Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

8

The Saboteurs: In a Time of War, the Laws Are Silent

The Farm

West of Berlin, Germany

April 14, 1942

The Farm looked like every other large villa in the serene countryside near Berlin. Once owned by wealthy Jewish industrialists, most of these estates were now the property of the Third Reich and had become uniform in their operation and appearance.

But this particular estate was different.

As the sun rose over the center of a million square miles of Nazi-occupied Europe, George Dasch—thirty-nine years old, with long, lanky arms, and a streak of silver through the center of his dark hair—sat through another class on bomb-making. Well-trained German shepherds patrolled the perimeter of the estate, just beyond a large stone wall.

Each student at the Farm had been specifically chosen for a special mission based on their ability to blend into ordinary American communities. All of them had spent time in the United States, most having left only after failing in a string of professional pursuits.

As George watched the instructor demonstrate the bomb assembly for what seemed like the five hundredth time, he looked around the classroom and began to wonder about his classmates. None of them, to his knowledge, had demonstrated any real loyalty to the Nazis or hatred toward the United States. He had neither. Worse, none of them had experience in espionage or military tactics or any of the other skills that might make someone a useful candidate for this kind of mission.

It was all pretty surreal, George thought, and so atypical of the way the Nazis normally operated. Loyalty and allegiance to the Third Reich were everything to them. He’d expected to be interrogated, maybe even tortured, in an attempt to break him. He’d prepared for the inevitable pain that was to come; worked to control his heart rate and breathing, and he thought carefully about how he would answer questions about his time in the United States. How would he fake the animosity they would so desperately want to see? He worried that he’d never be able to pull it off. He worried that he’d be labeled a sympathizer of the enemy and executed, his body thrown in some shallow grave outside the Farm.

But George didn’t need to worry about any of that, because the interrogation never came.

There were no questions, no torture, and no threats against his family.

Now he and his classmates were inside the Farm, training for an incredibly difficult and important mission—and none of them had the slightest idea how they’d gotten there.

New York City

Monday, December 8, 1941

John Cullen thought he was minutes away from becoming a U.S. Marine.

That morning he, along with hundreds of other tall, blue-eyed twenty-one-year-olds, set out for the New York City Armed Services recruiting station. He wanted to hit back against the Japanese personally, violently, and immediately.

Well, not quite immediately. After all, Christmas was just over two weeks away. He figured he could sign up now, spend one more Christmas with his family, and then ship out right afterward.

John entered the recruiting station, waited in line, and eventually reached a Marine sergeant who looked to be straight out of Hollywood central casting. “We’re here to sign up,” he said, pointing to the friend he’d brought along.

“If you fellas are ready to ship out tonight, we will take you,” snapped the sergeant. “If not, leave now. Don’t have no time for those who prioritize holidays over freedom.”

John and his friend looked at each other. Neither of them wanted to be the first to say what they were thinking—but, to the sergeant, the look on their faces was obvious.

They left the Marine recruiting station and joined the Coast Guard instead.

The Farm

Wednesday, April 29, 1942

5:30 P.M.

George carefully mixed the chemicals and prepared the detonator as he was taught—but he knew it was hopeless. Remembering details was not his strength. That might be okay when it came to names and dates and places, but when those details meant life or death, bad things were bound to happen.

Would the bomb explode? At the right time? With enough power?

Creeping through the darkness, looking in every direction for anything out of place, George attached the bomb to the fuel tank and turned to leave. As he did, a series of explosions stopped him dead in his tracks. The noise was incredible. George covered his head with his arms, his ears ringing, eyes burning from the smoke and legs singed by sparks.

Then it all stopped just as quickly as it had started. The fireworks were done; the drill was over. George had failed.

That night, every student at the Farm took a version of the same final exam. Every student failed.

The next day, they received their assignments.

They were headed for America.

The Farm

Thursday, April 30, 1942

9:15 A.M.

“There will be two teams of four men,” the heavyset instructor told his students. “U-202 will take Team One to New York’s Long Island. U-584 will take Team Two to the east coast of Florida. The subs will get as close to shore as possible, surface briefly, and then each team will take a small rubber boat to the shore.”

George and his seven classmates stared incredulously at the instructor. If the bomb-making classes had seemed surreal, this plan—or whatever it could be called—seemed downright absurd.

