He was particularly a thorn in the side of the FBI, the ONI (the Office of Naval Intelligence), G2 (Military Intelligence), and the State Department Intelligence Division. These bodies had quickly proved to be a thorn in the side of William J. Donovan.
It. Colonel Stevens and Captain Fine saluted when Donovan walked over to them. Donovan returned the salute, smiled, and then shook their hands. Then he walked to the tail of the aircraft and met the call of nature.
By that time, Canidy and Whittaker had climbed out of the aircraft and begun to unload the luggage. Fulmar, Stevens saw, was not with them.
As Canidy and Whittaker approached the Austin Princess, Donovan said, “Canidy would like to keep the airplane.”
“I’ll bet he would,” Stevens said, smiling.
“He thinks he can get it in and out of the strip at Whitbey,” Donovan said, seriously. “Would keeping it pose problems?”
“No, sir,” Stevens said.
Donovan nodded. It was an order. Stevens would now have to somehow arrange for the transfer–or at least the indefinite “loan”–of the B-25 to the London Station. Another victory for the persuasive Canidy-Whittaker combination.
KI see you brought your lawyer with you, Colonel,” Canidy said to Stevens as he offered his hand. “Been behaving yourself, Stanley?” Prior to his entry into military service, Captain Stanley S. Fine, a tall, skinny, somewhat scholarly-looking man of thirty-three, had been Vice President, Legal, of Continental Studios, Inc. Before he had been recruited for the OSS, he had been a B-17 Squadron Commander.
“I see you brought this one back in one piece,” Fine said, nodding at the B-25.
“We try to learn from our little mistakes,” Whittaker said, wrapping an affectionate arm around Fine and then kissing him wetly on the forehead.
Fine was torn between laughter and annoyance.
The trouble with Dick Canidy, Fine thought as Canidy hugged him, is that I both like and admire the sonofabitch.
If I didn’t like him, both of them, the goddamned Bobbsey Twins, it would be very easy to stay pissed off because they get to fly around in airplanes, while I sit on my ass and clean up the paperwork mess they leave behind them.
Fine was not just kidding when he needled Whittaker and Canidy about bringing the B-25 back in one piece. Not too long ago the pair had wrecked a Navy R-5D Curtiss Commando transport aircraft on takeoff from the airfield in Kolwezi in the Belgian Congo. And Fine had wound up dealing with the problem of how to explain the lost airplane.
Fine had flown one of the R-5Ds involved in the Kolwezi Operation.
After that Operation was successfully (miraculously was a better word) completed, Fine had started to Kmake himself useful” in London, “until something else comes up.” Before long he’d turned into something like Stevens’s deputy. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this, It was important work, but he was a pilot, and pilots should be flying.
Just before Canidy and Whittaker talked Stevens into letting them take the B-25 to North Africa, Captain Peter Douglass, Sr. , USN, Donovan’s deputy, made a two-day trip to London. Ten minutes after he arrived at Berkeley Square, he tossed a thick folder, red-stamped SECRER, on Fine’s desk.
KCOME up with how you think we should handle this, Stan,” he said.
Then, chuckling, he added, GIT’s right down your alley.” It was a thick file from the Navy’s BUAIR (Naval Bureau of Aeronautics), with addenda and comments from the U. S. Army Air Corps and the War Production Board, expressing the Navy’s bureaucratic outrage, An R-5D transport which they had loaned to the Army Air Corps had not only not been returned, but the Air Corps professed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts. Further, the Navy complained, in the absence of a Certificate of Loss Due to Enemy Action, the War Production Board refused to grant them anything higher than a “B”
Priority for its replacement from the Curtiss Production Stream.
This wasn’t as funny as it first appeared. Bureaucratically, it was necessary to find the Navy a replacement aircraft as soon as possible, which meant arranging an “AAA” priority for them. Otherwise, the next time the Navy was asked to loan the Air Corps an aircraft, it would find sufficient reason to delay indefinitely doing so, priority or no priority.