‘‘I would have to go to Naval Headquarters and explain the situation,’’ Grüner said. ‘‘My man, unfortunately, owes his allegiance to Castillo.’’
‘‘You have only one asset in Naval Headquarters?’’ Goltz asked impatiently.
‘‘Only one in the office of the Harbor Master,’’ Grüner said.
Goltz turned to Peter.
‘‘Oberst Grüner and I will work this out, von Wachtstein, ’’ he said. ‘‘We really have until, say, six o’clock tonight. You understand what I’m thinking?’’
‘‘I think so, Herr Standartenführer. Presuming I can get out of El Tigre, I should be in Magdalena by five or five-thirty. Oberst Grüner will determine the Océano Pacífico’s estimated time of arrival and where she will drop anchor, and he will send that information to me at Magdalena. On your orders, I will take the boat out to the Océano Pacífico. From that point, we will proceed with the discharge of the matériel aboard the ship as per the original plan.’’
‘‘You see any problems with that, von Wachtstein? Aside from getting out of El Tigre into the River Plate?’’ Grüner challenged.
‘‘Only finding the Comerciante del Océano Pacífico at night, Herr Oberst.’’
‘‘If that looks like a problem, you could delay taking the boat out from Magdalena until first light,’’ Goltz ordered. ‘‘I’ll have to go out to her myself; and if you think there would be a problem finding her at night, I would have the same problem. Grüner, I presume everything else is ready?’’
‘‘Yes, it is,’’ Grüner replied. ‘‘The only possible problems I can see are von Wachtstein getting out of El Tigre, and then finding the ship from there at night.’’
‘‘We are presuming your friend can order her to drop anchor someplace where it will be convenient to Magdalena and the landing point.’’
‘‘Where is that, Herr Standartenführer?’’ Peter asked.
‘‘You’ll be advised, Hans, at the appropriate time,’’ Goltz said. ‘‘What I will do now is wait here for the Ambassador to arrive. That will be all, gentlemen, thank you.’’
Gradny-Sawz gave the Nazi salute, and barked, ‘‘Heil Hitler!’’
Peter had come to the Embassy by taxi from his apartment. Then, there had been any number of taxis on the street. Now there were none in sight on Avenida Córdoba in either direction. There was no other traffic either, vehicles or pedestrians.
The word was apparently out that the revolution had begun.
Further up Avenida Córdoba, he could see the lead elements of the stalled columns of the First Cavalry and the Second Infantry regiments—riflemen on foot, mounted cavalry, and even some horse-drawn 75-mm howitzers.
He was going to have get past those lines anyway, he reasoned. Perhaps traffic was again moving in the areas now controlled by the revolutionary forces. He started walking toward the soldiers.
He had walked two blocks when his ears picked up the sound of a light aircraft. A very low-flying light aircraft. He looked up in the sky, trying—without success—to spot it.
And then it came from behind him, very low. It was a Piper Cub, wearing the insignia of the Argentine Army. It was no more than a hundred feet over the roofs of the buildings lining both sides of Avenida Córdoba.
I wonder what the hell that’s about?
XXIII
[ONE] Office of the Naval Attaché The Embassy of the United States The Bank of Boston Building Avenida Bartolomé Mitre Buenos Aires, Argentina 0555 19 April 1943
The event that became known in history books as the Argentine Revolution of 1943 first came to the attention of Lieutenant Commander Frederico Delojo, USN, Naval Attach é (and, covertly, OSS representative) of the Embassy of the United States of America at 0452 19 April 1943.
He was later to remember the precise time and circumstances because he not only made a note of the time but also because he was wakened from a sound sleep in his apartment by a horrendous squealing of tortured tires, followed immediately by the scream of metal tearing asunder.
He jumped out of bed and went to the balcony of his apartment. As he suspected, there’d been one hell of an accident, involving a truck and an automobile. The automobile was a police vehicle. It was equipped with a large chrome-plated (and probably American) siren mounted on the roof. And it had collided with an Army truck, striking the truck as it moved through the intersection.
Then Commander Delojo noticed something odd. There was not just one Army truck, but a number of them, a convoy, presumably under the command of the officer who now appeared, wearing a sword, and accompanied by four soldiers in German-style helmets and field gear. As the of ficer directed the removal of the injured driver of the police vehicle from his crushed vehicle, another police vehicle, with siren screaming, came racing down the street and very narrowly avoided colliding with the two vehicles now blocking the intersection.
