The Best American Crime Writing 2003

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: SLAVES OF THE BROTHEL

The plan called for a “soft entry,” which meant that the police officers would ask to come in, rather than break down the door. It was 1:45 on the morning of July 6, 2001, and a convoy of white-painted U.N. police vehicles were gunning through Priština’s deserted streets on their way to raid the infamous Miami Beach Club. The convoy passed a dead dog and a row of overflowing garbage bins and the destroyed post office and groups of tough-looking young men who turned to stare at the SUVs as they went by.

The owner of the Miami Beach, Milam Maraj, was suspected of trafficking in women and forcing them into prostitution. What to all outward appearances was a regular strip club was, in fact, a brothel, and the girls who worked there-teenagers from the former Soviet Union-were in all likelihood being held in conditions amounting to virtual slavery. Several months earlier, Maraj had been crippled by a bullet to the knee because he was willing to testify against a local strongman named Sabit Geci, who was also involved in trafficking and prostitution. Geci was sentenced to six years in prison-the first major victory against organized crime in Kosovo-but it cost Maraj his knee. Now he had to walk with crutches and carry a gun for protection and was suspected by the U.N. of engaging in the same kind of crimes that had put his archrival in jail.

The convoy of SUVs ground up the dark, pitted streets of Jablanica Hill and came to a stop a hundred yards from the bar. The raid went down fast. A team of heavily armed U.S. soldiers stood guard on the perimeter while half a dozen police officers rushed the front door and flattened the two bouncers up against the wall. From there they moved into the dimly lit bar and screamed for more light as they pushed the men to one side of the room and the women to the other. Maraj hobbled out on his crutches and played host with as charming a smile as he could muster. “Please, do your jobs,” he invited, sweeping one hand toward the girls, who were already sitting at a table, waiting to be questioned by the police. “There is no problem. You will see.”

And in fact he was right. An hour later the police left, empty-handed. Of the dozen or so girls found at the club that night, not one had a forged visa, not one had entered the country illegally, not one admitted having been trafficked, beaten up, raped, or threatened. They just flirted with the police officers and then waved goodbye prettily when the officers trooped back out the door. The incident was all too typical of the failure to combat forced prostitution, which has spiraled out of control, becoming one of Europe’s major problems.

Most of the prostitutes in Kosovo have been trafficked illegally from the poorest parts of the ruined Soviet state. They are lured by the promise of a good job, usually in Italy or Germany, their passports are confiscated, and they generally wind up sold to Albanian pimps, who force them to work in brothels to pay off their “debt,” i.e., what it cost the pimp to buy them. Not surprisingly, the system is set up so that that is virtually impossible, and the women essentially become trapped in the dark, violent world of the Albanian Mafia. A moderately attractive young woman goes for around $1,000. Tall ones are worth more, and very beautiful ones are worth more. Moldovan women are preferred because they are particularly desperate-the living wage in their country is calculated at $100 a month, and the average income is a quarter of that-and they are remarkably beautiful. Moldova seems to have beautiful women the way Sierra Leone has diamonds-peculiar national treasures that haven’t done either country much good.

The problem with investigating human trafficking in Europe is that the women themselves often deny needing help. They are too scared, manipulated, or desperate for money to dare admit anything to the police. The only way around the problem is undercover work, but the U.N. mandate in Kosovo until very recently did not include such intelligence gathering. Journalists, however, have never been bound by such rules. One weekday night in the pouring rain, photographer Teun Voeten and I drove out of Priština toward the Macedonian border, where there are dozens of brothels tucked away in the smaller towns. We were with two Albanian translators, Erol and Valon, who spoke Serbian and whose appearance let them pass for anything-Serb or Albanian, Kosovo or Macedonian. Our idea was to walk into a brothel, pretend to be American servicemen in Kosovo, and buy an hour or two with one of the women. In the privacy of a motel room, out of sight of the Albanian Mafia, which runs the brothels-in fact, some would say, runs the whole country-we could interview the woman with a tape recorder and get the real story of how she got there.

The highway was two narrow lanes of ruined pavement. Convoys of trucks blasted past us in the oncoming lane, and U.N. tanks and armored trucks slowed traffic heading south, toward Macedonia, to a crawl. Albanian rebels had seized a large part of the mountainous border between the two countries, and the U.N. peacekeepers were building up their presence in case they had to intervene on short notice. Off in the distance we could see the diffuse yellow glow of Camp Bondsteel reflecting off the cloud cover. Bondsteel is an enormous American base built close to a nasty little industrial town called Ferizaj. As a result, Ferizaj has an inordinate number of brothels, and at a gas station outside of town, with the rain drumming down and the trucks roaring past, the pump attendant advised us to check out one called the Apaci. It had the best girls in town, he said, so that was where all the American officers went. We thanked him and drove around the ghastly apartment blocks and ruined factories of Ferizaj until we found a low concrete building covered in camouflage netting. It had a photograph of an Apache attack helicopter on the door. We parked by some railroad tracks and walked in.

There are very good reasons why something amounting to slavery has been allowed to thrive in the middle of Europe. Not only is the Albanian Mafia notoriously violent-Kosovo has one of the highest murder rates in Europe-but it has attempted to infiltrate and buy off both the local police force and the government. “Those who have money here have power,” as one United Nations police officer says. “And the Mafia has money.” Undercover work in the brothels is dangerous, and attempting a police action that the Mafia doesn’t get tipped off to is extremely difficult. Furthermore, the Mafia is deeply intertwined with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which fought the Serb Army and then started an insurrection in Macedonia, and it has access to plenty of weapons. Last year a German relief worker made the mistake of talking to some trafficked women about the possibility of escape, and that night someone attempted to throw a grenade into his hotel room. It was tossed into Room 69, which was empty; the relief worker was staying in Room 96.

No one paid us much attention when we walked in. There was a group of tough-looking Albanians in one corner, talking very seriously among themselves, and an American officer in uniform in another corner with his back to the wall. He was sitting with two Albanian translators and a blond in a very short skirt who was feigning interest in whatever he was saying. Between her bad English and the music, she couldn’t have understood much. We sat up front by the stage and made sure that the bartender couldn’t get a clear view of Teun, who had a small, low-light camera in his pocket. He carefully took it out and put it under his hat.

There were eight or ten girls ranged at the table in front of us, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes and barely talking. Some had hair dyed jet black, and the rest had hair bleached so blond it almost looked blue. Occasionally I’d catch one of them looking at us, but then I’d realize she was looking right through us and was too bored even to make eye contact. They sat with their legs crossed, waiting for their next shift on the stage, occasionally getting up without much enthusiasm to go talk to the table of Albanian men. They were pretty, but not extraordinarily so. A couple looked to be straight out of the Romanian peasantry-big, strong girls with rough faces and too much makeup-but one stood out from the rest. She was petite and had platinum-blond hair pulled back tight across her skull and dark glossy lipstick and one of those heartbreaking Slavic faces-high cheekbones, dark eyes, a slightly Asian cast-that you remember for years. She sat off by herself, oblivious to everyone around her, and when the DJ put on an Algerian song called “Aicha,” she stubbed out her cigarette and got up to dance.

There was something different about her-she was distant from the other girls, almost disdainful. I thought that maybe she would speak more openly than the others. “Her,” I said to Erol before she’d even finished her dance. Erol waved the bartender over, a young guy with his hair bound improbably into a topknot, and negotiated the deal: We were to wait until closing time and then go out to our car and follow the security guys to a motel. The girls would already be there. Erol would go up alone at a cost of about $150. If he wanted to take her home with him he had to put down a deposit of her full price-$2,000-and if she escaped he would forfeit all of it.

After she finished her dance the bartender sent her over to our table. She was young-in her late teens, maybe-and unnervingly self-possessed. She sat there playing with her hair and smoking cigarettes and said that it was her first night at the Apaci and she was not happy to be there. She also said that her name was Niki and that she was from a small town in Moldova. (In order to protect her, I have changed her name.)

“Where did you work before here?” I asked.

“Banja Luka.”

Banja Luka was the capital of Serb Bosnia, the site of some of the worst ethnic cleansing in the war.

“What did you think of Banja Luka?”

“If I could drop a bomb on Banja Luka,” she said, “I would do it tomorrow.”

It was around two in the morning when the lights went up. A hard, ugly rain was coming down outside, and the place had cleared out except for us and the thugs and the girls, who had been herded into the corner. The thugs who ran them were putting on their leather jackets. We were getting ready to go when a heavyset man-later thought by U.N. investigators to be Bashkim Beqiri-walked in the door. Beqiri was a local boxing champion who ran a strip bar called Europe 2000. One hand jammed in his pocket, he planted himself before an Apaci security guy and started yelling. The security guy didn’t say much, and his buddies stood around, shifting from foot to foot while the girls looked away and Beqiri hollered. I asked Erol what was going on.

“That man wants his money,” Erol whispered back. “He says he wants [$2,000] right now or he’s going to kill the girl.”

We couldn’t tell which woman he was talking about. Beqiri turned and walked out the door, saying he would be back the next day. The security guys held a quick council and then herded the women outside into the pouring rain to a couple of late-model BMWs parked next to the railroad tracks. They looked dumb and well-muscled, and they squeezed themselves into a couple more cars and motioned for us to follow. We trailed them in our car through the dark streets of Ferizaj to a place called the Muhaxheri Motel, off a side street at the center of town.

The Muhaxheri was a slapdash five-story modern building with a cheap plastic sign outside and no one at the front desk. The thugs got out of their cars and looked around and then pulled the women out and shoved them toward the door. A police car drove by slowly but didn’t stop. One of the men motioned to Erol, who got out of our car and nodded to us and disappeared into the motel. Another carload of men pulled up and went into the Muhaxheri and came out ten minutes later and drove off. We waited an hour like that, the rain coming down, an occasional car pulling up and then driving away, and Erol never emerged from the motel.

War has been good for the Albanian Mafia. In February and March 1998, Serb military and paramilitary forces carried out a series of massacres in the Drenica region of central Kosovo that quickly grew into a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. By the time NATO intervened a year later, as many as 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed and an estimated 800,000 driven across the country’s borders. A massive NATO bombing campaign finally forced the Serbs to concede defeat, and they withdrew on June 10, 1999. Within hours, approximately 43,000 NATO troops poured into Kosovo to impose order, but it wasn’t fast enough. Groups of young Albanian toughs were already patrolling the streets of Priština and other large towns, establishing control in a society that had been completely sundered by the Serb occupation. Already in a position of power because they had helped fund and arm the KLA, the Mafia bought off local officials, infiltrated the police force, and killed anyone they couldn’t intimidate.

