12:25 A.M.
Coastguard Seaman Second Class John Cullen was just beginning his midnight patrol. Dressed in his standard Coast Guard uniform, he walked along the beach through the Long Island fog, quietly singing to himself “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo.”
Some days he regretted turning down the Marines in favor of the Coast Guard. He imagined himself training for the upcoming invasion of Guadalcanal and taking the fight to the enemy. Instead he was pounding sand on beaches nine thousand miles away, patrolling a dark and quiet coastline from . . . what, exactly?
The good news was that he felt safe; the bad news was that he felt very alone.
In reality, he was neither.
Fifteen minutes into his patrol, John saw the most unlikely of sights: people. The fog was too thick to be sure of it, but it looked like they were pulling a dinghy out of the surf and onto the beach. Shining his flashlight toward them, its light doing nothing but illuminating the fog, he called out, “U.S. Coast Guard. Who are you?”
“Coast Guard?” shouted back one of the strangers. He had dropped the dinghy and was walking toward John.
Cullen could barely make out in the darkness the other three strangers busying themselves unloading materials of some kind out of the dinghy and onto various points along the beach.
“Yes. Who are you?” John asked.
“Fishermen. From East Hampton,” the man replied.
The man bore no resemblance to a fisherman. He wore a red woolen sweater, tennis shoes, a dark fedora hat, and pants that had been soaked through. Besides, he had no fishing supplies.
“We were trying to get to Montauk Point, but our boat ran aground,” he said, his long, lanky arms flailing. “We’re waiting for the sunrise to continue.” He was a thin man, shorter than average, with a streak of silver running through the middle of his jet-black hair.
“What do you mean, East Hampton or Montauk Point?” asked John. The two locations were twenty miles from each other, and these supposed fishermen were only five miles from where they said they’d started. Fog or no fog, John thought, who misses their landing spot by fifteen miles?
“Do you know where you are?” he asked the man in the odd clothes, with the odd accent and even odder story.
“I don’t believe I know where we landed,” he replied. “But you should know.”
“You’re in Amagansett. That’s my station over there,” John said, pointing up the beach to a building that was barely discernible through the fog. “Why don’t you come up to the station and stay the night?”
“All right,” the stranger said. But then, after a few steps, he stopped.
John’s suspicions grew. The bizarre stranger seemed even more nervous than before. If he were truly a lost fisherman, he would have no reason not to come to the Coast Guard station.
But John was now quite sure that this was no fisherman. And so the mysterious man’s next statement confirmed what John already knew.
“I’m not going with you.”
Shangri-La
Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland
Saturday, June 13, 1942
12:30 A.M.
In a large house set inside the most isolated of country estates, the President of the United States slept alone and undisturbed, his face a picture of a man at peace. The fate of his republic, and perhaps a few others as well, hinged on the choices he made during the day—but the night was his. He slept soundly at this weekend retreat in the mountains north of Washington, this place he had repurposed as a retreat and named Shangri-La after the fictional Himalayan utopia.
Yes, it was true that his nation and its allies were losing a war in which the very freedom of mankind was at stake. And yes, MacArthur was trapped in the Philippines, while Rommel was racking up victories in North Africa and half of America’s fleet lay useless at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt had carried the nation through a depression. There was nothing, he believed, he could not bend to his iron will—and that included the Nazis.
Amagansett, Long Island
Saturday, June 13, 1942
12:35 A.M.
“What do you mean you’re not coming with me?” John Cullen asked.
“I have no identification card, and no permit to fish.”
“That’s all right. We’ll sort it all out.”
“No, I won’t go.”
“You have to come,” Cullen said, grabbing for the man’s arm.
“Now listen,” the man replied, his tone suddenly changing, his hands trembling, his eyes narrowing, his accent becoming clearer. “How old are you, son?”
“Twenty-one,” replied John.
“You have a mother?”
“Yes.”
“A father?”
“Yes.”
“Look, you have no idea what this is all about. I don’t want to kill you. Forget about this and I’ll give you some money and you can go have a good time.”
“I don’t want your money,” John said, his heart beginning to race.
A second man was now visible through the fog, coming closer and dragging a large canvas bag. He started speaking in German to the man John had been questioning.
“Shut up,” the man called out in English, looking mortified. “Go back to the other guys.”
The other man did as he was told and retreated.
