The Spymasters: A Men at War Novel

by Griffin, W. E. B. ; Butterworth IV, William E.

L’Herminier—whose submarine was carrying her complement of four officers and fifty men, plus a half-dozen OSS agents—would again use the method he had developed for covert landings. After carefully surveying the coast by periscope, looking for any enemy activity and pinpointing an appropriate landing spot for the teams to go ashore by rubber boat, the sub would slip back out to sea, flood its ballast, and sit on the bottom of the Mediterranean awaiting night.

  Then, at dark, with the sub barely on the surface to keep a low profile from enemy patrols, the small boat would be launched. Casabianca crewmen, armed with Sten 9mm submachine guns, would row the OSS men—carrying W/T radios and weapons and cash—to shore. The team then inserted, the crewmen would return to the sub and the sub would return to the sea bottom until the scheduled times to ascend to periscope depth and receive the signal either to retrieve the team or to leave them.

  “But goddamn it!” Canidy blurted. “That is exactly the same thing we’re trying to do with Mercury Station!”

  “Except,” Fine said reasonably, “Mercury is (a) on Sicily and (b) no one at AFHQ is aware that the station even exists. Owen took more than a little delight just now in carefully reminding me quote Remember that our Supreme Commander is quite anxious about the security of Husky and thus has ordered there be absolutely no OSS activity there prior to D-day unquote.”

  Canidy looked ready to explode.

  “The sonofabitch doesn’t know that I’ve been in and out of Sicily twice!” he said. “Can you imagine trying to sell this to Ike now? ‘General Eisenhower, sir, I realize that no one in AFHQ ever believed that the Krauts had chemical and biological weapons on Sicily. But I went in and found them, then blew them up, and then left behind a clandestine radio team that, despite us now believing it is controlled by the SS, is reporting that up to a half-million enemy combatants are arriving to defend against Husky. Oh, and we also have reason to believe that the Krauts have brought in more Tabun and/or yellow fever. So, sir, can you please allow us a sub to insert one small team?’”

  Fine stared silently at Canidy.

  “Yeah. And that’s exactly what Ike would do, too, Stan. Just stare at me. And then probably have me put in shackles until after Husky—hell, maybe for good measure until six months after the end of the war—for the ‘good order and discipline’ of the service.”

  He paused, then sighed. “Jesus!”

  Kicking up a trail of counterfeit reichsmarks, Canidy walked across the room to the French doors. He swung them open and for a long, quiet moment looked out at the ocean.

  “When did the Casabianca sail?” Canidy then said.

  “Three days ago,” Fine said.

  “From here to Corsica,” Canidy said, looking out in its direction, “that’s right at five hundred nautical miles, making it a four-day run at best to get there. Then another day or two on station, while they deal with Pearl Harbor, then four days to get back here.”

  He turned, looked at Fine, and said, “That’s best-case scenario—”

  “Agreed.”

  “—and I can’t wait that long, even if I thought I could convince Jean to turn around and insert us again in Sicily.”

  “Then what?” Fine said.

  “We are in radio contact with the Casabianca, no?” Canidy said.

  Fine looked at John Craig van der Ploeg.

  “Daily, right?”

  John Craig nodded.

  “The commo room,” he said, “has a schedule of four times each day for the Casabianca to surface en route to periscope depth and receive our messages. Beyond that, she can transmit to us anytime that she needs to.”

  “Great,” Canidy then said. “Then that’s what we’ll do!”

  “What is what you’ll do?” Fine said.

  “What we’ll do is parachute in and get Jean to pick us up.”

  Both Fine and Canidy knew L’Herminier had the mind-set of a special operator willing and able to make his own independent decisions. Six months earlier, when the SS went to capture the French fleet at the port of Toulon, the admiralty of Vichy France demanded its ships be scuttled. As dozens were burned and sunk at their moorings, L’Herminier ignored orders and, with the Casabianca under cannon fire, dived and made way for Algiers.

  “I can convince him to do that,” Canidy said. “Ike will never know.”

  Canidy looked between Fine and John Craig.

  They said nothing.

  “Good. I take it that we’re agreed,” Canidy then said.

