“The Secret Service just rolls his wheelchair into a laundry van, drives it around the corner to the service entrance of the Washington, then rolls him through the kitchen in the basement to the service elevator, and on up to an apartment they keep for him there.”
“He can’t walk?” Frade blurted.
Dulles shook his head. “Not much farther than that door”—he pointed— “and that’s pretty exhausting for him.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Not many people do,” Dulles said. “Anyway, it was a small dinner. Just the President, Graham, Donovan, Putzi Hanfstaengl, and me.”
“Am I supposed to know who Putzi Haf . . . whatever you said . . . is?”
“I’d be surprised if you did. Putzi Hanfstaengl—Ernst is his name; we just call him ‘Putzi’—is a German. He was at Columbia with Roosevelt and Donovan. Got pretty close to Hitler. He was smart enough to get out just in time— before they were going to see he had a fatal accident. As an enemy alien in the U.S., he’s under arrest, of course. The Army has posted guards on him in his quote cell end quote at the Washington, which just happens to be down the corridor from the President’s apartment. Staff Sergeant Ernst Hanfstaengl—same name as his father, you might note—is in charge of that guard detail. So far Putzi hasn’t tried to escape.”
“This all sounds . . . fantastic!”
“And I have barely begun, Major Frade. You sure you wouldn’t like me to refresh your drink?”
“I think that would be a very bad idea, Mr. Dulles.”
“Please call me ‘Allen.’ And if I may, I’d like to call you ‘Cletus.’ ”
“I could no more call you Allen, sir, than I could call Colonel Graham by his first name.”
“Give it a shot. It may not be as difficult as you might think. But may I call you ‘Cletus’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you. Well, the reason Putzi was there was because we were talking about the war against Germany—”
“Who the hell are you?” Frade blurted.
“I do, in Bern, Switzerland, what you are doing in Buenos Aires. I keep an eye on the Germans and try to make trouble for them. I’m the OSS station chief in Switzerland.”
That’s it! Graham told me about a Dulles!
So this could all be true, of course.
But it could also be some sort of trap.
Have I admitted Galahad is von Wachtstein?
Cletus, ol’ pal, you’re way in over your depth here.
“The regional commander?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re the OSS regional commander?”
“I suppose you could phrase it that way. But I concentrate on the German and Italian high commands. The sabotage and espionage, that sort of thing, is run by David Bruce out of London.”
I’ve got a badge. All my people have badges.
How come you don’t?
What have I got to lose by asking?
“I don’t suppose you have your credentials handy, do you, Mr. Dulles?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your credentials. Your badge.”
“Now I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then how do I know you’re who you say you are?”
“I suppose you’ll just have to take my word for it. May I continue?”
Frade raised both hands in a Have at it gesture.
“Your name came up,” Dulles went on. “We talked of other things, of course, but your name came up.”
Frade didn’t reply.
“The President said that Alex had a loose cannon running around in Argentina, who—believe it or not—refused to share the name of his mole in the German embassy in Buenos Aires with his commander in chief.”
Frade continued to keep his mouth shut.
“I told the President (a) that I knew who Galahad was, and (b) I wasn’t going to tell him or Donovan either. Which predictably set off Wild Bill’s Irish temper. Then I told them why. I told them Galahad’s identity was too important a secret—right up there with the Manhattan Project, in my judgment—”
“The what?”
“The Manhattan Project. I’ll get to that in a minute. Far too important a secret to be shared with everyone in the intelligence community, and that if I didn’t identify Galahad for them, they could truthfully tell the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff, and J. Edgar Hoover that they didn’t know.”
“You say you know it’s von Wachtstein. How do you know that?”
“Because I am privy to a secret known to no more than eight or nine Americans, one of whom, Cletus, is you.”
“What secret is that?”
“General von Wachtstein intends to assassinate Adolf Hitler,” Dulles said. “We are in communication. One of his co-conspirators is a chap, a lieutenant colonel, named Claus von Stauffenberg, Count von Stauffenberg, who is a close friend of young von Wachtstein.”
Jesus! He’s got to be who he says he is!
Otherwise, he couldn’t know any of this.
Frade, carefully choosing his words, said, “Peter told me he’d gone to see von Stauffenberg in Munich. But until just now, I thought this ‘regicide’ that his father was talking about was just wishful thinking.”
“It is not.”
“And they’re calling this operation the Manhattan Project?”
Dulles laughed.
“No, it is not. The Manhattan Project involves the development of a bomb of enormous power, incredible power. It involves nuclear energy and an element known as uranium. One of my jobs in Berne is to see how far along the Germans are with their development of what is now called an ‘atomic bomb.’ And to do whatever I can to throw a monkey wrench in their works. Whoever creates this bomb first is going to win the war. It’s as simple as that.”
“My God!”
“Indeed,” Dulles said. “And one of your tasks when you get back to Argentina, almost as your first priority, is to report immediately anything you hear about uranium or a superbomb or heavy water—”
“Heavy water?”
“I don’t understand much of this, but apparently when an extra atom, or several extra atoms, are added to water it becomes deuterium oxide—or ‘heavy water’—and this heavy water is somehow necessary to create a nuclear explosion. The Germans had a facility to make heavy water in Denmark. The British trained some Danes as commandos and sent them in to destroy the facility or render it inoperative. I’m not privy to the details, but their mission was successful and so set back the Germans somewhat.”
“This is all new to me.”
“It’s all new to all of us,” Dulles said. “Anyway, David Bruce told me that he’s just parachuted an OSS team into Denmark—run by a fellow Princetonian, Lieutenant Bill Colby, a chap about your age, Cletus—ostensibly to do commando-type things with the Norwegian resistance, but actually to see what the Germans are doing with their now partially destroyed heavy-water plant. So keep your eyes and ears open vis-à-vis anything nuclear but—importantly— without anybody noticing.”
Frade nodded.
“Now, the Germans—presuming they don’t develop their nuclear bomb before we do; and the indications are they will not—have lost the war. This is apparent to their senior officers, to everybody but Hitler. Most importantly, it is apparent to Admiral Canaris, chief of Abwehr intelligence. Which is why he’s been talking to me. That’s another secret to which you are privy, along with no more than perhaps a dozen others. Am I going too fast for you?”
“Yes, sir. You are. My head is spinning.”
“Well, then, let me finish, and when I have, I’ll try to clarify what you may not fully understand. All right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The question then becomes, when will they lose the war? The sooner the better, obviously. But there are some problems. For one thing, they are somewhat ahead of us in the development of jet fighter aircraft. Our XP-59A didn’t get into the air until the first of October 1942—”