In July of 1943, Milton Leibermann, the “legal attaché”—the euphemism for FBI agent—of the U.S. embassy, who had been forbidden by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to have any contact with OSS agents in Argentina, nevertheless called Frade. He and Frade—who regarded as asinine the OSS’s order not to have any contact with FBI agents in Argentina—had started sharing intelligence with one another almost from the day they’d met. And they had become friends.
Leibermann told Frade that he had a Wilhelm Frogger and wife, Else, cached in his apartment. Frogger, the commercial attaché of the German embassy, had been ordered home to Germany. Fearing for a number of reasons that meant he was headed for a konzentrationslager and/or a painful death, Frogger fled with his wife to Leibermann’s apartment.
Leibermann told Frade he had to get the Froggers to safety. Frade moved them to a small house on an estancia he owned in Tandil, turning them over to Sergeant Siggie Stein for interrogation.
Almost as soon as they got to Tandil, Frau Frogger, a dedicated Nazi, changed her mind. She announced that she was going to return to the embassy and place herself under the orders of the Führer. Frade thought she was crazy.
And then an attempt to either get the Froggers back or kill them was mounted by a detachment of SS troopers and a company of the Tenth Mountain Regiment. Warned of the operation by the regiment’s sergeant major—an old comrade of Enrico Rodríguez—Frade’s Private Army was ready for them.
After removing the Froggers from their hideout, and watching the Tenth Mountain reduce the house to rubble with heavy machine-gun fire and then drive away, the ex–Húsares de Pueyrredón eliminated the SS troops who had stayed behind to make sure that the Froggers were dead. They buried the bodies in unmarked graves on the Pampas.
The question then had become what to do with the Froggers.
And that problem was greatly compounded by Frau Frogger, now manifesting symptoms of total insanity.
Enrico Rodríguez suggested that she be taken to “the vineyard in Mendoza.” Until that moment, Clete had been only vaguely aware that among the properties he had inherited from his father was the vineyard called Estancia Don Guillermo.
When Clete asked the old soldier what he was talking about, Enrico told him that when Clete’s aunt lost her mind after her son’s death in Stalingrad, she had been taken to the vineyard and placed in the care of the Little Sisters of Saint Pilar. Part of the house had been converted to sort of a one-bed psychiatric hospital—and that seemed ideal for the crazy Nazi woman.
When Clete asked Enrico why he had never heard any of this, the old soldier replied, “Because you never asked, Don Cletus.”
The next step in the Frogger saga occurred when President Franklin Roosevelt became annoyed with Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American–Grace (Panagra) Airways, for his close relationship with aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. A national hero, Medal of Honor recipient “Lucky Lindy” was also a vocal critic of the President and his policies. FDR decided to punish Trippe by giving him a little competition. He authorized the sale of twenty-four Lockheed Lodestar twin-engine transports—ones the Air Corps had no need for—to a new airline, South American Airways, starting up in Argentina.
The managing director of the new airline, Señor Cletus Frade, flew to Los Angeles to take delivery of the first of the Lodestars at the Lockheed plant. There, Colonel A. F. Graham, deputy OSS director for the Western Hemisphere, told Frade that the reason the OSS was starting an airline in Argentina was because FDR ordered it, the subject not open for debate.
When Clete reported on Wilhelm Frogger and his problems therewith—Frade said that he didn’t know how far he could trust the Kraut, and that the wife was mad as a March hare—the name “Frogger” rang a bell with Graham.
Two days later, a Lockheed Constellation piloted by Howard Hughes left California with Frade and Graham aboard. Ostensibly, Hughes thought a familiarization flight with SAA’s managing director might result in future sales of the brand-new advanced aircraft. Hughes even checked out Frade on the Constellation’s peculiarities and allowed him to make half a dozen touch-and-go landings. But their secret destination had been the Senior German Officer Prisoner of War Detention Facility at Camp Clinton, Mississippi.
Camp Clinton held Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, the sole surviving son of Wilhelm and Else Frogger. He had been captured while serving with the Afrikakorps. More important, before he had been captured he had served as the contact between Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg.
