W.E.B. Griffin: Victory and Honor

That night First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, met Capitán Hans-Peter Freiherr von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe. Peter had accompanied to Argentina the body of Clete’s cousin, who’d been killed at Stalingrad flying as an observer in a German Storch. While Clete and Peter immediately understood that they were enemies, they also learned they were fighter pilots—and more. “Suppose,” Peter had suggested, “that as officers and gentlemen, we might pretend it’s Christmas Eve? We’d only be off by a couple of weeks.” They had—and over time had become close friends.

4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín Buenos Aires 1500 11 May 1945

Hors d’oeuvres and cocktails were being served when Clete and Dorotea entered the enormous, richly appointed library. The Frades looked as satisfied—maybe as satiated—as if fresh from the shower.

Clete saw the look Peter von Wachtstein was giving him and had an epiphany.

I know what you’re thinking, Hansel!

“How come you and Dorotea, who you last saw only a week ago, just got to enjoy the splendors of the nuptial couch, while I—without the opportunity to do the same since last July—sit here sucking on a glass of wine and a black olive with my equally sex-starved wife but two kilometers away?”

Or words to that effect.

Clete and Dorotea walked across the polished hardwood floor toward von Wachtstein.

“I have several things to say to you, Hansel,” Clete said as he took two glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon from a maid, handing one to his wife.

“Really?” von Wachtstein said.

“‘Life is unfair,’” Clete intoned solemnly.

“Is it?”

“‘Fortune favors the pure in heart.’”

“You don’t say?”

“‘Patience is a virtue, and all things come to he who waits.’”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dorotea asked, confused.

“Hansel, you may wish to write some, or all, of that down,” Clete concluded.

Clete looked around the room. With the exception of Father Welner, who was smiling and shaking his head, everyone looked baffled.

“Why don’t we go in and have our lunch?” Clete went on. “I’m sure that everyone—Peter especially—is anxious to get this over and move on to other things.”

Frade stood at the large double doors between the library and the ornate dining room and waited politely as his guests passed through.

When the last of them had done so, Clete looked around the library.

With a couple of exceptions, he thought, it’s just like it was the night I found Peter here listening to the phonograph. Then there was only one leather armchair and footstool. Now there’s two, because Dorotea wanted her own.

And, of course, when this was my father’s library, there was no hobbyhorse or baby blue prison pen to keep the kids from crawling around—or any other accoutrements of toddlers and infants.

My father never had anything to do with kids.

Would he have liked it—or not given a damn?

His reverie was interrupted by Lavalle.

“Mi coronel,” the butler said, “there is a telephone call.”

“When did you start calling me ‘mi coronel,’ Antonio?”

Both Dorotea and Lavalle had told Clete—many times—that gentlemen referred to their butlers by their surnames. Clete thought it was not only rude but also that gentlemen referred to their friends by their given names, and Antonio Lavalle often had proved just how good a friend he was.

“When you were promoted, mi coronel ,” Lavalle said with a smile.

Clete smiled and shook his head.

“Tell whoever it is that we’re having lunch and I’ll call back.”

“It is el Señor Dulles.”

Clete gave that a long moment’s consideration, then said: “Start feeding the hungry, Antonio. Tell Doña Dorotea I had to take a call.”

Clete walked to one of the large, brown-leather-upholstered armchairs. As he settled in it, his mind went back to the first time he’d met Allen Welsh Dulles.

It had been a remarkable meeting—one in which some staggering pieces of the greater espionage puzzle that affected Clete began to fall into place. It had taken place at Canoas Air Base, Puerto Alegre, Brazil, in the commanding officer’s Mediterranean-style red-tile-roof cottage in July of ’43, days after “Aggie”—Colonel Graham—had sent “Tex”—Frade—a cryptic radio message that he was to see the CO at “Bird Cage”—Canoas, where the first Lockheed Lodestars destined for the newly formed South American Airways had been sent for final delivery to el Señor Cletus Frade, managing director of SAA.

Frade, of course, had expected to see the commanding officer. Instead, the cottage held only a stranger.

“Allen Welsh Dulles,” he introduced himself, then made them drinks, then casually announced that they had mutual friends. “My brother—John Foster Dulles—has a law firm in New York City; among his clients are Cletus Marcus Howell and Howell Petroleum. And, of course, I have been friends with Alejandro Graham a long time—and not just our time working for Wild Bill Donovan.”

Frade, not knowing what to believe of the stranger’s story, didn’t reply.

Then Dulles really surprised him by naming Frade’s mole in the German Embassy: “Galahad is Major Hans-Peter Baron von Wachtstein.”

Frade, who refused to reveal that to anyone in or out of the OSS, professed ignorance.

Dulles answered: “The FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Army’s Chief of Intelligence, and of course SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg—among others—would dearly like to know that, too.”

And that got Frade’s attention, too.

He knew that the Germans had at least two secret programs in Argentina. Von Deitzberg—Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s deputy—was running one, an unnamed operation in which senior SS officers were ransoming Jews to be released from concentration camps and moved to Argentina. The other was Operation Phoenix—senior members of the Nazi hierarchy purchasing property in South America, primarily in Argentina but also in Paraguay, Brazil, and other countries, to which they could flee when Germany fell, and from which they could later rise, phoenix-like, to bring Nazism back.

Then Dulles described the private dinner in the Hotel Washington he’d had only nights earlier—“Just me, Graham, Donovan, the President, and Putzi Hanfstaengl.”

Frade again professed ignorance—this time truthfully. “Am I supposed to know who Putzi Haf-whatever is?”

Dulles explained that the wealthy Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had attended Columbia with Roosevelt and Donovan, had been in Hitler’s inner circle before he got smart and fled to the United States—just prior to the SS’s plan for Putzi to suffer a fatal accident. FDR prized Putzi’s insider perspective of the mind-set of Hitler’s high command. And, as Dulles related to Frade, it was Putzi’s belief that most if not all senior Nazis knew the war was lost, that Hitler was psychologically unable to face that, and that no one dared suggest it to him.

“Which explains the existence of such secret operations as Phoenix and Valkyrie,” Dulles said.

Then, finally convincing Frade that Dulles was who he said he was, Dulles said: “I am privy to a secret about Valkyrie known to no more than nine Americans, one of whom is you. Through Admiral Wilhelm Canaris”—he paused to see if Frade recognized the chief of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, then went on after he’d nodded—“I am in communication with General von Wachtstein, who in fact intends to assassinate Adolf Hitler. One of his other co-conspirators—Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, Count von Stauffenberg—is a close friend of young von Wachtstein . . . your Galahad.”