The Human Pool (18 page)

BUDAPEST/ZURICH, 1944

I DIDN'T KNOW IT THEN,
but Karl-Heinz used Willi for my contact. We met down by the river, the day after Willi and Karl-Heinz had dinner (to which no reference was made). Willi seemed out of sorts and I saw for the first time how much of a nocturnal and indoors man he had become. Daylight and fresh air seemed to disagree with him. He had a hacking cough as he told me there was an urgent and highly confidential message to deliver to Dulles.

Although nothing had been mentioned, relations between us had cooled since my brief arrest by Hungarian intelligence after my confession to him about Nelly. When I asked why he couldn't deliver the message himself, he sounded snappish. ‘Because I'm Betty's boy, and Betty is out of favour since this Abwehr business.'

He was referring to her having had several lovers and intelligence sources in the Abwehr. According to Beate, Betty had complained once to her of losing Dulles's confidence towards the end of the war.

Willi also said, ‘This meeting never took place.'

I travelled to Switzerland the next day on a special emergency pass issued by the SS. Willi had given me a sealed envelope whose contents I was to commit to memory and then destroy. I have no idea if Willi knew what was written in the message. He claimed he didn't, saying, ‘This is nothing to do with me. I'm only doing it as a favour.'

•   •   •

Dulles was shaking by the time I had finished reciting the message. He asked, ‘What do these people want?'

I said that I had been told to warn him that his cables to and from Washington were being intercepted. If he wanted proof of that he should refer to the recent one from Washington criticising the quality of his intelligence, which was considered ‘ill informed, inaccurate, and substantially wrong in its details'.

According to a snippet of Betty's, dug up by Beate, Dulles had received a tipoff at the end of the previous year that the Abwehr was feeding damaging information about him—‘all damned lies' according to Dulles—to U.S. Treasury agents. In the light of what has been subsequently learned, the information was remarkably accurate, and provided an extra reason for Dulles wanting to discredit the Abwehr. Of course, this information became available to Karl-Heinz once the SS takeover of the Abwehr was complete.

Dulles didn't say much in the way of a response to my message apart from ‘Christ Almighty!' several times to himself, then: ‘And what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?'

I said it was recommended he reroute any money transactions through Brussels for the time being and not through Switzerland.

 

We then entered the stage of what might be called reckless secrecy, when men like Karl-Heinz and Dulles were prepared to risk everything, and use anyone. I had an uncomfortable image of them dining together openly after the war, grinning survivors, while I lay dead and done in some ditch.

Karl-Heinz was playing opera on his gramophone when we next met in his lavish private quarters on one of the city's smartest boulevards. He later told me he was worried about microphone bugs. Karl-Heinz in shiny jackboots, braces, and a silk shirt, ‘on top of his game' as the sports people say.

‘Strictly between us, it's getting too late to fuck about,' he told me almost inaudibly. ‘I have a mole in the Swiss banking system. We are moving into a difficult period where nothing should be recorded, only memorised and erased.'

He asked what I was thinking. I said I wondered if he was working to orders or playing the entrepreneur. The diva hit the high note. Karl-Heinz turned the question around and asked, ‘What do you think?'

I told him the one thing I had learned was that everyone had a deal on the side.

‘And how does that make you feel?'

‘Very exposed.'

‘Your problem is you're too honest.'

The scratch of the needle at the end of the record; sitting in such sumptuous surroundings (requisitioned), I had a clear flash-forward to life among the ruins.

 

I was given a time and an address in an unremarkable part of Zurich for meeting Karl-Heinz's banker.

The first appointment I had to pass up because I thought someone was tailing me. It was during an unseasonably late snow storm, big dry flakes that showed up the silhouettes of the two men. They didn't seem good enough to be Dulles's payroll.

When I told Dulles about being followed, he was concerned they were Treasury Department agents. I didn't think they were, but I was picked up later by the Treasury and grilled. It wasn't out of the question that Dulles had made the tipoff himself, to see if I could find out what the Treasury had on him. Nothing that they were telling me, it turned out.

The Swiss banker was, as he put it, prepared to deal with the devil. He was urbane and ironic and had the same upper-class mannerism as Betty Monroe and Dulles of starting his conversations in the middle. ‘The price of oil is about to take a leap,' he began by saying moments after we had met. ‘Why do you think that should be?'

I said I was flattered that he thought I might know the answer.

The oil companies, he pointed out, were perfectly aware that the Allied armies were about to embark on an invasion of Europe. He said this equably and left me to draw my own conclusion.

‘Who provides the oil in the Middle East?' he asked.

‘The Arabs.'

‘Whom then would the American oil companies be keenest not to upset?'

‘The Arabs.'

‘And whom do the Arabs dislike most?'

‘The Jews.'

The man nodded. ‘The Jews are short of friends at the moment. Would you describe your friend Mr Allen Dulles as a friend to the Jews?'

I said it would be presumptuous of me to call Mr Dulles a friend, or to answer for him.

The banker smiled patiently. ‘A man of diplomatic skills. What is Mr Dulles by profession?'

‘A lawyer.'

‘And if Standard Oil of New Jersey were one of Mr Dulles's main clients, whom would that make him a friend to?' He didn't wait for an answer. ‘Let us stop playing games. Mr Dulles is a committed anti-Zionist on account of long-standing legal, banking, and business interests, dating back to his early Istanbul posting. I am quite open about my antagonism. There is acceptable greed and unacceptable greed, and Mr Dulles falls into the latter category. Furthermore, Mr Dulles has large financial interests in the Third Reich, involving many American clients whose German investments he brokered before the war. Does any of this surprise you?'

