The Secret Agent (2 page)

In the early 1920s, the world's appetite for oil was growing. The Texas boom had flooded the market with cheap oil, which gradually shifted the course of the world economy. “The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power,” writes the oil historian Daniel Yergin. “The internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive.” Agriculture shrank as a percentage of gross world product, while manufacturing grew. Machines that ran on oil – tractors, gas ovens, factory boilers – boomed and gave birth to their own industries. Cars were a leading indicator of the shift: in 1900, there were 8000 in the United States. By 1921, there were 10.5 million. The new availability of oil began to transform militaries, as well. Warships switched from coal to oil, and generals phased out cavalry battalions in favor of tank-led divisions.

After college, Eric Erickson hitched his career to the only business he knew: petrochemicals. He was hired as a salesman by Standard Oil, founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller, and transferred first to Shanghai and then Yokohama, Japan. He began traveling the world selling crude to emerging economies, constantly in search of the next deal.

Across the ocean in Berlin, now a dirty and haunted metropolis, another young man, born ten years before Erickson, was also thinking about how oil was reshaping the world. Adolf Hitler was convinced that “an economy without oil is inconceivable,” and that Germany, which had little, needed to find a way to obtain more. Only then could the fast, modern and mechanized army that Hitler envisioned be built. “To Hitler, [oil] was
the
vital commodity of the industrial age,” writes Yergin. “He read about it, he talked about it, he knew the history of the world's oil fields.” Though Eric Erickson and Adolf Hitler would never actually cross paths, as early as the 1920s the two men were on trajectories that would bring them very near to each other. Erickson had gambled his life on making a fortune in the oil game, and Hitler was in search of the magical elixir of the modern mechanized army: an inexhaustible supply of fuel.

The American moved easily in the fraternity of oil men. In Japan, he left Standard Oil and went to work for the Texas oil pioneer, Joseph “Buckskin Joe” Cullinan, founder of the Texas Company (later Texaco). Even in the rough-hewn oil industry, Cullinan had a reputation for abrasiveness. He was considered one of the hardest men ever to work the fields. In 1902, when a fire erupted at Spindletop, Cullinan took charge of the firefighting operation and barely slept for a week, scorching his eyes and searing his lungs as he struggled to extinguish the flames. When the fires were out, Cullinan collapsed, slept for a spell, then conducted business from his hospital bed, his eyes bandaged shut.

Erickson matched Cullinan's drive. He rose quickly in the company. Cullen was so impressed that, in 1924, he promoted Erickson to the head of the office in Erickson's ancestral homeland of Sweden. But a Swedish law at the time dictated that any head of a company must be at least 35 years old. Erickson was only 27, so he quietly added eight years to his age.

The new executive had more urgent problems than his birth year. The Swedish operation was losing money fast. Employees were stealing from the company, and Russian competition was driving down the price of oil. Erickson put a stop to the theft, introduced new management techniques and slowly pulled the company out of the red. “I have been working many nights, Saturdays and Sundays,” he wrote Henry back in the States. “It's a hell of a lot of work.” By April, 1926, the Swedish office had had its best month ever, selling 1.1 million barrels of oil, an increase of 33% percent over the year before. “Cullinan was pleased,” he wrote his brother. “[And] wait until he sees May and June.” But “Buckskin Joe” only pushed his protégé harder. He sent a man from the New York office, “a former clerk,” Erickson wrote waspishly, who didn't speak Swedish and didn't know how the business was run, in order to “spy” on Erickson. “The thing is so absurd, they make me wonder if they are in their right mind,” Erickson wrote.

Stockholm was expensive, and by the mid-1920s, Henry and Eric were both feeling financial strain. “I am not sure I'll be able to keep up the payments as we are finding it a little tough going,” Eric wrote his brother on May 26, 1926, about one of their investments. The dream Erickson first entertained in 1914, while sitting on the Texas-bound train headed for the Beaumont fields, was slipping from his grasp. His marriage to a Swedish native named Elsa - “a girl who [speaks] English, having lived in South Carolina, well-traveled, a good sport, the companionable type” - only increased the pressure to perform.

In 1926, he took the plunge he'd been preparing for since the Texas oil-fields. He gave up his salary and went independent, risking his savings on starting a small petroleum company. Erickson built the firm using his skills as a salesman and a punishing work ethic, then sold it off to one of the majors. He immediately took the profits and started another company. It was a strategy that any American oilman would have recognized: Maximum risk for maximum reward. “Each well, whether successful or unsuccessful,” said William Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, “provided the stimulus to drill another.” After a few years, Erickson sold his latest venture and doubled down, plowing the money into the construction of an oil terminal in Stockholm. When the terminal was completed, tankers from South America or the Middle East began to dock and unload their oil, which Erickson sold to the Nordic and central European markets.

At the start of the 1930s, the Third Reich was rising to power in Germany, and Erickson was building yet another oil company, which he named Pennco. He and Elsa spent their summers in the bay town of Krokek. During the rest of the year, he traveled widely to negotiate oil contracts – from Teheran to Bucharest to Tokyo. When Stalin needed a Westerner to supervise the building of a refinery in Baku, 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?

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 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.

“All you have to do,” Tikander said drily, “is quit doing business with the Germans.”

It was a simple solution, and, even better, it was exactly what Henry had asked him to do. But his brother had accused him of high crimes, and having his name removed wasn't going to appease Erickson's shame. He needed to show Henry and his family and everyone else that they'd underestimated his capacity for atonement.

“I want to go further,” Erickson told Tikander. “I want to go to Germany.”

Erickson volunteered to become an Allied agent. His target would be the Nazi oil industry. Henry had accused him of being small and greedy, so he would reply with an audacious gamble. Beyond the rightness of the work—helping to defeat Hitler—it was the size of the bet that appealed to Erickson. There was one other thing: He'd accept only $1 for his services. His detractors thought he'd gotten rich off blood money, so Erickson would work for practically nothing.

After a thorough interrogation, Tikander allowed Erickson to audition as a spy. He put the oilman in touch with two diplomats at the embassy, Walter Surrey and Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Sweden Herschel Johnson. These men, along with Tikander, would be Erickson's link to the OSS and Allied Bomber Command.

Together they outlined a mission that would send Erickson all over Germany and central Europe to locate the sources of the magical elixir with which Hitler was obsessed: the synthetic oil plants.

Erickson's response to Henry's letter would be stark: either his redemption or his death.