Kosovo was, and still is, the perfect place to base a criminal network-chaotic, violent, and ringed by porous borders. Local and international authorities can’t hope to control the trafficking routes. To the north are Serb gangsters who work closely with the Russian Mafia and are only too happy to overlook old ethnic hatreds in the interest of business. To the east are Bulgarian moutri-“thick-necks,” mostly graduates of wrestling schools-who work for security firms that double as racketeering outfits. Criminal clans in Albania proper, given free rein by a corrupt, bankrupt, and utterly impotent government, have taken over the port town of Vlorë and use 500-horse-power inflatable rafts called scafi to run illegal immigrants and drugs across the Adriatic into Italy. An estimated 10 percent of the population of Vlorë are in business with the local Mafia, and two-thirds of the cars on the streets have been stolen from Western Europe.

Worldwide, the effect has been disastrous. The Balkan drug trade, which moves more than 70 percent of the heroin destined for Europe, is valued at an estimated $400 billion a year. By early 2001 the Albanian Mafia had muscled its competition out of the way and all but taken over London’s crime-ridden red-light district, Soho. Albanian organized crime has established alliances with the Italian Mafia and with criminal gangs in Turkey. In February 2001 an Albanian insurrection started in Macedonia, and the Mafia quickly moved in to help arm and pay for the guerrilla movement that went from several hundred to several thousand men in a matter of months. In some cases, Mafia bosses simply became local rebel commanders and funded their military operations through criminal enterprises that could operate much more effectively under the cover of war.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)-part of the temporary governing body in Kosovo-estimates that around 200,000 women each year are trafficked from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, most of them as prostitutes. The value of their services has been estimated at between $7 and $12 billion. Even before the Kosovo war, human trafficking in Europe-much of it through the Balkans-was worth as much as $4 billion a year. Bulgaria alone loses 10,000 women a year to the traffickers. Moldova-a country so poor that a quarter of the population has emigrated in search of work-reportedly supplies two-thirds of the prostitutes working in Kosovo. Romania is a distant runner-up, followed by Ukraine, Bulgaria, Albania, and Russia.

Prostitution became a mainstay of the criminal economy within months of NATO intervention in Kosovo. With 43,000 men stationed on military bases, and spending by international reconstruction groups making up 5 to 10 percent of Kosovo’s economy, the problem was bound to arise. There are now as many as a hundred brothels in Kosovo, each employing up to twenty women. Thousands more women are trafficked through Kosovo and on into Western Europe. In southern Macedonia, the town of Velesta has dozens of brothels under the control of a strongman named Leku, who has reportedly paid off the local police and operates in the open with complete impunity. When national authorities tried to crack down on his empire, he threatened to take to the hills and start his own private war. The highway south of the Macedonian town of Tetovo-long a hotbed of Albanian nationalism and organized crime-is lined with brothels as well.

Unable to use local women easily-they aren’t so poor, and their families would come looking for them-men such as Leku have turned to the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants fleeing the former Soviet Union. Young women who have been promised innocent-sounding jobs in Western Europe, particularly Italy, are typically escorted by Serb or Bulgarian gangsters into Kosovo and Macedonia and then sold to Albanian pimps. By the time they realize what is going on, it is too late. Deprived of their passports, gang-raped, often forced to take drugs, and disoriented by lack of food and sleep, these women find themselves virtual prisoners of whatever brothel they wind up in.

“Once, Leku told a Bulgarian girl to take off her bra when she was dancing,” a Moldovan woman I will call Elena told me. Elena had managed to escape the Macedonian Mafia after months of brutality and servitude. “She didn’t want to, because she was ashamed, so Leku took a belt from the bartender and started beating her. Then he made her go onstage bruised and bleeding and crying.” Another bar Elena worked at was owned by a man she knew as Ayed. “Ayed put three new girls in a car and made the rounds of his friends-they all took turns raping them. They made the girls do things they’d never done before because they were very young. We all lived in one room and slept on mattresses next to each other. There wasn’t enough room, so we had to sleep on our sides. We only ate once a day, and we had to beg toothpaste and soap from our clients. Ayed had a huge ring on his hand, which was shaped like a lion’s head. One day he started beating us one by one in the face.” According to Elena, if they fell down he kicked them, if they cried he beat them, if they looked at him he beat them, if they didn’t look at him he beat them.

“I learned about good and evil,” she says, “I saw so many evil people.”

After an hour and a half Erol still had not come out, so Valon decided to look for him. He walked into the hotel lobby and heard men talking in the hallway and was spotted by them as he slipped closer. They wanted to know who the hell his friends in the car were. “They’re from the United States,” Valon said. For some reason he added, “One of them is a basketball coach.”

That seemed to satisfy the thugs, who kicked him out and said Erol would be out in a few minutes. Erol emerged ten minutes later, smoking a cigarette and looking shaken. He got into the car and told Valon to get us out of there. “They found the tape recorder,” he said. “They had a lot of questions.” Valon pulled the car into the street, and we drove off through Ferizaj, keeping watch behind us to make sure no one was following. It was three in the morning, and Ferizaj was completely deserted. Erol said they’d found the tape recorder when they patted him down outside Niki’s room, and five or six of them had gathered around and started yelling, demanding explanations. Erol said that it was just his tape recorder and that he took it everywhere with him.

They confiscated it and then wrote down his name from his passport. They were very angry and kept telling him not to fuck with them. “Listen,” one of the men had finally said. “Go in the room, finish your job for one hour, or you can go, right here and now.”

Erol screwed up his nerve and went into the room. There was one bed and a window with a narrow balcony and a shower but no toilet. Niki was sitting on the bed, and she started to undress when he walked in. “You don’t have to do that-I’m not here for that,” he said. “I just want to talk to you.”

She’d probably had stranger requests before-they all must have. He asked her where she was from and how she’d gotten here, and she became very serious and told her story. This is what Erol could remember of it on the drive back to Priština:

Niki was from Moldova; her father was dead, and she had lived with her mother. She’d been promised a good job by a recruiter in Moldova who was actually in league with the Mafia, and she wound up trafficked to Banja Luka. Banja Luka was hell on earth, she said. Every customer was drunk and many were violent-one even grabbed her belly-button ring and ripped it right out. A month ago she had been trafficked to Ferizaj, where she wound up at Europe 2000. She sought refuge in the Apaci. Tonight her previous “owner”-Beqiri-had come looking for her at the Apaci and said he was going to kill her if he didn’t get back her purchase price. She didn’t have the money, and neither did the owner of the Apaci. That was the argument we had witnessed. She was the girl they’d been arguing over.

“I like life very much. I’m too young to die,” Niki had told Erol. “I’m just eighteen years old.”

Erol asked her if she was free to go home to Moldova if she wanted. She said that she was, but then admitted that she didn’t actually have her passport. (In all likelihood, Beqiri did.) She wasn’t even sure that any of the $150 Erol had paid for her would wind up in her pocket, so he gave her all the money he had on him, a 10 deutsche mark note (about $5). On it he wrote, “For Niki, the most beautiful girl.” She gave him a cigarette lighter in return. His last question was whether she ever had feelings for the guys she was with, or were they all the same?

“Of course sometimes I have feelings,” she said. “I’m human.”

Erol told her he was sorry and said goodbye and walked out of the room.

The next day we went to the police station in Gnjilane to report what we’d seen. Not only was there plenty of evidence of trafficking and prostitution in Niki’s case, but there was reason to believe her life was in danger. The deputy police chief in Gnjilane was an American named Bill Greer, who quickly organized a group of Kosovar police to raid the Apaci. (U.N. police officers are training local Albanians-many of them taken from the ranks of the disarmed Kosovo Liberation Army-and Serbs in basic police procedure.) The newly trained cops crowded into Greer’s office and strapped on their guns and flak jackets while he explained through a translator: “We’re going to get a young lady who’s been threatened with being exterminated. She ran away from one pimp to the Apaci, and he came after her and demanded [$2,000] or she’d be killed.”

The owner of the Apaci, Sevdush Veseli, was well-known to the authorities. He’d already been detained for trafficking a young Romanian woman, but when it came time to make a statement to the judge, she was too frightened to repeat what she’d said earlier to the police, so they had to let him go. Veseli was a former member of the KLA who wasn’t known to be particularly violent, but Greer wasn’t taking any chances. He sent half a dozen local police, backed up by a couple of U.N. officers, and they picked up reinforcements at the Ferizaj police station before bursting through the door at the Apaci. All they found was an old guy mopping the floor.

If Veseli hadn’t been tipped off before, he certainly knew something was up now. Our little escapade the night before couldn’t have escaped his notice, and he must have figured out that Niki had been the object of today’s raid. Between the police and Beqiri, she was causing him more problems than she could possibly be worth. That meant that, one way or another, he would probably try to get her off his hands. That afternoon Ali Osman, a Turkish police officer who headed the Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit in Gnjilane, sent word to Veseli that he was to appear at the police station the following morning with all of his dancers.

Technically the Apaci was just a strip joint on the outskirts of Ferizaj. And technically the police could round up the employees anytime they wanted to check their visas and work papers. At nine the next morning, Teun and I showed up at the police station to watch the interrogation of a dozen or so women employed by Sevdush Veseli at the Apaci.

The women were seated in a small room, smoking and looking annoyed. Teun and I walked in, glanced around, and told Osman that Niki was not among them. That was no surprise. We went into Osman’s office; the next step was to question the women individually, where we could speak freely without the other girls or their bosses listening in. Not only might they know what happened to Niki, but some of them might want out. Those were the ones who could provide testimony of trafficking and prostitution at the Apaci, which was what Osman needed to put Veseli behind bars.

Since undercover investigations were not allowed at this time under the U.N. mandate, convicting someone like Veseli usually depends on testimony from the prostitutes. It’s a delicate game, though. First there are plenty of prostitutes who-no matter how desperate their lives-have decided that anything is better than what they escaped from back home. Their pimp may be a violent alcoholic, but maybe their husband or father was, too, and at least here they have the possibility of making a little money. “You’re fighting against the most appalling economic conditions,” says Alison Jolly of the OSCE in Priština. “And one of the worst myths is that these women want to become prostitutes. I mean in a sense, yes, but how much of a choice is it when the alternative is to stand in a breadline trying to feed your child? You’re a paid slave, but you’re still a slave. I personally consider it a very clever ruse by the pimps to pay the women something. This is a recent development. These guys are very smart, and a little intimidation goes a long way.”

Even for the ones who are desperate to escape, though, making the leap into police custody is risky. To begin with, the pimps have convinced their prostitutes that the police will simply throw them in jail for prostitution or visa violations-which was true until U.N. regulations were recently established that overrode the Yugoslav Criminal Code. Furthermore, the women know that-since they were recruited back home-the Mafia network extends into the smallest villages of their home country. When a pimp promises to harm a prostitute or her family, it is not an idle threat.

