Like Dasch’s group, they decided it was safer to split up into pairs. Kerling and Neubauer, the injured soldier with the American wife, checked into the Seminole Hotel in downtown Jacksonville under the names of Edward Kelly and Henry Nichols.28 Haupt and Thiel found rooms in the Mayflower Hotel, just a block from the bus station. As an American citizen, Haupt registered under his own name: if questioned about where he had been over the last year, he planned to claim he had just returned from a long trip to Mexico. Thiel signed as William Thomas.
That afternoon, they went on a shopping expedition, just like their comrades from U-202. Haupt, who had the most expensive tastes and felt deprived of consumer goods in Germany, felt particularly at home in American stores. He had his hair cut and got something to eat, and then proceeded to make a string of purchases: a three-piece tan suit from a fashionable New York tailor, a pink-gold Bulova wristwatch, some neckties and shirts, underclothes, a tan leather suitcase, silk handkerchiefs, and several pairs of shoes. 29 The others limited themselves to the basics.
In the evening, they all met for drinks at the Mayflower Hotel and agreed on a plan of action. Kerling and Thiel would travel to Cincinnati and New York, Neubauer to Chicago. Haupt was adamant that he also be allowed to return to Chicago, despite warnings from Kappe about contacting his family. Even though Kerling knew of Haupt’s fondness for money, and doubted his loyalty to the Nazi cause, he decided to entrust him with a canvas zipper bag containing $10,000 in a false bottom, to be left for safekeeping with his uncle in Chicago. His reasoning was that a Haupt running around with plenty of spending money posed less of a threat than a financially strapped Haupt who might be tempted to turn everyone in to the FBI for a cash reward. 30
The plan was for the saboteurs to meet again on July 6, two days after the planned July 4 rendezvous between Kerling and Dasch in Cincinnati. Even though gasoline rationing was in force along the East Coast for owners of private automobiles, Kerling and Haupt would somehow find a way to return to Florida and retrieve the explosives.
IN NEW YORK, meanwhile, the other saboteurs were wondering what had become of their leader. Neither Quirin nor Heinck had seen Dasch since the tense meeting at Grant’s Tomb. To their dismay, he failed to show up at Horn and Hardart on Tuesday morning.
Burger tried to telephone Dasch in his room at the Governor Clinton around 10 a.m. on Tuesday to remind him about the rendezvous. There was no answer. Since Dasch had previously told him to keep an eye on the other two, he went to the Automat by himself. Quirin and Heinck were both in a bad mood, saying they wanted to get out of town as soon as possible and expected Dasch to give them suggestions about their trip to Chicago. They had felt exposed in their downtown hotel and had moved to a more modest rooming house on Seventy-sixth Street. Although Burger did his best to smooth things over, he got the impression that the pair were getting “more and more suspicious.” 31
When they were not arguing with each other, the saboteurs spent most of their time in Manhattan shopping. They bought watches and cuff links, perfume and leather belts, bathrobes and slippers, sports coats and topcoats, shirts and neckties, shoes and shoe trees, hats and cigars, scissors and keychains, and still more suits, which had to be taken in and taken out. The slow, phlegmatic Heinck seemed incapable of making up his mind about anything, so Burger took him to Rogers Peet clothing store on Fifth Avenue and Forty-first Street to measure him for a suit. Burger, who was an enthusiastic photographer, also spent around $180 on a new Leica camera with various filters, lenses, and exposure meters.32 He later explained that he had owned a Leica in Germany but his wife had been forced to sell it because of financial difficulties while he was in the hands of the Gestapo. It seemed only right that he should buy a new camera at Nazi government expense.
When Dasch finally returned on Wednesday morning, from his marathon pinochle game, he told Burger he was exhausted and needed to go to bed. He could not face another meeting with Quirin and Heinck. To Burger’s complaint that this was hardly the right time to disappear for so long, Dasch replied, “You should be glad I played pinochle because I’m now more or less my old self again.”33 Burger had to admit that his friend seemed less high-strung than before his disappearance: his hands were no longer trembling uncontrollably.
