Editing Wilhelm Canaris (section)

===United States===

{{Main|Duquesne Spy Ring}}

[[File:Mug shots of the 33 convicted members of the Duquesne spy ring (cropped).tif|thumb|The 33 convicted members of the Duquesne spy ring. Duquesne is pictured in the top, right; Lang is in the third row, fourth from left. (FBI print)]]

In 1937, Canaris created a new office of air intelligence in the ''Abwehr'' and assigned ''[[Hauptmann]]'' [[Nikolaus Ritter]] of the Luftwaffe to be the chief of I. Luft (Chief of Air Intelligence).{{sfn|Duffy|2014|p=13}} Ritter, who had lived in the United States for twelve years, was given primary authority over ''Abwehr'' agents operating in the Americas and Britain.{{sfn|Duffy|2014|pp=13–15}} Canaris instructed Ritter to contact and reactivate a former German Naval Intelligence [[spymaster]] living in [[New York City]] whom Canaris knew from the First World War, [[Fritz Joubert Duquesne]]. Duquesne was an [[Afrikaner]] who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in the British [[Imperial fortress]] [[British Overseas Territory|colony]] of [[Bermuda]] during the [[Second Boer War]] and had been falsely credited for the death of British Army Field Marshal [[Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener]] in the sinking of {{HMS|Hampshire|1903|6}} during the First World War).{{sfn|Evans|2014}} Back in 1931, Ritter had met Duquesne in New York, and both spies reconnected in New York on 3 December 1937.{{sfn|Evans|2014}} Ritter also met with Herman W. Lang, a spy who operated under the code name PAUL.{{sfn|Duffy|2014|p=26}}

Herman Lang worked as a machinist, draftsman and assembly inspector for the Carl L. Norden Company in New York, which had been contracted to manufacture an advanced top-secret military bomber part, the [[Norden bomb-sight]].{{sfn|Evans|2014}} He provided the ''Abwehr'' a large drawing of the bomb-sight and later went to Germany to work on and finish an improved version. In Germany, Lang debriefed with both Canaris and Göring.{{sfn|Duffy|2014|pp=44–45}} Ritter employed several other successful agents across the United States, but he also made the mistake of recruiting a man who would later become a double agent for the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] (FBI), [[William Sebold]]. On 8 February 1940, Ritter sent Sebold to New York under the alias of Harry Sawyer and instructed him to set up a shortwave radio-transmitting station to establish contact with the German shortwave station abroad. Sebold was also instructed to use the codename TRAMP and to contact a fellow agent, codenamed DUNN, Fritz Duquesne.{{sfn|Evans|2014}}

On 28 June 1941, after a two-year investigation, the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 other Nazi spies on charges of relaying secret information on US weaponry and shipping movements to Germany. On 2 January 1942, less than a month after the US [[Attack on Pearl Harbor|attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor]] and Germany had declared war on the United States, the 33 members of the Duquesne Spy Ring were sentenced to serve a total of more than 300 years in prison. They were found guilty in what historian Peter Duffy said in 2014 is "still to this day the largest espionage case in the history of the United States".{{sfn|Duffy|2014|p=2}}

One German spymaster later commented that the ring's roundup delivered "the death blow" to their espionage efforts in the United States. [[J. Edgar Hoover]] called his FBI swoop on Duquesne's ring the greatest spy roundup in US history. In a 1942 memo to his superiors, Canaris reported on the importance of several of his captured spies by noting their valued contributions, and he wrote that Duquesne had "delivered valuable reports and important technical material in the original, including U.S. gas masks, radio-controlled apparatus, leak proof fuel tanks, television instruments, small bombs for airplanes versus airplanes, air separator, and propeller-driving mechanisms. Items delivered were labeled 'valuable', and several 'good' and 'very good'".{{sfn|Duffy|2014|p=224}}