The guardhouse was manned by two men in blue, vaguely police-type uniforms. They had badges pinned to zipper jackets, and were armed with Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers.
When Graham’s 1942 Plymouth station wagon came down the road, one of the guards stepped out of the shack and waved it, unnecessarily (a striped pole barrier hung across the road), to a stop. As Graham rolled down his window, the guard leaned over and looked in the car.
Graham offered the guard a small leather wallet, holding it open. It contained an identification card with a photo on it. The guard knew Graham by sight, but the security Standing Operating Procedure dictated that no one would be passed through without proper identification, not even an Assistant Director of the OSS.
“Good morning, Colonel,” the guard said.
“Morning,” Graham replied, then nodded his head toward Staff Sergeant David G. Ettinger, Army of the United States, who was sitting beside him. “The Sergeant is with me.”
“Yes, Sir,” the guard said; he didn’t seem at all surprised that an Army sergeant was wearing a well-cut civilian suit. “Sergeant, may I see some identification? Dog tags?”
Ettinger, a tall, dark-eyed, sharp-featured man, with very light brown hair, reached into the pocket of his tunic and came out with a small, folding leather wallet much like the one Graham had shown the guard. The guard took it, said, “Just a moment, please,” and went into the guard shack.
“I’ve heard about this place,” Ettinger said.
There was a faint accent, but not readily identifiable. In New York City, it would go unnoticed, Graham observed when he first met Ettinger.
“From what I’ve heard,” Graham said, “you will quickly learn to loathe it.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” Ettinger said.
“Perhaps our security here isn’t as tight as we like to think,” Graham said. “I’m sure it couldn’t be that there are loose lips at the Counterintelligence Corps Center.”
“What they told us in training was that there are loose lips everywhere, Sir,” Ettinger said.
Graham smiled. In the eighteen hours since he met Ettinger, he had come to like him. He had a droll sense of humor…not unlike his own. And he quickly became convinced (good things as well as bad often come in threes) that he was right in choosing Ettinger to round out the Argentine Team. It could have gone the other way. Ettinger could have been as fluent in Spanish as Graham himself, as knowledgeable about radio as David Sarnoff himself, and wholly unsuitable for the Argentine Team.
The guard returned to the car with a clipboard and a visitor’s badge: a plastic-covered, striped card hanging from a dog-tag chain.
“Sergeant, would you sign this?” the guard asked. “It’s a receipt for the visitor’s badge. Wear it at all times when you’re on the reservation.”
He handed the clipboard across Graham to Ettinger, who looked carefully at what he was being asked to sign before signing it and handing it back. When the guard passed him the visitor’s badge, he looped the chain around his neck.
The guard inside the shack pressed a lever, and the striped steel pole barrier rose into the air.
“Thank you,” Graham said to the guard by the car and drove onto the reservation.
“I had something like this when I was in kindergarten,” Ettinger said, examining the visitor’s badge.
Graham chuckled. “Where was that?”
“Madrid,” Ettinger said.
“They called it a ‘kindergarten’?”
“It was run by Germans,” Ettinger said simply.
Graham turned a curve on the narrow road and a large fieldstone and brick building, the Club House, came into view.
“And how did the members of this place react when it was placed in public service?” Ettinger asked.
“There were howls of protest that it was too much of a sacrifice to ask for the war effort,” Graham said. “Except from the finance committee, who saw their patriotic sacrifice as a means to fill up the treasury. I hate to think what this place is costing the taxpayer.”
“It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry to tell you, David, but you won’t be living here. Just over the hill—out of sight of this, of course—they’ve built standard barracks for the trainees.”
“For some reason, I am not surprised.”