Paul found the clinic telephone and discreetly put in a call to Frances with the discouraging update. She would pass the news through channels at the house of spies to Allen Dulles. The operation was a bust. They would need to try again another day and move the operation to a safe location. Assuming, of course, that Edda didn’t change her mind again and that they could keep her and the diaries safe a little longer from the Gestapo.
Frances thought quickly. She knew that Edda would refuse to let them take Galeazzo’s papers anywhere without her. Edda never let the remaining diaries out of her sight. She was terrified of being tricked and losing them. Why didn’t they come to Le Guintzet? They could copy all night at the estate, uninterrupted. Frances would come and collect Edda in person. She had her little sports car, courtesy of Allen Dulles, and she adored driving. Edda would trust her. If Tracy Barnes and Allen Dulles’s team could smuggle Edda out of the clinic, she would come and get her and the diaries.
Sources are conflicting on what happened next. Some say that Frances set off that same night. Some say the operation was rescheduled for the next evening. What is not in dispute is that when Frances warmed up the Fiat and took off in darkness for Monthey, to collect Edda and bring her to Fribourg for a late-night photo session, she was well aware that rural mountain roads made her and Edda tempting targets for the Gestapo. The drive was a terrible risk for both of them. Edda was under constant surveillance, and it was a long drive on lonely roads for two women. The journey would take two hours in each direction. Neither Frances nor Edda would ever forget that drive—either the frisson of fear or the excitement. Edda would later talk of it to her friend as their “adventure.” Neither of them talked that night of grand ideas and moral choices, but both were aware that they were delivering something important, something aimed at what they each believed was justice.
The convoy to Le Guintzet—Edda and Frances in the Fiat Topolino and apparently an OSS team and Paul in another vehicle—rolled into the gravel drive sometime after midnight. At the estate, they trooped down to the manor’s cavernous working cellars, and Jacqueline de Chollet, six years old that winter, remembers the hubbub and seeing them gathered around while a local photographer took shots of the diaries spread out on a kitchen table. She remembers too that her mother, risking both their lives and dreading with every mile the Gestapo, drove Edda back to the clinic in the predawn hours, so her midnight adventure would not be discovered at daybreak and Edda would not face the risk of deportation. At just after 4:00 A.M., on either January 10 or January 11, 1945, while Frances idled around the corner, Edda clambered through a window and back into her room at the clinic, waved, and then Frances was off again, back over the mountain roads she loved driving.
Unfortunately, Edda and Frances’s predawn adventure did not go as seamlessly as they had hoped. An intrepid Swiss journalist lurking outside the convent, hot on the trail of Edda’s reported marriage and looking for the scoop on another scandal for Mussolini’s “nymphomaniac” daughter, witnessed her returning through a window and concluded she had been off meeting a lover. The newspapers were full in the days that followed of unsavory stories about Edda’s licentious overnight activities, and it was a stark warning of how easily the Germans might have spotted them had they been looking. And the scurrilous stories in the papers were better than the truth: the breaking story that Edda had just passed over to the Americans Count Ciano’s explosive wartime diaries.
* * *
Back in her room at dawn, Edda immediately regretted her decision and panicked. What if the Americans double-crossed her after all? What would the Germans do now to her and the children in retaliation? Hilde Beetz and the Germans had tricked her and Galeazzo. Hadn’t the Germans before that promised to take them safely to Spain and instead delivered them into the power of Joachim von Ribbentrop, her husband’s sworn enemy, in Munich? What evidence would she have, now that the Americans had copies, that the publication rights were hers? She was desperately broke and saw no other way of restoring her family fortunes. “I have put all my cards on the table and have confidence in you and your government and I expect a fair deal,” she wrote to Allen Dulles:
I am no fool, or dumb, and I can help a lot. Things are not as easy as they looked…I am waiting with great anxiety your answer. Don’t make me wait too long or I shall have a second and fatal nervous breakdown. Forgive the mistakes, but it’s five in the morning, not able to sleep and too worried to bother about the right spelling.
Edda considered. She did have one other piece of leverage. There were diaries that were still in Italy, hidden at Ramiola—“the chocolates.” Edda tried to dangle them now, adding, “Another thing, the rest. The complement of the diaries are still in Italy—if you take me out of here, I am willing to go and fetch them, only Pucci and I know where they are. Pucci does not know that I know.”
