Synopsis

In Chapter 1 (KTB #148) ERICH begins his career as a spy, and he lets us know of his love of beautiful women. In Chapter 2 (KTB #149), he was transferred home to Germany and his shipboard romance with Karen ended. In Chapter 3 (KTB #151) he began his training as a spy - and he learned that a spy who falls in love with an enemy spy - gets shot! In Chapter 4 (KTB #152) we read where ERICH himself falls for a woman who turned out to be a German spy herself and her job was to lure German spies in training to betray themselves - and ERICH is nearly washed out of spy training. In Chapter 5 (KTB #153) we learned that ERICH was to be in charge of Operation PELIKAN, the plan to blow up the Panama Canal with two Ju 87 STUKA dive bombers brought over on two U-boats. At the last moment, it was thought by the German agency, that someone had tipped off the Americans to this plot, so the plan was scrapped. In Chapter 6 (KTB #154 and KTB #155) we read how ERICH and the Abwehr tried to find him a partner for his mission into the USA with the intended purpose of sabotaging the Manhattan Project - the atomic bomb project in the United States. In Chapter 7 (KTB #156) we read about the Atlantic crossing to the USA where ERICH and Billy were to be put ashore to assault the ‘Manhattan Project’. In Chapter 8 (KTB #157), the two agents landed on the coast of Maine, ready to begin their sabotage of the atomic bomb project. In Chapter 9 (KTB #158) ERICH gets the shock of learning that Billy has taken all the money and the diamonds, and deserted not only the mission, but ERICH as well. In the first part of Chapter 10 (KTB #159) ERICH is trying desperately to find Billy - and get his $60,000 and diamonds back. In the balance of Chapter 10, we see how ERICH outwitted Billy and got his suitcases, filled with money and spy equipment back - at Billy’s expense but in the meantime to nobody’s surprise, ERICH has found another woman. In chapter 11, ERICH is doing well with this new woman, an old contact is going to tell him about the Manhattan Project - but his time is running out and Billy is about to betray him to the F.B.I.

Chapter 11 (continued): Billy Betrays Me to the F.B.I.

“Have you any money?” his contact asked.

“Yes, I’ve got a whole heap of money.”

“Will you take a bit of good advice?”

“Yes, I can always do with that.”

“Listen then,” he said. “Take yourself to South America as fast as your legs will carry you. You’re running into disaster with your eyes open. Still to be working for Germany.....It’s sheer madness.”

“That’s just what we are, fools, you and I,” I replied.

“And for the moment you must just accept the situation.”

The redhead had disappeared, which suited me down to the ground. I absented myself with the utmost caution. I was not afraid of Mr. Brown. It was quite obvious that he was afraid of me. He had got old and obese and secret agents who are old and obese are not much use for the dirty work. But at least they know the rules of the game. He would keep his mouth shut. He would buy his freedom by passing on fresh information to me.

Needless to say, the American War Department had done everything humanly possible to keep the atom project secret, but that was impossible. It was, strange to say, childishly simple to get into contact with the Hiroshima bomb. I knew that to produce this weapon of destruction they needed uranium, and uranium was to be found in northern Canada. Getting it was a laborious business involving many hundreds and thousands of specialists, and a thing like that could never be kept secret. To an experienced agent like Mr. Brown - I never got to know his real name - there would be no difficulty in getting at any rate some general information.

For the moment I had nothing more to do than wait. There was still no sign of Billy. Strangely enough the air was still clear. I re-doubled my vigilance and the more trouble free my environment appeared to be, the more assiduously I studied it.

There was no F.B.I. agent on my trail but Santa Claus seemed to be following my every movement. There he was, on loudspeakers, on the radio, in neon lights and in every kind of advertisement. To the Americans, the his coming meant peace, but in Germany at the same time the festival of the Prince of Peace was being celebrated without joy; that year the German Christmas was bare.

I thought of Margarete and drowned my melancholy in whisky, feeling like an octogenarian meditating in his bath chair on what he would do if he could live his life over again.......

The next few days passed without special incident. Joan, my co-tenant in Santi’s apartment, supplied me with other preoccupations. I had already become expert in drying dishes. What a sensation it would be: “Germany’s last secret agent wears apron in kitchen, helping enemy girl to polish off allied food supplies.”

