Victory and Honor
( HONOR BOUND - 6 )
W.E.B. Griffin
William E. Butterworth IV
Wars come to an end. But then new ones begin. Just weeks after Hitler's suicide, Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS find themselves up to their necks in battles every bit as fierce as the ones just ended. The first is political-the very survival of the OSS, with every department from Treasury to War to the FBI grabbing for its covert agents and assets. The second is on a much grander scale-the possible next world war, against Joe Stalin and his voracious ambitions. To get a jump on the latter, Frade has been conducting a secret operation, one of great daring-and great danger-but to conduct it and not be discovered, he and his men must walk a perilously dark line. One slip, and everyone becomes a casualty of war.
W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV
Victory and honor
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
Colonel José Manuel Menéndez
Cavalry, Argentine Army, Retired.
He spent his life fighting Communism and Juan Domingo Perón.
PROLOGUE
There was little question by January 1945 that the Axis—Germany, Japan, and Italy—had lost the war. It was now just a matter of time.
In early 1942, just before the Japanese conquest of the Philippines was complete—the greatest defeat in American history—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the American commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, to Australia.
On Corregidor Island, as MacArthur boarded a small patrol torpedo boat at a wharf in Manila Bay, he made the melodramatic promise to the Philippine people, “I shall return!”
On October 20, 1944, after he had waded ashore from one of the landing craft that had carried troops of the United States Sixth Army onto the beaches of Leyte, ignoring Japanese mortar and sniper fire, MacArthur melodramatically proclaimed, “I have returned!”
On January 17, 1945, Soviet troops forced the Germans out of Warsaw, and ten days later liberated the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, where they found the remains of more than a million people who had been murdered by the Germans.
On January 28, 1945, the Battle of the Bulge—Germany’s last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of war in Western Europe—failed. The Americans suffered some 75,000 casualties, the Germans nearly 100,000. The Americans easily recovered from their losses. The Germans had thrown just about all of their reserves into the fight and had no means of recovery. Most historians agree that after the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans had absolutely no hope of winning the war.
On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, died suddenly at Warm Springs, Georgia. With him at the time was his mistress, Lucy Mercer, his wife’s former social secretary.
Roosevelt was not quite four months into his fourth term as President. Vice President Harry S Truman—who had seen Roosevelt only twice since their inauguration; never for more than fifteen minutes, and he had never been alone with him during that time—was sworn in as the thirty-third president on the afternoon of Roosevelt’s death.
The next morning, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer in charge of something called the “Manhattan Project,” went to Truman in the Oval Office and said, “Mr. President, there is something you have to know.”
He then went on to tell President Truman what President Roosevelt had felt the former U.S. senator from Missouri should not know: The Manhattan Project had secretly developed a new superweapon, called the “atomic bomb,” and two of these devices were available for use.
On April 25, 1945, Major General Isaac Davis White’s “Hell on Wheels” Second Armored Division, with its bridges across the Elbe River, was prepared to take Berlin. Ordered to halt in place so as to permit the Red Army to take Berlin, White—a direct descendant of Isaac Davis, the man who fired “the shot heard around the world” at Concord Green, thus starting the American Revolution—was reported to be so angry that he kicked the windows out of his truck-mounted command post.
On April 28, 1945, Benito Mussolini and his mistress were captured by antifascist Italian partisans, executed, and then hung upside down from a light pole.
On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops came close to the “Führer Bunker” in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun—his ex-mistress and bride of mere days—committed suicide. As soon as Dr. Josef Goebbels had seen that their bodies had been burned, the Nazi propaganda minister stood by as his wife fed cyanide capsules to their six children, and then she and he bit into their own capsules.
On May 2, 1945, Red Army troops completed the capture of Berlin and the last German troops in Italy surrendered.
On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally.
I
[ONE]
Hotel Britania Rua Rodrigues Sampaio 17 Lisbon, Portugal 3 May 1945
The younger man quickly stood when he saw the older man enter the restaurant and walk toward his table.
The older man was in his fifties, featured an ill-defined mustache and somewhat unkempt gray hair, and wore a black single-breasted garment with little or no padding in the shoulders—what members of his social class thought of as a “sack suit”—with a white button-down-collar shirt and bow tie.
He looked like a distinguished schoolteacher. Indeed, he always reminded the younger man of the Reverend Richard Cobbs Lacey, headmaster of Saint Mark’s of Texas, an Episcopal preparatory school in Dallas at which, a decade earlier at age fourteen, the younger man had had a brief—five-month—and ultimately disastrous association.
The younger man wore the somewhat splendiferous uniform of a South American Airways captain—SAA wings on a powder-blue tunic with four gold stripes on its cuffs and darker blue trousers with an inch-wide gold stripe down the hem.
Neither man was what he appeared to be.
The older one, whose name was Allen Welsh Dulles, was deputy director for Europe of the Office of Strategic Services. And the younger one, whose name was Cletus Howell Frade, was a Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel detached for service in South America with the same U.S. spy organization.
