Hitler's peace

XVII

It was Mike Reilly, the head of the White House Secret Service detail, who decided that I was telling the truth. But it took him a lot of frowning and several fingernails to arrive at the conclusion that if I really had been a German agent then I’d had ample opportunity to take a pop at Roosevelt while I was on the Iowa; or in the president’s study back in Washington. I was beginning to see why the U.S. Treasury wanted to keep the service a secret. It wouldn’t have done to let the Germans know that the president’s safety depended on cheeseheads like Rauff and Pawlikowski.

“I’m sorry about that, Prof,” Reilly told me when his two men had gone. “But they’re paid to be overzealous.”

“I understand. So am I.”

We were meeting on Saturday evening in the magnificent dining room at La Mersa. As soon as Rauff and Pawlikowski left for La Casa Blanca, Reilly had the Joint Chiefs join us, and I told them what I had heard on Radio Berlin.

“Is this confirmed?” asked Admiral Leahy, who was FDR’s personal representative on the Joint Chiefs.

“Yes, sir,” said Reilly. “I took the liberty of radioing the American legation in Cairo and was told that while they had no knowledge of what the Germans were broadcasting, the president’s imminent arrival in Cairo is an open secret. They would be very surprised if the Germans didn’t know about it.”

“So what are the British saying?” General Marshall asked. “This is supposed to be their sphere of influence.”

“They’re saying that eight squadrons of fighter aircraft have been concentrated in Cairo for the protection of the president and Mr. Churchill,” said Reilly. “And that there are more than a hundred antiaircraft guns on the ground, to say nothing of three infantry battalions.”

“And Churchill? What’s his opinion?” asked Admiral King.

“Mr. Churchill is still en route from Malta aboard the HMS Renown, ” Reilly said. “He’s not due in Alexandria until tomorrow.”

“And Eisenhower?”

“General Eisenhower is well aware that security in Cairo has not been the best, sir.”

“That’s a considerable understatement,” General Arnold said.

“If you remember, it was Ike who proposed the conference be moved to Malta.”

“No, Mike, Malta’s no good,” Arnold answered. “There are no decent hotels in Malta.”

This was the kind of diplomacy I could understand. Good hotels made for good foreign policy.

“There’s no decent food and not much water,” Leahy added.

My mind was made up. I didn’t want to go to Malta any more than Arnold.

“Maybe we’re making too much of this,” said Arnold. “Okay, the secret’s out. We were aware of that on the Iowa. All that’s changed is that we know for sure that the krauts are in on the secret. If they were planning a surprise bomber attack, then they’d hardly tell the world on Berlin Radio that they know all about the conference. I mean, that would just put us on our guard. No, they’d say nothing at all about it.”

“What do you think, Prof?” asked Reilly

“I think General Arnold makes a good point. But at the very least, we should be even more vigilant. Deploy a couple of night-fighter squadrons north of Cairo. Bring in some more armored cars. More troops.”

“Makes sense,” agreed Leahy. “What else?”

“Since the two principal targets are the president and Mr. Churchill, perhaps we ought to leave the final decision to them. A short delay in the departure for Cairo might be a good idea, just to give them time for an exchange of telegrams.”

“Mike? What do you think?”

“It couldn’t do any harm to stay here another day,” agreed Reilly. “And it might be better if the president flew at night.”

“That’s true,” said Arnold. “There would be no need for a fighter escort at night.”

“How about this?” I said. “All the Joint Chiefs to fly on Sunday morning, six A.M., as scheduled. But the president doesn’t fly until late Sunday evening, which means he wouldn’t arrive in Cairo until Monday morning. In other words, we fool the world into believing the president is arriving in Cairo at lunchtime on Sunday, when in fact he won’t be there for another twenty hours. That way, if the Germans were to mount an attack, then the president would be safe.”

“Let me get this straight,” said General Marshall. “Are you proposing to use the Joint Chiefs as decoys?” The cavernous dining room at La Mersa seemed to give his words an extra resonance.

“That’s right, sir, yes.”

“I like it,” said Reilly.

“You would,” growled King.

“My suggestion has another advantage,” I added.

“What do you want us to do now?” asked Arnold. “Put up some smoke for German bombers?”

“No, sir. I was thinking that when you all arrived in Cairo, who better than yourselves to evaluate the security situation on the ground for the president? If you get there and decide that the situation warrants a change of location, you could direct the president somewhere else. Alexandria, for example. After all, that’s where Churchill is due to arrive tomorrow morning. And I’m told there are some excellent hotels in Alexandria.”

