not adapted for high altitude precision bombing of ground targets and certainly not of moving ships,” according to the RAF report. The truth was, the Luftwaffe’s mismanaged Technical Office, long in possession of Hermann Lang’s plans for the Norden, was still in the midst of developing a gyro-stabilized bombsight for installation in its medium bombers.

On July 16, with the Luftwaffe conducting the raids against coastal installations and shipping lanes that represented the opening phase of the Battle of Britain, President Roosevelt informed the newest cabinet members—Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, both Republicans and interventionists—that the gossips were correct. “Knox brought up the question of the bombsight and the president indicated that his information indicated that the Germans already had it,” wrote Stimson in his diary. “He said that of course if that was true, we certainly ought to give it to the British at once. He mentioned a number of striking facts which indicated carelessness on our part in the preservation of that bombsight from the work of the Fifth Column agents,” confirmation of FDR’s familiarity with the discoveries of Bill Sebold. But the president couldn’t overcome a jittery military leadership that had just convinced him to shelve his idea of giving the Brits twelve (out of the Air Corps’ current fifty-two) B-17 Flying Fortresses as an unconscionable breach of national security. Besides, the revelation that he had handed away
our most valuable secret
would be certain to hurt his now-active campaign against the tousled-haired utilities executive unexpectedly nominated by the Republicans, Wendell Willkie, who, like FDR, was an interventionist wary of doing or saying anything that might upset the isolationists now coalescing around a newly formed organization, the America First Committee. It is a measure of British desperation that Churchill approved a plan (which he initially regretted) to send a technical mission to the United States to reveal the UK’s greatest innovations without an explicit promise that the bombsight the RAF had long sought would be made available in return. The delegation soon arrived with a large black metal deed box containing Britain’s own holiest of holies, the resonant cavity magnetron tube, which was better than the Sperry Gyroscope–developed klystron tube at increasing the range of microwave radar and would prove an essential component of the Allied victory in World War II. The Norden had not yet been tested in combat and was already worth all the money spent in its development.