“Oh, yes,” Willi Rangio said. “Tell me, Craig, would Sanford T. Felter eat that?”
It was the first time he had said anything. His English was perfect, but without an identifiable accent, neither British, nor American, nor any variation of those dialects.
“Would he eat the ham, Willi? Oh, yes, and with relish. Is he Jewish? Which, if it’s what you’re asking, yes he is.”
“Is he CIA?” Rangio asked.
“No, he’s not. Actually, Willi, I suspect that his service is much like yours. Are you a graduate of the military academy here?”
“All Argentine officers are.”
“Most Americans are not. I’m not, Father’s not. Felter is a West Pointer.”
“He’s not listed in your Army Register,” Fosterwood said,
“I didn’t know that,” Lowell said. “But it doesn’t surprise me. Anyway, Felter is a serving officer. A full colonel.”
“You told General Pistarini that he is your closest friend,” Rangio said, making it a question.
“Yes, he is,” Lowell said, and put a chunk of melon and prosciutto in his mouth.
“Really delicious,” he said.
“Tell us how you met him,” Rangio said.
“I was a very young officer in Greece, a second lieutenant. Felter was there, as a first lieutenant. He had served in the war against Germany. He saved my life.”
“How did he do that?” Fosterwood asked.
“This is one of my secrets,” Lowell said, looked at Pistarini, and then went on: “I was serving with a Greek company on the Albanian border. We were attacked by Communists, Greek and Albanian, and nearly overrun. I was pretty badly shot up, and there were other wounded. A Greek relief column was sent, under an American captain—a West Pointer, by the way—to reinforce us. This ‘officer’ concluded that under the circumstances fifty dead Greeks, thirty wounded Greeks, fifteen unwounded men, and a second lieutenant did not justify moving the column in such a manner that would bring it under fire and he himself might be hit.”
“And what happened?” Pistarini asked.
“Felter did what he concluded was necessary for an honorable officer to do under the circumstances,” Lowell said matter-of-factly. “He shot him, took over the column, and, as the expression goes, saved my bacon.”
“I never heard that story before,” Father blurted.
“And you probably won’t again. It’s not for repeating. This is a special situation,” Lowell said.
“So he was an intelligence officer as early as your involvement in Greece?” Rangio asked.
“No,” Lowell said. “He got involved with intelligence—actually counterintelligence—after Greece. In Germany. Probably because he spoke German.”
“I understand that you had many German Jews in Germany running down Nazis,” Rangio said.
“We did, but from the beginning, Felter has been involved with the Communists.”
“And do you think he had a connection with the Gehlen organization? ” Pistarini asked, almost innocently.
“He did, and does, General,” Lowell said.
“Am I allowed to ask what that is?” Fosterwood asked.
“You don’t really know, Ricky?” Pistarini asked.
“Sir, I’m just a simple soldier,” Fosterwood said.
“General Gehlen was the Abwehr officer, under Admiral Canaris, in charge of Eastern intelligence, Russian intelligence,” Pistarini said. “When the war was over, he offered to turn his entire operation over to the Americans, providing that they didn’t go after any of his men in the de-Nazification program.”
“And we agreed?” Father asked incredulously. “To let some Nazis walk?”
Lowell nodded.
“Either Eisenhower or President Truman—probably Truman, no one else would have had the authority—decided we couldn’t have done without what Gehlen was offering.”
The waiter who reminded Lowell of Doubting Thomas took the prosciutto and melon plates away, replaced them with plates of enormous grilled chunks of filet mignon, and then refilled the wineglasses.
When he had finished, General Pistarini asked, “And is that how Mr.—Colonel—Felter became close to General von Greiffenberg? ”
“In a way, General,” Lowell said. “Felter learned that my father-in-law was in Siberia, with several thousand other German POWs the Russians never intended to send home. He arranged for the Gehlen organization to get him out.”
“Because he was your father-in-law?” Rangio asked.
“That was a happy by-product of getting him out,” Lowell said. “I think—and Felter’s told me this—that he could justify the effort because von Greiffenberg, whose anti-Nazi credentials are impeccable, was fully aware of what happened in the Katyn Forest.”
“The Katyn Forest?” Fosterwood asked.
“When the Red Army moved against Poland,” Lowell said, “they took a large portion of the Polish army officer corps, thousands of them, including several hundred teenage officer cadets, into the Katyn Forest, shot them in the back of the head, and buried them in unmarked mass graves. And then, when it came out, tried to blame it