Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

On Saturday, Traynor asked, “Is there any way you can get in touch with the leader of the other group?”

“Well, yes,” George said. “I had him write the name of somebody on a handkerchief.” If they found that man whose name was on the handkerchief—a friend of the other group’s leader, Edward Kerling—they would probably find Edward himself.

George reached into his pocket and took out the handkerchief. It was blank. “Well, how do you develop it?” asked Traynor.

“I can’t remember.” George paused, squeezed his eyes, and put his index finger to the top of nose, thinking hard. “You use some kind of smelly stuff.”

A day later, the name of the “smelly stuff” finally came to George. “Ammonia!” he exclaimed. “I passed the handkerchief over a bottle of ammonia. It shows red until it dries. You read it slowly and then it goes away again.”

• • •

Four days later George signed each of the 254 single-spaced typewritten pages that made up his statement. “My mind is all upside down,” he told Traynor, but George expected the next steps to be much easier: a prominent government job helping in the fight against Hitler. At the very least he’d keep the eighty thousand dollars and start a new life.

But after six days of talking and thinking about all of the places where this new life might lead him, George had never stopped to consider the one place that it actually would: prison.

Washington, D.C.

Monday, June 22, 1942

“Take this down,” J. Edgar Hoover told his secretary. “To President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Regarding Nazi spies. The FBI has apprehended all members of the group which landed on Long Island. They are being held secretly and incommunicado. I have taken detailed statements from each of the persons arrested and the story is a startling and shocking one. Long and extensive training is being given by the German authorities to specially selected men who in turn are being placed on board German submarines to be landed on the shores of the United States. I expect to be able to have in custody all members of the second group.”

Hoover hadn’t risen to the top of the FBI—and stayed there—by sharing credit. Almost every sentence in his memo included the word I . Not once did it mention that George Dasch had turned himself in or that his initial call to the New York field office had been referred to the “nutter’s desk.”

Washington, D.C.

Thursday, June 25, 1942

A few minutes past noon on June 25, Duane Traynor explained to George Dasch that he was under arrest and that he would be stripped of his personal belongings, from his gold watch to his eighty thousand dollars. And that he would be spending the night in jail.

Recording the saboteurs’ every move, a jailer noted in an official logbook: “G. Dasch. Urinated at 11:40 p.m. Appears a little depressed.”

New York City

Saturday, June 27, to Sunday, June 28, 1942

“I have a very important statement to make,” Director Hoover told the reporters he’d assembled in the FBI’s New York office. “I want you to listen carefully; this is a serious business.”

The next morning, Hoover picked up the Sunday edition of the New York Times and cracked a rare smile. The headline was huge; it was as big as the headline that had announced the attack on Pearl Harbor: “FBI SEIZES 8 SABOTEURS LANDED BY U-BOATS.”

“Before the men could begin carrying out their orders,” reported the Times , “the FBI was on their trail and the round-up began. One after another, they fell into the special agents’ nets.”

The story was perfect. Hoover only needed to make sure the public never heard the truth from George John Dasch.

Hyde Park, Washington, D.C.

Saturday, June 27, to Tuesday, June 30, 1942

Smiles were rare for J. Edgar Hoover. But not for Franklin Roosevelt. Along with his cigarette holder and fireside chats, his smile was something of a trademark. And for one of the first times since the war began, the president had a lot to smile about.

“Eight spies and one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in cash,” Attorney General Francis Biddle called Hyde Park to report.

The president loved a good spy story. And a good joke.

“Not enough, Francis,” he said. “Let’s make real money out of them. Sell the rights to Barnum and Bailey for a million and a half—the rights to take them around the country in lion cages at so much a head.”

Biddle was sure he was kidding, but the memo FDR dictated to him three days later was no joke. “The two American citizens,” said Roosevelt—referring to Herbie Haupt, who was a naturalized citizen, and to Burger, whose American citizenship was questionable—“are guilty of high treason. This being wartime, it is my inclination to try them by court martial.” Not that a trial, in Roosevelt’s mind, was necessary to determine their guilt.

“I do not see how they can offer any adequate defense. Surely they are just as guilty as it is possible to be and it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory.”

In that regard, the American people, regardless of their politics, were in complete agreement. An editorial by the Detroit Free Press read, “Realism calls for a stone wall and a firing squad, and not a holier-than-thou eyewash about extending the protection of civil rights to a group that came among us to blast, burn, and kill.”

Others were more succinct. “Shoot them,” said the New Orleans State . “Give them death,” demanded the El Paso Times . The New York Times reported that “Americans want to hear the roar of rifles in the hands of a firing squad.” And LIFE magazine’s headline bluntly declared, “The Eight Nazi Spies Should Die.”

Moving on to the “six who I take it are German citizens,” Roosevelt said, “They were apprehended in civilian clothes. This is an absolute parallel of the case of Major Andre in the Revolution and of Nathan Hale. Both of them were hanged.”

The president, impatient with civil liberties even in peacetime, was not about to deny America “the roar of rifles in the hands of a firing squad” that so many demanded. Americans were sacrificing their lives and loved ones in a war for the nation’s survival—a war that was not going well. The navy was waging a war on two oceans with just half the fleet that had been sailing on December 6, 1941. General MacArthur, the country’s most beloved general, was trapped in the Philippines, his invincibility shattered, his army starving. Americans deserve a victory , Roosevelt thought.

And he was going to give it to them.

“Here again it is my inclination that they be tried by court martial as were Andre and Hale. Without splitting hairs, I can see no difference.”

Of course, Roosevelt knew that the Supreme Court might try to interfere and decide the case belonged in a civil court. What would he do if the men in black robes said the Constitution required a trial by jury, guilt beyond reasonable doubt, individual counsel for every defendant, the right to exclude coerced confessions, and a sentence in accord with civil laws? After all, under civil law, their sentences would likely not exceed two years in prison.

Roosevelt wouldn’t hear of it. “I want one thing clearly understood, Francis,” he told Biddle. “I won’t give them up. I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?”

Biddle nodded, thinking that the president, though never boring, could be a bit boorish.

United States Department of Justice

Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, July 8, 1942

Unsure how his plan had gone so wrong, and unclear about why he was even under arrest, George was once again on his way to the Justice Department. But this time, his ride to the corner of Ninth and Constitution did not begin at the Mayflower, and what awaited him was not a tribe of stenographers hanging on his every word but a military commission—a tribunal of seven officers who would decide whether he lived or died.