Death and Honor Page 8

  Donovan shook his head.

  “What do you think he means about Galahad’s connections?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. But I know him well enough now to know he really thinks it’s important.”

  Donovan nodded.

  “Okay. Go down and see what he has to say.”

  “I will.”

  Graham headed for the door and was halfway there when Donovan realized he hadn’t gotten into the second thing Roosevelt had brought up at dinner.

  While Donovan held Alex Graham in very high regard, it was also true that their personalities clashed, almost always because Graham was one of the very few people in the world who was not afraid to tell Donovan no and then was uncowed when this inevitably triggered Donovan’s temper.

  And it just happened again. He told me no, and I became annoyed to the point where not only didn’t we have the friendly cup of coffee I set up but, also, I forgot I promised FDR I would have Graham implement his latest friendly suggestion for the OSS.

  “Hold it a second, will you, Alex?” Donovan called.

  Graham turned.

  “There’s something else,” Donovan said. He waved at the couch and the coffee service. “Have you time for a cup of coffee?”

  Graham recognized the olive branch.

  “Thank you. I’d love one.”

  He walked to the couch and sat down. Donovan walked to the coffee table carrying a cigar humidor, offered a cigar to Graham, lit it for him, and then poured the coffee.

  “Why does this little bird on my shoulder keep whispering, ‘Beware of Irishmen bearing gifts’?” Graham said.

  “Because you have a cynical streak in your character,” Donovan said.

  “True,” Graham said.

  “FDR had dinner with Hap Arnold night before last,” Donovan began. “During which Arnold told him how well aircraft production is going.”

  General Henry H. Arnold was commanding general, Army Air Forces.

  Graham nodded and waited for Donovan to go on.

  “Arnold apparently got carried away and said something about almost being at the point where we have more airplanes than we need.”

  “That’s hard to accept,” Graham said. “From what I hear, there have been awful losses in Europe.”

  “It seems Arnold wasn’t talking about bombers and fighters,” Donovan said. “What has apparently happened, Alex, was that cost-plus contracts were apparently let for all kinds of aircraft, not only fighters and bombers and the larger transports. The aircraft industry rose to the challenge and went on an around-the-clock, no-weekends-off production schedule and has churned out, for example, large numbers of aircraft—the models in question here are Lockheed’s Lodestar and Constellation—”

  “You mean that Queen Mary-size wooden airplane Howard Hughes is building?”

  “No. I don’t know what they call that wooden airplane, but that’s not it. You know what the Lodestar is, of course?”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the Constellation?”

  “Another of Hughes’s designs. Great big, four-engine, forty-odd-passenger airplane. It has three tails. It can fly across the Atlantic. Or to Hawaii.”

  “I’ve seen pictures.”

  “Well, neither airplane fits comfortably into the Army Air Force. The Lodestar carries only fourteen people and the door isn’t large enough to conveniently drop parachutists. The Douglas DC-3—the C-47—carries twenty-one people and the door is big enough for paratroopers. The Constellation is really a better airplane than the DC-4—it cruises at better than three hundred miles an hour; the DC-4 only goes a little better than two hundred—but the decision was made early on to go with the DC-4 as the standard, and that Lockheed should produce the P-38 fighter instead of more Constellations.” He paused and looked at Graham. “You see where I’m going, Alex?”

  “No. I don’t think this is just polite conversation over coffee, but I don’t know where it’s leading.”

  “The President remembered we sent a Lodestar down to Argentina,” Donovan said.

  “That was a mistake. I suggested that Roosevelt send a Staggerwing Beechcraft down there to replace the one Frade lost—his father’s airplane— when he was shot down leading one of our submarines—the Devil Fish—to the Reine de la Mer. The President agreed, and told the Air Force to come up with one. They couldn’t find one, so they sent the next best thing, a twin-engine, fourteen-passenger airliner, to replace a single-engine six-seater.”

