Hitler's peace

III

Named after the leading poet of Polish romanticism, the Adam Mickiewicz Square in Posen was one of the old city’s most attractive sights. On the eastern side of the square was a castle built for Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1910, when Posen had been part of the Prussian empire. In truth, it hardly looked like a castle, more like a town hall or a city museum, with a facade that was fronted not by a moat but by a large wrought-iron railing protecting a neatly kept lawn and an open graveled area that resembled a parade ground. On this particular day, that spot had been given up to at least a dozen SS staff cars. Parked in front of the railing were several Hannomag troop carriers, each containing fifteen Waffen-SS Panzergrenadiers, and there were almost as many patrolling the castle’s perimeter. The Polish passengers riding on a tram along the eastern side of Adam Mickiewicz Square glanced in at the castle and shuddered, for this was the headquarters of the SS in Poland, and even as they looked, still more SS staff cars could be seen going through the heavily guarded gates and dropping SS officers at the tree-lined entrance.

The inhabitants of Posen, formerly known as Poznan, had endured the SS in their city since September 1939, but no one on the tram could remember ever seeing so many SS at the Konigliches Residenzschloss; it was almost as if the SS were holding some sort of rally at the castle. If the people on the tram had dared to look more closely, they would have noticed that every one of the SS officers arriving at the castle that morning was a general.

One such general was a handsome, dapper-looking man of medium height in his early thirties. Unlike most of his brother senior officers, this particular SS general stopped for a moment to smoke a cigarette and look with a critical eye at the exterior of the castle, with its ignoble, suburban clock tower and high mansard roof from which were hung a number of long swastika banners. Then, looking one last time across Adam Mickiewicz Square, he ground the cigarette under the heel of his well-polished boot and went inside.

The general was Walter Schellenberg, and he was no stranger to Posen. His second wife, Irene, had come from Posen, something he had discovered not from her but from his then boss and the former chief of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich. Six months after marrying Irene, in May 1940, Schellenberg had been given a file by Heydrich. It revealed that Irene’s aunt was married to a Jew. Heydrich’s meaning had been clear enough: Schellenberg now belonged to Heydrich, at least as long as he cared anything about his wife’s relations. But two years later Heydrich was dead, murdered by Czech partisans, and Department 6 (Amt VI) of the foreign intelligence section of the Reich Security Office, one of the key administrations formerly commanded by Heydrich, was given to Schellenberg.

In the castle’s Golden Hall there were perhaps only two notable absentees: Heydrich’s replacement as chief of the Reich Security Office (which included the SD and the Gestapo), Ernst Kaltenbrunner; and Himmler’s former adjutant, Karl Wolff, now the supreme SS representative in Italy. It had been given out that both men were too ill to attend Himmler’s conference in Posen, that Kaltenbrunner was suffering from phlebitis and Wolff was recovering from an operation to remove a kidney stone. But Schellenberg, a man as well informed as he was resourceful, knew the truth. On Himmler’s orders Kaltenbrunner, an alcoholic, was drying out in a Swiss sanatorium, while Wolff and his former boss were no longer on speaking terms after the Reichsfuhrer-SS had refused Wolff permission to divorce his wife, Frieda, in order to marry a tasty blonde named Grafin-a permission subsequently granted by Hitler himself when (quite unforgivably, in Himmler’s eyes) Wolff went over Himmler’s head.

