In the early morning darkness, a thin-faced former San Francisco waiter slipped ashore with three other men from a German submarine on a mission to knock out New York City's water system and bridges as well as factories, canals and railroads across the Northeastern United States.
The landing June 13, 1942, on an isolated Long Island beach touched off a bizarre cloak-and-dagger escapade -- complete with trunks of explosives, suitcases of cash and instructions in invisible ink -- that has unusual relevance to the Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign.
Within two weeks, before any bombs were planted, all the men -- and a second team of saboteurs who landed in Florida -- were in custody. President Franklin Roosevelt immediately ordered them tried by a secret military tribunal, and six of the eight saboteurs were quickly executed.
Congress nominated FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for a medal of honor for cracking the case.
While the story was splashed across the nation's front pages, the details of the men's arrest and their trial were cloaked in secrecy. What the American public was not told was that George Johann Dasch, the former waiter, had gone to the FBI in Washington and disclosed the entire plot.
The FBI promised Dasch no more than six months in jail and a presidential pardon if he pleaded guilty and agreed not to testify about his role in the case. But Dasch refused, believing he was a hero for revealing the scheme.
He was tried secretly with the others and sentenced to 30 years.
"He was screwed," said former White House counsel John Dean, who recently wrote about the legal implications of the case. In an interview this week, Dean said it was Hoover's own office that had stirred up the effort to get him the congressional medal.
"It is clearly a cautionary tale about having secret proceedings," said Dean, who knows first-hand of the dangers of government secrecy through his involvement in the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency.
A MODEL FOR BUSH TRIBUNALS The 1942 case is being used as the model for President Bush's plans to set up military tribunals to try al Qaeda members and other suspected terrorists.
The Bush administration copied provisions directly from Roosevelt's order, including those that permit closure of the tribunals to the public, judgments by a two-thirds vote of the military commissioners, no appeals and the admission of evidence that has "probative value to a reasonable man," a standard not permitted in civilian courts.
Bush defended his order yesterday in a fiery speech before an assembly of applauding U.S. prosecutors.
"Non-U.S. citizens who plan and/or commit mass murder are more than criminal suspects," the president said. "They are unlawful combatants who seek to destroy our country and our way of life. And if I determine that it is in the national security interests of our great land to try by military commission those who make war on America, then we will do so."
But a number of legal experts have questioned whether the president's order is constitutional, pointing out that legal precedent upholding presidential authority for tribunals refers to the commander-in-chief's power only during formally declared wars.
This week, Congress opened hearings into the administration's action, and several senators sharply questioned the issuance of Bush's tribunal order without consulting Congress.
Some legal commentators such as Dean have distinguished between the use of the tribunals for terrorists captured overseas and those arrested in this country.
"I think that when you are capturing hundreds of people in Afghanistan, a good case can be made for overseas tribunals," Dean said. But he was critical of the use of tribunals for suspected terrorists detained in the United States,
where civilian courts are available.
TRIAL IN GUAM The legal debate could soon be eclipsed by the latest developments in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence sources said Wednesday that anti-Taliban forces had captured Ahmed Rahman, described as a top al Qaeda operative, and up to a dozen other suspected members of the terrorist network. There were reports that the suspects might be flown to Guam to face trial before a U.S. military commission.
If such a tribunal is convened, it is certain to face legal challenge, and the administration will almost certainly invoke as a legal precedent the 1942 sabotage case, whose legality was upheld in an emergency Supreme Court ruling.
On its facts, however, the 1942 case appears a dismal model of fairness and justice.
"It is an important case with immense relevance today," said William Turner,
a former FBI agent who has written several books about Hoover and the FBI. "It shows how (tribunals) can be rigged when they are not out in the open."
George Dasch had come to the United States from Germany in 1922, served in the U.S. Army, then worked off and on as a waiter in San Francisco and New York during the 1920s and 1930s. A sharp dresser with a smooth manner, Dasch was described by colleagues in San Francisco as a quick, efficient waiter.
In 1941, apparently unhappy with restaurant work and frustrated by the depression, Dasch returned to Germany. There, he was quickly recruited by German intelligence, along with seven other Germans who had also recently returned after extended stays in the United States.
