faith that could win victories. Since Stalingrad, there had been precious little reason for optimism; and with an Allied landing in Europe expected sometime in the next year, it seemed more likely that many of the generals in the Golden Hall were less concerned with victory than with avoiding the retribution of Allied military tribunals after the war was over. And yet Schellenberg couldn’t help thinking that there was still a way that victory might yet be won. If Germany could strike decisively at the Allies with the same surprise and effect that had been achieved by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, they might still turn the tide of the war. Hadn’t he been presented with just such an opportunity in agent Cicero’s information? Didn’t he already know that as of Sunday, November 21, Roosevelt and Churchill would be in Cairo for almost a week? And then in Teheran with Stalin until Saturday, December 4?
Schellenberg shook his head, puzzled. What on earth could have possessed them to pick Teheran for a conference in the first place? It seemed likely that Stalin must have insisted on the two other leaders coming to him. Doubtless he would have given them some excuse about the necessity of his being near his soldiers at the front; but all the same, Schellenberg wondered if either Churchill or Roosevelt was aware of the real reason behind Stalin’s insistence that they meet in Teheran. According to Schellenberg’s sources in the NKVD, Stalin had a morbid fear of flying and could no more have countenanced a long-distance flight to Newfoundland (which was the location favored by Churchill and Roosevelt) or even Cairo, than he could have bought himself a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The chances were that Stalin had chosen Teheran because he could spend a large part of the journey on his armored train, making only a short flight at the end of it.
He imagined that the Big Three would never have picked Teheran if Operation Franz had ever gone into action. A joint operation of the Luftwaffe’s elite 200 Squadron and the Friedenthal Section of Amt VI, the plan had been to fly a Junkers 290 carrying one hundred men from an airfield in the Crimea and drop them by parachute near a large salt lake southeast of Teheran. With the help of local tribesmen, F Section-many of whom spoke Persian- would then have interrupted American supplies for Russia that were being carried on the Iran-Iraq railway. The plan had been delayed following damage to the Junkers and the arrest of several of those pro-German Iranian tribesmen. By the time they were ready to go again, the best of the men in F Section, commanded by Otto Skorzeny, had been ordered to try to rescue Mussolini from his Italian mountaintop prison, and Operation Franz had been scrubbed. But the more Schellenberg thought about the situation now, the more it looked like a plan. F Section, with its Persian- speaking officers and special equipment, was, as far as he was aware, still intact; and there were the Big Three, heading for the very country in which F Section had been trained to operate. And there was no reason why such a plan should be restricted to a ground attack force. Schellenberg thought a commando team in Teheran might operate in tandem with a very specialized form of attack from the air. And he resolved to speak to a man he knew was coming to Posen that evening for the Reichsfuhrer’s speech the following day: Air Inspector General Erhard Milch.
Himmler’s speech finally ended, but Schellenberg was too excited to have lunch. Using a borrowed office in the castle, he telephoned his deputy in Berlin, Martin Sandberger. “It’s me-Schellenberg.”
“Hello, boss. How’s Posen?”
“Never mind that now, just listen. I want you to drive over to Friedenthal and find out what state F Section is in. Specifically, whether they’re up for another shot at Operation Franz. And, Martin, if he’s there, I want you to bring that baron fellow back to Berlin.”
“Von Holten-Pflug?”
“That’s him. Then I want you to set up a department meeting for first thing on Wednesday morning. Reichert, Buchman, Janssen, Weisinger, and whoever’s running the Turkish and Iranian desk these days.”
“That would be Major Schubach. He reports to Colonel Tschierschky. Shall I ask him, too?”
“Yes.”
