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Frederick " Fritz" Joubert Duquesne ( ; sometimes Du Quesne; 21 September 187724 May 1956) was a South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalism, and espionage. Many of the claims Duquesne made about himself are in dispute; over his lifetime he used multiple identities, reinvented his past at will, claimed family ties to aristocratic clans and famous people and even asserted the right to military titles and medals with no third-party verification.
Duquesne fought on the side of the Boers in the Second Boer War and as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He gathered HUMINT, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions as a covert field asset in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Central and South America, and the United States. Duquesne went by many pseudonym, fictionalized his identity and background on multiple occasions, and operated as a con artist. As a Boer spy he was known as the "Black Panther", in World War II he operated under the code name DUNN, and in FBI files he is frequently referred to as "The Duke". He was captured, convicted, and escaped from several prisons.
During the Second Boer War, Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time he escaped. On one occasion he infiltrated the British Army, became an officer and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and to assassinate the commander-in-chief of the British forces, Lord Kitchener. His team was given up by an informant and all were captured and sentenced to death. He later became known as "the man who killed Kitchener" since he claimed to have guided a German U-boat to sink HMS Hampshire on which Lord Kitchener was en route to Russian Empire in 1916, although forensics of the ship do not support this claim.
After a failed attempt to escape prison in Cape Town, Duquesne was sent to prison in Bermuda, but he escaped to the US and became an American citizen. In World War I, he became a spy and ring leader for German Empire, sabotaging and destroying British merchant ships in South America with concealed bombs. After he was caught by federal agents in New York in 1917, Duquesne feigned paralysis for two years and cut the bars of his cell to make his escape, thereby avoiding deportation to Britain where he faced murder charges for the deaths of British sailors.
In 1932, Duquesne was again captured in New York by federal agents and charged with both homicide and for being an escaped prisoner, only this time he was set free after the British authorities declined to pursue his wartime crimes. The last time Duquesne was captured and imprisoned was in 1941, when he and thirty-two other members of the Duquesne Spy Ring working for Nazi Germany were caught by William G. Sebold, a double agent with the FBI who half-pretended to be spying for the Germans. Duquesne was later convicted in the largest espionage conviction in American history.
Between wars, Duquesne served as an adviser on big-game hunting to US President Theodore Roosevelt, as a publicist in the movie business, as a journalist, as a fictional Australian war hero and as head of the New Food Society in New York. During the Second Boer War he had been under orders to kill Frederick Russell Burnham, Chief of Scouts in the British Army, but in 1910 he worked with both Burnham and then Rep. Robert Broussard to lobby the United States Congress to fund the importation of into the Louisiana bayous to solve a severe meat shortage.
As a youth, Duquesne became a hunter like his father. His hunting skills proved useful not only in the African veld, but also later in life when he would publish articles about and give lectures on big-game hunting. It was during one of his early hunting trips that Duquesne became interested in panthers. He observed a black panther patiently waiting motionless for the perfect time to strike while a cautious African Buffalo approached and drank from a nearby water hole. The panther became his totem and its hunting style also became his. In the Second Boer War, Duquesne became known as the "Black Panther", and as a spy in the 1930s he stamped "all of his communiques to Germany with the figure of a cat, back arched and fur raised in anger."
At age 12, Duquesne killed a Zulu people who attacked his mother. He used the man's assegai short sword to stab him in the stomach. Not long after the killing, a war party from a Bantu language-speaking tribe attacked the area near Nylstroom, and the Duquesne family was forced to retreat to the nearby river. The family, along with six other settler families, fought a long gun battle against the Impi and Duquesne shot and killed several. When the fighting ended, his uncle Koos, his wife and their baby were all dead.
When he was aged 13, Duquesne was sent to school in England. After graduation, biographer Clement Wood states that Duquesne went to Oxford University for a year and then attended the Académie Militaire Royale in Brussels; however, his attendance records at these two institutions have never been found. Also, Duquesne himself writes that after he finished school in England he was sent to Europe to study engineering, but on the ship he met an embezzlement named Christian de Vries and the two decided to take a trip around the world.
After British forces began an offensive aimed at capturing Pretoria, a portion of the gold reserve in the city's central bank and national mint was sent by train to the small town of Machadodorp, then by road to the neutral harbor of Maputo in Portuguese Mozambique to be shipped to the Netherlands for the use of President Paul Kruger and other Boer exiles who had fled from Africa. A final tally showed about 1.5 million pounds (680,000 kilos) of gold bullion was removed from the central bank and national mint between 29 May and 4 June 1900.
