Free The Secret Agent by Stephan Talty

German industrial strategy or the political machinations going on in Berlin, but on something more ancient and durable: greed. Erickson had come to see many of his German contacts not as ideologues, but as normal businessmen chasing money and power. “I found out that they were interested in what was in it for them.” In that way, it was a counterpart to Erickson’s earlier brainstorm about Nazi wives.
    The scheme was built around a business deal. Erickson would go the German legation in Stockholm and make them an offer. Since German oil plants were being bombed, why not build a huge new refinery in Sweden? (What he didn’t mention, of course, was that the plants were being attacked because he’d given Bomber Command the coordinates.) He would make the arrangements, grease the wheels with the Swedish government and even get a syndicate of local businessmen to help finance the $5 million project. Germany would ship the crude oil to Sweden through pipelines; Erickson’s factory would then refine it and ship high-octane gasoline back to Germany to fill the panzer tanks and Mercedes trucks. The Allies would never bomb a factory located in neutral Sweden.
    Erickson prepared a prospectus for the refinery, detailing who would pay for the factory, where the technical equipment would come from and how the profits would be split. He forged a series of memoranda and minutes from meetings that had never happened, detailing how the deal had been hashed out, down to the questions and objections of the imaginary Swedish investors. Then he drew up the final document: an agreement to build the Nazi refinery, signed by several vice-presidents of the Swedish national bank, as well as some of the richest and most influential industrialists in the country. The OSS vetted the names, making sure none of the businessmen had made any anti-Nazi statements that would cast doubt on their role in the deal. The document was a sham, but it was necessary to convince Himmler the project had been green-lighted in Stockholm.
    The agreement was the product of everything Erickson had learned over thirty years in the oil business. It could have fooled John D. Rockefeller. But there was a problem. No industrialist or banker in his right mind would sign on to such a deal; in fact, Erickson didn’t even bother asking them. Instead, he forged their signatures. He brought a copy with him and left another at the American legation for safekeeping. The imaginary deal had taken two weeks to flesh out.
    Erickson arranged a meeting with his contacts at the German legation. He warned them that if the deal became public, “the signers would deny any and all knowledge of the plan.” This was to prevent the Germans approaching the real people whose signatures were on the papers, in an attempt to confirm the plan’s details.
    At first, the reaction was frosty. “Some members of the legation thought the proposition was the work of some fool.” But Erickson by now knew a great many SS officers in Berlin and they were the actual targets of the scheme. To lure them in, he’d built in an unusual feature: Himmler and his top officers would hold a stake in the refinery. Not only would they get access to an unbombable oil plant, they’d actually own a part of the business. “It meant that Nazi party would have a certain amount of capital in their account,” Erickson said, “if something went wrong in Germany.”
    At one point in the negotiations, Erickson was called away to the phone. The voice on the other end told him to pick up a copy of Trots Allt , one of the leading leftist newspapers in Stockholm. Puzzled and a bit anxious, Erickson excused himself from the meeting and rushed out to find a newsstand. When he picked up a copy of the newspaper, he felt a wave of nausea. The full story of the fake deal was there on the front page. Erickson had been exposed.
    The OSS tracked down the source of the story. The