The first woman they brought into Osman’s office was a short, dark-haired Moldovan who pretended barely to understand Serbian. She said she had come by taxi through Romania into Serbia, then across the internal border into Kosovo. She claimed she was just a stripper, not a prostitute, and made about $50 a month at the Apaci. “Tell her we are here to help her,” Osman said to the translator. “She has no problem with the police.” She said nothing, so Osman sent her out.

The next woman was Romanian, dressed in tight black pants, a purple spandex halter, and the same high-heeled white sandals as the previous girl. When she also claimed to be just a dancer, Osman told her that her owner had sold his girls to customers, had threatened them, had beaten them. She feigned surprise and said that her owner was very nice. “One day everything will change, you will see,” Osman told her. He was playing tough cop, but I could see concern softening his eyes. Maybe he had a teenage daughter back home. “And when it does, I may not be able to do anything.”

Finally a tall blond came in. I recognized her as the one who had sat with the American officer at the Apaci. She said that her name was Kristina and that she was from a small village in Moldova. She was wearing the same tight vinyl pants as the second woman but had different sandals and a lot less makeup. In the light of day she looked rougher, a more hardened version of her dance-floor self. I could see what she would look like as an old woman. She sat smirking with her legs spread and her feet cocked provocatively back on her high heels. She was smart and confident and said she spoke five languages well-all the countries she’d worked in. She said that she had come here by taxi from Moldova, and that her trip was paid for by a friend back home named Oleg. She had stayed in a house in Serbia for a while and then crossed the internal border into Kosovo two weeks ago.

“I heard about those houses with women waiting there,” Osman said. “People come from Kosovo to pick you out.” He pretended to be a buyer: “You, you, and you!”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Kristina said.

“I am sure you were trafficked. You were sold.”

“No.”

“Someone paid for you. Someone paid money for you.”

“Nyet.”

“Da.”

“Nyet.”

“Da. You have no trouble with the police. Our job is to arrest the pimps, not you.”

“I am telling you the truth, sir.”

Before he let her go, Osman allowed me to ask her some questions. I described Niki and asked if she knew her. Kristina furrowed her brow in a parody of concentration and finally shook her head.

“Do you remember sitting at a table with an American officer at the back of the room two nights ago?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember four men at a table sitting close to the stage?”

“No.”

“One more question,” I said. “Have you ever seen me before in your life?”

We’d spent an hour about three feet from her-at one point she’d even given us a smile. Now, she looked straight at me, touched one hand to her hair, and laughed.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

Some do escape. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), which is charged with sheltering migrants and sending them back to their home countries, rescued more than 700 women from the Balkans and Italy during the year 2000. Elena, who was “owned” by Leku, escaped into police custody in a Macedonian town named Kumanovo, only to be sold by the police back to another bar owner. Through the help of a sympathetic client, she finally managed to make it to an IOM office in Macedonia, where she was taken care of and eventually put on a plane for home. There she was installed in an IOM safe house in Chişinâu, the capital of Moldova, and given psychiatric counseling and job training.

Another Moldovan woman, whom I’ll call Nina, left her husband to work in Italy as a waitress or cleaning lady because her son had a degenerative disease and she needed money to pay for his treatment. She wound up getting trafficked to Romania, where she was drugged and put on a train to Belgrade. Unable to buy her freedom, she wound up being sold again, this time to a brothel owner in the Bosnian town of Doboj, where she discovered that her husband had gotten her pregnant before she left. Her owner-unable to persuade her to have an abortion-took her to a corrupt doctor, who she suspects gave her an injection that induced miscarriage. A customer at the bar who found out what had happened slipped her the equivalent of $200 and offered his help. She eventually escaped to a local IOM office and made it back to Chişinâu, though she never told her husband the details of what had happened to her.

Inevitably, the women who are driven to escape are the ones who have suffered the most trauma and are most urgently in need of care. But they are also the ones who have the most damning evidence against the traffickers and, theoretically, the most reason to want to put them in jail. This is where the agendas of the IOM and U.N. prosecutors diverge slightly. With no witness protection program yet in place to shelter the women, the IOM argues that their safety will be compromised if they are detained in Kosovo. Furthermore, there is insufficient funding to lodge them in safe houses for the duration of a criminal trial. For their part, U.N. prosecutors argue that in the long run the problem cannot be solved-in other words, the traffickers will never end up behind bars-if these women don’t provide testimony.

The problem is made more complicated by the thicket of legal issues surrounding trafficking and prostitution. In the United States, gathering evidence of prostitution is fairly straightforward. Since it is nearly impossible to prove that a customer is not the prostitute’s boyfriend, undercover cops pose as customers in order to prove prostitution charges. In Kosovo, however, the U.N. police force was until very recently prohibited from surreptitious intelligence gathering, and the Kosovo Police Service-the local police corps-has not yet been sufficiently trained in undercover work. (KPS officers, who are paid only $230 a month, are also highly vulnerable to corruption, making security breaches almost unavoidable.) In addition, most of Europe has extremely rigorous standards for admitting into a trial evidence gained by an agent provocateur. A police action that in this country would be considered a standard “buy and bust” operation is more likely in Europe to be considered entrapment and therefore excluded as evidence.

As a result, the prostitutes themselves are needed to provide testimony against the pimps. Witness protection concerns aside, this raises legal issues. A woman who accuses someone of being her pimp is implicitly admitting to prostitution, which is in itself punishable by jail. To get around this, Section 8 of United Nations Regulation 2001/4-which supersedes preexisting local laws-declares that providing evidence of trafficking protects the woman against charges of prostitution. “Section 8 understands that in many cases, but not all, a foreign woman in Kosovo finds herself a stranger in a strange land,” says Michael Hartmann, an international prosecutor for the U.N. in Kosovo, “and that she was basically not given a choice. Even though she became a prostitute voluntarily, one could assume that she is someone who would not ordinarily do that.”

Because she is at risk, it is not in her best interest to remain in Kosovo long enough to provide testimony against her owner in a criminal trial. As a result, U.N. regulations allow for videotaped testimony to be admitted in court. This has its own shortcomings, however. A good defense attorney can argue that his inability to cross-examine his client’s accuser weakens the value of the evidence, and-more insidiously-video testimony can even be viewed skeptically by a biased judge. Major criminal trials in Kosovo have two international judges sit on a panel with three local, or “lay,” judges. This panel hears all evidence and then comes to a verdict. The lay judges, however, occasionally display the prejudices of the highly patriarchal Kosovar culture. They tend to blame the woman for her troubles, in other words. “The majority of rape cases are fabricated by the alleged victims, seeking revenge, or trying to pressure the defendant to force a marriage proposal,” one judge, according to an OSCE report, declared before a rape trial.

Even a perfect system, however, would face daunting enforcement challenges. New U.N. regulations have made trafficking itself a crime, apart from the related issues of assault, rape, forced prostitution, etc. Trafficking is defined, in part, by the level of deception involved: If a trafficker tells a woman she is going to be a waitress and then transports her across a border to sell her into prostitution, he is guilty of trafficking whether she went voluntarily or not. As a result, traffickers have changed their strategy to get around this new, looser definition of the crime. Instead of slipping across borders at night, for example, they pay off border guards so that the women have legitimate visas in their passports. They coach the women in what to say if they are questioned by the police-some of whom are corrupt and have been bought off in the first place. They have placed informants throughout the local and U.N. administrations. And they have started offering the trafficked women just enough money to keep them in the game.

“Ultimately the problem is the economic conditions that make prostitution the only thing these women can do,” says Alison Jolly. “Even when jobs come onstream, it’s not going to be the women who get them. For some countries it will be decades before the economic situation is such that you don’t need to take the risks associated with trafficking. They think, Maybe, just maybe, I’ll find something better out there.”

In late March 2001, two women were arrested in Chişmâu for selling illegal meat in plastic bags. Suspicious, the authorities tested it and confirmed their worst fears: The meat was human. The women said that they had gotten it at the state cancer clinic, and that they had been driven by poverty to sell it.

Only weeks earlier, the World Health Organization had warned that Moldova’s economic collapse had created a thriving transplant market in human kidneys and other body parts. Some people were voluntarily selling their organs for cash, and others were being tricked into it in a ruse similar to the one used to lure women into prostitution. Moldova-pummeled by droughts, cold spells, and the 1998 Russian financial crisis-has become by far the poorest country in Europe. The average salary is $30 a month, unemployment is reportedly at 25 percent (though much higher in rural areas), and up to one million Moldovans-nearly a quarter of the country-have gone abroad to work. Some villages have lost half of their population, and virtually all their young people. Every year these migrants wire home an average of $120 million, which is equivalent to half the national budget. Two-thirds of the budget, however, is sent right back overseas to service the nation’s foreign debt. With productivity only 40 percent of what it was under the Soviets, Moldova has voted back in a Communist government. It is the only former Soviet republic to have returned so unabashedly to its past.

Teun and I have left Kosovo. It is now several months later, and we’re driving through the emptied and sullen countryside of Moldova. We have come to see this place where, according to a significant proportion of the trafficked women, life is even worse than in the brothels of Kosovo. It’s a low, dark day that will soon deteriorate into a pounding rainstorm that will fill up the rivers and wash out the roads and force the villagers to take off their shoes and carry them under their jackets. That’s what you do when you own only one pair.

Village after village stands nearly empty, the brightly painted wooden gates of the houses hanging open and the weeds growing up around the palings. Cornstalks are piled against the fences to dry, and an occasional horse cart rattles by with an old man at the reins. Sodden hills checkered with woods roll south toward the town of Kagul and the Romanian border. There are no workers in the fields, no cars on the roads, no children in the houses. It is as if a great plague had swept through, leaving behind a landscape out of medieval Europe, out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Kagul is the center of trafficking in southern Moldova, and we are with a woman I’ll call Natalia, who was trafficked through Kagul and just made it home a few weeks ago. Natalia’s story is so horrendous that I’m tempted to think she has embellished it, but at this point I’ve heard and read so many accounts of trafficked women, and the brutality is so consistent, that I’ve given up looking for some other explanation. These are troubled, traumatized women who may have distorted, misremembered, or even fabricated details of their experience, but their testimonies are unfortunately too similar to be doubted.

Natalia grew up in a desperately poor village named Haragij, where people survived on whatever they could grow, and children had to bring their own firewood to school in the winter. At age 16 she was married against her will to a violent alcoholic who wound up beating her so badly that he fractured her skull and almost killed her. She says the police in her town were so corrupt that they had to be bribed in order to even consider arresting him, so she decided to leave and look for work in Chişjnâu instead. She had two young children, and she was determined to support them.

She wound up being trafficked twice. The first time she fell for the standard scam: A trafficker offered her a good job in Italy, but she was sold to a brothel in Macedonia. With the help of the IOM, she eventually escaped, but when she made it back to Moldova, she found out that her young sister had been trafficked as well. Now knowing that world inside out, she decided to go back to Chişinâu and get herself sold into prostitution one more time. It was the only way she could think of to get back to the Balkans and bring her sister home.

