The Secret Agent Read Free Page B

were bombing London. The oil business had always been amoral. The product went where the price was highest.
    Even after the West imposed a boycott on trade with Germany, Erickson scored contract after contract with the Nazis. Perhaps the profits were so fabulous he couldn’t walk away; perhaps he saw it as a matter of survival. Erickson had come of age in an industry with a highly specific vision of success and failure. “For a great many, the oil business was more like an epic card game,” said William Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, “in which the excitement was worth more than the great stack of chips … None of us was disposed to stop, take his money out of the wells, and go home.” Walking away from the game made a man “worthless as teats on a bull.”
    The American was placed on the Allied blacklist of war collaborators. His greed had become a source of embarrassment to his family back in America, especially to his closest sibling, Henry. One day in 1942, Erickson received a letter from his brother, who was now working for the War Production Board. Henry’s son, the boy who, at eight months, had looked so much like his father and uncle, had joined the Army and was training to fight in Europe. (There were, in fact, two of Eric’s nephews in the services: Lt. William Erickson of the Marines Ordinance Division and Corporal Henry Erickson of the 191st tank battalion, which would later fight its way across the Rhine at Aschaffenburg.) In the letter, Henry told Eric how mortified he was that his own brother was betraying his own country to help a dictator responsible for the deaths of so many, including, potentially, his own nephews. Henry cut off all contact with his sibling. “He would have nothing to do with me,” Erickson recalled.
    The letter from Henry pained him deeply. Pacing in his Stockholm apartment, Erickson recited his defense. Henry didn’t understand the oil business. The industry, like arms-dealing, was beyond right and wrong. If I don’t sell to the Reich, someone else will , he thought . Henry hadn’t been in Texas. He hadn’t absorbed the winner-take-all ethos of the oilmen. Eric had and it had changed him.
    Nor did Henry understand Sweden, a country under direct threat of invasion from the Third Reich. Trading with the Nazis wasn’t only socially acceptable, it was necessary. Even King Gustav V was doing it! The United States itself had only recently joined the economic blockade on the Nazis, in December 1941. Up until then, Dupont and Lockheed and other companies had been supplying the Reich with millions of dollars’ worth of war material. How could Henry condemn him when American businessmen were just as guilty?
    Erickson desperately tried to convince himself that his arguments were right. He brooded over his memories of Brooklyn—the teeming house on Sterling, the sandlots, his parent’s gratitude toward the country that had taken them in. The prodigal son, he must have yearned once again to make his family proud.
    Slowly, the flaws in his defense became clearer. His arguments were tactical. Henry’s were moral. Days later, his defense collapsed, and Erickson was filled with remorse. No matter which way he looked at it, he had been collaborating with the Nazis.
    Instead of writing Henry back, Erickson left his apartment and hurried to the U.S. Embassy. He asked to meet with Wilho Tikander, the Finnish-American chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) mission in Scandinavia. Once in Tikander’s office, Erickson begged to be taken off the blacklist. Tikander knew about Erickson, a big man in Stockholm, his lucrative oil deals with the Reich a matter of public record. The OSS chief wasn’t inclined to help a businessman who’d gotten fabulously rich off the war.
    â€œAll you have to do,” Tikander said drily, “is quit doing business with the Germans.”
    It was a simple solution, and, even