  “The commander in chief expressed a desire which has the force and effect of law. What were they going to tell him? ‘Sorry’?”

  “Where’s this leading, Bill?” Graham said suspiciously.

  “The commander in chief, after being informed by the commanding general of the Army Air Forces that he had more Lockheed Lodestars and Constellations than he really needed, wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea for the OSS to use some of those airplanes to set up its own airline down there, under that stalwart Marine Aviator Cletus Frade.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” Graham said.

  “I told the commander in chief that you would implement his suggestion, Colonel Graham.”

  “No way, Bill. It’s a . . . nutty . . . idea.”

  “After I tell you that FDR really warmed to his idea—he feels that not only would it enhance the image of the arsenal of democracy—”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That the arsenal of democracy, now in high gear, is so formidable that we can sell the very latest airplanes to friendly—or neutral—foreigners.”

  Graham grunted.

  “And, waving his cigarette holder around, the President smugly suggested that the OSS could probably find some advantage in having its own airline.”

  Graham sadly shook his head.

  “You want to tell him it’s a nutty idea, Alex?” Donovan asked.

  “If I thought it would do any good, I’d be happy to tell him,” Graham said. “But since Roosevelt believes he is divinely inspired—”

  “Between us—to go no further than this room—what’s wrong with the idea?”

  “Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of things wrong with it. For one thing, even if Frade could get permission to set up an airline, which seems unlikely, he’s not qualified to run an airline. For God’s sake, he really shouldn’t even be flying the Lodestar he has.”

  "Why not?”

  “Because he’s likely to kill himself doing so. And we need him alive, not spread over some mountain in the Andes.”

  “I somehow got the idea he’s a pretty good pilot,” Donovan said. “He’s an ace, right? And he has been flying the Lodestar he has?”

  “He’s a Marine fighter pilot, a young one. He therefore believes he can fly anything. That is known as the arrogance of youth.”

  “The President is very impressed with him.”

  “Did the President suggest where the pilots to fly the airplanes of OSS Airways are supposed to come from?”

  “Argentina.”

  “And who’s going to train them? Frade?”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I tried—hard—to dissuade FDR from this airline idea? And raised the question of pilots to him?”

  “And what did he do? Flash that famous smile and say, ‘Oh, Bill, that can be worked out’?”

  “What he said was that Arnold also told him that the pilot-training program has gone so well that they are getting ready to release the transport pilots commissioned early on to return to the airlines, and that they would be ideal, because of their experience, in setting up an airline.”

  “You mean transfer them to the OSS?”

  “He didn’t get into that. But that could be worked out.”

  Graham snorted.

  “Will have to be worked out,” Donovan added. “The bottom line, Alex, is that unless you can talk him out of this idea . . .”

  “Huh!”

  “. . . there will be an airline.”

  Graham shook his head again but sai
d nothing.

  “Among the many reasons I like you, Alex,” Donovan said, after a moment, “and the primary reason I put up with your—how do I phrase this?— independent spirit is that I know if I give you an order, you’ll either obey it or tell me, up front, that you won’t take the order. You are not capable of accepting an order and then not doing your very best to carry it out.”

  “I gather this is an order?”

  Donovan nodded.

  “Keep what you just said in mind, Bill, if I can’t make your airline idea . . .”

  “The President’s airline suggestion.”

  “. . . fly.”

  Donovan smiled, then had another thought.

  “Just a second, Alex,” he said, and reached for the accordion envelope and handed it to Graham.

  “Why don’t you stop by the Documents Branch and have these made out for Major Frade and his team before you go?”

  Graham examined the credentials, at first curiously and then incredulously.

  “And whose idiot idea was this?”

  “If you mean, Was this another presidential suggestion? No. It came from downstairs.”

  Graham, shaking his head in disbelief, handed the envelope back to Donovan.

  “No, I meant it,” Donovan said. “Take the badges down there.”

  “I’m not following you, Bill.”

