Heinrich Heinck and Richard Quirin were the other members of Dasch’s team. Machinists by trade, they had gone to America in 1927, eventually joining different chapters of the German-American Bund. In 1939 both accepted Germany’s offer to pay return passage for emigrants. They ended up at adjoining workbenches at a Volkswagen factory.

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The second team’s leader was Edward Kerling, 32. Kerling went to America in 1929 looking for work. He married a German girl and together they hired out as a butler and a cook. He later abandoned his wife and took up with an American girl. When the war broke out, Kerling bought a yawl, which he attempted to sail to Germany, but he was stopped by the Coast Guard. In June 1940, eager to help the Fatherland, Kerling returned to Germany, where he went to work for the Ministry of Propaganda.

Kerling was put in charge of three other men. The youngest, at 22, was Herbert Haupt. His parents had taken him to the United States when he was five. As a young man, he became an optician’s apprentice in Chicago. Just before World War II broke out, Haupt traveled to Mexico, then made his way to Germany.

The third member of Kerling’s team, Hermann Neubauer, went to America in 1931 at the age of 21. He worked as a cook in several U.S. cities and became a member of the Bund and the Nazi Party. In 1939, he joined Kerling’s boat crew. A year later, he returned to Germany, where he was drafted. He had been slightly wounded during Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and was in the hospital when Kappe contacted him, on Kerling’s recommendation.

Kerling’s fourth man, Werner Thiel, had gone to America in 1927. He found a series of menial jobs in Detroit, Indiana, California and Florida, and helped to found a chapter of the Bund. He returned to Germany after the war began and got a job in a war plant, where Kappe spotted him.

The would-be saboteurs arrived at the Abwehr school in early April 1942, joining two instructors and an assistant from the Abwehr explosives laboratory in Berlin, as well as several military observers.

On May 23, the men were given their assignments. Dasch’s team was assigned to destroy the hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls, the Aluminum Company of America factories in Illinois, Tennessee and New York, as well as the Philadelphia Salt Company’s cryolite plant in Philadelphia, which supplied raw material for aluminum manufacture. They were also instructed to bomb locks on the Ohio River between Louisville, Ky., and Pittsburgh, Pa.

Kerling’s team was given the job of blowing up the Pennsylvania Railroad station at Newark, plus the famous horseshoe bend section of the railroad near Altoona, Pa., parts of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, the New York Central Railroad’s Hell Gate bridge, the lock and canal complexes at St. Louis, Mo., and Cincinnati, Ohio, and the water supply system in New York City. In addition, both teams were told to plant bombs in Jewish-owned department stores and in the locker rooms at major passenger railroad stations, with the object of creating panic and terror.

Kerling’s team left the submarine base at Lorient, France, aboard U-584 on the evening of May 26, bound for a beach near Jacksonville, Fla. Dasch’s team departed two nights later, aboard U-202. Its destination: the south shore of Long Island, near East Hampton.

The two teams were to bury their munitions crates on the beach, where they could be left safely and dug up later, then proceed to various cities and set up phony identities. They planned to meet in Cincinnati on July 4.

Each group carried $50,000 for living expenses, travel, supplies–and bribes. Each member was also given $9,000, $5,000 of which was held by the group leader. The remaining $4,000 was put in a money belt. Everyone was also given $450 in cash for immediate use. All of this was in genuine U.S. bills, none larger than $50. Both team leaders were also given a handkerchief that carried the names and addresses of mail drops and contacts in America, written in invisible ink.

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