The Secret Agent Read Free Page A

Erickson was tapped for the job. He kept and rode a stable of expensive horses, gambled in the South of France and owned a swank apartment in the fashionable Ostermälm neighborhood of Stockholm.
    Erickson had earned a life of fancy dinner parties, well-cut suits and fine English silver. These were the rewards of a long, often bitter struggle. He was content.
    How was he to know that war would soon change everything about his beautiful life?

Chapter Three
The Blacklist
    On a map of Europe, Sweden is poised like a dagger above the northern border of Germany. But by the mid-1930s, it was the larger country that began to pose a danger to its smaller, neutral neighbor. Adolf Hitler was transforming Germany into an economic and military powerhouse. He frightened his neighbors with chest-thumping aggression and talk of lebensraum, or “living space,” code words for the Reich’s territorial expansion in the East . As the leading industrial producer in Scandinavia and home to high-grade iron-ore mines, the Swedes suspected that the country lay squarely in Hitler’s sights.
    For Erickson, Germany’s resurgence in the 1930s meant fat profits, as he exported and imported petrochemicals to and from Germany. He may not have agreed with Hitler’s racial policies, but he was a businessman in a ruthless industry. “I hated Hitler and everything he stood for,” Erickson would later say, and his war record backs him up fully. Still, in the beginning, he didn’t mind making a fortune off the Reich.
    Erickson’s business ledger for Pennco shows that in 1939 he cleared a profit of 2.75 million Swedish kronor. A very conservative estimate of that figure in today’s dollars would be $10 million. After twenty years in the oil business, Erickson was raking in astonishing sums. A Texas-sized dynasty wasn’t out of the question.
    As his star rose, Erickson became part of an informal circle centered around the American Embassy in Stockholm. Two men there made an especially strong impression on him: Laurence Steinhardt, a Jewish-American diplomat who’d served as Minister to Sweden in 1933, and his successor in Stockholm, Fred Sterling. “Steinhardt asked me to keep my eyes and ears open to anything that could be of use to the Allies,” Erickson remembered. “And Sterling mentioned that to his way of thinking the most important way of getting to the Nazis was to deprive them of oil.” But for now, it was just talk. America, like Sweden, was still neutral.
    Germany invaded and occupied Denmark and Norway in April, 1940 and Finland allied itself with Hitler. Sweden was essentially surrounded by the Reich. The country was a hostage to its own geography. By careful concessions and the use of delaying tactics, Sweden maintained its neutrality, which it had prized since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. But its ports were blockaded by both sides and its freighters and tankers were attacked on the open seas. King Gustav V appeased Hitler by supplying his military with essential products: ball bearings, wood, food, ships and iron ore, which made up 30 percent of Germany’s imports, and by opening up its northern borders to the Reich. Inside Sweden there was no stigma attached to doing business with Hitler. It was even considered patriotic. Most Swedes understood that if they withheld essential war supplies from Germany, the Reich would invade.
    Erickson’s non-German business suffered. Fuel was a main target of the British embargo, grouped with ammunition, explosives and other items as “absolute contraband.” Swedish imports of petroleum products plunged by 88 percent between 1938 and 1944. Cut off from Western markets, Germany became the only game in town. And Erickson was hardly alone in doing business with the Reich: much to the fury of the British, Standard Oil of New Jersey was supplying the Luftwaffe with tetraethyl lead gasoline for the Messerschmitt planes that