ARMED FORCES: The Case of the Missing Major

On the Italian front in December 1944, word reached OSS headquarters in Siena that Major William V. Holohan, chief of a secret mission far behind the German lines, had disappeared; the Army marked him down as one more brave man lost in the service of his country. Last week, 6½ years later, the Defense Department explained Major Holohan’s disappearance: it was cold-blooded murder by four of his subordinates. The Defense Department’s story was backed up point by point by the confessions of three of the accused men and by the recovery of Holohan’s poisoned and bullet-riddled body. The fourth man, Lieut. Aldo Icardi, called the ringleader in the plot by the other three, flatly denied his guilt, stuck to his story that the major had died at the hands of German and Fascist troops.

The case took interest and importance from the fact that Holohan’s death resulted in North Italian Communists’ getting thousands of guns which backed their bid for political control of the area after the war. Some of these arms are still turning up when police raid the secret arsenals of the underground Communist army.

And the case took a horrifying piquancy from the fact that the U.S. Government accused two U.S. soldiers of murdering their superior officer; yet, the Government suppressed the facts for months, and now says it cannot legally prosecute the men whom it accuses.

Hide & Seek. In September 1944, while Allied armies inched painfully up the Italian boot, three Americans from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services parachuted down on Mt. Mottarone in northern Italy, 100 miles beyond the battle lines. Big cargo chutes floated down arms and a powerful radio. Their mission, which bore the code name “Chrysler,” was to make arrangements with partisan groups—Communists, Socialists, Catholics, independents—for the supply of arms. The U.S. recognized the value of partisans who killed Germans behind the lines, but some U.S. officials also realized that certain of the partisans were more interested in fighting for the postwar control of the area. Holohan saw his job as getting U.S. arms to those who were killing Germans.

“Chrysler’s” team was ill assorted: Holohan, 40, was a big (6 ft. 2 in.) stony-faced bachelor, a lawyer by profession and a peacetime cavalry officer in the Reserves; Icardi, 23, was a slim, daring, bright-eyed young University of Pittsburgh law student; the third American dropped on Mt. Mottarone was Sergeant Carl G. LoDolce, 22, their quiet, plodding radioman, a factory worker before the war. Of the three, only Lieut. Icardi spoke the dialect of the province.

Partisans met them when they hit the ground. There were handshakes, proud speeches by the partisans, quiet replies from the Americans. Then with their guides, the Chrysler mission moved off into the darkness.

For more than two months, they roamed the hills around Lake Orta, 45 miles northwest of Milan, checking on partisan groups, radioing back coded reports to OSS headquarters in Siena, always playing a nerve-racking hide & seek with the enemy. One night, they lay flattened out in a rainswept field listening to Nazi convoys splashing down the road 100 yards away; for several days, they were hidden in a church altar vault while German troopers camped below.

The Villa by the Lake. The team found a good hideout, a vacant, 22-room villa, screened by trees on the west shore of Lake Orta. From there, the Chrysler mission asked Siena for its first airdrop. Two Army C-47s flew over, dumped out cascades of mortars, rifles, Tommy guns and ammunition. Holohan had arranged that this first drop was to go to nonCommunists. Instead, the Communists tried to grab the arms. Holohan was furious, but agreed to a meeting with the Red leader. The man he faced was Vincenzo Moscatelli, now a member of the Italian Senate.

After his brush with Moscatelli, Holohan resolved to order no more arms drops until he was quite sure into whose hands they would fall. Icardi disagreed with this cautious policy, and the issue sharpened a growing conflict between the two men. Holohan, cold and curt, puttered around the villa. Icardi, dashing and adventurous, liked to get around the countryside, turn up at bars and dances. Holohan insisted that the mission follow orders to wear U.S. uniforms, so that if captured they could not legally be executed as spies.

Up to this point, the story of danger, difficulty and friction can be matched by dozens of others in the secret annals of operations behind enemy lines. The account of what happened next is drawn from the confessions of three men, confessions believed by the Italian police and the U.S. Defense Department.

Lieut. Icardi told Sergeant LoDolce that the trigger-happy Communists were losing patience with the mission. If it were not for the major, the mission could forget about politics, start sending back vital military information and getting weapons that would save thousands of American lives. Icardi spoke of sending Holohan “to Switzerland without his shoes”—a partisan expression meaning to kill him.

The idea grew. Icardi and LoDolce talked it over with their two partisan attendants, a slim, wiry workman named Guiseppe Manini, and a slow-witted peasant by the name of Gualtiero Tozzini, known as “Pupo,” the baby.

