The Assassination Option Read online

  Among the documents turned over were some that Gehlen’s agents had stolen from the Kremlin itself. They included photographic copies of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria’s proposal, dated March 5, 1940, to execute all captured Polish officers. Gehlen also provided photographic copies of Stalin’s personal approval of the proposal, signed by him on behalf of the Soviet Politburo, and reports from functionaries of the NKVD reporting in detail their execution of their orders. At least 21,768, and as many as 22,002, Poles had been murdered. Approximately 8,000 were military officers, approximately 6,000 were police officers, and the rest were members of the intelligentsia, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests.

  The Americans could not raise this in the face of the Soviet Union, however, as they would have had to say where they got their information, and when the Nuremberg trials began, the Americans were denying any knowledge of the whereabouts of former Major General Reinhard Gehlen.

  I

  [ONE]

  Walter Reed Army Medical Center

  Washington, D.C.

  0905 22 December 1945

  The MP at the gate did not attempt to stop the Packard Clipper when it approached the gate. He had seen enough cars from the White House pool to know one when he saw one, and this one was also displaying a blue plate with two silver stars, indicating that it was carrying a rear admiral (upper half).

  The MP waved the car through, saluted crisply, and then went quickly into the guard shack—which was actually a neat little tile-roofed brick structure, not a shack—and got on the phone.

  “White House car with an admiral,” he announced.

  This caused activity at the main entrance. A Medical Corps lieutenant colonel, who was the Medical Officer of the Day—MOD—and a Rubenesque major of the Army Nurse Corps, who was the NOD—Nurse Officer of the Day—rushed to the lobby to greet the VIP admiral from the White House.

  No Packard Clipper appeared.

  “Where the hell did he go?” the MOD inquired finally.

  “If it’s who I think it is,” the NOD said, “he’s done this before. He went in the side door to 233. The auto accident major they flew in from South America.”

  The MOD and the NOD hurried to the stairwell and quickly climbed it in hopes of greeting the VIP admiral from the White House to offer him any assistance he might require.

  They succeeded in doing so. They caught up with Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant James L. Allred, USN, as the latter reached to push open the door to room 233.

  “Good morning, Admiral,” the MOD said. “I’m Colonel Thrush, the Medical Officer of the day. May I be of service?”

  “Just calling on a friend, Colonel,” the admiral replied. “But thank you, nonetheless.”

  He nodded to his aide to open the door.

  The NOD beat him to it, and went into the room.

  There was no one in the hospital bed, whose back had been cranked nearly vertical. A bed tray to one side held a coffee thermos, a cup, and an ashtray, in which rested a partially smoked thick, dark brown cigar. The room was redolent of cigar smoke.

  “He must be in the toilet,” the nurse announced, adding righteously, “He’s not supposed to do that unassisted.”

  Lieutenant Allred went to the toilet door, knocked, and asked, “You okay, Major?”

  “I was until you knocked at the door,” a muffled voice replied.

  “Thank you for your interest, Colonel, Miss,” Admiral Souers said.

  They understood they were being dismissed, said, “Yes, sir,” in chorus, and left the room.

  “Who is he?” the MOD asked.

  “You mean the admiral, or the major?”

  “Both.”

  “All I know about the admiral is that the word is that he’s a pal of President Truman. And all I know about the major is that he was medically evac’d from someplace in South America, maybe Argentina, someplace like that, and brought here. Broken leg, broken arm, broken ribs. And no papers. No Army papers. He told one of the nurses he was in a car accident.”

  “I wonder why here?” the MOD asked. “There are very good hospitals in the Canal Zone, and that’s a lot closer to Argentina than Washington.”

  The NOD shrugged.

  “And that admiral showed up an hour after he did,” she said. “And shortly after that, the major’s family started coming. He has a large family. I think they’re Puerto Ricans. They were all speaking Spanish.”

  “Interesting,” the MOD said.

  Major Maxwell Ashton III, Cavalry, detail Military Intelligence, a tall, swarthy-skinned, six-foot-three twenty-six-year-old, tried to rise from the water closet in his toilet by using a chromed support mounted to the wall. The support was on the left wall. Major Ashton’s left arm was in a cast and the cast was in a sling. Using his right arm, he managed to rise about eighteen inches from the toilet seat before his hand slipped and he dropped back down.

  He cursed. Loudly, colorfully, obscenely, and profanely, in Spanish, and for perhaps thirty seconds.

  He then attempted to rise using the crutch he had rested against the toilet wall. On the third try, he made it. With great difficulty, he managed to get his pajama trousers up from the floor and over his right leg, which was encased in plaster of paris, and to his waist.

  “Oh, you clever fucking devil, you!” he proclaimed, in English.

  He unlocked the door, held it open with his forehead, and then managed to get the crutch into his armpit, which permitted him to escape the small room.

  He was halfway to the bed when Lieutenant Allred attempted to come to his aid.

