Victory and Honor
Page 2
Frade nodded. “And the second?”
“That some Secret Service agent need only stumble across one of Gehlen’s men we’re smuggling for our whole operation to be blown.”
Frade made a face, then said, “Well, if you and Graham are right about the Russians—and I think you are—then making the deal was the right thing to do. Why the hell wouldn’t Morgenthau also see that?”
“If I were Jewish,” Dulles said, “I don’t think I’d be able to see it. Particularly after seeing the movies of the concentration camp ovens. And the bodies. And insofar as destroying German industry is concerned, I’ve always thought it had more to do with punishing the Germans than anything else.”
“Colonel Graham told me he thought it had more to do with giving the Russians a license to steal what’s left of German industry and move it to Russia. He said that the plan had been written by Morgenthau’s deputy, a guy named Harry Dexter White, who he and J. Edgar Hoover were agreed was a Communist.”
“I submit the possibility that we’re both right,” Dulles said.
“You said Admiral Leahy and General Marshall are our enemies, too,” Frade said. “What did we do, change sides?”
“Clete, you know that the OSS has always been a thorn in the side of the Army and the Navy. I don’t think it’s too far off to say they’ve always hated us—them and especially Hoover’s FBI—for any number of reasons, some of them valid but most simply visceral. We’re not like they are. From the beginning, we had Wild Bill Donovan’s friendship with Roosevelt to protect us.
“Roosevelt is gone. The military establishment is already telling Truman it’s time to shut down the OSS. The war in Europe is over, and General MacArthur refuses to permit us to operate in the Pacific. What worries me is that Harry Truman won’t—doesn’t know how to—say no to the generals.”
“I always thought generals and admirals were afraid of presidents, not the other way around.”
“Harry Truman was a captain in the First World War. After it, he joined the reserves and stayed in. He’s currently a reserve colonel. Colonels—with certain exceptions, such as Graham and you—don’t argue with generals. It’s not a question of whether the OSS will be shut down, but when. And whenever it happens, it will leave a vacuum that won’t be good for the country.”
“When do you think it will happen?”
“The Army, Navy, and State Department intelligence people will probably start to try to take us over—or try to take over individual operations, such as yours—possibly right about now. I don’t think we’ll be officially shut down for three, maybe four months.”
“And what am I supposed to do when that happens?”
“That’s what I came to tell you, Clete—that I don’t know what to tell you to do. You’ll be on your own. If, for example, some would-be admiral in the Office of Naval Intelligence arrives in Buenos Aires and says, ‘You now belong to me, so give me everything you know about everything here,’ you could not be faulted for doing just that.
“But, on the other hand, if you decide that handing over information or assets to someone would not be good for the country . . .”
“What would I do with stuff—with the people, the assets, all of it—I decided not to turn over?”
“You could, as I intend to, go on the perhaps naïve premise that sooner or later—very likely later, much later—President Truman, or even his successor—they’re already talking about General Eisenhower in that capacity—will see there is a need for an agency like the OSS and resurrect it.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“My sentiments exactly. I believe that will happen, Clete. But in this agreement with Gehlen I have to believe that will happen, don’t I?”
Frade met Dulles’s eyes a long moment, then said, “If I turned over what I know about all of Gehlen’s people I’ve gotten into South America, how long do you think it would take for Morgenthau to find out?”
Dulles considered the question as he sipped at the scotch. He finally said, “A week. Possibly as much as two. People have a tendency to present the misbehavior of others to their superiors as quickly as they can.”
“The Gehlen operation was your decision. So, if I opened my mouth about that, you’d be in trouble, right?”
“I don’t want you to take that into consideration, Clete.”
“And if I did roll over, a lot of people who don’t need to know about the Gehlen operation get to know about it and the Russians get to know about it, right? Probably before Morgenthau does?”
“That seems a credible scenario.”
“And the Russians learn everything about Gehlen’s agents in place, right?”
Dulles looked Frade in the eyes but did not reply.
Frade went on: “Whereupon the Russians execute them. And I won’t be responsible for that.”
“That would have to be your decision, Clete, taking into account what it would mean for you. You’d be liable to find yourself in very hot water.”
Frade shook his head in frustration.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been in hot water before, but if I declare that I don’t know anything, then I don’t know anything.”
Dulles said, “To repeat myself, that would have to be your decision.”
“What happens to von Wachtstein and Boltitz now?” Frade then said.
Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had been deputy military attaché for air—and Frade’s mole—in the German Embassy in Buenos Aires. Frade had asked Dulles to have him and Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz, the embassy’s naval attaché, safely moved to the States. Both of their fathers had been in Hitler’s High Command—and both targeted for execution for their participation in Operation Valkyrie. While the fate of Peter’s father still was unknown, the OSS had evidence of Karl’s father being killed—and it hadn’t been a stretch of anyone’s imagination to believe that Hitler would have ordered the sons hung from a meat hook, too.
“What do you mean?” Dulles said.
“I mean, do they get sent back to Germany? Or what?”
“That’s the most likely scenario.”
“You arranged to get them sent to Fort Hunt. Can’t you arrange to get them sent back to Argentina? They could be a great help in dealing with the bad Germans there, starting with those involved with Operation Phoenix.”
“I’ll try. That would be the decent thing to do, and I will try. But right now I don’t see how I could help.”
Frade shook his head, then sarcastically said, “Whoopee!”
Dulles drained his drink.
“I am sorry, Clete. Unfortunately, that is the nature of our business.”
Frade was silent a long moment, then sighed.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, “but it damn well doesn’t mean I have to like it. Thank you for leveling with me, Mr. Dulles.”
“How many times have I asked you to call me by my Christian name?”
“I could no more call you ‘Allen’ than I could call Colonel Graham ‘Alejandro.’”
“You could if you tried.”
“And if that’s all you have for me, Mr. Dulles, I’ll get in my airplane and fly another load of Germans wearing clerical garb and carrying Vatican passports to sanctuary in Argentina.”
Frade stood and put out his right hand. Dulles took it.
“We’ll be in touch,” Dulles said.
Clete nodded and walked out of the restaurant.
[TWO]
Washington National Airport Arlington, Virginia 1310 10 May 1945
The four-engine, triple-tail Lockheed Constellation was the finest transport aircraft in the world. In 1939, Howard Hughes, the master aviator whose vast holdings included the majority of shares in Trans World Airlines, had ordered the superplane built to his specs. It was capable of flying forty passengers in its pressurized cabin higher (an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet) and faster (cruise speed was better than three hundred knots) and for a longer distance (forty-three hundred miles) than any other transport aircraft. It
s wing design was nearly identical to that of the single-seat Lockheed Lightning P-38 fighter—although on a far grander scale.
South American Airways would have never received a single Connie if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had not had what Clete Frade thought of as a “hard-on” for Juan Trippe and his Pan American Airways. Actually, if Roosevelt had not been beyond pissed at Trippe—who had hired, then at first refused to fire, Colonel Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh after the world-famous aviator had dared to cross FDR—there never would have been a South American Airways at all.
But SAA did indeed exist, and it had not just one but a total of eleven Connies, setting it up to dominate transoceanic air travel postwar—and angering the volatile Juan Trippe no end.
Graham had told Clete: “FDR really knows how to carry one helluva grudge.”
Four days earlier, when Clete had landed South American Airlines Constellation Ciudad de Mendoza at Buenos Aires’s Coronel Jorge G. Frade airport—after a one-stop, Dakar-Senegal, flight from Lisbon—his wife had been waiting for him with a radiogram.
LOS ANGELES CAL 3 PM 9 MAY 1945
VIA MACKAY
CLETUS H FRADE
SOUTH AMERICAN AIRWAYS
BUENOS AIRES ARGENTINA
LITTLE CLETUS STOP THERE ARE FIVE CONNIES IN THE USED CAR LOT STOP IF YOU CAN HAVE YOUR BANK GUARANTEE PAYMENT AND GET THEM FLOWN OUT OF HERE WITHIN FIVE DAYS THEY ARE YOURS STOP REGARDS HOWARD
By the time Cletus broke ground at the controls of South American Airways Constellation Ciudad de Córdoba four hours later, he was absolutely convinced he was on a roll.
When he hadn’t been considering all that Allen Dulles had told him about their new enemies, Frade had spent much of the time between Lisbon and Buenos Aires wondering what the hell he could do about Peter von Wachtstein and Karl Boltitz. He wanted them out of prisoner-of-war confinement at Fort Hunt, Virginia, and back to Argentina—or somewhere safe—yet hadn’t come up with much of anything.
Howard Hughes’s radiogram solved just about everything.
While Frade was genuinely delighted to be able to buy five more Connies for SAA, taking a dozen pilots and six flight engineers to Los Angeles to pick them up was the cherry on that cake. It gave him a reason for the flight that would satisfy the curiosity of the U.S. government.
And there was a cherry on that cherry, too. “Aunt Martha” Howell was the only mother Clete had ever known—his mother having died in childbirth when he was an infant—and Clete was about twelve before he realized that his sisters Beth and Maggie were really his cousins. They had not yet seen Cletus Howell Frade Jr. who was now five months old. He could pick up the women in Midland or Dallas and bring them to Buenos Aires now and worry about getting them back to the States later.
Most important—the cherry on top of the-cherry-on-thecherry—once Frade was in the States he could have a shot at getting Peter and Karl out of Fort Hunt.
He hadn’t figured out exactly how he was going to do that, but he wasn’t worried.
He was on a roll.
Clete made a very low approach in Ciudad de Córdoba along the Potomac River to the runway of what he thought of as “Gravelly Point”—the mudflats that in 1941 had been filled in to provide an airport near Washington.
Frade keyed his microphone and in Spanish said to his copilot, “I think, Gonzalo, that this would be a good time to dirty the bird up.”
“Gear coming down, flaps to thirty,” Gonzalo Delgano replied.
As chief pilot of South American Airways, Delgano wore a uniform—one even more colorful than Frade’s SAA uniform—that had five gold stripes on the tunic cuffs, an inch-and-a-half-wide stripe down each hem of his trousers, and SAA wings topped with a circled star.
Somewhere over North Carolina, Clete had changed out of his SAA uniform. He now wore his Marine Corps uniform, the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel on the epaulets and collar points, and it brought back the memory of the first time he’d landed here, in October 1942, as a first lieutenant. He’d been twenty-two, and recently returned from flying F4Fs of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-221 off Fighter One on Guadalcanal—where he’d become an ace.
Sitting beside him in the Eastern Airlines Douglas DC-3 had been Colonel A. F. Graham. The previous day in Los Angeles, Graham had promised Frade immediate relief from a Pacific War Heroes War Bond Tour if he agreed to join something called the Office of Strategic Services. Frade had never heard of the OSS, but he would have volunteered for service in the New Orleans Girl Scouts if that guaranteed his ticket off the tour.
After Frade signed a document that made clear that the penalty for revealing anything about the OSS was castration by dull knife—and worse—Graham told him that he was being sent to Argentina: (a) to command a three-man team whose mission would be to destroy allegedly neutral Spanish and Portuguese merchant vessels resupplying German submarines, and (b) to establish contact with el Coronel Jorge G. Frade—his politically powerful father, quite probably the next president of the Argentine Republic—and attempt to tilt him toward the Allies. Clete knew next to nothing of his father, except that his grandfather, the legendary Texas oilman Cletus Marcus Howell, called him “an unmitigated three-star sonofabitch.”
