Death and Honor Read online

  The command structure of the OSS in Argentina as posted on a Top Secret chart in OSS headquarters in Washington differed greatly from the way things actually were in Argentina. That this had not come to the attention of OSS Director Donovan was because all reports from Argentina passed through the hands of Colonel A. F. Graham. As the deputy director of the OSS for Western Hemisphere Operation, Graham filtered anything he suspected would annoy Donovan—sometimes by burning the reports—rather than have Donovan see them.

  Most of the reports that complained about how things were going came from Lieutenant Commander Frederico Delojo, USN, who in Buenos Aires was the naval attaché—and, covertly, the OSS station chief—of the Embassy of the United States.

  Commander Delojo was a Puerto Rican, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and had been an intelligence officer from the time he had been a lieutenant junior grade. In theory—on the manning chart at OSS headquarters—Delojo was in command of all OSS personnel and activities in Argentina.

  One of the reports that Commander Delojo had sent to the OSS in Washington—and that Graham had burned—reported that then-Captain Cletus Frade, USMCR, had told him that the next time he came anywhere near Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo or tried to establish contact with any of the OSS personnel there he would be shot.

  Frade had made a similar threat to Lieutenant Colonel Richard Almond, USAAF, who had gone to Argentina ostensibly to teach Frade how to fly the Lodestar but actually had been sent by Army Intelligence to identify “Galahad,” Frade’s window into the German embassy, and more.

  Colonel Graham wasn’t sure that the threats were bona fide, but he suspected Frade meant them. Frade was determined to keep his men and his sources alive.

  Captain Maxwell Ashton III was on the manning chart as the commanding officer of Team Turtle, and therefore under the orders of Lieutenant Commander Delojo. However, he actually took his orders from Frade—and Delojo didn’t even know where he or any of the others were or what they were doing.

  Graham had sent a message to Delojo telling him that not only was he not to consider Captain Ashton and Lieutenant Pelosi subject to his orders, he also was not to inquire into their activities. Delojo’s four-page letter of protest about that, sent via the diplomatic pouch to Director Donovan, accordingly had gone up in flames in Graham’s wastebasket.

  It was Graham’s judgment that not only had Frade done a magnificent job so far in Argentina, but if left alone could probably make an even greater contribution to the war effort.

  Graham could not think of having a better agent in place, just about equally because Frade seemed to have a natural talent for covert warfare and because of his superb connections. The man leading the junta that had taken over Argentina was personally fond of him. Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, whom Graham believed to be a dangerous man and one destined to assume a greater role in Argentina, had been Frade’s father’s best friend, and looked on Frade as a beloved nephew.

  And all of that didn’t get into Frade’s connections with people who could tell him the details of the German Operation Phoenix, and the despicable practice within the SS of allowing Jews in concentration camps to be ransomed out, which really had the attention of the President of the United States.

  The status quo was not easy for Graham. He had been an infantry company commander—and later, as a major, a regimental intelligence officer—with the Marines in France in the First World War, and there learned to devoutly believe in the principles of leadership and obedience that made the Marine Corps what it was.

  He reluctantly had left the Marine Corps after the war, and only because he knew that it would shrink in size to the point where he would be lucky to get a commission as a lieutenant, and that promotions would come as quickly as glaciers melt—if at all.

  He had gone into the railroad business and there applied the techniques of leadership he had learned in the Marine Corps. He knew they worked. Before he had gone back on active duty he had been chairman of the board of the nation’s second-largest railroad.

  And he really disliked the deceit he knew he was practicing with OSS Director Donovan. He genuinely admired and liked Donovan, despite their monumental political differences.

  Yet he remained absolutely sure that letting Major Cletus Frade, USMCR, have a freer hand than Graham ever had granted any other subordinate was the correct thing to do.

  There were two young women near the men on the verandah—one petite and dark, the other tall, lithe, fair-skinned, and very blond.

