The gentleman asking smiled a slight, fixed grin. Sixty-three, wearing a three-piece suit, he clutched his lapels in a folksy, pleasant manner. Resembling both an alert bird and a farmer holding his suspenders, he proceeded to scour the office for listening devices. He glanced back toward the door he had just entered. He scanned the ceiling and each corner. He wandered by the hat tree and coat rack, and peeked inside the mirrored cabinet over the sink.
A 1941 tear-off calendar on the office wall read June 25. Both the calendar and the table clock on the desk were strategically positioned to be captured by the motion-picture camera rolling quietly in the next room, where FBI agents were recording and filming the two men from behind an “x-ray mirror.”
In late 1940, the FBI had rented the sixth-floor office, at 152 West Forty-Second Street and Broadway in New York City’s Times Square, for an elaborate sting. Painted letters on the office door revealed its main protagonist: WILLIAM G. SEBOLD.
Bill Sebold, aka Harry Sawyer, was now an FBI double agent and a “diesel engine consultant” steeped in tradecraft. He was on the verge of pulling off the largest successful espionage case in the history of the United States.
Satisfied at last that the room wasn’t bugged, the visitor, Fritz Duquesne, sat beside the end of Sebold’s desk. Nicknamed the “Duke” by the FBI, Duquesne was a Nazi spy described in his 1932 “biography” as “the most adventurous man on earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” As a guerrilla fighter in the Second Boer War, Duquesne apparently escaped a British penal colony in Bermuda by swimming through shark-infested waters. He was a big-game hunter who met Teddy Roosevelt at the White House in 1909. Once declared dead in the pages of the New York Times, the Duke had also been a secret agent for Germany during World War I, and was credibly to blame for a bombing that claimed the lives of three British sailors.
In the New York City office, at around six fifteen p.m., the spy put on his glasses, rolled up a pant leg, and pulled U.S. military secrets from his sock—diagrams and photos of a Navy mosquito boat, a Garand semiautomatic rifle, a light tank, and a grenade launcher.
Three days later, on June 28, FBI agent James Ellsworth—a Mormon who learned German during his missionary service in the Weimar Republic—picked up Sebold on Forty-Second Street. The day before, unbeknownst to Sebold, some two hundred and fifty Bureau agents met in Manhattan to finalize plans to dismantle the Nazi spy network.
To avoid reprisals, Ellsworth drove Sebold to a safe house in Long Island.
For over a year, FBI agents had followed, photographed, recorded, and filmed the conspirators, intercepting and altering valuable intelligence meant for Germany. In Long Island, following Nazi orders given to Sebold, the Bureau set up a shortwave radio to transmit fake messages—with fake intel—to Hamburg. Over fourteen months, they sent 301 ciphered messages in Sebold’s name, and received back 167.
Across America, German operatives had their cover stories rudely interrupted. In Long Island, a musician was pulled off a hotel bandstand. In Milwaukee, a waiter was nabbed in a hotel room. FBI agents arrested ship stewards and cooks, a bookseller, a restaurateur, a mechanic, a carpenter, and a power-plant engineer.
Lilly Stein, an “artists’ model,” was entertaining a guest that Saturday night. FBI agents listening in waited for the man to leave before arresting her.
“Well, I’ll say one thing,” Stein told the federal investigators, after learning that her apartment was bugged. “You sure got an earful.”
Everett Roeder was celebrating his son’s marriage when G-men knocked. They reportedly found one hundred thousand rounds of ammo in his basement.
Duquesne himself was arrested at his West Seventy-Sixth Street apartment by a Bureau agent who had been posing as his upstairs neighbor. Joining the Duke in cuffs was his Nazi-sympathizing American girlfriend, an artist some twenty years his junior who claimed to dabble in playwriting, sculpting, and toy design.
On June 30, “Harry Sawyer” and the FBI relayed a coded message to Hamburg over the shortwave radio. “Newspapers report arrest here of twenty nine German agents. I believe everything still all right here. Believe Harry Safe.”
The spy network was astounding in its scope. Sebold had initially been put in contact with four operatives. The FBI sting netted thirty-three arrests.
The trial was in Brooklyn, New York.
“Nazi Spies Told to Get Secrets of New Weapons, Jury Hears,” one headline blared. The Associated Press reported on the operatives’ interest in chemical and biological warfare, range finders, “radio sending and receiving devices,” airplane production, and, of course, the “anti-aircraft shell with an ‘electric eye.’ ”
In D.C., Tuve filed away a clipping of the article.