What Edda did not know is that the diaries they had hidden—which included some of the most damaging and sensitive of all Galeazzo’s papers—were already in Germany. Only Edda and Emilio had known their location. But Emilio Pucci had fallen hard for the beguiling Hilde, and he had told her everything. Hilde Beetz had turned them over, not in an act of betrayal but in a desperate attempt to save herself. Though in saving herself she had accomplished her intelligence mission.
* * *
In Weimar, Germany, Hilde was at that very moment working in secret to complete the translation of “the chocolates” for her superiors. Just two days later, on January 12, 1945, Hilde would finish her work on the papers in German possession. That day, she would send the original manuscripts and her translations to Berlin, as were her orders. She had been explicitly instructed to make no copies. Each night, under tight security, she had returned her drafts and the originals to the Gestapo office in Weimar for safekeeping. There had been no breach in security. Once her superiors had read Galeazzo Ciano’s manuscripts and taken whatever steps the content required, the documents would be destroyed. Both the down-payment papers and the Ramiola “chocolates” were gone or would be perhaps in a matter of days. Edda just didn’t know it.
* * *
Now that Allen Dulles had Galeazzo Ciano’s diaries, it was crucial that the material be transferred to the United States under tight security. The American government, already looking ahead to the trials that would eventually take place in Nuremberg, understood that the diaries were powerful evidence especially against Joachim von Ribbentrop, and possibly also against Ernst Kaltenbrünner and Heinrich Himmler. There was also every reason to believe that the materials, in the short term, would work as important propaganda: one more small weight that would, finally, conclusively, tip the balance of the war in the direction of the Allies.
There was no way to send a thousand photographs by telegram. Classified material had to be carried in secret on a flight out of Europe and routed through an Allied base or neutral country. The journey would involve traveling over land through Vichy France and crossing Spain to an air base in Portugal. Someone flying from Lisbon would need to hand-deliver the photographic films to Washington, and it had to be someone prepared to accept that he—or she—might not be able, if the political situation changed, to return immediately to Switzerland. Someone who was an American. Someone US intelligence unreservedly trusted. Allen Dulles could not risk a professional agent like Cordelia Dodson or Tracy Barnes, not in 1945 with the last, crucial stage of the war unfolding. So Frances took the mission.
By now, Frances had not been home to America since that week, nearly five years earlier, when she sailed out of New York Harbor for France with Louis, in the first flush of love and having just lost custody of her teenage daughter in order to protect her marriage. That daughter was now a grown woman. Louis had other pursuits. The children lived in another world, with maids and nannies. Her marriage was collapsing. And this work—her work as a spy, her adventure with Edda—was the most important thing that had happened in her life.
Both Paul Ghali and Frances’s daughter Jacqueline remember different parts of Frances’s last adventure, her secret flight to carry the Ciano Diaries to America, allowing us to piece together the story. Years later, when queried on whether it had been Frances who acted as the American courier, Paul Ghali’s wife went back and looked in her by-then-late husband’s files. “You mention the American lady, Mme. De Chollet, whose name Paul used,” she wrote: “I was 90% certain she was the lady who got the bottle with the film to the United States but I wanted to make it sure for 100% and unearthed the big file of the Ciano Diary through which I went. Result: Yes, it was Mme. Frances de Chollet who did it. Apparently, she was a good friend of Edda Ciano in Switzerland.”
Jacqueline has different but complementary memories of that winter. Her mother hated flying but told her when she was older the story of how she once flew in an “airship” to the United States from Lisbon to take something to America. She would have had to have left Switzerland unseen, have traveled across France and Spain, and she must have done so on a separate passport, because hers is notably silent on any record of her travels. One likes to imagine Frances driving the Topolino fast along the French Riviera, the canisters of film that she and Edda had saved for history on the passenger seat beside her. That part of the story Frances never mentioned. She only told her daughter later that the takeoff from Lisbon in rough weather was a nightmare and the only part that truly terrified her.
And with that last trip to deliver the copies of the diaries of Galeazzo Ciano to the State Department in America, it seems that the intelligence career of Frances de Chollet ended as suddenly as it had started.
