“I am having difficulty understanding—no offense, Mr. Cronley—why such a responsibility would be handed to a twenty-two-year-old captain. And also how you got to be a captain at twenty-two.”
I have to tell him, Cronley thought.
And did.
—
“So you know Generalmajor Gehlen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There are those who believe Generalmajor Gehlen and his entire staff should be here, in cells next to Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Field Marshal Alfred Jodl, and the other senior Nazis awaiting trial, like Martin Bormann, but he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“But what he’s given us, in an intelligence sense, is worth the President allowing him . . . hell, ordering that he be allowed to vanish?”
Before Cronley could frame a reply, Jackson added, aloud but as if he was speaking to himself, “I can’t believe I’m asking that of a twenty-two-year-old captain.”
And then, as if he had heard what he had said, he added: “Again, no offense intended, son.”
“None taken, sir. Sir, when General Gehlen surrendered to Colonel Wallace—”
“Who?”
“Colonel Harold Wallace, sir. Then of the OSS and now chief, DCI-Europe. The man I told you was looking over my shoulder when I was chief in case I fuc—didn’t perform as expected.”
“Oh, yes.”
“When he surrendered to us, General Gehlen was two jumps ahead of the Sicherheitsdienst.”
“Who had heard that he wanted to switch sides?”
“The Sicherheitsdienst didn’t know about that. What they wanted to do was take him, and his staff, to the Flossenbürg concentration camp and hang him and his deputy, Oberst Ludwig Mannberg, beside Admiral Canaris for their role in the attempted assassination of Hitler.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jackson said. “But I heard that when we liberated the Flossenbürg camp, they found Admiral Canaris’s naked body still hanging from the gallows on which he had been hung two weeks before.”
“I heard that, too, sir. My point is that General Gehlen and most of the members of Abwehr Ost were not Nazis. Quite the opposite.”
“Most, but not all?”
“Not all. The ‘Russian’ we swapped for Col
onel Mattingly, Major of State Security Venedikt Ulyanov, had once been SS-Brigadeführer von Deitelberg, a Nazi on Gehlen’s Abwehr Ost staff. Gehlen had gotten rid of him by assigning him to the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, where he changed sides.”
“Incredible,” Jackson said. “And while I really would like to continue this conversation—and we will, later—let’s turn to a subject really dear to my heart, my personal safety.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I really at some risk? Or are Sid Souers and the President being overly cautious?”
“I don’t know how much of a risk, sir, because we don’t really know why the Russians started the kidnapping, or what they hope to accomplish. But they are kidnapping or trying to kidnap people, and I think that means you are at risk, sir.”
“And how do you propose to protect me?”
“I think the best way to do that is to get the Army—the 1st Division—out of the picture. They don’t know what they’re up against. The CIC—General Greene’s CIC—is already charged with the basic security of the trials, sort of supervising the soldiers from the 1st Division . . .”
“And making sure Göring and his friends stay in their cells.”