IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED—the cruel wartime spring and summer of 1943—both the Nazi spymaster who headed Section 6 and the Secret Service agent in charge of the American president’s security unknowingly shared a common preoccupation: airplanes.
For Mike Reilly, the habitual worrier, his sudden interest was prompted by, not surprisingly, the president’s safety. He had not yet been made cognizant, to use the service’s word, of where, when, or even if the much-discussed meeting among the Big Three would take place, but it was his job to be prepared for any eventuality. The Casablanca Conference had taken FDR halfway across the world—“Africa?” he could still hear himself echoing dumbly after the Boss told him the news—and one of the largest concerns in a trip that had been jam-packed with valid reasons for distress had been the flight across the Atlantic. They had made do with one of the Army Air Force’s lumbering four-engine C-54s, an efficient cargo transport plane that’d been seeing a lot of wartime action. It offered a steady-enough ride as long as the pilot kept below 22,000 feet; the cabin wasn’t pressurized. The range, another asset at 3,900 miles, was good enough to allow a takeoff from Washington and a nonstop landing on the other side of the Atlantic. And while the seats were rudimentary, fashioned from a rough canvas, there was room for fifty soldiers, a space that could generously accommodate one commander in chief and a handful of the president’s men without any of the distinguished passengers sitting shoulder to pin-striped shoulder. Still, for Mike, who, as he emphatically put it, was “charged with the President’s safety and comfort,” the C-54 left a lot to desire. And even more to fret about.
One problem was that “the Boss couldn’t use normal steps.” A ramp, therefore, had to be built for the president’s wheelchair before the plane landed. But at the first signs of construction, enemy field agents or German analysts peering at aerial reconnaissance photos would have a telltale clue identifying the mystery traveler who’d soon be arriving. “An absolute giveaway,” Mike griped.
Another concern was that the Boss, stuck in his wheelchair most of the time, unable to wander willy-nilly about the cabin, grew quickly restless. Except for conferences with his aides or reading state papers, there wasn’t much for him to do but look out the window. Only the window was tiny, a porthole really, and high enough up so that FDR, strapped down tight, had to keep his head raised at an awkward, unnatural angle to steal just a glimpse. Still, Mike would’ve preferred that the Boss didn’t do even that: the window wasn’t bulletproof.
The resounding bottom line, though, to Mike’s list of negatives was that the plane was simply not grand enough for any American president, and certainly not for one who had been born and bred in patrician splendor. The C-54 was a satisfactory flying machine for hauling Army grunts from one place to another, but nothing more. It hadn’t been designed to transport a jaunty swell who liked his dry martinis chilled just so, or who rakishly puffed away using an enamel-tipped five-inch cigarette holder.
So, “with those things in mind,” a determined Mike left Washington and made the long trip across the country to meet with the engineers and designers of the C-54. Of course he could’ve telephoned. Or, if the security of the phone lines had been too great a fear, he could’ve put his thoughts into a detailed memo, stamped the pages top secret, and had them hand-delivered by an armed Secret Service agent. But Mike wasn’t looking for shortcuts. He wanted to hear everything the experts had to say in response to his suggestions, and he also wanted to work with them, to apply his firsthand knowledge, and then be on hand to help think through the inevitable problems. He knew he didn’t begin to have all the answers, but he also wasn’t about to let any pointy-headed engineers cut corners where the Boss was involved.
The Douglas Aircraft Company was spread across Culver Field in Santa Monica, California, just down the road from Los Angeles. Arriving from the wartime White House, a tense, cramped world of endless intrigues and monumental decisions, he quickly felt that he’d entered unfamiliar yet at the same time exhilarating territory. It wasn’t just the harsh sunshine that baked the rows of hangars in a radiant glow, or the breeze coming off the incredibly blue Pacific stretching off to the west, or the very air itself, redolent of the fresh salt of the ocean. What was most affecting was the unexpected vastness of the enterprise at Culver Field, larger than the Montana town where he’d been raised, for sure, and all devoted to the making of the aircraft needed to win the war. He saw women zipping by on roller skates, and when he asked what that was about, he learned that the facility was so huge that they had to skate from one end to the other to deliver the mail. In Washington it had been easy to fall into the trap of believing that only a handful of diplomats and politicians had formed a battle line on the home front to fight this war, but out there he understood for the first time that the entire nation, men and women, had rolled up their sleeves to get the job done.
