Double Agent (9 page)

The story that follows is so deservedly ignominious that it is almost too painful to relate: On September 15, Chamberlain, who was sixty-nine years old, took the first airplane ride of his life, landing in Munich, traveling three hours by train to Berchtesgaden, and motoring up to Hitler’s chalet, the Berghof. Escorted to Hitler’s study on the first floor, Chamberlain listened as Hitler sputtered for a few hours about the plight of his
Volk
in a manner that somehow convinced Chamberlain that “here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word,” as he actually wrote. After agreeing in principle that the Sudetenland should be handed over to German control, Chamberlain made the long slog home, convincing his cabinet and then the French that this gift would be, as Hitler had promised, his last territorial claim in Europe.

By September 21, the Czechs had been bullied into going along. On the following day, Chamberlain flew in triumph to the Rhineland resort of Bad Godesberg and presented Hitler with his benefaction. “I’m sorry,” Hitler responded after a brief pause, “but that won’t do anymore.” He wanted a speedier occupation of a larger area of western Czechoslovakia, a more forceful expulsion (“no foodstuffs, goods, cattle, raw materials, etc., are to be removed”) of the non-Germans residing there, and land grabs for neighboring Poland and Hungary to further weaken the Czech state. Chamberlain harrumphed about being “both puzzled and disappointed.” Flying back to London, he “saw spread out like a map beneath him the mile upon mile of flimsy houses which constituted the East End of London,” shuddering “to think of their inmates lying a prey to bombardment from the air,” wrote an aide.

By September 26, Chamberlain’s cabinet, the French, and the Czechs had all rejected Hitler’s Bad Godesberg ultimatum. For the next two days, the world braced for war. French troops manned the Maginot Line, built for just this purpose after World War I, and Chamberlain mobilized the British fleet. The Allied capitals anticipated an aerial attack the likes of which humankind had never seen. Charles Lindbergh, who had been given the privilege of touring Reich aviation facilities a year earlier with his friend Ernst Udet, was in London meeting with senior British officials and influential notables and communicated his expert opinion that “German air strength is greater than that of all other European countries combined” and “has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Prague,” according to a memo he wrote at the request of that most fervent of appeasers, US ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Lindbergh said the Luftwaffe possessed eight to ten thousand aircraft with the capacity to produce five to eight hundred more a month, vast overestimates that would become conventional wisdom among military, political, and opinion leaders throughout the world. On the evening of the twenty-seventh, Chamberlain told his nation over the wireless, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing!”

In Berlin, Hermann Göring received a memorandum from the Luftwaffe general who had been asked to draw up a war plan for Great Britain. Citing a lack of sufficient airfields in northern Germany, bomber pilots without training over water, and a poor weather-reporting service, the general concluded, “A war of destruction against England with the resources we have on hand is ruled out.” The Luftwaffe had about 2,900 planes, just 1,669 of which could’ve been mobilized during the crisis, with the ability to build less than 450 a month. Without at least the services of runways in the Low Countries or France, the Luftwaffe’s medium bombers had no chance of mounting effective attacks against the British mainland. Several other German generals, fearful that Hitler was leading the nation to certain defeat, were apparently ready to launch a putsch, according to their postwar claims. But before the plan could be activated, Hitler (at the decisive urging of Benito Mussolini) agreed to a British plan to convene a four-power summit to try to avoid war. On the afternoon of September 28, Chamberlain was speaking in the House of Commons when Sir John Simon handed him a note. “I have something further to say to the House yet,” he said after looking it over, one of the most dramatic moments in the body’s history. “I have now been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him in Munich tomorrow morning. . . . I am sure that the House will be ready to release me now to go and see what I can make of this last effort.” The applause from the assembled MPs was thunderous. Talks between Hitler, Chamberlain, French premier–douard Daladier, and Mussolini (an interested neutral who spoke the languages of the other three) began at noon on September 29 and ended at 3:00 a.m. on September 30 with the signing of the Munich Agreement, essentially Hitler’s once-rejected counterproposal from Bad Godesberg. The Soviets hadn’t been invited to participate. The Czechs were waiting in the next room to be informed of the fate of their sovereignty. Not content to let well enough alone, Chamberlain took the Führer aside later that morning and had him scrawl his name to a sheet of paper pledging that Germany and Great Britain would never go to war against each other. Returning to the acclamation of a grateful nation on October 1, Chamberlain waved the document on the tarmac at Heston and later from the windows of 10 Downing Street, where he told the crowd that he believed he had achieved “peace for our time.” From the backbenches, Winston Churchill had to pause for the protests to die down after he told his colleagues, “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

