The more he heard, the more Freddy warmed up to the idea of a mission into the Austrian Tyrol. It wasn’t Germany, but it seemed about as close as he could get: barely twenty-five miles to the south of the border in Bavaria. He would be the team leader, Dyno said, and he would have free rein on the ground to get the intelligence the Americans needed any way that he could. He would need to devise a cover story, perhaps several, and he would need a radio operator with him to pass information back to the base in Italy; Hans was the obvious choice for the job. “Completely loyal and devoted to Fred,” an OSS officer wrote of Hans in one operational plan that February.
But there was a critical piece still missing. Neither Freddy nor Hans had ever been to Austria, and they would be parachuting in “blind”; in OSS terms, that meant there would be no anti-Nazi resisters on the ground to map out covert plans with them ahead of time, meet them at the landing spot, or find “safe houses” where they could hide out. In southern France, the site of their scuttled jump, the resisters in the towns vastly outnumbered those who backed Hitler, according to OSS’s intelligence on the ground; a virtual greeting party of Maquis fighters was supposed to be there when they landed. In the Austrian Alps, however, Dyno expected no such reception: the Tyrol region was considered fervently pro-Nazi—90 percent, by OSS’s estimate—and it was controlled with violent zeal by Franz Hofer, a Hitler acolyte who was the Gauleiter, the Nazi Party leader, in the Austrian city of Innsbruck. If anyone at all was there on the ground to greet them, it would most likely be Gestapo men with rifles drawn and execution orders set on the spot.
Against those formidable odds, Dyno and Freddy realized that they needed to bring someone onto the team who already knew the area—both the treacherous mountain terrain and the people themselves. As improbable as it sounded, they needed a tour guide through Hitler’s heartland. Dyno talked with American and British officials at Nazi POW barracks in Italy to scout possible candidates—prisoners who seemed disloyal to Hitler and might be willing to cooperate with the enemy. “DVs,” he called them: deserter volunteers. American military policy, not to mention the Hague Convention of 1907 on the treatment of prisoners of war, frowned on the practice of using POWs as conscripted soldiers. But Dyno interpreted OSS’s mandate from General Eisenhower quite broadly: practically anything short of flagrant war crimes, he figured, was allowed.
For months the task of finding Nazi defectors for OSS’s mission in Bari had fallen mainly to Dyno; his bosses thought that a “hyphenated American” like him—a European-born American who spoke perfect German—was the ideal recruiter. Dyno would drive to POW camps up and down Italy to look for Nazi deserters he might be able to convert into OSS agents, talking first to the American jailers about their prisoners and then to prisoners themselves to suss out candidates. Some deserters seemed eager to work with the Americans—sometimes too eager—in hopes of getting out of prison, and maybe even make some money in return for their cooperation. Dyno interrogated them about what they did during the war, why they deserted, and how they felt about the Nazis, and sometimes, just to test their reaction, he let them know in dramatic fashion that he himself was a German Jewish refugee. “You know what you guys did to my race?” he would ask angrily. If the prisoner revealed any defiance at the remark, or displeasure at sitting across from a Jew, Dyno quickly dropped him.
Dyno thought that Freddy might prove a helpful scout. “What do you think,” he asked, “if we both went out to find the third man?” “The third man”: just a few years later it would become the name of a classic postwar film, also set, coincidentally, in Austria. But for now, it was simply their most glaring need for the mission ahead: someone who could plow the Alpine ground for them.
Thus had Freddy become a “prisoner” at POW Camp 209 in Naples. Part of Dyno’s thinking in planting him inside the barracks in Nazi garb was to determine, first of all, if Freddy’s German was good enough for him to pose as a Nazi in Austria, six years after he had immigrated to America and stopped speaking the language on principle. There were bound to be Nazi expressions he had never heard on the streets of Freiburg, and being surrounded by German prisoners for a few days would help prepare him.