  “Hold on, Dick,” Fine then said. “Do you really think it’s wise for you to go in—especially with all you know?”

  “I’ll answer that question with a question: Did Wild Bill think it was wise to go into North Africa right before Operation Torch?”

  “But, damn it, Dick, Donovan wasn’t there.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  Fine thought about it for a moment and said, “Then no one knew he was there!”

  Canidy made a smug smile. “Exactly.”

  Fine pursued: “If the SS finds you—”

  “And begins peeling the skin from my pecker?” Canidy interrupted. “I’ll do what Donovan always says if he’s captured—bite a Q-pill.”

  Fine looked at John Craig, who appeared to be contemplating the disturbing idea of suicide by cyanide pill.

  “You’re my witness, son. I don’t approve of this.” He paused, then added, “That does not mean that I don’t understand it. I just don’t approve of the damn thing.”

  “Okay,” Canidy then said cheerfully, “now that that’s resolved, one last thing.”

  He looked at John Craig.

  “I’m not going to keep calling you ‘John Craig,’ and I’m damn sure not going to stumble over ‘van der Ploeg’ over and over. So, if I’m still going by Jupiter, then you can be . . . oh, what the hell . . . you can be Apollo.”

  “Any particular reason?” van der Ploeg said. “I don’t know my Greek gods.”

  “Apollo was god of all kinds of things—light, sun, truth, healing, even plague.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think we’re probably going to need all that—particularly the plague.”

  Apollo grinned.

  “Stan,” Canidy then said, “would you get on the horn and tell Darmstadter we’re on our way out there? Just as soon as Apollo and I go downstairs and load up in the warehouse, then prepare a message for the commo room to send to the Casabianca. Tell Hank I’ll borrow one of those tiny Stinsons I saw out at Maison Blanche if I have to.”

  Now Fine grinned. In some circles, Canidy was damn near infamous for stealing airplanes, boats, trucks, whatever—which he declared he was actually only “borrowing,” arguing that he always returned whatever he took.

  “You wouldn’t be borrowing it, Dick. Those birds belong to us.”

  IV

  [ONE]

  OSS Bern Station

  Herrengasse 23

  Bern, Switzerland

  2325 27 May 1943

  Allen Dulles, keeping eye contact with Wolfgang Kappler, said to the agent, “Yes, please show him in.”

  Kappler wordlessly raised his eyebrows.

  They looked toward the door as a man entered and the agent slipped back out the door and closed it.

  Kappler studied the man. Because of the dimly lit room, details were difficult to make out from the distance. But the fact that Dr. Bernhard was massive was unmistakable. He stood six-foot-six and had broad shoulders.

  “Come join us,” Dulles called out.

  As the man approached, walking somewhat hunched over, Kappler could make out that, with the rumpled tweed jacket, unkempt thin hair, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses with very thick lenses, he looked very much like a university professor of about age forty.

  An enormous university professor, Kappler thought.

  And a familiar-looking one . . .

  Reaching Dulles, the man held out his hand and said in a deep, almost abrasive voice, “A pleasure to see you again, Allen. I hope I am not int
errupting anything.”

  I think I know that voice, Kappler thought.

  In fact, I know I do!

  Then the man turned toward Kappler and seemed to be trying to focus on him through the thick lenses.

  He offered Kappler his hand and said, “I am Dr. Bernhard—”

  No, I don’t think so . . . Kappler thought.

  “I know who you are!” Kappler suddenly said, his tone cordial. “Hans, it’s me, Wolfgang. We met when you worked for Hjalmar Schacht at the Reichsbank in Berlin. You were involved with providing me funds for the expansion of my coal mine operations in the Ruhr Valley, near Ruhrpott.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then he replied, “Wolfgang Kappler?”

  He instantly pulled back his great big hand as if he had touched a red-hot stovetop. He glared down at Dulles.

  “You asked me here to meet with a messenger of the devil himself?” he said. “This man can go to hell—he is closer to Hitler than Hitler’s own mistress!”

  Kappler puffed out his chest and declared, “It is you who can go to hell, Hans!”

