The day after Hitler declared war on the United States on Dec. 11, 1941, a Brooklyn jury returned convictions on a viperous nest of 33 Nazi spies brought to justice by a humble but courageous Manhattan man.
It all began when a lone German-American refused to give in to Nazi aggression and hatred.
His name was William Sebold, and he served the Allied cause by becoming a double agent for the FBI.
Pre-WWI , many nations had either weak or small national, and foreign, intelligence communities, but that would soon change.
William Sebold was the FBI’s first double agent and the country’s first hero of World War II.
Sebold was a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked in industrial and aircraft plants throughout the U.S. and South America after leaving his native land in 1921.
During a return trip to Germany in 1939, Sebold was “persuaded” by high-ranking members of the German Secret Service to spy on America.
In September 1939, a Dr Gassner visited Sebold in Mülheim and interrogated him about military planes and equipment in the United States.
He also asked Sebold to return to the United States as an agent for Germany.
Subsequent visits by Dr. Gassner and a Dr. Renken, later identified as Major Nickolaus Ritter of the German Secret Service called Abwehr, persuaded Sebold to cooperate with the Reich because he feared reprisals against family members still living there.
Nikolaus Adolph Fritz Ritter
Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant colonel) Nikolaus Ritter led spy rings in the United States, Great Britain, and North Africa from 1936 to 1941
Ritter was born in Germany , served as an officer in the First World War on the Western Front in France, and hwas twice wounded.
He emigrated to New York in 1924, married an American, and returned to Germany in 1936 to join the Abwehr as Chief of Air Intelligence based in Hamburg operating under the code name: DR. RANTZAU.
He first met Fritz Duquesne in 1931, and the two spies reconnected in New York on December 3, 1937.
Ritter also met Herman Lang while in New York, and he arranged for Lang to later go to Germany help the Nazis finish their version of the topsecret Norden bombsight.
Ritter achieved several major successes with Abwehr, most notably the Norden bombsight, in addition to an advanced aircraft auto-pilot from the Sperry Gyroscope Company, and also intelligence operations in North Africa in support of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
But some of Ritter’s recruits became double-agents who catastrophically exposed his spy rings.
Ritter recruited William Sebold who later joined to FBI and resulted in the arrest of the 33 Abwehr agents of the Duquesne Spy Ring. In Great Britain, he recruited Arthur Owens, code named JOHNNY, who became an agent for MI5 (British Intelligence) operating under the code name SNOW.
Owens exposed so many Abwehr covert agents operating in Britain that by the end of the war MI5 had enlisted some 120 double agents.
Although Ritter was never captured, it was the arrest of the Duquesne Spy Ring that ultimately resulted in Ritter’s fall from the Abwehr and his re-assignment in 1942 to air defenses in Germany for the remainder of the Second World War.
Since Sebold’s passport had been stolen shortly after his first visit from Gassner, he went to the US consulate in Cologne, to obtain a new one.
While there, Sebold secretly told consulate personnel about his future role as a German agent and expressed his wish to cooperate with the FBI when he got back to America.
Sebold received espionage training in Hamburg (including how to work a short-wave radio), but not before secretly visiting the American consulate in Cologne and telling officials there, he wanted to cooperate with the FBI.
On completion of training, he was given five micro photographs containing instructions for preparing a code and detailing information he was to transmit to Germany from the United States.
Sebold was told to retain two micro photographs and to deliver the other three to German operatives in the United States:
Fritz Joubert Duquesne, Hermann Lang, and one other.
After receiving final instructions, including using the assumed name Harry Sawyer, he sailed from Genoa, Italy.
Agents from the FBI were waiting when Sebold returned to New York City in February 1940.
He’d been instructed by the Nazis to take on the persona of “Harry Sawyer,” a diesel engineer consultant.
Per their instructions, he was to meet with various spies, pass along instructions to them from Germany, receive messages in return, and transmit them back in code to Germany – which all led to the Duquesne Spy Ring, in what still stands as the largest espionage case in American history.
