Eisenhower's Spy Read online

  There, of course, was the clincher, Buchanan thought.

  Anti-communism.

  The bulwark of mid-twentieth-century American foreign policy. He took a break to open his window and open his door to allow a breeze. The sun was still blasting the building. He went to the hall for water then returned to the briefing notes.

  There were uncountable contradictions of pro-Hitler anti-communisms, he noted as he set back to reading.

  During World War Two, Franco’s regime rescued somewhere in the realm of fifty thousand Jews from occupied countries of Europe. Spain provided visas for thousands of French Jews to transit across Spain en route to Portugal to escape the Nazis. Spanish diplomats protected four thousand Jews living in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. At least thirty thousand Jews were allowed to pass through Spain in the first half of the war. But in January 1943, the German embassy in Spain told the Spanish government that it had two months to remove its Jewish citizens from Western Europe. Spain complied.

  After the war, Franco refused to recognize Israel as a legitimate state. The Francoist regime's official policy claimed the existence of an international cabal of Jews and Communists against Spain. Under the Francoist regime, Jews, along with other non-Catholic communities, were heavily discriminated against. Worship of non-Catholic religions was only allowed in private. Only Catholic ceremonies were permitted in public places.

  After the end of World War Two, Spain was excluded from the Marshall Plan, unlike other neutral countries in Europe. Franco allowed many former Nazis and other former Fascists, to flee to Spain. Hundreds of high-ranking Nazis found refuge in Spain, plus many Nazi refugees of lesser rank. Thousands obtained Spanish passports and new identities.

  “Obviously,” read the notes, “this is of growing interest within the Central Intelligence Agency for reasons too plentiful to enumerate here. A world of possibilities presents itself.”

  Franco appointed himself Caudillo de España, proclaiming himself as a de facto regent for life. Absent a king, Franco took on the trappings of a monarch. He wore the uniform of a Captain General, a rank traditionally reserved in Spain for the King. He established his residence in El Pardo Palace in Madrid. At public functions, he walked under a canopy, perhaps to discourage snipers left over from the civil war as much as keep with the presumptive regal bearing. His portrait appeared on most Spanish coins and postage stamps.

  “The General recently also added the phrase por la G. de Dios, [by the grace of God], to Spanish currency adjacent to his likeness. The phrase is usually part of the style of monarchs, including those of Spain,” said the brief file.

  Buchanan finished the final line of the sixteen pages, so struck by the final line that he repeated it aloud.

  “Por la grazia de Dios.”

  A voice intruded. “By the grace of God?” came a question from the doorway.

  Buchanan’s head bolted upright. At the door, in suit and tie, was Mike Edelstein, whose office was two doors down.

  “Sorry,” Edelstein said next. “Did I startle you?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’m reading about a certain country that speaks Spanish.”

  “Must be some kick-ass, exciting reading,” Edelstein said.

  Buchanan shifted gears. “Hey. I’m glad you came by,” he said. “Craig Gilmartin came by earlier. I might be getting an assignment out of the country. Some of my cases are going to go to you.”

  “Oh, perfect. Just what I need.”

  “Sorry about that, partner. Nothing I can -” A thought crashed in on him and his gaze dived to his watch. “Holy hell! What time is it?”

  “Six-twenty,” Edelstein said, confirming what Buchanan saw on his watch. “That’s why I was wondering if you were planning to stay overnight.”

  Buchanan bolted to his feet, assembled his briefing notes into their file envelope, and stuffed them into his attaché case.

  “Something important?” Edelstein asked, preparing to duck out of the way.

  “Meeting my wife for dinner!” he said.

  Edelstein gave him a wave and was gone.

  Buchanan skipped the elevator, which often had a wait at that hour, and darted down the steps. He folded his suit jacket over his arm, held the attaché case like a football, and did a quick jog in the direction of his car in the parking lot.

  He arrived at the restaurant at six fifty-five, his shirt wet from a second light sprint through traffic and across city blocks. Ann was waiting at their usual table – Cora always saved it for them – a knowing grin and a gin and tonic parked in front of her.