That would be the sort of thing the newspapers would run if I were caught. Fortunately I did not realize how near to arrest I was. I did not learn until later what had happened in the interim, how my fate was catching up on me, and how the American M.I. was coming upon the scent. The sequence of events was retold to me later by the F.B.I. officials in generous detail

After his abortive attempt to recover my cases at Grand Central Station, Billy had gone on drinking for two days without pause. And when the drink went to Billy’s head he was soft, soft as jelly.

Some years before he had had a friend in New York and this friend might well have been fighting at Okinawa or Anachen. The chance of his being in New York was a very slim one indeed but in fact that was just where he was. He had been twice wounded, had become a much-decorated war hero and was now occupying an important position in the American armament industry.

Billy found him. He thought up a story and his friend, Tom S. Warrens, believed him. At any rate he believed him at first. Although the two friends were so different there was one thing they had in common and that was their liking for whisky. Billy still had some money and so they went from bar to bar. They put their arms around the girls’ naked shoulders and stuffed money into their garters. They treated the assembled company and sang and danced. They went on like this for days on end. Tom failed to report at his place of work and reported sick. And he was sick, from too much alcohol.

Billy got a thick head. One day at four in the morning he got an attack of the miseries. I was familiar with this mood of his; I had witnesses it once or twice when I had been with him. The friend wallowed in misery with him, at any rate at first; but he was a little more sober than Billy, just a trifle, a fatal trifle.

Billy rambled on incoherently with the crazy logic of the inebriated. He babbled, he stammered, he talked of U-1230. Tom just laughed at him. He laughed at him for one long day and one short night, but Billy went on and on with the same story. He was now sobering up as his money was running short. His friend went on listening and the apparently inconsequential chatter began to take reasonable shape.

What was to be done? Tom S. Warren was, like every other American, a patriot; he had been twice wounded in the war and had been discharged from the Army with honor; but he was also a loyal friend. To report the matter to the F.B.I. would be a breach of faith with Billy. And who would contact the secret service on the strength of the ramblings of a drunken man? Yet it all seemed to hang together. Supposing Billy really was working against his own country? Tom sought the counsel of other friends an their advice was clear and unequivocal: “Go to the F.B.I.!”

The friends recalled the Dasch case, when fathers and mothers were sentenced to death because they had held their sons in their arms and had not at once gone to the police to order the hangman for their own sons. There were no extenuating circumstances, not in wartime. As it happened, the sentences were not carried out, but twenty years imprisonment was bad enough.

So the F.B.I. was informed and its officers took Billy in charge without any special enthusiasm. They waited until he was sober. He was then interrogated and at once broke down; his sole concern was to save his own neck, but it was already in the noose and the rope was already being drawn tight.

“I want to inform you,” said Billy, “that a German agent is at large. He is called Edward Green. He’s very dangerous. He is the most dangerous man of the German Reich Security. I crossed the Atlantic with him.”

“You say you are an American,” an official interrupted him, “and yet you admit that you smuggled a German spy into your own country?”

“I only did it as a means of getting back to America myself, so as I could place myself at the disposal of the Army authorities and hand the German spy over to you. I’m an American and want to remain an American.”

The F.B.I. men still could not make up their minds whether they were dealing with a madman or a spy. Spies who spoke as freely as Billy were rare, and hardly worth taking seriously. Billy’s files were produced; they established that he was a deserter and that his sympathies for National Socialism had excluded him from taking a commission in the Navy.

Alarm! Special alarm! The most urgent alarm the F.B.I. had known in New York in the whole course of the war.

Traitors Not Well Liked

“Speak, you swine, or I’ll push your face in.” Billy was being handled with delicacy. No, no country of the world deals gently with its own traitors. I, on the other hand, was to be cross-examined with singular fairness, but more of that later. Billy sat there, a small, cowardly figure, trembling with fear.

“What does he look like? Come on, talk! Tell us again! First you said he was not very tall, then you said he was very tall. Which is it? Come on, speak up, you swine!”

Billy was too frightened to utter a word. He asked for a cigarette, which was given him with bad grace, and then he started babbling. He gave a full description of me. The officials were frightening him to try him out and see if he was lying. But why should he lie? He saw a tiny ray of hope; he hoped that if I were caught he might secure a pardon on the strength of the information he had given against me. The hope was a slim one, but when all reasonable hope was gone you can always dream up something.

