Free Double Agent by Peter Duffy Page A

counterespionage.” The questioner was referring to the nearly moribund Military Intelligence Division and Office of Naval Intelligence.
    “Yes, I think so, frankly. Both the Army and Navy intelligence have been held pretty low on funds.”
    “Do you mean by that answer, sir, to approve activities of counterespionage?”
    “What do you mean?” FDR said. “Do you mean running down spies in this country? That is what I mean by counterespionage. I think we ought to have more money for that purpose.”
    With a presidential rebuke stinging in his ears, the
Post
’s FDR-supporting publisher caved. A few hours later, that afternoon’s edition carried a front-page notice announcing that the Turrou series had been postponed until after the trial. “The
Post
believes that nothing in this series of articles would have, in any way, interfered with the course of justice,” the notice read. “But it desires to avoid setting a precedent which might handicap the government in guarding itself against other spy activities.” The paper understandably focused the bulk of its coverage on the second part of the president’s comments, when he seemed to propose a new counterintelligence policy for the United States, which, the paper noted, was the whole point of the prosecution to begin with. “Roosevelt Asks Spy Hunt Fund,” read the banner across the top of the
Post
. But other papers also fronted with this angle. The
New York Times
began its page 1 article (“President Urges Fund to Fight Spies”) with the news that the president “favors larger appropriations for the Army and Navy Intelligence Services for the expansion of counterespionage activities within the United States.” The
Los Angeles Times
(“Counter Spy Fund Sought”) said more generally that FDR “came out in favor of more cash to detect and apprehend spies.”
    Hoover, who refused to accept Turrou’s resignation and instead fired him “with prejudice,” now set about ensuring that the FBI would lead the counterespionage initiative that the president had publicly committed himself to launching. Like the rest of the nation, he was now certain that many more Nazi spies were yet to be uncovered.
    CHAPTER FOUR
    TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE
     
     
    What is America but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records, and Hollywood?
    —Adolf Hitler in conversation with his friend Ernst Hanfstaengl
    W ilhelm Gottlieb Sebold wanted nothing to do with the Aryan cause. He was a not-atypical German immigrant living in Yorkville who had experienced the horrors of the trenches and emigrated during the volatility of the Weimar era. If his early history had been characterized by anything, it was by a desire to forget all about the troubles that disfigured the Old Country. He saw his adopted homeland as “a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe may compel to seek happiness in other climes,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1817. “I came to America to forget all this,” Sebold said in less exalted language when asked his ideological views. “Don’t you talk to me about politics.”
    He was born in 1899, the eldest child of a beer-wagon operator who christened him in the name of the reigning monarch. Wilhelm quit school as a young teenager at about the time his father’s death left his mother as the sole supporter of his two brothers and sister. He began apprenticing as a mechanical draftsman in the heavy-metal works that defined his home city of Mülheim on the Ruhr River in a smoke- and soot-filled region near the French border often compared with the Monongahela Valley surrounding Pittsburgh. Over four years of rigorous instruction, Sebold gained a thorough grounding in machine sciences that would carry him through the rest of his life. At age seventeen, he was drafted into the Imperial Army and, in early 1918, sent to the Western Front in the Somme District. Later asked about technology that was used during the war, he responded, “I don’t know anything. We were