W.E.B. Griffin, William E. Butterworth IV
Top Secret
26 July 1777
“The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged.”
DEDICATION
FOR THE LATE
WILLIAM E. COLBY
An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
AARON BANK
An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant who became a colonel and the father of Special Forces.
WILLIAM R. CORSON
A legendary Marine intelligence officer whom the KGB hated more than any other U.S. intelligence officer — and not only because he wrote the definitive work on them.
RENÉ J. DÉFOURNEAUX
A U.S. Army OSS Second Lieutenant attached to the British SOE who jumped into Occupied France alone and later became a legendary U.S. Army intelligence officer.
FOR THE LIVING
BILLY WAUGH
A legendary Special Forces Command Sergeant Major who retired and then went on to hunt down the infamous Carlos the Jackal. Billy could have terminated Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s but could not get permission to do so. After fifty years in the business, Billy is still going after the bad guys.
JOHNNY REITZEL
An Army Special Operations officer who could have terminated the head terrorist of the seized cruise ship Achille Lauro but could not get permission to do so.
RALPH PETERS
An Army intelligence officer who has written the best analysis of our war against terrorists and of our enemy that I have ever seen.
AND FOR THE NEW BREED
MARC L
A senior intelligence officer, despite his youth, who reminds me of Bill Colby more and more each day.
FRANK L
A legendary Defense Intelligence Agency officer who retired and now follows in Billy Waugh’s footsteps.
AND
In Loving Memory Of
Colonel José Manuel Menéndez
Cavalry, Argentine Army, Retired
He spent his life fighting Communism and Juan Domingo Perón
OUR NATION OWES THESE PATRIOTS A DEBT BEYOND REPAYMENT.
PROLOGUE
Many in the intelligence community feel that the first American counter-fire shot in what became the Cold War occurred even before World War II was over — specifically when Major General Reinhard Gehlen contacted Allen W. Dulles. (Or Dulles contacted Gehlen; the details remain, more than half a century later, highly classified.)
Gehlen was the German intelligence officer who ran Abwehr Ost, which dealt with the Soviet Union. Dulles was the U.S. Office of Strategic Service’s man in neutral Switzerland.
Realizing Nazi defeat was inevitable, Gehlen feared both Soviet ambitions for Europe and specifically what the victorious Russians would do to his officers, his men, and their families.
Gehlen struck a deal with Dulles. He would turn over to the OSS all his intelligence and assets. These included the identities of Soviet spies who had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and of Abwehr Ost agents inside the Kremlin. In exchange, Dulles would place Gehlen, his officers and men and their families — who faced certain torture and death at the hands of the Soviets — under American protection.
Exactly who at the highest levels of the American government knew about Operation Gehlen, and when they knew it, also remains even today highly classified. It is obvious that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, then Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had to know about it.
It seems equally obvious that President Franklin Roosevelt was not made privy to it. Not only was Roosevelt deathly ill at the time, but he and his wife, Eleanor, had made it clear that they did not regard the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin, as any threat to the United States. There was wide belief that there were Communists in Roosevelt’s inner circle.
There were other problems, too.
Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, was justifiably outraged by the monstrous behavior of the Nazis toward the Jewish people and unable to concede there existed “Good Germans” among the many “Bad Germans.” Morgenthau seriously advocated a policy that would have seen senior German officers executed out of hand whenever and wherever found. It was known that Gehlen was on the list of those German officers to look for.
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posed other problems. Hoover had opposed the very formation of the OSS. He devoutly believed the FBI could do the job better. He made no secret of his loathing for OSS Director William J. Donovan. And vice versa. Hoover had been humiliated before the President when Donovan had turned over the names of Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project that Allen Dulles had turned up, and furious when Dulles had refused to name his source. Dulles of course couldn’t, as the source had been Gehlen. Not even Donovan knew of the Gehlen project until after President Roosevelt had died in the arms of his mistress in Warm Springs, Georgia.
So far as Dulles was concerned, if Donovan knew, he would have felt duty bound to inform President Roosevelt. And that would have been the end of the secret; the Soviets would have learned of it within hours.
When, on Roosevelt’s death, Vice President Harry S Truman became the thirty-third President of the United States, the former senator from Missouri had seen the President only twice after their inauguration and had never been alone with him.
On Truman’s first day in office, Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, U.S. Army, went to see him in the Oval Office. Groves headed the Manhattan Project, and told Truman he thought he should know that the United States had a new weapon, the most powerful ever developed, called the “atomic bomb.”
It is also known that both Allen Dulles and General Donovan met privately with Truman in the very early days of his presidency. Many believe that Truman was made privy to Operation Gehlen during one of those meetings.
Shortly afterward, in mid-July 1945, Truman met with Stalin in Potsdam, near Berlin. He told the Russian dictator of the atomic bomb. When Stalin showed no surprise, Truman decided this confirmed what Donovan had told him — that J. Edgar Hoover had not been able to keep Russian espionage out of the Manhattan Project.
Truman ordered General George C. Marshall to shut off all aid to the Soviet Union.
Right then. That afternoon.
The OSS — often with the assistance of the Vatican — within days began to send many of “the Gehlens” to Argentina. Others were placed in a heavily guarded OSS compound at Kloster Grünau, a former monastery in Schollbrunn, Bavaria, which had been provided by the Vatican. These actions could not have happened without Truman’s knowledge and approval.
On August 6, 1945, the United States obliterated Hiroshima, Japan, with an atomic bomb. Three days later, a second atomic bomb obliterated Nagasaki.
On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was performed in Tokyo Bay, Japan, aboard the battleship USS Missouri.
World War II was over.