He met in an office hidden away in a corner of a mud-colored hangar with a businesslike group of Douglas officials, and they listened to what he had to say with an attention he found flattering. Later, he’d realize that was just the way engineers worked; they liked to get a handle on problems, “gather the relevant facts” was how they put it, and then they’d go to work to solve them. Unlike the daily dramas at the White House, where all the players pushed and shoved simply to maximize their own fiefdoms, out here, he couldn’t help feeling, everyone was predisposed to cooperate. If there were egos or personal agendas involved, Mike couldn’t detect them. They just wanted to get the job done.
The plane that was finally delivered looked like the old C-54, but at the same time was very much something different. On the assembly line, workers had welded onto the standard body a new, longer set of wings that provided space for four auxiliary fuel tanks; if weather prevented the scheduled landing, the plane could circle for hours or easily make it to a fallback destination. There was a compact, battery-powered elevator at the rear of the craft so that a ramp was no longer necessary; with just the pull of a lever, the president sitting in his wheelchair could be raised or lowered. He also got, as he’d lobbied for, an expansive bulletproof window thoughtfully positioned so that the Boss while seated could easily enjoy the view. And the accommodating engineers had taken heed of Mike’s stern rants about security: from the outside the plane didn’t look any different from a run-of-the-mill C-54 transport. Both the abnormally large window and the elevator attachment had been artfully concealed. An enemy agent checking out the plane from across the landing field would have no clue that this craft was carrying the president.
Inside, however, was another story, and for Mike a completely gratifying one. As he had requested, the designers went to town bringing the interior up to the Boss’s high standards. There was now “an executive conference room” with an ample desk befitting a president, sofas that concealed fold-down beds, and a private presidential lavatory. Best of all, or so FDR would see it, Mike suspected, there was an electric refrigerator and freezer in the galley that could chill the presidential gin to a pleasingly numbing cold. The people at Douglas had christened the special craft with the tail numbers VC-54C, and had given it the lofty official title of “the Flying White House.” The press pool wags called it the “Sacred Cow” since its pilots had the license to do whatever they—or the president, more often than not—wanted, and that was the name that stuck.
Mike felt a sort of proprietary pride in the gleaming aircraft that had come to life from the wellspring of his many worries. He thought that if the Boss was soon required to go to some distant corner of the world to huddle with Churchill and Stalin—Newfoundland was the chosen site, according to the latest White House scuttlebutt—the Sacred Cow would undoubtedly make the trip safer and more comfortable.
But even as he found this small measure of reassurance, another notion took hold. All it would require was for one enemy fighter to penetrate the cordon of protective planes flanked around the huge VC-54C, one Nazi fighter’s cannons to get the craft centered in its sights, and if the aircraft was hit, if it crashed in flames—well, there was no engineering feat that would enable this president to crawl from the wreckage.
SCHELLENBERG, FOR HIS PART, had not been thinking about safety, and comfort was even further down his list. His concern was purely operational: Was there a plane that could accomplish the mission he’d begun envisioning? Before he could take his plan any further, he realized that this fundamental question needed to be answered.
When he’d left his desk after his long immersion in the Iran files, his cluttered musings kept returning to guilty thoughts about loyalty and betrayal. Both services, the incriminating record had made clear, had let their agents down. They had sent them off, and with an obliviousness that he found astonishing, left them pretty much on their own. Then when things had gotten sticky after the Allied invasion, both the Abwehr and the SD not only didn’t rush to the rescue, but shrugged off their fieldmen’s fates with an Olympian detachment. And the agents? They had stayed behind up to their necks in risk, always certain of their duty, still convinced that the Fatherland’s ultimate victory would be reward enough for their unswerving loyalty. The entire sad episode filled Schellenberg with shame.
