The Assassination Option Read online

  “Cronley talked about him. He said he comes from an Army family that goes way back. That they were Indian fighters, that two of his grandfathers beat Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish American War.”

  “Did he mention that he almost graduated from Norwich? That his father was a Norwich classmate of Major General I.D. White, who commanded the Second Armored Division?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, when Cronley returned to Germany, to Kloster Grünau, he learned that those black soldiers—the ones he calls ‘Tiny’s Troopers’—had grabbed a man as he attempted to pass through—going outward—the barbed wire around Kloster Grünau. He had documents on him identifying him as Major Konstantin Orlovsky of the Soviet Liaison Mission. They have authority to be in the American Zone.

  “On his person were three rosters. One of them was a complete roster of all of General Gehlen’s men then inside Kloster Grünau. The second was a complete roster of all of Gehlen’s men whom we have transported to Argentina, and the third was a listing of where in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, et cetera, that Gehlen believed his men who had not managed to get out were.

  “It was clear that Orlovsky was an NKGB agent. It was equally clear there was at least one of Gehlen’s men—and very likely more than one—whom the NKGB had turned and who had provided Orlovsky with the rosters.

  “When he was told of this man, Colonel Mattingly did what I would have done. He ordered Dunwiddie to turn the man over to Gehlen. Gehlen—or one or more of his officers—would interrogate Orlovsky to see if he’d give them the names of Gehlen’s traitors.

  “Do I have to tell you what would happen to them if the interrogation was successful?”

  “They would ‘go missing.’”

  “As would Major Orlovsky. As cold-blooded as that sounds, it was the only solution that Mattingly could see, and he ordered it carried out. And, to repeat, I would have given the same order had I been in his shoes.

  “Enter James D. Cronley Junior, who had by then been a captain for seventy-two hours. When Dunwiddie told him what had happened, he went to see the Russian. He disapproved of the psychological techniques Gehlen’s interrogator was using. Admittedly, they were nasty. They had confined him naked in a windowless cell under the Kloster Grünau chapel, no lights, suffering time disorientation and forced to smell the contents of a never-emptied canvas bucket which he was forced to use as a toilet.

  “Cronley announced he was taking over the interrogation, and ordered Tiny’s Troopers to clean the cell, empty the canvas bucket, and to keep any of Gehlen’s men from having any contact whatsoever with Orlovsky.”

  “What did Gehlen do about that? Mattingly?”

  Souers did not answer the question.

  “Cronley and Dunwiddie then began their own interrogation of Major Orlovsky. As Colonel Mattingly pointed out to me later, Orlovsky was the first Russian that either Dunwiddie or Cronley had ever seen.”

  “Sir, when did Colonel Mattingly learn about this? Did General Gehlen go to him?”

  After a just perceptible hesitation, Souers answered the question.

  “Colonel Mattingly didn’t learn what Captain Cronley was up to until after Orlovsky was in Argentina.”

  “What?” Ashton asked, shocked.

  “Cronley got on the SIGABA and convinced Colonel Frade that if he got Orlovsky to Argentina, he was convinced he would be a very valuable intelligence asset in the future.”

  “And Cletus agreed with this wild hair?”

  “Colonel Frade sent Father Welner, at Cronley’s request, to Germany to try to convince Orlovsky that Cronley was telling the truth when he said they would not only set him up in a new life in Argentina, but that General Gehlen would make every effort to get Orlovsky’s family out of the Soviet Union and to Argentina.”

  “Gehlen went along with this?”

  “The officer whom many of his peers believe is a better intelligence officer than his former boss, Admiral Canaris, ever was, was in agreement with our Captain Cronley from the moment Cronley told him what he was thinking.”

  “So this Russian is now in Argentina?”

  “Where he will become your responsibility once you get there. At the moment, he’s in the Argerich military hospital in Buenos Aires, under the protection of the Argentine Bureau of Internal Security, recovering from injuries he received shortly after he arrived in Argentina.”

