Jungleland (23 page)

Regarding Morde’s endgame of extracting Hitler, von Papen said that there was one potential obstacle: “the Nazis were still capable of tricks.” In carrying out the plan, von Papen worried, his life, as well as the lives of his family, would be in danger.

But would he do it? Morde wanted to know. “Are you willing to do your utmost to get rid of Hitler?”

Morde watched him move forward in his chair. “Yes,” the ambassador said at last. “Tell your President I will leave to contact my people in Germany. Tell him I must have something definite to offer them. Tell him that I will do my best.”

To stay in touch, the ambassador gave Morde a secret code to decipher telegrams. They had to be very cautious. “[Von Papen] said that he trusted me, and that I must be very careful,” Morde explained in a top secret agency wire. “And that in turn I could trust him without reservation not to disclose what took place between us.” When Morde turned to go, the ambassador wished him luck, and the men agreed to talk again in five or six weeks.

DAYS LATER, A
military plane whisked Morde to Washington, where controversy immediately erupted. The plan caused a feud between Roosevelt’s two most trusted spy chiefs.

Robert Sherwood, who was the head of the Office of War Information, urged the president to reject the plot and even denied the government’s role in it. He suggested that Morde was operating as a rogue agent and “making a certain amount of trouble.”

Wild Bill Donovan, Morde’s immediate boss, however, encouraged Roosevelt to consider the plan as a possible way to end the war. “I beg you to read this carefully,” he wrote to the president in a top secret memo. “It contains an idea that your skill and imagination could develop. . . . If the plan went through, and if the culprits were delivered and fittingly tried and executed, and if the unconditional surrender resulted, it would strengthen your position morally at the peace table.”

Without ever meeting Morde, Roosevelt rebuffed the plan; although he never explained why, the sense was that such a single-handed clandestine scheme would disrupt the tenuous alliance with Stalin and potentially undermine the Allied agreement to seek an unconditional surrender, which included the total annihilation of the Nazis and the war machine that they had created.

Of course, people would later wonder what the world would have looked like if Hitler had been murdered then. Millions of lives might have been saved, but the act might have also turned Russia against the United States, creating an entirely new front in the war.

One mystery that would remain is who actually initiated the Istanbul plot—the OSS or Morde himself? Donovan would never say, and neither would Morde.

As for the ambassador, Morde didn’t see him again. “Two or three messages did come through from Papen to Morde, which we could not break,” recalled John Toulmin, the head of the OSS branch in Cairo. “We have no idea what they said.” How much recruiting von Papen did for the internal capture-or-kill group, no one will ever know.

Later, U.S. troops would seize the ambassador in Germany. According to one of the soldiers with him that day, von Papen was overheard mumbling, “I wish this terrible war were over.” Following the Allied victory, von Papen would be tried at Nuremberg and acquitted.

Morde, meanwhile, was transferred to the Maritime Unit of the OSS, where he spent the rest of the conflict.

“I’M ON THE
wagon,” he wrote in a report from Livorno, Italy, not far from Genoa on the Ligurian Sea. He had begun drinking recently but now decided it was time to wind it down for fear it was turning him upside down.

Livorno had been wrecked by the war. Bridges were out, the roads full of ruts; the harbor was a graveyard of sunken ships, the coast a minefield waiting to explode.

As in the jungle, it rained a lot, and Morde’s existence there was a rugged hell. “We lay down on a pile of rubble on a chewed-up pier. . . . Half the men are down with colds,” he wrote one week.

The air stank of smoke. He spent a lot time on the sea, where his wandering life had started. In Maritime Intelligence (MI), he headed up an eighty-five-foot patrol boat that chased submarines, inserted agents behind enemy lines, planted mines underwater, collected naval intelligence, and engaged in amphibious sabotage. By 1945, Morde was an OSS chief.

Occasionally, his mind drifted to life back in the States and what it might actually be like to have a place he could, for once, call home. In a letter that winter to the Explorers Club, he wrote, “The war has provided me with many fine experiences, including an opportunity to complete another trip (during the past fourteen months) around the world. One doesn’t get any younger, however, and I look forward with pleasure to a few months of settled existence in the U.S.”

