THE DUQUESNE SPY RING, GERMAN ESPIONAGE IN THE US

Three of the 33 members of the Duquesne Spy Ring

Today, The Grandma has been watching TV at home. She has chosen an interesting film titled The House on Carroll Street directed by Peter Yates and with Kelly McGillis, Jeff Daniels and Mandy Patinkin.

After watching it, The Grandma has remembered a story very similar to the story explained in the movie. It is the story about The Duquesne Spy Ring, the largest espionage case in the United States history that ended in convictions by The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on a day like today in 1942.

Watching The House on Carrol Street by Peter Yates

The Duquesne Spy Ring is the largest espionage case in the United States history that ended in convictions.

A total of 33 members of a German espionage network headed by Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne were convicted after a lengthy investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Of those indicted, 19 pleaded guilty. The remaining 14 were brought to jury trial in Federal District Court, Brooklyn, New York, on September 3, 1941; all were found guilty on December 13, 1941. On January 2, 1942, the group was sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison.

The agents who formed the Duquesne Ring were placed in key jobs in the United States to get information that could be used in the event of war and to carry out acts of sabotage: one opened a restaurant and used his position to get information from his customers; another worked on an airline so that he could report Allied ships that were crossing the Atlantic Ocean; others worked as delivery people as a cover for carrying secret messages.

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William G. Sebold, who had been blackmailed into becoming a spy for Germany, became a double agent and helped the FBI gather evidence. For nearly two years, the FBI ran a shortwave radio station in New York for the ring. They learned what information Germany was sending its spies in the United States and controlled what was sent to Germany. Sebold's success as a counterespionage agent was demonstrated by the successful prosecution of the German agents.

Fritz Joubert Duquesne

One German spymaster later commented the ring's roundup delivered the death blow to their espionage efforts in the United States.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called his concerted FBI swoop on Duquesne's ring the greatest spy roundup in U.S. history. The 1945 film The House on 92nd Street was a thinly disguised version of the Duquesne Spy Ring saga of 1941. 

After the Duquesne Spy Ring convictions, Sebold was provided with a new identity and started a chicken farm in California. Impoverished and delusional, he was committed to Napa State Hospital in 1965. Diagnosed with manic-depression, he died there of a heart attack five years later at 70. His life story as a double agent was first told in the 1943 book Passport to Treason: The Inside Story of Spies in America by Alan Hynd.

Special Agent Jim Ellsworth was assigned as Sebold's handler or body man, responsible for shadowing his every move during the sixteen-month investigation.

William Gustav Friedemann was a principal witness in the Duquesne case. He began working for the FBI as a fingerprint analyst in 1935 and later became an agent after identifying a crucial fingerprint in a kidnapping case.

After World War II, he was assigned to Puerto Rico, where he pinpointed the group behind the assassination attempt on President Harry Truman. Friedemann died of cancer on August 23, 1989 in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

More information: All That's Interesting

Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne (21 September 1877-24 May 1956; sometimes Du Quesne) was a South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and a spy.

He fought on the side of the Boers in the Second Boer War and as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He gathered human intelligence, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions as a covert field asset in South Africa, Great Britain, Central and South America, and the United States. He went by many aliases, fictionalized his identity and background on multiple occasions, and operated as a conman.

As a Boer spy he was known as the Black Panther, in World War II he operated under the code name DUNN, and in FBI files he is frequently referred to as The Duke. He was captured, convicted, and escaped several prisons.

During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time he escaped. On one occasion he infiltrated the British army, became a British officer, and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and to assassinate the commander-in-chief Lord Kitchener, only his team was given up by an informant and all were captured and sentenced to death. After a failed attempt to escape prison in Cape Town, he was sent to prison in Bermuda, but he escaped to the United States and became an American citizen.

William G. Sebold

In World War I, he became a spy and ring leader for Germany and during this time he sabotaged British merchant ships in South America with concealed bombs and destroyed several. He sometimes purchased insurance on merchandise he shipped on the vessels he sabotaged and then filed claims for damages. He became known as the man who killed Kitchener since he claimed to have guided a German U-boat to sink HMS Hampshire on which Lord Kitchener was en route to Russia in 1916, although forensics of the ship do not support this claim.

After he was caught by federal agents in New York in 1917, he feigned paralysis for two years and cut the bars of his cell to make his escape, thereby avoiding deportation to England where he faced execution for the deaths of British sailors. In 1932, he was again captured in New York by federal agents and charged with both homicide and for being an escaped prisoner, only this time he was set free after Britain declined to pursue the wartime crimes.

The last time he was captured and imprisoned was in 1941 when he and 32 other members of the Duquesne Spy Ring were caught by William G. Sebold, a double agent with the FBI, and later convicted in the largest espionage conviction in the history of the United States.

Between wars, Duquesne served as an adviser on big game hunting to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, as a publicist in the movie business, as a journalist, as a fictional Australian war hero, and as head of the New Food Society in New York.

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During the Boer war he had been under orders to kill Frederick Russell Burnham, Chief of Scouts in the British Army, but in 1910 he worked with both Burnham and then Rep. Robert Broussard to lobby the U.S. Congress to fund the importation of hippopotamuses into the Louisiana bayous to solve a severe meat shortage. Duquesne often took on many identities, reinvented his past at will, attached his ancestry to aristocratic clans, granted himself military titles and medals, and spoke of many people, some fact and some fictional.

After meeting a German-American industrialist in the Midwest around 1914, Duquesne became a German spy. He was sent to Brazil as Frederick Fredericks under the disguise of doing scientific research on rubber plants. As an agent for Naval Intelligence in South America, he was assigned to disrupt commercial traffic to countries at war with Germany. Duquesne received and delivered communiques through German embassies, and he was responsible for numerous explosions on British merchant ships.

On 28 June 1941, following a two-year investigation, the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 German spies on charges of relaying secret information on U.S. weaponry and shipping movements to Germany.

He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, with a 2-year concurrent sentence and $2,000 fine for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He began his sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, along with fellow German spy Hermann Lang.

In 1945, Duquesne was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, due to his failing physical and mental health. In 1954, he was released owing to ill health, having served 14 years.

Fritz Duquesne died at City Hospital on Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York City on 24 May 1956 at the age of 78 years.

More information: Reprobate

There will always be spies.

We have to have them.

Gary Oldman