Von Stauffenberg was planning to kill Adolf Hitler.
It was shortly thereafter announced that Oberstleutnant Frogger had escaped from Camp Clinton. He was believed to be trying to get to Mexico, from where he would return to Germany. FBI Director Hoover promised President Roosevelt that the full resources of the FBI would be called into motion to recapture the escaped Nazi.
By the time the last of the more than two hundred FBI agents had made it to the Mexican border to prevent Frogger’s escape, he was in Argentina, flown there by Frade in one of the Lockheed Lodestars painted in the South American Airways color scheme.
—
The first time that Frade had ever seen Niedermeyer and Strübel was some time later, as they boarded one of SAA’s Constellations in Frankfurt. Traveling on Vatican passports, the Germans had been wearing the brown robes and the sandals of Franciscan monks.
Frau Niedermeyer and Frau Strübel also had been on that flight, and wearing the white robes of the Order of the Little Sisters of the Poor. And the three Niedermeyer children carried Vatican passports identifying them as orphans on their way to Argentina to be placed in the care of distant relatives.
Frade had been told Obersturmbannführer Alois Strübel had been sent by General Gehlen to determine whether the Americans would—or could—make good on their promise to keep the officers of the Gehlen Organization and their families out of the hands of the Russians. Hauptscharführer (Sergeant Major) Niedermeyer had been sent along to help.
That had been a relatively long time ago—just over two years—and neither Strübel nor Niedermeyer any longer dressed like Franciscan friars or, for that matter, much like Germans. Today, Strübel and Frogger were both wearing well-tailored business suits, appropriate to people engaged in the wine trade, their new cover. And Niedermeyer was more spectacularly dressed. He wore a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches much like the one that Jimmy Cronley had inherited from Clete Frade’s father. Niedermeyer also had on riding breeches, highly polished riding boots, and a pale yellow silk shirt, and knotted around his neck was a foulard. He could easily pass for a successful estanciero, and that, in fact, was what he had become.
In their first serious meeting—after Niedermeyer had confessed to being General Gehlen’s Number Three and a lieutenant colonel, and had sent word to Gehlen that it would be safe to start sending Abwehr Ost officers, non-coms, and their families into the care of the Americans—the question came up of how to pay for establishing new homes and lives for what eventually would be about a hundred “Good Gehlen” families and one-quarter that many “Nazi Gehlen” families.
It had already been agreed between General Gehlen and Allen W. Dulles that once the Germans got to Argentina, the Americans—in other words, Frade—would continue to pay their Wehrmacht/SS salaries, including family allowances. They would be paid what their American counterparts would be paid—except, Dulles said, not paid extra, as Americans were, for service outside their home country.
Dulles arranged for the OSS to send a million dollars in cash to Clete via the American embassy for this purpose, and promised to send more, as needed. Clete knew the million dollars wouldn’t last long and he didn’t think that additional money would be sent. Dulles knew that Clete had inherited his father’s enormous wealth, and knew that Frade would continue to pay the Gehlens should it be decided that additional funds could not be sent because of the likelihood the wrong people would find out about it and ask questions that
couldn’t be answered about why millions of dollars were being sent to Argentina.
Dulles expecting Frade to support the operation out of his own pocket wasn’t fair to Frade, of course. But it reminded Frade that someone had once observed, “All’s fair in love and war.”
Yet Frade had managed to come up with the money, more or less painlessly.
In April 1943, Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, then the assistant military attaché for air at the German embassy, had tipped off Clete to the German plan to smuggle ashore a shipment of valuables—not further described—and approximately forty members of the SS from an ostensibly neutral Spanish merchant steamer.
The illicit landing on the shore of Samborombón Bay would be under the supervision of Oberst Grüner, the military attaché, his deputy, Standartenführer Goltz, and Major von Wachtstein.
