Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

Burger described how he had scattered bits of evidence on the beach, including a pack of cigarettes, bathing trunks, shirt, socks, and a vest. These items had probably already led the American authorities to the buried arms cache, making it impossible for any member of the group to carry out Kappe’s orders for a large-scale sabotage campaign.

  By now, the two V-men had worked themselves up into a state of high emotion, and were sobbing and hugging each other for support. Instead of commenting directly on Burger’s actions, Dasch reached out and patted him on the arm.6 Burger told Dasch he had long suspected him of being an American agent: how else to explain his remarkable lack of interest in the details of sabotage training at Quenz Lake? Dasch’s Nazi posturing had also seemed very artificial.

  As he listened to Burger’s tales of Nazi Party intrigues and repression of political opponents, Dasch decided that his companion was “made to order” for “the setup which I hope to be able to create to fight that rotten gang.”7 In his mind, the two of them would play starring roles in the anti-Hitler propaganda campaign, using as their weapons the knowledge they had gained of the inner workings of the Nazi system and the wads of American dollars supplied to them by Kappe. Together, they would open up the eyes of the German people to the truth about Nazism.

  “Kid, you are a godsend,” he said, putting his long, gangly arms around the stolid Burger. “God brought us together. We are going to make a team.”8

  It was getting on toward 1 p.m., and suddenly both men realized that they would be late for their planned meeting with Quirin and Heinck at the Swiss Chalet. In order to head the others off, Dasch called the Hotel Chesterfield, only to discover that they had never checked in there, as Dasch had recommended. He and Burger interpreted this as a sign that their two companions “did not trust us” and were going to be difficult to control.9

  Having established that they had similar views, Dasch and Burger now had to formulate a plan of action. Beyond wanting to hit Hitler “where it hurts,” neither man had a very clear idea of what to do next. They were both afraid to go to the New York office of the FBI because Kappe had told them that it was under constant observation by the Gestapo. On the other hand, they also had to be careful not to be caught by the American authorities before they could turn themselves in voluntarily.

  The solution they eventually agreed upon was to telephone the FBI in New York, provide a code word and a rough outline of their mission, and announce that one of them would travel to Washington to meet with J. Edgar Hoover “on a very important matter.”10 Since it would be easy to trace a call from their hotel, they decided to look for a more discreet place to make the call. Burger jotted down the number of the FBI’s local office from the telephone directory, and handed it to Dasch.

  They were still talking and making plans when they realized they might be late for their second rendezvous with Quirin and Heinck at 6 p.m. Rushing out into the street, they jumped into a taxi and headed uptown to Grant’s Tomb.

  STANDING ON a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, the monument to America’s Civil War hero was one of New York’s most celebrated landmarks. Built at the end of the nineteenth century using eight thousand tons of granite, it was an American version of the great European monuments that the saboteurs had been gazing at just a few weeks before, the Brandenburg Gate and the Arc de Triomphe—a little ugly and crass, but exuding power and strength. Across the front of the tomb, above the Ionic columns, were the words of Ulysses S. Grant following the deadliest war America had ever fought: LET US HAVE PEACE.

  The great chunks of polished white marble, the American eagles with their wings outstretched, the sheer size of the monument—“the tomb of all tombs,” in the words of Theodore Roosevelt—all combined to create an image of a resurgent America after a great national catastrophe. Over 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War, compared to 100,000 in World War I; American deaths in World War II would eventually total around 200,000. The country had bounded back from these earlier crises, as it appeared to be recovering from the devastating setback of Pearl Harbor. It was this self-confidence that Dasch and his men had been sent to America to destroy.

  When Dasch and Burger pulled up in a cab on Riverside Drive, the sun was already beginning to go down, sending flashes of light through the panoply of trees along the Hudson River. Quirin and Heinck were sitting on a bench in front of Grant’s Tomb, nervous and angry about the missed lunchtime meeting, and almost ready to leave. When they saw their companions arrive, twenty minutes late, they showed no sign of recognition. Instead, they got up from the bench and walked along 120th Street toward Columbia University. Dasch and Burger trailed behind.