There was, Schellenberg thought to himself as he sauntered into the hall, never a dull moment in the SS. Well, almost never. A speech by Himmler was not something he could view with anything other than dread, for the Reichsfuhrer had a tendency to longwindedness, and given the number of SS generals who were gathered in architect Franz Schwechten’s Golden Hall, Schellenberg expected a speech of Mahabharatan length and dullness. The Mahabharata was a book the young general had made himself read so that he might better understand Heinrich Himmler, who was its most passionate advocate; and having read it, Schellenberg had certainly found it easier to see where Himmler got some of his crazier ideas concerning duty, discipline, and, a favorite Himmler word, sacrifice. And Schellenberg did not think it too fanciful to view Himmler as someone who regarded himself as an avatar of the supreme god, Vishnu-or, at the very least, his high priest, descended to earth in human form to rescue Law, Good Deeds, Right, and Virtue. Schellenberg had also formed the impression that Himmler thought of Jews in the same way that the Mahabharata spoke of the one hundred Dhartarashtras — the grotesque human incarnations of demons who were the perpetual enemies of the gods. For all Schellenberg knew, Hitler held the same opinion, although he thought it much more likely that the Fuhrer simply hated Jews, which wasn’t exactly unusual in Germany and Austria. Schellenberg himself had nothing at all against the Jews; his own father had been a piano manufacturer in Saarbrucken and then in Luxembourg, and many of his best customers had been Jews. So it was fortunate that Schellenberg’s own department was obliged to pay little more than lip service to all the usual Aryanist claptrap about Jewish subhumans and vermin. Those anti-Semites who did work in Amt VI-and there were quite a few-knew better than to give vent to their hatred in the presence of Walter Schellenberg. The young Foreign Intelligence head was interested only in what a British secret agent, Captain Arthur Connolly, had once called “the Great Game”-the game in question being espionage, intrigue, and clandestine military adventure.

Schellenberg helped himself to coffee from an enormous refectory table, and, his eyes hardly noticing the enormous portrait of the Fuhrer hanging underneath one of three enormous arched windows, he fixed a smile on his clever schoolboy’s face and meandered toward a pair of officers he recognized.

Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, was a man much admired by Schellenberg. He hoped he might get a chance to warn Nebe of a whispered rumor making the rounds in Berlin. In 1941, according to the gossips, Nebe, in command of a Special Action Group in occupied Russia, had not only falsified his report of the slaughter of thousands of Jews, but also had allowed many to escape.

No such rumors attended the record of the second officer, Otto Ohlendorf, now chief of the SD’s Domestic Intelligence Department and responsible for, among other things, compiling reports regarding German public opinion. The Einsatzgruppe commanded by Ohlendorf in the Crimea had been regarded as one of the most successful, slaughtering more than a hundred thousand Jews.

“So here he is,” said Nebe, “our youngest brother, Benjamin.” Nebe was repeating a remark made by Himmler about Schellenberg being the youngest general in the SS.

“I expect to grow older and wiser this morning,” said Schellenberg.

“I can guarantee you’ll grow older,” said Ohlendorf. “Last time I went to one of these affairs it was in Wewelsburg. I think Himmler got all of it straight out of a Richard Wagner libretto. ‘Never forget we are a knightly order from which one cannot withdraw and to which one is recruited by blood.’ Or words to that effect.” Ohlendorf shook his head, wearily. “Anyway, it was all very inspiring. And long. Very, very long. Like a rather slow performance of Parsifal. ”

“It wasn’t blood that got me into this knightly order,” said Nebe. “But that’s certainly been the end result.”

“All that ‘knightly’ order stuff makes me sick,” said Ohlendorf. “Dreamed up by that lunatic Hildebrandt.” He nodded at another SS-Gruppenfuhrer who was engaged in earnest-looking conversation with Oswald Pohl. Hildebrandt’s own department, the Race and Resettlement Office, was subordinate to the Administration Office of the SS, of which Pohl was the head. “My God, I detest that bastard.”

“Me, too,” murmured Nebe.

“Doesn’t everyone?” remarked Schellenberg, who had an extra reason to hate and fear Hildebrandt: one of Hildebrandt’s principal functions was to investigate the racial purity of SS men’s families. Schellenberg lived with the fear that just such an investigation might discover that there was more than one Jew in his family.

“There’s Muller,” said Ohlendorf. “I had better go and make my peace with him and the Gestapo.” And putting down his coffee cup, he went to speak to the diminutive Gestapo chief, leaving Nebe and Schellenberg to their own conversation.

Nebe was a small, tough-looking man with gray, almost silver hair, a thin slit of a mouth, and a policeman’s inquiring nose. He spoke in a thick Berlin accent.

“Listen carefully,” said Nebe. “Don’t ask questions, just listen. I know what I know because I used to be in the Gestapo, when Diels was still in charge. And I still have a few friends there who tell me things. Such as the fact that the Gestapo have you under surveillance. No, don’t ask me why because I don’t know. Here-” Nebe took out a cigarette case shaped like a coffin and opened it to reveal the little flat cigarettes he smoked. “Have a nail.”

