Agent 146 : the true story of a Nazi spy in America /

Originally published as Spion fur Deutschland in 1957, this spy's memoir will be popular not only with the traditional espionage audience but also with those hooked on current news about military tribunals, American defectors, and terrorists. The late author, a professional German agent, along with a still-living American named William Colepaugh, who went over to the Germans, landed in Maine by U-boat in November 1944. Colepaugh soon betrayed Gimpel; a military court sentenced both of them to death; and Truman commuted their penalties. Within these central events, Gimpel's narrative is propelled along by a number of high-interest factors, including his anxiety about the single blunder that could expose him, Colepaugh's back stabbing, and his (and the Americans') revilement of the double traitor. Also holding spy buffs' attention will be Gimpel's recruitment into the German spy service and operations in the Netherlands, Spain, and Norway. However, there are discrepancies between Gimpel's details and other sources, which have yet to be sorted out. As it stands, the I-was-a-spy story always circulates. --Gilbert Taylor

What is it like to pass yourself off as an ordinary citizen in an enemy state for nefarious purposes? After September 11, the problem of "sleepers" has made this question all too urgent, which may be why Thomas Dunne is issuing the first U.S. edition of this riveting 1957 memoir. Gimpel's WWII mission in the U.S.-to learn about the Manhattan Project and, if necessary, destroy factories related to it-took place late in the war, when Germany's defeat looked increasingly inevitable. His co-infiltrator was an untrustworthy American Germanophile, William Colepaugh. Gimpel's "deliberately unsentimental" narrative is exemplary in its unfussy clarity (while also mirroring the amoral, cipherlike personality that permitted him to succeed so well at espionage). Much of the book makes for breathless reading-his plan to destroy the Panama Canal,his 46-day U-boat voyage across the Atlantic, his clandestine entry into the U.S., his suspicion-fraught dealings with the unreliable Colepaugh in New York, his furtive love affair with an American woman unaware of his true identity, right up to his arrest by the FBI. His account of interrogation, trial and incarceration is no less compelling. The passages describing his scheduled execution read like something out of Poe, and the most remarkable aspect of the book is perhaps the improbable deferral of his execution with only hours to go. His sentence commuted to life imprisonment, Gimpel was paroled in the 1950s and died in Germany in 1996. Anyone with the remotest interest in WWII or espionage should find this memoir exciting reading. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

It reads like an improbable Hollywood thriller: German spies are delivered to the East Coast via U-boat and there infiltrate wartime New York City, looking for atomic secrets. Yet this is exactly what happened in December 1944 as related by Gimpel, himself one of the spies. Captured and sentenced to hang by a U.S. military court, he was spared at the last moment by FDR's death and spent the next ten years in the Fort Leavenworth and Alcatraz prisons. Gimpel was eventually released on parole and repatriated to Germany, where he wrote this memoir (originally published in Great Britain in 1957 but never before published in America). With an air of a disillusioned realist, he still manages to play up the dramatic details of his unique spying career. The prose is noticeably stiff in its dated British translation, but as a first-person account of remarkable events it is revealing. However, a good chronology and illustrations would have been helpful. The Gimpel case is also examined in David Allen Johnson's Germany's Spies and Saboteurs and David A. Kahn's Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence of World War II. Recommended for strong World War II history collections.-Elizabeth Morris, formerly with Otsego Dist. P.L., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A former Nazi spy chronicles his training, missions, capture, trial, imprisonment, parole, and return to der Vaterland. Appearing for the first time in the US, these memoirs were originally published in England in 1957--thus trucks are "lorries" and prison guards are "warders." But Gimpel writes well in the sort of gee-whiz but prudish style of a half-century ago (no sex or profanity). He begins in 1945 as he's waiting to hang for espionage in Fort Jay. Naturally, his thoughts turn to how he got into this mess. In 1935, Gimpel was a vacuous, hedonistic young man working for a German firm in Peru. There, he discovered his aptitude for languages, becoming fluent in Spanish and English. When he returned to Germany, the Secret Service recruited him. According to Gimpel, he had foolproof plans to destroy Gibraltar as well as the Panama Canal; the aborted "Project Pelican" called for the bombing of Gatun Dam. Near the end of the war, his superiors sent him across the Atlantic aboard U-1230 in company with an appropriately spineless American traitor named "Billy," who, unremarkably, got drunk and betrayed Gimpel to the FBI--but not before the spy had sent back to Germany the intelligence that the atom bomb existed, that its creators had arranged to divert Columbia River water for cooling, that an important building stood at Oak Ridge. The author portrays himself as charming, sexy (an American named "Joan" falls for him), hard-nosed, impossible to crack in interrogation, popular with fellow prisoners, guards, and even FBI agents, who grudgingly admire Gimpel's tradecraft and misplaced patriotism. His demise was postponed by FDR's death (no executions during a period of national mourning), then forestalled by VE-Day. He spent 11 years in Leavenworth, Alcatraz, and an Atlanta penitentiary before being released and returned to West Germany. He died in 1996. Brisk and oddly appealing, Gimpel's narrative nonetheless invites skepticism since it contains no supporting documentation whatsoever.