Hitler's peace

XVI

The atmosphere around Roosevelt grew a lot more tense-certainly among the members of his Secret Service detail-when my idea about a German spy aboard the Iowa became more generally known.

On one particular occasion, however, the defensive posture assumed by FDR’s bodyguards seemed to go beyond what was reasonable. The morning of the nineteenth, the Iowa sighted the fourth escort group; it comprised the light cruiser Brooklyn and five destroyers, two of them American and three British. While watching the new escort group through binoculars on the flag bridge, FDR’s cape blew off. A young seaman fetching the cape off the air-search antenna had climbed up to return it to the president, only to find himself wrestled to the deck by Agents Pawlikowski and Rowley, guns drawn and faces contorted with alarm.

“For Christ’s sake,” yelled Admiral King, “are you two guys too dumb to see that the boy was only fetching the president his cape?”

That was the moment when Captain McCrea turned on me. “This is all your fault,” he hissed at me. “I blame you and your loose talk about German spies for this.”

It was a nice sentiment. I went back to my cabin, filled a glass with scotch, stood in front of the mirror, and toasted myself silently. “Here’s to the satisfaction of being right,” I told myself.

After that I kept to my cabin, rereading the books I had brought and drinking up much of what remained of Ted Schmidt’s supply of Mount Vernon. I even wrote the letter of condolence to his widow, and then rewrote it when I was sober, editing out all the stuff about how his last words had been about her. But that didn’t make any difference. It still left me feeling depressed as hell. I couldn’t help but let my mind’s eye picture Debbie Schmidt reading it and then, in my romantic little scenario, flagellating herself over the way she had behaved toward him. A psychiatrist would probably have told me I had in fact written another letter to Diana.

The State Department would certainly have forwarded the letter to Mrs. Schmidt. But thinking to speed its journey home by writing Schmidt’s home address on the envelope, I searched his bag, looking for his address book, only to discover it was missing. For a brief stupid moment, I considered reporting the theft to the captain, and then rejected the idea. McCrea would hardly have thanked me for alleging that yet another crime had been committed aboard his precious battleship.

It was just my luck that whoever had stolen Ted Schmidt’s address book should have ignored Donovan’s Louis Vuitton suitcase containing all those Bride intercepts.

But who had taken the address book? After all, what good was a State Department employee’s address book in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? It looked even less useful now that we were about to land in North Africa.

At 1800 hours the combined task group reached a point about twenty miles west of Cape Spartel, not far from Tangier. All the ships went to general quarters, for now we were in range of enemy attack from the air. The voyage was almost over.

The Iowa and its escort group were due to come through the Straits of Gibraltar at night, under a blackout. That had been the intention, but powerful Spanish searchlights had managed to mark the ship out, providing a very easy target for any German submarines that might have been in the area. I’ve never liked cruises very much. But we were lucky.

The ship finally anchored at Oran, where Mike Reilly, the head of the White House Secret Service detail, came aboard to supervise the president’s disembarkation. With the ship’s entire crew mustered on deck, FDR was lifted into a motorized whaleboat on the port side of the ship and then lowered into the water, whereupon his boat came around to the gangway and Harry Hopkins and the Secret Service climbed in alongside their beaming president.

I had expected to want to kiss dry land when once again I was standing upon it. Instead, I almost fell on it. It felt strange to be on land, and I lurched unsteadily as my legs, used to compensating for the movement of a ship’s deck underneath my feet, adjusted suddenly to being on solid ground. But it’s also possible I was just a little drunk.

There was hardly time to look around Algeria’s second-largest city and its busy port, where infamously the British had bombed the French navy, before a U.S. Army sergeant with a Wiener schnitzel ear and a nose like a bicycle saddle asked me for my name. When I gave it to him he handed me a slip of paper showing two numbers, and directed John Weitz and me to the car that, as a part of the presidential motorcade, would transport us fifty miles to the United States Army airstrip at La Senia.

It was nine o’clock in the morning and the air was already as warm as a Louisiana bread oven. I took off my coat and fanned myself with my hat. The boat landing was thick with the oily exhausts of U.S. Military Police motorcycles as they revved loudly, impatient to escort the presidential party through the streets of the thousand-year-old city. It looked like a proper seaport with a castle and a church, and reminded me of a coastal town in the south of France. I imagined that was the way the French liked it. The only trouble was that there were three-quarters of a million Algerian Arabs living in it. The place looked friendly enough. But then, we weren’t French.

