Specifically, both had been shot in the head by parties unknown, although there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Cletus Frade of the American OSS had at least ordered the killings, and more than likely had pulled the trigger himself.
Schneider had gone first to Ambassador von Lutzenberger and then, when SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Cranz had arrived in Buenos Aires to replace Grüner, to Cranz offering to personally eliminate Frade, even if this meant giving his own life to do so.
Both told him, in effect, that while his zeal to seek vengeance for the murders of Grüner and Goltz was commendable and in keeping with the highest traditions of SS honor, the situation unfortunately required that everyone wait until the time was right to eliminate Frade.
They told him the greatest contribution he could make to the Final Victory of the Fatherland was to continue what he was doing with regard to handling the classified files, the dispatch and receipt of the diplomatic pouches, and the decryption of the coded messages the embassy received from the Ministry of Communications after they had received them from the Mackay Cable Corporation.
Neither told him that was sort of a game everyone played. The Mackay Corporation was an American-owned enterprise. They pretended that they did not—either in Lisbon, Portugal, or Berne, Switzerland—make copies of all German traffic and pass them to either the OSS or the U.S. Embassy. And the Germans pretended not to suspect this was going on.
Important messages from or to Berlin were transmitted by “officer courier,” which most often meant the pilot, copilot, or flight engineer on the Lufthansa Condor flights between the German and Argentine capitals.
And when these messages reached the Buenos Aires embassy, they were decoded personally by Ambassador von Lutzenberger or Commercial Attaché Cranz, not Schneider. Schneider had no good reason—any reason at all—to know the content of the messages.
Cranz picked up the message and read it:
Cranz looked at von Lutzenberger.
“You said Schneider had this waiting for you when you came in this morning?”
Von Lutzenberger nodded.
“A Condor arrived in the wee hours,” he said. “Our Johann met it, and the courier gave him that.”
“When did you start letting ‘Our Johann’ decode messages like this?”
“It came that way,” von Lutzenberger said, and handed Cranz two envelopes. “The outer one is addressed to ‘The Ambassador’; the inner one said ‘Sole and Personal Attention of Ambassador von Lutzenberger.’ ”
“Interesting,” Cranz said as he very carefully examined both envelopes.
“It could be that they were preparing to send it as a cable, and then for some reason decided to send it on the Condor,” von Lutzenberger suggested.
Cranz considered that for a long moment.
“If a Condor was coming, that would keep it out of the hands of Mackay,” Cranz said, and then wondered aloud, “Not encrypted?”
Von Lutzenberger shrugged.
“Maybe there wasn’t time; the Condor may have been leaving right then. And that brings us to the question: ‘What the hell is this all about?’ ”
“Questions,” von Lutzenberger corrected him. “ ‘Who is this senior officer?’ ‘What is he going to do once he gets here?’ And most important: ‘What are we going to do about this?’ ”
Cranz nodded, signifying he agreed there was more than one question.
“Was there anybody interesting on the Condor?”
“Businessmen, two doctors for the German Hospital. No one interesting.”
“Which means the Condor could have been held at Tempelhof.”
“Unless that might have delayed the Condor a day, and they wanted to get this to us as soon as possible.”
“Which brings us back to: ‘What are we going to do about it?’ ” Cranz said.
“Unless you have some objection, or better suggestion, what I’m going to do is tell Schneider that he is to tell no one anything about the message for me. Then I’m going to call Gradny-Sawz in here as soon as he comes to work, show him this, and tell him that he is to tell no one about it, and that he is responsible for getting the identity card, the driver’s license, et cetera, and the apartment.”
“And not bring Boltitz and von Wachtstein in on this?”
“And not bring anyone else in on this, anyone else. Then, if it gets out, we will know from whom it came.”
Cranz considered that for a long moment, then nodded.
“Raschner?” he asked.
“That’s up to you, of course. But I can see no reason why he has to be told about this now.”
After a moment, Cranz nodded again.
[FOUR]
Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade
Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1545 30 August 1943
First Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, Corps of Engineers, AUS, who was an assistant military attaché of the United States Embassy, stood outside the door of Base Operations and watched as a South American Airways Lodestar turned on final, dropped its landing gear, and touched smoothly down on the runway.
Pelosi was in uniform and could have posed for a U.S. Army recruiting poster. He wore “pinks and greens,” as the Class “A” uniform of green tunic and pink trousers was known. The thick silver cord aiguillette of an attaché hung from one of his epaulettes. His sharply creased trousers were “bloused” around his gleaming paratrooper boots.
Silver parachutist’s wings were pinned to the tunic. Below the wings were his medals—not the striped ribbons ordinarily worn in lieu thereof. There were just three medals: the Silver Star, the National Defense Service Medal, and the medal signifying service in the American Theatre of Operations.
Pelosi was one of the very few officers—perhaps the only one—to have been awarded the nation’s third-highest medal for valor in combat in the American Theatre of Operations. There was virtually no combat action in the American Theatre of Operations. The citation for the medal was rather vague. It said he had performed with valor above and beyond the call of duty at great risk to his life in a classified combat action against enemies of the United States, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself, the United States Army, the United States of America, and the State of Illinois.
