The Assassination Option Part 33

"That's very interesting," Smith said softly. "And whose idea was that?"

"My . . . I guess he could be called my administrative officer. Staff Sergeant Hessinger."

"And you thought this idea of your staff sergeant was a good idea?"

"Sir, Hessinger said something to the effect that eventually somebody is going to want to look at our records. And if that happens, and we say, 'We haven't been keeping any records,' that's not going to be an acceptable answer."

"And I agreed, General," Schultz said. "And told Cronley to start making after-action reports on everything of significance that's happened at Kloster Grnau-"

"Where?" Smith interrupted.

"The monastery," Schultz furnished.

General Smith nodded his understanding.

"And at the Pullach compound. And about everything else he's done of significance anywhere."

"And who gets these after-action reports?" Smith asked.

"Colonel Ashton," Cronley said. "As responsible officer for Operation Ost. And he sits on them, hoping that no one will ever want to see them."

General Smith considered that for a full thirty seconds.

"Your sergeant was right, Cronley," he said. "Napoleon said, 'An army travels on its stomach,' but the U.S. Army travels on its paper trails. If this thing blows up in our faces, and we didn't have any kind of a paper trail, (a) they wouldn't believe it, and (b) in the absence of a paper trail, we could be accused of anything. I think General Eisenhower would agree. I also think it would be a good idea if I had a look at them, in case they needed . . . what shall I say? . . . a little editing."

"Yes, sir," Cronley said.

"Not your decision to make," Smith said. "Chief, what about it?"

After a moment, Schultz said, "Hand-carry them to General Smith personally. Either you or Tiny."

"Yes, sir."

"Back to the basic question, Cronley: What is your a.s.sessment of the risk of exposure of Operation Ost? Increased, diminished, or no change?"

"Greatly diminished, sir."

"Why?"

"Sir, just about all of General Gehlen's n.a.z.is are already in Argentina. There's a dozen, maybe twenty, still unaccounted for in Eastern Europe. If we can get them out, either to West Germany or Italy, we'll use the Vatican to get them to Argentina. I mean, we're no longer going to use SAA to transport them."

"If you're right, and I have no reason to doubt that you are, that's good news," General Smith said. "Colonel Ashton, what's your a.s.sessment of the same thing, this blowing up in our faces in Argentina?"

"Sir, I'll probably regret saying this, but I don't think it's much of a problem, and the chances diminish by the day."

"Why do you say that?"

Schultz answered for him: "General, the only people looking for n.a.z.is in Argentina are the FBI. And since Juan Domingo Peron and the Catholic Church don't want any n.a.z.is found, the FBI is going to have a very hard time finding any."

"You don't sound as if you're rooting for the FBI," Smith said. "Doesn't that make you uncomfortable?"

"No, sir, it doesn't. President Truman and General Eisenhower getting burned by J. Edgar Hoover over Operation Ost is what makes me, and Admiral Souers, uncomfortable."

"I'd forgotten that you have spent so much time in South America," General Smith said, but it was a question, and everybody at the table knew it.

When Schultz didn't reply immediately, Smith made a statement that was clearly another question: "Chief, in the lobby just now, I said that I thought, when he told me he was sending you to Europe, that Admiral Souers was implying there's more to your relations.h.i.+p than being old s.h.i.+pmates. Then Homer appeared before you could reply. Or saved you from having to reply."

"You sure you want me to get into that, General?"

"Only if you're comfortable telling me."

"Comfortable, no, but the admiral trusts you, which means I do, and I think you have the right to know," Schultz said. "So okay. The admiral and I were s.h.i.+pmates on battles.h.i.+p USS Utah in 1938. He was then a lieutenant commander and I had just made chief signalman. About the time he made commander, and went to work for the chief of Naval Intelligence, the Navy sent me to Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey, to see what the Army Signal Corps was up to. My contact in ONI was Commander Souers. I kept him up to speed about what the Army was developing-radar, for one thing-and, more important, what became the SIGABA system."

"It's an amazing system," General Smith said. "You were involved in its development?"

"Yes, sir, I was. In 1943, I installed a SIGABA system on a destroyer, the USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107, which then sailed to the South Atlantic to see what kind of range we could get out of it. To keep SIGABA secret, only her captain and two white hats I had with me knew what the real purpose of that voyage was.

"We called at Buenos Aires, official story 'courtesy visit' to Argentina, which was then neutral. Actual purpose, so that I could get some SIGABA parts from Collins Radio, which were flown down there in the emba.s.sy's diplomatic pouch.

"A Marine captain comes on board, in a crisp khaki uniform, wearing naval aviator's wings, the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the third award of the Purple Heart . . ."

"Cletus?" Cronley asked.

