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.