G-Man, page 41
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The War Department had first floated the idea of interning all people of Japanese descent—citizens and noncitizens alike—on December 10, just three days after Pearl Harbor. At the time, Hoover had dismissed the proposal as a symptom of post-attack hysteria, reactionary and unnecessary by any reasonable interpretation of the facts. His own detention program focused on noncitizens. And despite his warnings about a Japanese “fifth column,” and the FBI’s rush to arrest “Class A” offenders, internal reports suggested that the number of “dangerous” people was actually quite small.[26]
By mid-January, few politicians were acknowledging these sorts of subtleties. “Internment of All Japs Asked,” read a headline in the San Francisco Examiner on January 21, documenting a call for all people of Japanese descent to be placed in “concentration camps,” regardless of their individual backgrounds, points of view, or personal loyalty. General John DeWitt, the commander in charge of West Coast security, captured the conventional view, drawing upon a long history of anti-Asian racism to declare people of Japanese descent disloyal as a group. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” DeWitt argued in a memo to the secretary of war. “While many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.” This racial distinction was already enshrined in federal law. Under U.S. immigration law, people born in Japan were banned from becoming U.S. citizens, while immigrants from Europe—including Germans and Italians—could choose to become naturalized. Even in 1942, as the U.S. went to war on two fronts, there was little talk of launching mass internment for Germans and Italians.
That was partly a matter of numbers. Discriminatory naturalization and immigration laws had produced a situation in which fewer than two hundred thousand people of Japanese descent lived on the U.S. mainland. By contrast, there were millions of citizens with German and Italian ancestry, rendering mass internment administratively impossible. But the distinction was a matter of racism more than anything else. Like many Americans, General DeWitt rejected Hoover’s view that it was possible to assess Japanese-Americans as individuals. “A Jap is a Jap!” he argued. Under this logic, the only way to achieve security would be to round up all people of Japanese extraction: citizens and noncitizens, loyal and disloyal, violent and nonviolent, men, women, and children alike.[27]
Perhaps War Department officials assumed that Hoover would come around to this view. If so, they underestimated his commitment to his own, very different vision of wartime internment, in which individualized investigation and professional fact-finding were supposed to prevent the sort of sweeping, indiscriminate restrictions that the government was now contemplating. Hoover spoke out against thinking of the war in racial terms. “No man should be suspected simply because he is foreign-born or has a foreign name or accent,” he wrote in the summer of 1941. “Americans, unlike other nationals, are not a race. Americanism is an idea.” He also had a legal argument: while noncitizens could be detained, the federal government had no constitutional right to detain U.S. citizens without due process, even in a time of war. More than that, he saw internment as bad politics, convinced that any attempt at dragnet raids or mass relocation would backfire, produce criticism, and create new dangers, including vigilantism. “Nothing could contribute more to recruiting fifth columnists than unfounded accusations or unjust oppression measures against them,” he declared in a public statement. Hoover had designed his own internment program to avoid just such an outcome.[28]
His chief ally within the Roosevelt administration was Francis Biddle, the liberal attorney general who had come to office in late 1941. Hailing from the Main Line of Philadelphia, Biddle was just the kind of elite do-gooder that Hoover often assailed in his speeches. Yet the two men saw eye to eye on a surprising number of wartime issues, including Japanese internment. Their shared opposition to the policy put them in an odd political position that winter, allied against the Roosevelt White House. They nonetheless set out to convince Roosevelt to reject mass internment and take another course of action.
