Double Agent (5 page)

Duquesne’s cover story began to unravel in February 1932 when W. Faro Inc. released a 429-page biography called
The Man Who Killed Kitchener,
a tale so obviously fictionalized that its author, Clement Wood, wrote in the prologue that he employed an “interpretative” method, which was “infinitely truer than any bald statement of biographical facts can ever be.” The book is a genuine achievement in romantic balderdash that inflates the outlines of Duquesne’s life story into a glorious saga of world-historical import. “He was the champion swordsman of Europe before he was twenty,” Wood writes. “He was the most adventurous man on earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He may have been the most adventurous man who ever lived. His prowess with sword and rifle, his many escapes from fortresses and jails regarded as impregnable, his amazing lone successful warfare against the widest and most powerful empire since Rome, his high-souled destruction of property and numberless lives in satisfaction of a vow he had made, these things read like ancient miracles or modern tabloid inventions. They are flat sober happenings of our own century.”

Three months later, probably tipped off by the publishing house looking to boost lagging sales, police apprehended Frank Craven in his Broadway office, which resulted in a flurry of stories on the “ ‘cleverest and most dangerous’ agent of the Central Powers in the World War” (the
New York Times
) who had “lost none of his dapperness and jaunty effrontery in his past thirteen years as a fugitive” (the
New York Sun
). The
New York Mirror
ran a splashy excerpt (“The True Story of Duquesne, Boer Soldier of Fortune, Arch Enemy of the British Empire”) even as the
London Daily Express
quoted a British operative calling Duquesne “a good spy” who “certainly could not have had any hand in the loss of the
Hampshire
.”

Confronted with a difficult case to prove so many years after the fact, His Majesty’s government declined to pursue extradition on the murder warrant. Likewise, a city magistrate dismissed all charges stemming from the Bellevue escape. Duquesne, his self-advertised reputation for narrow escapes shown to have basis in fact, was free to assail the newspapers for participating in a “slanderous frame-up against me by Great Britain.”

After Adolf Hitler assumed power in January of the following year, Duquesne became a picturesque member of a cabal of drawing-room habitués in Manhattan connected to Nazi diplomatic circles, the upper echelon of the Bund movement, and native-led Fascist groups. The entertaining monologist renowned for his charm was growing into a crank, offering his espionage services for pay to a Fifth Avenue real estate broker who founded a blue-blooded society (the Order of ’76) that sought to save America from falling into the clutches of the Jews and the Communists. (“To this day the identity of this man has been withheld from most of the members,” wrote John Spivak in an investigative report headlined “Plotting the American Pogroms” in the Communist magazine
New Masses
from October 1934. “They may know now. He is Col. Fritz Duquesne, war time German spy who claimed to have sunk the
Hampshire
with Lord Kitchener on board.”) To Nikolaus Ritter, Duquesne was a prize recruit. They met in late 1937 at the midtown apartment that Duquesne shared, as was his wont, with a younger woman of means bewitched by his stories and willing to fund his comfortable existence. Ritter said that Duquesne agreed “at once” to serve a Nazi state that wasn’t yet engaged in an open fight with his nemesis, Great Britain, but did represent the highest expression of the anti-Semitic belligerency he had been marinating in for the past half decade. With the Reich a long way from sponsoring violent acts on the American homeland, he wasn’t yet recruited as a bomb-planting saboteur, his purported specialty. Instead, Duquesne would be assigned to procure “all information possible about the American aircraft industry” for a monthly payment and reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses. Ritter furnished him with the services of a transatlantic courier, a maildrop address in Coimbra, Portugal, and an advance of $100, a concession to the old guerrilla’s perpetual need for cash.

▪  ▪  ▪

On his last evening in town, Ritter took in a vaudeville performance in Times Square and had a cup of coffee at the Nedick’s hot dog stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Immigration documents report that he boarded the North German Lloyd liner
Europa
on December 16, 1937, a month and five days after arriving in New York for a mission that must be considered a major achievement of prewar Nazism. “I felt greatly relieved as the ship finally headed homeward,” he wrote. Reaching Bremerhaven after the four-and-a-half-day journey, he was met at the dock by a driver, who transported him directly back to his office in Hamburg. “The entire landscape,” he noticed, “was covered by a thick blanket of snow.”

