Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

17. The Spy in US Industry: The Norden Bombsight

133 17 The Spy in US Industry The Norden Bombsight America has been good to me. But I can never forget the Fatherland. And I want Germany to have this wonderful invention, for she may need it in the future. Nazi spy, Hermann Lang, to a fellow Nazi. Quoted by Wighton and Peis, Hitler’s Spies and Saboteurs The Nazis were well aware that air power would be crucial to their plans to dominate Europe. Although Germany possessed some of the most brilliant scientific minds on the planet, the Nazis were too impatient to wait for the fruits of their research to improve the capabilities of their air force. Nazi intelligence was tasked to steal American aviation technology in order to accelerate the development of German air capabilities. Aviation secrets would become as critical to the warring powers in the 1930s as atomic bomb secrets would be in the 1940s. In World War I aircraft were primarily used for reconnaissance purposes , though some attempts were made at aerial bombardment. Simple physics complicated dropping bombs from the sky. The higher an airplane flew to drop a bomb, the more chance it would miss. The lower the plane flew, the more vulnerable it was to enemy ground fire. Precision bombing at high altitudes seemed impossible unless a scientific solution could be found. 134 Espionage during the World Wars, 1914–45 A Dutch émigré to the United States solved this problem. Carl Norden, who was born in the East Indies of Dutch parents, worked as a mechanical engineer in Europe before emigrating to the United States, where he was hired by the Sperry Company to design gyroscopes for the US Navy. In the process Norden applied the technology to invent a precision bombsight and founded his own company to manufacture the instrument in mass quantity for the US military. Using a gyroscope, Norden devised a stable platform for the bombsight that would be unaffected by the changing position of a moving airplane. The sight held the target in its crosshairs in a fixed position relative to the Earth,whichenabledabombardiertodeterminetheexactsecondtorelease his payload. Aeronautical engineers at Norden claimed a bomb “could be dropped into a pickle barrel from twenty-five thousand feet.”1 Although this may have been an exaggeration, during a test run in 1939, B-17 bombers repeatedly dropped six 300-pound bombs squarely on target from a height of 12,000 to 15,000 feet.2 The Norden bombsight provided such a decisive advantage in air combat that the US government shrouded the entire project in secrecy.3 Any shipments of machinery or parts for the bombsight were transported in trucks covered with canvas. The bombsight itself was covered until it was aboard an aircraft for a mission and was locked in a vault the rest of the time. Anyone involved in handling the instrument was required to sign an acknowledgment that he had read and was familiar with the Espionage Act of 1917. Pilots flew with strict instructions to destroy the bombsight if they had to abandon their aircraft, including firing pistol rounds into the scope and jettisoning it overboard. Before the development of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project, the Norden bombsight was one of America’s most closely guarded military secrets. These strict security measures, unfortunately, did not include intensive screening of those with access to the secret bombsight. When Norden founded his company, he hired a number of immigrants like himself who were skilled in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. Many were of German extraction, but American fears about “the Hun at the gate” had dissipated in the two decades after World War I. Among the German-born engineers Norden hired was Hermann Lang, a stocky, dark-haired immigrant who worked as a draftsman in the bombsight production plant in 135 Manhattan. Lang was a simple working man and lived a simple life in a modest home with his wife and daughter on Long Island. His quiet and reserved diligence on the job won him a promotion to assembly line inspector at Norden. Lang had no craving for money, no personal problems, and no resentment against his employer or adopted country.4 Lang was simply a German patriot. And so he became a German spy. He was the quintessential little “gray man” who becomes an extraordinarily effective spy precisely because he attracts no attention. Off duty, Lang sometimes mingled in haunts frequented by other German Americans...