“Where’s Dr. Weizmann?” Eleanor asked the reporter next to her. The aristocratic old scientist who had led the Zionists for three decades was nowhere to be seen.
“Back at the hotel, that’s what they said. I heard it was too much for the old guy.”
“Too much for me,” Eleanor said, her lips dry. She could feel her heart pounding the way it did the moment her kayak hit white water. There was a lull in the din from below while an impassive Arab delegation in their fluttering traditional robes moved down the aisle in full sail. It was just before five p.m. and the last of the preliminary speakers had just sat down. Below her, Foster sat with the American delegation. He had nodded at her, and his face, as usual, was inscrutable. She raised her arms questioningly and he shrugged back.
If Foster doesn’t know …
Perhaps the newspapers were right, all the pressure on the swing countries had come up short. Below, the assembly president was gaveling the partition vote to order. The coughs and mutterings began to die away as the president motioned to an aide to bring a simple wicker basket to him. It contained each of fifty-six nations’ names on small slips of paper. He straightened and peered out into the great hall, at the murmuring sea of faces before him.
“Guatemala,” he said firmly, put the slip aside, then waited.
It was as if a great electric current surged through the assembly, shocking it instantly into an uncanny silence. The world is here, Eleanor thought, and it’s holding its breath.
The chief Guatemalan delegate rose to cast his vote.
Behind Eleanor, from near the back wall of the spectators’ gallery, a single strained voice called out, harsh but clear: “Ana ad Hoshiya!” There was an uproar, which the president gaveled down.
The newsmen were going mad, desperate to decode the shout. “It means ‘Lord, save us,’” a voice spoke up clearly, a voice with an eastern European accent by way of England. “It’s Hebrew.”
She turned to see where he was, but the pillar stood in her way. She braced herself against the chair back and leant far to her right, but she couldn’t see if it was really him.
“Pro, señor,” the Guatemalan delegate announced.
Another sea of murmurs rose, washed over the hall, and subsided. Eleanor penciled a rough grid on the back of an envelope and entered a slash under yes.
The next slip appeared in the president’s hand: “France.”
The French had abstained on Wednesday. Several dozen heads on the floor swiveled to see what the French would do when the vote counted.
“Pour, monsieur le président,” intoned the French delegate. The hall gasped as one. The president, this time with his gavel ready, thumped the vote to order with several sharp blows.
The next votes were evenly and predictably split: the USSR for, Cuba against, Mexico abstaining.
The following vote was a sensation: the Haitian delegate, opposed on Wednesday, stood and voted for.
Then, one after another, the Latin American countries either abstained or voted for; Cuba aside, there was not a single “against” vote in the entire Western hemisphere. Even the hardened reporters were struck dumb, their pens in midair, as they watched the Bolivian delegate sit down, another completely unexpected reversed vote, the third of three in from Catholic Latin America. Several votes later, Eleanor looked around the pillar again as Nicaragua also reversed its vote, moving the pro vote ever closer to partition.
Misha was huddled with two other men near the door. He didn’t look up. She could not reach him: the press box was shoulder to shoulder.
Eleanor looked down at her own scribbled record of the vote. Norway led a run of five fors in a row. Brazil, Byelorussia, Denmark: for. India: against. Then another three in a row for: Ukraine, the Dominican Republic, and, dramatically, New Zealand a change from Wednesday’s abstention. The newsmen realized almost as one that they had a hell of a story on their hands, even as the Venezuelan delegate voted for. China abstained. Poland: for.
“What you got, Lou?” a reporter in a porkpie hat demanded.
“Twenty-six for, eight abstentions, eight against, with fourteen to go,” Lou, standing at Eleanor’s feet, replied in a Brooklyn accent.
“Jeez, they’re swimming in abstentions,” the first said. “They might win the damn thing. That’d be something.”
Chile abstained. Now you could hear a pin drop as the president pulled the remaining Middle Eastern nations from the hat.
“There goes my five bucks,” the other reporter joked as Saudi Arabia voted against.
Then it was down to the final dozen votes.
Eleanor checked her tally.