The nascent Duquesne Spy Ring was beginning its work without the least hindrance from American legal authority.

Only the wisest ruler can use spies; only the most benevolent and upright general can use spies; and only the most alert and observant person can get the truth using spies. It is subtle, subtle!

—Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

I
t makes perfect sense that the Luftwaffe’s Technical Office in Berlin took one look at the Norden blueprints that had been stolen from the United States and sent a message to Nikolaus Ritter at Ast Hamburg telling him they were the work of a charlatan. The idea that a humble machinist living in Queens could actually deliver an innovation able to address one of the air force’s most pressing technological needs was not easily believable. Military bureaucracies are perhaps justly cautious of purported marvels gathered in the shadows by individuals of uncertain motivation. The Germans were so suspicious of a senior Polish officer who had recently offered his services to the Reich that he was hanged in the unfounded belief that he was a double agent. But the Luftwaffe was desperate to improve its ability to destroy targets on the ground and prove the much-feared fleet could actually conquer a foreign foe from the air. The Norden gift was too precious to go unrecognized for long.

Yet the Technical Office may have been less than receptive, at least initially, to the offering of a precision bombsight for level-flying bombers for another reason. The unlikely figure appointed by Hermann Göring to lead the Technical Office, Ernst Udet, was a World War I ace known throughout the world for his individualistic feats of stunt flying and record breaking who had decided that the bombsighting problem would be solved by daredevil pilots in agile single-engine planes diving in a near-vertical descent and releasing their bombs so close to the target that they needed little more than a modified gunsight. The regime’s ideological leaders were attracted to the idea of a Germanic knight of the sky plunging toward the earth in selfless devotion to the cause of the Aryan war machine, striking the target not because his plane was equipped with a newfangled bomb-aimer (which they didn’t have anyway) but because he was a hurtling exemplar of the majesty of National Socialism. Hitler himself was favorably impressed by the
Sturzkampfflugzeug
(dive-battle aircraft) or
Stuka
demonstrations he witnessed. Further, the precise dive-bomber, the fast fighter with mounted machine guns, and the imprecise level-flying medium bomber (mostly responsible for the deliberate carnage at Guernica) were believed sufficient to conduct the air attack against the regime’s presumed enemies, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, countries that Germany’s military theorists had been plotting to fight since the 1920s. During his meeting with military commanders on November 5, 1937, Hitler announced that he was planning a regional war that would achieve living space for the Aryan race “in immediate proximity to the Reich.” In an attempt to free up valuable raw materials and production space to create the short-range force, the Luftwaffe had downgraded plans to develop the kind of four-engine heavy bomber (like America’s newly introduced B-17 Flying Fortress) essential to fighting an aerial war far from Germany’s borders, in the belief that the project could be resumed when the time was right. The Luftwaffe, then, felt it had all the precision-bombing capability needed to serve
current
regime objectives.

But Nikolaus Ritter knew he had found a trophy that deserved immediate consideration. When he received the note from Berlin about the “completely worthless” plans that his source had provided in an attempt to “fraudulently get money,” he slammed his fist on his desk so hard that his secretaries jumped. He was incensed by the suggestion that Hermann Lang, a patriotic Nazi with “open face” and “quiet and honest voice” would be out for anything other than the fatherland. After arguing on behalf of Lang’s devotion with his Ast Hamburg superior, Ritter was permitted to fly to Berlin, where he pleaded his case to the officer who led the Abwehr division responsible for overall spying for the Luftwaffe, Friederich Grosskopf. He told Grosskopf that the plans represented “something entirely new, something revolutionary,” which low-level staffers at the Technical Office couldn’t be expected to understand. “In Germany we certainly have a specialist who is working on the problem of a bombsight,” Ritter quoted himself as saying. “I would like to show these drawings to that man.” Grosskopf agreed to allow him to see Wolfram Eisenlohr, the new director of the Department for Engines and Accessories within the Technical Office, which required Ritter to take a flight to Frankfurt. Once there, he told Eisenlohr the whole story and laid the drawings on his desk. The old professor studied them for several long minutes, taking out a pencil to sketch out some of the ideas. “You could hear a pin drop in the room,” Ritter wrote. “Anxiously, I waited, my heart pounding.” At last, Eisenlohr raised his head and pronounced them
“etwas ganz Grosses”
—something very great. He decreed that the deliveries must continue. “Bring me as many drawings as you can,” Eisenlohr said, according to Ritter. “The more we have, the less we have to design ourselves.”

