Double Agent by Peter Duffy Read Free Book Online Page A

more than a modified gunsight. The regime’s ideological leaders were attracted to the idea of a Germanic knight of the sky plunging toward the earth in selfless devotion to the cause of the Aryan war machine, striking the target not because his plane was equipped with a newfangled bomb-aimer (which they didn’t have anyway) but because he was a hurtling exemplar of the majesty of National Socialism. Hitler himself was favorably impressed by the
Sturzkampfflugzeug
(dive-battle aircraft) or
Stuka
demonstrations he witnessed. Further, the precise dive-bomber, the fast fighter with mounted machine guns, and the imprecise level-flying medium bomber (mostly responsible for the deliberate carnage at Guernica) were believed sufficient to conduct the air attack against the regime’s presumed enemies, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, countries that Germany’s military theorists had been plotting to fight since the 1920s. During his meeting with military commanders on November 5, 1937, Hitler announced that he was planning a regional war that would achieve living space for the Aryan race “in immediate proximity to the Reich.” In an attempt to free up valuable raw materials and production space to create the short-range force, the Luftwaffe had downgraded plans to develop the kind of four-engine heavy bomber (like America’s newly introduced B-17 Flying Fortress) essential to fighting an aerial war far from Germany’s borders, in the belief that the project could be resumed when the time was right. The Luftwaffe, then, felt it had all the precision-bombing capability needed to serve
current
regime objectives.
    But Nikolaus Ritter knew he had found a trophy that deserved immediate consideration. When he received the note from Berlin about the “completely worthless” plans that his source had provided in an attempt to “fraudulently get money,” he slammed his fist on his desk so hard that his secretaries jumped. He was incensed by the suggestion that Hermann Lang, a patriotic Nazi with “open face” and “quiet and honest voice” would be out for anything other than the fatherland. After arguing on behalf of Lang’s devotion with his Ast Hamburg superior, Ritter was permitted to fly to Berlin, where he pleaded his case to the officer who led the Abwehr division responsible for overall spying for the Luftwaffe, Friederich Grosskopf. He told Grosskopf that the plans represented “something entirely new, something revolutionary,” which low-level staffers at the Technical Office couldn’t be expected to understand. “In Germany we certainly have a specialist who is working on the problem of a bombsight,” Ritter quoted himself as saying. “I would like to show these drawings to that man.” Grosskopf agreed to allow him to see Wolfram Eisenlohr, the new director of the Department for Engines and Accessories within the Technical Office, which required Ritter to take a flight to Frankfurt. Once there, he told Eisenlohr the whole story and laid the drawings on his desk. The old professor studied them for several long minutes, taking out a pencil to sketch out some of the ideas. “You could hear a pin drop in the room,” Ritter wrote. “Anxiously, I waited, my heart pounding.” At last, Eisenlohr raised his head and pronounced them
“etwas ganz Grosses”
—something very great. He decreed that the deliveries must continue. “Bring me as many drawings as you can,” Eisenlohr said, according to Ritter. “The more we have, the less we have to design ourselves.”
    Additional Norden plans were then smuggled out of the United States during the early months of 1938, just as the FBI’s New York office suddenly received the necessary permissions from the bureaucratic hierarchy to investigate a Reich-sponsored spy operation of indefinite proportion. The catalyst had been the NYPD’s apprehension of a low-level agent connected to Nest Bremen named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich.
    “Arrest Bares Spy Ring Here”