The Company

by Robert Littell

  “I assume you are prepared to name names,” snapped the CIA officer presiding over the hearing.

  “I can name names, yes. There are SS Obersturmführers Franz Goring and Hans Sommer. Sommer’s name will ring a bell—he got into trouble with his Gestapo superiors for organizing the 1941 burning of seven Paris synagogues. There is SS Sturmbannführer Fritz Schmidt, who was involved in the executions of slave labor workers at the Friedrich Ott camp near Kiel in 1944. There is Franz Alfred Six, the SS Brigadeführer of Section VII of Himmler’s RSHA, convicted at Nuremberg to twenty years imprisonment for having ordered executions of hundreds of Jews when he commanded a Jajdkommando in July and August 1941; he was released after four years and immediately employed by Gehlen’s Org. There is Standartenführer Emil Augsburg, who headed a section in Adolf Eichmann’s department handling the so-called Jewish problem. My guide when I turned up at Gehlen’s compound goes by the name of Doktor Uppmann. His real name is Gustav Pohl. He was a staff officer in Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East but he wore second hat—he was the German Foreign Office’s liaison to the SS during the invasion of Russia. According to evidence presented at Nuremberg, Pohl participated in the creation of the SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads that shot Jews, including women and children, as well as Commissars, into the graves that the condemned had been forced to dig.”

  At the side of the room Frank Wisner appeared to be dozing in a wooden chair tilted back against a wall. “Now I did warn you, Ebby,” he called out, his eyes still closed. “You can’t say I didn’t. I warned you I’d kick ass when things didn’t work out the way I thought they ought to.” The Wiz righted his chair and came ambling across the room. “I’m ’bout to kick ass, Ebby. Let me fill you in on some facts of life—you know who the OSS officer was who negotiated with Gehlen to get hold of his goddamned microfilms? It was me, Ebby. I negotiated with him. I swallowed my pride and I swallowed my bile and I swallowed whatever scruples the weak-kneed crowd came up with and I made a deal with one devil the better to fight another devil. Do you really believe we don’t know that Gehlen employs ex-Nazis? Come off it, Ebby—we pick up the tab over in Pullach. Jesus Christ Almighty, here you got a Joe ’bout to jump out of an aeroplane into Communist Russia and you suddenly have qualms about where you’re getting the ID your Joe needs to avoid a firing squad. Myself, I’d crawl through dog shit on all fours and kiss Hermann Goering’s fat ass if he could supply me with what my Joe needed to survive. In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head, Ebby? In Berlin Station you got all hot under the collar because Harvey Torriti—who happens to be one of the most competent officers in the field—needs a ration of booze to get through the day. In Frankfurt Station you get all hot under the collar because of the company the Company keeps. Didn’t your Daddy ever teach you that the enemy of your enemy is your friend? And while we’re on the subject of your Daddy let me tell you something else. Before he parachuted into Bulgaria he was hanging out in Madrid doing deals with Spanish fascists to get the skinny on German raw material shipments. Hell, your Daddy was made of harder stuff than his son, that’s for damn sure. So which way you gonna jump, boy? You gonna go all out for your Joe or you gonna fill our ears with slop about the occasional ex-Nazi in the woodpile?”

  In a large corner office in “L” building next to the Reflecting Pool, James Angleton leafed through the day’s field reports clamped between the metal covers of the top-secret folder.

  “Anything happening I need to write home ab-b-bout, Jimbo?” asked his friend Adrian, the MI6 liaison man in Washington.

  Angleton plucked a sheet from the folder and slid it across the blotter. Stirring a whiskey and branch water with one of the wooden tongue depressors he’d swiped from a doctor’s office, Kim Philby leaned over the report and sniffed at it. “Smells top secret,” he said with a snicker. He read it quickly, then read it a second time more slowly. A whistle seeped through his front teeth. “You want a second opinion? We should have gotten round to this kind of shenanigans months ago. If there really is a Ukrainian resistance movement in the Carpathians we’d be b-b-bloody fools not to hook up with them.”