“Take a good look at my face,” the man said as he removed his dark fedora, reached into a tobacco pouch, and stuffed a wad of money into Cullen’s hand. “Look into my eyes. Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”
“No, sir,” John lied. He knew he would never forget the odd streak of silver hair through the middle of the stranger’s head, but the time for honesty had passed. He was unarmed and powerless over these men, whoever they were. “I never saw you before.”
“You might see me in East Hampton sometime. Would you know me?”
“No, I never saw you before in my life.”
“You might hear from me again. My name is George John Davis. What’s your name, boy?”
“Frank Collins, sir,” he lied again—now even more nervous after hearing the man say his name. Why is he telling me these things? he thought.
Cullen slowly took a step back. Then another. And another. After a few more paces the man had disappeared into the fog.
Cullen ran.
New York City
Saturday, June 13, 1942
7:30 P.M.
The Governor Clinton Hotel was among New York’s ritziest, and its restaurant, the Coral Room, among the city’s most elegant. As George sat down for dinner, he thought of all the other times he’d been in places like this, as a waiter, never as a customer. Now, far from his old life, and far from the scarcity of war-torn Germany, George sat in the Coral Room with a fine linen napkin across his lap and eighty thousand dollars in cash strapped around his waist. It was more money than the president of the United States made in a year.
After his encounter with the boy from the Coast Guard this morning, George and his three teammates—Peter Burger, Richard Quirin, and Henry Heinck—had found their way to the Amagansett train station. There they’d boarded an early morning Long Island Rail Road train headed for Queens. George and Peter had checked into the Governor Clinton while suggesting to the team’s other two members that it would be safer if they found a different hotel.
Across the table was Peter Burger, a toolmaker by trade. But neither Pete nor George looked liked a tradesman tonight. After treating themselves to a shave and a shopping spree in Queens, they’d made it to Manhattan and headed straight for Macy’s. There they bought more shirts, trousers, underwear, ties, handkerchiefs, and suits—plus new watches and three suitcases to carry it all in.
George was smart enough to know that shopping sprees and steak dinners were not exactly the best way to stay inconspicuous—but at that moment he didn’t really care. This was a celebration. After all, they’d somehow convinced their own government not only to let them leave the country, but to send them back on their own private U-boats.
“My sister’s father-in-law was seventy-three, a fine man,” George said to Peter once they’d finished talking about their early morning escape. “The Nazis threw him into a concentration camp. Nine months. Because he was too Catholic. While he was in there, his wife died.”
Pete, perhaps buoyed by the wine, perhaps emboldened by George’s criticism of the Nazis, talked about his own seventeen months in prison. How he’d written a paper critical of the Gestapo. How he’d been held with sixty other prisoners in a windowless cell. And how his pregnant wife had been harassed, pressured to divorce him, and shaken down by the Gestapo. When she miscarried, Pete knew whom to blame.
“I have a lot to talk to you about,” George said. It was, by any measure, an understatement.
“I know what you are going to tell me,” said Pete. “I am quite sure that our intentions are very similar.”
George looked around. He badly wanted to talk with Peter now—but there were too many people sitting around them, too many prying ears. George knew that he’d been sloppy up until this point—he was an untrained, unmotivated, unsympathetic German. His carelessness and erratic nature were among the reasons he’d failed in most of his professional pursuits, none of which—from waiting tables, to clerking at a soda fountain, to managing a brothel—had prepared him for international espionage.
But he would not be sloppy anymore. He didn’t care about his mission, but he had no idea if the Nazis had sent others to watch him and his team. Be patient, George told himself.
“In the morning,” he said.
New York City
Sunday, June 14, 1942
8:30 A.M.
“I want the truth, nothing else—regardless of what it is,” George said. Looking Pete in the eye, pointing to the window across the hotel room, he added, “If we can’t agree, either I go out the window or you do.”
“There is no need for that. I think we feel very much the same,” Pete replied. “Let’s get on with it.”
But George was in no hurry. Instead of getting right to the reason the two of them were there, he instead started telling Pete about his life.
He explained how he’d left Germany in 1922 at age nineteen for America. That another nineteen years later he’d retreated back to his home country, looking for a new start.
He knew almost instantly that it had been a mistake. It was 1941 and, as George explained, “There was too much terror and too much want, not enough food and not enough fun.”
His next stop was the Farm—and then right back here, to America.
Pete told a story not altogether different: a childhood in Germany, an emigration to America, and a return home that he quickly regretted. “I never intended to carry out the orders,” he said, beginning to cry. “And when I got to the beach yesterday, I started sabotaging the mission right away.”
