Double Agent (42 page)

: “Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations,” 570.

: FBI file of Special Agent James C. Ellsworth, 317.

: Details of Sebold’s coercion into the service of the Abwehr come from the Duquesne FBI case file and the trial transcript.

: Evans,

696.

: PREM 4/25/1. British Archives, Records of the Prime Minister’s Office, Kew, London.

: Cajus Bekker,

(Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 26–27.

: Timothy Snyder,

(London: Vintage, 2011), 119.

: “Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations,” 571–72.

: Tim Weiner,

(New York: Random House, 2012), 83.

: Jules Witcover,

(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1989), 321.

: Emerson Hough,

(Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1919), 59.

The other great explosion of the violent campaign occurred on January 11, 1917, when four hours of blasts destroyed the Canadian Car and Foundry Company plant in Kingsland, New Jersey, which manufactured artillery shells for Britain and Russia. One man perished in an attempt to escape from the chaos.

The American decision to join the war as a combatant nation on April 6, 1917, was made in response to unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping in the Atlantic Ocean and the publication of the so-called Zimmerman Telegram, which revealed a German government attempt to persuade the Mexicans to invade the Southwestern United States with the help of the Japanese. But President Woodrow Wilson explicitly pointed to German-sponsored actions within the boundaries of the United States, and conducted with the assistance of some of its residents, as one of the “extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German government” that “left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government.” In his Flag Day speech of June 14, 1917, Wilson said that Germany had “filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators” and “sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce.”

Upon American entry into the war, the government acted quickly to impose what President Wilson called “a firm hand of stern repression” against anyone deemed too sympathetic to the other side. Most German saboteurs took this opportunity to flee to Mexico or farther south of the border. The president issued two executive orders that sought to restrict the activities of “enemy aliens,” noncitizens born in the Central Powers nations, with the second requiring them to register with federal authorities or face imprisonment (as sixty-three hundred eventually did), a process overseen by a Justice Department law clerk who was always willing to work late, John Edgar Hoover. Within nine weeks of the war declaration, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and strengthened it the following year with the Sedition Act of 1918, which abridged the First Amendment by making it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.”

Gripped by a wartime panic of such determined ferocity, the nation sought to purge itself of anything that smacked of Germanness. Town and street names were changed (out with Berlin or Germantown, in with Lincoln and Pershing); Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss were stricken from the repertories of symphony orchestras; German-language books were burned during patriotic rallies; the frankfurter became known in common parlance as the hot dog, inaugurating its journey to the quintessence of American cuisine. The same state legislatures that were passing laws that sought to ban the speaking of the German language in public were also voting in favor of the proposed Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which, when ratified in 1919 and adopted into law in 1920, prohibited just the sort of “intoxicating liquors” that were being produced in large quantities by German Americans with names such as Pabst, Miller, Anheuser, and Busch.

: “Jürgen Thorwald: Die unsichtbare Front. Das Tagebuch von OKW/Abwehr enthüllt den Einsatz des deutschen Geheimdienstes,”

March 15, 1953. Thorwald was assisted in his reporting by

reporter Günter Peis.

: Max Hastings,

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 23.

: William Sebold, 10/26/39, Confidential File 862.20211/2249, Surveillance of William Sebold by Agents of the German Government, and William Sebold, 11/6/39, File 340.1115/8207, Welfare and Whereabouts of American Citizen in Europe, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.

: Leonard Mosley,

(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 259.

: Quotations from La Follette’s speech,

October 13, 1939.

: “Guardsmen Accuse Capt. Prout in Plot,”

, May 7, 1940.

: Nathan Miller,

(New York: Scribner, 1995), 534.

: Robert Dallek,

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 203.

: Robert W. Love Jr.,

(Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1992), 1:616.

: Bernard C. Nalty, general ed.,

(Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997), 1:162.

: Thomas H. Greer,

(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, US Air Force, 1985), 101.

: Zimmerman,

45.

: Sander A. Diamond,

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 333.

: Nicholas Jenkins, “Goodbye, 1939,”

, April 1, 1996.

: James C. Ellsworth diary.

: From an interview with former special agent William G. Friedemann conducted by author Art Ronnie, November 29, 1974. Special thanks to Mr. Ronnie for providing a copy of the interview notes. The principal sources for the narrative of the investigation are the Duquesne case FBI file and the trial transcript.

: Agent Newkirk’s unpublished memoir was provided to the author courtesy of the Newkirk family.

: From a privately published booklet entitled “Memories of Jim and Nell Ellsworth,” 17.

: “That night Nell and I were dinner guests of the Vetterlis in their apartment and Reed of course was still very upset,” Jim Ellsworth wrote in a postretirement journal. “During the evening he took me aside and said, ‘Jim, I have been in 3 shooting scrapes now and have had men knocked down all around me but I have never been touched. I attribute this to the fact that I always wear my garments. You would never catch me day or night without my garments on. I have every faith in their protective power.’ ” Vetterli was referring to a type of underwear worn by Mormons.

: James C. Ellsworth FBI file.

: The diary was provided to the author courtesy of the Ellsworth family.

: Sebold personal FBI file.

: Ibid.

: Stein family genealogy provided to the author by a distant relation of Ms. Stein’s, Alice Ra’anan.

“official Washington’s first fascist family”

: “Official Washington’s First Fascist Family,”

magazine, March 21, 1941.

: J. E. Hoover memo to Brigadier General Watson, OF 10-b, Justice Department, FBI Reports, 1939–40, 34, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.

: Sperry Gyroscope Company Papers, Series II, Box 35, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.

Time

: “Profits and Secrets,”

, September 4, 1939.

: Copies of Everett Roeder’s prison writings were provided to the author courtesy of the Roeder family.

: Henry L. Stimson Diaries, vols. 29–34, 1939–41, Reel 6, entry for July 16, 1940, 14–15, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

: Gentry,

212.

New Republic

: Francis MacDonnell,

(Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2004), 172.

: Regin Schmidt,

(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2000), 357.

: Laurence S. Seidman,

(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 212.

: Weiner,

, 87–88.

: Organization—German American Bund, Fiorello La Guardia Papers, Municipal Archives of New York City, Roll 0150.

: Julian Jackson,

(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3.

: Agent Millen’s essay on the establishment of the radio station was provided to the author courtesy of Mr. Millen’s son, Jim.

: Joseph E. Persico,

(New York: Random House, 2001), 52.

: Franklin D. Roosevelt,

(New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947–50), 2:1036–37.

: J. E. Hoover memo to Brigadier General Watson, OF 10-b, Justice Department, FBI Reports, 1939–40, 153, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.

: Sperry Gyroscope Company Papers, Series III, Box 32, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.

: Stimson Diaries, previously cited.

: Tizard Diary, August 25, 1940, entry, Papers of Sir Henry Tizard, Imperial War Museum, London. “The President was very nice, a most attractive personality,” wrote Sir Henry. “He said he was going to get his draft bill for conscription through Congress but it would probably lose him the election in November. However that ‘didn’t matter.’ He talked generalities, except that he explained that the withholding of the Nordem ?? [