The eight men were put through intensive training for the sabotage mission in the United States. Dasch was picked as the leader of the four-man team that landed on the Long Island shore near Amagansett.
After burying a cache of explosives and changing from swim suits to civilian clothes, the Long Island team was discovered by Coast Guard patrolman John Cullen. Dasch stepped forward in the misty darkness and said they were fishermen.
The men then headed by train to New York City, carrying their half of the $180,000 cash allotted for the mission. There, they spent several days buying clothes, drinking and playing cards while the FBI launched a manhunt in the New York area based on Cullen's report of his encounter and the discovery of the explosives.
A CALL TO THE FBI The Long Island team was scheduled to rendezvous in Cincinnati on July 4 with the leader of the second sabotage group that had landed by submarine in Florida on June 17.
But Dasch had other plans.
On the evening of his second day in New York City, he called the local FBI office, telling an agent he had just arrived from Germany, had information for Hoover and would be in Washington in four days.
The agent, believing it a crank call, made a quick report and filed it away.
Five days later, Dasch arrived in Washington, where he called FBI headquarters from a room at the Mayflower Hotel. Agents quickly detained Dasch,
and over the next four days he outlined the sabotage plot, handing over a leather briefcase with $82,350. He also produced a white handkerchief with invisible ink, which over ammonia fumes revealed key names and addresses.
A week later, on June 27, Hoover held a press conference in New York City announcing that the FBI had cracked the case and that all eight saboteurs were under arrest. They included Ernest Burger, a member of Dasch's team who at the last minute had agreed with Dasch's decision to disclose the sabotage operation.
"The FBI made it look as if they were standing on the beach and arrested these fellows as they came in, when, in fact, two of them had decided to defect," former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler told a CBS reporter recently. Cutler had served as a young clerk for the prosecution team at the time.
The military trial took most of the month of July. Before it even started in a sealed room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, questions were raised about how fair it would be. In a confidential June 30 memo to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt called the death penalty appropriate, adding:
"Surely, they are just as guilty as it is possible to be."
Roosevelt appointed seven Army major generals to sit as judge and jury. Biddle prosecuted the case, and three Army officers represented the eight men.
GENERALS WERE CONFUSED Transcripts of the proceeding, which were kept secret for 18 years, show the generals were often confused by the legal arguments, the standard of evidence and objections by the defense.
Some of the defendants seemed more like hapless bunglers than hardened Nazis. Herbert Haupt, a 21-year-old Chicagoan who had lived in the United States since the age of 5, went to Mexico in 1941 after he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant.
From there Haupt took a boat to Germany looking for work. He was quickly recruited into the sabotage scheme, which, he testified, seemed like a good way to get back to the United States. The defense put on evidence that after he landed in Florida, Haupt had quickly made his way to Chicago, where he proposed marriage to his former girlfriend. He testified that he never intended to go through with the sabotage plan.
Each of the other defendants also testified that they had never intended to carry through with the sabotage.
Dasch's defense was straightforward. Still bewildered that he was being tried at all, he testified that he had planned from the beginning of his training in Germany to expose the operation once they got to the United States.
After three days of deliberations, the generals delivered a unanimous judgment to the White House that each man be executed. They added a recommendation, however, that Dasch and Burger's sentences be commuted to life in prison.
Roosevelt agreed with the recommendations but reduced Dasch's sentence to 30 years. The announcement was made on Aug. 12, shortly after the six men were secretly electrocuted in the District of Columbia jail.
In 1948, President Harry Truman pardoned Dasch and Burger, and they were deported to Germany. For years, there were internal government battles over whether the trial transcript and other records of the case should be released, but Hoover and the FBI prevailed until the records were finally declassified in 1960.
Looking back on the trial, Cutler said that, at the time: "We had no victories. We had the great disaster of Pearl Harbor, 2,000 sailors killed, half of the fleet destroyed, and we were grasping at any straw to show that we were in the war and accomplishing something."
E-mail Williams Carlsen at wcarlsen@sfchronicle.com
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