Operation Elster ("Magpie" in English) was a German espionage mission intended to gather intelligence on U.S. military and technology facilities during World War II. The mission commenced in September 1944 with two Nazi agents sailing from Kiel, Germany on the U-1230 and coming ashore in Maine on November 29, 1944. The agents were William Colepaugh, an American-born defector to Germany, and Erich Gimpel, an experienced German intelligence operative. They spent nearly a month living in New York City, expending large amounts of cash on entertainment, but accomplishing none of their mission goals.
Colepaugh quickly lost his commitment to espionage, and hoping to avoid the death penalty for treason, turned himself in to the FBI and betrayed his partner Gimpel, effectively ending the operation in late December 1944. In February 1945, the two agents were convicted of espionage by a military court and sentenced to death. At the time, the military tribunal which named American citizens in a conspiracy to commit treason was only the third of its kind ever held in the history of the US. When the war ended, their sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment by President Harry S. Truman. Gimpel was paroled in 1955, and Colepaugh in 1960.
Operation Elster was one of only two times the Germans landed agents on American shores by submarine during the war. Despite a number of claims and speculations that the mission was intended to sabotage the Manhattan Project, no supportive evidence exists in the official investigative records.
Mission
The idea of landing spies in the United States originated with Nazi Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and this particular operation was developed by the Schutzstaffel (SS). Operation Elster would be Germany's second and final attempt to insert agents onto the American mainland by submarine. They had previously landed agents on American shores by U-Boat as part of Operation Pastorius in June 1942, a mission that also failed due to the betrayal of its senior member to the FBI, resulting in the capture of all eight of the espionage agents who were deployed.
Originally intended to gather information gauging the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in the United States, the objective of Operation Magpie was later widened to include the gathering of technical engineering information, generally from public sources. Of particular interest was intelligence on shipyards, airplane factories, and rocket-testing facilities.
The mission was intended to last for two years, and called for information to be communicated to Germany by morse code radiotelegraphy using a shortwave radio transmitter the agents were expected to build. In the event they could not transmit by radio, they were to send the information via postal letters written in secret ink and addressed to a number of "mail drops", which included both American prisoners of war and intermediaries in Spain. It was thought that the agents would eventually build additional shortwave radio transmitters for use of other German agents sent to the United States in the future.
Agents
Chosen for the mission were 26 year-old William Colepaugh, an American citizen from Niantic, Connecticut who defected to Germany, and 34 year-old Erich Gimpel, a German radio operator and technician who had been engaged in spying operations in other countries since the start of the war.
Gimpel was a seasoned operative, having begun activities as an intelligence informant in the mid 1930s in Lima, Peru where, while working for Telefunken as a radio engineer, he transmitted shipping information to German U-Boats waiting offshore. He also conveyed information helpful to the German government gathered from corrupt Peruvian officials and underworld contacts. He was deported from Peru back to Germany in 1942, and was shortly recruited by the German Foreign Intelligence Service Amt VI. His experience as a covert operative and skilled radio operator was considered valuable, and he was reportedly assigned to serve in Operation Pelikan, a German espionage mission designed to cripple the Panama Canal which was cancelled shortly before it was scheduled to take place.