The Colonial-style house is located at the top of the property and surrounded by towering shade trees. It has a copper roof and a double porch. The furnishings are rustic and comfortable, inviting cooperation and camaraderie. Delegations from friendly services have stayed there. So have men who have betrayed their country. The last was an Iraqi who helped Saddam try to build a nuclear bomb. His wife was hoping for an apartment in the famous Watergate and complained bitterly throughout her stay. His sons set fire to the barn. Management was pleased to see them leave.
On that afternoon, new snowfall covered the pasture. The landscape, drained of all color by the heavily tinted windows of the hulking Suburban, appeared to Gabriel as a charcoal sketch. Alexander, reclining in the front seat with his eyes closed, came suddenly awake. He yawned elaborately and squinted at his wristwatch, then frowned when he realized it was set to the wrong time.
It was Chiara, seated at Gabriel’s side, who noticed the bald, sentinel-like figure standing at the balustrade on the upper porch. Gabriel leaned across the back seat and peered up at him. Shamron raised his hand and held it aloft for a moment before turning and disappearing into the house.
He greeted them in the entrance hall. Standing at his side, dressed in corduroy trousers and a cardigan sweater, was a slight man with a halo of gray curls and a gray mustache. His brown eyes were tranquil, his handshake cool and brief. He seemed a college professor, or perhaps a clinical psychologist. He was neither. Indeed, he was the deputy director for operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, and his name was Adrian Carter. He did not look pleased, but then, given the current state of global affairs, he rarely did.
They greeted each other carefully, as men of the secret world are prone to do. They used real names, since they were all known to each other and the use of work names would have lent a farcical air to the affair. Carter’s serene gaze settled briefly on Chiara, as though she were an uninvited guest for whom an extra place would have to be set. He made no attempt to suppress his frown.
“I was hoping to keep this at a very senior level,” Carter said. His voice was underpowered; to hear him, one had to remain still and listen carefully. “I was also hoping to limit distribution of the material I’m about to share with you.”
“She’s my partner,” Gabriel said. “She knows everything, and she’s not leaving the room.”
Carter’s eyes moved slowly from Chiara to Gabriel “We’ve been watching you for some time—ever since your arrival in Vienna, to be precise. We especially enjoyed your visit to Café Central. Confronting Vogel face to face like that was a fine piece of theater.”
“Actually, it was Vogel who confronted me.”
“That’s Vogel’s way.”
“Who is he?”
“You’re the one who’s been digging. Why don’t you tell me?”
“I believe he’s an SS murderer named Erich Radek, and for some reason, you’re protecting him. If I had to guess why, I’d say he was one of your agents.”
Carter placed a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Come,” he said. “Obviously, it’s time we had a talk.”
THE LIVING ROOM was lamplit and shadowed. A large fire burned in the hearth, an institutional metal urn of coffee stood on the sideboard. Carter helped himself to some before settling with donnish detachment into a wingchair. Gabriel and Chiara shared the couch while Shamron paced the perimeter, a sentry with a long night ahead of him.
“I want to tell you a story, Gabriel,” Carter began. “It’s a story about a country that was drawn into a war it didn’t want to fight, a country that defeated the greatest army the world had ever known, only to find itself, within a matter of months, in an armed standoff with its former ally, the Soviet Union. In all honesty, we were scared shitless. You see, before the war, we had no intelligence service—not a real one, anyway. Hell, your service is as old as ours. Before the war, our intelligence operation inside the Soviet Union consisted of a couple of guys from Harvard and a teletype machine. When we suddenly found ourselves nose to nose with the Russian bogeyman, we didn’t know shit about him. His strengths, his weaknesses, his intentions. And what’s more, we didn’t know how to find out. That another war was imminent was a foregone conclusion. And what did we have? Fuck all. No networks, no agents. Nothing. We were lost, wandering in the desert. We needed help. Then a Moses appeared on the horizon, a man to lead us across Sinai, into the Promised Land.”
