ESPIONAGE: Old-Fashioned Spy

“Eleven ships leaving for Russia, including steamer with airplane motors and 28 long-range guns. One steamer has deckload airplanes, below deck airplane motors, Boeing and Douglas airplane parts on steamer with Curtiss-Wright airplanes, motors and small munitions, searchlights and telegraphic material.”

In such messages did tall, spectacled, shabby Ernest Frederick Lehmitz, 57, zealous air-raid warden, waiter, and operator of a sailors’ boardinghouse, reveal U.S. ship movements to Nazi Intelligence. Spy Lehmitz settled in the U.S. in 1913, worked in the German Consulate in New York during World War I, was classed as a “dangerous alien” but not interned. Naturalized (1924), he went to Germany in 1938, was trained in a Nazi spy school, returned to the U.S. March 27, 1941 ready to work.

From his home on Staten Island (where the F.B.I, arrested him this week) Spy Lehmitz kept close tabs on ship movements in New York harbor, picked up more information in bars from loose-lipped soldiers and sailors. To report all this in letters to Nazi agents in Zurich and Lisbon, old-fashioned Spy Lehmitz used an ancient device: between the lines of letters about Victory gardens and California sherry, he wrote his messages in invisible ink. Lehmitz pleaded guilty of espionage. U.S. authorities bugled: “One of the most important arrests.”