The United Kingdom’s Sir Alexander Cadogan announced His Majesty’s government would abstain from voting.
Two against: Turkey and Pakistan.
Then South Africa: for.
Yugoslavia abstained.
When it came time for the Dutch delegate to rise, the entire hall knew the magic number.
The Dutchman voted for.
The assembly hall went stone quiet as the president drew Iceland’s slip.
Iceland voted for.
Inside the hall there was a kind of awed silence for a moment. Then, even as the radio broadcast told the crowd outside that history had been made, a dull roar penetrated the hall.
The Jews, for the first time since the Romans destroyed the temple of Solomon, had a homeland of their own.
The stream of people carried Eleanor along to the front doors of the skating rink, where photographers had gathered and where a copse of microphones stood, awaiting the reactions of the diplomats still eddying from the exits.
She saw no one she knew, least of all Misha, until the flow of people swept her outside, onto the forecourt, where a madly happy throng ignored the gloomy dusk tinged with rain. “We have a country!” one woman called out of the crowd, which wasn’t quite true. What the Jews had now was a place to fight for, and that, as Eleanor well knew, was a very different thing.
She tried to work her way to the row of cars and limousines in the driveway, but she could not; the silent, proud Arabs, their pure white robes shimmering, were leaving, they too thinking of the fight ahead. The crush was impossible.
Then, against all odds, she turned and saw three or four men moving toward the rank of cars. A cry went up from the crowd as they recognized the leaders of the Jewish Agency and called their names: Shertok, Shiloah, and the others, each of them wreathed in smiles. And, to one side, a younger one, curly-haired, smiling for all he was worth too, his profile unmistakable. Eleanor called out.
Misha turned to the waiting cars and saw her then. He cut through the crowd toward her, and by the time he reached her Eleanor found she could no longer see for the tears.
He kissed her, hard, holding her fiercely, and she could feel his tears on her cheek. “You haven’t shaved,” she whispered.
“I’ve been a little busy,” he said as the crowd began to sing the Hatikvah as one. “I’ve a memento for you.”
She took the simply wrapped package and felt its heft, then smiled. She kissed him, deep into the bristles on his cheek. “Grunau,” was all she said.
“That’s right, from the boathouse. I found it.” He pressed it into her hand.
The crowd surged around them, a sea of singing people, faces wreathed in pure joy. Misha looked around him for a moment and Eleanor caught his uncertain expression. “Where are you going now?” she asked as the crowd pressed them together; she could see the hauntedness in the depths of his eyes.
He turned to look at her, his face set, driving his hands deep into his coat pockets. “I told you once before: Berlin.”
“Berlin? You’re joking. Truly?”
Misha nodded. “Berlin can always use a few Jews like me.”
“It seems a little perverse, Mish. I mean, what’s there for you?”
“I’m a European Jew, Ellie. I can’t live in Palestine, not me.
I’m a different breed.”
“What will y
ou do?”
“I’m thinking a lot of nothing for a while. Play my horn, mostly, maybe open a jazz club. I have a little money.”
“In a Swiss bank?”
“Very funny,” Misha replied, and smiled gently. “Well, this is it. I’m on a boat tonight.”
“Boats again,” she said, trying to be brave.
“Boats again,” he agreed, meaning it, and bent close to her, kissing her gently, this time full and sweet.
“Congratulations, Mish,” was all Eleanor could say, nodding, a blessing and farewell all at once, as she touched his cheek again. “You should go. They’re holding the car for you.”
He kissed her once more and turned back into the crowd, cutting his way through the chanting, singing mass. Then he stopped and shouted something.
Eleanor held her hand to her ear, puzzled.
“I mean ‘Thank you’!” Misha shouted again. “Shalom!” Then he was gone, a face in a car, a smudge of white, a hand waving, gone.
LIX
A cool rain edged off the Long Island Sound, melting the last of the wild day into night, streaking the sidewalks with ripples of light. There were, for once, more cabs than fares, the world’s diplomats generously offering one another the next car, their correctness unruffled by the history they had wrought. The wind gusted and the rain fell harder, blackening the naked limbs of the Flushing Meadows trees. The police kept the two Palestinian contingents, Arab and Jew, well apart, and their shouts and counter-shouts blended into a crude human roar, but on the fringes of both sides the thoughtful weighed what had just happened inside the old rink, and were struck silent.
