The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  The call he had taken disturbed him. He had told the caller there had been no one spotted near his house, no one hanging around his factory, no one asking questions about him. But he was worried. Miller? Who the hell was Miller? The assurances down the phone that the reporter would be taken care of only partly assuaged his anxiety. The seriousness with which the caller and his colleagues took the threat posed by Miller was indicated by the decision to send him a personal bodyguard the next day, to act as his chauffeur and stay with him until further notice.

  He drew the curtains of the study, shutting out the winter landscape. The thickly padded door cut out all sounds from the rest of the house. The only sound in the room was the crackle of fresh pine logs in the hearth, the cheerful glow framed by the great cast-iron fireplace with its wrought vine-leaves and curlicues, one of the fitments he had kept when he bought and modernised the house.

  The door opened and his wife put her head round.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she called.

  ‘Coming dear,’ said Eduard Roschmann.

  The next morning, Saturday, Oster and Miller were disturbed by the arrival of a party from Munich. The car contained Leon and Motti, the driver and another man who carried a black bag.

  When they reached the sitting room Leon said to the man with the bag, ‘You’d better get up to the bathroom and set out your gear.’

  The man nodded and went upstairs. The driver had remained in the car.

  Leon sat at the table and bade Oster and Miller take their places. Motti remained by the door, a camera with flash attachment in his hand.

  Leon passed a driving licence over to Miller. Where the photograph had been was blank.

  ‘That’s who you are going to become,’ said Leon. ‘Rolf Gunther Kolb, born June 18th, 1925. That would make you nineteen at the end of the war, almost twenty. And thirty-eight years old now. You were born and brought up in Bremen. You joined the Hitler Youth at the age of ten in 1935, and the SS in January 1944 at the age of eighteen. Both your parents are dead. They were killed in an air raid on Bremen docks in 1944.’

  Miller stared down at the driving licence in his hand.

  ‘What about his career in the SS?’ asked Oster. ‘At the moment we have reached something of a dead end.’

  ‘How is he so far?’ asked Leon. Miller might as well not have existed.

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Oster. ‘I gave him a two-hour interrogation yesterday and he could pass. Until someone starts asking for specific details of his career. Then he knows nothing.’

  Leon nodded for a while, examining some papers he had taken from his attaché case.

  ‘We don’t know Kolb’s career with the SS,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t have been very much, for he’s not on any wanted list and nobody has ever heard of him. In a way that’s just as well, for the chances are the Odessa have never heard of him either. But the disadvantage is, he has no reason to seek refuge and help from the Odessa unless he was being pursued. So we have invented a career for him. Here it is.’

  He passed the sheets over to Oster who began to read them. When he had finished he nodded.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘It all fits with the known facts. And it would be enough to get him arrested if he were exposed.’

  Leon grunted with satisfaction.

  ‘That’s what you have to teach him. Incidentally, we have found a guarantor for him. A man in Bremerhaven, a former SS colonel, is going on a sea cruise, starting February 16th. The man is now a bakery owner. When Miller presents himself, which must be after February 16th, he will have a letter from this man assuring the Odessa that Kolb, his employee, is genuinely a former SS man and genuinely in trouble. By that time the bakery owner will be on the high seas and uncontactable. By the way,’ he turned to Miller and passed a book across to him, ‘you can learn bakery as well. That’s what you have been since 1945, an employee in a bakery.’

  He did not mention that the bakery owner would be away only for four weeks, and that after that period Miller’s life would hang by a thread.

  ‘Now my friend the barber is going to change your appearance somewhat,’ Leon told Miller. ‘After that we’ll take a new photograph for the driving licence.’

  In the upstairs bathroom the barber gave Miller one of the shortest haircuts he had ever had. The white scalp gleamed through the stubble almost up to the crown of the head by the time he had finished. The rumpled look was gone, but he also looked older. A ruler-straight parting was scraped in the short hair on the left side of his head. His eyebrows were plucked until they almost ceased to exist.