On that same day, German troops crossed the border into the Sudetenland as joyous crowds flung flowers before their path and heiled praises to the great leader who had once again proved the master of his opponents. In swift order, the invaders took control of the mountain fortress line that represented Czechoslovakia’s best protection against a land invasion, arrested the eight thousand ethnic German and two thousand Czech political opponents of Nazism who hadn’t joined their comrades in flight, seized the Skoda Works munitions plant and other industrial structures, and installed Konrad “Little Hitler” Henlein as the first commissioner of the new Reich Region Sudetenland. Charles Lindbergh flew to Berlin, where an appreciative Hermann Göring presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star, the highest decoration that the Nazi state could bestow on a foreigner, honoring him for delivering (willfully or not) misinformation that enhanced the Luftwaffe’s sinister renown while giving it greater time to build up its strength.

On October 14, Hitler told Göring to “execute a gigantic production program, against which previous efforts would pale into insignificance” that would increase the size of the Luftwaffe by
five
times. With a war against long-range enemies now a distinct possibility, Nazi air planners ordered the mass production of two planes that were said to have the capacity to fly more than two thousand miles and finally provide Hitler with the ability to strike into the heart of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Yet Ernst Udet insisted that both planes function as dive-bombers, heedlessly brushing away concerns about the technical difficulty of manufacturing such machines and guaranteeing a significant delay in the creation of a mature air force to serve Hitler’s most delusional ambitions of international conquest. Orders were issued to develop a dive-bombing sight rather than the kind of precision bombsight for level flight that Hermann Lang had stolen from America, which meant that the hard work of turning the Norden blueprints into an instrument that German industry could replicate in numbers was yet to begin. “It is comparatively easy to build two or three bombsights,” Ted Barth, president of Norden Inc., later said. “To get sizable production takes a terrific effort.” On October 21, Hitler told his military to begin preparations for a strike against the rest of the tottering Czech state in the belief that Chamberlain and Daladier weren’t serious when they promised to guarantee the integrity of its newly drawn borders. “That fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague,” Hitler was heard muttering on the way home from Munich.

▪  ▪  ▪

With his clamorous HUAC hearings earning him a national reputation for smoking out un-American enemies, Congressman Martin Dies (“rhymes with ‘spies,’ ” noted
Time
magazine) wanted a greater hand in suppressing the spy menace that everyone seemed to agree was a growing threat to the country. The president would have none of his meddling. When asked by reporters about a meeting he had with US Attorney Lamar Hardy to discuss the “spy situation,” Roosevelt went out of his way to note that the administration wasn’t interested in suppressing “propaganda activity” of the sort the Dies Committee had been investigating but only in “military and naval spy activity” that “goes by the generic term of ‘foreign spies.’ ” He said “very, very deep study” was being conducted to determine how to “counteract the continuance of foreign government spying on our national defenses.” Congressman Dies responded the next day by proposing a legislative angle to Roosevelt’s effort, suggesting the creation of a central intelligence agency, a ban on foreign-controlled groups, and a drastic tightening of immigration and deportation laws. “The president has taken cognizance of this grave situation in a splendid move,” Dies said.

