Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  Second, Eisenhower had always worried about his troops meeting and engaging the Red Army on the run through the German countryside. He thought it more prudent to rendezvous with a broad river as a barrier between the occupying armies.

  Winston Churchill was furious. Churchill wanted every possible effort made to reach Berlin before the Red Army. He protested to Roosevelt that Ike had even informed Stalin of this decision without consulting Churchill or Roosevelt. Churchill felt that Eisenhower had grossly overstepped his authority by making the decision on his own and had thus allowed the Red Army to arrive in Berlin first.

  Might things have ended differently?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  At the time the Western Allies reached the Elbe, many German units were trying to surrender. Others were moving westward hoping to surrender to any Allied units they could find other than the Russians. At the time, Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov had not yet crossed the Oder. And the German armies had not given up in the East.

  The Soviets launched their final big offensive on January 11, 1945.

  By February 1945, Berlin had become what Hitler had promised that it would never be: a battle zone. The bombing and strafing of Berlin had started. Throughout that month, hundreds of British and American air raids continually pounded the city. By this time, the acting mayor of Berlin was clumsy, clubfooted Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, proponent of the Big Lie, and Gauleiter of Berlin.

  Goebbels screamed over what remained of the city on the radio. “Factories will be blown up and the whole capital incinerated!” He promised the Russians a Pyrrhic Berlin. Berlin would be defended brick by brick, sidewalk by sidewalk, until there was nothing left.

  Yet, through the smoke of fires set by R.A.F. and U.S. bombers, overcrowded Berlin could see the lightning and hear the thunder of guns in the distance, the artillery units of Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov’s First White Russian Army.

  Tons of shells rained down on the remaining civilian residents in Berlin, descending through clouds and smoke and spraying lethal, red-hot fragments in all directions.

  General Zhukov’s army never stopped moving forward. Nearly a million grimy, unshaven Russian soldiers moved forward in an enormous human wave, as gray and ceaseless as the Russian steppes. Bedraggled soldiers drove enormous tanks and mobile guns. They carried mortars, submachine guns, and grenades. They cried out Dayosh Berlin! – Give us Berlin!

  Nothing was going to stand in their way. The forward wall of the Red Army moved around the clock, destroying everything and everyone in its path. Units of soldiers fought for twenty-four hours, then rested for twenty-four hours. Supply lines rolled forward a few miles behind the front, passing forward ammunition replenishment when needed, rations soon afterward if possible. Elsewhere, on still-secure airfields deep in the Reich, special long-range aircraft kept their engines running. They were waiting to take as many Nazi higher-ups as could board the flights. The destinations were Japan or South America: Montevideo, Buenos Aires, or Rio de Janeiro. Smaller planes stood by for possible escape to Spain or North Africa. Meanwhile, chaos reigned in Berlin.

  The ill-trained and incompetent Volkssturm – the storm of the people – fired on a column of German refuges at night, mistaking them for Soviet invasion squads. The Volkssturm was a national militia established by the Nazi Party on the orders of Hitler in September 1944. Its members were conscripted males between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five, any males with a pulse who were not already serving in the military. The Volkssturm comprised a final component of the total war promulgated by Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, part of a Nazi endeavor to overcome their enemies' military strength through force of will. The Volkssturm had also fired on an SS unit, mistaking them for Red Army. The SS unit returned fire, killing scores of loyal old men and teenagers.

  Now, in a final defense of Berlin, the conscripts of the Volkssturm dug trenches, set land mines, chopped down any tree left standing, and built barricades from bomb rubble. They were no more than terrified civilians with swastika arm bands.

  At Tempelhof Airport, Berlin’s most central airfield, air traffic crews reported that Russian fighter squadrons had flown close by at dawn, low and within five hundred meters of the airport, breaking through the clouds and emerging like a swarm of angry wasps. They had taken a close aerial inspection of Tempelhof and then had disappeared toward the east, vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.