It was followed almost immediately by another police car, siren screaming, which could not stop in time and collided with what Delojo now thought of as Police Vehicle Two.
The intersection was now effectively blocked by the truck and three police vehicles. An Army car, a 1941 Chevrolet four-door sedan, now appeared, and a lieutenant colonel hurried out of the backseat and, with some excitement and waving of his arms, began to order the clearing of the intersection.
Moments later, two sergeants appeared with twenty soldiers in field gear and directed their pushing of the disabled vehicles off the intersection.
As soon as that was accomplished, the convoy of army trucks began to move again. Without thinking about it, Commander Delojo began to count them. Twenty-six trucks passed through the intersection. Each of them was loaded with infantrymen in German-style steel helmets sitting shoulder to shoulder and holding their rifles erect between their knees.
This was possibly a routine maneuver, Commander Delojo decided. But on the other hand, it was also possible that the troops were somehow connected with the coup d’état that everybody expected.
It was worth calling the duty officer at the Embassy, Delojo decided. His telephone was dead.
At that point, Commander Delojo put on his uniform, checked to see that he had both his diplomatic passport and the carnet issued to diplomats by the Argentine Foreign Ministry, and left his apartment. Obviously it was his duty to notify the OSS as soon as possible that the long-expected coup d’état was finally taking place.
Nothing now on the street indicated what had roused him from his sound sleep but the first police car. The other police cars and the convoy were nowhere in sight.
A taxi came down the street. He flagged it and ordered the driver to take him to the United States Embassy.
En route to the Embassy the taxi was stopped twice by roadblocks, one manned by half a dozen members of the Corps of Mounted Police and the other by a platoon of soldiers of an Engineer Battalion. The Mounted Police passed him through immediately, but the two Engineer lieutenants held a whispered discussion that lasted ten minutes before deciding they should pass the American diplomat.
While he was waiting for their discussion to conclude, Delojo reconsidered his original idea to urgently message the OSS in Washington that the coup d’état was now taking place.
For one thing, he did not know for a fact that it was. He really should not message Washington unless he could transmit facts. And prudence suggested that just sitting on the nest waiting to see what breed of chick emerged from the egg was the proper course of action.
Yesterday, Vacuum—Mr. Milton Leibermann of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—put his head in the door and in an unexpected and frankly unwelcome spirit of interagency cooperation informed him that he had just learned that one of Frade’s enlisted men, Sergeant David Ettinger, was missing from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo and was very possibly in great danger, and that he thought Delojo should know about it.
Oracle would certainly want to know about that. Theoretically, Frade or his parachutist deputy would have relayed that informati
on to Washington. But that was a dangerous presumption to make. Perhaps Frade didn’t know about it, and Lieutenant Whatsisname—Pelosi— could not be relied upon to act in a responsible manner. He was, in fact, a demolitions man, not an intelligence officer.
On one hand, Delojo reasoned, if he messaged Oracle about the missing sergeant, it might make the point that he was staying on top of the situation in Buenos Aires. But on the other hand, doing so raised two potential areas of difficulty. Frade was responsible for reporting on his own men. After that unnecessarily curt message from Donovan about his role with respect to Frade, it might appear that he was trying to put his nose in somewhere it wasn’t welcome. Furthermore, if he did inform the OSS that the sergeant was missing, he would be expected to reveal the source of his information, Leibermann. Director Donovan had told him personally that he was to have as little to do with the FBI as possible—preferably nothing.
It was near six A.M. when Commander Delojo reached the Bank of Boston Building. Just before he entered it, he decided that the most prudent course of action was to find out as much about the coup d’état as possible—if that’s really what it was—and to see if he could learn anything about the missing sergeant, but not to message Oracle unless he had facts to report.
As Delojo entered the narrow corridor where his office was located, one of the cryptographic section’s enlisted men was approaching from out of the corridor. He was a large, tall, corn-haired Iowa farm boy to whom Commander Delojo had been introduced—the Embassy Security Officer thought it a good idea for cryptographic clerks to be personally acquainted with officers authorized to dispatch or receive TOP SECRET material—but he could not at the moment recall his name.
