The Assassination Option Read online

  Is that what Gehlen’s been up to? Setting the stage for letting Parsons know that Mannberg and Seidel, the EUCOM G2, are old college fraternity buddies?

  And how come Mannberg didn’t tell me that?

  “How interesting!” Parsons said. “And have you been in touch with General Seidel since the war ended?”

  “Yes, I have,” Mannberg said. “Actually, he tasked the CIC to find me. And, of course, they did.”

  And now I will sit here with bated breath waiting to see where all this goes.

  It went nowhere.

  As they talked, they had been eating.

  When they had finished eating, they were through talking.

  Parsons said something to the effect that while he hated to leave good company, he “and Warren have a lot on our plates for tomorrow” and that they were “reluctantly going to have to call it a night.”

  Hands were shaken all around, and thirty seconds later Colonel Parsons and Major Ashley had left.

  When they were out of earshot, Gehlen asked, “Jim, would you think that talking this over while it’s still fresh in our minds might be a good idea?”

  Cronley nodded.

  Gehlen, with his usual courtesy, is going to hand me my ass on a platter.

  “Why don’t we go upstairs to my room?” he said.

  [FOUR]

  Suite 527

  Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten

  Maximilianstrasse 178

  Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  2155 29 December 1945

  Suite 527—an elegantly furnished bedroom, sitting room, bath, and small office—was Cronley’s, although he rarely spent the night in it, or for that matter, used it at all.

  He had inherited it, so to speak, from the OSS. When Colonel Robert Mattingly had commanded OSS Forward, he had requisitioned all of the fifth floor’s right wing for the OSS when it had been decided to put—hide—General Gehlen’s people at least temporarily in Kloster Grünau.

  Mattingly had no intention of spending his nights on a GI cot in a cold, former, and until very recently, long-deserted former monastery in the middle of nowhere when the five-star Vier Jahreszeiten was available to him.

  When the OSS was disbanded, and Mattingly became deputy chief, CIC-Europe, he had put Kloster Grünau under then Second Lieutenant Cronley. And turned Suite 527 over to him. At the time Cronley had thought it was a nice, if misguided, gesture. The very things that made the Vier Jahreszeiten appealing to Mattingly—it was a playground for senior officers and their wives and enforced a strict code of dress and decorum—made it unappealing to a young second lieutenant.

  Cronley now believed that it was far less benevolence on Mattingly’s part that gave him access to “the fifth floor” than Mattingly’s desire to distance himself as far as possible from Kloster Grünau and what was going on there. There was a very good chance that Operation Ost was going to blow up in everyone’s face, and Mattingly wanted to be far away when that happened.

  “I don’t know what’s going on at Kloster Grünau. I turned the whole operation over to Cronley. I never went down there. Why, I even gave him my suite in the Vier Jahreszeiten because I never used it.

  “Now, as far as FILL IN THE BLANK going so wildly wrong down there under his watch, I certainly don’t want to belittle what Cronley did in Argentina, but the cold fact is that he was made a captain before he even had enough time in grade to be promoted to first lieutenant, and he really didn’t have the qualifications and experience to properly handle something like Kloster Grünau.”

  Everyone filed into suite 527 and everyone but Cronley, who leaned against an inner wall, found seats.

  The Louis XIV chair under Dunwiddie disappeared under his bulk.

  If that collapses, it will add a bit of sorely needed levity to this gathering.

  “Gentlemen,” Cronley said in a serious tone, “if Captain Dunwiddie will forgo delivering the speech about the havoc a loose cannon can cause rolling about on a dinner table that he’s been mentally rehearsing for the past hour, we can go directly to seeing if anything at all can be salvaged from that disastrous dinner.”

  Dunwiddie and Hessinger shook their heads. Mannberg and Gehlen smiled.

  “I will admit, Jim,” Gehlen said, “that if you had told us beforehand how you were going to confront Colonel Parsons, it might have gone a little better than it did. But it wasn’t a disaster, by any means.”