The real life characters involved, a femme fatale, a soldier of fortune, and a gun-toting Sperry engineer, along with a nest of 33 spies – most were naturalized citizens .
With Sebold’s masterful acting, the FBI played right along with the ruse, using some deceits of their own.
First, FBI Lab engineers built a secret shortwave radio transmitting station on Long Island.
There, FBI agents pretending to be Sebold, sent authentic-sounding messages to his German superiors for about 16 straight months.
Over that time, more than 300 messages were sent and another 200 were received from the Nazis.
Second, the FBI helped set up an office for “Harry” in Manhattan where he could receive visiting spies.
The office was outfitted with hidden microphones and a two-way mirror, where we could watch and film everything going on.
With cameras secretly rolling, Sebold met with a string of Nazis who wished to pass secret and sensitive national defense and wartime information to the Gestapo.
In Sebold’s rigged office, Duquesne explained how fires could be started at industrial plants and shared photographs and plans he’d stolen from a plant in Delaware, describing a new bomb being made in the United States.
One of those visitors, was Duquesne, a veteran spy, who served as the group’s leader.
Another one of the spies, we learned, was preparing a bomb of his own and even delivered dynamite and detonation caps to Sebold.
Once the FBI had enough information to pinpoint the members of the ring and enough evidence for an airtight case, the 33 spies were arrested.
The German agents who formed the Duquesne Ring were placed in key jobs in the United States to get information which could be used in the event of war and to carry out acts of sabotage:
One Germn agent opened a restaurant and used his position to get information from his customers.
Another German worked with an airline so that he could report Allied ships that were crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
Other germans worked as delivery people, so they could deliver secret messages alongside mundane ones.
The two years, the FBI ran a shortwave radio station in New York was prolific, they learned what information Germany was sending its spies in the United States and controlled what was sent to Germany.
Sebold’s success as a counterespionage agent was demonstrated by the successful prosecution of the German agents.
As a result of the massive investigation, the FBI—and America—entered the war with confidence that there was no longer a major German espionage network hidden in U.S. society.
Of those indicted, 19 pleaded guilty, the 14 others were found guilty at trial in the days following the Pearl Harbor attack.
On January 2, 1942, the group was sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison.
After the Duquesne Spy Ring convictions, Sebold was provided with a new identity and started a chicken farm in California.Impoverished and delusional, he was committed to Napa State Hospital in 1965. Diagnosed with manic-depression, he died there of a heart attack five years later at 70. His life story as a double agent was first told in the 1943 book Passport to Treason: The Inside Story of Spies in America by Alan Hynd.
The American FBI Agents
James Ellsworth
Special Agent Jim Ellsworth was assigned as Sebold’s handler or body man, responsible for shadowing his every move during the sixteen-month investigation.
In early February 1940, FBI agent James Ellsworth left his home in Huntington Park, California, prepared for a normal day of work.
Instead, he was met by a man with a message from John Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI in Washington, D.C., instructing him to take the next possible plane to New York City.
“I asked Dick what the case was and he said Mr. Hoover would not say,” Ellsworth’s personal diary read. “I asked him how long I should prepare to be gone and he said he had no idea.”
Ellsworth immediately returned home, packed a suitcase for a two-week trip, picked up his plane ticket and went to New York.
“When I arrived at the airport at New York City, I was met by two agents whom I knew,” Ellsworth’s diary continued.
“They put me into an automobile and drove me into New York City. On the way they took away my gun, my identification badge and credentials and all identifications cards. They gave me a new set of identification cards and a fictitious name and gave me a little background of the case I was to work on.”
It was that day that Ellsworth met German-born William G. Sebold, the first double agent in FBI history, as Ellsworth took part in the war against Nazi Germany.
Ellsworth, who had served a mission for LDS in Germany, including serving in the city where Sebold was born, would spend 16 months with Sebold as his handler on a case that would eventually lead to the arrest of 33 spies in what is still the largest espionage case in American history.