  “Do me a favor, Adrian, keep this under your hat until we hear our man’s safely on the ground,” Angleton said.

  “Ayatollah Angleton’s every wish is his servant’s command,” Philby shot back, bowing obsequiously toward his friend. They both laughed and, clinking glasses, sat back to polish off their drinks.

  SUMMERSAULT had to shout to be heard over the roar of the C-47’s engines. “I thank you, I thank President Truman, I thank America for sending me back. If my father sees me now, for sure he turns over in his grave—his son Alyosha comes home in a plane where he is the only passenger.”

  Ebby had brought SUMMERSAULT to the secret air strip in the American zone of Germany at sunset to meet the two pilots, Czech airmen who had flown Spitfires during the Battle of Britain. The C-47 had been “sheep-dipped”—stripped of all its markings—and fitted with extra fuel tanks under the wings for the round trip to the Ukrainian Carpathians and back. An Air Force sergeant had personally folded the main parachute and the emergency chute into their packs and had shown the young Ukrainian how to tighten the straps over his shoulder blades. “The plane’s going to descend to six hundred feet for the drop,” he instructed Alyosha, who had seen training films but had never jumped himself. “When the yellow light comes on, you position yourself at the open door. When the green light comes on, you jump. Remember to count to five before you pull the rip cord. Count slow-like. One one-hundredth. Two one-hundredth. Like that, awright?”

  “Awright,” Alyosha had replied, imitating the sergeant’s New York accent.

  Ebby had helped SUMMERSAULT lug his gear out to the plane—the heavy parachute pack, the small suitcase (containing worn Russian clothing, the shortwave radio and several dozen German wristwatches that could be used to bribe people), a lunchbox with sandwiches and beer. Now, with the engines revving, Ebby carefully removed the poison capsule from a matchbox and forced it through the tiny rip in the fabric under SUMMERSAULT’s collar. He wrapped his arms around his Joe in a bear hug and yelled into his ear, “Good luck to you, Alyosha.” He would have said more if he could have trusted himself to speak.

  SUMMERSAULT grinned back. “Good luck to both of us and lousy luck to Joe Stalin!”

  Moments later the plane climbed into the night sky and, banking as it gained altitude, disappeared into the east. Ebby used a base bicycle to peddle over to the Quonset hut that served as the flight center. If everything went according to plan the C-47 would be droning in for a landing in roughly six hours. The Czech pilots were under strict orders to maintain radio silence; the hope was that the Russians would take the flight for one of the aerial surveillance missions that regularly cut across the “denied areas” in a great rainbow arc. An Air Force duty officer brought Ebby a tray filled with warmed Spam and dehydrated mashed potatoes and offered him the use of a cot in a back room. He lay in the darkness, unable to cat-nap because of the disjointed thoughts tearing through his brain. Had he and Spink overlooked anything? The labels in Alyosha’s clothing—they were all Russian. The soles on his shoes—Russian too. The wristwatches—anyone who had served in a Russian unit in Germany (Alyosha’s military status book bore the forged signature of an officer who was dead) could explain away a packet of stolen wristwatches. The radio and the one-time pads and the Minox camera—they would be buried immediately after SUMMERSAULT sent word that he had landed safely. But what if he broke an ankle while landing? What if he was knocked unconscious and some peasants turned him in to the militia? Would the legend that Ebby had devised—that Alyosha had worked for two-and-a-half-years at a dam construction project in the northern Ukraine—stand up under scrutiny? The doubts crowded in, one behind the other, a long succession of them jostling each other to reach the head of the line.

  An hour or so before dawn Ebby, braving the icy air outside the Quonset hut, thought he heard the distant drone of engines. He
climbed on the bicycle and pedaled across the field to the giant hangar, arriving just as two wing lights snapped on and the C-47 touched down at the end of the strip. The plane taxied up to the hangar. Spotting Ebby, one of the Czech pilots slid back a cockpit window and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Ebby, exhilarated, sliced the air with his palm in response. All that remained now was to pick up the first cipher message announcing that the landing had gone off without a hitch.