“Your first task will be to bury the TNT crates on the beach—you’ll retrieve these later, right before the attacks are set to begin. In the meantime, you’ll go out and find lodging and clothing and begin to blend back into the American society. This should not be difficult; you’ve all done it before.”

The instructor, sweat dampening his forehead and cheeks, then began to explain the carefully selected targets designed to cripple American morale and frustrate industrial production.

“This bridge is called the Hell Gate Bridge. It connects Queens to the Bronx. Team One is going to blow it up.

“This bridge crosses Horseshoe Curve. It’s critical to the Pennsylvania Railroad. . . .

“These two factories in Pennsylvania process cryolite, which is needed for aluminum production. . . .”

He continued down the list, explaining the need for each operative to memorize the targets, which included bridges, railroads, canals, factories, and, most important of all, he said, a series of aluminum factories in east Tennessee.

“You can’t make a war plane without aluminum,” he said. “And every blue cross you see on this map is a factory that produces it.” Many of the crosses were dotted around a small town, just south of Knoxville, called Alcoa.

“Team One”—he looked at George, who had been selected as its leader—“your job is to blow out the electricity at these power plants for eight hours. Eight hours. That’s all it takes. After eight hours of no electricity, the metals will harden. If the metals harden, the stoves break. If the stoves break, the factory dies. If the factory dies, the aluminum supply dries up. If the aluminum dries up, there are no new planes.”

He paused to dramatize the moment, as though some of the students might not be taking it seriously enough.

“And if there are no more American planes, we win the war.”

Long Island, New York

Saturday, June 13, 1942

12:25 A.M.

Coastguard Seaman Second Class John Cullen was just beginning his midnight patrol. Dressed in his standard Coast Guard uniform, he walked along the beach through the Long Island fog, quietly singing to himself “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo.”

Some days he regretted turning down the Marines in favor of the Coast Guard. He imagined himself training for the upcoming invasion of Guadalcanal and taking the fight to the enemy. Instead he was pounding sand on beaches nine thousand miles away, patrolling a dark and quiet coastline from . . . what, exactly?

The good news was that he felt safe; the bad news was that he felt very alone.

In reality, he was neither.

Fifteen minutes into his patrol, John saw the most unlikely of sights: people. The fog was too thick to be sure of it, but it looked like they were pulling a dinghy out of the surf and onto the beach. Shining his flashlight toward them, its light doing nothing but illuminating the fog, he called out, “U.S. Coast Guard. Who are you?”

“Coast Guard?” shouted back one of the strangers. He had dropped the dinghy and was walking toward John.

Cullen could barely make out in the darkness the other three strangers busying themselves unloading materials of some kind out of the dinghy and onto various points along the beach.

“Yes. Who are you?” John asked.

“Fishermen. From East Hampton,” the man replied.

The man bore no resemblance to a fisherman. He wore a red woolen sweater, tennis shoes, a dark fedora hat, and pants that had been soaked through. Besides, he had no fishing supplies.

“We were trying to get to Montauk Point, but our boat ran aground,” he said, his long, lanky arms flailing. “We’re waiting for the sunrise to continue.” He was a thin man, shorter than average, with a streak of silver running through the middle of his jet-black hair.

“What do you mean, East Hampton or Montauk Point?” asked John. The two locations were twenty miles from each other, and these supposed fishermen were only five miles from where they said they’d started. Fog or no fog, John thought, who misses their landing spot by fifteen miles?

“Do you know where you are?” he asked the man in the odd clothes, with the odd accent and even odder story.

“I don’t believe I know where we landed,” he replied. “But you should know.”

“You’re in Amagansett. That’s my station over there,” John said, pointing up the beach to a building that was barely discernible through the fog. “Why don’t you come up to the station and stay the night?”

“All right,” the stranger said. But then, after a few steps, he stopped.

John’s suspicions grew. The bizarre stranger seemed even more nervous than before. If he were truly a lost fisherman, he would have no reason not to come to the Coast Guard station.

But John was now quite sure that this was no fisherman. And so the mysterious man’s next statement confirmed what John already knew.

“I’m not going with you.”

Shangri-La

Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland

Saturday, June 13, 1942

12:30 A.M.

