“Getting back to what I said at the beginning, the bad news here is that when the OSS is inevitably disbanded, Team Turtle personnel will be reassigned. That almost certainly means everyone will be assigned to the Office of the Military Attaché—in other words, to Colonel Flowers.
“And as soon as the OSS is disbanded—and probably before, possibly as soon as tomorrow—Colonel Flowers is going to try to assume authority over all of you.”
“Fuck him,” Tony Pelosi blurted.
“Please permit me to associate myself with Major Pelosi’s position,” Major Ashton said.
That earned them some chuckles.
“While orders are orders,” Dulles said, “there is a loophole here: Until the OSS is formally disbanded, and until Colonel Flowers is ordered to assume command, so to speak, the status quo will prevail. He will not have the legal authority to issue orders to any of you.
“I think, however, that he will try. If he fails, he will have lost nothing. If he succeeds, the advantages to him are obvious. Victors write history. He will write the history of why the plan to have Operation Phoenix assets seized failed, and Colonel Frade’s gross incompetence—and perhaps his disloyalty—will be the reason.”
“Mr. Dulles,” Lieutenant Oscar Schultz asked, “two questions.”
“Shoot, Jefe,” Dulles said.
Jefe—“chief” in Spanish—made reference both to the Brooklynborn Schultz’s former status as a Navy chief radioman and to what he was called by the workers of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. Fluent in Spanish, Schultz often could be found in what he called his gaucho outfit—a broad-brimmed black hat, loose white shirt with billowing sleeves, billowing black bombachas tucked into calf-high soft black leather boots, and a wide silver-studded and buckled leather belt carrying a fourteen-inch knife in a silver scabbard.
“Make that three questions,” the old sailor said. “But if I get the right answer to question one, I won’t have to ask the other two.”
Dulles, Frade, and Ashton immediately took Jefe’s meaning.
Frade and Dulles laughed.
Ashton said, “Good thought!”
Schultz pulled his wicked knife from its scabbard, looked at it admiringly, then began, “A quick and simple fix for this problem—”
“Sorry, Jefe,” Dulles interrupted. “As General of the Army Eisenhower was denied permission by President Roosevelt to remove a problem named Charles de Gaulle by shooting him, this deputy director of the OSS herewith denies you permission to remove a problem named Colonel Richmond C. Flowers by shooting or any other lethal means.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Schultz said, his tone genuinely disappointed, and slipped his blade back in the scabbard.
That caused general laughter.
“Even though,” Dulles added, “the gentleman in question clearly deserves it.”
More laughter.
“And your other two questions?” Dulles asked.
“How much time do we have before they shut down the OSS?”
“I really don’t know,” Dulles replied. “Much depends on what happens in the Pacific. Or, more precisely, President Truman’s perception of what will happen there. If he thinks that the war will continue for some time, he may decide that the OSS might prove useful and not shut us down immediately. On the other hand, if he thinks the Emperor will surrender—or seek an armistice, or something unexpected happens . . .”
Dulles met Frade’s eyes for a moment.
Clete thought: He’s talking about that superbomb, that “atomic” bomb!
“. . . in the near term, he may decide the OSS is no longer needed.”
Schultz was not satisfied with that answer.
“Time frame?” he pursued.
“From tomorrow to possibly as late as October or November. Sorry, Jefe, that’s really the best I can do.”
“And what are our priorities during that time?”
“Right now there are two. I’m not sure which priority is most important; both could be. Immediately, I would lean toward protecting the Gehlen operation. Because if President Truman hears about it—especially via Treasury Secretary Morgenthau—he will very likely order that the OSS be shut down that instant. And then probably order the arrest of everybody concerned with the Gehlen operation.
“I think that alone explains the absolute necessity for keeping it a secret. But let me express further how important it is: A moment ago, I said that you could not take out Colonel Flowers despite his having proven to be a danger to the OSS. That said, if Colonel Flowers were to learn of the Gehlen operation, and was about to pass what he had learned, or even thinks he had learned, on to anyone—”
“Then we could shoot him?” Schultz interrupted.
“That’s a very tough call to make, Jefe, and we would have to be absolutely sure the Gehlen operation was in imminent danger of being compromised. But . . .”
“Understood,” Schultz said, nodding.
Dulles added, “Colonel Frade, I think it important that you understand that.”
“I understand,” Clete said. “And what I want everyone else to understand is that we are not going to take out Colonel Flowers until I am sure we have to. I’ll make that decision. Everybody got that?”
There were nods and mumbles of “Got it” and “Okay.”
“Not good enough,” Clete said. “You will respond, Mr. Schultz, by saying, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Army personnel will respond by saying, ‘Yes, sir. I understand the order.’”
There was something in the tone of his voice that discouraged either wisecracks or insubordination.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Schultz said.
This was followed by multiple, overlapping, replies of “Yes, sir, I understand the order.”
“Thank you,” Frade said. “Please continue, Mr. Dulles.”
“The second problem falls under what I mentioned earlier,” Dulles said, “about the dangers unique to the end of a war. There has been a great deal of confusion—and, at times, outright chaos—leading up to the Germans agreeing to surrender unconditionally. And now afterward. Accordingly, the intelligence that we have, and continue to gather, is all over the chart. Some of it is solid and reliable. And some is so wild that it boggles the mind.”
“Let’s hear the wild stuff,” Pelosi said.
Schultz, sitting next to Pelosi, looked at him and chimed in: “Yeah, I’d like to hear something worse than the news that we’re being disbanded and taken over by our worst nightmare.”
There were a couple chuckles.
“I’ll save the outrageous for later,” Dulles said. “But I will say now that it fits with some of what you’ve already dealt with—specifically the Phoenix program, which of course we know existed and therefore lends some credibility to the wildest of scenarios. And it shares the common thread of U-boats still at sea—possibly as many as sixty submarines, but maybe only twenty. Our intelligence, as I said, is all over the chart. We know a great deal about some of these subs, almost nothing about others. And knowing nothing means we haven’t the first idea if their crews plan to follow orders to surrender their vessels and crews—or if they have their own plans, either missions meant to be executed at war’s end, or perhaps instances of every man for himself—or, in this case, every vessel for itself. Of all these U-boats, however, we are particularly interested in two, U-234 and U-977.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Dulles,” Boltitz interrupted. “With regard to U-234, if memory serves, she’s a Type XB U-boot, a minelayer pressed into service as a cargo carrier—long range, able to cover more than eighteen thousand nautical miles if running on the surface. And I know that U-977 is a Type VIIC.”