Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1235 11 May 1945
Washington, D.C., was a long way—just over five thousand miles—from Buenos Aires. It had been necessary for South American Airways Double Zero Two Ciudad de Córdoba to refuel at Belém, Brazil, after a nine-hour flight from Washington. Refueling had taken two hours. Then it had been a just-over-eight-hour flight to Buenos Aires.
The Ciudad de Córdoba completed its landing roll and turned off the runway onto a taxiway. A tug—it had been surprisingly easy to convert John Deere tractors, ones fitted with enormous double tires for use in rice fields, into aircraft tugs powerful enough to move Constellations—painted in SAA’s powder blue and gold color scheme came down the taxiway toward the Constellation.
The Connie stopped, then shut down its engines as the ground crew backed up the tug to it and connected to the front landing gear.
The tug dragged the airplane to the tarmac, past three enormous hangars, and then pushed the Connie, tail first, into the center hangar.
“It would seem, Gonzalo,” the pilot said solemnly to his first officer, “that we have once again cheated death.”
“Cletus, you know damned well I don’t like it when you say that,” Delgano said as he unfastened his harness, stretched in his seat, and then stood.
“Well, you may be happy with near-empty tanks—maybe ten minutes left—but I’m always concerned.”
Delgano snapped his head around to examine the fuel gauges.
They showed there was considerably more fuel remaining than ten minutes.
“Gotcha!” Frade cried happily.
Delgano shook his head and left the cockpit.
Frade looked out the window. The Connie was the only airplane in the hangar, but there were a number of automobiles, most of them large and chauffeur-driven.
Frade waited until the REAR DOOR light glowed red and then he killed the MASTER POWER switch and left his seat.
By the time he walked through the passenger compartment he was the last person in it.
When he stood on the platform at the head of the ladder, the first thing he looked for was the couple he often in the past called—to their great annoyance—Hansel und Gretel.
When he found them, his throat tightened and his eyes teared.
Hansel—Hans-Peter Baron von Wachtstein—had his arms around Gretel—the former Alicia Carzino-Cormano—in a bear hug that suggested neither had the slightest intention of ever breaking the embrace in their lifetimes.
His thoughts were interrupted by a shrill whistle. He knew it well, including the time it had brought three taxis to a dead halt at once during rush hour on Avenida 9 de Julio. His wife made it by squeezing her tongue tip with two fingertips, then quickly exhaling. It was a skill Clete had never mastered, either as a Boy Scout when all the other members of Troop 36, Midland, Texas, could do it with ease, or after his marriage, when he had tried even harder to learn how.
He found her standing near the foot of the stairway.
Doña Dorotea Mallín de Frade, who had just turned twenty-two, was the image that came to mind when one heard the phrase “classic English beauty.” She was tall and lithe, blond, and had startlingly blue eyes and a marvelous milky smooth complexion.
Standing off to the right was Enrico Rodríguez and another man who looked very much like him. They both cradled Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot shotguns in their arms as they kept a wary eye on everybody in the hangar. The other man, former Sargento Rodolfo Gómez, had, like Rodríguez, retired from the Húsares de Pueyrredón. He now was rarely more than fifty feet from Doña Dorotea and her children—and usually closer.
Clete was not wearing his Marine Corps uniform, nor his SAA captain’s uniform. He was far less formally attired in khaki trousers, a yellow polo shirt, battered Western boots, and a wide-brimmed Stetson hat once the property of his late uncle James Fitzhugh Howell—who for almost all of Clete’s life was the only father Clete had known.
Frade went quickly down the stairs and embraced his wife.
Dorotea put her mouth close to his ear and whispered: “You done good, my darling. And do I have a reward for you in mind!”
“You mean maybe two empanadas and a beer?” he asked, teasing.
“Maybe afterward,” Dorotea said, flicked her tongue in his ear, and broke their embrace.
Then something caught his eye. Three men were walking up to them.
One of the men wore a clerical collar and was fond of referring to himself as a simple priest. This was not precisely the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Clete had once thought of the Reverend Kurt Welner, S.J.—a bespectacled, slim, fair-skinned man who’d lost most of his light brown hair and looked to be in his forties—as the éminence grise behind the throne of the Cardinal Archbishop of Argentina and the official chair of the president of the Argentine Republic, whose confessor he was.
Events over the last twenty-odd months had caused Frade to add to that the throne of the Papal Nuncio to Argentina, and to conclude that if Welner was not de jure Pope Pius XII’s man in Argentina, he held that role de facto. Well, maybe not directly, but through one or more of the most senior cardinals in Pius XII’s inner circle.
At dinner one night in Lisbon, Allen W. Dulles had told Frade that when dealing with Welner—or any other Roman Catholic clergyman of importance—the thing to keep in mind was that they understood their first priority was to preserve the Roman Catholic Church and always acted accordingly.
