"It occurred to me that if someone wished to paint the registration numbers of an already registered aircraft on another aircraft-in other words, to substi-tute aircraft-I very much doubt anyone would notice."
"Unless the original aircraft showed up," Ramirez said thoughtfully.
"I don't think that's likely in this case," Mart¡n said.
"Wouldn't the name of the manufacturer of the aircraft appear somewhere?"
"Both el Coronel Frade's missing aircraft and the aircraft Se¤or Frade wishes to bring into Argentina were manufactured by Beech."
"Then there would be no problem at all, is that what you're saying?"
"There is one small problem. El Coronel Frade's missing airplane had one engine. The other aircraft has two."
"Well, you're a very resourceful fellow, Coronel," Ramirez said. "A little thing like the number of engines shouldn't be too difficult for you to deal with."
"Another thought occurred to me, mi General: If something goes wrong when Outline Blue is executed, an aircraft that can fly six, and in a pinch, eight, people to Uruguay might be nice to have."
"Your resourcefulness never ceases to amaze me, Coronel," Ramirez said.
[TWO]
Office of the Director
The Office of Strategic Services
Washington, D.C.
1930 11 April 1943
"Come on in, Alex," Colonel William J. Donovan, a stocky, well-tailored man in his fifties, said, looking up from his desk. "What have you got?"
Colonel A. (Alejandro) F. (Fredrico) Graham, USMCR, laid a large, torn-open manila envelope on Donovan's desk and settled himself in a green leather armchair.
Donovan went into the envelope and extracted a slightly smaller envelope, also recently torn open. It was stamped TOP SECRET in red letters, top and bottom, on both sides. From this he extracted three stapled-together sheets of paper.
The first sheet of paper was a U.S. Government Inter-Office Memorandum. It was from the Chief of Naval Intelligence and addressed to the Deputy Direc-tor for Western Hemisphere Operations, Office of Strategic Services, and an-nounced that transmitted herewith by officer courier was nondecrypted message N-45-7643 (no copies made) of a communication received from Sta-tion Aggie at 1505 hours 13 April 1943.
The second sheet of paper contained many lines of apparently meaningless five-letter words (e.g., AKLQE MXCBI PISLA TDEQF).
The third sheet of paper was stamped TOP SECRET in red, top and bottom, and was headed: DECRYPTION OF USN # N-45-7643. Donovan tore that from the top two sheets and dropped them, plus the two manila envelopes, into one of two wastebaskets at the side of his desk. This one held a white paper bag on which was printed in several places, in four-inch-high red letters, the phrase BURN TOP SECRET BURN.
Donovan's expression clearly intended to convey to Graham the idea that his time was too valuable to waste tearing unimportant pieces of paper from im-portant pieces of paper, and that Graham should have performed this bureau-cratic task himself.
If Colonel Graham felt rebuked, he offered no apology. And there was no sign on his face that he regretted annoying Colonel Donovan.
Donovan started to read the decrypted message:
TOP SECRET
DECRYPTION OF USN #N-48-?643
URGENT TOP SECRET
PROM STACHIEP AGGIE 1555 GREENWICH 11APR43
MSG NO 0001