Some time back, the History Book Club's monthly selection was Ladislas Farago's The Game of the Foxes, which told the story of World War II's Abwehr. The Abwehr was the German General staff's foreign intelligence service, presided over by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, one of the key officers in the July 20, 1944 Hitler assassination plot. One of its chapters told the story of Simon Emil Koedel, who Farago says was Germany's best all-around agent in World War II.

Koedel's reputation as a spy actually began in World War I; he immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, was naturalized and served in the US Army. He offered his services to the Abwehr in 1915, serving its interests from his base in New York City throughout the remainder of the war. At its end, he made his way to Germany, was commissioned a Captain in the miniscule postwar Wehrmacht, and began a lengthy period of sharpening his espionage skills. After employing them against various European targets, he returned to America in 1937.

A surprisingly well-funded Koedel rented a large apartment on Manhattan's Riverside Drive and went immediately to work. Two of his early coups are examples of the level of his work; intensive cultivation of a friendship with Senator Reynolds of North Carolina led to his being admitted to the prestigious American Ordnance Association, membership in which guaranteed him entrée to virtually any defense-related plant in the country. In 1940, when the German battle cruiser Graf Spee was trapped by several much smaller British vessels in Uruguay's River Plate, the Uruguayan government refused to grant the ship permanent sanctuary. When notified of this decision, the ship's commanding officer immediately took the ship and a skeleton crew clear of the port and scuttled her, committing suicide as the crew cleared the and returned to internment in Uruguay.

This was, of course, a major black eye for Hitler's Reich, and he demanded immediate and full details of the incident from his Admiralty. Weeks passed, and, dissatisfied with the delayed and sketchy response, he vented his volcanic temper on the hapless naval establishment, promising the customary Nazi penalty for failure, an unpleasant death, to everyone concerned with the meager intelligence produced thus far.

Admiral Canaris immediately signaled all Abwehr stations requesting an intensified effort to produce a full accounting of the Graf Spee's loss. Koedel's query to the AOA revealed that such an accounting had just been done by a blue-ribbon committee, and the voluminous report would, of course, be available to interested members. A copy, delivered by a Pam Clipper-borne Naval Attache, was in Hitler's hands beforthe week was out. Thus did Koedel become indispensable to the Nazi war effort.

Unfortunately, things turned sour for the superspy in 1944, whn he was arrested in Norfolk and charged with a single act of coast-watching. He finished the war in Federal prison, but I found myself wondering, what might he have done if his luck hadn't run out? What if, for example, he'd escaped FBI surveillance, jumped into his car and headed south on US1, not stopping until the car broke down- where? In a little town a lot like the one in which I grew up...