One of the spies disclosed, in a letter meant for Germany, that while a photoelectric fuse was discussed in scientific magazines, he was “unable to find anyone who knew anything about the actual experimental use of such a device.”
The Sebold episode came at a delicate time, just as Section T was looking to hire outside contractors to assemble their experimental fuses. It seemed likely that other Nazi agents inside the United States still remained at large.
Either for infiltration or sabotage, German intelligence was clearly targeting American companies involved in national defense. Among those arrested were a draftsman, a radio engineer, and an inspector for Westinghouse Electric. One Nazi agent, Hermann Lang, had already delivered details of a highly classified Norden bombsight, an intelligence coup with potentially disastrous results.
Duquesne himself hoped to sabotage the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York—a factory that was producing fuse parts for Section T.
After the massive espionage ring was dismantled, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent Section T a confidential report entitled “Suggestions for Protection of Industrial Facilities.” The booklet advised plant managers engaged in defense work on exactly how to keep foreign agents from infiltrating their factories.
One of the spies arrested, the FBI discovered, already had a copy.
On August 7, 1941, at ten o’clock a.m., American consular officers from Germany and Italy gathered in room 300 of the Carnegie Institution of Washington headquarters on P Street. Among the diplomats was none other than Alfred Klieforth, the consul general whom Sebold had approached for help in Cologne in 1939.
In fact, Klieforth was the star witness.
Presiding over the discussion was Harvard president James Conant, a natural diplomat himself. Conant was now chairman of NDRC.
In May, NDRC had been restructured. Van Bush’s organization was now called the Office of Scientific Research and Development, or OSRD, with NDRC incorporated underneath it. Bush’s expanded duties included overseeing medical research of military value. Drawing funds directly from Congress, he also now had the authority to actually produce small batches of weapons.
Several other representatives of OSRD were present at the meeting, as were two members of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The diplomats had been invited to reveal everything they knew about German military science. If Conant could find out what Nazi scientists had devised, and what they were working on, OSRD would know which projects to prioritize. New information—let alone fruitful intelligence—was scarce. But even faint clues could help.
According to the diplomats, the Nazis were working diligently to produce synthetics that could replace scarce raw materials and allow the Germans to keep up production in the face of Allied blockades. Chemists had devised synthetic rubber, and synthetic fibers were being made from “potato tops.” German researchers were trying to build a motor that ran on coal dust, and a battery that didn’t contain lead.
All radio technicians in Germany seemed to be engaged in Hitler’s ambitions, and the government was so fearful of running out of scientific talent that they were frantically training more scientists and technicians. University laboratories had been closed to students and redirected to military research.
Old radio towers had been torn down unceremoniously and replaced by peculiar “new structures with movable cross-arms at the top.”
Rumors warned of large stores of poison gases outside of Milan.
In Cologne, Germany, more hearsay. Klieforth’s cook had a fiancé who worked at a poison gas factory. As a deterrent against leaks, two or three men from the plant apparently “vanished” every month. According to Klieforth, the men were likely innocent, but that did not diminish the effect of their disappearance.
At an air-raid shelter Klieforth visited, the walls were painted in glow-in-the-dark paint that was activated by light. For two hours after the lights shut off, the paint remained luminous enough to read a book by.
He had seen rockets fired near Cologne.
On a trip to Essen, Germany, he visited the Krupp Industrial Works, a steel and weapons manufacturer at the heart of Hitler’s rearmament program once described as the “pride of Germany.” The Krupp Works remained mostly undamaged, hidden from British aircraft by what Klieforth called “mist projection.” The Nazis were using artificial fog, which emerged from hundreds of “fountains” or pipe nozzles and extended some five hundred to eight hundred feet above the factory.
Klieforth compared to it a dry London fog, only “slightly yellowish.” The mist didn’t smell like smoke, didn’t stain clothing, and carried a strong enough foul taste that he kept his mouth closed. The artificial fog was being used to mask production facilities that couldn’t be blacked out, like blast furnaces.
Conant, the other OSRD representatives present, and the naval intelligence officers made it a point to question the diplomats on topics of special interest. But the consular officers had no information on new medical treatments for gas burns, or special clothing that might protect against chemical attack. Nor did the foreign service officers have any information regarding where individual German scientists might now be located.