‘‘Morning, Commander,’’ the sergeant said. ‘‘I was just looking for you.’’
‘‘Is that so?’’
‘‘Poop from the group for you,’’ the sergeant said, extending a clipboard to Delojo. ‘‘Just came in. If you’ll sign that, please?’’
Commander Delojo held the opinion that the U.S. Army did not instill in its enlisted men a proper respect for commissioned officers—enlisted Army personnel were, if anything, worse than their Marine counterparts—but he did not think this the place or the time to have a word with the sergeant about his informality.
He took the clipboard and signed for Message 3002, TOP SECRET NO COPIES, handed the clipboard back, and reached for the message’s envelope.
‘‘What the hell’s going on outside, Commander?’’
‘‘I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the Argentines are staging a coup d’état,’’ Delojo said.
‘‘No shit? Against who?’’
That did it. The next time I see the cryptographic officer I will have a word with him about this young man.
‘‘By definition, Sergeant, a coup d’état is made against the existing head of state. Here that would be President Castillo.’’
Commander Delojo carried the envelope to his office, closed and locked the door after him, then tore open the envelope.
URGENT TOP SECRET
NOT TO BE COPIED
FROM ORACLE WASHDC
MSG NO 3002 DIR 0050 GREENWICH 19 APRIL 43
TO STACHIEF AGGIE
STACHIEF BUENOS AIRES1. ADDRESSEE WILL REPLY QUICKEST MEANS GIVING TIME RECEIPT THIS MESSAGE
2. RELIABLE INTELLIGENCE GIVES ETA GROCERYSTORE TWO MOUTH RIVER PLATE 1600 GREENWICH 20 APRIL 1943.
3. DETERMINE AND ADVISE QUICKEST MEANS:a. LOCATION AGGIE.
b. LOCATION TEX AND PARROT AND OPERATIONAL STATUS OF PARROT.
c. LOCATION SNOOPY AND TEAM AND EQUIPMENT AND OPERATIONAL STATUS EQUIPMENT.
4. QUERY SOURCE GALAHAD POSSIBLE REASON SPECIAL INTEREST AT HIGHEST LEVELS BERLIN IN SECURITY OF QUOTE REPATRIATION PLAN MATERIEL ENDQUOTE POSSIBLY ABOARD GROCERYSTORE TWO.
5. WHOEVER ESTABLISHES FIRST CONTACT WITH AGGIE WILL RELAY FOLLOWING: PRESIDENT DESIRES EARLIEST POSSIBLE IDENTIFICATION AND MOTIVATION OF GALAHAD.
DONOVAN END
TOP SECRET
NOT TO BE COPIED
‘‘Damn!’’ Commander Delojo said, realizing that the message placed him in an even more difficult position than having to decide whether or not to message Oracle vis-à-vis the coup d’état and Sergeant Whatsisname.
Obviously, if he was to locate Aggie—Colonel A. F. Graham, USMCR—that meant he was down here somewhere.
Why? Has something else gone wrong that I’m not aware of?
Delojo had no idea where Tex—Major Cletus H. Frade, USMCR—was except that he had left Buenos Aires by train five days ago.
The last word he had from Snoopy—Captain Maxwell Ashton III, AUS—was that he was in Santo Tomé and his team and their equipment were in Pôrto Alegre, Brazil.
Pôrto Alegre was the last known location of Parrot—the airplane that Frade had gone to Pôrto Alegre to pick up and, against Delojo’s objections, bring into Argentina black, while carrying the rest of Team Snoopy and their radar equipment with him.
Since he had no idea of the identity, much less the motivation, of Galahad, he obviously could not locate him and query him regarding the ‘‘ ‘repatriation plan matériel’ possibly aboard grocerystore two,’’ whatever the hell that might be.
But an order was an order, and there was nothing to do but reply to Oracle’s 3002, even though he was quite sure it was going to make him look like a fool.
He sat down and rapidly typed his reply on a blank sheet of paper:
TOP SECRET
URGENT
FROM STACHIEF BUENOS AIRES 0010 GREENWICH 19 APRIL 43
TO ORACLE WASHDC
REFERENCE YOUR 30021. RECEIVED 1050 GREENWICH 19 APR 43.
