by Dan Simmons
Axel Wenner-Gren was one of the richest men on the planet. He was also—the FBI, the BSC, the COI, the ONI, and every other intelligence agency in the Western Hemisphere was certain—a Nazi spy. Wenner-Gren had his own nickname in the counterintelligence community—“the Swedish Sphinx.” The millionaire had founded Swedish Elektrolux and was a chief shareholder in the Bofors gun-manufacturing corporation. Wenner-Gren’s contacts with Hitler’s lieutenants and German intelligence filled, I knew, a separate dossier larger than that of Howard Hughes. In the past few years, the Swedish industrialist had come into my sphere of SIS concern in Mexico and the Latin American region.
At the outbreak of the war between Germany and England, Wenner-Gren had established his own bank in the Bahamas and become close friends with the Duke of Windsor, becoming so trusted that the duke appointed him as his personal banker. I knew from my own midnight chamfering that British Security Coordinator Stephenson and his second in command, Ian Fleming, considered the Duke of Windsor a traitor and maintained a constant surveillance on Axel Wenner-Gren as the duke’s primary liaison with Nazi Germany.
During the week in which the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, six months before, the U.S. government had blacklisted Wenner-Gren, denying him a visa and an entry permit. The multimillionaire had moved his base of operations to Mexico, where my group of the SIS noted his contacts with Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr agents in that country. Specifically, we had become convinced that Wenner-Gren was financing an attempt to overthrow Mexico’s current president.
After buying the Southern Cross from Howard Hughes the previous autumn, Axel Wenner-Gren had further modified the yacht—giving it sophisticated radio and shortwave capabilities and super-long-range fuel tanks as well as arming it with heavy machine guns, a hundred and fifteen rifles, and antitank rockets—and then given it as a gift to Dr. Paul Fejos and the Viking Fund.
Fejos’s name was not as familiar to me. Born in Hungary in 1896, Fejos had been a cavalry officer and pilot in the Great War, earned a medical degree, and then gone on to direct plays, operas, and motion pictures in his home country before becoming an American citizen in 1929. Unhappy with Hollywood’s way of making films, Fejos had returned to Europe to make movies for MGM there. He had come back to the United States in 1940 and set up the Viking Fund in New York City in 1941. Chartered as a nonprofit organization to finance explorations with the goal of finding lost Inca cities in the Peruvian jungles—said explorations to be recorded on film by Paul Fejos and sold commercially despite the Viking Fund’s nonprofit status—the FBI considered the organization a front for pro-German intelligence operations. The first contribution to the Viking Fund last winter had been Axel Wenner-Gren’s gift of the modified 320-foot yacht the Southern Cross.
All this was of interest, but not nearly as interesting as the fact that Dr. Fejos’s current wife was one Inga Arvad.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered a third and final time. These were just carbons and duplicates of Inga Arvad’s file, but this excerpt must run to 150 single-spaced pages. I flipped through them, pausing at the photographs and photostats and transcripts of ELINT (electronic surveillance), TELSUR (telephone surveillance), and FISUR (physical surveillance). Inga Arvad had been and still was one heavily surveilled dame.
It was then that I recognized a phenomenon which I had witnessed scores of times in field work. Different agencies had followed different spoors to the same nexus, converging—as they were converging now on Arvad and the Southern Cross—without premeditation or plan. Donovan’s COI soon-to-be OSS had become deeply interested in Axel Wenner-Gren, as had my own SIS. Fleming’s and Stephenson’s BSC were obviously interested in Wenner-Gren and the Southern Cross. U.S. Naval Intelligence was sure that the yacht had been modified as part of a scheme to refuel German submarines in the Caribbean or off the coast of South America or both. The FBI had become obsessed with Inga Arvad and followed her trail to the yacht, Wenner-Gren, and all the rest.
Inga Arvad’s life—even the snippets of it I was skimming through in this abbreviated dossier—was the sort of true-life tale that Hemingway and his ilk could never get away with putting in their made-up stories. It bordered on the unbelievable—despite the fact that Inga Arvad was only twenty-eight years old and didn’t seem old enough to have done all that was attributed to her here.
