Part 3; The Devil's Chessboard...Sunrise & Ratlines

The Devil's Chessboard: 

Allen Dulles,the CIA,and the Rise of 

America's Secret Government

By David Talbot

4 

Sunrise 

Allen Dulles’s most audacious intervention on behalf of a major Nazi war criminal took place in the waning days of the war. The story of the relationship between Dulles and SS general Karl Wolff—Himmler’s former chief of staff and commander of Nazi security forces in Italy—is a long and tangled one. But perhaps it’s best to begin at a particularly dire moment for Wolff, in the still-dark early morning hours of April 26, 1945, less than two weeks before the end of the war in Europe. 

That morning, soon after arriving at the SS command post in Cernobbio, a quaint town nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps on the shores of Lake Como, Wolff was surrounded by a well-armed unit of Italian partisans. The partisans had established positions around the entire SS compound, a luxurious estate that had been seized by the Nazis from the Locatelli family, a wealthy dynasty of cheese manufacturers. With only a handful of SS soldiers standing guard outside his villa, Wolff had no way to break through the siege and his capture seemed imminent. As chief of all SS and Gestapo units in Italy, Wolff was well known to the Italian resistance, who blamed him for the reprisal killings of many civilians in response to partisan attacks on Nazi targets, as well as for the torture and murder of numerous resistance fighters. If he fell into the partisans’ hands, the SS commander was not likely to be treated charitably. 

At age forty-four, the tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Wolff carried himself with the supreme self-confidence of a man who had long been paraded around by the Nazi high command as an ideal Aryan specimen. A former advertising executive, Wolff understood the power of imagery. His climb through the Nazi Party ranks had been paved by his Hessian bearing, his imperial, hawk-nosed profile, and the erect figure he cut in his SS dress uniform. Himmler, the former chicken farmer, drew confidence from Wolff’s suave presence and fondly called him “Wolffie.” The SS chief made Wolff his principal liaison to Hitler’s headquarters, where he also quickly became a favorite. 

Hitler enjoyed showing off Wolff at his dinner parties and made sure that the SS-Obergruppenführer was by his side during the war’s tense overture, when German forces invaded Poland and Hitler prepared to join his troops at the front. “To my great and, I openly admit, joyful surprise, I was ordered to the innermost Führer headquarters,” Wolff proudly recalled as an old man. “Hitler wanted to have me nearby, because he knew that he could rely on me completely. He had known me for a long time, and rather well.” 

But in April 1945, encircled by his enemies at the Villa Locatelli, Wolff was far from these glory days. The desperation of his situation was underlined the following day when Benito Mussolini, Italy’s once all-powerful Duce, whose status had been reduced to that of Wolff’s ward, was captured by partisans at a roadblock on the northern tip of Lake Como while fleeing with his dwindling entourage for Switzerland. Taken to the crumbling but still grand city hall in the nearby lakeside village of Dongo, Mussolini was assured he would be treated mercifully. “Don’t worry,” the mayor told him, “you will be all right.” 

A horde of partisans and curious townspeople crowded into the mayor’s office, to fire questions at the man who had ruled Italy for over two decades. Mussolini answered each question thoughtfully. In the final months of his life, he had grown increasingly reflective and resigned to his fate. He spent more time reading—his tastes ranged from Dostoyevsky and Hemingway to Plato and Nietzsche—than dealing with governmental affairs. “I am crucified by my destiny,” Mussolini had told a visiting Italian army chaplain in his final days. 

When his captors asked him why he had allowed the Germans to exact harsh retributions on the Italian people, Mussolini mournfully explained that it was beyond his power. “My hands were tied. There was very little possibility of opposing General Albert Kesselring field commander of the German armed forces in Italy and General Wolff in what they did. Again and again in conversations with General Wolff, I mentioned that stories of people being tortured and other brutal deeds had come to my ears. One day Wolff replied that it was the only means of extracting the truth, and even the dead spoke the truth in his torture chambers.” 

In the end, Mussolini found no mercy. He and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, who insisted on sharing his fate, were machine-gunned and their bodies were put on display in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. Mussolini’s body was subjected to particular abuse by the large, frantic crowd in the square; one woman fired five shots into Il Duce’s head—one for each of her five dead sons. The bodies were then strung up by their feet from the overhanging girders of a garage roof, where they were subjected to further indignities. When he heard about Mussolini’s grotesque finale, Hitler—who, near the end, had told the Duce that he was “perhaps the only friend I have in the world”—ordered that his own body be burned after he killed himself. 

General Wolff knew that he, too, faced a merciless end if he fell captive at Villa Locatelli. But unlike Mussolini, the SS commander had a very dedicated and powerful friend in the enemy camp. 

At eleven in the morning on April 26, Allen Dulles received an urgent phone call in his Bern office from Max Waibel, his contact in Swiss intelligence. Waibel reported that Karl Wolff was surrounded by partisans at Villa Locatelli and “there was a great danger they might storm the villa and kill Wolff.” 

The SS general was the key to Dulles’s greatest wartime ambition: securing a separate peace with Nazi forces in Italy before the Soviet army could push into Austria and southward toward Trieste. With the Communists playing a dominant role in the Italian resistance, Dulles knew that blocking the advance of the Red Army into northern Italy was critical if Italy was to be prevented from falling into the Soviet orbit after the war. Dulles and his intelligence colleagues had been secretly meeting with Wolff and his SS aides since late February, trying to work out a separate surrender of German forces in Italy that would save the Nazi officers’ necks and win the OSS spymaster the glory that had eluded him throughout the war. 

The negotiations for Operation Sunrise, as Dulles optimistically christened his covert peace project, were a highly delicate dance. Exposure could spell disaster for both men. According to Wolff, during their diplomatic courtship, Dulles identified himself as a “special representative” and “a personal friend” of President Roosevelt—neither of which was true. In fact, by negotiating with the SS general, Dulles was clearly violating FDR’s emphatic policy of unconditional surrender. Just days before Wolff was trapped at Villa Locatelli, Dulles had been expressly forbidden by Washington from continuing his contacts with Wolff.

Meanwhile, the SS commander’s secret diplomatic efforts both dovetailed and competed with the numerous other Nazi peace initiatives coming Dulles’s way, including that of his boss, Heinrich Himmler, who was also shrewd enough to realize that the German war effort was doomed and he along with it, unless he managed to cut his own deal. Even the Führer himself was toying with the idea of how he might save the Reich by splitting the Allies and winning a favorable peace settlement. In his backroom dealing with Dulles, Wolff at times found himself an emissary of the Nazi high command and at other times a traitorous agent working at cross-purposes to save his own skin. 

But with Wolff now surrounded by Italian resistance fighters at Villa Locatelli, his end seemed near—and with it, all the painstaking and duplicitous efforts undertaken by the two men over the previous two months on behalf of Operation Sunrise. Dulles had too much at stake to let his happen. Alerted to Wolff’s predicament, he flew into action, mounting a rescue party to cross the border and reach the villa before it was too late. 

Dulles knew that risking brave men to save a Nazi war criminal’s life—in the interests of his own unsanctioned peace mission—was an act of brazen insubordination that could cost him his intelligence career. So, to give himself cover, Dulles arranged for his loyal subordinate, Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, to oversee the rescue. 

Dulles later related the story with typical bonhomie—but, as was often the case, his glib delivery masked a darker tale. “I told Gaevernitz that under the strict orders I had received, I could not get in touch with Wolff. . . . Gaevernitz listened silently for a moment. Then he said that since the whole Operation Sunrise affair seemed to have come to an end, he would like to go on a little trip for a few days. I noticed a twinkle in his eye, and as he told me later, he noticed one in mine. I realized, of course, what he was going to do, and that he intended to do it on his own responsibility.” 

When it came to saving Wolff, Gaevernitz shared his boss’s zeal. Gaevernitz was the handsome scion of an illustrious European family and a relative of the Stinnes family, whose fortune had helped finance Hitler’s political rise. The Gaevernitzes had broken from the Nazis early on, and Dulles helped funnel their money to safe havens outside of Germany, as he did for many wealthy Germans, including those who remained loyal to the Nazi regime, before and during the war. Dulles and Gaevernitz were also tied together by their political views—they both believed that “moderate” members of Hitler’s regime must be salvaged from the war’s wreckage and incorporated into postwar plans for Germany. By the extremely generous standards of Dulles and Gaevernitz, even Karl Wolff qualified as one such redeemable Nazi. 

After being dispatched by Dulles, Gaevernitz, accompanied by the Swiss secret agent Waibel, jumped on an Italy-bound train, arriving at the Swiss border town of Chiasso late that evening. There they met one of Dulles’s top agents, Don Jones, a man well known to the Italian resistance fighters in the border area as “Scotti.” Gaevernitz thought that Scotti, a man who risked his life each day fighting SS soldiers, would balk at the idea of saving the general who commanded them. But Scotti gamely agreed to lead the mission. 

And so, as midnight approached, a convoy of three cars set off toward the western shore of Lake Como. One vehicle carried OSS agent Scotti and three Swiss intelligence operatives, the second was filled with Italian partisans, and the third conveyed two SS officials Dulles had recruited to ease the convoy’s passage through German-controlled areas. It was one of the most bizarre missions in wartime Europe: a joint U.S.-German rescue effort organized for the benefit of a high-ranking Nazi general. 

As the convoy crawled through the dark toward the lake, partisans opened fire on the cars. Scotti bravely jumped out of his vehicle and stood in the headlights, praying that the resistance soldiers would recognize him and stop shooting. Fortunately, one did. There was more gunfire and even a grenade attack as they continued their journey, but finally, the odd rescue team arrived at the Villa Locatelli. After talking their way past the partisans’ blockade as well as the SS guard, they entered the villa and found General Wolff in full SS uniform, as if he had been expecting them all along. He offered the rescue party some of the vintage Scotch he kept for special occasions, volunteering that the whiskey had been expropriated from the British by Rommel during the North African campaign. 

It was after two in the morning when the caravan arrived safely back in Chiasso with their special passenger, who had changed into civilian clothes for the journey and was slumped low in the backseat of the middle car. Gaevernitz was anxiously awaiting the rescue team’s return in the dingy railroad station café. He had no intention of greeting Wolff in public. But when the SS general heard that Dulles’s aide was there, he bounded over to him and shook his hand. “I will never forget what you have done for me,” Wolff declared. 

Dulles and Gaevernitz would learn that the SS man had a strange sense of gratitude. In the coming years, Wolff would become a millstone around their necks. 

Later that morning, an exhausted Gaevernitz, who had not been out of his clothes all that night, took a train to his family’s lovely villa in Ascona, on Lake Maggiore, so he could enjoy a long sleep. At the railway station in Locarno, where he stopped for breakfast, he listened to the 7:00 a.m. radio broadcast, which was filled with news of Mussolini’s capture and other dramatic bulletins from the Lake Como area. Gaevernitz kept expecting to hear news of General Wolff’s rescue by a U.S.-led team of commandos; he was determined that his boss’s name must be kept out of the story. 

“It would have made a lovely headline in the papers,” Gaevernitz later mused in his diary. “‘German S.S. General Rescued From Italian Patriots by American Consul’!!! Poor Allen!! I really felt I had to spare him this embarrassment.” 

It took Wolff several more days of high-stakes diplomacy before his maneuvers finally resulted in the surrender of German forces on the Italian front on May 2, 1945. By then, Hitler was dead, the German military machine had all but collapsed, and it was just six days before the capitulation of all Axis forces in Europe. In the end, Operation Sunrise saved few lives and had little impact on the course of the war. It did succeed, however, in creating a new set of international tensions that some historians would identify as the first icy fissures of the Cold War. 

The Dulles-Wolff maneuvers aggravated Stalin’s paranoid disposition. While he was still alive, Roosevelt, whom Stalin genuinely liked and trusted, was able to reassure the Soviet leader that the United States had no intention of betraying an alliance forged in blood. But after FDR’s death, Stalin’s fears of a stab in the back at Caserta—where the surrender on the Italian front was signed by German and American military commanders—only grew more intense. His suspicions were not unfounded. After the separate peace was declared at Caserta, some German divisions in Italy were told not to lay down their arms but to get ready to begin battling the Red Army alongside the Americans and British. 

Even Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, who would become a dedicated Cold Warrior, took a dim view of Operation Sunrise and tried unsuccessfully to shut it down. Truman later wrote in his memoir that Dulles’s unauthorized diplomacy stirred up a tempest of trouble for him during his first days as president.

Operation Sunrise would become Allen Dulles’s creation myth, the legend that loomed over his entire intelligence career. For the rest of his life, the spymaster would energetically work the publicity machinery on “the secret surrender,” generating magazine articles and more than one book and attempting to turn the tale into a Hollywood thriller. It was, according to the story that Dulles assiduously spun throughout the rest of his life, a feat of daring personal diplomacy. Time magazine—which, under the ownership of his close friend Henry Luce, could always be counted on to give Dulles good press—trumpeted Operation Sunrise as “one of the most stunning triumphs in the history of secret wartime diplomacy.” The reality, however, was far from triumphant. 

Karl Wolff was Allen Dulles’s kind of Nazi. Like Hitler and Himmler, Dulles admired Wolff’s gentlemanly comportment and found him “extremely good looking.” He struck Dulles as a man with the right sort of pedigree, the type of trustworthy fellow with whom he could do business. 

Wolff liked to present himself as a high-level administrator who was unsullied by the more inhumane operations of his government. He was not one of the Nazi Party’s vulgar anti-Semites, he would later insist. He took pride in rescuing the occasional prominent Jewish prisoner from the Gestapo dungeons— a banker, a tennis celebrity, for instance. Eichmann sneeringly referred to Wolff as one of the “dandy officers of the SS, who wore white gloves and didn’t want to know anything about what’s going on.” 

Wolff was a financially savvy fixer, a man whom the Nazi hierarchy could rely on to get things done. After serving with distinction as a young army officer on the western front during World War I, Wolff originally pursued a career in banking, before going into advertising. But his ambitions in both fields were thwarted by Germany’s postwar economic crash. His decision to join Hitler’s rapidly growing enterprise, where he rose quickly through the ranks, was more of a professional decision than an ideological one. There were unlimited opportunities in the Nazi movement for a polished blond warrior like Wolff. 

His business background gave Wolff cachet in the SS, where such skills were in short supply. It was Wolff who was put in charge of Himmler’s important “circle of friends,” a select group of some three dozen German industrialists and bankers who supplied the SS with a stream of slush money. “Himmler was no businessman and I took care of banking matters for him,” Wolff later recalled. In return for their generosity, the corporate donors were given special access to pools of slave labor. They were also invited to attend high-level government meetings and special Nazi Party ceremonies. It was said that Wolff took such good care of the wealthy contributors at the 1933 Nuremberg rally that they were pampered more than the Führer himself. On other occasions, the privileged circle of friends was even taken on private tours of the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, escorted by Himmler and Wolff. Presumably the SS shut down the camps’ crematoria during the distinguished guests’ visits to spare them the unpleasant stench. 

In pursuing the Sunrise peace pact, Dulles and Wolff harbored similar political motives. Both viewed the Soviet army’s advance into Western Europe as a catastrophe. But they also shared business interests. Throughout the war, Dulles had used his OSS command post in Switzerland to look out for Sullivan and Cromwell business clients in Europe. Stopping the war before these clients’ manufacturing and power plants in industrial northern Italy were destroyed was a priority for both men. 

Under the terms of Operation Sunrise, Wolff specifically agreed not to blow up the region’s many hydroelectric plants, which generated power from the water roaring down from the Alps. Most of these installations were owned by a multinational holding company called Italian Superpower Corporation. Incorporated in Delaware in 1928, Italian Superpower’s board was evenly divided between American and Italian utility executives, and by the following year the power company was swallowed by a bigger, J. P. Morgan–financed cartel. The ties between Italian Superpower and Dulles’s financial circle were reinforced when, toward the end of the war, the spymaster’s good friend—New York banker James Russell Forgan—took over as his OSS boss in London. Forgan was one of Italian Superpower’s directors. 

Dulles concluded that Wolff was, in effect, a member of his international club—a man with similar views, connections, and willingness to do business. Neither man was particularly interested in the clash of ideas or human tragedies associated with the war. They were fixed on the calculus of power; each understood the other’s intense ambition. Operation Sunrise was for both of them a bold, high-wire career move. 

After he decided that Wolff was a dependable partner, Dulles went to great lengths to rehabilitate the SS commander’s image. In his reports back to OSS headquarters, he framed Wolff in the best possible light: he was a “moderate” and “probably the most dynamic [German] personality in North Italy.” Although some U.S. and British intelligence officials suspected that Wolff was serving as an agent of Hitler and Himmler and trying to drive a wedge between the Allies, Dulles insisted that the German general was acting heroically and selflessly to bring peace to Italy and to spare its land, people, and art treasures from a final, scorched-earth conflagration. 

Dulles knew from the beginning that working with Wolff was an extremely risky proposition—not just because of the Allies’ strict prohibition against a separate peace deal but because Himmler’s right-hand man was certain to be placed high on the list of Nazi war criminals. Even many years later, when the evidence against Wolff had grown to utterly damning proportions, the old spy refused to pass judgment on him. “The conclusions about Wolff must be left to history,” wrote Dulles in his carefully calibrated Operation Sunrise memoir. He was delaying a judgment that, for many, had long since been obvious. 

When Wolff was later confronted with the obscenity of the Nazi leadership’s war crimes, he would inevitably plead ignorance, claiming he occupied such a lofty perch in the Reich’s clouds that he did not learn about the death camps until the final days of the war. When this tactic failed, he would claim that he had been powerless to stop the mass slaughter, or he would fall back on legalisms and other technical evasions. But the stains on Wolff were not so easily erased. 

Karl Wolff, who would go down in history as “one of the unknown giants of Hitler’s Reich,” was content to operate in the shadows. While little known by the public, however, he played a prominent administrative role in Hitler’s lethal assembly line. He was, as Time magazine later branded him, the “Bureaucrat of Death.” 

The Nuremberg trials would firmly establish the principle that administrators of murder—not just the actual executioners—could be found guilty of war crimes. Although he was not a central cog in the daily operations of the Holocaust like Adolf Eichmann, Wolff, as Himmler’s top troubleshooter, frequently intervened to ensure the smooth efficiency of the extermination process. 

During the Nuremberg trials, a highly incriminating letter written by Wolff would emerge that made it clear how important his intervention could be in keeping the trains rolling to the death camps. In July 1942, after the trains hauling Polish Jews to the Treblinka gas chambers were temporarily halted because of the German military’s demand for railcars, Wolff appealed to a Nazi transportation official for help. After the rail shortage was successfully resolved, Wolff sent off a heartfelt letter of thanks. 

“I was especially pleased,” Wolff wrote the transportation minister in a chillingly bureaucratic note, “to receive the information that, for the last 14 days, a train has been leaving daily for Treblinka with 5,000 members of the chosen people, and that in this way we are in a position to carry out this population movement at an accelerated tempo.” 

Wolff also played a key administrative role in a series of medical experiments on human subjects at the notorious Dachau camp from 1942 through 1943. The research was conducted by Luftwaffe doctors who were intent on increasing the survival rates of German pilots, and was strongly supported by Himmler, who fancied himself a man of science. In the first round of experiments, human guinea pigs culled by the SS from Dachau’s ranks of the damned were forced inside special low-oxygen chambers to determine how long Luftwaffe pilots could fly at high altitudes before passing out. Inside the chambers, victims gasped for air, frantically cried out, and finally collapsed. It was up to the Luftwaffe doctor in charge of the experiments, a sadist named Siegmund Rascher, whether the victims would be revived in time or allowed to die. Rascher oversaw about 150 such high-altitude experiments, of which at least half resulted in death. 