"Who else? Anyway, he tells the skipper he understands that he has a SIGABA expert on board and he wants to talk to him. Cletus Frade is a formidable guy. The skipper brings Captain Frade to the radio shack.

"He says he's heard I'm a SIGABA expert. I deny I ever heard of SIGABA. 'What is it?'

"He says, 'Chief, if you ever lie to me again, I'll have you shot. Now, are you a capable SIGABA repairman or not?'

"I tell him I am. He asks me if I know anything about the RCA 103 Radar-which was also cla.s.sified Top Secret at the time-and I tell him yes. He says, 'Pack your sea bag, Chief, orders will soon come detaching you from this tin can and a.s.signing you to me.'

"I don't know what the h.e.l.l's going on, but I'm not worried. The skipper's not going to let anybody take me off the Alfred Thomas. Who the h.e.l.l does this crazy Marine think he is? The chief of Naval Operations?

"At 0600 the next morning, so help me G.o.d, there is an Urgent message over the SIGABA. Very short message. Cla.s.sified Top SecretTango, which security cla.s.sification I'd never heard of until that morning. 'Chief Signalman Oscar J. Schultz detached USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107, a.s.signed personal staff Captain Cletus Frade, USMCR, with immediate effect. Ernest J. King, Admiral, USN, Chief of Naval Operations.'

"At 0800, Cletus is waiting for me on the wharf. In civvies, driving his Horch convertible, with a good-looking blond sitting next to him. It's Dorotea, his Anglo-Argentine wife. He says we're going out to the ranch, and should be there in time for lunch.

"'Sir,' I say, 'what's going on here?'

"'Congratulations, Chief, you are now a member of Team Turtle of the Office of Strategic Services. The team's out at the ranch. What we do, among other things, is look for German submarines, supposedly neutral s.h.i.+ps that supply German submarines, and then we sink them or blow them up or arrange for the Navy to do that for us. We use the RCA 103 Radar to find them, and the SIGABA to pa.s.s the word to the Navy. So we need you to keep those technological marvels up and running.'"

"That's quite a story," General Smith said.

"Yeah. But let me finish, General, it gets better."

"I wouldn't miss it for the world," General Smith said.

"So we go out to the ranch. I found out later that it's about as big as Manhattan Island. Really. Cletus owns it. He inherited it, and a h.e.l.l of a lot else, from his father, who was murdered at the orders, so the OSS guys told me, of Heinrich Himmler himself when it looked like El Coronel Frade was going to become president of Argentina.

"And I met the team. All a bunch of civilians in uniform. Well, maybe not in uniform. But not professional military men, if you know what I mean. No offense, Polo."

"None taken, El Jefe. That's what we were, civilians in uniform. On those rare occasions when we wore uniforms."

"Admiral Souers-by then he was Rear Admiral, Lower Half-finally learned that I'd been shanghaied off the USS Alfred Thomas. He got a message to me saying that he couldn't get me out of Argentina, but I could still be of use to the Office of Naval Intelligence by reporting everything I could learn about what Frade and Team Turtle were up to. The admiral said that it was very important to ONI.

"By then, I'd already heard about the trouble Clete was having with the naval attache of our emba.s.sy-a real a.s.shole-and the FBI and some other people supposed to be on our side, and I'd gotten to know the OSS guys. So first I told Clete what the admiral wanted, told him I wasn't going to do it, and then I got on the SIGABA and told the admiral I wasn't going to report to ONI on Team Turtle and why.

"I got a short message in reply. 'Fully understand. Let me know if I can ever help with anything Frade needs.'"

"And then one thing led to another, General," Ashton said. "First, El Jefe became de facto chief of staff to Frade, and then de jure. Or more or less de jure. Without telling El Jefe that he was going to, Clete got on the horn-the SIGABA-to Admiral Souers and told him he was going to ask the Navy to commission El Jefe and was the admiral going to help or get in the way?"

"Two weeks later," El Jefe picked up the story, "the naval attache was forced to swear me in as a lieutenant, USNR. The attache couldn't say anything, of course, but that really ruined his day, which is why I asked Clete to have him ordered to do it."

General Smith chuckled.

"The reason I look so spiffy in my uniform is that it's practically brand-new," El Jefe said. "I don't think it's got two weeks' wear on it."

"You didn't wear it because you were too cheap to buy more gold stripes when you were made a lieutenant commander," Ashton said. "Or when Clete got you promoted to commander so you'd outrank me and could take command of what was still the OSS, Southern Cone, when he took off his uniform."

Schultz gave him the finger.

"Clete thought-and he was right-that it looked better if people thought I was a chief, rather than an officer," Schultz said. "So we kept my change of status quiet."

