It did not occur to the members of the E.R.R. staff that their every move was watched. A courageous Frenchwoman named Rose Valland had ingratiated herself with the “right people” and had become a trusted member of the staff. During the months she worked at the museum, she had two main objectives. One was to sabotage the daily work as much as possible by making intentionally stupid mistakes and by encouraging the French laborers, engaged by the Germans, to do likewise. The other, and far and away the more important, was the compilation of a file, complete with biographical data and photographs, of the German personnel at the Jeu de Paume. How she ever accomplished this is a mystery. The colonel said that Mlle. Valland, now a captain in the French Army, was working with the official French committee for Fine Arts. She had already provided our Versailles office with a copy of her E.R.R. file. Later in the summer I met Captain Valland, a robust woman with gray hair and the most penetrating brown eyes I have ever seen. I asked her how she had ever had the courage to do what she had done. She said with a laugh, “I could never do it again. The Gestapo followed me home every night.” After regaling us with this account of the E.R.R., Colonel Webb whetted our appetites still further with an outline of what his deputy, Charlie Kuhn, was up to. As the result of a “signal,” he had taken off by plane for Germany, and at the moment was either in the eastern part of Bavaria or over the Austrian border, trying to trace two truckloads of paintings and tapestries which two high-ranking Nazis had spirited away from the Laufen salt mine at the eleventh hour. Latest information indicated that the finest things from the Vienna Museum had been stored at Laufen, which was in the mountains east of Salzburg; and it was further believed that the “top cream” of the stuff—the Breughels, Titians and Velásquezes—was in those two trucks. These pictures were world-famous and consequently not marketable, so there was the appalling possibility that the highjackers had carried them off with the idea of destroying them—Hitler’s mad Götterdämmerung idea. There was also the possibility that they intended to hold the pictures as a bribe against their own safety. Back at the hotel that night, Craig and I reviewed the events of the day. What we had learned from Colonel Webb was only an affirmation of the exciting things we had gleaned from the reports in the London office. We were desperately anxious to get into Germany where we could be a part of all these unbelievable adventures instead of hearing about them secondhand. Strict censorship was still in force, so we weren’t able to share our exuberance with our respective families in letters home. But we could at least exult together over the fantastic future shaping up before us.