Bureau of Internal Security
Ministry of Defense
Edificio Libertador
Avenida Paseo Colón
Buenos Aires
2230 19 December 1942
Comandante Habanzo delivered the preliminary visual and communications surveillance reports ten minutes late, at 2210 hours. While he leafed through the five-inch-tall stack of papers, el Teniente Coronel Bernardo Martín kept Habanzo standing in front of his desk.
He wondered if he was doing this because Habanzo was late, or because he simply did not like the man. He decided it was the latter. He had often warned his agents that it was far better to turn in a report late than to turn it in inaccurate—but obviously not often enough, to judge by the quality of the visual surveillance reports in front of him.
The question then changed to why he disliked his deputy. First of all, obviously, because Habanzo was stupid. Stupid people did not belong in internal security. How Habanzo wound up there was one of the great mysteries of life. For a long time, he simply assumed that he never completely trusted the information Habanzo gave him because the man was so devastatingly stupid. But now vague, uncomfortable tickles in the back of his mind were suggesting other reasons as well.
Could Habanzo be taking small gifts—or large ones, for that matter—from some interested party or other? Could he be passing items of interest to them?
Could the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, for example, have him on their payroll? The answer came swiftly: Not likely. Habanzo’s limited mental abilities would be immediately apparent to the G.O.U. And they would be afraid of him, too; for they would see him as the loose cannon that he is. He was perfectly capable of having a sudden attack of conscience and confessing, for instance. Or of selling out to a higher bidder.
On the other hand, in the counterintelligence business, one was expected to consider the unlikely—even the absurdly unlikely—as a possibility.
The communications surveillance preliminary reports were typewritten. Almost all of the wiretappers came from Army and Navy Signals, where they’d been radio operators. Radio operators were trained to sit before a typewriter and almost subconsciously transcribe Morse Code signals. Now they sat before a typewriter in a basement somewhere, or in an office off the Main Telephone Frame Room in the Ministry of Communications, and pecked out a transcript of someone’s telephone calls. Aside from minor corrections, and the elimination of abbreviations, their final reports would not be much different from what Martín had in front of him.
The visual surveillance preliminary reports were something else: They were handwritten, compiled from notes discreetly taken on site. And predictably, the syntax in these reports was often highly imaginative. More important, they were liberally sprinkled with question marks. This was done in the interest of fairness, so that El Coronel A’s words would not become a matter of official record when the agent was not absolutely positive that it was El Coronel A who spoke them, or that these were his exact words. The idea was that questionable items would be verified in the final reports: that it was not El Coronel A, but in fact El Coronel B, and that he said he was not going to Córdoba, rather than that he was going to Córdoba.
By the time the preliminary reports were finalized, about ninety-five percent of the information verified was no longer of any interest whatever. It was a terrible system. But—as Winston Churchill said about democracy—el Teniente Coronel Martín could not think of a better one.
Nothing in the reports before him was especially interesting. That was not surprising. Just about all of the members of the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos attended el Capitán Duarte’s funeral, but they were all far too intelligent to reveal anything worth paying attention to anywhere they might be overheard.
And though el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade solaced the loss of his nephew with a liter or so of Johnnie Walker, this did not yield useful information…unless irreverent remarks about the funeral ceremony could be considered useful.
Visual surveillance of young Frade was a little more interesting. He did not follow the casket to Recoleta Cemetery, but instead returned to the Frade Guest House on Avenida Libertador, where two American men were waiting for him.
One of them, Pelosi, Anthony J., was ostensibly an oil-industry technical expert who came to Argentina with young Frade. The other, Ettinger, David, was a newly arrived employee of the Banco de Boston.
If one accepted the theory that young Frade was an OSS agent…and Habanzo is strongly convinced of this; I wonder why… then Ettinger would likely be the third member of a three-man team. But on the other hand, none of these three look like men any intelligence agency in its right mind would send anywhere.
Which, of course, might be precisely what the OSS hopes someone like me will think.
Martín would have liked very much to know exactly what they talked about, but that was out of the question. At the same time, Martín was sure that his decision not to install listening devices in the house was correct. Tapping a telephone was relatively simple, and difficult to detect. Listening devices were the opposite, difficult to install and easy to detect. They were also very expensive and hard to come by. He had a budget to consider. If el Coronel Frade or his son came across a listening device—and the
y more than likely would—they would simply smash it. And a good deal of money, time, and effort would go down the toilet. All a listening device would accomplish would be to remind Frade and his son that they were under surveillance.
There was one anomaly in the reports, which of course Habanzo’s summaries offered little to explain: Shortly after young Frade met with the two other Americans, he returned to the Duarte mansion. On the way there, he stopped for a time at the lobby restaurant in the Alvear Palace Hotel. There he encountered the young German Luftwaffe officer and the two Carzino-Cormano girls.
Habanzo did not have a man on the young German officer, pleading a shortage of available agents. And “technical difficulties” created a ten-minute loss of phone coverage at the Guest House—which meant the man tapping the Guest House line had gone either to relieve himself or to have a little snack. During that time there could possibly have been a telephone call in connection with the meeting between young Frade and the German.
According to the visual agent’s report, young Frade suddenly left the Frade Guest House garage and then drove at “a high rate of speed” to the Alvear Palace. By the time the agent caught up with him, Frade was in a confrontation with the older of the Carzino-Cormano girls, Isabela. This was followed by an apparent confrontation with the young German officer, as Frade “walked angrily” out of the hotel.
Since it was reasonable to presume that the young German officer was not involved with young Frade’s mission for the OSS (if indeed young Frade was actually working for the OSS), it seemed reasonably safe to presume that the confrontation had something to do with the Carzino-Cormano girl. Isabela was a beautiful young woman, and both the German and the American could easily be romantically interested in her.
Thus, a likely scenario: Young Frade slipped away from the funeral and the post-funeral reception for a meeting with his men, then telephoned the Duarte mansion (during the period of “technical difficulties” with the telephone surveillance), somehow managed to get through, and was informed that the Señorita had left with the German officer.
Thirty-two incoming calls came to the Duarte mansion during the afternoon; four of them asked for Señorita Isabela Carzino-Cormano.
Masculine ego outraged, he went looking for them in one of the very few public places where a young woman of her position could be seen, found her with the German, expressed his displeasure, and “walked angrily” out of the hotel.