  “What the hell, everybody down there in South America—friend, foe, and ostensibly neutral—knows Frade’s in the OSS, so why not? And—I admit this is unlikely—it might just remind him he’s in the OSS if you handed him a fancy badge like that.”

  Graham looked at Donovan for a moment, then said, “Well, I can’t see where it would do any harm.”

  “Have a nice flight, Alex. Keep in touch.”

  [FOUR]

  El Palomar Air Field Campo de Mayo Military Base Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1525 4 July 1943

  As the airliner taxied up to the terminal, Colonel A. F. Graham saw—not surprising him at all—that El Coronel Alejandro Bernardo Martín had elected to meet Varig Flight 207.

  Martín, wearing a well-cut suit and an overcoat, was standing outside the terminal building with a group of immigration and customs officers. He was a tall, fair-haired, light-skinned thirty-six-year-old who carried the euphemistic title of “Chief, Ethical Standards Office” within the Ejército Argentino’s Bureau of Internal Security. In fact, he was the most powerful—and, making him even more dangerous, the most competent—intelligence officer in Argentina.

  It had been necessary for Graham to get a visa for travel to Argentina. Said visa had been stamped at the Argentine embassy in Washington inside a diplomatic passport issued with the greatest reluctance by the State Department. The passport identified Graham as a career State Department officer with the personal rank of under secretary. The Department of State, in requesting Graham’s visa from the Argentine embassy, had declared he was traveling to Argentina to coordinate security and other matters at the U.S. embassy.

  No one was fooled. But both the Argentines and the Americans understood the rules of the game. Graham would have diplomatic status in Argentina, protecting him from arrest. Theoretically, if he was caught with twenty pounds of dynamite in the act of placing it under the Casa Rosada—Argentina’s pink equivalent of the White House—all that could happen to him would be to be declared persona non grata and expelled from the country, after which the Argentine ambassador in Washington would “make representations” to the U.S. secretary of State.

  As a practical matter, both sides understood that if he were caught trying to blow up Casa Rosada—or in some other outrageous activity—he would be shot, after which the American ambassador in Buenos Aires could “make representations” to the Argentine foreign minister.

  There were Argentines in Washington carrying diplomatic passports—most of them running errands for the Germans—with no more right to theirs than Graham had to his. They were under constant surveillance by the FBI, as Graham would be under constant surveillance by the BIS in Argentina.

  But as diplomats they were protected against arrest and could not be questioned, which obviated the necessity of coming up with some imaginative excuse to explain one’s presence where one was not supposed to be.

  Anything less than really outrageous behavior was tolerated by both the United States and Argentina. It was in their mutual interest.

  And there was a simple, logical explanation as to why Graham found El Coronel Martín meeting his Brazilian airline flight not surprising. There was no question in Graham’s mind that within an hour of his acquiring the visa— no longer than it had taken to encrypt the message—somebody from the Argentine embassy had gone to Western Union, or Mackay Radio, and sent a cable informing the BIS that Graham was coming to Buenos Aires.

  What had somewhat surprised Colonel A. F. Graham were the airplanes that had carried him from Natal, Brazil, to Argentina. They were both Lockheed Lodestars.

  He’d flown from Miami to Natal—with fuel stops in Trinidad and Belem— in great luxury aboard a Panagra Boeing 314—the same “Dixie Clipper” that had in January flown President Roosevelt to the Casablanca Conference. It was an enormous forty-two-ton flying boat powered by four 1,600-horsepower engines. Aboard was a bar and comfortable bunks, and first-class food had been served by Panagra stewards in crisply starched white jackets.

  They’d spent the night in luxurious accommodations in Belem, then flown the next morning on to Natal, an eight-hour flight during which they had averaged a bit over 125 miles per hour. This was as far south as the big seaplanes went. From Natal, they either flew across the South Atlantic to British Gambia on the African Coast or returned to Miami.