  Back at Frankfurt Station later that morning, Ebby was catnapping on an office cot when Tony Spink shook him awake. Ebby sat straight up. “Did he check in?” he demanded.

  “Yeah. The kid said he’d landed, no bones broken. He said he was going to bury the radio and head for the hills to find his friends. He said he was happy to be home. He said he’d get in touch again in a few days. He said…he said ‘I love you guys.’”

  Ebby searched Spink’s face. “What’s wrong, Tony? The fist was Alyosha’s, wasn’t it?”

  “The fist was right. My man who taught him Morse swears it was Alyosha sending. But the kid inserted the danger signal in the message—he signed it Alyosha instead of SUMMERSAULT.”

  Ebby clutched at a straw. “Maybe he forgot—“

  “No way, Ebby. He’s being played back. We’ll act as if we don’t suspect anything for as long as they want to play him. But the kid is a dead man walking.”

  4

  BERLIN, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1951

  JACK’S AFTER-HOURS HAUNT, DIE PFEFFERMÜHLE, WAS FILLED WITH what the Vichy police chief in Mr. Humphrey Bogart’s motion picture Casablanca would have called “the usual suspects.” Freddie Leigh-Asker, the MI6 Chief of Station, sidled up to the bar to chase down a refill. “Two doubles, no rocks,” he hollered to the harried bartender. “Heard the latest?” he asked Jack, who was nursing a double with rocks before meandering toward the small dance theater for his semi-weekly session with the agent known as RAINBOW. It was Jack’s third double of the afternoon; he was beginning to understand what pushed the Sorcerer to drown his angst in alcohol. Freddie’s hot breath defrosted Jack’s eardrum. “The psych warfare crazies have come up with a pisser—they want us to bombard Russia with zillions of extra-large condoms.”

  On the small stage an all-female jazz band dressed in tight lederhosen was belting out number three on the American top ten, “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” “Not sure I follow you,” Jack called over what in other circumstances would have passed for music.

  “The condoms will all be stamped ‘medium’ in English!” Freddie explained. “Do I need to draw you a diagram, old boy? It’ll demoralize every Russian female of the species who hasn’t reached menopause. Never look at their blokes again without wondering what they’ve been missing out on. Absolutely wizard scheme, what?”

  Groping in an inside pocket of his blazer for some loose marks, Freddie flung them on the bar, grabbed his drinks and drifted off into a smog of cigarette smoke. Jack was glad to be rid of him. He knew the Sorcerer couldn’t stand the sight of Leigh-Asker; Torriti claimed to be leery of people with hyphenated names but his Night Owl, Miss Sipp, had come up with a better take on the situation.

  “It’s not the silly little hyphen, oh, dear, no,” she had confided in Jack late one night. “Poor Freddie Leigh-Asker had what the Brits call a good war—he parachuted into the burning fiery furnace and wasn’t even singed. He’s absolutely positive that if he hasn’t bought it by now he’s home free to die of old age. It’s said of him that he doesn’t know what the word fear means. Mr. Torriti prefers to work with people who are afraid—he feels they have a better chance of staying one jump ahead of the opposition. He likes you, Jack, because he reckons that behind your bravado—behind your ‘Once down is no battle’ mantra—there’s a healthy trepidation.”

  A lean, muscular man in his mid twenties with short-cropped hair climbed onto the stool next to Jack and lifted a finger to get the attention of the bartender. “Draft beer,” he called. He caught sight of Jack’s face in the mirror behind the bar. “McAuliffe!” he cried. “Jacko McAuliffe!”

  Jack raised his eyes to the mirror. He recognized the young man sitting next to him and wagged a finger at his reflection, trying to dredge up the name that went with the familiar face. The young man helped him. “The European championship? Munich? Forty-eight? I was rowing stroke in the Russian coxed four? You and me we fell crazy in love with Australian peacenik twins but broke off romance when the sun came up?”

  Jack slapped his forehead in recognition. “Borisov!” he said. He glanced sideways, genuinely delighted to stumble across an old bar-hopping pal from Munich. “Vanka Borisov! Damnation! What the hell are you doing here?”

