Free Krueger's Men by Lawrence Malkin Page B

passports, leading the Turkish police to order all foreign nannies — most of them German — to leave the country after questioning.
    The police reported that as much as £150,000 worth of false notes originating in Germany and Italy had been circulated in Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Moreover, they remarked on the superior quality of the German notes, a sign that they may have been products of Operation Andreas. The Turks made it clear they believed this was part of a Nazi plot to undermine the pound. The Bank of England took note of the roundup and clipped the story from the London
Evening Standard
for its files. A week later another story in the same newspaper reported that counterfeits in denominations as high as £100 were circulating in Switzerland. The Bank of England clipped that story, too, assured the newspaper that none of the counterfeits had made their way to England, and then called Scotland Yard.
    The American imagination was proceeding on similar lines, and the same arguments were rehashed. Early in 1941 the
New York Times
ran a typically tut-tutting editorial about the increase in the number of reichsmarks in circulation, with the consequent danger of inflation (as if that were the worst crime then being committed in Germany!). On January 25 a reader named Henry D. Steinmetz wrote that it might not be a bad idea for the British to throw a little fuel on the fire, print up “a few score billions of excellent counterfeit mark notes” and dump them on Germany to undermine its economic morale. He was put down five days later by another reader, Manfred A. Isserman, who pointed out that the RAF had already dropped forged ration cards on Germany, and the damage done by dropping counterfeit money would be minimal because rationing made money less important; moreover, the Germans might retaliate and harm Britain’s much freer economy.
    Letters also arrived in Washington from personages high and humble as soon as war broke out. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Private N. E. Cortright of the Weather Squadron at Langley Field, Virginia, sent a handwritten plan to shower “exact duplicates of the enemies [
sic
] paper money,” enumerating nine potential benefits in economic disruption and weakened resistance. His superiors commended his “patriotism and sincerity” and saw to it that his letter was forwarded up the chain of command, where it eventually reached Lieutenant Colonel Robert A. Solborg in the infant office of the Coordinator of Information, predecessor of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime espionage agency. (Like all spy shops in those days, it masqueraded behind an inoffensive name.) Solborg commented dryly in a handwritten note that “Mr. Morgenthau said we are not in the counterfeiting business.” He kept the letter on file anyway.
    On January 6, 1942, Colonel (later General) William Donovan, who had been named chief of the espionage services, was forwarded a letter from a “very able Colorado publisher” by that state’s Senator Edwin C. Johnson, a member of the Military Affairs Committee. Once again, the letter writer thought he had a brilliantly original idea: flood Germany with fake marks. Donovan replied on the basis of advice from his economic section chief, Emile DesPres, deploying many of the familiar arguments against its effectiveness: tight German control, rationing rather than lack of money as the cause of scarcity, and finally the risks of retaliation. These were elaborated in a letter to the president from Donovan’s deputy, G. Edward Buxton, who warned: “Distribution is a major problem as dropping from planes is inefficient, and success seems to depend on a widespread underground penetration of the country by agents. The program seems promising if done on a large scale at a moment of crisis in Germany or Japan. In occupied countries it might produce more distress to the conquered than to the conquerors.”
    In a slight twist only a month later, the