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activities as may affect the economic and political life of the country as a whole,” a pivotal step in restoring subversion-hunting powers that had been stripped from him after the lawless excesses of the Palmer or Red Raids of two decades earlier. But the FBI was rarely permitted to open up a
specific
counterespionage investigation in the absence of a request from the Army, Navy, or State Department, which meant that Hoover’s special agents, celebrated as remorseless defenders of the nation’s honor trained in the new science of forensic analysis and outfitted in the smartest of suits and snap-brim hats, had little incentive to develop expertise in the detection and apprehension of spies. In simple fact, the United States was doing next to nothing to protect itself from foreign espionage on the day Nikolaus Ritter arrived in the port of New York.
    Yet in the seconds after he reached the two-story passenger terminal at Pier 86 at West Forty-Sixth Street on the Hudson River, Ritter thought his covert career had come to a premature end. As he was making his way through the entry process, he heard his name being shouted: “Ritter!” It was not an officer of the law preparing to haul him to the detention facility on Ellis Island, he was relieved to discover, but an acquaintance of his, a reporter for the
Staats
who was present to get a quote or two from disembarking notables. After an inspector spent many excruciating moments trying to determine whether a prescription drug found in his luggage could be carried into the US—it couldn’t—he was asked to hand over his umbrella cane, which was of a type that was “not at all well-known in America at that time,” he wrote. The inspector removed the casing, performed a careful examination, and announced that it would make “an excellent hiding place.” Ritter joked, “I’m sorry that I have to disappoint you.” Permitted to enter the United States of America at last, he hopped a cab bound for the Taft Hotel, the two-thousand-room behemoth at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-First Street, with the expectation that he would blend into its clientele of travelers from throughout the world.
    Over the next few days, he acted the part of a legitimate businessman, constructing an alibi by loudly speaking to would-be clients over the lobby telephone. He reserved a room at the Wellington Hotel, four blocks to the north, under the name “Alfred Landing,” and then mailed two postcards to his fictitious creation, one sent to the Wellington, the other to a nearby post office, general delivery, as he explained in his book. After checking out of the Taft as Ritter, he registered at the Wellington as Landing, where he was given the postmarked item that had earlier arrived for him and which he took to the post office and used as identification to receive the postcard waiting there. With his new identity given recognition by a branch of the US government, he gathered up all of his Ritter-related documents and stuffed them into a safe-deposit box, giving the key to a friend who would hold it until he was ready to return to Germany. Wearing a new felt hat he purchased on Broadway, his old gray overcoat from Hamburg, and an American pair of nickel eyeglasses, Ritter was now Alfred Landing, on the hunt for agents to work for Hitler.
    His first stop was to see “Pop,” Friederich Sohn, whom he described as a “stocky, middle-aged man in shirtsleeves.” Sohn was an employee of Carl L. Norden Inc., the US military contractor in lower Manhattan that produced what Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, chief of staff of the US Army Air Corps, called “the most important military secret project under development.” Known to the Navy as the Mark XV bombsight and to the Army as the M-9 or M-series bombsight, the “Norden bombsight,” as it would eventually be known to the culture, was a mechanical-electrical-optical apparatus roughly the size of a watermelon. It weighed fifty pounds, boasted at least