Duquesne was in command of a shipment of gold bullion being sent by wagon to Portuguese Mozambique; however, it never made it to Lourenço Marques. While in the bushveld of Portuguese Mozambique, a violent disagreement broke out among the shipment's escort. This resulted in a violent confrontation that left only three wounded Boers (including Duquesne) and several indigenous porters alive. Duquesne ordered the porters to hide the gold in a nearby cave for safekeeping, along with burning the wagons and killing any wounded they found. He gave the porters all the oxen, except for one which he rode away on. Historian Art Ronnie argued that the buried gold, commonly referred to as "Kruger's Millions" is only a legend; however, in 2001 and 2013 there have been news reports about possible discoveries of the missing gold.
Duquesne rejoined the Boer forces in time for the Battle of Bergendal, but his unit was forced to fall back to Portuguese Mozambique. Many members of the unit, including Duquesne, were captured by Portuguese forces and sent to an internment camp in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. For Duquesne, this would become a watershed event, as Ronnie noted "life would never be the same for him... In a few months, he would be launched on a forty-year career as a professional spy and counterfeit hero– a man who would constantly reinvent himself to suit the needs of the moment."
At Caldas da Rainha, Duquesne charmed the daughter of one of the camp's guards, who helped him escape to Paris. From there, he went to Aldershot, Hampshire and infiltrated the British Army. In 1901, Duquesne was posted to South Africa in 1901 as an officer. There, he passed through his hometown of Nylstroom, discovering that his parents' farm had been destroyed by British forces as part of scorched earth policies implemented by Lord Kitchener. Duquesne also discovered that his sister had been raped and killed, and his mother interned in the Nylstroom concentration camp. Ronnie writes: "the fate of his country and of his family would breed in him an all-consuming hatred of England" and "would turn him into what (a biographer of Duquesne) Clement Wood called: a walking living breathing searing killing destroying torch of hate".
Duquesne returned to Cape Town with secret plans to sabotage British installations and assassinate Kitchener. He recruited twenty Boers for his plans, but the group was betrayed by the wife of one. On 11 October 1901, while attending a dinner with Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the governor of the Cape Colony, Duquesne was arrested for criminal conspiracy and espionage. He was and sentenced to be executed along with his co-conspirators. The other members of his team were executed by firing squad, but as a plea bargain, Duquesne's sentence was reduced to life in prison. In exchange, Duquesne agreed to divulge secret Boer codes and to translate several of their dispatches. According to Ronnie, "for the rest of his life he swore he never betrayed the Boer cause but actually created new codes that would mislead the British." Duquesne was imprisoned in the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, a fortification built by the Dutch East India Company in 1666. The walls of the castle were extremely thick, yet night after night, Duquesne dug away the cement around the stones with an iron spoon. He nearly escaped one night, but a large stone slipped and pinned him in his tunnel. The next morning, a guard found him unconscious but uninjured.
Duquesne was one of many Boer prisoners sent to the British colony of Bermuda, an archipelago known for its frequent storm-wracked conditions, shark infested waters and dangerous reefs. According to Ronnie, Bermuda was an "impossible, hopeless, and impregnable prison of pink beaches and sunlit waters from which no prisoner could escape – or so believed the British." Duquesne escaped from several other prisoner-of-war camps, and on the night of 25 June 1902, he slipped out of his tent, climbed a barbed-wire fence, and swam 1.5 miles (2.4 km) past patrol boats and bright spot lights. He used a distant lighthouse for navigation until he arrived on the main island. Duquesne then went to the home of Anna Maria Outerbridge, a leader of a Boer Relief Committee. Outerbridge helped him escape to the port of St. George's, Bermuda, where another Boer Relief Committee member, W. E. Meyer, arranged for his transportation off the island. Within the week, Duquesne was a passenger on a ship heading to the United States.
During the Second Boer War, Duquesne was under orders to assassinate Frederick Russell Burnham, the American acting as Chief of Scouts for the British Army. After the war, Burnham remained active in counter-espionage for the British, and much of it involved keeping track of Duquesne. In 1910 he and Representative Robert Broussard founded the New Food Supply Society to import useful African wildlife into the US as a solution to a serious American meat shortage, and Broussard selected Duquesne as an expert. In support of this plan, Broussard introduced H.R. 23261, also known as the American Hippo Bill, attempting the appropriation of $250,000 to import hippopotamus into the Louisiana bayous as a food source and to control the water hyacinth then clogging Southern river systems. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt backed the plan, as did the US Department of Agriculture, as well as editorial writers in The Washington Post and The New York Times, which praised the taste of hippopotamus as "lake cow bacon". Duquesne's expert testimony on this subject before the House Committee on Agriculture is recorded in the Congressional Record. The bill fell just short of passing, and the New Foods organization was disbanded.
| To my friendly enemy, Major Frederick Russell Burnham, the greatest scout of the world, whose eyes were that of an Empire. I once craved the honor of killing him, but failing that, I extend my heartiest admiration. |
During this time, Duquesne became former President Roosevelt's personal shooting instructor and accompanied him on a hunting expedition. He published several newspaper articles on Roosevelt's hunting trip to Africa, safari big game hunting in general and the heroic accomplishments of Caucasian people to bring civilization to black Africans. Duquesne became a naturalized American citizen in December 1913.