He could not discuss—especially in Argentina—what he had done to earn the Silver Star.
Pelosi had earned the medal while flying in a Beechcraft Staggerwing aircraft piloted by then-First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR. What they had done—getting shot down in the process—was illuminate with flares a Spanish-registered merchant vessel then at anchor in Samborombón Bay.
Illuminating the ship, which was then in the process of replenishing the fuel and food supplies of a German submarine, had permitted the U.S. submarine Devil Fish to cause both the submarine and the ship to disappear in a spectacular series of explosions.
All of this naval activity—German, Spanish, and American—was in gross violation of the neutrality of the Republic of Argentina. Samborombón Bay, on the River Plate, was well within Argentine waters. After some lengthy consideration, the government of Argentina decided the wisest course of action was to pretend the engagement had never happened.
But of course the story had gotten out. The officers with whom Lieutenant Pelosi had shared an official lunch for military and naval attachés of the various embassies at the Officers’ Casino at Campo de Mayo—the reason he was wearing his uniform—knew not only the story but also of Pelosi’s role in it.
No one had mentioned it, of course, but it sort of hung in the air. Pelosi had been understandably invisible to the German naval attaché, Kapitän zur See Boltitz; the German assistant military attaché for air, Major Hans-Peter Baron von Wachtstein; and to their Japanese counterparts.
Peter von Wachtstein had managed to discreetly acknowledge Tony Pelosi while they were standing at adjacent urinals, and some Argentine officers—all naval officers but one—had been quite cordial, as had the Italian naval and
military attachés. That, Tony reasoned, was probably because King Victor Emmanuel had bounced Il Duce and had the bastard locked up someplace.
South American Airways Lodestar tail number 007 was wanded into a parking spot beside almost a dozen of its identical brothers.
The rear door opened and Sergeant Major Enrico Rodríguez (Ret’d) came down the stairs, carrying his shotgun. When he saw Pelosi, he smiled.
“Don Cletus will be out in a minute,” he announced. “I have to find a truck.”
Pelosi asked with hand gestures if he could go into the aircraft. Enrico replied with a thumbs-up gesture, and as he walked away, Pelosi marched toward the aircraft and went inside.
The chief pilot of South American Airways, Gonzalo Delgano, and the managing director of the airline, Cletus Frade, were in the passenger compartment. Pelosi saw that all but two of the seats had been removed. There were two enormous aluminum boxes strapped in place.
Delgano was in uniform: The uniform prescribed for SAA captains was a woolen powder blue tunic with four gold stripes on the sleeves, darker blue trousers with a golden stripe down the seam, a white shirt with powder blue necktie, and a leather brimmed cap with a huge crown. On the tunic’s breast were outsized golden wings, in the center of which, superimposed on the Argentine sunburst, were the letters SAA.
Chief Pilot Delgano, as was probably to be expected, had five golden stripes on his tunic sleeves and the band around his brimmed cap was of gold cloth.
The managing director of SAA, who was bent over one of the aluminum crates, was wearing khaki trousers, battered Western boots, and a fur-collared leather jacket that had once been the property of the United States Marine Corps.
Cletus Frade came out of the box holding a lobster by its tail. Pelosi decided the lobster had to weigh five pounds, maybe more.
“You’re still alive, you great big ugly sonofabitch!” Frade proclaimed happily. “God rewards the virtuous. Remember that, Gonzo.”
Delgano shook his head.
Frade spotted Pelosi.
“And, by God, we’re safe! The 82nd Airborne is here!”
“Where’d you get the lobster?” Pelosi inquired.
“Santiago, Chile, from which Delgano and I have flown in three hours and thirteen minutes. At an average speed of approximately 228 miles per hour, while attaining an altitude of nearly 24,000 feet in the process. We had to go on oxygen over most of the Andes, and it was as cold as a witch’s teat up there. But neither seems to have affected my friend here, despite the dire predictions of my chief pilot.”
“I thought the cold and/or lack of oxygen would kill them,” Delgano said.
“What are you going to do with it?” Pelosi asked.
“Well, at first I thought I’d organize a lobster race, but now I think I’ll eat him. And at least some of his buddies in the tank. If you promise to behave, Tony, you are invited to a clambake this very evening at the museum. You may even bring your abused wife.”
Tony knew that the museum was the Frade mansion—which indeed resembled, both internally and externally, a museum—on Avenida Coronel Díaz in Palermo.
“You’ve got clams?”
“Clams, oysters, and lobster. Santiago is a virtual paradise of seafood.”
“Don Cletus thinks we can make money flying it in,” Delgano explained.
“Trust me, Gonzo,” Frade said. “And now curiosity is about to overwhelm me: What are you doing here, dressed up like some general’s dog-robber?”
“Curiosity just overwhelmed me,” Delgano said. “ ‘Dog-robber’?”
“Aides-de-camp, who must be shameless enough to snatch food from the mouths of starving dogs to feed their general, are known as dog-robbers,” Frade explained.
