ISBN 978-1-59433-628-7
ISBN 978-1-59433-629-4 eBook
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2016939629
Copyright 2016 Carl Douglass
—First Edition—
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical or electronic means including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, in whole or in part in any form, and in any case not without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
DEDICATION
To the warriors, the defenders, the restorers, and the historians
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Butugychag Tin Mine, Soviet Gulag Camp for German POWs, Kolyma River, Siberia, USSR, April 1953
CHAPTER ONE
Arkhangelskoye Military Convalescent Home, Moscow, USSR, October 9, 1961
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
Alaskan Bear Lodge, Excursion Inlet, Alaska, August 7, 1962
CHAPTER FOUR
Alaskan Bear Lodge, August 8, 1962
CHAPTER FIVE
Regional Major Crimes Unit [MCU], Alaska Bureau of Investigation Post, Juneau, Alaska, August 9, 1962
CHAPTER SIX
Lomas de los Carolinos, Córdoba, Argentina, August 9, 1962
CHAPTER SEVEN
Central de Policia de Cordóba, Av. Colón 1254, Cordóba Capital [Police Headquarters, Provincial Capital, Cordóba], the same day
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jardin du Luxembourg Park, Rue d’ Assas Entrance, Fauborg Saint Germain-des-Prés, 6th arrondissement [6ème], Paris, Assumption Day, August 15, 1962
CHAPTER NINE
47 Rue d’Assas, Fauborg Saint Germain-des-Prés, 6th arrondissement [6ème], Paris, Assumption Day, late morning
CHAPTER TEN
26 Rue Vavin, Fauborg Saint Germain-des-Prés, 6th arrondissement [6ème], Paris, Assumption Day, 1962, early afternoon
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Bundesland State of Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, August 22, 1962
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bundeskriminalamt [BKA-Federal Criminal Police Office], Office of Der Polizeipräsident in Wiesbaden [The Police Chief of Wiesbaden], Thaerstrsse 11, Wiesbaden, Germany, August 23, 1962
Landespolizei [Bundeslandt State Police] Kriminalpolitzei, Detective Branch, Wittelsbachstrasse. 3, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, August 25,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thirty minutes later
Schloss Krupp, southeast corner of Lietzenburger and Pfalzburger Strassen, Charlottenburg Section of City West, Berlin, Germany, six hours later
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Landespolizei [Bundeslandt State Police] Kriminalpolitzei, Detective Branch, Wittelsbachstrasse. 3, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, late evening, August 28, 1962
Suite 2212, Haus Cumberland Office Building on the Kurfürstendamm Avenue between Bleibtreu and Schlüterstrasse, Charlottenburg, Berlin, August 29, 1962, three o’clock in the afternoon
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Headquarters, Metropolitan Police Service/New Scotland Yard, Criminal Investigation Department [CID], Victoria Embankment, August 21, 1962
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Army and Navy Club in London [popularly known as The Rag], 36-39 Pall Mall, St. James Square, Sixth Floor Conference Room
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Magadan, Siberia, April 1953
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Magadan, Siberia, March 1954
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Magadan, Yakutia, Siberia, late April 1954
Oymyakon, Yakutia, Siberia, June 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Tommot, Aldansky District, Yakutia, Siberia, July 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Moschendorf Transit and Release Camp, Occupied Germany on the Bavaria, August 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Schlosskirche [Palace Church], Ellingen, Bavaria, August 22, 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Bad Kreuznach—Lager Galgenberg und Bretzenheim PWTE—Bad Kreuznach District, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, August 18, 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Bad Kreuznach—Lager Galgenberg und Bretzenheim PWTE—Bad Kreuznach District, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, August 22, 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
POW Camp 63 Brienne le Chateâu, France [Kriegsgefangenenpost 62: POW Post Office], August 29, 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
POW Camp 63 Brienne le Chateâu, France [Kriegsgefangenenpost 62: POW Post Office], September 1, 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Schlosskirche [Palace Church], Ellingen, Bavaria, August 19, 1954
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Schlosskirche [Palace Church], Ellingen, Bavaria, August 19 to September 14, 1954
CHAPTER THIRTY
Konstanz Cathedral in Konstanz, Baden-Wurttemberg, Lake Constance Border Region, September 25, 1954
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland], Rue des Noirettes, 35 Centre des Acacias 1227 Carouge, Genève, Switzerland, September 28, 1954
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland], Rue des Noirettes, 35 Centre des Acacias 1227 Carouge, Genève, Switzerland, September 28, 1954
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Corporate Offices of European International Conglomerate, No. 13 Upper Belgrave Street, London, February 2, 1959
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Corporate Offices of European International Conglomerate, No. 13 Upper Belgrave Street, London, September 8, 1960
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Arkady Hotel, Central Moscow, USSR, October 8, 1961
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Arkhangelskoye Military Convalescent Home, USSR, October 9, 1961
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
MYC [Moscow Criminal Investigations Department] Building, Petrovka 38 Street, Moscow USSR, October 9, 1961
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MYC [Moscow Criminal Investigations Department] Building, Petrovka 38 Street, Moscow USSR, October 9, 1961—afternoon
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MYC [Moscow Criminal Investigations Department] Building, Petrovka 38 Street, Moscow USSR, October 9, 1961, late afternoon
CHAPTER FORTY.