In a large house set inside the most isolated of country estates, the President of the United States slept alone and undisturbed, his face a picture of a man at peace. The fate of his republic, and perhaps a few others as well, hinged on the choices he made during the day—but the night was his. He slept soundly at this weekend retreat in the mountains north of Washington, this place he had repurposed as a retreat and named Shangri-La after the fictional Himalayan utopia.

Yes, it was true that his nation and its allies were losing a war in which the very freedom of mankind was at stake. And yes, MacArthur was trapped in the Philippines, while Rommel was racking up victories in North Africa and half of America’s fleet lay useless at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt had carried the nation through a depression. There was nothing, he believed, he could not bend to his iron will—and that included the Nazis.

Amagansett, Long Island

Saturday, June 13, 1942

12:35 A.M.

“What do you mean you’re not coming with me?” John Cullen asked.

“I have no identification card, and no permit to fish.”

“That’s all right. We’ll sort it all out.”

“No, I won’t go.”

“You have to come,” Cullen said, grabbing for the man’s arm.

“Now listen,” the man replied, his tone suddenly changing, his hands trembling, his eyes narrowing, his accent becoming clearer. “How old are you, son?”

“Twenty-one,” replied John.

“You have a mother?”

“Yes.”

“A father?”

“Yes.”

“Look, you have no idea what this is all about. I don’t want to kill you. Forget about this and I’ll give you some money and you can go have a good time.”

“I don’t want your money,” John said, his heart beginning to race.

A second man was now visible through the fog, coming closer and dragging a large canvas bag. He started speaking in German to the man John had been questioning.

“Shut up,” the man called out in English, looking mortified. “Go back to the other guys.”

The other man did as he was told and retreated.

“Take a good look at my face,” the man said as he removed his dark fedora, reached into a tobacco pouch, and stuffed a wad of money into Cullen’s hand. “Look into my eyes. Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”

“No, sir,” John lied. He knew he would never forget the odd streak of silver hair through the middle of the stranger’s head, but the time for honesty had passed. He was unarmed and powerless over these men, whoever they were. “I never saw you before.”

“You might see me in East Hampton sometime. Would you know me?”

“No, I never saw you before in my life.”

“You might hear from me again. My name is George John Davis. What’s your name, boy?”

“Frank Collins, sir,” he lied again—now even more nervous after hearing the man say his name. Why is he telling me these things? he thought.

Cullen slowly took a step back. Then another. And another. After a few more paces the man had disappeared into the fog.

Cullen ran.

New York City

Saturday, June 13, 1942

7:30 P.M.

The Governor Clinton Hotel was among New York’s ritziest, and its restaurant, the Coral Room, among the city’s most elegant. As George sat down for dinner, he thought of all the other times he’d been in places like this, as a waiter, never as a customer. Now, far from his old life, and far from the scarcity of war-torn Germany, George sat in the Coral Room with a fine linen napkin across his lap and eighty thousand dollars in cash strapped around his waist. It was more money than the president of the United States made in a year.

After his encounter with the boy from the Coast Guard this morning, George and his three teammates—Peter Burger, Richard Quirin, and Henry Heinck—had found their way to the Amagansett train station. There they’d boarded an early morning Long Island Rail Road train headed for Queens. George and Peter had checked into the Governor Clinton while suggesting to the team’s other two members that it would be safer if they found a different hotel.

Across the table was Peter Burger, a toolmaker by trade. But neither Pete nor George looked liked a tradesman tonight. After treating themselves to a shave and a shopping spree in Queens, they’d made it to Manhattan and headed straight for Macy’s. There they bought more shirts, trousers, underwear, ties, handkerchiefs, and suits—plus new watches and three suitcases to carry it all in.

George was smart enough to know that shopping sprees and steak dinners were not exactly the best way to stay inconspicuous—but at that moment he didn’t really care. This was a celebration. After all, they’d somehow convinced their own government not only to let them leave the country, but to send them back on their own private U-boats.

“My sister’s father-in-law was seventy-three, a fine man,” George said to Peter once they’d finished talking about their early morning escape. “The Nazis threw him into a concentration camp. Nine months. Because he was too Catholic. While he was in there, his wife died.”

Pete, perhaps buoyed by the wine, perhaps emboldened by George’s criticism of the Nazis, talked about his own seventeen months in prison. How he’d written a paper critical of the Gestapo. How he’d been held with sixty other prisoners in a windowless cell. And how his pregnant wife had been harassed, pressured to divorce him, and shaken down by the Gestapo. When she miscarried, Pete knew whom to blame.

