WAR & PEACE: The World of William Sebold

Last week, in a Brooklyn courtroom, at the Government’s spy trial, the testimony unwound the story of two worlds in conflict:

In the last year of the 19th Century, William Sebold was born in a city near the Rhine. A region of narrow valleys and expanding industries, this section looks like the country around Pittsburgh. There William Sebold was apprenticed to a draftsman, grew up through a boyhood no more extraordinary than one spent in a hard-working manufacturing town in Western Pennsylvania before the war.

When he was 15, Germany went to war. Big for his age, slow-spoken, a heavy-set boy with a flair for mechanics, William Sebold went too; before he was 19 he was a machine-gunner on the Western Front. When the Ruhr was swept by the Revolution, William Sebold lived through it. Later, like many another German of his generation, he went to sea. For years he lived the rootless, lonely, self-contained life of the post-war wanderers, never quite able to master the language of the people he lived with, never quite at home among them, and yet unable to feel at home where he had grown up.

Eventually Sebold landed in California, wandered over the U.S., married in New York at 33, became a U.S. citizen, worked for Consolidated Aircraft in California, gradually lost touch with the Vaterland. After some years Sebold, now a 200-lb., 6-foot man with a slight limp, and a brooding expression, packed up, went back to the Rhineland town where he was born, for a long visit with his family.

Germany under Hitler had changed unrecognizably. Sebold got a job in a turbine factory, tried to settle down. When he got a letter from a Dr. Gassner (Heil Hitler!) asking him to dinner “to talk over old times” he laughed. Friends told him it was no laughing matter, urged him to take the letter to Gestapo headquarters. He did so, found the Gestapo cool, suspicious. Presently another letter came, threatening him unless he met Gassner. He went to the U.S. consul, was advised to leave Germany. But his passport had been stolen. At last William Sebold wrote Gassner: “I accept your proposition 100 per cent.” For the next month he lived in a be wildering maze of instructions in codes, radio transmission, photography , microphotography. His code book was Rachel Field’s novel All This and Heaven Too. Soon he was sent to the U.S. to stay at Manhattan’s 63rd St. Y.M.C.A. — “most of the crooks in America stay there,” said his Nazi boss.

He was to meet Inspector Herman Lang, employed by the makers of the famed U.S. secret Norden bombsight. He was to set up a radio transmitter and operate it. So, weighted down with instructions, fake names, five messages in microfilm hidden in his watch, and $1,000 for a starter, William Sebold returned to Manhattan.

A State Department agent, waiting at the dock, whisked “Spy” Sebold to FBI headquarters. He turned over $910 and the microfilms to an agent, went on FBI’s payroll at $50 a week. For the next three months he lived in a maze of instructions even more bewildering than those of Hamburg. A Mr. Price, became William Sebold long enough to set up and operate a radio transmitter (selecting a comfortable house in quiet Centerport, L.I.).

Like a man in a nightmare, who finds that he must live his most private life in the midst of a great crowd of friends and relatives, William Sebold lived constantly in the presence of a veritable mob of Government agents. When he met men spying for Germany, hidden dictaphones recorded the conversation, hidden motion-picture cameras recorded the scene. And all around him industrious operatives collected evidence, still managing to look like casual passers-by in the ordinary run of U.S. life.

Last June the FBI swooped suddenly, arrested 33 (16 pleaded guilty). Last week in a Brooklyn courtroom a subdued William Sebold told his story, and narrative-wise U.S. Attorney Harold Kennedy filled in the gaps. On trial were Herman Lang, accused of selling details of the design of the bombsight, shadowy Frederick Joubert Duquesne, blond Axel Wheeler-Hill, brother of Bundster James Wheeler-Hill, as well as a baker, a shipping clerk, a book salesman, a photographer, a musician, a seaman, a machinist.

Introduced as evidence in the U.S. Government’s case were decoded messages that asked for information about weather, ship movements, hydraulic pumps, the Normandie, plane production, Swedish plane orders, data about docks, U.S. sea charts —a mass of miscellaneous questions that kept the FBI humping to find harmless but plausible fictional answers.

Last week watchers at the trial were mightily impressed at FBI efficiency. But watching glum William Sebold as he told his story, many a spectator was more impressed at the craziness and waste of the Nazi world his story pictured, a world so madly different from the desires of an ordinary German who had merely wanted to be an engineer in his own home town.