Around noon, Burger visited Quirin and Heinck in their new lodgings, a nondescript brownstone house. He asked the “colored woman who came to the door” to speak with a Mr. Quintas, Quirin’s assumed name. She told him she had never heard of a Mr. Quintas, but a Mr. Albany had checked in the day before. This turned out to be Quirin.
Quirin and Heinck were infuriated to learn that Dasch had spent the last thirty-six hours playing pinochle. They exhausted their stock of expletives denouncing his irresponsibility. Finally, Quirin told Burger he intended to “have it out” with Dasch and take over leadership of the group himself.34 Burger tried to calm him down, saying that George had already made preparations for everyone to move to Chicago but needed to leave New York City for a couple of days to make some “important contacts.”
That afternoon, Heinck and Quirin took the subway out to Astoria in Queens to make a call on a former German-American Bund member. Before leaving Lorient, Heinck and Dasch had quarreled over whether to renew such contacts, with Dasch saying they would take place “over my dead body.” Although Kappe was in favor of recruiting former Bund members, he had left the final decision to the group leaders. Now that Dasch was being so erratic, Heinck thought he had nothing to lose by looking up one of his oldest friends in the United States.
The friend, Hermann Faje, had been working as a steward aboard Vincent Astor’s luxury yacht when Heinck first met him in 1934. He was now employed as a hairdresser. He was still at work when Heinck and Quirin first called, but his wife invited the two men back for dinner. Faje showed up around 11 p.m. They all proceeded to get a little drunk, particularly Heinck, who was never very good at handling alcohol.35
Naturally, Faje was interested in how his friend got back to the United States. After first claiming that they had returned to America on a neutral Portuguese ship, Heinck eventually blurted out that they had come back on a German submarine, and hinted that he was involved in intelligence work. He added that he was authorized to promise the Iron Cross, Second Class, to any German-Americans who assisted him in his mission. Anxious to get rid of potentially incriminating evidence, Heinck then gave Faje his money belt for safekeeping. It contained $3,600 in fifty-dollar bills; Heinck had previously removed $400 as spending money for himself.
Heinck had one final request before he left. He had taken a liking to a fountain pen he had seen in Faje’s pocket. He asked his friend to use one of the fifty-dollar bills to buy another pen just like it and give it to him when they next met. Faje was welcome to keep the change.
As Heinck and Quirin were getting drunk with Faje in Astoria, Burger and Dasch were dining together at Dinty Moore’s, an Irish restaurant near Broadway and Forty-sixth Street, which specialized in corned beef and cabbage. Dasch was still “damn tired,” but he was determined to introduce Burger to the culinary delights of New York City, from classic American to Scandinavian smorgasbord.36
“Just forget you are Dutch for once,” he told Burger, using the slang word for “German.”
Despite his pinochle-playing binge, Dasch was still in a state of anxiety, wondering how the FBI would react to his revelations and whether they would accuse him and Burger of being part of the sabotage plot. Burger tried to cheer him up, arguing that they were doing everything in their power to prevent the others from blowing up American factories.
AROUND THE time the saboteurs from U-584 were heading into Jacksonville, and Burger was preparing for his meeting with Quirin and Heinck at the Automat, J. Edgar Hoover was sitting fuming in his wood-paneled office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department in Washington. The FBI director was furious with the Coast Guard for its amateur handling of the events in Amagansett. Coast Guard officials had failed to seal off the beach, they h
ad allowed a stranded submarine to escape, and they had delayed alerting law enforcement agencies to the presence of suspected German agents.37 Now, it seemed, they were “withholding” important evidence from the FBI.
Built like a bulldog, with a heavy torso, spindly legs, and a pugnacious face, Hoover had already become an American legend for his single-minded rebuilding of the country’s top federal law enforcement agency. In 1924, at the age of twenty-nine, he had taken over a corrupt and ineffective division of the Justice Department and turned it into a feared and respected crime-fighting force. The new agency—renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935—reflected Hoover’s own image of himself as a young lawyer with a reputation for professionalism, hard work, and an extraordinary eye for detail. Hoover and the FBI were almost synonymous in the public mind: its successes were his successes; when it messed up, it was the director who got the blame.
