The Company

by Robert Littell

  On paper the operation looked propitious.

  Spink drove the Ford along a winding unpaved road through endless fields planted with winter wheat to an isolated dairy farm. Pulling up in front of a stone barn, they could see a young man with a baby face and blond hair drawing water from a well. He greeted Spink with a broad smile, pounding him on the back. “When you sending me home to my Carpathians?” he asked eagerly.

  “Pretty soon now,” Spink promised.

  Spink explained that he had come out to introduce Ebby (for security reasons, he used a pseudonym), who was going to be working with SUMMERSAULT in devising a legend and fabricating the official Soviet documents to go with it. “I got a birthday present for you, son,” he added. With Alyosha dancing behind him excitedly, he opened the Ford’s trunk and gave SUMMERSAULT a Minox camera disguised as a cigarette lighter, and a book-size battery-powered shortwave radio with a built-in Morse key and an external antenna that could be strung between trees; the transmitter, German war surplus, had a range of eight hundred kilometers.

  When Spink headed back to Frankfurt, Ebby and SUMMERSAULT circled each other cautiously. As a prelude to creating a workable legend, Ebby began to walk Alyosha through his biography; when they constructed a legend they wanted as much of it as possible to be true. At first, the young Ukrainian seemed reluctant to tell his story and Ebby had to worm details out of him: his childhood on the banks of the Styr River in Lutsk with his father deeply involved in a clandestine circle of Ukrainian nationalists; an adolescence filled with terror and suffering when his father and he wound up fighting against the Russians (“because they are Russians, not because they are Communists”) in Vlasov’s Army of Liberation. When Alyosha finally came to talk about his father’s execution by the Russians, his eyes brimmed with tears and he had difficulty finishing his sentences. Ebby’s eyes misted over, too, and he found himself telling Alyosha about the death of his father, a legendary OSS officer who had parachuted into Bulgaria at the end of the war to pry that country out of the Axis alliance. Winstrom Ebbitt had been betrayed by a supposed partisan and tortured by the Germans until he had agreed to radio back false information; he had included in the report a prearranged signal to indicate he was being “played back” by German intelligence. After a while the Germans realized that the OSS hadn’t taken the bait. On the day the Red Army crossed the Danube into Bulgaria, Ebbitt had been hauled out on a stretcher—because both of his ankles had been broken—to a soccer field on the edge of Sofia, lashed to a goal post and bayonetted to death by a German firing squad that was short of ammunition. One of the executioners, on trial for war crimes after the end of hostilities, remembered a curious detail: the American OSS officer had died with a smile on his lips.

  The telling of the story broke the ice between the two young men and, for the better part of two weeks, they became inseparable companions. During sessions that went on into the early hours of the morning, on long walks through the fields of waist-high winter wheat, Alyosha related the details of his life to the person he came to call “my American brother.” Using the main lines of the Ukrainian’s biography, filling in the gaps with plausible fictions (Alyosha had to account for the years in Vlasov’s army and the post-war years in Western DP camps), Ebby painstakingly constructed a persona that could pass all but the most careful examination by trained KGB investigators. Seeing that Alyosha was chafing at the bit, he took him for a night on the town in Frankfurt that included a visit to a local brothel (paid for with a pair of nylon stockings from the station’s PX) and a meal in a black-market restaurant, where a dinner and a bottle of Rhine wine could be had in exchange for several packs of American cigarettes.

  Back at the farm Alyosha polished his Morse “fist,” memorized the silhouettes of Soviet planes from flash cards and plowed through thick briefing books to bring himself up to date on life in the Soviet Union—trolley fares, the price of a loaf of black bread, the latest regulations on changing jobs or traveling between cities, the most recent Russian slang expressions. Ebby, meanwhile, began the last phase of the legend-building: creating the Soviet documents that would support the legend. Which is how he came in contact with the shadowy West German intelligence “Org” run by Reinhard Gehlen.