Inga Maria Arvad was born on October 6, 1913, in Copenhagen, Denmark. She had been a beautiful, precocious child, studying dance and piano under masters, and had been crowned Beauty Queen of Denmark at the ripe old age of sixteen. The same year, she competed in Paris for the title of Miss Europe, was offered a job in the Folies-Bergere, but chose instead to elope with an Egyptian diplomat when she was seventeen. She divorced him two years later.
There were numerous photographs of Arvad in the dossier. The first showed a very young and very beautiful blonde sitting next to Adolf Hitler in what looked to be a sports arena. The label on the back read “Inga Arvad and Adolf Hitler, Berlin Olympics, 1936”. The accompanying report said that after Arvad had left the Egyptian diplomat, then starred in a Norwegian-based movie directed by Paul Fejos, and then begun an on-again, off-again affair with the director, she had suddenly gone off to Berlin as correspondent for the Copenhagen newspaper Berlingske Tidene. There had been no mention of any journalistic training before this, but it was becoming obvious that whatever young Miss Inga Arvad wished to do, she did.
Here there was an insert of an FBI interview with Arvad dated just a few months ago, December 12, 1941. In the transcript, Arvad stated that her assignments in Germany had been to interview prominent persons—including Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels—and that she “might have been present in Hitler’s box on one occasion when the Führer was there.” The FBI reports from that period suggested that the relationships had been a little more personal: that Arvad had been invited to Hermann Goering’s private wedding ceremony, at which Adolf Hitler was the best man; that Hitler had described the young Arvad as “a perfect example of Nordic beauty” and had begged her “to visit me every time you return to Berlin.”
It looked as if she had. Despite the fact that she had quit her job as “correspondent” before the Summer Olympics of 1936—after marrying Dr. Paul Fejos—she had been a guest of the Führer in his private box at the Olympic Games and had become good friends with Goering and even closer friends with Rudolf Hess. According to the FBI report, Arvad had made her last visit to Berlin in 1940, when she had been invited to work for the German Propaganda Ministry. In her December 12, 1941, interview with the FBI, Arvad said that she had turned down the offer, but a 1936 clipping from the International News Service stated that even then Hitler “had made her Chief of Nazi propaganda in Denmark.” She had been twenty-two that year.
According to the dossier, Arvad had married Dr. Paul Fejos in 1936, but she had been the mistress of Axel Wenner-Gren before and after that wedding ceremony. When Fejos and Arvad had moved to the United States in 1940, it was her lover, Wenner-Gren, who had set up the Viking Fund, chartered in Delaware with its actual headquarters in New York City.
There followed several pages of Naval Intelligence threat estimates and photostats of the shipbuilder’s designs of the Southern Cross. I pulled out the design, folded it, and put it in my pocket.
“Hey!” shouted Delgado, straightening up from where he had been straddling the chair. “You can’t take that.”
“I need it,” I said. “Shoot me.” I checked my watch—five minutes left before I had to get back to the finca—and went on to the last section of the dossier.
The entire Arvad file was still active, but this last section was filled with recent surveillance reports, wiretap transcripts, bugging transcripts, and copies of letters photographed during FBI black bag jobs. All of it involved a romantic liaison between Inga Arvad and a young officer in U.S. Naval Intelligence, Ensign John F. Kennedy.
I realized from the notes that this was one of the sons of Joseph P. Kennedy, the
millionaire and former U.S. ambassador to England. Everyone in the Bureau knew that Director Hoover was friends with Ambassador Kennedy—keeping the Irish patriarch up-to-date on classified information which might benefit him—but we also knew that Hoover distrusted Kennedy, considering him dangerously pro-German, and that there was a thick and constantly updated O/C file on the former ambassador. Surveillance on Arvad had reached a fever pitch since the previous December—shortly after Pearl Harbor—when Wenner-Gren’s mistress and Hitler’s favorite Nordic beauty had begun an extramarital affair with the twenty-four-year-old Ensign Kennedy. As an officer in the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the Division of Naval Intelligence, Ensign Kennedy was cleared for top-secret reports and was involved on a daily basis with rewriting decrypts from foreign stations for the ONI’s various bulletins and in-house memos.
