Donegan made clear this would not be possible, as the saboteurs were likely to be brought before some kind of court, and everything would then “come out in the newspapers.” He gave Dasch a choice. One option was for the FBI to acknowledge his contribution in rounding up the other saboteurs, in which case he would be given “appropriate consideration” by the attorney general. The drawback was that news of his betrayal would rapidly make its way back to Germany, endangering the lives of his parents and relatives. The second option was for Dasch to plead guilty, in which case he would be treated the same as the other saboteurs, and be sentenced to a long prison term. After a “period of time,” say six months, Director Hoover would recommend a presidential pardon. 2 If he followed this course, “everything would appear in order to the Germans” and he would not be singled out as the traitor. The choice was entirely up to Dasch.
It was clear from the way Donegan spoke which option the FBI preferred.
Dasch felt trapped. He told the two FBI agents that his information about conditions in Germany would go “stale” if he spent too long in prison, and he would no longer be able to fulfill his dream of leading a propaganda offensive against the Nazis. He wanted to know exactly how long he would be in prison. He was also frightened that the Nazis would take revenge on his parents, particularly his mother. At times, he broke down crying. By the end of the ninety-minute session in Donegan’s office, he had come around to the FBI’s point of view, and agreed to plead guilty and be sentenced to prison, on the understanding that he would be released from prison sooner rather than later.
Traynor explained that in order to deter future sabotage operations, it was necessary to convince Nazi leaders that the American coastline was impenetrable, even though this was obviously not the case. Hitler should be led to suspect that Operation Pastorius had been betrayed from within his own intelligence service, thereby creating distrust at the highest levels of the German government. Much of the propaganda and deterrence value of rounding up eight Nazi saboteurs would be lost if the real reason for their capture became known.
“You will have to become an actor, and a damn good one,” Traynor told Dasch. “You will have to steel yourself to play the part, particularly since there will be many occasions when you feel downhearted and depressed.”3
Dasch promised to do as Traynor and Donegan asked. After being taken to the bathroom to change into his prison clothes, he was escorted back to his cell.
WHEN DASCH first walked into FBI headquarters in Washington, Hoover’s immediate inclination was to use him as a decoy to channel misinformation to Hitler, and arrest any future teams of Nazi saboteurs. This was a tactic he had already employed successfully with William Sebold, a German-born naturalized American recruited by the Abwehr to operate a clandestine shortwave radio station on Long Island. Sebold reported what had happened to the American authorities and, for the next sixteen months, supplied his masters in Berlin with bogus information fed to him by the FBI. As a result, Hoover had rolled up an entire network of thirty-three Nazi agents in July 1941, effectively shutting down Abwehr espionage operations in the United States. In return, the FBI helped Sebold begin a new life under an assumed identity after he testified against his fellow agents at their trial.
Hoover quickly decided that Dasch’s case was very different from Sebold’s. He did not believe it would be possible to keep the Dasch affair out of the newspapers for very long. Other government agencies knew about the saboteur landings, and people were bound to talk. There was already speculation in the newspapers about a hunt for Nazi saboteurs in Florida. A reporter from the Associated Press had been asking questions about a rumor that the FBI had arrested some German agents who landed on the East Coast. Although the reporter had been warned off the story, the news was sure to get around.
“This thing can blow up in our faces at any moment,” Hoover told Eugene Connelley on June 24.4 “If the AP has the story, we can be sure that some of the columnists will have it within a few days.” Although his men were keeping a close watch on Haupt, Hoover was afraid they might “lose” Neubauer if the news broke prematurely.
Hoover was paranoid about leaks from other government agencies. At one time or another, he suspected the army, the navy, and the Coast Guard of talking to the press about the Dasch case. In fact, some of the leaks may well have come from within the FBI itself. Bureau documents show that reports of the Amagansett incident were widely disseminated within the organization, particularly in Florida, where they were discussed at a law enforcement conference attended by dozens of people.5
In addition to the danger of leaks, there was also “the danger facing our coasts,” in Hoover’s phrase. The landings in Long Island and Florida had demonstrated the lamentable state of the nation’s coastal defenses. Coast Guard patrols were untrained and unarmed, and there were not enough of them to mount anything approaching a permanent vigil. Kerling’s men had reached Jacksonville without arousing anyone’s suspicions. The fact that a Coast Guard patrol had run into Dasch on the beach at Amagansett was sheer coincidence. The FBI director was angry with the Coast Guard for allowing a stranded U-boat to escape, and doing nothing to prevent the intruders from taking the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan.
Mixed up in all these calculations was the question of who would get the credit for rounding up the saboteurs. Already embroiled in a furious argument with the Coast Guard and navy intelligence over who had responsibility for investigating the case, Hoover feared that some other agency would “flamboyantly announce” a major breakthrough. The only way to prevent this from happening was for Hoover to make a flamboyant announcement of his own. He wanted the Nazi saboteur case to be recognized as a major FBI triumph, an important contribution to the war effort. Which meant a triumph for Hoover personally, since the Bureau was his creation and he was its public face. In Hoover’s mind, the national interest, the Bureau’s interests, and his own personal reputation were inextricably intertwined.