“I don’t like Alexandria,” said General Marshall. “It’s a hundred miles nearer to Crete, and the last I heard, there were thirty thousand German paratroopers on Crete. Not to mention, the Luftwaffe.”

“Yes, sir, but the Luftwaffe on Crete is mostly all fighters, not bombers,” I said. This was the advantage of being a specialist in German intelligence. I did at least know what I was talking about. “And they’re short of fuel. Of course, we could always choose Khartoum. But the logistics of moving everyone in Cairo a thousand miles to the south might be too much to contemplate.”

“Damn right they are,” muttered King.

“There are no good hotels in Khartoum, in any event. I’m not sure there are even any bad ones.”

I found myself beginning to warm to Arnold.

“Gentlemen,” said Marshall. “I think we’ll just have to hope that for once British defenses are as good as they say they are.”

I went back to La Mersa, had a shower, and checked my mail. There wasn’t any. Poole wanted me to see four of the local sights. Two of the local sights were named Leila and Amel, the other two were called Muna and Widad. But I’d had enough excitement for one day. Besides, I could hardly have looked in my shaving mirror and told myself I was in love with Diana with some Tunisian broad’s lipstick on my shirt collar. So I had a lousy dinner and went to bed early, although, as things turned out, I was not alone.

Early on the morning of Sunday, November 21, I awoke, with a couple of flea bites. It was a bad start. And when I looked in my shaving mirror I didn’t feel I had gained very much from declining Ridgeway Poole’s offer of hospitality. Awakening with a couple of Tunisian girls had to be better than awakening with a couple of flea bites. Things always look a lot different in the morning.

At six A.M. I accompanied the Joint Chiefs on one of the C-54s leaving the airfield of El Aounia. Ahead of us lay a five-and-a-half-hour flight to Cairo. I was pleased to discover that none of the president’s Secret Service agents were on our plane. The last thing I wanted was to endure the further scrutiny of Agents Rauff and Pawlikowski.

Approaching Cairo from the west, we enjoyed a spectacular view of the Pyramids before putting down at an RAF airfield in the western desert. Minutes later, the RAF were driving the Joint Chiefs and their liaison officers to the Mena House hotel, near the Pyramids at Giza. I was driven to Shepheard’s Hotel in the center of Cairo.

“Imshi,” yelled my driver, or, as often, “Fuck off,” as he steered the little Austin Seven between ancient-looking Thorneycroft buses, nervous flocks of sheep, cruelly laden asses, and other impatient drivers.

“From America, sir?” asked the driver. He was a blue-eyed, hatchet-faced man, as lean as a garden hose, and by the look of things, just as wet. Sweat rolled out of his wavy short black hair, down his thin white neck, and underneath his khaki shirt collar, to join a large damp patch between his shoulder blades.

“Yes. And you?”

“Manchester, England, sir. I used to dream of being somewhere hot, sir. And then I came here. Did you ever see such a bloody place, sir? Bloody chaos, that’s what it is.”

“Seen much action?”

“None since I’ve been here. At least not from the bloody Germans. You’ll see the antiaircraft searchlights at night, but there’s little chance of any bombers coming this far south. Not since the summer. By the way, sir, the name is Coogan, sir. Corporal Frank Coogan, and I’ll be your regular driver while you’re here in Cairo.”

“Nice to meet you, Frank.”

At last Coogan turned down a side street and I caught my first sight of the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, an ungainly building at whose large front terrace dozens of British and American officers were seated. Coogan pulled up, waved away an Arab guide wearing a bright red tarboosh, and, collecting my cases off the luggage rack, led the way inside.

Battling my way through officers of all ranks and races, prosperous Levantine businessmen, and several dubious-looking women, I presented myself at the reception desk and glanced around at the Moorish-style hall with its vast pillars, thick and lotus-shaped, and the grand staircase that swept upward, flanked by two tall caryatids of ebony. It was like being on the set of a film by Cecil B. DeMille.

There were three messages for me: one from Donovan, suggesting that we meet for a drink in the hotel’s long bar at three o’clock; an invitation for dinner the following evening from my old friend, the Princess Elena Pontiatowska, at her house in Garden City; and a letter from Diana.

I dismissed Coogan, and, thinking I might try one last time to lose Donovan’s case, I let the hotel manager organize its delivery to my hotel room. But fifteen minutes later, I was safely ensconced in my suite with all my bags, including Donovan’s. Throwing open the shutters and the windows, I stepped onto the balcony and surveyed the rooftops and the street below. There was no doubt about it: Donovan had done me proud; I could not have chosen better myself.