  Over lunch in the “Casino,” a dollar-a-day mess in one of the enormous I.G. Farben buildings, Tony Spink told Ebby more about the man whose unofficial Company code name was “Strange Bedfellow.” General Gehlen, it seemed, had been the commander of Fremde Heere Ost, a World War II German intelligence unit that had targeted the Soviet Union. With the war winding down, Gehlen had microfilmed his archives (including invaluable profiles of Soviet political and military leaders), destroyed the originals and buried fifty-two cases of files near an alpine hut in the Bavarian mountains. “The microfilmed files were Gehlen’s life insurance policy,” Spink explained. “He put out feelers to Western intelligence and offered to give his files to the Americans.”

  “In exchange for?”

  One of the Casino waiters, recruited from a nearby Displaced Persons camp, cleared off the empty plates and carefully emptied the butts in the ashtray into an envelope, which he put in the pocket of his white jacket. Spink made sure the waiter was out of earshot before he answered the question.

  “Gehlen wanted to set up a West German intelligence entity, with him as its Führer, and he expected the CIA to fund it. There was a lot of soul searching. Putting a German general back in business—especially one who had remained loyal to Der Führer to the bitter end—rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Sure, we wanted his files and his assets, but Gehlen came with the package. Take it or leave it, that was his attitude. To make a long story shorter, the Cold War was starting to heat up and Gehlen’s microfilms contained a gold mine of information on the enemy. Besides which Gehlen had stay-behind teams along the railway line from Vologda to Moscow, he claimed to be in contact with survivors of Vlasov’s army scattered across the Oriol Mountains, he could identify anti-Soviet Ukrainian units around Kiev and Lvov, he even had assets in the part of Germany occupied by Soviet armies.” Spink shrugged philosophically. “Without Gehlen and his microfilm we would have been up shit’s creek as far as the Ruskies were concerned.” He pulled two cigarettes from a pack and left them on the table as a tip. “I know how your old man bought it, Ebby. So here’s some unsolicited advice: grit your teeth and get the job done.”

  The next afternoon Ebby checked out a car from the motor pool and drove the two hundred miles down to the village of Pullach, some eight miles from downtown Munich. Arriving at dark, he found Heilmannstrasse, with a ten-foot-high gray concrete wall running along one side, then turned and followed the narrow road that ran parallel to the thick hedges with the electrified fence behind it until he came to the small guardhouse manned by sentries wearing green Bavarian gameskeepers’ uniforms. A naked electric bulb illuminated a sign in four languages that read: “SUD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIE-VERWERTUNGS GmbH—Switch off your headlights and switch on your inside lights.” Only when Ebby had complied did one of the guards approach the car. Ebby cracked the window and passed him his American passport and Company ID card. The guard took them back to the house, dialed a number and read the documents to someone on the other end. Moments later a jeep roared up to the gate and a lean, balding man with a distinctive military bearing pushed through a turnstile and let himself into the passengers seat of Ebby’s car. “I am Doktor Uppmann of the Records Department,” he announced. He never offered his hand. “You may switch on the headlights now.”

  “What about my ID?” Ebby asked.

  “They will be returned to you when you leave. I will accompany you until then.”

  The gate in the electrified fence swung open and Ebby followed Herr Uppmann’s directions through the Compound. “This is your first visit here, yes?” Uppmann commented.

  “Yes,” Ebby said. He could feel a tingling at the back of his neck.

  “We are, be assured, eager to be of service to our American friends,” his guide s
aid, gesturing with an open palm toward a lighted road to the right.

  Ebby turned into the road. “Does anyone fall for the South German Industries Utilization Company sign back at the gate?” he inquired.

  The German managed a thin smile. “Doktor Schneider”—Gehlen’s cover name—“has a hypothesis: If you want to keep a big secret, disguise it as a boring and inconsequential secret rather then try to convince people it is not a secret at all. You would be astonished how many Germans think we steal industrial secrets from the Americans or the French.”