The press conference at which Hoover would break the news was planned like a military campaign. The director brought a large entourage to New York, having already decided that Haupt would be arrested as soon as he left his house on Saturday morning. He waited all day Saturday for news from Chicago of Neubauer’s arrest, which finally arrived at 6:45 in the evening. Journalists were then told to come to the FBI’s New York office at 8:30 for an important announcement.
The rest of the government had been left in the dark about Hoover’s intentions. A few minutes before 8:30, his aides began phoning senior government officials to tell them what was about to happen.6 Hoover himself called his nominal superior, Attorney General Francis Biddle, to say he had seized “the last” of the saboteurs, and was about to inform the press. Biddle, who was dining with the Yugoslav ambassador when the call came through, felt an immediate “flood of relief.”7 “I had had a bad week trying to sleep as I thought of the possibilities. The saboteurs might have other caches hidden, and at any moment an explosion was possible. Would it not have been better to alert the country, even if we lost our quarry?”
Hoover’s aides told the War Department that the FBI was compelled to go public because “the newspapers became aware of the story” as a result of the arrests of Haupt and Neubauer in Chicago.8 This was untrue. FBI memos show that Hoover had been planning to break the story for at least three days, and was simply waiting for the right moment.
“I have a very important statement to make,” the FBI director began, once the reporters were all assembled. “I want you to listen carefully: this is a serious business.”9
The story that Hoover told the press was a dramatic one, and emphasized the central role played by the FBI in cracking the case. There was no mention of Dasch, and no mention of Dasch’s encounter with the Coast Guard on Amagansett Beach. An amused Biddle later recalled that Hoover’s performance and the accompanying press reaction created the impression that “a particularly brilliant FBI agent, probably attending the school in sabotage where the ei
ght had been trained, had been able to get on the inside, and make regular reports to America. Mr. Hoover, as the United Press put it, declined to comment on whether or not FBI agents had infiltrated into not only the Gestapo but also the High Command, or whether he had watched the saboteurs land ...” 10
The New York Times came out with a front-page banner headline of the type normally reserved for major events of the war, such as Pearl Harbor and the Japanese defeat in the Battle of Midway:
FBI SEIZES 8 SABOTEURS LANDED BY U-BOATS
HERE AND IN FLORIDA TO BLOW UP WAR PLANTS
INVADERS CONFESS
Had TNT to Blast Key
Factories, Railroads and
City Water System
USED RUBBER BOATS
Carried $150,000 Cash
—All Had Lived in U.S.
—Face Death Penalty
The Times story quoted Hoover as saying FBI agents had been pursuing the saboteurs “almost from the moment the first group set foot on United States soil,” and had recovered enough sabotage equipment for “a two-year campaign of terror.”11 It recalled the infamous Black Tom explosion in World War I, and accused former German diplomats in the United States of recruiting German-Americans for use as saboteurs prior to the outbreak of war. But it added reassuringly: “Before the men could begin carrying out their orders, the FBI was on their trail and the round-up began. One after another, they fell into the special agents’ net. Each confessed fully, providing information that will make repetition of the sabotage invasions difficult.”
A few more details were provided by Walter Winchell, the most widely read gossip columnist in America and beneficiary of frequent leaks direct from Hoover, including a fair amount of misinformation. In his weekly radio broadcast, Winchell reported that the saboteurs had “spent a lot of time in Broadway stores” and well-known Manhattan restaurants and nightclubs. “The apprehension of the spies by the G-men, based on the slightest of tips, will take your breath away,” he told his listeners. 12 Although the full, incredible story could only be told after the war was over, Winchell was already in a position to reveal that “FBI agents are not only in the United States, but are even in the Gestapo and the border of Berlin.” He hailed the arrest of the saboteurs as “the most exciting achievement yet of John Edgar Hoover’s G-men.”
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT was entertaining European royalty at Hyde Park, his ancestral home, when he learned about Hoover’s latest exploit. Just why a wartime leader of the United States would want to spend so much time with dethroned monarchs was a mystery to his advisers, but they were willing to indulge him. It was one of FDR’s foibles, a way of relaxing, like mixing martinis or going through his stamp collection. But sometimes even kings and queens got on his nerves.
The royals “are driving the P to distraction,” Roosevelt’s seventeen-year-old goddaughter, Margaret “Roly” Hambley, wrote in her diary, after being roped into entertaining King George of Greece. To her great disappointment, the king turned out to be a very ordinary sort of person, not at all “the kind of man Churchill is . . . It is just awful trying to remind oneself that he is a king and should be treated as such . . . If only he had some kind of monocle or something on!”13 Other guests at Hyde Park that weekend included Princess Martha of Sweden, FDR’s alter ego Harry Hopkins and his fiancée, Louise Macy, who, Roly commented tartly, had “a very lifeless way of talking” in an affected “English accent.” The formidable Queen Wilhelmina of Holland was expected shortly.
The president had just returned from taking his guests for a ride through the Hudson Valley countryside when Biddle called with news of the arrest of the saboteurs and the seizure of $175,000, a huge sum by 1942 standards. “Not enough, Francis,” he joked.14 “Let’s make real money out of them. Sell the rights to Barnum and Bailey for a million and a half—the rights to take them around the country in lion cages at so much a head.”
