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During the war, the network had provided secure communications between OSS headquarters in Washington and important OSS stations around the world. Deputy OSS Director Allen Dulles had had one when he had been stationed in Berne, Switzerland. David Bruce, who had run the OSS organization attached to Eisenhower’s Supreme Command in London, had had another. Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Frade, who commanded Team Turtle, the OSS operation covering the “Southern Cone”—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—had another. And there had been a very few other stations in the network.
Despite the demise of the OSS, parts of the network remained “up.” Instant, secure communication between Germany and Vint Hill Farms was still possible, but since the OSS had been “disestablished” was never used.
There were now two stations in Germany. One had been set up immediately after the war by Colonel Mattingly in what had been Admiral Canaris’s home in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. Mattingly had moved the station he had had with OSS Forward to Kloster Grünau the day before the OSS had ceased to exist.
Communications between Germany and Argentina, because of Operation Ost, were frequent.
There were no secure communications links between Colonel Mattingly’s office in the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, Major Harold Wallace’s office in the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel in Munich, and Kloster Grünau. Or between any of them.
One of the reasons was the “antenna farm” that the Collins transceiver needed. Since Mattingly did not want anyone to know the radio network even existed, he could not order that antennae be set up on the roofs of either the Farben Building or the Vier Jahreszeiten.
And since the less known by anyone about Kloster Grünau the better, he could not go to the Signal Corps and tell them to install a secure—encrypted—telephone line there. They would want to know why one was needed. And even if he told them why he needed one and pledged—or threatened—them to silence, a platoon of Signal Corps telephone linemen installing the heavy lead-shielded cable necessary for encrypted secure lines would cause questions to be asked about what was going on at the supposedly deserted former monastery.
These problems would go away when the South German Industrial Development Organization moved to Pullach. But for the time being, telephone calls had to be conducted in the presumption that someone was listening to what was being said.
—
“Mattingly.”
“Cronley, sir.”
“Thank you for returning my call so promptly, Captain. It can’t be more than two or three hours since I asked Dunwiddie to have you call me immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hope you had a pleasant joyride through the countryside?”
“Colonel, I need to talk to you.”
“Odd, when I called before, I needed to talk to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Among other things, I was curious how your flying lesson went.”
“I think it went well, sir.”
“And then I can hope that sometime in the near future, we may look forward to having our own aerial taxi service?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you give me an idea, just a ballpark estimate, of when that might be? In, say, two weeks?”
“Sir, the planes are at the monastery.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sir, I have the planes here now.”
“How did they get there?”
“I flew one of them and Schröder flew the other.”
“I don’t believe I know anyone by that name.”
“He and three mechanics came with the planes, sir.”
“Are you telling me you flew a German national to the monastery?”