“I have a lot to talk to you about,” George said. It was, by any measure, an understatement.

“I know what you are going to tell me,” said Pete. “I am quite sure that our intentions are very similar.”

George looked around. He badly wanted to talk with Peter now—but there were too many people sitting around them, too many prying ears. George knew that he’d been sloppy up until this point—he was an untrained, unmotivated, unsympathetic German. His carelessness and erratic nature were among the reasons he’d failed in most of his professional pursuits, none of which—from waiting tables, to clerking at a soda fountain, to managing a brothel—had prepared him for international espionage.

But he would not be sloppy anymore. He didn’t care about his mission, but he had no idea if the Nazis had sent others to watch him and his team. Be patient, George told himself.

“In the morning,” he said.

New York City

Sunday, June 14, 1942

8:30 A.M.

“I want the truth, nothing else—regardless of what it is,” George said. Looking Pete in the eye, pointing to the window across the hotel room, he added, “If we can’t agree, either I go out the window or you do.”

“There is no need for that. I think we feel very much the same,” Pete replied. “Let’s get on with it.”

But George was in no hurry. Instead of getting right to the reason the two of them were there, he instead started telling Pete about his life.

He explained how he’d left Germany in 1922 at age nineteen for America. That another nineteen years later he’d retreated back to his home country, looking for a new start.

He knew almost instantly that it had been a mistake. It was 1941 and, as George explained, “There was too much terror and too much want, not enough food and not enough fun.”

His next stop was the Farm—and then right back here, to America.

Pete told a story not altogether different: a childhood in Germany, an emigration to America, and a return home that he quickly regretted. “I never intended to carry out the orders,” he said, beginning to cry. “And when I got to the beach yesterday, I started sabotaging the mission right away.”

“When you were talking with the Coast Guardsman, I dropped a pack of German cigarettes,” Pete continued, “and a vest. And some socks and swimming trunks. Then I dragged the crates of TNT along the beach. I could have carried them. They were light enough. But I knew dragging them would leave marks leading right to where we buried them. The fog obscured what I was doing from the others—they had no idea.”

Smiling, and sure he’d found an ally, George gripped Pete’s shoulder with his trembling hand. “Kid, I think God brought us together. We are going to make a great team.”

New York City

Sunday, June 14, 1942

7:51 P.M.

The FBI received a lot of phone calls. Some of them were taken seriously, and the rest were routed to an agent who sat at a “nutter’s desk.”

“Can you spell that, sir?” asked the agent who was, at the moment, listening to a caller who claimed to have arrived from Germany the prior morning.

“Franz. F-R-A-N-Z. Daniel. D-A-N-I-E-L. Pastorius. P-A-S-T-O-R-I-U-S.”

The agent wrote down “Postorius.”

“And what type of information do you want to give?”

He told the agent that he would be traveling to Washington to report something “big.” Once there, he wanted to speak directly to J. Edgar Hoover. “He is the person who should hear it first.”

“Mr. Hoover is a busy man—”

“Take down this message,” the caller demanded. “I, Franz Daniel Pastorius, shall try to get in touch with your Washington office this coming week, either Thursday or Friday, and you should notify the Washington office of this fact.”

Before hanging up, George added, “Tell them I am about forty years old, and have a streak of silver in my hair.”

From the nutter’s desk, the FBI agent typed a memo for the file. Neither it, nor George’s message, ever left New York.

Washington, D.C.

Friday, June 19, to Wednesday, June 24, 1942

It was Friday morning when George dialed the operator at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. His message to the FBI may not have made it to the capital, but he had. “Room service, please.”

Peter Burger knew that George was in D.C. to turn himself in to the FBI and expose the entire operation, but the other two team members had no idea. Peter had told them that George was leaving New York for a few days to get in touch with some Nazi sympathizers living in America, hopeful that they could help with logistics.

George was finally beginning to feel like himself again. It had been a long time. But now, between the great food, seeing old friends, and playing marathon games of pinochle, he was starting to realize that his future was bright. His next step, which would be to explain the entire German plot to the American government, would finally set him free.

