Double Agent by Peter Duffy Read Free Book Online

American Pogroms” in the Communist magazine
New Masses
from October 1934. “They may know now. He is Col. Fritz Duquesne, war time German spy who claimed to have sunk the
Hampshire
with Lord Kitchener on board.”) To Nikolaus Ritter, Duquesne was a prize recruit. They met in late 1937 at the midtown apartment that Duquesne shared, as was his wont, with a younger woman of means bewitched by his stories and willing to fund his comfortable existence. Ritter said that Duquesne agreed “at once” to serve a Nazi state that wasn’t yet engaged in an open fight with his nemesis, Great Britain, but did represent the highest expression of the anti-Semitic belligerency he had been marinating in for the past half decade. With the Reich a long way from sponsoring violent acts on the American homeland, he wasn’t yet recruited as a bomb-planting saboteur, his purported specialty. Instead, Duquesne would be assigned to procure “all information possible about the American aircraft industry” for a monthly payment and reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses. Ritter furnished him with the services of a transatlantic courier, a maildrop address in Coimbra, Portugal, and an advance of $100, a concession to the old guerrilla’s perpetual need for cash.
    ▪  ▪  ▪
    On his last evening in town, Ritter took in a vaudeville performance in Times Square and had a cup of coffee at the Nedick’s hot dog stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Immigration documents report that he boarded the North German Lloyd liner
Europa
on December 16, 1937, a month and five days after arriving in New York for a mission that must be considered a major achievement of prewar Nazism. “I felt greatly relieved as the ship finally headed homeward,” he wrote. Reaching Bremerhaven after the four-and-a-half-day journey, he was met at the dock by a driver, who transported him directly back to his office in Hamburg. “The entire landscape,” he noticed, “was covered by a thick blanket of snow.”
    The nascent Duquesne Spy Ring was beginning its work without the least hindrance from American legal authority.
    CHAPTER THREE
    ALMOST SINGLE-HANDED
     
     
    Only the wisest ruler can use spies; only the most benevolent and upright general can use spies; and only the most alert and observant person can get the truth using spies. It is subtle, subtle!
    —Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
    I t makes perfect sense that the Luftwaffe’s Technical Office in Berlin took one look at the Norden blueprints that had been stolen from the United States and sent a message to Nikolaus Ritter at Ast Hamburg telling him they were the work of a charlatan. The idea that a humble machinist living in Queens could actually deliver an innovation able to address one of the air force’s most pressing technological needs was not easily believable. Military bureaucracies are perhaps justly cautious of purported marvels gathered in the shadows by individuals of uncertain motivation. The Germans were so suspicious of a senior Polish officer who had recently offered his services to the Reich that he was hanged in the unfounded belief that he was a double agent. But the Luftwaffe was desperate to improve its ability to destroy targets on the ground and prove the much-feared fleet could actually conquer a foreign foe from the air. The Norden gift was too precious to go unrecognized for long.
    Yet the Technical Office may have been less than receptive, at least initially, to the offering of a precision bombsight for level-flying bombers for another reason. The unlikely figure appointed by Hermann Göring to lead the Technical Office, Ernst Udet, was a World War I ace known throughout the world for his individualistic feats of stunt flying and record breaking who had decided that the bombsighting problem would be solved by daredevil pilots in agile single-engine planes diving in a near-vertical descent and releasing their bombs so close to the target that they needed little