Secret Armies Part 17

I called upon the second of the three suspected spies subpoenaed by the Dies Committee. Alfred Boldt had done very responsible work on the U.S. cruiser "Honolulu." Though he had not been in Germany for ten years, he suddenly got enough money last year to go there and to send his son to school at a n.a.z.i academy. Boldt, too, has no bank account.

He needed a minimum of seven hundred dollars for his wife and himself to cross third cla.s.s, but the Dies Committee was not interested in where the money for the trip had come from.

Boldt left for Germany on August 4, 1936, and returned September 12.

On the evening I dropped in to see him, he was tensely nervous. He had heard that someone had been around to talk with Dieckhoff.

"I understand your only son, Helmuth, is going to school in Langin, Germany?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "I sent him there two years ago."

"No schools in the United States for a fifteen-year-old boy?"

"I wanted him to learn German."

"What do you pay for his schooling over there?"

He hesitated. His wife, who was sitting with us and occasionally advising him in German, suddenly interrupted in German, "Don't tell him. That's German business."

I a.s.sume they did not know that I understood, for Boldt pa.s.sed off her comment as if he had not heard it and said casually, "Oh, twenty-five dollars a month."

"You earn forty dollars a week at the Navy Yard, pay for your son's schooling in Germany, clothes, etc., and you and your wife took more than a month's trip to Germany last year. How do you do it on forty a week?"

His wife giggled a little in the adjoining room. Boldt shrugged his shoulder without answering.

"The cheapest the two of you could do it, third cla.s.s, would be about seven hundred dollars. Where do you have your bank account?"

"No. No bank account," his wife interrupted sharply.

"All the money is kept here, right here in this house," he laughed.

"You saved all that money in cash?"

"Yes; in cash, right here."

"No banks?"

"We like it better like that--in cash."

Boldt, like Dieckhoff, had been a marine engineer on the North German Lloyd. He went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1931. When the cruiser "Honolulu" made its trial run in the spring of 1938, Boldt was on board.

Like Dieckhoff and Boldt, Harry Woulters, _alias_ Hugo Woulters, the third of the three subpoenaed men, is a naturalized citizen of German extraction. He went to work in the Navy Yard within one day of Dieckhoff. Before that, both had worked on the same four American destroyers at the Staten Island s.h.i.+pbuilding Company.

The house where Woulters lives has a great many Jews in it, judging from the names on the letterboxes, and since Hugo sounded too German, he listed his first name as "Harry."

"You and Dieckhoff worked on the same destroyers on Staten Island and you say you never met him there?" I asked.

"No, I never met him until the second day after I went to work in the Navy Yard."

"How many people work on a destroyer--a thousand?"

"Oh, no. Not that many."

"About one hundred?"

"About that," he said uncertainly.

"And you worked with Dieckhoff for six months on the same wars.h.i.+ps and never met him?"

"Yes," he insisted.

"How come that if you never met him both of you applied for jobs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at about the same time?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. It's funny. Sounds funny, anyway."

"When you worked on the cruiser 'Honolulu' you handled blueprints?"

"Yes, of course, but they were never left in my possession overnight,"

he added quickly. I couldn't help but think that Dieckhoff, too, had been very quick in protesting that the blueprints had never been left in his possession overnight. They seemed worried about that even though I had not said anything about it.

"Were they _ever_ left in your possession overnight?"

"No. They guarded the blueprints--"

"My information is that they were left in your possession."

"Wells, sometimes--blueprints--you know, when you work from blueprints sometimes, yes, sometimes blueprints were left in my possession overnight. I was working on reduction gears on the cruiser 'Brooklyn'

and I kept the blueprints overnight."

"How often?"

"I can't remember how often. Sometimes the blueprints were kept overnight in my tool box."

"You also worked on turbines and other complicated and confidential structural problems on the wars.h.i.+p?"

"Yes."

"And you kept those blueprints overnight, too?"

"Sometimes--not often. Sometimes I left them in my tool box overnight."

Woulters, during the latter period of construction on the "Brooklyn"

and the "Honolulu" had got two jobs which most workers do not like. He had the four to midnight and the midnight to eight A.M. watches.

Normally Woulters likes to stay at home with his wife.

"While you had these watch duties you had pretty much the run of the s.h.i.+p?"

He hesitated and weighed his words carefully before answering. Finally he nodded and added hastily, "But no one can get on board."