Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

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. 32He 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.” 33Burger 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. 34Burger 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 had allowed a stranded submarine to escape, and they had delayed alerting law enforcement agencies to the presence of suspected German agents. 37Now, 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.