The Spymasters (Men at War 7)

In late April, “Major Martin”—a cadaver in a Royal Marines battledress uniform with a briefcase chained to him—had been set adrift from a British submarine just off “neutral” Spain. Secret and personal papers in the briefcase had been created at OSS Whitbey House Station to suggest the major was a courier en route from the United Kingdom to Allied Forces Headquarters when his aircraft crashed and he washed ashore. After the “most secret” papers—disinformation on the true plans for OPERATION HUSKY—fell into the hands of Spaniards sympathetic to Hitler, they were photographed by German agents and the copies sent up to the German High Command.

ULTRA—the code name given to intelligence that was taken from intercepts of secret messages encrypted by German Enigma cipher machines—quietly revealed every step along the way. Including that German intel personnel in Berlin then judged the content of the materials to be entirely credible.

“According to Ultra,” Fine went on, “Hitler has just now—on May thirteenth—announced that he believes the Sicily invasion is a diversion, and that, as Major Martin’s Top Secret papers said, Greece is next. Which of course was exactly what he feared, making the whole deception even more believable to him.”

“Tell them what they want to hear,” Canidy said.

“Right. So Hitler has demanded that ‘measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else.’”

He gestured at the shorter of the two piles of messages.

“There’s traffic in there from the two Sandbox teams that we sent in to support the Greek resistance. As the Germans begin moving armored divisions by train to Greece, the teams will help the resistance in taking out bridges and rails to keep those divisions there—and far away from being able to reinforce Italy and Sicily.”

Canidy pointed to the message from MERCURY STATION.

“It would not hurt to have another team go in to see if we can corroborate any of what’s in that. And another team to save Tubes’s ass. I left the poor bastard there. . . .”

Fine exchanged a long look with Canidy, then said, “Jim wanted to go operational. You know that, Dick.”

“Yeah, I do. And he actually did a damn good job while I was there with him.”

“And you do know that twice we sent in teams to try locating him and Nola, right?”

“Twice? What happened?”

“Each time Mercury Station went off the air. And when it finally returned, it was always with the excuse that Nola had had to go deep underground to evade the Italian secret police, and Tubes went along to keep the station from being detected. Then suddenly the station’s back up and he’s sending these detailed messages.”

Canidy shook his head. “Assuming they are in fact under SS control, we’re damn lucky the SS didn’t set up a trap for those teams—lure them in to execute them.”

ULTRA had revealed one of Adolf Hitler’s secret orders, issued on October 18, 1942: “All enemies on commando missions—in or out of uniform, with or without weapons, in battle or in flight—are to be slaughtered to the last man. Should it be found necessary to spare one or two for interrogation purposes, these men are to be shot immediately after interrogation.”

“Trust me,” Fine said, “knowing that Hitler has ordered that all captured spies be executed, we were very cautious about that. That the teams were not ambushed suggests that the Germans value keeping Mercury Station on-air more.”

“And if they’d either killed them or made them controlled, too, that would have sent the signal that Mercury Station was compromised.”

Fine nodded.

After a moment, Canidy said: “Then Tubes really is being controlled.”

Fine said: “John Craig van der Ploeg has been sending Tubes chickenfeed since that first suspicious message he showed you on April tenth.”

While the SS was prone to execute captured enemy agents—something they readily did well before Hitler sent out the order to do so—they would spare those radio operators who agreed to transmit under control. Knowing this, Allied agents were trained to use a secret danger signal that let their case officer know they had been compromised—signing off, for instance, as “Will” instead of the usual “Bill.” That allowed the transmission of factual but harmless intel—the so-called chickenfeed—to the agents to keep them alive until a rescue mission could be staged or Allied troops overran their position.

But even without the use of the secret danger signal, chickenfeed could prove effective.

Fine went on: “That was more than a month ago, and John Craig says in that time he’s only become more convinced that Tubes hasn’t independently worked the radio.”

Canidy saw Fine’s eyes look beyond him, past the pair of French doors that opened onto the balcony, which was off the main living area. He heard the sound of footsteps, and then felt the presence of someone standing behind him.

Canidy turned his head in time to hear John Craig van der Ploeg declare, “And I still am convinced of that.”

II

[ONE]

Old City

Bern, Switzerland