Night Soldiers

The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has, once again, been dragging its feet and is as unresponsive in this project as it has been in all others. No report from that office to date on RFE, but same will be forwarded once it arrives-if it ever does. Can’t Col. Donovan do something about this?

On April 17 I telephoned RFE at his office in the guise of Mr. Hamilton’s secretary and arranged a lunch for the following Monday, April 20, at Luchow’s. According to the headwaiter, he asked for “Mr. Hamilton’s table” and waited twenty minutes before asking the headwaiter “if Mr. Hamilton had called.” (He had been given no “Hamilton” telephone number.) He was told that Mr. Hamilton had telephoned the restaurant, apologizing for the inconvenience and requesting that RFE meet him for lunch at the Coleman Hotel on East 23 rd Street and Fifth Avenue. On arriving at that location and discovering no such hotel, he consulted a telephone directory and proceeded to Coleman’s, a restaurant on East 25 th Street, where he asked for “Mr. Hamilton.” Informed that no such person was there, he made a telephone call (in all probability to his office, since “Hamilton’s secretary” had reached him there earlier), then ate lunch at the counter and left the restaurant, returning to work.

My recommendation is to accept this candidate for further COI screening.

Signed: Agatha Hamilton

COI-New York

April 24, 1942P.S. Hub, my friend Maria de Vlaq is someone you might consider taking to lunch when you are next in New York. She is formerly the Countess Marensohn-Swedish nobility-divorced two years ago, and moves easily in society. She rides and shoots excellently, is lethally charming and of a rather daring disposition. She is of Belgian citizenship and descent, and I believe would be amenable to recruitment. Her connection to Belgian, German, and Swedish circles remains strong, and her relationship with her former husband, and his family, is cordial.P.S.S. Not to end on a sour note, but here it is April and there is only silence from Washington on my February vouchers. While it is the case that fortune has smiled on me in this world, I cannot by myself assume the cost of the war effort.

In Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Colonel H. V. Rossell leaned his elbows on the scarred wooden desk and stared at the man seated on the other side. Eidenbaugh, Robert F. His fourteenth interview of the day. He knew that if he were charming and likable the candidate would be put at ease, and the consequent forthrightness would help in making a proper decision. But he simply hadn’t the strength for charm. He’d been working twenty-hour days since Pearl Harbor, and his initial burst of high-tension energy was long since dissipated. He was out of gas. What he really wanted to do was push his lips into an extended pout and make ishkabibble sounds by flapping them with his fingertips. That would prove everybody right. Since Colonel Donovan had persuaded Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence service, life had come to resemble a lunatic asylum. Rossell had some considerable experience in this work, a career in army intelligence going back ten years. As early as 1937- when war had seemed inevitable to him-he’d run small preparatory operations when his superiors would allow it, stockpiling European clothing, for instance, by purchasing it from incoming refugees, then storing it in a warehouse under squares of cardboard marked DO NOT CLEAN! Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers.

But if he knew his way around the profession, few others did. Above him were Donovan and a bunch of Ivy League lawyers, bankers, and Wall Street types. They would, he knew, work out well over time. Once these people got going, the Axis powers would be subject to ferocious trickery of every kind, the sorts of things lawyers and bankers might do if they were able to give in to their cruelest fantasies. Now they were being encouraged to do that very thing. Just that morning, a memo had crossed his desk recommending that a million bats be put aboard a submarine, then released off the Japanese coast in daylight, each one equipped with timer and minute incendiary bomb. They would fly into the dark spaces of a million Japanese homes and factories and, he supposed, blow up, spattering everyone in the neighborhood with exploded bat. He could just hear one of his superiors giving him the good word: “Oh, Rossell. Be a good fellow and get me a million bats, will you? By lunch? Thanks loads!”

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Donovan-with Hoover and the FBI fighting him every step of the way-was in the process of acquiring an extraordinary zoo of people. “The successful intelligence service,” someone had said, “is one which can best turn eccentricity to its own advantage.” Well, they’d have that, all right. They’d hired Marxists, led by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Playwrights-Robert E. Sherwood and others. Academicians, recruited by Archibald MacLeish. John Ford, the film director. A young actor named Sterling Hayden who would, he thought, eventually be sent to fight with Yugoslav partisans. Then there was John Ringling North, of the circus family, and a large, vivacious woman named Julia Child. There was Virginia Hall, about to be parachuted into occupied France with her artificial leg held under one arm lest it break when she landed. The pile of file folders on his desk climbed toward the sky. Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Arthur Goldberg. Ilya Tolstoy and Prince Serge Obolensky, the hotel baron married to an Astor. He had them from Standard Oil and Paramount Pictures, he had Mellons and Vanderbilts, Morgans and du Ponts. Union organizers and tailors. He had everything. And more coming in every day.

Meanwhile, they had just been renamed. COI, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, was now to be called the Office of Strategic Services-OSS. Which local wags lately referred to as Oh So Silly, Oh So Secret, and Organization Shush-Shush. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, had got in on the fun. Knowing that the OSS offices were next to the experimental labs at the National Institute of Health, he had stated in a recent radio broadcast that the organization was composed of “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs-and a staff of Jewish scribblers!” Hey, Dr. Goebbels, Rossell thought, you left out the bats.

Slowly, his mind returned to business and he realized that the poor soul across from him probably thought he was being tested in a cold-eyed staredown, not a daydreaming contest. Rossell was in his late forties, with gray hair cut in a military brush, big shoulders and thick arms. His tie was pulled down, jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up in useless defiance of a steam radiator that would grow orchids if they let it. And here it was May. Couldn’t somebody get them to turn the goddamn thing off?

“Well,” he finally said to the man across from him, “say something.” If you couldn’t manage charm, discomfort would serve.

Eidenbaugh stared at him for a long moment, then, from a face composed in utter seriousness, came a singsong “M-i-s, s-i-s, s-i-p-p-i.”

“Oh yeah?” Rossell said. “Is that supposed to get you a job here?”

“No sir,” Eidenbaugh answered, “that’s supposed to help you spell Mississippi.”

To Rossell, the laugh felt better than a week of sleep and seemed to serve the same purpose. He launched himself-once again, into the breach! — into the usual interview format. This Eidenbaugh wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t much to look at, but he had a nimble mind. Would he do the job? Difficult to guess until the situation presented itself. But he found himself enjoying the man, and that weighed heavily in his favor. One of those slippery qualities, hard to quantify, that could really count in the world he was about to enter.

Then there was luck.

It just so happened that while the two of them chattered away, a fly settled on the edge of Rossell’s desk. Slowly, he picked up a file folder-it happened to be that of Merian C. Cooper, producer of the film King Kong-and swatted it dead.

“See that?” he asked.

“Yes sir.”

“That, son, is technical intelligence at work.

“I always get ‘em,” he continued, “because I know that flies take off backward. So you swat in back of them, see?”

“Yes sir. Will I be allowed to swat Hitler, sir?”

Rossell rubbed his eyes for a moment. Christ, he was tired, and he looked like hell. But he didn’t feel so bad. He really liked to do the fly trick-it put him in a good mood. “I think so, son,” he said. “We just may allow you that privilege.”

In Paris, in the early hours of June 11, 1940, Khristo Stoianev lay awake in his cell in the Sante prison and planned his “escape.” Staring at the opaque window with the tiny hole in its upper corner, he smoked up a week’s tobacco ration and watched the short, summer darkness fade into early light. In two days’ time it would be thirty- six months that he had spent in captivity.

He could bear no more.