Everybody shook hands.
“Why are you smiling, Jack?” Ledbetter asked.
“You asked if Ludwig was a stranger to Berlin. Is it all right if I tell him, Cronley?”
In for a penny, in for a pound!
“In a previous life, Colonel, Mr. Mannberg was Oberst Mannberg of Abwehr Ost,” Cronley said.
“Really?”
“Under Admiral Canaris, in whose dining room we are now gathered,” Mannberg confirmed.
“I’d heard this was his house,” Ledbetter said. “He must have been a fine officer.”
“Why do you say that?” Mannberg asked.
“Because of what the Nazis did to him. I saw his rotting corpse still hanging from a gallows when we liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp.”
“And Captain von Wachtstein of South American Airways,” Cronley said, gesturing toward him, “who is also DCI, was Major von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe.”
“And Mr. Ostrowski? Also ex-Luftwaffe?” Ledbetter asked softly.
“Ex–Free Polish Air Force,” Ostrowski said. “The last time I was in Berlin I was flying an Eighth Air Force North American P-51.”
“Magnificent airplane!” von Wachtstein said.
“I know it’s not polite to ask questions,” Ledbetter said, “but . . .”
“For example?” Cronley replied.
“How is an Argentine airline connected with the DCI?”
Cronley visibly thought it over before replying.
“If I have to say this, Colonel, just about all of this is classified Top Secret–Presidential and I probably shouldn’t tell you and Major Rogers any of it. But some of it may—probably will—come into play in the next week or so, and you should know who the players are.
“So, to answer your question, SAA is a DCI asset, inherited from the OSS when OSS was shut down. It was started up at President Roosevelt’s order by the Southern Cone OSS station chief, Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Frade, USMCR.”
?
??When I met Frade, he was Captain Frade of SAA,” Ledbetter said.
“Well, the DCI does have its little secrets, Colonel,” Cronley said.
“There are rumors going around that the DCI has been shipping Nazis to Argentina—”
“Scurrilous and absolutely untrue,” Cronley said, smiling.
“I wondered how,” Ledbetter said, smiling back.
“Very few Nazis,” Cronley said. “Lots of relatives of former members of Abwehr Ost whom our Russian allies wanted to chat with. The deal Allen Dulles struck with Gehlen was that Gehlen would turn over to us all his assets, including agents in place in the Kremlin, in exchange for us keeping his people, and their families, out of the hands of the Russians.”
Ledbetter nodded.
“Well, the official story is that Dulles never told Donovan about the deal. That it was kept secret from Donovan because if he knew he would have felt obligated to tell President Roosevelt, who probably would have stopped it and/or told Mrs. Roosevelt, who would have promptly told her Soviet friends.
“Clete thought that story smelled. He thought Donovan knew about Operation Ost from the beginning and that Donovan knew that the OSS was going to need a means to get Gehlen’s people—especially the Nazis among them—out of Europe to Argentina. What better way to do that than with an Argentine airline that the OSS controlled?”