A subsequent round of medical experiments at Dachau was aimed at finding the best ways to revive German aviators who were rescued after crashing into the frigid North Sea. Camp inmates were forced to stand naked in freezing weather for up to fourteen hours. Others were submerged in tanks of iced water for three hours at a time. The subjects of the initial freezing experiments all died. But then the doctors added a new twist to their experiments. They “rewarmed” their victim in a hot bath and then revived him further with “animal heat” provided by four female Gypsies. The victim, after being nearly frozen to death, suddenly found his naked body warmly embraced by four women who brought him back to life.

Wolff should have been sitting in the dock at Nuremberg as part of the first round of defendants. But it was the cruder and less-connected executioner Ernst Kaltenbrunner who would hang for the sins of the SS. Nor was Wolff in the dock the following year, when the Doctors’ Trial began, though he would be singled out by prosecutors as one of the principal “masterminds” behind the Dachau experiments. Throughout the Nuremberg proceedings and the legal challenges that confronted him in later years, Wolff was watched over by his twin guardian angels—Dulles and Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. They made sure that the sword of justice never came down with its full might on SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Among the few lives saved by the Operation Sunrise peace gambit, as it turned out, was that of Wolff himself and those of the SS officers who conspired with him. 

On May 13, 1945, shortly after the Operation Sunrise surrender, Karl Wolff celebrated his forty-fifth birthday at the villa of the Dukes of Pistoia in Bolzano, the royal estate he had requisitioned as his final SS command post. Before his lunch party began, Wolff relaxed on the villa’s terrace with his SS aide and Sunrise partner Eugen Dollmann, who had served as the interpreter for Hitler and Himmler in Italy. “It’s really rather pleasant here, Eugenio,” remarked the SS-Obergruppenführer, using his affectionate name for the Italy-besotted Dollmann as the two men gazed at Wolff’s children and Dollmann’s Alsatian hound gamboling in the rose garden. But Dollmann, who could hear American tanks rumbling nearby, could not let himself enjoy their idyll. “I have a feeling that this is going to be your last birthday in sunny Italy, Herr General,” he remarked. Dollmann’s grave mood brought a burst of laughter from Wolff. “My dear Eugenio! You’re not going to get the wind up in these lovely surroundings? And on my birthday too!” 

Shortly afterward, Wolff’s wife, Ingeborg, a tall, blond beauty and former countess, who had left her aging, aristocratic husband for her perfect Aryan match, came onto the terrace and announced that lunch was ready. 

Dollmann’s instincts, as usual, proved correct. As Wolff and his guests— staff officers of the Wehrmacht in dress uniform—sipped champagne in the villa’s flower-adorned entrance hall, they suddenly heard the growl of tanks outside. “The Americans,” Wolff said in a deflated voice, as he looked out the windows. Soldiers in the white helmets of military policemen burst through the doors, carrying machine guns and herding Wolff’s children in front of them. One of their officers, chewing a wad of gum, unceremoniously approached the SS commander and announced that he was under arrest. 

Wolff was aghast, protesting indignantly that Allen Dulles, the president’s personal representative in Switzerland, had promised him “honorable treatment.” But the military police officer was unimpressed. “Put your things in a small case,” he snapped at Wolff, still working his Wrigley’s. “Go on, get a move on.” 

As the Obergruppenführer bid farewell to his wife and children outside the villa, a mob of Italians gathered to also send the SS officers on their way, pelting Wolff and Dollmann with rocks and rotten eggs as the MPs stood by laughing. The two Nazi VIPs were then stuffed inside an American jeep and whisked away —first to a gloomy Bolzano dungeon and then, more hospitably, to Cinecittà, the sprawling film studio in Rome that the Allies had transformed into a POW camp. 

Wolff began invoking the name of Allen Dulles to anyone who would listen as soon as he was behind bars. The question of whether Dulles had promised Wolff immunity from war crimes prosecution in return for his Sunrise collaboration would nag the intelligence chief for many years. Dulles would repeatedly insist that Wolff had never asked for such protection and he had never offered it. According to Dulles, the SS commander had maintained all along that he was no war criminal and “he was willing to stand on his record.” 

In truth, Wolff’s growing confidence as he successfully dodged prosecution over the following years derived from the fact that Dulles had indeed offered him immunity. Two of the Swiss intermediaries involved in the Sunrise negotiations would later confirm that such an arrangement had been made. Dulles’s negotiating team went so far as to promise Wolff that he and other “decent” and “idealistic” members of the Nazi high command would be allowed to participate in the leadership of postwar Germany. Wolff was even given to believe that he might be awarded the minister of education post. 

Dulles threw his cloak of protection over Wolff from the very start. The SS general spent the first days of his confinement as a privileged guest of the U.S. military. He had been warned by Gaevernitz that he might have to spend some time behind bars, to deflect any criticism of preferential treatment. But Wolff enjoyed VIP treatment, receiving better food than other prisoners and even being allowed to wear his full uniform, complete with sidearm. In August, he was transferred to a small U.S.-run POW camp near Gmunden, Austria—a lakeside resort known for its health spas, featuring pinecone and salt-bath treatments. According to a highly embarrassing article that ran in the New York Herald Tribune, Wolff enjoyed a pleasant summer idyll on the lake, where he was reunited with his family and even asked for his yacht to be delivered to him. 

That summer was the period of greatest jeopardy for Wolff, as the Nuremberg prosecutors selected their first list of defendants and the world outcry for justice was at its peak, on the heels of the appalling revelations about the Final Solution. Justice Robert Jackson and the Allied legal staff considered Wolff to be a primary target, circulating a list that named him one of the “major war criminals.” With Hitler and Himmler both dead, Wolff was among the highest Nazi officials to survive the war, clearly outranking most of the defendants who were subsequently put on trial at Nuremberg. 

Determined to keep Wolff out of the defendants’ dock, however, Dulles went so far as to bury incriminating evidence, including one particularly damning OSS report that blamed the Nazi general not only for the “wholesale slaughter of populations” and “the collective reprisals” against Italian civilians, but also for the torture and murder of OSS agents in his Bolzano SS headquarters. The feelings against Wolff were running understandably high in some OSS quarters, where the SS general was suspected of personally interrogating American intelligence officers. But Dulles betrayed his own men, blocking the OSS report on Wolff from ever reaching the Nuremberg staff. Instead, it was Dulles’s portrait of Wolff as a “moderate” and a “gentleman” that was sent to the Nuremberg legal team, along with a recommendation that he not be prosecuted for SS crimes.

Dulles succeeded in keeping Wolff off the Nuremberg defendants list. The general would appear at the trial only as a witness, testifying on behalf of his fellow war criminal Hermann Goering. But as Nuremberg prosecutors prepared for new rounds of trials, and as war crimes tribunals were organized in Italy and other countries that had fallen under the boot of Nazi occupation, Wolff still found himself behind bars. Realizing that the SS general was still not safe from prosecution, Dulles arranged for Wolff to be diagnosed with a nervous disorder, and in spring 1946 he was transferred to a psychiatric institution in Augsburg, Austria. 

Wolff knew that Dulles had engineered his psychiatric diagnosis to shield him from prosecution, but he also suspected that it was a way “to prevent me from talking.” The general knew that he continued to have great leverage over Dulles: if he revealed the immunity deal that the two men had worked out, the spymaster’s career would be jeopardized. Wolff was also privy to another Sunrise dirty secret: the extent to which the separate peace pact was a cold betrayal of the United States’ and Britain’s wartime Soviet allies. In fact, Dulles was so concerned about what Wolff might be telling his interrogators behind bars that he began to have his conversations secretly taped. 

As Wolff’s imprisonment stretched on, he grew increasingly frustrated and began talking more freely about the “mutual understanding” that he and Dulles had struck and about the way he had been double-crossed. Wolff’s increasingly vocal behavior was not lost on Dulles and the other American and British authorities involved in the Sunrise deal. At one point, his jailers quietly offered him an open door to his freedom. But Wolff did not want the life of a rat on the run, hiding out in Argentina or Chile. He was determined to hold the Sunrise cabal to their deal; he wanted to be fully exonerated and allowed to regain a prominent position in the new Germany. 

In February 1947, Wolff played his trump card, writing a letter to President Truman in which he boldly revealed the terms of the Operation Sunrise agreement. Wolff informed Truman that, in return for his cooperation on the secret surrender, “I received from Mr. Dulles and his secretary, Mr. Gaevernitz, an explicit promise” of freedom for himself and his fellow “meritorious” SS collaborators on the Sunrise deal. It was now time, Wolff informed Truman, for the United States to honor the bargain made by Dulles. 

The German POW followed up his letter to Truman with an equally emphatic note to Dulles, in which he managed to strike a tone at once courtly and threatening. Wolff insisted that Dulles must come to his aid, and that of his “entire Sunrise squadron,” to win their “honorable release from captivity.” His direct appeal to Dulles, wrote Wolff, “is not only my right but my knightly duty”; by negotiating secretly with the U.S. spymaster, Wolff reminded him, he had “saved your honor and reputation . . . at the risk of our lives.” 

Wolff stirred the pot further by sending a similar letter to Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, who had worked closely with Dulles as the U.S. Army’s point man on the Sunrise negotiations. Lemnitzer shared Dulles’s strong anti-Soviet sentiments, and he had colluded with the OSS official to keep the secret talks with Wolff going forward, even after President Roosevelt and the Allied command thought they had pulled the plug on Sunrise. After the German surrender, the ambitious Lemnitzer had also worked with Dulles to promote Sunrise in the press as an espionage triumph. When Wolff’s letter reached Lemnitzer, he was stationed at the Pentagon, where he had been appointed to a prestigious position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lemnitzer would ultimately rise to become the Army chief of staff under President Kennedy, where once again his career would be fatefully linked with that of Dulles. 

