Dulles was very good at what he did, and superbly qualified. As a State Department officer, he had been stationed in Bern, Paris, Istanbul, Vienna, and Berlin.
The other man was Graham.
Graham had been genuinely surprised when Donovan told him that he had been chosen—with President Roosevelt’s approval—as one of the two men who were to be prepared to step in immediately as Donovan’s successor should that be necessary. Surprised because he was the antithesis of a WASP Washington insider. He was a Roman Catholic Texan of Mexican heritage who had graduated from Texas A&M, and his only connection with politics had been to support—and make substantial financial contributions to—the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell L. Willkie, whom Roosevelt had soundly beaten.
To be prepared to take over from Donovan, the three met whenever they could find the opportunity. Dulles could rarely get to Washington, so what most often had happened was that Graham would meet with Donovan in Washington, and then Graham would travel to Europe—most often to Portugal, which had air service to Switzerland—and personally tell Dulles what Donovan thought he should know. He had told Dulles of the Manhattan Project, the ultrasecret program to develop an atomic bomb.
And Dulles would tell Graham what secrets he thought Donovan and his possible successor and no one else should know. Two of these secrets involved the identities of anti-Nazi Germans high in the hierarchy of the Thousand-Year Reich with whom Dulles was dealing.
One of these was a man named Fritz Kolbe, who provided Dulles with the identities of German spies around the world and had told him of the German development of a revolutionary German fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me- 262, which, powered by a new type of engine—a “jet”—was capable of great speed and posed a real threat to the Army Air Forces’ plans to bomb Germany into submission.
And Graham had relayed to Donovan that Dulles was in contact with Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, who was dedicated to the overthrow of Adolf Hitler, and there had even been vague talk about a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Canaris’s and Kolbe’s activities were secrets as tightly held as was that of the atomic bomb.
And, Graham thought, looking at Frade, if I’m to believe what I’m hearing, Cletus Frade, a very junior and very amateur OSS operative on the pampas of Argentina, has uncovered the Canaris secret.
That’s incredible!
But maybe—even probably—he’s simply reporting gossip.
“I find that very hard to believe, Frade,” Graham said. “What do you know about Canaris?”
“He’s the head of German intelligence.”
“And you’re telling me he’s . . . sympathetic to the Allied cause?”
“That’s what I hear. From what you would call an absolutely reliable source.”
“And who would that be?” Graham demanded.
“Let me take it step by step,” Frade said.
“Okay.”
Frade took a sip of his drink, then began: “Himmler knows they’ve got a traitor in their embassy here. It’s pretty obvious. They couldn’t get that Operation Phoenix money into Argentina, and lost two of the best guys trying: Colonel Karl-Heinz Grüner, the military attaché who was also the Sicherheitsdienst guy, and Standartenführer Josef Goltz of the SS.
“So Himmler put SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, his adjutant, into a Wehrmacht Generalmajor’s uniform and sent him down here to find the traitor.”
There had been a good many German names and titles in what Frade had said, and Graham realized that Frade had pronounced them correctly and with ease.
“Where’d you get the German?” Graham asked.
“Siggy Stein—Sergeant Stein—asked me if I didn’t think I should at least be able to understand some German, so he’s been teaching me.”
“And doing very well, I must say,” Graham said.
“There’s not really a hell of a lot to do here on the pampas,” Frade said. “There’s been plenty of time to try to learn German. I want to get back to that— not much to do—but later. Let me finish.”
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Von Deitzberg, who is smart, tough, and could charm the balls off a brass monkey, decided that maybe the captain of the Reine de la Mer knew something that hadn’t come out about (a) how come the Argentines knew where they were going to try to land all that money; (b) how much, if at all, the gottverdammt Amerikaners involved in (a) . . .”
Graham smiled at the “goddamned Americans” correctly translated and pronounced in German. Frade smiled back.
“. . . and (c) how come von Wachtstein, who was in the boat with Grüner and Goltz, didn’t also get his brains blown all over the beach of Samborombón Bay—”
“We got lucky there, didn’t we?” Graham interrupted.
“Yeah, we did. I fucked up there big-time; Argentines don’t believe the Scripture that says that vengeance is only the Lord’s. I should have known that Enrico and Sarjento Gómez would not pass up an opportunity to kill the Germans who ordered my father’s murder, tried to murder me, and in the process got Enrico’s sister’s throat slashed. We got lucky that Enrico knew von Wachtstein had nothing to do with my father’s murder and that he’s a friend of mine and, when he saw von Wachtstein in the boat, told Gómez.”
“I’m as much at fault about what happened on the beach as you are,” Graham said. “I didn’t come to Argentina for the first time yesterday. I know all about their concepts of vengeance and honor. I should have told Sawyer to watch those two.”
“Which would have made him curious why we wanted von Wachtstein kept alive, and we couldn’t tell him, could we? And even if we had told him that Enrico and Gómez had more on their minds than covering his ass while he was taking pictures, there was nothing Polo could have said or done to stop them.”
" ’Polo’?”
“Sawyer. He’s the only one who’s not bored out of his skull here,” Frade said, smiling. “He spends most of his time on horses, swinging a mallet at a willow-wood ball. He’s pretty good; he was a three-goal player before he joined the Army.”
“Who does he play with?” Graham asked.
“My father’s polo team. Of which, of course, my father was captain. San Pedro y San Pablo. I call them the Pedro y Pablo Hot Shots.”
“And how do you explain Sawyer to them?”
“Well, first of all, they live here. El Patron doesn’t have to explain anything to them. And Sawyer—and the others—are by no means the first people who have been guests here for extended periods while other people were looking for them. If you’re asking, ‘Am I putting the team at risk?’—no. The opposite, I would say. Most of the polo players are supervisors of some kind. Which means they run the gauchos who are my perimeter guard. Nobody gets close to this place without my having at least thirty minutes’—more often an hour’s— warning.”
“How about from the air?”
“We don’t get as much warning of somebody flying over,” Frade admitted. “But you would be surprised how far the sound of an aircraft engine carries in the pampas. And that’s not much of a threat anyway. Martín knows what we’re doing here—including that we have the radar—and doesn’t seem to care. What he worries about is my guys being loose in Argentina. So I don’t let them leave the estancia.”
Graham considered that, nodded, and then said, “Well, you don’t have to worry about Oberst Grüner and Standartenführer Goltz anymore.”