  “As you may have noticed, General, I’m a little slow. You don’t think that was a total disaster?”

  Gehlen shook his head.

  “‘Know thine enemy,’” Hessinger quoted. “Sun Tzu, The Art of War.”

  “Precisely,” Gehlen said.

  “It looked to me like we gave him a lot of information about us. But what did we learn about him?” Cronley asked.

  “We confirmed much of what we presumed about him,” Gehlen said. “Most important, I suggest, we confirmed what I said a few days ago about the greatest danger posed to Operation Ost—that it will come from the Pentagon, not the Russians. And Colonel Parsons is going to be a formidable adversary.”

  “You think he’s that smart, that dangerous?” Cronley asked.

  “For several reasons, yes, I do. I presumed the Pentagon was going to send a highly intelligent officer as their liaison officer, since his purpose would go beyond a liaison function. His primary mission is to clip the just-born bud of the Directorate of Central Intelligence before it has a chance to blossom, and return it and its functions to where it belongs, under the assistant chief of staff for intelligence in the Pentagon.

  “We saw that Parsons is highly intelligent—and I think Ashley, too, is not quite what he would wish us to believe. In other words, I judge him to be far more intelligent and competent—and thus more dangerous—than a well-meaning, if not too bright, subordinate who has to be reined in when his enthusiasm gets the better of him.”

  “You think that ‘Shut up, Warren’ business was theater, rehearsed theater, sir?” Dunwiddie asked.

  “Theater? Yes. Rehearsed? Not necessarily. I would judge the two of them have worked together before. They didn’t, they thought, have to rehearse much to deal with a junior captain whom they thought would be facing them alone. That didn’t happen. And then the junior captain proved a far more able adversary than they anticipated he would be.”

  Does he mean that? Or is he being nice? Or charming, for his own purposes?

  “What makes Colonel Parsons and Major Ashley especially dangerous is that they believe passionately in their mission,” Gehlen said. “Almost Mossad-like.”

  “Excuse me?” Cronley asked.

  “The Zionist intelligence apparatus,” Hessinger said.

  “And once again, apparently, Hessinger knows all about something I never heard of,” Cronley said. “Lecture on, professor.”

  Gehlen smiled and gestured to Hessinger to continue.

  “The Zionists, the Jews,” Hessinger explained, “want their own homeland, their own country, in what is now Palestine. Until they get it, they’ve got sort of a shadow government, à la the British. Including an intelligence service. It has many names, but most commonly, the Mossad.”

  “And are you planning to move to Palestine?” Cronley challenged.

  “Not me. I’m an American,” Hessinger replied. “I’ll do what I can to help the Zionists, of course, but my plan for the future is to become a professor at Harvard.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up, Friedrich,” Gehlen said.

  “Sir?”

  “‘I’ll do what I can to help, of course,’” Gehlen parroted. “There are two things that make the Mossad so good, Jim. And they are really good. Even better than the Vatican. One is that they really believe in their cause. The second is what Friedrich just said. Jews all over the world are willing to help them, even eager. Ev
en when helping them violates the law.

  “The same, I think, is true of Colonel Parsons and Major Ashley. Not only do they really believe Operation Ost, and the entire DCI, should be under the Pentagon, but as Jews all over, like our friend Friedrich here, are willing to help the Mossad, so will just about everybody in the Army support Parsons and Ashley.”

  “I got the feeling earlier today that General Smith is on our side,” Cronley said.

  “I’m sure he is. But I am not sure about every member of his staff who is in a position to help Colonel Parsons and hurt the DCI.”

  “For the good of the service,” Dunwiddie said, drily sarcastic.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cronley said. “So what it boils down to is that it’s us against just about everybody.”

  “President Truman seems to be on our side. Or vice versa,” Gehlen said.

  “Even though we’re the good guys,” Cronley went on, “maybe what we should do is connect somehow with this Mossad. Maybe they could show us where we can get some help. Right now, I feel like Custer at the Little Big Horn. Where did all these Indians come from?”