  As they crossed Broadway, the four men finally came together. Quirin and Heinck were full of recriminations, saying they were about to leave New York because they feared something had happened to Dasch and Burger. Quirin reminded Dasch of Kappe’s orders to move to Chicago as soon as possible, and set up a sabotage cell there. Neither he nor Heinck felt safe in Manhattan, he complained.

  Dasch tried to calm them down. He told them he had many matters to attend to as group leader, such as making sure their identity papers were in order and contacting various people about their future work. They would all have to stay in Manhattan until he was ready to leave. In the meantime, they should try to remember the formulas for homemade explosives they had studied at Quenz Lake.

  Quirin and Heinck were themselves divided over whether to go back to collect the boxes of explosive materials in Amagansett. Quirin, who had always shown the greatest enthusiasm for the sabotage mission, wanted to return immediately. Heinck, by contrast, was nervous, and helped persuade his friend that Dasch’s encounter with the coastguardsman made it too dangerous to try to pick up the gear. As they walked away from Grant’s Tomb, Heinck told Burger, “I guess the job is all over now.”11

  Although they agreed to meet again the following Tuesday at 11 a.m. at the Horn and Hardart in Macy’s, the two pairs of saboteurs were deeply suspicious of each other. When Dasch asked Quirin and Heinck the name of their hotel, they replied, “The Chesterfield.” Dasch knew this to be false because he had called the hotel a few hours before and was told they had never registered there. Dasch told Heinck that he and Burger were staying at the New Yorker Hotel, another lie.

  Quirin and Heinck wandered off by themselves, frustrated and disappointed. Dasch and Burger caught a bus in the direction of Penn Station. They got off at Fifty-second Street, and walked across town to Madison Avenue, looking for a phone booth with a little privacy. They eventually found one in the lobby of a hotel. Burger waited outside the booth as Dasch picked up the phone.

  ON THE evening of Sunday, June 14, Dean F. McWhorter was manning what was known around the New York FBI office as the “nutters’ desk”: fielding telephone calls from concerned, outraged, and just plain crazy citizens. At 7:51, as he meticulously noted down in his logbook, a call came through that he could remember for a long time.

  The caller was nervous but persistent, with a slight foreign accent. He began by saying he wanted a record made of the call, as he had a statement to make of the utmost importance to the nation’s security. The agent was skeptical, but it was his job to hear people out. He asked the caller his name.

  The caller gave an unintelligible foreign name.

  “Can you spell that, sir?”

  “Franz. F-R-A-N-Z. Daniel. D-A-N-I-E-L. Pastorius. P—”

  As his own personal code word for the FBI, Dasch had decided to use the title of the sabotage operation. But either he got it garbled or McWhorter made a slip in writing the name of America’s first German settler. It went down in FBI records as “Postorius.”12

  “What type of information do you want to give?”

  The caller became even more conspiratorial. He told McWhorter he was a German citizen who had arrived in America from Europe the previous morning. His case was “so big” that the right place to “spring it” was Washington, and the “person who should hear it first” none other than J. Edg
ar Hoover.13

  McWhorter replied with the practiced spiel of a bureaucrat dealing with an unwanted caller. The director was an exceptionally busy man. There was no need to go to Washington. The Bureau had men in New York who could interview Mr. Postorius at any time.

  This seemed to irritate the caller, who told the agent to take down a simple message. “I, Franz Daniel Postorius, shall try to get in touch with your Washington office this coming week, either Thursday or Friday, and you should notify the Washington office of this fact.” The caller said he was about forty years old and could easily be recognized by a streak of gray that ran through his dark hair. He then insisted that McWhorter read back the whole message, and specify the exact time and date.

  After McWhorter got off the phone, he typed out “a memorandum for the file” recording the contents of the conversation and concluding, “This memo is being prepared only for the purpose of recording the call made by POSTORIUS.”

  The memorandum duly made its way to the file room, then to the desk of a supervisor, who handed it to his assistant, with the remark “Napoleon called yesterday.”14 The assistant decided the caller was “crazy” and there was therefore no need to relay his message to Washington. 15

  The message went back to the file room.