It didn’t take long. Within a few days she met a woman who passed her the phone number of a man who supposedly could get her work in Italy. She met with him-a well-dressed and impressive businessman of 35 or so-and he offered to put her up in his apartment. She soon found herself with about forty other women in an apartment somewhere in Chişinâu. From this point on, her life would no longer be her own.

The women who didn’t have passports were given fake ones and charged for them, which was the beginning of their debt. They were first taken by car to Constanta, Romania, and from there to the banks of the Danube, which they crossed at night by boat. Now they were in Serbia. There they were forced to walk across fields at night to a road, where they were picked up by a man named Milos, who she says took them to the White Star cafe-bar in the town of Kraljevo. There were dozens of women-Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians-being held in the basement of the bar, waiting to be bought by brokers for the Albanian Mafia.

Natalia spent several weeks there and was then moved across the lightly guarded internal border from Serbia into Kosovo. There she was sold to a place called #1, in the town of Mitrovica. The women at #1 were all on drugs-pot, morphine, pharmaceuticals, coke-and fell into two categories: slaves and girlfriends of the owner, a Serb Natalia referred to as Dajan. The girlfriends were the most beautiful ones and were given a certain degree of privilege in exchange for keeping order among the regular prostitutes, whom they held in contempt. One girlfriend tried to force a new Moldovan girl to have sex with her, and when Natalia stood up for the girl, she was beaten by the owner. In revenge, Natalia says, she found some rusty thumbtacks and put them on the woman’s office chair, and when the woman sat on them she got an infection that sent her to the hospital. Natalia never saw her again.

The schedule was brutal. They had to strip-dance from 8:00 P.M. until 6:00 A.M., taking time to go in back with clients if called upon, and they had to be up at 8:00 A.M. in case there were clients during the day. She says the customers were a mix of local Serbs and United Nations personnel. The prostitutes made around $30 per client and $1 for each drink the client bought, which was all put toward their debt. Natalia owed $1,500, but the owner deducted for food, lodging, clothes, and, of course, drugs, particularly cocaine, which the girls freebased in back. The new girls lived at the bar, and the ones who had repaid more than half their debt lived in an apartment, because the owner didn’t want the experienced ones warning the new ones about what was going to happen to them. If a particular girl got close to repaying her debt, the owner sold her off to someone else, and she had to start all over again.

One day, according to Natalia, Dajan’s brother killed an Albanian man at the bar, and the police finally came and shut the place down. The girls were hidden from the police before the raid, and Natalia was sold off to another bar in Mitrovica, but there her luck changed. The toilet had a small window in it, and she managed to crawl out and escape. She walked all night and made it to Priština, but instead of turning herself in to the IOM, she hitched a ride to Ferizaj. She had heard a rumor that her sister was in one of the Ferizaj bars, and she wanted to try to find her.

Natalia could not track down her sister, but at the Alo Bar she started talking to a beautiful and morose Moldovan woman named Niki. Niki was the girlfriend of the owner, an Albanian named Tus, and she said that she had been trafficked to Bosnia and then to the Apaci bar in Ferizaj, where she wound up in some kind of trouble.

“She told me that someone tried to help her and she thought that the owner noticed and so he sold her,” Natalia says.

We are squeezed into the backseat of a Russian Lada on the way to Kagul. It has been raining hard all morning, and the creeks are up over the roads; the locals are using horses to drag cars through the washouts. “She told me there was something special on their faces,” Natalia goes on. “She was afraid they were journalists and she didn’t want to screw up her reputation back home. One of them questioned her, but he wasn’t in love with her-she said he was either a journalist… or maybe the police.”

Natalia spent hours talking to Niki, almost certainly the same woman we had tried to help. Either Natalia somehow heard about our experience and just repeated it to us, or the Kosovo underworld is so small and sordid-and the girls get shuffled around so much-that they just wind up meeting one another. Niki kept a diary, and during the time they were together she had let Natalia read it. I had told Niki my name when she came to our table, and in her journal she had referred to me as Sebastian Bach. She wrote that she must somehow have deserved the terrible things that happened to her, and so it didn’t make sense that we were trying to help her. The owner had been tipped off that there was going to be a raid, and she had actually hidden herself when the police came looking for her after we left. She was scared of them because she knew that most of them were also customers at the bar. She knew that only the OSCE could help her, but she didn’t want to escape before she had a little money to return home with. Also, she feared going to jail if she turned herself in to the police. In the meantime, she had taken some photos at the Alo Bar that she would try to send home to her mother. That way-however unrealistic the hope-her mother might be able to help her.

We arrive in Kagul in early afternoon, and Natalia takes us to the Flamingo Bar, which is near the bus station. It’s a cheap-looking place with Formica tabletops and louver blinds on the windows. This is where the traffickers try to pick up girls who are waiting for buses to Chişinâu or Bucharest. Well-dressed men come and go from tables, and Natalia hides her face from them because she’s afraid of being recognized. She got a crew cut a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to disguise herself, but she still lives in fear that they’ll somehow find out she escaped. I ask her if she would testify against her traffickers if she had the chance.

“What would I do about my family?” she asks. “The police would lock up one guy, and there are ten more… We’d have to leave the country. It’s better that I forget. I just pretend I don’t see anything, and I go on with my life.”

It was not until July 2001 that Moldova passed an anti-trafficking law. Recruiting for and organizing the trafficking of a human being abroad for the purpose of sexual exploitation, slavery, criminal or military activity, pornography, or “other loathsome purposes” is now punishable by up to fifteen years in jail. Traffickers can get up to twenty-five years if their crimes involve minors, groups of people, the use of violence, or the taking of internal organs.

The Moldovan law is modeled after U.N. regulations, but enforcing it is even more daunting here than in Kosovo. In a country where doctors make around $30 a month, buying off the entire justice system-from the police right on up to the judges on the bench-presents no particular difficulty for the Moldovan Mafia. There are honest cops and judges, but they face a trafficking system that is so fluid and hard to pin down that it is almost impossible to crack. The process often starts with a completely legal classified ad in the newspaper: “Hiring girls without complexes for the work abroad” is a common one. The ad includes a phone number, and the initial contact is usually a woman, often one who was trafficked and has been blackmailed or otherwise coerced into doing the job. From there, the recruits are handed over to the traffickers themselves, whose job it is to get them across the border into Romania. In many ways that is the smallest obstacle in the entire process. Passports can be bought or forged for just a few hundred dollars, border guards can be bribed for even less, and the border itself is so porous that until recently the authorities didn’t even bother to keep records of who went back and forth. (The Moldovan government is still hoping for an international loan that will allow it to buy a computer system to handle that task.) Once the girls are in Romania, they’re almost always beyond help.

Vastly adding to the problem is the psychology of both the new recruits and the ones who have made it back. Not only are they poor, uneducated, and desperate, but they have grown up in a society that tolerates such astronomical levels of domestic violence that almost any kind of abuse could be considered normal, even deserved. “During the Soviet times there weren’t as many social problems,” says Lilia Gorceag, an American-trained psychologist who treats women at the IOM safe house in Chişinâu. “There was some kind of stability. Now that everything is gone, all our frustrations and fears have been converted to a fear about tomorrow, and it really increased the levels of violence.”

According to Gorceag, one of the more common reactions to a violent childhood or marriage-not to mention a violent trafficking experience-is massive feelings of guilt. Niki’s conviction that she somehow deserved her fate is a classic example of this sort of psychological defense. “Most trafficked women have very negative sexual experiences during childhood,” says Gorceag. “Many were raped when they were young-I have many patients who had been raped by the age of twelve, sometimes by their own father. They adopt a perspective that they have been created to satisfy someone else’s sexual needs. They consider themselves depraved, unacceptable to family and friends. And very few men here would tolerate it if they found out a woman had been trafficked. I know one nineteen-year-old woman who says her brother would kill her if he found out.”

Such a woman is perfect prey for a trafficker, and a good candidate for relapsing into prostitution even if she makes it back to Moldova. Gorceag says that women who are trafficked to Turkey, Greece, and Italy generally survive their experiences psychologically intact, but the ones who wind up in the Balkans are utterly destroyed as people. They exhibit classic symptoms of severe posttraumatic stress disorder: They can’t focus; they can’t follow schedules; they’re apathetic to the point of appearing somnambulistic; they fly into violent rages or plunge into hopeless depression; some even live in terror that someone will come and take them away. Their condition keeps them from functioning normally in a family or a job, and that puts them at even greater risk of being trafficked again.

“One of my patients ate napkins,” says Gorceag. “When I took away the napkins, she started eating newspaper. She wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. There is another patient who counts. She counts everything. When she can’t find anything to count, she turns her sleeve and counts the stitching. These are people with completely destroyed psyches. It’s a form of genocide. I know that’s a very strong word, but I live with twenty-two of these women, and I see their suffering every day.”

On our last day in Moldova, Teun and I meet Natalia to look at some photos she wants to show us. I have just received word from members of the U.N. anti-trafficking unit in Kosovo that they think they have found the bar where Niki is working, and they want me to fly back there to participate in a police raid. That way I can identify her so she can be sent home to Moldova, whether she wants to be or not. It’s a beautiful fall day, and Natalia and Teun and I sit down at an outdoor cafe next to two puff-pastry blonds who are wearing maybe an ounce of fabric between them. Natalia-tough, smart, and battered by her experience in Kosovo-tosses them a dismissive look.

“What do those women want?” I ask her. “What are they looking for?”

“Men with money,” Natalia says. “Moldovan women have become very cold, very callous. They don’t want to fall in love. They just want to meet a rich guy, and most of the guys with money are thugs. It’s their mothers who push them into this-that’s the worst part.”

The photos Natalia shows us were taken at a bar when she was working as a prostitute. One was taken a few days after she arrived; she’s very drunk and her eyes are red from crying. She has long, glamorous hair and very red lipstick and a forced smile that says more about her situation than any expression of hate or fear. There is none of the wry sarcasm in her eyes that I have become so fond of. I tell her that Niki has been located, and that if I go back to identify her she in all likelihood will be repatriated to Moldova.

“What should we do?” I ask. “Would we just be making things worse for her?”

“Yes, I think so,” Natalia says without hesitation.

“So we shouldn’t go to the police?”

Natalia takes a drag on the cigarette we gave her and crushes it in the ashtray. For her this is clearly not a question of principle; it’s a question of guessing what Niki herself would want. If Niki were tied up in a basement getting raped, the answer would be easy: Break down the door and save her. But she’s not. She’s imprisoned by a web of manipulation and poverty and threat and, much as I hate to admit it, personal choice. The answers aren’t so obvious.

“She would just deny that she’s a prostitute,” says Natalia. “Look, there’s nothing here for her. If you brought her home you’d have some sort of…” She casts around for the right words.

