The Honor of Spies

Phoenix was of course the plan concocted by Bormann, Himmler, Ribben trop, and others at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy to establish a sanctuary for senior Nazis in South America, from which they could rise phoenixlike from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich when the war was lost.

It had been no trouble for von Deitzberg to arrange for Standartenfuhrer Goltz to be sent to Buenos Aires as the man in charge of Operation Phoenix. That posting conveniently placed him in a position to be the confidential special fund's man in South America.

By then, curiously, there actually was a problem with the financial success of the fund. There was far more cash floating around than could be spent--or even invested--without questions being raised. It followed that the confidential special fund's leadership--von Deitzberg, Goltz, and Raschner--decided that setting up their own private version of Operation Phoenix was the natural solution. After all, von Tresmarck was already in place in Montevideo; it would pose no great problem for him to make investments for the confidential special fund. He was already doing that for Operation Phoenix.

And then there were the blunders. Von Deitzberg took little pride in being able to recognize a blunder when one occurred. Or an appalling number of them.

The first had been the failed assassination attempt on the American son of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade. When it became known that Cletus Frade--who had ostensibly "come home" to Argentina--was in fact an agent of the Office of Strategic Services and whose purpose in Argentina was to turn his father against Germany, the decision had been made to kill him. His murder would send the message to the man who almost certainly was going to be the next president of Argentina that even his son could not stand up to the power and anger of the Thousand-Year Reich.

But that hadn't worked. Young Frade, clearly not the foolish young man everyone seemed to have decided he was, killed the men sent to kill him. His outraged father then had loaned his pilot son an airplane with which young Frade located the Spanish-flagged--and thus "neutral"--merchant ship that had been replenishing German submarines in Samborombon Bay. Soon thereafter, a U.S. Navy submarine had torpedoed the vessel and the German U-boat tied alongside.

Von Deitzberg never learned who among the most senior of the Nazi hierarchy had ordered young Frade's assassination. And because that attempt had failed, no one was going to claim that responsibility.

They were, however, obviously the same people who had ordered the second blunder, the assassination of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade himself. The intention there was to send the message to the Argentine officer corps that just as Germany was prepared to reward its friends, it was equally prepared to punish its enemies no matter their position in the Argentine hierarchy.

That assassination had been successful. El Coronel Frade died of a double load of double-ought buckshot to his face while riding in his car on his estancia. The results of that assassination, however, were even more disastrous for Germany than the failed assassination of Frade's son.

The Argentine officer corps was enraged by Frade's murder. And during the attempted smuggling ashore of the first "special shipment"--crates literally stuffed with currency and precious jewels to be used to purchase sanctuary--from the Oceano Pacifico

at Samborombon Bay, both Standartenfuhrer Goltz and Oberst Karl-Heinz Gruner--the military attache and his assistant who were there to receive it--died of high-power rifle bullets fired into their skulls. Only good luck saw that the special shipment made it safely back to the Oceano Pacifico.

Who actually did the shooting never came to light. It could have been the OSS, perhaps even Frade himself. Or it could have been Argentine army snipers sending the message to the Germans that the assassination of a beloved Argentine officer was unacceptable behavior.

It didn't matter who did the shooting. So far as Bormann, Himmler, and the other senior Nazis behind Operation Phoenix were concerned, Operation Phoenix was in jeopardy. And that was absolutely unacceptable.

And there was more: On the death of el Coronel Frade, his only child inherited everything his father had owned, which included his enormous estancia, countless business enterprises, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, what amounted to his own private army. Young Frade now had several hundred former soldiers of the Husares de Pueyrredon who had returned to their homes on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo with their devotion to their murdered commander, el Coronel Frade, intact and now transferred to his son. Including, of course, their considerable military skills.