Winston Churchill, whose Secret Intelligence Service was thought to be a model for Donovan’s OSS, once described those fledgling spy days for the United States and Europe as “the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.”
Gateway to the Lost Cities
HERE WE ARE,” said Chris as our speedboat bumped up the Río Wampú. “It’s the gateway to the lost cities.”
The protagonist of Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, Allie Fox, made a similar voyage up a fictionalized Río Wampú with his wife and three kids. In pursuit of a happier, simpler life, far away from an America that he believed to be in decline, Fox and his family eventually settle on a sliver of land along the river. They build huts and plant gardens, and soon they hear rumors of an ancient tribe, untouched by civilization, deep in the forest. “The Munchies kept themselves hidden in secret cities in the jungle,” a native tells Fox. “They had been here longer than the Miskito Indians, or Pech, or Tawahkas or Zambus. . . . They were tall and built pyramids and were in all respects a noble people.” Fox goes in search of the tribe, wondering what true freedom from modern life looks like, but he never finds them.
We had paid a skinny Tawahka man named Jiménez $150 to take us up on a fifteen-foot tin boat with a forty-horsepower Yamaha engine that the Indian owner had said made it the “fastest boat on this part of the river.” Three hours later, after we entered the rugged mountains, not far from the place on the map where Dr. Jesús Aguilar Paz had inscribed his famous question mark for the White City, Jiménez slowed the boat and let out a whistle.
He steered into a claustrophobic branch off the river and shut down the engine, allowing the boat to glide into a muddy bank. For a minute I thought we were stopping to take stock of the damage the boat had suffered on the bumpy ride upstream. But then he pointed at the rising leafage in front of us. “It’s here,” he said. “The path.”
There was no path, but we climbed out. When I joked that maybe he’d like to come with us, he was unamused. He restarted the engine and reversed the boat. We were again alone.
I began to strap on my shin guards but then decided it was too hot and my legs were too tired to walk with them on. Then something cracked overhead: a gang of monkeys in the trees. Suddenly fruit and pieces of wood were raining down on us. “They’re attacking us!” Chris yelled. Ducking for cover, we unsheathed our machetes and headed for the lost city.
WE HAD WALKED only about five minutes before Pancho raised his hand and a stranger stepped out of the green gloom. My first thought was that we were about to be ambushed. The man had shaggy black hair, clumped into greasy threads, and was hunched forward like a running back pushing through a line. His face was smudged with dirt; his jeans were slick with mud. He carried a satchel over his shoulder and swung a machete in one hand.
We never caught his name. He must have been in his late twenties or early thirties, though he had a boyish face, with murky eyes that looked like a churned-up tide pool. He said he lived in a village east of there and had been walking since the sun came up. Chris asked where he was going, and a flash of recognition crossed his face.
“My son is very sick,” the man said. “I am going to see him in Catacamas”—a two- or three-day walk. He looked up into the heavy canopy of trees, as if searching for light. There was none, only shade.
The man stuck his machete into the mud and leaned on it. Then he told us a story, taking deep breaths, as if he were slowly being unburdened of a great weight. “My baby boy was born, and he was healthy then,” he said. That had been about a month before. But then his boy had fallen ill, and his tiny body had become very hot. “Caliente,” he said, pointing at his forehead.
Over this rough land, through rivers and swamps and mountain, he and his wife had carried the newborn to a medical clinic in Catacamas, where a doctor had diagnosed a strain of flu. After a couple weeks, the baby had seemed to improve and the man had returned to his village, leaving behind his wife and baby to stay with the doctor.
A few weeks had passed, and then, a day ago, his wife had sent him a message on the radio. “She said that our son is very sick again. She said that I must come quickly.” He moved his hands in front of his narrow body, trying to make sense of something that lacked cause. Biting his lip, he said, “I’m worried that he is going to die.”
That was the last he said. He turned to go, and we followed him for a while up a steep streambed, where mud rose to our knees. He moved faster and faster, pulling farther ahead of our group, and after about an hour he was gone.
“They Had Orders to Shoot”
I LOOKED OUT THE back window a few times,” Morde wrote of the car ride to rendezvous with the German ambassador.
Worried that he was being followed by rival spies who also wanted to see the enemy, he instructed the driver to go at a fast pace through Istanbul before turning onto a back road and then racing again. He kept his head craned backward, but there was no one that he could see.
Morde carried with him a small translucent sheet of gelatin, outlining in tiny print his secret operation to kill or capture Hitler. It was unreadable without a magnifying glass. At the edge of the city, the car jerked to a halt in front of the German embassy. As he climbed out, Morde suspiciously eyed a man sitting in a car on the opposite side of the street—who was that?—and then hurried through the gate.
Inside, a bodyguard led him to a study with views of the Bosporus Strait and the walls featuring one notable decoration: a life-size portrait of Hitler in Nazi uniform. As he recalled in his official report, which would be declassified many years later, Morde was now behind enemy lines.
