“An immediate problem?”
“We need one more man here in Berlin,” Heydrich said. “Someone who will understand the situation and who can be trusted. I want you to recruit him yourself. Can you think of anyone?”
That had posed no problem for von Deitzberg.
“Josef Goltz,” he said immediately. “Obersturmbannführer Goltz.”
Heydrich made a Give me more sign with his hands.
“He’s the SS-SD liaison officer to the Office of the Party Chancellery.”
Heydrich laughed. “Great minds run in similar channels. That’s the answer I got when I asked Raschner for ideas. Why don’t the two of you talk to him together?”
In addition to his other duties, Gruppenführer Heydrich had been named Protector of Czechoslovakia. On 31 May 1942, he was fatally wounded when Czech agents of the British threw a bomb into his car in Prague.
Before leaving Berlin to personally supervise the retribution to be visited upon the Czechs for Heydrich’s murder, Himmler called von Deitzberg into his office to tell him how much he would have to rely on him until a suitable replacement for the martyred Heydrich could be found.
Meanwhile, von Deitzberg was faced with a serious problem. With Heydrich’s death, he had become the senior officer involved with the confidential fund and the source of its money. But von Deitzberg had never learned from Heydrich how much Himmler knew about it.
He quickly and carefully checked the records of dispersal of money; he found no record that Himmler had ever received money from it.
It was of course possible that the enormous disbursements to Heydrich had included money that Heydrich had quietly slipped to Himmler; that way there would be no record of Himmler’s involvement.
Three months later, however, after Himmler had asked neither for money nor about the status of the confidential fund, von Deitzberg was forced to conclude that Himmler not only knew nothing about it but that Heydrich had gone to great lengths to conceal it from the reichsprotektor.
It was entirely possible, therefore, that Himmler would be furious if he learned now about the confidential fund.
The reichsprotektor had a puritanical streak, and he might consider that Heydrich had actually been stealing from the Reich, and that von Deitzberg had been involved in the theft up to his neck.
When von Deitzberg brought up the subject to Raschner, Raschner advised that as far as he himself knew, Himmler either didn’t know about the fund—or didn’t want to know about it. Thus, an approach to him now might see everyone connected with it stood before a wall and shot.
They had no choice, Raschner concluded, except to go on as they had— but of course taking even greater care to make sure the ransoming operation remained secret.
Obersturmbannführer Josef Goltz had died at Samborombón Bay with Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner. That meant only four people, all SS officers, were left who knew the details of the confidential special fund: Von Deitzberg, Raschner, Cranz, and their man in Uruguay, Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck.
And von Tresmarck wasn’t really in the same league as von Deitzberg, Raschner, and Cranz. He wasn’t really a senior SS officer, for one thing. And for another: his sexual orientation.
Von Tresmarck had come to von Deitzberg’s attention when a Sicherheitspolizei report of his relationship with a young SS officer had come to his desk for action.
At the time, von Deitzberg had needed someone reliable in Uruguay. Reasoning that someone whose choices were doing precisely what he was told to do—and keeping his mouth shut about it—or swapping his SS uniform and the privileges that went with it for the gray striped uniform of a Sachsenhausen concentration camp inmate—with a pink triangle on the breast—would be just the man he needed.
And von Dattenberg had spelled it out to von Tresmarck in just about those terms.
If von Tresmarck would marry someone suitable immediately, his Sicherheitspolizei dossier would remain in von Deitzberg’s safe while he went to Uruguay and did what he was told to do.
He even defined someone suitable for him.
“One of the ladies who spends a good deal of time around the bar in the Adlon Hotel is a Frau Kolbermann. Inge Kolbermann. She is the widow of the late Obersturmbannführer Kolbermann, who fell for the Fatherland in Russia and left her in pretty dire straits financially. And there are other reasons she will probably accept a proposal of marriage. You had better hope she accepts yours.”