* * *
Frances’s friendship with Edda Ciano did not end. They had become, through it all, sisters of a kind: a friendship forged in adversity and the sorrows of two middle-aged women not certain any longer where they were going. Frances was determined that Edda would not be double-crossed—or just plain forgotten. She delivered the films, visited family in America, and then returned to Switzerland. Frances took on the role of Edda’s financial adviser. She was going to ensure that Edda did receive from the publication of the diaries the funds she needed to secure her family’s independence.
Paul Ghali’s newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, initially offered thirty-five hundred dollars for the rights to publish the Ciano Diaries, which the US Department of State reserved the right to censor if needed for national security. Edda had counted on a much larger sum and was despairing. Ultimately, at Frances’s urging as the spy-house hostess, Allen Dulles and the State Department would approve an unrecorded royalty to Edda, paid through the newspaper, of twenty-five thousand dollars for world rights in English. It was nothing more than the diaries deserved. They were clearly a bombshell and destined to become a bestseller. Allen Dulles saw it at once when he received the first translations back from the United States in March 1945. Here was evidence to indict the Germans—Joachim von Ribbentrop especially—of war crimes. Frances also reserved rights in French. Edda assigned to her friend the sole right to negotiate those commercial contracts.
With publication assured, Edda grew increasingly anxious about the fallout. How were they going to get her and the children out of Switzerland and harm’s way? There was some talk in Allen Dulles’s cables back to Washington of Edda Ciano applying for asylum in the United States, but that went nowhere. None of the Allies wanted to touch the problem of Mussolini’s daughter in the spring of 1945, with the war not quite yet over. That left Edda still a refugee in Switzerland and there on suffrage, though her friends had managed now to have her moved to better accommodations in Montreaux. Edda’s great fear was angering the Swiss. “[W]e must be very careful,” Edda urged Frances. “For God’s sake tell Paul to be very careful…because if the authorities get wind of something off, I’ll go to another convent.”
* * *
By the end of April 1945, the Allies were on the verge of victory in Europe, and loose ends were starting to get tied up hastily. The Nazis had two important parts of Galeazzo’s papers: the down-payment papers, delivered as part of the planned prison break, and “the chocolates”—the papers recovered from Dr. Melocchi at the clinic in Ramiola. Hilde Beetz had been assigned to translate these documents, and some captured personal records of Benito Mussolini, while she was working from home in Weimar, Germany.
When Hilde completed her translations, the Gestapo had sent Galeazzo’s original manuscripts and the translations to the Nazi senior command, where the cache ultimately made its way into the hands of Adolf Hitler. Hitler reviewed the materials in German possession, and then sometime in April or May 1945, just before the end, personally ordered the destruction of the Ciano Diaries. Both the originals and Hilde’s translations perished.
* * *
Edda’s father famously did not survive those last weeks of the war in Europe either. Neither did Clara Petacci, who had tried on that last night in Verona to save Galeazzo. Mussolini had lived in fear of what would happen if he betrayed Hitler. But the danger, in the end, was elsewhere. On April 28, in a small village in northern Italy, partisans in the local resistance, having tracked down Il Duce, lined Benito Mussolini and his mistress up against a wall and mowed them down with gunfire. Their bodies were later strung up, a ghastly image caught on camera. One wonders whether, in those final moments as he faced a vigilante firing squad, Mussolini thought of how his death paralleled the one that he had ordered for his son-in-law that morning in January little more than a year earlier. One wonders, too, whether he thought of Edda, his favorite daughter.
Edda’s fury burned as brightly as ever. The Swiss press reported—accurately or not, no one is quite sure—that Edda, when she heard of her father’s death and, later, the public abuse of his body, put on a bright-red dress and went for a walk of defiant celebration.
* * *
Benito Mussolini was executed on April 28. Two days later Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. The war ended officially in Europe little more than a week later, on May 8, 1945, and before the month was out Hilde Beetz’s boss Ernst Kaltenbrünner would be arrested, and Heinrich Himmler would be dead from suicide. In June, the Allies would arrest Galeazzo’s sworn enemy, the man even the other Nazis hated: Joachim von Ribbentrop.
It was only a matter of time, Hilde knew, before she and her husband would be arrested. She had spent the war as a Nazi spy, working hand in glove with the Gestapo. Gerhard Beetz had been a senior military commander. Hilde retreated to her mother’s home and tried to keep a low profile. But she was just waiting for the knock on the door, and she knew she was looking at a prison sentence.