At the time, von Papen was considered one of Germany’s most prominent political figures, not to mention something of an enigma—the press described him as “a slick silver fox.” In 1932, under President Paul von Hindenburg, von Papen had served as the chancellor of Germany. Years earlier, during World War I, he had been expelled from the United States for organizing several bombings in New Jersey. When Hitler took power, von Papen was seen as a rival to the Nazi leader. He was demoted to vice chancellor and then to the rank of diplomat. In that role he had aided in the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the infamous purge of the summer of 1934 known as the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazi regime executed many of von Papen’s allies; hundreds of people were murdered. Von Papen was spared, however. And though he eventually returned to Hitler’s inner circle (“We must never part until our work is accomplished,” Hitler once said to him), he sometimes felt like a dead man walking.
“I came as a trusted messenger,” Morde told the ambassador, explaining that he was “disguised” as a journalist. His presence in Istanbul was “an absolute secret” and he hadn’t checked in with any authorities.
“Mr. Mord-a,” said the ambassador with a heavy German accent.
In photographs, von Papen’s lined face gave nothing away—his high flat forehead, stiff brushed mustache, and cold slits for eyes. The smile, patient and empty, could have been that of an executioner.
“A man in my position has a great weight to carry and many troubles,” the ambassador told Morde. “Several attempts have been made on my life.” The last close call had come a year earlier, when the Soviets had tried to bomb him.
Instinctually, von Papen would consider Morde an adversary. If his visit was not some kind of U.S. trick, perhaps Morde was a gestapo agent assigned to execute him.
Von Papen offered Morde a Turkish cigarette, and the two men sat down and smoked. Following a bit of light talk, though, Morde felt that the ambassador “no longer entertained any suspicions.” They were free to talk. So he reached into his pocket and produced the secret document. “It contains something you might finding interesting,” he told von Papen. “You only have my word
to vouch for whether this represents any one’s true opinions or not.”
As the ambassador read the document through a magnifying glass, Morde was struck by the emotion that suddenly washed over the man’s face. “It seemed to me that tears were very close to his eyes,” he wrote, surely relieved.
Seeing his opening, Morde laid out the plot for ending the war. With his heart pounding, he said it was time for the Germans to “get rid of Hitler” and that the Allied bombing would not end until the führer’s “capture or his death.”
Morde told him that his plan involved building up a group of German allies inside the country who would eventually rise up and, at the right moment, grab Hitler. He wanted von Papen to head up the operation, from recruiting the necessary people inside Germany to making sure that the plot went according to plan. Once captured, Morde said, the German dictator “could be flown out of Germany to a spot under American control.”
Von Papen nodded, his eyes locked with Morde’s.
And then the ambassador spoke. If the United States had Hitler, he wondered, what would it do with him? “Would he be treated as a prisoner of war?”
Morde didn’t know, but he suspected that he would be “treated . . . in accordance with his former rank as head of a state and confined in a safe place.”
The ambassador said that he would need time to think. As Morde stood to leave, von Papen placed a hand on the explorer’s shoulder and leaned close to his ear. “You cannot realize how seriously affected I am by this talk.” It was an utterly unexpected sentiment. Pointing at a vehicle out front, he added, a bit cryptically, “The car has men in it whose job is to protect me. If you had made an attempt against my life, they had orders to shoot.”
THAT NIGHT MORDE returned to a safe house, where he waited for von Papen to think things through.
In that business, there was a lot of waiting, and during those times the lost city occasionally entered his thoughts—the remoteness of the place, the serenity of the jungle gloom in its green profusion, the Westerners on the rivers who had left behind the warring world where he now made his way.
What had become of Camp Ulak? And what had happened to Burke? What about the German banana runners? The Tawahka Indians?
As the years passed, he worried that someone else might find his city. He needed to get back. He kept an eye on the news, watching for other expeditions. Meanwhile, he had heard that his friend Laurence Brown was also getting sucked into the terrible war.
In the first of three letters to the Explorers Club, he wrote, “It is my intention to return to the field of exploration as soon as the world conditions permit. Much remains to be done in Honduras.”
Still, even as he reminisced about the ancient place and talked about returning, the life of a spy increasingly engulfed him. The thing was, to be anything but single-minded in the midst of war was to risk death.
My Lowest Low
NIGHTFALL CAME, AND we were still climbing the mountain. The man’s story had left all of us silent, churning it over in our heads, until at last Pancho bent down and pointed at paw prints in the mud. “Jaguar,” he said. It seemed we were being followed. The heat had sucked out my energy, and I was lagging behind. Then people started to disappear. First I lost sight of Pancho and then of Angel. Soon Chris vanished too.
I paused for a minute and began to laugh hysterically because I was suddenly alone in this shithole jungle, as if everything had been headed for this particular moment.
