Howard Blum - Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitlers Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin

A S THE CRISP, CLEAR MORNING dawned on the first day of June 1943, offering a hard blue sky and perfect weather for flying, the spy sat in the passenger terminal of Portela Airport outside Lisbon waiting to make a phone call. The call would be a death warrant.

His vantage point was a wooden bench shoved up against a rear wall, and his eyes surveyed the hectic scene playing out in front of him with a professional watchers focus. It was just after six a.m., but the terminal was already crowded, a tempest of voices sweeping through the high-ceilinged room. It was a clamor fueled by desperation. Jammed into the boxlike space were men, women, and families determined to get a ticket on the 7:30 a.m. British Overseas Airway Corporation (BOAC) plane to Whitchurch, Englanda seat on the lifeboat that would be their escape from a Europe that was a rapidly sinking ship.

Over the past three cataclysmic years, Nazi Germany had tightened its sharp coils around much of the continent, but a resolute Portugal had nevertheless managed to carry on as a neutral state. And as tens of thousands of refugeesJews, artists, Communists, and other freethinking enemies of the Reichgathered up whatever they could and hurried to flee from the advancing goose-stepping hordes, they poured into Portugal. It was an oasisyet one that was both temporary and ominously precarious. The countrys welcome, for one thing, was not open armed: refugees with the proper visas were granted a mere thirty-day residency. And while this statute was enforced by the Public Security Police more often than not with only a philosophical wink and a nod, the prospect of the countrys continued neutrality created more genuine terrors.

Neutrality was a dangerous national strategy; it was a contract that was not even worth the paper that had not been signed. At any moment the winds of war might come blowing in over the Pyrenees from Falangist Spain or Vichy Franceand the refugees would be trapped at the end of the continent, backed up against the roiling Atlantic as the Gestapo sighted them in the crosshair.

The twin-propellered DC-3 that made four commercial flights each week from Lisbon to Whitchurch Airport outside Bristol offered a way out, the opportunity to escape once and for all from the Nazis murderous grasp. England would be a secure refuge; and from there, one could scramble to find a way to a new life in America, or Palestine. Dreams were fueled by such possibilities.

The obstacles to obtaining a ticket on a BOAC flight out of Lisbon, however, were formidable. One hurdlealbeit one that might be jumped by a nimble scheme or a kings ransomwas the requirement of a transit visa. The other, however, was more inflexible, determined by the laws of an inexorable mathematics: there were only thirteen passenger seats on a DC-3.

The terminal was very much a sellers marketplace. Day after frantic day, the bidding continued fast and furious.

Yet, like any fieldman on a mission, the spy would have found the discipline to pay only fleeting attention to the countless small and large dramas that fed the tumult storming about the terminal. Hed have concentrated on the faces. And, always conscientious, his glance would also have kept returning to the tarmac.

From his observation post on the bench, the view was perfect. Directly across the terminal, a row of three symmetrical windows, each as wide as a doorway and nearly as tall, gave an open view of the blacktopped runway. And there, with the early-morning sun simmering down on it as if a spotlight, the camouflage-painted plane, its name, Ibis, a tribute to the spindly ancient bird, painted in a cursive script under the cockpit window, the distinctive red, white, and blue BOAC stripes on its tail, stood, ready for boarding.

T HE SPY WAITED, AND HE watched. He had been at the airport for days, ever since the order had been passed on from Berlin, and today was just like yesterday, and that had been the same as the day before. Yet his patience was undoubtedly fortified by the tenets any veteran professional would have learned the hard way: surveillance is a game played long; and more often than not, its diligence is without rewardthe quarry never shows.

Worse, this assignment, he knew, was more improbable than most, its logic more a prayer than a certainty. Simply because the Distinguished Personage had returned to England the previous January from Bermuda on a commercial Boeing flying boatthe first transatlantic air trip in history by a world leaderthat was no guarantee hed repeat the experience. After all, even the Distinguished Personage, in soul-searching retrospect, had conceded that his last-minute decision to forgo the waiting battleship with its muscular escort of fast destroyers was a rash thing. To think that hed once again take the identical foolhardy risk, traveling on an unprotected BOAC flight in wartime, was like believing that lightning would indeed strike twice. Yet Berlin had its agents lurking about the souks and cafs in North Africa, and they were reporting a tantalizing rumor: at the conclusion of the military meetings in Algiers and Tunis, the Distinguished Personage would fly out of Gibraltar to Lisbon. From there, hed catch one of the scheduled DC-3s home. It was a question of only what day, what flight.

So the spy dutifully maintained his vigil. He kept the image of the Distinguished Personage focused in his minds eye, but he never expected to see it in the flesh. It was 7:25 and the propellers on the