Shamron went still for a moment in order to supply the name of this Moses: General Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German General Staff’s Foreign Armies East branch, Hitler’s chief spy on the Russian front.
“Buy that man a cigar.” Carter inclined his head toward Shamron. “Gehlen was one of the few men who had the balls to tell Hitler the truth about the Russian campaign. Hitler used to get so pissed at him, he threatened to have him committed to an insane asylum. As the end was drawing near, Gehlen decided to save his own skin. He ordered his staff to microfilm the General Staff’s archives on the Soviet Union and seal the material in watertight drums. The drums were buried in the mountains of Bavaria and Austria, then Gehlen and his senior staff surrendered to a Counterintelligence Corps team.”
“And you welcomed him with open arms,” Shamron said.
“You would have done the same thing, Ari.” Carter folded his hands and spent a moment staring into the fire. Gabriel could almost hear him counting to ten to check his anger. “Gehlen was the answer to our prayers. The man had spent a career spying on the Soviet Union, and now he was going to show us the way. We brought him into this country and put him up a few miles from here at Fort Hunt. He had the entire American security establishment eating out of his hand. He told us what we wanted to hear. Stalinism was an evil unparalleled in human history. Stalin intended to subvert the countries of western Europe from within and then move against them militarily. Stalin had global ambitions. Be not afraid, Gehlen told us. I have networks, I have sleepers and stay-behind cells. I know everything there is to know about Stalin and his henchmen. Together, we will crush him.”
Carter stood and went to the sideboard to warm his coffee.
“Gehlen held court at Fort Hunt for ten months. He drove a hard bargain, and my predecessors were so hypnotized that they agreed to all his demands. Organization Gehlen was born. He moved into a walled compound near Pullach, Germany. We financed him, we gave him directives. He ran the Org and hired the agents. Ultimately, the Org became a virtual extension of the Agency.”
Carter carried his coffee back to his chair.
“Obviously, since the primary target of the Organization Gehlen was the Soviet Union, the general hired men who had some experience there. One of the men he wanted was a bright, energetic young man named Erich Radek, an Austrian who’d been chief of the SD in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. At the time, Radek was being held by us in a detention camp in Mannheim. He was released to Gehlen and was soon behind the walls of Org headquarters at Pullach, reactivating his old networks inside the Ukraine.”
“Radek was SD,” Gabriel said. “The SS, SD, and the Gestapo were all declared criminal organizations after the war and all members were subject to immediate arrest, and yet you allowed Gehlen to hire him.”
Carter nodded slowly, as if the pupil had answered the question correctly but missed the larger, more important point. “At Fort Hunt, Gehlen pledged that he would not hire former SS, SD, or Gestapo officers, but it was a paper promise and one that we never expected him to keep.”
“Did you know that Radek was linked to Einsatzgruppen activities in the Ukraine?” Gabriel asked. “Did you know that this bright, energetic young man had tried to conceal the greatest crime in history?”
Carter shook his head. “The scale of the German atrocities wasn’t known then. As for Aktion 1005, no one had heard the term yet, and Radek’s SS file never reflected his transfer from the Ukraine. Aktion 1005 was a top-secret Reich matter, and top-secret Reich matters weren’t put to paper.”
“But surely, Mr. Carter
,” Chiara said, “General Gehlen must have known about Radek’s work?”
Carter raised his eyebrows, as though surprised by Chiara’s ability to speak. “He might have, but then, I doubt it would have made much difference to Gehlen. Radek wasn’t the only former SS man who ended up working for the Org. At least fifty others found work there, including some, like Radek, who were linked to the Final Solution.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to Gehlen’s controllers either,” Shamron said. “Any bastard, as long as he’s anti-Communist. Wasn’t that one of the Agency’s guiding principles when it came to the recruitment of Cold War agents?”
“In the infamous words of Richard Helms, ‘We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts, we would have joined the Boy Scouts.’ ”
Gabriel said, “You don’t sound terribly distressed, Adrian.”
