by War
They were fishing in it for dear life, knowing it couldn't last.
Copper telephone wire, for instance, as stolen as fast as it was strung up. Hundreds of miles of it had vanished. The Persians loved copper trinkets, plates, and bowls, and the bazaars were now flooded with them. These people had been robbed for centuries, said Seaton, by conquerors and by their own grandees. Loot or be looted was the truth they knew.
"Should you succeed in getting Stalin out," he said, yawning, "for God's sake don't try to install your free enterprise system here, with party elections and the rest. BY free enterprise, Persians mean what they're doing with your copper wire. A democracy in a backward or unstable country simply gets smashed by the best-organized power gang.
Here it'll be a communist gang that will open the gates of Asia to Stalin. So forget your antiroyalist principles, and strengthen the monarchy."
"I'll do my best," said Pug, smiling at the cynical candor of the man.
Seaton smiled sleepily back. "One is told you have the ear of the great."
The Tehran Conference was an off-again, on-again thing until the last minute. Suddenly it was on. A presidential party of seventy fell out of the sky on General Connolly: Secret Service men, generals, admirals, diplomats, ambassadors, White House stewards, and assorted staff people, swirling through the Amirabad base in unholy confusion.
Connolly told his! secretary that he was too busy to see anybody, but on hearing that Captain Henry had reappeared he jumped up and went out to the anteroom.
"Good God. Look at you." Pug was unshaven, haggard, and covered with grime.
"The truck convoy got caught in a dust storm. Then in a mountain blizzard. I haven't been out of my clothes since Friday. When did the President get here?"
"Yesterday. General Marshall's in your room, Henry.
We've moved you over to the officers' quarters."
"Okay. I got your message in Tabriz, but the Russians sort of garbled it."
"Well, Hopkins asked where you were, that's all. I thought you'd better get the hell back here. So the Russians did let you through to Tabriz?"
"It took some talking. Where's Hopkins now?"
"Downtown in the Soviet embassy. He and the President are staying there."
"In the Soviet embassy? Not here? Not in our legation?"
"Nope. There are reasons. We've got nearly everybody else."
"Where's the Soviet embassy?"
"My driver will take you there. And I think you should hurry."
Pug rubbed a hand over his grimy stubby face.
Connolly gestured at a bathroom door. "Use my razor."
Despite a few new boulevards which the deposed Shah had bulldozed through Tehran, most of the city was a maze of narrow crooked streets lined by blank mud-wattle walls.
Seaton had told Pug that this Persian way of building a town was meant to slow and baffle an invading horde. It slowed the Army driver until he struck a boulevard and roared downtown. The walls around the Soviet embassy gave it a look of a high-security prison. At the entrance, and spaced all along the street and around the corners, frowning soldiers stood with fixed bayonets. One of these halted the car at the iron gates. Victor Henry rolled down the window and snapped in clear sharp Russian, "I am a naval aide to President Roosevelt."
The soldier fell back in a stiff salute, then leaped on the running, board to guide the driver through the compound, a spacious walled park with villas set here and there amid autumnal old trees, splashing fountains, and wide lawns dotted with ponds.
Russian sentries and American Secret Service men blocked the veranda of the largest villa. Pug talked his way into the foyer, where civilians and uniformed men, British, Russian, American, bustled about in a polyglot tumult. Pug spied Harry Hopkins slouching along in a gray suit by himself, hands in his pockets, looking sicker and skinnier than ever.
Hopkins saw him, brightened, and shook hands. "Stalin just walked over to meet the Chief." He gestured at a closed wooden door.
"They're in there. Quite a. historic moment, hey? Come along, I haven't unpacked yet. How's the Persian Gulf Command doing?"
Behind the door, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin sat face to face. There was nobody else in the room but two interpreters.
Across the narrow street that separated the Russian and the British compounds, Winston Churchill sulked in a bedchamber of his legation residence, nursing a sore throat and a sorer spirit. Since arriving in separate planes from Cairo, he and Roosevelt had not spoken. He had sent an invitation to Roosevelt to stay at his legation. The President had declined. He had asked urgently for a meeting before any talks with Stalin. The President had refused. Now those two were meeting without him. Alas for the old intimacy of Argentia and Casablanca!
To Ambassador Harriman, who went across the street to calm him, Churchill grumbled that he was glad to "obey orders," that all he wanted was to give a dinner party two nights later on his sixty-ninth birthday, get thoroughly drunk, and leave the next morning.
Why was Franklin Roosevelt staying in the Russian compound?
Historians casually note that on arrival he had declined invitations from both Stalin and Churchill, so as to offend neither.
At midnight Molotov had urgently summoned the British and American ambassadors to warn them of an assassination plot afoot in Tehran.
Stalin and Churchill were scheduled to come to the American legation in the morning for the first conference session. It was over a mile from the British and Russian compounds, which adjoined each other.
Molotov urged that Roosevelt move to one of these, hinting that otherwise business could not safely proceed.