They shook hands. Then Dulles motioned for Frade to sit, and found his seat.
A waiter appeared.
“A Johnnie Walker Black Label—a double, neat—for me,” Dulles ordered, and then asked, “Cletus?”
Frade shook his head. “I’m flying. Or at least I think I am.”
Dulles nodded, then looked at the waiter and said, “Just the one drink, please.”
The waiter left.
“So, how goes the war?” Frade said.
“In one sense, rather well,” Dulles began, then paused as he saw the waiter suddenly approaching with his drink.
When the waiter had left again, Dulles raised his glass in salute and solemnly said, “To victory in Europe.”
He took a sip and then went on in explanation: “Just before I left Bern to come here, I learned that German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, and northwestern Germany will surrender tomorrow to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath, just southeast of Hamburg.
“Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, now head of the German state, has sent Admiral von Friedeburg, his successor as commander in chief of the German navy, to General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims to set up things. And Colonel-Generaloberst Alfred Jodl—the chief of staff of OKW, who will actually sign the surrender documents—is on his way to Reims as we speak.”
“And the other sense? What’s that? The reason you’re not in Reims?”
“I thought it more important—and so did Graham—that we had a talk before you went b
ack to Argentina. The other sense, Clete, is that our war—Graham’s, mine, and yours—is just about to begin.”
Frade’s eyebrows went up when he heard his name rolled in with those of Dulles and Colonel Alejandro F. Graham, USMCR, the deputy director for the Western Hemisphere of the Office of Strategic Services. Both men were equals in the OSS, reporting directly to—and on occasion directly defying—OSS Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
“That sounds ominous,” Frade said. “Who are we going to fight?”
“It’s a long list of belligerents, I’m afraid, starting with those Germans you know are already in South America under the Nazis’ Operation Phoenix and planning, at some point, to resurrect the Thousand-Year Reich. And the Soviet Union, of course. Josef Stalin really is not Friendly Uncle Joe, as Roosevelt and Eleanor have tried so hard to make us believe. But our immediate enemies are Admiral Leahy and General Marshall and others of their ilk. And possibly Harry Truman, although he may surprise us. And, of course, not to forget Henry Morgenthau.”
“The secretary of the Treasury?”
“The secretary of the Treasury,” Dulles confirmed.
“You don’t really think anybody’s going to go along with that nutty idea of his . . . what’s it being called? ‘The Pastoralization of Germany’?”
“Yes, Cletus, I’m afraid that I do. They want Germany powerless, and believe completely demolishing its industry will accomplish that. But what I actually was thinking about is Morgenthau finding out about the deal we quietly struck with Colonel Gehlen. Morgenthau’s Jewish. He has every right in the world to loathe and detest the Germans for what they did to the Jews—and see that they’re punished for it. He quite seriously proposed summarily executing the top one hundred Nazis as soon as they came into our hands. I shudder to think what Morgenthau would do if he knew we had arranged the movement of several hundred Nazis to sanctuary in Argentina.”
“That’s been a constant question in my mind from the beginning,” Frade said, and his memory flashed with his initial oh shit! reaction to being told of the operation some sixteen months earlier in this same hotel.
Frade clearly recalled Dulles and Graham announcing that the plan was not only for American spies to smuggle German spies to South America—but for Frade’s OSS spooks and SAA Lockheed Constellation aircraft to carry out the operation. They explained that they had made the secret agreement with Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, who was head of Germany’s Abwehr Ost—Russian—intelligence. Gehlen believed (a) that Germany was losing the war—they said he in fact was involved with Count von Stauffenberg in Operation Valkyrie, the plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler—and (b) that after the war, Gehlen’s agents faced firing squads or worse, particularly if Stalin had a say.
So Gehlen offered to the OSS all his assets, data, and agents-inplace in exchange for Gehlen and his officers and their families not falling into ruthless Russian hands.
Perhaps even more staggering—if protecting enemy agents at war’s end wasn’t outrageous enough—was the fact that Dulles and Graham were doing this specifically without anyone’s knowledge or authority—including Wild Bill Donovan’s. They explained that if they didn’t tell the OSS chief, then he could honestly say he never knew. But more important, if they did tell Donovan, he’d likely feel duty bound to share it with his boss, FDR. And then—if against incredible odds they actually got approval—the secret soon would find its way to others—Morgenthau and Vice President Henry Wallace leapt to mind—who would act on their moral outrage over aid and comfort to the Nazis.
And the OSS—and America—would lose Gehlen’s great wealth of intelligence on Communist spies, especially those who had infiltrated America’s all-important atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Project.
Dulles and Graham further explained to Clete that sharing this devout distrust of Communists were certain elements within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, influential ones who offered to readily supply Vatican-issued passports and other papers identifying Gehlen’s men and their wives and children as, respectively, priests and nuns and orphans seeking safe passage to South America to perform God’s work.
