Double Agent (28 page)

With the newspapers publishing clarifying stories that described Hermann Lang of Norden and Everett Roeder of Sperry as the true “brains” of the outfit (rather than the more copy-worthy Fritz Duquesne), Roeder decided to give up the fight, pleading guilty to the Espionage Act count. “Compared with the other individuals involved in this investigation,” wrote the FBI in a postwar summation, “Roeder was probably the greatest producer of detailed technical data relating to national defense materials and production.” Winchell crowed that his oft-broadcast warnings about such nefarious figures lurking within Sperry Gyroscope Co. had been proven correct. “It has taken more than a year to confirm these allegations,” he wrote. Roeder’s conviction ensured that his son wouldn’t be permitted to serve overseas with the US Army. His father, Carl Roeder, the esteemed Juilliard professor who saw himself as “a preacher of righteousness,” made no comment on the family disgrace.

On Wednesday, September 3, 1941, a jury of nine men and three women was selected in three hours and twenty-five minutes to sit in judgment of the sixteen spies who had pleaded not guilty. (The number would drop to fourteen by the end of the trial.) “Any prejudice because defendant was born in Germany, became a naturalized citizen and is now charged with conspiring to convey defense secrets to the German Reich?” was one of the jury qualification questions. “Have any of you had relatives in European countries who have fled or become refugees from said country?” was another.

On the following day, the American destroyer
Greer
was traveling with mail and supplies to the new US Marine garrison in Iceland when a British plane alerted it to the presence of a U-boat in the vicinity. The
Greer
located
U-652
with the aid of sonar-detection equipment and passed along its location to the RAF, which flew to the spot and dropped depth charges at 10:32 a.m. “The
Greer
continued tracking the submarine until at 12:40 p.m., the U-boat ceased fleeing, turned on the
Greer,
and fired a torpedo that missed,” according to the official account from the chief of naval operations. It was the first Nazi shot fired at the US military. “The
Greer
counterattacked with depth charges and the U-boat responded with torpedoes.” Neither vessel was hit. Although the
Greer
was clearly the instigator of the confrontation, President Roosevelt was determined to tell a different story more in line with his foreign policy objectives. On Saturday, September 6, the White House announced that he would be delivering a speech of “major importance” on the following Monday. It would be broadcast on all three national networks and translated into fourteen languages for rebroadcast throughout the world. When the president’s mother died on Sunday night at age eighty-six, the speech was postponed until Wednesday.

Early on the morning of Monday, September 8, Ellsworth and Sebold, accompanied by four agents, traveled from their temporary quarters in Brooklyn Heights to the courthouse on Washington Street for a final conference with the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Harold Kennedy. “Then I had the agents keep Sebold in the petit jury room just off the courtroom on the third floor,” Ellsworth wrote. “I got Bill into the courtroom and let him try out the witness chair. He was very nervous and had given me a real scare recently when he refused to testify unless we guaranteed his people in Germany would not be endangered as a result and unless he had a status other than that of informer with us. I took him to Mr. Connelly who explained all we could do was help him get his folks to America after the war if they wanted to come. We also assured him that he is not an informer but a counterspy of the FBI. He agreed to go ahead with the trial.”

At 10:30 a.m., the proceedings began, presided over by Judge Mortimer W. Byers, a silver-haired eminence with an officious manner who was eager to keep things moving. The German defendants mispronounced his name as “Judge Bias,” which Duquesne decided was the perfect nickname for him. “A diagram has been prepared of the defendants as they are sitting in the courtroom,” the judge said, “and copies will be submitted to the jury to simplify matters.” Although the rumor mill was full of speculation about a surprise witness, Kennedy mentioned nothing during his forty-five-minute opening statement, which detailed how the spy plot relied on what the
Times
described as “such out-worn movie props as complicated radio codes, contained in the pages of best-seller novels; micro-photographs of documents and blueprints, telegraphy, and mail drops scattered from China to South America.” Fritz Duquesne was characterized as a “spy for forty years” who was so brazen that he concluded a letter to the Chemical Warfare Service in Washington by writing, “Don’t worry if this information is confidential, because it is in the hands of a good citizen.” Hermann Lang “furnished the particulars about the design” of the Norden bombsight during his 1938 visit to Germany, Kennedy said, pointing to the $3,000 that had been placed in a German bank account as compensation. “Whether the motive of these men was money, hatred of one country, or love of another country, the fact is that they transmitted information which affected our national defense,” he said.