  AFTER PRYING itself off the sandbar at Amagansett, submarine U-202 headed out into the Atlantic en route to the Caribbean, the latest hunting ground of German U-boats. “The crew needs a little rest,” Linder noted in his log, soon after his seemingly miraculous escape. “Dive and continue under water. The stress of the last couple of hours was too great. But morale of entire crew is great.”16

  The medical crisis over the appendicitis case came to a head early on Monday morning. Linder sent a message to U-boat headquarters asking for a doctor from one of the supply ships that were circulating off the American coast. All attempts to relieve Zimmermann’s pain had failed, and it looked as if an emergency operation would be necessary. There was no opium left on board U-202. Twenty hours later, another small miracle occurred. The patient was “feeling considerably better,” Linder reported. The crisis was over.

  Linder also reported that he had successfully completed his part of Operation Pastorius. His message was relayed by U-boat command to Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, where Colonel Lahousen noted in his diary that “the task force consisting of four persons was put on land during the night of June 13–14 at the ordered place near East Hampton on Long Island, New York State.”17

  As far as the Abwehr spymasters were concerned, everything was going according to plan.

  DASCH MAY have announced his intention of turning his comrades in to Hoover and the FBI, but actually doing the deed was another matter entirely. He felt edgy and unsure of himself, a “mental and nervous wreck,” his mind “all tied in knots.”18 He struck Burger, the one person he had taken into his confidence, as a man in the throes of a nervous breakdown. He now resorted to a tried-and-tested method of calming his nerves: playing cards.

  Known as Mayers after its manager, Joseph Mayer, the waiters’ club on West Forty-ninth Street at the back of Rockefeller Center was one of Dasch’s favorite haunts. Everybody there knew him, and there was nothing he loved better than to drop by for a game of pinochle. Mayer considered him to be “a Communist through and through,” but other waiters could not figure out whether he was a Communist or a Nazi.19 In fact, Dasch appeared to see little difference between the two ideologies, remarking at one point that Nazis and Communists were “striving toward the same ends.”20 He often talked about how wonderful everything was in Russia, hinting that he had a brother high up in the Russian Communist Party. When he left New York in a hurry to catch the boat from San Francisco, he told his friends he was going not to Germany, but to Russia. A few weeks after his departure, Mayer received a postcard from Dasch, postmarked Japan, with the message, “Regards to the boys.”

  Since it was practically impossible to travel from either Russia or Germany to America, the “boys” were surprised to see Dasch walk through the door of Mayers, around nine o’clock on Monday evening. He seemed reluctant to say where he had been since they last met, and instead insisted on immediately starting a two-handed pinochle game. He boasted that he had plenty of money, adding, “Thank God, I don’t have to work as a waiter anymore.”

  His principal opponent was a German Jew named Fritz Muller, an old waiter buddy. Aware of Dasch’s constant financial problems, Muller was stunned to hear him say he would not mind losing some money at cards, as he had $83,000 in reserve. He would have put this down to bragging, but he saw Dasch break open several large bills. While Muller played for his usual two-dollar stake, his opponent placed side bets of $30 and $40 a game with other people in the club.

  As the game became more and more intense, other waiters gathered around the table, urging Dasch to tell them about life in Russia and joking about his sudden reappearance. To the persistent questions about how he got back, he would only reply, “I’m here—what difference does it make how I came?” One friend speculated that he must have come by plane; another said the only way of getting to the United States from Europe these days was by submarine. At this, Dasch’s face went white, but he brushed the remark aside: “Never mind the wisecracks.” 21

  By the second day, he was exhausted, and could be heard mumbling to himself, “If I talk, it means death.” But he seemed addicted to the pinochle table. A “pinochle fiend,” in the phrase of one of his fellow waiters, he was fascinated by the game’s seemingly infinite variations. Win a trick, meld, watch the points pile up. He could play for hours in search of the holy grail of pinochle players, the magic combination of two Queens of Spades and two Jacks of Diamonds, the three-hundred-point “double pinochle.”