Welner had been el Coronel Jorge G. Frade’s best friend, as well as his confessor, and as soon as Clete had arrived in Buenos Aires Welner had appointed himself to that role for Cletus Frade. He had been very helpful in several difficult situations, and would doubtless be helpful in the future. But after his dinner with Dulles, Clete had never been able to look at Welner without remembering what Dulles had said about the highest priority of powerful, influential Roman Catholic clergymen.
The second man was General de Brigada Alejandro Bernardo Martín, a tall, fair-haired, light-skinned thirty-nine-year-old. Frade was about as surprised to see Martín in uniform as he was to see either him or Father Welner in the hangar, and wondered who had had the big mouth announcing the Connie’s arrival.
Martín was chief of the Ethical Standards Office of the Argentine Ministry of Defense’s Bureau of Internal Security, the official euphemism for the Argentine Intelligence and Counterintelligence Service, and usually wore civilian clothing.
Also in the last twenty-odd months, Frade and Martín had become close friends. Before that, they had been adversaries, which caused Clete to consider that Martín’s first priority still was the Argentine Republic—and that the priorities of the Argentine Republic were most often not the same as those of the Office of Strategic Services.
The third man was an American officer, Major Anthony J. Pelosi, whose pink and green uniform was adorned with the golden aiguillette of a military attaché, parachutist’s wings, and the ribbon of the Silver Star medal, the nation’s third-highest award for gallantry. His citation was as vague vis-à-vis exactly what he had done, and where, as was Frade’s Navy Cross citation, and for the same reasons.
“Gentlemen,” Clete said, “may I say I’m dazzled by your military sartorial splendor? Alejandro, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in your general’s suit.”
Martín said: “Surely you’ve heard, Colonel Frade, that Argentina is now at war and we are allies?”
Frade had indeed been told that Argentina had declared war on the Axis powers on March 29, about six weeks earlier.
He said: “I do remember hearing something about that, now that you mention it. It looks like our side is winning, doesn’t it?”
“In Europe, Colonel, it seems we have won,” Martín said.
He handed Frade a copy of the Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper.
“This is today’s edition,” Martín said.
Splashed across the front page was a photograph of an immaculately turned-out German officer sitting at a desk. His marshal’s baton lay on the desk beside his upside-down uniform cap, which held one of his gloves.
The caption beneath the photograph read: German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs a surrender document at Soviet headquarters in Berlin, May 9, 1945. The Soviets insisted that a second ceremonial signing take place in Soviet-occupied Berlin.
“Interesting,” Clete said. “I heard the Krauts surrendered to General Eisenhower in Reims, France, on May seventh.”
“It says the Russians demanded that there be a second signing in Berlin,” Martín pointed out unnecessarily.
“Well, wherever it happened, it certainly calls for a celebration drink, wouldn’t you say, Alejandro?”
“I would say that what calls for a celebration,” Father Welner said, “is that you pulled it off.”
“Pulled what off?” Clete asked.
“Bringing Karl and Peter here, of course,” Welner said. “I really didn’t think you stood much of a chance.”
“Oh, ye of little faith!” Clete said. “What I’m wondering, Father, is who had the big mouth and told you—and the general—about it. I just don’t think your being here is a coincidence.”
“I did,” Dorotea said simply. “I told both of them. I thought they might be able to help.”
Clete looked at his wife. She was not only more intimately involved with his OSS activities than anyone suspected—except perhaps Martín and Welner—but she was very good at it.
If she told them not only that I had gone to Washington, but why, she had her reasons. What the hell could they be?
“How the hell could they have helped?” Frade asked, more confused than annoyed or angry.
“Perhaps she had this in mind, Cletus,” the priest said, handing him an envelope. “There was no question in Dorotea’s mind that you would succeed.”
Clete opened the envelope. It held two booklets called libretas de enrolamiento. One was in the name of Kurt Boltitz and the other in that of Peter von Wachtstein, both of whom, according to the LE, had immigrated to Argentina in 1938.
“Karl,” Frade called out, “make Hansel stop forcing himself on that poor woman, and the both of you come over here.”
When they had, Clete handed them the identity documents.
“Say ‘thank you’ to Dorotea,” Clete said. “But not to either of these two, for I’m sure neither of them would break the—at least—ten laws of the Argentine Republic somebody had to break to get these.”
Boltitz and von Wachtstein had known Martín officially when they had been respectively the naval attaché and the assistant military attaché for air of the embassy of the German Reich.
Martín offered his hand to Boltitz and said, “Karl.”
Boltitz replied, “Alejandro.”
Martín then did the same thing to von Wachtstein.
Neither said “thank you,” but profound gratitude could be seen in the eyes of the Germans.
“How good are those, Alejandro?” Frade asked.
“They will withstand all but the most diligent scrutiny,” Martín said, and then added: “We’ll get into that when we talk.”
“Okay.”
“It would be better if we talked now,” the priest said.
Clete looked between the two Argentines and his wife.
“Here?”
