As midnight approached, George was beginning to lose his voice. Accompanied by Traynor, he returned to the Mayflower, where the FBI agent slept in a spare bed. It was all going according to plan, George thought. It was exciting. And even though it was exhausting, and a little scary, he was having fun. It felt good to be a hero.
On Saturday, Traynor asked, “Is there any way you can get in touch with the leader of the other group?”
“Well, yes,” George said. “I had him write the name of somebody on a handkerchief.” If they found that man whose name was on the handkerchief—a friend of the other group’s leader, Edward Kerling—they would probably find Edward himself.
George reached into his pocket and took out the handkerchief. It was blank. “Well, how do you develop it?” asked Traynor.
“I can’t remember.” George paused, squeezed his eyes, and put his index finger to the top of nose, thinking hard. “You use some kind of smelly stuff.”
A day later, the name of the “smelly stuff” finally came to George. “Ammonia!” he exclaimed. “I passed the handkerchief over a bottle of ammonia. It shows red until it dries. You read it slowly and then it goes away again.”
? ? ?
Four days later George signed each of the 254 single-spaced typewritten pages that made up his statement. “My mind is all upside down,” he told Traynor, but George expected the next steps to be much easier: a prominent government job helping in the fight against Hitler. At the very least he’d keep the eighty thousand dollars and start a new life.
But after six days of talking and thinking about all of the places where this new life might lead him, George had never stopped to consider the one place that it actually would: prison.
Washington, D.C.
Monday, June 22, 1942
“Take this down,” J. Edgar Hoover told his secretary. “To President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Regarding Nazi spies. The FBI has apprehended all members of the group which landed on Long Island. They are being held secretly and incommunicado. I have taken detailed statements from each of the persons arrested and the story is a startling and shocking one. Long and extensive training is being given by the German authorities to specially selected men who in turn are being placed on board German submarines to be landed on the shores of the United States. I expect to be able to have in custody all members of the second group.”
Hoover hadn’t risen to the top of the FBI—and stayed there—by sharing credit. Almost every sentence in his memo included the word I. Not once did it mention that George Dasch had turned himself in or that his initial call to the New York field office had been referred to the “nutter’s desk.”
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, June 25, 1942
A few minutes past noon on June 25, Duane Traynor explained to George Dasch that he was under arrest and that he would be stripped of his personal belongings, from his gold watch to his eighty thousand dollars. And that he would be spending the night in jail.
Recording the saboteurs’ every move, a jailer noted in an official logbook: “G. Dasch. Urinated at 11:40 p.m. Appears a little depressed.”
New York City
Saturday, June 27, to Sunday, June 28, 1942
“I have a very important statement to make,” Director Hoover told the reporters he’d assembled in the FBI’s New York office. “I want you to listen carefully; this is a serious business.”
The next morning, Hoover picked up the Sunday edition of the New York Times and cracked a rare smile. The headline was huge; it was as big as the headline that had announced the attack on Pearl Harbor: “FBI SEIZES 8 SABOTEURS LANDED BY U-BOATS.”
“Before the men could begin carrying out their orders,” reported the Times, “the FBI was on their trail and the round-up began. One after another, they fell into the special agents’ nets.”
The story was perfect. Hoover only needed to make sure the public never heard the truth from George John Dasch.
Hyde Park, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, June 27, to Tuesday, June 30, 1942
Smiles were rare for J. Edgar Hoover. But not for Franklin Roosevelt. Along with his cigarette holder and fireside chats, his smile was something of a trademark. And for one of the first times since the war began, the president had a lot to smile about.
“Eight spies and one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in cash,” Attorney General Francis Biddle called Hyde Park to report.
The president loved a good spy story. And a good joke.
“Not enough, Francis,” he said. “Let’s make real money out of them. Sell the rights to Barnum and Bailey for a million and a half—the rights to take them around the country in lion cages at so much a head.”
Biddle was sure he was kidding, but the memo FDR dictated to him three days later was no joke. “The two American citizens,” said Roosevelt—referring to Herbie Haupt, who was a naturalized citizen, and to Burger, whose American citizenship was questionable—“are guilty of high treason. This being wartime, it is my inclination to try them by court martial.” Not that a trial, in Roosevelt’s mind, was necessary to determine their guilt.
“I do not see how they can offer any adequate defense. Surely they are just as guilty as it is possible to be and it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory.”
In that regard, the American people, regardless of their politics, were in complete agreement. An editorial by the Detroit Free Press read, “Realism calls for a stone wall and a firing squad, and not a holier-than-thou eyewash about extending the protection of civil rights to a group that came among us to blast, burn, and kill.”
Others were more succinct. “Shoot them,” said the New Orleans State. “Give them death,” demanded the El Paso Times. The New York Times reported that “Americans want to hear the roar of rifles in the hands of a firing squad.” And LIFE magazine’s headline bluntly declared, “The Eight Nazi Spies Should Die.”
Moving on to the “six who I take it are German citizens,” Roosevelt said, “They were apprehended in civilian clothes. This is an absolute parallel of the case of Major Andre in the Revolution and of Nathan Hale. Both of them were hanged.”