George had spent a lot of time over the past few days thinking about what he’d do with his life once the Americans had labeled him a hero. Maybe he could help the U.S. war effort by improving their propaganda. Or maybe the government would have its own ideas. Whatever the case, as long as he was helping to bring down the Nazis, he’d be happy.

Picking up the phone to call the FBI, George had a moment of doubt—not about whether to call, but about whom to call. It suddenly occurred to him that maybe the Secret Service was the proper agency. Unsure, he dialed the U.S. Government Information Service and told the woman who answered that he had “a statement of military as well as political value.” She suggested trying the colonel in charge of Military Intelligence at the War Department. George hung up, called the colonel, and left a message.

Undeterred, and in something of a hurry for a change, George reverted to his original plan: He called the FBI and asked to speak to J. Edgar Hoover.

The operator transferred him to a second office; which sent him to a third office. That office connected him to Duane Traynor, the agent in charge of the FBI’s anti-sabotage unit.

If George couldn’t talk directly to Hoover, he figured Traynor would have to do. “Did New York tell you I was on my way?”

Of course, New York had not told him anything. But, intrigued, Traynor sent a car to the Mayflower to pick George up and bring him in. While he waited, George wrote a letter to Pete:

Got safely into town last night and contacted the responsible parties. At present I’m waiting to be brought over to the right man by one of his agents. I had a good night’s rest, feel fine physically as well as mentally and believe that I will accomplish the part of our participation. It will take lots of time and talking but please don’t worry, have faith and courage. I try hard to do the right thing.

After arriving at the Justice Department, George sat down with Agent Traynor. “I have a long story to tell,” he said, “but I want to tell it my own way.”

For twelve hours, George told Traynor about the Farm and the U-boats, about the second team sent to Florida and about the targets they were ordered to hit. Of course, he also treated Traynor to a healthy dose of his life story as a team of six stenographers worked in one-hour shifts to record every word that came out of his mouth. Finally, perhaps for the first time in his life, George had a receptive audience willing to sit and listen to anything that popped into his head.

As midnight approached, George was beginning to lose his voice. Accompanied by Traynor, he returned to the Mayflower, where the FBI agent slept in a spare bed. It was all going according to plan, George thought. It was exciting. And even though it was exhausting, and a little scary, he was having fun. It felt good to be a hero.

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.

The caravan that carried him included six police motorcycles, an army truck packed with machine-gun-bearing soldiers, two vans with soldiers on the running boards, another truck, and more motorcycles. Along the procession, thousands of onlookers shouted lines like “there go the spies” and “Nazi rats.”

When George walked into Room 5235, where he would be tried for war crimes, he expected to find something that looked like a courtroom. Instead, he found a long and narrow area of bland office space that had once been a classroom. It sat along a hallway easily closed off from the rest of the building. Glass doors connecting other corridors were boarded up and watched by armed guards. The room’s windows were covered in black curtains to preserve secrecy, and as George looked around, he was surprised to see that there were no members of the press. He badly wanted to tell his story to the public, but he was beginning to wonder if powerful people in the U.S. government had something else in mind.

No sooner had the commission begun to swear in the officers of the court than a six-foot, five-inch-tall colonel rose to speak. He wore a green, loose-fitting Class A uniform and spoke with a soft country drawl. The colonel had a Harvard law degree and a skillful courtroom manner. He was George’s best hope.

“This entire proceeding is invalid and unconstitutional,” said Colonel Kenneth Royall, who also represented the other seven defendants. “In 1866, the Supreme Court was clear. Civil courts have jurisdiction when they are open in the territory in which we are now located.”

George, for the first time since his arrest, began to get his hopes up. Perhaps, he thought, the commission would be dissolved on its very first day.

After a lengthy discussion and a short recess, the general in charge of the commission ruled on his attorney’s plea: “The commission does not sustain the objection of the defense. Proceed.”

The general then read the charges against them—espionage and sabotage—and when his name was called, George stood up, looked at the presiding general, and answered the charges with the same plea as the other defendants.

“Not guilty.”

Hyde Park, New York

Sunday, July 12, 1942

“What should be done with them?” the president asked his aide. The tribunal had not yet decided the saboteurs’ guilt or sentences, but the president was thinking ahead.

His aide wondered, but only for a moment, if the president was considering clemency.

FDR turned back to his aide and clarified his question. “Should they be shot or hanged?”