  ‘Bare eyebrows don’t make a man look older,’ said the barber chattily, ‘but they make the age almost unguessable within six or seven years. There’s one last thing. You’re to grow a moustache. Just a thin one, the same width as your mouth. It adds years, you know. Can you do that in three weeks?’

  Miller knew the way the hair on his upper lip grew.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. He gazed back at his reflection. He looked in his mid-thirties. The moustache would add another four years.

  When they got downstairs Miller was stood up against a white sheet, held in place by Oster and Leon, and Motti took several full-face portraits of him.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the driving licence ready within three days.’

  The party left and Oster turned to Miller.

  ‘Right, Kolb,’ he said, having long ceased to refer to him in any other way, ‘you were trained at Dachau SS training camp, seconded to Flossenburg concentration camp in July 1944 and in April 1945 you commanded the squad that executed Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr. You also helped kill a number of the other army officers suspected by the Gestapo of complicity in the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. No wonder the authorities today would like to arrest you. Admiral Canaris and his men were not Jews. There can be no overlooking that. OK, let’s get down to work, Staff Sergeant.’

  The weekly meeting of the Mossad had reached its end when General Amit raised his hand and said, ‘There is just one last matter, though I regard it as of comparatively low importance. Leon has reported from Munich that he has for some time had under training a young German, an Aryan, who for some reason of his own has a grudge against the SS and is being prepared to infiltrate the Odessa.’

  ‘His motive?’ asked one of the men suspiciously.

  General Amit shrugged.

  ‘For reasons of his own, he wants to track down a certain former SS captain called Roschmann.’

  The head of the Office for the Countries of Persecution, a former Polish Jew, jerked his head up.

  ‘Eduard Roschmann? The Butcher of Riga?’

  ‘That’s the man.’

  ‘Phew. If we could get him, that would be an old score settled.’

  General Amit shook his head.

  ‘I have told you before, Israel is no longer in the retribution business. My orders are absolute. Even if the man finds Roschmann, there is to be no assassination. After the Ben Gal affair it would be the last straw on Adenauer’s back. The trouble now is that if any ex-Nazi dies in Germany, Israeli agents get the blame.’

  ‘So what about this young German?’ asked the Shabak chief.

  ‘I want to try and use him to identify any more Nazi scientists who might be sent out to Cairo this year. For us that is priority number one. I propose to send an agent over to Germany, simply to put the young man under surveillance. Just a watching brief, nothing else.’

  ‘You have such a man in mind?’

  ‘Yes,’ said General Amit. ‘He’s a good man, reliable. He’ll just follow the German and watch him, reporting back to me personally. He can pass for a German. He’s a Yekke. He came from Karlsruhe.’

  ‘What about Leon?’ asked someone else. ‘Will he not try to settle accounts on his own?’

  ‘Leon will do what he’s told,’ said General Amit angrily. ‘There are to be no more settling of accounts.’

  In Bayreuth that morning Miller was being
given another grilling by Alfred Oster.

  ‘OK,’ said Oster. ‘What are the words engraved on the hilt of the SS dagger?’

  ‘Blood and honour,’ replied Miller.

  ‘Right. When is the dagger presented to an SS man?’

  ‘At his passing-out parade from training camp,’ replied Miller.

  ‘Right. Repeat to me the oath of loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler.’

  Miller repeated it, word for word.

  ‘Repeat the blood oath of the SS.’

  Miller complied.

  ‘What is the significance of the emblem of the Death’s Head?’

  Miller closed his eyes and repeated what he had been taught.

  ‘The sign of the Death’s Head comes from distant Germanic mythology. It is the emblem of those groups of Teuton warriors who have sworn fealty to their leader and to each other, unto the grave and even beyond into Valhalla. Hence the skull and crossed bones, signifying the world beyond the grave.’

  ‘Right. Were all SS men automatically members of Death’s Head units?’