The president, impatient with civil liberties even in peacetime, was not about to deny America “the roar of rifles in the hands of a firing squad” that so many demanded. Americans were sacrificing their lives and loved ones in a war for the nation’s survival—a war that was not going well. The navy was waging a war on two oceans with just half the fleet that had been sailing on December 6, 1941. General MacArthur, the country’s most beloved general, was trapped in the Philippines, his invincibility shattered, his army starving. Americans deserve a victory, Roosevelt thought.
And he was going to give it to them.
“Here again it is my inclination that they be tried by court martial as were Andre and Hale. Without splitting hairs, I can see no difference.”
Of course, Roosevelt knew that the Supreme Court might try to interfere and decide the case belonged in a civil court. What would he do if the men in black robes said the Constitution required a trial by jury, guilt beyond reasonable doubt, individual counsel for every defendant, the right to exclude coerced confessions, and a sentence in accord with civil laws? After all, under civil law, their sentences would likely not exceed two years in prison.
Roosevelt wouldn’t hear of it. “I want one thing clearly understood, Francis,” he told Biddle. “I won’t give them up. I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?”
Biddle nodded, thinking that the president, though never boring, could be a bit boorish.
United States Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, July 8, 1942
Unsure how his plan had gone so wrong, and unclear about why he was even under arrest, George was once again on his way to the Justice Department. But this time, his ride to the corner of Ninth and Constitution did not begin at the Mayflower, and what awaited him was not a tribe of stenographers hanging on his every word but a military commission—a tribunal of seven officers who would decide whether he lived or died.
The caravan that carried him included six police motorcycles, an army truck packed with machine-gun-bearing soldiers, two vans with soldiers on the running boards, another truck, and more motorcycles. Along the procession, thousands of onlookers shouted lines like “there go the spies” and “Nazi rats.”
When George walked into Room 5235, where he would be tried for war crimes, he expected to find something that looked like a courtroom. Instead, he found a long and narrow area of bland office space that had once been a classroom. It sat along a hallway easily closed off from the rest of the building. Glass doors connecting other corridors were boarded up and watched by armed guards. The room’s windows were covered in black curtains to preserve secrecy, and as George looked around, he was surprised to see that there were no members of the press. He badly wanted to tell his story to the public, but he was beginning to wonder if powerful people in the U.S. government had something else in mind.
No sooner had the commission begun to swear in the officers of the court than a six-foot, five-inch-tall colonel rose to speak. He wore a green, loose-fitting Class A uniform and spoke with a soft country drawl. The colonel had a Harvard law degree and a skillful courtroom manner. He was George’s best hope.
“This entire proceeding is invalid and unconstitutional,” said Colonel Kenneth Royall, who also represented the other seven defendants. “In 1866, the Supreme Court was clear. Civil courts have jurisdiction when they are open in the territory in which we are now located.”
George, for the first time since his arrest, began to get his hopes up. Perhaps, he thought, the commission would be dissolved on its very first day.
After a lengthy discussion and a short recess, the general in charge of the commission ruled on his attorney’s plea: “The commission does not sustain the objection of the defense. Proceed.”
The general then read the charges against them—espionage and sabotage—and when his name was called, George stood up, looked at the presiding general, and answered the charges with the same plea as the other defendants.
“Not guilty.”
Hyde Park, New York
Sunday, July 12, 1942
“What should be done with them?” the president asked his aide. The tribunal had not yet decided the saboteurs’ guilt or sentences, but the president was thinking ahead.
His aide wondered, but only for a moment, if the president was considering clemency.
FDR turned back to his aide and clarified his question. “Should they be shot or hanged?”
United States Supreme Court
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, July 29, to Thursday, July 30, 1942
The spectators in the packed impromptu courtroom sat in rapt silence as Colonel Royall rose before them. Like the colonel, everyone there—including J. Edgar Hoover, and the gentleman beside him, the associate director of the FBI, Clyde Tolson—believed the argument that Colonel Royall was about to make would be the difference between life and death for his clients.
“Mr. Chief Justice,” Royall began, “and may it please the court.”
Royall had challenged the authority of the military tribunal, which had not yet rendered its verdict, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. For three days, Royall quoted from the court’s precedents and appealed to its highest ideals. Citing a seventy-six-year-old case called Ex Parte Milligan, Royall explained to the justices that Abraham Lincoln had attempted to try a southern sympathizer in a military tribunal. The defendant had been arrested in Indiana in 1864, and the Supreme Court had ruled it was unconstitutional to convene a military tribunal in a territory where the civil courts were open.
When it was the prosecution’s turn, Attorney General Biddle approached the podium. “The United States and the German Reich are now at war,” he told the Court. “That seems to be the essential fact on which this case turns and to which all our arguments will be addressed.” He argued that the “Indiana of 1864” bore no resemblance to the “East Coast of today.” Modern war is “fought on the total front, on the battlefields of joined armies, on the battlefields of production, and on the battlefields of transportation and morale, by bombing, the sinking of ships, sabotage, spying, and propaganda.”