That for the reason given—that any information General Donovan passed to President Roosevelt or President Truman now would soon be known to the Soviets—both Colonel Graham and Mr. Dulles (most likely together) decided that their oath to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, gave them the authority to not give to General Donovan certain information.
The Director believes this was a very difficult decision for them to make, as he knows both of them hold General Donovan in the highest possible personal and professional regard. The Director personally feels that if General Donovan were in the shoes of either Dulles or Graham, he would have done as they did.
The damage to the OSS and to Mr. Dulles and Colonel Graham if any of this came out would be cataclysmic and would spill over to the Bureau and the Director personally. There are powerful figures in the government who would hold that if the Bureau or the Director personally even suspected anything like this, it would be the FBI’s duty to bring it to the attention of the President.
The Director believes there is a strong possibility that Mr. Dulles has established a relationship with General Gehlen. This would neatly explain where he got the names of the Soviet agents who have infiltrated the Manhattan Project, and why they were “slipped under the door” to the Bureau. It would also explain the disappearance of Gehlen’s officers in the latter months of the war. The rumor that they have found sanctuary in Argentina becomes a credible scenario if one considers they may have been flown there from Lisbon on Frade’s SAA aircraft.
The question then becomes, “Why would Dulles do something like that?”
Gehlen had something Dulles wanted, and offered to exchange it for Dulles arranging to have his officers and their families taken to sanctuary FROM THE SOVIETS in Argentina. That has to be intelligence, possibly even assets, German agents in place in the Soviet Union. Gehlen knew the war was lost and that when inevitably Abwehr Ost fell into the hands of the Soviets he and his people—including their families—would be interrogated under torture and then eliminated.
He knew that somewhere in the United States there was a person or persons who regarded the Soviet Union as a serious threat to the United States, and who would accordingly place a high value on Gehlen’s intelligence assets, and who could arrange the sanctuary he was after in exchange for them.
It is also possible, of course, and an equally credible scenario that Mr. Dulles went to Gehlen and made the advance himself. If this was the case, he was the man Gehlen was looking for.
The Director, who is fully aware of the furor that would erupt in the United States if such a deal became known, nevertheless feels that Mr. Dulles has acted in a courageous, patriotic manner.
“At the risk of repeating myself, Milt, this Mormon pal of yours is very good,” Clete said as he handed another page of the letter to Dorotea.
“At the risk of repeating myself, never underestimate the FBI. Read on—you’re almost through.”
The question now becomes, “What’s going to happen to the Gehlen assets?” Compounding this question, “Especially since the OSS is about to go out of existence?”
This brings us to your mission, Milt, my old friend, something we would have considered a fantasy, if we ever considered it at all, in our days at the Academy.
You are to get to Mr. Dulles, obviously through Frade, and convince him first that if we know what he’s been up to, eventually, sooner or later, probably later, but inevitably, so will the Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, and the State Department.
And when that happens—and/or when the OSS is incorporated into one of the above on its dissolution—the Gehlen data and personnel will be compromised.
This doesn’t even get into what will happen to Mr. Dulles or Lieutenant Colonel Frade when their activities become known. The Director is sure they have considered at length all the many unpleasant scenarios of what will happen to them.
The obvious place to put the Gehlen assets is with the Bureau.
For that matter, the obvious thing to do with the OSS on its dissolution is to incorporate it into the Bureau, but that’s a subject that can be dealt with later.
The Director would like Mr. Dulles to consider that the Director is far better equipped to refuse to divulge the sources of his information than Mr. Dulles is. And more importantly, the Director is better equipped than anyone else to keep them from falling into the hands of the Soviets.
The Director is willing—more precisely, eager—to meet with Mr. Dulles or Lieutenant Colonel Frade at any place of their choosing to discuss this personally.
Obviously, the less about this matter committed to paper, the better. Your reports on this matter will be relayed verbally to Bureau special agents visiting the Embassy in Buenos Aires covertly as diplomatic couriers, et cetera, who will identify themselves to you by introducing the phrase “loose cannon” into their conversation.
In consideration of the above, old buddy, when you’ve read this several times, you’d better put a match to it.
Looking forward to seeing you soon, Fellow Gangbuster.
Best,
Frade looked at Leibermann, sighed audibly, then said, “Milt, you didn’t have to show us this letter; you could have just come out here and told me Donovan wants to meet with Dulles. So far as that goes, there must be a ‘legal attaché’ in Bern who could have gone to Dulles directly. What’s going on?”
“Multiple question,” Leibermann said. “Where to start? Let me start by saying that Clyde Holmes and I are not old buddies. And that I think he thinks I’m even more stupid than is the case. Which sort of annoys me. That promotion is bullshit. I don’t suppose you know how the FBI works?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Well, for one thing, they don’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to civil service rules.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, just about everybody is a special agent, except for a favored few like inspectors and the directors. Special Agents in Charge are what it sounds like. But that’s a position title, not a rank. They get extra money—how much depending on the circumstances, which are determined by the assistant directors. A SAC in charge of an office with fifty agents gets paid more than a SAC in an office with five—as long as they hold that office. If they screw up, they are reassigned to another office as a special agent and get paid as a special agent with so many years of service.”
