Realizing that the mission was going to be doomed after the encounter with the Coast Guard, Dasch decided he had a secret of his own. The day after the landing at Amagansett, he called Burger, the most guarded and disciplined member of the team, into the upper-story hotel room the two men shared. He walked over to the window and opened it wide. "You and I are going to have a talk," Dasch said, "And if we disagree, only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." He then revealed the truth to Burger: he had no intention of going through with the mission. He hated the Nazis and wanted Burger on his side when he turned the entire plot over to the FBI. Burger smiled. Having spent seventeen months in a
Nazi concentration camp, his own feelings for the party were less than warm. He too had been planning to betray the mission. They agreed to defect to the United States immediately.
Shaken but not discouraged, Dasch ordered Burger to stay put and keep an eye on the other men. On 15 June, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI from a
pay-telephone on Manhattan's
Upper West Side explaining who he was and asked to convey the information to
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. When the FBI agent was trying to figure out if he was talking to a
crackpot, Dasch hung up. Four days later, he took a train to
Washington, D.C. and checked in at the
Mayflower Hotel. Dasch then walked into the FBI’s headquarters carrying a briefcase, asking to speak with Director Hoover. Dasch bounced from office to office until finally Assistant Director D.M. Ladd, the agent in charge of the manhunt, agreed to humor him with five minutes of his time. Dasch angrily repeated his story after he was dismissed as a crackpot by numerous agents. He finally convinced the FBI by dumping his mission's entire budget of $84,000 on the desk of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd.
[15] At this point, he was taken seriously and interrogated for hours.
[16] Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested.