Wild Bill Donovan by Douglas Waller

Author:Douglas Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2015-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

The Plot

DONOVAN WAS FINISHING dinner in his Georgetown home the night of July 20 with Lieutenant Colonel Hsiao Po and his wife when a servant whispered into his ear that he had a phone call from his office. Hsiao was Chiang Kai-shek’s military attaché as well as Tai Li’s Washington representative for the Sino-American Cooperative Organization. Though Donovan had traded threats with Tai during his Chungking visit, he remained on cordial terms with Hsiao and occasionally had him for dinner.

Donovan excused himself from the table and took the call in another room. The message center was on the line to relay a report Dulles had just delivered by radio-telephone. The Bern station chief was intentionally vague and cryptic. He knew both the Swiss and the Germans listened in on all his calls. There had been “an attempt on Hitler’s life” that day, Dulles told Donovan. “I presume you all have the news we have on this. We haven’t very much except the names of the various generals and admirals who were wounded.” But Hitler survived the attack, Dulles said. “The man seems to have a charmed life.”

The next morning Dulles began sending Donovan lengthier coded cables with all the details he had so far been able to piece together on Valkyrie, the name given for the plot to remove Hitler. Some of the German generals who were in on the conspiracy had been at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia “when the bomb went off because the only chance for planting the bomb was in conjunction with a conference attended by many of the chief military leaders,” Dulles cabled Donovan. Even though Hitler survived the blast, Dulles believed the conspirators could still have carried out the coup, but “one of the disheartening facts seems to be that the participants in the revolt did not have adequate radio facilities at their command” to mobilize the Home Army against the Nazi regime. Dulles had dossiers on most of the senior officers who were part of the conspiracy. “Various members of the Canaris organization were also giving their assistance,” he wrote Donovan. But he did not have much on the obscure colonel who actually planted the bomb, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. He checked his files and discovered Stauffenberg’s name on an earlier list of dissident officers, “but at that time we did not realize the part he would play,” Dulles wrote.

Stauffenberg, in fact, had become the engine behind the assassination plot. A Catholic aristocrat who had lost his left eye and right hand in the Tunisia campaign, he had become deeply disillusioned with the war and had joined the conspirators. Now as chief of staff for the Replacement Army, which trained soldiers for the front, he had been under orders to report to Hitler personally at Wolf’s Lair. Stauffenberg had entered the wooden hut where the noon meeting was held and placed a briefcase containing a small bomb under the heavy oak conference table as near as he could to the führer.

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