John Weitz and I found our car. The American MP driver saluted and handed us some American newspapers, a letter for Weitz, and a telegram for me that made my heart leap like a cat for a moment. The driver was the eager type, keen to show us how well he could drive a car along an empty desert road. Red-haired, red-faced, and red-eyed, as if he had been drinking. He hadn’t. It was the wind and the sand. Algeria seemed to have a monopoly on wind and sand. Red looked over our shoulders and told us that as soon as Mr. Schmidt showed up we could be on our way.

“He won’t be joining us,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“That’s too bad,” said Red. “What should I do with this, sir?” The MP showed me the telegram for Ted Schmidt.

“You can give that to me,” I told him. “And I have a letter for his widow that I’d like you to post for me.”

I climbed into the back of the car, alongside Weitz.

“Thanks again for doing that,” said Weitz. “Writing that letter to Schmidt’s wife. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

I waited until the motorcade was under way before opening my own telegram. The optimist in me had hoped it might have been from Diana. But it was from Donovan, informing me that I should make contact with a Major Poole, the OSS man in Tunis, at the Cafe M’Rabet, that same afternoon.

Schmidt’s telegram was from the State Department. It was dated the previous day, Friday, November 19, and I read it through several times. Ted Schmidt’s widow had been killed in a car accident on Thursday afternoon.

The streets of Oran were lined with U.S. Army soldiers who came to attention as the motorcade swept through. The Algerians standing behind them waved hospitably at the most powerful man in the world, apparently, and his escort. I hardly noticed. The news that both of the people who had been in a position to shed more light on the murder of Thornton Cole were dead preoccupied me.

“Bad news?” asked Weitz.

“It seems that Ted’s widow was involved in a traffic accident the day before yesterday.”

“Oh, God. Is she okay?”

“She’s dead.”

“That’s terrible. What a terrible tragedy.” Weitz shook his head. “Did they have children?”

“No.”

“That’s something, I suppose.”

I leaned forward to speak to Red. “There’s no need to send that letter I gave you,” I told him. “The one for Mr. Schmidt’s widow? It seems she met with a fatal car accident.”

“That’s a rare coincidence,” observed Red.

“Yes, it is,” I said thoughtfully.

This coincidence might be less of a coincidence than it seemed. Debbie Schmidt’s accident may not have been an accident at all. She, too, might have been killed to ensure silence regarding Cole’s true sexual predilection. Which could have meant that I was very possibly the only person alive who knew that Thornton Cole had not been murdered in the scandalous way the Metro Police had believed.

At La Senia Airport half a dozen American C-54s were lined up to fly us the 653 miles to Tunis. And it was only then, as I saw everyone on the airstrip, that I realized just how large the U.S. delegation really was, for many more had joined it since our arrival in Oran. The Joint Chiefs, their liaison officers, military attaches, Secret Service men-all were lining up to board the planes. The delegation was set to get even bigger when yet more diplomats joined it in Tunis and Cairo.

To my surprise, I found myself assigned to the first plane, along with the president, Mike Reilly, the president’s personal bodyguard, and Harry Hopkins, whom I sat next to.

Reilly was a smooth-faced, dark-haired man, with hooded eyes and the hard look of a former bootlegger. He came from Montana, but it might just as well have been Connemara, with a touch of the Spanish Armada. He wore a double-breasted, nicely cut flannel suit and was never very far from Roosevelt’s right ear, into which he would sometimes whisper something important. He had dropped out of George Washington, where he had studied law, to work for the Farm Credit Administration, investigating cases of fraudulent lending agencies. Reilly transferred to the Secret Service in 1935, and in that capacity had always worked at the White House. This I learned from Harry Hopkins while we waited in the plane for Reilly and one of the other agents to carry Roosevelt bodily up the aircraft steps. Once the president was aboard, the doors were closed and the C-54 began to taxi up the runway.

“Did you know that there’s a town called Oran in the state of Iowa?” Hopkins asked me as the four Pratt amp; Whitney engines revved louder. “That’s my home state. Ever been to Sioux City, Professor? Don’t go. That’s my advice. There’s nothing there. My father was from Bangor, Maine, and he went west to look for gold. Never found any. He became a harness maker instead. You know anything about horses?”

