Léon Turrou was a talented and capable special agent when he took on the Rumrich spy ring in the FBI's first major espionage investigation.
The case hinged on a tip from the British intelligence agency MI5, which discovered secret communications from an agent named Crown in New York that had been delivered to a dead letter in Dundee, Scotland. After intercepting a letter indicating that Agent Crown was planning to lure a US Army colonel to New York in January 1938 in order to subdue him and steal a briefcase full of classified documents, MI5 passed the information to the U.S. military attaché, who alerted the U.S. Army and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A man was soon arrested as he entered the hotel where the army colonel had been summoned under false pretenses. This man turned out to be Gunther Rumrich, a particularly brazen and reckless member of a large German spy ring operating in and around New York City. The investigation into the so-called Rumrich spy ring was assigned to Turrou, a Polish-born special agent who was a rising star within the Bureau.
Turrou was fluent in seven languages and was hired by the Bureau on the orders of President Herbert Hoover, even though Turrou did not have a law degree, as required by all other FBI agents. At the end of his investigation, fourteen members of the spy ring were identified, four of whom were convicted of espionage. Many other members of the ring escaped once they realized their arrest was imminent, greatly embarrassing the FBI.
But by then, the astute Turrou was already planning his next move. Even before the convictions were handed down, he had leveraged his inside information into news articles, a book and even a movie contract. Turrou became an almost household name after solving the case and writing several high-profile articles about it. He was portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in the 1939 film "Confessions of a Nazi Spy."
For episode 69 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with author and historian Andrew Jeffrey about Leon Turrou, the Rumrich spy ring, and other espionage cases in the years leading up to World War II .
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