She indeed had accepted von Tresmarck’s proposal, as von Deitzberg thought she would. He knew a good deal about Frau Kolbermann, both professionally and personally. She was no stranger to his bed. If she was in Uruguay, she posed far less of a threat to embarrass him.
And so far, both of them had performed adequately.
Almost visibly thinking, Raschner hadn’t replied for a long moment.
“I don’t believe in good luck,” he said finally. “But sometimes things happen randomly that others might consider good luck.”
“Meaning?”
“The pie, with Goltz gone, can now be sliced into three parts, not four.”
“Yes, that’s true. I hadn’t thought about that.”
“The weak links in the chain are von Tresmarck in Uruguay and those I think of as the worker bees in Germany, those who—”
“I take your point.”
“You will be there. You can arrange things so the worker bees about whom you have any suspicions, or who know too much, can be sent to work in other hives or otherwise disposed of. And von Tresmarck can continue accepting contributions to the confidential fund as he has been doing, with Cranz keeping a close eye on him. And me keeping a close eye on both of them.”
“And Cranz,” von Deitzberg said, “as commercial attaché, will be able to make the right kind of investments.”
“With me watching him,” Raschner said.
“And me watching you,” von Deitzberg said smiling. “Keep in mind always, Erich, that you work for me, not Cranz.”
“Of course,” Raschner said. “Are you going to tell him that?”
“Of course. As a matter of fact, I’ll tell him right now. Go get him, would you, please? He’s with Frogger.”
[SIX]
Army Security Agency Facility Vint Hill Farms Station Near Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia 1940 13 July 1943
As the black 1942 Buick Roadmaster approached the small frame guard shack, floodlights came on and a large military policeman—one of three on duty— came out of the shack. He held up his right hand in an unmistakable Stop right there! gesture.
When the car had stopped, he walked to the driver’s window.
“You didn’t see the sign, ‘Do Not Pass—Restricted Military Area’?”
“We’re expected, Sergeant,” Colonel A. J. Graham said from the backseat of the Buick.
The MP sergeant shined his flashlight in the backseat and saw a well-dressed civilian.
“My name is Graham, Sergeant.”
“Colonel Graham?” the MP asked dubiously.
“That’s right.”
The flashlight went off.
“Lieutenant!” the MP sergeant called.
Graham saw a barrel-chested young Signal Corps officer push himself off the hood of a jeep where he had been sitting. He marched purposefully toward the Buick.
“Is there a problem?” the lieutenant asked in a booming voice.
“Sir, there’s a civilian in the backseat of the Buick, says he’s Colonel Graham.”
“ ‘Civilian’?” the lieutenant parroted, making it clear he thought that what he had been told was highly unlikely.
He marched to the Buick and boomed, “Colonel Graham?”
“That’s right.”
“We expected a Marine colonel,” the lieutenant boomed.
“And that’s what you got,” Graham said, and held out his identity card.
The lieutenant examined the card, and then Graham, very carefully.
Then he handed the card back, came to attention, sal
uted, and boomed, “Good evening, sir. Sir, I am Lieutenant McClung, the officer of the day. If the colonel will have his driver follow me, I will take you to the colonel, who is waiting for you, sir.”
“Thank you,” Graham said.
“The colonel will understand that when I said we expected a Marine colonel, we expected one in uniform, sir.”
“That was reasonable,” Graham said. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure, Colonel?” Colonel Raymond J. Scott, Signal Corps, commanding Vint Hill Farms Station, asked as he shook Graham’s hand.
“I didn’t mean to make waves, Colonel,” Graham said. “But I had to come out here as soon as I could, and I’d never been here before, so I asked our commo officer, Colonel Lemes, to set it up.”
“Well, what he did was call the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and his deputy called here and said you—Colonel Graham of the Marines and the OSS—was on his way out here and to give him—you—whatever you wanted. So I sent Iron Lung to the gate—”
“ ‘Iron Lung’?” Graham chuckled. “I can’t imagine why you call him that.”