  Meanwhile, workers in Berlin slept in factories and worked around the clock until each factory was blown to bits by bombs or artillery. For days on end as the final battles continued, there was not a person or place in the city that didn’t expect to be surrounded by Red Army paratroopers within the hour. A brigade of German women, mostly wives and widows of soldiers, rode on the antiaircraft guns pulling out for the Oder front, leaving their children behind. Like tens of thousands of other German females, they were captured, raped, and then slaughtered as the Red Army overwhelmed them.

  During this time, Eisenhower allowed British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery to advance his army to block the Jutland Peninsula to keep the Soviets out of Denmark. Always looming was the British inclination to complicate the war with political foresight and nonmilitary objectives. Here Eisenhower was sympathetic. It was fine with Ike to keep the Russians out of Denmark. It was also fine with the Danes.

  It was the second political move in what would become the Cold War. The first had happened several months earlier in July and August 1945 at Potsdam.

  The victorious Allies had carved up the remains of Germany, at least on paper. Germany would be divided into four temporary occupation zones, thus reaffirming principles laid out earlier by the Yalta Conference. These zones were located roughly around the then-current locations of the Allied armies.

  In truth, Potsdam had been a disaster for Churchill. Anthony Eden, later the Prime Minister, had been on Churchill’s staff. He recalled Sir Winston’s performance as appalling. Churchill exasperated the Americans, and was easily led by Stalin, to whom he was supposed to be a counterforce.

  “Sir Winston was unprepared and verbose,” Eden recalled. “And Truman was inexperienced. He had not been in office for five months and had the weight of the impending nuclear bombing of Japan on his narrow shoulders.”

  Also divided into occupation zones was Berlin, the city that Ike had not seized, located a hundred miles inside Soviet-controlled Eastern Germany. A political objective and not a military one. Looked at on a new map, north to south, the British, the Americans, and the French controlled the Western Zones of the city, while Soviet troops controlled the Eastern Sector.

  Ike had been right. It had all been haggled over and decided at Yalta and Potsdam. Why lose lives over something you already have?

  Chapter 3

  New York City - February 1948

  Bill Cochrane would always remember it was on a winter Saturday, February 21, when the letter arrived that would pull him in a roundabout way not just to England but back to Berlin. Had the correspondence arrived on a weekday while he was at work at FBI headquarters in downtown Manhattan, his wife, Laura, might have phoned him and asked if she should open it and read him the contents. He would have answered yes, and she knew it.

  Instead, the postman, Mr. Sonenshein, pushed the morning’s mail under the door of the Cochrane family’s sixth-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East Seventy-Second Street. Bill and Laura had for several years lived on the third floor but had moved to a larger seven-room apartment in January of 1946, following the end of the World War in 1945 and the birth of their daughter, Caroline, in 1944.

  Within the morning’s mail was an airmail envelope – pale blue with bold red and blue markings on the edges – from England. It bore three attractive stamps of different denominations and colors, all of which bore the profile of King George VI, in the top right. On the top left was the address of an office at the University of Cambridge. The post had arrived a few minutes after Laura had taken Caroline out for a walk to the car
ousel in Central Park.

  Cochrane recognized the return address and knew the envelope would contain an answer to an application he had filed before Christmas. With a deft swipe of a letter opener, he slit the paper on the envelope, opened it, and stood reading the contents.

  He read the notification once in astonishment and then a second time. Only then did he allow himself a broad smile and a hoot of pleasure. He was still smiling two hours later when Laura returned with their daughter shortly before noon.

  “I received an answer from Cambridge,” he said as she came in the door and found him in the library they had set up in their apartment.

  “And?” she asked.

  “We’re going,” he said.

  Laura smiled and let out an exclamation of pleasure to match her husband’s. Bill’s application had been accepted to fill the spot of a visiting guest lecturer at the university. There had been several dozen applicants for two available spots at Cambridge. Cochrane had picked off one of them.