“Why don’t we go to the house on Libertador San Martín?” Dorotea suggested. “The men could have a shower, and then we could talk over lunch. Everyone else can go to Doña Claudia’s house and we can all get together later.”
Clete looked at his wife and thought: Why do I think this has been the plan all along?
Beth Howell was visibly—and vocally—distressed at being separated from Boltitz. But aside from her exception, Dorotea’s plan went unchallenged.
The men, plus Dorotea, went to what Cletus thought of as “Uncle Willy’s house by the racetrack”—it was across Avenida Libertador General San Martín from the Hipódromo de Palermo—in a four-car convoy. Martín’s official Mercedes led the way, followed by Tony Pelosi’s U.S. Embassy 1941 Chevrolet, then by Father Welner’s 1940 Packard 280 convertible—a gift from el Coronel Jorge G. Frade—and finally by the enormous Horch touring car that had been el Coronel Frade’s joy in life and in which he had been assassinated.
Their route took them past the German Embassy on Avenida Córdoba, causing Clete to wonder if Martín had done so intentionally. There were two soldiers standing in front of the gate. They were wearing German-style steel helmets and German-style gray uniforms and were holding German 7mm Mauser rifles in what the Marine Corps would call the Parade Rest position.
But they were not Germans. They were Argentines. And flying from atop the pole just inside the fence was the blue and white flag of Argentina, not the red swastika-centered flag of Nazi Germany that had flown there for so long.
Clete wondered what Boltitz and von Wachtstein were thinking about that.
4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín Buenos Aires 1405 11 May 1945
When the parade of vehicles from the airport reached Uncle Guillermo’s turn-of-the-century mansion, Cletus saw proof that it had been no accident that everybody had come there for a talk over lunch. Dorotea indeed had set it up—and made sure they were expected.
The first suggestion of that was the 1940 Ford station wagon parked at the curb. A legend painted on its doors read FRIGORÍFICO MORÓN. That, Frade thought, could be considered disinformation—maybe even a cover—as the Frigorífico Morón—or Morón Slaughterhouse and Feeding Pens—no longer existed to process the cattle from his estancia. The property in Morón was now the site of Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade.
Two men were sitting in the Ford. Clete knew that they were armed with Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot shotguns, .45 ACP Thompson submachine guns, and Argentine versions of the U.S. 1911-A1 .45 ACP pistol. He was certain, too, that on the street behind the mansion there could be found another vehicle, maybe not another station wagon, but one also carrying the FRIGORÍFICO MORÓN legend on its doors, and also holding at least two well-armed men.
The armed men were all ex–troopers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón. And they had been born—as had their parents and their parents’ parents, as far back as anyone could remember—on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
Clete’s father had versed him well in their distinguished history, to which he now was deeply connected.
Back in 1806, Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo had been owned by Juan Martín de Pueyrredón. When the British occupied Buenos Aires, he escaped to the estancia, which encompassed some eighty-four thousand hectares, or a little more than three hundred twenty-five square miles. He turned several hundred of its gauchos—his gauchos—into a cavalry force, and returned to Buenos Aires and recaptured the city. Not overwhelmed with modesty, Pueyrredón named his force of ferocious cowboys the Húsares de Pueyrredón. The title was made official in 1810, and the regiment was the most senior unit of the Argentine army.
From the beginning, gauchos of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo had done their military service with the Húsares and then returned to the estancia, either after completion of their required national service or on their retirement.
As the estancia, under the Napoleonic Code, passed from one descendant of Juan Martín de Pueyrredón to another, many of the patrónes of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo—after starting their careers fresh from the military academy as subtenientes—in time became colonels commanding the Húsares de Pueyrredón. Two of the most recent colonels commanding, el Coronel Jorge G. Frade and his father, el Coronel Guillermo Alejandro Frade, had done so.
El Coronel Jorge G. Frade would have preferred that his only son, Cletus, follow in the footsteps of his ancestors. But he’d taken what solace he could from knowing that Cletus had served with great distinction in the United States Corps of Marines, which el Coronel Frade had considered to be a military organization very nearly as prestigious as the Húsares de Pueyrredón.
On el Coronel Frade’s assassination, the gauchos of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo—the ex–troopers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón—had no trouble at all passing their loyalty to the new patrón.
First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, had been more than a little discomfited to be crisply saluted by the estancia’s gauchos. More recently, he had been even more discomfited when Enrico Rodríguez spread the news all over the estancia of Clete’s promotion to lieutenant colonel—and the ex-troopers began addressing him as “mi coronel.”
But he had grown used to it, and had come to think, perhaps immodestly, of the gauchos/ex–Húsares de Pueyrredón troopers as his private army. They were deployed all over Argentina, protecting the vast properties that he’d inherited after his father’s murder. As here at Uncle Willy’s house, they stood guard over Clete’s immediate and extended families, as well as at the various places where he had, as he thought of it, stashed people who needed either protection or confinement.
