Frade is now involved in things far more important. It doesn’t matter how he got involved; the fact is that he knows about—is involved with—resistance to the Nazis by senior members of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; the German navy; the head of Abwehr; the assassination plot against Hitler; Operation Phoenix; and the ransoming of Jews from concentration camps.
And while he’s so painfully right that he’s in over his head with all of this, the bottom line there is: So what? He’s involved.
“Major Frade, I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say,” Graham said seriously.
Frade looked at him quizzically, nodded his head, but said nothing.
“That was an order,” Graham said. “To which, as a serving Marine officer, you are expected to reply, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ ”
Graham saw the look on Frade’s face.
Is that contempt? Or amusement?
Probably both: Contemptuous amusement. Or amused contempt.
Frade said, “Aye, aye, sir.”
“Is something bothering you, Major?”
“ ‘Serving Marine officer,’ Colonel? So far as I know—with the exception of the Marine guards at the embassy—I’m the only Marine in Argentina. And God knows, I’m not functioning as a Naval Aviator. And as a serving Marine officer, I’m supposed to place myself at the orders of the senior officer of the Navy Department present. That would be Commander Delojo, and I have absolutely no intention of placing myself—or the Army officers, enlisted men, or Chief Schultz, who I do command—under Delojo’s orders.”
“Finished?” Graham asked.
Frade nodded. Then, a long moment later, when he realized Graham was waiting for the expected response, he said, “Yes, sir.”
“First, let’s straighten out the chain of command,” Graham said. “You are a Marine officer seconded to the Office of Strategic Services. As am I. I’m the senior Marine officer in OSS. That makes you subject to my orders. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
That reply was neither amused nor contemptuous.
I got through to him. At least a little.
A stray thought popped into Graham’s head.
The last time I thought of an amused contemptuous look on the face of Major Frade was when I went to the Documents Branch to pick up those absurd credentials Donovan ordered me to bring down here.
I knew that would be his understandable reaction to them.
But can I turn that around?
Christ, it’s worth a shot.
And I have to have him under control before I get into what he’s going to have to do now that he has stumbled into things he can’t control himself.
“You asked me to come down here at a time when I was planning to come anyway,” Graham said. That wasn’t true, but he saw that he had Frade’s attention.
Frade looked at him curiously, but said nothing.
“I’ll be back in a minute, Major,” Graham said. “While I’m gone, why don’t you give some serious thought to the chain of command you’d like to see in place here?”
“Sir?” Frade asked, but Graham was already at the door and didn’t reply.
“Very interesting,” Frade said after examining the leather folder holding the plastic-sheathed photo identification card and gold OSS badge. “What am I supposed to do with it? Show it to Colonel Martín?”
And there’s that sardonic look on his face. And I understand it.
“I can do without the sarcasm, Frade,” Graham said icily.
“Sorry,” Frade said, not sounding very contrite.
“You noticed, I hope, that in the rank block, you are identified as area commander. ”
“I saw that. What does it mean?”
“Just what it says,” Graham said.
Frade held both hands out, palms upward, signaling he had no idea what Graham was talking about.
“Let me explain,” Graham said. “You’re not the only officer around with command structure problems . . .”
I’m making this up as I go along.
"... and this new system is what Director Donovan and I—in consultation with the attorney general—came up with.”
“New system?”
“The Rules for the Governance of the Navy—or Army Regulations—just don’t provide for situations in the OSS where the best-qualified man to perform a function, or issue orders, is an officer—or often an enlisted man—junior to, and thus subject to the orders of, someone else in his unit.”
“That finally occurred to somebody, did it?” Frade asked.
“So we’ve developed our own OSS command structure, which gives the necessary lawful authority to the individual who should have it, regardless of his rank in his service. At the moment, there are four grades: special agent, senior agent, supervisory agent, and area commander.”
Frade pursed his lips thoughtfully.
Not sardonically. Have I got him?
If I don’t blow this, I just may have.
“Just about everybody in the field will be a special agent,” Graham went on. “Again, without regard to their actual rank in their branch of the service. Those with greater responsibility will hold the higher ranks. I can readily see where a lieutenant—for that matter, a sergeant—will be a senior agent. Frankly, I don’t think that many sergeants will be supervisory agents, but if that becomes necessary, it will happen. The important thing about the new system is that it gives lawful authority to those we think should have it.”
“Ashton’s a good man, but he doesn’t know half as much about communications or the radar as Chief Schultz,” Frade said. “Or Siggy Stein.”
“In that case, if you want to, you could designate Chief Schultz as a senior agent. That would give him the lawful authority over the others he needs.”
Frade didn’t reply.
He’s obviously giving this some thought. Which means he’s swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
“What are you thinking, Frade?”
“That maybe I better apologize for what I was thinking when you handed me this Junior G-Man’s badge. This’ll work, Colonel.”
“My badge reads theater commander. That outranks an area commander.”
Where the hell did I get that?
“I was afraid it would,” Frade said. “What do I call you, ‘theater’? Or ‘commander’? ”
“ ‘Sir’ will do nicely. This is strictly for internal use. You understand that?”
Frade nodded. “You have these for the other guys?”
“Special agent badges and ID cards for everybody, plus about a dozen blanks—already signed—for the ID cards. When you decide who’ll be what, you can fill them out. I also have some senior and one supervisory thingamabobs that go on the badges.”
When I took everything away from those morons in Documents, it was to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. I never dreamed they’d be used.
Thank God I didn’t have time to destroy them.
“Let me think about it,” Frade said.
“Certainly. Now, there’s two other things we have to talk about.”
“Okay.”
“There are three really significant secrets, Frade, that only very few people know about. By very few people, I mean Director Donovan, Allen W. Dulles, and me.”
“Who’s Dulles?”
“The senior OSS man we have in Switzerland. Like me, a theater director.”
Frade nodded.
“One of them is actually two,” Graham said. “That’s Operation Phoenix and the ransoming of Jews from concentration camps.”
Frade nodded again.
“The second is that Dulles is in contact with Admiral Canaris, and that means with the plan to assassinate Hitler.”