“And here I was thinking that I might have to warn you about something.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“There’s a rumor going around the SD that you falsified the figures for your Einsatzgruppe in Byelorussia.”

“Everyone did,” said Nebe. “What of it?”

“But for different reasons. It’s said that you actually tried to put a brake on the slaughter.”

“What can you do about such slanders? Himmler himself inspected my theater of operations, in Minsk. So, as you can see, accusing me of going easy on some Russian Jews is the same thing as saying that Himmler wasn’t clever enough to spot anything wrong. And we can’t have that, can we?” Nebe smiled coolly and lit their cigarettes. “No, I’m in the clear about that one, old boy, whatever the rumors say. But thanks. I appreciate it.” He sucked hard at his cigarette and nodded warmly at Schellenberg.

Schellenberg’s mind was already racing out of the castle and back to his hometown of Saarbrucken. Not long before he died, Heydrich had given Schellenberg the file about his wife’s Jewish uncle. But had Heydrich kept a copy that was now in the possession of the Gestapo? And was it possible that the Gestapo might now suspect that he himself was Jewish? Berg was a German surname, but it could hardly be denied that there were more than a few Jews who had used the name as a prefix or suffix in an attempt to Germanize their own Hebraic names. Could that be what they were out to prove? To destroy him with the insinuation that he himself was Jewish? After all, the Gestapo had tried to destroy Heydrich with the suggestion that the “blond Moses” was also a Jew. Except that, in Heydrich’s case, this was a suggestion that turned out to be partly true.

After Heydrich’s murder, Himmler had shown Schellenberg a file that proved Heydrich’s father, Bruno, a piano teacher from Halle, had been Jewish. (His nickname in Halle had been Isidor Suess.) Schellenberg had thought it was a strange thing for Himmler to have done so soon after Heydrich’s death until he realized that this was the Reichsfuhrer’s way of persuading Schellenberg that he should forget about his former boss, that his loyalty now lay with the Reichsfuhrer himself. But with Schellenberg’s own father, a piano maker, Schellenberg did not think it so very far-fetched that someone in the Gestapo, jealous of his precocious success-at thirty-three he was the youngest general in the SS-should have considered it worth the Gestapo’s time to investigate the possibility of his being Jewish, too.

He was about to ask Nebe a question, but the Berliner was already shaking his head and looking over Schellenberg’s shoulder. And as soon as Schellenberg turned, he saw a heavyset man with a bull neck and a shaven head who greeted him like an old friend.

“My dear friend,” he said. “How nice to see you. I wanted to ask if there was any news about Kaltenbrunner.”

“He’s ill,” said Schellenberg.

“Yes, yes, but what is it that ails him? What is this illness he has?”

“The doctors say it’s phlebitis.”

“Phlebitis? And what’s that when it’s not in a medical dictionary?”

“Inflammation of the veins,” said Schellenberg, who was anxious to get away from the man, hating the familiarity with which Richard Gluecks had spoken to him. Schellenberg had only ever met him once before, but it was not a day he was likely to forget.

Richard Gluecks was in charge of the concentration camps. Not long after his appointment as chief of the SD, Kaltenbrunner had insisted on taking Schellenberg to see a special camp. Schellenberg looked into Gluecks’s florid face as the man began to speculate on what might have caused Kaltenbrunner’s illness and remembered that dreadful day in Mauthausen in all too vivid detail: the ferocious dogs, the smell of burning corpses, the unhinged cruelty of the officers, the absolute freedom of the swaggering guards to maim or kill, the distant gunshots, and the stench of the prisoners’ barracks. The whole camp had been an insane laboratory of malice and violence. But the thing that Schellenberg remembered most vividly of all had been the drunkenness. Everyone on that tour of the special camp, himself included, had been drunk. Being drunk made things easier, of course. Easier not to care. Easier to torture someone or kill them. Easier to conduct hideous medical experiments on prisoners. Easier to force a thin smile onto your face and compliment your brother SS officers on a job well done. Small wonder that Kaltenbrunner was an alcoholic. Schellenberg told himself that if he had had to visit a special camp more than once, by now he would have killed himself with drink. The only wonder was that not every SS man serving in the special camps was addicted in the same way as Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

“I’m not in Berlin very much,” said Gluecks. “My work keeps me in the East, of course. So if you see him, please tell Ernst I was asking for him.”