Freddy figured that his test run in the Nazi lockup could also help solve the bigger problem: finding their elusive third man. Indeed, by the time he left Camp 209 in Naples, Freddy was convinced he had found their Austrian expert in Franz Weber. Not only did the Nazi prisoner’s disdain for Hitler seem sincere, but he came from a small town only about ten miles outside the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. After hearing Freddy recap his clandestine conversations with the prisoner, Dyno quickly arranged another meeting with Franz, pulling him out of his barracks to make him a proposition. Freddy came, too, but dressed in an American uniform this time. He kept a low profile, and in such a starkly different setting, Franz didn’t seem to recognize the man now sitting with him as the same one who had been his fellow Nazi prisoner. Dyno, speaking in his native German, quizzed Franz about his background and why he had deserted, then cut quickly to the central question: was he willing to cooperate with the Americans and go back to Austria on an espionage mission?
Dyno didn’t expect an answer right away. Think about it, he told Franz. This was an enormous decision for both sides. The Americans were taking a leap of faith with the young Nazi prisoner sitting in front of them. What if it was all a con? Franz had certainly sounded the right notes when he talked of hating what the Nazis had done to his Austrian homeland. He was horrified, Franz said, by the grotesque things he saw in Poland as an officer candidate in early 1941: He remembered arriving at the railway station in Warsaw to the jarring sight of haggard, deathly thin people with yellow, starred bands on their arms, just lying in the street in a snowstorm. “Who are these people?” he asked another Nazi soldier. “They are Jews,” came the answer. He had never seen a Jew before. “What will happen to them?” he asked. “They will be taken to a collection camp.”
He had watched as the Jews were herded inside the ten-foot-high walls of the Warsaw Ghetto; only watching, he insisted, never participating. “It was a terrible scene . . . It wasn’t normal anymore.” Of course, that was what all the Nazis said once they were captured, wasn’t it? Dyno had seen the ploy before. They had heard things, but they never took part in the atrocities themselves, they would insist. It could all be a ruse by Franz to save his own skin, to get leniency from the Americans after doing whatever unspeakable things he might have done in Poland without admitting to them. Or worse, the earnest young man sitting in front of him could be a Nazi plant who had surrendered not to help the Americans, but to infiltrate them.
Dyno had little but his gut instinct to guide him, but his gut told him Franz was really on their side. He wanted desperately to be right. The Austrian’s knowledge of Innsbruck and the Alpine region could determine the success of the mission. But if they were wrong, if Franz was just talking his way back into a free plane ride home or worse, Dyno realized how damaging the miscalculation would be for him, for OSS, and for the American military.
There had already been too many costly miscues out of OSS in Italy, and Dyno and his boss at the base in Bari, Alfred Ulmer Jr., a navy lieutenant, were under intense pressure to score some intelligence wins. Just a few months earlier, OSS had dispatched Ulmer to take over the German-Austrian commando operations run out of Bari. He was another in the string of Princeton men at the spy agency; a “typical, clean-cut American naval officer,” as Freddy would describe him. Ulmer was not optimistic about his new assignment. On first inspection, he felt as though he had been brought in to run “a circus.” He thought many of the missions were poorly conceived, many of the agents and crew were badly trained, and many of the Nazi defectors were untrustworthy characters looking to get on the winning side in the war. One team of commandos was supposed to parachute into southeastern Austria, but instead was dropped more than twenty miles off course in Yugoslavia by mistake. A former Nazi POW on a mission in the Balkan Peninsula had buried a s
tash of gold OSS had given him for the operation and returned home to his farm in what Ulmer called “a fiasco.” Most devastating of all, the Nazis executed a dozen OSS agents who were captured after parachuting into German-occupied Slovakia east of Vienna. The brutal executions had practically wiped out OSS’s presence in that region.
Despite the travails, Ulmer developed complete confidence in Freddy—“our most aggressive and ingenious” agent, he called him. He recognized his penchant for taking shortcuts and his disregard for rules, even on the base, like the time he stole an army jeep to get around town. (“We had no transportation whatsoever,” Freddy explained unapologetically.) But those same qualities, Ulmer believed, would make him a deft spy behind enemy lines.