Brought up by a stern mother, Hoover imposed a strict code of behavior on his agents and demanded their total loyalty. They had to dress and conduct themselves at all times as eager young executives. The G-men, or “Government men”—the term originated with the criminal underworld and was later popularized by Hoover’s supporters in the media—all came in a standard shape and size. Hoover insisted that his agents wear dark suits, white shirts, sober ties, and snappy hats. They could be neither too heavy nor too short. The agents were all men and, with a few exceptions, such as the director’s personal driver, all white. Above all, they must do nothing to “embarrass” the Bureau, which meant doing nothing to embarrass Hoover personally.
One key to Hoover’s success was his genius for public relations. He understood that a favorable public image for the Bureau and himself would lead almost automatically to more generous congressional funding, which could then be used to further strengthen the Bureau. With the aid of some very skillful publicists, he set out to turn the G-man into a popular hero, whose exploits were chronicled in newsmagazines, comic strips, radio programs, and, most important of all, Hollywood movies. Journalists and writers deemed “friendly” to the FBI were given plenty of material; those who declined to see stories the same way as Hoover were frozen out. The Bureau’s spokesman and symbol, needless to say, was Hoover himself, energetic, incorruptible, and plainspoken. He depicted himself as the sworn enemy of an unholy alliance of “human rat” gangsters and their “dirty, filthy, diseased women,” “the miserable politicians who protect them,” and the “sob-sister judges” who always sided with the criminals.38
The news that Nazi agents had come ashore on Long Island, and might already be plotting acts of sabotage, was made to order for Hoover’s talents and political needs. His enemies and even some allies, such as President Roosevelt, had long suspected that the director was much more enthusiastic about pursuing Communists than Nazis. Hoover had done his best to correct this impression, sending a memo to FDR in early June listing the Bureau’s accomplishments in combating the “pro-Fascist element,” including the “apprehension” of 8,827 German, Italian, and Japanese subversives. 39 But he felt under pressure to do more, particularly since Russia was now a valued ally of the United States, doing most of the actual fighting against the common Nazi enemy. By vigorously going after suspected Nazi saboteurs, he could once again prove his indispensability.
Hoover had reported the landing of the saboteurs to the White House in a memorandum dated June 16, which also mentioned “widespread rumors” of additional landings of German agents along the coastal areas of Georgia and Massachusetts.40 He had alerted all coastal offices of the FBI to be on their guard for “additional enemy activity,” and also kept in close touch with his nominal boss, Attorney General Francis Biddle, who marveled at his “imaginative and restless energy . . . stirred into prompt and effective action.”41 As Hoover talked about the hunt for the Nazi agents, Biddle noticed sparks of excitement flickering “around the edge of his nostrils.” His eyes were bright, his jaw firmly set. “He was determined to catch them all before any sabotage took place.”
In order to catch the saboteurs, Hoover decided to rely on Assistant Director Eugene Connelley. When the director needed someone to handle an exceptionally important or delicate investigation, he invariably picked Connelley, a man known throughout the Bureau as a slave driver, albeit a very capable one.42 By chance, Connelley had been in the New York office on an inspection tour at the time of the Amagansett incident: Hoover ordered him to drop everything else and take “complete charge” of the case.43
Connelley called Hoover from New York at 10:23 a.m. on Wednesday, according to the office log kept by the director’s personal secretary, Helen Gandy. He had a long list of criticisms of the Coast Guard, beginning with what he saw as their inadequate patrols of coastal areas.44 Beach patrols were unarmed, patrol posts too far apart, and communications with Coast Guard stations practically nonexistent. There was no system for reporting incidents to other government agencies. The fact that Cullen had run into German intruders on Amagansett Beach was sheer coincidence: there were long periods when the beach was not patrolled at all. In Connelley’s opinion, the entire system of beach defense needed to be revamped and upgraded. Hoover told him to put his criticisms in writing: if there were similar incidents in the future, the FBI would be able to say, “I told you so.”
