Graham shook his head again but sai
d nothing.
“Among the many reasons I like you, Alex,” Donovan said, after a moment, “and the primary reason I put up with your—how do I phrase this?— independent spirit is that I know if I give you an order, you’ll either obey it or tell me, up front, that you won’t take the order. You are not capable of accepting an order and then not doing your very best to carry it out.”
“I gather this is an order?”
Donovan nodded.
“Keep what you just said in mind, Bill, if I can’t make your airline idea . . .”
“The President’s airline suggestion.”
“. . . fly.”
Donovan smiled, then had another thought.
“Just a second, Alex,” he said, and reached for the accordion envelope and handed it to Graham.
“Why don’t you stop by the Documents Branch and have these made out for Major Frade and his team before you go?”
Graham examined the credentials, at first curiously and then incredulously.
“And whose idiot idea was this?”
“If you mean, Was this another presidential suggestion? No. It came from downstairs.”
Graham, shaking his head in disbelief, handed the envelope back to Donovan.
“No, I meant it,” Donovan said. “Take the badges down there.”
“I’m not following you, Bill.”
“What the hell, everybody down there in South America—friend, foe, and ostensibly neutral—knows Frade’s in the OSS, so why not? And—I admit this is unlikely—it might just remind him he’s in the OSS if you handed him a fancy badge like that.”
Graham looked at Donovan for a moment, then said, “Well, I can’t see where it would do any harm.”
“Have a nice flight, Alex. Keep in touch.”
[FOUR]
El Palomar Air Field Campo de Mayo Military Base Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1525 4 July 1943
As the airliner taxied up to the terminal, Colonel A. F. Graham saw—not surprising him at all—that El Coronel Alejandro Bernardo Martín had elected to meet Varig Flight 207.
Martín, wearing a well-cut suit and an overcoat, was standing outside the terminal building with a group of immigration and customs officers. He was a tall, fair-haired, light-skinned thirty-six-year-old who carried the euphemistic title of “Chief, Ethical Standards Office” within the Ejército Argentino’s Bureau of Internal Security. In fact, he was the most powerful—and, making him even more dangerous, the most competent—intelligence officer in Argentina.
It had been necessary for Graham to get a visa for travel to Argentina. Said visa had been stamped at the Argentine embassy in Washington inside a diplomatic passport issued with the greatest reluctance by the State Department. The passport identified Graham as a career State Department officer with the personal rank of under secretary. The Department of State, in requesting Graham’s visa from the Argentine embassy, had declared he was traveling to Argentina to coordinate security and other matters at the U.S. embassy.
No one was fooled. But both the Argentines and the Americans understood the rules of the game. Graham would have diplomatic status in Argentina, protecting him from arrest. Theoretically, if he was caught with twenty pounds of dynamite in the act of placing it under the Casa Rosada—Argentina’s pink equivalent of the White House—all that could happen to him would be to be declared persona non grata and expelled from the country, after which the Argentine ambassador in Washington would “make representations” to the U.S. secretary of State.
As a practical matter, both sides understood that if he were caught trying to blow up Casa Rosada—or in some other outrageous activity—he would be shot, after which the American ambassador in Buenos Aires could “make representations” to the Argentine foreign minister.
There were Argentines in Washington carrying diplomatic passports—most of them running errands for the Germans—with no more right to theirs than Graham had to his. They were under constant surveillance by the FBI, as Graham would be under constant surveillance by the BIS in Argentina.
But as diplomats they were protected against arrest and could not be questioned, which obviated the necessity of coming up with some imaginative excuse to explain one’s presence where one was not supposed to be.
Anything less than really outrageous behavior was tolerated by both the United States and Argentina. It was in their mutual interest.