Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

The soldiers and sailors were followed by war industry workers carrying banners proclaiming they were on their guard against saboteurs. Then a detachment from the merchant marine, including 150 survivors from U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic. “The Axis Subs Don’t Scare Us,” read one much-applauded banner; “We Deliver the Goods.” There were also loud cheers for a group of German-American trade unionists who carried an outsized figure of a worker aiming a sledgehammer at a swastika. Other slogans captured the feverishly patriotic mood:

Attended by two and a half million people, one-third of the city’s population, this was “the greatest parade” in New York’s history, Mayor La Guardia told reporters, as he wiped the sweat off his face in the humid eighty-degree heat. 14The only parade likely to surpass it was when the boys “came home victorious.”

AMONG THE people absent from the parade was a small team of experts assembled by the FBI to examine the sabotage materials retrieved by the Coast Guard from Amagansett Beach. That afternoon, they laid out the contents of the wooden crates and seabag on the floor of the basement shooting range of the Federal Court House in downtown Manhattan, and began tagging every single explosive device and item of clothing. Cursing the Coast Guard for ripping open the boxes so unmethodically, they drew up their own meticulous inventory: 15

Two small bags marked “C. Heinrich Anton Dusburg Reibanzünder” 6.1939, containing ten fuse lighters, pull wire.

One small paper bag containing five fuse lighters.

Twenty-five electric blasting caps, .30 caliber.

Fifty electric match heads contained in small brass tabular adapters.

Fifteen wooden box containers, approximately 2 × 3 inches, apparently containing five detonators each with threaded ends.

And so on down the list of seventy-three different items, ending with “coil of detonating fuse approximately 82′ in length.” Assistant FBI Director Eugene J. Connelley, assigned by Hoover to head the investigation, described the haul as the “most impressive” array of sabotage equipment he had ever seen. 16Whoever put it together must have had access to some extraordinary resources.

The FBI scientists were led by Donald Parsons, an eight-year Bureau veteran and one of the top explosives experts in the country. As he picked up each item, he marveled at its sophisticated construction. He conducted a series of tests on the explosive devices, checking the fuses against a stop-watch and firing bullets into the yellow blocks of TNT to test their explosive velocity. It did not take him long to conclude that there was enough material in the boxes to do millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the American war industry.

While Parsons and his colleagues were analyzing the bomb-making equipment, other FBI agents were preparing for a night on Amagansett Beach to see if anyone returned to the empty arms cache. G-men took over the Coast Guard observation tower on the beach and accompanied the newly armed sand pounders on their patrols. Shifts of fifteen agents at a time were assigned to foxholes on the beach. Vacation cottages were commandeered as FBI posts, and agents were equipped with telephones and walkie-talkies.

Despite the evidence of a large-scale sabotage operation, Hoover and Connelley were skeptical of some aspects of the story told by Cullen and other coastguardsmen. The talk about a German submarine stranded on the sandbar seemed too fantastic to be true, an example of the “garbled stories” coming out of the Coast Guard and the navy. 17Hoover and Connelley also found it difficult to accept the claim that Cullen had run into people on the beach burying explosives and had been allowed to tell the tale. They speculated that he might have been accepting money from whiskey runners, “and it was only when he realized that explosives were being cached that he decided to report the matter.” 18

Suspicious of Cullen, Hoover’s men decided to isolate him from his comrades. They took him to the home of an FBI agent in East Hampton, where they questioned him for “hours and hours,” searching for inconsistencies in his version of events. 19It soon became obvious to Cullen that the G-men “figured that I had to be in league” with the men on the beach. But he stuck to his story.

NIRSCHEL AND FRANKEN were angry about being sidelined by the FBI. On their way back to Long Island, the two Coast Guard intelligence officers decided to do a little sleuthing of their own, beginning with the question of who owned the brown vest they had failed to turn over to the Feds.

The vest bore the dry-cleaning mark 1167-X11. 20Knowing that most dry cleaners had their own distinctive system for identifying clothes, the two lieutenants decided to consult a Nassau County policeman recognized as “the outstanding authority in the country” for deciphering laundry marks. Without revealing the circumstances of the find, or why they needed the information, they persuaded him to provide a list of laundries in the New York area that used such symbols.

The officers also made a careful examination of the bills given to Cullen as a bribe. They noted that the bills had been issued by Federal Reserve Banks in San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, and New Jersey, “indicating the possibility that the pay-off men had come from California and had either cashed large bills or checks en route.” This suggested “a California connection” to the plot. 21

In the meantime, other Coast Guard intelligence officers were fanning out around Amagansett. The FBI insisted that they keep away from the beach, but this did not prevent them from trying to make themselves useful by going undercover in “strategically important jobs.” 22One German-speaking agent got himself hired as a waiter in a restaurant known to be frequented by Bund sympathizers; a second found a position at a wholesale fish business; a third went to work for a gas station at Montauk Point.

They quickly began to tire of their assignments. As the Eastern Sea Frontier war diary noted, “FBI agents were in control of the man hunt and the [Coast Guard] intelligence officers were shunted off without being given any information as to developments.” The supposedly glamorous undercover life turned out to consist mainly of pumping gas and waiting on tables.

AFTER THEIR shopping expedition to Macy’s, Dasch and Burger went back to the Governor Clinton for a bath and a nap followed by dinner. The hotel boasted “two delightful restaurants and a coffee shop”; they chose the Coral Room on the ground floor. Dasch ordered a couple of rare steaks and a bottle of wine, a meal virtually unobtainable in wartime Germany. 23

Over dinner, they talked about the harsh times back home and their assignments in America. Emboldened by the wine and fine food, Dasch mentioned the hardships experienced by some of his relatives under the Nazi regime. 24He was thinking in particular of the father-in-law of his sister Johanna—a man he had visited in Germany—who had spent nine months in a concentration camp at the age of seventy-three because of his devout Catholicism. During the time the old man was in prison, his wife had died.

Dasch’s stories prompted the more reserved Burger to open up about his own experiences with the Gestapo. He described how he had got into trouble with Nazi Party officials over a report he had written for a Berlin political science institute on social conditions in occupied Poland; the party hacks were already suspicious of him because of his close association with the murdered S.A. chief, Ernst Röhm, and were not prepared to tolerate even mild criticism of their activities. As a result, Burger spent seventeen months in Gestapo prisons, first in Poland and then in Berlin, accused of “falsification of documents.” 25