Of even greater concern to Hoover was Connelley’s complaint that Coast Guard intelligence officers were giving the Bureau “the run-around.” Connelley had heard through the police grapevine that the Coast Guard was mounting its own investigation into a vest found on the beach: laundry marks showed that it had been handled by a dry cleaner in Yorkville, a German neighborhood of Manhattan. Without telling the FBI, the Coast Guard intelligence officers had traced previous ownership of the vest to a German-American plumber suspected of Nazi sympathies.
To the hypersuspicious Hoover, this information was further demonstration of the need to aggressively defend FBI prerogatives. He considered the behavior of the intelligence officers “outrageous” and “reprehensible,” and immediately telephoned the director of Naval Intelligence to demand that they be court-martialed for “insubordination.”45 He was not appeased later that afternoon when the two lieutenants, Nirschel and Franken, finally handed over the vest to Connelley. He continued to fume about Coast Guard “incompetence” for years afterward.
For all Hoover’s criticisms of the Coast Guard, the FBI’s own performance had hardly been stellar. The truth was that nobody, including the FBI, took the first reports of Nazi saboteurs landing in Amagansett very seriously. Although the Bureau claimed it was not “officially” informed about the case until 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, other records show that the FBI’s New York office received preliminary reports of the landing within two hours of the saboteurs’ coming ashore, but took no immediate action. 46 Hoover and Connelley were initially skeptical of Cullen’s claim that a German-speaking man on the beach had offered him a bribe. When the leader of the saboteurs called the FBI office in New York with a personal message for Hoover, he was, perhaps understandably, dismissed as a crank.
The laundry marks on the vest—seen by both the Coast Guard and the FBI as an important break in the case—soon turned out to be a false lead. The plumber had no connection with any of the saboteurs: the numbers used to identify clothes were recycled year after year.
The investigation had reached a dead end.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A STORY TO TELL (JUNE 18–19)
BY THURSDAY MORNING, Dasch decided he could wait no longer. He was nervous about going to the FBI, but even more nervous about being arrested before he could blow the whistle on Operation Pastorius. He had already called the Bureau to announce his intention of traveling to Washington to see Mr. Hoover on either “Thursday or Friday.” Over breakfast in the Governor Clinton Hotel, he told Burger he would leave for Washington that afternoon. While he was away, Burger would have the job of keeping the other two saboteurs distracted.
There were a few logistical details to ta
ke care of first. He had to pick up a new suit from a tailor. He also had to decide what to do with the money he had been carrying around with him ever since his arrival in America. He thought about putting it in a safe deposit box, and visited a bank on Seventh Avenue to make the necessary arrangements.1 After escorting Dasch down to the vault, the bank officials explained that deposit boxes could only be rented by the year. And they could only offer one kind of box: a long, thin box that would not be large enough for the thick bundles of bills he had been keeping in his Gladstone bag.
Perhaps, after all, it would be more sensible to take the money to Washington. Dasch headed back to a store near Pennsylvania Station, where he purchased a large, tan leather briefcase for $38. In another store, he bought some large manila envelopes, rubber bands, and metal clasps. Returning to the hotel, he removed the money from under the false bottom of his bag, and carefully counted it out. He sorted the fifty-dollar bills into bundles of a hundred, each bound by a rubber band, and stuffed the bundles into the envelopes. He then wrote a note for himself in pencil on hotel stationery:
Content $82,350
Money from German government for their purpose, but to be used to fight them Nazis.
George J. Dasch
alias George J. Davis
alias Franz Pastorius 2
He packed a leather suitcase with enough shirts, neckties, pajamas, and suits, all brand-new, to last him through the weekend. The rest of his belongings he wrapped in laundry bags, which he put into the water-damaged Gladstone. He left this bag in the closet of Burger’s room across the hall, after letting himself in with a key borrowed from the maid.
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