“And that is the last goddamn time!” he snapped. “You call me ‘sir’ when we’re over the fence, and we’ll both get killed.”
The look on John Craig’s face showed that he understood.
[TWO]
OSS Bern Station
Herrengasse 23
Bern, Switzerland
2250 27 May 1943
OSS Chief of Station Allen Welsh Dulles was in the library of his mansion in Old City Bern, sitting in one of four deep-cushioned leather armchairs. The seating was arranged in a semicircle at a low round marble table before the enormous stone fireplace.
Dulles, who in April had turned fifty years old, had the calm, thoughtful appearance one might expect of perhaps a Presbyterian minister—warm, inquisitive eyes behind frameless round spectacles, thinning silver hair, a neatly groomed gray mustache. He was in fact the son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of a Presbyterian missionary. He’d joined the diplomatic corps in 1916, right after graduating Princeton University.
He was wearing what members of his social standing called a sack suit, a two-piece woolen garment with cuffed baggy pants and no padding in the shoulders of the jacket. His closet held more than a dozen such suits—all very much of the same cut, varying only in color, either gray or black, with or without pinstripes, and all from the clothier J. Press—which he invariably wore with a crisp white dress shirt and a striped bow tie.
Herrengasse 23 was a four-story classic baroque-style residence that had been built in the seventeenth century. The richly appointed oak-paneled high-ceiling library—dimly lit by the flickering flames of the crackling fire and a single torchiere lamp glowing in a near corner—had the comfortable smell of old leather and fine tobacco. With Bern’s blackout rules in effect, and strictly enforced to avoid aerial attacks by Axis forces, the great room’s massive crystal chandelier remained darkened and the heavy fabric draperies were pulled tightly across the tall casement windows.
A German-manufactured Braun radio-phonograph combination was tuned to 531 kilohertz to pick up Landessender Beromünster, Switzerland’s national public station. Earlier, Dulles had been listening to a news broadcast in German, then a rebroadcast of a BBC-produced report, its reader having the markedly distinct clipped accent of the British.
Now, with the Braun’s volume turned low, the radio station was playing a performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. It had been recorded in German at the Stadttheater, which was a half-dozen blocks away, not far from the Zeitglocke, which would sound its massive bronze bell in ten minutes.
Dulles appreciated the works of Mozart; he just could not decide which held more irony during wartime, the playing of a comic opera heavy with sex or the la folle giornata—day of madness—story line of the opera itself.
Especially on a radio station whose signal reaches far into Nazi territory, where the penalty for listening to Beromünster’s broadcasts gets one charged with sedition—and the death sentence of getting thrown in a concentration camp.
Dulles picked up a Zippo lighter that was on a silver tray on the marble table. The tray also held two bottles of Rémy Martin VSOP cognac and four snifters. One of the crystal glasses was nearly half-full. Beside the tray sat a large wooden humidor heavy with Honduran cigars and a thick manila envelope rubber-stamped in red ink: TOP SECRET.
It would seem all we have now is day after day of madness—and none of it humorous.
Today alone brings Sparrow’s killing by parties unknown and confirmation of a link between that chemist Schwartz and von Braun that can only mean more madness.
And now this envelope of photographs showing damage from the Ruhr Valley bombings.
He glanced at the stainless steel lighter and ran his thumb over the emblem on its case that was a miniature representation of the orange-and-black crest of Princeton. Although the dim light did not allow him to see details, he mentally recited his alma mater’s motto that was embossed in Latin on the crest: Dei sub numine viget.
As he moved his thumb upward, flicking open the top of the lighter, he thought of its translation: “Under God’s Power She Flourishes.”
His thumb then spun the gnarled wheel that sparked the lighter to life. With a practiced flourish, he held its flame to the tip of the foot-long straw-like stick of wood he held in his other hand, then turned the stick vertically so that the flame grew hotter as it burned upward. Then he picked up his favorite pipe, one crafted of exotic burl wood, gently tamped the tobacco in the bowl with his thumb, and finally held the flame over the tobacco.
A purist, he used the wooden stick’s flame—and not that of the Zippo—so that the delicate flavor of the tobacco would not be affected by any taste of lighter fluid.
He began to puff. The tobacco caught fire, glowing red. He blew out the flame on the wooden stick and placed it in the ashtray on the table.
He breathed in the thick, sweet smell of the tobacco, put the pipe back to his lips, and took a lengthy, slow draw. After a long moment, as he exhaled appreciatively, he looked up at the oil painting of Old Glory that had recently been hung over the mantel.
Under God’s Power She Flourishes indeed . . . he thought.
While Dulles looked and acted every bit the Ivy League–educated diplomat—he presently was registered with the Swiss government as the special assistant to the American Minister, U.S. Legation to Switzerland, where he kept his official office—he of course was the top U.S. secret agent there, quietly conducting OSS business at the mansion on Herrengasse.
The cov
ert meetings Dulles held almost always at night, when the dark of blackout made surveillance of who came and went via the alley leading to the mansion’s rear entry practically impossible. The security of his residence—with the notable exception of its telephone lines being tapped, as no suspect telephone in Switzerland went unmonitored, either by the Fremdenpolizei or other organizations, authorized to do so or not—also afforded Dulles the confidence that no one saw or overheard anything said therein.
For Dulles, such security was critical, as he devoutly believed in his mission. He genuinely feared the threat of the spreading of Fascism. He’d at times served as a League of Nations legal adviser, which had allowed him to meet world leaders, among them the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the German chancellor Adolf Hitler. Neither man had left him with a good gut feeling then, and everything he had learned of them since only served to support what his gut had warned him.