Still, while other agents complained about their uncomfortable bases, the wandering, the bad weather, the constant danger, Morde mostly seemed to relish the adventure at hand. One year, he wrote in a memo to the Washington bureau, “I’m having the time of my life.”

FOR HIS FINAL
assignment, in July 1945, he headed for the Japanese-held island of Weichow, twenty-three miles south of the Gulf of Tonkin. It was the rainy season. As he and his two men fought high seas on a small fishing boat, they suddenly encountered twenty-four Japanese junks that opened fire on them.

He probably should have retreated but instead fought back for two days. Eventually, a thick fog provided him with enough cover to slip past the enemy line and onto the island. The men made camp and went off in different directions, scouting the land for intelligence. But when Morde returned to camp, after clearing debris from a runway so U.S. Army Air Forces planes could land, he found one of his men beheaded. It was an ambush. With the Japanese opening fire, the men scrambled to their boat and the man beside Morde was shot in half.

For his efforts, Morde was awarded the Bronze Star. But the violence would haunt him. After World War II ended, he resigned from the OSS, noting in a classified memo that he had taken “no sick leave.”

In a final letter to the secretary of the Explorers Club, Donald B. Upham, in the winter of 1945, Morde recalled his five years of duty overseas and, with a note of fatigue, said that his future plans were now up in the air. He didn’t know what he was going to do next. “There will come a day when I hope to be able to visit you frequently,” he wrote to Upham, somewhat dreamily, seeming to imply that he desired to visit with other explorers there and figure out a way to return to his lost city. “It is possible that I will take part once more in the world of exploration, but it is too early to decide at present.”

Journey to the Crosses

T
HE VOICE SAVED
me.

“You okay?” It was Chris. He had doubled back. I looked at him. How much time had passed was hard to say. His face was a mess of mud, and his glasses were fogged.

“I hate this,” I said and enumerated. I hated the walking. I hated the Clif Bars. I hated the beans and rice. I hated my two sets of clothes. I hated carrying my backpack. I hated Pancho’s radio that gave us only bad news about the coup and dead people. I hated the acrid iodine-infused water. I hated the malarial fog in my head. I hated the jungle. I hated the goddamn lost city.

Chris nodded. “I know. It’s rough.”

I felt an urge to punch him.

I stood up, and for a moment we remained there. Angel and Pancho had returned. Chris had been telling Pancho we were headed in the wrong direction, and finally Pancho had figured out that we had been circling the mountain for hours instead of climbing it.

“We have to keep moving,” Chris said now. “It’s getting dark.”

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, trying to suppress the hate, and forced myself to go on. We slogged for another five or six hours through miles of up-and-down muddiness, keeping an eye out, as ever, for snakes and jaguars.

Night came. At one point I begged to stop, but Pancho began worrying about bandits.

Feeling the hate coming back again, I tried to imagine myself somewhere else—on a beach or a lake or just on the couch at home, comfortable, settled, living a conventional life. But the jungle kept intruding, like an enemy that won’t let you go even when you are dying and long past saving. On one steep descent through a canyon, my pant leg snagged on a tree trunk and ripped up the seam. I nearly lost my pants. Two minutes later, I stepped into a bog and toppled over. I had warm mud in my nose, mouth, down my underwear, up my shirt, dripping from my beard, my hair. I felt the smooth carapace of a sizable insect and tasted bug. Standing, I took two more steps and fell again, the hate pouring back into me.

“You gonna make it?” Chris yelled.

The mud had by now infiltrated every pore of my body. I had nothing left inside me. I couldn’t laugh or cry if I wanted to. I didn’t think I could move.

Then I felt something on my neck. It was Pancho, in his perfectly pressed blue button-down shirt, his hand lifting me out.

I don’t really know how I made it. I wrapped a piece of string around my leg to keep my ripped pants together and went on. For an hour or so Pancho had been claiming that he heard dogs, suggesting a settlement, but I didn’t hear anything and thought he was just trying to give me hope. But he was right. Eventually, we came to a tiny village called Cielo Azul, or Blue Sky.