“Yes, I will.” With relief Schellenberg turned away from Gluecks, only to find himself face-to-face with a man he regarded with no less loathing: Joachim von Ribbentrop. Since he knew that the foreign minister was well aware of Schellenberg’s pivotal role in the attempt of his former aide, Martin Luther, to discredit him with the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Schellenberg expected to be cold-shouldered. Instead, much to the intelligence chief’s surprise, the foreign minister actually spoke to him.

“Ah, yes, Schellenberg, there you are. I hoped to have a chance to talk to you.”

“Yes, Herr Reichsminister?”

“I’ve been speaking to that fellow of yours, Ludwig Moyzisch. About Agent Cicero and the supposed contents of the British ambassador’s safe in Ankara. I’m surprised to hear that you think Cicero’s material is genuine. You see, I know the British very well. Better than you, I think. I’ve even met their ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe, and I know the kind of man he is. Not a complete fool, you know. I mean he only had to run a background check on this fellow-Bazna, isn’t it? Cicero’s real name? All he had to do was ask one or two questions to have discovered that one of Bazna’s former employers in Ankara was my own brother-in-law, Alfred. Shall I tell you what I think, Schellenberg?”

“Please, Herr Reichsminister. I should be pleased to hear your opinion.”

“I think Sir Hughe did ask; and having discovered that he had been Alfred’s employee, they decided to put some information his way. False information. For our benefit. Take my word for it. This is the Big Three we’re talking about. You don’t just stumble across top-secret information about when and where they are meeting. If you ask me, this Cicero is a complete charlatan. But speak to my brother-in-law yourself, if you like. He’ll confirm what I say.”

Schellenberg nodded. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. “But I did speak to our own former ambassador to Persia. At length. He tells me that Sir Hughe was British ambassador there from ’34 to ’36, and that Sir Hughe has never been particularly careful about security. Even then, he was, apparently, often in the habit of taking sensitive documents home with him. You see, the Abwehr tried to steal them as long ago as 1935. As a matter of fact, they have quite a large file on Sir Hughe relating to his time in Teheran. ‘Snatch,’ as he is better known to those who were at Balliol with Sir Hughe, is privately considered by no less a figure than your opposite number in England, Sir Anthony Eden, to be leakier than a sieve. And none too intelligent, either. The Ankara posting was seen as a means of keeping him safely out of harm’s way. At least, it was until the outbreak of war, when the small matter of Turkish neutrality came up. In short, everything I have learned in assessing the intelligence from Cicero has led me to suppose that Sir Hughe was too lazy and trusting to make thorough enquiries about Bazna. Indeed it seems that he was much more concerned with hiring a good servant than with vetting a potential security risk. And with all due respect, Herr Reichsminister, I think you are mistaken in judging him by your own highly efficient standards.”

“What an imagination you have, Schellenberg. But then I suppose that is your job. Well, good luck to you. Only don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With that von Ribbentrop turned on his heel and walked off in the opposite direction, finally coming to a halt next to Generals Frank, Lorner, and Kammler.

Schellenberg lit a cigarette and continued to watch von Ribbentrop. It was interesting, he thought, that the foreign minister should have been prepared to overcome his loathing of him long enough to try to discredit Bazna and suggest his material was of no value. Which seemed to indicate that von Ribbentrop held quite the opposite opinion and was trying to prevent Amt VI from acting on Cicero’s intelligence. Schellenberg had formed no particular plans in this matter, but given von Ribbentrop’s interest in the affair, he began to wonder if he should try to think of one, if only to irritate the most pompous minister in the Reich.

“Can’t you do without a cigarette in your mouth for just five minutes?”

It was Himmler, pointing at the Golden Hall’s magnificent Neo-Romanesque ceiling, where a thin cloud of smoke was already gathering above the heads of the SS troop leaders. “Look at the air in here,” he said irritably. “I don’t mind the odd cigar in the evening, but first thing in the morning?”

Schellenberg was relieved to see that Himmler’s antismoking remarks were addressed not just to him but also to several other officers who were smoking. He looked around for an ashtray.