  “Injuries?”

  “The car in which he was riding was attacked shortly after it left the airport by parties unknown. They used machine guns and Panzerfausts—”

  “What?”

  “German rocket-propelled grenades.”

  “Then they were Germans?”

  “The BIS—and Cletus Frade—believes they were Paraguayan criminals hired by the Russians. So does Colonel Sergei Likharev of the NKGB.”

  “Who?”

  “When Major Orlovsky realized that the NKGB was trying to kill him, and probably would do something very unpleasant to his wife and kids if General Gehlen could not get them out of the Soviet Union, he fessed up that his name is really Likharev and that he is—or was—an NKGB colonel. And gave up the names of Gehlen’s traitors.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “You don’t want to know, Colonel Ashton.”

  “So Cronley did the right thing.”

  “I don’t think that Colonel Mattingly would agree that the ends justify the means.”

  “But you do?”

  “On one hand, it is inexcusable that Cronley went around Mattingly. On the other hand, we now have Colonel Likharev singing like that proverbial canary. And on the same side of that scale, General Gehlen has gone out of his way to let me know in what high regard he holds Cronley and Dunwiddie. But let me finish this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After Frade informed me that he believed Likharev had truly seen the benefits of turning, and that he believed he would be of enormous value to us in the future, I was willing to overlook Cronley’s unorthodoxy. Then Cronley got on the SIGABA and sent me a long message stating that he considered it absolutely essential that when he is transferred to the DCI that he have another commissioned officer to back him up, and that he wanted First Sergeant Dunwiddie commissioned as a captain—he said no one pays any attention to lieutenants—to fill that role.

  “My first reaction to the message, frankly, was ‘Just who the hell does he think he is?’ I decided that it probably would be unwise to leave him in command of the Pullach compound. I then telephoned General Gehlen, to ask how he would feel about Major Harold Wallace—do you know who I mean?”

  Shaking his head, Ashton said, “No, sir.”

  “He was Mattingly’s deputy in OSS Forward . . .”

  “Now I do, sir.”

  “And is now commanding the Twenty-seventh CIC, which is the cover for the Twenty-third CIC, to which Cronley and Dunwiddie are assigned. You are familiar with all this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I asked General Gehlen how he would feel if I arranged for Major Wallace to take over command of the Pullach compound. He replied by asking if he could speak freely. I told him he could. He said that in the best of all possible worlds, he would prefer that Colonel Mattingly and Major Wallace have as little to do with Pullach as possible. When I asked why, he said that he regarded the greatest threat to the Pullach compound operation, in other words, to Operation Ost, was not the Russians but the U.S. Army bureaucracy.

  “In case you don’t know, the Pentagon—the deputy chief of staff for intelligence—has assigned two officers, a lieutenant colonel named Parsons and a major named Ashley—to liaise with Operation Ost at Pullach.”

  “Frade told me that, but not the names.”

  “DCS-G2 thinks they should be running Operation Ost. Both Parsons and Ashley outrank Captain Cronley. See the probl
em?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought it could be dealt with, since Mattingly, in the Farben Building, is a full colonel and could handle Parsons, and further that Wallace could better stand up to Parsons and Ashley than Cronley could.”

  Ashton nodded his understanding.

  “General Gehlen disagreed. He told me something I didn’t know, that First Sergeant Dunwiddie’s godfather is General White, and that in private Dunwiddie refers to General White as ‘Uncle Isaac.’ And he reminded me of something I already knew: The President of the United States looks fondly upon Captain Cronley.”

  “How did Gehlen know that?”

  “I don’t know, but I have already learned not to underestimate General Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen put it to me that he felt Parsons was under orders to somehow take control of Pullach, that Mattingly, who is interested in being taken into the Regular Army, is not going to defy the general staff of the U.S. Army.

  “Gehlen put it to me that DCS-G2 taking over Operation Ost would be a disaster—reaching as far up as the President—inevitably about to happen. And I knew he was right.”

