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.”