Frade thought of all this when the massive iron gate to the mansion was opened to them by a tough-looking man cradling a Thompson in his arms and then when they had driven into the underground garage and another heavily armed man had opened the Horch’s door, smiled, and said, “Doña Dorotea,” and then come to attention and said, “Mi coronel.”
Everyone exited their vehicles and followed Dorotea into the house itself. They were greeted by a small army of servants standing behind a distinguished-looking elderly man wearing a nicely tailored butler’s suit and tie. Antonio Lavalle had been Jorge Frade’s butler. Now he was head of Dorotea’s crews running everything for her everywhere.
Dorotea turned to the newly arrived group of men and announced, “For those of you gentlemen who have not met our butler, this is Antonio Lavalle. He and his staff will assist those of you who would like to perhaps freshen up. Or who would simply prefer to relax. Please make yourself at home.”
She then turned to Antonio Lavalle and said loud enough for everyone to hear, “And you may please start serving any of our guests in the library.”
As Clete walked with his bride up the staircase to the mansion’s master bedroom that took up most of the third floor, he thought—as he often did—that he had many memories of Uncle Guillermo’s house, many of them very private and very touching—and too many of them of vicious murder.
Clete’s father had been born here, and had insisted on turning over the mansion to him the first day that father and son had, over many drinks and emotional moments, reconnected.
Not long after, Clete had been in the master bedroom when la Señora Marianna Rodríguez de Pellano—Enrico’s sister, who had cared for Clete from birth until his mother had gone to the States and died in childbirth—had had her throat cut in the kitchen. Assassins had killed her in order to get to Clete. But, when they’d come upstairs after him, he had shot them both dead with an Argentine .45—wounding one first in the leg before putting a round in his forehead.
Three days later, as Clete lay in the bed, an angry la Señorita Dorotea Mallín burst in and gave him hell for not calling her after the attack. What happened next caused Clete’s first son to be conceived—and for Clete to no longer be able to lovingly refer to Dorotea as “the Virgin Princess.”
And, late one December night, it had been in Uncle Willy’s house that Clete had first come across a young man in the library. The stranger, slumped in one of the armchairs, had worn a quilted, darkred dressing gown. There’d been a cognac snifter resting on his chest, a lit cigar in the ashtray on the table beside him, and Beethoven’s Third Symphony coming from the phonograph.
That night First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, met Capitán Hans-Peter Freiherr von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe. Peter had accompanied to Argentina the body of Clete’s cousin, who’d been killed at Stalingrad flying as an observer in a German Storch. While Clete and Peter immediately understood that they were enemies, they also learned they were fighter pilots—and more. “Suppose,” Peter had suggested, “that as officers and gentlemen, we might pretend it’s Christmas Eve? We’d only be off by a couple of weeks.” They had—and over time had become close friends.
4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín Buenos Aires 1500 11 May 1945
Hors d’oeuvres and cocktails were being served when Clete and Dorotea entered the enormous, richly appointed library. The Frades looked as satisfied—maybe as satiated—as if fresh from the shower.
Clete saw the look Peter von Wachtstein was giving him and had an epiphany.
I know what you’re thinking, Hansel!
“How come you and Dorotea, who you last saw only a week ago, just got to enjoy the splendors of the nuptial couch, while I—without the opportunity to do the same since last July—sit here sucking on a glass of wine and a black olive with my equally sex-starved wife but two kilometers away?”
Or words to that effect.
Clete and Dorotea walked across the polished hardwood floor toward von Wachtstein.
“I have several things to say to you, Hansel,” Clete said as he took two glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon from a maid, handing one to his wife.
“Really?” von Wachtstein said.
“‘Life is unfair,’” Clete intoned solemnly.
“Is it?”
“‘Fortune favors the pure in heart.’”
“You don’t say?”
“‘Patience is a virtue, and all things come to he who waits.’”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Dorotea asked, confused.
“Hansel, you may wish to write some, or all, of that down,” Clete concluded.
Clete looked around the room. With the exception of Father Welner, who was smiling and shaking his head, everyone looked baffled.
“Why don’t we go in and have our lunch?” Clete went on. “I’m sure that everyone—Peter especially—is anxious to get this over and move on to other things.”
Frade stood at the large double doors between the library and the ornate dining room and waited politely as his guests passed through.
When the last of them had done so, Clete looked around the library.
With a couple of exceptions, he thought, it’s just like it was the night I found Peter here listening to the phonograph. Then there was only one leather armchair and footstool. Now there’s two, because Dorotea wanted her own.
And, of course, when this was my father’s library, there was no hobbyhorse or baby blue prison pen to keep the kids from crawling around—or any other accoutrements of toddlers and infants.
My father never had anything to do with kids.
Would he have liked it—or not given a damn?
His reverie was interrupted by Lavalle.
“Mi coronel,” the butler said, “there is a telephone call.”
“When did you start calling me ‘mi coronel,’ Antonio?”