“Moral responsibility?”

“Yes,” Natalia says, never taking her eyes off me. “Exactly.”

The four men arrived by U-boat and landed on a deserted beach near Amagansett, Long Island, in the midnight darkness on Saturday, June 13, 1942, a mere six months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. They had close to $80,000 (equivalent to nearly a million dollars today) in cash, four boxes of explosives, and a mission that had been planned at the highest levels of the Third Reich-namely, to halt production at key American manufacturing plants, create railroad bottlenecks, disrupt communication lines, and cripple New York City’s water supply system. The mission, audacious in means and scope, had the potential to seriously impede America’s military buildup, and perhaps even to affect the outcome of the war.

It was a spectacular failure. Within the month the operatives were arrested, along with the members of another team of four, who had landed in Florida four days later, under similar circumstances. Neither team had managed even to attempt an act of sabotage.

President Franklin Roosevelt, newly engaged in the war against Germany and eager to demonstrate successes, demanded that justice be swift and severe. To that end he ordered the creation of a military tribunal, using as precedents obscure cases from the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Within a month all eight men had been sentenced to death and six had been executed. The other two, who had turned in their colleagues and cooperated with the U.S. government, had their sentences reduced-one to life in prison, the other to thirty years. Transcripts of the tribunal’s proceedings, on which this article is based, ran to some 3,000 pages and were kept secret for eighteen years after the trial; a copy sits in the “Map Room files” at the Roosevelt Presidential Library, in Hyde Park, New York. Prior to the tribunal the FBI interviewed all eight of the would-be saboteurs, who provided details about their training in Germany, their arrival in the United States, and their capture. Transcripts of those interviews, on which this article also relies, can be found in Justice Department files at the National Archives.

This episode, though minor in the overall context of the war, is nevertheless of renewed interest today. The military tribunals proposed by the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks rely on the case of the captured Germans for precedent.

The idea of sending saboteurs to the United States was the brainchild of Walter Kappe, a high-ranking Nazi official who had immigrated to America from Germany in 1925. Kappe took a job at a farm implement factory in Kankakee, Illinois; he later moved to Chicago, to write for a German-language newspaper, and by 1933 he had moved to New York and become a leader in the Friends of Hitler movement there. In 1937 he returned to Germany to serve in the Third Reich’s propaganda office, where he spent the next four years giving pep talks to repatriated Germans like himself. By late 1941 Kappe had been transferred to German military intelligence, known as the Abwehr, where he was assigned to identify and train men for a sabotage campaign in America.

The Abwehr had studied U.S. military production and key transportation lines in great detail, and Kappe made use of this intelligence in his planning. To cripple the light-metals industry, critical in airplane manufacturing, he and the Abwehr targeted plants operated by the Aluminum Company of America in Alcoa, Tennessee; Massena, New York; and East St. Louis, Illinois. To disrupt the supply of important raw materials for aluminum production, they targeted the Philadelphia Salt Company’s cryolite plant. They developed plans to sabotage certain U.S. waterways-focusing particularly on the Ohio River locks between Cincinnati and St. Louis and the hydroelectric power plants at Niagara Falls and in the Tennessee Valley. They also wanted to mangle the Horseshoe Curve, an important railroad site in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and the Hell Gate Bridge, which connected the rail lines of New England with New York City. They had designs on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, one of America’s major coal carriers. They planned to bomb Jewish-owned department stores for general terror-inducing effect.

Kappe code-named his mission Operation Pastorius, after Franz Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first group of Germans to settle in colonial America, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. Kappe imagined that he would ultimately return to Chicago as the mastermind of the operation. He had plans that a U-boat with German saboteurs would arrive in the United States every six weeks until the war was won.

There was no shortage of candidates for Kappe’s initial crew of operatives. The Nazis had recently repatriated thousands of Germans living in the United States by offering them one-way tickets home. But his requirements were exacting: He wanted men who spoke English, were familiar with the United States, and were skilled in a trade that could provide them with cover while they lived in America. That proved difficult.

George John Dasch was Kappe’s first recruit. He had gone to America in October of 1922, as a stowaway on the S.S. Schoharie, and had been a dishwasher and a waiter in Manhattan and on Long Island. In August of 1926 he was arrested twice, for operating a brothel and for violating Prohibition laws. While working in a hotel he met and married an American. Later he spent time in Chicago selling sanctuary supplies for the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy before returning to waiting tables. Although he completed the requirements for U.S. citizenship in 1939, he never showed up in court to be sworn in.

In 1941 Dasch returned to Berlin, where the Nazi bureaucracy required that he fill out forms explaining the reason for his return to Germany. Dasch wrote that he intended “to partake in political life.” This led to his being questioned further by a Gestapo agent, to whom he said, “Even if I have to work as a street cleaner and do my job cleaning streets right, I want to participate politically.” His motives may have been more complicated, however: He was not, one of his fellows later observed, “the absolute Nazi he pretended to be.” After his capture by the FBI, Dasch claimed that he had joined the sabotage mission in order to learn secrets that he could later use in the United States to fight against the Nazis.

On June 3, 1941, Dasch met Kappe, who cross-examined him about his life in the United States. When Dasch said he wanted to join the German army, Kappe said he believed that Dasch might serve the Third Reich to far better advantage in another, unspecified capacity. Kappe subsequently hired Dasch to monitor U.S. radio broadcasts in a listening station where fifty-three languages were spoken and where the news that was gathered was teletyped to all the members of the German cabinet.

In November, Kappe called on Dasch again and asked him if he would like to return to America, to help realize “the plan on which my office has been working for a long time.” Dasch demurred, saying, “But that’s a peaceful country, isn’t it?” Kappe admitted that the United States was indeed neutral, but he characterized it as an indirect enemy, because it was a supplier and a supporter of Germany’s enemies. “Therefore,” he said, “it is time to attack them. We wish to attack the American industries by industrial sabotage.” By mid-January of 1941 Dasch had been assigned permanently to the planning of the U.S. mission.

On March 1 Dasch reported to a secret officer of the Abwehr to review the personal histories of several other men whom Kappe had tentatively selected to make up two teams of saboteurs, one of which Dasch would lead. In a series of interviews Dasch identified and eliminated a number of what he called “nitwits,” along with others who seemed interested simply in escaping Germany at any cost. In the end he selected the following men, who, if not “nitwits,” were also not exactly the Nazi elite.

Ernest Peter Burger, born in 1906, joined the Nazi Party at the age of 17. He immigrated to America in 1927 to work as a machinist in Milwaukee and Detroit. He became a U.S. citizen in February of 1933, but when he couldn’t find work during the Depression, he returned to Germany. There he rejoined the Nazi Party and became an aide-de-camp to Ernest Roehm, the chief of the Nazi storm troopers. He went on to study at the University of Berlin, and he later wrote a paper critical of the Gestapo-a move that earned him seventeen months in a concentration camp. Upon his release from the camp, in July of 1941, Burger served as a private in the German army, guarding Yugoslav and British prisoners of war. The following February he appeared on a list of Germans who had lived in America, and soon after he was interviewed and-somewhat oddly, given his history-selected to attend sabotage school.

Herbert Haupt, born in 1919, was the youngest of the recruits. He had also spent the most time in America, having moved to Chicago with his family when he was 6 years old. Haupt attended Chicago’s Lane Technical High School and served in the German-American Bund’s Junior League, but he fled to Mexico in June of 1941. The German consul in Mexico City gave him money and arranged for his passage to Japan; Haupt took a Japanese freighter to Yokohama, where he later boarded a German steamer that broke through the British naval blockade of Germany and landed him in Bordeaux 107 days later. He received the Iron Cross, second class, for sighting an enemy steamer while on lookout.

Heinrich Heinck, born in 1907, entered the United States illegally in 1926. After working in New York City as a busboy, a handyman, an elevator operator, and a machinist, he leaped at the German government’s return offer in 1939. He had a limited command of English and spoke with a thick German accent. The other recruits considered Heinck phlegmatic and unsure of himself.

Edward Kerling, born in 1909, was among the first 80,000 men to join the Nazi Party. He joined at the age of 19 and maintained his membership after moving to America, in 1928. After a stint smoking hams for a Brooklyn meat-packing company, Kerling found work as a chauffeur and handyman in Mount Kisco, New York, and Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1940 he returned to Germany, where he ran the propaganda shows in movie theaters. With his puffy cheeks, heavy jaw, and dimpled chin, Kerling was, Burger thought, a “decidedly Irish type.” He was chosen to lead the second team.

Herman Neubauer, born in 1910, went to America in 1931; he worked as a cook in restaurants, on ships, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1933. In 1939 he moved to Miami, but in 1940, while visiting his family in Germany, he was drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded in the face and the leg by shrapnel. While recovering in an army medical center in Vienna, he received a note from Kappe inquiring whether he would “like to go on a special assignment to a country where you have been before.”

Richard Quirin, born in 1908, moved to the United States in 1927. He worked in maintenance at a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, but was laid off during the Depression. He then moved to New York City, where he joined the Friends of the New Germany and found work as a house-painter. He, too, returned to Germany in the repatriation program.

Werner Thiel, born in 1907, traveled to America in 1927 to work as a machinist at a Ford plant in Detroit. He later moved to New York, where he took a job as a porter in a senior citizens’ home. He subsequently moved to Hammond, Indiana, before taking various jobs in Illinois, California, and Florida. In 1939 Thiel returned to Germany in the repatriation program.

In April, Kappe and his recruits were dispatched to a farm in Brandenburg, forty miles west of Berlin. From the road all that was visible of the farm, formerly the home of a wealthy Jewish shoe manufacturer, was a large stone farmhouse and a few pigs and cows roaming the grounds. But back behind a stone wall armed guards and German shepherds were on patrol twenty-four hours a day. In the fields behind the farmhouse members of the Abwehr constructed sections of railroad track and bridges of various kinds and lengths. They also set up pistol and rifle ranges, a field for hand grenade practice, and a gymnasium for boxing and judo training. Classrooms and laboratories were situated above the garage, and a nearby greenhouse supplied fresh fruit, vegetables, and-incongruously, given the circumstances-flowers.

On their first day at the farm Kappe told the men that they were about to begin training for an important battle against U.S. production and manufacturing. Their training, he said, would include courses in the construction and use of explosives, primers, fuses, and timers, and in the workings and vulnerabilities of industrial plants, railroads, bridges, and canal locks. The men would also be given plausible new identities for use in the United States.

The recruits settled into a routine of classroom time, private study, practical training, and exercise. They began each day with calisthenics, attended lectures in the morning and the afternoon, and had regular breaks from the classroom for sports. They took walks in the countryside, during which they sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Oh, Susanna!” At meals and after hours they were required to read recently published American newspapers and magazines. In pairs they practiced blowing up the railroad tracks laid around the estate, determining by trial and error the exact amount of explosives required in a given situation. Occasionally their instructors tested their vigilance and their reactions by launching surprise attacks on them.