As soon as Lemnitzer received the letter from Wolff, who appealed to him “as one general to another” to make sure the Sunrise deal was honored, Lemnitzer smelled trouble. As with his letter to Dulles, Wolff’s appeal to Lemnitzer melded obsequious German courtesy with a flash of steel. Wolff signed off with a clear warning, telling Lemnitzer that he was hoping to resolve the situation “as a comrade” before he was forced to air his grievances “publicly.” Lemnitzer fired off a letter to Dulles, who was in Switzerland at the time, telling him that he was “anxious to discuss this matter with you” as soon as Dulles returned home. 

Thus began a series of carefully worded letters and private discussions between the two most prominent Americans who were associated with the Sunrise deal. Dulles, who was savvy enough to never put his agreement with Wolff in writing, warned Lemnitzer to be “very careful” in communicating with Wolff. “He has proved to be a clever, tricky and wily customer,” Dulles cautioned Lemnitzer. The spymaster appeared to have a certain amount of professional respect for the way the Nazi military man had played him. 

The circumspect communications between Dulles and Lemnitzer led to a flurry of behind-the-scenes efforts on Wolff’s behalf. The last thing anyone wanted was a “sensational trial,” as Dulles put it, where Wolff would undoubtedly spill the entire Sunrise story. 

In March 1948, Wolff was transferred to a detention center in Hamburg, and instead of being tried for war crimes, he was put through a much less threatening “denazification” hearing in a German court. Dulles supplied Wolff’s defense team with a glowing affidavit that was read aloud in the courtroom and concluded, “In my opinion, General Wolff’s action . . . materially contributed to bringing about the end of the war in Italy.” The ever-loyal Gaevernitz showed up as a character witness, testifying for over an hour about Wolff’s Sunrise heroism and insisting, falsely, that the SS general had never “demanded any special treatment after the war.” 

The German court was impressed by the defendant’s influential friends. Found guilty of the relatively minor charge of “being a member of the SS with knowledge of its criminal acts,” Wolff received a four-year sentence. Through Dulles’s lobbying efforts, the sentence was reduced to time already served, and in June 1949, Wolff walked out of the men’s prison at Hamburg-Bergedorf a free man. Gaevernitz and other Sunrise intermediaries were there to celebrate the war criminal’s release. “It seemed like old times and we missed you greatly,” he wrote Dulles. 

One of the first actions taken by the newly liberated Wolff was to, once again, demand special treatment. He insisted that the U.S. government owed him at least $45,000 for an itemized list of clothing and family belongings that he claimed were looted by U.S. military police from his SS palace in Bolzano after his arrest. The demand for reparations by Himmler’s former right-hand man was, at last, even too much for Dulles. “Between you and me,” an exasperated Dulles wrote the following year to his Swiss intelligence comrade Max Waibel, “KW doesn’t realize what a lucky man he is not to be spending the rest of his days in jail, and his wisest policy would be to keep fairly quiet about the loss of a bit of underwear, etc. He might easily have lost more than his shirt.” 

Wolff’s journey now came full circle, as the middle-aged SS veteran returned to the advertising field he had abandoned two decades earlier for a career with Hitler. Landing a job as an advertising sales manager with a weekly magazine in Cologne—courtesy yet again of Dulles, who had helped pave the return to civilian life by ensuring he was not subjected to an employment ban—Wolff quickly proved to be a man on his way up. With the “circle of friends” he had made as Himmler’s banker, Wolff found it easy to establish contacts with the advertising departments of the leading German companies. As his sales soared, so did his commissions. By 1953, he was prosperous enough to buy a manor for his family on Lake Starnberg in southern Bavaria, complete with a dock and bathhouse. 

Wolff’s success emboldened him. He began talking more openly about his past to friends and even journalists. He revealed that ten days before Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker, the Führer had promoted him to the rank of senior general of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of Himmler’s empire. 

The general wanted it both ways: he wanted to be seen as one of the clean and honorable Germans, but his pride also had him crowing about his grand and loyal service to Hitler’s Reich. Wolff’s ambivalence was highlighted again when he told a newsletter published by an SS veterans club that Hitler had known about and “completely approved” of his Operation Sunrise machinations, presumably as a tactic for buying time and splitting the Allies. Wolff, regarded with disdain by his former SS colleagues for his role in Sunrise, might have been trying to ingratiate himself with his old Nazi brethren. But it was a dubious claim. Eugen Dollmann undoubtedly came closer to the truth when he wrote in his memoir that a fading Hitler—pumped full of drugs during their final meeting in the bunker—gave Wolff “a vague sort of permission to maintain the contact he had established with the Americans.” 

In the mid-1950s, the increasingly self-assured Wolff, convinced that Germany needed his leadership, became politically active again. In 1953, he took a lead role in establishing the Reichsreferat, a neo-fascist party, and in 1956, he began organizing an association of former SS officers. The old ideas came slithering out once more: the demonization of non-Germanic races and the Bolshevist menace, the glorification of power. 

Karl Wolff was eager to return to center stage, and who better to help his quest than his powerful American patron? Wolff had stayed in touch with Dulles through the U.S. occupational authorities stationed in Germany, passing him notes and books related to Operation Sunrise that he thought the spymaster might find interesting. After his release from prison, Wolff had developed a side business with U.S. intelligence agencies, selling information to a notorious espionage freebooter named John “Frenchy” Grombach, who had served in Army intelligence. Grombach gathered information from a far-flung network of SS old boys and other ex-Nazis in Europe, peddling it to the CIA, State Department, and corporate clients. But Wolff knew that his best connection in the American intelligence world was Allen Dulles himself, who by 1953 had become chief of the CIA. 

On May 20, 1958, Wolff marched confidently into the U.S. embassy in Bonn and asked to see two CIA officers he knew. Informed that those agents were no longer in Bonn, Wolff was escorted into the office of the CIA station chief. As usual, Wolff thoroughly charmed his host, who later reported that he “was most polite, almost ingratiating for a former General.” Wolff, the station chief added, was “sporting a tan which looked as though it had been acquired south of the Alps and exuded prosperity.” Wolff informed his CIA host that he wanted to visit the United States. He wanted to see his daughter, who was married to an American, and his son, who was also residing there. He did not mention the other person he wanted to see, but it was obvious to the station chief. Everyone in the agency’s upper ranks knew about the CIA director’s long and intricate history with Wolff. 

Chatting with the Bonn station chief, Wolff soon got to the point. He wanted assurances that he would have no trouble securing a visa for his visit to the United States. Informed about his old wartime collaborator’s wishes, Dulles pulled strings on his behalf in Washington. But the two men were never to be reunited in America. Karl Wolff’s name still stirred too much unease in the bowels of Washington’s bureaucracy. Some foreign service functionaries began asking awkward questions about the general’s wartime activities. There were some specters from the past, realized Dulles, that were best left in the past, to be conjured only in one’s smoothly crafted memoirs.

5 

Ratlines 

Karl Wolff was not the only prominent SS officer who greatly benefited from Dulles’s Operation Sunrise. In the fall of 1945, former SS colonel Eugen Dollmann, Wolff’s principal intermediary during the Sunrise negotiations, found himself living in a gilded cage in Rome. The apartment, which was located on Via Archimede, a quiet, horseshoe-shaped street in the city’s exclusive Parioli district, contained few distractions for the bored Dollmann. But he did discover an extensive sadomasochistic literary collection left behind by the former tenant, a German mistress of Mussolini, and he whiled away the hours reading about feverishly inventive ways to mortify the flesh. Dollmann was not an entirely free man, since he was a guest of U.S. intelligence officers. But, even though he remained under close surveillance, compared to his accommodations after he and Karl Wolff were arrested in May, the colonel’s Parioli lifestyle was sublime. 

Before he was spirited off to Rome by the Strategic Services Unit, the agency that replaced the disbanded OSS after the war, the Nazi diplomat had been installed in a temporary cell at Cinecittà Studios. Spoiled by years of the best Italian cuisine, Dollmann found the rations at Cinecittà so distasteful that he considered joining a hunger strike started by fellow POW Gudrun Himmler, the late Reichsführer’s daughter. Then he was transferred to a POW camp in Ascona, on picturesque Lake Maggiore, where the daily fare—consisting mainly of watery pea soup—was even more objectionable, and the inmates were forced to sleep in tents that floated away in heavy downpours. Dollmann later had the nerve to compare Ascona to Dachau. “At least in Dachau they had wooden huts,” he observed. 

Relief for Dollmann came when he was transferred to a low-security prison camp run by the British military in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. One night, Dollmann found it remarkably easy—one American intelligence agent would call it “suspiciously” easy—to cut through the wires encircling Rimini and flee to Milan, where he knew he would find sanctuary. Here Dollmann presented himself to the well-connected cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster in the prelate’s palazzo adjoining the enormous Gothic cathedral. Dollmann, known as one of Rome’s more elegant peacocks during his SS glory days, now sat before the eminent cardinal in a filthy raincoat, looking the worse for wear after his frantic trek from Rimini. 

As they sipped liqueur from long-stemmed glasses, Dollmann reflected on how the cardinal always put him in mind of “a delicate alabaster statue.” But Schuster, who had worked with Wolff’s SS team on the Sunrise deal, was not as refined as all that. The wily cardinal was part of the Vatican elite that had collaborated with Mussolini’s fascist regime—and, out of self-interest, he was inclined to help Dollmann now, to avoid an embarrassing war crimes trial. Besides, Schuster thought that men like Dollmann might still play a useful role in postwar Italy; he hoped to recruit the former SS officer in the campaign against the Church’s nemesis, the Italian Communists, who had emerged from the war as a powerful political force. 