Both Dorotea and Lavalle had told Clete—many times—that gentlemen referred to their butlers by their surnames. Clete thought it was not only rude but also that gentlemen referred to their friends by their given names, and Antonio Lavalle often had proved just how good a friend he was.
“When you were promoted, mi coronel,” Lavalle said with a smile.
Clete smiled and shook his head.
“Tell whoever it is that we’re having lunch and I’ll call back.”
“It is el Señor Dulles.”
Clete gave that a long moment’s consideration, then said: “Start feeding the hungry, Antonio. Tell Doña Dorotea I had to take a call.”
Clete walked to one of the large, brown-leather-upholstered armchairs. As he settled in it, his mind went back to the first time he’d met Allen Welsh Dulles.
It had been a remarkable meeting—one in which some staggering pieces of the greater espionage puzzle that affected Clete began to fall into place. It had taken place at Canoas Air Base, Puerto Alegre, Brazil, in the commanding officer’s Mediterranean-style red-tile-roof cottage in July of ’43, days after “Aggie”—Colonel Graham—had sent “Tex”—Frade—a cryptic radio message that he was to see the CO at “Bird Cage”—Canoas, where the first Lockheed Lodestars destined for the newly formed South American Airways had been sent for final delivery to el Señor Cletus Frade, managing director of SAA.
Frade, of course, had expected to see the commanding officer. Instead, the cottage held only a stranger.
“Allen Welsh Dulles,” he introduced himself, then made them drinks, then casually announced that they had mutual friends. “My brother—John Foster Dulles—has a law firm in New York City; among his clients are Cletus Marcus Howell and Howell Petroleum. And, of course, I have been friends with Alejandro Graham a long time—and not just our time working for Wild Bill Donovan.”
Frade, not knowing what to believe of the stranger’s story, didn’t reply.
Then Dulles really surprised him by naming Frade’s mole in the German Embassy: “Galahad is Major Hans-Peter Baron von Wachtstein.”
Frade, who refused to reveal that to anyone in or out of the OSS, professed ignorance.
Dulles answered: “The FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Army’s Chief of Intelligence, and of course SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg—among others—would dearly like to know that, too.”
And that got Frade’s attention, too.
He knew that the Germans had at least two secret programs in Argentina. Von Deitzberg—Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s deputy—was running one, an unnamed operation in which senior SS officers were ransoming Jews to be released from concentration camps and moved to Argentina. The other was Operation Phoenix—senior members of the Nazi hierarchy purchasing property in South America, primarily in Argentina but also in Paraguay, Brazil, and other countries, to which they could flee when Germany fell, and from which they could later rise, phoenix-like, to bring Nazism back.
Then Dulles described the private dinner in the Hotel Washington he’d had only nights earlier—“Just me, Graham, Donovan, the President, and Putzi Hanfstaengl.”
Frade again professed ignorance—this time truthfully. “Am I supposed to know who Putzi Haf-whatever is?”
Dulles explained that the wealthy Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had attended Columbia with Roosevelt and Donovan, had been in Hitler’s inner circle before he got smart and fled to the United States—just prior to the SS’s plan for Putzi to suffer a fatal accident. FDR prized Putzi’s insider perspective of the mind-set of Hitler’s high command. And, as Dulles related to Frade, it was Putzi’s belief that most if not all senior Nazis knew the war was lost, that Hitler was psychologically unable to face that, and that no one dared suggest it to him.
“Which explains the existence of such secret operations as Phoenix and Valkyrie,” Dulles said.
Then, finally convincing Frade that Dulles was who he said he was, Dulles said: “I am privy to a secret about Valkyrie known to no more than nine Americans, one of whom is you. Through Admiral Wilhelm Canaris”—he paused to see if Frade recognized the chief of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, then went on after he’d nodded—“I am in communication with General von Wachtstein, who in fact intends to assassinate Adolf Hitler. One of his other co-conspirators—Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, Count von Stauffenberg—is a close friend of young von Wachtstein . . . your Galahad.”
Clete felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Peter had told Clete that he’d seen von Stauffenberg in Munich and that the subject of regicide had been discussed.
Then, making Frade’s head really spin, Dulles broached the biggest secret: the Manhattan Project. He explained that the Americans were racing the Germans to develop an enormously powerful atom bomb from an element known as uranium.
“Whoever creates this bomb first is going to win the war. It’s as simple as that,” he said. Then, saying Graham shortly would TOP SECRET message him the same, he laid out Frade’s marching orders: “So your first priority is the immediate reporting of anything you hear about uranium or a superbomb.”
The next priorities, Dulles went on, were of equal importance: allowing the ransoming and Phoenix operations to continue while learning everything about them.
