The Honor of Spies.
W.E.B. Griffin.
William E. Butterworth IV.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF.
Colonel Jose Manuel Menendez, Cavalry, Argentine Army, Retired
He spent his life fighting Communism and Juan Domingo Peron.
PROLOGUE.
By August 1943, the United States of America had been in the Second World War for twenty months.
England had been at war for four years, since 1 September 1939, when--a week after German leader Adolf Hitler signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union--Germany launched its Blitzkrieg ("Lightning War") against Poland.
England and France declared war.
By 6 October 1939, Poland had fallen and was divided between the Soviet Union and Germany. "The Phony War" followed, with the belligerents taking little--virtually no--action against each other.
One significant exception to this occurred two months later, when, on 13 December 1939, Royal Navy cruisers engaged the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the Atlantic coast of South America and forced the damaged ship to seek refuge in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Diplomatic pressure (largely from the United States, although this was denied at the time) on Uruguay forced that small country to insist on following international law, which required belligerent vessels to leave sanctuary ports within seventy-two hours. On 17 December, Captain Hans Langsdorff, to save further loss of life in a battle he knew he could not win, scuttled the Graf Spee just outside the mouth of the Montevideo harbor. He then went to Argentina, buried his dead, made arrangements for the internment of his crew--and then shot himself in the temple, arranging that event so his body would fall on the German navy battle flag.
The Phony War turned real on the night of 9/10 May 1940, when the Germans occupied Luxembourg and launched another Blitzkrieg, this time into the Netherlands and Belgium. The Dutch surrendered 15 May.
On 5 June 1940, the Germans solved the problem of the "impregnable" French Maginot Line of fortresses by going around them. Paris fell on 14 June. Not all French were desolated; substantial numbers of them embraced the motto "Better Hitler Than Blum." Andre Leon Blum, a socialist, already had twice served as France's prime minister.
The French capitulated on 25 June 1940.
The only good news for the English during this period was their brilliant evacuation of 300,000 British soldiers and some 38,000 French from Dunkirk.
Germany began a massive aerial bombardment of England as the prelude to a cross-Channel invasion. The Royal Air Force's valiant and effective defense of Enland caused Winston Churchill, its prime minister, to utter the famous line "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
The severe losses suffered by the Luftwaffe are cited by some historians as the reason Adolf Hitler called off the invasion. Other historians feel that it was Hitler's decision to stab the Soviet Union in the back that brought him to that decision. He would deal with the English after he had dealt with the Communists.
The backstabbing--"Operation Barbarossa," named in honor of Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor--was the largest attack of the Second World War, and initially the most successful. It began on 22 June 1941.
It was brilliantly planned, brilliantly executed, and took the Russians entirely by surprise.
On 15 September, German forces began the siege of Leningrad. They--and almost everyone else--thought it would be over in about a month. With that in mind, the Germans on 2 October 1941 began their march on Moscow and soon the gilded tops of the Soviet capital's churches could be seen through German binoculars.
Before things (including the weather and Soviet tenacity) turned against them, the Germans held 750,000 square miles and had nearly 100 million people under their boot.
On 5 December, the attack on Moscow was called off. Winter had set in, and the Germans were simply unprepared to fight in the terrible cold. The troops were freezing and could not be properly supplied. Moscow could wait until spring.
Two days later--7 December 1941, a date President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared "would live in infamy"--the Japanese attacked the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii. That, too, was a brilliant operation, one meticulously planned, effectively carried out, and which took the Americans by complete surprise. When it was over, most American battleships in the Pacific were at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
And things promptly got worse.
On 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. On Christmas Day 1941, Japan took Hong Kong, and on 2 January 1942, Manila was declared an open city and fell to the Japanese.
With the fall of all the Philippines to the Japanese only a matter of time, and aware that the morale of the American people was as low as it had ever been--and sinking--President Roosevelt authorized a near-suicidal bombing attack on Japan.
On 18 April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led a small flight of B-25 Mitchell bombers from the deck of an aircraft carrier to Tokyo. The physical damage they caused was minimal, but the damage to Japanese pride was enormous. And the United States could finally claim to be fighting back.
Eighteen days later, on 6 May 1942, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wain-wright surrendered the Philippines to the Japanese. It was the largest surrender in U.S. history.
Japan was now poised to invade Australia from bases in the Solomon Islands. But on 7 August 1942, the just-formed U.S. First Marine Division, which was not supposed to be ready to fight for a year, was thrust into the breach and landed on Guadalcanal.
Surprising just about everybody, the landing was a success and the Marines took the island, fighting without their heavy artillery and living off captured Japanese rations.
Australia was saved, and some dared to hope the tide of war had changed. Some proof of this hope came on 8 November 1942, when United States Army troops, under Lieutenant General George S. Patton, landed in North Africa. The French valiantly defended their North African colonies against the Americans, and in a thirty-six-hour battle, with negligible damage to themselves, the battleship USS Massachusetts, the cruisers USS Augusta, USS Brooklyn, USS Tuscaloosa, and USS Wichita, and aircraft from the carrier USS Ranger either sank or knocked out of action most of the French fleet, including the battleship Jean Bart and the cruisers Primaguet, Fougueux, Boulonnais, Brestois, and Frondeur.