I shook my head again.

“Keep it that way. Unpredictable animals. Dad got his leg broke by a runaway team in Chicago. Best thing that ever happened to him. He sued the freight-line owners for ten thousand dollars and bought a harness shop with the proceeds, in a place called Grinnell, Iowa. Don’t ask me why he went there. He hated the place. But we buried him there just the same.”

I smiled, and for the first time I saw why FDR liked having Hopkins around; in addition to a dry sense of humor, which the president seemed to share, there was something very commonsensical about Harry Hopkins.

Three and a half hours after leaving La Senia we reached El Aounia Airfield, about twelve miles northeast of Tunis. It was less than eight months since Allied forces had inflicted a decisive defeat on Rommel in the area, and wrecked aircraft still littered the ground on both sides of the runway. It was an unnerving sight to behold from the vantage point of a plane that had yet to land safely, even if the wrecks were German planes.

The president’s C-54 was met by his two sons, Elliott and Franklin Junior. Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s ship, the USS Myrant, had suffered bomb damage at Palermo and was undergoing repairs at Gibraltar. At least that was the story they had put out. Meanwhile, Elliott Roosevelt commanded a photo-reconnaissance squadron that was stationed in the area.

We drove through the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage, destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C., to Tunis, where, next to the Zitouna, the city’s largest mosque, FDR and his immediate party were staying in the famous Casa Blanca. Formerly the seat of the Tunisian government, the Casa Blanca was currently being used by General Eisenhower as his operational headquarters. Vacating the Casa Blanca for the duration of the president’s stay, Eisenhower, together with Hopkins and the rest of us, was accommodated in La Marsa, about twenty minutes outside the city center, in a beach-front French colonial house, a great wedding cake of a place with enormous and ornate blue doors.

The city of Tunis was bigger than I had imagined, and I thought it neither very Arab nor very African. Nor, for that matter, very French, either. After a short nap, I took a quick look at the famous souk and the mosque, and then sought out the Cafe M’Rabet, where I was to meet the OSS man in Tunis.

Ridgeway Poole had a Ph. D. in classical archaeology from Princeton and, already the author of one book on Hannibal and the Punic Wars, he had jumped at the chance of working for the OSS just a few miles from Carthage. He had been stationed in Tunis for just three months, working under vice-consular cover, but he knew the area very well, having worked on an important prewar excavation of the Antonine thermal baths. Fluent in Arabic and French, he seemed entirely at home in the cool interior of the cafe, sitting on a little platform, shoes off, smoking a sweet-smelling water pipe and sipping Arab tea.

“Sit down,” he said. “Take off your shoes. Have some tea.” Poole waved a waiter toward us and ordered without waiting for me to agree. “Pity you’re not here very long,” he said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” I said, trying to conceal my lack of enthusiasm for the second large North African town I’d seen that day.

“Donovan’s reserved you a room at Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo, which, all being well, is where he will meet you for lunch tomorrow. Lucky you. I wouldn’t mind a weekend at Shepheard’s myself.”

“Have you any idea how long we’re going to be there?”

“Donovan said at least four or five days.”

“I’ve an old girlfriend in Cairo. I wonder if I might be able to send her a telegram.”

“No problem. I can fix that for you.”

“I’d also like to get a message back to Washington.”

“A girl in every port, eh?”

“Actually this is a message to the Campus. I was hoping that someone there might be able to check out the circumstances of a death.” I told Poole about Ted Schmidt’s disappearance and his wife’s death in a traffic accident.

“All right. I’ll see what I can organize. All part of the service. So, what are your plans? Care to make a night of it? I’d be happy to show you the ruins. Couple of clubs I know.”

“I’d like to, really. But there’s a dinner tonight at La Mersa. Harry Hopkins’s son and the two Roosevelt boys and their fathers. It seems I’m invited.”

“That blowhard Elliott’s been talking about nothing else these past few days. ‘Idiot Roosevelt’ we call him. He’s been fucking some British WAC while his wing has been stationed here. That’s okay to do if you’re a nobody like me, and I’ve certainly had my moments since I got here. But you can’t expect to get away with that kind of thing when your pa is the president of the United States and you’ve got a wife and three kids back home.”