He was determined to write a new ending.
He went to work on an operation that would use these loyal, experienced agents and their networks. A mission that would demonstrate that their sacrifice had not been in vain. And the parsimonious spymaster in him also wanted a return on his service’s long-term investment; it would be good business, after all.
But once he began to tackle the problem he found himself glumly conceding that since the three spies’ arrivals in the East too much had changed—in Iran, and, more consequentially, in Germany. Their original mission had two components. The first had been intelligence gathering: identify the oil fields ripe for the taking, scout for possible locations for German airfields. The second had been political: stoke the fires of discontent, make sure that when the Nazis pitched their tents in Iran, the natives would enthusiastically help them pound in the stakes. Only those ambitions were now hopelessly out of date. Two long years ago Germany had lost its opportunity to gain control of the country. Russia and Britain had invaded Iran to pitch their tents, and more than thirty thousand American troops had come in their wake, largely to facilitate and protect the invaluable carloads of US Lend-Lease matériel traveling across the country by rail toward the Soviet Union. And the Afrika Korps marching to Iran? After the demoralizing defeat at Stalingrad, Schellenberg had come around to conceding that the Allies’ savagely pouring into Berlin seemed not only more likely but destined.
So, what could be realistically done? And would it be worth the effort? Those two indelicate questions rumbled through Schellenberg’s harried mind.
Yet in the course of this ruminative exercise, his operational goals began to clarify. What if, he asked himself with a growing sense of satisfaction, he could delay the ineluctable Allied march to victory? Help persuade the enemy that it was high time to negotiate a reasonable peace? And in the process earn new honor for the service, as well as for the gritty agents in Iran who had never been broken, who had maintained their loyalty during their years in isolation, had paid every price and never called it sacrifice? That would be a mission he’d be proud to launch, and one that the lofty Canaris would endorse, too.
Methodically, these questions led him to the tactical conclusion that had been gnawing at him even as he’d first read the files. But just to make sure—to recheck his sums, he’d say—he backtracked through the latest analysts’ reports. And he found the hard supporting evidence: the Americans had been shipping forty thousand tons every month of much-needed Lend-Lease war supplies, and the amount was predicted to keep growing—tanks, trucks, engines, guns, machine parts—on the Trans-Iranian Railway across the country and over the borders into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the British were taking all the Iranian oil they could grab; it was helping to keep their war machine rolling.
And now he had it! He would put an end to all that. He’d send in commando teams who, working hand in hand with the veteran agents already in place in Iran, would launch an audacious sabotage campaign against the railroad, against the oil fields. The operation would be more than a last-gasp gesture. The Allies would bleed. It would hurt.
But before he focused on the task of recruiting the teams, he needed to assure himself that the mission was feasible. Could commandos be inserted into Iran?
He summoned to his office Werner Baumbach, the interim commander of KG 200, the elite Luftwaffe squadron that provided air support for all clandestine missions. The fate of his bold plan would hang on what the much-decorated bomber pilot had to say.
ORIGINALLY, PRIOR TO ITS BEING confiscated by the Gestapo and its residents summarily transported to the walled ghetto at Łódź, the building on Berkaerstrasse had been a Jewish old age home, and Schellenberg’s large office on the fourth floor had been the director’s. He had kept much of the previous inhabitant’s tasteful decorations—the deep carpeting, the oversize mahogany desk, and the gracefully carved antique wooden cupboard that served as a bookshelf. But he had also added his own personal touches to the room, and these more directly reflected his spymaster’s job, as well as his very real fears about becoming a victim of the internecine vendettas that often swept through the upper echelons of Hitler’s Reich.