Since December, both ONI counterintelligence and the FBI had been monitoring the Kennedy-Arvad affair with the assumption that not only was there a security leak in progress but that Kennedy might be an active participant in a Nazi espionage operation. It was obvious that the FBI part of the surveillance included mail chamfering, black bag jobs, phone taps, physical surveillance, and interviews with everyone from one of the young Kennedy’s sisters, who had introduced him to Arvad at the paper where they worked, to statements taken from janitors, mailmen, and bellboys at the hotels and apartments where the couple held their illicit meetings.
December 12, 1941—A memo to Director Hoover states that Frank Waldrop, editor at the Washington Times Herald, contacted a special agent in charge at the Washington field office to report that Miss P. Huidekoper, a reporter at that paper, had stated to Miss Kathleen Kennedy, another reporter at that paper, that their mutual acquaintance Inga Arvad, a columnist for the Times Herald, was almost certainly a spy for some foreign power. The memorandum sent to Hoover that day was headed “Mrs. Paul Fejos, alias Inga Arvad”. Since Hoover had been keeping a confidential file on Arvad since the day she and her husband had arrived in America in November 1940, the revelation was small surprise to the director.
December 14, 1941—Full-scale surveillance is set up at Arvad’s apartment at 1600 Sixteenth Street, #505. Dr. Fejos had left the country that day—bound again for Peru as part of his mysterious Viking Fund project—and Arvad’s secret lover had appeared to spend successive nights in the married woman’s bedroom. It seemed that Axel Wenner-Gren’s mistress’s lover was a U.S. naval ensign who wore “a gray overcoat with raglan sleeves and gray tweed trousers. He does not wear a hat and has blonde curly hair which is always tousled… he is known only as Jack.”
Within twenty-four hours, the Office of Naval Intelligence has identified “Jack” as John F. Kennedy, son of Ambassador Kennedy, an ONI ensign assigned to Washington Naval Intelligence Headquarters. But the FBI is still in the dark. The file begins to fill up with intercepted communications between Kennedy and Arvad, Hitler’s “perfect Nordic beauty.”
January 1, 1942—Telegram from Kennedy, in New York, to Arvad:
They are not keeping them flying so I won’t be there until 11:30 by train. I would advise your going to bed, but if you come, buy a thermos and make me some soup. Who would take care of me if you didn’t?
Love, Jack.
On that same New Year’s Day, FBI Special Agent Hardison acknowledges that all attempts to solve the identity of the assumed agent codenamed “Jack” have proved to be “entirely unproductive” but that the Bureau is still working on it.
Meanwhile, ONI—based on its memos included in the dossier—is becoming worried. An interdepartmental intelligence conference on December 31 includes notes on a conversation between Assistant Director Captain Klingman of the ONI to top FBI officials Tamm and Ladd “relative to Ambassador Kennedy’s son, who is reported to be going to marry a woman who will divorce her present husband.” The follow-up FBI memo by Ladd stated to the director: “Captain Klingman stated that they find this boy is ‘right here in our midst,’ and he wanted to know more of the circumstances…”
So while Special Agent Hardison and his men were puzzling over the identity of Arvad’s New Year’s Eve lover, Director Hoover was on the phone checking it out himself. A memo from the director reported: “Captain Klingman stated that he will handle the matter properly.”
January 9, 1942—A copy of a request from the Chief of Naval Operations to the Bureau of Navigation requests that Ensign “Joseph F. Kennedy” be transferred immediately out of Washington, D.C. They meant “John F. Kennedy.” The Bureau of Navigation, according to a separate ONI report, took no action. Surveillance on the suspected female Nazi spy and her intelligence service lover continued and intensified.
January 11, 1942—An intercepted letter from Dr. Paul Fejos, currently working for Axel Wenner-Gren’s Viking Fund front organization, to his wife, Inga Arvad:
You, dearest, can be more cryptic than the prophets of the Old Testament. You write that if you would be eighteen, you would probably marry Jack. I suppose it means Jack Kennedy. Then you follow up with, “But I would, might probably, choose you instead.” Now, my inconsistent child, what is all this about? Has anything gone wrong with yours or Jack’s love? Or is this again your sweet charity feeling toward me? Anything but that please. You see, Darling, you have made me some very difficult days with those charity attempts, and honestly it is far more human if you don’t do them. Slowly I will get used to it, that I am without you, and that you cannot be reached, had—and things will heal (I hope) and there would not be any use to try to be charitable and therefore unwillingly, but in the final result: Cruel.
