The Spymasters: A Men at War Novel Read online

  “That’s my take, except I’m not going to tell him because Sikorski has been valuable to us. We obviously want to keep it that way.”

  He took from his desktop a decrypted message from OSS Bern Station and passed it to Stevens.

  “This is the response to my message to Allen Dulles about those SS identity papers.”

  “The ones Sausagemaker got when they tried rescuing that trainload of prisoners?” Stevens said.

  He noticed that Bruce made a face when he used the code name for the Polish resistance leader, Mordechaj Szerynski, and decided it was because it reminded Bruce that Major Richard M. Canidy had come up with it. Stevens knew that the diplomatic-minded Bruce was solidly in the camp of those who considered Canidy a reckless agent, and Canidy’s choice of flippant code names—among other unconventional acts—seemed only to reinforce that opinion.

  Stevens, however, because his background was military and not diplomacy, understood Canidy’s actions as an OSS operative and thus held a far higher opinion of him.

  Bruce nodded. “The ones that Sikorski passed to us two days ago.”

  Stevens read the message:

  * * *

  TOP SECRET

  OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

  X STATION CHIEF

  FILE

  COPY NO. 1

  OF 1 COPY ONLY

  30MAY43 0730

  TOP SECRET

  FOR OSS LONDON

  EYES ONLY COL BRUCE

  FROM OSS BERN

  BEGIN QUOTE

  DAVID,

  MY ABWEHR SOURCE CONFIRMS THAT THE SS IDENTITY CARDS LISTED IN YOUR MESSAGE OF 28MAY ARE IN FACT GENUINE.

  THE SS-SCHARFUHRER BABYSITTERS, WHILE LEGIT, ARE OF COURSE SMALL FRY.

  BUT SS-STURMBANNFUHRER KLAUS SCHWARTZ -- SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 3,154, NSDAP NO. 10,654 -- IS A VERY BIG FISH. WITH VERY BIG TEETH.

  THIS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE APPROPRIATE TIMES ONE CAN INVOKE THAT NEW FIGURE OF SPEECH THAT IT DOES NOT TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF SCHWARTZ HAVING SERVED AS CHIEF ASSISTANT TO SS-STURMBANNFUHRER WERNHER VON BRAUN -- SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 1,254 -- SINCE JANUARY 1943.

  THEIR SS RANKS AND MEMBERSHIP NUMBERS ARE HONORIFIC, PERSONALLY MADE BY HIMMLER. AS A POINT OF REFERENCE, HITLER’S RIGHT HAND MAN, MARTIN BORMANN, HAS SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 555, ALSO HONORIFIC AND ASSIGNED BY HIMMLER.

  SCHWARTZ, PRIOR TO JOINING VON BRAUN IN JANUARY, WAS HEAD OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT AT CHEMISCHE FABRIK FRANKFURT A.G. -- A MAJOR PRODUCER OF AGRICULTURAL CHEMICALS, PARTICULARLY PHOSPHATES FOR PESTICIDES -- FOR THREE YEARS.

  CHEMISCHE FABRIK FRANKFURT IS OWNED BY RUHR VALLEY INDUSTRIALIST WOLFGANG KAPPLER, WHO I BECAME WELL ACQUAINTED WITH IN THE EARLY 1930S AT SULLIVAN AND CROMWELL BERLIN. I AM PRESENTLY TRYING THROUGH MY CHANNELS TO REACH KAPPLER TO GET HIS INSIGHTS ON SCHWARTZ. WHEN I KNOW SOMETHING, YOU WILL KNOW.

  YOU DID NOT ASK, BUT AS TO SCHWARTZ’S PRESENT WHEREABOUTS, THEY ARE UNKNOWN. HE HAS GONE MISSING, OR AT LEAST NO ONE IS TALKING IF THEY DO KNOW WHERE HE IS. MY SOURCE WILL PROVIDE UPDATES AS AVAILABLE.

  I MUST SAY YOU HAVE MY ATTENTION WITH THIS. CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT OUR INTEREST IS IN SCHWARTZ? YOUR LAST MESSAGE WAS QUITE CRYPTIC, EVEN BY OUR HUMBLE OSS STANDARDS.

