Read Double Agent for Free Online Page A

into the Brazilian jungle in 1913. Carrying film equipment to shoot motion pictures for an intended lecture series, Duquesne set out for the tropics a few days after becoming a US citizen in December 1913. But his plans apparently changed once the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914 and the Kaiser’s representatives in port cities began recruiting “agents for arranging explosives [explosions] on ships bound for enemy countries, and for arranging delays, embroilments, and confusion during the loading, dispatch, and unloading of ships,” according to a German government directive. Although Duquesne would boast of sinking twenty-two British ships, setting another hundred afire, and burning two waterfront towns, he was credibly accused of working with a gang of local conspirators to pack sixteen containers of timed explosives (probably encased within his film materials) on a British merchant steamer. Six days after the SS
Tennyson
left the Brazilian port of Bahia (now Salvador), a massive blast destroyed much of the commercial cargo and killed three British sailors but did not sink the ship. One of the conspirators admitted to Brazilian authorities that Duquesne “directed all operations connected with cases shipped by
Tennyson,
” according to a British intelligence report. Whatever else we know about Fritz Duquesne and his grandiosity, we know this: he was entirely capable of murder.
    Wanted by British authorities, he probably arranged for the
New York Times
to print a story (“Captain Duquesne Is Slain in Bolivia”) on April 27, 1916, that reported how the “noted adventurer and soldier of fortune” had been killed in a battle with Indians on the Bolivian frontier. “His expedition was looted by the attacking band,” it said, crediting the information to a “brief cablegram” sent to the paper. Duquesne resurrected himself on May 8, when the Associated Press printed a follow-up (under one of Duquesne’s aliases) that detailed how he “has been found by troops at Rio Pilcomayo in a badly wounded state.” The AP reported that the explorer was expected to recover. Why would Duquesne go to such lengths to concoct two contradictory stories? wondered a Duquesne biographer, Art Ronnie. “Speculation would suggest that he regretted the first story announcing his death even though its effect had been the desired one: to put a halt to the intensive manhunt for him,” Ronnie wrote. “He might’ve feared that if he were ‘dead,’ he would never be able to return to America, Alice, and the good life.”
    Duquesne (pronounced “doo-cane” by Americans and “doocwez-nee” by South Africans) would then tell his boldest lie, how he traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, disguised himself as a Russian nobleman (Count Boris Zakrevsky), and somehow managed to be aboard the HMS
Hampshire
when it left the British naval base at Scapa Flow carrying the architect of Britain’s war strategy and the brutal scourge of the Duquesne family, Lord Kitchener. At the decisive moment on June 5, 1916, Duquesne signaled a German U-boat, which launched a torpedo that sank the vessel, a more thrilling tale than the reality that Kitchener and some six hundred British seamen went to their deaths after the
Hampshire
struck a mine. Duquesne, who claimed he was plucked from the waters by the U-boat, was next heard from in New York, where he sought to capitalize on the US war effort by disguising himself as “Captain Claude Stoughton of the West Australia Lighthorse,” a Croix de Guerre winner available for a fee to lecture on what it was
really
like to fight the Germans at the Somme, Flanders, etc. Soon discovered and arrested by the NYPD’s bomb squad, which had been tipped off to his questionable loyalties, Duquesne was charged in connection with an insurance-fraud scheme that included an attempt to recoup the loss of his film that had been destroyed on the
Tennyson,
a nervy bit of gamesmanship. After pleading guilty to the fraud