Ed Stevens, settling into one of the two chairs in front of the desk, did not reply immediately, but when Bruce continued to look at him, seemingly expecting some comment, Stevens said cautiously, between sips of coffee, “Canidy is due here this morning.”
“Good. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve always thought that Canidy is out of his depth here, and he is helping prove my point with his reckless acts.”
He poked a finger at the stack of documents.
“There’s a message in here from Howell confirming that Howell arrived in Washington with Fulmar and the Dyers. Just that. Nothing more.”
Stevens felt unease at what he recognized as Bruce’s ob
vious anger. The slight that had triggered it clearly had not been forgotten nor forgiven.
David Bruce had learned on February 14—two days after celebrating his birthday—in an EYES ONLY personal message from Colonel Donovan that a mission was taking place in Bruce’s backyard, one of such extreme importance—“Presidential,” Donovan had written—that Bruce was deemed not to have the “Need to Know.”
That was difficult enough for the chief of OSS London to swallow, but what made matters worse was the fact that Stevens—My deputy, for Christ’s sake! Bruce had thought disgustedly—did have the Need to Know, though Donovan had said that Stevens was privy only to limited details in order for him to act should he suspect that any actions by OSS London Station—or by Bruce personally—might undermine the mission.
It was not a perfect situation, the OSS director apologized, but it was a necessity, one made by direct order of FDR. Donovan promised to bring Bruce into the loop as soon as possible.
It turned out that Donovan didn’t have to; of all people, Canidy had done it for him, in a TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY message that he had sent from German-occupied Hungary.
Dick Canidy was Eric Fulmar’s OSS control officer. He had sent Fulmar, his prep-school classmate and the American-born son of a German industrialist, to Germany to smuggle out Professor Frederick Dyer, whom Canidy understood to be an expert in metallurgy and in the manufacture of jet and rocket engines. The fifty-nine-year-old professor was disgusted with Nazis in general and Hitler in particular, and it was hoped that he would assist the Allies not only in the pinpointing of the factories that were producing these engines, which would then be bombed and thus preserve Allied air superiority, but also in the advancement of the Allies’ own development of jets and rockets.
What Canidy—and Stevens and Bruce and everyone except a select few on the secret list controlled by the President—did not know was that Dyer was more importantly also a scientist with expertise in nuclear fission, and his escape would (a) deny the Germans his work in the race to develop an atomic bomb and (b) help the Americans in theirs—code-named the Manhattan Project—at which they had already had considerable success, including the first uranium chain reaction on December 2, 1942, in a lab secretly built in a squash court under the football stands of the University of Chicago.
An escape route had been carefully planned, with a series of OSS and British Special Operations Executive agents and resistance members set to smuggle Fulmar and the professor and his daughter from Marburg an der Lahn in Germany (where Fulmar was leaving a long trail of German SS bodies) to Vienna, then Budapest, and ultimately to the coast of the Adriatic Sea, where a fishing boat would ferry them out to the island of Vis, on which Canidy waited with his hidden B-25 aircraft.
That had been the plan. But, as plans can, it went bad—placing the President’s extreme mission, as well as the lives of Fulmar and the professor, in jeopardy.
Canidy had sent a message from Vis saying that only Gisella Dyer, the professor’s attractive twenty-nine-year-old daughter, had made it out via the Hungarian pipeline. Fulmar and the professor were serving ninety days’ hard labor in Pécs, in southwest Hungary, their punishment for being black marketers, ones who failed to pay off local officials.
When word got back to OSS Washington, Donovan made a cold-blooded decision: If in ten days Canidy failed to rescue Fulmar and Professor Dyer, Canidy was ordered to terminate them to keep them from falling into the hands of the Germans on their trail.
When Donovan then learned that Canidy, risking everything, had gone after them himself, and then that the OSS team and the C-47 sent to support him was declared late and presumed lost, Donovan had had to cut his losses: He ordered a squadron of B-17s, ostensibly en route for a raid on Budapest, to take out the Hungarian prison as a target of opportunity.
But the C-47 hadn’t been lost—it’d been forced to land.
And then, as the B-17s leveled the prison at Pécs, it’d taken off with Canidy and Fulmar and Professor Dyer…mission accomplished.
Bruce reached out for the carafe and poured himself more coffee as he thought how that damned loose cannon Dick Canidy had again gotten away with not following the standard operating procedures.
But maybe not, he thought, judging by this morning’s message. Maybe Donovan is about to call Canidy on the carpet.
Bruce caught the look in Stevens’s eyes and realized that he had put him in an awkward position.
“Sorry, Ed. Forget I said anything.”
Bruce thumbed through the pile of messages until he found what he was looking for and passed it to Stevens. “You’ve seen this?”
“Yeah,” Stevens said after he scanned it. “Another request from Sandman for Corsica.”
“I know getting the weapons is no problem. But do we have the cash on hand that they request?”
“Can you give me a minute?” Stevens asked and nodded toward his office, signifying that he wanted to check something.
“Of course,” Bruce said, then picked up his coffee cup and turned his attention to the decrypted message from the OSS agent on the Axis-held French island of Corsica.
Two months earlier, in mid-December, the Office of Strategic Services had made history with the landing of the first OSS secret agent team inside enemy-occupied Europe. To the great relief of OSS stations from North Africa to London to Washington, the team, with minimal difficulties, had had textbook success from the time its clandestine radio station, code-named PEARL HARBOR, had, on December 25, 1942, sent to OSS Algiers Station the first of what would become almost daily messages that detailed German and Italian strengths and strategic locations and more.
It was remarkable for the OSS on a number of levels, not the least of which was that it garnered the young agency genuine credibility—albeit grudgingly in some quarters, such as the British SIS, which had been formed in the sixteenth century and had absolutely no patience for the stumbles of the infant American intelligence organization.