Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  Crocker eyed them in turn. Brigadier General Peter Alfred, a white-haired, mustachioed officer, Marshall's exec, saw his job first and last as protecting the chief of staff and the chief's turf. Crocker did not admire such hedged loyalty in a military man, but he often wished his own people had it.

  Next to Alfred was Colonel George Cheever, the number two at OSS, a man Crocker had known since Groton. Cheever had stayed on in the army after the First War, and in this one had become famous as Patton's G-2, head of intelligence, in North Africa. Cheever's association with those first American triumphs in the war, and his white-shoe connections, had made him a logical choice the year before when Wild Bill Donovan assembled what wags derided as his "Oh So Social" OSS.

  Beside Cheever was Colonel John Lawrence, deputy director of military intelligence. Lawrence's uniform had been made by his Savile Row tailor and looked it. His brown tie was a soft worsted, not the quartermaster's serge, and the twill of his trousers was a shade off regulation tan, just enough to be noticed. In Crocker's primitive view intelligence officers were supposed to collect impressions, and it put him off that Lawrence so obviously liked to make them. Colonel Lawrence wasn't the man Crocker had ordered here anyway, and he had to stifle his impatience. Lawrence's boss, Major General George Veazey Strong, had refused to come to this meeting when he learned that his archrival Donovan was sending his deputy.

  Seated somewhat apart from the other three, with a vacant chair setting him off, was Brigadier General Victor E. Forbes, the chief of Joint Security Control, whose job was to make sure that plans for the coming Allied invasion of the Continent remained completely secret. As befitted his job, he was a reticent man famous for sitting through meetings like this one without saying a word.

  Crocker smiled slyly and said, "Gentlemen, I know that you are not often around the same table." He put his hand quite deliberately down on his desk. "I appreciate your indulging me by coming to this one."

  "What's our agenda, Randy?" General Alfred asked with unclothed impatience.

  "I'd like you to meet a couple of"—how to refer to them?—"friends of mine." He leaned toward his intercom and pressed it. "Send those gentlemen in, Harry, would you?"

  A moment later, Crocker's door opened and the pair of civilians walked into the room.

  Crocker stood, balancing himself with a hand on the edge of the desk.

  The others looked up at the newcomers, pointedly not rising.

  "This is Walter Dunlop, the assistant director for domestic intelligence."

  "Assistant director of what?" Cheever asked sharply.

  "Of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Dunlop replied. He carried his hands at his side. His brown suit was sharply creased. His shoes were polished. Like all members of Hoover's inner circle, he had learned to stop buying his clothes at Robert Hall.

  At Dunlop's announcement, a wave of disdain curled palpably through the military men. Crocker saw Forbes's eyebrow shoot up as he exchanged a glance with Alfred, and it occurred to Crocker that the outsiders' arrival, in a single stroke, had eliminated the officers' disregard for one another.

  Crocker gestured toward Dillon. "And this is...?"

  Dunlop introduced him. "Special Agent Dillon, who is supervisor in this case."

  Crocker pointed to the empty chair between Forbes and Lawrence while resuming his own seat himself. "Please, Mr. Dunlop."

  Dunlop approached the chair but remained standing.

  Crocker said, "There is a Dictaphone player on the table. You have the recording?"

  "Yes, sir." Dunlop paused, then added, "Although, because of security requirements, I must know who is present."

  For a moment no one moved, even to look at him, their surprise was so complete. Then, recovering, the officers made a show of rolling their eyes at each other: Who is this asshole?

  "Forgive me," Crocker said ingratiatingly, as if the awkwardness resulted from a lapse of his manners. Inwardly he groaned, More positioning! These spooks and counterspooks never let up. Crocker then introduced the officers to Dunlop, who nodded at each from his position behind the vacant chair. They just stared at him. No one offered to shake hands.

  Dillon counted for even less than Dunlop in that room. He took up a position away from the others, at the conference table. When Dunlop nodded in his direction he took the belt of wire out of his satchel and set it up on Crocker's machine.