Two months later, in captured/liberated Casablanca, Roosevelt and Churchill met and decided to invade Sicily as soon as possible. They also decreed that Germany would not be allowed to seek an armistice, but must surrender unconditionally.
And two weeks after that, on 31 January 1943, there came what most historians agree was the beginning of the end for Germany. Newly promoted Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was forced to surrender his troops--90,000 of them, who were surrounded, out of ammunition, and reduced to eating their horses--at Stalingrad.
But the war was by no means over, and historians now agree that it could easily have gone the other way.
If, for example, Germany had won the race to build the atomic bomb.
If, for example, Germany had managed to get into production the Me-262, a jet fighter capable of causing unacceptable losses to the flights of British and American bombers that were reducing German cities to rubble.
If, for example, the Germans had perfected a means of accurately aiming their rocket-powered missiles.
If, for example, German submarines could have successfully interdicted the shipment of troops and the materiel of war from the United States to Europe.
If, for example, the inevitable Allied invasion of France could have been thrown back into the English Channel.
Hitler devoutly believed all of the above were possible, even probable. But many members of the Fuhrer's inner circle were more pragmatic and had begun to consider the ramifications of a German defeat.
"Operation Phoenix" was born. If there were temporary reverses in the fortunes of the Thousand-Year Reich--if, for example, the Russians took Berlin--all would not necessarily be lost. National Socialism and its leaders could rise phoenixlike from the ashes.
All it would take would be some place of refuge for the leaders to bide their time, and some place to conceal vast amounts of money from the victorious Allies until the time came to spend it to restore the Reich, probably immediately after the West and Russia had both been fatally weakened in the inevitable war between them.
Argentina seemed to be just the place. Argentina, ostensibly neutral, leaned heavily toward the Axis powers. The Argentine army was armed with Mauser rifles, wore German steel helmets and uniforms patterned on those of the Wehr -macht, and had its headquarters in the Edificio Libertador in Buenos Aires, a magnificent structure built with the generous assistance of Germany.
While it was also true that the Argentine navy leaned toward the British (and to some degree, toward the Americans) and that there were large numbers of Jews in the country who hated Nazism and all it stood for, these problems could be dealt with.
Operation Phoenix was put into play even before the Stalingrad surrender.
I.
[ONE].
Estancia Casa Chica.
Near Tandil.
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina.
0805 11 August 1943.
A white two-ton 1940 Ford truck with a refrigerator body followed a white 1938 Ford Fordor sedan down the unnumbered macadam road that branched off National Route Three to Tandil.
The truck body had a representation of a beef cow's head painted on it, together with the legend FRIGORIFICO MORON, and there was a smaller version of the corporate insignia on the doors of the car.
They were a common sight in the area, which bordered on the enormous Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, the patron of which did not know within five or six thousand exactly how many head of cattle grazed his fields. Nor did he know who operated the estancia's eight slaughterhouses, of which Frigorifico Moron had been one of the smallest, until recently, when Frigorifico Moron had been shut down to make room for the runways and hangars of South American Airways.
The car and the truck slowed and turned off the macadam road onto a narrower road of crushed stone, then stopped when they came to a sturdy closed gate, above which a sign read CASA CHICA.
A sturdy man in his fifties with a full, immaculately trimmed cavalryman's mustache got out of the car and walked toward the gate, holding in his hand a key to the massive padlock that secured the chains in the gate.
He had just twisted the key in the lock when a man on horseback trotted up, holding a rifle vertically, its butt resting on the saddle. Without speaking to him--which the man on horseback correctly interpreted to be a signal of disapproval; he knew he should have been at the gate before the man with the mustache reached it--the man returned to the Ford. He got in and waited for the peon to get off the horse and finish dealing with the chain and swing open the gate.
When the car and truck had passed through the gate, the peon went to the right post of the gate, pulled a piece of canvas aside, and then knelt beside an Argentine copy of the U.S. Army's EE-8 field telephone. He gave its crank several hard turns, then stood up, holding the headset to his ear as he looked up the steep hill to Casa Chica.
An identical field telephone rang in the comfortable living room of Casa Chica, a bungalow sitting near the crest of the hill.
There were five people in the room. A middle-aged balding man wearing a sweater over his shirt sat across a desk from a younger man wearing a loosely knit white turtleneck sweater. A Thompson submachine gun hung from the back of the younger man's chair.
Another rifle-armed peon--this one leaning back in a chair that rested against a wall--had been on the edge of dozing off when the telephone rang. A large, even massive, dark-skinned woman in her thirties sat on a couch across from a middle-aged woman in an armchair, who was looking bitterly at the middle-aged balding man at the desk. When the telephone rang, the large woman rose with surprising agility from the couch and went to it.