  FONDLY,

  ALLEN

  END QUOTE

  TOP SECRET

  * * *

  “You know that this,” Stevens said, holding up the message, “is one of those instances where we provided the weapons and C-2 and—”

  “I do know,” Bruce interrupted, nodding.

  “And not only to Sausagemaker,” Stevens went on, “but to the Sikorski Tourists who smuggled it in as well.”

  “Yes. And it was through their pipeline that the SS identity papers were brought back here. And Sikorski fed them to us—after, I’m sure, making detailed copies for himself.”

  When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Sikorski and his troops escaped through Hungary and Romania while the Polish Navy sailed the Baltic Sea for Britain. The routes of escape were kept open for his men—who, in a respectful nod, called themselves Sikorski’s Tourists—to go back in and support the resistance.

  “That we’re supplying them with as much as a stick of chewing gum is something Winant doesn’t have the need to know,” Bruce said. “I’m certainly not going to give him any information that he’d use to rub in Sikorski’s face.”

  “How are you going to handle his request, then?”

  “By adhering to something that Winant would appreciate, the unofficial maxim of the Corps Diplomatique.”

  “I’m confident I can make a reasonable stab at that, but I’ll ask anyway: Which is?”

  David Bruce said: “Quote Take no action on absolutely anything today that can be reconsidered tomorrow—or next month unquote.”

  Stevens nodded.

  “Yeah, particularly with Winant, that would’ve been one of my first guesses,” he said, then looked back at the message.

  “The magnitude of this just gets worse by the moment,” Stevens said after a moment.

  “Unfortunately so. As Allen rather drily notes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to connect von Braun’s work with this Schwartz’s.”

  Major Wernher von Braun was thirty-one years old, a darkly handsome German of aristocratic heritage. His mother traced her royal heritage to France’s Philip III, England’s Edward III, and Scotland’s Robert III. In his finely tailored suits, von Braun looked more like a well-to-do corporate businessman than the absolutely brilliant scientist that he was.

  It was well known that even before the war von Braun had been working on new technology involving rockets—including having discussions with Robert Goddard, the top American physicist—and that he now was making major advances for Adolf Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.

  The OSS—through Allen Dulles’s source in the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service—had been told that one of von Braun’s projects was running the manufacturing and testing facilities for a range of new, almost secret weapons of his design. The self-propelled flying bombs were being called “aerial torpedoes”—the latest of which were reported to be able to carry a ton of TNT-based high explosive for two hundred miles at more than three thousand miles per hour.

  They were “almost secret” weapons because Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels already was threatening that the V-1 and V-2—Vergeltungswaffe, or retaliation weapon—would first target London, wiping it out as payback for the Allied bombings that were devastating German cities.

  “Before Ike went back to AFHQ last week,” Bruce said, referring to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander in chief at Allied Forces Headquarters, “he told Donovan and me that he was extremely concerned about the impact, if you will forgive the poor choice of words, of these new bombs.”

  “Goebbels is broadcasting that the attacks will begin this coming December,” Stevens said.

  Bruce shrugged.

  “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that that time frame is pure propaganda at this point.”

  “But our intel tells us that the first, smaller version of these bombs is being tested.”

  The Fieseler Fi-103 had a thirty-foot-long sheet metal fuselage, wooden wings, and a new jet engine that pulsed fifty times a second, creating a buzz sound. The Luftwaffe had flown—and crashed—the first one under its own power in December 1942.

  “And that’s what worries Ike. He’s afraid that London under siege—whether six months from now or early next year, which would be far worse—will severely interfere with the cross-channel invasion now set for May.”

  In 1942, then–Major General Eisenhower had written the plans for OPERATION ROUNDUP that he tried to get approved as the spring 1943 invasion of northern France. The British, however, wanted nothing to do with it. Prime Minister Winston Churchill favored attacking the Axis through the Mediterranean, what he called “Europe’s soft underbelly.” Now that that was happening—the Allies, having just captured North Africa, expected to have Sicily and Italy
taken within a matter of months—additional plans were being hammered out for the invasion of France, this time at the coast of Normandy in spring 1944.

