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“Now what the hell?” Frade muttered.
“It’s probably Doña Dorotea,” Schultz said, and went to a telephone—an Argentine copy of the U.S. Army EE-8 Field Telephone—hidden behind a row of books.
—
There was no gate to the enormous Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, just a sign reading BIENVENIDO!
This was not to say the estancia went unguarded. At least two of the more than two hundred gauchos working the estancia around the clock always had the entrance in sight. If a vehicle entering the property was not known to them, it would be stopped by gauchos on horseback suddenly appearing somewhere on the eight-kilometer road between the BIENVENIDO! sign and the Big House complex.
If the vehicle was known to be welcome, the gaucho who made this decision would ride to the nearest field telephone—all of the phones were mounted six feet up in eucalyptus trees; the gauchos disliked having to dismount—and call the Big House.
“It’s an embassy car,” el Jefe announced as he returned the telephone to its hiding place.
“I wonder what Tony wants?” Frade asked rhetorically.
Frade couldn’t think of anyone else from the U.S. embassy who would come to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo either unexpectedly or uninvited.
Major Anthony J. Pelosi, CE, USAR, now an assistant military attaché of the embassy, had come to Argentina in 1942 as a second lieutenant, accompanying then–First Lieutenant Cletus Frade, USMCR.
They had been charged by the OSS with a dual mission: blowing up a “neutral” merchant ship or ships known to be replenishing German submarines in Samborombón Bay, and with attempting to make contact with the man the OSS believed would become the next president of the Argentine Republic, and then to attempt to make this man tilt as far toward the United States as he was then tilting toward the Third Reich.
Lieutenant Pelosi had been well qualified for his task. His family in Chicago had been demolishing buildings in the Windy City for more than a century. Tony at the age of twelve had “taken down” his first structure—a 120-foot-tall grain elevator—with trinitrotoluene charges.
Lieutenant Frade, who had been flying fighter aircraft off Fighter One on Guadalcanal, had only one qualification to accomplish his mission: The man the OSS believed was about to become president of Argentina was his father.
Frade could never remember having seen el Coronel Jorge G. Frade. All he knew about him was that his grandfather never referred to him except as “that sonofabitch,” or more commonly, “that miserable three-star Argentine sonofabitch.”
Frade later learned that the OSS never had any real hope that either mission would be accomplished, but had decided that giving it a try was well worth putting the lives of an Army second lieutenant and a Marine Corps first lieutenant at risk.
Against odds, they succeeded. And within a year, Frade was a captain and Pelosi a first lieutenant. Frade had been awarded the Navy Cross—the nation’s second-highest award for valor—and Pelosi the Silver Star—the third-ranking medal for valor. The citations accompanying the medal were more than a bit vague and obfuscatory. Sinking neutral merchant vessels in neutral waters posed a number of diplomatic problems.
And el Coronel Jorge G. Frade was murdered by the SS as he drove across his Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered his assassination to make the point to the Ejército Argentino officer corps that growing too close to the Americans would not be tolerated.
It didn’t work.
Cletus Frade, who had made his peace with his father only six weeks before, fell heir not only to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo—which was slightly larger than New York City, all of it, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, too—but also to everything else that made up what Frade thought of as “El Coronel, Inc.”
This probably would have been enough for the OSS to decide to keep him in Argentina, but what settled the question once and for all was Allen Welsh Dulles’s pronouncement, echoed by Colonel Alejandro Graham—the OSS deputy directors for Europe and the Western Hemisphere, respectively—that they had never encountered anyone who seemed more born to be an intelligence officer than Cletus Frade.
Frade was named OSS commander for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
Then Frade had arranged for Pelosi to be assigned to the American embassy. For one thing, it made his presence in Argentina legitimate. For another, Pelosi kept him abreast of what was going on in the embassy.
—
Fifteen minutes after the field telephone call, one of the maids came into the library carrying a small silver tray. He looked at her curiously, but picked up what the tray held, an engraved calling card.
* * *
Bosworth Stanton Alexander
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
of the
President of the United States of America
to
