The Honor of Spies

They told him the greatest contribution he could make to the Final Victory of the Fatherland was to continue what he was doing with regard to handling the classified files, the dispatch and receipt of the diplomatic pouches, and the decryption of the coded messages the embassy received from the Ministry of Communications after they had received them from the Mackay Cable Corporation.

Neither told him that was sort of a game everyone played. The Mackay Corporation was an American-owned enterprise. They pretended that they did not--either in Lisbon, Portugal, or Berne, Switzerland--make copies of all German traffic and pass them to either the OSS or the U.S. Embassy. And the Germans pretended not to suspect this was going on.

Important messages from or to Berlin were transmitted by "officer courier," which most often meant the pilot, copilot, or flight engineer on the Lufthansa Condor flights between the German and Argentine capitals.

And when these messages reached the Buenos Aires embassy, they were decoded personally by Ambassador von Lutzenberger or Commercial Attache Cranz, not Schneider. Schneider had no good reason--any reason at all--to know the content of the messages.

Cranz picked up the message and read it:

Cranz looked at von Lutzenberger.

"You said Schneider had this waiting for you when you came in this morning?"

Von Lutzenberger nodded.

"A Condor arrived in the wee hours," he said. "Our Johann met it, and the courier gave him that."

"When did you start letting 'Our Johann' decode messages like this?"

"It came that way," von Lutzenberger said, and handed Cranz two envelopes. "The outer one is addressed to 'The Ambassador'; the inner one said 'Sole and Personal Attention of Ambassador von Lutzenberger.' "

"Interesting," Cranz said as he very carefully examined both envelopes.

"It could be that they were preparing to send it as a cable, and then for some reason decided to send it on the Condor," von Lutzenberger suggested.

Cranz considered that for a long moment.

"If a Condor was coming, that would keep it out of the hands of Mackay," Cranz said, and then wondered aloud, "Not encrypted?"

Von Lutzenberger shrugged.

"Maybe there wasn't time; the Condor may have been leaving right then. And that brings us to the question: 'What the hell is this all about?' "

"Questions," von Lutzenberger corrected him. " 'Who is this senior officer?' 'What is he going to do once he gets here?' And most important: 'What are we going to do about this?' "

Cranz nodded, signifying he agreed there was more than one question.

"Was there anybody interesting on the Condor?"

"Businessmen, two doctors for the German Hospital. No one interesting."

"Which means the Condor could have been held at Tempelhof."

"Unless that might have delayed the Condor a day, and they wanted to get this to us as soon as possible."

"Which brings us back to: 'What are we going to do about it?' " Cranz said.

"Unless you have some objection, or better suggestion, what I'm going to do is tell Schneider that he is to tell no one anything about the message for me. Then I'm going to call Gradny-Sawz in here as soon as he comes to work, show him this, and tell him that he is to tell no one about it, and that he is responsible for getting the identity card, the driver's license, et cetera, and the apartment."

"And not bring Boltitz and von Wachtstein in on this?"

"And not bring anyone else in on this, anyone else. Then, if it gets out, we will know from whom it came."

Cranz considered that for a long moment, then nodded.

"Raschner?" he asked.

"That's up to you, of course. But I can see no reason why he has to be told about this now."

After a moment, Cranz nodded again.

[FOUR]

Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade

Moron, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

1545 30 August 1943

First Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, Corps of Engineers, AUS, who was an assistant military attache of the United States Embassy, stood outside the door of Base Operations and watched as a South American Airways Lodestar turned on final, dropped its landing gear, and touched smoothly down on the runway.

Pelosi was in uniform and could have posed for a U.S. Army recruiting poster. He wore "pinks and greens," as the Class "A" uniform of green tunic and pink trousers was known. The thick silver cord aiguillette of an attache hung from one of his epaulettes. His sharply creased trousers were "bloused" around his gleaming paratrooper boots.

Silver parachutist's wings were pinned to the tunic. Below the wings were his medals--not the striped ribbons ordinarily worn in lieu thereof. There were just three medals: the Silver Star, the National Defense Service Medal, and the medal signifying service in the American Theatre of Operations.