  When he had finished shaking hands with the men, he turned to them.

  “Señora Frade,” Graham said in Spanish to the blonde. “I’d really forgotten how lovely you are.”

  “They call that ‘the bloom of pregnancy,’ ” she replied in English that made her sound as if she would be quite at home in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. “Unfortunately, it’s temporary, and soon I’ll be grotesquely swollen and as gray as a dirty sheep.”

  I’d forgotten that, too. Dorotea Mallín de Frade says exactly what she’s thinking.

  He smiled and turned to the small, dark young woman. She reminded him very much of his late wife. She looked as Emelia had when he’d met her.

  “We’ve never met,” he said, “but I suspect you are Señora Pelosi. My name is Graham.”

  She smiled shyly, and her reply was so soft he couldn’t hear it.

  And that, too, reminded him of Emelia.

  “Okay, fireworks time,” Cletus Frade announced behind him, “after which we can get down to the serious drinking.”

  Graham turned to look at him.

  Frade handed him a bottle of beer.

  “No glass,” Frade said. “No self-respecting Aggie would drink beer from a glass on the Fourth of July.”

  “Absolutely not,” Graham said, and took the bottle.

  They walked back to the airstrip through the formal gardens. Flaming torches lit the path paved with brick. Frade, holding his wife’s hand in his left hand and a bottle of Quilmes beer in the right, led the way with Graham at his side. Enrico walked behind them, his shotgun cradled in his arms. The others followed.

  As they came out of the garden, just as Graham noticed that chairs and a table loaded with food had been set up, there was a roll of drums. A brass band began to play the song of the U.S. Army Artillery, “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.”

  Graham saw a twenty-man-strong, ornately-uniformed band lined up next to the Lodestar.

  “I’m impressed, Cletus,” Graham said, laughing.

  “That’s the band of the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miracles,” Frade replied. “When I found out that most of its members were retired members of the Húsares de Pueyrredón regimental band, I decided to give them a chance.”

  Graham shook his head and smiled. He knew that Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo was so large and so far from the nearest town and had so many workers that it had its own church, complete with two priests and a cemetery. And he was not surprised that El Coronel Frade had found employment for old soldiers of his regiment. In many ways, the large estancias were feudal fiefdoms, with El Patron—now Cletus Frade—acting as paterfamilias.

  By the time they had reached the row of chairs, the band had segued into another march.

  “What the hell is that?” Graham asked.

  “ ‘Semper Paratus,’ the Coast Guard song,” Frade replied. “I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

  “Where the hell did you get the music?”

  “I told Pelosi to tell Delojo I needed it. He finally found it somewhere in the embassy’s storage. I don’t think they used it much; I don’t think the box the music came in ever had been opened.”

  “Did you tell Commander Delojo what you wanted it for?”

  Frade took a swig of beer, smiled, then shook his head.

  By the time everyone had settled into their seats, the band had made another segue, this time to “The Aggie War Hymn.”

  Frade and Graham immediately stood. Technical Sergeant
Ferris and Lieutenant Sawyer, seeing this, looked at them curiously.

  “Atten-hut!” Graham barked. Everyone complied.

  “And stay that way!” Frade snarled.

  Next came “The Marines’ Hymn” and after that the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The landing light of the Lodestar came on, illuminating the national colors on a pole, which hadn’t been visible before.

  Graham put his hand over his heart. Then he saw that Frade was saluting.

  You’re not supposed to salute in civilian clothing.

  Then he saw that all the others were saluting.

  Graham felt his eyes water.

  Well, goddamn it, why not?

  Civilian clothes or not, these are warriors on a field of battle every bit as dangerous as Guadalcanal or the skies over Germany.

  Graham moved his right hand, the fingers now stiff and together, from over his heart to his eyebrow.

  When the band of the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miracles had concluded their rendition of the National Anthem of the United States of America, they were given a round of hearty applause. Someone—Graham suspected Lieutenant Pelosi—whistled very loudly and shrilly through his teeth.