United States Supreme Court

Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, July 29, to Thursday, July 30, 1942

The spectators in the packed impromptu courtroom sat in rapt silence as Colonel Royall rose before them. Like the colonel, everyone there—including J. Edgar Hoover, and the gentleman beside him, the associate director of the FBI, Clyde Tolson—believed the argument that Colonel Royall was about to make would be the difference between life and death for his clients.

“Mr. Chief Justice,” Royall began, “and may it please the court.”

Royall had challenged the authority of the military tribunal, which had not yet rendered its verdict, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. For three days, Royall quoted from the court’s precedents and appealed to its highest ideals. Citing a seventy-six-year-old case called Ex Parte Milligan, Royall explained to the justices that Abraham Lincoln had attempted to try a southern sympathizer in a military tribunal. The defendant had been arrested in Indiana in 1864, and the Supreme Court had ruled it was unconstitutional to convene a military tribunal in a territory where the civil courts were open.

When it was the prosecution’s turn, Attorney General Biddle approached the podium. “The United States and the German Reich are now at war,” he told the Court. “That seems to be the essential fact on which this case turns and to which all our arguments will be addressed.” He argued that the “Indiana of 1864” bore no resemblance to the “East Coast of today.” Modern war is “fought on the total front, on the battlefields of joined armies, on the battlefields of production, and on the battlefields of transportation and morale, by bombing, the sinking of ships, sabotage, spying, and propaganda.”

Speaking on behalf of the commander in chief, Biddle told the court, “Our whole East Coast is a theater of operations in substantially the same sense as the North Atlantic or the British Isles.”

Countering that Biddle’s notion of “total war” was broad enough to cover any crime by any person committed anywhere in wartime, Royall did his best to fight back. There must be some limit to Biddle’s theory, he said, “or we have very few constitutional guarantees left when we go to war.”

Royall could tell from the justices’ cold reception and hostile questions that he was losing. But he was unaware of something even more dismal: Some of them had already made up their minds. As Justice Felix Frankfurter told his colleagues behind closed doors, Royall’s clients were “damned scoundrels” and “low-down, ordinary, enemy spies who, as enemy soldiers, have invaded our country and therefore could immediately have been shot by the military when caught in the act of invasion.”

Justice Frankfurter did not plan to tie the president’s hands. This was war.

Washington, D.C., Jail

Saturday, August 8, 1942

9:00 A.M.

The clanging of the keys woke George up from a nap. He hadn’t been sleeping well at night ever since the Supreme Court had publicly denied his appeal and sent the case back to the military tribunal. Brief, restless naps were his best chance to sleep.

The provost marshal entered his cell—with a stern look on his face. Despite all of the disappointments and betrayals he’d experienced over the previous months, George still expected to be told that he was a free man; that the tribunal and, in fact, the country, had come to its senses and realized that he was not a spy or a saboteur; he was a hero.

“George John Dasch,” the marshal began, “I am here on behalf of the government of the United States of America to inform you that you have been found guilty of espionage and sabotage and sentenced to thirty years in prison.”

George, arms flailing, began rambling about his family, words sputtering out of his mouth faster than he could control them. The provost marshal turned and left. He couldn’t understand what the convicted spy was saying and, like many before him, he really didn’t care.

• • •

The provost marshal preferred the reaction of Peter Burger, whom he found lying in bed reading a magazine. When told he would spend the rest of his life in prison, Pete looked up, said, “Yes, sir,” and went back to reading the Saturday Evening Post.

• • •

The other six defendants were not so lucky. The provost marshal entered each of their cells and recited the same line: “You have been found guilty of espionage and sabotage and your sentence is death. Your execution is scheduled for later today.”

Among the six who received that news was Herbie Haupt, a twenty-two-year-old American citizen, who had recently written a letter from prison to his parents in Chicago.

Please don’t judge me too hard.

While I was in Germany I worried night and day wondering how you were getting along. I tried to get work in Germany but I could not, and when they told me that they had chosen me to go back to the United States you don’t know how happy I was. I counted the days and hours until I could see you again and probably help you.

Dear Mother, I never had any bad intentions. I did not know what a grave offense it is to come here the way I did in wartime. They are treating me very well here, as good as can be expected.

Dear Mother and Father, whatever happens to me, always remember that I love you more than anything in the world. May God protect you, my loved ones, until we see each other again, wherever that may be.

