If at First...

Despite the dismal failure of other attempts to put submarine-borne spies to work on U.S. soil, the Germans tried again. This time they sent only two, but apparently thought their prospects well worth a lot of trouble: the Nazis took a U-boat out of service for 54 days to ship them from Kiel to Frenchman's Bay, Me.

As usual the agents were meticulously trained, as correctly equipped with secret inks, money, jewels and forged documents as second-string characters in an Eric Ambler mystery. Furthermore, one of them was a U.S. citizen and knew his way around. But, as usual, U.S. agents swung into step behind them almost as soon as they landed. Last week, 33 days after their arrival, the FBI announced that both had been arrested, issued a report strewn with dismantled parts of the Nazi plot.

The pair had been carefully picked to do two important jobs--set up radio communication with Germany, and find places of refuge for other spies. The leader, German-born Erich Gimpel, was a tough, 35-year-old radio engineer. He had learned communications well in seven years with Telefunken, German radio corporation in Peru. He had been interned in Texas, after arrest by Peruvian authorities in 1942, had stayed long enough to pick up U.S. colloquialisms, and spoke English with only the faintest of accents. Repatriated, he had been tried and proved as a courier between Berlin and Madrid. Then he was accepted for more dangerous duty.

Traitor's Progress. William Curtis Colepaugh, his renegade companion, was a weak-faced, gangling young man who had grown up in Connecticut, had somehow developed a sentimental sense of attachment to "beautiful Germany." He had graduated from Farragut Academy in New Jersey, flunked out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grabbed later as a draft dodger, he joined the Navy, put on such a show of love for the Germans that the Navy discharged him. From then on, it was easy--for a while. Colepaugh sailed to Europe as a messboy on the diplomatic exchange liner Gripsholm, jumped ship at Lisbon, and presented himself at the German consulate. He was quickly enrolled in espionage schools, introduced to Gimpel, started on the long voyage home, an accomplished traitor.

All during the Atlantic crossing, Gimpel and Colepaugh wore naval uniforms in the event of possible capture, changed to civilian clothes with U.S. labels at the last moment. The U-boat, which ran seven miles up the Bay from the Atlantic, surfaced 300 yards from shore, cloaked by snow and darkness, and two of her sailors paddled the spies ashore in a rubber boat.

With all this dark-of-the-moon melodrama behind them, the pair traveled confidently to Bangor, Boston and New York. They had a set of admirably forged draft cards, $60,000 in U.S. currency, and a fistful of diamonds. In Manhattan they browsed in radio shops, openly buying parts for a radio transmitter. Also they sampled the city's night life--in less than four weeks they managed to spend $3,425 of the Third Reich's funds.

The U.S. was left to guess at the details of the chase which brought them to grief--an omission which many a weary wartime traveler found less baffling than the minor mystery contained in one sentence of the FBI report: "Gimpel and Colepaugh stayed at the best hotels."

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