Nazi Spies and New York Perspectives

The opening credits to the 1945 spy thriller “The House on 92nd Street,” released just a month after Hiroshima, coyly proclaim that the film “could not be made public until the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.”

In fact, the German spy ring on which the movie was loosely based had been smashed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation four years earlier — after its agents stole the secret Norden bombsight, but before they could further penetrate American military secrets. (The Germans got the bombsight; the Russians got the bomb.)

So much for artistic license. In “Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the F.B.I. Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring” (Scribner), Peter Duffy absorbingly recounts the true story of William G. Sebold, a naturalized American citizen turned counterspy. Mr. Sebold was instrumental in bringing down a group of German agents led by Frederick Joubert Duquesne, whose exploits in New York merit their own movie. (He worked as a theater critic under an assumed name and even tricked The New York Times into reporting his death; Mr. Sebold, who entered a kind of witness-protection program, never got an obituary himself.)

Mr. Duffy’s retelling of the F.B.I. sting operation and of the ambiguity of some German-Americans is right on target. Thirty-three German agents were arrested. Fourteen of them pleaded not guilty, but all were convicted on Dec. 13, 1941, two days after the United States declared war against Germany.

Hoping to visit the Hudson Valley this summer? Even if you can’t make it — or maybe especially — Vernon Benjamin’s thoroughly informative, approachable (don’t let the bulk intimidate you) and illustrated historical narrative of what Congress called “the landscape that defined America” is a must.