US Army Alaska Defense Command/Alaska Department, 83rd MP Det CID [Criminal Investigation Division], Office of the Special Agent in Charge, Building 47645, Fort Richardson, Anchorage, Alaska, August 20, 1962
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Fort Sam Houston, Camp Bullis Army Base Military Police Office, Bexar County, Texas, Northwest of San Antonio, August 20, 1962
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Fort Sam Houston, Camp Bullis Army Base Military Police Office, Bexar County, Texas, Northwest of San Antonio, August 24, 1962, midmorning
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Fort Sam Houston, Camp Bullis Army Base Military Police Office, Bexar County, Texas, Northwest of San Antonio, August 24, 1962, afternoon
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Central de Policia de Cordóba, Av. Colón 1254, Cordóba Capital [Police Headquarters, Provincial Capital, Cordóba], August 10, 1962
Police Station 28, San Carlos de Bariloche, Rio Negro Province, Argentina, early evening
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Police Station 28, San Carlos de Bariloche, Rio Negro Province, Argentina, 1900 hours, August 26, 1962
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France [The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL], Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200
Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, August 28, 1962
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France [The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL], Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, August 30, 1962, late afternoon
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France [The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL], Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, August 30, 1962, later that same day
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
United States Department of Justice, Office of the Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, August 30, 1962, 12:35 p.m
CHAPTER FIFTY
Headquarters, Metropolitan Police Service/New Scotland Yard, Criminal Investigation Department [CID], Victoria Embankment, August 31, 1962
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Corporate Offices of European International Conglomerate, No. 13 Upper Belgrave Street, London, August 22, 1962
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Corporate Offices of European International Conglomerate, No. 13 Upper Belgrave Street, London, August 22, 1962, later that day
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Empty lot next to Cantina Rojas, Ojinaga, Chihuahua State, Mexico, September 29, 1962
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium, outside Fort Worth, Texas, September 31, 1962, evening
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium, outside Fort Worth, Texas, September 31, 1962, late evening
Soviet Naval Aviation Office, A-253, Chapayevskiy Per., Dom 19, across from the Moscow Military District Headquarters, 1600 hours Moscow time, the same late evening
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX.
Soviet Naval Aviation Office, A-253, Chapayevskiy Per., Dom 19, across from the Moscow Military District Headquarters, 1622 hours Moscow time, the same late evening
Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium, outside Fort Worth, Texas, October 1, 1962, 0830
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium, outside Fort Worth, Texas, October 3, 1962, early morning
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Arbat Street, No. 83, Moscow, October 3, 1962, late morning
Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium, outside Fort Worth, Texas, October 3, 1962, early afternoon
Abasto Transient Hotel, Ex Abasto District, Córdoba, Argentina, the same afternoon
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Corporate Offices of European International Conglomerate, No. 13 Upper Belgrave Street, London, October 3, 1962, late morning
CHAPTER SIXTY
Abasto Transient Hotel, Ex Abasto District, Córdoba, Argentina, October 4, 1962, late morning
Headquarters, Metropolitan Police Service/New Scotland Yard, Criminal Investigation Department [CID], Victoria Embankment, London, the same day
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Boehme New Alemana Delicatessen 420 Avenida Pepito Moreno, San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, October 8, 1962
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France [The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL], Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, June 12, 1963
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Construction Headquarters, Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi Project, Bariloche, Argentina, September 23, 1963, 0900
Chocolatería Más Rico de Bariloche, No. 669 Avenida General José de San Martin, San Carlos de Bariloche, September 23, 1963, 0910
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France, Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, 1300, the same day.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Department of Justice, Office of the Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC, September 23, 1963, afternoon
Palais de Justice Boulevard du Palais in the Île de la Cité in central Paris, SDM [Service de Contrôle Budgétaire et Comptable Ministériel—Office of Accounting and Budget], Office of Philippe Jean Joseph de Douai, assistant minister, that same afternoon
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations [Mossad LeAliyah Bet], Headquarters of Director Levi Appleman ben Cohen, Glilot Junction on Highway 2, Ramat Aviv Neighborhood of Tel Aviv, September 28, 1963, afternoon
Boehme New Alemana Delicatessen 420 Avenida Pepito Moreno, San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, that same afternoon, four o’clock