“Come on! Don’t be so dumb!” said a small, stout F.B.I. man. “Open your mouth, Billy. So he’s about five feet ten, is he, your friend? Come along then, just keep on talking. What does he like to eat? What does he drink? Is he left-handed? Has he got a good digestion? Is he color-blind? Does he go to church? Does he go to nightclubs? Has he got corns on his feet?”

“I don’t know any of those things,” said Billy.

“Well, what do you know?”

“Well, he’s not left-handed,” replied Billy. “I know that. His digestion is all right. Grilled steak is his favorite dish and he drinks whisky. He drinks plenty but he can stand it.”

“Come on!”

“He’s got an English accent.”

“We know that already. We’re trying to find out something we don’t know.” The lamp was shining straight into Billy’s face and his interrogators were standing in the dark. They were relieved every twenty minutes. It went on like this for hours and was to continue like it for days. There was no pity, no sympathy for Billy or me. The chase was on, but so far the press knew nothing of it.

‘Desperate German Christmas offensive in the Ardennes.’ Such was the headline of the moment. New York, sure of the victory, almost tired of victory already, trembled for a space, the space of a few days, haunted once more by fear of the Nazis, fear that the war could still drag on, fear that the invasion had been in vain.

And the Department for Psychological Warfare worked on. If a German spy should chance to fall into enemy hands at this time of all times, then he’d be especially unlucky.

“I’ve told you everything,” Billy repeated again and again. “There’s nothing more I know.”

“Haven’t you ever noticed anything about him, some little mannerism that’s a bit unusual?”

“No.”

“Think again, or we’ll help you do your thinking.”

“I don’t know anything more.”

The interrogating officer went close up to Billy and stared him straight in the eyes. His face had become gaunt and the eyes were lying deep in their sockets. The light was blinding and Billy wanted to close his eyes but he could not. Again and again the F.B.I. men forced him to look at them, to look into the light, to answer their questions. Always the same questions, put sometimes gently, sometimes quietly, sometimes angrily, sometimes indifferently.

The Tip-Off

“There’s one thing that occurs to me,” said Billy. He seemed now almost relieved. He thought perhaps there’s be an end to the questioning if he had something. “One thing occurs to me,” he began. “I have noticed an odd habit. When he pays for something and gets change, he always puts it into his left breast pocket.”

One of the officers nodded to his colleagues, and a new identification sign for the German spy was broadcast to all police stations. Attention! Attention! The search was on for Edward Green alias Erich Gimpel, the German spy. Top secret! The American civil population must not be made to feel uneasy. Every F.B.I. man available must be thrown into the task of finding Erich Gimpel. They laid their traps to catch me and laid them on an American scale without regard for money, time or men.

But I still knew nothing of all this.

I had arranged to meet Mr. Brown in a snack bar on 31st Street. He arrived punctually, and alone. He had every reason to play straight. “My car is outside,” he said. We got into an old Packard and drove this way and that through New York. “I’ve a whole heap of information,” he said. “Can I depend on it that this is our last interview?”

“If I find the information satisfactory, yes.”

The traffic lights turned green. Brown put his foot on the gas. “The atomic bomb will be ready soon.”

“How many months?”

“Five or six at the most.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll tell you afterwards. My information is totally reliable.”

“And how are the bombs dropped?”

“They’re still experimenting on that. The bomb is terribly heavy. It has to be flown in a special machine. The trials are being made in California. An air force captain has been practicing starting and landing with excessive loading there for weeks.”

I made a note of name and place. It would be easy to check up on this information.

“They reckon,” said Brown, “that they can bring the war to an end with one or two bombs. The effect of the bomb is terrific.”

“And how many bombs have they?”

“Only two or three,” replied Brown. “But that will be plenty.”

“And where are the works?”

“That I cannot say exactly, but mark this name: Mr. Griffiths. He’s a physicist. He lives in a hotel on 24th Street. You may care to get in touch with him. But if you do, it’ll mean the end for you. You realize that, don’t you?”

“That’s not your affair,” I replied.

He gave me a mass of technical details. I repeated them over to myself until I could carry them in my memory. I wondered how much truth there was in what Brown had told me. I didn’t know yet what his information was worth.........

“And the bombs will be used?”

“You can depend on that,” answered Brown. “America regards the atomic bomb as the only thing to bring the war to an end. The only thing that would prevent them using it and that would be if Germany or Japan had the atomic bomb too. You see what I mean?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“And now will you take a piece of advice from me?”

