MIKE STOOD IN THE MIDST of a stand of tall olive trees, protected from the merciless sun and, he hoped, any curious glances as he waited for his contact. He had flown for days—a fitful, intermittent itinerary that had him bouncing in a C-54 from New York to Cuba to Trinidad to Belém, Brazil, to Dakar, and finally to Marrakech, Morocco. Exhausted, he waited not far from the Menara Airport terminal, across from a field of white tents housing platoons of Air Transport Command soldiers, barely hidden from the stream of scurrying airport porters in djellabas, for the meet.
Mike had not liked the plan from the start. For one thing, it was too insecure. In his suit, tie, and fedora he didn’t look like a military man, and he certainly couldn’t pass as a native. He might as well have had a sign on him announcing “SECRET AGENT.” So much for cover. Any enemy watchers staking out the airport must’ve made him in an instant.
The recognition signals didn’t give him much comfort, either. Only a simple visual, and then it was all systems go: proceed. You’ll recognize the contact on sight, he was told. Wait till he’s alone in the car. The rear door will be unlocked; just hop on in. To Mike’s way of looking at things, that was a plan made for disaster. What if he was walking straight into a trap? There was no word code, no emergency signal to abort, for sending a warning if an enemy agent was crouched out of sight in the front seat, waiting for him to sidle into the car before he pounced. And just the thought of the two of them being shoulder to shoulder in the back seat parked out in the open, sitting ducks for a sniper, filled him with a terrible apprehension.
The timing of the rendezvous was more sloppy tradecraft. Mike had traveled halfway around the world for several days, and, to his complete surprise and satisfaction, he had arrived at the prearranged time and place with an hour to spare. Yet his contact would also be coming a long way, all the way from Moscow. To count on their both arriving at the agreed time was too high a leap of faith. Like any good fieldman, Mike always expected something to go wrong—an early snowstorm grounding flights out of Moscow, a faulty landing gear on the plane and damned if the parts weren’t readily available, the pilot out of commission from the flu or maybe just hungover from all the vodka. Then if his contact didn’t show, how long should he wait? A day? A week? That had not been made clear. Mike was traveling on another mission, too, and it had its own vital demands, its own very precise timetable. He realized he might out of necessity have to choose one mission or the other.
Mike stood in the thin shade, and the next hour passed slowly. There were ages to think; and time to think is always dangerous on an operation.
The cardinal rule in any meet is that the agent in the field sets the terms; he’s the one who decides what’s safe, what’s most practical. He’s the one, after all, taking the risk. But Mike’s control had written the entire script. He’d said: The man from Moscow will be coming with a message. It might be a single word, perhaps “on,” or maybe “off.” Or it could be a sentence. It likely won’t be much longer. Listen, and that will determine what you need to do next.
Mike had not objected. It had never crossed his mind to share his operational concerns. He had simply said “Yes, sir,” and within the week he was at the Menara Airport outside Marrakech in a grove of olive trees as he waited for his contact to arrive from Moscow. After all, how could the case man protest when the controller giving orders was the president of the United States?
IT WAS NOVEMBER 2, 1943—at least a day after Schellenberg had heard the news about the Egyptian summit—when Mike was summoned by the president. Without any of his usual banter, FDR jumped right in. He announced that he was going to Cairo to meet with Churchill. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the president of the Republic of China, would also be arriving for the conference.
To Mike’s eyes, the Boss looked unusually healthy, even youthful. He seemed as excited as any traveler about to head off on an exotic trip.
Since the generalissimo will be coming to Cairo, the president went on, there was no possibility that Stalin would make an appearance. The last thing the marshal needed was for the Japanese emperor to feel Russia was taking sides in the Sino-Japanese War, the president helpfully explained.
Then FDR started on a new tack. He shared a secret, and Mike understood what was behind the Boss’s buoyant mood. The president revealed that he remained optimistic about his sitting down for talks with Churchill and Stalin.
It was a piece of intelligence that Schellenberg had not yet intercepted, or even imagined.
FDR explained: “Cordell Hull is in Moscow now. He is trying to make the arrangements for a meeting between Stalin and me.”
At the same time, like a veteran spymaster, the president also was careful not to tell the agent he was sending into the field more than the operative needed to know. He did not share that he’d managed to get over his initial pique with Stalin. In the end he’d found the statesman’s wisdom that empowered him to shrug off petty, personal annoyances and to focus instead on all that was to be gained. Nor did he reveal that when put to the test, he was a man of great courage; he would not allow his precarious health to be an impediment to the shaping of a postwar world that could create a lasting peace. He did not tell Mike that he had authorized Hull to inform the Soviet marshal that the American president was now willing to meet in Tehran.
