The Largest Spy Ring the FBI Missed for Years

Описание: In 1941, the FBI executed the largest espionage bust in American history—arresting 33 Nazi spies operating across seven states in a single coordinated morning. But the most disturbing revelation wasn't that a German intelligence network had infiltrated the United States. It was that the FBI had received warnings for years and dismissed them as isolated incidents. The Duquesne Spy Ring gathered critical military intelligence—ship schedules, aircraft specifications, coastal defenses—and transmitted it directly to Nazi Germany while American counterintelligence looked the other way. This is the story of how Fritz Duquesne, a known WWI saboteur, built the largest spy network on American soil by recruiting ordinary citizens with access to defense plants and shipyards. It's the story of William Sebold, the double agent who walked into the FBI and spent two years maintaining a dangerous deception. And it's the uncomfortable truth about how the Bureau watched the network operate for two years before finally moving—raising the question: how much damage is acceptable while gathering intelligence? This operation didn't just dismantle a spy ring. It exposed the institutional blindness that nearly allowed catastrophic intelligence loss and forced America to rebuild its counterintelligence system from the ground up.
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