It did and it didn't. The allegations were enough to astound, but by then the hidden motive was an inevitable feature of the world through which I moved. I asked how I could be sure he was telling me the truth.

The banker said, ‘You can choose to believe me, or you can believe Mr Dulles. Of course, bear in mind that Mr Dulles is a thoroughly respected, respectable, and believable character. The likes of Allen Dulles will always get away with things. But Mr Dulles, for all his bonhomie and civilised manners, hates “Yids”, but will go to enormous lengths to disguise it. We are dealing with a far more sophisticated and dangerous enemy than rabble rousers like Goebbels.'

We were in a stuffy Zurich apartment. The place felt as if it hadn't been lived in for a long time. The brief snowfall had been followed by several days of heavy rain. We were in a room at the back, overlooking a courtyard. In spite of feeling unoccupied, the heating was on and the place was too warm.

The banker said: ‘Mr Dulles has been instrumental in building Saudi oil interests on behalf of his American clients, particularly Standard Oil; another oil company, Socony Vacuum, employs many agents from Mr Dulles's organisation. His interests have long caused him to oppose any policy within the United States government for a Jewish homeland. These interests resulted in an interlocking financial network created by Mr Dulles on behalf of American oil companies, Saudi Arabia, and Nazi business corporations. Many of these interests continue to do cloaked business despite the war. It should not be too difficult for your contact to work out which these companies are. He could start with I.G. Farben.'

It was the breadth of Dulles's ambition that astonished me most. I knew him well enough by then to know that he would have acted in the belief that he would get away with it, and regarded himself as sufficiently protected to avoid disgrace or exposure. I had the small consolation of relishing the memory of making him shake from the shock of my news.

The banker said, ‘Since the start of the war, Mr Dulles's client, Standard Oil, has been able to overcharge on the price of oil, against the threat of withholding supply, and has been behind the payment of large bribes to Saudi Arabia. And you thought the war was about armies fighting.'

I asked if he believed that Mr Dulles could be exposed. The banker gave a weary smile. ‘If I thought that he could be brought down by any other means, I would not be giving you this information to pass on to an enemy I detest even more than Mr Dulles. Mr Dulles is a lawyer. He is an expert at laying down false trails. He has the advantage of being in Switzerland where under the cloak of neutrality he can consort with many of his former colleagues. Mr Dulles still has many contacts with the German Schroeder Bank, for which he has acted as an adviser in the past. Through them he is in a position to shield his American investors. Once President Roosevelt had frozen all Swiss bank accounts in the United States, on the grounds that they contained disguised Nazi assets, Mr Dulles was bound to come to Switzerland, and here he remains.'

 

We met twice more. On the third occasion he didn't turn up, and I failed to spot my followers who bundled me into a car and stuck a gun in my side. They didn't seem like German agents or Americans. Given the banker's abrupt no-show, I sensed they were probably working for him.

David and his gang were the last players to slot into place.

Our immediate destination was a deserted mechanic's garage under a railway arch, where we went through the shameful process of extracting information and confession. They couldn't decide if I was an agent for the Nazis, in which case they wanted to kill me, or for the Americans, in which case they wanted to turn and run, or both.

The torture was of symbolic rather than actual importance, in part a result of their own frustration at fighting a war without enemy contact. They were not experts in the way I am sure Jaretski would have been. What I had always dreaded was made endurable by the belief that I was instrumental to their plans and they would therefore not kill me.

I told them what I knew, which I did not regard as much, more out of a sense of accumulated isolation than anything else. It was a salutary lesson to discover that any illusions of loyalty I might have had were meaningless. If there was anything shameful about the process, it had to do with our complicit awareness of how little our small drama counted for in the face of so much death and suffering. We were playing self-conscious games, way off in the margins where forbidden alliances were forged. We were already shamed by the compromises of survival.

David wore glasses and had a high forehead. His dark hair was already receding. He was wiry and intense. David, echoing Dulles, to me: ‘Information is either priceless or very dangerous, so use it well.' He reminded me that I worked for the Red Cross as well as for Mr Dulles, and it was time both of us did something to help the Jews.

 

The meeting between Dulles and David took place at Betty Monroe's house, with myself as the agreed intermediary. Betty let us in and out, saving an ironic aside for me—‘Well, look who's here'—but otherwise remained absent. She made a point of not offering tea or coffee. We used her upstairs study, the room in which I now sit.

Dulles was uncomfortable dealing with someone as young as David, and tried to condescend. ‘Well, boys', he said, ‘what can we do for you?'

David's emerging message was clear: Help us, or we dish the dirt on you. He was well informed on Dulles's hidden activities and knew that the older man's security had been penetrated on several fronts, including ones Dulles didn't know about. Swiss intelligence was also feeding the U.S. Treasury information on Dulles's irregular financial dealings. What's more, David had the name of Dulles's mole in the German Foreign Office, which gave Dulles pause to consider: the mole was a German diplomat named Kolbe.

The bottom line was, Dulles was being blackmailed and he knew it. He afforded himself a pained chuckle as he said, ‘You boys really are serious, aren't you?'

Other than that, he covered his surprise well, kept up his pipe-fiddling act, and conducted the meeting as though it were an academic discussion on nothing more threatening than Spenser's
Faerie Queen,
his mild discomfort a result of overindulging at lunch. But I could read his mind by then, calculating the odds, figuring out how best to accommodate David while using him. I could picture him saying to Betty afterwards: ‘I'm going to fuck that boy every which way.'

Dulles's only betrayal of interest was an almost imperceptible leaning forward, until David told him about his line into the Kremlin, which made his eyes bulge and gave him the look of a man who had just been offered something he wanted very badly.