Dollmann, who was conniving by nature but not political, was uninterested in the cardinal’s plot, but he was in no position to quibble. He allowed himself to be safely hidden away in a Church-run asylum for wealthy drug addicts, where his fellow inmates included a fading Italian film diva and an emotionally fragile duchess. As he languished among the delicato junkies, Dollmann decided to sample some of the forbidden fruit that the screen siren kept stashed in her room, snorting a snowy mound of heroin. For a time, Dollmann—who had much to forget in his life, but was plagued by a detailed memory—seemed in danger of disappearing among the lotus eaters. 

Salvation came in the form of James Jesus Angleton, a rising young star in U.S. intelligence who had run the X-2 branch (OSS counterintelligence) in Italy during the war and had stayed behind to use his wiles against the Communists. After tracking down Dollmann in the Milan asylum, Angleton sent a big U.S. Army Buick with a chauffeur to pick him up and drive him to the Eternal City, where he installed Dollmann in the Via Archimede safe house in the Parioli district. 

Counterintelligence was the spy craft’s deepest mind game—it was not just figuring out the enemy’s next moves in advance and blocking them, but learning to think like him. Not yet thirty, Angleton was already being talked about in American and British intelligence circles as one of the masters of the field. He had been educated in British prep schools and at Yale, where he had edited the avant-garde poetry magazine Furioso and courted the likes of Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings as contributors, and he seemed to bring an artist’s intuition to his profession. But he could get lost in the convolutions of his own fevered mind, which drove him to prowl the streets of Rome late at night in a black overcoat so big it looked like a cape, on the hunt for clues about the growing Communist menace, and to crawl around on his office floor at 69 Via Sicilia in search of hidden bugging devices.

Angleton was as gaunt as a saint. (His wife, Cicely, would rhapsodize about his “El Greco face.” His colleagues called Angleton “the Cadaver.”) He smoked incessantly, and his bony frame was wracked by consumptive fits of coughing. When he introduced himself to Dollmann, Angleton must have struck the colonel as yet another strung-out soul. But Angleton’s addiction was of a more ideological nature. 

As Angleton sat with Dollmann in the comfortable, five-room apartment on Via Archimede, the young spy explained his vision for the new world. Dollmann felt bound to listen politely, since Angleton had gone to the trouble of plucking him from Cardinal Schuster’s madhouse. But Dollmann had heard it all before— with even more fervor—from the Führer himself and his SS overlords: how Bolshevism must be crushed for the new world to be born, why there must be no rules in a clash like this between civilization and barbarity. 

Angleton, however, was lost in his own passion. He had found strong support for his views from Allen Dulles in the months after the war, as Dulles lingered in Europe, hoping that President Truman would anoint him commander of the shadow war against the Soviet Union. In October 1945, Dulles visited Rome with Clover, ostensibly to revive their marriage after the strains of separation during the war. But he had another mission as well: to organize the Italian front in the new Cold War. Angleton, who was wired into the Vatican, helped arrange a secret meeting for Dulles with Pope Pius XII, who had maintained a mutually beneficial arrangement with Mussolini’s regime and was a determined foe of Communism. 

Angleton looked up to Dulles as a mentor—a powerful figure in the mold of his adored father, James Hugh Angleton, an international businessman who had paved his son’s path into the spy trade and continued to play an influential role in the young spook’s life. Dulles would remain a strong, paternal figure for Angleton junior throughout their deeply entwined intelligence careers. In Rome, the two men conferred about the growing “Red challenge” and “the drastic, subrosa measures required to meet it,” as a colleague put it. These extreme measures included recruiting agents “without overscrupulous concern for their past fascist affiliations.” 

Dollmann was high on their list of such recruitment targets. With his continental sophistication and network of contacts, Dollmann might prove a valuable espionage asset on the strategic front lines in both Italy and Germany. As Angleton sat with the well-groomed colonel in the Via Archimede safe house now, the American opened a bottle of Scotch whisky that he had brought along and carried on with his enthusiastic recruitment pitch. But as he listened, sipping the good Scotch, Dollmann was filled with utter contempt for his guest. “He was talking like a young university lecturer who dabbled a bit in espionage in his spare time,” mused the colonel. His views struck the world-weary German as typically American—naïve and overblown. 

As for Dulles, Dollmann had only contempt for his benefactor, whom he later called “a leather-faced Puritan archangel . . . the type who had fled from the European sink of iniquity on the Mayflower and now returned to scourge the sinners of the old world.” He would ridicule the way that Dulles had misrepresented himself at their secret Sunrise meetings in Switzerland as President Roosevelt’s personal emissary, delivering little speeches to Wolff and Dollmann about how “delighted” FDR supposedly was about the SS officers’ selfless mission for peace. “Wasn’t that nice now?” sneered Dollmann. “Such manly, upright and heartening words from President Roosevelt and his special representative in Europe, Mr. Allen W. Dulles!” 

While Dollmann was unimpressed with Angleton’s political lecture, he did appreciate the fake identity card the young spy gave him. The document—which identified him as an Italian employee of an American organization—afforded Dollmann the confidence to venture into the streets of his beloved Rome without fear of being molested by the authorities. Sprung from his apartment, the colonel found himself drawn to some of his favorite old haunts. He strolled through the fashionable Via Condotti shopping district, where he paid a visit to the Bulgari jewelry shop. 

In the old days, he had been treated like royalty by the Bulgari brothers, who would take him on tours of their vaults beneath the Tiber River, where there was a red room for rubies, a blue room for sapphires, and a green room for emeralds. The Bulgaris would pour him Napoleon brandy as they showed off the crown jewels of the late czar and other dazzling treasures. But those pleasant days were long gone. This time, when he suddenly appeared in the luxury shop, Giorgio Bulgari greeted him as if he were a ghost. “We were all afraid you had been killed,” the jeweler told Dollmann, after he recovered from his shock. 

During the war, Giorgio Bulgari had been so revolted by the deportation of Rome’s Jews—an order stamped by Dollmann’s boss, Wolff—that he and his wife hid three Jewish women in their own home. Now, gazing at the resurrected SS colonel, the jeweler undoubtedly wished Dollmann was dead. And Dollmann knew it.

Afraid he’d been killed? That was rich. Bulgari’s false concern infuriated Dollmann, but he adopted his usual droll manner. “How very amusing. People like me don’t just disappear forever like that.” 

Dollmann always liked to give the impression that he was too cosmopolitan to indulge in the Nazis’ anti-Jewish mania. But now he felt offended by Bulgari’s forced courtesy; Bulgari “sickened” him—he was a “corpulent Levantine . . . with fleshy lips and a greasy smile.” Dollmann turned abruptly and fled the shop. 

Once upon a time, Dollmann had had a love affair with Italy, and he was certain that his sunny “arcadia,” as he called it, returned his ardor. But now he was no longer certain. Dollmann had arrived in Italy two decades earlier, long before the war, as a young graduate student in Renaissance history. The young German was well educated, fluent in Italian, and boasted some sort of connection to the doomed Habsburg dynasty. He was also gay and charming, and he quickly shed as much of his stolid German upbringing as he could in favor of la dolce vita. With his slickly groomed hair, sleek Italian suits, and year-round tan, Dollmann went completely native, becoming Eugenio instead of Eugen. 

Dollmann had been embraced by the German diplomatic set in Rome, who appreciated his nuanced grasp of the local language and customs, and by the Italian aristocratic set, who found him an amusing decoder of all things Deutsch. His binational skills were increasingly in demand as the two countries’ fates grew more closely linked. He was sought out by a principessa named Donna Vittoria, who was the reigning queen of Roman salons. Her soirees, held at her otherworldly palazzo in the imperial ruins of Teatro Marcello, were frequented by Mussolini’s daughter Edda and her husband, Count Ciano, as well as the leading Italian film stars of the day. She very much hoped to have Hitler, too, as an honored guest someday, the principessa confided to Dollmann. 

In Naples, he was invited to the midnight entertainments at Duchess Rosalba’s decaying mansion, festivities so lavishly debauched that they could have inspired a young Fellini. One night the lady of the house greeted Dollmann as she reclined on a divan and was attended to by two slyly grinning female dwarves and a well-built retainer packed into a form-fitting suit. The dwarves later appeared on a stage with a troupe of other diminutive performers, who enacted a long and baroque melodrama for the amusement of Duchess Rosalba’s guests. Dollmann was haunted not just by the odd performance but by the strange smile that his hostess fixed on him. The duchess, he noted, had “a simultaneously charming and inhuman mouth.” He later learned the story of her deformity. The duchess liked to prowl Naples’s rough waterfront bars for her handsome henchmen, replacing them in quick succession with one rugged seaman after another. One night she was attacked with a knife by one such jealous sailor, who left the mark of his fury on her once beautiful face. 

But not even this decadent world could prepare Dollmann for the life he began when he joined the SS, where he would rise to become the link between the courts of Hitler and Mussolini. Dollmann later tried to make sense of why he had enlisted in Himmler’s death’s-head corps. It wasn’t political ambition that drove him—he insisted that he had none. And it wasn’t monetary reward. “I already lived well and comfortably, and my life, after I had yielded to my so called motives, was no better than before, only more arduous.” Was it the way he looked in his trimly tailored SS uniform? Vanity was always a factor with Dollmann. Years later, he proudly displayed photos of himself standing in the very center of history, between Hitler and his visiting Italian dignitaries, gazing into the Führer’s magnetic eyes, ready to translate his every momentous word. Dollmann, always up to date on the latest Rome gossip, became a court favorite of Hitler. He was at the Führer’s side whenever Hitler and his retinue descended on Italy, and he was there whenever Mussolini or his top ministers trekked to summits in Germany. 

By serving as the essential diplomatic link between Germany and Italy, Dollmann ensured that his sojourn in his adopted land would not be interrupted by the coming war. Dollmann would point to this as the primary reason why he made his Faustian bargain. Italia was the great passion of his life. “I loved Italy with the doomed love of all German romantics.” 