  “Come on in and relax, Mr. Buchanan. Natty Bo?” asked Cora when she saw Buchanan enter.

  “Natty Bo,” he said. “Definitely.”

  By the time he had rolled up his sleeves, the waitress, who knew him, had reappeared with a twenty-ounce draft of Natty Bo: National Bohemian Beer.

  He settled in. It was the first time he had relaxed all day.

  Chapter 5

  Washington, D.C. – August 3, 1950 – Late evening

  After dinner and after returning home, Buchanan settled into a chair in his living room and read the back end of the Agency files. In essence, the documents in front of him were background, but one was twenty pages, one was sixteen and the other was thirty-one. The reports were from the very heart of Alan Dulles’s territory, but Buchanan sensed Bedell Smith’s fingerprints on them, both in spirit and in a Machiavellian air.

  What was spelled out in print was a jolt, a punch in the face right out of the past. Buchanan, in reviewing, felt as if it were the mid-1940s all over again and he was a much younger man trying to fight for the country he believed in and survive at the same time.

  In November of 1942, almost eight years earlier but a world and a lifetime in the past, Buchanan had been serving his country as an infantry captain in the United States Army's First Armored Division. Torch was a combined British-American pincer operation against Rommel in North Africa. Operation Torch was under the command of a West Point graduate who had never seen combat but who was a shrewd commander and strategist. He was still in the news in 1950.

  The man’s name was Dwight David Eisenhower and in November of 1942, he had been appointed Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force of the North African Theater of Operations. The impending campaign was planned underground within the Rock of Gibraltar. The U.S. Army’s First Armored Division, Buchanan’s division, was part of Torch. A big part.

  Despite some confusion and indecision at the outset of the operation, the allied operation outflanked and outgunned their German, Vichy French, and Italian adversaries. They bypassed the Axis defense on the Mareth Line in late March 1943 and squeezed the Axis forces until the Axis forces in Africa surrendered on May 13, 1943.

  The invasion of Sicily, which Eisenhower also oversaw, followed two months later, during which Buchanan won two silver stars. He also earned two purple hearts: twice during fighting near Palermo Buchanan had been hit by enemy fire, once in the leg, once in the shoulder. Two other times bullets came so close to his head they shattered the boulders behind which he had taken cover. Italian troops had already fled and deserted. The bullets were courtesy of a savage German SS suicide unit dug in to slow the inevitable Allied advance northward to Rome.

  A noncom who fought with him, a M/Sgt. Matty Shannon from New Jersey, smiled as Buchanan brushed rock fragments off his uniform for the second time the same afternoon.

  “Better keep your head down, Cap,” grinned the tenacious Shannon, “the thing about luck is it eventually runs out.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Sarge,” Buchanan answer. “You keep your smart-ass Irish head down, too, huh?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” Shannon smiled and flashed him an ”okay” sign, thumb and forefinger.

  The next day the luck ran out for Shannon. A German sniper put a bullet through his neck from an abandoned church tower a hundred meters away. Buchanan crawled through fifty meters of debris and spotted the sniper. He patiently waited for the
German sniper to poke his head up once again. When he did, Buchanan killed him and felt good about it. There was perhaps no hatred within Buchanan that was stronger than his hatred for the SS units.

  Buchanan never expected to survive the fighting in North Africa and Italy.

  Somehow he did.

  As an American officer fluent in Italian, he became an interpreter for his unit, as well as an adviser to the command of the American Fifth Army, following a transfer to a unit where he was needed for his language skills.

  As a soldier in the Fifth Army, he remained under General Eisenhower’s command, though eventually Ike, as everyone called him even then, returned to England to assist in the planning of the invasion of northern Europe. As Buchanan remained in Italy through December of 1943, Eisenhower became the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

  Buchanan had been among the first American soldiers to reach the center of Rome late at night on June 5, 1944, initiating the liberation of the magnificent, ancient city under heavy gunfire. Rome had been the first of the three Axis powers' capitals captured by Allied forces. Its recapture was a significant victory for the Allies and the new American commanding officer who led the final offensive, Lieutenant General Mark Clark. Hours later, hundreds of miles to the northwest, the momentous invasion of Normandy would begin.