“As morally despicable as the ransoming is,” Dulles explained, “FDR says the bigger issue is saving lives wherever and however possible. If we were to expose the ransoming, the real result would be the extermination of all the Jews in concentration camps. And if we expose Phoenix, the Nazis will simply deny its existence. Letting it continue, however, allows us to trace the money from the moment it arrives in Argentina. You’ll create a paper trail of what was bought with it, and from whom. Plus the names of the officials—Argentine, Paraguayan, Uruguayan—who are being bought. Everything.
“The thinking is that if we went to General Ramírez or General Rawson now with what we have, or what you might dig up, they would tell us to mind our own business. The Argentines are not convinced the Germans have lost the war. But, while the Germans will hang on as long as possible, ultimately they will surrender unconditionally, as demanded by Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference. And what that means, under international law, is that the moment the Germans sign the surrender document, everything the German government owns falls under the control of the victors. Things like embassy buildings, other real estate, bank accounts.
“Our ambassador will then call upon the Argentine foreign minister, present him with a detailed list of all German property in Argentina—which you will have prepared, to include bank account numbers, descriptions of real estate, et cetera—and inform him that we’re taking possession of it.
“The Argentine government may not like it, but it’s a well-established principle of international law, and it really would be unwise of them to defy that law. I rather doubt they will. Nations, like people, tend to try to curry favor with whoever has just won a fight.”
Cletus Frade then admitted that his head was indeed spinning, and suggested that he was way out of his depth, that starting up South American Airways was proving challenging enough.
Dulles replied: “Alec Graham said, vis-à-vis you, something to the effect that the first impression you give is of a dangerously irresponsible individual who should not be trusted out of your sight. And then, depending on how much experience one has with really good covert intelligence officers, one comes to the realization that one is in the company of a rare person who seems to be born for this sort of thing.”
Frade had considered that, wondered how much of it was smoke being blown up his ass, then said: “Does that mean you’re going to tell me what this airline business is all about?”
“Alec and I talked about that, and General Donovan told me he’d asked the President. No one knows anything except that Franklin Delano Roosevelt thinks it’s a good idea, and that he was pleased to learn of your remarkable progress in getting one going.”
Two years later, Frade—who now knew a helluva lot more than he wanted about the usefulness of South American Airways and about the secret German operations—picked up the telephone from the lower shelf of the table next to his chair. He crisply announced, “Area Commander Frade speaking, sir.”
He heard Allen W. Dulles chuckle.
“How was your flight from Washington, Area Commander?” Dulles asked.
“How did you hear about that?”
“I spoke with someone who began the conversation along the lines of ‘I’m glad you’re there. You won’t believe what Alec’s loose cannon just did with a pair of POWs at Fort Hunt.’”
“From that I infer ‘there’ is ‘here,’ right?” Frade said.
“I’m in the Alvear Palace.”
“And you’re here because of what allegedly happened in Washington? I don’t understand . . .”
“In part that. I thought we—you, me, and those allegedly sprung from Fort Hunt—need to discuss some new developments, ones that have come up in the week since you and I last spoke in Lisbon—”
“Oh, do we absolutely have to talk!” Frade announced.
“—and so,” Dulles went on, “believing that because you had just flown the Atlantic you probably would spend at least a day or two in the bosom of your family, I went back to Lisbon and caught the very next South American Airways flight to Buenos Aires.”
He paused, chuckled, then went on: “Tangentially, an observation or two about that: Your airline must be making money, Cletus. I was lucky to get a seat. Every one got sold, despite the outrageous prices you’re charging for a ticket. Many of the seats were occupied by Roman Catholic clergy of one affiliation or another. I decided that Buenos Aires must be overflowing with sinners for the Pope to spend so much money rushing all those priests, brothers, and nuns over here to save souls.”
Clete laughed.
“I’ll tell Father Welner what you said,” he said.
“Have you seen the good Father lately?”
“He met the airplane and he’s here now. Having his lunch. He and General Martín—they met the plane and said we had to talk.”
“Do they know about von Wachtstein and Boltitz?” Dulles said.
“Welner handed them—in front of Martín—Argentine identity documents stating that they’d immigrated to Argentina in 1938.”
“Then what Martín probably wants to talk about is what should be done with them in the immediate future. So far as a great many Germans in Argentina are concerned, both are traitors to the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“Not only Argentine Germans,” Frade said, “but I’d say at least half of the newly converted clergy—of the sort you said were on your flight—also think they’re traitors. I don’t mind the good Germans, but I’ve about had enough of these Kraut bastards.”
Dulles didn’t reply immediately. Then he said, “Understood. We need to discuss that, too.”
“So,” Frade said, “can you tell me about these new developments you just mentioned?”
And why they are so important that you came all the way here to tell me about them?
“When can we get together?” Dulles said. “I don’t want to talk about them on the phone.”
“I don’t think you want to come here to Uncle Willy’s house.”
“Not if Martín and Father Welner are there, Cletus.”