It was the most peculiar of ironies, and one that Dollmann and his intimates no doubt privately relished. The man who kept the Axis partners smoothly aligned, with his impressive language and social skills, was a highly educated, arts-loving homosexual who enjoyed trading in the most salacious gossip about the personalities who ruled Germany and Italy. Dollmann was, in short, precisely the type of person the Nazis sent to the gas chambers. But instead, Hitler’s interpreter was free to attend gay and lesbian orgies in Venice, a city whose shadows offered some protection from the authorities’ prying eyes. And he had the pleasure of going on shopping safaris with Eva Braun, Hitler’s companion, during her Italian holidays. 

Braun was mad for crocodile shoes and accessories. “She loved crocodile in every shape and form, and returned to her hotel looking as if she had come back from a trip up the Congo rather than along the Tiber.” 

Dollmann was fond of Braun, a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman’s mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. “He is a saint,” Braun told Dollmann wistfully. “The idea of physical contact would be for him to defile his mission. Many times we sit and watch the sun come up after spending the whole night talking. He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.” 

Dollmann strongly suspected that the Führer had other passions besides Germany. On Christmas Eve 1923, when he was a university student in Munich, Dollmann had been invited to an extravagant, candlelit party at the home of General Otto von Lossow, who had helped put down Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. During the evening, Lossow took Dollmann and some of his other guests into his parlor, where he entertained them by reading selections from Hitler’s thick police dossier. “In a café near the university on the evening of, Herr Hitler was observed . . .” Lossow’s voice was matter-of-fact as he read through the depositions and eyewitness reports about Germany’s future leader. The general’s small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics. 

These were the sorts of tales that Dollmann kept tucked away—stories that would help the consummate survivor navigate what he called the “witches’ cauldron” of Rome as well as Berlin’s dark labyrinth. As the Nazis’ main fixer in Rome, it helped to know everything he could about the dangerous men with whom he was dealing. 

The Nazi official Dollmann most dreaded escorting around Italy was Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s top executioner. “Now there was a man clearly meant to be murdered by someone or other,” Dollmann observed years later. “He was a daemonic personality, a Lucifer with cold blue eyes.” One night, Heydrich demanded that Dollmann take him to Naples’s finest brothel. Two dozen half naked women representing the full spectrum of the female form—from “slim gazelles to buxom Rubenesque beauties”—were arranged for Heydrich’s inspection in the brothel’s ornate lobby, with its gilt-edged mirrors and frescoes of rosy nymphs. Heydrich gazed at the women on display with his blank, shark eyes. Considering the SS butcher’s reputation, Dollmann did not know what to expect next. Suddenly Heydrich flung a fistful of shiny gold coins across the marble floor. “Then he jumped up, Lucifer personified, and clapped his hands. With a sweeping gesture, he invited the girls to pick up the gold. A Walpurgisnacht orgy ensued. Fat and thin, ponderous and agile, the women scrambled madly across the salotto floor on all fours.” 

Afterward, Heydrich looked pale and spent, as if he himself had joined in the frenzy. He coolly thanked Dollmann and disappeared into the night. The interpreter was glad to see Heydrich go. He was, said Dollmann, “the only man I instinctively feared.” 

History has come to judge Eugen Dollmann as “a self-serving opportunist who prostituted himself to fascism,” in the words of legal scholar Michael Salter, but not a fanatic like the men he served. Nevertheless, as war criminal proceedings got under way in Nuremberg in the fall of 1945, Dollmann knew that he was at high risk of prosecution. The Nuremberg trials, where Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ambassador Franz von Papen were both convicted, firmly established that diplomats like Dollmann who moved in rarefied Nazi circles were not immune from judicial reckoning. 

Dollmann was perhaps at even greater risk in Italy, where passions ran high regarding Nazi massacres of Italian civilians, such as the infamous slaughter of 335 prisoners in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome in March 1944. Although Roberto Rossellini modeled the effeminate, sadistic SS captain Bergmann on Dollmann in his postwar film Rome, Open City, Dollmann was not directly involved in the Ardeatine atrocity; in reality, the colonel had no taste for brutality. After the war, Dollmann claimed that he had once even rescued several Italian partisans who were being burned alive by fascist thugs. Regardless of his degree of guilt or innocence, however, Dollmann was the most visible symbol of the Nazi occupation of Rome. Italians were all too familiar with the numerous newspaper photos of his slim, ben vestito figure taken at social events in Mussolini’s Palazzo Quirinale or the Vatican. In the fall of 1945, as he strolled around Rome with his fake ID card, Dollmann was acutely aware that if he fell into the wrong hands—particularly those of Italian Communists—he could be lynched.

Dollmann’s anxieties were heightened when American agents installed two former SS colleagues in his Rome apartment—including the notorious Colonel Walter Rauff, who had served as Karl Wolff’s second-in-command in northern Italy—because he knew that the hideout might now attract increased interest from Nazi hunters. Dollmann, who regarded Rauff as “one of my most disagreeable acquaintances,” was well aware of his new roommate’s past. In 1941, Rauff had overseen the development and operation of a fleet of “Black Raven” vans, in which victims were sealed inside and asphyxiated with exhaust fumes. As many as 250,000 people on the war’s eastern front were murdered in Rauff’s vehicles, which were eventually replaced by the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau. “In my opinion,” Dollmann mordantly remarked, “he was quite certainly due for the high jump [at Nuremberg] when they got round to him.” But Rauff had managed to save his neck by prudently jumping on board the Operation Sunrise bandwagon with Wolff. 

Weary of his roommate’s baleful presence, Dollmann often fled the Via Archimede apartment to go to the movies. As he sat in the dark day after day, he began getting the prickling sensation that he was being followed. One afternoon in November 1946, as the colonel watched a trifle titled Kisses You Dream Of at his neighborhood cinema, Dollmann felt a firm hand on his shoulder and heard a voice of authority: “Kindly leave the cinema with me.” He was taken into custody by a plainclothes detective who was accompanied by two armed carabinieri and then whisked away to a nearby police station. 

Dollmann and his fellow SS escapees had been tracked for months by the 428th U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), a detachment of Nazi hunters based in Rome. Major Leo Pagnotta, the Italian American who was second-in command of the CIC unit, was a sharp investigator. He figured out that Dollmann, who knew it was unwise to show his face too much on the streets, would sooner or later reconnect with the Italian chauffeur who had driven him around during his SS days. Dollmann did indeed contact the chauffeur, but Pagnotta had gotten to him first, making him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “If you see Dollmann and you don’t tell me,” Pagnotta had told the driver, “I’ll arrest you and you’ll be shot.” The chauffeur quickly gave up Dollmann, pinpointing when and where he would be dropped off at the cinema. 

Now, as Dollmann sat waiting in the police station holding room, the door suddenly opened and Major Pagnotta walked in. The two men took an immediate dislike to each other. Dollmann was predisposed to look down on Americans, whom he found in general to be a crass, illiterate, and mongrelized people. To make matters worse, this one was “rather fat”—a cardinal sin with Dollmann—and the American didn’t bother with any social niceties, treating the Nazi fugitive like “a pretty low sort of criminal.” 

The situation appeared bleak for Dollmann—his next stop could well be Nuremberg. But he knew that he had an ace up his sleeve, and he immediately played it. Dollmann took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Pagnotta. “Please call this number,” he told him. “Ask for Major Angleton. He knows who I am.” 

Major Pagnotta was quite familiar with Major Angleton. In fact, Pagnotta’s team of Nazi hunters was headquartered in the same building on Via Sicilia as Angleton’s rival intelligence operation, the Strategic Services Unit’s X-2 branch. Pagnotta’s CIC unit was on the first floor, Angleton was on the second, and British intelligence was on the third. Pagnotta and his men didn’t trust Angleton —they thought he was “a devious and arrogant son of a bitch,” in the words of Pagnotta’s aide William Gowen. Angleton seemed to work more closely with the British spies than with his U.S. Army colleagues, and the British treated him like one of their own. Before transferring to Rome in 1944, Angleton had been stationed in London, where his X-2 unit was overseen by British intelligence. 

The espionage scene in postwar Rome was rife with rivalries and competing agendas. Some U.S. intelligence units, such as Leo Pagnotta’s, were determined Nazi hunters. But other operatives, such as Angleton, had very different objectives. This spy-versus-spy atmosphere made Pagnotta’s investigative work extremely complicated. 

As Pagnotta tracked top Nazi fugitives in Italy, many of whom had escaped from the British-run prisoner-of-war camp in Rimini, it became clear to him that he was often working at cross-purposes with Angleton and British intelligence. One of the most notorious fugitives, SS captain Karl Hass, who had overseen the Ardeatine Caves massacre, mysteriously escaped every time Pagnotta’s team tracked him down and turned him over to British occupational authorities in Italy. Finally, after his fourth arrest, Hass escaped for good. It was not until many years later that Hass was tracked down in Argentina and extradited to stand trial in Italy for his role in the massacre. Hass received a life sentence, but by then he was an old man, and his failing health kept him out of prison. 

Unsurprisingly, after capturing Dollmann, Pagnotta decided to hang on to him, placing him in a U.S. military prison in Rome instead of handing him over to the British. In the beginning, Dollmann was a cooperative prisoner, readily revealing the address of his apartment on Via Archimede. When Pagnotta’s team raided the apartment, they narrowly missed catching Dollmann’s infamous roommate Walter Rauff, who managed to flee to Bari, on the Adriatic coast, where he boarded a ship for Alexandria, Egypt—the next stop in the Nazi exterminator’s long and winding ratline. Rauff would cap his bloody career in Chile, where he became a top adviser to DINA, military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s own Gestapo. When Rauff died in 1984—at age seventy-seven, after successfully rebuffing years of extradition attempts—hundreds of aging Nazis flocked to his funeral in Santiago, where he was laid to rest amid loud salutes of “Heil Hitler!” 

