The Office of Strategic Services
National Institutes of Health Building
Washington, D.C.
1045 22 June 1943
“Got a minute, Alex?” Colonel William Donovan asked, stepping inside the office of the Deputy Director for Western Hemisphere Operations, Colonel Alejandro Graham.
“Truth to tell, Bill, I’m up to my ass in alligators.”
“I really need just a minute.”
“OK.”
“I just had a rather interesting chat with the G-2,” Donovan said.
“Really?”
“Someone has apparently told him we have a team in Argentina headed by someone named Frade.”
“I wonder who told him that? That’s supposed to be Need To Know.”
“That’s what I told him. He was pretty vague about that. He said he was sorry, but I didn’t have the Need To Know who told him that. He sort of hinted it came from the White House.”
“From the White House? That place leaks like a sieve, doesn’t it?”
“I keep telling Roosevelt he should tighten things up,” Donovan said. “But you know how he is.”
“Yes, I do. Is there more?
“Oh, yes. It seems the G-2 sent a new assi
stant attaché for air to Buenos Aires. And this man not only got to meet Frade—your friend Leibermann introduced them—but checked him out in that Lockheed we sent down there by mistake.”
“Really? I’m not sure I’m glad to hear that.”
“And then, the attaché told the G-2, Frade repaid his courtesy by threatening to kill him.”
“Maybe the attaché asked Frade the wrong question,” Graham suggested.
“I have no way of knowing this, of course—and the G-2 said he had never heard the phrase ‘Galahad’—but I think maybe the attaché did ask Frade the wrong question.”
“That does seem likely, doesn’t it?”
“What do you think I should do, Alex?”
“I think I’d tell the G-2 he should tell his man to be careful.”
“I did. I told him that Frade’s already killed six people we know about.”
“I think the figure is four, but who’s counting?” Graham asked. Then, more seriously: “Are you going to have trouble with your friend Franklin about this?”
“I don’t see how he can complain to me that Frade threatened this guy without admitting to me he sent him down there to ask a question he promised me he wouldn’t ask.”
“I don’t know which of the two of you is the more devious,” Graham said. “I say that as a compliment. Now get out of here and let me go back to work.”
Donovan left, and Graham sat at his desk, the events of the last two months whirring through his head.