ESPIONAGE: Old-Fashioned Spy

"Eleven ships leaving for Russia, including steamer with airplane motors and 28 long-range guns. One steamer has deckload airplanes, below deck airplane motors, Boeing and Douglas airplane parts on steamer with Curtiss-Wright airplanes, motors and small munitions, searchlights and telegraphic material."

In such messages did tall, spectacled, shabby Ernest Frederick Lehmitz, 57, zealous air-raid warden, waiter, and operator of a sailors' boardinghouse, reveal U.S. ship movements to Nazi Intelligence. Spy Lehmitz settled in the U.S. in 1913, worked in the German Consulate in New York during World War I, was classed as a "dangerous alien" but not interned. Naturalized (1924),...

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