Lisbon

I was hurriedly sent to Lisbon. Although I wasn’t fluent in Portuguese, it was similar enough to the other Latin-based languages I did speak that it wouldn’t be an issue. What concerned me was the lack of instructions I received regarding my assignment. I had faint photos of the OSS officers working in and around the city and scant details about them that were barely more than one might gather from striking up a conversation with a complete stranger. Since I had only just been activated, I doubted that any of them, nor any of the Germans would have much on me either. They probably didn’t even know what I looked like. That gave me a temporary advantage that likely couldn’t be utilized because I did not know what I was supposed to be doing in Portugal.

These were the early days of modern American espionage. Until the second world war, the nation hadn’t moved much past Nathan Hale in terms of spycraft. The British had tried to catch us up with their processes, but the pace and quality of the training was chaotic. My own learning had been rushed, and limited by time constraints. What I knew about the art of espionage could sparsely fill a chapter in a book, but circumstances necessitated indoctrination by saturation. Many of the people I had known previously had been dropped behind enemy lines to train and equip resistance fighters. From what I had heard about neutral Portugal however, the Germans stayed in a Lisbon hotel on one side of a street and the Americans stayed in a hotel across the street. Both sides knew each other and neither side made much of an effort to conceal their presence. Their mission constituted little more than lightly managing a loose network of contacts that extended no further than Madrid. The real burden was born upon the assets that ferried intelligence out of France, to Madrid, and onto Lisbon. If that had been the parameters of my stay there then that would be a welcome way to ease into my first field assignment.

The climate was so pleasantly mild that I imagined myself retiring there on the banks of the Tagus River. After a few hours of casual surveillance that could more accurately have been called tourism, I made my way to the hotels. Nobody had made contact with me, but they’d notice me soon enough, so this was my last real chance of being covert. To that end, I entered the hotel that the Germans occupied. It was a modest building of traditional Spanish design. Most of the arrivals had already checked in and were now in the lobby, gathered around the concierge, who obviously had a passion for his town. I could only make out some of what he said, but his delight in story-telling did not need any translation. I stood with my shoulder against a wall, vaguely implying that I was meeting somewhere there. Frankly, it didn’t matter if I was conspicuous since I didn’t have an established agenda. This is when I spotted one of the Americans, Bill Cole. I recognized him because his eyes were sunk deeply into their sockets and were spread unusually far apart from one another, just as depicted in his photo. Since I wasn’t given his actual age, I guessed him to be roughly the same age as I was..

I observed him to do a subtle check before he picked up a woolen duffle from behind a nearby plant and leisurely made his way back across the space and out the exterior doors. It seemed unfathomable that I would witness this so soon after arriving, yet the very fact that I had been placed there in Lisbon suggested that there might just be a traitor in the Americans’ cadre. If

true, this was a distinct opportunity to vet my colleague before he had any idea who I was.

He slowly walked directly across the street to the hotel where the Americans were staying, walked inside, and was lost as he ascended the stairs. Following someone without being discovered was something that I had been thoroughly trained for, thus I was rather confident in my ability to trail him covertly. He stopped at a door on the second floor, fiddled for his keys, and then let himself in. There was a patio at the end of the hallway and from there I could see if he left the room without being spotted, even by a fellow OSS officer. I hoped that he would choose to eat dinner out, leaving his room unattended. 30 minutes passed before he finally came out. Unfortunately, he walked out onto the same patio as I was standing on. He greeted me in English as he pulled out a cigarette. I greeted him back in perfect Spanish, betting that would suggest I was not American but also not Portugues, possibly alleviating any suspicion on his part. He finished his smoke and bid me a gratuitous goodbye.

He had placed a tiny piece of paper above the door so that anyone who entered the room would make the scrap fall on the ground. This would alert him if anyone had been there while he was gone. This was a moot point since I had seen him do it when he left and he’d know someone had been in there if the money was missing. The lock was simple to pick and I was inside Cole’s room in a few seconds. It didn’t take long to locate the duffel in his narrow closet. When I opened the duffel I found the money I expected to, plus a small black ledger sitting on top of the cash. I glanced at it for a moment. It had extensive pages of handwritten notations about the Allied spy network in Spain, plus the names of probable German spooks in Madrid. This was probably what Cole intended to turn over to the Nazis in exchange for the money. I closed up the duffel with the book and cash, and quickly left the room.

