Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Haupt met Neubauer inside the theater’s vast lobby, with its marble pillars, red-carpeted stairways, Louis XIV–style tapestries and drapes, and enormous chandeliers suspended from the five-story-high ceiling. When the theater was opened in 1921, with seats for five thousand people and a stage big enough for an opera, Billboard magazine proclaimed it “perhaps the most magnificent theater in the world,” a piece of Versailles transported to Chicago. 19The front of the house was decorated by a stained-glass window and dozens of laughing joker faces that seemed to mock the hapless FBI agents frantically looking for their quarry.

After the show—a Bob Hope movie featuring a gang of evil Nazi spies—the two saboteurs sat down on the faux Louis XIV furniture in the lobby. Neubauer was still a bundle of nerves. 20That morning, he told Haupt, he had jumped out of bed in a cold sweat when someone knocked at the door of his hotel room unexpectedly. It turned out to be an electrician checking a broken light fixture, but Neubauer found it difficult to stop his hands from shaking violently. In addition to his fear of the FBI, he was afraid of running into someone he knew, as he had worked in the Chicago hotel industry before the war. He had decided to move to a hotel with a predominantly Negro staff, who, he reasoned, would be less likely to recognize him.

Haupt tried to boost Neubauer’s morale by describing how he had sauntered into the Chicago office of the FBI to clear up his draft status. Nothing had happened to him, and he had walked right out again. To Neubauer, this sounded foolhardy. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet with Haupt again on Sunday night at the Uptown Theater.

After leaving Neubauer, Haupt phoned Gerda Stuckmann. She had completed her blood work for the marriage license, and wanted to know if he had also taken the test. He lied and said yes. They arranged a date for Saturday.

FBI agents stationed outside the Haupt apartment on North Fremont Street observed the “subject returning to his residence” at 5:30 p.m. Surveillance of the Oxford Shirt Shop was discontinued. Half an hour later, Herbie drove to the Warner Motor Sales Agency with his father to pick up his new car. At 6:30 p.m., the agents observed the younger Haupt leave the dealership in “a black 1941 Pontiac five passenger coupe having red wheels, a radio aerial on the left front side and red sticker on the right side of the windshield.” They spent the rest of the evening chasing him around various Chicago nightspots. It was not until 1 a.m. that he finally returned home.

BY WEDNESDAY evening, Kerling was cooperating with his interrogators, having concluded there was no point in holding out any longer. He agreed to accompany FBI agents to Florida to locate the spot where he had buried the explosives when he first came ashore. Hoover called Connelley in Chicago, and ordered him to fly to Jacksonville to oversee the recovery of the arms cache. This was a “mighty important” operation and Hoover worried that someone else might mess it up. 21

Kerling arrived in Jacksonville on Thursday morning on the overnight train from New York in the company of his FBI escorts. Connelley flew in by plane. In order not to attract any attention, they set off for the beach in a lone automobile. Four miles south of Ponte Vedra, Kerling told the driver to stop. He walked up and down the beach, carefully examining each clump of trees, without recognizing any of them. After about an hour, he had the FBI men drive him up and down Highway 140, until he spotted a fence next to an abandoned building.

He led the FBI agents along the fence to the tip of the sand dunes, where there was a grove of palm trees. “This is the place,” he told them. By this time, he was exhausted, and could hardly stand. He had not slept for the past two nights, was sick with dysentery, and in a state of shock. 22He was dressed in an open-neck shirt and dark pants; his guards had removed the laces from his shoes to prevent any suicide attempt. As the agents began digging into the sandy soil, the cocksure Nazi Party member who once boasted that the American soldier was no match for the German slumped to the ground, clutching his head between his knees.

There were four boxes buried in the sand. Connelley had arranged for the FBI’s top explosives expert, Donald Parsons, to carefully examine each box. The contents were virtually identical to the sabotage materials recovered twelve days earlier at Amagansett.

AS KERLING was scouring Ponte Vedra Beach for the buried boxes, Dasch was completing his marathon, 254-page typewritten statement. “My mind is all upside down,” he told his interrogators, as he signed each page separately, making the occasional correction. 23

The time had come to rid Dasch of the notion that he would play a starring role in the arrest of the other saboteurs. As gently as possible, Traynor explained that his plan assumed that the U.S. government was unaware of the landing on Amagansett Beach. In fact, the FBI had been making extensive inquiries of its own, long before Dasch came to the Washington office, beginning with the questioning of the young coastguardsman, John Cullen. If the Coast Guard knew about the events on the beach, then other government agencies also knew. There was a danger that the newspapers would get hold of the story, causing members of the second group “either to go into hiding or immediately begin their wave of sabotage.” Five saboteurs had already been arrested. Since Dasch was worried about the fate of his relatives back in Germany if it became known that he had betrayed Operation Pastorius, it seemed to make sense to arrest him as well.

By inventing a clever cover story, Traynor told Dasch, the FBI could make it appear that he had been betrayed by either Quirin or Heinck. In order to make the story convincing, the FBI could not merely pretend to arrest Dasch. It would have to treat him exactly the same as the other arrested saboteurs. While the Bureau would examine ways to allow Dasch to contribute to the propaganda war against Nazi Germany, Traynor would make no promises.

This was not at all what Dasch had had in mind when he walked into Traynor’s office six days before. “If I am not treated fairly and squarely,” he told Traynor, “I will lose all faith in human nature. I might as well be dead. And if I have to die, I might just take another life to avenge myself.” 24He then began to cry.

At 12:15 p.m., Traynor informed Dasch he was under arrest, and would be sent to New York to join the other saboteurs. Agents went through his pockets, and confiscated all his personal property, including his gold wristwatch, Schaeffer pen, gold tie clasp, and brown fedora hat. They catalogued his stash of money, which came to a total of $82,710.17, and had him sign a receipt. Before escorting him to the railroad station, they took him to see Mickey Ladd, the assistant FBI director in charge of internal security. Ever since he arrived, Dasch had been pestering Traynor to allow him to meet with Hoover, but had to settle instead for a ten-minute meeting with Ladd.

“Have you read my stuff?” was Dasch’s first question on entering Ladd’s office. 25

“I have only managed to read part of it so far.”

“Have you read the part about propaganda?”

“Not yet.”

Dasch was crushed.

He was taken by train from Washington to Jersey City, and then by car ferry to Manhattan, in order to avoid running into crowds of travelers at Pennsylvania Station. After treating him to a final dinner at a restaurant around the corner from FBI headquarters, his escorts took him to a sixthfloor conference room where they told him to change into his prison clothes. He was then photographed with a prisoner identification tag around his neck and examined by the same doctor who had asked Kerling and Thiel if they had any “complaints” two nights before.