  The bartender shaved the head off the beer with the back of his forefinger and set the mug down in front of Borisov. The two young men clinked glasses. “I am working for the Soviet import-export commission,” the Russian said. “We conduct trade negotiations with the German Democratic Republic. What about yourself, Jacko?”

  “I landed a soft job with the State Department information bureau—I’m the guy in charge of what we call boilerplate. I write up news releases describing how well our Germans are making out under capitalism and how badly your Germans are faring under Communism.”

  “The last time I saw you you had a bad case of blood blisters under your calluses.”

  Jack showed the Russian his palms, which were covered with thick calluses. “When we beat Harvard last Spring I was pulling so hard I thought the rib I cracked in Munich would crack again. The pain was something else.”

  “What ever happened to your cox? Leon something-or-other?”

  A faint current buzzed in Jack’s brain. “Leo Kritzky. I lost track of him,” he said, a grin plastered on his face. He wondered if the Russian really worked in import-export. “We had a falling out over a girl.”

  “You always had an eye for the ladies,” the Russian said with a broad smile.

  The two young men talked rowing for a while. The Russians, it seemed, had developed a new slide that ran on self-lubricating ball bearings. Borisov had been one of the first to test it during trial runs on the Moscow River; the mechanism worked so smoothly, he told Jack, it allowed the rower to reduce the exaggerated body work and concentrate on blade work. The result, Borisov guessed, was worth one or two strokes every hundred meters. Still smiling, the Russian looked sideways at Jack. “I have never been to the States,” he said nonchalantly. “Tell me something, Jacko—what is a lot of money in America?”

  The buzzing in Jack’s head grew stronger. It depended, he replied evenly, on a great many things—whether you lived in the city or the countryside, whether you drove a Studebaker or a Cadillac, whether you bought readymade suits or had them custom-tailored.

  “Give me an approximate idea,” Borisov insisted. “Twenty-five thousand dollars? Fifty? A hundred thousand?”

  Jack began to think the question might be innocent after all—everybody in Europe was curious about how Americans lived. He allowed as how $25,000 was an awful lot of bucks; $50,000, a fortune. Borisov let that sink in for a moment. When he turned back to Jack the smile had faded from his face. “Tell me something else, Jacko—how much do you earn a year producing boilerplate stories for the State Department?”

  “Somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars.”

  The Russian jutted out his lower lip in thought. “What if somebody was to come up to you—right now, right here—and offer you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash?”

  The buzzing in Jack’s head was so strong now it almost drowned out the conversation. He heard himself ask, “In return for what?”

  “In return for the odd piece of information about a Mr. Harvey Torriti.”

  “What makes you think I know anyone named Harvey Torriti?”

  Borisov gulped down the last of the beer and carefully blotted his lips on the back of a wrist. “If a hundred fifty thousand is not enough, name a figure.”

  Jack wondered how Vanka had gotten involved with th
e KGB; probably much the same way he’d gotten involved with the CIA—a talent scout, an interview, several months of intensive training and whoops, there you were, baiting a hook and casting it into the pitchy waters of Die Pfeffermühle.

  “You tell me something,” Jack said. “How much is a lot of money in the Soviet Union?” Vanka squirmed uncomfortably on his stool. “Would a Russian with five thousand United States of America dollars stashed in a numbered Swiss bank account be considered rich? No? How about twenty-five thousand? Still no? Okay, let’s say somebody walked up to you—right here, right now—and wrote down the number of a secret Swiss bank account in which a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars had been deposited in your name.”

  The Russian let out an uncomfortable laugh. “In exchange for what?”

  “In exchange for the odd bit of information from Karlshorst—import-export data, the names of the Russians who are doing the importing and exporting.”

  Borisov slid off his stool. “It has been a pleasure seeing you again, Jacko. Good luck to you at your State Department information bureau.”

  “Nice bumping into you, too, Vanka. Good luck with your import-export commission. Hey, stay in touch.”