An obviously distraught Dasch then asked the guard for a cigarette and a cup of cold water. As he sipped the water, pacing up and down his tiny cell, he began talking incoherently to the guard. “I’ve been a coward, but tonight I found myself.”22 He said he had read a newspaper account of the sufferings of American soldiers on Corregidor, which had helped him find his courage. “I cannot cause an innocent man’s death. Young people should live. People who have already lived their lives can die. That’s the way my mother and father would want it.”
The guard had no idea what Dasch was talking about, and was under strict orders not to engage the prisoner in conversation. He just listened, waiting for him to hand back the empty cup.
Dasch had a sleepless night, tossing and turning on the hard planks that served as a bed. The following morning, he peeked through the peep-hole of his wooden cell door and saw another guard reading a newspaper story about Hoover’s press conference. His own picture was splashed across the front page under the headline “CAPTURED NAZI SPY.”23 He felt confused and betrayed. His brother and sister lived in the United States. What would they think when they saw the story? What would his friends think? What right did they have to use his picture anyway?
When Donegan finally dropped by to see him, Dasch said he had changed his mind. Instead of pleading guilty, he would take his chances in court, and provide a full explanation for his behavior. The meaning of his disconnected remarks of the previous evening now became clear. He was willing to risk Nazi retribution against his parents in Germany (“people who have already lived their lives”) for his own reputation and the well-being of his brother and sister in the United States (“Young people should live”).
FBI officials were furious. Donegan reported to Hoover that the prisoner was “behaving like an opera star.”24 Connelley said he was in favor of “shooting Dasch” because he “backs in and out,” “stands on his dignity,” “gets up and waves his arms,” and throws a fit “when there is no reason for it at all.” Even the patient, solicitous Traynor admitted to having “doubts” about Dasch’s veracity. He found it almost impossible to figure his star informant out. First Dasch had expressed great concern about the fate of his parents in Germany, insisting that the German government must never be permitted to learn of his role in betraying Operation Pastorius. Now he was saying his parents would have to look after themselves.
Dasch signaled his dismay at the way he was being treated by becoming surly and uncooperative. Hoover felt that his initial 254-page “confession” was too candid and unwieldy to be used in court, and wanted him to agree to a summary prepared by FBI agents. But Dasch refused to sign the new document, saying it was “too cold and bare” and left out many important details.25 Instead, he penned a rambling twelve-page letter, depicting himself as “little Geo. J. Dasch” battling impersonal, bureaucratic forces on both sides of the Atlantic.26
“I came to this country not as a foe, but as an ally, ready and anxious to do my very best in helping to defeat the present government of Germany,” he wrote. “One thing I could not foresee was the way I was to be received after arriving in the U.S.A. I had all reason to believe that I would be greeted with open arms, befriended as an ally.” Instead, “I was not only thrown into jail but also photographed like a criminal.” He explained his change of heart by arguing that he did not want to expose his relatives in the United States to the “risk of losing their jobs” if he was convicted as a Nazi spy. Above all, he refused to be party to “a lie.”
Any good soldier carries his flag proudly to the battle. I always wanted to be a good soldier, a soldier that carries his flag openly, unashamed into a battle for rightfulness, into the battle to free these poor people of Europe regardless of race, religion, or nationality. Just because I’m so deeply convinced that the battle I pray to take part in is for a just cause makes me proud to carry my flag into the open. Let them rotten gangsters [the Nazis] know that poor little me was able to beat to the punch by not only exposing their rotten plans to the people of the U.S.A. but by coming out in the open and fight with all my knowledge, all that I’ve observed, all the trickeries I’ve learned from them. I do not fear the loss of my beloved ones over there, for mother told, to go right ahead. Their lives rest in the hands of God . . .
Dasch “wants to be a martyr,” Connelley complained. 27
FRANCIS BIDDLE had the reputation of being the liberal ornament in FDR’s war cabinet. He was descended from a long line of Philadelphia aristocrats, and was married to a well-known poet, Katherine Garrison Chapin. His friends included writers, intellectuals, foreign diplomats—a representative cross-section of the Great and the Good. Some Roosevelt intimates regarded him as too effete and soft to make an effective attorney general during a time of war. The saboteur case was his opportunity to prove them wrong.
The president himself enjoyed ribbing Biddle for his commitment to civil liberties. A few months earlier, over lunch in the cabinet room of the White House, he had played a practical joke on his chief law enforcement officer. Putting on his most serious and solemn face, he said he planned to suspend freedom of speech for the duration of the war, and wanted Biddle to draft a suitable proclamation. “It’s a tough thing to do, but I’m convinced it’s absolutely necessary and I want to announce it in this speech we are working on now.”28
The other people in the room, who were in on the presidential joke, sat silently as Biddle rose to the bait and passionately defended the right of Americans to express themselves freely, even in a time of war. As he paced back and forth, the attorney general got more and more worked up, making a fervent plea for Roosevelt to reconsider. Biddle’s tirade went on for some five minutes before the other lunch guests burst out laughing.