The balding man stopped what he was doing, which was working on an organizational chart, and looked at the massive woman.
"You just keep on working, Herr Frogger," the young man said not very pleasantly in German.
"I don't have all these details in my memory, Major," Frogger said.
"Try harder," the young man said coldly.
He was Sergeant Sigfried Stein, U.S. Army, although Herr Wilhelm Frogger and his wife, Else, had been told--and believed--that he was a major.
Until weeks before, Wilhelm Frogger had been the commercial attache of the German Embassy in Buenos Aires. On the fourth of July, he had then appeared at the apartment of Milton Leibermann, a "legal attache" of the U.S. Embassy, and offered to exchange his knowledge of German Embassy secrets for sanctuary in Brazil.
Leibermann was de facto the Federal Bureau of Investigation's man in Argentina. He had no place to hide the German defectors from either the Germans or the Argentine authorities--who, he knew, would be told the Froggers had been kidnapped--nor any means to get the defectors out of Argentina. So he had turned them over to someone he thought could do both.
He knew that Don Cletus Frade, patron of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, was in fact a U.S. Marine Corps major and the de facto head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in Argentina. He also knew that having any dealings at all with anyone connected with the spies of the OSS had been absolutely forbidden by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and for that reason Leibermann had not reported to the FBI that the Froggers had come to him, or what he had done with them.
Frade was interested in the Froggers because he knew more of the secret activities of the German Embassy than Frogger thought he could possibly know, most importantly about something the Germans called "Operation Phoenix."
Frogger steadfastly denied any knowledge of Operation Phoenix, which convinced Frade he was a liar. It had also become almost immediately apparent that Frau Else Frogger was an unrepentant National Socialist who not only had decided that defecting had been a mistake but that if they could only get away from Frade and his gottverdammt Jude--"Major" Stein--all would be forgiven at the German Embassy.
Frade, however, knew enough about the SS officers in the German Embassy to know that before or after the Froggers were returned to Germany to enter a concentration camp they would be thoroughly interrogated about Leibermann and about Frade's operation. And the Froggers had seen too much to let that happen.
Letting them go was not an option.
Frade had no immediate means of getting them even to Brazil without taking unjustifiable risks. So while they were, so to speak, in limbo, he was hiding them on a small farm that his father had used for romantic interludes in the country.
There was a chance that Siggie Stein could break down one of them--or both--and get them to reveal what they knew about Operation Phoenix. Not much of a chance, though, for Stein was a demolitions man turned communications /cryptography expert, not a trained interrogator. Still, on the other hand, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and had some relatives who'd not been able to escape and had perished in concentration camps.
The massive Argentine woman, who was known as "The Other Dorotea"--Don Cletus Frade's Anglo-Argentine wife was Dona Dorotea Mallin de Frade--listened to the telephone and then reported, "It is Suboficial Mayor Rodriguez."
Stein rose from his chair, picking up the Thompson.
"Watch them," he said to the peon with the rifle, then turned to Herr Frogger and said, "Keep at it," and then walked out of the room and onto the verandah to wait for Rodriguez.
The incline in front of Casa Chica was very steep, and between the house and the road and gate, but not visible from either, a landing strip had been carved out of the hillside. Frade had told Stein his father had used it to fly his lady love into the house in one of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo's fleet of Piper Cubs.
The car and the truck appeared a moment later, moving slowly in low gear, and turned onto the landing strip. When they stopped, Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodriguez--who had been Cavalry, Ejercito Argentino, and had retired with the late Coronel Jorge Frade from the Husares de Pueyrredon, Argentina's most prestigious cavalry regiment--got out of the car and started toward the house, going up the stairs carved into the hillside. He carried a Remington Model 11 self-loading twelve-gauge riot shotgun in his hand.
The driver of the refrigerator truck got out from behind the wheel, went to the rear doors, and pulled them open. A dozen peones, all armed with Mauser rifles, began to pile out of the truck and then to unload from it equipment, including ammunition cans, blankets, food containers, and finally a Browning Automatic Rifle.
Rodriguez put his arm around Stein's shoulders and pounded his back affectionately, but did not speak.
"What's going on, Sergeant Major?" Stein asked in Spanish.
Their relationship was delicate. Rodriguez had a long service history and had held the senior enlisted rank for ten years of it. He knew that Stein had just been promoted to staff sergeant yet had been in the army not even two years.
On the other hand, Don Cletus Frade had made it clear to Rodriguez that Stein was in charge of the Froggers and Casa Chica.
"I have had a telephone call from an old friend," Enrico Rodriguez said. "There are two trucks of Mountain Troops on their way here. They have with them a half-dozen Nazi soldiers--the ones who came off the submarine? The ones with the skulls on their caps?"
Stein nodded his understanding.
"What makes you think they're coming here?"
"My friend, he is also of the Husares, heard the Nazi officer tell his men they were going after traitors to the Fuhrer."