After checking into my own hotel room and employing the same little paper trick on my door, I decided to go out to a quaint restaurant I had seen earlier. The notebook was in the inside pocket of my navy overcoat. The money was stashed in the hotel, but not in my room. Even if I were found out, the war would be over before anyone discovered where I hid the bag. It was only a minute or so before I became aware that someone was following me. My heart raced. I stopped and pulled out a cigarette and a woman in long flared trousers and a leather jacket walked up next to me and offered me a lit match.

“Totem?” she asked, wanting me to acknowledge my code name. She was British, probably from Scotland. She had light red, curly tresses drawn back around her ears.

“Motherland?” I replied. My notes had not included a photo of this particular agent, but I was aware of who she probably was. It wasn’t a very secure challenge, but she had initiated contact with my code name, so I was relatively confident in her identity.

“Welcome to Lisbon,” she said in an Edinburgh accent. I thanked her for the pleasantry, and took a puff from my cigarette. “I saw you earlier, in the hotel lobby. I would have made contact then, but I saw that you followed Cole. What came of that?”

“How do you mean?” I asked. We both knew what she meant, yet I felt the need to let her lead the conversation forward.

“Do you have the money?” she asked. I nodded. “How much was it?”

I took a puff of the cigarette and discarded it. “In American currency, it’s about $20,000.”

“And the ledger? Do you have it?”

There was a nudge towards lying at this point, though she already knew about the money and the ledger without me having said a word about either. I opened my coat slightly and showed her that the book was in the inside pocket. If she had been working with Cole, I now expected her to ask where the money was since any conspirator would need both.

“Keep the duffel. Keep the money,” she said. “Give me the ledger and Cole won’t be able to get to both easily. He loses either way.”

Her logic was sound. I had the same thought, which is why I hid the duffel and kept the ledger with me. I slid the black book to her and she placed it inside her jacket. “Cole is going to suspect you. Keep the heid and don’t tell him a thing.”

My appetite had been broken so I went back to the hotel. After 12 hours in the city I wouldn’t have anticipated an ISS agent to be the only operative I’d have met so far. That cleared up as soon as I opened the door to my room. The station head, Joseph Lynch, was sitting in the only chair, his legs and eyebrows crossed angrily. I shut the door behind me and took a seat on the bed. My initial thought was that he was here to congratulate me on a most monumental first day in country, but that idea faded quickly. He wasn’t there to bestow accolades.

“You’ve been busy,” he started. I said nothing. “Last week we captured a German officer surveilling our embassy. I had negotiated with the Nazis to hand them back their man in exchange for approximately $20,000 USD. We retrieved the money from the Germans and then the money disappeared. At first I thought the Bavarians had decided to take back their ransom, so I refused to free their officer. As you might imagine, that conversation did not proceed kindly. It was then that I began to suspect somebody might have done something incredibly stupid. Was that you?”

Everybody in Lisbon seemed to only ask questions they already knew the answer to, or so I thought. Lynch genuinely didn’t know the answer to his next query.

“Where is the ledger?”

“Motherland has it,” I announced. “I have the cash and she has the book.”

Lynch uncrossed his legs. “Motherland? Motherland hasn’t been in Portugal for a month. You not only screwed up the deal I negotiated, but you gave the krauts the names of every allied contact in Spain. You have practically given the Iberian Peninsula to the Axis and now I have to decide whether to throw your corpse in the river or send you back to Uncle Sam with a note saying you’re too damn stupid to work here.”

What could I say at this point? If what he was saying was true then I really had packed a career’s worth of mistakes into one day’s work.

“What on God’s earth do you have to say for yourself?” Lynch asked.

I started to shrug because no words were forming, but then I had a weird thought. Since when did we start taking foreign agents hostage? “Does anyone in Washington or London know

about the $20,000?” Lynch stiffened. I continued. “Who was going to get that money?”

Lynch was backed into a corner he hadn’t expected to be in. He had every right to fire me and send me back to Washington with my tail tucked between my legs, but he knew he couldn’t without burning Cole and him. As long as I knew about the money and was the only one who knew where it was, I was as good as untouchable. He fumed. “Where is the money, Totem?”

“Why would I tell you that?”

Lynch stood and pulled his blazer down over his paunch. He pointed a finger at me, then left the room without another word. My situation was still precarious of course, but for the time being I had successfully extended my stay in Lisbon.