Captured in New York because of Colepaugh’s bumbling and betrayal, Gimpel tells his dramatic story in “Agent 146” (St. Martin’s). Originally published in Germany and Britain in 1957, the book is being released for the first time in the United States. Both men had been sentenced to hang, but they were unbelievably lucky. Before their sentences could be carried out, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, which led to four weeks of mourning when no executions were allowed. Then the war ended, and President Harry S. Truman took away the threat of the hangman’s noose for good. “It is customary to hang spies during a war, but it is also customary to pardon them when the war is over,” he declared.
After a decade in American prisons, Gimpel returned to Germany and wrote up his exploits, sometimes with an Ian Fleming flair (women, booze, money and diamonds abound). He portrays himself as a master spy done in by the hapless American, who “was one of the thirstiest and most accomplished drinkers I ever met.” Early in the war Gimpel is posted to Lima, where he mingles with Allied sailors and flirts with the daughter of an American shipping magnate, picking up information for German U-boats on the hunt for new prey. Even on the eve of his capture in New York he has a fling with an American woman, who later makes a surprise appearance at his military trial to testify to his good character and to her continued love for him, unfazed by the revelation of his true identity.
One of Gimpel’s American interrogators tells him that “no German agent has ever before got as far as you did” in an undercover mission to the United States. This was true. Six of his predecessors had been immediately caught and sent to the electric chair, and everyone knew he was being dispatched on a near-hopeless mission. Gimpel’s prose continues to radiate pride that he beat the odds as long as he did.
Gimpel also lauds the gentlemanly treatment he receives from his captors, who play by rules that initially astound him. When he is picked up, one of the FBI agents asks him for permission to search the hotel room where he has stashed his transmitter, bundles of cash and other incriminating evidence. The explanation: it was too late in the day for the agent to get a search warrant. “This punctiliousness seemed so strange to me that I was at a loss to understand it,” he writes. He continues to be treated with respect as a spy serving his country even when he refuses to reveal his pro-German contacts in the United States. By contrast, he delights in the far harsher, derisive treatment meted out to Colepaugh, the American traitor.
But for all his skills and intuition, Gimpel never learns anything other than purely tactical lessons from his experiences–chief among them that he should never have relied on Colepaugh. He recalls seeing a film during his undercover period in New York that portrayed German soldiers tormenting Russian civilians, and–even with the benefit of hindsight–dismisses it as “this piece of trash.” He recognizes that an enemy spy would be treated very differently in his own country. Yet he maintains that he was no more than a patriot who never reasoned why, never knew anything about what the horrific regime he served really represented–even long after its fall. “I know nothing of politics and I don’t want to,” he writes. “I have never had anything to do with politics, and I never will.”
His overblown protests ring hollow. Here was a clever agent willing to concoct any scheme–once he plotted to blow up Gibraltar, another time the Panama Canal–to win the war for Hitler. Writing in the mid-1950s, he directed all his anger at those who undercut or betrayed him, still proud of what he might otherwise have accomplished. Gimpel, now 92, is alive, whereabouts unknown, probably still convinced of his virtue. That, as much as his ability to elude sloppy wartime surveillance, is a chilling parallel to today’s headlines.