“And if they don’t screw up?
“Then they’re transferred from being a SAC of a five-man office to being SAC of one with, say, fifteen agents. That raises their pay. Knowing that they can get transferred at the whim of a deputy director upward, or downward, tends to keep people in line. You getting the picture?”
“I always thought the FBI was like the post office, cradle-to-grave security under civil service rules. How does the FBI get out from under the civil service?”
“First of all, no one complains. In large measure, the FBI system is basically fair; it rewards good work and punishes bad. Second, if some special agent decides he has been treated unfairly and goes to the Civil Service Commission, the investigator is shown pictures of him with some hooker and the suggestion is made that they will not be shown to his wife because he is known to be a friend of the FBI. Getting the picture?”
“I’m shocked. Really shocked. I’ve always thought of the FBI as Boy Scouts with guns.”
“A great many of them fit that description, Clete.”
“What you’re saying is that if your buddy found out you didn’t tell them the whole truth, you would have stopped being the SAC here and become . . .”
“A special agent in the Bullfrog Falls, Kansas, office, with a corresponding reduction in pay. Which would also have happened if my old buddy even knew I had been talking to you. And which will happen, I strongly suspect, however this thing turns out. I will be transferred to the Bullfrog, Kansas, office and encouraged to take my well-earned retirement. Retired special agents, like dead m
en, tell no tales.”
“Jesus, Milt!” Stein said.
“So, why are you here?” Frade asked.
Leibermann held up his hand and moved it back and forth.
Frade looked at him curiously.
“I’m waving the flag,” Leibermann said. “The last refuge of the scoundrel.”
“Explain that.”
“There’s a lot in Holmes’s letter that I agree with. Especially the threat the Russians pose. I don’t like them any more than I like the Germans. Even with what we hear about German concentration camps, the Russians have probably killed more Jews over the years.”
“My father used to say that,” Stein said softly. “When the Germans started in on the Jews, he said, ‘Germany is getting to be no better than Russia.’”
“I think the Russians have to be stopped, and it looks to me as if the only people who understand that, and are in a position to do anything about it, are J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles.”
He waved his hand again.
“So, Clete, that explains why I’m here. Questions for you. Are you willing to go to Dulles with this?”
“Of course.”
“The first thing Dulles is going to think—correctly—is that Hoover, in addition to wanting everything Dulles has gotten, or is going to get from Gehlen, wants to take over the OSS. How’s he going to react to that?”
“I dunno,” Clete said. “Why doesn’t Hoover just make a play to take over the OSS himself? If they’re going to shut it down, the FBI would seem to me a logical place to put it.”
“I don’t think you understand that the reason the Army and the Navy want to take over the OSS is because that when it’s in their tent, they can really kill it. They don’t want it ever to come back. The OSS, running loose, has been a nightmare for them.”
“But Hoover doesn’t think it would be?”
“Hoover, rightly or wrongly, believes he could control it. And he thinks it would be useful. The Army and the Navy believe—I think they’re wrong—that they could have done whatever the OSS has done, and done it more efficiently, and under the wise thumb of the chief of staff and/or the chief of naval operations.”
“I don’t know when I’ll see Dulles again,” Clete said. “And I can’t go to Washington—he’s in Washington—because I have to go to Germany tomorrow. When I get there, I’ll get word to him that I’d like to see him. That’s the best I can do right now.”
“Well, if that’s it, that’s it,” Leibermann said.
“What are you going to tell this Holmes guy?” Clete asked.
“That when I went to see you tomorrow, I just missed you. That I was told you were flying to Lisbon and would be back in a week or ten days.”
“Okay,” Clete said.
“Max, are you about through doing that?” Leibermann asked.
Ashton was making a nice stack of all the pages of the letter from Deputy Director Holmes. After he had tapped it a final time on the arm of his chair, he carefully handed the stack to Leibermann.
Leibermann took one page, held it up, and then set it on fire with a Zippo lighter. When it was almost consumed, he took a second page from the stack and lit it from the first.
He continued this process until all the pages had been burned. No one on the verandah said a word while this was going on.
Then Leibermann turned to Frade.
“I will now have that Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks that you offered a while ago,” he said.
[ONE]
Executive Suite, South American Airlines Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1725 16 May 1945
When the telephone on the desk of the managing director of South American Airways rang, Don Cletus Frade, with a grunt and some difficulty, took his feet from the desk and reached for it.
“Why do I think our diplomats may have finally decided to show up?” he asked of no one in particular.
There were six men in the room. Moments before the telephone rang, Frade had idly thought he couldn’t remember ever having seen so many people in his office. All but one of them were wearing some variation of the SAA flight crew uniform.