  Ashton impatiently waved him off, made it to the bed, and, with difficulty, got in.

  “You should have asked a nurse to help you,” Allred said.

  “I’m sure it’s different in the Navy, but in the Cavalry, we consider it unbecoming an officer and a gentleman to ask women with whom we are not intimately acquainted to assist us in moving our bowels,” Ashton said.

  Admiral Souers laughed.

  “I’m delighted to find you in a good mood, Max,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  “Sir, do you really want to know?”

  “I really do.”

  “I am torn between that proverbial rock and that hard place. On one hand, I really want to get the hell out of here. I am told that when I can successfully stagger to the end of the hall and back on my crutches, I will be considered ‘ambulatory.’ I can do that. But if I do it officially, that will mean I will pass into the hands of my Aunt Florence, who is camped out in the Hay-Adams extolling my many virtues to the parents of every unmarried Cuban female in her child-bearing years—of the proper bloodline, of course—between New York and Miami.”

  “That doesn’t sound so awful to me,” Allred said.

  “What you don’t understand, Jim—although I’ve told you this before—is that unmarried Cuban females of the proper bloodline do not fool around before marriage. And I am still in my fooling-around years.”

  “Or might be, anyway, when you get out of that cast,” Admiral Souers said.

  “Thank you, sir, for pointing that out to me,” Ashton said.

  Souers chuckled, and then asked, “What do you want first, the good news or the bad?”

  “Let’s start with the bad, sir. Then I will have something to look forward to.”

  “Okay. There’s a long list of the former. Where do I start? Okay. General Patton died yesterday in Germany.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. He always said he wanted to go out with the last bullet fired in the last battle.”

  “And a car wreck isn’t the last battle, is it?” Souers replied.

  “Unless it was an opening shot in the first of a series of new battles,” Ashton said.

  “We looked into that,” Souers said. “General Greene—the European C
ommand CIC chief? . . .”

  Ashton nodded his understanding.

  “. . . was all over the accident. And he told me that’s what it was, an accident. A truck pulled in front of Patton’s limousine. His driver braked hard, but ran into the truck anyway. Patton slid off the seat and it got his neck, or his spine. He was paralyzed. Greene told me when he saw Patton in the hospital, they had him stretched out with weights. Greene said it looked like something from the Spanish Inquisition.”

  “And what does General Gehlen have to say about it?” Ashton asked.

  “I think if he had anything to say, Cronley would have passed it on. Why do you think it could be something other than an accident?”

  Before Ashton could reply, Admiral Souers added, “Dumb question. Sorry.”

  Ashton answered it anyway.

  “Well, sir, there are automobile accidents and then there are automobile accidents.”

  “Accidents happen, Max,” Souers said.

  “Sir, what happened to me was no accident,” Ashton said.

  “No, I don’t think it was. And Frade agrees. But accidents do happen.”

  Ashton’s face showed, Souers decided, that he thought he was being patronized.

  “For example, sort of close to home, do you know who Lieutenant Colonel Schumann is? Or was?”

  Ashton shook his head.

  “He was Greene’s inspector general. I met him when I was over there. Good man.”

  Ashton said nothing, waiting for the admiral to continue.

  “More than a very good IG,” Souers continued, “a good intelligence officer. He was so curious about Kloster Grünau that Cronley had to blow the engine out of his staff car with a machine gun to keep him out.”

  “That’s a story no one chose to share with me,” Ashton said drily.

  “Well, we didn’t issue a press release. The only reason I’m telling you is to make my point about accidents happening. The day Patton died, Colonel Schumann went to his quarters to lunch with his wife. There was apparently a faulty gas water heater. It apparently leaked gas. Schumann got home just in time for the gas to blow up. It demolished the building.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Literally blowing both of them away, to leave their two kids, a boy and a girl, as orphans.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Ashton said.

  “Quickly changing the subject to the good news,” Souers said. “Let’s have the box, Jim.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Allred said, and handed the admiral a small blue box.

  Souers snapped it open and extended it to Ashton.

  “Would you like me to pin these to your jammies, Colonel, or would you rather do that yourself?”

  “These are for real?” Ashton asked.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Ashton, those are for real.”

  “In lieu of a Purple Heart?” Ashton asked.

  “Prefacing this by saying I think you well deserve the promotion, the reason you have it is because I told the adjutant general I desperately needed you, and that the only way you would even consider staying in the Army would be if your services had been rewarded with a promotion.”

  Ashton didn’t reply.

  “Operative words, Colonel, ‘would even consider staying.’”

  Again, Ashton didn’t reply.

  “If nothing else, you can now, for the rest of your life, legitimately refer to yourself as ‘colonel’ when telling tales of your valiant service in World War Two to Cuban señoritas whom you wish to despoil before marriage.”

  “Sometimes it was really rough,” Ashton said. “Either the steak would be overcooked, or the wine improperly chilled. Once, I even fell off my polo pony.”