  ‘No. But the oath was the same.’

  Oster rose and stretched.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘I can’t think of anything else you might be asked in general terms. Now let’s get on to the specifics. This is what you would have to know about Flossenburg concentration camp, your first and only posting …’

  The man who sat in the window seat of the Olympic Airways flight from Athens to Munich seemed quiet and withdrawn.

  The German business man next to him, after several attempts at conversation, took the hint and confined himself to reading Playboy magazine. His next-door neighbour stared out of the window as the Aegean Sea passed beneath them and the airliner left the sunny spring of the eastern Mediterranean for the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites and the Bavarian Alps.

  The business man had at least elicited one thing from his companion. The traveller in the window seat was undoubtedly a German, his grasp of the language fluent and familiar, his knowledge of the country without fault. The business man travelling home after a sales mission to the Greek capital had not the slightest doubt that he was seated next to a fellow countryman.

  He could hardly have been more wrong. The man next to him had been born in Germany thirty-three years earlier, under the name of Josef Kaplan, son of a Jewish tailor, in Karlsruhe. Three years old when Hitler came to power, seven when his parents had been taken away in a black van, he had been hidden in an attic for another three years until, at the age of ten in 1940, he too had been discovered and taken away in a van. His early teens had been spent using the resilience and the ingenuity of youth to survive in a series of concentration camps until in 1945, with the suspicion of a wild animal burning in his eyes, he had snatched a thing called a Hershey bar from the outstretched hand of a man who spoke to him in a foreign language through his nose, and had run away to eat the offering in a corner of the camp before it was taken away from him.

  Two years later, weighing a few pounds more, aged seventeen and hungry as a rat, with that creature’s suspicion and mistrust of everyone and everything, he had come on a ship called the President Warfield, alias the Exodus, to a new shore many miles from Karlsruhe and Dachau.

  The passing years had mellowed him, matured him, taught him many things, given him a wife and two children, a commission in the Army, but never eliminated the hatred he felt for the country to which he was travelling that day. He had agreed to go, to swallow his feelings, to take up again as he had done twice before in the previous ten years, the façade of amiability and bonhomie that was necessary to effect his transformation back into a German.

  The other requirements had been provided by the Service: the passport in his breast pocket, the letters, cards and documentary paraphernalia of a citizen of a West European country, the underclothes, shoes, suits and luggage of a German commercial traveller in textiles.

  As the heavy and freezing clouds of Europe engulfed the plane he reconsidered his mission, fed into him in days and nights of briefing by the quiet-spoken colonel on the kibbutz that produced so little fruit and so many Israeli agents. To follow a man, to keep an eye on him, a young German four years his junior, while that man sought to do what several had tried and failed, to infiltrate the Odessa. To observe him and measure his success, to note the persons he contacted and was passed on to, check on his findings, ascertain if the German could trace the recruiter of the new wave of German scientists headed for Egypt to work on the rockets. Never to expose himself, never to take matters into his own hands. Then to report back with the sum total of what the young German had found out before he was ‘blown’ or discovered, one of which was bound to happen. He would do it; he did not have to enjoy doing it, that was not part of the requirement. Fortunately, no one required that he like becoming a German again. No one asked him to enjoy mixing with them, talking their language, smiling and joking with them. Had it been asked, he would have refused it. For he hated them all, the young reporter he was ordered to follow included. Nothing, he was certain, would ever change that.

  The following day Oster and Miller had their last visit from Leon. Apart from Leon and Motti, there was a new man, sun-tanned and fit looking, much younger than the others. Miller adjudged the new man to be in his mid-thirties. He was introduced simply as Josef. He said nothing throughout.

  ‘By the way,’ Motti told Miller, ‘I drove your car up here today. I’ve left it on a public parking lot down in the town, by the market square.’

  He tossed Miller the keys, adding. ‘Don’t use it when you go to meet the Odessa. For one thing it’s too noticeable, for another you’re supposed to be a bakery worker on the run after being spotted and identified as a former camp guard. Such a man would not have a Jaguar. When you go, travel by rail.’