“He does give new meaning to the phrase ‘voice of command,’ doesn’t he? Actually, he’s a fine young officer.”
“That was the impression I formed,” Graham said. “He’d have made a fine drill instructor at Parris Island.”
“Actually, before he came here, he was a tactical officer at Signal Corps OCS at Fort Monmouth.”
“What was that, the round peg in the round hole?”
Scott laughed.
“So how can we help the OSS?” Scott said, waving Graham into a chair.
“I’ve got a team in the field that needs better radios than they have to communicate with Washington.”
“Where are they?”
“South America. They’ve asked for six Collins Model 295 Transceivers.”
“Well, they know what to ask for, but . . .”
“There’s a problem?”
“How skilled is your commo sergeant?”
“He’s a long-service Navy chief radioman. About as smart as they come. As a matter of fact, he’s about to be commissioned.”
“Then no problem. They’re great radios, but they need people who know what they’re doing when they go down. And, as matter of fact, to set them up. When do you want them?”
“Would tomorrow morning be too soon?”
“You’re serious?”
“Within the next couple of days.”
“How are you going to ship them?”
“By air. In an airplane that’s also going down there.”
“Can you give me forty-eight hours?”
“That would work fine.”
“Happy to be able to oblige,” Colonel Scott said. “Where do you want them?”
“We’re in the National Institutes of Health complex on—”
“I know where it is. I’ll have Iron Lung personally check them out and deliver them himself.”
“I’m really grateful, Colonel. Thank you.”
“Anything else the Army Security Agency can do for the OSS?”
“No. That’s about it,” Graham said. Then he changed his mind. “This is a wild hair . . .”
“ASA deals with wild hairs all the time.”
“Cryptography.”
“You came to the right place. What’s the problem?”
“When we augmented the team down there, we sent an Army M-94 cylindrical cipher device with them, thinking it would be an improvement over the hand encryption they’re using. El Jefe refuses to use it. He says it’s too easy to break.”
“El Jefe? The Chief?”
Graham, smiling, nodded.
“Well, he’s right. Who’s liable to intercept?”
“The Germans, most likely. Others.”
“Apropos of nothing whatever, Colonel, does the term Enigma mean anything to you?”
“Yes, it does.”
“I thought it might. Well, the bad news is we don’t have anything nearly as good. The M-94 is pretty primitive. We have another one called the SIGABA, which is almost as good, as safe as the one whose name is classified.”
“We have those at several places,” Graham said. “But when I asked Colonel Lemes, he said that not only are they awfully expensive—”
“Is that a problem for you?” Scott interrupted.
Graham shook his head and went on. “—but that they are large, heavy, delicate—apparently they’ve never successfully dropped one by parachute— difficult to operate, and a mechanical nightmare.”
“Unfortunately, he’s right. About the only place they work reliably, outside of fixed bases, is aboard ship.”
“How common is that? I mean, would they have one aboard a destroyer?”
“What destroyer? Some do, some don’t.”
“The USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107,” Graham said.
“You want me to find out?”
“Could you?”
“Sir,” Lieutenant McClung boomed from the door. “I have—more precisely Lieutenant Fischer has—the information the colonel requested vis-à-vis the SIGABA aboard a Navy vessel.”
“Is he out there with you?”
“Yes, sir,” McClung boomed.
“Bring him in.”
The two young officers marched into Colonel Scott’s office.
Second Lieutenant Leonard Fischer, Signal Corps, was nowhere as large as First Lieutenant McClung.
“What did you find out, Len?” Scott asked.
“Sir, there is one aboard the Alfred Thomas. My source in the Navy says he doesn’t know if it’s operable, and probably is not, because the chief radioman who knew how to operate it and repair it was taken ill and removed from the ship somewhere in South America—Argentina or Uruguay, he wasn’t sure.”
Colonel Scott and Colonel Graham looked at each other, but neither responded directly.