So when Roosevelt woke in the morning, a choice was thrust on him: either move in with ichurchill, his old trusted ally, offering comfortable English-speaking hospitality and reliable privacy; or with Stalin, the ferocious Bolshevik, Hitler's former partner in crime, offering a goldfish bowl of alien attendants and perhaps of concealed microphones. An American Secret Service man had already checked the Russian villa Roosevelt was being offered; but could such a cursory inspection detect the sophisticated Soviet bugging?
Roosevelt chose the Russians. Churchill writes in his history that the choice pleased him because the Russians had more room.
Chagrin is not something a great man often acknowledges.
Was there an assassination plot?
Nobody really knows. A book by an aged Nazi ex-agent asserts that he was part of one. Of making such books there is no end. At the least, Tehran's streets were risky; German agents were there; public men do get killed -riding through streets; the First World War had started that way. The weary disabled Roosevelt no doubt was better off staying downtown.
Yet -why with the Russians, when the British were across the street?
Franklin Roosevelt had come all the way to Stalin's back fence.
So he had bowed to the brute fact that Russia was doing the main suffering and bleeding against Hitler. To take this last step, to accept Stalin's hospitality, to show openness and trust to a tyrant who knew only secrecy and distrust, was perhaps the subtle gamble of an old lion, the ultimate sipal of goodwill across the political gulf between east and west.
Did it signal to Stalin that Franklin Roosevelt was a naieve and gullible optimist, a soft touch, a man to push around?
Stalin seldom disclosed his inner thoughts. But once, during -the war, he told the communist author Djilas, "Churchill merely tries to pick your pocket. Roosevelt steals the big things."
The grim ultra-realist was not unaware, it would seem from this, that Russians were dying by the millions and Americans by the thousands, in a war that would give world preeminence to' the United States.
We have a record of the first words they exchanged.
ROOSEVELT: I have been trying for a long time to arrange this.
STALIN: "Sorry, it is all my fault. I have been preoccupied with military matters.
Or, translated into plain terms, Roosevelt was saying, as for
the first time he shook hands with the second most powerful man on earth, "Well, why have you been so difficult and mistrustful for so long?
Here I am, you see, under your very roof.
And Stalin, whom even Lenin called rude, was drawing instant first blood in his retort: "We've been doing most of the fighting and dying, that's why.
So these two men in their sixties met at Stalin's back fence in Persia and chatted: the huge crippled American in a blue-gray sack suit, the very short potbellied Georgian wearing an army uniform with a broad red stripe down the full trousers; the one a peaceful social reformer three times elected, guiltless of any trace of political violence, the other a revolutionary despot with the blood of unthinkable millions of his own countrymen on his hands. A strange encounter.
Tocqueville had predicted that America and Russia would between them rule the earth, the one as a free land, the other as a tyranny.
Here was his vision made flesh. What drew these opposites together was only the mutual need to crush a mortal menace to the entire human race, Adolf Hitler's FrostCuckoo Land, coming from the east, and coming from the west.
A Secret Service man looked into Hopkins's room. "Mr. Stalin just left, sir. The President's asking for you."
Hopkins was changing his shirt. Hurriedly he tucked the shirttail inside baggy trousers, and pulled -over his head a red sweater with a hole in one elbow. "Come along, Pug. The President was inquiring about you this morning."
Everything about this villa was oversize. Hopkins's bedroom was huge. So was the crowded foyer. The room in which Roosevelt sat might have accommodated a masquerade ball. Tall windows admitted a flood of golden sunshine through the sere leaves of high trees. The furniture was heavy, banal, randomly scattered, and none too clean. In an armchair in the sun Roosevelt smoked a cigarette with the holder in his teeth, exactly as in the aricatures. c "Why, hello there, Pug. -Grand to see you." His arm swept out for a hearty handclasp. The President looked drawn, lean,-much older, but a massive man still, radiating strength and-at the moment-triumphant good humor. The color of the big-jawed face was high. "Harry, it went beautifully.
He's an impressive fellow. But bless me, the translation does eat up the time! Terribly tedious. We're meeting at four for the plenary session. Does Winnie know that?"
"Averell went over to tell him." Hopkins-glanced at his wristwatch. "That's in twenty minutes, Mr. President."
"I know. Well, Pug!" He gestured at a sofa on which seven men might have sat. "We get gorgeous statistics about all the Lend-Lease aid going to Russia through this Persian corridor.
Did you see any sign of it out there? Or is it all just talk, as I strongly suspect?"
The far-etiousness went with a broad smile. Roosevelt clearly was still winding down from the excitement of meeting Stalin.
"It's all out there, Mr. President. It's an unbelievable, a magnificent effort. I'll have a report for you later today on one sheet of paper. I'm just back from the road."
"One sheet, eh?" The President laughed, glancing at Hopkins.
"Grand. The top sheet is all I ever read, anyway."
"He toured Iran from the gulf to the north," said Hopkins.
"By rail and by truck."
"What can I tell Uncle Joe, Pug, if Lend-Lease comes up?"
Romevelt said a shade more seriously. In an aside he remarked to Hopkins, "I don't think it will today, Harry.
That wasn't his mood."
"He's changeable," Hopkins said.