Cyanide in the Soup. The major liked minestrone. On the night of Dec. 6, Tozzini fixed a big pot of the soup. Holohan sat down with his back to the stove, and Manini slipped potassium cyanide into Holohan’s bowl. Holohan took a few spoonfuls. The soup burned, he said. The major doggedly ate on, said that he felt sick, and reeled upstairs to vomit.

Sitting before the fireplace, Icardi and LoDolce decided not to take a chance on the poison. They tossed a coin. LoDolce lost. He was handed a 9-mm. Beretta automatic, and crept up the stairs. The others followed behind. LoDolce shoved open the door. “What’s the matter?” asked Holohan, sitting up in bed. LoDolce fired two shots into the major’s head.

The murderers worked swiftly. While Icardi wrapped a towel around Holohan’s head to stop the blood, the two partisans wrapped the body in a sleeping bag, stuffed in the major’s clothes and guns, and lugged their burden down to the lake. Manini had a boat waiting. The partisans weighted the bag with a stone and shoved off. About 100 yards from shore, they slipped the body of Major William V. Holohan into the icy waters of Lake Orta.

Icardi took command of the Chrysler mission, radioed back that Holohan had been lost in an enemy attack. Between then and the end of the war, 50 airdrops floated down on the Orta district. During that period, LoDolce had a nervous breakdown and was smuggled out to Switzerland.

After the war, the OSS and the Army began a routine investigation of Major Holohan’s disappearance, officially listed him as killed in action.

The First Confessions. One man did not accept the story of William Holohan’s death. His brother, Joseph R. Holahan,* 51, a Wall Street stockbroker, kept looking for more details. He met Icardi after the war, and heard a plausible story of the Nazi attack in which the major was supposedly lost. Icardi showed him a picture of the Chrysler mission team, offered to go back to Italy with him sometime to find the body. Still Joe Holahan was not satisfied. He wanted to find his brother’s body. He wrote letters to the OSS, the Army, to Italian partisans and Italian police.

In January 1949, a young Italian carabinière named Lieut. Elio Albieri, commanding the Arona station near Lake Orta, became interested in the case. He questioned the Chrysler mission’s two helpers. In March 1950, Tozzini, caught in contradictions, confessed first. Manini confirmed him in almost every detail.

In June, Albieri grappled for Major Holohan’s body. At the exact spot pointed out by the two partisans, his net hauled up a heavy bundle. Inside, preserved by cold lake water, was the body of Major Holohan, two bullets from a 9-mm. Beretta in his skull, traces of cyanide in his intestines. Tozzini confessed the name of the man to whom he had sold the pistol. It was found. The bullets that killed Holohan had been fired from it.

In Rochester, N.Y., the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and local police picked up Carl LoDolce, who now has a pretty wife, two children, and a job as an engineer. He denied everything. After a lie-detector test showed him nervous, he confessed. His story jibed with the one told by Manini and Tozzini.

Hints & Repudiations. At that point, amazingly, U.S. investigation seems to have stopped. In Washington, the Judge Advocate General’s office told Army investigators that the two Americans, LoDolce and Icardi, could not be tried by a military court because they had been discharged from the Army. Since the crime was committed outside the U.S., no civil court could try them. (This mile-wide loophole has since been plugged, but the law is not retroactive.)

Lieut. Icardi, after the war, finished law school at the University of Pittsburgh, went to Peru for further legal study, several months ago returned to the U.S., and was working for Pan-American Grace Airways in New York when the case broke last week. After the three confessions naming him had been made, he was never officially questioned about the case. In the past year, stories of how Holohan died appeared in the Italian press, and there were a few very incomplete hints in the U.S. press. But the details might never have been told if True magazine had not got on the scent, pulled the story together. Last week, when an advance copy of True reached Washington, the Defense Department dashed into print with a story it could bottle up no longer. The Rochester police then made public LoDolce’s year-old confession. Last week he partially repudiated the confession, saying that it was “incomplete” and adding, “The facts will prove that I am completely innocent.” Icardi coolly stuck to his original story. Said he: “Major Holohan disappeared … I am the victim of enemies in Italy . . . The whole ‘cloak & dagger’ story is untrue.”

Manini and Tozzini are awaiting trial in Italy, and last week the Italian government considered asking that LoDolce and Icardi be extradited from the U.S. to be tried with them.

Whereupon Icardi made a point which, whether he is guilty or innocent, has considerable force. Said he: “It is unthinkable that an American espionage agent should be brought to trial by the very enemy against which he fought.” Icardi said that he would fight extradition, but was ready and eager to stand trial in a U.S. court. He even offered to go back into the Army to make that possible. The Government, however, still said that no U.S. court could try him, even if he went back into the Army.

There this week, as Bill Holohan’s body came home for burial, stood the strange case of the missing major.

* The names are spelled differently because of a mixup in school records.