  “Ike says keeping secret an operation on the massive scale that they’re planning—they’re building on his Roundup, mobilizing more than a million troops—is a challenge in and of itself. It follows, then, that the actual invasion would be impossible to ramp up and launch from England if London is being leveled at the same time.”

  Stevens nodded solemnly.

  “Now,” Bruce said, motioning toward the message, “getting back to Allen’s point of connecting why Schwartz has been working for von Braun. Those agriculture fertilizers he mentioned use concentrated amounts of phosphoric acids—”

  “As do incendiary bombs,” Stevens interrupted.

  “Exactly. And the same plant making chemicals for firebombs can make a high explosive like TNT. So call that Connect One.”

  David Bruce then tapped his finger on a manila file folder on his desk.

  “And here’s where it gets worse. I had Helene dig out this background on nerve gas that Professor Rossi put together before he left for the States,” he said, referring to the University of Palermo scientist whom Dick Canidy recently had rescued from the SS in Sicily. “Rossi writes that thanks to a Herr Doktor Gerhard Schrader, who developed the industrial process for mass production of T-83, any facility capable of producing such chemicals can easily be converted to produce components for the nerve gas.” He paused, then added, “Thousands of metric tons of it.”

  Tabun, code-named T-83, was colorless, mostly odorless, and, as far as chemists were concerned, relatively easy to make. It also was effective. It quickly attacked the central nervous system, causing intense convulsions, restricted breathing—and painful death.

  “And thus the possible Connect Two,” Stevens said, meeting Bruce’s eyes as he handed back the sheet. Then, without thinking, he suddenly added, “Canidy called this.”

  David Bruce looked at Ed Stevens with a face of resignation.

  “Canidy suggested the possibility when Donovan was here,” Bruce clarified.

  Stevens said: “What I recall he said was, ‘It’s possible, but is it probable?’”

  Bruce looked at him for a long moment.

  “Right. None of these bombs can be allowed to strike here, period, no matter what they might carry. Where is he, by the way?”

  Captain Helene Dancy came in with a wooden tray that held a pot of coffee and four china mugs.

  “Where’s who?” she said as she put the tray on a table beside the couch.

  “Canidy,” Stevens and Bruce said almost simultaneously.

  “Either on his way to see Stan Fine in Algiers,” she said, reaching for the coffeepot, “or already there. Said he had unfinished business.”

  Stevens and Bruce exchanged glances.

  “Ed here will pour us the coffee, Helene,” Bruce then ordered, “while you go grab your message pad. We have an urgent for General Donovan.”

  [THREE]

  OSS Algiers Station

  Algiers, Algeria

  0923 30 May 1943

  “That lying sonofabitch!” Major Richard M. Canidy, United States Army Air Forces, who was a big-boned, six-foot-tall twenty-six-year-old with close-cropped dark hair and deeply intelligent dark eyes, said, angrily waving a decrypted secret message. “Why is he saying that the Nazis never had a yellow fever lab in Sicily? I saw the damn thing, Stan. I blew it up.”

  Canidy looked at Captain Stanley S. Fine, USAAF—a tall, ascetic thirty-five-year-old who had a thin, thoughtful face framed with horn-rimmed glasses—sitting across from him on the main balcony of La Villa de Vue de Mer. The “Sea View Villa,” an 1880s French Colonial–style four-story mansion built high on the lush hillside, served as OSS Headquarters, Mediterranean Theatre of Operation.

  The villa belonged to Pamela Dutton, the wealthy widow of one of Wild Bill Donovan’s law school buddies. Wentworth Danfield Dutton had served in the United States legation to Algeria. Mrs. Dutton had made her own fortune in New York City importing Italian shoes for women. With Donovan’s promise that the villa would be preserved and protected, she had let it to the Office of Strategic Services for the sum of ten dollars per annum.

  Fine was wearing a U.S. Army tropical worsted uniform. Canidy—under his brown horsehide A-2 aviator’s jacket with the gold leaves of a major pinned to its epaulets—had on a tan button-down shirt, brown woolen trousers, and calfskin chukka boots that he had pulled from the wardrobe in the master suite. It wasn’t the first time he’d helped himself to the diplomat’s clothing made at a local haberdashery—he’d done that for the missions to Sicily—and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Two piles of the typewritten messages were next to a dented stainless steel thermos on the massive Mediterranean teak table. Fine picked up the battered thermos.