I put off reading Diana’s letter for as long as I could, the way you do when you’re afraid of finding out a truth. I even smoked a cigarette while I contemplated it from a safe distance. Then I read it. Several times. And there was one passage in her letter to which I paid particular attention.

You mentioned the injustice of my walking out on you as I did and avoiding you these last few days. I’m afraid I was and still am very angry with you, Willard. The person with whom I had spent that evening, when I was supposed to be at the movies, was an old friend of mine, Barbara Charisse. I don’t think you’ve ever met her, but she has heard of you and, recently, she had been in London. She’s also an old friend of Lord Victor Rothschild, whom I believe you do know. It seemed she had been at a party you were also at, and had heard from some pansy that while you were in London you were sleeping with someone called Rosamond Lehmann. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but it irritated me the way you quizzed me about whether I’d seen that film or not, and your unspoken assumption that you had occupied the moral high ground by not asking me about it further. And I thought to myself, Fuck you, mister. Fuck you, for making me feel like I was the betrayer. So, since you ask, I find that I haven’t really changed that opinion. I also find that I’m not likely to change it, either. Fuck you, Willard.

I folded Diana’s letter up and put it in my breast pocket, right next to the aching hole where my heart had been. A few minutes before three o’clock, I went down to the lobby. Outside on the hotel terrace someone was playing a piano, badly, while the lobby was buzzing loudly with conversations, mostly in English. I went into the Long Bar, forbidden to ladies, and glanced around as a group of slightly drunk British officers clapped their hands loudly for service and shouted Arabic words they mistakenly believed would summon a waiter.

Almost immediately I saw Donovan, seated with his back to a pillar and sweating profusely in a white tropical suit that was maybe a size too small for his retired football player’s physique.

Approaching the silver-haired figure, I reviewed all of the prejudices I was likely to encounter with this sixty-year-old Hoover Republican, this millionaire lawyer, Irish Catholic decorated war hero. To my certain knowledge, the general had been away from Washington since July, first visiting his son-a lieutenant who was aide to Admiral Hall in Algiers-then in Sicily, then in Quebec, and, for the most part of October and November, in Cairo, trying to foment an anti-Nazi revolution in Hungary and the Balkans.

“Good afternoon, General.” Even as I shook Donovan’s strong hand and sat down, he was catching the waiter’s eye, stubbing out his cigarette, and checking the time on the gold pocket watch he’d pulled from his vest.

“I like a man who is punctual,” said Donovan. “God knows that isn’t easy in this country. How was the voyage? And how is the president?”

I told him about the Willie D. incident and mentioned my suspicions regarding the disappearance of Ted Schmidt and the death of his wife back in Washington. “It’s my opinion that there was a German spy aboard the Iowa, ” I said. “And that having killed Schmidt, he radioed someone in the States to do the same to Mrs. Schmidt. I think someone wanted to make sure that an investigation into Cole’s murder was closed down as quickly as possible, and the Welles scandal made this easy. But my guess is that Cole was on to a German spy. Possibly the same German spy who was aboard the Iowa. ”

“That makes some sense.”

“I asked Ridgeway Poole if he could radio the Campus and find out some more about Mrs. Schmidt’s accident.”

Donovan winced a little, and I remembered, too late, that he hated Washington’s nickname for the OSS HQ almost as much as he hated his own. The “Wild Bill” cognomen by which he was known referred to the Donovan who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1918. These days, the general preferred to project a more sober, responsible image than that of the dauntless battlefield hero. Personally, I didn’t like heroes very much. Especially when they were officers. And whenever I looked at Donovan I wondered how many men in his platoon his heroism had got killed.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about German spies if I were you,” Donovan said as the waiter came over at last. He ordered a lemonade.

My jaw dropped. For a moment, I was too astonished at what the general had just said to order anything at all. I asked for a beer and, when the waiter had gone, an explanation.

“We’re at war with the Germans,” I said. “German intelligence is my special field. I’m supposed to be a liaison officer between you and the president. Why would I not worry about German spies? Especially if one were so close to the president and might already have murdered someone.”

“Because I happen to know that the last thing the Germans want right now is to kill President Roosevelt,” answered Donovan. “For the last few weeks, my man in Ankara has been conducting talks with Franz von Papen, the German ambassador. Von Papen is in touch with leading figures in the German government and army, with a view to negotiating a separate peace between the Germans and the Western allies.”

“Does the president know about this?”

“Of course he does. Goddamn it, do you think I’d do something like this on my own initiative? FDR has an election in 1944, and I’d say the last thing he wants is to send a million American boys into battle unless he absolutely has to.”

“But what about ‘unconditional surrender’?”

