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Zusatztext “A Griffin adventure to bring out the Walter Mitty in every red-white-and-blue-blooded American male.” -- Kirkus Reviews “Engaging…It’s a testament to the authors’ skill and wide experience that the pages seem to turn themselves.” -- Publishers Weekly “The makings of an excellent series. The period between WWII and the Cold War offers raw material for several books! and as fans of Griffin’s body of work are well aware! he really sinks his teeth into politics and history.” -- Booklist Informationen zum Autor W.E.B. Griffin, William E. Butterworth IV Klappentext James Cronley's first successful mission for the new Central Intelligence Directorate has drawn all kinds of attention, some welcome, some not, including from the Soviets, his own Pentagon, and a seething J. Edgar Hoover. Now complications have sprung up all over, including a surprising alliance between the Germans and, of all things, the Mossad; and an unplanned meeting with an undercover agent against the Soviets known only as Seven K.. Cronley knows that if just one thing goes wrong, he's likely to get thrown to the wolves. And he thinks he hears them howling now.PROLOGUE Early in 1943, at a time when victory was by no means certain, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United States of America—“the Allies”—signed what became known as “the Moscow Declaration.” It stated that the leaders of Germany, Italy, and Japan—“the Axis Powers”—would be held responsible for atrocities committed during the war. In December of that year, the Allied leaders—Prime Minister Winston Churchill of England, General Secretary Joseph V. Stalin of the Soviet Union, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States—met secretly in Tehran, Iran, under the code name Project Eureka. The meeting later came to be known as the Tehran Conference. At a dinner in Tehran on December 29, 1943, while discussing the Moscow Declaration, Stalin proposed the summary execution of fifty thousand to one hundred thousand German staff officers immediately following the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. Roosevelt thought he was joking, and asked if he would be satisfied with “the summary execution of a lesser number, say, forty-nine thousand.” Churchill took the Communist leader at his word, and angrily announced he would have nothing to do with “the cold-blooded execution of soldiers who fought for their country,” adding that he’d “rather be taken out in the courtyard and shot myself” than partake in any such action. The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of Germany. In London, on August 8, 1945, the four Allied powers—France, after its liberation, had by then become sort of a junior member— signed “the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis Powers.” “The London Agreement” proclaimed that the senior Nazi leaders would be tried on behalf of the newly formed United Nations at Nuremberg, and that lesser officials would be tried at trials to be held in each of the four zones of occupation into which Germany was to be divided. The Soviet Union wanted the trials to be held in Berlin, but the other three Allies insisted they be held in Nuremberg, in Bavaria, in the American Zone of Occupation. Their public argument was that not only was Nuremberg the ceremonial birthplace of Nazism, but also that the Palace of Justice compound, which included a large prison, had come through the war relatively untouched and was an ideal site for the trials. What the Western Allies—aware of the Soviet rape of Berlin and that to get the Russians out of the American Sector of Berlin, U.S. General I.D. White had to quite seriously threaten to shoot on sig...