  The Panagra flights to Natal always carried high-priority supplies and senior officers bound for the large U.S. Army Air Forces base at Brazil’s Pôrto Alegre, and thus routinely were met by a USAAF plane from Pôrto Alegre. The last time Graham had gone to Argentina, that aircraft had been a B-24 and everyone had had to sit on the floor.

  This time, the airplane had been a Lodestar—one painted olive drab, making it in USAAF parlance a C-60—fitted out to transport seven passengers in the comfort befitting Air Forces senior officers.

  That had made Graham wonder how long there had been a plethora of Lodestars before Hap Arnold had confided in Roosevelt the amazing success of the aircraft production system.

  And when he’d gone to the civilian side of the airfield at Pôrto Alegre to board a Varig flight to Buenos Aires, he again had been surprised to see that it too was a Lodestar, also apparently brand new, but this time configured as a normal airliner with seats for fourteen passengers.

  The stewardess told him that the Brazilian airline had recently acquired a dozen of the airplanes.

  This, of course, forced him to think of Roosevelt’s “suggestion” that Cletus Frade start an airline in Argentina. He wondered if Roosevelt had other reasons for making the suggestion. In his experience with the President, the reason advanced for one idea or another was most often not the real one.

  Graham, admiringly, not pejoratively, thought that Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have given lessons in political maneuvering to Niccolò Machiavelli.

  Colonel Martín was standing just inside the immigration and customs booths in the terminal.

  “Colonel Martín, what a pleasant surprise!” Graham greeted him cheerfully in Spanish, putting out his hand.

  “Have a nice flight, did you, Colonel?”

  “Actually, I think you’re supposed to call me ‘Mr. Secretary,’ ” Graham said.

  “What is that saying of your Corps of Marine infantry, ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine’?”

  “And that is actually the ‘Marine Corps’ instead of what you said,” Graham replied. “Tell you what: Why don’t you call me ‘Alejandro’? Or better yet, ‘Alex’?”

  “I’m afraid that would annoy my German friends—you know how fond they are of their titles and ranks—who might think we were being too friendly, b
ut thank you just the same.”

  “And we must never forget evenhanded neutrality, right?”

  “You understand my problem,” Martín said, smiling. “But perhaps, when we are alone, and we are sure no one can hear or is watching, we can call one another by our Christian names.”

  “I’d like that, but I understand the BIS is always watching and listening.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Martín said. “Are you going to be with us long, Mr. Secretary? ”

  “Probably not long at all,” Graham said. “Perhaps we could have lunch.”

  “You’ll be staying where?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to ask me that,” Graham said. “But in the spirit of friendship, I’ll tell you: at the Alvear Palace.”

  “I thought you perhaps might be staying with Major Frade.”

  “Are you referring to Don Cletus Frade, by any chance?”

  Martín, smiling, snapped his fingers and shook his head ruefully.

  “I just can’t seem to get it straight in my mind that he’s no longer an officer of your Corps of Marines, but one of our most respected estancieros.”

  “Perhaps you should write it on the palm of your hand, if you have trouble remembering. And to answer another question you shouldn’t be asking: I feel sure that sometime during my visit, I will avail myself of Don Cletus’s famous hospitality.”

  “When you see Don Cletus, please express my regards?”

  “I’ll be happy to.”

  “May I offer you a ride into Buenos Aires, Mr. Secretary?”

  “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “Not at all. The Alvear is right on my way.”

  “Then thank you, Colonel.”

  [FIVE]

  Suite 407 Alvear Palace Hotel Avenida Alvear 1891 Buenos Aires, Argentina 1645 4 July 1943

  Graham just had time to go into his suitcase for a change of linen and his toilet kit when there was a knock at his door.

  When he opened the door, Cletus Frade was standing there. Behind him was Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez, Ejército Argentino, Retired. Graham saw that Rodríguez’s trench coat, worn over his shoulder, did not entirely conceal the self-loading shotgun he carried against his leg.