* * *
The Second World War continued, of course, in the Pacific theater until mid-August, but for those in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany there were wild celebrations and other painful reckonings in May. The Swiss wanted to be rid of Edda Ciano. She had never been a welcome refugee, and what to do with her and with Emilio Pucci now were open questions. Emilio wanted to return to Italy, but his status as an officer (and an AWOL officer at that) complicated his repatriation, and he risked facing a court-martial for desertion. A trial would almost certainly end with Emilio in prison too. Cordelia Dodson, his old friend from Reed College and OSS agent, intervened to try to save him.
Without Emilio’s heroic efforts, Cordelia argued to Allen Dulles, Edda and the diaries would never have made it to Switzerland. When Allen Dulles was fully apprised of Emilio’s role in the preservation of the manuscripts and of his role in Edda’s escape from Italy, he agreed that, if Emilio put his story on the record for the eventual prosecutors, something would be done to ease his post-war return to Italy. In May and June, Emilio was debriefed twice by the US government and recorded in two extensive documents the dramatic story of their escape from Ramiola and his torture at the hands of the Gestapo. Emilio also provided detailed information on the location of “the chocolates”—the portions of Galeazzo’s diaries that, as far as Edda and Emilio knew, were still hidden with Dr. Melocchi.
As soon as the war was over, Allen Dulles personally traveled to Ramiola to retrieve the diaries and the jewels that Edda and Emilio had left hidden at the electrical power station. There was, of course, no hope of finding them. Hilde Beetz, confronted with the accusations of Gestapo-informant Father Guido Pancino, had “discovered” them in a bid to save her life and passed them over to the Nazis. The Germans, Allen Dulles learned, had beaten them to the cache, and he did not need to be told that Hitler had already ordered their destruction. It was obvious to Allen Dulles that this part of the Ciano Diaries was lost to history. The Americans had received from Edda a small portion of the originals: five slim, papery volumes out of what had once been three small suitcases of papers. The diaries the Allies possessed—saved by the joint efforts of Hilde, Edda, and Frances—were crucially important. But they were only a sliver.
* * *
On May 27, 1945, Allen Dulles held in his hands a package of papers. They were the translations of the diaries that Edda Ciano, with the help of Frances de Chollet, had allowed the Americans to photograph that night in Le Guintzet on the kitchen table. Before Allen Dulles was Robert H. Jackson, appointed by the president as the chief US counsel and the head prosecutor at the war-crimes trials that would come to be simply known as Nuremberg, after their location. The scope of the Holocaust in Europe was so breathtaking in its depravity that the International Military Tribunal would, for the first time in history, attempt to bring the major perpetrators to justice. The charges would be crimes against the peace, conspiracy, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Allen Dulles personally handed that packet of papers to Justice Jackson. They would indict Ernst Kaltenbrünner and Galeazzo’s archrival, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s foreign minister. Hilde Beetz, Edda Ciano, and Frances de Chollet: They had each risked their lives to make that moment possible.
Robert Jackson had looked forward to this moment and noted it in his diaries. He fully understood the importance of the diaries of Galeazzo Ciano, even if he did not fully comprehend that it was three women who had raced above all to save them. Like Paul Ghali, Robert Jackson wrote them, however unwittingly, out of the history. “Dulles,” he wrote, “has maintained an OSS post in Switzerland and it is a most valuable one for us. He has…Count Ciano’s diaries.…After long negotiation, Dulles personally got the diaries. It contains much said to be very damaging to Ribbentrop.” Allen Dulles considered securing the Ciano Diaries one of his major wartime victories.
* * *
By June, Edda’s fate had been decided. She would be returned to Italy. As Mussolini’s daughter, her position was precarious. Nothing could massage the fact of who her father and her husband had been. Nothing could change the fact that she and Galeazzo had both been, before those mid-war course corrections, fascists. The Swiss, who had never wanted Edda Ciano, were determined to expel her, and Edda wrote a last letter to Allen Dulles, confused and worried about her future. She could not understand why she was being forced to return to a country where she knew she was hated. “I am not a criminal of war (how could I be?),” she insisted. “My government has not asked for me. I have never in my life done anything against the Swiss. Anyway if they send me back to Italy I’ll know the meaning of death soon enough.” She saw how the story had ended for Galeazzo and her father. It was true that Edda had never served any political role. Her support for Mussolini and for Hitler had been personal and symbolic. But Edda’s moral universe was myopic. She would never truly comprehend, even decades later, her culpability as a fascist. All Edda could see was the violence that had been inflicted upon her family and the sacrifices they had made in turning their back on fascism in the summer of 1943 with Galeazzo’s vote at Grand Council.