Having taken an oath to defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, Cletus Frade came to agree with the position that Morgenthau and all others who simply sought retribution against the Germans would cause the United States even greater harm if they failed to secure Gehlen’s intel.
And shortly thereafter Frade’s SAA Connie left Lisbon for Buenos Aires with the first load of Vatican-sponsored priests, nuns, and orphans among its passengers.
Now, sixteen months later, Frade asked, “Are we going to do any more of that, now that the war’s over?”
Dulles nodded.
He sipped his scotch and then said, “There’s another thirty-five or so of Gehlen’s men still in Germany that we promised to get out. Which we are going to have to be even more careful about now with Germany’s surrender; word is that Morgenthau has ordered the Secret Service—it being, of course, under the Treasury Department—to assign agents to track what happens with senior Nazis, particularly those top one hundred he’d like seen stood before a firing squad and mowed down with machine guns.”
“Tracking every senior Nazi won’t be easy for them to do.”
“Agreed. But there are two things in play. One, Morgenthau is on a mission he devoutly believes in, and will not be deterred.”
Frade nodded. “And the second?”
“That some Secret Service agent need only stumble across one of Gehlen’s men we’re smuggling for our whole operation to be blown.”
Frade made a face, then said, “Well, if you and Graham are right about the Russians—and I think you are—then making the deal was the right thing to do. Why the hell wouldn’t Morgenthau also see that?”
“If I were Jewish,” Dulles said, “I don’t think I’d be able to see it. Particularly after seeing the movies of the concentration camp ovens. And the bodies. And insofar as destroying German industry is concerned, I’ve always thought it had more to do with punishing the Germans than anything else.”
“Colonel Graham told me he thought it had more to do with giving the Russians a license to steal what’s left of German industry and move it to Russia. He said that the plan had been written by Morgenthau’s deputy, a guy named Harry Dexter White, who he and J. Edgar Hoover were agreed was a Communist.”
“I submit the possibility that we’re both right,” Dulles said.
“You said Admiral Leahy and General Marshall are our enemies, too,” Frade said. “What did we do, change sides?”
“Clete, you know that the OSS has always been a thorn in the side of the Army and the Navy. I don’t think it’s too far off to say they’ve always hated us—them and especially Hoover’s FBI—for any number of reasons, some of them valid but most simply visceral. We’re not like they are. From the beginning, we had Wild Bill Donovan’s friendship with Roosevelt to protect us.
“Roosevelt is gone. The military establishment is already telling Truman it’s time to shut down the OSS. The war in Europe is over, and General MacArthur refuses to permit us to operate in the Pacific. What worries me is that Harry Truman won’t—doesn’t know how to—say no to the generals.”
“I always thought generals and admirals were afraid of presidents, not the other way around.”
“Harry Truman was a captain in the First World War. After it, he joined the reserves and stayed in. He’s currently a reserve colonel. Colonels—with certain exceptions, such as Graham and you—don’t argue with generals. It’s not a question of whether the OSS will be shut down, but when. And whenever it happens, it will leave a vacuum that won’t be good for the country.”
“When do you think it will happen?”
“The Army, Navy, and State Department intelligence people will probably start to try to take us over—or try to take over individual operations, such as yours—possibly right about now. I don’t think we’ll be officially shut down for
three, maybe four months.”
“And what am I supposed to do when that happens?”
“That’s what I came to tell you, Clete—that I don’t know what to tell you to do. You’ll be on your own. If, for example, some would-be admiral in the Office of Naval Intelligence arrives in Buenos Aires and says, ‘You now belong to me, so give me everything you know about everything here,’ you could not be faulted for doing just that.
“But, on the other hand, if you decide that handing over information or assets to someone would not be good for the country . . .”
“What would I do with stuff—with the people, the assets, all of it—I decided not to turn over?”
“You could, as I intend to, go on the perhaps naïve premise that sooner or later—very likely later, much later—President Truman, or even his successor—they’re already talking about General Eisenhower in that capacity—will see there is a need for an agency like the OSS and resurrect it.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“My sentiments exactly. I believe that will happen, Clete. But in this agreement with Gehlen I have to believe that will happen, don’t I?”
Frade met Dulles’s eyes a long moment, then said, “If I turned over what I know about all of Gehlen’s people I’ve gotten into South America, how long do you think it would take for Morgenthau to find out?”
Dulles considered the question as he sipped at the scotch. He finally said, “A week. Possibly as much as two. People have a tendency to present the misbehavior of others to their superiors as quickly as they can.”
“The Gehlen operation was your decision. So, if I opened my mouth about that, you’d be in trouble, right?”
“I don’t want you to take that into consideration, Clete.”
“And if I did roll over, a lot of people who don’t need to know about the Gehlen operation get to know about it and the Russians get to know about it, right? Probably before Morgenthau does?”
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