Pagnotta did snare another fugitive who was living in the Via Archimede apartment, SS officer Eugen Wenner, who had also played a part in the Operation Sunrise maneuvers. It soon dawned on Pagnotta’s team that Angleton was operating a safe house on Via Archimede for a stream of Nazi fugitives who were connected to Sunrise and other Dulles operations. They even traced the car driven by Dollmann’s chauffeur to Angleton’s father, who kept a villa nearby in Parioli. 

Nobody would get to know the deeply clever ways of Angleton in Rome better than William Gowen, who, at age eighteen, was one of the youngest members of Pagnotta’s crew of Nazi hunters. 

It was only a matter of time before Jim Angleton—who made it his business to meet the important people in postwar Rome—crossed paths with Bill Gowen, who, despite his youth, was known to be well connected. Gowen’s father, Franklin, was a career diplomat who had served under Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in London and was currently the assistant to Myron C. Taylor, the former U.S. Steel chairman whom FDR had appointed as his special representative to the Vatican during the war. Gowen’s family had money—one of his ancestors had been president of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange—but they were by tradition Democrats. Roosevelt was fond of Franklin Gowen, whom he regarded as one of the few blue-blooded members of the diplomatic corps he could trust. 

The younger Gowen brought a special sense of mission to his Army counterintelligence job. His family owned property in Italy and had deep roots there. His grandfather Morris was living in Florence when war broke out. Although he was Episcopalian, Morris Gowen was denounced as a Jew and put on a train for Auschwitz. When the Germans realized he was American, he was taken off the train in northern Italy and put in an SS encampment, where the seventy-seven-year-old man died in July 1944 of what his death certificate stated was “exhaustion.” Bill Gowen’s family had a number of Jewish family friends in Italy who suffered similar fates. “When I got to Rome in 1946 as a young soldier,” he later remarked, “I didn’t need to read about the Nazi terror. My family had been touched by it.” 

All in all, young Bill Gowen had a pedigree that Angleton clearly found both appealing and threatening. Gowen’s dedication as a war crimes investigator posed a distinct problem for Angleton, who viewed Nazi fugitives like Dollmann and Rauff in more pragmatic terms. And the Gowen family’s Italian background also infringed on Angleton’s turf. “I think that between the father and son, the Angletons thought they had a lock on Italy, and on the Vatican,” Gowen observed. “Jim Angleton was very jealous of my family, because he wanted to have a monopoly on Italy. And anything that might threaten him had to be taken care of.” 

Angleton made a point of keeping Gowen close in Rome. In early 1947, Gowen and his father were invited to the Italian wedding of Angleton’s sister, Carmen, where Angleton chatted up the younger Gowen and insisted they meet for lunch someday. They got together soon afterward at Angleton’s favorite spot, a Jewish restaurant near Rome’s once thriving ghetto. Angleton was fond of the restaurant’s house specialty—carciofi fritti—and he took charge of ordering when the waiter arrived at their table. To Gowen’s surprise, however, Angleton —who presented himself as an expert on all things Italian—displayed so little mastery of the language that his younger lunch companion had to take over communication with the puzzled waiter. Gowen, who was born in his family’s Livorno villa, was impressively fluent in the local tongue. It was yet another thing that Angleton found irritating about Gowen. 

Lunch companions like Bill Gowen always made Angleton uneasy. Gowen —whose family was filled with bankers, lawyers, diplomats, and Episcopalian ministers—had a solid Social Register background. And, despite his tender age, he was already a man of the world, having shuttled around Europe’s diplomatic posts with his father. With his cheery mid-Atlantic accent and his continental sartorial flair, Gowen seemed born and bred for the top tier. 

Angleton was also raised in wealth. But his father, Hugh, was not the Main Line type. He was a swashbuckling, self-made man who had swept up his future wife, Carmen, when she was a teenager in Mexico, after he joined General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 1916 expedition to capture Pancho Villa. Despite young Angleton’s British affectations, his face would always carry traces of his south of-the-border heritage. Even as he rose to the top ranks of the U.S. intelligence establishment, he remained something of an outsider in that thoroughly WASPy world, marked not just by his brilliant, idiosyncratic personality but by his mixed ethnicity. Angleton was, in short, what his Nazi associates would call a mongrelized American. 

Gowen might have been Angleton’s social superior, with much better connections to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, but in the end it was Angleton who prevailed in the spy games. In May 1947, after Dollmann had spent several bleak months in prison in Rome, Angleton succeeded in outwitting Pagnotta and Gowen and getting the former SS colonel transferred to a U.S. military prison in Frankfurt, where he was safe from the wrath of Italian political enemies and prosecutors. The clever Angleton had Dollmann smuggled out of his Roman cell on a stretcher. In Germany, Dollmann was soon switched to even more agreeable accommodations: a cozy guesthouse in the lush Main countryside that he shared with other former Nazi VIPs, such as the notorious propagandist “Axis Sally,” and Otto Skorzeny, the scar-faced Waffen-SS colonel who was famous for a daring glider raid that rescued Mussolini from mountaintop captivity. By November, after the U.S. military released him from incarceration, Dollmann was a completely free man.

There was sharp disagreement over suspected war criminals like Dollmann within the U.S. military command overseeing the occupation of Germany. General George Price Hays, a decorated officer who led the 10th Mountain Division’s assault on Monte Cassino during the Allies’ Italian campaign and commanded the 2nd Infantry Division’s artillery on Omaha Beach during D-day, was angered by the kid-glove treatment given Dulles’s Sunrise Nazis. Hays, who became high commissioner for the U.S. occupation zone in Germany, tartly pointed out in a November 1947 memo that it was the U.S. Army that was responsible for the surrender of Nazi troops in Italy, not Dulles’s secret maneuvers. Hays was adamantly opposed to granting amnesty to “possible war criminals or war profiteers” like Dollmann, which, he observed, would “condone their crimes without proper examination.” Nonetheless, by 1947, many in the American military hierarchy shared the Dulles-Angleton view that fighting Communism was a bigger priority than prosecuting fascist war criminals. 

Even after securing Dollmann’s release, Angleton remained nervous about Bill Gowen. The young man knew too much about Angleton’s string-pulling on behalf of Dollmann and the other Nazi fugitives who had been harbored on Via Archimede. Angleton suspected that Gowen’s CIC unit kept extensive files on the ratlines that had allowed Sunrise collaborators like Dollmann and Rauff to escape justice. He was determined to see what was in those files—an interest undoubtedly shared by Angleton’s mentor, Dulles, as well as their allies in the U.S. intelligence complex. 

In November 1947, as Dollmann walked free, the U.S. military moved to shut down its Nazi-hunting operation in Rome. That month, Bill Gowen hopped a train for Frankfurt, which was to be his new base of operations. By the time the slow-moving train crawled into the Frankfurt station, it was after midnight. A jeep driven by a hulking soldier with CIC insignia on his uniform was waiting for Gowen, who threw his duffel bag into the vehicle and jumped in. 

Frankfurt was still pulverized from the war. One of the few buildings left miraculously untouched by Allied bombing was the massive IG Farben complex, which now served as the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Command. The city’s demolished landscape was illuminated only by scattered pinpoints of light, and the darkness closed in on Gowen and his driver as the jeep pulled away from the train platform. 

“I guess you’re tired,” the driver said. “You’ll want to go to a hotel.” 

Gowen, exhausted from the long train ride, nodded emphatically. But instead of heading toward a hotel, the soldier drove deeper into the city’s ruins. Now the only light came from the jeep’s headlamps. 

“Where are we going?” asked Gowen. 

“I just want to show you something,” said the soldier. There was nothing to be seen, only dark piles of rubble. 

“I’ve been to Germany before—I just want to go to bed,” Gowen said. But the jeep kept creeping slowly through the night shadows. Suddenly the driver came to a halt, jumped out, and told Gowen to follow him. Gowen didn’t like his situation. “He was armed and I wasn’t. I was alarmed, and I’m normally not scared.” Gowen cautiously followed the soldier, walking slowly behind him into the gloom. Gowen didn’t know how far they had walked when the soldier abruptly turned around and headed back to the jeep. When they got to the vehicle, Gowen immediately realized that his duffel bag was missing. 

“I wasn’t dumb enough to ask him where my bag was,” Gowen recalled years later. “I knew what had happened. I knew what they were looking for.” As it turned out, there were no intelligence files in Gowen’s stolen bag. But the story wasn’t over. 

In January 1948, while Gowen was still stationed in Germany with Army intelligence, he received a transatlantic phone call from syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. The influential Washington journalist told Gowen that he was working on a hot scoop and that Gowen was at the center of it. Pearson was going to report that Ferenc Vajta, a fugitive from war crimes charges in Hungary, where he had worked as an anti-Semitic propagandist for the fascist Arrow Cross Party, had slipped into the United States illegally—with the help of young Nazi hunter Bill Gowen. Pearson claimed he had proof: documents that showed Gowen had worked closely with Vajta on various covert missions. As he listened to Pearson, Gowen was so flabbergasted that he didn’t know what to say. Pearson’s exclusive story ran in newspapers across America on January 18 and was amplified further by his coast-to-coast radio broadcast. 

There was some truth to Pearson’s report. Gowen did indeed know Vajta from his days in Rome, when he had used the Hungarian as an informer to help track the notorious Croatian fugitive Ante Pavelic´, the fascist leader of the Ustaše movement who led a genocidal campaign in the Balkans during the war that was so extreme he had to be restrained by German authorities. With the help of Ferenc Vajta, Gowen had traced Pavelic´ to a villa atop the Aventine Hill. Pavelic´ was under the protection of Croatian officials in the Vatican and other fascist sympathizers. From his villa, Pavelic´ was able to sneak into nearby safe houses through a series of secret passageways that honeycombed the Aventine. 