  Miller nodded his agreement, but privately he regretted being separated from his beloved Jaguar.

  ‘Right. Here is your driving licence, complete with your photograph as you now look. You can tell anyone who asks that you drive a Volkswagen, but you have left it in Bremen, as the number could identify you to the police.’

  Miller scanned the driving licence. It showed himself with his short hair but no moustache. The one he now had could simply be explained as a precaution, grown since he was identified.

  ‘The man who, unbeknown to him, is your guarantor, left from Bremerhaven on a cruise ship on the morning tide. This is the former SS colonel, now a bakery-owner, and your former employer. His name is Joachim Eberhardt. Here is a letter from him to the man you are going to see. The paper is genuine, taken from his office. The signature is a perfect forgery. The letter tells its recipient that you are a good former SS man, reliable, now fallen on misfortune after being recognised, and it asks the recipient to help you acquire a new set of papers and a new identity.’

  Leon passed the letter across to Miller. He read it and put it back in its envelope.

  ‘Now seal it,’ said Leon. Miller did so.

  ‘Who’s the man I have to present myself to?’ he asked.

  Leon took a sheet of paper with a name and address on it.

  ‘This is the man,’ he said. ‘He lives in Nuremberg. We’re not certain what he was in the war, for he almost certainly has a new name. However, of one thing we are quite certain. He is very high up in the Odessa. He may have met Eberhardt, who is a big wheel in the Odessa in North Germany. So here is a photograph of Eberhardt the baker. Study it, in case your man asks for a description of him from you. Got that?’

  Miller looked at Eberhardt’s photograph and nodded.

  ‘When you are ready,’ he said, ‘I suggest a wait of a few days until Eberhardt’s ship is beyond the reach of ship-to-shore radio-telephone. We don’t want the man you will see to get through a telephone call to Eberhardt while the ship is still off the German coast. Wait till it’s in mid-Atlantic. I think you should probably present yourself on Thursday morning next.’

  Miller nodded.

  ‘All right. T
hursday it is.’

  ‘Two last things,’ said Leon. ‘Apart from trying to trace Roschmann, which is your desire, we also would like some information. We want to know who is now recruiting scientists to go to Egypt and develop Nasser’s rockets for him. The recruitment is being done by the Odessa, here in Germany. We need to know specifically who the new chief recruiting officer is. Secondly, stay in touch. Use public telephones and phone this number.’

  He passed a piece of paper across to Miller.

  ‘The number will always be manned, even if I am not there. Report in whenever you get anything.’

  Twenty minutes later the group was gone.

  In the back seat of the car on their way back to Munich Leon and Josef sat side by side, the Israeli agent hunched in his corner and silent. As they left the twinkling lights of Bayreuth behind them Leon nudged Josef with his elbow.

  ‘Why so gloomy?’ he asked. ‘Everything is going fine.’

  Josef glanced at him.

  ‘How reliable do you reckon this man Miller?’ he asked.

  ‘Reliable? He’s the best chance we have ever had for penetrating the Odessa. You heard Oster. He can pass for a former SS man in any company, provided he keeps his head.’

  Josef retained his doubts.

  ‘My brief was to watch him at all times,’ he grumbled. ‘I ought to be sticking to him when he moves, keeping an eye on him, reporting back on the men he is introduced to and their position in the Odessa. I wish I’d never agreed to let him go off alone and check in by phone when he thinks fit. Supposing he doesn’t check in?’

  Leon’s anger was barely controlled. It was evident they had been through this argument before.

  ‘Now listen one more time. This man is my discovery. His infiltration into Odessa was my idea. He’s my agent. I’ve waited years to get someone where he is now – a non-Jew. I’m not having him exposed by someone tagging along behind him.’

  ‘He’s an amateur. I’m a pro,’ growled the agent.