Intelligence officer seeks to commemorate Nazi infiltration

HANCOCK, Maine (AP) If a retired intelligence agent has his way, a plaque will be placed on Mount Desert Island to commemorate the World War II saga of two German spies who were dropped off by U-boat at Hancock Point.

The plaque would be placed at Salisbury Cove, pointing thousands of summer visitors to the spot across Frenchman Bay where Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh slipped ashore in a small rubber boat on the night of Nov. 29, 1944. They carried loaded revolvers and more than $100,000 in cash and diamonds.

Just over a month later, the two men were apprehended with great fanfare in New York City.

The New England chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers plans to fund plaques throughout the region to commemorate historic spy sites. Dick Gay, a retired agent and innkeeper in Blue Hill, wants Maine's U-boat site to be the first story selected.

''Submarines were everywhere during the war, but I think our deal is by far the most exciting story,'' Gay said. ''I'm still digging. There's more story here than meets the eye.''

The Association of Former Intelligence Officers is a nonprofit educational organization based in McLean, Va. Elizabeth Bancroft, its director of publications, said no decision has been made on where the first plaque will be located.

''The whole idea was to acknowledge the role of intelligence at the local level,'' she said. ''New England [chapter] had the idea first, but we're hoping this will spread.''

Residents of Hancock are familiar of the story about how young homemaker Mary Forni and 17-year-old Boy Scout Harvard Hodgkins spotted the two spies on the snowy night they came ashore.

Gay has spent the past six months researching the incident, through the eyewitness accounts of Forni, the U-boat's radio operator, and one of the spies, whom Gay claims is now living in South America and communicating with him by letter.

The 250-foot submarine, known as U-1230, must have passed through Frenchman Bay, taking a deep-water path similar to that which the high-speed ferry The Cat takes now.

Gay believes Frenchman Bay was chosen primarily because German intelligence would have had the detailed charts of the Maine coast that German cruise ship captains used to visit Bar Harbor at the turn of the century.

''They probably had better charts than we had,'' Gay said.

Erich Gimpel, 35, was a professional spy and a native of Germany. But William Colepaugh, 26, was a native of Connecticut and a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who had defected and offered his services to the Nazis.

Forni was driving home from a card party after midnight when she saw the men, wearing odd topcoats and hats and carrying bags, as they walked along the road. She slowed the car and visually traced their snowy footprints to a wooded area.

''They just weren't like normal Mainers in November,'' Forni, 86, who still lives on Hancock Point, said Friday. ''You just never saw anybody walking without boots when it was snowy like that. It's a wonder I didn't stop and offer them a ride.''

When Forni told her husband what she had seen, he suggested that the men probably had car trouble. But something didn't seem right, so Forni called a friend, the wife of Deputy Sheriff Dana Hodgkins, who was away on a hunting trip. When he returned about a week later, investigators questioned Forni.

For a month, she waited to hear from the FBI, while the small town buzzed with stories about the mysterious men.

The story finally broke on Jan. 2, 1945, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover announced the capture of the spies after Colepaugh robbed his partner and turned informant. FBI agents said Deputy Hodgkins' son, Harvard, had noticed the spies while driving home from a dance and tipped off authorities.

But Forni doubts Hodgkins could have seen the men that snowy night without her spotting him, and she didn't see the youth on her drive home.

Gay believes the young man, who died several years ago, was a convenient cover story for American intelligence officers who had been tracking the sub.

''That story fit in with the FBIs needs,'' Gay said. ''They came down here and scoured the place. The story just gelled.''

Gay believes that U.S. intelligence officers intercepted and decoded encrypted messages sent by U-1230.

''We were reading their traffic. In retrospect, we must have known they were here,'' Gay said.

In 1945, the FBI said U-1230 and its spies had been sent to report on troop movements and shipping. Gay suggests instead that Gimpel and Colepaugh were headed to MIT to spy on or even sabotage the Manhattan Project, which was developing the atomic bomb.

''It was the end of the war, and we were winning the race,'' Gay said.

The men were tried in secret military tribunals, were jailed at Alcatraz and Leavenworth, and like fellow German spies who had been caught on Long Island, were sentenced to hanging.

But after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, President Harry Truman commuted their sentences sometime during the 1950s. Colepaugh is said to have died in prison; Gimpel simply disappeared.