Delgano shook his head.
Pelosi said: “I was at a reception for foreign attachés at Campo de Mayo. You had to go in uniform with medals.”
“And was Major Baron von Wachtstein there, dazzling everybody with his Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross?”
Pelosi nodded.
“Good. That means he’s in town and can come.”
“So was el Coronel Perón.”
“He can’t.”
“And there’s a package for you.”
“Yeah?”
“From Room 1012, National Institutes of Health Building, Washington, D.C. It was in the pouch. My boss said to get it to you, and to get a receipt.”
The headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services was in the National Institutes of Health Building.
Pelosi’s boss, the military attaché of the U.S. Embassy, was not fond of either Pelosi or Frade. He had received a teletype message from the vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army directing him not to assign Lieutenant Pelosi any duties that could possibly interfere in any way with his other duties. The other duties were unspecified. The military attaché knew that Pelosi was the OSS man in the embassy and worked for Cletus Frade.
“He didn’t happen to open it before he gave it to you to give to me, did he?”
Pelosi shook his head.
“Where is it?”
“In my car.”
“You left the report of my Wasserman test in your car where anybody can get at it? Go get it! My God, what if Dorotea should see it?”
Pelosi got quickly off the Lodestar.
“What test is that?” Delgano asked.
“They draw blood. And test it. If you flunk your Wasserman test, you have syphilis. And it has to be that. I can’t think of anything else the National Institutes of Health could possibly be sending me. Can you?”
Delgano knew where OSS headquarters was.
“Not really,” he said, shaking his head. “Cletus, you are impossible.”
Pelosi had to wait to get back on the airplane until half a dozen workmen had unstrapped the aluminum crates and manhandled them into the back of a 1940 Chevrolet pickup truck.
Then he came aboard and handed Frade a large padded envelope.
Frade tore it open.
It contained an inch-thick book. Clete flipped through it, then handed it to Delgano, who read the title aloud: “‘Pilot’s Operating Manual, Lockheed L-049 Constellation Aircraft.’”
Delgano then looked at Frade, who handed him a small note that had been paper-clipped to the book.
“Constellation? Is that that great big new airplane? The one with three tails?” Pelosi asked.
“It has three vertical stabilizers, Tony,” Frade said as he read the note.
When he had finished reading the note, Delgano looked at Frade.
“Again?” he asked.
“I have no idea what this is all about,” Frade confessed. “If I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.”
[FIVE]
Sidi Slimane U.S. Army Air Force Base
Morocco
1250 4 September 1943
Captain Archer C. Dooley Jr., USAAF, commanding officer of the 94th Fighter Squadron, studied the runway behind him in the rearview mirror of his P-38, saw what he wanted to see, then looked to his left, saw that he had the attention of First Lieutenant William Cole, smiled at him, raised his right hand, and gestured with his index finger extended, first pointing down the runway and then in a circling motion upward.
When Cole had given him a smile and a thumbs-up gesture, Dooley put his hand on the throttle quadrant and pushed both levers forward to take off power.
This caused the twin Allison V-1710 1,475-horsepower engines of his P- 38 “Lightning” to roar impressively and the aircraft to move at first slowly, and then with rapidly increasing velocity, down the runway.
He lifted off—with Cole’s Lightning perhaps two seconds behind him—retracted the gear, and retarded the throttles to give him the most efficient burning of fuel as he climbed to altitude and to the rendezvous point over the Atlantic Ocean.
Sixty seconds later, two more P-38s roared down the runway, and sixty seconds after they had become airborne, two more, and sixty seconds after that, two more, for a total of
eight.
“Mother Hen, check in,” Captain Dooley ordered.
One by one, the seven other P-38s in the flight reported in, starting with “Chick One, sir. All okay.”
When Chick Seven had been heard from, Dooley went on: “Pay attention to Mother Hen. We’re going out over the drink on this heading, our speed and rate of climb governed by our concern for fuel consumption. Think fuel conservation. Better yet, think of what a long swim you are going to have if you don’t think fuel conservation. We are going to eleven thousand feet, which should put us above Grandma. Everyone, repeat everyone, will monitor the frequencies you have been given for Grandma’s squawk. Everyone will acknowledge by saying, ‘Yes, Mother.’ ”
The responses began immediately: “Chick One. Yes, Mother.”
Two of the Chicks were unable to keep the chuckles out of their voices. They tried. The Old Man could be a real hard-ass if he was crossed.
Captain Dooley had been the valedictorian of the 1942 Class at Saint Ignatius High School in Kansas City, Kansas. He still was not old enough to purchase intoxicating spirits—or, for that matter, even beer—in his hometown.
He had become an aviation cadet, been commissioned, been selected for fighter pilot training and graduated from that, in time to be assigned to the aerial combat involved in the American invasion of North Africa, flying P-51s for the 403rd Fighter Squadron of the 23rd Fighter Group.
Four weeks and six days after Second Lieutenant Dooley had reported to the 403rd and flew his first mission, the Squadron First Sergeant had handed him a sheet of paper to sign:
The Honor of Spies Page 21