Operation Elster (“Magpie” in English) was a German espionage mission designed to gather intelligence on U.S. military and technological facilities during World War II. The mission began in September 1944 with two Nazi agents sailing from Kiel, Germany, on the U-1230 and landing in Maine on November 29, 1944. The agents were William Colepaugh, an American-born defector in Germany, and Erich Gimpel, a seasoned German intelligence agent. They spent nearly a month living in New York City, spending large amounts of money on entertainment, but without achieving any of their mission’s objectives. Colepaugh quickly lost his commitment to espionage and, hoping to avoid the death penalty for treason, turned himself in to the FBI and betrayed his partner Gimpel, ending the operation in late December 1944. In February 1945, the two agents were convicted of espionage by a military tribunal and sentenced to death. At the time, the military tribunal that named American citizens in a conspiracy to commit treason was only the third of its kind ever held in US history. When the war ended, their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment by President Harry S. Truman. Gimpel was paroled in 1955. Colepaugh was paroled in 1960. Operation Magpie was one of only two times (the other being with the submarine Innsbruck in the summer of 1942) that the Germans landed agents on American shores by submarine during the war. Despite a number of claims and speculations that the mission was intended to sabotage the Manhattan Project, there is no supporting evidence in official investigative documents.