Crowded on a trolley table within easy reach of his desk was a row of telephones. Direct lines could connect him in just an instant to the Führer at the Chancellery, Himmler’s office on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, as well as his own apartment in Berlin and his country house in Herzberg; if the Gestapo long knives came after him, a last-minute appeal for mercy, or for that matter a hurried warning to his family, might make all the difference.
As an additional precaution, the entire office was wired for sound. Lodged in the walls, under the desk, in the telephone consoles, in the base of a lamp—microphones were hidden everywhere. The system was always on; it picked up every conversation, every grunt or laugh. He wanted to be sure he had an irrefutable record. The best defense, Schellenberg had come to learn as he’d mutely watched a procession of heads go on the block, would be ironclad proof that the charges were fabrications.
He’d also made sure that tampering with the evidence, or, for that matter, stealing his voluminous files filled with all sorts of useful dirty little secrets, would be impossible. Each night before he left, he flicked a switch that activated a strategically arrayed system of photoelectric cells. Anyone climbing through the window, fiddling with his safe, or just opening the door would be greeted by an ear-piercing alarm. Within thirty seconds, if not sooner, a squadron of guards would have their rifles leveled at the intruder.
And woe to him who tried to sandbag the master spy while he was sitting with apparent nonchalance hunched over his work. “My desk was like a small fortress,” he’d bragged without exaggeration. As soon as a visitor entered the room, he was automatically tracked by the muzzles of two guns discreetly built into the desk’s ornate mahogany woodwork. With the press of a button within easy reach, Schellenberg could spray his guest with a hail of bullets. If he was in a more forgiving mood, another button on the desk could be tapped: an alarm would sound, guards would surround the entire building, blocking every exit, while the unwelcome guest would be shuffled off at gunpoint. After the rigorous questioning, though, the captive might have preferred that Schellenberg had simply fired away.
It was these two hidden guns that automatically fixed Oberstleutant Werner Baumbach in their sights as the acting commander of the KG Luftwaffe command sat opposite the head of Section 6. Quite possibly they were aimed at the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords that the veteran pilot wore with pride around his neck. And no less a possibility, as the frustrating conversation proceeded it was also likely that the spy was tempted to press the deadly button; at least it would’ve put a merciful end to the discussion.
For no sooner had Schellenberg explained that he needed a plane that could transport commandos to Iran than the pilot began to hurl his objections. Sure, Baumbach offered, his Junkers Ju-290s had the range. A couple of the big, four-engine planes were parked out of sight of Allied bombers in a secret base in the Crimea, and they could make the trip to Iran and back without refueling (in size, engine configuration, even cruising speed, the craft were nearly identical to the C-54 that Mike had focused on in Santa Monica; but, of course, neither man knew what the other was up to). The problem, Baumbach proceeded to make clear, was that he was not prepared to risk one of the valuable planes in Iran. There was no way to guarantee that once it touched down in the desert, a heavily armed contingent from the Allied occupying force wouldn’t swoop in and capture the craft. In fact, that was the likely scenario; their radars would be tracking the plane every foot of the way as it made its descent. Of course, there was also the chance that their eager gunners wouldn’t wait for it to land. They’d shoot it out of the sky as it was coming down over Iran. Either way, though, the result would be the same.
Schellenberg didn’t argue, because he knew there’d be no point. The pilot was right. The Ju-290s were too valuable to lose. And there was not much likelihood of the factories churning out a replacement at this desperate stage of the war. So much for his mission, his chance at making a difference, at repaying old debts, at redemption. Unless—
Suppose, Schellenberg now suggested with an offhandedness that belied the fact that everything hung on the answer, the plane didn’t land. Didn’t descend below twenty thousand feet until the end of the mission. Kept out of the range of the Allied antiaircraft guns.
Paratroopers, Baumbach said, completing the thought.
The word hung in the silence for a long moment, by all accounts.
Then: Yes, Baumbach agreed at last with a flat certainty. A paratroop mission could work. His pilots could certainly get a team to the drop point. The rest would be up to them.