A figure edged through the throng on the curb, a package jammed against her side, carefully taped and labeled. Its corner caught the Italian ambassador’s sleeve and there was a gentle moment as he recognized the smallish woman wearing the thick spectacles and the broken smile. The two exchanged apologies in Italian; the crowd closed in and the moment was gone in the cool breath of a fresh downpour. There are some victories best tasted alone.
Eleanor Dulles walked into the angling showers, her umbrella bobbing in the crosswind, her shadow an awkward shape against the flat gray buildings, the heels of her sensible shoes leaving ringlets of light in the pools of rainwater. She turned a corner and the mob’s shoutings faded into the hiss of the falling rain.
She stopped and peeled back the stiff brown paper and looked down at the oval cameo, the faces of the crowd at the long-ago regatta, serene, the rowers with their oars held vertically, Masai with their assegais, she thought, the women in their hoop skirts and cinched waists and full hats, so beautiful. One of the rowers standing caught her eye, a darkish fellow, muscular, his shoulders round with bunched strength, his crossed arms smooth and perfect. He had his back to one of the columns of the Krumme Lanke pergola. How young he seemed.
Eleanor walked on, still light-headed. Perhaps it was Goethe, she thought to herself, muddled and sharply rational all at once, the feelings tumbling through her like clouds—or was it Schiller? She couldn’t recall anything save the words themselves: So empty is the space / where once my heart did beat / as in love, so in treachery—was that right? or was it “conspiracy”?—it is given to us to live / such things to the full / but once.
Eleanor turned west and considered the street ahead of her. Manhattan was a smear on the horizon, a child’s watercolor of a city awaiting winter. She wandered to the river’s edge, a small middle-aged woman thickening at the waist, her wool skirt shivering in the November wind, a stray strand of her gray hair trapped beneath the bridge of her spectacles. She came to the railing and pulled her hair back, straightening her glasses to see the far shore. As she did so, the last of the sun breached the clouds and a pillar of light carved a bright disk on the dark surface of the river.
A small sailboat edged along the water, a twenty-four-footer, she reckoned, its sail full in the early evening light, its wake a perfect chevron, wrinkles of evening sun on the wave tops. She watched until the boat came close enough for her to make out the lines of rigging and the trimwork on the cabin, strips of varnished red-brown against the white. She wished she were aboard, wanting that feeling of flying on the water she’d known since childhood.
She stood quite still, her body upright, a hand on the rail. There would be a new country in the oldest quarter of man’s time on this planet, a place of safety for a shattered people. It was, she decided, worth the sorrows, worth having lived for, fair recompense for all her brother had done: the one right thing.
Eleanor raised her gaze across the river; the shadows of the great city skyline cut like templates. She faced north, upriver, to the source, where rivers are born. And her own source: she needed to see the lake again, the purity of it, its still smoothness, the tang of the pines at nightfall, the fine coolness of the mornings stealing south from Canada, her lake, Eleanor’s lake—that was what she would do. A fresh gust spun the last leaves around her. She began to walk. A crescent of leaves followed her, guardians.
POSTSCRIPT
This is a novel, but much of what you have read is based on known fact—although the most intriguing elements are still classified. Some isn’t. There were no Neimanns, for instance, but Baron von Schröder knew Foster Dulles well; the Sullivan and Cromwell record of involvement in “cloaking” Nazi assets is clear; Reuven Shiloah did in fact mastermind the Mossad from the networks we recount. Eleanor did work with the Quakers in France in 1917 and had a peculiar habit of turning up in Allen’s life at critical points, just as we suggest, not least in Trieste in 1946 … but that’s for another book. So is the interrogation Foster endured about his cloaking practices at the hands of some highly motivated Treasury lawyers in 1942; thanks to our colleague Professor Cees Wiebes for drawing this to Brendan’s attention.
