“In my quarters,” General Gehlen said.
“And what do you think we should do with her now?”
“Argentina,” Cronley said.
“She’s still Mossad, a Nazi hunter. What about . . .”
“Our Nazis?” Cronley said. “She said she’d leave ours alone, that there were more than she could handle in Argentina already there under the Phoenix Program.”
“General Gehlen?” Schultz asked.
“She’s a woman of her word.”
“General Seidel, do you have any problem with this?”
“I never heard of this person until just now.”
“General White?”
“I’ll go along with General Gehlen. Obviously, we can’t continue to hide, to protect her here.”
“Turning to von Dietelburg and Burgdorf. Cronley, why didn’t you at least tell Colonel Wasserman what you planned to do?”
“I thought he’d order me to tell Wangermann that we thought we had him, and that Wangermann would grab him himself.”
“Why would that be bad?”
Cronley told him.
“Anybody think that was a bad call?”
For a moment it looked as if Colonel Wallace had something to say, but in the end he was silent.
“Okay,” Schultz said. “This is what’s going to happen. It is not open for discussion. I say that because I had a long talk on the phone with Chief Justice Jackson when we landed at Rhine-Main. He already had heard from Colonels Wallace and Wasserman how Super Spook had fucked up by the numbers. But he also thought Cronley probably had good reasons for what he had done, and he made pretty good guesses as to what they were.
“Seven-K goes to Argentina. So do Cronley, Spurgeon, Zielinski, and the Winterses. They will go right now, immediately, to Rhine-Main in General White’s C-45, with a quick stop in Nuremberg to pick up Mrs. Winters and the baby. Captain Dunwiddie will take over protection of Justice Jackson. While Clete makes a quick round-trip to Buenos Aires, I will go—and I’d like you to come with me, General Seidel—to Vienna and put out the Wangermann volcano eruption by pouring money on it. General Gehlen, you have as long as Seidel and I are in Vienna—no more than seventy-two hours—to interrogate von Dietelburg and Burgdorf. Then Colonel Wallace will take them to the Tribunal prison in Nuremberg. Once they’re in there, you can work out further interrogation with Morty Cohen. Any questions?”
There were none.
[SEVEN]
LONG-SOUGHT NAZIS ARRESTED
By Janice Johansen
Associated Press Foreign Correspondent
Munich, Oct 8—
Major General Bruce T. Seidel, USFET’s chief intelligence officer, announced today that former Major General Wilhelm Burgdorf and former SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg are now in cells of the Allied War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg.
Seidel said their arrests “somewhere in Austria” were the result of a combined operation involving the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, the super-secret U.S. Directorate of Central Intelligence, and Austrian authorities.
“I cannot fully express how grateful we are for the cooperation of the Austrian authorities,” Seidel said. “We could not have made the arrests without their help.”
Burgdorf, one of the two generals sent by Hitler to Stuttgart late in the war to offer General Erwin Rommel the choice between a cyanide capsule and hanging for his role in the failed plot to kill Hitler, was reported to have died in the Hitler bunker and been buried in the Chancellery Garden.
“We knew this was a ruse,” said Colonel Harold Wallace, the chief of DCI-Europe, and the only member whose name is made public, “but we allowed him to think he had fooled us so we could catch him. His arrest, and that of his deputy von Dietelburg, removes the leadership of the so-called Odessa Organization, which has tried, without much success, to help other Nazis escape to South America and other locations.”