  Crocker eyed General Alfred. "You asked about our agenda, Peter. It begins, uncharacteristically enough, with our listening to something." He waved his hand toward Dillon even while pushing back in his chair, using his good leg to lever his wooden one up onto the edge of his lowermost desk drawer. Suddenly, at that display of his infirmity, his discreetly tailored clothing—the French cuffs, the gray silk tie riding at a precise angle above the V of his waistcoat—seemed incongruous. Who was he to be presiding over this meeting of robust, trained men in their physical prime?

  Dillon snapped the machine on and stood away from it, watching the reel turn as if it were the passionate arrival of the man and the woman.

  "You never told me where you went," Sylvia Yergin said, a hollow, ghostly version of her voice.

  "Who said I went anywhere?"

  "Can any of you," Crocker put in quickly, "tell me who these people are?"

  "I know you left Washington..."

  The men listened in silence to the conversation, each more impassive than the other. They were a group of past masters at masking their reactions, especially from one another.

  When finally the wire ran through the spool and the sounds of the man and woman talking were replaced not by the sighs of foreplay, but by the loose end of stiff black cord going flick, flick, flick, General Forbes announced, "That's Lothrop."

  Crocker nodded and readjusted his leg to come forward to his desk. "Right. David Lothrop, deputy undersecretary of war, materiel. He works for me, which is the genesis of my interest here."

  General Alfred said, "But he's talking about landing ships. That's the navy's purview. The chief of K-2 should be here."

  Crocker stared at Alfred, unable to believe he wanted to crowd this pitch further by bringing in navy intelligence too. But then Crocker realized Alfred was only anticipating Admiral King's raging complaint to Marshall when he learned of this meeting. By declaring the navy's interest, Alfred was covering Marshall's ass. The others simply ignored Alfred.

  General Forbes said with steely precision, "Lothrop is off the tickler. Everybody knows that. What the hell is he doing traveling the Mediterranean?"

  "He didn't."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Everything Lothrop told the woman is false. Unknown to anyone in his office or, for that matter, in his family, he spent the last twelve days in a house in horse country, preparing himself for this deception. He has nothing to do with the LCIs"—Crocker swung toward Alfred—"as the navy knows better than anyone."

  Alfred rebutted, "Lothrop is a fool, which makes him a goddamned security risk."

  "That he is," Crocker replied, "but he was hand-picked for this operation."

  "By whom?"

  "By the woman." Crocker paused to let his answer sink in. "She picked him up at a party. She didn't know that we don't let Lothrop within a mile of his own factories or of what's real here. Lothrop has been watching shadows on the wall the whole war long. He's perfect for this. The woman didn't know that his title as my deputy means nothing, any more than his own wife knows it. Once the woman had her hook in him, we had to decide what to do about it. As it happened, the timing was perfect for using Lothrop to launch Noah's Ark."

  The military men knew that "Noah's Ark" was the name Churchill and Roosevelt, meeting in Teheran six weeks before, had dubbed their deception strategy. Fooling the Nazis into worrying about the Balkans, and therefore keeping a full third of German infantry divisions and half their panzers in southeastern Europe, was the flip side of their final decision to invade through Normandy.

  Colonel Cheever sat forward. "G
eneral Donovan has been traveling the Med. He is in Turkey now, deliberately making his presence known to the Abwehr. He is going on to Cyprus and Cairo, as if visiting staging areas. He thinks he is launching Noah's Ark."

  "Doesn't matter who smashes the champagne, does it?" Crocker asked mildly. "As long as the Krauts maintain their southern front?"

  But Lawrence was unable to restrain himself any longer and slapped both his hands down on the polished black arms of his chair. "Noah's Ark explicitly falls under General Strong's purview. Not General Donovan's, and, with all due respect, not yours, Mr. Secretary."

  Crocker did not blink. "Lothrop is the man at bat, and he is my explicit responsibility."

  Lawrence started to reply, but Crocker cut him off, and all pretense of gentility disappeared. "I've had it with you people! Joint Security, OSS, K-2, G-2, ONI, CIC, CID, Special Branch—you're all like novice skippers panicked by the warning gun into trying to nose your boats up to the starting line in a yachting race! Don't you know how important it is to hang back? You take what opening you get and then move into it!"

