Double Agent by Peter Duffy Read Free Book Online Page B

was the front-page headline in the
Daily News
when “Gus” Rumrich, a twenty-six-year-old grifter who was AWOL from the US Army, was taken into custody after telephoning the State Department’s Passport Agency at 26 Wall Street, identifying himself as Secretary of State Cordell Hull (a sixty-seven-year-old Tennessean), and requesting that thirty-five blank US passports be delivered to the Abwehr’s preferred hostelry, the Taft Hotel, for an “Edward Weston,” whom he identified as an undersecretary of state. The supervisor answering the call knew instantly he was being hoaxed. In the single-spaced, ten-and-a-half-page confession he made to the State Department, Rumrich said he found work as a dishwasher at Meyer’s Restaurant in downtown Brooklyn “much harder than the life I had been used to in the Army and quite a strain.” So he volunteered his services to Nazi Germany, mostly mailing along reports of easily obtained info that he typed onto official-looking letterhead. Handed over to the FBI, Rumrich quickly implicated a Leipzig-born pal stationed at the US Army Air Corps’ Mitchel Field on Long Island and a hairdresser/courier on the
Europa,
who, upon questioning following her arrival in port, spilled the beans on Dr. Ignatz Griebl, a Nazi theoretician and gynecologist who operated out of a fancy home/office on East Eighty-Seventh Street between Madison and Park in the Silk Stocking district.
    During his second interrogation session, Griebl consented to provide information about Nazi spy activities just as long as he could remain free to continue his medical practice and not be required to affix his signature to a confession, a generous arrangement that was apparently approved by the US attorney in Manhattan, FBI headquarters in Washington, and, according to Griebl’s later statement, President Roosevelt himself. “We handled him with gloves, for he was of more value to us as a willing witness than as an unwilling one,” wrote Leon Turrou, the talented and egotistical special agent assigned to lead the Bureau investigation. “We did not arraign him, nor place him under bond, nor keep him under close surveillance after he began talking.” Dr. Griebl showed his good faith by pointing out a German-born technician at Seversky (later Republic) Aircraft in Farmingdale, Long Island, an ideological Nazi who had spent the past three years in proximity with the designers transforming the now-obsolete P-35 single-engine fighter plane into the P-47 Thunderbolt, which, prized for its ability to endure heavy fighting in poor weather conditions, would be produced in greater numbers than any other US-made fighter during World War II.
    Agent Turrou knew he was onto a blockbuster case. Dr. Griebl was filling his head with fantastical tales about a German spy apparatus that had penetrated all levels of the US defense establishment. Griebl described grand boasts he claimed were made to him by his superiors in Germany: “In every strategic point in your United States we have an operative,” he quoted them as telling him. “In every armament factory in America we have a spy. In every shipyard we have an agent; in every key position. Your country cannot plan a warship, design a fighting plane, develop a new instrument or device, that we do not know of it at once!” Just at the point when he should’ve been chasing down leads, Turrou instead reached out to an ace reporter for the
New York Post,
with whom he began a secret project to write a series of articles, an exclusive view of the Nazi spy ring from the inside that would be published at an opportune time with an eye toward book and movie treatment. But Griebl was just stalling for time, offering “partly false, partly exaggerated remarks, in order to confuse the Federal agents by this mass of material and throw them off the right scent,” according to the postwar revelations of his Nest Bremen spymaster. Asked to review statements attributed to him by Griebl about the