In the classroom the men were forbidden to take notes and were required instead to commit everything to memory. Using detailed photographs, plans, and drawings, their instructors discussed the major terminals of the U.S. railroad system, the various engines used, and average freight-train speeds. The men were briefed on railroad bottlenecks where sabotage would inflict the greatest disruption.

The primary objective of the missions, Kappe told his men, was simply to do enough harm to impede production. He warned them not to try to blow up large dams or iron bridges or bridges with girders-such jobs were too difficult for a small team to carry out. They should also avoid targeting passenger trains. The Abwehr wanted to minimize civilian casualties.

Kappe told his men that when they arrived in the United States, their first task would be to create suitable cover for themselves. He provided them with forged Social Security and Selective Service registration cards. Dasch and Kerling became George John Davis and Edward Kelly, respectively-both born in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake and fire, which meant that no one could demand records to corroborate their papers. Thiel became John Thomas, and was identified as a Polish immigrant in order to explain his accent, which was heavy. Heinck became Henry Kayner, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (a town name he was consistently unable to spell). Richard Quirin became Richard Quintas; Herman Neubauer became Henry Nicholas. Haupt kept his own identity, as did Burger. (Both had American citizenship.) Because Burger had worked as a commercial artist, Kappe developed the idea that Burger should move to Chicago, set up an art studio, and insert an ad for his services in the Chicago Tribune on the first and the fifteenth of each month-a plan that would give Burger visibility and credibility and would also provide all the men involved in the mission with an easy way to find him.

Kappe also made the men sign contracts obliging them to remain silent about their mission throughout their lives, on penalty of death, and stating that if they died during the mission, their wives would receive lump sums determined by the German government. Should their efforts prove successful, they would be given good jobs following the war. Kappe told them that they would be under constant observation in the United States by German intelligence-which, he claimed, had infiltrated the FBI.

On April 30, the last day of class, Kappe gave special instructions to Dasch and Kerling. Each was to lead three other men. The teams were to travel across the Atlantic by U-boat and land secretly in separate locations, carrying with them crates of explosives and other tools for sabotage. Dasch and Kerling would each be given $50,000 in cash for bribes and expenses, and their men would be given $9,000 apiece. Dasch and Kerling received white handkerchiefs that, when permeated with fumes from a bottle of ammonia, would reveal a message stating how to reach Kappe and several U.S.-based contacts. Kappe emphasized that the two men were to focus initially on establishing cover and to refrain from any sabotage activities whatsoever. Detailed instructions would come at noon on July 4, at the Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati.

Almost a month later, after his men had had a few weeks of leave, Kappe gathered them together in Lorient, France, where the Germans based some of their U-boats, and gave them their final orders. Kerling, Neubauer, Haupt, and Thiel would depart for Florida on May 26; Dasch, Burger, Heinck, and Quirin would depart for New York on May 28.

On May 28 Dasch and his team boarded submarine U-202. Captain Hans-Heinz Lindner announced over the loudspeaker that the four men were on special assignment to America, and called on every crew member to treat them well and ask no questions. The sub carried forty men, fourteen torpedoes, a cannon, and an antiaircraft gun. As the vessel approached the Long Island coast, on June 12, the captain switched from diesel to silent electric motors. Just before midnight the men heard a scraping sound: The sub had touched the ocean floor some fifty yards from shore.

Dasch and his team, accompanied by members of the U-boat’s crew, were loaded into an inflatable rowboat along with four wooden crates full of explosives and supplies, and a giant canvas seabag containing civilian clothes and other gear. The men were dressed in German military uniforms; if they were apprehended immediately, they would become prisoners of war. Lindner ordered Dasch to subdue by violence any civilian or soldier who challenged his team, and to send the person back in the rowboat so that the sub’s crew could “take care of him.”

“It was pitch-dark, foggy night, made to order for landing,” Dasch later recalled. The fog was so thick that the men could see barely fifty feet ahead. After rowing in circles for a time, the group finally made a landing, and Dasch quickly sought higher ground to survey his surroundings. To his horror, he saw beacons both left and right. Running back to the boat, he ordered his men to put on their civilian clothes. As soon as they had changed, Quirin and Heinck began burying the explosives in some high dunes. Burger, however, seemed already to be entertaining thoughts of betraying the mission. Out of sight of the others he placed an empty German cigarette tin in the sand, where it could later be easily discovered by a passing patrol. Farther up the beach he left a small schnapps bottle, some socks, a vest, and a bathing suit for good measure.

Also on the beach that night, on a six-mile foot patrol, was Coast Guardsman John Cullen, of Bayside, Queens, a 21-year-old former Macy’s deliveryman who enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1940 and later became a “sand pounder,” to keep watch at night for suspicious activity close to shore. For weeks on end Cullen had patrolled, unarmed, without ever encountering another person. But at about 12:30 that morning, through the fog, he saw a dark object in the water some twenty feet away, and three men standing nearby. “I thought they were fishermen, local residents,” he recollected recently, at his home in Chesapeake, Virginia, “until I saw one of the guys dragging a seabag into the dunes and then speaking in German.”

“What are you doing down here?” Cullen asked. “Who are you?”

“We’re a couple of fishermen from Southampton who have run ashore,” Dasch answered. “We will stay here until sunrise and we will be all right.”

Cullen told them that sunrise was hours away and said that there was no reason Dasch couldn’t come with him to the Coast Guard station until then. Dasch, concerned that the seabag might raise Cullen’s suspicions, decided to pretend to go along with him. In the meantime, one of the Germans came running down the beach with the seabag and addressed Dasch in German, Dasch hollered, “You damn fool, why don’t you go back to the other guys?” He then took Cullen’s arm and asked menacingly how old he was, and if he had a father and a mother. Cullen said he did.

“Well,” Dasch said, “I wouldn’t want to have to kill you. Forget about this and I will give you some money and you can have a good time.” He offered Cullen $100, which Cullen refused. Dasch then offered $300, and Cullen accepted. “I was afraid they were going to knock me off right there,” Cullen later said. “But when he offered me the money, I knew that was a little encouragement.”

Dasch took off his hat and shined a flashlight into his own face. “Take a good look at me,” he said to Cullen. “Look in my eyes. You will hear from me in Washington.” Dasch then turned around and joined his colleagues, and Cullen began walking cautiously backward before turning and racing toward the station, in the town of Amagansett.

Burger told the others that Dasch had been talking to an American sailor. The men were concerned, but Dasch said to them, “Now, boys, this is the time to be quiet and hold your nerves. Each of you get a box and follow me.” Burger dragged the seabag, deliberately leaving a track that could be identified later, and then helped the others bury it, along with their army uniforms.

The team proceeded inland, almost crawling, for half a mile. They lay still in the dunes for an hour and then began walking until they found a road. Whenever a car passed, they dove into nearby bushes. Heinck, shivering like a dog, said over and over, “We’re surrounded, boys!” Eventually, at just after five in the morning, they stumbled into the tiny train station in Amagansett. They were wet, grass-stained, and generally filthy.

When the station opened for business, at six-thirty, Dasch bought four tickets to Manhattan. “Fishing in this neighborhood has been pretty bad lately,” he observed at the ticket window, in a feeble attempt at nonchalance. Not long after, he and his men boarded their train.

After moving out of sight of Dasch and his men, Cullen raced to the Coast Guard station and sounded the alarm. He and other officers quickly formed a search party and returned to the site of the encounter. “While I was standing there,” Cullen recollected recently, “I saw the light from the sub. I could also smell diesel oil. I knew it had to be a sub, so we notified the main Coast Guard station at Napeague. The sub was stuck on a sandbar, and when they revved the engines, the ground where I was standing shook. We didn’t know at the time whether the Germans were coming in or leaving.”

At daybreak they found the cigarette tin and the bathing suit. After following the trail left by the seabag, a member of the search party poked a stick in the sand and struck something hard. The men dug the four crates of explosives out of the sand. Other members of the party followed footprints and soon found the buried German clothing, including a cap with a swastika sewn on it.

Sensing the gravity of what had been found, Coast Guard intelligence officers came and immediately took it all to Governor’s Island, near Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, where, at the area Coast Guard headquarters, they opened three of the crates. The fourth, hissing because the TNT inside had been exposed to salt water, was moved to the end of a dock and carefully opened there. At 11:00 A.M. the FBI was notified of the find, and by noon everything the Germans had brought with them, with the exception of their money and the clothes on their backs, had been impounded by the Bureau. Tension remained high, however: No one knew how many men had landed or what their plans were.

In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, breathlessly informed Attorney General Francis Biddle of the news of the moment. Biddle later wrote, “All of Edgar Hoover’s imaginative and restless energy was stirred into prompt and effective action. His eyes were bright, his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils. He was determined to catch them all before any sabotage took place.” The FBI worked with the Coast Guard to set up continuous surveillance of the area where the materials had been buried, hoping to apprehend the men when they returned for their stash. The Bureau commandeered a private bungalow on the beach and began interviewing local residents who fit the descriptions given by Cullen. Hoover also imposed a news blackout on the story.

Meanwhile, Dasch and his team had arrived at Jamaica Station in New York, at about 9:30 A.M., and had immediately bought themselves new sets of clothes. After changing in the men’s room at a restaurant, they threw their old clothes in a trash can and split into two groups, agreeing to meet later. Dasch and Burger registered at the Hotel Governor Clinton-Dasch as George John Davis, and Burger as himself. Heinck and Quirin registered at the Hotel Martinique under their respective aliases. They all ate, washed, and rested.

The men found themselves completely on their own in the city. Free and loaded with money, they took full advantage of their situation by shopping, carousing in clubs, and seeking out prostitutes. Dasch later wrote, “There was nothing in the way of Nazi surveillance to prevent me from taking [all of the money] I’d been provided with and fading into a happy and luxurious obscurity.”

But he didn’t. Dasch and Burger began to have frank discussions about their mission and their motivations. Dasch admitted to Burger that he felt he didn’t belong in Germany, and that he had in fact begun planning an escape back to America even as he had worked for Germany’s propaganda division. Burger, for his part, talked of his troubles with the Gestapo. Dasch then told Burger that he “was not George John Davis, the group leader of a gang of saboteurs, but George John Dasch, the man who came here into this country for the opportunity to fight Hitler and his gang in my own fashion.” Upon hearing this, Burger, according to Dasch, “broke out in a crying spell” and confessed to having left a trail of evidence on the beach, adding that he believed the crates of explosives must have been discovered by that time. The mission seemed botched before it had even begun.