  The well-bred officers could only stare at this strange lawyer, a cripple giving them a lesson in strategy.

  But in the Penobscot Bay of Maine Randy Crocker and his crew of Deer Island boys were famous for always sailing away from the fleet, looking for their own wind and often finding it. Crocker hated jostling, because to him the race was never against other boats but against nature and against himself.

  "Who is the woman?" General Forbes asked.

  "I thought you'd never ask," Crocker said. "The woman is the point, gentlemen. And like it or not, the woman falls outside the 'purview' of each of your organizations for the simple reason that none of you uncovered her. Which is why I'll let the people who did introduce her to you, as they did to me." He raised his eyes to Dunlop, who in turn looked at Dillon.

  Dillon withdrew a manila folder from his satchel, and from that he took half a dozen glossy copies of the same photograph. He passed them out.

  "Her name is Sylvia Yergin," Dunlop said. "She is a Danish national, employed by the Central Coordinating Committee of the International Red Cross. In effect, she serves as liaison between Geneva and the American headquarters on Eighteenth Street, where she has an office." Dunlop paused while the others studied the photograph. It showed a stolid middle-aged woman standing at attention in the unglamorous nubby blue uniform, including hat and shoulder patch, of a Red Cross functionary. Only her fierce eyes, fixed squarely on the camera lens, indicated that she was a woman of exceptional energy. "She is an agent of the Abwehr."

  "Impossible!" Lawrence blurted out. "A German agent across the way from the White House? Impossible!"

  "Why do you say impossible?" Cheever countered. "Isn't CIC responsible for vetting the auxiliaries? That's General Strong's—"

  "The Red Cross is an entirely civilian—"

  "It is charged with care and support of military personnel, prisoners of war—"

  "I won't have General Strong disparaged—"

  "Gentlemen!" Crocker barked, but his glare was aimed at Lawrence. "General Strong could be here to defend himself, Colonel, as I asked him to be. But apparently there are other, more important items on his schedule." Crocker let the full weight of his displeasure fall on Lawrence, then he brought Cheever in under it. "You two are out of order. If you have questions or comments, direct them to Mr. Dunlop."

  General Forbes said with overelaborate casualness, "Perhaps Mr. Dunlop could tell us who tipped him to the fact that this Yergin woman is a Kraut agent?"

  "No tip," Dunlop answered. "Simple police work. My agents tracked her from an Argentine embassy party last April. We found that she frequented social functions at various embassies beyond what a woman in her position would reasonably be expected to do. We also found that she was, shall we say, generous in her affections. In both the Canadian and British chanceries, she has been friendly with cipher clerks and signals personnel. Among Americans, she has had a special knack for cultivating military staff workers."

  "That hardly proves—"

  Dunlop abruptly held a hand out toward Dillon, who took another set of photographs out of his folder and gave them to Dunlop, who passed them around. This showed Yergin standing next to a man in a crowded public square. The man, dressed in a bowler hat and frock coat, had his hand on Yergin's shoulder and seemed to be admonishing her.

  Dunlop said, "That is Major General Helmut Reinhardt, head of the Abwehr regiment which refers to itself as Amt Ausland."

  "A German general operating in Washington?"

  Before Dunlop could reply to Forbes, Cheever said, "Not Washington!" He stood up at his place to peer across Lawrence's head at the FBI division chief. "Where was this photograph taken?"

  Dunlop did not answer.

  Cheever slapped the photograph. "That automobile behind them is a Peugeot. Where was this? France? No, Switzerland. That license plate is Switzerland." Cheever whipped around toward Crocker. "This is a violation of the President's explicit order! FBI operations are restricted to this hemisphere." Cheever faced Dunlop once more. "Geneva! Your people tracked her to Geneva!"

  "Sit down, Colonel," Crocker said icily.

  "I will not sit down. OSS by its charter has—"

  "Then get out!" Crocker bellowed as his arm shot toward the door of his office. "And when Donovan asks why he wasn't brought into this operation, you tell him you stalked out of the initial briefing to protest the infringement of precious OSS prerogatives. Go ahead!"

  Cheever was immobilized.

