Colonel J. Stanton Ludlow, Sr., Corps of Military Police--a tall, gray-haired fifty-six-year-old; a "Retread," having served in World War One--entered Building T-209. He was trailed by a serious-looking lieutenant, a wiry twenty-two-year-old with closely cropped black hair.
They found six men in the living room, three of them in uniform.
The officers in uniform rose and came to attention in respect to the presence of the Camp Clinton commander. Two of them, a lieutenant and a major, wore MP brassards and the other accoutrements of military policemen, including holstered Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistols, on their khaki shirts-and-trousers uniforms. The third wore short khaki pants and a khaki tunic onto which had been pinned and sewn the insignia of an oberstleutnant--lieutenant colonel--of the Afrikakorps.
The third was of course Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, who had been captured when General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim had surrendered the Afrikakorps, and who was the sole surviving son of Wilhelm and Else Frogger.
"At ease," Colonel Ludlow ordered, and turned to the eldest of the three civilians, who was sitting in one of the armchairs. He was wearing a sweat-soaked shirt. He had his sleeves rolled up and his tie pulled down. Gaily striped suspenders held up his pants.
"Thank you for coming so quickly, Colonel," Colonel A. F. Graham, USMCR, said.
"What can I do for you, Colonel?" Colonel Ludlow said, and looked at the two other men in the room, both of whom were wearing sort of a uniform of knit polo shirts, khaki slacks, and aviator's sunglasses as they leaned against the wall and held bottles of Coca-Cola.
"I don't mean to offend," Colonel Ludlow said to the taller of the two, "but has anyone ever told you that you look like Howard Hughes?"
"I've heard that before," Hughes said.
"Hughes is much better-looking, Colonel," the man beside him--Major Cletus Frade, USMCR--said. "And isn't going bald."
Colonel Graham flashed Frade an impatient look, then pushed himself out of the armchair.
"With the caveat that the classification is Top Secret, Colonel," Graham said, "would you please take a look at this?"
He handed Ludlow a four-by-five-inch envelope.
"Didn't you show me this when you first came?" Colonel Ludlow asked as he opened the envelope.
"What I showed you when I came was my authorization to see Colonel Frogger," Graham said. "This is somewhat different."
Ludlow read the document: Ludlow's face showed his surprise as he looked at Colonel Graham.
"This is a blank check for anything, Colonel," Ludlow said.
"Yes, it is," Graham said. "I have to ask about your lieutenant. Do you want him to participate in what I'm going to need, or would you rather I have Major Frade take him into the kitchen, tell him what certainly will happen to him if he breathes a word of this to anyone for the rest of his life, and send him away?"
Ludlow considered that for a moment.
"Colonel Graham, this is Lieutenant Mark Dalton. I trust him. The question is whether he wants to become further involved with what's going on here." Ludlow looked to the wiry lieutenant. "Dalton?"
"You may show him that note," Graham said.
Ludlow handed the note to Dalton, who read it.
"In or out, Lieutenant?" Graham asked.
"In, sir," Lieutenant Dalton said.
"We don't shoot people who run off at the mouth about things like this, Lieutenant," Graham said. "But what we do, instead, is confine them in Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, where they stay incommunicado at least for the duration of the war, plus six months. If Colonel Ludlow trusts you, I'd like to have you, but I want you to be sure you know what you're letting yourself in for."
"In, sir," Lieutenant Dalton repeated.
"Incommunicado means your family will be informed you are missing in action."
"In, sir," Dalton said after a just-perceptible hesitation.
Graham nodded, then introduced Frade, Hughes, and Frogger, then said: "All right. What we are going to do is give Colonel Frogger a polo shirt and long-legged khakis. Lieutenant Dalton, you are then going to back Colonel Ludlow's staff car up to the back door and open the trunk. As the rest of us form as good a shield as we can, Colonel Frogger will then get in the trunk.
"Colonel Ludlow and Colonel Frogger will then get in that car. Major Frade and Mr. Hughes and I will get in the other car. We will follow you to the Jackson Army Air Base, where we will drive directly to our airplane, a Constellation. We then will again make as good a quick shield as we can while the trunk is opened and Colonel Frogger gets out, then goes up the ladder and into the aircraft.
"We will take off as soon as possible." He looked between Ludlow and Dalton. "You two will return here, and at 2300 hours, you will--in addition to whatever else you do when there is an escape--notify your superior headquarters and the FBI that Colonel Frogger has escaped."
He let that sink in, then added: "Don't let anyone--especially the FBI--know we were here at all."
"You're asking me to lie to the FBI?" Colonel Ludlow asked.
"I'm ordering you to lie to the FBI. I have the authority from the chief of staff to do so. It is important that the FBI believes that Colonel Frogger has actually escaped. If I didn't send them--and everybody else--on a wild-goose chase looking for Frogger, then someone will smell a rat."
"God, Alex, you are really a master of the mixed metaphor," Howard Hughes said.
Frade chuckled.
"What kind of an airplane did you say?" Lieutenant Dalton asked.
"A Constellation," Frade answered. "A Lockheed 1049, a great big four-engine, triple-tailed beautiful sonofabitch."
"I don't think I've ever seen one," Dalton said.
"Not many people have," Colonel Graham snapped. "Now, if it's not too much trouble, can we get this show on the road?"
[FOUR].
Office of the Deputy Director for Western
Hemisphere Operations
Office of Strategic Services
National Institutes of Health Building
Washington, D.C.
1630 8 August 1943
There came a quick knock at the door.
"I said 'nobody,' Alice," Colonel A. F. Graham called. He was sitting behind his desk, his feet resting on an open drawer, holding a short squat glass dark with bourbon whiskey.
