“What are you celebrating? What is that, a martini?”
“May I offer you a small libation, Mr. Director?” Graham asked.
“No, thank you,” Colonel William J. Donovan said. “I try to set an example for my subordinates.”
“Is that why you wear those gaudy neckties?” Graham asked.
“How many of those have you had, Alex?”
“Probably one-third to one-half of what I will ultimately have,” Graham said seriously.
“And neither of you is going to tell me what it is that you’re celebrating?”
“Actually, Bill,” Graham said, “what Allen and I were discussing when you burst uninvited in here was how little we could get away with telling you.”
“I don’t think you’re kidding,” Donovan said not very pleasantly.
“He wasn’t,” Dulles said. “You’ve heard, I’m sure, that the only way a secret known to three people can remain a secret is if two of the three are dead?”
“But you agreed—in what we lawyers call ‘a condition of employment’—that there would be no secrets between us. Remember that?”
“And if it were not for your buddy Franklin,” Graham said, “both Allen and I would happily live up to that co
ndition of employment. But you keep telling him things you shouldn’t.”
“To rain on your parade, Alex,” Donovan said, “my buddy Franklin happens to be the President of the United States.”
Dulles put in pointedly: “And who has in his immediate circle a number of people—especially the Vice President—who I would be reluctant to trust with any secret, much less this one, as far as I could throw the White House.”
“This secret is one we really don’t want to get to Uncle Joe Stalin via Mr. Henry A. Wallace’s close friends in the Russian Embassy,” Graham said.
They had had this argument, or ones very like it, many times before.
In any conventional organization, in ordinary times, subordinates don’t challenge the boss; if they do, the boss gets rid of them. The Office of Strategic Services was not a conventional organization, and these were not ordinary times.
William J. Donovan was the director of the Office of Strategic Services, which in theory answered to General George C. Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, but in practice only to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Allen W. Dulles and Alejandro F. Graham were the OSS deputy directors for Europe and the Western Hemisphere, respectively. They were both uniquely qualified for their roles. Both were prepared—in other words, were privy to all of the OSS’s secrets—to take over at a moment’s notice if anything should happen to Donovan.
The truth was that while all three had great admiration for one another, they often didn’t like one another very much, although Dulles and Graham liked each other much better than either did Donovan. For his part, Donovan, realizing how important Dulles and Graham were to the OSS, very often passed over clear insubordination from them that he absolutely would not have tolerated from anyone else.
He was doing so now.
Graham’s remark What Allen and I were discussing when you burst uninvited in here was how little we could get away with telling you had quietly enraged him. He hadn’t actually taken a deep breath and counted to ten to avoid blowing up, but he had told himself that he had to be careful. Blowing up—no matter how justified—would have been counterproductive.
“You are going to tell me, aren’t you, Allen, exactly what it is you don’t want Vice President Wallace to pass on to our Russian allies?”
Dulles met his eyes.
“Reluctantly, Bill, I will,” Dulles said. “Alex and I had just agreed that the President will inevitably ask you what was going on in the Hotel Washington, and that it would be best if we prepared you for the question.”
“And what was going on at the Hotel Washington? You don’t mean with Putzi Hanfstaengl?”
Both Dulles and Graham nodded.
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl was another Columbia University classmate of President Roosevelt and Director Donovan.
The scion of a wealthy Munich publishing family, he had been attracted to Hitler and National Socialism in its early days. Among other things, Hanfstaengl had loaned Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party propagandist, the money to start up the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.