Against great odds, Clete had—more or less—accomplished both missions.
On Lieutenant Colonel Cletus H. Frade’s uniform—above ribbons representing two Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Purple Hearts he had won on Guadalcanal—there was the ribbon representing the Navy Cross. His citation for the nation’s second most senior award for valor mentioned nothing about his aiding in the destruction of a “neutral” ship and the German submarine it was resupplying in the River Plate. Doing so would’ve caused substantial diplomatic problems for the United States government.
And, as a son, Cletus had more than made peace with his father—shortly before the Schutzstaffel—the notorious “SS”—had had el Coronel Jorge Frade killed.
The SS’s unlimited capacity for cold-blooded murder was now on Clete’s mind as he brought the Constellation in on final at Washington National. He was going to do everything in his power to save Peter and Karl.
Frade hadn’t talked to the Washington National control tower—if he had, they almost certainly would have denied him permission to land. He had filed a flight plan to the airport in Baltimore, and National had no idea he was coming until someone in the tower had seen the huge airplane, gear and flaps down, coming up the Potomac River lined up with the runway.
Furthermore, this clearly wasn’t an American airliner coming in to land. South American Airways was lettered down the sides of the fuselage, and there were Argentine flags prominently displayed on each of the three vertical stabilizers.
Already Clete could see frantic activity on the field. There was a reception party assembling. It was riding in a FOLLOW ME jeep, a Ford pickup truck—and a second jeep festooned with flashing lights, siren, and the legend MILITARY POLICE. Heavily armed MPs rode standing up, keeping an eye on the huge aircraft.
Oh, shit!
But . . . that’s to be expected.
Could this be the end of my being on a roll?
Frade touched down the Connie on the numbers marking the beginning of the runway and immediately put the propellers of the four Curtiss-Wright Cyclone engines into reverse.
And kept his hand on the throttle pitch levers.
He had landed here in a Connie once, though in the right seat. Howard Hughes had been the pilot. Clete knew that Hughes habitually did things with airplanes beyond the capabilities of lesser pilots, even including former Marine Corps fighter pilots.
Frade didn’t have approach charts giving him the length of the runway, but he remembered Howard using up most of it. And now Frade knew it was very likely he would run out of runway and have to go around—take off and make another attempt at landing.
But when he finally got the aircraft stopped, he had about three hundred yards of runway left.
Yes! Still on a roll!
Everyone was looking up at the Constellation with surprise, awe, or anger—often in combination.
“Cletus,” Delgano said, “I really think we should have gone into Baltimore.”
“I should be back in about two hours,” Frade said, unstrapping his harness. “I want to take off ten minutes after that. If I’m not back in three hours, go to Buenos Aires without me.”
Frade left the cockpit and started walking through the just-about-empty passenger compartment. There were forty-one seats, only six of which were occupied. Among the passengers were two male South American Airways captains and three females. The women were Mrs. Martha Howell and her daughters, Elizabeth, twenty-one years old, and Marjorie, nineteen.
Beth Howell stopped Clete as he walked down the aisle.
“When you see Colonel Graham, ask him about Karl, please,” she said.
To Clete’s utter surprise—once again proving, he told himself, he could be blind to the obvious—he’d recently learned that Beth and Karl were romantically involved. They had been making the beast with two backs as recently as when they all had gathered for Jorge Howell Frade’s christening and maybe going all the way back to when Beth and Karl met at Clete and Dorotea’s wedding.
“Sure,” Clete said to Beth—but he thought, With a little bit of luck, Graham won’t learn I’ve been anywhere near Washington until sometime tomorrow.
The sixth passenger was a burly, middle-aged man wearing a suit. He was now carefully checking a rope ladder he’d tied to the aircraft’s floor at the rear door. Frade had figured it was highly unlikely that Washington National would have a set of steps—or even a ladder—tall enough to reach the fuselage of the new aircraft.