  Following his guide’s hand signals, Ebby pulled up on the side of a long one-story building. Doktor Uppmann produced a metal ring with half a dozen keys attached to it. With one he turned off the alarm system, with another he opened the two locks on a heavy metal door. Ebby followed him down a lighted corridor. “How long have you been here?” he asked, waving toward the Compound.

  “We moved in soon after the end of hostilities. Except for some underground vaults that were added, the compound existed much as you see it today. It was originally built for SS officers and their families and by good fortune survived your bombers.” Uppmann let himself into a lighted office and locked the door behind them. Looking around, Ebby took in the sturdy furniture and the gray walls encrusted with squashed insects. He noticed an American poster taped to the back of the door. It read: “Watched from a safe distance an atomic explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Ebby asked his guide.

  Doktor Uppmann looked flustered. “It is merely a joke.”

  “I have heard it said a German joke is no laughing matter,” Ebby muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  Uppmann crouched in front of a large safe and fiddled with the dial until the door clicked open. From a shelf in the safe he withdrew a manila folder. He swung the safe’s door closed and spun the dial to make sure it was locked, then, straightening, emptied the contents of the manila folder onto a table. “All of these were fabricated by the Abwehr in the last months of the great struggle against Bolshevism,” Uppmann informed his visitor. “They are first-class forgeries, in some ways superior to the documents we fabricated earlier in the war. Many of the agents we dropped behind Bolshevik lines were executed because we made the error of using our own stainless steel staples and not the Russian staples which rust after a very short period of time. You Americans have a saying we Germans appreciate—live and learn. Take a close look at the stamps—they are small masterpieces. Only a Russian trained in credentials could distinguish them from the real thing.” He slid the documents across the table, one by one. “An internal passport for the Ukrainian Republic, a labor book, a military status book, an officer’s identity book, a Ukrainian ration book. When filling in the documents you must bear in mind certain Russian idiosyncracies. Whereas the internal passport, the military status and officer’s identity books would normally be filled in by secretaries with a more or less elaborate bureaucratic penmanship, the labor book would be signed by the factory managers who, if they rose from the ranks, might be quite illiterate and would scratch their initials in place of a readable signature. There is also the matter of which inks are used in Russia. But I am confident your experts in Frankfurt are familiar with these details, Herr Ebbitt.”

  Herr Doktor Uppmann led Ebby to a lounge at the end of the corridor. Waving him toward an easy chair, he fetched a bottle of three-star French cognac and two small glasses from a painted Bavarian cabinet. He filled them to the brim and handed one to Ebby. “Prosit,” he said, smiling, carefully clicking glasses. “To the next war—this time we get them together.”

  Ebby, trembling with anger, rose to his feet and set the glass down on a table without drinking. “I must tell you, Herr Doktor Uppmann—” He took a deep breath to control his temper.

  Uppmann cocked his head. “You must tell me what, Herr Ebbitt? That your father was killed in the war? I see you are surprised to discover I am familiar with your pedigree. As a matter of absolute routine we perform background checks on all visitors to the compound. My father, too, was a casualty of the war—he was taken captive at Stalingrad and did not survive the long march through the snow to the prison camp. My younger brother, Ludwig, stepped on a land mine and returned from the war with both of his legs amputated above the knees. My mother cares for him at our family estate in the Black Forest.”

  Ebby murmured, “Did you know?”

  “Did I know what?”

  “Did you know about the Final Solution?”

  The German rested a finger along the bridge of his nose. “Of course not.”

  Ebby said, “How could you not know? A little girl named Anne Frank hiding in an attic in Amsterdam wrote in her diary that the Jews were being packed off in cattle cars. How come she knew and you didn’t?”

  “I was not involved with the Jewish question. I did then what I do now—I fought Bolsheviks. I served on the intelligence staff of General Gehlen—three and one-half years on the Russian front. One thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days, thirty thousand six hundred hours in purgatory! Bolshevism is the common enemy, Herr Ebbitt. If we had had the good sense to join forces earlier your father and my father might still be alive, the Bolsheviks would not have swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe as well as a large portion of Greater Germany—“

  “You swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe before the Bolsheviks—Poland, the Sudetenland, Yugoslavia.”