Chocolatería Más Rico de Bariloche, No. 669 Avenida General José de San Martin, San Carlos de Bariloche, that same afternoon, four o’clock
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Vicinity of the Bariloche Train and Bus Terminals, 1622 the same day
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Entre Lagos, Chile, Ruta 215-CH, late evening the same day.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Municipal Bus Terminal, Puerto Montt, Chile, six a.m. the following day
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Casa Fischer Guesthouse, Calle Mirador 20, Puerto Varas, Chile, the same morning
Club Aleman, 264 Ave. Antonio Varas, Puerto Montt, September 29, 1963, midnight
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Super Seiner Factory Ship Port of Embden 220, in the South China Sea near the Spratley Islands, Six bells on the middle watch, October 18, 1963
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Victoria Harbor Port Facilities, Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong British Crown Colony, November 2, 1963
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France [The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL], Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, November 28, 1963
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Continental Hotel, 132 Đnen Khởi, Bến Nghé, Quận 1, Saigon, December 12, 1963
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, December 29, 1964
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, December 29, 1964, late evening
Le Bureau Central National (BCN) d’INTERPOL pour la France [The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL], Office of Senior Detective Chief Superintendent Eugène Léon Dentremont, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France, December 29, 1964, late evening
Oval Office, the White House, Washington, DC, December 31, 1964, 0600
Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations [Mossad LeAliyah Bet], Headquarters of Director Levi Appleman ben Cohen, Glilot Junction on Highway 2, Ramat Aviv Neighborhood of Tel Aviv, January 1, afternoon
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Tell Atlas Mountains, Northwestern Algeria, January 3, 0 dark-30
BOQ [Bachelor Officers Quarters], EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, early morning
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Armurerie, EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, January 3, 1964, 0715
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Armurerie, EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, January 3, 1964, noon
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Armurerie, EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, January 3, 1964, 1900 hours
EPILOGUE
Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations [Mossad Le Aliyah Bet], Headquarters of Director Levi Appleman ben
Cohen, Glilot Junction on Highway 2, Ramat Aviv Neighborhood of Tel Aviv, February 28, 1964
J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] Headquarters, Office of the DFBI [Director FBI] Warren Brent Gaines, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC, later that same afternoon
PROLOGUE
The Inscription over the Vestibule of Hell
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
-Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia di Dante: Inferno
[The Divine Comedy - Dante’s Inferno], Canto III: 1–21, 1317
Butugychag Tin Mine, Soviet Gulag Camp for German POWs, Kolyma River, Siberia, USSR, April 1953
Across the gravel empty space between the camp security gate and their barracks, two thin graying men shuffled painfully, eyes down, pushed and shoved by brutal camp guards. They were crawling with lice on their bodies which had not been bathed in a year, and their clothing was covered with cassiterite—tin ore dust—which had accumulated since the previous year’s washing. The two specters—barely living ghosts with skin stretched across their bones—wore all the clothes they owned on their backs—ill-fitting maximum security special treatment uniforms consisting of thin woolen pants and camp jackets with dull gray and maroon horizontal stripes and the same decrepit combat boots they were wearing when they were captured eight years previously. A close inspection of their faces would reveal they were twenty years older than their chronological age. They had been reduced to what was known in the Sevvostlag system of hard labor and minimal or no food as helpless dokhodyaga [goners].
They were POWs and known to the Soviets as zeks—slave laborers—who had lost their identity within the system, and no one in their native France was aware they were alive or had any idea where they had been for more than a decade. The two men and seventeen other survivors were all that remained of the eighty-one members of their 33rd Waffen-Grenadier SS Division when they were originally captured. The Schutzstaffel officers’ prison—since being captured in Berlin by victorious Soviet troops during the last days of the Third Reich—was the Butugychag Tin Mine, a Soviet gulag camp known as the “Valley of Death”—the most notorious of the infamous Soviet internment camps. The majority of gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia beyond the Arctic Circle. The Butugychag camp was part of the Sevvostlag—severo-vostochnye lagerya—or SVITL [The North-East Camps located along the Kolyma River]. A nearby area along the Indigirka River came to be known as the Gulag inside the Gulag. In one village in that region, a record low temperature of -96 °F was recorded. Under the supervision of Lavrenty Beria who headed both NKVD and the Soviet Atom bomb program until his demise in 1953, thousands of zeks like Antoine and Michaele were used to mine uranium ore and prepare test facilities at Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, and Semipalatinsk.