After Kennedy was finished, each of the several defense attorneys delivered brief opening remarks. The most fiery was Duquesne’s attorney, a Coughlinite activist named Frank Walsh, who made the (inaccurate) argument that the accused were within their rights to provide defense information to Germany “if it does no harm to America,” as he said. “We were not at war with Germany in 1936 when this conspiracy allegedly began. We are not at war now. Nothing has been shown to indicate anything transmitted by these defendants affected the United States. They may have affected Britain and others, but not this country.” He blamed the whole thing on an unnamed “informer” and “out-and-out double-crosser.” This shadowy individual “was the one who schemed, he planned this, he developed, and when the situation became slow, he coerced, he coerced these individuals day by day. ‘You have to go out and help Germany.’ ‘I want this, go and get me this, bring me that.’ ”

The first witness was a State Department official who testified that none of the sixteen had registered as agents of a foreign government as required by the law.

The second was Bill Sebold, now revealed as an actor of consummate skill who had been fooling them all along. The
Herald Tribune
called him “a powerful six-footer who speaks with a heavy German accent and wears an ominous expression.” A female court spectator complained to the
Brooklyn Eagle
that he “never smiles and he looks and wears his good clothes kinda sloppily, like my dad.” Fritz Duquesne said that he and his fellow spies “were just suckers for a German wharf rat.”

Prosecutor Kennedy walked Sebold through the events of his early life before turning to the main story, his journey to his mother’s house in Nazi Germany to recover from stomach surgery in early 1939, his coercion into the espionage service, his training in Hamburg, and his departure for the United States equipped with the tools to be a coordinating figure in Ast Hamburg’s New York operation. “His testimony was a sensation,” wrote Ellsworth. “The court was packed. The newspapers ate it up. I have a full file of news clippings on the case. Bill was worn out. I was proud of him.” The
Times
’ front-page story on the trial was headlined, “U.S. Bomb Sight Sold to Germany, Spy Jury Is Told.” The
Herald Tribune
’s headline was “Spy Trial Hears Nazis Got Secret U.S. Bombsight.” The
Daily News
wrote, “Trapped by the Gestapo during a trip to his native Germany, a naturalized American citizen was forced under threat of death to act as a Nazi spy in America.” According to the
Eagle,
the “Gestapo” employed “the gangster ‘or else’ threat,” a nod perhaps to the much-discussed murder trial of mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter that was about to begin in nearby Kings County Courthouse. “Hitler Couldn’t Scare Sebold, Spy Trial Star,” the
Boston Globe
said. “So He Helped F.B.I. Round Up Nazi Agents in U.S.A.”

Nikolaus Ritter was preparing to travel to a new assignment in Rio de Janeiro, from where he would continue his work against the United States, when he received a phone call ordering him to Berlin. Arriving at the Abwehr headquarters at Tirpitzufer 72–76, he says he was presented with a copy of the
Times
. “ ‘That sonofabitch,’ I said. ‘That traitor.’ ” His Abwehr superior, Hans Pickenbrock, responded, “But Ritter, according to your own rules, ‘Tramp’ was no traitor, not even a spy. He was a man who worked for his new Fatherland.” Ritter’s career as a spymaster was over.

Asked by the Foreign Office for explanation, Admiral Canaris claimed that suspicions had been aroused by some of Sebold’s radio messages but emphasized that agents in the United States had been thwarted in their work by the German embassy and consulates, which provided “neither financial support nor the use of diplomatic couriers for transmittal of information.” During a 1945 interrogation with American officials, General Erwin Lahousen, a senior Abwehr official tried at Nuremberg, described how Canaris would talk up “one man in the USA who apparently turned out well, and by whom bombsight was delivered,” referring to Hermann Lang. “Canaris constantly emphasized this success particularly, especially in dealing with the
Luftwaffenführungsstab
[Air Force Operations Staff],” probably at a time when the Luftwaffe was losing the war and the spy chief was trying to prove that he was a faithful servant of the regime. He wasn’t. He was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945.