Chief Pilot Delgano was there, in the most spectacular version thereof. Frade was wearing the uniform of an SAA captain. Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and Karl Boltitz were wearing the only slightly less spectacular uniforms of SAA first officers. And Master Sergeant Siggie Stein was wearing the uniform of an SAA radio officer/navigator.
The man not in uniform was retired Suboficial Major Enrico Rodríguez, who, Clete had decided—after going so far as to put him in a steward’s uniform—was just not going to look like a member of an SAA flight crew no matter how he was dressed.
And Rodríguez could not be left behind. To the usual arguments he made when not taking him along somewhere came up for discussion he had added a new one: “Don Cletus, I spent a year in Germany when el Coronel, may he be resting in peace with your sainted mother and all the angels, was at the Kriegsschule. You, however, have never been there.”
Enrico Rodríguez was listed on the flight manifest as a “security officer.”
They had been waiting since one o’clock for the “Foreign Minister’s Relief Party” to show up, the last three hours of that time in the executive offices as a result of an executive decision by the managing director, who was in something of a pique at the time.
“Fuck it!” he said. “I’m not going to stand around here with my thumb up my ass waiting for these clowns any longer. We’ll go to the executive offices and have them send up coffee and something to eat.”
The executive offices were not quite the center of executive activity it sounded like. Managing Director Frade was now willing to admit he had been a little derelict in the execution of his duties when examining the architect’s drawings of the buildings to be erected at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade. Concerned primarily with the hangars, the control tower, and the maintenance and cargo-handling facilities, Frade had not realized until everything had been constructed and equipped that about half of the third floor of the terminal building was devoted to something called the “Executive Suite.”
The Executive Suite was further divided into an office for the managing director, an office for the chief pilot, a conference room, an office for their secretaries, a small kitchen, separate restrooms, and a reception area.
SAA also maintained offices in downtown Buenos Aires—two floors in the Anglo-Argentine Bank, the managing director of which was el Señor Humberto Valdez Duarte. El Señor Duarte was also Cletus Frade’s uncle and SAA’s financial director. Duarte supervised the day-to-day business activities of SAA from his office in the bank.
The result of this was that the Executive Suite of the SAA terminal was, in corporate parlance, “underutilized.” Neither Cletus Frade nor Chief Pilot Gonzalo Delgano had secretaries, and moreover Delgano had a small but adequate office off the flight-planning room in Hangar Two. He almost never went to the Executive Suite. Frade went there rarely, usually only when he wanted to change into—or out of—his SAA captain’s uniform. The company had issued him three uniforms, and he kept them in the Executive Suite.
It was in the Executive Suite that von Wachtstein, Boltitz, and Stein had been hastily outfitted with SAA uniforms. Clete had sensed that all three shared his opinion of the garish outfits, but they were too polite to say anything, and he hadn’t said anything either because he thought it would only serve to make a bad situation worse.
The truth was that while SAA pilots, from Chief Pilot Delgano down, thought their uniforms properly reflected their important role as dashing fliers, when Frade put on his uniform and looked into the mirror, he thought he looked like a tuba player in the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus band—or maybe the guy driving the wagon holding the caged snarling tigers in the circus parade.
There were times, of course, when he had to wear it. Today, for one example. And, for another, when he was combining a scheduled Constellation flight wi
th a training flight for pilots being upgraded from the left seat of a Lodestar to the right seat of a Connie, which meant passengers were aboard. And he wore it when flying to Lisbon, putting it on only after all other preflight activities had been accomplished and taking it off just as soon as he could when he had returned to Aeropuerto Jorge Frade.
“Who’s down there?” Frade said into his telephone, his tone incredulous, and, after there was a reply, said, “Send them up.”
He put the handset in the base and turned to the men in the room.
“Get your feet off the coffee table, Gonzalo. Your boss is on the way up. And so is the guy who thinks he’s mine.”
It was an open secret to those in the room that in addition to his role as SAA chief pilot, Gonzalo Delgano was a colonel of the Bureau of Internal Security. He had been keeping an eye on el Coronel Frade from the time he was a captain and ostensibly the pilot of el Coronel’s Beechcraft Staggerwing. Now he kept an eye on Cletus Frade and SAA.
The other reference was obviously to Richmond C. Flowers, USA, the military attaché at the American Embassy who was de jure but not de facto the senior OSS officer in Argentina.
The same question ran through both Frade’s and Delgano’s minds: I wonder what the hell this is all about.
El General de Brigada Martín, in civilian clothing, came into the office first, followed by Colonel Flowers and two muscular young men, also in civilian clothing, one of them carrying a bulging leather briefcase that clearly was stuffed full.
Frade thought: Clever fellow that I am, I suspect that those two are Marine guards.
How do I know? They’re muscular, bright-eyed—and nobody else in Buenos Aires has haircuts like that.
I wonder what the hell this is all about. . . .
“Good afternoon,” Martín said.
“Bernardo, if you’ll tell me who told you we were up here,” Frade said as he stood up, “I’ll have him dragged down Runway 28—that’s the long one—by his testicles.”
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