In such an event, the leaders of the failed coup would have to have a means to get out of the country—their alternative being the firing squad. And Operation Blue had dealt with that proble
m: El Coronel Frade was to fly his Staggerwing Beechcraft to the airfield at the Campo de Mayo army base, and use it to transport himself and other senior officers to either Uruguay or Brazil.
By the time the coup began, El Coronel Frade was dead and the Beechcraft on the bottom of Samborombón Bay, having been shot down as Cletus Frade led an American submarine to the Reine de la Mer.
Cletus, who had read Operation Blue after he found it in his father’s (then his) safe at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, decided that since his father had put his fellow officers in danger, Cletus was honor bound to carry out his father’s wishes. He flew the Lockheed Lodestar to Campo de Mayo and placed it—and himself—at the disposal of General Rawson.
The coup didn’t fail, and the Lodestar wasn’t needed.
But toward the end of the coup, as two columns marched toward Argentina’s Casa Rosada, General Rawson confided in Cletus Frade that he had lost contact with both columns. He needed to get directions to them, otherwise unnecessary blood would be shed.
That didn’t seem to be much of a problem for Cletus Frade, who had been flying Piper Cubs over the prairies of Texas since he was fourteen, and where the standard method of getting messages—and often lunch—to someone on the ground was by dropping them in pillow cases out the window of a Cub. He told Rawson they could do the same thing using one of the Ejército Argentino’s Piper Cubs.
Rawson first asked Cletus if he would fly such a mission, and then when Frade—aware he’d put his foot in his mouth again—said he would, Rawson had another thought. He said he would go with him in the Cub, so that he could personally issue the necessary orders.
General Rawson had had very little experience flying in small aircraft, and absolutely none in flying at only two hundred feet above Avenida Libertador in downtown Buenos Aires. He regarded what Cletus Frade thought of as an uneventful short hop to a soccer field and back as a magnificent manifestation of both flying skill and great courage, proving that patriot’s blood as great as his late father’s coursed through the veins of Don Cletus Frade.
The command structure of the OSS in Argentina as posted on a Top Secret chart in OSS headquarters in Washington differed greatly from the way things actually were in Argentina. That this had not come to the attention of OSS Director Donovan was because all reports from Argentina passed through the hands of Colonel A. F. Graham. As the deputy director of the OSS for Western Hemisphere Operation, Graham filtered anything he suspected would annoy Donovan—sometimes by burning the reports—rather than have Donovan see them.
Most of the reports that complained about how things were going came from Lieutenant Commander Frederico Delojo, USN, who in Buenos Aires was the naval attaché—and, covertly, the OSS station chief—of the Embassy of the United States.
Commander Delojo was a Puerto Rican, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and had been an intelligence officer from the time he had been a lieutenant junior grade. In theory—on the manning chart at OSS headquarters—Delojo was in command of all OSS personnel and activities in Argentina.
One of the reports that Commander Delojo had sent to the OSS in Washington—and that Graham had burned—reported that then-Captain Cletus Frade, USMCR, had told him that the next time he came anywhere near Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo or tried to establish contact with any of the OSS personnel there he would be shot.
Frade had made a similar threat to Lieutenant Colonel Richard Almond, USAAF, who had gone to Argentina ostensibly to teach Frade how to fly the Lodestar but actually had been sent by Army Intelligence to identify “Galahad,” Frade’s window into the German embassy, and more.
Colonel Graham wasn’t sure that the threats were bona fide, but he suspected Frade meant them. Frade was determined to keep his men and his sources alive.
Captain Maxwell Ashton III was on the manning chart as the commanding officer of Team Turtle, and therefore under the orders of Lieutenant Commander Delojo. However, he actually took his orders from Frade—and Delojo didn’t even know where he or any of the others were or what they were doing.
Graham had sent a message to Delojo telling him that not only was he not to consider Captain Ashton and Lieutenant Pelosi subject to his orders, he also was not to inquire into their activities. Delojo’s four-page letter of protest about that, sent via the diplomatic pouch to Director Donovan, accordingly had gone up in flames in Graham’s wastebasket.
It was Graham’s judgment that not only had Frade done a magnificent job so far in Argentina, but if left alone could probably make an even greater contribution to the war effort.
Graham could not think of having a better agent in place, just about equally because Frade seemed to have a natural talent for covert warfare and because of his superb connections. The man leading the junta that had taken over Argentina was personally fond of him. Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, whom Graham believed to be a dangerous man and one destined to assume a greater role in Argentina, had been Frade’s father’s best friend, and looked on Frade as a beloved nephew.
And all of that didn’t get into Frade’s connections with people who could tell him the details of the German Operation Phoenix, and the despicable practice within the SS of allowing Jews in concentration camps to be ransomed out, which really had the attention of the President of the United States.
The status quo was not easy for Graham. He had been an infantry company commander—and later, as a major, a regimental intelligence officer—with the Marines in France in the First World War, and there learned to devoutly believe in the principles of leadership and obedience that made the Marine Corps what it was.
He reluctantly had left the Marine Corps after the war, and only because he knew that it would shrink in size to the point where he would be lucky to get a commission as a lieutenant, and that promotions would come as quickly as glaciers melt—if at all.
He had gone into the railroad business and there applied the techniques of leadership he had learned in the Marine Corps. He knew they worked. Before he had gone back on active duty he had been chairman of the board of the nation’s second-largest railroad.
And he really disliked the deceit he knew he was practicing with OSS Director Donovan. He genuinely admired and liked Donovan, despite their monumental political differences.
Yet he remained absolutely sure that letting Major Cletus Frade, USMCR, have a freer hand than Graham ever had granted any other subordinate was the correct thing to do.
There were two young women near the men on the verandah—one petite and dark, the other tall, lithe, fair-skinned, and very blond.
When he had finished shaking hands with the men, he turned to them.
“Señora Frade,” Graham said in Spanish to the blonde. “I’d really forgotten how lovely you are.”
“They call that ‘the bloom of pregnancy,’ ” she replied in English that made her sound as if she would be quite at home in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. “Unfortunately, it’s temporary, and soon I’ll be grotesquely swollen and as gray as a dirty sheep.”
I’d forgotten that, too. Dorotea Mallín de Frade says exactly what she’s thinking.