Frade had been delighted. Once he had smoking-gun photographs of Grüner, Goltz, and von Wachtstein smuggling, he would deliver them to the U.S. ambassador, who would immediately hand them to the Argentine foreign minister as he registered a formal complaint with the Argentine foreign ministry.
Although the Argentine government tilted heavily toward the Third Reich, they would not be able to ignore this outrageous breach of their sovereignty and neutrality. The Germans would be embarrassed, and the Spaniards could no longer righteously proclaim their own neutrality.
Maxwell Ashton III, then a captain, was dispatched to the beach with two Leica cameras. Clete sent Enrico with him to serve as scout and bodyguard.
On the beach, as Ashton snapped away, Oberst Grüner’s forehead came to be in the crosshairs of the Zeiss 4× telescopic sight mounted on what had been el Coronel Frade’s favorite 7mm Mauser hunting rifle. Enrico then blew Grüner’s brains out, turned the rifle on Standartenführer Goltz and blew his brains out, and then emptied the magazine on the SS men on the beach, being careful not to shoot Major von Wachtstein.
Clete understood why Enrico had done what he had—Enrico knew Grüner had hired the assassins who had murdered Clete’s father and Enrico’s sister—but he was nonetheless furious with the old soldier for ruining his planned diplomatic triumph.
The old soldier was unrepentant.
He waited until Clete had stopped screaming at him, then gave him a huge, heavy leather box.
“I brought this from the beach, Don Cletus. I thought you should have it.”
Clete was so furious that he didn’t even look in the box for three days.
When he finally opened it, it took him twenty minutes to count the $32,500,000 in brand-new U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills it contained. They were still in the packing in which they had come from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
Frade had a pretty good idea whose cash it was. It was money intended for someone very high in the Nazi hierarchy—perhaps Himmler or Goering, someone at that level—to buy refuge in Argentina once the Thousand-Year Reich came tumbling down around them.
He quickly realized that while it might have been Himmler’s or Goering’s money, that was no longer true. It was now his.
But what to do with it?
He knew if he told Allen Dulles, then the OSS, always short of money, would send an airplane to take it away.
Clete put the money in his father’s safe and allowed it to just slip his mind to mention it to Dulles.
When the million dollars Dulles had sent him to fund OPERATION OST ran out—even more quickly than Clete thought it would; he had spent almost $500,000 buying a small hotel in Rosario to discreetly house the arriving Gehlens until other arrangements could be made for them—he had to dip into the $32.5 million.
The next step had been to make loans from it so the Gehlens could buy houses or apartments and go into businesses of one kind or another. Niedermeyer had talked him out of just making grants; if the Gehlens knew they would have to repay the loans, he said, they would have a real interest in making their new businesses successful.
He himself, Niedermeyer said, would be interested in buying a farm on which he could raise cattle and horses “even before this is all over.”
Clete was not as naïve as he suspected Niedermeyer and the other Gehlens thought he was. He wondered, for example, what he would do if any of them, including Niedermeyer, didn’t repay the money they were borrowing. It was certainly a possibility that Niedermeyer recognized a cash cow when he saw one.
And he wondered why Niedermeyer had asked him for a pistol. Who did he think he was going to have to shoot in Mendoza? But he gave him the benefit of the doubt and provided a Ballester-Molina .45 ACP pistol from the cache of arms in the basement of Casa Montagna.
Within a week, quite by accident, Niedermeyer literally bumped into SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg in the men’s room of the Edelweiss Hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche. Von Deitzberg was first deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
Both had been in San Carlos de Bariloche for the same purpose, to acquire real estate to house Germans for whom the Fatherland was about to be no longer hospitable. Von Deitzberg had come secretly by submarine to Argentina to implement OPERATION PHOENIX, which would see the senior Nazi leadership find sanctuary in Argentina, and start the process by which National Socialism would rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich.
The SS had no idea of the deal struck between General Gehlen and Allen W. Dulles, and if von Deitzberg learned of it, everyone connected with Abwehr Ost still in Germany and Russia—and most of its personnel were still there in the spring of 1943—would be arrested, tortured, and executed.