On September 9, Sebold continued his narrative up to the point when the Centerport radio station made contact with Hamburg, which dominated the coverage in the next day’s papers. The
Times
called the communications link “probably the greatest hoax perpetrated on the vaunted Nazi military intelligence to date.” The
Daily Mirror
said the FBI played “Nazi espionage heads in Germany for a bunch of suckers.” A total of 468 messages—301 from Centerport to Hamburg; 167 from Hamburg to Centerport—were exchanged via a cipher system based on Rachel Field’s novel that left everyone befuddled. “Neither the jury or the spectators seemed able to fully understand the code method after it was outlined,” said the
Herald Tribune
.

During the afternoon session, the prosecutor paused in his questioning of Sebold to allow defense attorneys to begin cross-examination. Hermann Lang’s counsel, George W. Herz, a German-speaking attorney based in Ridgewood, emerged as Sebold’s principal antagonist. Herz went after him for initially entering the country illegally when he jumped ship at Galveston in 1922 (“Did the thought ever occur to you that perhaps you were violating the laws of the United States by remaining in the country without notifying some American immigration official?”); for once working at a Communist-affiliated summer camp in the Catskills (“Did you have to sign any pledge of allegiance to the Communist Party before you got the job?”); and for returning to Germany at a time when it was universally regarded as an outlaw nation (“And by that time you were able to read the New York newspapers and understand what was in them?”). Sebold grew angry when Herz asked for the “names and addresses” of his relatives back in Germany. “I do not think I have to tell that in the presence of all these people,” he said. The judge agreed, eventually castigating Herz for persisting in a line of questioning that is “nothing more than an attempt to intimidate him by fear of reprisals.” Ellsworth wrote, “Very trying day but Bill is over a bad hump.”

Yet on the following day, the grilling continued. Herz made a point of noting that Sebold’s wife did not travel with him to Germany in 1939, explaining to the judge, “I am interested in showing that this man did not lead a normal family life. I have that right. And if I can show that he went from place to place without his wife, the jury has a right to draw such inferences of the circumstances under which he lived as they may see fit.” Herz brought up the time Sebold went to Bellevue Hospital complaining of stomach trouble and was admitted to the psych ward after arguing with a doctor, which was gleefully picked up by Duquesne’s counsel, Frank Walsh. After a stay of “twenty-one days, two weeks, I don’t remember,” Sebold said, he was examined by “a big doctor there, from Brooklyn, Professor Dr. Koenig. He laid me out and touched my stomach and he said, ‘That man has a terrific adhesion on the stomach, he has to be operated on immediately,’ and I went up to the surgical ward.”

“In the interest of clarity or accuracy,” Walsh asked, “would you mind telling me how long you were in the psychiatric ward before you were released and declared not to be feebleminded?”

“I object on the ground that question is not proper,” Kennedy interjected.

“The objection is sustained,” responded Judge Byers. “And I warn you not to ask any such question as that.”

But Herz was the instigator of one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

“Did you say to me a minute ago, or did I misunderstand—did you say you agreed to become a spy because you had to give in?” he asked.

“Well, they had me in a corner,” Sebold responded.

“You mean they threatened to use physical violence?”

“Well, they don’t do such things,” Sebold said. “They do that in a nice way.” He explained that explicitly stated threats weren’t necessary in a terror state such as Nazi Germany.

“But you did agree to become a spy?” Herz asked.

“Sure, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“All right, then you lie down and die, or goose-step for the rest of your life,” Sebold snapped.

It was Sebold at his best. “He gets really good under fire and his mind seems to work better,” wrote Ellsworth. The defense attorneys “sought to belittle the former German army machine gunner with ridicule,” wrote the
Mirror
. “They attacked his veracity. They engaged in sharp argument with the court while attempting to refute Sebold’s claim to having been accepted by the Gestapo as an agent. But they failed to alter his story.”