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THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH
On January 5, 1946, U.S. military intelligence officers under the command of Colonel William Weaver of General Pattonβs G-2 staff were sent to Passau to make arrests. Instead, the agents were murdered and the house in which they were staying was burned. One agent, Lieutenant William H. Spector, survived. Hospitalized with a kidney stone, Spector narrowly missed the massacre at Passau. Vowing to avenge his slain fellow officers, Spector was nonplussed to find that the entire affair was hushed up on orders of superior officers who declared it a βsecurity issue.β Spector did learn that one of the men involved with the stolen arms as well as the agentsβ deaths was a Romanian national named Robert Abramovici. Abramovici later changed his name to Robert Adam and started an arms company called Intermecco Socomex, which became closely associated with the CIAβs arms company, Interarmco. The arms deals in Palestine were handled by Joseph Beidas and Eduardo Baroudi and his brothers, who sold weapons to both Arabs and Jews. Baroudi later became a vice president of Intrabank, based in Beirut, Lebanon, a major conduit for black market funds. Millionaires were made immediately after the war by both war surplus and black market arms deals. βBut none were to achieve the profitability of ODESSA, whose agents ranged throughout Europe and even behind the Iron Curtain,β explained Manning, adding: They bought and sold surplus American arms to Arab buyers seeking to strengthen the military capabilities of Egypt and other Middle Eastern Arab nations. Palestine was to be partitioned into a Jewish homeland, and they intended to destroy it at birth. But now, Jewish buyers, funded from America and elsewhere, entered the marketplace. They were barred from purchasing guns and American surplus P-51 Mustang fighter planes by President Truman, and their only recourse for survival was to trade on the European black market, which, unknown to them, was rapidly coming under the control of ODESSA agents. However, the Jewish agencyβs buyers might have purchased from the devil himself if it meant survival of the small, defenseless nation, just come into being on May 14, 1947.