This was the way James Ellsworth’s son, Tom, remembers his father beginning his telling of the Sebold case — a story about a case and a double agent much remembered today.
“We knew his experience, but we didn’t have the background,” Tom Ellsworth said in a phone interview.
“The whole part of the way the nation felt about war, the situation with the FBI at the time. … So we had his view of it, but we didn’t have the complete picture.”
“The case was extremely hard to write a coherent narrative of, “spy author Duffy said,” because it was so long and complex.”
Duffy said he had to learn everything about the 33 who were convicted , in order to really get down to the important things.
“Jim Ellsworth was loyal and honorable and dedicated to the case, and we can see that in looking at the fact that he didn’t begin writing the diary until the arrests had been made,” Duffy said.
“To write it during the case … it could have gotten into the wrong hands or jepordized the case in various ways. And then he returned to his diary.
It was probably the longest he had not kept a diary in his life. Ellsworth was a unique figure.”
For the Ellsworth family, the journals and letters between their parents surrounding the case, kept for family history, were something they thought about but never got around to publishing — part of the reason being the amount of research and information needed to do the story justice.
“Dad was in the FBI for 20 years. He was in some very scary situations where he was in danger and never had to draw his gun,” Tom Ellsworth said.
“He always felt like he was protected. Now, my mother didn’t feel that way, but those were the times when she taught me how to pray.”
Tom Ellsworth said ,there were many times when his father didn’t come home when he was supposed to or when his mother would call him at the office and discover he was out on assignment.
“She had incredible faith,” Tom said of his mother. “She would tell me to go to my closet and pray for father’s safety. And so I would. And of course, he always came home fine.”
Although the spiritual experiences didn’t fit into the book, Duffy includes James Ellsworth’s dedication to his faith many times.
“(Ellsworth) kept a diary all his life. His diaries are an important historical artifact, for particularly the Mormon experience,” Duffy said of Ellsworth, who would later be called by President Harold B. Lee as a mission president in Germany.
“He was deeply connected to his Mormon faith and wrote about it in his diaries, which encompasses a large part of the 20th century.”
William Gustav Friedemann
William Gustav Friedemann was a principal witness in the Duquesne case.
He began working for the FBI as a fingerprint analyst in 1935 and later became an agent after identifying a crucial fingerprint analysis in a kidnapping case.
After World War II, he was assigned to Puerto Rico, where he pinpointed the group behind the assassination attempt on President Harry Truman.
Friedemann died of cancer on August 23, 1989 in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Liaisons to the Duquesne Spy Ring
Takeo Ezima
Lieut Commander Takeo Ezima, of the Imperial Japanese Navy operated in New York as an engineer inspector using the name: E. Satoz; code name: KATO.
He arrived on the Heian Maur, in Seattle in 1938.
On October 19, 1940, Sebold received a radio message from Germany that CARR (Abwehr agent Roeder) was to meet E. Satoz at a Japanese club in New York.
Ezima was filmed by the FBI while meeting with agent Sebold in New York, conclusive evidence of German-Japanese cooperation in espionage, in addition to meeting with Kanegoro Koike, Paymaster Commander of the Japanese Imperial Navy assigned to the Office of the Japanese Naval Inspector in New York.
Ezima obtained a number of military materials from Duquesne, including ammunition, a drawing of a hydraulic unit with pressure switch A-5 of the Sperry Gyroscope, and an original drawing from the Lawrence Engineering and Research Corporation of a soundproofing installation, and he agreed to deliver materials to Germany via Japan.
The British had made the Abwehr courier route from New York through Lisbon, Portugal difficult, so Ezima arranged an alternate route to the West Coast with deliveries every two weeks on freighters destined for Japan.
As the FBI arrested Duquesne and his agents in New York in 1941, Ezima escaped back to the West Coast, boarded the Japanese freighter Kamakura Maru, and left for Tokyo.
One historian states, Ezima was arrested for espionage in 1942 and sentenced to 15 years; however, U.S Naval Intelligence documents state ,
“at the request or the State Department, Ezima was not prosecuted.”