Double Agent Read Online Free PDF Page B

recognized as a pure-hearted hero of the National Socialist movement, an embodiment of what Hitler called in
Mein Kampf
“the highest humanity.” Hermann W. Lang, a native of a Bavarian mountain village who lived among his landsmen in an apartment building in Ridgewood, had “pleasant facial features and blue eyes that exuded so much openness that, when I shook his hand, I involuntarily felt well disposed toward him.” A longtime Nazi who had been sanctified by his involvement in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Lang arrived in New York in 1927 and found short-term employment here and there as a machinist. In February 1929, he was hired to work at Norden as a lowly benchhand. Over the next several years, he proved to be a respected member of the staff with a high mechanical intelligence and discreet manner, taking the subway in each day from the Forest Avenue stop and accruing the plaudits necessary to be promoted to be one of four assistant inspectors. Now thirty-six, he was unapologetic enough about his political beliefs to join the labor affiliate of the Bund, the German-American Vocational League or Deutsche Amerikanische Berufsgemeinschaft (DAB), which described itself as a “united workers’ league of Germans abroad parallel with the league of German workers in the old homeland, which is united in a common front under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.” The DAB included “technicians occupying responsible posts, many of them in defense plants,” which made it “the most dangerous of Nazi organizations in the United States,” the Justice Department would later say.
    Speaking “rather modestly,” Lang described how he secreted the bombsight plans out of the Norden plant at the end of the workday, made copies by hand on his kitchen table while his wife slept, and then returned the originals before anyone noticed the next morning. Asked by Ritter why he would take such a risk, Lang delivered a patriotic oration that could’ve been written by Joseph Goebbels: “I am a German, and I love Germany. I know that Germany is trying to be free and strong again. I know that Germany is diligent, and I also know that Germany is poor. . . . When I got my hands on these drawings, I said to myself, ‘If you can bring this kind of instrument to Germany, then Germany will be able to save millions and lots of time. And then you have done something for the land of your forefathers.’ ” This was “an idealist,” a man of “genuine conviction” with “strong nerves” whose unwavering loyalty was “simply incomprehensible,” Ritter wrote.
    When Ritter made the mistake of bringing up payment, Lang dismissed the suggestion as beneath his dignity. “I hope that was just a figure of speech,” he said. All that mattered to him was that his materials be safely delivered to Germany, where “your experts will know what they’re dealing with.” Ritter had a plan for that. He left Pop Sohn’s apartment with a sketch which, along with an additional one he received from Lang a week later, was slipped past US Customs at Pier 86 curled inside an umbrella cane carried by one of the Abwehr couriers working on a German liner. The courier wasn’t using Ritter’s cane but a cheap one purchased at the ship’s store; Ritter got the idea from the inspector, he wrote. Yet the method was deemed too risky. Subsequent Norden copies would be cut up into numbered bands and inserted into the pages of a newspaper to make it past pier scrutiny. “Before I left New York for my own trip through a part of the United States, a second set of the bombsight drawings, subdivided into strips, was on the way to Hamburg and from there to Berlin,” Ritter wrote.
    He then traveled to Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago, meeting with two defense-plant technicians, a stamp collector who agreed to serve as a routing station (a
mail drop
,
live letter box
, or
cutout
in counterintelligence parlance) for other agents’ letters, and