Gisevius then unwrapped the cigar and ran it along his nose as he inhaled deeply. He grunted again. After dipping the closed end of the cigar in his cognac, he bit a small hole, then spit the piece of tobacco into the fireplace.
And such rudeness!
Finally he put the cigar in his mouth and, using the Zippo with the Princeton crest, lit it, then tossed the lighter back to the table.
He exhaled a massive gray cloud of smoke, grunted again, then said, “Not bad. Would be better in other company.” He glanced up at Dulles. “No offense to the host.”
But that is offensive!
Kappler quickly looked at Dulles to gauge his reaction—and was surprised to see that he was grinning.
Dulles then chuckled. He turned to Kappler, motioning toward the armchairs.
“Please have a seat, Wolffy. As we say in America, Hans’s bark is much worse than his bite.”
Gisevius grunted again.
“Or his grunt,” Dulles added with a smile.
Allen Dulles had become accustomed to the brusqueness of the forty-year-old Hans Bernd Gisevius shortly after they had first been introduced in early 1943. Gisevius then had carefully—but boldly—announced that he worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.
Canaris, Gisevius explained, had posted him as a vice counsel of the German consulate in Zurich, with the position serving as his cover for his secret mission of reaching out to the Allies. Then Gisevius had gone on to declare that he and Canaris were part of a group plotting to kill Hitler.
To Dulles, who by profession was trained to be skeptical, it had all sounded like so much hot air braggadocio. Gisevius certainly was not the first self-important German official to present himself at the American Embassy and try cutting a deal that promised, say, to single-handedly deliver the Nazi surrender in exchange for said official to find himself the head of the new German government.
Single-handedly with of course the full support and aid of America.
Thus, Gisevius had had to work hard to be believed. He’d already failed to convince the British, who had turned him away for fear he was a double agent. In 1933, after graduating from law school, Gisevius had joined the Geheime Staatspolizei—the Secret State Police—at its start only to be more or less thrown out for declaring that the organization itself was full of criminals, and the Brits had warned Dulles of that fear based on his having been in the Gestapo.
Despite being a skeptic, Dulles decided to take a chance—a cautious one—on the unlikely secret agent.
Gisevius soon solidified his standing with Dulles by supplying an endless stream of German intelligence, beginning with the fact that a mole had been working in the office of the military attaché in the American Embassy in Bern. When Dulles had questioned that, Gisevius produced a fistful of copies of Top Secret messages that the U.S. legation recently had sent—including one of Dulles’s—that had been intercepted by the Nazis and passed to the Abwehr.
Dulles’s OSS agents, with a little effort, were able to track the leak to a Swiss civilian who was employed as a janitor. A Nazi sympathizer, the janitor was stealing carbon copy sheets from the trash of the military attaché—copies that were supposed to be put in a secure burn bag and destroyed.
And then Dulles had learned that the Gestapo not only was watching Gisevius, it had given the group plotting against Hitler—including Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the German General Staff, and Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, Berlin’s chief of police—its own code name, Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra.
* * *
“Allen,” Gisevius now announced, holding up his snifter in his right hand, “so as not to appear rude to you, I will finish your nice cognac. But I then shall leave the company of one who actively supports Nazism”—he puffed on his cigar, then took it in his left hand and poked it in Kappler’s direction, the smoke filling Kappler’s face—“one who in fact was one of Hitler’s earliest financiers and today is on a first-name basis with Hitler’s High Command ring of thugs.”
Allen Dulles glanced at Wolfgang Kappler, whose face had turned red. His green eyes were narrow and clearly furious.
“Let me tell you how that happened!” Kappler suddenly snapped, his tone uncharacteristically cold.
“Please do,” Gisevius replied.
“Twenty years ago, when Fritz and I first met him, Marty Bormann was a snot-nosed twenty-three-year-old district leader in the Mecklenburg Freikorps Rossbach.”
He paused, locked eyes with Gisevius, then added almost bitterly, “I assume you know what that is?”
Gisevius was uncowed.
“The paramilitary organization,” he replied evenly, then puffed on his cigar. “The Freikorps that was established in the Ruhr set out to cause trouble for the French, whose military occupied the Ruhr to oversee steel and coal production for Germany, having defaulted on timber and coal deliveries. They were fanatical fighters, primarily against the Communists, but also against others.”
“Fanatical is precisely it,” Kappler said. “And already Marty—whom I, being twelve years his senior, knew very well, which I will get into in a moment—was showing that he had a cruel streak. He managed an estate by day, and it was there that he met, and came to lead, the Freikorps Rossbach guerrillas, sabotaging anything the French considered valuable and attacking anyone thought to sympathize with the French or the Communists.”
“‘Attack’?” Gisevius parroted, thickly sarcastic. “I believe the proper word is assassinated.”