  “I know,” he said, pouring rich aromatic Algerian coffee into one of Mrs. Dutton’s fine china cups. “And that’s not the first message to contradict what you did in Palermo.”

  Canidy shook his head as he looked out. The view was absolutely stunning. The capital city spread out below on a gentle slope that ended at the port some ten kilometers away. Beyond that, the vast Mediterranean Sea sparkled to the horizon. At anchor and moored at the docks in the circular harbor were military man-o’-wars flying the flags of the U.S. and England, and recently arrived American Liberty ships either off-loading their cargo or awaiting their turn to do so. Silver barrage balloons floated above the harbor, their steel cable tethers discouraging enemy aircraft from strafing the harbor and ships.

  Major Canidy and Captain Fine each had an AGO card—a sealed identity card issued by the Adjutant General’s Office—that stated they were members of the U.S. Army Air Forces. If anyone questioned their status, and checked military records, their names would be duly listed.

  But of course both were attached to the OSS.

  Fine, despite an appearance that some mistook as being possibly frail, was in fact absolutely fearless. And he efficiently accomplished his job—in and out of channels—using a creative ability that Canidy described as “beating back the rear-echelon bastards and their endless red tape and bureaucratic meddling.”

  Canidy would know. He, too, was expert at bending—and often outright breaking—rules in order to get done what had to be done, damn those who got in the way.

  Until being sent on the missions to Sicily, he had served as chief of OSS Whitbey House Station—commonly known to the agents training there as Canidy’s Throat Cutting and Bomb Throwing Academy—which was an ancient, massive eighty-four-room stone structure on a twenty-six-thousand-acre country estate outside London. That position had made him the OSS’s number three man in England, after the chief and deputy chief of OSS London Station.

  For the missions in Sicily, however, Canidy had reported directly to OSS Washington, to Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan himself. He knew that that had not moved him up to number two in all of the OSS—but it damn sure put him pretty high in the pecking order.

  Which in itself was a remarkable achievement. Because Canidy had not exactly been a willful recruit into the world of espionage.

  * * *

  Dick Canidy’s dream had been to be a pilot, and he’d attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, paying his way with a Navy scholarship. He graduated in 1938, cum laude, with a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering.

  He wasn’t particularly excited about having to pay back the Navy with four years of service. It was no secret he felt constrained by the military and its starchy rules and regulations. Still, he pledged that he would honor his obligation—but not serve a single second longer. Having accumulated, in addition to his MIT degree, a commercial pilot’s license, an instrument ticket, and 350 hours of solo time, he already was entertaining job offers, one in particular from the Boeing Aircraft Company in Washington State.

  After three years in the Navy—with barely a yea
r left on his obligation before he could pack his bags for Seattle—Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Richard M. Canidy, USN, was at Naval Air Station Pensacola when he was approached by a grizzled man named General Claire Chennault.

  It was June 1941, and Canidy, an instructor pilot in the backseat of single-engine bi-wing Kaydet trainers, was with fledgling naval aviators day after day flying a mind-numbing circuit around the skies of the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.

  Chennault was a legendary general known not to mince words with his gravelly voice. In short order, he bluntly laid it out to Canidy that the United States could not stay out of the world war much longer, that when it did join in the fight there would be an enormous demand for aviators, that there was no way the military was going to let skilled pilots out of the service—and that he, Canidy, would then be front of the line, assigned to flying missions God only knew where.

  But, the general told him, there was an option.

  Chennault—with FDR’s approval, if not discreet direct order—was pulling together a group of volunteer pilots, really good pilots. Their mission would be flying Curtiss P40-B fighters to defend the two-thousand-mile-long Burma Road that was the critical route for getting Western aid to China from Japanese attack.

  The contract with the Chinese was for one year, Chennault explained, and monthly pay came in at six hundred dollars—twice what Canidy got from the Navy. As further incentive, the general added, Canidy would also pocket a five-hundred-dollar bonus for each Jap he shot down.

  Canidy, always quick to take care of Number One first, signed up. He could not decide which was better—making more money or getting an honorable discharge from the Navy that came as part of the package.