Trying not to panic, I walked on and spent a long time slogging through ankle-deep muck, imagining that eventually I would find them. I made good progress for some time, trying to feel positive and hopeful about moving forward without falling on my face. But before I knew it I was treading through ten-foot-high razor grass that shut out the world, and every time I thought the grass would end, it kept going. I slipped and fell, water and sludge filling my boots and pants. I cut my hand on a rock. My shirt ripped at the chest. Mosquitoes had turned my skin to blood, and my new beard itched. I tried to jump a mud hole but tripped and fell into it instead.
That’s when I stopped. I slumped down under a tall mahogany tree and called out to Chris. To Pancho. To Angel. “Hello!” The siren pulse of insects swallowed up my voice. There was no echo. No one answered. I was out of breath. I was too tired to walk anymore. I couldn’t feel my legs. My eyelids were stones.
Sitting in the mud, I couldn’t get that young man’s face out of my head, how he was racing to see his dying son. He would probably not see his son live to be a year old—and I had just missed my daughter’s fourth birthday. I remembered the dead man I’d seen on the road weeks back. The aggressive loneliness of the place weighed on me. I was risking my life—the pirates, the snakes, the malarial air, the stalking jaguar—and for what? I remembered something Amy had said to me once: “We need to make memories together.”
My emotions bent out of shape. The farther I went into the jungle, the farther my family seemed to slip away. They were getting along without me. What had I done? In my notebook, I flipped to an open page and scribbled, “I’m so far gone,” while I began to laugh, and cry.
“I’m Having the Time of My Life”
VON PAPEN CALLED for a meeting the morning after they met and directed Morde to a private house on Prinkipo Island in the Sea of Marmara, an hour’s boat ride from the mainland. When the spy arrived, the ambassador was alone. He said that he had taken his own boat to avoid being trailed. The night before, von Papen had spent hours preparing his thoughts, writing them down on three single-spaced pages that he said he intended to destroy after the meeting.
Take notes, he told Morde, but “you are to show them to no one other than the President.”
Then the ambassador’s words came out in a rush, as if a pause might cause second thoughts. “Americans seem to think all Germans are Nazis,” he said, according to Morde’s official report. “That is not true.”
If anything was to be done about ending this war, von Papen said, he would require assurances. Morde’s plan called for building a counterrevolutionary force, but von Papen said his “friends” would not commit to doing that without a guarantee of peace for Germany, as well as a leadership role for it in Europe after the war.
Regarding Morde’s endgame of extracting Hitler, von Papen said that there was one potential obstacle: “the Nazis were still capable of tricks.” In carrying out the plan, von Papen worried, his life, as well as the lives of his family, would be in danger.
But would he do it? Morde wanted to know. “Are you willing to do your utmost to get rid of Hitler?”
Morde watched him move forward in his chair. “Yes,” the ambassador said at last. “Tell your President I will leave to contact my people in Germany. Tell him I must have something definite to offer them. Tell him that I will do my best.”
To stay in touch, the ambassador gave Morde a secret code to decipher telegrams. They had to be very cautious. “[Von Papen] said that he trusted me, and that I must be very careful,” Morde explained in a top secret agency wire. “And that in turn I could trust him without reservation not to disclose what took place between us.” When Morde turned to go, the ambassador wished him luck, and the men agreed to talk again in five or six weeks.
DAYS LATER, A military plane whisked Morde to Washington, where controversy immediately erupted. The plan caused a feud between Roosevelt’s two most trusted spy chiefs.
Robert Sherwood, who was the head of the Office of War Information, urged the president to reject the plot and even denied the government’s role in it. He suggested that Morde was operating as a rogue agent and “making a certain amount of trouble.”
Wild Bill Donovan, Morde’s immediate boss, however, encouraged Roosevelt to consider the plan as a possible way to end the war. “I beg you to read this carefully,” he wrote to the president in a top secret memo. “It contains an idea that your skill and imagination could develop. . . . If the plan went through, and if the culprits were delivered and fittingly tried a
nd executed, and if the unconditional surrender resulted, it would strengthen your position morally at the peace table.”
Without ever meeting Morde, Roosevelt rebuffed the plan; although he never explained why, the sense was that such a single-handed clandestine scheme would disrupt the tenuous alliance with Stalin and potentially undermine the Allied agreement to seek an unconditional surrender, which included the total annihilation of the Nazis and the war machine that they had created.
Of course, people would later wonder what the world would have looked like if Hitler had been murdered then. Millions of lives might have been saved, but the act might have also turned Russia against the United States, creating an entirely new front in the war.
One mystery that would remain is who actually initiated the Istanbul plot—the OSS or Morde himself? Donovan would never say, and neither would Morde.
As for the ambassador, Morde didn’t see him again. “Two or three messages did come through from Papen to Morde, which we could not break,” recalled John Toulmin, the head of the OSS branch in Cairo. “We have no idea what they said.” How much recruiting von Papen did for the internal capture-or-kill group, no one will ever know.
Later, U.S. troops would seize the ambassador in Germany. According to one of the soldiers with him that day, von Papen was overheard mumbling, “I wish this terrible war were over.” Following the Allied victory, von Papen would be tried at Nuremberg and acquitted.
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