Dasch told Burger it was critical that Dasch contact the FBI, because, he said, should any of the seven men-or even Dasch himself-fall into police hands, “it would be very difficult for me to prove the real reason I came here.” First, however, Dasch and Burger needed to reassure Heinck and Quirin that all was proceeding according to plan. Burger met Heinck and Quirin several times during the next few days and persuaded the two to remain quiet in New York while Dasch supposedly pursued covert contacts for the team.

On Sunday, June 14, Dasch called the FBI. Agent Dean McWhorter answered, and Dasch introduced himself as Franz Daniel Pastorius, “a German citizen who has arrived in this country only yesterday morning.” Dasch told McWhorter that he had information so important to report that “the only person who should hear it is J. Edgar Hoover.” McWhorter suggested that Dasch come to his office, but Dasch mildly replied, “I, Franz Daniel Pastorius, shall try to get in contact with your Washington office either Thursday or Friday, and you should notify them of this fact.” McWhorter indeed made note of the call, but rather than sending a message to Washington, merely wrote, “This memo is being prepared only for the purpose of recording the call made by [Pastorius].”

On the morning of June 18, Dasch packed for Washington. He divided the money Kappe had given him into several envelopes bound together with a rubber band and attached a note that said, in part, “Money from German [government] for their purpose, but to be used to fight the Nazis. George J. Dasch, alias George J. Davis, alias Franz Pastorius.” He paid his and Burger’s hotel bills and left Burger a note.

Dear Pete:

Sorry for not have been able to see you before I left. I came to the realization to go to Washington and finish that which we have started so far.

I’m leaving you, believing that you take good care of yourself and also of the other boys. You may rest assured, that I shall try to straighten everything out to the very best possibility. My bag and clothes I’ll put in your room. Your hotel bill is paid by me, including this day. If anything extraordinary should happen, I’ll get in touch with you directly.

Until later,

I’m your sincere friend,

George

Dasch arrived in Washington late Thursday and checked into the Mayflower Hotel. After breakfast the following morning he phoned the Information Service of the U.S. government and asked the young woman who answered to explain the difference between the FBI and the Secret Service. “She asked me what the purpose of my visit was,” he later recalled, “and I told her that I had to make a statement of military as well as of political value.” Directed to phone the FBI, Dasch ended up speaking to Agent Duane Traynor, who listened politely as Dasch identified himself as George John Dasch, the leader of a team of eight saboteurs who had just arrived from Germany. Traynor told him to remain in his room so that FBI agents could escort him to the Justice Department.

Dasch spoke with FBI special agents over the next five days. He told them he wanted to lead them to each of the seven other men and expressed an interest in “having the opportunity to meet your superior, and Mr. Hoover perhaps?” He told the agents all he knew about Kappe. He discussed his experiences after his return to Germany, his dissatisfaction with the Third Reich, and the circumstances of his amphibious return to the United States, including his encounter with John Cullen. He insisted that he had planned his betrayal long before. “This is an idea,” he said, “that is eight months old.”

Dasch also insisted that Burger was as staunchly anti-Nazi as he, having joined the mission “as a way to get even.” Quirin and Heinck he dismissed as “a couple of Nazis who have only one duty to perform and that is to listen to the command.” He said, “They have not to question the sincerity, truthfulness, and correctness. Their duty is to follow it, otherwise to die.” By the end of the second day of interrogation, working with information provided by Dasch, the FBI had located and apprehended all three members of Dasch’s team.

Rounding up the second team, which had landed near Jacksonville, Florida, during the night of June 16, was somewhat more difficult. All Dasch knew was that the two teams were to meet in Cincinnati on July 4, but he offered up the white handkerchief as a potential lead. At first he could not remember how to handle the invisible ink, but the FBI lab “broke the hankie,” and agents were dispatched to shadow the contacts named on it. Within days the FBI had found all four members of Kerling’s team, in New York and Chicago, and had them in custody.

Only after all the other men had been jailed, in New York, did the FBI officially arrest Dasch, on July 3. During his interrogation, Dasch later said, the FBI had told him to plead guilty and not to mention his betrayal-just to put on “the biggest act in the world” and “take the punishment,” for which, after a few months in prison, he would receive a presidential pardon. After his arrest Dasch begged to be jailed with his colleagues, so that they would not suspect he had turned them in. The FBI obliged. Dasch was walked past the cells of his colleagues and then placed in his own cell. He was under the impression that his new friends at the FBI would soon come to release him. But not long after he arrived, he looked out the peephole of his cell and saw a guard reading the New York Daily News: Dasch’s picture was on the front page, accompanied by the headline “CAPTURED NAZI SPY.”

So it was that two weeks after the Long Island landing, all eight Germans found themselves in custody without having even tried to commit a single act of sabotage. Dasch consoled himself by remembering the FBI’s promise of a presidential pardon.

When the men had all been apprehended, Attorney General Bid-die telephoned President Roosevelt with the good news. Roosevelt was determined that punishment be harsh, to discourage future infiltrations. In a memorandum to Biddle, Roosevelt wrote that the two American citizens among the eight were guilty of high treason and the other six were spies. All, he felt, deserved the death penalty. “I want one thing clearly understood, Francis,” he told Biddle. “I won’t hand them over to any United States Marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus.”

Meanwhile, Hoover and his aides at the FBI had decided that when the story was made public, Dasch’s surrender and his and Burger’s cooperation would go unmentioned, so as to give the German government the impression that the U.S. authorities were so efficient and so well-informed that additional landings would be a waste of time and manpower.

With the approval of the President and the Attorney General, Hoover broke the story at a press conference on June 27, making headlines nationwide the following day. “FBI CAPTURES 8 SABOTEURS” read the front page of The New York Times. The story itself, however, was remarkably light on the details of the men’s capture. When pressed on how the FBI had broken the case, Hoover was quick and succinct. “That,” he said, “will have to wait until after the war.” Hoover did, however, reveal exactly which aluminum plants and railway bridges had been targeted, how much explosive material had been found on the beaches, and the fact that two of the men were American citizens.

Immediately after the arrests the FBI swung into action. Agents swarmed over the Swedish liner Drottningholm, for example, in search of German spies masquerading as refugees. They subjected the baggage and the mail of all 868 Drottningholm passengers to two days of intensive investigation-the most rigorous examination ever of a vessel docked in the Port of New York up to then. They questioned some 250 “enemy” aliens in Altoona, and seized many “powerful short-wave radio transmitters.” When asked if these efforts were in any way connected to the eight Germans, the head of the FBI’s Philadelphia field office responded, “Draw your own conclusions.”

The public vilified the would-be saboteurs. Life magazine published FBI mug shots of the men, photographs of some of their equipment, and display type reading “THE EIGHT NAZI SABOTEURS SABOTEURS SHOULD BE PUT TO DEATH.” When the South Bend (Indiana) Tribune polled its readers on July 2, only one respondent wanted them set free. An overwhelming majority-1,097 people-were in favor of immediate execution. One reader went so far as to suggest that the men be fed to Gargantua, a giant circus gorilla-and enclosed money for Gargantua’s funeral, writing that the gorilla would “surely… die of such poisonous eating.”

On June 30 Biddle informed the President that a military tribunal would be preferable to a civil trial for handling the case, because it would be quick and secret and because the death penalty could be imposed with only a two-thirds majority among the judges. Biddle also feared that if the eight defendants were tried in a civil court, the jury might find that no sabotage had been committed, and the men might therefore receive sentences of only two or three years. He dredged up a seventy-six-year-old precedent, dating from the Civil War and involving Lambdin Milligan, a resident of Indiana and an outspoken opponent of Abraham Lincolns. Milligan had been charged with giving aid to and communicating with the enemy and violating the laws of war. He had been tried by a military commission and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court heard the case and unanimously granted him a writ of habeas corpus, citing a citizen’s right to a trial in civil court unless “ordinary law no longer adequately secures public safety and private rights.”

On July 2, less than a week after the men had been captured, Roosevelt issued a proclamation to the nation.

Whereas the safety of the United States demands that all enemies who have entered upon the territory of the United States as part of an invasion or predatory incursion… should be promptly tried in accordance with the Law of War; now, therefore, I, Franklin D. Roosevelt,… do hereby proclaim that all persons who are subjects, citizens or residents of any nation at war with the United States or who give obedience to or act under the direction of any such nation, and who during time of war enter or attempt to enter the United States or any territory or possession thereof, through coastal or boundary defenses, and are charged with committing or attempting or preparing to commit sabotage, espionage, hostile or warlike acts, or violations of the law of war, shall be subject to the law of war and to the jurisdiction of military tribunals; and that such persons shall not be privileged to seek any remedy or maintain any proceeding, directly or indirectly, or to have any such remedy or proceeding sought on their behalf, in the courts of the United States.

The wording of the proclamation was broad enough to cover almost any remotely similar future offense.

Major General Frank R. McCoy was chosen to preside over the tribunal (it was never to be called a court) that was hastily convened to handle the case. Three other major generals and three brigadier generals completed the commission. Attorney General Biddle was assigned to lead the prosecution, assisted by Major General Myron Cramer, the Army’s judge advocate general. Brigadier General Albert L. Cox was the tribunal’s provost marshal. Among the many lawyers working for Biddle was Lloyd Cutler, who went on to become the White House counsel to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton-and who has now been consulted by the Bush administration as it attempts to set up military tribunals.

Colonel Cassius M. Dowell and Colonel Kenneth C. Royall were ordered to serve as defense lawyers. Dowell, a forty-year Army veteran who had been wounded in World War I, handled a number of legal issues for the Army. Royall, a trial lawyer from North Carolina with a degree from Harvard Law School, had recently been appointed by Army Secretary Henry L. Stimson to head the Army’s legal division in charge of military contracts. The two men came to the conclusion that it was best for their case if Dasch was defended separately, so Colonel Carl Ristine, of the Army Inspector General’s Office, was appointed counsel for Dasch.

The votes of five of the commission’s seven members were required for conviction and sentencing. As Commander in Chief, the President would be the final arbiter of all commission recommendations. There would be no appeal.

On July 4 the eight Germans were moved in secret from New York to Washington, where they were incarcerated in the District of Columbia Jail. Each man was isolated in a tiled cell, with an empty cell on either side of him, and was under surveillance around the clock. Clad only in pajamas and paper slippers, the prisoners were denied writing materials. They were allowed to read old magazines and newspapers and to smoke cigarettes lit for them by their guards. Current newspapers were forbidden, so that the prisoners could not learn of their fate. No man was allowed to talk to any other. They were given only paper spoons and paper plates with which to eat their meals-there was to be no opportunity for suicide. The men never asked to see clergymen or relatives.