  “Modesty becomes you, but we both know what you did in Argentina.”

  “And once I was struck by a hit-and-run driver while getting out of a taxi.”

  “That, too.”

  “I really wish, Admiral, that you meant what you said to the adjutant general.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That you desperately need me.”

  “They say, and I believe, that no man is indispensable. But that said, I really wish you weren’t—what?—‘champing at the bit’ to hang up your uniform. With you and Frade both getting out—and Cletus wouldn’t stay on active duty if they made him a major general—finding someone to run Operation Ost down there is going to be one hell of a problem.”

  Ashton raised his hand over his head.

  When Souers looked at him in curiosity, he said, nodding toward the toilet, “No, sir. I am not asking permission to go back in there.”

  “This is what they call an ‘unforeseen happenstance,’” Admiral Souers said after a moment. “You’re really willing to stay on active duty?”

  Ashton nodded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have to ask why, Max.”

  “When I thought about it, I realized I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life making rum, or growing sugarcane,” Ashton said. “And I really would like to get the bastards who did this to me.”

  He raised both the en-casted arm resting on his chest and his en-casted broken leg.

  “I was hoping you would say because you see it as your duty, or that you realize how important Operation Ost is, something along those lines.”

  “Who was it who said ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’?”

  “Samuel Johnson said it. I’m not sure I agree with it. And I won’t insult you, Max, by suggesting you are unaware of the importance of Operation Ost. But I have to point out Romans 12:19.” When he saw the confusion on Ashton’s face, the admiral went on: “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ Or words to that effect.”

  “The Lord can have his after I have mine,” Ashton said. “When do you become our nation’s spymaster?”

  “That title belongs to General Donovan, and always will,” Souers said. “If you’re asking when the President will issue his Executive Order establishing the United States Directorate of Central Intelligence, January first.”

  “Let me ask the rude question, sir,” Ashton said. “And how does General Donovan feel about that?”

  “Well, the Directorate will be pretty much what he recommended. Starting, of course, with that it will be a separate intelligence agency answering only to the President.”

  “I meant to ask, sir, how he feels about not being named director?”

  Souers considered his reply before giving it.

  “Not to go outside this room, I suspect he’s deeply disappointed and probably regrets taking on J. Edgar Hoover. My personal feeling is that the President would have given General Donovan the Directorate if it wasn’t for Hoover.”

  “The President is afraid of Hoover?”

  “The President is a very smart, arguably brilliant, politician who has learned that it’s almost always better to avoid a bitter confrontation. I think he may have decided that his establishing the Directorate of Central Intelligence over Hoover’s objections was all the bitter confrontation he could handle.”

  “How does Hoover feel about you?”

  “He would have preferred—would really have preferred—to have one of his own appointed director. Once the President told him that there would be a Directorate of Central Intelligence despite his objections to it, Hoover seriously proposed Clyde Tolson, his deputy, for the job. But even J. Edgar doesn’t get everything he wants.”

  “That wasn’t my question, sir.”

  “He’s hoping he will be able to control me.”

  “What’s General Donovan going to do now?”

  “You know he’s a lawyer? A very good one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, the President, citing that, asked him to go to Nuremberg as Number Two to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who’s going to be the c
hief American prosecutor.”

  “He threw him a bone, in other words?”

  “Now that you’re a lieutenant colonel, Colonel, you’re going to have to learn to control your tendency to ask out loud questions that should not be asked out loud.”

  “Admiral, you have a meeting with the President at ten forty-five,” Allred said.

  Souers walked to the bed, extending his hand.

  “I’ll be in touch, Max,” he said. “Get yourself declared ambulatory. The sooner I can get you back to Argentina, the better.”

  “I was thinking, sir, that I would go to Germany first, to have a look at the Pullach compound, and get with Colonel Mattingly and Lieutenant Cronley, before I go back to Buenos Aires.”

  “I think that’s a very good idea, if you think you’re up to all that travel,” he said.

  “I’m up to it, sir.”

  “I hadn’t planned to get into this with you. That was before you agreed to stay on. But now . . .”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Now that you’re going to have to have a commander-subordinate relationship with Captain . . . Captain . . . Cronley . . .”

  “Sorry, sir. I knew that the President had promoted Cronley for grabbing the uranium oxide in Argentina.”

  “And for his behavior—all right, his ‘valor above and beyond the call of duty.’”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Prefacing this by saying I think he fully deserved the promotion, and the Distinguished Service Medal that went with it, and that I personally happen to like him very much, I have to tell you what happened after he returned to Germany.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Admiral,” Lieutenant Allred said, as he tapped his wristwatch, “the President . . .”

  “The world won’t end if I’m ten minutes late,” Admiral Souers said. “And if it looks as if we’ll be late, get on the radio to the White House and tell them we’re stuck in traffic.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know about those Negro troops who have been guarding Kloster Grünau? Under that enormous first sergeant they call ‘Tiny’? First Sergeant Dunwiddie?”