"OK. As soon as I can get there, I'll see you there."
Ashton nodded.
"One thing, mi Mayor. I think you should know that I got a Gold Star to take home to Mommy when I went through the knife-fighting course," Ashton said. "If we reach Porto Alegre and you tell me 'Sorry, there's been a change a plan' and we have to do the parachute bit, I will, mi Mayor, with my razor-sharp instrument of silent death, turn you into a soprano."
"I'll bear that in mind," Clete said. "My very best regards to Se¤orita Con-suelo, Capitan."
[SIX]
The Port
Montevideo, Uruguay
1430 15 April 1943
Although he was in fact an agent of the Office of Strategic Services-and be-fore that an agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps-David Ettinger rarely thought of himself as a real-life version of the secret agents Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and other film stars portrayed in the movies.
Earlier, he was assured that his employment at the RCA Laboratories was "essential to the war effort" and would thus exempt him from the draft. Even so, he enlisted in the Army because putting on the uniform of the country that had given him and his mother refuge seemed the right thing to do.
At the time, however, he thought there was very little chance he would be handed a rifle and sent off to fight the Nazis and the Germans in the trenches.
Indeed. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, for whom he worked, had used that ar-gument when he tried to talk him out of enlisting:
"One of two things will happen to you, David. They will make you a rifle-man and you will get killed, which would be a terrible waste and not nearly as great of a contribution to the war as you can make here; or they will send you to the Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, where they will have you doing the same thing you're doing here, except with a good deal less freedom, and on a private's pay."
At the time Sarnoff tried to dissuade him from enlisting, Sarnoff was him-self about to become Colonel David Sarnoff of the Signal Corps, so David con-cluded that Sarnoff's arguments to him were pro forma at best. Meanwhile, other sources told him that a man with his background and experience would qualify for a commission. Thus he imagined that after he went through the hor-rors of basic training, he would be commissioned a lieutenant. And then, more than likely-as Colonel Sarnoff suggested-he would be assigned to the Army's Signal Laboratory to work in his specialty-high- and ultrahigh-frequency radiation.
He applied for both a direct commission and for Officer Candidate School during his second week of basic training at Camp Polk, Louisiana. By the time both applications returned-within days of each other in his seventh week of basic training-he had decided that being an enlisted man was not the most pleasant way to serve one's newly adopted country. Unhappily, the returned ap-plications stated that inasmuch as he was a Spanish National, he was not quali-fied to be commissioned as an officer in the Armed Forces of the United States.
A week later he was summoned from the Live Hand Grenade Range to meet a gentleman from the Counterintelligence Corps-he still remembered holding a bomb, fuse ticking, as the most terrifying aspect of his basic training. It had come to the attention of the CIC, the gentleman in civilian clothing told him in a thick Munich accent, that he spoke both German and Spanish. Was this true?
"Auch Franzosisch," Private Ettinger replied.
They chatted for ten minutes, long enough to convince the CIC agent-also a Jew who had escaped from Nazi Germany-that he wasn't a Nazi spy. And then the CIC agent told him that the CIC needed someone like him. A large number of Germans lived in the Yorktown district of New York City-and else-where. And the Army wished to keep an eye on them. And Private Ettinger seemed to have the necessary linguistic and educational qualifications for that.
Private Ettinger volunteered for the Counterintelligence Corps for several reasons. For one thing, it would keep him from being sent to the then forming Ninety-fifth Infantry Division for training as a radio operator. For another, he would probably be assigned to New York City, where his mother lived. And finally, he was told that after graduation from the CIC School in Baltimore, he would be designated a Special Agent of the CIC, which carried with it the pay of a staff sergeant. CIC agents, he was told, worked in civilian clothing, and their rank was not made public.
That seemed to be the next-best thing to getting the commission he was de-nied because of his Spanish nationality.
After graduating from the CIC School at Camp Holabird in Baltimore, Special Agent Ettinger was retained there as an instructor in shortwave radio telephony. This allowed him to travel to New York City to see his mother just about every other weekend. The Pennsylvania Railroad's tracks went past Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where, had he not been overwhelmed with patriotic fervor to serve his adopted country, he would still be employed by RCA at a vastly greater compensation than he was now being paid.
While he was stationed at the CIC Center, another civilian with interesting credentials visited him. This man was an agent of the Office of Strategic Ser-vices, an organization about which Special Agent Ettinger had heard very little.
This interview was conducted in a dialect of Spanish Ettinger recognized as Tex-Mex-in other words, spoken by people of a Mexican background who lived in Texas. In this interview the OSS agent told him that the OSS needed someone qualified to set up and operate a clandestine shortwave radio station in a not-then-identified South American nation, and that Ettinger seemed to have the qualifications they were looking for. It was some time later that Ettinger learned that he had been interviewed by a man who was not only a full colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps, but Assistant Director for Western Hemisphere Op-erations of the OSS.
A week later, Ettinger found himself in a place that before the war had been the Congressional Country Club in Virginia, not far from Washington. The training there was something like a repeat of basic training and CIC training- in a sense, ludicrous, consider
ing what he had been told was planned for him. He was going to Argentina, by Pan American Airlines, ostensibly an expert on oil-industry tank farms, to operate a radio station. He thought it highly unlikely that he would ever be called upon to parachute from an airplane, or engage in a knife fight, or follow someone down city streets without being seen, or pick a lock.
Once he was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he did find himself on the fringes of warlike acts, but only on the fringes. He wore civilian clothing and lived in an apartment. He ate in restaurants. He even had a maid to do his laundry, and an automobile to get around town and to drive out to the radio station. His role in the sinking of an ostensibly neutral merchant vessel engaged in the clandes-tine resupply of German submarines was indisputably noncombatant.
Nevertheless, he took a private pride in knowing that without his radio station, there would have been no way to tell the submarine where to find the ship it would torpedo.
Although he sensed that if he gave either of them the slightest hint of this, they would be embarrassed, David Ettinger was thrilled to be closely associated with men like Cletus Frade and Anthony Pelosi.
More than that, they had given him the resolve-he didn't think of it as courage-to do what he was doing now. He realized that in a manner of speak-ing he was indeed now in the trenches, facing the Nazis personally.
And he was doing work that Cletus Frade and Tony Pelosi could not do, no matter how courageous they were, or how skilled at things like flying airplanes or rigging explosive charges. They didn't have his background or, frankly, his intelligence. Nor did they speak German, nor were they Jews.