  He expected a chuckle, or at least a smile, from Gehlen and the others. Dunwiddie and Hessinger did in fact smile. But Gehlen’s face was expressionless.

  “You’re a Jew, Freddy,” Cronley went on. “How’s chances you can get your co-religionists, the super spies of Mossad, to come galloping to our rescue before we’re scalped?”

  Hessinger, smiling, gave him the finger.

  “Actually, in a sense, that’s already happening,” Gehlen said.

  “Sir?”

  What the hell is he talking about?

  “Seven-K in Leningrad is a double agent. She’s an NKGB officer and a Mossad agent,” Gehlen said.

  “My God!” Cronley said.

  Gehlen smiled and nodded, and then went on: “One of the things Mossad is very good at is getting Jews out of Russia. When I realized getting Mrs. Likharev and her children out of Russia was really important, I asked her to help.”

  This is surreal. His agent—which means our agent—in Leningrad is an agent—a female agent—of this super Jewish intelligence organization—Mossad—that I never heard of?

  “Why would she do that?” Hessinger asked before Cronley could open his mouth to ask the identical question.

  “Over the years, we have been helpful to one another,” Gehlen said. “I thought of that when Colonel Parsons told us he has had little experience with the ‘nitty-gritty’ side of intelligence. This is the nitty-gritty side.”

  “I’m lost,” Cronley confessed.

  “You’re aware that middle-to-high-level swine in the Schutzstaffel grew rich by allowing foreign Jews—so-called Ausländer Juden—particularly those in the United States—to buy their relatives and friends out of the death camps and to safety in Argentina or Paraguay?”

  “Cletus Frade told me,” Cronley said.

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” Dunwiddie said.

  “Once the ransom money had been paid, Tiny,” Gehlen explained, “SS officers would go to Dachau or Auschwitz or wherever and remove the prisoners ‘for interrogation.’ They were not questioned, because the camps were run by the SS. Nor were they questioned when they reported the prisoners had died during interrogation. That happened often during SS interrogation.

  “What actually happened to the prisoners was that they were taken first to Spain, and then to Portugal, where they boarded vessels of neutral powers for transportation to South America.

  “When this came to my attention, I knew I couldn’t stop it. The corruption went right to the top of the Nazi hierarchy. If not to Heinrich Himmler himself, then to those very close to him. But the idea of getting people out of prison camps had a certain fascination for me. I didn’t understand the fascination, but it was there. I told Ludwig here, and Oberst Niedermeyer—you met Otto in Argentina, right, Jim?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I told them to think about it, and Otto came up with Mossad. We knew they had been active in the Soviet Union for a long time. The question then became what did we have that they wanted? And the corollary, what did they have that we wanted?”

  “What was the Mossad doing in Russia?” Cronley asked.

  “Zion’s business,” Mannberg said. “Somehow that had gone right over my head—and if I may say so, the general’s.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Cronley said.

  “What they were interested in was this homeland they want in Palestine. It didn’t really matter to them whether the Soviets won the war, or we did,” Mannberg said, and then clarified, “The Germans did. What they wanted to do was get as many Zionist leaders out of Russia as they could. The Soviets, who didn’t trust them, had jailed many of them, sent them to Siberia, or had them locked up in concentration camps.”

  “When Germany moved into Russia,” Gehlen picked up Mannberg’s narrative, “and took over the NKGB prison camps, the SS either killed all the Jews they found in them on the spot, or marched them off to become laborers. And among the people the SS marched off were many of the Zionist leaders Mossad wanted to get out of Russia and to Palestine.

  “So, more than a little belatedly, I realized there was common cause between Abwehr Ost and Mossad. They had penetrated the highest levels of the Kremlin, far more successfully than we had. On the other hand, my people, especially those who were in the SS, could get into the SS prison and slave labor systems. And get people out of them with the same ease—actually far more ease—than the SS could take prisoners from the death camps.

  “So I arranged to meet with the lady who was to become Seven-K.”