  Buchanan remained in Rome for three months. Then, his reputation as an interpreter growing, he was sent to Paris shortly after that city’s liberation. He was assigned to an intelligence unit, working with officers of de Gaulle’s Free French forces, some of them Spanish by birth, as well as with the American high command. He was finally sent onward to Berlin, where he worked again in intelligence.

  Berlin was a learning experience he would never forget. The city was devastated. Buchanan became part of an intelligence unit. Mobs of bedraggled civilians wandered the streets, looking for missing relatives. A handful of crazy Nazi diehard snipers made Allied movement hazardous. Most blocks were rubble or blocked by army checkpoints. At times, Buchanan was part of a mixed American-French-British-Soviet artillery squad rooting out the snipers and executing them on sight.

  In the bargain, he enhanced his skills in the Russian and French languages and acquired some new ones from the French soldiers who had been born in Spain. He learned to distrust Red Army intelligence and the shifty, thick-browed thugs who were turning into the East Berlin secret state police. As the war ended and the mop-up campaign concluded in Berlin, he developed an even deeper hatred for Hitler, the Nazi party, those who had enabled them, those who now apologized for them, and the atrocities that they had committed.

  The films and photos that Eisenhower had insisted on recording were now circulating both in the western and military press, with the most horrifying ones in the military commands. It was sickening. The images would stay with Buchanan forever, as well as the first-hand knowledge of what Nazism and run-away nationalism had done to so many innocent people. It was not something he could ever put aside or forget. It was imprinted on him as indelibly as his battle scars.

  Now, as he edged into these files in the sanctity of his apartment several years later, it all came back. These files in front of him were about several venal men who had evaded justice. He paused to go to a special shelf in his small kitchen where he kept whiskey. He poured himself three ounces of the best Scotch he had.

  He returned to his chair. He reopened the files. Ann had disappeared into the bedroom and had put some soft music on the radio.

  He went back to the files.

  “The Nuremberg trials sent Hitler’s senior henchmen to the gallows or long stretches in prison,” wrote someone identified as “GH-65/w” as the first file began. “But many others escaped. With barely any public notice, hundreds of middling and low-ranking war criminals eluded justice at Nuremberg and subsequent efforts to apprehend them. They obtained false papers, in some cases false passports, packed their bags, gathered their wealth and families, and vanished to various safe havens. Among the distant havens, Uruguay and Argentine. Among the closer ones, Francoist Spain.”

  Legends followed the escapees. There were tales of U-boats packed with Nazi gold docking on the coast of Patagonia. Pulp novels conjured up a shadowy Fourth Reich of mosquitoes, swastikas, and eugenic laboratories in the Amazon jungle and Andean foothills. Some fantastical accounts – borderline farcical at times - had the Führer himself in a Panama hat somewhere clipping orchids as Eva Braun sat by beatifically in a sundress.

  The reality was more prosaic but still sinister.

  Hundreds, possibly thousands, had escaped through the "ratlines." They had found sanctuary, many starting in Spain, before continuing onward. Now in 1950, five years after the war had ended, Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, was still at large. So was Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons.” Erich Priebke, a notorious Waffen SS captain was out there. Their trails had been scrubbed clean. Some had escaped through Italy. Some had gone through Spain.

  Buchanan kept reading. It wasn’t pleasant. The names and horrors kept coming.

