Double Agent by Peter Duffy

asked for a vast increase in funding to hire and train new personnel that should be obtained “with the utmost degree of secrecy in order to avoid criticism or objections which might be raised to such an expansion by either ill-informed persons or individuals having some ulterior motive,” a wily suggestion that would allow the FBI to accrue power before its intragovernmental rivals knew what was happening. And the director needed control: Yes, Hoover was willing to coordinate spy efforts with military and naval intelligence, whose leaders, he told the president, had already agreed to the arrangement. But he wanted to end the State Department’s role in authorizing investigations, arguing “that the more circumscribed this program is, the more effective it will be and the less danger there is of its becoming a matter of general public knowledge.” There was no need for “a larger departmental committee” because “other agencies of the government are less interested in matters of counterespionage and general intelligence.” In his best bureaucratese, the nation’s number one G-man was making the case that he, and he alone, should be its number one spymaster.
    By the end of the trial’s second week, with FDR continuing to mull Hoover’s proposal, the government’s case still appeared to be strong. On Thursday, October 27, the prosecution spent much of the day discussing how the spies had obtained plans for an experimental dive-bomber developed by Curtiss-Wright and a machine-gun sighting system for naval airplanes built by an unnamed contractor that enabled “a gunner to lead an enemy plane much as a duck hunter leads a bird,” testified Lieutenant Commander Daniel V. Gallery of the Bureau of Ordnance. A gasp filled the courtroom when an assistant prosecutor reached under a pile of newspapers and pulled out a large weapon equipped with such a sight, a stunt that “unquestionably made a profound impression on the jury,” wrote one reporter.
    But the newspapers were more riveted upon Dr. Ignatz Griebl’s mistress, Kate Moog, who took the stand at 3:55 p.m. after arriving at the courthouse resplendent in a sailor cap and black velvet suit with silver-fox scarves draped around her neck. She described traveling with Naz to Germany, where they met with Abwehr officers impressed with her boasted acquaintances with Rear Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson, and President Roosevelt, for whom she had once served as a nurse. Over tea at the roof garden of the Hotel Eden, she had been asked if she would be interested in using her society connections to host a salon in Washington to instruct politicians, military men, reporters, and other DC players in the intimate glories of National Socialism, a barely disguised attempt to send her into the field as a new Mata Hari, the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and seductress executed by a French firing squad in 1917 for allegedly employing her sexual wiles on behalf of Imperial Germany. “He thought I could extend a gweat service to them if I could make social contacts for them,” she told jurors, according to the
Daily News
’ phonetically precise transcription. Although she testified that the proposal was an innocent ploy to improve relations between the two countries, the coverage in the next day’s papers made her out to be a dumb broad who was clearly being recruited as a femme fatale. “In the carefully modulated tone of a debutante trying out for a society play, a comely nurse told a jury in federal court yesterday that two ‘fine gentlemen’ she met at lunch in Berlin a year and a half ago wanted to cast her in the role of an American Mata Hari,” began the
Times
’ story.
    When she returned to the witness stand on the next morning, she was a different woman. “The baby talk of Kate Moog Busch gave way to the ferocity of a tigress,” wrote the
Daily News
. In her rage, she claimed to have forgotten all about spy