  The Lodestar’s landing light went out.

  “I didn’t have the manpower to present the colors,” Frade said. “But that seemed to work pretty well, didn’t it?”

  When Graham was sure he had control of his voice, he said, “Well done, Major Frade.”

  “I also couldn’t lay my hands on a Marine Corps flag,” Frade said. “And God knows I tried. If I could have found one, I’d have put it beside the flag so the Lodestar could have lit it up, too.”

  “Semper fi, Major Frade,” Graham said, hoping that Frade hadn’t picked up on his throat-tightened voice.

  “All right, Pelosi,” Frade ordered. “Get your show off the goddamn dime!”

  Graham saw Pelosi run across the runway into the darkness. A moment after he disappeared, a skyrocket raced into the night sky and burst into fireballs.

  “Where did you get the fireworks?” Graham asked as another skyrocket went off.

  “No problem. They use them down here for everything from New Year’s Eve to baby christenings.”

  Graham said what he was thinking: “You’d have made a pretty good company commander, Frade.”

  “If that’s an offer, Colonel, I can be packed in no more than three minutes.”

  “Just as soon as the Corps gives me the regiment I want and so richly deserve, I’ll send for you.”

  Frade chuckled, and handed Graham a fresh bottle of Quilmes beer.

  The celebration at the airstrip lasted another hour. The chapel band played popular music, American and Argentine, and Lieutenant and Mrs. Pelosi danced the tango to the great delight of the others. Graham remembered how embarrassed Emelia had been when he had to explain to her what Mrs. Astor, the Anglo-American socialite, had meant when she described the tango as a “naval engagement without seamen.” María Teresa Pelosi reminded him more and more of Emelia Graham.

  Graham decided early on that the talk he had to have with Frade could— and should—wait until morning. Not only would it more than likely be confrontational and unpleasant and destroy the good feeling celebrating the Fourth of July on the Argentine pampas had caused, but Frade had never been without a bottle of beer from the moment they had reached the ranch. It would obviously be better to have their meeting bright-eyed and sober in the morning.

  [TWO]

  As they walked into the house, Frade took Graham’s arm.

  “Why don’t we go into the study?”

  “How about in the morning?”

  “Now would be better,” Frade said.

  He started walking down the long, wide corridor toward what had been his father’s office, with Enrico trailing after him. After a moment’s hesitation, Graham followed them.

  When Frade reached the door, he signaled to Enrico to sit in a leather armchair outside the office, then unlocked the door and went in. As Graham followed him inside, he saw that Frade had gone to a table lined with whiskey bottles.

  “Close the door, please,” Frade said, then announced: “I’m having scotch. What can I fix for you?”

  “I’ll have a scotch,” Graham said. “But we’re back to wouldn’t it be better to do this in the morning? When you’re . . . clearheaded?”

  Frade looked at him for a moment until he understood, then chuckled.

  “This is my first today, Colonel. There was water in my beer bottle. I didn’t want to set the wrong example for the troops.”

  “Okay. Sorry. That puts us back to my thought that you would have been a good company commander.”

  Frade didn’t reply. He handed Graham a stiff drink, then sat down at what had been his father’s desk.

  He looked at Graham for a long moment, then shrugged.

  “What do you want to hear first?” Frade said.

  “Isn’t that obvious? What you made me come all the way down here to hear in person.”

  “I thought maybe you’d ask, ‘So how’s Galahad these days?’ ”

  “Okay, so how’s Galahad these days?”

  “Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein is fine, thank you. He did not have to go to Valhalla after spreading himself—as an honorable officer and gentleman—all over the runway at El Palomar.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Frade did not respond directly. Instead, he said, “And when he told me why he was still among us, it came out that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is one of the good guys—”

  “Oh, come on, Frade!” Graham interrupted, thinking, My God, where did he get that? “The head of the Abwehr is a good guy? Somebody’s pulling your chain!”