  Uppmann bridled. “We created a buffer between the Christian West and the atheistic Bolsheviks.” He turned to stare out the window at the lighted streets of the Compound. “Hitler,” he whispered, his hollow voice drifting back over a shoulder, “betrayed Germany. He confused the priorities—he was more concerned with eliminating the Jews than eliminating the Bolsheviks.” Uppmann turned back abruptly to face his visitor and spoke with quiet emotion. “You make the mistake of judging us without knowing what really happened, Herr Ebbitt. My class—the German military class—despised the crude corporal but we agreed with his goals. After the Versailles Diktat we Germans were a Volk ohne Raum—a nation without space to develop. I tell you frankly, German patriots were seduced by Hitler’s denunciation of the odious Versailles Treaty, we were drawn to his promise of Lebensraum for the Third Reich, we shared his passionate anti-Bolshevism. Our mistake was to see Hitler’s chancellorship as a passing phase in chaotic German politics. Do you know what Herr Hindenburg said after he met Hitler for the first time? I shall tell you what he said. ‘Germany could never be ruled by a Bohemian corporal.’ That is what he said.” Uppmann threw back his head and gulped down the entire glass of cognac. Then he poured himself a refill. “I personally saw Hitler at the end in his bunker—Herr Gehlen sent me to deliver an appreciation of the Russian offensive against Berlin. You cannot imagine…a stooped figure with a swollen face, one eye inflamed, sat hunched in a chair. His hands trembled. He tried without success to conceal the twitching of his left arm. When he walked to the map room he dragged his left leg behind him. The one we called the Angel of Death, the Braun woman, was present also: pale, pretty, frightened to die and afraid not to. And what did Hitler have to offer the German people at this tragic hour? He issued an order, I myself heard him, to record the sound of tanks rolling over roads, cut gramophone records and distribute them to the front line commands to play over loudspeakers for the Russians. We were reduced to stopping the Bolsheviks with gramophone records, Herr Ebbitt. This will never—I repeat to you the word never—happen again.”

  Ebby covered his mouth with a palm to keep from speaking. Herr Doktor Uppmann took this as a sign of sympathy for the story he had told. “You maybe begin to see things in the new light.”

  “No!” Ebby closed the gap between him and the German. “It makes me want to throw up. You didn’t wage war, Doktor Uppmann, you inflicted holocausts. Your solutions to Germany’s problems were Final Solutions.”

  Uppmann
appeared to address his words directly to a photograph of Gehlen hanging on the wall. “The Jews won the war and then wrote the history of the war. This number of six million—they picked it out of a hat and the victors swallowed it to diabolize Germany.”

  “The only thing left of your thousand-year Reich, Herr Doktor Uppmann, is the memory of the crimes you committed—and the memory will last a thousand years. It makes me sick to my stomach to be on the same side as you—to be in the same room with you. If you will conduct me to the main gate—“

  The German stiffened. A muscle in his neck twitched. “The sooner you are gone from here the sooner we can get on with the struggle against Bolshevism, Herr Ebbitt.” He downed the last of his cognac and flung the empty glass against a wall, shattering it into pieces. Crunching the shards under foot, he stalked from the room.

  The official complaint was not long in working its way up the German chain of command and back down the American chain of command. Summoned to explain what had happened, Ebby appeared before a three-man board of inquiry. The Wiz came up from Vienna to sit in on the hearing. Ebby made no effort to water down what the officers in Frankfurt Station were calling “The Affair.” It turned out that Ebby had punctured the abscess. Company officers across Germany heard the story on the grapevine and slipped him memos and Ebby boiled them down to an indictment, which he read aloud to the board of inquiry. “When General Gehlen was allowed to get back into the business of intelligence,” he began, “he agreed in writing not to employ former Gestapo officers or war criminals. Yet he has surrounded himself with ex-Nazis, all of whom are listed on his masthead under false identities.”