“I don’t know what’s going on at Kloster Grünau. I turned the whole operation over to Cronley. I never went down there. Why, I even gave him my suite in the Vier Jahreszeiten because I never used it.
“Now, as far as FILL IN THE BLANK going so wildly wrong down there under his watch, I certainly don’t want to belittle what Cronley did in Argentina, but the cold fact is that he was made a captain before he even had enough time in grade to be promoted to first lieutenant, and he really didn’t have the qualifications and experience to properly handle something like Kloster Grünau.”
Everyone filed into suite 527 and everyone but Cronley, who leaned against an inner wall, found seats.
The Louis XIV chair under Dunwiddie disappeared under his bulk.
If that collapses, it will add a bit of sorely needed levity to this gathering.
“Gentlemen,” Cronley said in a serious tone, “if Captain Dunwiddie will forgo delivering the speech about the havoc a loose cannon can cause rolling about on a dinner table that he’s been mentally rehearsing for the past hour, we can go directly to seeing if anything at all can be salvaged from that disastrous dinner.”
Dunwiddie and Hessinger shook their heads. Mannberg and Gehlen smiled.
“I will admit, Jim,” Gehlen said, “that if you had told us beforehand how you were going to confront Colonel Parsons, it might have gone a little better than it did. But it wasn’t a disaster, by any means.”
“As you may have noticed, General, I’m a little slow. You don’t think that was a total disaster?”
Gehlen shook his head.
“‘Know thine enemy,’” Hessinger quoted. “Sun Tzu, The Art of War.”
“Precisely,” Gehlen said.
“It looked to me like we gave him a lot of information about us. But what did we learn about him?” Cronley asked.
“We confirmed much of what we presumed about him,” Gehlen said. “Most important, I suggest, we confirmed what I said a few days ago about the greatest danger posed to Operation Ost—that it will come from the Pentagon, not the Russians. And Colonel Parsons is going to be a formidable adversary.”
“You think he’s that smart, that dangerous?” Cronley asked.
“For several reasons, yes, I do. I presumed the Pentagon was going to send a highly intelligent officer as their liaison officer, since his purpose would go beyond a liaison function. His primary mission is to clip the just-born bud of the Directorate of Central Intelligence before it has a chance to blossom, and return it and its functions to where it belongs, under the assistant chief of staff for intelligence in the Pentagon.
“We saw that Parsons is highly intelligent—and I think Ashley, too, is not quite what he would wish us to believe. In other words, I judge him to be far more intelligent and competent—and thus more dangerous—than a well-meaning, if not too bright, subordinate who has to be reined in when his enthusiasm gets the better of him.”
“You think that ‘Shut up, Warren’ business was theater, rehearsed theater, sir?” Dunwiddie asked.
“Theater? Yes. Rehearsed? Not necessarily. I would judge the two of them have worked together before. They didn’t, they thought, have to rehearse much to deal with a junior captain whom they thought would be facing them alone. That didn’t happen. And then the junior captain proved a far more able adversary than they anticipated he would be.”
Does he mean that? Or is he being nice? Or charming, for his own purposes?
“What makes Colonel Parsons and Major Ashley especially dangerous is that they believe passionately in their mission,” Gehlen said. “Almost Mossad-like.”
“Excuse me?” Cronley asked.
“The Zionist intelligence apparatus,” Hessinger said.
“And once again, apparently, Hessinger knows all about something I never heard of,” Cronley said. “Lecture on, professor.”
Gehlen smiled and gestured to Hessinger to continue.
“The Zionists, the Jews,” Hessinger explained, “want their own homeland, their own country, in what is now Palestine. Until they get it, they’ve got sort of a shadow government, à la the British. Including an intelligence service. It has many names, but most commonly, the Mossad.”
“And are you planning to move to Palestine?” Cronley challenged.
“Not me. I’m an American,” Hessinger replied. “I’ll do what I can to help the Zionists, of course, but my plan for the future is to become a professor at Harvard.”
“I’m glad you brought that up, Friedrich,” Gehlen said.
“Sir?”