Pug Henry swiftly described the pile-ups he had seen at the northern depots.-especially at the truck terminal. The Russians had refused to permit the truck convoys to drive any distance into their zone of Iran, he said, allotting only one unloading terminal far from the Russian frontier. That was the big bottleneck. If the trucks could go straight on to Caspian ports and Caucasus border points, the Russians would get more materiel, much faster. Roosevelt listened -with sharp attention.
"That's interesting. Put it on your one sheet of paper."
"Don't worry," said Pug without thinking, making Roosevelt laugh again.
"Pug's been boning up on Iran, Mr. President," Hopkins said. "He's on to Pat Hurley's idea, that we should become a party to the treaty guaranteeing withdrawal of foreign armies after the war."
"Yes, Pat keeps harping on that." On Roosevelt's expressive face impatience fleetingly came and went. "Didn't the Russians reject the notion at the Moscow Conference?"
"They stalled." Hopkins, sitting beside Pug, held out a bony hand in an argumentative gesture. "I agree, sir, that we can hardly initiate it. That would be pushing ourselves into the old imperialist game. Stills' "Exactly. And I won't have that."
"But what about the Iranians, Mr. President? Suppose they ask for a guarantee that we'll get out? Then a new declaration would be in order, which would include us."
"We can't ask the Iranians to ask us," Roosevelt replied with casual candor, as though he were in the Oval Office, and not in a Soviet building where all his words were almost certainly being overheard. "That won't fool anybody. We've got three days here.
Let's stick to essentials."
He dismissed Victor Henry with a smile and a handshake.
Pug was making his way out through the noisy crowded foyer when he heard a very British voice: "I say, there's Captain Henry." It sounded like Seaton. He glanced about, and first noticed Admiral King, standing straight as a telephone pole, looking around with visible lack of love at the swarming uniformed Russians. Beside him a tanned man in a beribboned R.A.F blue uniform was smiling and beckoning. Pug had not seen Burne-Wilke in several years, and remembered him as taller and more formidable-looking. Beside King the air vice marshal appeared quite short, and he had a mild harassed look. "Hello, there" he said as Pug approached.
"You're not on your delegation's roster, are you? Pamela said she'd looked, and you weren't "Henry, I thought you were in Moscow," Admiral King said in cold harsh tones. In their rare encounters King always made Pug uneasy. It was a long time since he had thought of the Northampton, but now in a mental flash he saw his burning cruiser going down, and sensed a hallucinatory stench of petroleum in his nostrils.
"I came to Iran on special assignment, Admiral."
"You're in the delegation, then?"
"No, sir."
King stared, not likin" the vague responses.
Burne-Wilke said, "Pug, if we can manage it, let's get together while we're here."
As coolly as he could, Pug replied, "Pamela's with you, you say?"
"Yes indeed. I was summoned from New Delhi on very short notice.
Problems with the Burma campaign plans. She's still sorting out the maps and reports that we hustled together. She's my aide-decamp now, and jolly good at it.
One realizes what she must have done for poor old Talky."
DesPite King's look of distaste for this chitchat, Pug persisted, "Where is she?"
"I left her at our legation, hard at work." Burne-Wilke gestured toward the open doorway. "Why don't you pop over and say hello?"
A Jew's Journey (from Aaron Jastrow's manuscript) IT WILL Norr be easy to record my meeting with Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann. In a sense I am starting this narrative over; and not only this narrative!
Whatever I have written, all my life long, now seems to have been composed in a child's dream.
What I must put down is so dangerous that the former hiding-place of my papers will not do. As for the encipherment in Yiddish transliteration, the SS here would penetrate the poor mask instantly.
Any one of a thousand wretches in Theresienstadt would read it all off for a bowl of soup or to avoid a beating. I have discovered a more secure place. Not even Natalie will know about it. If I go in one of the transports (at the moment this still seems unlikely) the papers will molder until wreckers or renovators, probably long after this war is over, let sunlight into the walls and crevices of Theresienstadt's mournful old buildings. If I survive the war, I will find these papers where I hid th
em.
Eppstein himself came by this morning, to accompany us to the SS headquarters. He tried to be agreeable, complimenting Natalie on her looks and on the healthy appearance of Louis, whom she was clutching in her arms. Eppstein is in a pitiful position: a Jewish tool, the figurehead "mayor" (.Altester) who carries out the SS orders; a shabby Jew like the rest of us with his yellow star, making a point of wearing a clean if frayed shirt and a threadbare tie to show his hip position.
His wan, puffy, worried face is a truer badge office.
We had never been in or near SS headquarters before; a high wooden fence separates it and the entire town plaza from the Jews. The sentry passed us through the fence and we went along a street bordering the park, past a church and into a government building with offices and bulletin boards and stale-smelling corridors echoing with typewriter noise. It was very strange to come out of the grotesque and squalid ghetto into a place that, except for the large picture of Hitler in the lobby, belonged t(y the old familiar order of things. In its ordinariness, it was almost reassuring; the last thing I expected of SS headquarters. Of course I was very, very nervous.