What Hoover and Biddle had going for them was the FBI’s bureaucratic and investigative machinery—an asset that no other institution in Washington possessed to the same degree. In January, FBI agents conducted “spot” raids on Japanese households, checking for contraband and then advertising their failure to find anything. Bureau reports also helped to discredit rumors that Japanese residents were dodging the draft in unusual numbers, disclosing secret military information, or contaminating the food supply. Hoover’s intelligence surveys noted that things were rapidly returning to normal and “quiet” within the Japanese business community, while farmers were hoping “that if they continue with their work as they have always done they will not be bothered.” He even went so far as to argue that mass internment might cut the FBI off from key informants. “It is believed if any mass evacuation of Japanese aliens is undertaken it is probable that the few sources of information among the Japanese available at this time would be closed,” he wrote. Biddle presented Hoover’s position at a January 30 cabinet meeting, arguing that mass internment was both ill advised and difficult to administer, and that the FBI at any rate had the Japanese situation under control.[29]
Just how far off this was from the War Department’s thinking—and from the Roosevelt administration’s position—became clear in early February, when Hoover and Biddle sat down with key defense officials in an emergency meeting to iron out their differences. They all hoped to walk away with a joint press release, public evidence that ruffled feathers had been smoothed. But when Hoover and Biddle proposed that the release include an affirmation of Japanese-American loyalty and a statement rejecting mass internment of citizens, the military men refused to sign and walked out.
Two weeks later, the president signed Executive Order 9066, designating the West Coast as a military district “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Rather than the FBI or the Justice Department, it was the army that took control of moving approximately 120,000 people into ten barbed-wired “relocation” camps over the next few months. More than 70 percent of the detainees were American citizens, born and raised in the country that now accused them of disloyalty.[30]
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Hoover continued to object to the mass internment policy as the war went on, even as he accommodated the FBI to a fait accompli. Meanwhile, his own detention program continued on a separate track, with its process of individual assessment, arrests, surveillance, and detention. By the end of the war, the FBI had arrested and detained approximately thirty-one thousand men and women, most of them of German, Italian, or Japanese descent. Of those, approximately two-thirds were released without being interned, while the final third ended up in Justice Department camps.[31]
Under the circumstances, Hoover may have taken some satisfaction in a request that arrived in 1943 asking the FBI to investigate deteriorating conditions at the Japanese mass internment facilities. Outraged at their treatment by the U.S. government, small groups of prisoners had begun to rebel against their guards, leading to riots and violent clashes. The request asked Bureau agents to assess the situation, with a focus on improving security and suppressing the riots. In a small act of bureaucratic rebellion, the Bureau rejected those limits. Instead, Hoover handed back a meticulous indictment of the entire mass internment network, where mismanagement of “food, housing, clothing, available medical facilities, working conditions, privileges and above all the attitude and policies of the administrative staff” had led to widespread discontent.
The report reminded federal officials of what Hoover had said from the start: that the entire mass internment endeavor was doomed to fail. “It is, therefore, extremely unfortunate that the Government, the War Relocation Authority, and the public did, in the past, seize upon what they first believed to be a simple determining factor of loyalty,” the report concluded. “There actually can be only one efficient method of processing the Japanese for loyalty, which consists of individual, not mass, consideration.” It was a subtle protest against a policy that Hoover deemed illegal and unprofessional, a view rejected by much of wartime Washington but borne out by the judgment of history.[32]
Chapter 24
The Most Exciting Achievement Yet
(1942)
Hoover (seated, in pin-striped suit) at secret military commission proceedings for eight Nazi saboteurs captured by the FBI in 1942. Attorney General Francis Biddle is to his left, in white suit.
Library of Congress
When Hoover finally did come across enemy saboteurs, they turned out to be German, not Japanese.
Well before dawn on June 13, 1942, an unarmed Coast Guard officer patrolling the beach along Amagansett, Long Island, noticed a man standing near the shore. The man was assisting two companions knee-deep in the water, wrestling with a rubber boat. It was a foggy night and visibility was low, so he called out to ask what they were doing. The man on shore replied that they were lost fishermen, coming ashore to wait for first light. He spoke perfect English, though with a slight accent, and seemed amiable enough, so the guardsman invited the men to sit out the night at the nearby Coast Guard station. Before they could settle on a plan, however, one of the man’s companions began to speak in German, and the man clapped a hand over his companion’s mouth.