The village of some half-dozen huts straddled a valley. At the first one, a Ladino man in his fifties, with his sombrero tilted forward on his head and a pistol on his belt, invited us in to eat. “You are welcome,” he said. I thought I was dreaming.

HIS WIFE SERVED
us the usual, and we ate the beans on a crude wood bench outside. Somehow Pancho had found batteries for his radio, and news of the coup filled the damp night air; little had changed. The death toll had risen to seven, and there were new rumors that younger officers in the military might rebel against the coup leader. I tuned the news out. I was grateful to be at rest and grateful to be alive. Even the beans were okay.

Above us the stars were bright and close, the moon’s giant whiteness flooding the valley. The air smelled of pine. The owner of the hut asked where we were going. No Americans had ever passed through here. When Chris pointed west, the man said, “Las Crucitas,” the Crosses. He said the area was considered a burial ground. “We don’t go there,” his wife said. She had emerged from the hut and now stood beside him in a white dress and flip-flops. “Strange things go on there,” she said.

Other people from the village began to appear, drawn in by our voices echoing in the night. “There are many large mounds around there. Tall as that,” the owner of the hut said, pointing at a thirty-foot palm tree next to us.

Another man, with a handlebar mustache and muscular shoulders, materialized from the shadows. “The ones who lived there were giants. The giants built those mounds,” he said. “Who else could move those big rocks? Have you seen the pottery scattered out there? It’s huge.” All eyes were on him, the butt of a 9-millimeter jutting from his dirty white jeans.

He suggested that the giants were buried in the hills and made a rocketing gesture at the midnight stars. “There are green lights that shoot up from the mounds. We see them sometimes. The lights go up, and then they are gone.”

That night we slept in our hammocks next to a stream. Because there was an open pasture nearby, I managed to get a signal on the satellite phone. My daughter picked up, and her small voice sent my mind back to my agony hours before. I told her how sorry I was that I’d missed her birthday, how sorry I was to be away, that it had been so long since I’d seen her, that I thought about her every day and wished I was home with her. I was so happy to hear her voice. But she didn’t want to talk about any of that.

“Have you seen any snakes?” she asked, cutting me off.

I said I had.

“Are they scary, Daddy? What do they look like? Are they slippery?”

I told her that I’d seen an orange one and that sometimes they scared me.

“Have you seen Curious George?” she asked.

Amy came on. The first thing that came out of my mouth was “Did the raccoon come back?”

She said it hadn’t, but she didn’t sleep in our room anymore. She had duct-taped the window, and the woman upstairs had helped her screw a slatted steel window guard into place. At night she left the lights on. “I’m sleeping on a blow-up mattress in Sky’s room,” she said. “I’m tired.”

I began to apologize to her too, but she cut me off. “Listen,” she said, “we’ve been worried about you.”

We had been at odds about this trip, and now it sounded as though she had gone through her own process of thinking.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I tried to tell her everything that had happened, but there was no time. “It’s just good to hear your voice,” she said. We spoke for about ten minutes, and then I told her I was coming home. “We miss you,” she said.

“From Journalist and Explorer and Spy to a Father”

W
HY DIDN’T THEODORE MORDE
ever go back to the lost city? How did his life come apart? Did he die by his own hand, or was one of his enemies taking revenge? It’s impossible to answer those questions. What’s certain is that his life was turned upside down when he met a girl at a New York City party in the summer of 1948.

Gloria Gustafson was a model: blond, leggy, with a sparkling white smile that “turned heads,” as Morde told his family. She was twenty-two and had been staying at the Barbizon Hotel for Women at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street. A kind of finishing school, it was home to countless fashionable young women over the years, from Grace Kelly to Joan Crawford and Edith Bouvier Beale.

Morde had taken a “consulting” job in 1947 with the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, which may or may not have been an informal intelligence mission. The last year had brought him writing assignments and radio shows, and, later, when the Arab-Israeli conflict erupted in the late 1940s, he made a twenty-eight-minute black-and-white documentary of the Gaza strip,
Sands of Sorrow
, about the suffering in Palestinian refugee camps.