Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

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. 39But 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. 40He 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.” 41As 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. 42By 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. 44Beach 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.” 45He 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. 46Hoover 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.

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 take 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. 1After 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.