In June 1942, a man walked into FBI headquarters in Washington and dumped $84,000 in cash onto an assistant director’s desk. He was George John Dasch, commander of a Nazi sabotage team that had landed by U-boat on Long Island days earlier, and he was there to betray his entire unit. This episode traces the life and defining choices of a man chosen by German high command to cripple the American war effort who instead ended up exposing it.

We cover the Abwehr’s Operation Pastorius, from Admiral Canaris’s obsession with repeating the 1916 Black Tom explosion, through the sabotage school near Berlin where recruits learned to mold explosives like lumps of coal and memorize baseball statistics, to the botched beach landing, the fumbled bribe of Coast Guardsman John Cullen, and the hotel-room ultimatum that turned Ernest Burger. Then we examine how J. Edgar Hoover buried Dasch’s defection to claim credit, how FDR’s military tribunal and the Supreme Court’s Ex parte Quirin ruling sealed the saboteurs’ fate, and why Dasch died in Germany despised by both countries.

• Why the Abwehr chose eight men who had lived in the US and put a non-party member in charge
• The target list: Niagara Falls hydroelectric plants, Alcoa aluminum, Ohio River locks, and Hell Gate Bridge
• Why the saboteurs landed in German Navy uniforms and what that meant under the laws of war
• The first military tribunal on US soil since the Lincoln assassination and six executions in August 1942
• Truman’s 1948 clemency, deportation, and Dasch’s lifelong unanswered pleas for a pardon