  With the blessing of the FBI, for whom he worked in the New York office, and the intelligence agencies in Washington to whom J. Edgar Hoover occasionally “lent” him, Cochrane would be put on paid leave for fifteen months. Bill could take his family with him to England as part of a “working sabbatical,” or at least that’s what his superiors in the American post-war intelligence community called it.

  Happily, the University of Cambridge in England had invited him to deliver a series of lectures and discussions commencing in the fall. His talks, based on his own experience as an intelligence officer in various positions in the American government and law enforcement, would range from postwar Western economics to political threats to the Western democracies.

  Cochrane had a thorough knowledge of much of what was important in the postwar world, not the least of which was the fact that “off duty” in his situation was a subjective term. In his line of work, an agent’s eyes and ears were never completely “off duty” if he still had a pulse. Nonetheless, he had worked as an undercover agent abroad in 1943 and had participated in more than a few intelligence operations dating well back into the 1930s. While he was proud of what he had done and continued to contribute to law enforcement and intelligence activity on behalf of his country, the prospect of a year and a few months of “downtime” was more than a little attractive to him. It would also provide him some time and relaxation with the wife and family he cherished.

  Chapter 4

  Moscow - March 1948

  As usual, Josef Stalin was looking down the road and preparing to render it as bumpy as possible for his former wartime allies, the British, the French, and the Americans. Uncle Joe had more than a few things up his rumpled sleeve.

  In a June 1945 meeting in Moscow, Stalin had gleefully alerted German Communist leaders that he expected to sabotage the British within their occupation zone. He conjectured that the United States would turn inward and go home within eighteen months and that the French had no interest in rebuilding Germany. At that point, with the financially pressed British packing up and the Americans losing interest by 1947 or early 1948, Stalin guessed nothing would stand in his way of creating a united Germany under Communist control within the Soviet orbit. Twice in Stalin’s memory Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had no interest in promoting German reunification. Yet reunification seemed to be the game plan for the United States, Great Britain, and, incredibly, France.

  The Soviet Union had the largest standing army in the world. The Americans were dismantling their army for an expected “peacetime” economy. In England, Churchill had mishandled his re-election campaign by resorting to party politics and by trying to denigrate the opposition Labour Party. On June 4, 1945, Churchill had committed a serious political gaffe by saying in a radio broadcast that a Labour government would require "some form of Gestapo" to enforce its agenda.

  Some form of Gestapo?

  Churchill’s phraseology boomeranged. After the exchange, his challenger Clement Attlee rose in the polls. Churchill now had more to worry about in London than in Berlin. Stalin liked Attlee. He considered him a docile, potential tool for international Communism. Attlee was even an intellectual and bore a distant physical resemblance to Lenin: he had a receding hairline and a trim set of chin whiskers. How bad could the man be, Stalin asked his confidants, if he looked like Lenin? He was the type of man whom Stalin took for a pushover.

  Meanwhile, also to Stalin’s liking, Roosevelt was dead, buried, and replaced – in Stalin’s calculation – by a feisty, corrupt, little machine-politician from faraway America, a man named Harry Truman, who had once run a haberdashery shop in the American hinterland. Stalin had taken Truman’s measure at Potsdam and in Uncle Joe’s opinion, he hadn’t measured much. Stalin took him to be the glorified necktie salesman that he once had been.

  In the intervening time, Stalin had been on a roll.

  Even though the United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from the war as the two global superpowers, Stalin had annexed the Baltic states and established Soviet-aligned governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, all backed by local Communists or the Red Army. Through Stalin’s firm leadership, the Soviet Union had overcome the millions of casualties, deliberate starvation of its cities, and Nazi Germany's worst crimes against humanity. Stalin had industrialized and modernized Russia. When Stalin assumed power in the late 1920s after Lenin’s death, the USSR was underdeveloped and primarily agrarian. This was far less so at the end of World War II. Rumor was the USSR was working on atomic weapons and had even pilfered many American atomic secrets. If there was an imbalance, Stalin knew it would be evened out by 1950.