  “Jesus!”

  “And he said he felt that because both Dunwiddie and Cronley had friends in high places, they would be the best people to defend Operation Ost from being swallowed by DCS-G2. And I realized Gehlen was right about that, too.

  “General White is about to return to Germany from Fort Riley to assume command of the Army of Occupation police force, the U.S. Constabulary. I flew out to Fort Riley on Tuesday and talked this situation over with him. He’s on board.

  “On January second, the day after the Directorate of Central Intelligence is activated, certain military officers—you, for example, and Captains Cronley and Dunwiddie—”

  “Captain Dunwiddie, sir?” Ashton interrupted.

  “Sometime this week, First Sergeant Dunwiddie will be discharged for the convenience of the government for the purpose of accepting a commission as Captain, Cavalry, detail to Military Intelligence.

  “As I was saying, Cronley and Dunwiddie—and now you—will be transferred to the Directorate. Colonel Mattingly and Major Wallace will remain assigned to Counterintelligence Corps duties. I told General Greene that Colonel Frade suggested that for the time being they would be of greater use in the CIC and that I agreed with him.”

  When it looked as if Ashton was going to reply, Admiral Souers said, “Were you listening, Colonel, when I told you you’re going to have to learn to control your tendency to ask questions out loud that should not be asked out loud?”

  “Yes, sir. But may I ask a question?”

  Souers nodded.

  “It looks to me as if the effect of all this is that in addition to all the problems Cronley’s going to have with Operation Ost, he’s going to have to deal with Colonel Parsons—the Pentagon G2—and Colonel Mattingly, and maybe this CIC general, Greene, all of whom are going to try to cut him off at the knees.”

  Souers did not reply either directly or immediately, but finally he said, “I hope what you have learned in our conversation will be useful both when you go to Germany and later in Buenos Aires.”

  “Yes, sir. It will be.”

  Souers met Ashton’s eye for a long moment, then smiled and turned and started to walk out of the room.

  [TWO]

  Kloster Grünau

  Schollbrunn, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  0330 22 December 1945

  Senior Watch Chief Maksymilian Ostrowski, a tall, blond twenty-seven-year-old, who was chief supervisor of Detachment One, Company “A,” 7002nd Provisional Security Organization, woke instantly when his wristwatch vibrated.

  He had been sleeping, fully clothed in dyed-black U.S. Army “fatigues” and combat boots, atop Army olive-drab woolen blankets on his bed in his room in what had once been the priory of a medieval monastery and was now a . . . what?

  Ostrowski wasn’t sure exactly what Kloster Grünau should be called now. It was no longer a monastery and was now occupied by Americans. He had learned that the Americans were guarding—both at Kloster Grünau and in a village, Pullach, near Munich—nearly three hundred former Wehrmacht officers and enlisted men and their families. Both the monastery and the village were under the protection of a company of heavily armed American soldiers. All of them were Negroes, and they wore the shoulder insignia of the 2nd Armored Division.

  Ostrowski was no stranger to military life, and he strongly suspected that it had to do with intelligence. Just what, he didn’t know. What was important to him was his belief that if he did well what he was told to do, he wouldn’t be rounded up and forced to return to what he was sure was at best imprisonment and most likely an unmarked mass grave in his native Poland.

  He sometimes thought he had lived two previous lives and was on the cusp of a third. The first had been growing up in Poland as the son of a cavalry officer. He had graduated from the Szkola Rycerska military academy in 1939. He just had time to earn his pilot’s wings in the Polish Air Force when Germany and Russia attacked Poland. That life had ended when his father died leading a heroically stupid cavalry charge against German tanks, and he and some other young pilots for whom there were no airplanes to fly had been flown to first France and then England.

  Life Two had been World War II. By the time that ended, he was Kapitan Maksymilian Ostrowski, 404th Fighter Squadron, Free Polish Air Force. The watch that had woken him by vibrating on his wrist was a souvenir of that life. Fairly late in the war, he had been at a fighter base in France, waiting for the weather to clear so they could fly in support of the beleaguered 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne.