  “—which is why I wanted you to come down here,” Frade went on, immune to Graham’s sarcasm. “I didn’t want to send that in a message, for the obvious reasons. You really never know who’s reading your radio traffic, or whether somebody in the State Department is reading stuff in the diplomatic pouch before they send it over to the OSS.”

  Graham looked at him in disbelief.

  It was possible that something—anything from a train or airplane crash to a heart attack—would remove William J. Donovan from command of the OSS. That contingency had to be planned for. An immediate successor— someone who knew the most secret of all the secrets—would have to be named.

  Two men had been selected.

  One was Allen W. Dulles, who was running OSS operations in Europe from Switzerland. Dulles was the archetypical WASP Washington insider. A Princeton graduate, he was the grandson of John W. Foster, who had been secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison, and the nephew of Robert Lansing, who had been President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of State.

  Dulles was very good at what he did, and superbly qualified. As a State Department officer, he had been stationed in Bern, Paris, Istanbul, Vienna, and Berlin.

  The other man was Graham.

  Graham had been genuinely surprised when Donovan told him that he had been chosen—with President Roosevelt’s approval—as one of the two men who were to be prepared to step in immediately as Donovan’s successor should that be necessary. Surprised because he was the antithesis of a WASP Washington insider. He was a Roman Catholic Texan of Mexican heritage who had graduated from Texas A&M, and his only connection with politics had been to support—and make substantial financial contributions to—the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell L. Willkie, whom Roosevelt had soundly beaten.

  To be prepared to take over from Donovan, the three met whenever they could find the opportunity. Dulles could rarely get to Washington, so what most often had happened was that Graham would meet with Donovan in Washington, and then Graham would travel to Europe—most often to Portugal, which had air service to Switzerland—and personally tell Dulles what Donovan thought he should know. He had told Dulles of the Manhattan Project, the ultrasecret program to develop an atomic bomb.

  And Dul
les would tell Graham what secrets he thought Donovan and his possible successor and no one else should know. Two of these secrets involved the identities of anti-Nazi Germans high in the hierarchy of the Thousand-Year Reich with whom Dulles was dealing.

  One of these was a man named Fritz Kolbe, who provided Dulles with the identities of German spies around the world and had told him of the German development of a revolutionary German fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me- 262, which, powered by a new type of engine—a “jet”—was capable of great speed and posed a real threat to the Army Air Forces’ plans to bomb Germany into submission.

  And Graham had relayed to Donovan that Dulles was in contact with Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, who was dedicated to the overthrow of Adolf Hitler, and there had even been vague talk about a plot to assassinate Hitler.

  Canaris’s and Kolbe’s activities were secrets as tightly held as was that of the atomic bomb.

  And, Graham thought, looking at Frade, if I’m to believe what I’m hearing, Cletus Frade, a very junior and very amateur OSS operative on the pampas of Argentina, has uncovered the Canaris secret.

  That’s incredible!

  But maybe—even probably—he’s simply reporting gossip.

  “I find that very hard to believe, Frade,” Graham said. “What do you know about Canaris?”

  “He’s the head of German intelligence.”

  “And you’re telling me he’s . . . sympathetic to the Allied cause?”

  “That’s what I hear. From what you would call an absolutely reliable source.”

  “And who would that be?” Graham demanded.

  “Let me take it step by step,” Frade said.

  “Okay.”

  Frade took a sip of his drink, then began: “Himmler knows they’ve got a traitor in their embassy here. It’s pretty obvious. They couldn’t get that Operation Phoenix money into Argentina, and lost two of the best guys trying: Colonel Karl-Heinz Grüner, the military attaché who was also the Sicherheitsdienst guy, and Standartenführer Josef Goltz of the SS.

  “So Himmler put SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, his adjutant, into a Wehrmacht Generalmajor’s uniform and sent him down here to find the traitor.”