Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Neubauer was arrested as he returned to his hotel room at 6:45 p.m. after watching yet another movie. He struck his captors as exceptionally nervous. He had changed hotels twice in three days, and was planning to move again on Saturday. The previous evening, he had paid another visit to Harry and Emma Jaques, who had mentioned hearing a radio report of the landing of German agents in the United States. 35Neubauer did his best to brush the report aside, saying he had read something similar in the newspapers. But he was seriously rattled.

An FBI doctor noted that Neubauer’s pulse was “very rapid, being approximately 125 beats,” and that he complained of continual headaches, caused by a head wound received on the eastern front. 36By the following morning, he had calmed down somewhat, although his nerves remained “twitchy.”

After eleven days of freedom, it was a relief to be in captivity.

GEORGE JOHN DASCH posed a difficult dilemma for Hoover’s G-MEN. On the one hand, there was no denying that he had performed a valuable service for the United States by betraying an ambitious, and potentially deadly, Nazi sabotage operation. On the other hand, his megalomaniac personality, tendency to ramble, and refusal to do what was expected of him were all likely to make him a poor witness in court. In this particular production, there could be only one starring role. The more credit Dasch received for exposing Operation Pastorius, the less would redound to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

After being left to ponder his predicament in a solitary detention cell for some thirty-six hours on the thirtieth floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, Dasch was permitted to change out of his prison clothes into a suit. He was then taken to meet the head of the FBI’s New York office, Thomas Donegan. With Donegan was Dasch’s original interrogator, Duane Traynor. Together they played “good cop, bad cop”: Traynor the solicitous lawyer doing his best to look after the interests of his client, Donegan the tough policeman warning Dasch of the consequences of noncooperation.

“I am very upset. I didn’t expect to be left all this time alone in a cell. It seems you don’t believe me,” Dasch began. 1He felt that he had already played his part by allowing himself to be led in prison clothes past the cells of the other saboteurs, in order to dispel any suspicion that he was the traitor. Looking at Traynor, he said he hoped he would now be taken “out of here.”

Donegan made clear this would not be possible, as the saboteurs were likely to be brought before some kind of court, and everything would then “come out in the newspapers.” He gave Dasch a choice. One option was for the FBI to acknowledge his contribution in rounding up the other saboteurs, in which case he would be given “appropriate consideration” by the attorney general. The drawback was that news of his betrayal would rapidly make its way back to Germany, endangering the lives of his parents and relatives. The second option was for Dasch to plead guilty, in which case he would be treated the same as the other saboteurs, and be sentenced to a long prison term. After a “period of time,” say six months, Director Hoover would recommend a presidential pardon. 2If he followed this course, “everything would appear in order to the Germans” and he would not be singled out as the traitor. The choice was entirely up to Dasch.

It was clear from the way Donegan spoke which option the FBI preferred.

Dasch felt trapped. He told the two FBI agents that his information about conditions in Germany would go “stale” if he spent too long in prison, and he would no longer be able to fulfill his dream of leading a propaganda offensive against the Nazis. He wanted to know exactly how long he would be in prison. He was also frightened that the Nazis would take revenge on his parents, particularly his mother. At times, he broke down crying. By the end of the ninety-minute session in Donegan’s office, he had come around to the FBI’s point of view, and agreed to plead guilty and be sentenced to prison, on the understanding that he would be released from prison sooner rather than later.

Traynor explained that in order to deter future sabotage operations, it was necessary to convince Nazi leaders that the American coastline was impenetrable, even though this was obviously not the case. Hitler should be led to suspect that Operation Pastorius had been betrayed from within his own intelligence service, thereby creating distrust at the highest levels of the German government. Much of the propaganda and deterrence value of rounding up eight Nazi saboteurs would be lost if the real reason for their capture became known.

“You will have to become an actor, and a damn good one,” Traynor told Dasch. “You will have to steel yourself to play the part, particularly since there will be many occasions when you feel downhearted and depressed.” 3

Dasch promised to do as Traynor and Donegan asked. After being taken to the bathroom to change into his prison clothes, he was escorted back to his cell.

WHEN DASCH first walked into FBI headquarters in Washington, Hoover’s immediate inclination was to use him as a decoy to channel misinformation to Hitler, and arrest any future teams of Nazi saboteurs. This was a tactic he had already employed successfully with William Sebold, a German-born naturalized American recruited by the Abwehr to operate a clandestine shortwave radio station on Long Island. Sebold reported what had happened to the American authorities and, for the next sixteen months, supplied his masters in Berlin with bogus information fed to him by the FBI. As a result, Hoover had rolled up an entire network of thirty-three Nazi agents in July 1941, effectively shutting down Abwehr espionage operations in the United States. In return, the FBI helped Sebold begin a new life under an assumed identity after he testified against his fellow agents at their trial.

Hoover quickly decided that Dasch’s case was very different from Sebold’s. He did not believe it would be possible to keep the Dasch affair out of the newspapers for very long. Other government agencies knew about the saboteur landings, and people were bound to talk. There was already speculation in the newspapers about a hunt for Nazi saboteurs in Florida. A reporter from the Associated Press had been asking questions about a rumor that the FBI had arrested some German agents who landed on the East Coast. Although the reporter had been warned off the story, the news was sure to get around.

“This thing can blow up in our faces at any moment,” Hoover told Eugene Connelley on June 24. 4“If the AP has the story, we can be sure that some of the columnists will have it within a few days.” Although his men were keeping a close watch on Haupt, Hoover was afraid they might “lose” Neubauer if the news broke prematurely.

Hoover was paranoid about leaks from other government agencies. At one time or another, he suspected the army, the navy, and the Coast Guard of talking to the press about the Dasch case. In fact, some of the leaks may well have come from within the FBI itself. Bureau documents show that reports of the Amagansett incident were widely disseminated within the organization, particularly in Florida, where they were discussed at a law enforcement conference attended by dozens of people. 5

In addition to the danger of leaks, there was also “the danger facing our coasts,” in Hoover’s phrase. The landings in Long Island and Florida had demonstrated the lamentable state of the nation’s coastal defenses. Coast Guard patrols were untrained and unarmed, and there were not enough of them to mount anything approaching a permanent vigil. Kerling’s men had reached Jacksonville without arousing anyone’s suspicions. The fact that a Coast Guard patrol had run into Dasch on the beach at Amagansett was sheer coincidence. The FBI director was angry with the Coast Guard for allowing a stranded U-boat to escape, and doing nothing to prevent the intruders from taking the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan.