The Arms Maker of Berlin by Dan Fesperman Page A

product. They figured he was being played for a fool. Too bad for them. By war’s end Dulles was an expert at separating fact from rumor, information from disinformation.
    He brought to the job a masculine but genteel clubroom manner, puffing a pipe and sipping port during amiable hearthside chats. Considering the privations of rationing, he offered one of the best tables in town. Shucked oysters, perhaps, followed by roast leg of lamb. Nat had seen those items and more on the household cook’s grocery lists, which were on file in a tattered notebook at the National Archives. The cook turned out to be jotting down other items as well, and she was promptly fired when Dulles found out she had been passing information to the Germans.
    That was par for the course in wartime Bern—a crowded nest of espionage hatchlings, all crying for their daily feed, then wondering what it was they were really digesting for their masters back home. And Gordon Wolfe, even if nothing but a lowly clerk, had been stationed at the center of it all. That much soon became clear to Nat from the “GW” notations penciled at the corner of several filings. It was eerie to come across his initials, especially while knowing that at the time Gordon was roughly half Nat’s current age. Hard to think of him as an ambitious young snoop after having just seen him at the courthouse, shuffling off to jail.
    Nat wondered anew why Gordon seemed so eager for him to do a thorough job. And what was it that everyone really wanted him to find? Or not find, in Gordon’s case. White Rose materials, while interesting, would hardly seem to have much impact on the here and now. And if Nat came up empty, how was that supposed to strengthen Gordon’s hand with the feds? Theft was theft, whether the goods were helpful or not.
    Halfway through the first box Nat still hadn’t found anything even remotely connected to the White Rose, not even in the news summaries. But he had noticed a potentially important anomaly. The label on the box’s spine said it contained folders 1-37. A quick count showed that only 33 folders were inside. Numbers 4, 5, 11, and 12 were missing. Was this what Gordon had meant? If so, then where was the missing material, and what was its significance?
    Shortly before lunch Nat came across a few items that he figured might someday be useful in his own research. One was a lengthy and colorful account from February 1943 of a visit to Dulles by a German banker, Dieter Elsner. The poor man swallowed so much of Dulles’s port that he ended up facedown in the rear garden—next to a grape arbor, appropriately enough. The cook, presumably more reliable than her turncoat predecessor, helped drag the portly fellow back indoors, where Dulles and she revived him long enough for Elsner to groggily telephone a business associate to come retrieve him.
    The associate turned out to be industrialist Reinhard Bauer, whom Nat was familiar with from the man’s prominent role in Germany’s wartime armaments industry. He also became a player in the country’s postwar economic renaissance, partly by switching from tank parts to coffeemakers. Bauer was one of those eager-to-please Hohenzollern blue bloods who had dropped the “von” from the family name to appease Hitler’s mistrust of the aristocracy. But he was never enough of a gung-ho Nazi to attract the attention of war crimes investigators.
    Dulles’s typewritten account noted that Bauer arrived at his rear entrance within minutes of Elsner’s phone call, which led the spymaster to believe that the whole evening had been a ruse to arrange an introduction. Bauer showed up impeccably dressed, even though it was 2 a.m., and before they even reached his supposedly drunken friend, Bauer was already offering to share his insights on the German rearmament effort led by Reichsminister Albert Speer. The conversation began with such promise that Dulles summoned an interpreter to the house shortly afterward to help