That had been a relatively long time ago—just over two years—and neither Strübel nor Niedermeyer any longer dressed like Franciscan friars or, for that matter, much like Germans. Today, Strübel and Frogger were both wearing well-tailored business suits, appropriate to people engaged in the wine trade, their new cover. And Niedermeyer was more spectacularly dressed. He wore a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches much like the one that Jimmy Cronley had inherited from Clete Frade’s father. Niedermeyer also had on riding breeches, highly polished riding boots, and a pale yellow silk shirt, and knotted around his neck was a foulard. He could easily pass for a successful estanciero, and that, in fact, was what he had become.
In their first serious meeting—after Niedermeyer had confessed to being General Gehlen’s Number Three and a lieutenant colonel, and had sent word to Gehlen that it would be safe to start sending Abwehr Ost officers, non-coms, and their families into the care of the Americans—the question came up of how to pay for establishing new homes and lives for what eventually would be about a hundred “Good Gehlen” families and one-quarter that many “Nazi Gehlen” families.
It had already been agreed between General Gehlen and Allen W. Dulles that once the Germans got to Argentina, the Americans—in other words, Frade—would continue to pay their Wehrmacht/SS salaries, including family allowances. They would be paid what their American counterparts would be paid—except, Dulles said, not paid extra, as Americans were, for service outside their home country.
Dulles arranged for the OSS to send a million dollars in cash to Clete via the American embassy for this purpose, and promised to send more, as needed. Clete knew the million dollars wouldn’t last long and he didn’t think that additional money would be sent. Dulles knew that Clete had inherited his father’s enormous wealth, and knew that Frade would continue to pay the Gehlens should it be decided that additional funds could not be sent because of the likelihood the wrong people would find out about it and ask questions that couldn’t be answered about why millions of dollars were being sent to Argentina.
Dulles expecting Frade to support the operation out of his own pocket wasn’t fair to Frade, of course. But it reminded Frade that someone had once observed, “All’s fair in love and war.”
Yet Frade had managed to come up with the money, more or less painlessly.
In April 1943, Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, then the assistant military atta
ché for air at the German embassy, had tipped off Clete to the German plan to smuggle ashore a shipment of valuables—not further described—and approximately forty members of the SS from an ostensibly neutral Spanish merchant steamer.
The illicit landing on the shore of Samborombón Bay would be under the supervision of Oberst Grüner, the military attaché, his deputy, Standartenführer Goltz, and Major von Wachtstein.
Frade had been delighted. Once he had smoking-gun photographs of Grüner, Goltz, and von Wachtstein smuggling, he would deliver them to the U.S. ambassador, who would immediately hand them to the Argentine foreign minister as he registered a formal complaint with the Argentine foreign ministry.
Although the Argentine government tilted heavily toward the Third Reich, they would not be able to ignore this outrageous breach of their sovereignty and neutrality. The Germans would be embarrassed, and the Spaniards could no longer righteously proclaim their own neutrality.
Maxwell Ashton III, then a captain, was dispatched to the beach with two Leica cameras. Clete sent Enrico with him to serve as scout and bodyguard.
On the beach, as Ashton snapped away, Oberst Grüner’s forehead came to be in the crosshairs of the Zeiss 4× telescopic sight mounted on what had been el Coronel Frade’s favorite 7mm Mauser hunting rifle. Enrico then blew Grüner’s brains out, turned the rifle on Standartenführer Goltz and blew his brains out, and then emptied the magazine on the SS men on the beach, being careful not to shoot Major von Wachtstein.
Clete understood why Enrico had done what he had—Enrico knew Grüner had hired the assassins who had murdered Clete’s father and Enrico’s sister—but he was nonetheless furious with the old soldier for ruining his planned diplomatic triumph.
The old soldier was unrepentant.
He waited until Clete had stopped screaming at him, then gave him a huge, heavy leather box.
“I brought this from the beach, Don Cletus. I thought you should have it.”
Clete was so furious that he didn’t even look in the box for three days.
When he finally opened it, it took him twenty minutes to count the $32,500,000 in brand-new U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills it contained. They were still in the packing in which they had come from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
Frade had a pretty good idea whose cash it was. It was money intended for someone very high in the Nazi hierarchy—perhaps Himmler or Goering, someone at that level—to buy refuge in Argentina once the Thousand-Year Reich came tumbling down around them.
He quickly realized that while it might have been Himmler’s or Goering’s money, that was no longer true. It was now his.
But what to do with it?
He knew if he told Allen Dulles, then the OSS, always short of money, would send an airplane to take it away.
Clete put the money in his father’s safe and allowed it to just slip his mind to mention it to Dulles.
When the million dollars Dulles had sent him to fund OPERATION OST ran out—even more quickly than Clete thought it would; he had spent almost $500,000 buying a small hotel in Rosario to discreetly house the arriving Gehlens until other arrangements could be made for them—he had to dip into the $32.5 million.
The next step had been to make loans from it so the Gehlens could buy houses or apartments and go into businesses of one kind or another. Niedermeyer had talked him out of just making grants; if the Gehlens knew they would have to repay the loans, he said, they would have a real interest in making their new businesses successful.
He himself, Niedermeyer said, would be interested in buying a farm on which he could raise cattle and horses “even before this is all over.”
Clete was not as naïve as he suspected Niedermeyer and the other Gehlens thought he was. He wondered, for example, what he would do if any of them, including Niedermeyer, didn’t repay the money they were borrowing. It was certainly a possibility that Niedermeyer recognized a cash cow when he saw one.
And he wondered why Niedermeyer had asked him for a pistol. Who did he think he was going to have to shoot in Mendoza? But he gave him the benefit of the doubt and provided a Ballester-Molina .45 ACP pistol from the cache of arms in the basement of Casa Montagna.
Within a week, quite by accident, Niedermeyer literally bumped into SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg in the men’s room of the Edelweiss Hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche. Von Deitzberg was first deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.