Now that the Nazi saboteurs were under lock and key, Biddle was as eager as any of his colleagues to make an example of them. Like Roosevelt, he felt they should be tried by military tribunal. It would be difficult to prove a case of attempted sabotage in a civilian court: Dasch and his colleagues had not even gone back to collect the bomb-making equipment cached on the beaches, much less blown anything up. According to civilian law, “if a man buys a pistol, intending murder, that is not an attempt at murder.” 29 Legal experts at the War Department believed that a U.S. district court would sentence the saboteurs to a maximum of two years in prison and a fine of $10,000 for “conspiracy to commit a crime against the United States.”30 Under military law, they could be charged with violating the rules of war by crossing the front line in civilian clothes with hostile intent, an offense that carried the death penalty.
Not only was Biddle prepared to hand the saboteurs over to the military authorities; he wanted to prosecute the case himself, a highly unusual step for an attorney general. He was afraid that lawyers for the saboteurs might invoke the ancient tradition of habeas corpus, a procedure that could send the case to the Supreme Court. If this happened, there was a serious risk of army prosecutors messing things up. He was worried that the judge advocate general of the army, Major General Myron Cramer, had limited legal experience and had never appeared before the Supreme Court.
“We have to win in the Supreme Court, or there will be a hell of a mess,” Biddle warned Roosevelt.31
“You’re damned right, Mr. Attorney General.”
Biddle’s desire to prosecute the case himself was strongly opposed by the secretary of war. A stickler for regular procedures, Stimson thought the trial should be handled as a “routine matter” by the military, with as little fanfare as possible. He had a low opinion of his cabinet rival, whom he regarded as both weak and vain. Already upset by Hoover’s headline-grabbing news conference, Stimson suspected that Biddle had also fallen victim to “the bug of publicity.”32 He told him it was “infra dig” for the attorney general to appear in a case of “such little national importance.”
But Biddle insisted on leading the prosecution team at the trial. Reluctantly, Stimson let him have his way.
NEWS OF the saboteur debacle reached H
itler at the Wolf’s Lair in eastern Prussia as he was preparing a new offensive in the Crimea. In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 28, Berlin time, American radio stations started carrying reports of the arrest of all the participants in Operation Pastorius. The detail contained in the reports—accurate descriptions of the bomb-making equipment, the names of the V-men, as well as an account of how they had received extensive training at a sabotage school outside Berlin—left no room for doubt that the operation had been a complete fiasco.
The Führer was livid. He summoned the Abwehr chiefs, Canaris and Lahousen, to appear at Wolfsschanze the following Tuesday. Once again, they took a military plane from Berlin to Rastenburg, and then a staff car through the woods to Hitler’s military headquarters. That afternoon, Hitler subjected them to one of his most withering tirades, complaining that the Americans had achieved a huge propaganda victory. The only possible quibble with the American account was that some of the sabotage objectives, such as the targeting of the Hell Gate Bridge in New York, had been misrepresented or exaggerated.
Canaris tried to shift the blame onto the Nazi Party, arguing that the saboteurs had not been “trained Abwehr agents,” but Nazi loyalists selected by the party. This only made Hitler more angry.
“Why didn’t you use Jews for that?” he yelled at the stocky admiral.33 Even though the Holocaust was already well under way, Hitler still thought he could force Jews to do his dirty work. Canaris, who was beginning to doubt the Führer’s sanity, would later use Hitler’s remark as an excuse for recruiting a few Jewish agents into the Abwehr, thereby saving them from the death camps.
The commander in chief of the submarine fleet, Admiral Dönitz, was also infuriated by the news from America. He had little confidence in either the Abwehr or the Nazi Party’s Ausland Institut, which had screened the agents in the first place. He had opposed the use of his U-boats for transporting saboteurs, and had only agreed to Operation Pastorius after being assured by the Abwehr that the V-men were all “high-class intelligence agents.”34 This was obviously not the case, and Dönitz angrily withdrew his consent for follow-up operations.
FROM THE German point of view, the only glimmer of light from the whole affair was the havoc submarine U-202 inflicted along the eastern seaboard following its miraculous escape from Long Island.35 But even that was marred by controversy.
In the early morning hours of Monday, June 22—nine days after landing the saboteurs on Amagansett Beach—Linder had spotted a 4,900-ton steamer 150 miles southeast of New York. He fired a torpedo at the ship, hitting the boiler room just above the water level on the starboard side. One of the boilers immediately exploded, killing five crewmen. The ship sank in eleven minutes, as the survivors scrambled aboard lifeboats.
When U-202 surfaced to survey the damage, it turned out that the steamer, the Rio Tercero, had been flying the Argentine flag. In theory at least, it should have been off-limits to German submarines as a neutral ship, although Linder maintained that it had not been properly identified. He invited the captain and surviving crew members on board and, in a conciliatory gesture, offered them some glasses of cognac and a pair of shoes, which they accepted. After the Argentineans got back into their lifeboat, four German sailors appeared on the deck of the U-boat armed with submachine guns. The Argentinean captain feared a massacre, but at that moment an American plane appeared overhead, and U-202 immediately crash-dived. The sinking of the Rio Tercero prompted a strong diplomatic protest from Argentina to Nazi Germany.