  There had been a spectacular poker game with a mixed bag—Poles, Brits, and Americans—of fellow fighter pilots. He liked Americans, and not only because he could remind them that he wasn’t the first Pole to come to the Americans’ aid in a war. He’d tell them Casimir Pulaski was the first. He’d tell them Pulaski had been recruited by Benjamin Franklin in Paris, went to America, saved George Washington’s life, and became a general in the Continental Army before dying of wounds suffered in battle.

  This tale of Polish-American cooperation had not been of much consolation to one of the American pilots, who, convinced the cards he held were better than proved to be the case, had thrown a spectacular watch into the pot.

  It was a gold-cased civilian—not Air Corps–issued—Hamilton chronograph. It had an easily settable alarm function that caused it to vibrate at the selected time.

  Ostrowski’s four jacks and a king had taken the pot.

  On the flight line at daybreak the next morning, just before they took off, the American had come to him and asked, if he could come up with three hundred dollars, would Ostrowski sell him the watch?

  Ostrowski was already in love with the chronograph, so he knew why the American pilot wanted it back. Reluctantly, he agreed to sell it. The pilot said he’d have the cash for him when they came back.

  He didn’t come back. The American had gone in—either shot down or pilot error—just outside Bastogne.

  In Life Two, Ostrowski had worn an RAF uniform with the insignia of a captain and a “Poland” patch sewn to the shoulder. As what he thought of as Life Three began, he was wearing dyed-black U.S. Army “fatigues” with shoulder patches reading Wachmann sewed to each shoulder. There was no insignia of rank, as the U.S. Army had not so far come up with rank insignia for the Provisional Security Organization.

  The Provisional Security Organization was new. It had been created by the European Command for several reasons, primary among them that EUCOM had a pressing need for manpower to guard its installations—especially supply depots—against theft by the German people, and the millions of displaced persons—“DPs”—who were on the edge of starvation.

  There were not enough American soldiers available for such duties. Germans
could not be used, as this would have meant putting weapons in the hands of the just defeated enemy. Neither, with one significant exception, could guards be recruited from the DPs.

  That exception was former members of the Free Polish Army and Air Force. When they were hastily discharged after the war, so they could be returned to Poland, many—most—of them refused to go. The officers, especially, were familiar with what had happened to the Polish officer corps in the Katyn Forest. They had no intention of placing themselves at the mercy of the Red Army. So they joined the hordes of displaced persons.

  When, at the demand of the Soviets, several hundred of them had been rounded up for forcible repatriation, some broke out of the transfer compounds and more than two hundred of them committed suicide. This enraged General Eisenhower, who decreed there would be no more forcible repatriations, and ordered that former Free Polish soldiers and airmen being held be released.

  Then someone in the Farben Building realized that the thousands of former Free Polish military men who refused to be repatriated were the solution to the problem of providing guards for EUCOM’s supply depots.

  Over the bitter objections of the State Department, which Eisenhower ignored, the Provisional Security Organization was quickly formed. Although nothing was promised but U.S. Army rations and quarters, the dyed-black fatigues and U.S. Army “combat boots,” and a small salary—paid in reichsmarks, which were all but worthless—there were so many applicants for the PSO that the recruiters could be choosy.

  Training of the first batch of guards—in whose ranks was former Kapitan Maksymilian Ostrowski—was conducted by the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in a former Wehrmacht kaserne in Griesheim, near Frankfurt am Main.

  It consisted primarily in instruction in the use of the U.S. Carbine, Cal. .30 and the Model 1911A1 Pistol, caliber .45 ACP with which the PSO would be armed. There were lectures concerning the limits of their authority, the wearing of the uniform, and that sort of thing. The instruction syllabus called for seventy-four hours of classes. The classes took two weeks. There were 238 students in Class One-45.