"Does that include me?" a stocky, gray-haired, well-tailored man in his sixties asked as he entered the room.
"I told you, Allen," Graham said to the man sitting on his couch in the process of replenishing his martini glass, "that the other shoe was going to drop."
Allen Welsh Dulles chuckled. He was in his fifties, had a not-well-defined mustache on his lip, somewhat unkempt gray hair, and was wearing what members of his class thought of as a "sack suit," a black single-breasted garment with little or no padding on the shoulders. He also wore a white button-down-collar shirt and a bow tie.
"And Deputy Director Dulles," the stocky, well-tailored man said, "my day is now complete. You were going to stop by my office and say hello, weren't you, Allen?"
"Not today, if I possibly could have avoided it," Dulles said. "Bill, you have this remarkable ability to cause it to rain on any parade of mine."
"What are you celebrating? What is that, a martini?"
"May I offer you a small libation, Mr. Director?" Graham asked.
"No, thank you," Colonel William J. Donovan said. "I try to set an example for my subordinates."
"Is that why you wear those gaudy neckties?" Graham asked.
"How many of those have you had, Alex?"
"Probably one-third to one-half of what I will ultimately have," Graham said seriously.
"And neither of you is going to tell me what it is that you're celebrating?"
"Actually, Bill," Graham said, "what Allen and I were discussing when you burst uninvited in here was how little we could get away with telling you."
"I don't think you're kidding," Donovan said not very pleasantly.
"He wasn't," Dulles said. "You've heard, I'm sure, that the only way a secret known to three people can remain a secret is if two of the three are dead?"
"But you agreed--in what we lawyers call 'a condition of employment'--that there would be no secrets between us. Remember that?"
"And if it were not for your buddy Franklin," Graham said, "both Allen and I would happily live up to that condition of employment. But you keep telling him things you shouldn't."
"To rain on your parade, Alex," Donovan said, "my buddy Franklin happens to be the President of the United States."
Dulles put in pointedly: "And who has in his immediate circle a number of people--especially the Vice President--who I would be reluctant to trust with any secret, much less this one, as far as I could throw the White House."
"This secret is one we really don't want to get to Uncle Joe Stalin via Mr. Henry A. Wallace's close friends in the Russian Embassy," Graham said.
They had had this argument, or ones very like it, many times before.
In any conventional organization, in ordinary times, subordinates don't challenge the boss; if they do, the boss gets rid of them. The Office of Strategic Services was not a conventional organization, and these were not ordinary times.
William J. Donovan was the director of the Office of Strategic Services, which in theory answered to General George C. Marshall, the Army's chief of staff, but in practice only to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Allen W. Dulles and Alejandro F. Graham were the OSS deputy directors for Europe and the Western Hemisphere, respectively. They were both uniquely qualified for their roles. Both were prepared--in other words, were privy to all of the OSS's secrets--to take over at a moment's notice if anything should happen to Donovan.
The truth was that while all three had great admiration for one another, they often didn't like one another very much, although Dulles and Graham liked each other much better than either did Donovan. For his part, Donovan, realizing how important Dulles and Graham were to the OSS, very often passed over clear insubordination from them that he absolutely would not have tolerated from anyone else.
He was doing so now.
Graham's remark What Allen and I were discussing when you burst uninvited in here was how little we could get away with telling you had quietly enraged him. He hadn't actually taken a deep breath and counted to ten to avoid blowing up, but he had told himself that he had to be careful. Blowing up--no matter how justified--would have been counterproductive.
"You are going to tell me, aren't you, Allen, exactly what it is you don't want Vice President Wallace to pass on to our Russian allies?"
Dulles met his eyes.
"Reluctantly, Bill, I will," Dulles said. "Alex and I had just agreed that the President will inevitably ask you what was going on in the Hotel Washington, and that it would be best if we prepared you for the question."
"And what was going on at the Hotel Washington? You don't mean with Putzi Hanfstaengl?"
Both Dulles and Graham nodded.
Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl was another Columbia University classmate of President Roosevelt and Director Donovan.
The scion of a wealthy Munich publishing family, he had been attracted to Hitler and National Socialism in its early days. Among other things, Hanfstaengl had loaned Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party propagandist, the money to start up the Volkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
He became part of Hitler's inner circle, but as he became progressively more disenchanted with Hitler and the Thousand-Year Reich, Hitler became progressively more disenchanted with Hanfstaengl. A friend warned Hanfstaengl that he was about to have an SS-engineered accident, and Hanfstaengl fled Germany.
In the United States, Hanfstaengl looked up Roosevelt and Donovan. Both helped him get settled, and he began working in the family's New York office. When war came, he was automatically an enemy alien. Under the law, and especially because of his known ties to the Nazi regime, he was required to be incarcerated as a threat to national security.
On the other hand, Hanfstaengl's judgment of how senior Nazi officials and top-ranking military officers would react in a given circumstance was obviously of great value to Roosevelt. But equally obviously, Hanfstaengl could not be seen wandering around the White House, and picking his brain would be difficult if he were locked up somewhere in the Arizona desert with the other German threats to American National Security.
The solution proposed by Donovan and ordered executed by the commander in chief saw Hanfstaengl incarcerated under military guard in a suite in the Hotel Washington, a stone's throw from the White House. The guard was U.S. Army Sergeant Egon Hanfstaengl, who called his prisoner "Poppa."
Roosevelt would visit his old pal by having his wheelchair rolled into a laundry truck at the White House. The truck would then drive to the basement service entrance of the Hotel Washington, and Roosevelt would then be wheeled through the kitchen to an elevator operated by a Secret Service agent and taken to Hanfstaengl's suite.