The newspapers didn’t need to seek comment from FDR to know he had no interest in cooperating with Dies. In a cabinet meeting on Friday, October 14, 1938, Roosevelt asked Attorney General Homer Cummings to chair a committee “to inquire into the so-called espionage situation” and report back in a week with recommendations for Roosevelt to implement. He asked that the proposed system “be confined to the investigation of espionage on the part of foreigners” and arranged “so that the budget could supply the funds without attracting too much attention,” according to Cummings’s notes.

But first Lamar Hardy had a spy trial to conduct. He caught a break when young Guenther Rumrich pleaded guilty, agreeing to testify against his codefendants and leave unchallenged any incriminating statements he had made to Special Agent Leon Turrou. On the Monday following FDR’s Friday cabinet meeting, Hardy delivered an epic opening statement before a courtroom full of reporters from throughout the world, a diplomatic assault against an ostensibly friendly nation that the press described as unprecedented. He charged that a conspiracy “conceived in and directed from Germany” had sought to steal “information respecting our national defense” for “the advantage of a foreign government, namely Germany.” Hardy identified eighteen defendants—five regime officials in Germany, six transatlantic couriers, six spies, and a Scottish woman whose Dundee address served as a mail drop (and who was already serving time in a British jail)—but could only point jurors to the four unprepossessing individuals in custody, whom most observers dismissed as “small fries.”

The first week of the trial was dominated by the unchallenged testimony of Rumrich, described by the
Times
as a “United States Army deserter and unsuccessful dishwasher,” whose stories were so odd that it was “almost impossible to learn from his recital where fiction ended and fact began.” Many column inches in the nation’s newspapers were nonetheless expended on his revelations about a plot to entice an Army colonel to the McAlpin Hotel, where a courier dressed as a window washer was to subdue him with a fountain pen filled with gas, and an equally ludicrous daydream about obtaining the plans for the aircraft carriers
Yorktown
and
Enterprise
by falsifying President Roosevelt’s signature on faked White House stationery. (
Daily News
front page: “Spies Plotted F.D.R. Forgery.”) Rumrich testified about seeing a photograph of a courier posing with Hitler aide Fritz Wiedemann and Ambassador Hans Dieckhoff at the German embassy in Washington, which resulted in international headlines suggesting that figures of truly prominent stature were tied up with the plot.

The press coverage was still favorable when Attorney General Cummings delivered his promised espionage report to President Roosevelt on the trial’s fourth day, October 20. The six-page memo was written not by Cummings, who would only serve for another few months and would quickly recede into history’s shadows, but by J. Edgar Hoover. The director made the case that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was perfectly situated to transform itself into the nation’s premier spy-chasing agency. He reminded the president that the FBI already had his authorization to conduct broad-picture surveillance of Fascist and Communist threats, which enabled agents “to collect through investigative activity and other contact and to correlate for ready reference information dealing with various forms of activities of either a subversive or a so-called intelligence type,” Hoover wrote. He said there were “approximately 2500 names now in the index of the various types of individuals engaged in activities of Communism, Nazism, and various types of foreign espionage.”

Since the FBI already had the legal authority to conduct occasional spy investigations at the instigation of the State Department and other agencies, he wrote, it didn’t need any “special legislation which would draw attention to the fact that it was proposed to develop a special counterespionage drive of any great magnitude.” Instead, the Bureau needed money. He asked for a vast increase in funding to hire and train new personnel that should be obtained “with the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised to such an expansion by either ill-informed persons or individuals having some ulterior motive,” a wily suggestion that would allow the FBI to accrue power before its intragovernmental rivals knew what was happening. And the director needed control: Yes, Hoover was willing to coordinate spy efforts with military and naval intelligence, whose leaders, he told the president, had already agreed to the arrangement. But he wanted to end the State Department’s role in authorizing investigations, arguing “that the more circumscribed this program is, the more effective it will be and the less danger there is of its becoming a matter of general public knowledge.” There was no need for “a larger departmental committee” because “other agencies of the government are less interested in matters of counterespionage and general intelligence.” In his best bureaucratese, the nation’s number one G-man was making the case that he, and he alone, should be its number one spymaster.