I SPY

The Espionage Act is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?

- AMY DAVIDSON SORKIN

In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again.

Volkswagen offered to pay Heine, who was an American citizen, to collect information on the production of airplanes in the U.S., including military planes. This was odd. Volkswagen had been founded only a few years earlier, as a Nazi Party-managed project for building a people’s car”; it hadn't even mass-produced that automobile yet, let alone a plane. And Heine was instructed to send the information not to its headquarters but to addresses that included a mail drop in Peru and an apartment on East Fiftyfourth Street, in Manhattan, occupied by a sometime artist’s model in her twenties named Lilly Stein, whose transportation-industry credentials were scant.