  Then he looked at Dulles and added, “What is this Dr. Bernhard nonsense? And how dare he speak of me that way! I thought that we were friends, Allen.”

  “It is his code name,” Dulles explained evenly. “I think you know for obvious reasons why.”

  His other code name being Tiny, which is equally obvious.

  When Kappler did not respond, Dulles added: “Hans is as much an anti-Nazi as you and Franz Messner.”

  Gisevius grunted derisively as he looked between Kappler and Dulles.

  Then, as Kappler watched with shock, Gisevius casually dropped into one of the deep-cushioned leather armchairs. He leaned forward and poured himself a snifter of cognac, spilling some on the floor as he did so.

  He acts as if this is his own home! Kappler thought.

  Next, he flung open the humidor, fished out a fat cigar, and slammed shut the top.

  Such arrogance!

  Gisevius then unwrapped the cigar and ran it along his nose as he inhaled deeply. He grunted again. After dipping the closed end of the cigar in his cognac, he bit a small hole, then spit the piece of tobacco into the fireplace.

  And such rudeness!

  Finally he put the cigar in his mouth and, using the Zippo with the Princeton crest, lit it, then tossed the lighter back to the table.

  He exhaled a massive gray cloud of smoke, grunted again, then said, “Not bad. Would be better in other company.” He glanced up at Dulles. “No offense to the host.”

  But that is offensive!

  Kappler quickly looked at Dulles to gauge his reaction—and was surprised to see that he was grinning.

  Dulles then chuckled. He turned to Kappler, motioning toward the armchairs.

  “Please have a seat, Wolffy. As we say in America, Hans’s bark is much worse than his bite.”

  Gisevius grunted again.

  “Or his grunt,” Dulles added with a smile.

  Allen Dulles had become accustomed to the brusqueness of the forty-year-old Hans Bernd Gisevius shortly after they had first been introduced in early 1943. Gisevius then had carefully—but boldly—announced that he worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.

  Canaris, Gisevius explained, had posted him as a vice counsel of the German consulate in Zurich, with the position serving as his cover for his secret mission of reaching out to the Allies. Then Gisevius had gone on to declare that he and Canaris were part of a group plotting to kill Hitler.

  To Dulles, who by profession was trained to be skeptical, it had all sounded like so much hot air braggadocio. Gisevius certainly was not the first self-important German official to present himself at the American Embassy and try cutting a deal that promised, say, to single-handedly deliver the Nazi surrender in exchange for said official to find himself the head of the new German government.

  Single-handedly with of course the full support and aid of America.

  Thus, Gisevius had had to work hard to be believed. He’d already failed to convince the British, who had turned him away for fear he was a double agent. In 1933, after graduating from law school, Gisevius had joined the Geheime Staatspolizei—the Secret State Police—at its start only to be more or less thrown out for declaring that the organization itself was full of criminals, and the Brits had warned Dulles of that fear based on his having been in the Gestapo.

  Despite being a skeptic, Dulles decided to take a chance—a cautious one—on the unlikely secret agent.

  Gisevius soon solidified his standing with Dulles by supplying an endless stream of German intelligence, beginning with the fact that a mole had been working in the office of the military attaché in the American Embassy in Bern. When Dulles had questioned that, Gisevius produced a fistful of copies of Top Secret messages that the U.S. legation recently had sent—including one of Dulles’s—that had been intercepted by the Nazis and passed to the Abwehr.

  Dulles’s OSS agents, with a little effort, were able to track the leak to a Swiss civilian who was employed as a janitor. A Nazi sympathizer, the janitor was stealing carbon copy sheets from the trash of the military attaché—copies that were supposed to be put in a secure burn bag and destroyed.

  And then Dulles had learned that the Gestapo not only was watching Gisevius, it had given the group plotting against Hitler—including Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the German General Staff, and Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, Berlin’s chief of police—its own code name, Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra.

  * * *

  “Allen,” Gisevius now announced, holding up his snifter in his right hand, “so as not to appear rude to you, I will finish your nice cognac. But I then shall leave the company of one who actively supports Nazism”—he puffed on his cigar, then took it in his left hand and poked it in Kappler’s direction, the smoke filling Kappler’s face—“one who in fact was one of Hitler’s earliest financiers and today is on a first-name basis with Hitler’s High Command ring of thugs.”