Allen, from 1953 to 1962 the head of the CIA, produced wartime intelligence of often highly dubious quality, a fact noted by Nuremberg trial judge Michael Musmanno. In a memorandum long classified, Judge Musmanno excoriated Allen for obtaining immunity from war crimes prosecution for his SS contacts, including many of his Bern SS interlocutors, in exchange for a separate Italian surrender. And the Vatican did work hand in glove with the murky proponents of the Ratlines: the saga of the Balkans war crimes suspects and the Vatican ratline alone—John and Brendan met while Brendan was researching a CBC TV investigative documentary on Canada’s role in the affair—is stomach-turning.
Equally disturbingly, the Vatican did own a series of interlocking joint ventures stretching from Italy and Switzerland to Lisbon and to South America, never mind interests large and small in banks and insurance companies in Mussolini’s Italy, Vichy France, Fascist Spain and Fascist Portugal. Brendan’s recent research on behalf of American investigative reporter Gerald Posner suggests the insurance companies of Italy bear serious examination regarding Nazi capital flight; when God closes a window, He opens a door, as the saying goes.
Many of those closest to Allen, despite liking him, acknowledge he was corrupt; his postwar Berlin Station colleagues essentially admitted to longtime CIA reporter Joe Trento acting as Allen’s procurer; Trento’s interview with Jim Angleton on the old counterspy’s deathbed is one of the most important assessments of Allen’s time at the CIA. Several of Allen’s non-CIA colleagues were far less kind. One, who’d briefed Allen with accurate estimates of Soviet economic data—all were ignored—termed him “a whore and a liar.”
Allen was the last person to see Jim Kronthal alive. Kronthal died, allegedly by his own hand, after a final meal alone with Allen in 1953. He is to this day the prime suspect for the CIA’S most senior Soviet mole; he was almost certainly the subject of the sexual blackmail we recount, perhaps as early as 1935, by the Gestapo.
John personally interviewed the Haganah agent who had first-hand knowledge of the blackmail of Nelson Rockefeller. Prescott Bush was indeed up to his eyeballs in the Union Bank affair, and some believe—John does, Brendan is not so sure—that the Bush family fortune stemmed from hi
s single Union share. Certainly the Bern–Berlin wiretapping story is true; John has seen the Luftforschungsamt intercept that opens the novel—in a slightly different form—at Fort Meade, the National Security Agency’s massive archive, when his NATO-level security clearances allowed him to roam the vaults at will.
Eleanor Lansing Dulles died at the age of 101 in 1996; her death marked the end of an unequaled dynasty of 130 years of Dulles family involvement in the U.S. diplomatic service. Long identified with West Berlin affairs, Eleanor lived to see a minor genius bicycle along the parapet of the suddenly meaningless Berlin Wall on CNN. Hers was a remarkable run. Her work for children during her retirement says much about her priorities. Her friend Grace Dunlop is a composite of real, known friends mentioned in Eleanor’s autobiography.
And Misha? Misha is a composite of several underground Haganah operatives, now all long dead … and Eleanor’s wartime lover, whom she details in her autobiography in ruminative and discreet terms. Eleanor did help mastermind the rescue and escape of her paramour’s mother from Warsaw, whom she never named and whose identity is still deep in classified FBI and State Department files. In 1999, whilst researching a different book, in a Berlin still not yet again the German capital, Brendan did hear rumours of an elderly jazzman well-known to the waiters of a certain café not far from Berlin’s Great Synagogue. Ask the right waiter … you might find there’s a book in it.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
96/11/04 Statement: Death of Eleanor Lansing Dulles
Office of the Spokesman
Press Statement by Nicholas Burns/Spokesman
November 4, 1996
DEATH OF ELEANOR LANSING DULLES
Eleanor Lansing Dulles served with distinction in the Department of State for two decades. She helped establish the basis for modern U.S.-German relations, earning a reputation as an expert on German affairs. During World War II she made an important contribution to the planning for postwar Germany. In the immediate postwar years, she served in the Office of the U.S. Political Adviser in Austria during the difficult years in the postwar reconstruction of that divided country.
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