Mark Frost - The Second Objective

Yours sincerely, Otto Skorzeny

Hindsight makes it clear that in the utilitarian opinion of Bill Donovan and the CIA, Skorzeny possessed more value as a living intelligence asset than a dead war criminal. Although rumors reported his whereabouts all over the globe, one of the world’s most sought after fugitives spent the next two years living in Paris, where he regularly dined at the Café de la Paix. Recently declassified documents confirm that he was now working on behalf of the Western Allies, gathering intelligence against the French Communist Party. After his identity was revealed in France, he published his memoirs and moved back to Germany, where he lived under an assumed name for a few years, before finally settling in General Franco’s fascist Madrid. He would spend the next twenty-five years straddling an unsettling line between Western intelligence informant and godfather to the surviving remnants of the Waffen -SS, known initially as “The Brotherhood” and later more notoriously as Odessa. During that time, drawing on his early training as an engineer, Skorzeny founded a technical consulting company and amassed a considerable personal fortune. He amplified that fortune with a number of less savory business ventures, among them industrial espionage, assassination for hire, and international arms dealing. Throughout these years Skorzeny lived the social life of a dissolute playboy, romancing dozens of glamorous socialites and minor royalty, including, for a time in Argentina where he worked as a consultant with that fascist regime, Eva Perón. Operationally conceived on the back of Skorzeny’s World War Two commando force, to this day Odessa remains the original prototype for the modern terrorist organization.

When he finally succumbed to cancer in 1975, Otto Skorzeny was laid to rest in a Madrid cemetery. In surviving footage of the funeral, a band plays “ Deutschland Über Alles ” while the aging members of his organization offer their dead leader a sustained Nazi salute as his casket lowers into the grave.

The 150th Panzer Squad, Operation Greif , and all the details about training at the Grafenwöhr camp are based on fact, most of which remained classified by American Military Intelligence for fifty years after the end of World War Two. Much of what the Allies learned about the objectives of the operation during the Battle of the Bulge, including the plot to kill General Eisenhower, came from a captured German commando named Karl Schmidt. Two American-born soldiers took part in the attack; one was a deserter by the name of William Sharper. Another of the German commandos, the son of a diplomat, had learned English while growing up in England.

Less than half of the men who trained at Grafenwöhr and served in Skorzeny’s Brigade 150 survived the war. The casualty rate among the commando group, Company Stielau, approached 75 percent. Of the twenty members of the commando group who took part in the Second Objective, eighteen were either killed in action or captured and executed by American forces during the Battle of the Bulge.

The remaining two men have never been accounted for.

Los Angeles, California

November 2006

Many thanks to my agent, Ed Victor; editor in chief Will Schwalbe; my editor, Gretchen Young; and my expert researcher, Jennifer Bidwell.