“A Navy lieutenant got out of the car and opened the rear door, and then a civilian and an admiral got out. They marched up onto the porch, and the admiral said, ‘General White, I’m Sid Souers,’ and handed me an envelope.
“Inside the envelope was a note on White House stationery. The note—handwritten, not typed—read ‘Dear General White. I have sent Admiral Souers to see you. He will explain. Best wishes, Harry S Truman.’”
“Jesus!”
“Which the admiral promptly did. He told me that Truman had realized he had made a mistake when he disestablished the OSS. Everybody who had been saying the OSS was useless, a threat to democracy, et cetera, and had to be abolished—by everybody I mean Army G-2, Navy Intelligence, the FBI, and the State Department—was now angling to take it over.
“The admiral told me that Truman had decided, when he ordered the dissolution of the OSS, to turn over to him certain operations which had to be kept running.”
“Him? Why? The Navy? Who is this admiral, anyway?”
“I later found out he’s a longtime crony of the President, going back to Missouri, where Truman was a weekend warrior in the National Guard and Souers a weekend sailor in the Naval Reserve.”
“I’d heard Truman was a National Guard colonel,” Harmon said.
“He was an Artillery captain in France in the First World War. Anyway, when I said the admiral was the President’s crony, I meant just that. When Souers went on active duty when the war started, he was assigned to Naval Intelligence in Washington. Where he moved into Senator Harry Truman’s apartment, and they were bachelors together.”
White paused in thought, then went on: “Where was I? Oh, yeah. The admiral told me that when Truman signed the order disbanding the OSS, Truman had decided where he would put the OSS operations that couldn’t be shut down. He promoted Souers to rear admiral, had him named deputy chief of ONI. Then he gave responsibility for these clandestine operations to the deputy chief of ONI.
“Next, when the President decided he really needed a clandestine espionage, et cetera, organization answering only to him, he signed an Executive Order establishing the Directorate of Central Intelligence as of January first and named Admiral Souers as director.”
“That’s three weeks ago,” Harmon observed.
“Just before I came back here,” White said. “Somewhere during our conversation on the porch, Souers introduced the civilian. His name is Schultz. Souers said that Schultz had been Number Two in the OSS operation in the Southern Cone—Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile—during the war. He had just retired as a commander and was now Souers’s Number Two. The ‘executive assistant to the director.’
“Souers then told me ‘it had been decided’ that the Constabulary was going to provide whatever support was requested by DCI-Europe . . .”
“Decided by who?”
“He didn’t say. I got the feeling that Souers has the authority to do whatever he thinks has to be done. Anyway, he said that Harry Bull was in the loop, as is a brigadier general named Greene.”
Harmon shook his head, signaling he didn’t know who Greene was.
“He runs the CIC for USFET,” White said. “I had met him once, but didn’t know him. And the head of the Army Security Agency in USFET, a major named McClung, and a Major Wallace, who used to run OSS Forward and is now ostensibly working for Greene.”
“Didn’t . . . What’s his name? Mattingly . . . Didn’t Colonel Bob Mattingly, who used to be in Hell on Wheels before he went to the OSS, command OSS Forward?”
“When I asked the same question, Schultz—who is known as ‘El Jefe,’ which means ‘the Chief’ in Spanish, because he was once a chief petty officer—”
“An ex-CPO is now Number Two in this DCI?” Harmon interrupted, his tone incredulous.
White nodded. “He is. Schultz told me that Colonel David Bruce, who ran the OSS in Europe, decided that OSS Forward could function more efficiently if ‘the Army’ thought it was commanded by Bob Mattingly, when it was in fact commanded by Major Harold Wallace, who was—is—in fact Colonel Harold Wallace. Schultz also told me that Bob Mattingly, who is now Greene’s deputy, would not, repeat not, be in the loop.”
“What’s that all about?”
“G-2 wants to take over DCI-Europe. Quote, Since Colonel Mattingly has applied for integration into the Regular Army . . .”
“I always thought he was a fine officer,” Harmon said.
“He was. Is. Let me finish the quote . . . he might consider his primary loyalty was to the Army, rather than to DCI. End quote. So Mattingly is not in the loop. Lieutenant Colonel Billy Wilson is.”
“Billy’s part of this?” Harmon asked, shaking his head in disbelief.
“You remember that during the war he was always doing things for the OSS?”
Harmon nodded.
“Among those things he did for the OSS was fly Major Wallace to the rendezvous point where Generalmajor Gehlen surrendered. Among the things he’s done recently for the OSS—now the DCI—was arrange for the pickup across the border in Thuringia of the wife and two kids, boys, of an NKGB colonel the DCI had bagged and sent to Argentina.”