Niedermeyer the next day told Clete of the encounter, and that he had taken the only action appropriate to the situation: He had used the Ballester-Molina .45 to eliminate SS-Brigadeführer von Deitzberg. He said he was sure he was “gone” as he had shot him twice in the face. And, no, he added, the police were not looking for him.
“Like you, Colonel,” Niedermeyer had said, “I’m a professional.”
After that, Clete had felt much safer in trusting Niedermeyer and had turned over to him just about all of the responsibility for dealing with both the Good Gehlens and the Nazi Gehlens. And when Niedermeyer asked to borrow three-quarters of a million dollars to purchase the estancia he had seen near San Carlos de Bariloche, Clete handed him packages of crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills two days later.
Clete had also dipped into “the money in the safe” for other purposes. For example, he had built the building everyone called The BOQ with it, and used it to fortify the mountaintop, and paid and equipped his private army of ex–Húsares de Pueyrredón. They, after all, were working for the OSS, not for Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
—
“Now that everyone knows everybody else,” Frade said, “with your kind permission I will continue. Was all that protection at the airport and that convoy here necessary? All those Thompsons scared the hell out of the women.”
“This woman was curious, my darling,” Dorotea said, “not on the edge of hysteria.”
“Okay. Then it scared hell out of me,” Clete said. “Was it necessary?”
“We’ve been under increased surveillance, Clete . . .” Major Ashton began.
“By whom?”
“Well, the only way we can learn that is by asking them,” Niedermeyer said. “And if we do that, they’ll know we know they’re snooping. We thought we’d ask you first before we grab—or dispose of—one or more of them.”
“We suspect, of course,” Frogger said, “that it’s people from the Tenth Mountain. And, letting my imagination run wild, I thought there was at least a possibility that whoever it is might be thinking of attacking our people while they’re on the road between here and the airport.”
“I can’t imagine who they might want to do that to,” Clete said sarcastically. He turned to Captain Garcia. “Alfredo, how angry do you think General Martín would be if he heard I told these people you’re actually Teniente Coronel Garcia and the Number Three at BIS?”
&nbs
p; “Livid,” Garcia said, shaking his head and smiling.
“Then I guess I’d better not tell them, huh? We know none of them can keep a secret. So tell me, Captain Garcia, what you would do about these people who are spying on us with an eye to ambushing us?”
“First, I would find out who they are,” Garcia said.
“And how would you do that?”
“I’d arrange for the Gendarmería Nacional to make a random patrol where they were last seen. The gendarmería can question the Ejército—the Policía Federal can’t.”
“And you have acquaintances in the gendarmerie, right?”
“Don Cletus, I’d rather wait until the general gets here,” Garcia said.
“Martín is coming here?” Niedermeyer asked, surprised. “I’d have thought he’d be in the hospital.”
“There’s an SAA Lodestar with Martín and a bunch of his BIS people en route here now,” Frade said. “He had some things to take care of in Buenos Aires. And von Wachtstein is bringing with him Boltitz, von Dattenberg—”
“Willi von Dattenberg?” Niedermeyer said.
Frade nodded, and went on: “And as many of my people who can fit in my Lodestar. One or both of them should be landing within the next thirty minutes or so. So we can wait, Alfredo, until he gets here before we call the gendarmes.”
“The gendarmes are going to be far more receptive to a request from General Martín than they would be to one from Captain Garcia,” Garcia said.
“Understood,” Frade said.
“Whatever is going on seems very interesting,” Niedermeyer said. “Starting with why is von Dattenberg coming here? I would have thought he’d be confined somewhere, or at the very least have been interned with the Graf Spee survivors at Villa General Belgrano.”
“He was in Villa General Belgrano,” Frade said, stopped, and after a moment went on: “You’re not going to like this answer, Otto.”
“Well, that would certainly be a first for us, wouldn’t it, Cletus?” Niedermeyer replied, lightly sarcastic.
“And it will probably piss off Frogger, Strübel, von Wachtstein, Boltitz, and my wife, as well.”
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