“Okay. Well, what I’m planning now—and, unless I’m given a good reason not to, what I’m indeed going to do—is spend the night here, then load everybody on the Red Lodestar and fly them out to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. From there, I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“So then why don’t you drop by Jorge Frade about nine tomorrow morning and fly out to the estancia with us? Martín and Welner aren’t going.”
“Very well. I’ll see you at the airport at nine,” Dulles said, and hung up.
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province Republic of Argentina 1005 12 May 1945
Cletus Frade brought the Lodestar in low over the pampas and smoothly touched down on the runway. The first time he’d flown here, the runway had been grass. Now, three years later, it was pebble and lined with lights. And the tarmac was now cobblestones, and there was another hangar, this one large enough for two Lodestars.
During the landing, he had seen that there was a welcoming party. It wasn’t until he had taxied up to the hangars and stopped the aircraft that he really realized how large the group was.
“It looks like the Turtles have come out to welcome us,” Frade said, turning to look at his wife in the copilot seat.
When I met you, he thought, you’d never even been in an airplane.
And look at you now, Amelia Earhart!
“Darling,” his copilot said resignedly, as she shut down the engines and then took off her headset, “I’ve told you time and again that they don’t like being called the Turtles.”
A Top Secret personnel roster filed in Colonel Alec Graham’s office at OSS Headquarters in Washington, D.C., listed the members of OSS Western Hemisphere Team 17, which was code-named Team Turtle. A sunken ship was sometimes said to have “turned turtle”—and the original mission of the team had been to cause the sinking of the Reine de la Mer to stop its replenishments of German U-boats.
The roster listed, under one Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Frade, USMCR, Majors Maxwell Ashton III and Anthony J. Pelosi (now assistant military attachés at the U.S. Embassy); Captain Madison R. Sawyer III; Navy Lieutenant Oscar J. Schultz, the team’s radioman; Master Sergeant William Ferris, their weapons and parachute expert; and Technical Sergeant Jerry O’Sullivan, who operated the team’s highly secret radar.
Ferris, Ashton, and Sawyer all came from wealthy, socially prominent families, thus meeting the criteria for the—possibly a little jealous—critics of the OSS who suggested the abbreviation actually stood for “Oh, So Social.”
The only Turtles missing from the reception party—or not on the Lodestar—were Captain Sawyer and newly promoted Master Sergeant Sigfried Stein, the team’s explosives expert who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Both were at Frade’s Estancia Don Guillermo, near Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes, holding down the fort of what Frade thought of as the lunatic asylum, and his wife thought of as her little house in the mountains, more formally known as Casa Montagna.
There were also four gauchos on horseback by the hangars, all armed with either rifles or submachine guns, and there were, Clete knew, at least six or eight more out of sight, keeping watch on the Big House.
There were also a half dozen servants of both sexes from the Big House and as many mechanics/ground handlers.
“I really hate to go out there,” Clete said to Dorotea. “Signing autographs for fans is so tiring.”
“My father was right about you. You’re bonkers, absolutely bonkers. I should have listened to him.”
“You were deaf with uncontrollable lust.”
“You bah-stud!”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
“My God!” Dorotea exclaimed as she opened the door to the passenger compartment. Clete saw that she was smiling.
After disembarking from the Lodestar, the women saw that the children were placed in baby carriages for the ride to the Big House that would pass through over a hectare of English garden. Then the women—with the exception of Dorotea—walked after the servants who pushed the baby carriages. Other servants trailed them with everyone’s luggage.
The men, meantime, pushed the Lodestar into the hangar. Moving the big airplane took grunting effort from all of them.
When the Lodestar had been arranged to Clete’s satisfaction, Allen Dulles cleaned his hands with a handkerchief. Then, pointing, Dulles asked, “What’s that under the tarpaulin?”
“The last time Hansel was here, he left in a hurry and forgot it,” Frade said. “Being the wonderful fellow that I am, I’ve been taking care of it for him.”
Von Wachtstein, having heard his name, walked up as two mechanics responded to Clete’s gesture and started removing the tarpaulin.
When they had finished, von Wachtstein said, “My God!”
The Fieseler Storch—a small, highwing, single-engine aircraft—was painted in the Luftwaffe spring and summer camouflage scheme of random-shaped patches in three shades of green and two of brown. Black crosses identifying it as a German military aircraft were on both sides of the fuselage aft of the cockpit, and the red Hakenkreuz of Nazi Germany was painted in white circles on both sides of the vertical stabilizer.
“It looks like it could be flown right now,” von Wachtstein said.
Frade glanced at his wife, then said, “Dorotea and I flew it to your mother-in-law’s house for dinner last week.”
“How did Peter come to ‘forget it’ the last time he was here?” Dulles asked.
“Well,” Frade said by way of explanation, “Peter can’t be accused of being a military genius, but he did set up an emergency get-out-of-Dodge plan. Which worked.”
