The Honor of Spies

The truth was that while all three had great admiration for one another, they often didn't like one another very much, although Dulles and Graham liked each other much better than either did Donovan. For his part, Donovan, realizing how important Dulles and Graham were to the OSS, very often passed over clear insubordination from them that he absolutely would not have tolerated from anyone else.

He was doing so now.

Graham's remark What Allen and I were discussing when you burst uninvited in here was how little we could get away with telling you had quietly enraged him. He hadn't actually taken a deep breath and counted to ten to avoid blowing up, but he had told himself that he had to be careful. Blowing up--no matter how justified--would have been counterproductive.

"You are going to tell me, aren't you, Allen, exactly what it is you don't want Vice President Wallace to pass on to our Russian allies?"

Dulles met his eyes.

"Reluctantly, Bill, I will," Dulles said. "Alex and I had just agreed that the President will inevitably ask you what was going on in the Hotel Washington, and that it would be best if we prepared you for the question."

"And what was going on at the Hotel Washington? You don't mean with Putzi Hanfstaengl?"

Both Dulles and Graham nodded.

Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl was another Columbia University classmate of President Roosevelt and Director Donovan.

The scion of a wealthy Munich publishing family, he had been attracted to Hitler and National Socialism in its early days. Among other things, Hanfstaengl had loaned Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party propagandist, the money to start up the Volkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

He became part of Hitler's inner circle, but as he became progressively more disenchanted with Hitler and the Thousand-Year Reich, Hitler became progressively more disenchanted with Hanfstaengl. A friend warned Hanfstaengl that he was about to have an SS-engineered accident, and Hanfstaengl fled Germany.

In the United States, Hanfstaengl looked up Roosevelt and Donovan. Both helped him get settled, and he began working in the family's New York office. When war came, he was automatically an enemy alien. Under the law, and especially because of his known ties to the Nazi regime, he was required to be incarcerated as a threat to national security.

On the other hand, Hanfstaengl's judgment of how senior Nazi officials and top-ranking military officers would react in a given circumstance was obviously of great value to Roosevelt. But equally obviously, Hanfstaengl could not be seen wandering around the White House, and picking his brain would be difficult if he were locked up somewhere in the Arizona desert with the other German threats to American National Security.

The solution proposed by Donovan and ordered executed by the commander in chief saw Hanfstaengl incarcerated under military guard in a suite in the Hotel Washington, a stone's throw from the White House. The guard was U.S. Army Sergeant Egon Hanfstaengl, who called his prisoner "Poppa."

Roosevelt would visit his old pal by having his wheelchair rolled into a laundry truck at the White House. The truck would then drive to the basement service entrance of the Hotel Washington, and Roosevelt would then be wheeled through the kitchen to an elevator operated by a Secret Service agent and taken to Hanfstaengl's suite.

"What were you doing with Hanfstaengl?" Donovan demanded. "And who was there?"

"Originally, myself," Graham said. "And Howard Hughes. And Cletus Frade. And a German lieutenant colonel named Frogger. And then the President came in."

"What the hell is this all about?" Donovan snapped. "And start at the beginning."

His control then suddenly disappeared.

"You took Cletus Frade to see Hanfstaengl?" he demanded as spittle flew. "And some German officer? You better have a goddamned good reason."

Dulles said softly: "How about a chance--admittedly not a very good one, but a chance--to eliminate Hitler? To remove Der Fuhrer permanently from this vale of tears?"

It was a long moment before Donovan replied.

"I can't believe that either of you, even half in the bag as you are, would joke about something like that."

"We're not," Graham said simply. "And if you can keep your Irish temper under control, Bill, I'll tell you what has happened."

"Have at it," Donovan snapped.

"Hoover's head man in Buenos Aires--a fellow named Milton Leibermann, who learned to speak Spanish when he was an FBI agent in Spanish Harlem--defied J. Edgar's strict orders to have no contact with the OSS down there by bringing to Cletus Frade the commercial counselor of the German Embassy and his wife, who had deserted their posts and come to him asking for asylum."

"Why did he do that?" Donovan asked.