W.E.B. Griffin: Victory and Honor

“And what am I supposed to do when that happens?”

“That’s what I came to tell you, Clete—that I don’t know what to tell you to do. You’ll be on your own. If, for example, some would-be admiral in the Office of Naval Intelligence arrives in Buenos Aires and says, ‘You now belong to me, so give me everything you know about everything here,’ you could not be faulted for doing just that.

“But, on the other hand, if you decide that handing over information or assets to someone would not be good for the country . . .”

“What would I do with stuff—with the people, the assets, all of it—I decided not to turn over?”

“You could, as I intend to, go on the perhaps naïve premise that sooner or later—very likely later, much later—President Truman, or even his successor—they’re already talking about General Eisenhower in that capacity—will see there is a need for an agency like the OSS and resurrect it.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“My sentiments exactly. I believe that will happen, Clete. But in this agreement with Gehlen I have to believe that will happen, don’t I?”

Frade met Dulles’s eyes a long moment, then said, “If I turned over what I know about all of Gehlen’s people I’ve gotten into South America, how long do you think it would take for Morgenthau to find out?”

Dulles considered the question as he sipped at the scotch. He finally said, “A week. Possibly as much as two. People have a tendency to present the misbehavior of others to their superiors as quickly as they can.”

“The Gehlen operation was your decision. So, if I opened my mouth about that, you’d be in trouble, right?”

“I don’t want you to take that into consideration, Clete.”

“And if I did roll over, a lot of people who don’t need to know about the Gehlen operation get to know about it and the Russians get to know about it, right? Probably before Morgenthau does?”

“That seems a credible scenario.”

“And the Russians learn everything about Gehlen’s agents in place, right?”

Dulles looked Frade in the eyes but did not reply.

Frade went on: “Whereupon the Russians execute them. And I won’t be responsible for that.”

“That would have to be your decision, Clete, taking into account what it would mean for you. You’d be liable to find yourself in very hot water.”

Frade shook his head in frustration.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been in hot water before, but if I declare that I don’t know anything, then I don’t know anything.”

Dulles said, “To repeat myself, that would have to be your decision.”

“What happens to von Wachtstein and Boltitz now?” Frade then said.

Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had been deputy military attaché for air—and Frade’s mole—in the German Embassy in Buenos Aires. Frade had asked Dulles to have him and Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz, the embassy’s naval attaché, safely moved to the States. Both of their fathers had been in Hitler’s High Command—and both targeted for execution for their participation in Operation Valkyrie. While the fate of Peter’s father still was unknown, the OSS had evidence of Karl’s father being killed—and it hadn’t been a stretch of anyone’s imagination to believe that Hitler would have ordered the sons hung from a meat hook, too.

“What do you mean?” Dulles said.

“I mean, do they get sent back to Germany? Or what?”

“That’s the most likely scenario.”

“You arranged to get them sent to Fort Hunt. Can’t you arrange to get them sent back to Argentina? They could be a great help in dealing with the bad Germans there, starting with those involved with Operation Phoenix.”

“I’ll try. That would be the decent thing to do, and I will try. But right now I don’t see how I could help.”

Frade shook his head, then sarcastically said, “Whoopee!”

Dulles drained his drink.

“I am sorry, Clete. Unfortunately, that is the nature of our business.”

Frade was silent a long moment, then sighed.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, “but it damn well doesn’t mean I have to like it. Thank you for leveling with me, Mr. Dulles.”

“How many times have I asked you to call me by my Christian name?”

“I could no more call you ‘Allen’ than I could call Colonel Graham ‘Alejandro.’”

“You could if you tried.”

“And if that’s all you have for me, Mr. Dulles, I’ll get in my airplane and fly another load of Germans wearing clerical garb and carrying Vatican passports to sanctuary in Argentina.”

Frade stood and put out his right hand. Dulles took it.

“We’ll be in touch,” Dulles said.

Clete nodded and walked out of the restaurant.

Washington National Airport Arlington, Virginia 1310 10 May 1945

The four-engine, triple-tail Lockheed Constellation was the finest transport aircraft in the world. In 1939, Howard Hughes, the master aviator whose vast holdings included the majority of shares in Trans World Airlines, had ordered the superplane built to his specs. It was capable of flying forty passengers in its pressurized cabin higher (an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet) and faster (cruise speed was better than three hundred knots) and for a longer distance (forty-three hundred miles) than any other transport aircraft. Its wing design was nearly identical to that of the single-seat Lockheed Lightning P-38 fighter—although on a far grander scale.

South American Airways would have never received a single Connie if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had not had what Clete Frade thought of as a “hard-on” for Juan Trippe and his Pan American Airways. Actually, if Roosevelt had not been beyond pissed at Trippe—who had hired, then at first refused to fire, Colonel Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh after the world-famous aviator had dared to cross FDR—there never would have been a South American Airways at all.

But SAA did indeed exist, and it had not just one but a total of eleven Connies, setting it up to dominate transoceanic air travel postwar—and angering the volatile Juan Trippe no end.

Graham had told Clete: “FDR really knows how to carry one helluva grudge.”

Four days earlier, when Clete had landed South American Airlines Constellation Ciudad de Mendoza at Buenos Aires’s Coronel Jorge G. Frade airport—after a one-stop, Dakar-Senegal, flight from Lisbon—his wife had been waiting for him with a radiogram.

LOS ANGELES CAL 3 PM 9 MAY 1945

VIA MACKAY

CLETUS H FRADE

SOUTH AMERICAN AIRWAYS

BUENOS AIRES ARGENTINA

LITTLE CLETUS STOP THERE ARE FIVE CONNIES IN THE USED CAR LOT STOP IF YOU CAN HAVE YOUR BANK GUARANTEE PAYMENT AND GET THEM FLOWN OUT OF HERE WITHIN FIVE DAYS THEY ARE YOURS STOP REGARDS HOWARD

By the time Cletus broke ground at the controls of South American Airways Constellation Ciudad de Córdoba four hours later, he was absolutely convinced he was on a roll.

When he hadn’t been considering all that Allen Dulles had told him about their new enemies, Frade had spent much of the time between Lisbon and Buenos Aires wondering what the hell he could do about Peter von Wachtstein and Karl Boltitz. He wanted them out of prisoner-of-war confinement at Fort Hunt, Virginia, and back to Argentina—or somewhere safe—yet hadn’t come up with much of anything.

Howard Hughes’s radiogram solved just about everything.

While Frade was genuinely delighted to be able to buy five more Connies for SAA, taking a dozen pilots and six flight engineers to Los Angeles to pick them up was the cherry on that cake. It gave him a reason for the flight that would satisfy the curiosity of the U.S. government.

And there was a cherry on that cherry, too. “Aunt Martha” Howell was the only mother Clete had ever known—his mother having died in childbirth when he was an infant—and Clete was about twelve before he realized that his sisters Beth and Maggie were really his cousins. They had not yet seen Cletus Howell Frade Jr. who was now five months old. He could pick up the women in Midland or Dallas and bring them to Buenos Aires now and worry about getting them back to the States later.