“I don’t mind you killing yourself with nicotine, but I do object to your poisoning me with it. If my throat doesn’t hold up through the next three and a half hours, I shall hold all of you responsible.”

Himmler marched off to the podium, his boots knocking loudly on the polished wooden floor, leaving Schellenberg to finish his cigarette in peace and to reflect upon the imminent prospect of a three-and-a-half-hour speech from the Reichsfuhrer-SS. Three and a half hours was 210 minutes, and for that you needed something a lot stronger than a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Schellenberg unbuttoned the breast pocket of his tunic and took out a pillbox from which he removed a Benzedrine tablet. In the beginning he had taken Benzedrine for his hay fever, but it wasn’t very long before the drug’s effect in the prevention of sleep made itself well known. Mostly, he preferred to take Benzedrine in situations involving pleasure rather than work. In Paris, he had used it liberally. But a 210-minute speech by Himmler was something of an emergency, and, swallowing the tablet quickly with the dregs of his coffee, he went to take his seat.

At midday, a strong smell of hot food came up the stairs from the castle’s basement kitchens, arriving in the Golden Hall to torture the nostrils and stomachs of ninety-two SS troop leaders waiting for Himmler to finish. Schellenberg glanced at his wristwatch. The Reichsfuhrer had been speaking for 150 minutes, which meant that there was still a whole hour to go. He was speaking about bravery as one of the virtues of the SS man.

“Part of bravery is composed of faith. And in this I don’t think we can be outdone by anyone in the world. It’s faith that wins battles, faith that achieves victories. We don’t want pessimists in our ranks, people who have lost their faith. It doesn’t make any difference what a man’s job is-a man who has lost the will to believe shall not live among us in our ranks…”

Schellenberg glanced around, wondering how many of his fellow SS troop leaders were still possessed of the faith that could win victories. Since Stalingrad, there had been precious little reason for optimism; and with an Allied landing in Europe expected sometime in the next year, it seemed more likely that many of the generals in the Golden Hall were less concerned with victory than with avoiding the retribution of Allied military tribunals after the war was over. And yet Schellenberg couldn’t help thinking that there was still a way that victory might yet be won. If Germany could strike decisively at the Allies with the same surprise and effect that had been achieved by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, they might still turn the tide of the war. Hadn’t he been presented with just such an opportunity in agent Cicero’s information? Didn’t he already know that as of Sunday, November 21, Roosevelt and Churchill would be in Cairo for almost a week? And then in Teheran with Stalin until Saturday, December 4?

Schellenberg shook his head, puzzled. What on earth could have possessed them to pick Teheran for a conference in the first place? It seemed likely that Stalin must have insisted on the two other leaders coming to him. Doubtless he would have given them some excuse about the necessity of his being near his soldiers at the front; but all the same, Schellenberg wondered if either Churchill or Roosevelt was aware of the real reason behind Stalin’s insistence that they meet in Teheran. According to Schellenberg’s sources in the NKVD, Stalin had a morbid fear of flying and could no more have countenanced a long-distance flight to Newfoundland (which was the location favored by Churchill and Roosevelt) or even Cairo, than he could have bought himself a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The chances were that Stalin had chosen Teheran because he could spend a large part of the journey on his armored train, making only a short flight at the end of it.

He imagined that the Big Three would never have picked Teheran if Operation Franz had ever gone into action. A joint operation of the Luftwaffe’s elite 200 Squadron and the Friedenthal Section of Amt VI, the plan had been to fly a Junkers 290 carrying one hundred men from an airfield in the Crimea and drop them by parachute near a large salt lake southeast of Teheran. With the help of local tribesmen, F Section-many of whom spoke Persian-would then have interrupted American supplies for Russia that were being carried on the Iran-Iraq railway. The plan had been delayed following damage to the Junkers and the arrest of several of those pro-German Iranian tribesmen. By the time they were ready to go again, the best of the men in F Section, commanded by Otto Skorzeny, had been ordered to try to rescue Mussolini from his Italian mountaintop prison, and Operation Franz had been scrubbed. But the more Schellenberg thought about the situation now, the more it looked like a plan. F Section, with its Persian-speaking officers and special equipment, was, as far as he was aware, still intact; and there were the Big Three, heading for the very country in which F Section had been trained to operate. And there was no reason why such a plan should be restricted to a ground attack force. Schellenberg thought a commando team in Teheran might operate in tandem with a very specialized form of attack from the air. And he resolved to speak to a man he knew was coming to Posen that evening for the Reichsfuhrer’s speech the following day: Air Inspector General Erhard Milch.