  The marathon game finally sputtered to a halt around 8 a.m. on Wednesday when Dasch, by now several hundred dollars richer than when he arrived, announced he would pay everyone’s bill for food and drink. He told one of the waiters he was in the United States on a mission for the Russian secret service, and had an appointment with the Russian embassy in Washington. To Mayer, on the other hand, he said he had to go to Washington “to see Mr. Hoover,” as “I’ve got something to explain to him.” 22

  On his way out the door, he gave a five-dollar bill to a waiter with a hard-luck story about losing all his money at cards and repaid an old ten-dollar debt to another waiter, known as Johnny the Polack. He then disappeared into the morning rush-hour crowds. The card-playing binge had lasted for almost thirty-six hours.

  Calming his nerves was certainly one explanation for Dasch’s bizarre behavior. But if his own account of his actions is to be believed, he was guided by another, equally important, motivation: he wanted to give the second group of saboteurs a chance to turn themselves in to the FBI rather than be arrested on the spot, as soon as they landed in Florida. He thought in particular of the young Chicago boy, Herbie Haupt, who seemed to see the sabotage mission as his best chance of going home to his family. As Dasch later put it, “To be a real decent person I had to wait, to give every person a chance to say what I had to say.”23

  From his conversations with Linder aboard U-202, Dasch knew that the second party of saboteurs under Edward Kerling was likely to land in America around June 17, the very day he staggered out of Mayers.

  AFTER ESCAPING the depth charge attack from the British plane on its first day out of Lorient, U-584 had had a fairly routine Atlantic crossing. One day, it accidentally met another German submarine traveling on the surface. Later Kapitänleutnant Joachim Deecke tried to chase a 20,000-ton Allied freighter, but it was traveling too fast, and its zigzag tactics made it impossible to get close enough to fire his torpedoes.

  The landing of the V-men from U-584 went much more smoothly than the landing from U-202 just four days earlier. Even so, there were some anxious moments. As he navigated the shoreline south of Jacksonville, Deecke had to dodge an American patrol boat and a barrage of zeppelin observation balloons monitoring the coast for enemy
submarines.24 The little zeppelins were particularly tiresome creatures, very difficult to shake off.

  Eventually the submarine got within several hundred feet of a wide sandy beach near Ponte Vedra. Deecke ordered the bow tanks to be flooded, so that his boat nudged against the sand, its decks peeking out of the water. A thin sliver of moon glowed in the sky, making the night a little less impenetrable than the mist-shrouded obscurity that had enveloped U-202, but dark enough nonetheless. Unlike their counterparts from U-202, the men from U-584 were dressed only in bathing suits and German marine caps as they came ashore in a rubber dinghy.25 They assumed that the Nazi swastika insignia on the caps would be sufficient to give them prisoner of war status as German soldiers if they were captured on landing. Their civilian clothes were zipped up in waterproof bags.

  After depositing their passengers on the beach, the two crewmen from the submarine scooped up a can of American sand to take back with them to Germany. They could hear some girl bathers chatting and giggling a little to the north of the landing spot. They used flashlights to signal Deecke that the landing had gone according to plan and returned to the U-boat almost immediately.

  A slender man with wavy brown hair and heavy jaw, Kerling made a quick tour of the beach to make sure there were no inhabited houses nearby and that nobody had seen his men land.26 He then selected a place to hide the four boxes of explosives and other sabotage gear, all practically identical to those brought ashore by Dasch’s group. The spot he chose was easy to remember: a grove of palm trees on a little hill next to a wire fence, halfway between the beach and the road. The saboteurs buried the boxes just as a gray dawn was breaking, and threw the spade into the sea, where it would be taken out by the tide.

  Dressed in swimsuits and carrying their clothes in bundles under their arms, they then walked north from Ponte Vedra Beach in the direction of Jacksonville Beach. For the next four hours, they lounged around on the beach, swimming and relaxing like vacationers. While still in their bathing suits, they gave a cheery wave to a passing police patrol car, and received a wave in return.27 At around eleven, they put on their clothes and caught a bus into Jacksonville, some forty-five minutes away.