The Honor of Spies

"You're asking me to lie to the FBI?" Colonel Ludlow asked.

"I'm ordering you to lie to the FBI. I have the authority from the chief of staff to do so. It is important that the FBI believes that Colonel Frogger has actually escaped. If I didn't send them--and everybody else--on a wild-goose chase looking for Frogger, then someone will smell a rat."

"God, Alex, you are really a master of the mixed metaphor," Howard Hughes said.

Frade chuckled.

"What kind of an airplane did you say?" Lieutenant Dalton asked.

"A Constellation," Frade answered. "A Lockheed 1049, a great big four-engine, triple-tailed beautiful sonofabitch."

"I don't think I've ever seen one," Dalton said.

"Not many people have," Colonel Graham snapped. "Now, if it's not too much trouble, can we get this show on the road?"

[FOUR]

Office of the Deputy Director for Western

Hemisphere Operations

Office of Strategic Services

National Institutes of Health Building

Washington, D.C.

1630 8 August 1943

There came a quick knock at the door.

"I said 'nobody,' Alice," Colonel A. F. Graham called. He was sitting behind his desk, his feet resting on an open drawer, holding a short squat glass dark with bourbon whiskey.

"Does that include me?" a stocky, gray-haired, well-tailored man in his sixties asked as he entered the room.

"I told you, Allen," Graham said to the man sitting on his couch in the process of replenishing his martini glass, "that the other shoe was going to drop."

Allen Welsh Dulles chuckled. He was in his fifties, had a not-well-defined mustache on his lip, somewhat unkempt gray hair, and was wearing what members of his class thought of as a "sack suit," a black single-breasted garment with little or no padding on the shoulders. He also wore a white button-down-collar shirt and a bow tie.

"And Deputy Director Dulles," the stocky, well-tailored man said, "my day is now complete. You were going to stop by my office and say hello, weren't you, Allen?"

"Not today, if I possibly could have avoided it," Dulles said. "Bill, you have this remarkable ability to cause it to rain on any parade of mine."

"What are you celebrating? What is that, a martini?"

"May I offer you a small libation, Mr. Director?" Graham asked.

"No, thank you," Colonel William J. Donovan said. "I try to set an example for my subordinates."

"Is that why you wear those gaudy neckties?" Graham asked.

"How many of those have you had, Alex?"

"Probably one-third to one-half of what I will ultimately have," Graham said seriously.

"And neither of you is going to tell me what it is that you're celebrating?"

"Actually, Bill," Graham said, "what Allen and I were discussing when you burst uninvited in here was how little we could get away with telling you."

"I don't think you're kidding," Donovan said not very pleasantly.

"He wasn't," Dulles said. "You've heard, I'm sure, that the only way a secret known to three people can remain a secret is if two of the three are dead?"

"But you agreed--in what we lawyers call 'a condition of employment'--that there would be no secrets between us. Remember that?"

"And if it were not for your buddy Franklin," Graham said, "both Allen and I would happily live up to that condition of employment. But you keep telling him things you shouldn't."

"To rain on your parade, Alex," Donovan said, "my buddy Franklin happens to be the President of the United States."

Dulles put in pointedly: "And who has in his immediate circle a number of people--especially the Vice President--who I would be reluctant to trust with any secret, much less this one, as far as I could throw the White House."

"This secret is one we really don't want to get to Uncle Joe Stalin via Mr. Henry A. Wallace's close friends in the Russian Embassy," Graham said.

They had had this argument, or ones very like it, many times before.

In any conventional organization, in ordinary times, subordinates don't challenge the boss; if they do, the boss gets rid of them. The Office of Strategic Services was not a conventional organization, and these were not ordinary times.

William J. Donovan was the director of the Office of Strategic Services, which in theory answered to General George C. Marshall, the Army's chief of staff, but in practice only to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Allen W. Dulles and Alejandro F. Graham were the OSS deputy directors for Europe and the Western Hemisphere, respectively. They were both uniquely qualified for their roles. Both were prepared--in other words, were privy to all of the OSS's secrets--to take over at a moment's notice if anything should happen to Donovan.