Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [79]
J. Edgar Nichols, son of Edgar’s close aide Lou Nichols, was to recall his father reminiscing about a fantastic scheme. ‘Mr Hoover, my father and a third man whose name I don’t know developed a plan to go behind German lines and assassinate Hitler. They actually presented this plan to the White House, and it got bucked to the State Department, and they got taken to task by Secretary of State Hull. What they had in mind was a three-man assassination team, and my father talked as though he and Mr Hoover somehow hoped to take part themselves. My understanding is that this was no joke – they really did hope something would come of it.’
If Edgar was yearning for a new chance to play center stage, he got it. Suddenly, at the height of his squabbles with Donovan and the British, fate delivered a spectacular burst of favorable publicity. At midnight on June 13, 1942, a German submarine surfaced off Amagansett, at the eastern end of Long Island. It disgorged four men laden with arms, explosives and cash – German saboteurs with orders to cause havoc in factories vital to the war effort, and panic in the population. The team might have succeeded had its leader not betrayed the operation almost at once. That inconvenient truth, which would have made nonsense of Edgar’s propaganda, was suppressed.
The leader of the commandos, thirty-nine-year-old George Dasch, had lived in the United States for many years before the war. On his return to Germany, it seems, he quickly lost faith in the Nazi regime. During training for the American mission, he seemed less than zealous and oddly disinterested in sabotage techniques. He saw his role, he was to say in a memoir after the war, as ensuring that the mission misfired.
That nearly happened without his help. The Germans ran into a lone Coast Guardsman on the beach, then let him go after thrusting money into his hand to keep quiet. By the time he raised the alarm, however, the Germans had vanished, leaving equipment and explosives behind in a poorly concealed cache.
The FBI joined the search for the saboteurs within hours, and Edgar rushed to see Attorney General Francis Biddle. ‘His eyes were bright,’ Biddle recalled, ‘his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils.’ The rest was a great FBI success story – or so it appeared to the public.
Two weeks later, Edgar called a victorious press conference to announce that eight would-be saboteurs, including a second group seized in Florida, had been caught. He appeared regularly at the military tribunal that followed. Lloyd Cutler, a member of the prosecution team and long afterwards counsel to President Jimmy Carter, thought Edgar carried himself ‘like a general, very much in control of his troops, the agents. We were handed the case prepared by the FBI, and Hoover kept us at arm’s length from his men.’
All the commandos were sentenced to death, and six of them went to the electric chair. Edgar recommended the sentences be carried out, and personally organized the executions. Only two of the Germans, George Dasch and a comrade named Ernst Burger, had their sentences commuted to long jail terms.
Thirty years later, Edgar would still be talking of the case as one of his ‘most important accomplishments.’ As late as 1979, a bronze marker commemorating the capture was placed in a Justice Department hallway. In fact, as Edgar well knew, the FBI’s role had been negligible.
Far from being tracked down by intrepid Bureau agents, Dasch had deliberately betrayed his fellow saboteurs. He began by phoning the FBI in New York and identifying himself as ‘Franz Daniel Pastorius,’ the German code name for the operation. He said he had just arrived from Germany, would shortly have valuable information to deliver to J. Edgar Hoover and asked that Washington be