“Histrionics are not my way, Gabriel. I’m a professional, like you and your legendary boss over there. I deal with the real world, not the world as I would like it to be. I make no apologies for the actions of my predecessors, just as you and Shamron make no apologies for yours. Sometimes, intelligence services must utilize the services of evil men to achieve results that are good: a more stable world, the security of the homeland, the protection of valued friends. The men who decided to employ Reinhard Gehlen and Erich Radek were playing a game as old as time itself, the game of Realpolitik, and they played it well. I won’t run from their actions, and I sure as hell won’t let you of all people sit in judgment of them.”
Gabriel leaned forward, his hands folded, his elbows on his knees. He could feel the heat of the fire on his face. It only fueled his anger.
“There’s a difference between using evil individuals as sources and hiring them as intelligence officers. And Erich Radek was no run-of-the-mill killer. He was a mass murderer.”
“Radek wasn’t directly involved in the extermination of the Jews. His involvement came after the fact.”
Chiara was shaking her head, even before Carter had completed his answer. He frowned. Clearly, he was beginning to regret her inclusion in the proceedings.
“You wish to take issue with something I said, Miss Zolli?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “Obviously you don’t know much about Aktion 1005. Whom do you think Radek used to open those mass graves and destroy the bodies? What do you think he did with them when the work was done?” Greeted by silence, she announced her verdict. “Erich Radek was a mass murderer, and you hired him as a spy.”
Carter nodded slowly, as if conceding the match on points. Shamron reached over the back of the couch and placed a restraining hand on Chiara’s shoulder. Then he looked at Carter and asked for an explanation of Radek’s false escape from Europe. Carter seemed relieved by the prospect of virgin territory. “Ah, yes,” he said, “the flight from Europe. This is where it gets interesting.”
ERICH RADEK QUICKLY became General Gehlen’s most important deputy. Eager to protect his star protégé from arrest and prosecution, Gehlen and his American handlers created a new identity for him: Ludwig Vogel, an Austrian who had been drafted in the Wehrmacht and had gone missing in the final days of the war. For two years, Radek lived in Pullach as Vogel, and his new identity seemed airtight. That changed in the autumn of 1947, with the beginning of Case No. 9 of the subsequent Nuremburg proceedings, the Einsatzgruppen trial. Radek’s name surfaced repeatedly during the trial, as did the code name of the secret operation to destroy the evidence of the Einsatzgruppen killings: Aktion 1005.
“Gehlen became alarmed,” Carter said. “Radek was officially listed as missing and unaccounted for, and Gehlen was eager that he remain that way.”
“So you sent a man to Rome posing as Radek,” Gabriel said, “and made sure you left enough clues behind so that anyone who went looking for him would follow the wrong trail.”
“Precisely.”
Shamron, still pacing, said, “Why did you use the Vatican route instead of your own Ratline?”
“You’re referring to the Counterintelligence Corps Ratline?”
Shamron closed his eyes briefly and nodded.
“The CIC Ratline was used mainly for Russian defectors. If we’d sent Radek down the line, it would have betrayed the fact he was working for us. We used the Vatican route to enhance his credentials as a Nazi war criminal on the run from Allied justice.”
“How clever of you, Adrian. Pardon my interruption. Please continue.”
“Radek disappeared,” Carter said. “Occasionally, the Org fed the story of his escape by slipping false sightings to the various Nazi hunters, claiming that Radek was in hiding in various South American capitals. He was living in Pullach, of course, working for Gehlen under the name Ludwig Vogel.”
“Pathetic,” Chiara murmured.
“It was 1948,” Carter said. “Things were different by then. The Nuremberg process had run its course, and all sides had lost interest in further prosecutions. Nazi doctors had returned to practice. Nazi theoreticians were lecturing again in the universities. Nazi judges were back on the bench.”