Room 5235 of the main Department of Justice building was ordinarily used by the FBI for lectures and films. On July 8, however, it became a military courtroom, its windows covered with heavy black curtains that blocked all daylight. At the front of the room that day, as the tribunal began, long tables were placed end to end to serve as the bench for the seven judges. To the left of the bench stood a witness chair, a small table for the court reporter, and tables for the prosecution and the defense. Behind the table for the defense sat all eight defendants, in alphabetical order, dressed in the clothing-suits and two-toned shoes-that they had bought during their brief time at large in the United States. Each man was flanked by guards. At the rear of the room were the buried clothing, the explosives, and the crates, all of which were to be entered as evidence.

Each day of the trial the prisoners were transported from the jail to the Justice Department and back, in two armored black vans. FBI agents led the procession, and nine police officers on motorcycles followed alongside. Behind the prisoners’ vans were three Army scout cars with soldiers and machine guns at the ready. Each of the nineteen days that the men were summoned before the tribunal, the motorcade took a different, circuitous route to the Justice Department, where fifty soldiers stood guard outside the entrance. Hot-dog and ice-cream vendors set up stands to feed the curious.

Colonel Royall opened his defense with a statement to the tribunal. “In deference to the commission,” he said, “and in order that we may not waive for our clients any rights which may belong to them, we desire to state that, in our opinion, the order of the President of the United States creating this court is invalid and unconstitutional… Our view is based first on the fact that the civil courts are open in the territory in which we are now located and that, in our opinion, there are civil statutes governing the matters to be investigated.”

Biddle was no less tough in his response. “This is not a trial of offenses of law of the civil courts, but is a trial of the offenses of the law of war, which is not cognizable by the civil courts. It is the trial, as alleged in the charges, of certain enemies who crossed our borders… and who crossed in disguise and landed here… They are exactly and precisely in the same position as armed forces invading this country.”

Royall argued that the articles of war cited in the charges applied solely to U.S. citizens caught aiding an enemy, and not to enemies themselves. He further contended that no evidence suggested that the men would have followed through with their plans for sabotage. They had not been trained for espionage, had only vague contacts through which to communicate with Germany, and had no plans to return home until after the war. In response Biddle cited the case of Major John André, the British officer executed during the Revolutionary War for passing through American lines with the intention of bribing an American officer.

Lloyd Cutler remembers the opening arguments as a harbinger of what was to come. “Royall stood up and made an objection-a perfectly good one. The president of the court banged his gavel and said, The court will rise.’ Forty-five minutes later the court came back and said ‘Objection overruled.’ Then Biddle asked a second question, and the same thing happened. The court took another forty-five-minute break and overruled the objection. Royall got the message.”

Coast Guardsman John Cullen was the first witness. After recalling the events of his encounter with the Germans, Cullen said he could identify Dasch only if allowed to hear his voice. When Dasch said, “What is your name?” Cullen positively identified him. In his cross-examination of Cullen, Colonel Ristine noted that Dasch had never attempted any violence against Cullen. After Cullen left the stand, Warren Barnes, the chief of the Amagansett Coast Guard station, identified all the objects found on the beach, including the clothes Dasch’s men had buried. Next an FBI munitions expert testified as to the type of the explosives.

The next two FBI agents to testify seemed to strengthen Dasch’s case. Special Agent Charles Lanham stated that Burger had confessed that he and Dasch had never planned to follow through on the sabotage but instead had wanted to fight Hitler. Special Agent Norval Wills testified to the promise of a presidential pardon for Dasch in return for pleading guilty.

Royall later called each of the Germans to testify in his own defense. Haupt testified that he had planned all along not to go through with the sabotage and to turn the others in on July 6, when he would know where they all were. Neubauer swore that he and Kerling had almost immediately come “to the conclusion that we would not have a chance to go through with our orders.” Quirin claimed to have developed doubts about the mission “on the submarine.” Thiel claimed that he would never have carried out acts of sabotage. During the trial, under interrogation by Biddle, Thiel and Neubauer claimed that they hadn’t turned themselves in to the FBI for fear of the alleged Gestapo infiltration, which would have resulted in dire harm to their families in Germany. Heinck admitted that even before going to the training farm he had understood that the work he was about to do in America was definitely sabotage.

Meanwhile, the question of Dasch’s and Burger’s special status as collaborators with the U.S. government was also being discussed outside the tribunal. On July 16 Biddle wrote in a memorandum to Roosevelt,

Dasch and Burger were helpful in apprehending the others and in making out the proof. However, up to now, they have refused to testify. The Judge Advocate General and I intend to ask the Commission to impose the death penalty on them because we think they had some intention to go through with their plans when they landed and are therefore legally guilty. If the Commission sentences all eight to death, we will probably be prepared to recommend that you grant some clemency to Dasch and Burger. At the very least, however, they should be detained a la Rudolph Hess until after the war. Burger wants no publicity if he receives clemency. He prefers death to endangering his family. Dasch, however, seems to prefer the publicity, and it might be useful to make him somewhat of a hero, thus encouraging other German agents to turn in their fellows.

Dasch and Burger finally did testify. Dasch claimed that the sole reason he had entered sabotage school was to escape Germany, and Ristine again pointed out Dasch’s failure to harm Cullen, despite the orders he was under to subdue and take back to the submarine anybody he encountered. Burger was the last to testify; he said that he was an American citizen who had served in two National Guard units, earning two honorable discharges. After his return to Germany, he said, he quickly became disillusioned with the Nazi Party and began to plot a return to the United States. The lawyers defending him pointed out that he had cooperated with the FBI agents when they came to his hotel room, and that his interrogation had actually been more useful than Dasch’s, with far more detailed descriptions of the school for saboteurs and of his colleagues.

After sixteen days in session the defense rested on July 27, and the six men other than Dasch and Burger signed a statement expressing appreciation for having been given a fair trial. In it they wrote, “Before all we want to state that defense counsel has represented our case unbiased, better than we could expect and probably risking the indignation of public opinion. We thank our defense counsel.”

But Royall wasn’t finished. Determined to challenge the President’s proclamation that the men should face a military tribunal, he sought to win his clients’ freedom by demanding a writ of habeas corpus. Though the Supreme Court had been adjourned for the summer, it convened in a special session on July 29 to consider the matter.

Royall argued that Long Island and Florida beaches could not be characterized as “zones of military operation.” There had been no combat there, and no plausible threat of invasion. Royall argued that the civil courts were functioning, and under the circumstances they were the appropriate venue for the case to be heard. Biddle argued that the United States and Germany were at war, and cited a law passed by Congress in 1798 that stated, “Whenever there is a declared war, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all native citizens, denizens or subjects of the hostile nation shall be liable to be apprehended… as alien enemies.”

On July 31 the Supreme Court unanimously denied Royall’s appeal, writing, “The military commission was lawfully constituted… petitioners are held in lawful custody for trial before the military commission and have not shown cause for being discharged by writ of habeas corpus.”

The members of the tribunal then deliberated for two days before reaching a verdict. Finally, on August 3, in accordance with instructions, the tribunal’s verdict was delivered-by Army plane-directly to Roosevelt, at Hyde Park, in four thick manila envelopes. It found all eight men guilty and recommended death by electrocution, but added, “In view of the apparent assistance given to the prosecution by defendants Ernest Peter Burger and George John Dasch, the commission unanimously recommends that the sentence of each of these two defendants… be commuted from death to life imprisonment.”

On August 7 General Cox, the tribunal’s provost marshal, received instructions from President Roosevelt: All but Dasch and Burger were to be electrocuted at noon the following day.

Early in the morning of August 8, after the Germans had been fed a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast at the District of Columbia Jail, General Cox and an Army chaplain entered the cells of the condemned men and informed them of their fate. Each man turned pale and seemed stunned. None said a word. Burger was reading a copy of The Saturday Evening Post when Cox and the chaplain entered and told him he had been spared. Burger responded simply “Yes, sir,” and returned to his reading.

As the morning progressed, military officers, Army doctors, the city coroner, and Army ambulances arrived at the jail. People moved quickly and said little. The mood was somber. Final adjustments were made to the electric chair-a red-oak device situated in a 12-by-18-foot execution chamber located on the top floor of the jail. Each condemned man would face a glass panel that appeared to him to be opaque, behind which would sit representatives of the tribunal and other officials. The witnesses were to include Major General McCoy, Hoover, and representatives of the War and Justice Departments. In alphabetical order, beginning with Haupt, the condemned men would be walked into the chamber and executed with 4,500 volts of electricity.

The process began at noon. Each execution took no longer than fourteen minutes-the time required to administer the sentence, establish a time of death, remove the corpse, and ventilate the room for the arrival of the next man.

After the final execution the tribunal reported to President Roosevelt that his orders had been carried out. Just before 1:30 P.M. an announcement was made by the White House press secretary, Steve Early, who reported that six executions had taken place. The six bodies were buried in a pauper’s cemetery at Blue Plains, in the District of Columbia, a site adjacent to the House for the Aged and Infirm and the Industrial Home School for Colored Children. Six wooden headboards-marked simply 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, and 281-identified the graves.

Early also announced that by “unanimous recommendation by the commission concurred in by the Attorney General and the judge Advocate General of the Army,” the President had commuted the sentences of Dasch and Burger. “The commutation directed by the President in the case of Burger,” Early said, “was to confinement to hard labor for life. In the case of Dasch, the sentence was commuted by the President to the confinement at hard labor for thirty years. The records in all eight cases will be sealed until the end of the war.”

Dasch and Burger spent some six years in U.S. prisons and then were deported to Germany in April of 1948. Burger subsequently disappeared and is rumored to have fled to Spain. In 1959 Dasch published Eight Spies Against America, a self-promotional and little-noticed account of the whole affair. He spent his final years working as a travel agent and a tour guide in Germany and enduring regular harassment in the places he lived, because of his role in the betrayal of his colleagues. In 1983 he was tracked down by an American college student named Jonathan Mann, who reported that Dasch “got all teary-eyed talking about how he facilitated the deaths of ‘those boys.’” Late in his life Dasch befriended Charlie Chaplin, who was living in exile in nearby Switzerland, and the two often compared notes on how J. Edgar Hoover had ruined their lives.

Until his death, in 1992, in Germany, Dasch remained hopeful that he would receive the presidential pardon promised to him decades before. It never came.

The editors at The Atlantic Monthly commissioned the “Keystone Kommandos” just after Bush signed the order allowing military tribunals to try foreigners charged with terrorism after September 11. Bush copied some provisions straight from President Roosevelt’s order, including closing the trials to the public, judgment by a two-thirds vote of the military commissioners, and no appeal.

But legal scholars, members of Congress, and civil rights activists questioned whether Bush’s order was constitutional, pointing out that the legal precedent for tribunals is only during formally declared wars.

My story had no political motivation; it was just meant to be a historical tale about the last time a military tribunal was convened. I think what I found most compelling were some of the parallels between the Al Qaeda terrorists and the hapless Nazis of 1942-their youth and inexperience, the rigorous training for the mission, even the fact that both sets of men seemed to enjoy their brief time in America. But history does not always repeat itself