There is, however, one thing I want to tell you in connection with your Jack. Before you let yourself go into this thing any deeper, lock stock and barrel, have you thought that maybe the boy’s father or family will not like the idea?
I stopped reading and looked at my watch. Time was up. But there were just a few more pages of dossier to scan, a few more photographs. Hemingway could wait a few minutes.
What the hell kind of impotent asshole was this Dr. Fejos, writing his wife this sort of whining garbage? I looked back at the photographs of Inga Arvad. Short, curly blond hair. Pencilled eyebrows. Full lips. Perfect complexion. Beautiful, all right, but not worth this sort of demeaning behavior. But then, what woman would be?
I studied the photos another moment. Though they might be sisters, this was not the woman I had seen swimming naked early this morning. Inga Arvad looked like a natural blonde.
I flipped through the last twenty pages of the dossier.
January 12, 1942—While FBI counterintelligence experts are still working on the identity of the Arvad contact “code-named Jack,” Walter Winchell’s syndicated column announces: “One of ex-Ambassador Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so that she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.”
January 13, 1942—Ensign John F. Kennedy is transferred out of Washington to a navy base in Charleston, South Carolina.
January 19, 1942—Special Agent Hardison’s surveillance report:
Ensign known only as Jack is confirmed to have definitely spent the nights of January 16, 17, and 18 with subject Arvad at Arvad’s apartment. Bureau continues 24-hour surveillance. It is the opinion of Agent Hardison that this man lives someplace in the immediate neighborhood and after spending the night with the subject, goes to his own apartment, changes to his uniform and then returns to her apartment for breakfast.
January 19, 1942—ONI surveillance confirms that Ensign Jack Kennedy has flown from Washington to join his father in Florida before beginning his assignment in Charleston.
January 19, 1942—Intercepted letter from Inga Arvad to Jack Kennedy’s new naval base postal box in Charleston:
January 19, 1942—the first time I missed anybody and felt lonely and as though I was the only inhabitant of Washington.
Loving—knowing it, being helpless about it, and yet not feeling anything bu
t complete happiness. At last realizing what makes Inga tick.
January 24–25, 1942—Agent Hardison and his crack team “lose” Inga, report that her whereabouts are “unknown.” The accompanying ONI report shows that Inga Arvad was waiting for Ensign Kennedy in Charleston when he reported for duty at his new assignment.
January 26, 1942—An intercepted letter from Arvad to Kennedy:
The further the train pulled away, the less visible was the young handsome Boston Bean… I slept like a log. At midday we arrived to the Capital of the United States. To that same Union Station, where I went on January the First 1942 as happy as a bird, without a care, a fear or trouble in the world—just in love—remember?
“Have you started making the baby yet,” was a question asked me today. Guess by whom?
And so the love letters continue. And around the lovebirds, more agencies become involved in surveillance and countersurveillance. It becomes obvious in the reports that Director Hoover had used the Arvad affair to resume hostile surveillance of Colonel Donovan of the COI. Out of self-defense, Donovan’s group begins a countersurveillance of Arvad and the host of FBI and ONI agents watching her.
On the same day that Arvad is writing her January 26 love letter to young Kennedy, Hoover is alerting the attorney general of the United States about his “current investigation of this woman as an espionage suspect,” concluding that Arvad may well be “engaged in a most subtle type of espionage activities against the United States.”
January 29, 1942—The special agent in charge of the investigation, taking over from the clueless Hardison, notes that the Arvad case has “got more possibilities than anything I have seen in a long time.”
February 4, 1942—The director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit at the Department of Justice writes Hoover demanding a “report of all information you have in your files in respect of… Mrs. Inga Fejos, 1600-16th St., NW, Washington, D.C. which I desire in considering whether a Presidential Warrant of apprehension should be issued.”