After bombing Tennyson, MI5 (British intelligence) operating in Brazil arrested an accomplice named Bauer who identified Duquesne as both the perpetrator of the crime and the ringleader. Bauer further revealed that Duquesne was operating under his own name and two pseudonym, George Fordam and Piet Niacud. Niacud is the pronunciation of Duquesne reversed. British intelligence confirmed that Duquesne was "a German intelligence officer ... involved in a series of acts of sabotage against British shipping in South American waters during the war". His cover now blown, Duquesne moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and several weeks later placed an article in a newspaper reporting his own death in Bolivia at the hands of Amazonian natives.
Duquesne evaded British intelligence in South America and returned to New York around May 1916. Using the aliases George Fordam and Frederick Fredericks, he had taken out insurance policies for the cargo he shipped and he now filed claims for the "films" and "mineral samples" lost with the ships he sank off the coast of Brazil, including Tennyson. The insurance companies were reluctant to pay and began their own investigations, which would go on for another year.
In his book The Man Who Killed Kitchener, biographer Clement Wood states that Duquesne left for Europe in June 1916 under orders from German intelligence. Duquesne posed as the Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky and joined Lord Kitchener on HMS Hampshire in Scotland. Once on board, Duquesne signaled the German U-boat that sank the cruiser, thus killing Lord Kitchener. Duquesne made his own escape using a life raft before the ship was and he was rescued by the U-boat. Duquesne was allegedly awarded the Iron Cross for this act, and he appears in several pictures in German uniform wearing an Iron Cross, in addition to other medals. Captain Louis Botha, son of the former prime minister of South Africa General Louis Botha, further writes that "Duquesne was a great friend of the Botha family" and that Duquesne "rose from the status of a Private in the German Army to the rank of Colonel and received the Iron Cross during the great war." The authenticity of several of these claims has been challenged by modern biographers, and the German records that would confirm or deny at least parts of these accounts are now missing and presumed destroyed during the war. According to the official story, Hampshire was lost in a force 9 gale after striking a mine laid by U-75, a German U-boat.
The next confirmed appearance of Duquesne is in Washington, D.C., in July 1917, not long after the US declared war on Germany. He had contacted Broussard, who by now was a United States Senator. Unaware that Duquesne was now a German spy, Broussard attempted to help him obtain a position with General George Washington Goethals, the acting US Army Quartermaster and former chief engineer of the Panama Canal, but he was not successful. Additionally, Duquesne filed for an underwater electromagnetic mine which he then attempted to sell to the United States Navy.
As a covert spy, it was necessary for Duquesne to manipulate people, assuming new identities and cover stories. It is known that he was handsome, charismatic, intelligent, fluent in several languages and as FBI Agent Raymond Newkirk observed, "the Duke was a very interesting talker but he always had to be the center of attention." Duquesne also sometimes took his deceptions further than seems necessary.
With the advent of World War I, Duquesne's stories of great white hunters and African safaris no longer fascinated the American public, and when he returned to New York he was dropped from the lecture circuit. To get back on stage he needed new material, so with the help of German intelligence he re-invented himself and pretended to be an Allied war hero, Captain Claude Stoughton of the Western Australian Light Horse regiment, a man who claimed to have "seen more war than any man at present" and claimed to have been " three times, gassed four times, and stuck once with a hook." Duquesne appeared before New York audiences dressed in uniform as Stoughton to tell them war stories, promote the sale of Liberty Bonds and to make patriotic speeches for organizations such as the Red Cross. As historian Jon Mooallem explains it, "Captain Stoughton's career took off. His talks made decent money, his heroism earned him respect, and ladies found him alluring", and "the Black Panther was an adrenaline junkie ... his invented persona had such magnetism and such possibility, in fact, that he began deploying his alter-ego in a wide variety of personal appearances ... it is possible that Duquesne simply liked attention, the performance."