Ulmer became sold on Franz as the point man for the mission as well. The Austrian seemed committed and reliable, or at least as reliable as a Nazi defector could be. Still, he wanted to make sure that Hans, as the radio operator, was comfortable with the prospective “third man.” OSS missions had been undermined before by a personality clash, and Ulmer and Dyno didn’t want to risk seeing another mismatch in Tyrol. But once Hans met the defector, he too was impressed by his demeanor. “A good anti-Nazi,” Hans called him. Franz came across as solemn, even repentant, and he spoke of his Gewissen—his conscience as a Catholic. It was an odd word to hear from an officer with the Third Reich. Hans never thought he would meet a Nazi, current or former, whom he actually liked, but he might have just found one.
Dyno went back to POW Camp 209 in January to size up Franz one final time. So, Dyno asked, was he in? Yes, the Austrian said; he was in. He didn’t want to be seen as just a deserter, a man who turned and ran, he said. A Nazi victory would be a disaster for everyone, he believed, and if he was truly opposed to this war—and truly opposed to the Nazis—then he reasoned that as a devout Catholic, he should actually do something to help end it. He did have some reservations, though. He was reluctant to pick up arms against his onetime cohorts, even Nazis. But if his role was to be simply a guide and a point man, working logistics in the Alps for his partners, then he would do it, Franz said.
“Okay,” Dyno said finally, “you go with us.” With that, Franz left the prison unit for good and headed with the Americans for the long drive back to Bari. He was no longer Franz Weber; he was now officially “Frank Winston,” Nazi defector and new OSS agent. They had found their third man.
The mission was on, and OSS set a date for late February—a month away, in the dead of the brutal Alpine winter. Ulmer and Dyno knew they needed to move quickly with the final planning. Warnings about Hitler’s Alpine fortress were growing more dire through the winter; “the Nazi redoubt was going to happen,” Ulmer believed, “and we had to have some very crafty sleepers in there.” While Allied forces were gaining ground throughout Europe, the Nazis had proven surprisingly resilient in staving off defeat. Just weeks before, Hitler had personally ordered a desperate but deadly blitzkrieg in the Battle of the Bulge, claiming more than eighty thousand American casualties. It was clear that the war was not over yet. The Nazis would fight on.
Back at the base in Bari, the newly formed spy team—Freddy, Hans, and Franz—was sequestered in private quarters away from other personnel to keep the details of their assignment secret. They would not know about any other OSS operations being planned at the base, and no one except the top officers would know about theirs. Freddy and Dyno questioned Franz for days about the Alpine area, and they briefed him on the information they hoped to get on the ground. They told him of reports that Hitler was preparing a violent last stand in the Alps, a fear they captured for him in a single word: Festung, or “fortress.” Their most pressing priority was to identify a landing spot in the jagged mountain range—a flat ridge, maybe, or an iced-over lake where they could drop down outside the Nazi perimeter of powerful antiaircraft weapons. That would not be easy to find, especially with banks of snow thirty feet deep or more. OSS had asked an air force reconnaissance team to obtain aerial photos to help pinpoint a landing spot. But with a constant churn of storms affecting the region, the air force was dubious about being able to get them any photos, and the maps that OSS had for the area were badly outdated.
That left Franz as the only real eyes of the operation. He had grown up in a small farming town just ten miles from Innsbruck, with the Austrian Alps as his backyard, and he became an expert Alpine skier, learning every peak, ridge, and gulley of the Inn Valley. He “has expert local knowledge and contacts in 50 mile radius,” Ulmer wrote optimistically in seeking approval for the plan, and the men “should be able to ‘live off the land’ for weeks at a time.”
Yet as many times as Franz had crisscrossed the mountains, there was one thing he had never done: he had never once thought about jumping down onto them from an airplane. He had no experience in parachuting, and Dyno realized that he needed to have him trained quickly so he could get in some practice jumps before the real thing.
It looked like the mission might really be happening. Freddy and Hans memorized the secret code names they had developed for their communications on the ground; the capital city of Innsbruck became “Brooklyn,” in honor of their adopted hometown. But the pair remained skeptical of ever needing them; they had been down this road together before, only to find themselves stranded on the runway en route to France.