“Lieutenant, let me ask you a question,” Graham said. “What would you say the chances are that a SIGABA could be shipped about five thousand miles on one airplane—I mean, it would be loaded aboard the airplane in Washington and off-loaded at its destination, not go through depots, et cetera—without suffering irreparable damage?”
“It would need a lot of work, sir,” Lieutenant Fischer said, after thinking about it. “Five thousand miles in an airplane is a lot of vibration, and there would be, I’d guess, half a dozen landings and takeoffs to make it that far. But irreparable? No, sir. Presuming the parts were available, and we know pretty well which parts will fail, and there was someone who knew what he was doing to make the repairs, it could be made operable.”
“Thank you,” Graham said, and looked at Scott.
“That’ll be all for right now, but stay close,” Scott said.
“Yes, sir,” McClung boomed, drowning out whatever Fischer replied.
Scott looked at Graham after the two had left.
“Did I ever tell you, Colonel, that in addition to everything else we do here, some of us read minds?”
“Read mine,” Graham said.
“How long will Lieutenant Fischer be on temporary duty with you?”
"It’s important, Colonel, or I wouldn’t ask,” Graham said. “Can I have him for thirty days?”
VII
[ONE]
Office of the Commercial Attaché Embassy of the German Reich Avenida Córdoba Buenos Aires, Argentina 0915 14 July 1943
Commercial Attaché Karl Cranz had come to work in a very pleasant frame of mind. There was only one problem to deal with that he could see, and it wasn’t at all a major one. There was no question in his mind that the foreign ministry would, as a result of his cable yesterday, cancel Commercial Attaché Wilhelm Frogger’s orders to return to Berlin. That caused the small problem of having two commercial attachés in the embassy.
Cranz had decided that could easily be solved by changing his own title to deputy commercial attaché. It didn’t matter, really, what official title one
carried, so long as everyone understood who had the authority.
Reminding Frogger that he was, in fact, Obersturmbannführer Cranz and in Argentina on an important and highly secret mission would keep Frogger in his place, leaving Frogger free to continue his auction bidding war with the Americans over the tinned corned beef.
What was amusing in all this was that he really wasn’t Obersturmbannführer Cranz at all, but actually Standartenführer Cranz, although he had to keep that under his hat until von Deitzberg was on the Condor on his way home.
When he was free to let everyone know his real rank, that would put a number of potential problems in order. As Standartenführer Cranz he would be both the senior service officer in the embassy and the senior SS officer in this part of South America.
That would make him senior to the just-promoted Fregattenkapitän Boltitz, the new naval attaché. Not that he anticipated any trouble with Karl Boltitz or his new number two, Military Attaché for Air Major Peter von Wachtstein. He had just about decided that whoever the traitor in the embassy was, it wasn’t von Wachtstein. If indeed there was a traitor. It seemed more and more likely that what had happened at Samborombón Bay was entirely an Argentine reaction to the elimination of Oberst Frade.
He would also put Raschner straight about why he had not been recalled to Berlin. Raschner obviously thought he still would be working for von Deitzberg, and in that capacity keeping an eye on Commercial Attaché Cranz. Immediately after advising Raschner of his actual rank, Cranz would make it clear to him that the reason Raschner remained in Buenos Aires was that Standartenführer Cranz had asked Himmler for his services and, accordingly, Raschner no longer worked for von Deitzberg.
Raschner—he was not a fool—would immediately recognize on which side of his bread was the butter and was probably going to be very useful.
And just as soon as von Deitzberg left for Berlin, Cranz would have von Wachtstein fly him to Montevideo, where he would assert his authority over both Councilor Konrad Forster and Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck in the embassy there.
Councilor Forster was actually Hauptsturmführer Forster of the Sicherheitsdienst. His primary function in the embassy—known only to Ambassador Schulker—was counterintelligence. Cranz would firmly tell Forster that Forster was now under his orders, and that Cranz was to be immediately furnished with any information he developed.
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