Conant and Bush, in other words, needed information they couldn’t get.
At the time of James Conant’s meeting with the diplomats, Conant and Bush were considering building a nuclear weapon. The whereabouts of Germany’s physicists might have revealed how actively Hitler was pursuing a bomb.
Throughout the summer of 1941, physicists in OSRD’s “Section on Uranium” and others were wrangling with that very question. On one side of the debate was Merle Tuve, who saw a nuclear weapon as morally repulsive, a far cry from a defensive weapon to protect against airplanes. An atom bomb, Tuve also believed, was a larger, longer-term project than Hitler could seriously invest in.
“The Germans can’t afford to do it in a big way,” he argued. The war with Germany would be over, Merle believed, before a bomb was ready. Advocating the other side was his childhood friend from just across the street in Canton, North Dakota, the physicist Ernest Lawrence. Lawrence wanted OSRD to commit a massive budget and substantial human resources toward building a nuclear weapon.
At thirty-nine, Lawrence looked very much the picture of a physicist. Dignified, solemn, he wore small glasses and kept his hair so firmly parted and combed that it suggested a marble bust. He retained his ever-polite manners. He still said “Sugar!” and “Oh fudge!” when angry. But he had influence now, having won a Nobel Prize in 1939 for inventing the cyclotron (the type of accelerator being assembled at DTM).
Earlier that year, behind Bush’s back, Lawrence lobbied Conant and others at OSRD, including MIT president Arthur Compton, for a large-scale nuclear program.
On March 17 at MIT, Lawrence startled Compton with the news that he was prepared to produce U-235, the uranium isotope capable of a chain reaction: neutrons splitting uranium atoms, releasing neutrons to split more atoms, and so on, in a colossal chain of atomic firecrackers. Lawrence planned to convert the powerful electromagnet of a cyclotron to separate the isotope.
On March 19, in New York, Bush gave Lawrence a tongue-lashing, telling him in no uncertain terms that he, Bush, “was running the show,” and if Lawrence didn’t like it, he could exit the debate within OSRD over producing the bomb.
Four days later, Lawrence visited Tuve at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Merle signed his friend into the Cyclotron Building register.
The pair had come a long way. As Merle put it, a lot of water had “gone under so many different bridges since the old days” in Canton, since they’d hiked as Boy Scouts through the wilderness, peered eagerly at unopened boxes of wireless-radio gear in Merle’s basement, and toiled on the sand greens for vacuum tubes. Underneath their feet, in the Cyclotron Building basement, stood the incomplete replica of Lawrence’s brainchild. A week prior, Lawrence had proposed converting that noble scientific invention, devoted to uncovering the secrets of the atom, into a machine that could enable the most destructive weapon ever produced in human history.
There is no record of what the two men discussed.
Tuve had no desire to build a bomb. He wanted to play defense, to protect Allied cities and navies with a revolutionary “smart” weapon—not offense, with the world’s most catastrophic bomb. As Lawrence’s faction gained leverage within OSRD, Merle abandoned the “uranium affair” to focus on the fuse.
Section T’s Bob Brode would join Lawrence in the New Mexico desert.
When Jeannie Rousseau, the Sciences Po graduate, was released from prison in Rennes after enduring the torments of the Gestapo, she returned to Paris and quickly found work that gave her renewed access to valuable Nazi intelligence.
Despite being suspected of espionage in Dinard, she was hired, once again as a translator, by a group of French industrialists who sold commodities (including strategic goods like steel and rubber) to the Germans.
She worked out of offices on rue Saint-Augustin, not far from the Louvre Museum. Her duties included frequent trips to the old Hôtel Majestic, just a short walk down the Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe. Previously a vast palace, the hotel had once housed a duke and queen in exile. Converted in 1936 by the French government for the Ministry of Defense, the regal building became, after the invasion, the headquarters of the German military high command.
Rousseau—whip-smart, charming, undeniably beautiful, with a sharp memory and a taste for tradecraft—had found the heart of Nazi power in France. She began to gather details about the German war machine’s industrial engine. She became the top liaison of the industrialists’ group, visiting the Nazi offices nearly every day and storing tidbits of information about German needs, inventories, purchase orders, supply lines, and other vital details gleaned from conversations.
She knew the information had military value. But she did not know, until a chance encounter, how to pass it along to the right contacts. And she could not have known that soon enough, by yet another stroke of luck, she would stumble upon secrets that could alter the war.