Donovan shrugged. “A bargaining ploy, designed to bring Hitler to his senses.”

“And the Russians, what about them?”

“Our intelligence indicates that they’ve been making their own peace feelers, in Stockholm.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Then what’s the point of all this Big Three stuff?”

Donovan straightened his right leg, painfully. “Peace negotiations take time,” he said. “Especially when they’re being conducted in secret. Besides, they could easily fail. What’s more, we think Sextant One and Sextant Two will help to keep the Germans focused.”

Sextant One was the official code name of the Cairo Conference, and I presumed Sextant Two referred to the Big Three Conference itself.

“I guess that explains a lot,” I said, although, in truth, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what it did explain. It explained why the Joint Chiefs had not been more worried about coming to Cairo. But none of that explained why the Schmidts were dead. Unless, of course, Ted Schmidt really had thrown himself over the side of the boat, and Debbie Schmidt had met a genuine traffic accident.

At the same time, I was aware that even if a separate peace negotiation was being pursued with one German faction, there were probably others, the fanatics, still intent on winning the war, whatever the cost.

One thing was clear, at any rate. Kim Philby had been right to be concerned about American peace moves in Ankara. Donovan had just given me the high-level confirmation Philby had been looking for; that the Americans really were of a mind to sell out the Russians. But who could I tell? A Russian at Sextant Two, wherever that might be? That hardly seemed practical. And what of the Russians themselves? Was it really possible, as Donovan had said, that they, too, were trying to negotiate a separate peace, in Stockholm?

Our drinks arrived. Caring nothing for Donovan’s opinion now, I wished I had asked for a double brandy. I lit a cigarette. I could taste the ash even as I smoked it. I felt certain that there was something important Donovan was not telling me. But what? Was it possible that the secret peace negotiations with the Germans were making better progress than Donovan had seemed to indicate?

“So where is Sextant Two to be held?” Seeing Donovan hesitate, I added, “Or am I going to have to tune in to Radio Berlin to find out?”

“I heard about what happened.” Donovan smiled. “One of those Secret Service idiots contacted me on the radio to check out your bona fides. A guy named Pawlikowski. As if one of my own people could be a spy.”

I smiled politely and wondered what Donovan would say if he ever did find out that I had once spied for the NKVD.

“In which case you won’t mind telling me where Sextant Two is going to take place.”

“The Joint Chiefs are kind of itchy about the security situation here in Cairo,” said Donovan. “Everybody knows that the president and Churchill are here. But it wouldn’t do to let too many people in on the location for our next port of call.”

“But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”

Donovan nodded. “It’s Teheran.”

I pulled a face. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I am. Why? What do you mean?”

“Whose brilliant idea was that? Iran is the most pro-German country in the Middle East, that’s why. The Joint Chiefs must be crazy.”

“I had no idea that your knowledge of German affairs extended so far east,” observed Donovan.

“Look, sir, the British invaded Iran, or Persia as it was then, to protect Russia’s back door. They deposed the last shah and put his son in his place. The Iranians hate the British and they hate the Russians. I don’t think there’s a worse place for a Big Three Conference.” I laughed with disbelief. “Teheran is full of Nazi agents.”

Donovan shrugged. “I believe it was Stalin’s choice.”

“There’s a Pan-Iranian neo-Nazi movement, and according to our sources, two of the ex-shah’s brothers were in Germany a while ago to enlist Hitler’s help in getting rid of the British.”

Donovan continued to look unperturbed. “There are thirty thousand American troops in Iran and God knows how many British and Russians. I’d say that’s more than enough to ensure the security of the Big Three.”

“And there are three-quarters of a million Iranians who live in Teheran. Very few of whom are on our side in this war. As for the tribesmen in the north of the country, they’re pro-Nazi to a man. If that’s Stalin’s idea of security, then he must have a screw loose.”

“From what I’ve heard, he has. But don’t worry about it. All the leading pro-German leaders have been arrested.”

“I hope you’re right, sir.”

“Teheran’s as safe as we are here in Shepheard’s,” insisted Donovan.

I glanced around the Long Bar. It was true, there were so many British and American uniforms I could easily have believed I was back in London.

“So relax,” said Donovan. “See the sights. Enjoy yourself. They won’t need you very much at Mena House. Not unless you speak Chinese. Besides. I’ve got a job for you while you’re here. You brought that suitcase from General Strong?”

My heart sank. “Yes, sir. It’s up in my room.”

“Good. Tomorrow, we’ll take a ride over to Rustum Buildings. That’s where the Special Operations executive and British intelligence have their headquarters in Cairo. The sooner we get started on that Bride material, the better.”