“And a Nazi mass murderer named Erich Radek was now an important American agent who needed protection,” Gabriel said. “When did he return to Vienna?”
“In 1956, Konrad Adenauer made the Org the official West German intelligence service: the Bundesnachrichtendienst, better known as the BND. Erich Radek, now known as Ludwig Vogel, was once again working for the German government. In 1965, he returned to Vienna to build a network and make certain the new Austrian government’s official neutrality remained tilted firmly toward NATO and the West. Vogel was a joint BND–CIA project. We worked together on his cover. We cleaned up the files in the Staatsarchiv. We created a company for him to run, Danube Valley Trade and Investment, and funneled enough business his way to make certain the firm was a success. Vogel was a shrewd businessman, and before long, profits from DVTI were funding all of our Austrian nets. In short, Vogel was our most important asset in Austria—and one of our most valuable in Europe. He was a master spy. When the Wall came down, his work was done. He was also getting on in years. We severed our relationship, thanked him for a job well done, and parted company.” Carter held up his hands. “And that, I’m afraid, is where the story ends.”
“But that’s not true, Adrian,” Gabriel said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”
“You’re referring to the allegations made against Vogel by Max Klein?”
“You knew?”
“Vogel alerted us to the fact that we might have a situation in Vienna. He asked us to intercede and make the allegations go away. We informed him that we couldn’t do that.”
“So he took matters into his own hands.”
“You’re suggesting Vogel ordered the bombing at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”
“I’m also suggesting he had Max Klein murdered in order to silence him.”
Carter took a moment before answering. “If Vogel is involved, he’s worked through so many cutouts and front men you’ll never be able to pin a charge on him. Besides, the bombing and Max Klein’s death are Austrian matters, not Israeli, and no Austrian prosecutor is going to open a murder investigation into Ludwig Vogel. It’s a dead end.”
“His name is Radek, Adrian, not Vogel, and the question is why. Why was Radek so concerned about Eli Lavon’s investigation that he would resort to murder? Even if Eli and Max Klein were able to prove conclusively that Vogel was really Erich Radek, he would have never been brought to trial by the Austrian state prosecutor. He’s too old. Too much time had elapsed. There were no witnesses left, none except Klein, and there’s no way Radek would have been convicted in Austria on the word of one old Jew. So why resort to violence?”
“It sounds to me as if you have a theory.”
Gabriel looked over his shoulder and murmured a few words in Hebrew to Shamron. Shamron handed Gabriel a file containing all the material he had gathered in the course of the investigation. Gabriel o
pened it and removed a single item: the photograph he had taken from Radek’s house in the Salzkammergut, Radek with a woman and a teen-aged boy. He laid it on the table and turned it so Carter could see. Carter’s eyes moved to the photo, then back to Gabriel.
“Who is she?” Gabriel asked.
“His wife, Monica.”
“When did he marry her?”
“During the war,” said Carter, “in Berlin.”
“There was never a mention of an SS-approved marriage in his file.”
“There were many things that didn’t make it into Radek’s SS file.”
“And after the war?”
“She settled in Pullach under her real name. The child was born in 1949. When Vogel moved back to Vienna, General Gehlen didn’t think it would be safe for Monica and the son to go with him openly—and neither did the Agency. A marriage was arranged for her to a man employed in Vogel’s net. She lived in Vienna, in the house behind Vogel’s. He visited them in the evening. Eventually, we constructed a passage between the houses, so that Monica and the boy could move freely between the two residences without fear of detection. We never knew who was watching. The Russians would have dearly loved to compromise him and turn him around.”
“What was the boy’s name?”
“Peter.”
“And the agent that Monica Radek married? Please tell us his name, Adrian.”
“I think you already know his name, Gabriel.” Carter hesitated, then said, “His name was Metzler.”
“Peter Metzler, the man who is about to be chancellor of Austria, is the son of a Nazi war criminal named Erich Radek, and Eli Lavon was going to expose that fact.”