  After a moment, his lips pressed thin and white, he resumed his seat.

  Crocker prided himself on an economy of emotional expression, and to have been driven to such a display was even more infuriating to him than the petty squabbling that prompted it. He leaned back in his chair, taking his pipe and tobacco pouch with him. He would reclaim his detachment by pretending already to have it. "And tell us about Lothrop, Mr. Dunlop. How does he come in?"

  "As you said, sir, she picked him up at a party."

  "Where?" Crocker began popping the flame above his pipe bowl.

  Dunlop stared blankly back at the undersecretary, unable to answer.

  "The Sulgrave Club," Sean Dillon put in. "On Dupont Circle. The occasion was a New Year's reception for war-relief workers. Mr. Lothrop was present to bring greetings from Secretary Stimson."

  "Yes, that's the sort of thing he does."

  Dillon continued, "We did not know who Lothrop was. We were outside. When he and Yergin came out together and drove away in his car, we noted the registration. When we ran a check and discovered the car belonged to a deputy undersecretary of war, we realized that Yergin had finally landed her fish."

  Crocker said, for the officers' benefit, "And that is when they came to me. I confronted Lothrop, told him who she is and offered him a chance, finally, to join the war effort. A chance, as I made clear to him, he had no choice but to accept. It has taken regular injections of spinal fluid, which, I believe, you, Mr. Dillon, have been administering, but Lothrop has conducted himself more or less admirably. His role, as you have all perhaps gathered, has involved both factual pretense—his LCI oversight, his trip to the Med—and a certain regular display of, what to call it, sexual enthusiasm. The woman seems to have been receptive on both fronts, and now perhaps is even convinced. Lothrop's success has brought us to the stage where we can offer each of you a chance to join up too."

  "For sexual enthusiasm, Randy?" Lawrence asked, grinning.

  Crocker smiled, but dismissively. "As the President hoped might happen, we have been given a major opportunity to reinforce Hitler's famous paranoia about the Balkans. Think of it, gentlemen. Nine panzer divisions! Forty-three infantry divisions! Sitting idle along the Danube! The balance of power in Europe depends on them staying there. If we do nothing else for the Allied cause, imagine what we do here! What Lothrop's pillow talk may have accomplished is just the start, and we can all be hugely grateful for it." Cr
ocker's gaze fell for an instant on the photograph of his son, who would almost certainly be one of those going ashore at Normandy.

  Dunlop said, "Yergin will see herself as providing the intelligence that will enable Germany to win the war. She will look everywhere now for other signs pointing to the Balkans, beginning with her own Red Cross."

  "Right," Crocker said, and he aimed his gaze at General Alfred. "The chief has to issue orders to have the Red Cross blood reserve moved to the Mediterranean, incrementally beginning now, and completed by mid-May."

  "That's ridiculous," Alfred countered, "the blood reserve—"

  "I'm not talking about the blood reserve. I'm talking about orders, about paper. Paper that has to cross desks on Eighteenth Street beginning this week. Paper that refers to medical staging areas on Crete, Cyprus and Malta."

  "But how will the woman get access to the paper?"

  Dillon answered from his place by the conference table. "She is sleeping with the Red Cross director's assistant too, another man near retirement age named Keith Simon. He's a widower, and she goes with him to his apartment. He expects to marry her in June."

  "But if you bring him and others at the Red Cross into this—"

  "We do nothing of the kind," Crocker said. "Everyone in the Red Cross remains in the dark about the real blood reserves and where they are. They don't know now. The levers they pull are attached to nothing." Crocker looked at Cheever. "Which presumably violates the Red Cross charter, George. We're poking holes through charters right and left, aren't we?"

  Forbes, the man in charge of security for the real invasion, said, "The Red Cross director hasn't known anything about the blood reserve for a year. When he gets an order from Marshall, he'll suspect it's a ruse, but he'll play along. He's no dummy."

  "That's just one example of what we can do now to satisfy Fraulein Yergin's curiosity. We want to give her a full set of collateral indications, documentation if possible, things to take with her when she returns to Geneva in—?" Crocker raised his eyebrows toward Dunlop.