"You're a full commander, Oscar?" Cronley asked.

"I retired a couple of weeks ago as a commander, U.S. Naval Reserve, Jim," Schultz said. "What I am now is a member of what they call the Senior Executive Service of the Directorate of Central Intelligence. My t.i.tle is executive a.s.sistant to the director."

When Cronley didn't reply, Schultz said, "Why are you so surprised? You've been around the spook business long enough to know that nothing is ever what it looks like."

"Like the chief, DCI-Europe, isn't what he looks like?"

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that I'm very young, wholly inexperienced in the spook business, and pretty slow, so it took me a long time to figure out that there's something very fishy about a very junior captain being chief, DCI Europe, and that no one wants to tell him what's really going on."

"Well, Jim, now that you have figured that out, I guess we'll have to tell you. I will on the way to the airport."

"Why don't you tell him now?" General Smith said. "I think General Greene should be privy to this."

"Yes, sir," Schultz said. "Okay. Where to start? Okay. When President Truman was talked into disbanding the OSS-largely by J. Edgar Hoover, but with a large a.s.sist by the Army, no offense, General-"

"Tell it like it is, Chief," General Smith said.

"He first realized that he couldn't turn off everything the OSS was doing-especially Operation Ost, but some other operations, too-like a lightbulb. So he turned to his old friend Admiral Souers to run them until they could be turned over to somebody else.

"Admiral Souers convinced him-I think Truman had figured this out by himself, so I probably should have said, the admiral convinced the President that the President was right in maybe thinking he had made a mistake by shutting down the OSS.

"The admiral didn't know much about Operation Ost, except that it existed. Truman told him what it was. The admiral knew I was involved with it in Argentina, so he sent for me to see what I thought should be done with it.

"The President trusted his old friend the admiral, and the admiral trusted his old s.h.i.+pmate. Okay? The President was learning how few people he could trust, and learning how many people he could not trust, starting with J. Edgar Hoover.

"So Truman decided a new OSS was needed. Who to run it? The admiral.

"So what to do about Operation Ost, which was important for two reasons-for the intel it had about the Russians, and because if it came out we'd made the deal with Gehlen and were smuggling n.a.z.is out of Germany, Truman would be impeached, Eisenhower would be court-martialed, and we'd lose the German intelligence about our pal Joe Stalin.

"So how do we hide Operation Ost from J. Edgar Hoover, the Army, the Navy, the State Department, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, et cetera, et cetera? We try to make it look unimportant. How do we do that? We pick some obscure bird colonel to run it. Which bird colonel could we trust? For that matter, which light bird, which major, could we trust?

"And if we found one, that would raise the question, which full colonel, which light bird would General Gehlen trust? I mean really trust, so that he'd really keep up his end of the deal?

"The President says, 'What about Captain Cronley?'"

"You were there, Chief?" General Smith asked. "You heard him say that?"

"I was there. I heard him say that. The admiral said, 'Harry, that's ridiculous!' and the President said, 'Who would think anything important would be handed to a captain?'

"The admiral said, 'Who would think anything in the intelligence business would be handed over to a captain?'

"And the President said, 'There are captains and then there are captains. I know. I was one. This one, Cronley, has just been given the DSM and a promotion to captain by the commander in chief for unspecified services connected with intelligence. J. Edgar knows it was because Cronley found the submarine with the uranium oxide on it. J. Edgar would not think there was anything funny if Captain Cronley were given some unimportant job in intelligence that might get him promoted.'

"The admiral said something about giving Cronley Operation Ost because no one would think Operation Ost was important if a captain was running it, and the President said, 'For that reason, I think we should name Captain Cronley chief, DCI-Europe, and let that leak.'

"'Harry,' the admiral said, "'General Gehlen is an old-school Kraut officer. I don't think he'll stand still for taking orders from a captain.'

"And the President said, 'Why don't we ask him?'

"So we asked General Gehlen. So there you sit, Mr. Chief, DCI-Europe. Okay? Any questions?"

"How soon can I expect to be relieved when you find some bird colonel you can trust, who's acceptable to General Gehlen and should have this job?"

"The job is yours until you screw up-or one of your people does-and Operation Ost is blown."

"Then I get thrown to the wolves?"

"Then you get thrown to the wolves. If that happens, try to take as few people down with you as you can. Any questions?"

"No, sir," Cronley said, and a moment later, "Thanks, Oscar."

[FIVE].

Suite 507 Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Maximilianstra.s.se 178 Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany 2010 16 January 1946 There had been a delay in the departure of SAA flight 233, so Cronley had told Max Ostrowski, "Head home. That way, if I have to go to Munich instead of Kloster Grnau, there will be only one Storch parked in the transient area to arouse curiosity, not two."