Anxious about the thought of another scuttled mission, Freddy grew angry when he learned that OSS was scheduling a separate parachuting operation—weeks before theirs—on the opposite end of Austria, to the east; it was going to be carried out, in fact, by two of the same Jewish refugees-turned-agents who had accompanied him into the colonel’s office at OSS headquarters to demand a transfer. “Why are you sending them out before us?” Freddy demanded of Ulmer. Freddy was the one who had led the revolt that day, and after all the waiting around he had done, he felt he had earned a spot at the front of the jump line. Ulmer assured him that there was no reason for alarm; Freddy’s time was coming soon enough.
The men put together lists of all the equipment they would need: food rations for seven days, winter clothes, uniforms, counterfeit documents, compasses, maps, radio equipment, code-books, pistols, ammo, and more. They would need money, too—for bribing willing locals and paying for essentials—so OSS headquarters approved fifteen hundred dollars in American money, ten thousand marks in Austrian currency, and sixty gold pieces. They packed the bulk of the supplies into giant metal drums that were to be dropped in parachutes from the sky just moments after the men themselves. Most of the equipment was standard stuff, but Freddy made sure to add one irregular item to his list: a package of condoms, just in case. Whatever it took for him to get information on the ground, he wanted to be ready.
Hans packed up his own rucksack to take with him. An OSS officer noticed him cramming a big, bulky book inside his bag. It didn’t look like military issue, and the officer questioned him about it, since every extra pound of baggage mattered. Hans smiled and said, “That’s my chemistry book,” as if introducing a firstborn child. As the radio operator, Hans explained, he was expecting a lot of lulls between the transmissions that he would be relaying from Freddy to the base in Italy. “I’m going to have to lie low, so there will be a lot of time on my hands,” he said.
As part of the subterfuge, meanwhile, Dyno and Ulmer directed Freddy and Hans to write batches of innocuous-sounding letters to their family members, dated weeks and months ahead of time; OSS, he said, would mail the letters home for them while they were gone. There was no way of knowing just how long the agents would be on the ground, and OSS didn’t want to arouse any suspicions at home with a prolonged silence. So they wrote, and wrote, and wrote. When their hands got tired, Dyno helped them write. Freddy made sure to have Dyno send a birthday card to his father in a few months if he wasn’t back by then. Hans still had no correspondence from his own parents, nor any word of their whereabouts, but he did have a devoted pen pal back in New York: he was now engaged to Elly, the same young lady he had taken t
o the Tavern on the Green on their first date, and he had plenty of letters he wanted to send her in his absence. “Tell Elly not to worry!” he instructed Ulmer.
But with the mission date quickly approaching, OSS still had not found time to schedule parachute training for Franz, and now there was simply no time left. Freddy, with his usual nonchalance, had spoken briefly with Franz about the basics of parachuting—just jump from the plane and pull the strap—but that was about as close as the mission’s third man would get to formal training. It looked like Franz’s first “practice” jump would come in the skies over Nazi-occupied Austria.
Ulmer still had an overarching question he needed to ask of the men as they gathered for final planning: Were they really prepared to go through with this? It wasn’t a rhetorical question. The mission would take “superhuman courage,” Ulmer believed, and he wanted to make sure that they knew what they were doing. The odds of success were depressingly slim: maybe one in a hundred. As pep talks went, this was not an inspiring one.
He reminded them that they couldn’t expect much support on the ground. This wouldn’t be like France. There weren’t many Nazi opponents in Austria in the first place, “and damn few who would do anything about it,” even if they did dislike the Nazis, he said. The area was swarming with Wehrmacht and SS troops, and it looked like “Tyrol would have to be fought and bled for.” Once they were dropped, Ulmer warned, they would be on their own, with little help from the OSS base in Italy, and if they were captured, they shouldn’t expect the Nazis to treat them as prisoners of war under international conventions. He told them the gruesome story of the dozen OSS agents summarily executed just weeks before by the Nazis in Slovakia.
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