2. HAVE BEGUN EFFORT TO LOCATE AGGIE.
3. LOCATION TEX UNKNOWN LAST REPORTED ENROUTE BIRDCAGE. NO INFORMATION AVAILABLE RE SNOOPY, TEAM, OR EQUIPMENT. HAVE BEGUN EFFORT TO DEVELOP REQUESTED INFORMATION.
4. CANNOT QUERY GALAHAD INASMUCH AS IDENTITY UNKNOWN.
5. UNUSUAL MILITARY AND POLICE ACTIVITY EARLY THIS AM SUGGESTS POSSIBLE COUP DETAT MAY BE UNDERWAY. PRESENTLY AVAILABLE
INTELLIGENCE INSUFFICIENT TO PREDICT OUTCOME.1. UNCONFIRMED INTELLIGENCE REPORTS SARNOFF MISSING.
END
STACHIEF BUENOS AIRES
TOP SECRET
He carefully read what he had typed, then took it to the cryptographic officer and instructed him to dispatch the message immediately.
Of all the missions Oracle had ordered, he decided, the priority mission was the location of Colonel Graham. The problem was that he had absolutely no idea where Colonel Graham might be.
The best thing to do, he concluded, was stay right where he was. For one thing, if Colonel Graham were here and became aware the coup d’état was probably taking place, he would either contact the Embassy or telephone. If that was true, it was his place to be available. Furthermore, the Embassy was probably the best place to gather additional information about the coup d’état.
Delojo returned to his office, left it to pick up a cup of coffee from the machine in the room housing the typing pool, and returned to his office.
He stepped out on the balcony and gazed down at the street. A group of natives was in the process of rocking a bus. As Delojo watched, they succeeded in turning it onto its side. Gasoline began to spill from the fueling mouth. Someone tossed a match, and the gasoline caught fire.
A minute or so later, the gas tank exploded.
Delojo stepped back from the edge of the balcony. There was no point in making oneself conspicuous in a situation like this.
An Argentine Army Piper Cub flew overhead, from the direction of the Casa Rosada. Delojo had several questions about it. Was it a loyalist, so to speak, aircraft, or aligned with the revolutionaries? And what was it doing? Delojo had had several conversations with the Army Attaché about such aircraft. For the Attaché had discussed with his Argentine Army counterparts the concept of direction of artillery fire by airborne forward observers, and had been told that this wou
ld be quite impossible until Argentine Army artillery units were equipped with radios capable of communicating with aircraft.
Commander Delojo set out to find the Army Attaché. This was an interesting development, and discussing it with the Army Attaché would be a fruitful way of passing the time until something happened.
[TWO] Aboard Argentine Army Air Service Light Aircraft Type 42 #6 Above Plaza San Martín Capital Federal Buenos Aires, Argentina 0615 19 April 1943
After a brief period of considerable—and visible—uneasiness and uncertainty, General of Division Arturo Rawson, President of the Governing Council of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Argentina, quickly became not only a believer in the amazing capabilities of light aircraft, but quickly applied those capabilities toward the execution of OUTLINE BLUE.
General Rawson had of course previously flown in Type 42 Aircraft (a high-wing monoplane powered by a 75-horsepower Continental A-75-8 engine and known commercially as the Piper J-4 Cub); but on those flights the pilots were Argentine Army Air Service officers with a deep interest in doing nothing that would make a general officer feel uncomfortable or give him any cause whatever to suspect that they were anything but sober, careful airmen devoted to all aspects of aviation safety.
Today, he was being flown by a pilot who had soloed, illegally, in a Piper Cub at thirteen years of age, after six hours of illegal, if careful, flight instruction by his uncle. Later, Marine Aviation Cadet Frade, C.H., had three times come very close indeed to being dropped from the program at the United States Navy Aviation Training Base, Pensacola, Florida. Cadet Frade’s problems with the program had nothing to do with his ability, or inability, to fly the Stearman ‘‘Yellow Peril’’ basic training aircraft, or with the academic portion of the training syllabus, but with his difficulty in learning to fly ‘‘The Navy Way’’ at the Navy’s pace, while paying strict attention to the Navy’s deep concern for flight safety.
Blood and Honor Page 65