Edda would ultimately be deported back to Italy, tried for crimes that included acting in favor of fascism, the persecution of Jews, and contributing to unleashing of war. In Italy, she was sentenced to house arrest for a period of two years on the small island of Lipari, where she soon found a handsome man to keep her company. The Ciano children were left to stay in Rome for those years with Frau Schwarz, their Swiss nanny.
* * *
For Frances de Chollet, the end of the war was the end of an adventure and a moment of unforgettable and sometimes heartbreaking and bitter clarity. Already newspapermen like Paul Ghali were writing her out of the story of the hunt for the Ciano Diaries, not out of any malign intent, but simply because it was irresistible to be the man who was the hero of such a fine spy caper. She was a wealthy banker’s wife and a forty-something mother, and women across America and Europe who had taken part in the war effort, from Allen Dulles’s amateur agents and the code breakers in Bletchley to Rosie the Riveter, were expected to retreat back to the domestic, making room for the returning soldiers. For Frances, that retreat to the domestic was impossible. Frances and Louis’s marriage by now was frayed beyond recovery. Both had taken on other lovers. Louis would soon file for divorce and eventually marry that fixture from the Fribourg salon at Le Guintzet, Roselyne Radziwiłł. Frances was swept up in a liaison with a French general and traveled with him to Germany in the weeks after the end of the war, where she witnessed and photographed the sweeping destruction of bombed-out cities. She felt afterward that, in her work with Edda saving the diaries, she had participated in the fight to defeat the Nazis.
That participation might not have been celebrated publicly. But Frances was rewarded for her efforts as an amateur spy that summer with the thing she most wanted: her motorcar. Allen Dulles made sure that it happened. When she and Louis fled Paris in 1940, one step ahead of police trouble for Louis’s work in smuggling funds out of the occupied capital, Frances had been forced to leave behind her beloved gray Packard sedan. She had parked it in the warehouse of the Cadoricin shampoo factory, owned by a friend of the family. She had no idea if the Germans had discovered it and confiscated her most cherished possession, but she dreamed that, somehow, it still might be waiting for her there under the sheets and amid the stacked boxes. That, she told Allen Dulles, was the thanks she wanted for her part in the spy mission that he considered one of the greatest American intelligence achievements in wartime Switzerland: permission to go to Paris and find out.
Allen Dulles, to his credit, did not write Frances out of the history, at least not in his private communications to the State Department. “[A]n American girl married to a Swiss named Mrs. Frances Cholet [sic] has rendered us very real service,” he wrote to officials in the department. “She is now applying through the Consulate for an amendment to her passport for France as she has a house and furniture in Paris.…While this trip has no direct military significance, I should like to do her the slight favour of supporting the application.…I would appreciate if you would have our State Department liaison man mention this.”
Frances was granted that permission. With her visa to Paris in hand, she traveled back to Paris to fetch her Packard, which she discovered dusty and dry after four years in storage, but safe. Jacqueline de Chollet, thinking of her mother, remembers how she went to Paris, fixed the car herself as an able mechanic, and drove it with the windows down, her scarf flying in the wind, all the way home to Switzerland, when the rest of her domestic world was crashing down around her. “That,” Jacqueline says, “was my mother.”
* * *
On June 25, 1945, Paul Ghali’s newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, published its first serial installment of the diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, covering the years from 1939 to 1943. Each week for the next month the installments riveted America, ultimately becoming, when released as a book in 1946, an instant New York Times bestseller. Only those in the inner circle of conspirators, who had fought to save the diaries and to persuade Edda to release them to the Americans, knew to mourn what was missing. Lost in Germany were the early volumes for the years 1937 and 1938, as well as Galeazzo’s more fulsome records of his foreign-office conversations and Edda’s own wartime diaries. But what was in the official diaries that had traveled to Switzerland with Edda was enough to be explosive—and enough to cause Joachim von Ribbentrop some very serious problems.