Himmler’s speech finally ended, but Schellenberg was too excited to have lunch. Using a borrowed office in the castle, he telephoned his deputy in Berlin, Martin Sandberger. “It’s me-Schellenberg.”

“Hello, boss. How’s Posen?”

“Never mind that now, just listen. I want you to drive over to Friedenthal and find out what state F Section is in. Specifically, whether they’re up for another shot at Operation Franz. And, Martin, if he’s there, I want you to bring that baron fellow back to Berlin.”

“Von Holten-Pflug?”

“That’s him. Then I want you to set up a department meeting for first thing on Wednesday morning. Reichert, Buchman, Janssen, Weisinger, and whoever’s running the Turkish and Iranian desk these days.”

“That would be Major Schubach. He reports to Colonel Tschierschky. Shall I ask him, too?”

“Yes.”

After the call Schellenberg went to his room and tried to sleep, but his mind was still fizzing with the mechanics of a plan he was already calling Operation Long Jump. He could see no obvious reason why the plan couldn’t work. It was daring and audacious, yes, but that was what was called for. And while he disliked Skorzeny, the man had at least proved that the apparently impossible could be pulled off. At the same time, the last person he wanted in command of such an operation was Skorzeny-that went without saying. Skorzeny was much too hard to control. And, besides, the Luftwaffe would never have agreed to Skorzeny, not after Abruzzi. Of the dozen glider pilots who had landed near Il Duce’s makeshift prison on the loftiest peak in the Italian Apennines, all had been killed or captured-not to mention the 108 SS parachutists who had accompanied Skorzeny. Just three men had flown off that mountain: Mussolini, Skorzeny, and the pilot of their light aircraft. Abruzzi might have been worth the heavy sacrifice of men and materials if something useful had been achieved. But Schellenberg thought Il Duce was finished and that rescuing him seemed pointless. The Fuhrer might have been delighted enough to award Skorzeny the Knight’s Cross, but Schellenberg and quite a few others had regarded the whole operation as something of a disaster; and he had told Skorzeny as much on the train to Paris. Predictably, Skorzeny, a large and violent man, had been furious and would probably have attacked and possibly even tried to kill Schellenberg but for the silenced Mauser pistol the young general had produced from underneath his folded leather coat. You didn’t criticize a man like Skorzeny to his face without having something in reserve.

Schellenberg finally fell asleep, only to be awoken at eight o’clock that evening by an SS-Oberscharfuhrer who told him Field Marshal Milch had arrived and was waiting for him in the officers’ bar.

Like everyone who worked for Hermann Goring, Erhard Milch looked rich. Thick-set, smallish, dark-haired, and balding, he offset his unremarkable appearance with a gold marshal’s baton that was a smaller version of the one Goring carried, and when he offered Schellenberg a cigarette from a gold case and a glass of champagne from the bottle of Taittinger on the table, the SD man’s keen eyes quickly took in the gold Glashutte wristwatch and the gold signet ring on Milch’s stubby little finger.

As with Heydrich, it was strongly rumored that Milch was of Jewish blood. But Schellenberg knew this for a fact, just as he also knew how, thanks to Goring, this was not a problem for the former director of the German national airline, Lufthansa. Goring had fixed everything for his ex-deputy in the Reich Air Ministry when he had persuaded Milch’s gentile mother to sign a legal affidavit stating that her Jewish husband was not Erhard’s true father. It was a common enough practice in the Third Reich, and in this way the authorities were able to certify Milch as an honorary Aryan. These days, however, Goring and Milch were no longer close, the latter having criticized the Luftwaffe for its poor performance on the Russian front, a criticism that Goring was not likely to forget. As a result it was also believed that Milch had transferred his allegiance to Albert Speer, the minister of armaments-a rumor that had only been fueled by their arrival together in Posen.