“When we got word,” von Wachtstein furnished, “Ambassador von Lutzenberger called me at four A.M. with the joyous news that God had saved our beloved Führer from Claus’s bomb at Wolfsschanze. I then picked up Karl Boltitz at his apartment, went out to El Palomar Airfield, filed a flight plan to Montevideo, and, as soon as it was light, took off in the Storch. And flew here. Cletus then flew us—no flight plan—to Canoas in the Red Lodestar. Thirty-six hours later, Karl and I were officially POWs at Fort Hunt.”
“Von Lutzenberger,” Dulles said, “the German ambassador in Buenos Aires?”
Von Wachtstein nodded.
“He knew what you were doing?” Dulles pursued.
Von Wachtstein nodded again, then looked at Frade and said, “What happened to him after the unconditional surrender?”
“I don’t know,” Frade said. “I should have asked Martín.”
“I did ask General Martín,” Dorotea said. “The ambassador and his wife are either in Villa General Belgrano or will be shortly. Just about everybody else from the embassy was taken to the Club Hotel de la Ventana in the south of Buenos Aires Province.”
“What’s that, a house?” Major Ashton asked. “‘Villa General Belgrano’?”
“It’s actually a place,” von Wachtstein said, “a little village in Córdoba. It looks like it’s in Bavaria. It was started by German immigrants, and when the Argentine government had to put the interned survivors of the Graf Spee somewhere, the most dedicated Nazis were sent there. I used to fly that”—he pointed to the Storch—“up there once a month with the payroll and their mail.”
“And the less dedicated Nazis?” Dulles asked.
“Some of them went to an Argentine army base near Rosario,” Boltitz chimed in, “and the rest to the Ventana Club Hotel.”
“I used to go there, too,” von Wachtstein said. “Usually, I had a message or a package for the Bishop of Rosario, a man named Salvador Lombardi. You know what they say about converts to Catholicism becoming more Catholic than the Pope? Well, that sonofabitch was a convert to National Socialism and was more of a Nazi than Hitler. He told me one time that anyone who opposed Der Führer would suffer eternal damnation. And he meant it.”
“I believe the bishop is a close friend of my Tío Juan,” Frade said. “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me.”
There were many reasons for Frade’s deep distrust of el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón—his godfather, “Uncle” Juan—who was vice president, secretary of War, and secretary of Labor and Welfare of the Argentine Republic. Chief among them was that Perón, very sympathetic to Germany’s socialist political ideals, was too friendly with the Nazis in Argentina. And, Frade had discovered, Perón’s ultimate ambition wasn’t to become president of Argentina—he instead aspired to be ruler of a Greater Argentina that the Nazis had intended to create by combining Uruguay, Paraguay, and even parts of Chile and Brazil.
All of which supported Frade’s strong suspicion that Perón had been complicit in the Nazis’ ordering the assassination of el Coronel Jorge Frade and the attempted assassination of Cletus Frade.
And when Clete—who embraced Sun Tzu’s philosophy of keeping one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer—finally ordered his Tío Juan to move out of Uncle Willy’s Avenida Libertador mansion— calling him a degenerate sonofabitch for his lust for thirteen-year-old girls—Perón had actually pulled a pistol on him. It had taken Frade considerable restraint not to let Enrico’s riot shotgun accidentally discharge double-ought buckshot in Perón’s direction.
“Some of those messages for Bishop Lombardi were from Perón,” von Wachtstein confirmed.
Allen Dulles suddenly put in: “Getting off the subject of Colonel Perón and with the caveat that there’s never a good time to say something like this, Peter and Karl, I want you to know both personally and on behalf of the OSS how very sorry we are about what Hitler did to Admiral Boltitz and General von Wachtstein.”
“Thank you,” von Wachtstein said simply.
“Thank you,” Boltitz said, then added: “But I have to tell you—fully aware that this is probably what we sailors call ‘pissing into the wind’—that I haven’t completely given up hope about my father. One of the later arrivals at Fort Hunt told me he had heard that when the word came that the bomb at Wolfsschanze failed to kill Hitler, my father, who was in Norway, in Narvik, simply disappeared.”
Frade had a sudden cold-blooded thought: He knew what was going to happen to any of the conspirators.
Jumping into those icy waters was preferable to what the SS would do to him—starting with torture and ending by getting hung from a butcher’s hook—if they got their hands on him.
“It’s possible, of course, that he took his own life,” Boltitz went on.
Jesus, he’s reading my mind!
“But I don’t think he would do that. He had Norwegian friends.”
Sorry, Karl, but I’m afraid you really are pissing into the wind.
“I’ll see if I can find out anything for you,” Dulles said.
“Thank you.”
“I’d love to say let’s go get something to drink,” Frade said. “But that’ll have to wait. Let’s go to the quincho. At least we can get some coffee.”
“You don’t need me in there,” Dorotea said. “And I have our lady guests to attend to. Clete can tell me what happened later.” She saw the look of surprise on Allen Dulles’s face and added: “He always tells me everything, Mr. Dulles. I thought you knew that.”
She then walked briskly toward the Big House.