Additional Norden plans were then smuggled out of the United States during the early months of 1938, just as the FBI’s New York office suddenly received the necessary permissions from the bureaucratic hierarchy to investigate a Reich-sponsored spy operation of indefinite proportion. The catalyst had been the NYPD’s apprehension of a low-level agent connected to Nest Bremen named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich.

“Arrest Bares Spy Ring Here” was the front-page headline in the
Daily News
when “Gus” Rumrich, a twenty-six-year-old grifter who was AWOL from the US Army, was taken into custody after telephoning the State Department’s Passport Agency at 26 Wall Street, identifying himself as Secretary of State Cordell Hull (a sixty-seven-year-old Tennessean), and requesting that thirty-five blank US passports be delivered to the Abwehr’s preferred hostelry, the Taft Hotel, for an “Edward Weston,” whom he identified as an undersecretary of state. The supervisor answering the call knew instantly he was being hoaxed. In the single-spaced, ten-and-a-half-page confession he made to the State Department, Rumrich said he found work as a dishwasher at Meyer’s Restaurant in downtown Brooklyn “much harder than the life I had been used to in the Army and quite a strain.” So he volunteered his services to Nazi Germany, mostly mailing along reports of easily obtained info that he typed onto official-looking letterhead. Handed over to the FBI, Rumrich quickly implicated a Leipzig-born pal stationed at the US Army Air Corps’ Mitchel Field on Long Island and a hairdresser/courier on the
Europa,
who, upon questioning following her arrival in port, spilled the beans on Dr. Ignatz Griebl, a Nazi theoretician and gynecologist who operated out of a fancy home/office on East Eighty-Seventh Street between Madison and Park in the Silk Stocking district.

During his second interrogation session, Griebl consented to provide information about Nazi spy activities just as long as he could remain free to continue his medical practice and not be required to affix his signature to a confession, a generous arrangement that was apparently approved by the US attorney in Manhattan, FBI headquarters in Washington, and, according to Griebl’s later statement, President Roosevelt himself. “We handled him with gloves, for he was of more value to us as a willing witness than as an unwilling one,” wrote Leon Turrou, the talented and egotistical special agent assigned to lead the Bureau investigation. “We did not arraign him, nor place him under bond, nor keep him under close surveillance after he began talking.” Dr. Griebl showed his good faith by pointing out a German-born technician at Seversky (later Republic) Aircraft in Farmingdale, Long Island, an ideological Nazi who had spent the past three years in proximity with the designers transforming the now-obsolete P-35 single-engine fighter plane into the P-47 Thunderbolt, which, prized for its ability to endure heavy fighting in poor weather conditions, would be produced in greater numbers than any other US-made fighter during World War II.

Agent Turrou knew he was onto a blockbuster case. Dr. Griebl was filling his head with fantastical tales about a German spy apparatus that had penetrated all levels of the US defense establishment. Griebl described grand boasts he claimed were made to him by his superiors in Germany: “In every strategic point in your United States we have an operative,” he quoted them as telling him. “In every armament factory in America we have a spy. In every shipyard we have an agent; in every key position. Your country cannot plan a warship, design a fighting plane, develop a new instrument or device, that we do not know of it at once!” Just at the point when he should’ve been chasing down leads, Turrou instead reached out to an ace reporter for the
New York Post,
with whom he began a secret project to write a series of articles, an exclusive view of the Nazi spy ring from the inside that would be published at an opportune time with an eye toward book and movie treatment. But Griebl was just stalling for time, offering “partly false, partly exaggerated remarks, in order to confuse the Federal agents by this mass of material and throw them off the right scent,” according to the postwar revelations of his Nest Bremen spymaster. Asked to review statements attributed to him by Griebl about the expansiveness of the Abwehr operation in the United States, he told his British interrogators, “I only discussed with Griebl persons whom I was definitely sure he knew.” The spymaster described Griebl’s comments as a “rubbishy extravaganza.”