Over champagne, Schellenberg told Milch about Agent Cicero’s intelligence, and then came quickly to the point: “I was thinking of resurrecting Operation Franz. Only instead of disrupting supplies on the Iran-Iraq railway, F team would try to assassinate the Big Three. We could coordinate their attack with a bombing raid.”

“A bombing raid?” Milch laughed. “Even our longest-range bomber would barely make it there and back. And even if a few bombers did get there, enemy fighters would shoot them down before they could do any damage. No, I’m afraid you’d better think again on that one, Walter.”

“There is a plane that could do the job. The Focke Wulf FW 20 °Condor.”

“That’s not a bomber, it’s a reconnaissance plane.”

“A long-range reconnaissance plane. I was thinking of four of them, each armed with two thousand-kilogram bombs. My team on the ground would knock out the enemy radar to give them a chance. Come on, Erhard, what do you say?”

Milch was shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

“They wouldn’t have to fly from Germany, but from German-held territory in the Ukraine. Vinnica. I’ve worked it out. From Vinnica it’s eighteen hundred kilometers to Teheran. There and back is just within the 200’s standard fuel range.”

“Actually it’s just outside, by forty-four kilometers,” said Milch. “The published figures on the 200’s range were inflated. Wrongly.”

“So they throw something out to save a bit of fuel.”

“One of the pilots, perhaps.”

“If necessary, yes. Or one of the pilots could take the place of the navigator.”

“Actually, I suppose that with overload fuel it might be possible to extend the range,” admitted Milch. “With a light bomb load, such as you describe, maybe. Perhaps.”

“Erhard, if we manage to kill the Big Three, we could force the Allies to the negotiating table. Think of it. Like Pearl Harbor. A decisive strike that completely changes the course of the war. Isn’t that what you said? And you’re right, of course. If we kill the Big Three there won’t be an Allied landing in Europe in ’44. Perhaps not at all. It’s that simple.”

“You know, things are not so good between myself and Goring right now, Walter.”

“I’d heard something.”

“He won’t be so easy to persuade.”

“What would you suggest?”

“That perhaps we should work around him. I’ll speak to Schmid at the Kurfurst.” Milch was referring to the intelligence arm of the Luftwaffe. “And to General Student in airborne.”

Schellenberg nodded: it was Student who had helped Skorzeny plan the air assault on the Hotel Campo Imperatore on the Gran Sasso in the Apennines.

“Then let’s drink to our plan,” said Milch and ordered another bottle of champagne.

“With your agreement, Erhard, I propose to call this plan of ours Operation Long Jump.”

“I like that. It has an appropriately athletic ring. Only this will have to be a world record, Walter. As if it were that black fellow from the last Olympiad in Berlin doing the long jumping.”

“Jesse Owens.”

“That’s the one. Marvelous athlete. When were you thinking of carrying out this operation of ours?”

Schellenberg unbuttoned his tunic pocket and took out his SS pocket diary. “This is the best part of the plan,” he grinned. “The part I haven’t yet told you about. Look here. I want to do this exactly eight weeks from tomorrow. On Tuesday, November thirtieth. At precisely nine P.M.”

“You’re very precise. I like that. But why that day in particular? And at that time?”

“Because on that day not only do I know that Winston Churchill will be in Teheran, I also happen to know that he’ll be hosting his own birthday party that night, at the British embassy in Teheran.”

“Was that also in agent Cicero’s information?”

“No. You see it’s obvious just from the location of this conference that the Americans are out to accommodate the Russians in whatever way they can. Why else would a president who is also a cripple be prepared to fly all that way? Now, that will discomfort the British, who, as the weakest of the three powers, will be looking for ways to try to control the situation. What better way to do it than to host a birthday party? To remind everyone that Churchill is the oldest of the three. And the longest-serving war leader. So the British will give a party. And everyone will drink to Churchill’s health and tell him what a great war leader he has been. And then a bomb from one of your airplanes will land on the embassy. Hopefully more than one bomb. And, if there is anyone left alive after that, my Waffen-SS team will finish them off.”

A waiter arrived with a second bottle of champagne, and as soon as it was open, Milch poured two glasses and raised his to Schellenberg. “Happy birthday, Mr. Churchill.”