  So now, in the Eastern Zone of defeated Germany, Soviet authorities went to work. They forcibly consolidated the Communist Party of Germany and Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Unity Party, a party with pro-Moscow leadership. Dissidents and any others who stood in the way had a funny propensity of falling from windows on high floors of mental hospitals. The new pro-Moscow leaders then called for the "establishment of an anti-Fascist, democratic regime, a parliamentary democratic republic." The Soviet Military Administration suppressed all other political activities.

  There were recent precedents as to how pro-Moscow forces took care of nuisances. In Czechoslovakia after the war, Jan Masaryk served as foreign minister under President Eduard Benes. It was a dicey time in central Europe. The Red Army had occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, and there were fears that the Soviets would try to install a Communist government in Czechoslovakia as it had in Poland, East Germany, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Masaryk, however, was skillful in dealing with the Soviets, arguing that a democratic Czechoslovakia posed no threat to the USSR.

  In 1947 though, Masaryk overstepped. When the United States unveiled the Marshall Plan, the multimillion-dollar rebuilding program for postwar Europe, Masaryk indicated Czechoslovakia’s interest in being part of it. The Soviets refused to listen. This was quickly followed in February 1948, by a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. President Benes was forced to accept a Communist-dominated government. Masaryk was one of the few non-Communists left in place. Soviet soldiers took him into custody. On March 10, 1948, Masaryk was found dead, wearing only his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window, three flights above. The pro-Soviet Czech government reported that Masaryk had committed suicide by “jumping” out of a window at the Foreign Ministry. In Masaryk’s case, the distinction between jumped out and pushed out was vague.

  There was nothing new to the brutal touch to Soviet foreign policy. Trotsky had been murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist with an ice hatchet. Dissidents in Europe had been suspiciously flying out of windows all through the 1940s.

  At the Kremlin, Stalin continued to play his cards cautiously but aggressively. So far Stalin, as befitting his name, maintained a grip of steel on postwar power. Extrajudicial assassinations eased the way, defenestration being just one method to the madness. In
private, Stalin bragged to visiting Bulgarian and Yugoslavian delegations that postwar Germany would be both Marxist and pro-Soviet.

  But, along with Molotov, they privately joked and drank to postwar worldwide dominion. They celebrated the absence of Roosevelt and Churchill. Stalin had spies all over the world, Russian moles burrowed deeply into the fabric of Western society, and gullible American sympathizers with Russian handlers. He had his people in America’s atomic research programs, in schools, in libraries, in the U.S. government, and in the State Department. He even had an agent in Franklin Roosevelt’s aircraft when Roosevelt returned to Washington from Yalta.

  There seemed to be nothing Stalin couldn’t do. There was no reason Berlin would not be a target. And, as usual, a treaty or a verbal agreement wasn’t worth the paper that it wasn’t printed on.

  “Truman is of limited vision and of nearly no intellectual capacity,” Stalin explained to Molotov one night over vodka following a party congress in Moscow, relaying what his operatives in Washington had reported. “He is not even of sound mind. His brain has apparently decayed and he entertains hallucinations.”

  “This is what is reported?” asked Molotov.

  “It is! The president of the United States sees disembodied spirits, specters of the non-living, ethereal representations of his predecessors.”

  Molotov laughed broadly and indulgently, his boots upon a seventeenth-century ottoman that had once belonged to the last Czar.

  “Ghosts,” said Stalin, who as a much younger man had once begun studies to be a priest in the Orthodox church. “Ghosts! Imagine this! Imagine our good fortune! The man who leads the Western World believes in the afterlife!”

  When Stalin thought of Truman in those terms, his respect for the American dropped even lower. It was difficult to imagine. He thanked fate once again that Roosevelt was gone. From the army purges to party purses, to the fake famine in Ukraine to the camps in the Gulag and Siberia, Stalin had murdered or brought about the demise of more than ten million people in his lifetime. And he hadn’t seen a single disembodied spirit yet.