Vic Socotra

05 September 2009

Resolve

(G-Men Fighting Crime with Science- Mechanics Illustrated 1938)

If you get the hint that I am bashing the FBI just because their long-time director was a prick, please don’t take it that way. I respect the men and women of the organization, and am only trying to describe just how hard it is to balance a public relations campaign with law enforcement.

It really was the first attempt at creating the Department of Homeland Security, and it didn’t go any better or easier than it is going this time.

John Edgar Hoover was the P.T. Barnum of law enforcement. The wild Duquesne trial of dozens of real and imagined German agents was supposed to demonstrate, for once and for all, that the Nazi agent network in the United States was destroyed by the vigilance of Hoover’s G-men.

That was absurd. Stumbling on the network was the product of a human source who walked into the office and laid it on the table for the FBI. Herr Sebold, the volunteer informant who was key to unraveling the operation, disappears from history after the trial, one of the early beneficiaries of the Witness Protection Program. It is too bad. If we were not following this strand of history, it would be interesting to stop and spend some time with the agents and double-agents, and the intrepid operators of the sting operation that co-opted the Duquesne network.

Operating the German agent network as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Crown was essentially what the Brits did to the Nazi Abwehr throughout the war.

MI5, their version of the national internal security forces, saw no need to have a show trial to buck up the nation while losing the exceptionally sensitive source.

Hoover did. And thus when the Nazis rowed ashore on the next try, there was no one on the radio to give advance warning, and welcome the new arrivals into the fold of the compromised.

It is easy to second guess from the cheap seats here more than a half century later, so let us be charitable. I know that a Spook would never have had the compulsion to show the dramatic fruits of success, and would have kept the secret unto death.

I know that for a fact. Having dinner with an older couple, friends of my parents, last year, we got to talking about what Washington was like in 1942, the year in which the major events of this story take place. The wife, a proper and adventurous woman, said that she had been one of the women officers commissioned as Navy WAVE. She was describing the delicious irony of dating an enlisted man who had been a classmante just a few months before- horrors!- and living up by Ward Circle with several other girls.

“Ward Circle?” I said. “Were you assigned to Nebraska Avenue?”

The girl’s school there had been appropriated by the Department of the Navy for their codebreaking activities shortly after Pearl Harbor. I warmed to the question. “Did you work on the MAGIC cryptologic effort against the Japanese naval ciphers?”

Now, understand, the secrets of that operation were declassified thirty years ago, and it is ancient history. I was interested because I was in the business, too, and it is fascinating to see how things were done at the beginning of history. She looked at me, a bit startled, and then shook her head, to say, “Not here, and not now. Not ever.”

When the Spooks mustered out the temporary help at war’s end, they told the women going home that if they ever talked about what they did, they would go to jail. She believed them. For all she knew, I could be working for the g-men. She kept her secrets to the end.

It is not like today, when any really decent secret has the shelf-life of some jerk getting to his Blackbery.

Anyway, the big Duquesne trial was history, and the radio channels the FBI had maintained had been fully and totally disclosed to the enemy. No information would ever come from that direction again,

This was a crisis. According to what Punchy Cullen said, there were at least four and maybe more Nazi saboteurs on the loose. A national man-hunt was launched, which is a bit problematic. The Bureau had many agents, but no police. They could not post pictures of the Germans down at the post office, since that would reveal that the enemy could still land agents with impunity on our shores.

G-men all over the nation made notes on pads on their desks, and watched their phones intently to see if anything turned up.

That is why Punchy got the Legion of Honor. His accidental meeting with the John George Dash near the surf on Long Island was the key to everything. Although the Germans were long gone when the Coasties got back, they were able to confirm that the operation was real enough, and came with explosives and everything.

But real live Germans? Not a trace.

That is where the life of the hunted, and the psychology of men on the run comes in. John George Dasch's resolution to be a saboteur for the Fatherland faltered. Later, he said that from the beginning of his recruitment he was planning on defecting, and the Abwehr was really only providing him transportation back to his adopted homeland.

Of course, that is what he said when he was under interrogation and needed to put the best light on things. Maybe it was the encounter with Punchy Cullen that convinced him of the impracticality of a bombing campaign across the heartland of America, and maybe it was the public relations campaign that made the FBI seem ten feet tall. It must have seemed like the best way to get out from under the whole thing.

Maybe he could even turn out to be a hero to the Americans, and get a shot at the Witness Protection program like the guy who turned in the Duquesne Ring.

If that was to happen, it would best be done before anything happened, and his comrades took action. He indicated to his co-conspirator Burger that he was thinking about going to the authorities. That put Burger in an awkward place. He could go along with Dash, or he could go on the run, or he could kill him.

Those appeared to be the only options. Of them, Witness Protection and a chance to end his personal involvement in the war probably seemed, on the whole, to be the best option.

Only two days after landing, Dash went to a payphone and placed a call to the New York Field Office of the FBI. He told them that he was recently arrived from Germany, illegally, and that his name was “Pastorius,” the Abwehr codeword for the operation.

He said he was going to come down to Washington, DC, and would call from there the following week.

The Field Office in New York dutifully passed the information along to their counterpart in Washington, and Dash was as good as his word. The official story is that the FBI was on high alert, and on 19 June, once he mentioned the codeword “Pastorius,” the Bureau took swift and decisive action, and swept to his downtown hotel- I wish I knew which one- I have an idea that it might be one of the shabby tourist hotels that survive not far from the Hoover Headquarters.

There is another story. In this one, Dash had to go to the office and was shuttled from desk to desk until he opened his briefcase and produced $75,000 in cash and got some interest. Take the version you prefer.

He was not treated as a home-coming hero. Instead, he was treated as a hostile enemy alien, which is what they called illegal combatants in those days. He was taken into custody and interrogated for several days. You can read transcripts of some of the sessions. They asked him about U-boats and all sorts of things, though of course they were most interested in the names and locations of the other saboteurs, so they could bust them with alacrity and head off the bombings, which would have commenced after the rendezvous in Cincinnati on the 4th of July.

Burger was picked first in New York City on June 20, and he never got a number. The two from the U-202 team who did were picked up shortly thereafter.

The Ponte Vedre Bund was more problematic, since Dash did not know where they had gone after landing, only where they would be on the 4th. Of the U-584 group, Kerling and Thiel were arrested in New York City on June 23, and Neubauer and Haupt and his family were arrested in Chicago on June 27.

So, landing to the hoosegow, the two teams had been abroad in America for a little more than two weeks. Some of them doubtless had the resolve to go one and fulfill their assigned missions, or die trying.

Others might have taken their cash and disappeared, if they had the chance. But we will never know. John George Dash sold them all out, and what comes next is sort of interesting.

At least it is if you read the newspapers, though that is something you probably do it on-line now.

I have lost the resolve to re-cycle the paper, and just do it electronically now.

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