Eight days later, on June 30, Linder struck again. This time, he sank a 5,900-ton American vessel, the City of Birmingham, off Cape Hatteras, a favorite stalking ground for German U-boats. The ship, which was packed with 381 passengers and crew, went down in just four minutes, but only nine persons were killed. On his way back to Europe, Linder refueled from one of the large supply submarines cruising around the Atlantic and intercepted an outbound American convoy near the Azores.
FROM HIS bedroom on the second floor of the Hyde Park mansion, Franklin Roosevelt looked out onto an idyllic scene of parkland, rolling hills, and the Hudson River glinting through a forest of maple and white pine. An apple tree brushed against the stone wall outside the room, so close that the president could lean through the hospital-green shutters of the window and pluck the fruit. Below the window was a steep hill that descended to a wooden bluff above the river, where, as a boy, Franklin had loved to go sledding in the snow.
Now that he was preoccupied by the affairs of the world, Roosevelt loved the “peacefulness and regularity” of Hyde Park, and the life of the country squire that went with it.36 Paralyzed from the hips downward, he would replay his boyhood adventures over and over in his mind until he eventually fell asleep. Because of his infirmity, his bedroom had become a second office. A black telephone on the wall above his heavy mahogany bed provided a direct line to the White House. In the morning, he would eat breakfast in bed and go through piles of papers sent up from Washington.
Thursday, July 2, was a big document-signing day at Hyde Park. The president’s aide, William Hassett, brought in an “unusually fat” pile of papers for him to sign, including what Roosevelt described as “the biggest appropriation bill in the history of the world” and documents setting up a military tribunal to try the Nazi saboteurs.37 “The Boss” signed the papers in bed, scrawling his name in the proper place with a heavy stroke of a pen. Then Hassett spread the documents out on every flat space in the room, including the rest of the bed, the chairs, and much of the floor, to wait for the ink to dry. “I’ve done half a day’s work, and I’m not yet out of bed,” FDR boasted to his wife, Eleanor, when she phoned him from Washington. “Having a grand time.”
The previous evening, Biddle had sent up a packet of papers to Hyde Park explaining the difficulties of trying the saboteurs in civilian court and the legal basis for establishing a tribunal. He pointed out that a military trial was likely to be “much swifter” than a civilian trial, and would side-step the cumbersome rules of evidence demanded by civilian courts.38 Furthermore, he proposed trying the saboteurs by a military commission rather than by court-martial because of its “greater flexibility, its traditional use in cases of this character and its clear power to impose the death penalty.” Courts-martial were subject to the Articles of War, a military code dating back to 1775 and the War of Independence against the British. A military commission was ad hoc, and the president could draw up his own rules. He could stipulate, for example, that the death penalty could be imposed with the agreement of only two-thirds of the members of the tribunal rather than the unanimous vote required by a court-martial. All this would “save a considerable amount of time,” in Biddle’s view.
At this point, Roosevelt was still unaware of the assistance provided to the FBI by Dasch and Burger, and believed all the saboteurs to be equally guilty. As far as he knew, the Bureau had broken the case through its own investigative brilliance. Hoover had discussed the case with Biddle, and together they decided to keep the information about Dasch’s betrayal of his colleagues to themselves for the moment. As long as FDR was at Hyde Park, Biddle told Hoover, “it would be very unwise to speak to the president over the telephone concerning Dasch.”39 They would tell him later, when they could get him on his own.
The president signed two documents relating to the saboteurs. 40 The first was an order establishing a military commission to try the eight invaders, giving the chairman of the tribunal the right to admit any evidence that would have “probative value to a reasonable man.” The tribunal’s verdict and sentence would be transmitted directly to the president for action, rather than being subject to the normal review procedures contained in the Articles of War.
The second document was a presidential proclamation denying the defendants access to civilian courts. Biddle was worried that lawyers for the saboteurs might try to invoke a “troublesome” Supreme Court decision that dated back to 1866, just after the Civil War, restoring liberties suspended by Abraham Lincoln while h
e suppressed the Confederate rebellion. The Supreme Court had ruled in Ex parte Milligan that civilians could never be brought before a military tribunal at a time when civilian courts were “open and properly functioning.” It was unclear whether the saboteurs were civilians or not: only two of them, Burger and Neubauer, were formally enrolled in the German army. It was also unclear whether the Supreme Court decision applied to foreigners. Roosevelt’s advisers hoped to avoid this legal controversy with a presidential order carving out an exception to the Milligan ruling:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, President of the United States of America and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the statutes of the United States, 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 rules 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 . . .
All this was very satisfactory to Roosevelt, who wanted to dispose of the saboteur case as swiftly and efficiently as possible. Hassett was faithfully echoing his master’s opinions when he noted in his diary, “Hanging would afford an efficacious example to others of like kidney. There’s no doubt of their guilt, but we are always too soft in dealing with spies and saboteurs.”
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