The 34th Degree

11

J ason Prestwick hurried along Fifth Avenue with a teddy bear from FAO Schwarz tucked under his arm. A phone call in the middle of the night had instructed him to pick up the cub at the famous toy shop and “carry it to a certain floor of a building in Manhattan,” the New York headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services.

Now, as he neared Rockefeller Center on this sunny afternoon of May 11, 1943, Prestwick slowed down and ran a quick check on a possible tale. At sixty-two, the Yale University professor knew he was hardly the sort one would associate with the spy trade, what with his tall, awkward frame, ill-fitting Harris tweed sport coat, shaggy gray hair, and round spectacles. Still, one had to be careful. No doubt some top-secret information about Operation Maranatha was stuffed inside this absurd teddy bear, and he was the courier.

The professor of classical Greek had been recruited in 1939 by the British Secret Intelligence Service as a cryptanalyst. After helping William Albright and the ULTRA team crack the Nazis’ secret Enigma codes, Prestwick had brought his formidable cipher and code-breaking skills to the Research and Analysis branch of the OSS, America’s fledgling spy agency. He later transferred to the agency’s Secret Intelligence section in order to serve as an OSS liaison with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, or SOE, created by Churchill “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy.” That meant helping resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe and engaging in all sorts of splendid intrigues designed to “set Europe ablaze.” For a frustrated academic like Prestwick, itching for cloak-and-dagger action, it was the perfect sort of work, even if he was a deskbound case officer and not a field agent behind enemy lines.

Prestwick passed under the statue of Atlas in front of the 630 Fifth Avenue entrance, crossed the lobby, and stepped into the nearest elevator. Already he fantasized about the good news on Maranatha. It was his greatest “caper,” as he liked to call his operations, and he looked forward to celebrating that evening at the Stork Club. Maybe he’d win back some money at gin rummy from a certain air force colonel and then share highballs in the Cub Room with a certain lovely starlet. The band would strike up “That Old Black Magic,” and they’d dance the night away…

The offices of British Passport Control were on the thirty-sixth floor at the end of a deserted hallway. A New York police officer sat outside on a wooden chair, dozing off under the Times as Prestwick walked by. The front-page headlines reported that Axis forces in North Africa were on the eve of official surrender.

Inside the reception area, a young blonde in a short skirt smiled at the teddy bear and pushed a button beneath her desk. The buzzer unlocked the door to the office of Bill Stephenson, code name INTREPID, the agent who coordinated joint American OSS-British SOE operations from New York.

As soon as Prestwick stepped into Stephenson’s office, he could sense something was off. Somebody else was seated behind the spymaster’s desk with his back toward the door. A cloud of cigar smoke hovered over his bald head. When the chair turned, Prestwick found himself face-to-face with Winston Churchill. Prestwick’s jaw dropped.

“Don’t just stand there gaping, man,” said the British prime minister. “Come in and close the door.”