The Waterfront Mata Hari: How a Father-Daughter Spy Team Hunted Ships in New York Harbor

0:00 Welcome back everybody. So today we're looking at the waterfront, Mana Haari. It's a strange one. Just to let you know, it's one of the most overlooked stories from the secret world of espionage. We're gonna be looking to a father daughter team that operated right under America's nose in the heart of New York City. The story of Simon email Codell and the young woman he turned into the waterfront, Mada Haari. So take a picture of New York Harbor in the late nineteen thirties and early forties. Liberty ships and freighters crowd the docks. Len Lee's supplies bound for Britain pile up on the piers. Cemen from every Allied nation pour into the waterfront bars of Brooklyn and Manhattan after their long voyages. The air smells of salt, diesel

0:44 and cheap whiskey, and somewhere in that haze, and middle aged German American German born American and his attractive young daughter are collecting secrets that could help synk those very ships. Simon Kodell was born in Wurzburg, Bavaria. He came to the United States in the early nineteen hundreds. In his twenties, enlisted in the U. S. Army, served as a corporal, and became a naturalized citizen. During the First World War, he had already shown a talent for espionage working for Imperial Germany. After the war, he settled into an ordinary American life, at least on the surface. By the nineteen thirties, with the rise of the Nazis, Codell was back in the game. They out there. Germany's military and Chelenging Service

1:19 enrolled him as agent A two sorry age agent eight twenty eleven. His specialty was American shipping and industrial production. Codell was patient and methodical. He posed as a concerned citizen, writing letters to congressman and officials, asking detailed questions about defense, plants and ports. He haunted the water front himself, watching ships load and unload from ferry decks and even from a small fishing boat. But his most effective tool was actually something else. It was his adopted daughter, Marie. Marie Codell was born in Brooklyn in nineteen eighteen to take her and her brother and his orphans. By the mid nineteen thirties, she was an attractive young woman, so Codell took her in when he was around thirty six, thirty

2:08 seven at the time. In nineteen thirty six, when she was eighteen, Simon arranged for her travel to Germany. There she received training from the Avere. When she returned to New York the following year, she was ready, Simon began sending marine to the waterfront bars. Her job was simple and dangerous. Strike up conversations with sailors. By them, drink, smile, flirt, and listen. The men talked about cargo, sailing, dates, destinations.

2:32 Marie reported everything back to her father. He called it, with a mixture of pride and dark humor, the Waterfront mana Hari, after the famous World War One spy who used seduction as her weapon. Marie was very effective through the men she dated. She supplied enough information for Simon to produce detailed reports for the German Navy. One report covered American ships inspected by the British on suspicion of carrying contraband another deal with the flow of supplies leaving New York for the Allies. Simon and self continued gathering open source material and observing the harbor. Together they built a safe stream of intelligence that reached Berlin long before the US entered the war. Their work was not glamorous.

3:11 It was repetitive, grubby, and after demeaning and often demeaning from Marie. Later she would claim that her father was abusive and she acted under pressure. Whether that was true or simply a defense strategy, the relationship with the true between the two was clearly complicated. Marie even became involved indirectly with a British sailor by name of Duncan scott Ford, whose own later espionage activities in Lisbon led to his execution by the British in nineteen forty two. The web of contacts around the malt Kotals stretched further than most people realized. For years, the pair operated with surprising freedom.

3:45 American counter intelligence was still finding its feet. The FBI military authorities were more focused on domestic radical groups and later on Japanese and German agents. After Pearl Harbor, the Codell's activities before the summer nineteen forty one I fell until late the legal gray zone. That timing, when later, saved them from the harshest possible penalties. You see, everything began to unrival in nineteen forty four. By then, the US was fully out war and security around the ports of Titans. Simon had been ordered out of the Eastern Defense Command in nineteen forty three had to move to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. On October twenty third, nineteen forty four, agents arrested him there. Marie was arrested the same day

4:25 in New York. The charges conspiracy to commit espionage under the Peacetime Statute. The trial that follows relatively quiet by the standards of wartime spy cases. Simon depleted guilty. Marie went to trial and was convicted. She claimed she had acted under duress and that her father had physically abused both her and her mother. The court said Simon to fifteen years, Marie received seven and a half. Both avoided the possibility of the death penalty that maritime espionage could have brought. Their known spying had happened while the United States was still officially neutral. Simon died actually in nineteen forty nine, so just a few years after being sentenced and not long after his release are while still in custody.

5:06 Records differ slightly on the exact circumstances. Marie served her time and then largely disappeared from public view. The story faded into the background of long wartime spy dramas, the Dukesen Ring, the landing of German saboteurs, the Atomic Secrets, the Waterfund. Mona Hari never became a household dame, but yet the case matters. It shows how vulnerable American ports were in the years before. Pearl Harbor demonstrates the a German intelligence preference for patient, low profile agents who used open sources, and also raises uncomfortable questions about the use of family members, especially a young woman in intelligence work.

5:44 Mary was both instrument and, by her own later account, victim. There's a photograph that sometimes circulates with the story, a newspaper image of Simon and Marie side by side, the caption noting the deep patreod for Britain. The faces look ordinary. That ordinariness is what makes the tales so unsettling. Spies do not always look like the figures in the movies.

6:03 Sometimes they look like a middle aged man writing letters to his congressman, or a young woman laughing with sailors in a Brooklyn bar. Today, the waterfront bars are mostly gone, replaced by parks and high rises. The ships that are once crowded the York Harbor a museums for pieces or scraps, but the lesson remains. Espionage thrives in the gaps between nations of peace and nations of war, between the public face of a citizen and the private work of an agent, between a father's ambition and a daughter's limited choices. That's the strange spy fact for today. That's it for now.