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He went on: “And, Grandfather, these are the senior officers of the operation here.”

He pointed to the two men seated at the side of the table.

“That’s Alois Strübel and Wilhelm Frogger.”

Then he pointed to the tall, hawk-featured man in his mid-thirties standing at the head of the table.

“And that is the senior man of Operation Ost, Otto Niedermeyer.”

—

Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Frade had known former Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger the longest—having met him after first having Frogger’s parents forced upon him.

In July of 1943, Milton Leibermann, the “legal attaché”—the euphemism for FBI agent—of the U.S. embassy, who had been forbidden by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to have any contact with OSS agents in Argentina, nevertheless called Frade. He and Frade—who regarded as asinine the OSS’s order not to have any contact with FBI agents in Argentina—had started sharing intelligence with one another almost from the day they’d met. And they had become friends.

Leibermann told Frade that he had a Wilhelm Frogger and wife, Else, cached in his apartment. Frogger, the commercial attaché of the German embassy, had been ordered home to Germany. Fearing for a number of reasons that meant he was headed for a konzentrationslager and/or a painful death, Frogger fled with his wife to Leibermann’s apartment.

Leibermann told Frade he had to get the Froggers to safety. Frade moved them to a small house on an estancia he owned in Tandil, turning them over to Sergeant Siggie Stein for interrogation.

Almost as soon as they got to Tandil, Frau Frogger, a dedicated Nazi, changed her mind. She announced that she was going to return to the embassy and place herself under the orders of the Führer. Frade thought she was crazy.

And then an attempt to either get the Froggers back or kill them was mounted by a detachment of SS troopers and a company of the Tenth Mountain Regiment. Warned of the operation by the regiment’s sergeant major—an old comrade of Enrico Rodríguez—Frade’s Private Army was ready for them.

After removing the Froggers from their hideout, and watching the Tenth Mountain reduce the house to rubble with heavy machine-gun fire and then drive away, the ex–Húsares de Pueyrredón eliminated the SS troops who had stayed behind to make sure that the Froggers were dead. They buried the bodies in unmarked graves on the Pampas.

The question then had become what to do with the Froggers.

And that problem was greatly compounded by Frau Frogger, now manifesting symptoms of total insanity.

Enrico Rodríguez suggested that she be taken to “the vineyard in Mendoza.” Until that moment, Clete had been only vaguely aware that among the properties he had inherited from his father was the vineyard called Estancia Don Guillermo.

When Clete asked the old soldier what he was talking about, Enrico told him that when Clete’s aunt lost her mind after her son’s death in Stalingrad, she had been taken to the vineyard and placed in the care of the Little Sisters of Saint Pilar. Part of the house had been converted to sort of a one-bed psychiatric hospital—and that seemed ideal for the crazy Nazi woman.

When Clete asked Enrico why he had never heard any of this, the old soldier replied, “Because you never asked, Don Cletus.”

The next step in the Frogger saga occurred when President Franklin Roosevelt became annoyed with Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American–Grace (Panagra) Airways, for his close relationship with aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. A national hero, Medal of Honor recipient “Lucky Lindy” was also a vocal critic of the President and his policies. FDR decided to punish Trippe by giving him a little competition. He authorized the sale of twenty-four Lockheed Lodestar twin-engine transports—ones the Air Corps had no need for—to a new airline, South American Airways, starting up in Argentina.

The managing director of the new airline, Señor Cletus Frade, flew to Los Angeles to take delivery of the first of the Lodestars at the Lockheed plant. There, Colonel A. F. Graham, deputy OSS director for the Western Hemisphere, told Frade that the reason the OSS was starting an airline in Argentina was because FDR ordered it, the subject not open for debate.

When Clete reported on Wilhelm Frogger and his problems therewith—Frade said that he didn’t know how far he could trust the Kraut, and that the wife was mad as a March hare—the name “Frogger” rang a bell with Graham.

Two days later, a Lockheed Constellation piloted by Howard Hughes left California with Frade and Graham aboard. Ostensibly, Hughes thought a familiarization flight with SAA’s managing director might result in future sales of the brand-new advanced aircraft. Hughes even checked out Frade on the Constellation’s peculiarities and allowed him to make half a dozen touch-and-go landings. But their secret destination had been the Senior German Officer Prisoner of War Detention Facility at Camp Clinton, Mississippi.

Camp Clinton held Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, the sole surviving son of Wilhelm and Else Frogger. He had been captured while serving with the Afrikakorps. More important, before he had been captured he had served as the contact between Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg was planning to kill Adolf Hitler.

It was shortly thereafter announced that Oberstleutnant Frogger had escaped from Camp Clinton. He was believed to be trying to get to Mexico, from where he would return to Germany. FBI Director Hoover promised President Roosevelt that the full resources of the FBI would be called into motion to recapture the escaped Nazi.

By the time the last of the more than two hundred FBI agents had made it to the Mexican border to prevent Frogger’s escape, he was in Argentina, flown there by Frade in one of the Lockheed Lodestars painted in the South American Airways color scheme.

—

The first time that Frade had ever seen Niedermeyer and Strübel was some time later, as they boarded one of SAA’s Constellations in Frankfurt. Traveling on Vatican passports, the Germans had been wearing the brown robes and the sandals of Franciscan monks.

Frau Niedermeyer and Frau Strübel also had been on that flight, and wearing the white robes of the Order of the Little Sisters of the Poor. And the three Niedermeyer children carried Vatican passports identifying them as orphans on their way to Argentina to be placed in the care of distant relatives.

Frade had been told Obersturmbannführer Alois Strübel had been sent by General Gehlen to determine whether the Americans would—or could—make good on their promise to keep the officers of the Gehlen Organization and their families out of the hands of the Russians. Hauptscharführer (Sergeant Major) Niedermeyer had been sent along to help.