  Dr. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death." Walter Rauff, an SS colonel, instrumental in the construction and implementation of the mobile gas chambers responsible for killing an estimated 100,000 people. Franz Stangl, nicknamed the “White Death” for his habit of wearing a white uniform and carrying a whip. Stangl was the architect of the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program under which the Nazis killed those with mental and physical disabilities. Josef Schwammberger, an SS commandant in charge of three labor camps. Brandishing a horsewhip and a German Shepherd trained to attack people, he organized the mass execution of five hundred Jewish prisoners at the Przemyśl camp. He once personally executed thirty-five prisoners at Przemyśl, shooting them in the back of their necks, and dispatched thousands of Jews to the Auschwitz death camp. In Mielec, Poland, in 1944, he cleansed the city of Jews.

  “The paths of these men were littered with corpses,” wrote GH65-w. “There is a good chance that all are still alive. One would think that shame or the outrage of the civilized world would follow these murderers, and yet public contrition seems in short supply.”

  Buchanan sipped his whiskey and flipped a page. From the next room, the scent of Ann’s cigarette smoke wafted in his direction. It was strangely comforting.

  “Today in early 1950 there are coastline towns in eastern Spain,” wrote GH65-w, “that resemble a beach resort on the North Sea. The plazas are new and have a vaguely Teutonic design. High and low German is spoken on the street, beautiful tall, blonde Frauleins sit in cafes or wear the modern ‘bikini’ swimwear from France. The restaurants serve – according to the season - bratwurst, schnitzel, fondue, venison, and chocolate cake, and there are remodeled churches, once Catholic, now Lutheran, with Gothic spires. It makes one wonder who won the war. It makes one wonder what so many American soldiers died for.”

  GH65-w was not a happy researcher and Buchanan was not a happy reader. He moved past the first section. The rest of the report was divided into thirds, each ten to fifteen pages.

  Three names stood out: Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian, Walter Bergmann, a German chemist and physician from Saxony, and Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle, a Belgian. Buchanan had a long memory for accused war criminals from hunting them down in Berlin in 1945. These names rang distant, unpleasant bells. They were lesser luminaries than the bigger names that GH65-w had already referenced, but they were presumably nearer and more susceptible to capture.

  Maybe.

  Each perpetrator had his section as part of the larger selection of three. Buchanan attacked his reading. Otto Skorzeny had been an SS-Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS. During the war years, he had been central to the removal from power of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy. Horthy had been a troublemaker for Hitler. Horthy's reluctance to contribute to the German war effort and the Holocaust in Hungary, as well as refusing to hand over more than 600,000 of the 825,000 Hungarian Jews to German authorities, coupled with several attempts to strike a secret deal with the
Allies of World War Two after it had become obvious that Axis would lose the war, eventually led the Germans to invade and take control of the country in March 1944 in Operation Margarethe.

  Skorzeny also helped plan the raid by German paratroopers and Waffen-SS commandos that freed Benito Mussolini from captivity on September 12, 1943. Hitler, after meeting with the rescued former dictator, then put Mussolini in charge of the Italian Social Republic, a Nazi puppet regime in Northern Italy. In late April 1945, in the wake of a near-total defeat, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland. Italian communist partisans captured them and executed them by firing squad on April 28, 1945 near Lake Como. Il Duce’s body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a local gas station service station to publicly confirm his demise.

  Buchanan remembered being in an army barracks in Berlin when the news of Mussolini’s death came across Armed Forces Radio. Everyone in the room stood and cheered.

  Skorzeny led Operation Greif, in which German soldiers infiltrated Allied lines by using their opponents' uniforms, equipment, language, and customs. Buchanan remembered the operation from personal experience. He remembered the bitter cold, the men with trench foot, frostbite, pneumonia, and battle wounds, especially from splinters from artillery bursts in the trees. He remembered bullets coming at him from every direction, mostly from Mauser pistols. The enemy was that close. Buchanan’s disgust mounted as he read the file. After Skorzeny and his special commandos impersonated American GIs and massacred nearly a hundred American prisoners at Malmedy, the Allied medics were issued 1911 pistols to protect themselves and the wounded.

  Skorzeny escaped from an internment camp in 1948. He hid out on a Bavarian farm for a year and a half, then spent time in Paris and Salzburg, somehow eluding recognition and capture before he disappeared. After that, the trail went cold and so did the file.