FDR simply gave Mike his mission: “The Secretary will be returning home soon, so you had better get over to Africa and meet him on the way back. Whatever he has been able to arrange will be all right with me.”
The secretary of state would tell Mike—quite possibly even before the president was informed, FDR acknowledged ruefully—whether or not there would be a meeting of the Big Three. And where it would take place.
If Hull had somehow managed to work things out, Mike didn’t have to be told what he’d need to do next. His mind was already looking into the future, already grappling with the still-unknown security challenges. But first he’d need to go to the site Hull had negotiated and get a sense of all the lurking dangers; “take the temperature,” as the old service hands would say. Then he would get down to the difficult business of putting together a practical plan that would ensure the safety of the three Allied leaders.
Before he left, the president gave one last solemn instruction: No one must know. No one must know that Mike was meeting with Hull. No one must know what, if anything, the secretary of state had been able to negotiate. And, above all, if Hull had succeeded, no one must know where or when the meeting among the American president, the British prime minister, and the Soviet marshal would take place. The enemy was on high alert, and the course of the war would depend on secrecy being maintained.
IN THE TRADE, THERE IS the maxim that every minute of waiting might just as well be an hour in the overt world. That was the misery that Mike suffered through as he stared toward the spreading fronds of a tall palm tree where Hull’s car would, if all went as planned, come to park. Yet in the course of his long, solitary vigil, as he restlessly tossed back and forth all the what-ifs, all that could go wrong, all the many tasks that, depending on the message he received, might soon be required from him, he found one consolation: he liked Hull. There was a quality to the secretary of state, an authenticity and directness, that was rare in most men, and, in Mike’s experience, pretty much nonexistent in politicians. Of all the people he had met during his time in the White House, Mike would say without hesitation that “none appealed to me more than the squeaky-voiced, courtly, yet adamant, hillbilly Judge from Tennessee.” Only now Mike found himself silently screaming, Where was he? Was he coming?
At last Mike saw a car pull under the palm tree. There was a rotund, white-haired man in the rear. Two GIs sat up front. He saw the man in the back say a few words to the soldiers. They saluted, and then they exited the car, walking off into the terminal.
Mike did not leave his hiding place. He waited until he was certain Hull was alone, that the soldiers weren’t returning, that no one else was approaching the car.
He forced himself to walk slowly, as if he were taking a stroll. If any of the enemy watchers had spotted the secretary of state, he knew his caution wouldn’t matter. It’d be too late. But he didn’t want to give anyone a reason to pay attention to a man racing across the tarmac, to wonder what all the hurry was about, or to stare into the car.
A tug on the handle and the rear door opened, as had been agreed. He climbed in.
Hull was smiling, a man who couldn’t wait to deliver his news. “Stalin don’t want to do much travelin’ of any kind,” he said, eager to give Mike a sense of how strenuously he’d had to fight for the Boss in Moscow. “But,” he went on triumphantly, “I got him to go as far as Tehran to meet with the president.
“It’s Tehran, then,” Hull repeated.
SCHELLENBERG HAD SENT AN SD photo technician under diplomatic cover along with boxes of equipment to Ankara, and now a covert photographic lab was up and running in a safe house near the German embassy. Moyzisch would deliver the rolls of film he’d picked up from the valet, and within hours they’d be developed, copies made for the handful of officials in the Reich who were on the Cicero distribution list. A special courier plane would be waiting to fly the product to Berlin. It was a very efficient operation.
It was in that way, sometime in the second week in November 1943, that Schellenberg found out the Big Three would be meeting in Tehran.
“I have just learned that U.J. will come to Tehran,” the president had cabled the prime minister on November 11.
“His latest message has clinched the matter, and I think that now there is no question that you and I can meet him there between the twenty-seventh and the thirtieth.
“Thus endeth a very difficult situation, and I think we can be very happy.”
Schellenberg received this news and at once all his previous plans for Cairo were discarded. They had been replaced, he recognized, by a new, even more promising situation. There was no longer any need for compromise. There would be three murders. And of all the places in the world—Tehran! He had a network already up and running in the city. He had hunted there before. The enemy who had been advancing from victory to victory, who had been so self-assured that it was drawing up the plans for the final battles of the war, who had been so mired in its absolutism that it was committed to waging a brutal peace, had suddenly taken a disastrous misstep. And with that unwitting mistake, Long Jump was no longer an improbable, far-fetched mission, but a genuine opportunity.