Admiral Sourer returned with a whiskey glass in each hand.
“I like it neat,” the President said as he took the glass. “Is that all right with you, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir, that’s fine.”
“Sid, he’s going to tell us what he knows of the Dulles-Gehlen deal,” Truman said, and gestured for Frade to start.
After a slight hesitation, during which he realized, almost as a surprise, that if any man had the right to know everything, it was the President of the United States, Clete related everything he knew about the deal.
The President, when Clete finished, nodded thoughtfully.
“Colonel,” he then said, “for years now—back to when I was in the Senate, I mean—officers—good, senior, experienced officers—have been coming to me to help them get the OSS shut down. When I became President, the pressure on me really built. Finally, I decided that all those officers couldn’t be wrong. I really admire General Donovan, but the bottom line was that it was Donovan versus just about every senior officer except Eisenhower. And you couldn’t call Ike an enthusiastic supporter.
“So I decided the OSS had to go. On September twentieth, an Executive Order will be issued disbanding the OSS—”
“With all possible respect, Mr. President, that’d be a terrible mistake,” Clete blurted.
“Hold your horses, son. Even ‘with all possible respect,’ lieutenant colonels are not supposed to volunteer to their commander in chief that he is about to make a terrible mistake.”
Clete didn’t reply.
“Even when you’re right, Colonel,” Truman said. “Now, the minute the word got out that I was shutting down the OSS, that terrible organization that wasn’t worth the powder to blow it up, a funny thing happened. Just about everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to the secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau got me in a corner and let me know they’d be happy to take the OSS organization under their wing.
“So that started me to think. If the OSS was so useless, why did they want it? I had an idea, and I took it to Sid—Admiral Sourer—here and asked him. We’re old friends. He’s not career Navy. Like me, he was a weekend warrior in the Navy Reserve when I was making my way up to colonel in the National Guard. The admiral told me what I was beginning to suspect on my own. All the generals and admirals and diplomats and bureaucrats didn’t hate the OSS. They hated Wild Bill Donovan, and the reason they hated Donovan was that he was independent. They couldn’t control him.
“And now they want to absorb the OSS into their little empires because they think that will make them stronger.
“Well, Colonel Frade, that’s not going to happen. I am now convinced—especially because of the trouble the goddamn Russians are certain to cause us . . .”
He paused, then went on: “Let me go off on a tangent on that one. At one o’clock this afternoon, I told General Marshall to shut
off all aid to the Soviets immediately, today.”
“Jesus, Harry!” Admiral Sourer said.
“The sonsof bitches have to be taught they can’t push Harry Truman around the way they pushed poor sick FDR around.”
“And that Bess isn’t Eleanor?” Sourer asked innocently.
“Bess keeps her nose out of politics, and you know she does,” Truman said. “And we’re getting off the subject. Getting back to it. A month or so after the OSS is shut down—as soon as I can—I am going to set up an organization, call it the Intelligence Agency or something like that, that will take the place of the OSS.
“Now, since I can’t name Wild Bill Donovan, Alec Graham, and Allen Dulles to run it, for the obvious reasons, I had to find somebody else. He didn’t have to be too smart—”
“Go to hell, Harry,” Sourer said dryly.
“—so I settled on Rear Admiral Sidney W. Sourer, United States Naval Reserve, to head the new agency. Which brings us to you, Colonel: Allen Dulles has convinced me we can’t afford to lose General Gehlen and his intelligence assets. One sure way to lose him is for Morgenthau to lay his hands on you or any of your people or—especially—any of the Nazis you have smuggled into Argentina. I want the truth now. Can you prevent that from happening in the next few months with damned little—no—help from anybody until Sid—Admiral Sourer—is up and running with the new agency?”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. President. I really think I can.”
Truman looked at him for a long moment.
“So do I. I really think you can,” the President said. Then he laughed. “When I heard you made the Secret Service take off their trousers . . . what did I say, Sid?”
“You said, ‘That young officer is apparently capable of anything.’”
“That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant.”
He put out his hand to Clete.