Caught in the Act

It was a pleasantly cool afternoon. In a Manhattan office two FBI agents waited nervously.

The lens of a small movie camera, hand-operated for secrecy, projected through a concealed hole into the next office.

The agents had reason to be nervous. For some two years the FBI had been working on this case; in three more days it would be ready to round up 33 individuals for its biggest spy trial so far. The tenant of that next office was glum-looking William Sebold, an FBI decoy (TIME, Sept. 22). Its walls were painted a bright white--to make the movies clearer. The camera focused on a calendar (June 25), on a clock on the desk (6:16) and on a tall, sardonic-looking, dark-haired man--Frederick Joubert Duquesne. Agent Johnson began to turn the crank.

He knew all about Duquesne--who had fought with the Boers against the British, worked as a U.S. newspaperman, been accused by the British of acting as an enemy agent in World War I.

While the camera ground, Sebold maneuvered Duquesne to face the invisible lens. Duquesne picked his nose, in most un-Hollywood fashion. While he warned Sebold about carrying secret papers on his person, he gestured like an old veteran of the silent films.

He took a long white envelope from his left sock. He handed over photographs and drawings of rifles and a mosquito boat. (Sebold, as impassive as Buster Keaton, thoughtfully turned the photographs toward the camera.) Duquesne, talking about guns and bombs, pantomimed aiming a gun.

It was quite a show. Last week, in a vast, high-ceilinged courtroom in Brooklyn, the scene was thrown on the screen for the jury. Duquesne was there, in the prisoners' dock; he looked at himself on the screen with interest. His gestures, especially the one with the imaginary rifle, brought a snicker from the audience. The other 15 defendants (17 of the 33 had pleaded guilty) had no such stellar roles as the trial rolled on and the case, unlike the movie, slowly proceeded. The U.S. had not yet learned from the trial how effective Nazi espionage in the U.S. might be. It was an open question whether the public would ever learn much of spy methods from the trial; spies often plead guilty rather than have their methods exposed. But the U.S. was certainly learning a great deal about the ingenious methods of the FBI.

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