Once the German words had been spoken, the man’s attitude changed. He said he did not have a fishing license and therefore wanted to stay away from the authorities. Then he pulled out a wad of bills and thrust $260 into the guardsman’s hands. The man “told him to take it and keep quiet otherwise he and his companions would be compelled to kill him at once,” a military intelligence report later noted. The shocked guardsman mumbled his assent and began to back away from the group, “afraid of being shot in the back.” When he was a few hundred yards away he turned around and ran back to the Coast Guard station, where he reported that a team of German agents was attempting to invade the United States of America.[1]
Even at the Coast Guard, tasked with patrolling the nation’s shores for signs of invasion and sabotage, this breathless report occasioned some skepticism. But when the guardsman showed off his crumpled bills, insisting that he had been forced to grab them and run, the rest of the station jumped into action. They raced back to the beach, where the fog still hung thick, obscuring any hope of an up-close sighting. At first light, the guardsmen noticed some sand that had been disturbed near the dunes. When they began to dig down, they found “three cases of TNT with holes bored in the TNT blocks for fuses, fuses, detonators, incendiary pens and pencils,” plus “a duffle bag which contained German seamen’s dungarees, shoes, and bathing trunks, all of which were soaking wet with sea water and covered with sand,” according to the FBI. They transported it all back to the Amagansett station, then on to the barge office in lower Manhattan.[2]
At that point, eleven hours after the initial encounter on the beach, the Coast Guard called the FBI to report a potential case of German sabotage. The call went not to Hoover in Washington but to the New York field office, located downtown near the barge office in the federal building at Foley Square. Citing Roosevelt’s 1939 order granting the FBI jurisdiction over sabotage and espionage, FBI officials seized the Coast Guard’s evidence and transported it up to Foley Square, where it was laid out in the FBI shooting range to be sorted and tagged.
Hoover sent headquarters officials to supervise the investigation, but he did not go to New York himself. Instead, he stayed in Washington to manage the political side of events, reaching out to the attorney general about what appeared to be a bona fide German sabotage plot. “All of Edgar Hoover’s imaginative and restless energy was stirred into prompt and effective action,” Biddle later wrote of consulting with Hoover that afternoon. “His eyes were bright, his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edges of his nostrils when he reported the incident to me.” The case would test nearly every part of the bureaucracy Hoover had built in recent years, from the lab’s technical expertise to the investigators’ manhunting prowess to the press-management strategies of Crime Records. Coming two years after the “smear campaign,” it also gave Hoover a chance to complete his wartime rehabilitation.[3]
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Though Hoover expressed confidence that the Bureau would “catch them all before any sabotage took place,” the federal track record on German sabotage was dismal at best. During World War I, German agents had acted with impunity in and around New York, blowing up arms shipments leaving the harbor and targeting regional munitions plants. Everyone had expected similar sabotage attempts this time around. In May, the Atlantic shoreline had been declared a military zone, on grounds that it might be “subject to espionage and acts of sabotage, thereby requiring the adoption of military measures necessary to establish safeguards against such hostile operations.” A few weeks later, Hoover met with Roosevelt to discuss the potential sabotage problem. But none of these conversations prepared Hoover for what to do about the fact that saboteurs had now landed in the Hamptons, or about the possibility that there might be other teams coming ashore elsewhere throughout the country.[4]
The best chance of capturing the Amagansett saboteurs, Hoover determined, was to lie in wait and hope that they came back for their clothing and weapons. Beginning on the afternoon of June 13, several rotating shifts of agents hid out in foxholes along the beach, while others accompanied the Coast Guard on patrol and still others took up surveillance from beachfront homes and cottages. The saboteurs failed to return, and local residents had little to offer beyond vague memories of hearing an engine grinding along the shore late at night, accompanied by the smell of diesel. Investigators would later determine that a German U-boat sent to deposit the saboteurs had run aground on a sandbar that night, stranded for several hours at low tide. The captain had gone so far as to order his men to prepare for blowing up the ship and turning themselves in as prisoners of war when, just before dawn, the tide came back in and allowed them to slip back beneath the ocean’s surface.
