PROLOGUE
Many in the intelligence community feel that the first American counter-fire shot in what became the Cold War occurred even before World War II was over—specifically when Major General Reinhard Gehlen contacted Allen W. Dulles. (Or Dulles contacted Gehlen; the details remain, more than half a century later, highly classified.)
Gehlen was the German intelligence officer who ran Abwehr Ost, which dealt with the Soviet Union. Dulles was the U.S. Office of Strategic Service’s man in neutral Switzerland.
Realizing Nazi defeat was inevitable, Gehlen feared both Soviet ambitions for Europe and specifically what the victorious Russians would do to his officers, his men, and their families.
Gehlen struck a deal with Dulles. He would turn over to the OSS all his intelligence and assets. These included the identities of Soviet spies who had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and of Abwehr Ost agents inside the Kremlin. In exchange, Dulles would place Gehlen, his officers and men and their families—who faced certain torture and death at the hands of the Soviets—under American protection.
Exactly who at the highest levels of the American government knew about Operation Gehlen, and when they knew it, also remains even today highly classified. It is obvious that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, then Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had to know about it.
It seems equally obvious that President Franklin Roosevelt was not made privy to it. Not only was Roosevelt deathly ill at the time, but he and his wife, Eleanor, had made it clear that they did not regard the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin, as any threat to the United States. There was wide belief that there were Communists in Roosevelt’s inner circle.
There were other problems, too.
Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, was justifiably outraged by the monstrous behavior of the Nazis toward the Jewish people and unable to concede there existed “Good Germans” among the many “Bad Germans.” Morgenthau seriously advocated a policy that would have seen senior German officers executed out of hand whenever and wherever found. It was known that Gehlen was on the list of those German officers to look for.
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posed other problems. Hoover had opposed the very formation of the OSS. He devoutly believed the FBI could do the job better. He made no secret of his loathing for OSS Director William J. Donovan. And vice versa. Hoover had been humiliated before the President when Donovan had turned over the names of Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project that Allen Dulles had turned up, and furious when Dulles had refused to name his source. Dulles of course couldn’t, as the source had been Gehlen. Not even Donovan knew of the Gehlen project until after President Roosevelt had died in the arms of his mistress in Warm Springs, Georgia.
So far as Dulles was concerned, if Donovan knew, he would have felt duty bound to inform President Roosevelt. And that would have been the end of the secret; the Soviets would have learned of it within hours.
When, on Roosevelt’s death, Vice President Harry S Truman became the thirty-third President of the United States, the former senator from Missouri had seen the President only twice after their inauguration and had never been alone with him.
On Truman’s first day in office, Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, U.S. Army, went to see him in the Oval Office. Groves headed the Manhattan Project, and told Truman he thought he should know that the United States had a new weapon, the most powerful ever developed, called the “atomic bomb.”
It is also known that both Allen Dulles and General Donovan met privately with Truman in the very early days of his presidency. Many believe that Truman was made privy to Operation Gehlen during one of those meetings.
Shortly afterward, in mid-July 1945, Truman met with Stalin in Potsdam, near Berlin. He told the Russian dictator of the atomic bomb. When Stalin showed no surprise, Truman decided this confirmed what Donovan had told him—that J. Edgar Hoover had not been able to keep Russian espionage out of the Manhattan Project.
Truman ordered General George C. Marshall to shut off all aid to the Soviet Union.
Right then. That afternoon.
The OSS—often with the assistance of the Vatican—within days began to send many of “the Gehlens” to Argentina. Others were placed in a heavily guarded OSS compound at Kloster Grünau, a former monastery in Schollbrunn, Bavaria, which had been provided by the Vatican. These actions could not have happened without Truman’s knowledge and approval.
On August 6, 1945, the United States obliterated Hiroshima, Japan, with an atomic bomb. Three days later, a second atomic bomb obliterated Nagasaki.
On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was performed in Tokyo Bay, Japan, aboard the battleship USS Missouri.
World War II was over.
Argentina, which had declared war on the Axis only in March, was one of the victors, although not a single Argentine soldier or sailor had died in the war and not one bomb or artillery shell had landed on Argentine soil. And now Argentina, as a result of supplying foodstuffs to both sides, was richer than ever.
Argentina’s role in World War II, however, was by no means over.
When, as early as 1942, the most senior members of the Nazi hierarchy—as high as Martin Bormann, generally regarded as second in power only to Hitler, and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler—realized the Ultimate Victory was not nearly as certain as Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels had been telling the German people, they began in great secrecy to implement Operation Phoenix.
Phoenix would establish refuges in South America—primarily in Argentina and Paraguay—to which senior Nazis could flee should the Thousand-Year Reich have a life shorter than they hoped. National Socialism could then rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes.
Vast sums were sent to Argentina, some through normal banking channels but most in great secrecy by
submarine. The U-boats also carried crates of currency, gold, and diamonds and other precious stones. Senior SS officers were sent to Argentina—some of them legally, accredited as diplomats, but again most of them secretly infiltrated by submarine—to purchase property where senior Nazis would be safe from Allied retribution.
The Allies knew of Operation Phoenix and had tried, without much success, to stop it. Their concern heightened as the war drew to a close. They learned that when Grand Admiral Doenitz issued the Cease Hostilities order on May fourth, sixty-three U-boats were at sea.
Five of them were known to have complied with their orders to hoist a black flag and proceed to an Allied port to surrender, or to a neutral port to be interned. There was reliable intelligence that an additional forty-one U-boats had been scuttled by their crews to prevent the capture of whatever may have been on board.
That left at least seventeen U-boats unaccounted for. Of particular concern were U-234, U-405, and U-977. They were Type XB U-boats—minelayers, which meant that with no mines aboard they could carry a great deal of cargo and many passengers for vast distances.
There was credible intelligence that when U-234 sailed from Narvik on April 16—two weeks before the German capitulation—she had aboard a varied cargo, some of which was either not listed on the manifest at all or listed under a false description. This included a ton of mail—which of course almost certainly hid currency and diamonds being smuggled. It also included Nazi and Japanese officers and German scientists as passengers. And something even more worrisome: 560 kilograms of uranium oxide from the German not-quite-completed atomic bomb project.
It was only logical to presume that U-405 and U-977 were carrying similar cargoes.
A massive search by ship and air for all submarines—but especially for U-234, U-405, and U-977—was launched from France, England, and Africa, and by the specially configured U.S. Army Air Forces B-24 “Liberator” bombers that had searched for submarines since 1942 from bases in Brazil.
The searches of course were limited by the range of the aircraft involved and, as far as the ships also involved in the searches, by the size of the South Atlantic Ocean once the submarines had entered it.
There were some successes. Submarines were sighted and then attacked with depth charges and/or aircraft bombs. While it was mathematically probable that several of the submarines were sunk, there was no telling which ones.
The concern that the U-boats—either certainly or probably—had uranium oxide aboard and were headed for Japan was reduced when the Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945. But that left Argentina as a very possible destination.