“Yeah, well, the sons of famous fathers. Listen, there’s one more favor you could do for me. Only I’m kind of behind with what’s been happening in Germany. I was wondering if you knew of a shortwave radio receiver I might listen to. In private. Preferably through a set of headphones-just in case anyone thinks I’m a German spy.”

“I can do better than that,” said Poole. “That is, if you don’t mind driving about ten miles into the desert.”

In Ridgeway Poole’s dusty-looking Peugeot 202 we drove north out of the city on the Bizerte Road, through military cemeteries and fields piled high with broken ordnance and ammunition dumps. Overhead, flights of the American Ninth Air Force rumbled through the sky like rusty dragonflies on their way to bomb targets in Italy.

Nearer Protville, which was our destination, Poole explained that he had lots of friends in the American First Antisubmarine Squadron, which was stationed in a building formerly occupied by the Luftwaffe. “They’ve got a German radio,” he said. “And it’s in perfect working order. A real beauty. The radio officer is a pal of mine from before the war. I don’t imagine he’ll mind you using it. Here we are.”

Poole pointed out four RAF Bristol Beaufighters and about ten USAAF B-24s. Operating as part of the Northwest African Coastal Air Force, it was the task of the B-24s to seek out and destroy enemy submarines between Sicily and Naples and west of Sardinia, and to fly escort for Allied shipping convoys. We found the squadron in a jubilant mood. One of the B-24s had shot down a long-range Focke Wulf 200 and, even now, a navy patrol was out searching the Gulf of Hammamet for the Germans who had bailed out.

“A 200,” I remarked, when Poole had finished making the introductions. “That’s a strange plane to be operating this far south.”

“You’re right,” said Lieutenant Spitz. “Mostly they operate as maritime patrol airplanes over Salerno, but this one must have strayed off course. Anyway, we’re pretty excited about it, what with the president coming here this afternoon.”

“The president’s coming here? I didn’t know.”

“FDR’s son, Elliott-his recon squad is stationed here. When you guys drove up we thought you were the advance party.”

Even as Spitz was speaking, a truck carrying more than a dozen MPs hove into view, and then another.

“This looks like them now,” said Poole.

“I’ll see that they don’t bother you,” said Spitz, and he showed us into a small white building where the radio room was housed, then left us with Sergeant Miller, the radio operator.

“We have a Tornister Empfanger B,” Miller said proudly. “And the ultimate German receiver, the E52b Koln. The frequency range is selected by the oblong control to the left of the indicator.” Miller plugged in some headphones and switched on the E52. “But it’s already tuned in to Radio Berlin, so all you gotta do is listen.” He handed me the phones.

I thanked him and sat down. Glancing at my watch, I put on the headphones, thinking I might just catch the next German news broadcast. Poole and Miller went outside to watch the deployment of MPs.

During the Atlantic voyage of the Iowa, the Washington Times-Herald had published the rumor that an international conference of major importance was about to be held in Cairo, and I wanted to find out if these rumors were being reported on German radio. I was hardly surprised to discover that they were, and in detail. Not only was Radio Berlin reporting that Churchill and Roosevelt planned to meet General Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo, but also that a conference of the Big Three, “to decide on military plans of great magnitude against Germany,” would take place at another location in the Middle East immediately afterward. On the face of it, I could hardly imagine that the Cairo conference could now proceed safely. And the Big Three conference now looked about as secret as a Hollywood divorce. Mike Reilly might as well have sent a press release to Hedda Hopper.

I kept on listening, hoping to learn more, turning up the volume as, for a moment, the signal from Radio Berlin seemed to fade away. Or at least, that was my intention. But somehow I managed to feed the German-speaking voice straight through the main loudspeaker. At almost full volume, it sounded like a speech at a Nuremberg party rally.

Panicking a little as I realized what I had done, I whipped off the headphones and tried to flick the switch that would cut the speaker. All I managed to do was find yet another pretuned German-language frequency. I jumped up and closed the open window quickly before trying, a second time, to switch off the radio. I was still examining the front of the Telefunken set when the door burst open and two U.S. Military Policemen stormed into the radio room and leveled their carbines at my head. I raised my hands instinctively.

“Turn it off,” yelled one of the policemen, a sergeant with a face of weathered brown brick.

“I don’t know how.”

The policeman worked the bolt on his carbine so that it was ready to fire. “Mister, you’ve got five seconds to turn it off or you’re a dead man.”