At first, Hoover did not believe certain details of the story: How was it possible that a German U-boat had been sitting in the Hamptons, hour after hour, and nobody—even in the supposedly vigilant Coast Guard—had managed to notice? He also expressed skepticism about the guardsman’s initial description of the bribe and the threats, speculating that he might have been out to meet whiskey smugglers that night and reversed course only after realizing he was talking with the wrong men. Hoover nonetheless believed that the sabotage plot was real. And he feared that the possibility of locating the men in question diminished with each passing moment.
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A phone call changed everything. On the morning of Friday, June 19, nearly a week after the initial encounter on the beach, an unidentified man called Hoover’s office asking for the director, claiming that he had just arrived from Germany and had critical information to impart. The connection was routed to Duane Traynor, the head of counter-sabotage operations, who had heard about the landings at Amagansett. Traynor sent a car for the mysterious caller, who was staying at the Mayflower Hotel. By eleven o’clock they were seated together at Bureau headquarters.
The man introduced himself as George Dasch (also known as George John Davis), a German citizen who had lived in the United States for much of his adult life. Upon returning to Germany in 1941, he had been recruited for a special mission: the Nazis wanted him to go back to America in order to blow up aluminum factories, war plants, dams, bridges, and, where possible, department stores owned by Jews. Dasch later claimed that he’d never intended to follow through on the sabotage plan, but that he feared defying the Nazi authorities. So in late May he had boarded a U-boat headed for Long Island. It was he who had run into the Coast Guard patrolman on the early morning of June 13, just minutes after the U-boat had deposited him on the shore. With him were three other would-be saboteurs, while a second team of four was traveling in another U-boat, bound for Florida. All eight of them had lived in the United States and knew English well; two were U.S. citizens. In a wink and nod to this circumstance, the Nazi government named their mission after Francis Daniel Pastorius, an early German migrant to the United States. In another deliberate act of symbolism, they scheduled a rendezvous for the eight saboteurs on July 4, 1942, at which point both teams were supposed to begin carrying out their campaigns of destruction.
Dasch had hoped to convey his story directly to Hoover, the one man he believed might be capable of thwarting Hitler’s aims. Indeed, he expressed surprise that the director was not sitting around in Washington awaiting his call. Earlier in the week, Dasch had phoned the New York office to say that he was a German citizen heading for Washington, with plans to “talk to Mr. HOOVER or his secretary” upon arrival—a call that had been taken, logged, and then dismissed by the local “nutters’ desk.” Now it was Traynor who met with Dasch instead, but the agent wasted little time in conveying the gist of the story to Hoover’s office. With the interview underway, Hoover dispatched several agents to Dasch’s hotel room, where they came across a suitcase stuffed with cash. Around the same time, New York agents reached out to the Amagansett patrolman, who tentatively selected Dasch from a photo array. By evening, Hoover was convinced that “by working on him . . . we could get the others.”
Though he declined to meet with Dasch, Hoover encouraged Traynor to make the would-be saboteur feel as if the FBI was on his side. Dasch seemed to be a volatile character, and by catering to his more grandiose aspirations, Hoover hoped to turn him into a “decoy”—or perhaps even a double agent—to lure in other members of the sabotage team. Rather than keep Dasch in custody, the FBI allowed him to return to his hotel room overnight, with Traynor sleeping on the extra bed. Over the next several days, they gave Dasch whatever he wanted: restaurant meals, ham salad, scotch and soda. They provided a sympathetic ear for his claims that he was and had always been a loyal American, the buried explosives notwithstanding. In return, Dasch gave up the details of the sabotage plot, naming all his coconspirators and even turning over a handkerchief inscribed with invisible-ink instructions from the German government.[5]
