Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

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. Edgar 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.” 14The 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.” 18He 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. 19In 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.” 20He 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.”