“I’m an American intelligence officer,” I yelled back at him. “It’s my fucking job to monitor German radio broadcasts.”

“And it’s my job to protect the president’s ass from German assassins,” said the sergeant. “So turn off the goddamn radio.”

I turned to face the radio, suddenly aware of the very real danger I was in. “Friendly fire” they called it, when your own side killed you. Which probably didn’t make it feel any better. I was about to experiment with another switch on the German radio when the MP said, “And don’t try to signal to anyone, either.”

I shook my head and, hardly certain of what I was doing, stood back from the radio, still keeping my hands up. I don’t have any excuse for this kind of cowardly behavior except to say that sometimes I get a little nervous when there’s a dumb, trigger-happy Okie pointing a loaded rifle at my head. I’d seen the metal hole at the end of the wooden part. It looked like the Washington Street traffic tunnel.

“ You try to turn it off,” I yelled. “This isn’t my radio and I don’t know how.”

The MP sergeant spat copiously onto the dirt floor, took a step forward, and fired, twice, at the radio, which ended the German broadcast, forever.

“Now why didn’t I think of that?” I said. “Shoot the radio. Let me find you a German newspaper and you can shoot that, too.”

“You’re under arrest, mister,” said the MP, and, grabbing hold of one of my wrists, he handcuffed me roughly.

“Do they train you boys to think when you’re standing up?” I asked.

The two MPs frog-marched me outside the radio hut toward a group of jeeps that were now parked in the middle of the airbase. In the distance, surrounded by more MPs and oblivious of what had just happened, the president was inspecting Colonel Roosevelt’s recon squadron. But as we neared the first group of jeeps, I saw Agents Rauff and Pawlikowski throw down their cigarettes and walk toward us.

“Tell these two clowns to uncuff me,” I told them.

“We caught this guy using a German radio,” said the MP who had fired the two shots.

“He makes it sound like I was telling Hitler the president’s telephone number.”

“Maybe you were at that,” sneered the sergeant.

“I was monitoring a German news broadcast. On a shortwave receiver. I was not transmitting a message. As an OSS officer that’s my job.”

“Show us,” Rauff told the MP, and, still handcuffed, I found myself marched roughly back into the radio hut.

“This is a German radio, all right,” said Rauff, examining the equipment. “Be easy to send a message to Berlin on this.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Not since Davy Crockett here put a couple of bullets into it. Listen, Rauff, there’s a radio operator somewhere around here named Miller. And a lieutenant named Spitz. I expect they’re on the other side of the airfield getting a look at the president. They’ll tell you that the Germans left all this equipment behind when they pulled out. And as I was trying to explain to these two a minute ago, one of my jobs is to monitor German radio broadcasts. That is a proper function of intelligence, which is something I imagine still has relevance in the world of the Secret Service.”

“Oh, yes,” said Rauff. “Which is how I come to be thinking that it is a hell of coincidence that it should be you who suggested a German spy was sending radio messages from the Iowa. ”

“Hey, that’s right,” agreed Pawlikowski, lighting a Kool. “It was him, wasn’t it? Might be a good way of covering up the fact he’s the German spy. Like a double bluff.”

Liking his theory a lot, Rauff added, “And let’s not forget that fellow Schmidt. He shared a cabin on the Iowa with you, didn’t he? Could be he found out that you were a German spy and was about to tell us. Except that you killed him first.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “According to the German news broadcast I just heard, the Germans know all about this Cairo conference. And it sounds to me like they’ve got some pretty good ideas about the one after that. Now, if I were a Luftwaffe commander in North Italy with fifty Junkers 88 bombers at my disposal, I would already be planning to bomb Mena House in Cairo. Yes, that’s right. Mena House. The Germans even know that that’s where the conference is going to be held. Under the circumstances, it would seem that even an elementary level of prudence demands a change of location. So why don’t you tell that to Hopkins and we’ll see what he has to say about all this?”

Rauff searched me and found my automatic. “Well, well, the prof is concealing some iron here.”

“That’s standard issue for all OSS officers. Surely you must know that.”

“I’d say you’ve got some explaining to do, Prof,” said Rauff. “And I’m not talking about the meaning of life.”

“The meaning of life? Tsk, tsk, Agent Rauff. You’ve been reading a book again.”