Double Agent by Peter Duffy Page A

conversations she once said she’d heard in a Bremen nightclub. “There was a floor show!” she said. “I was going to dance, have a good time. I was going to be a lady, not listen to gentlemen’s talk.” She angrily denied the suggestion that she was having an affair with Dr. Griebl. “Didn’t you ever have a friend? If you ever had a good friend, then you know what a good friend means.” In a teary-eyed appeal to the judge, she wailed, “When I came home, everything was hotsy-totsy [thirties slang for “A-OK”]. There was nothing doing about the spy business. I didn’t know anything about the spy business until this investigation began.” As the courtroom roared with delight, Judge Knox banged his hand on the bench and shouted, “Stop that!” And she turned on Leon Turrou, who “acted like a mental case or something.” Asked during cross-examination if Turrou had informed Dr. Griebl that a subpoena was about to be issued for him, she said he did. And didn’t Dr. Griebl then leave the country? “Yes,” she said.
    At this inopportune moment the trial was recessed for the weekend, and the government was forced to endure two days of speculation about whether the FBI’s lead investigator had assisted—“connived,” in the words of the papers—in the flight of a key figure in the ring. On Monday morning, Moog was guided through a lawyerly seeming-disavowal before the prosecution turned to other witnesses: “He never, at any time, told Dr. Griebl or me that we could leave the country or go anywhere,” she said of Turrou, which didn’t contradict her earlier testimony. “He told us we must stay right here.”
    On Tuesday, J. Edgar Hoover was asked by the White House to board the president’s train in a day’s time to discuss a matter of importance during the trip from Washington to Hyde Park. FDR aide Stephen Early didn’t specify the purpose of the meeting nor indicate whether it would last until the end of the line. According to a memo Hoover wrote several days later, Roosevelt wanted to talk spies. “He stated that he had approved the plan which I had prepared and which had been sent to him by the Attorney General,” Hoover wrote. FDR told him that he had just ordered his budget director to quietly allocate an increase in funds “to handle counterespionage activities,” as suggested by the memo, although Hoover was disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t receive all the money he requested (at least yet). But that’s about all Hoover revealed of a momentous encounter that allowed the FBI to vastly expand the scope of its investigative responsibilities. What we do know is that the president issued his fiat in an atmosphere of such secrecy that he hadn’t squared the matter with other branches in the government, especially the State Department, which was bound to protest the loss of its ability to shape policy regarding foreign spies. The discussion of what was essentially a private deal appears to have lasted all the way to Penn Station. Hoover wrote that the “special train was held until the conference with the President was concluded and I left the train at New York.”
    At the same time, Agent Turrou was appearing for a second day on the witness stand downtown, facing a barrage of hostile questions from defense attorney George C. Dix, who had traveled to the Reich in September and obtained a seventeen-thousand-word deposition from a gleefully vindictive Dr. Griebl. Turrou was forced to deny that the entire investigation was concocted “to serve the American Public for breakfast a sensational ‘spy case’ with highly interesting Anecdotes,” as Griebl wrote in a letter proclaiming his innocence. “What these G-men, including Mr. Turrou, assert sounds like an interesting spy romance, which exists only in his brain, but never occurred. These little fellows are making themselves ridiculous.” Over the remaining three weeks of the trial, Turrou would angrily deny a series of “damnable