[FOUR]
Roosevelt watched as the tip of Donovan’s bamboo fishing rod flexed once more, then the line began screaming off its bulky reel.
Donovan quickly put his cocktail glass on the teak deck and pulled the rod butt from its holder.
“Told you,” FDR said with a chuckle, then in a mischievous tone added: “You never listen to me, Bill.”
“Please accept my sincere apology, Mr. President, sir,” Donovan said drily.
As he raised his rod, both men looked out behind the boat. Some fifty yards back they saw a silver flash at the end of the line—and a large fish broke the surface of the Potomac.
“Looks like it might be the nicest striper yet,” the President said with a smile, then bit down on the cigarette holder at the corner of his mouth and began reeling in his line to keep it from getting tangled with Donovan’s.
They had been trolling for almost two hours, and in that time both had hooked plenty of fish. Iced down in the cooler that had been hauled below to the galley, where the chef was preparing dinner, were eight nice-sized striped bass, each weighing between fifteen and twenty pounds. FDR had caught five, Donovan three.
Donovan, however, had hooked two other fish. Both had broken off—one in a spectacular display of defiance complete with great leaps and shakes of its head to throw the lure free—and the President was not going to let it be forgotten.
FDR glanced over, and needled him: “Seeing how big it is, if you can actually boat it, I’ll allow it to count as two—”
Just as he said that, the huge fish shook its head and threw the lure.
Donovan sighed. He looked at FDR, shrugged, then leaned back in his mahogany fishing chair. He returned the rod butt to its holder, retrieved his cocktail, and took a healthy sip.
Roosevelt, letting line on his reel unspool in order to reposition his lure, then casually said, “Any further word about your loose cannon’s actions in Sicily?”
Donovan knew that he was referring to Dick Canidy, and was about to snap: We’ve had this conversation, Frank, and he’s not a loose cannon!
But then he saw out of the corner of his eye that Roosevelt, watching his lure get smaller in the distance, was smiling. And he remembered that, when Donovan had defended Canidy as someone who more times than not got things done no matter the obstacles, FDR had replied that he’d heard others call Donovan his loose cannon, and felt the name was as unfair to Donovan as it was to Canidy.
Donovan believed that the OSS’s successes came from what he called a “calculated recklessness.” He preached—and personally practiced—not being afraid to make mistakes, because the OSS had to be unafraid of trying things that had not been tried before.
And Donovan believed that what Canidy had done on the Nazi-occupied island was a perfect example of what defined an OSS operator—secretly going behind enemy lines to smuggle out a Sicilian scientist, then finding that the Nazis had chemical and biological weapons of warfare there, and more or less single-handedly destroying them. All without feeling obligated to go up the chain of command, asking permission to do so—permission that, if not immediately denied, would be delayed for future (fill in the blank) “discussion,” “research,” et cetera, et cetera, until the window of opportunity to act was slammed shut.
“What happened with the nerve gas?” FDR pursued.
“I talked with Canidy in London,” Donovan began, ignoring the loose cannon comment. “This gets a little complicated—”
“Then talk slowly,” FDR interrupted. “I’ll try to keep up when I’m not catching your fish.”
Donovan couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Thank you, Mr. President. I do appreciate your magnanimity.”
; He paused to gather his thoughts, then went on: “Okay, let me back up and bring in Allen Dulles. Among his many sources in Switzerland is a vice counsel of the German consulate in Zurich. That’s his cover—he’s actually working for Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr.”
“He’s a German intelligence officer posing as a diplomat?”
“Yes, at least as far as they want the Gestapo—and anyone else paying attention—to believe. What they don’t want anyone to discover is what Tiny really is—”
“Tiny?” Roosevelt interrupted again.
“That’s what Dulles calls Canaris’s agent behind his back, which apparently is enormous. Tiny is a giant of a man.”
“Does he have a real name?”
Donovan pretended not to hear the question, and instead said: “What Tiny really is, is a pipeline to those in Hitler’s High Command who believe the war is all but lost. Wilhelm Canaris is one, and posted him in Switzerland to reach out to the Allies. He went first to the Brits, but they dismissed him as untrustworthy, mostly due to him having been in the Gestapo. Then he approached Dulles, who cautiously took a chance. And it’s paid off. He fed us intel on von Braun. . . .”