  “How did you know with whom to meet?”

  “We knew who she was. Her given name is Rahil, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “Rahil—Russian for Rachel,” Gehlen said.

  “Jesus!”

  “I thought you would find that interesting,” Gehlen said.

  “Interesting?” Dunwiddie asked. “Fascinating! Two spies named Rachel.”

  “Fuck you, Tiny!” Cronley flared.

  “Temper, temper, Captain, sir,” Dunwiddie said.

  “You’re never going to forget that, are you?”

  “Probably not, and I’m not going to let you forget Rachel, either.”

  “Now I don’t know what anybody’s talking about,” Hessinger said. “Who the hell is Rachel? You’re not talking about Colonel Schumann’s wife . . . Or are—”

  “Private joke, Freddy,” Dunwiddie said. “Sorry.”

  “As I was saying,” Gehlen said, “I arranged, with some difficulty, to meet with Seven-K in Vienna. In the Hotel Sacher. Before she met me, I had to turn Ludwig over to some of her people, to guarantee her safe return. But finally we met, and over Sachertorte and coffee—”

  “Over what?” Cronley asked.

  “A chocolate layer cake for which the Hotel Sacher is famous,” Hessinger furnished. “I had my first when I was eight or nine, and still remember how delicious it was.”

  “Ours, unfortunately, was not,” Gehlen said. “It was made with powdered eggs and ersatz sugar, and the coffee was made from acorns, but nevertheless, we struck our first deal.

  “If she would get me certain information, I would try to get two people, two Zionists, out of the hands of the SS. She gave me the names, and Ludwig got them out of an SS-run factory in Hungary. I don’t think they were Zionists, but she got me the information I asked for.”

  “How could you know it was the right information?”

  “The general knew the answers before he posed the question,” Mannberg said.

  “You may have noticed, Ludwig, my tendency to ask stupid questions,” Cronley said.

  “Now that you mention it, Captain, sir . . .” Dunwiddie said.

  Mannberg chuckled.

 
“I would suggest to the both of you,” Gehlen said, on the edge of unpleasantness, “that Captain Cronley’s ability to get his mind around all aspects of a statement, to question everything about a situation, not only is useful, but is far greater than your own. Jim, I hope you always ask whatever questions occur to you.”

  He let that sink in a moment, and then went on.

  “I was impressed with her from the first. Her ability to get from Moscow, where she was then stationed, to Vienna proved that she was high-ranking. It required false identity documents, et cetera, and carried the real risk that it was an Abwehr Ost plan to seize her.

  “I don’t know this, but I suspect she told Nikolayevich Merkulov, the commissar of state security, or his deputy, Ivan Serov, that I had made overtures. They had to give her permission to go to Vienna. Why did they do so? For much the same reasons that I authorized Ludwig to meet with Mr. Dulles in Bern, when he first made overtures to me, to see what the head of OSS Europe had in mind.

  “But what to keep in mind here is that what Rahil wanted to learn was what she might get from Abwehr Ost that would benefit Mossad, and only secondarily the NKGB.

  “What is that phrase, Jim, you so often use? ‘Cutting to the chase’? Cutting to the chase here, very slowly, very carefully, Rahil and I developed mutual trust. I was useful to her, and she was useful to me. Much of what I learned about the plans of the NKGB for Abwehr Ost personnel when they won the war, I learned from Rahil.”

  He paused for a moment and then went on.

  “And much of what the NKGB initially learned about Mr. Dulles’s postwar plans for Abwehr Ost, they learned from me. It was what you call a ‘tough call,’ but in the end I decided it was necessary to tell her. It further cemented both our relationship with her and hers with her superiors in the NKGB.

  “But I was not in contact with her from the time I surrendered to Major Wallace until I decided the importance of getting Mrs. Likharev out of Russia justified the risk. I wasn’t sure, when I told Ludwig to try to reestablish the link, that she was still alive, or more importantly would be willing to reestablish our relationship.