  Allen Dulles glanced at Wolfgang Kappler, whose face had turned red. His green eyes were narrow and clearly furious.

  “Let me tell you how that happened!” Kappler suddenly snapped, his tone uncharacteristically cold.

  “Please do,” Gisevius replied.

  “Twenty years ago, when Fritz and I first met him, Marty Bormann was a snot-nosed twenty-three-year-old district leader in the Mecklenburg Freikorps Rossbach.”

  He paused, locked eyes with Gisevius, then added almost bitterly, “I assume you know what that is?”

  Gisevius was uncowed.

  “The paramilitary organization,” he replied evenly, then puffed on his cigar. “The Freikorps that was established in the Ruhr set out to cause trouble for the French, whose military occupied the Ruhr to oversee steel and coal production for Germany, having defaulted on timber and coal deliveries. They were fanatical fighters, primarily against the Communists, but also against others.”

  “Fanatical is precisely it,” Kappler said. “And already Marty—whom I, being twelve years his senior, knew very well, which I will get into in a moment—was showing that he had a cruel streak. He managed an estate by day, and it was there that he met, and came to lead, the Freikorps Rossbach guerrillas, sabotaging anything the French considered valuable and attacking anyone thought to sympathize with the French or the Communists.”

  “‘Attack’?” Gisevius parroted, thickly sarcastic. “I believe the proper word is assassinated.”

  Kappler looked at him a long moment.

  “Yes,” he said, “I will grant that that is what happened. And it is why Marty spent time in jail.”

  Gisevius nodded and smiled smugly.

  Kappler continued: “Marty was found guilty of aiding Rudolf Höss, who killed Walther Kadow for being the traitor they believed told the French about Albert Schlageter derailing the trains.”

  “Schlageter was found guilty and executed,” Gisevius said.

  �
��Correct. And almost immediately made a martyr for the Nazi party.”

  Dulles, his face showing no emotion as he took in the discussion, had watched much of what Gisevius and Kappler described, first when serving in the U.S. diplomat service in Switzerland and collecting intelligence against the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, and then between world wars when developing clients in Germany for Sullivan and Cromwell.

  During his time in both the government and the private sector, Dulles had come in contact with many leaders, including an up-and-coming charismatic politician, an Austrian by the name of Adolf Hitler.

  “‘Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Luger!’” Gisevius suddenly quoted, raising his right hand and mimicking a pistol with his thumb and trigger finger.

  “Actually,” Dulles put in, “the pistol in question was a Browning—Whenever I hear of culture, I release the safety on my Browning! The key dialogue in the stage play on Schlageter’s life, dedicated to Hitler, trumpeting the anti-bourgeois of Hitler and Nazism.”

  Gisevius, poking his cigar at Kappler again, said: “And you were a major supporter of National Socialism—of Hitler and the anti-bourgeois of Nazism—and encouraged others in your industry to support the same. You and Fritz Thyssen and Doktor Emil Kirdorf—”

  “Kirdorf was a blind, doddering old fool!” Kappler exploded at the mention of the ninety-year-old industrialist. “But he was immensely powerful—”

  “Hitler personally awarded him the Order of the German Eagle,” Gisevius interrupted, “the highest honor for a German civilian.”

  “—yes, and so he influenced us, particularly as we shared a national pride. We all believed that the Treaty of Versailles was belittling our great people.”

  With the treaty, Germany agreed to take responsibility for causing the First World War. It required that the country make steep reparations as well as to disarm—the aim to make the Germans conciliatory and to pacify them.

  “As Kirdorf declared,” Kappler went on, “‘We will rise again!’”

  Gisevius said: “And you embraced that. So much so that in Amsterdam you and Thyssen arranged, through Rudolf Hess, for a three-hundred-thousand-mark line of credit with the Dutch Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which Thyssen happened to quietly own. Hess spent the complete line—which you then personally covered in Dutch guilders—to purchase what would become the Nazi party’s headquarters in Munich. . . .”