Gowen was perfectly willing to rely on lesser criminals like Vajta to locate much bigger targets like Pavelic´. But he had had nothing to do with providing Vajta a special State Department security clearance and slipping him into the United States. That sleight of hand was likely performed by Frank Wisner, a close collaborator of Dulles’s from their days in the OSS who had recently been appointed head of the State Department’s clandestine operations unit, the Office of Policy Coordination. 

But it was Gowen who would take the fall for the Vajta escapade. It did not take him long to figure out who was responsible for setting him up. Pearson had been fed the false story by Raymond Rocca, Angleton’s deputy in Rome. 

Pearson’s exposé effectively ended Gowen’s budding intelligence career. Gowen never stopped trying to clear his name. At one point, he managed to get an appointment to see Dulles after Dulles became CIA director, but when Gowen showed up at the agency’s headquarters in Washington to plead his case, he was told that the spymaster had been called overseas. 

Years after both men returned to America, Angleton continued to keep an eye on Gowen. Back in Washington, where he eventually became the all- powerful chief of CIA counterintelligence, Angleton invited Gowen to lunch at the Army-Navy Club and even to his home in Virginia. “You know, he was a very devious character,” Gowen said, “but he wanted to give me the impression that he was very friendly. He introduced me to his wife, Cicely, and their children, who were very young at the time.” Angleton’s betrayal of Gowen hovered silently in the air. “I never discussed it openly with him, I never trusted Angleton enough to do that.” Both men knew who had won the power struggle in Rome. But they also knew that the secret history they shared had the power to undo Angleton’s grand career and expose the underside of Sunrise. 

Intelligence reports do not normally make for entertaining reading. Few station chiefs come close to having the literary touch of onetime spies like Graham Greene, David Cornwell (John le Carré), or Ian Fleming. But, following his release from U.S. military detention in 1947, Eugen Dollmann’s espionage career became such a flamboyant mess that he inspired some of the most colorful memoranda ever produced by the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. Reading through these declassified CIA documents fills one with awe for Dollmann’s endless powers of reinvention, and a sense of wonder as to why men as knowing as Dulles and Angleton ever saw him as spy material. 

U.S. surveillance of Dollmann began getting interesting in 1951, when he was located in a suite at the posh Hotel Paradiso, overlooking Lake Lugano in Switzerland, near northern Italy. By then, the colonel’s high life was beginning to catch up with him. He was reported to be in financial distress and looking for ways to make some quick cash. Among the schemes he was pondering was writing his memoirs—which he was promising would be dishy—and hustling various Nazi documents he claimed were authentic, including some supposedly written by Hitler. The colonel was shaking down the CIA for 200,000 lire in return for the “exclusive” rights to examine the documents. 

Dulles and the CIA knew that there was great potential for embarrassment with Dollmann. As the years passed, the agency’s memos on the colorful SS veteran revealed rising levels of anxiety and exasperation. 

In November 1951, Dollmann was reported to be in “close contact” with Donald Jones, which was an intriguing twist, since Jones was the OSS daredevil whom Dulles had asked to rescue Karl Wolff from the Italian partisans during the war. Jones was “still presumed to be an agent of U.S. intelligence,” but the memo made clear that Dollmann’s contact with him was not strictly professional. “The two are now divided because of a quarrel, presumed to have originated over a question of money, or perhaps jealousy, since both are suspected of being sexual perverts.” The memo concluded that Dollmann’s value as “an agent or informer” was “uncertain . . . he is not the man he was in 1940–45.” 

Dollmann, no doubt, would have readily agreed. For one thing, he had less money. And he was stuck in purgatory in Switzerland rather than enjoying the sweet life in his beloved Italy because U.S. agents had warned him they still could not guarantee his safety there. 

Nonetheless, Dollmann would soon find himself in Italy—at least briefly— after he outstayed his welcome in Switzerland. According to a U.S. intelligence report, Dollmann was expelled from Switzerland in February 1952 after he was caught having sex with a Swiss police official. In desperation, Dollmann appealed to his old fascist friends in the Italian church, and he was spirited across the border and given temporary sanctuary at a Franciscan monastery in Milan. Dollmann’s savior this time, Father Enrico Zucca, was famous for his role in raising Mussolini’s body from the grave on Easter 1946 in preparation for the day when Il Duce would be reburied with full honors on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. The abbot had less spectacular plans for Dollmann. He slipped a monk’s habit on him and smuggled him onto a boat in Genoa, from where Dollmann was shipped to General Franco’s fascist paradise in Spain. 

In Madrid, Dollmann came under the protection of former Nazi commando leader Otto Skorzeny, who had put together a wide-ranging racket, trading in arms and helping SS fugitives flee justice. Skorzeny was joined for a time in Spain by Hjalmar Schacht, who had been acquitted at Nuremberg and would parlay his reputation as Hitler’s banker into a postwar career as an international financial consultant. Schacht knew where much of the wealth plundered from Europe by German corporations and Nazi officials had been hidden, and Skorzeny used this inside knowledge to help finance his SS ratlines. Angleton also found Skorzeny’s services useful, and he kept in regular touch with the entrepreneurial ex-Nazi. 

Dollmann undertook errands for Skorzeny’s international neo-Nazi circuit. But Dollmann was no good at the freelance espionage game. In October 1952, he flew to Germany on some sort of political mission to make contact with German youth groups. His plans were betrayed and he was arrested at the airport as soon as he landed. The authorities accused him of traveling on a false passport, and he didn’t bother denying it. Even in his native Germany, Dollmann was a man without a country. No government wanted to claim him—at least not openly. 

A November 1952 CIA memo reported that Dollmann was back in Rome. He started haunting his favorite cinemas again, but this time it nearly proved fatal when “he was noticed by certain Communist elements” in the theater and had to be “rescued by the police from a threatening mob.” 

Still desperate for cash in Rome, Dollmann again tried his hand at selling Hitler documents that he insisted were genuine. This time he was dangling an Operation Sunrise angle that Dulles certainly found compelling. Among the papers in his possession, Dollmann swore, was a letter from Hitler to Stalin proposing a separate peace between Germany and Russia. Such a letter would have put Dulles’s own Operation Sunrise deal in a much better light. If Hitler and Stalin really did discuss their own pact near the end of the war, it made Dulles look like a brilliant chess player instead of an insubordinate troublemaker. Dulles’s friends at Life magazine let it be known that they would pay a staggering $1 million for such a letter. But Dollmann apparently never produced it.

Dollmann’s moneymaking schemes grew more frantic. In December 1952, he quietly reached out to Charles Siragusa, a federal narcotics agent in the U.S. embassy in Rome with close ties to the CIA. Siragusa had proved very useful to Angleton over the years, as a bagman for political payoffs and as a link to the criminal underworld when the agency required the Mafia’s services. Dollmann had his own interesting offer for Siragusa. He proposed becoming a paid informant for the narcotics agent and infiltrating the neo-Nazi movement in Vienna, which he claimed was financing its activities by dealing cocaine. 

Dollmann’s offer smacked of desperation, but, in fact, he was already spying on other ex-Nazi colleagues for the CIA. At the same time, in true Dollmann fashion, he was also hiring himself out to these neo-Nazi groups and reporting back to them about U.S. intelligence activities. As if this web of competing loyalties was not complicated enough, while Dollmann was living in Madrid by the grace of the Franco government, he was also working as a British spy. 

By 1952, CIA station chiefs in Europe had grown deeply leery of Dollmann. That spring, an agency memo circulating among the field stations in Germany, Italy, and Spain warned “against [the operational] use of Dollmann . . . because he had already been involved with several intelligence organizations in Western Europe since 1945; his reputation for blackmail, subterfuge and double-dealing is infamous; [and] he is homosexual.” At one point, CIA officials even raised the possibility that Dollmann had sold himself to Moscow and was a Soviet double agent. 

But it was not until 1955 that the CIA finally severed its ties to Dollmann. It took one last brazen blackmail attempt to persuade Dulles that he had to cut the cord. Dollmann had finished his memoirs that year, and, as promised, the book was rife with salacious details, including unflattering observations about Dulles and Angleton. Before the book went to the printers, Dollmann sent a message to Dulles through the U.S. consulate in Munich, letting it be known that he was eager “not to offend [my] great good friend” Dulles, and politely asking the CIA director to flag anything he found objectionable in the excerpts mailed to him. The implication was clear: They were men of the world who understood each other. They could certainly work out an appropriate arrangement. 

After this, Dollmann abruptly disappeared from the CIA documentary record. The astute colonel undoubtedly realized that he had pushed his luck with the agency as far as he should, and, for his own good, it was time to retire from the spy game. He lived on for three more decades, trading on his notorious past to get by. He was a good storyteller, and his two colorful memoirs sold briskly in Europe. His astonishing tales even proved, for the most part, to be true. Dollmann also made frequent appearances on European television, and dabbled a bit in his beloved cinematic arts, writing the German subtitles for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. 

In 1967, an American writer named Robert Katz, who was working on a book about the Ardeatine Caves massacre, tracked down Dollmann, finding him in the comfortable residential hotel in Munich where he would live out the rest of his days. At sixty-seven, the silver-haired and still trim Dollmann seemed quite content with his life. His sunny garret in the blue-painted hotel was cluttered with photos, books, and memorabilia that recalled his former life. He was perfectly happy to live in the past, Dollmann told his visitor—after all, he had begun his career as a historian, until he was kidnapped by history. 

At one point, Dollmann brought up Allen Dulles, his old American benefactor. Dulles had recently published The Secret Surrender, his Operation Sunrise memoir, and Dollmann was upset to read the spymaster’s description of him as a “slippery customer.” 

“From the little English I know,” Dollmann told Katz in his perfect Italian, “‘sleeperee coostomer’ is not exactly a compliment. Is it?” Katz explained that it meant someone who was shrewd, cunning, Machiavellian. 

The colonel broke into a radiant smile. “Oh! That is a compliment—for me.”

next
Part2
Useful People

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.