“When you were talking with the Coast Guardsman, I dropped a pack of German cigarettes,” Pete continued, “and a vest. And some socks and swimming trunks. Then I dragged the crates of TNT along the beach. I could have carried them. They were light enough. But I knew dragging them would leave marks leading right to where we buried them. The fog obscured what I was doing from the others—they had no idea.”
Smiling, and sure he’d found an ally, George gripped Pete’s shoulder with his trembling hand. “Kid, I think God brought us together. We are going to make a great team.”
New York City
Sunday, June 14, 1942
7:51 P.M.
The FBI received a lot of phone calls. Some of them were taken seriously, and the rest were routed to an agent who sat at a “nutter’s desk.”
“Can you spell that, sir?” asked the agent who was, at the moment, listening to a caller who claimed to have arrived from Germany the prior morning.
“Franz. F-R-A-N-Z. Daniel. D-A-N-I-E-L. Pastorius. P-A-S-T-O-R-I-U-S.”
The agent wrote down “Postorius.”
“And what type of information do you want to give?”
He told the agent that he would be traveling to Washington to report something “big.” Once there, he wanted to speak directly to J. Edgar Hoover. “He is the person who should hear it first.”
“Mr. Hoover is a busy man—”
“Take down this message,” the caller demanded. “I, Franz Daniel Pastorius, shall try to get in touch with your Washington office this coming week, either Thursday or Friday, and you should notify the Washington office of this fact.”
Before hanging up, George added, “Tell them I am about forty years old, and have a streak of silver in my hair.”
From the nutter’s desk, the FBI agent typed a memo for the file. Neither it, nor George’s message, ever left New York.
Washington, D.C.
Friday, June 19, to Wednesday, June 24, 1942
It was Friday morning when George dialed the operator at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. His message to the FBI may not have made it to the capital, but he had. “Room service, please.”
Peter Burger knew that George was in D.C. to turn himself in to the FBI and expose the entire operation, but the other two team members had no idea. Peter had told them that George was leaving New York for a few days to get in touch with some Nazi sympathizers living in America, hopeful that they could help with logistics.
George was finally beginning to feel like himself again. It had been a long time. But now, between the great food, seeing old friends, and playing marathon games of pinochle, he was starting to realize that his future was bright. His next step, which would be to explain the entire German plot to the American government, would finally set him free.
George had spent a lot of time over the past few days thinking about what he’d do with his life once the Americans had labeled him a hero. Maybe he could help the U.S. war effort by improving their propaganda. Or maybe the government would have its own ideas. Whatever the case, as long as he was helping to bring down the Nazis, he’d be happy.
Picking up the phone to call the FBI, George had a moment of doubt—not about whether to call, but about whom to call. It suddenly occurred to him that maybe the Secret Service was the proper agency. Unsure, he dialed the U.S. Government Information Service and told the woman who answered that he had “a statement of military as well as political value.” She suggested trying the colonel in charge of Military Intelligence at the War Department. George hung up, called the colonel, and left a message.
Undeterred, and in something of a hurry for a change, George reverted to his original plan: He called the FBI and asked to speak to J. Edgar Hoover.
The operator transferred him to a second office; which sent him to a third office. That office connected him to Duane Traynor, the agent in charge of the FBI’s anti-sabotage unit.
If George couldn’t talk directly to Hoover, he figured Traynor would have to do. “Did New York tell you I was on my way?”
Of course, New York had not told him anything. But, intrigued, Traynor sent a car to the Mayflower to pick George up and bring him in. While he waited, George wrote a letter to Pete:
Got safely into town last night and contacted the responsible parties. At present I’m waiting to be brought over to the right man by one of his agents. I had a good night’s rest, feel fine physically as well as mentally and believe that I will accomplish the part of our participation. It will take lots of time and talking but please don’t worry, have faith and courage. I try hard to do the right thing.
After arriving at the Justice Department, George sat down with Agent Traynor. “I have a long story to tell,” he said, “but I want to tell it my own way.”
For twelve hours, George told Traynor about the Farm and the U-boats, about the second team sent to Florida and about the targets they were ordered to hit. Of course, he also treated Traynor to a healthy dose of his life story as a team of six stenographers worked in one-hour shifts to record every word that came out of his mouth. Finally, perhaps for the first time in his life, George had a receptive audience willing to sit and listen to anything that popped into his head.