Duquesne was arrested in New York on 17 November 1917 on charges of fraud for insurance claims. At the time of his arrest, he had in his possession a large file of news clippings related to the bombing of ships, as well as a letter from the Assistant German Vice Consul at Managua in Nicaragua. The letter indicated that Duquesne was "one who has rendered considerable service to the German cause." British authorities were also looking at Duquesne as the agent responsible for "murder on the high seas, arson, faking Admiralty documents and conspiring against the The Crown", and the American authorities agreed that they would extradition Duquesne to Britain, if the British sent him back afterward to serve his sentence for fraud.
This man is partly paralysed in the right leg and always carries a cane. May apply for treatment at a hospital or private physician. He also has a skin disease which is a form of eczema. If located, arrest, hold and wire, Detective Division, Police Headquarters, New York City, and an officer will be sent for him with necessary papers.
The Daily Mail published the following on 27 May 1919:
Col. Fritz du Quesne, a fugitive from justice, is wanted by His Majesty's government for trial on the following charges: Murder on the high seas; the sinking and burning of British ships; the burning of military stores, warehouses, coaling stations, conspiracy, and the falsification of Admiralty documents.
Duquesne fled to Mexico and Europe, but in 1926 he moved back to New York and assumed a new identity as Frank de Trafford Craven. He worked for Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America (FBO Pictures), and later RKO Pictures, as part of the publicity staff. As part of this job he moved back to Manhattan, where he was well-known under his real name. In 1930, Duquesne moved to the Quigley poll, a producer of movie magazines, and called himself Major Craven.
On 23 May 1932, police arrested Duquesne in the Quigley Building in New York. He was brutally interrogated by police and charged with murder on the high seas. Duquesne claimed it was a case of mistaken identity and that his name really was Major Craven. Wood had recently published The Man Who Killed Kitchener, so the police asked Wood to identify the man in custody. Wood insisted that the man was not Duquesne but rather Major Craven, whom he had known for five years. Police did not believe Wood and Agent Thomas J. Tunney was brought in to positively identify Craven as Duquesne, the same man he had arrested in 1917. Duquesne was charged with homicide and as an escaped prisoner. He was defended by Arthur Garfield Hays. After Britain declined to pursue his war crimes, noting that the statute of limitations had expired, the judge threw out the only remaining charge of escape from prison and released Duquesne.
After his release, Duquesne remained associated with the Quigley family, and he talked for hours about the methods he used to blow up ships. To verify the stories, Quigley had Duquesne meet with several experts, the most prominent of whom was Fr. Wilfrid Parsons, SJ, editor of the Jesuits magazine, America. The experts verified his command of languages, that he was widely traveled and a skilled impersonator. While the chronology was imprecise, everything Duquesne told Quigley that could be verified proved to be correct.
In the spring of 1934, Duquesne became an intelligence officer for the Order of 76, an American pro-Nazism organization, and in January 1935 he began working for the US government's Works Progress Administration. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), knew Duquesne from his work in World War I and instructed his new chief of operations in the US, Col. Nikolaus Ritter, to make contact with Duquesne. Ritter had been friends with Duquesne back in 1931, and the two spies reconnected in New York on 3 December 1937. Ritter employed several other successful agents across the US, most notably Herman Lang, who delivered to the Germans the blueprints for the Norden bombsight, but he also made the mistake of recruiting a man who would later become a double agent, 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 code name TRAMP and to contact a fellow agent code named DUNN, who was Duquesne.
The FBI leased three adjacent rooms in Times Square. One room would serve as Sebold's office from which he would receive intelligence reports from German spies that would later be censored by the FBI and partially transmitted by Sebold to Germany. The other two rooms were used by German-speaking FBI agents who would listen in with headphones and record the meetings using a motion picture camera behind a two-way wall mirror. The first time Duquesne arrived at Sebold's office, he surprised the FBI agents by conducting an examination of the office, opening chests, looking in corners and around mirrors, and pointedly asking Sebold, "Where are the mics?" Once he believed he was safe, Duquesne raised his pants leg and removed documents from his sock, such as: a sketch and photo of the M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, a drawing of a new light tank design, a photo of a US Navy Mosquito boat, a photo of a grenade launcher, and reports on US tanks he had observed at bases at West Point and in Tennessee. Duquesne also described sabotage techniques he had used in earlier wars such as small bombs with slow fuses he could drop through a hole in his pants pocket, and he commented on where he might use these devices again.
The 64-year-old Duquesne did not escape this time. He was sentenced to eighteen years in prison, with a two-year concurrent sentence and $2,000 fine for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He began his sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, along with fellow German spy Herman Lang. During his time in prison, he was mistreated and beaten by other inmates. In 1945, Duquesne was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, due to his failing physical and mental health. In 1954 he was released owing to ill health, having served fourteen years. His last known lecture was in 1954 at the Adventurers' Club of New York, titled "My Life – in and out of Prison".
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