Love, your son, Herbie.

Washington, D.C., Jail

Saturday, August 8, 1942

3:30 P.M.

Guards strapped Herbie Haupt’s hands and feet to the electric chair and attached electrodes to his head and leg. A switch was flipped. His body tightened, trembled, and, sixty seconds later, relaxed.

Washington, D.C., Jail

Wednesday, August 12, 1942

When FBI agent Duane Traynor walked into George’s cell, he saw a thinning, pale man—a shell of the excitable and talkative optimist he’d met a month earlier.

For a moment George’s eyes sparkled at the sight of the confidant he had once trusted, the partner he had once believed to be his friend. They’ve finally come to let me out.

Those sparkles turned to tears when he realized that Traynor was only there to say good-bye.

New Hampshire

August–October 1942

The Supreme Court’s decision had been announced in July, but the more complicated task of explaining in a written opinion why the president had not violated the Constitution still lay ahead. It would not suffice to simply quote the old Latin maxim Inter Arma Silent Leges: In a time of war, the laws are silent.

Alone at his summer home in New Hampshire, Chief Justice Harlan Stone was rereading the attorney general’s legal brief. He was searching for sound legal reasoning to support the court’s decision. But Stone wasn’t finding what he wanted. “I certainly hope,” he told his clerk, “the military is better equipped to fight the war than it is to fight its legal battles.”

Finally, though regretting that “the opinion was not good literature,” Stone sent a draft to his colleagues, who unanimously signed onto it.

But what other choice did they have? By then, four of the justices had doubts about their decision, but six men had already been executed as a result of it.

Atlanta

Wednesday, November 3, 1943

The psychiatrist typed his report slowly. “The prisoner has an obsessive, compulsive, neurotic personality type. He complains of depressive trends, nervousness, insomnia, and vague pains. He repeatedly stated that he did not mind being in prison but that he was hurt by the way it was done; that he has terrific prejudice and anger and that he feels he cannot go on long this way.”

A few miles away, the prisoner—the one with a silver streak running through his black hair—wept quietly to himself.

Washington, D.C.

December 1971

J. Edgar Hoover sat down at the large desk in his dark office. It was just over a week before Christmas, his fifty-second at the FBI. It would be his last.

On his desk were two stacks of Christmas cards, one with the notes he would read, and one, a much larger stack, with the notes his secretary assured him he could ignore.

Near the bottom of the larger stack was a holiday card that had come virtually every year since 1948, when Peter Burger and George Dasch were granted executive clemency by President Harry Truman and deported back to Germany.

“Merry Christmas,” it said. “Yours, Peter Burger.”

EPILOGUE

2001–2004

Just a few months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, a twenty-year-old American citizen named Yasir Hamdi ran away from home. A devout Muslim, he had been told wonderful things about the Taliban from his friends and religious leaders, but when he’d arrived at a Taliban training camp in Afghanistan that summer, he quickly realized it had all been lies. He soon became disillusioned and, after just a few weeks, left the camp.

On his way home, Hamdi was arrested by Afghan warlords, who told their American allies that he was a Taliban fighter. The American military labeled Yasir Hamdi an unlawful enemy combatant and detained him: first in Afghanistan, then in Guantanamo Bay, next in Norfolk, Virginia, and finally on a naval base off the coast of South Carolina.

Hamdi told his captors that he was not an enemy of the United States and believed that a trial would exonerate him. For years the United States held him without charge, arguing that, as an enemy combatant, he was not entitled to due process.

Finally, in 2004, his case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his attorney argued that, as a U.S. citizen, his right to a jury trial was guaranteed by the Constitution.

The government’s case was made by the Solicitor General of the United States. He reminded the justices of an obscure legal precedent decided in 1942, when eight Nazi saboteurs had tried to make a similar argument. The government’s brief was forty-one pages long and referred to the saboteurs’ case thirty times.

In 2004, not many people seemed to care that the 1942 decision had been made hastily in the midst of a world war, or that four of the justices regretted their decision before the official opinion had even been released. It didn’t matter because the passage of time destroys context and circumstance the way termites destroy wood: slowly, steadily, and completely.

Yasir Hamdi, thanks in large part to a decision made sixty years earlier, lost his case. He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported to Saudi Arabia in 2004.