[THREE]
OSS Algiers Station
Algiers, Algeria
0923 30 May 1943
“That lying sonofabitch!” Major Richard M. Canidy, United States Army Air Forces, who was a big-boned, six-foot-tall twenty-six-year-old with close-cropped dark hair and deeply intelligent dark eyes, said, angrily waving a decrypted secret message. “Why is he saying that the Nazis never had a yellow fever lab in Sicily? I saw the damn thing, Stan. I blew it up.”
Canidy looked at Captain Stanley S. Fine, USAAF—a tall, ascetic thirty-five-year-old who had a thin, thoughtful face framed with horn-rimmed glasses—sitting across from him on the main balcony of La Villa de Vue de Mer. The “Sea View Villa,” an 1880s French Colonial–style four-story mansion built high on the lush hillside, served as OSS Headquarters, Mediterranean Theatre of Operation.
The villa belonged to Pamela Dutton, the wealthy widow of one of Wild Bill Donovan’s law school buddies. Wentworth Danfield Dutton had served in the United States legation to Algeria. Mrs. Dutton had made her own fortune in New York City importing Italian shoes for women. With Donovan’s promise that the villa would be preserved and protected, she had let it to the Office of Strategic Services for the sum of ten dollars per annum.
Fine was wearing a U.S. Army tropical worsted uniform. Canidy—under his brown horsehide A-2 aviator’s jacket with the gold leaves of a major pinned to its epaulets—had on a tan button-down shirt, brown woolen trousers, and calfskin chukka boots that he had pulled from the wardrobe in the master suite. It wasn’t the first time he’d helped himself to the diplomat’s clothing made at a local haberdashery—he’d done that for the missions to Sicily—and it wouldn’t be the last.
Two piles of the typewritten messages were next to a dented stainless steel thermos on the massive Mediterranean teak table. Fine picked up the battered thermos.
“I know,” he said, pouring rich aromatic Algerian coffee into one of Mrs. Dutton’s fine china cups. “And that’s not the first message to contradict what you did in Palermo.”
Canidy shook his head as he looked out. The view was absolutely stunning. The capital city spread out below on a gentle slope that ended at the port some ten kilometers away. Beyond that, the vast Mediterranean Sea sparkled to the horizon. At anchor and moored at the docks in the circular harbor were military man-o’-wars flying the flags of the U.S. and England, and recently arrived American Liberty ships either off-loading their cargo or awaiting their turn to do so. Silver barrage balloons floated above the harbor, their steel cable tethers discouraging enemy aircraft from strafing the harbor and ships.
Major Canidy and Captain Fine each had an AGO card—a sealed identity card issued by the Adjutant General’s Office—that stated they were members of the U.S. Army Air Forces. If anyone questioned their status, and checked military records, their names would be duly listed.
But of course both were attached to the OSS.
Fine, despite an appearance that some mistook as being possibly frail, was in fact absolutely fearless. And he efficiently accomplished his job—in and out of channels—using a creative ability that Canidy described as “beating back the rear-echelon bastards and their endless red tape and bureaucratic meddling.”
Canidy would know. He, too, was expert at bending—and often outright breaking—rules in order to get done what had to be done, damn those who got in the way.
Until being sent on the missions to Sicily, he had serv
ed as chief of OSS Whitbey House Station—commonly known to the agents training there as Canidy’s Throat Cutting and Bomb Throwing Academy—which was an ancient, massive eighty-four-room stone structure on a twenty-six-thousand-acre country estate outside London. That position had made him the OSS’s number three man in England, after the chief and deputy chief of OSS London Station.
For the missions in Sicily, however, Canidy had reported directly to OSS Washington, to Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan himself. He knew that that had not moved him up to number two in all of the OSS—but it damn sure put him pretty high in the pecking order.
Which in itself was a remarkable achievement. Because Canidy had not exactly been a willful recruit into the world of espionage.
* * *
Dick Canidy’s dream had been to be a pilot, and he’d attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, paying his way with a Navy scholarship. He graduated in 1938, cum laude, with a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering.
He wasn’t particularly excited about having to pay back the Navy with four years of service. It was no secret he felt constrained by the military and its starchy rules and regulations. Still, he pledged that he would honor his obligation—but not serve a single second longer. Having accumulated, in addition to his MIT degree, a commercial pilot’s license, an instrument ticket, and 350 hours of solo time, he already was entertaining job offers, one in particular from the Boeing Aircraft Company in Washington State.
After three years in the Navy—with barely a year left on his obligation before he could pack his bags for Seattle—Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Richard M. Canidy, USN, was at Naval Air Station Pensacola when he was approached by a grizzled man named General Claire Chennault.
It was June 1941, and Canidy, an instructor pilot in the backseat of single-engine bi-wing Kaydet trainers, was with fledgling naval aviators day after day flying a mind-numbing circuit around the skies of the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.
Chennault was a legendary general known not to mince words with his gravelly voice. In short order, he bluntly laid it out to Canidy that the United States could not stay out of the world war much longer, that when it did join in the fight there would be an enormous demand for aviators, that there was no way the military was going to let skilled pilots out of the service—and that he, Canidy, would then be front of the line, assigned to flying missions God only knew where.
But, the general told him, there was an option.
Chennault—with FDR’s approval, if not discreet direct order—was pulling together a group of volunteer pilots, really good pilots. Their mission would be flying Curtiss P40-B fighters to defend the two-thousand-mile-long Burma Road that was the critical route for getting Western aid to China from Japanese attack.
The contract with the Chinese was for one year, Chennault explained, and monthly pay came in at six hundred dollars—twice what Canidy got from the Navy. As further incentive, the general added, Canidy would also pocket a five-hundred-dollar bonus for each Jap he shot down.
Canidy, always quick to take care of Number One first, signed up. He could not decide which was better—making more money or getting an honorable discharge from the Navy that came as part of the package.
Being a Flying Tiger with Chennault’s American Volunteer Group (AVG) in Kunming, China, turned out to be damn dangerous. But Canidy rose to the challenge. And he proved that not only had he been born to fly but—with five kills on a single sortie, making him a certifiable ace—he was a natural fighter pilot.