“Why not?”

“Make yourself scarce,” he said. He stopped. I got out of the car. Our leave-taking was short and cool. “Think of my family,” he said.

“Give my love to the red-head,” I replied.

I wanted to pass my report on to Germany that same day. I walked on for a few blocks. Fortunately I did not know how many passers-by were keeping an eye on me. Billy’s description fitted me, of course, but there were thousands of men in New York whom it would have fitted equally well. Actually I did not think that Billy had already been caught, but I had no illusions about the fact that the days of his freedom and by the same token, the days of my freedom too, were numbered.

Now for Griffiths! Whether I could approach this man without drawing attention to myself was another question. If there was a Mr. Griffiths and if he was living in the hotel which had been named to me, then it would prove that Brown had not invented his information. In any case my next task was to establish the reliability of Brown’s information.

I found the hotel; it was a second-class establishment, neither good nor bad, and with the usual, obtrusive cleanliness. I passed into a small foyer. The porter was not there, but a black book lay upon his desk, the hotel register.

I stood there for a few minutes drumming my fingers on the desk. Two women were sitting on a sofa in the corner and like all Americans at the time were discussing the Ardennes offensive. A man was sitting in an armchair. I could not see his face, which was hidden behind a newspaper. Was he really reading? In a flash I was on my guard. I knew that trick. I had learned it myself. I notice at once how the newspaper was lowered a trifle, how the eyes moved to the edge apparently nonchalantly, how the newspaper was raised again and how the maneuver was repeated two or three times. The man who held the newspaper in his hand had had the same training as I had had. That’s the F.B.I., I told myself.

I turned my back on him. I opened the register and immediately hit upon the name Griffiths, but I turned on further, ran my finger down the page, stopped at a name and made a note of it. I could not see my shadower but I could feel him behind me. I felt instinctively that he was waiting for me, that he had recognized me, and that he was now about to act. In the next second perhaps. I straightened myself. The porter came back.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“A relative of mine was coming here,” I said. “James H. Miller.”

“He’s not here,” said the porter. “I’m sorry, sir.”

I stood about hesitantly for a few seconds more. My shadower was once more camouflaging himself behind the newspaper. His hands were quite still. The paper with the giant headlines was not shaking. What would he do? How had the F.B.I. been instructed?

While I was playing the part of a disappointed caller who couldn’t make up his mind, I was doing some rapid thinking. The F.B.I. have a strict rule that no arrest may be made unless two men were present. My man was alone. Perhaps his colleague had gone to the lavatory. Or perhaps he would have to get reinforcements before he could act. Perhaps the second man had just gone to get some cigarettes.

“Is there a toilet around here?” I asked the porter.

“Back there, to the left,” replied the man.

I gave him twenty cents and went slowly off. I did not quicken my steps; even when I was out of sight I could still be heard.

I stopped. From where I was standing I could still see the porter’s desk. If my nerves were not playing tricks with me the man with the newspaper would now get up, go to the desk and try to find out what name I had made a note of.

Right! There he stood, bending over the book.

I walked past the lavatory and past the kitchen. A staircase led upwards, but if I went upstairs I should land myself in the cart. If I went back I should be arrested. I might shoot, but I wouldn’t get very far in a busy street. There wouldn’t be much sense in that.

Quickly, quickly! I told myself, realizing at the same time that I must flee with my head rather than with my legs.

I saw the words ‘Tradesmens Exit’ on a door. Oh God, if only it’s not locked! There was my chance, one last small chance.

I put my hand upon the latch.............

Oh boy - looks like things are taking a bad turn for ERICH! More in KTB #163 next month.

Spy for Germany

Chapter 7: To America by Submarine (KTB # 156)
Chapter 8: The Landing in America (KTB # 157)
Chapter 9: Tricked by Billy in NYC (KTB # 158)
Chapter 10 (I): I Work Out My Own Situation (KTB # 159)
Chapter 10 (II): I Work Out My Own Situation (KTB # 160)
Chapter 11 (I): Billy Betrays Me to the F.B.I. (KTB # 161)
Chapter 11 (II): Billy Betrays Me to the F.B.I. (KTB # 162)
Chapter 13 (I): Grilled by the FBI (KTB # 165)
Chapter 13 (II): Grilled by the FBI (KTB # 166)