After the call Schellenberg went to his room and tried to sleep, but his mind was still fizzing with the mechanics of a plan he was already calling Operation Long Jump. He could see no obvious reason why the plan couldn’t work. It was daring and audacious, yes, but that was what was called for. And while he disliked Skorzeny, the man had at least proved that the apparently impossible could be pulled off. At the same time, the last person he wanted in command of such an operation was Skorzeny-that went without saying. Skorzeny was much too hard to control. And, besides, the Luftwaffe would never have agreed to Skorzeny, not after Abruzzi. Of the dozen glider pilots who had landed near Il Duce’s makeshift prison on the loftiest peak in the Italian Apennines, all had been killed or captured-not to mention the 108 SS parachutists who had accompanied Skorzeny. Just three men had flown off that mountain: Mussolini, Skorzeny, and the pilot of their light aircraft. Abruzzi might have been worth the heavy sacrifice of men and materials if something useful had been achieved. But Schellenberg thought Il Duce was finished and that rescuing him seemed pointless. The Fuhrer might have been delighted enough to award Skorzeny the Knight’s Cross, but Schellenberg and quite a few others had regarded the whole operation as something of a disaster; and he had told Skorzeny as much on the train to Paris. Predictably, Skorzeny, a large and violent man, had been furious and would probably have attacked and possibly even tried to kill Schellenberg but for the silenced Mauser pistol the young general had produced from underneath his folded leather coat. You didn’t criticize a man like Skorzeny to his face without having something in reserve.
Schellenberg finally fell asleep, only to be awoken at eight o’clock that evening by an SS-Oberscharfuhrer who told him Field Marshal Milch had arrived and was waiting for him in the officers’ bar.
Like everyone who worked for Hermann Goring, Erhard Milch looked rich. Thick-set, smallish, dark-haired, and balding, he offset his unremarkable appearance with a gold marshal’s baton that was a smaller version of the one Goring carried, and when he offered Schellenberg a cigarette from a gold case and a glass of champagne from the bottle of Taittinger on the table, the SD man’s keen eyes quickly took in the gold Glashutte wristwatch and the gold signet ring on Milch’s stubby little finger.
As with Heydrich, it was strongly rumored that Milch was of Jewish blood. But Schellenberg knew this for a fact, just as he also knew how, thanks to Goring, this was not a problem for the former director of the German national airline, Lufthansa. Goring had fixed everything for his ex-deputy in the Reich Air Ministry when he had persuaded Milch’s gentile mother to sign a legal affidavit stating that her Jewish husband was not Erhard’s true father. It was a common enough practice in the Third Reich, and in this way the authorities were able to certify Milch as an honorary Aryan. These days, however, Goring and Milch were no longer close, the latter having criticized the Luftwaffe for its poor performance on the Russian front, a criticism that Goring was not likely to forget. As a result it was also believed that Milch had transferred his allegiance to Albert Speer, the minister of armaments-a rumor that had only been fueled by their arrival together in Posen.
Over champagne, Schellenberg told Milch about Agent Cicero’s intelligence, and then came quickly to the point: “I was thinking of resurrecting Operation Franz. Only instead of disrupting supplies on the Iran-Iraq railway, F team would try to assassinate the Big Three. We could coordinate their attack with a bombing raid.”
“A bombing raid?” Milch laughed. “Even our longest-range bomber would barely make it there and back. And even if a few bombers did get there, enemy fighters would shoot them down before they could do any damage. No, I’m afraid you’d better think again on that one, Walter.”
“There is a plane that could do the job. The Focke Wulf FW 20 °Condor.”
“That’s not a bomber, it’s a reconnaissance plane.”
“A long-range reconnaissance plane. I was thinking of four of them, each armed with two thousand-kilogram bombs. My team on the ground would knock out the enemy radar to give them a chance. Come on, Erhard, what do you say?”
Milch was shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“They wouldn’t have to fly from Germany, but from German-held territory in the Ukraine. Vinnica. I’ve worked it out. From Vinnica it’s eighteen hundred kilometers to Teheran. There and back is just within the 200’s standard fuel range.”
“Actually it’s just outside, by forty-four kilometers,” said Milch. “The published figures on the 200’s range were inflated. Wrongly.”
“So they throw something out to save a bit of fuel.”
“One of the pilots, perhaps.”
“If necessary, yes. Or one of the pilots could take the place of the navigator.”
“Actually, I suppose that with overload fuel it might be possible to extend the range,” admitted Milch. “With a light bomb load, such as you describe, maybe. Perhaps.”
“Erhard, if we manage to kill the Big Three, we could force the Allies to the negotiating table. Think of it. Like Pearl Harbor. A decisive strike that completely changes the course of the war. Isn’t that what you said? And you’re