As an aficionado of spy stories and tales of subversive enemy activity, Roosevelt was “delighted” by the latest turn of events, and chuckled at the thought of the embarrassment inflicted on the Nazis.15 Biddle thought the president really believed in the Old Testament principle “a tooth for a tooth.” Like Hoover, Roosevelt was concerned that America’s coastline was insufficiently protected: he wanted to use the case to send a very clear warning to Hitler to refrain from similar stunts in the future. He summed up his thinking in a memorandum to the attorney general three days later, outlining his ideas for making an example of the saboteurs, and deterring any others who might follow them.
The two American citizens [Burger and Haupt] are guilty of high treason. This being wartime, it is my inclination to try them by court martial. I do not see how they can offer any adequate defense. Surely they are just as guilty as it is possible to be and it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory.16
In the case of the other six who I take it are German citizens, I understand that they came over in submarines wearing seamen’s clothes— in all probability German Naval clothes—and that some of them at least landed on our shores in these German Naval clothes. I think it can be proved that they formed a part of the German Military or Naval Service. They were apprehended in civilian clothes. This is an absolute parallel of the case of Major André in the Revolution and of Nathan Hale. Both of them were hanged. Here again it is my inclination that they be tried by court martial as were André and Hale. Without splitting hairs, I can see no difference.
Biddle did not need reminding that Nathan Hale had been a spy for George Washington captured by the British behind their lines on Long Island and hung the very next morning, on September 22, 1776. Major John André was a British officer caught by Washington’s army behind American lines in civilian clothes after returning from negotiations with Benedict Arnold for the surrender of West Point. He too was found guilty of espionage and executed by hanging, on October 2, 1780. Like Hale and André, the Nazi saboteurs had violated the customary rules of war and should be dealt with accordingly. That, at least, was how Roosevelt saw it.
“I want one thing clearly understood, Francis,” he told Biddle the next time they discussed what should be done with the saboteurs. “I won’t give them up . . . I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?”
NOT EVERYONE in the government was happy with Hoover’s handling of the case, and particularly his decision to go public. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, was “very, very angry” with the FBI for failing to consult with the military before announcing the arrests of the saboteurs.17 A patrician Republican lawyer recruited by Roosevelt to give a bipartisan character to the war effort, Stimson felt that an extraordinary chance had been lost to destroy Nazi sabotage networks once and for all.
Stimson’s chief of intelligence, Major General George Strong, was informed about Hoover’s press conference a few moments before it began, and given no opportunity to object. “The premature breaking of the story has wrecked our plans for seizing two additional groups of four men each who apparently are scheduled to land on our shores in August,” Strong complained the following day.18 “In consequence, the only benefit to National Defense that can be obtained is the deterrent effect upon possible sabotage by the prompt trial and execution of the eight men now in the hands of the FBI.”
At least Strong was informed in advance. Other officials received their information from the press. The head of naval intelligence in New York, whose men had dug up sabotage material on Amagansett Beach, was “incensed” by the “entire absence of any reference” to his department in the materials released by the FBI. Captain R. C. MacFall described the failure to keep him informed of developments as “rather shoddy” and “not conducive to full cooperative effort.”19 “Our operatives were made to appear stupid when they were informed by local police and radio broadcasts that the enemy agents had been picked up. In view of the fact that they had been sitting in company with FBI agents in fox holes on the beach during rain and fog, and were
being bitten with sand fleas, they do not feel very happy being treated this way.”
The sniping went both ways. Hoover was furious with naval intelligence for allegedly “concealing” evidence from the FBI. He delighted in shooting down attempts by other government agencies to muscle their way into the investigation. He accused the Justice Department of making “amateurish suggestions” and blasted a senator who called on the FBI to employ “strong arm tactics” against the saboteurs as “a cheap politician trying to get some publicity.”20 When the Office of Strategic Services asked for access to the transcripts of the interrogations of Dasch and the other saboteurs, Hoover ruled that “none of this material is to be plowed over until we are definitely through with it.” By contrast, when other agencies refused the FBI access to their materials, he was always quick to complain.
Some of this bureaucratic bickering percolated up to an exasperated FDR. The chief of the president’s Secret Service detail, Mike Reilly, complained that “Hoover’s boys hogged all the credit for running down the culprits.” 21 A branch of the U.S. Treasury, the Secret Service had played a peripheral role in the investigation, tracing the dollar bills that Dasch used to try to bribe the coastguardsman on Amagansett Beach to a shipment of currency sent to Germany in 1939. Reilly complained that the nation’s oldest federal law enforcement agency always received “fullest cooperation from Army and Navy Intelligence . . . but never the slightest recognition from FBI.”
IN THE meantime, Dasch was having second thoughts about his agreement to plead guilty. Escorted back to his cell from Donegan’s office on the afternoon of June 27, he had “ample time” to brood over his situation. At 10:25 that evening, he asked his FBI guard for another meeting with Donegan. The guard promptly relayed the message to Donegan, who said he would see the prisoner in the morning.