by Noel Hynd
It was clear: the leader of the Western World was a fool. Worldwide Communism would triumph. Berlin was the next prize along the road.
Chapter 5
Berlin - Spring 1948
The American at the top of the postwar military heap in Germany after World War II was General Lucius Clay. General Clay, a meticulous, workaholic Georgian who had become a general at the age of forty-three, had served as deputy to General Eisenhower in 1945, deputy military governor, Germany, in 1946, and commander in chief, United States Forces in Europe and military governor of the United States Zone, Germany, since 1947. He was a graduate of West Point who had a reputation for being so disciplined that he went long hours and even refused to stop to eat during his workdays.
In the British Zone, the man of parallel authority to General Clay was Air Commodore Reginald Newham Waite of the Royal Air Force. Waite had overseen the postwar disarming of the Luftwaffe. He had effectively done so, but in the process had been deeply moved by the plight of German refugees and disbanded German servicemen and women. A war had been won, but Waite understood that a peace needed to be won, also.
While due to be discharged after a quarter-century of service to his king and country, Waite had stayed on in Germany as head of the Air Section for the Combined Services Division, Control Commission Germany, based in Berlin. From what he had seen in the final days of the war and the first months of the peace, he had become deeply cynical about Soviet intentions.
The French controlled the northwest section of Berlin, the British the center-west zone, and the Americans the southernmost and largest section. From his command office within the British Zone, Commodore Waite quickly concluded that the most important work of his life lay right in front of him in Berlin in the postwar years.
Air Commodore Waite knew the Soviets very well. He and many British officers socialized with them, went to the same diplomatic functions, and even attended the revived Berlin opera together. None of those social events, however, blinded Waite to Soviet actions.
General Clay and Commodore Waite were men who considered each other friends, and who thought in much the same way.
There was one thing in Berlin that everyone agreed on: trouble lurked beneath the day-to day-governing of Berlin. Much of it involved the Anglo-American plan to create a new postwar currency, the Deutschmark, in the Western Zone of Germany. The new currency was one that the Soviets feared would fatally devalue the already hyperinflated Reichsmark that the Russian occupation forces used in the East. The Reichsmark wasn’t completely worthless, but it was the next worse thing and was pegged to the equally shaky Soviet ruble. But the burr that really scratched under Stalin’s saddle was that the Western Powers were also planning to put the new currency in circulation in the sectors of Berlin that they controlled.
The Russians were also concerned about a unified West Berlin: a capitalist city located right in the middle of their occupation zone, an urban center that would likely be powerfully and aggressively anti-Soviet.
Stalin decided that something needed to be done to stop the creeping reunification. For the Soviets, the creation of the Deutschmark by the West was unacceptable.
Thus, the Soviet Union withdrew from the Kommandatura, the four-power agency that had governed Berlin since June 1945. A treaty was just a piece of paper, after all. They initiated a series of steps to drive the Allied Powers out of Berlin.
On March 25, 1948, Soviet authorities issued orders restricting Western military and passenger traffic between the American, British, and French occupation zones and Berlin. The new regulations began on April first, along with an announcement that no cargo could leave Berlin by rail without the permission of the Soviet commander. The Soviets meant business.
In a rapid countermove the next day, Commodore Waite quietly ordered all supplies to the British military garrison be transported by air. This was done with no public announcement. In a parallel but independent decision, the Americans under General Clay’s command began to do the same thing. The Americans took the heat from the Soviets, but the British were on the same page. The notion of supplying the entire city by air was a nonstarter, but both Waite and Clay knew their military forces couldn’t risk an interruption of their supply lines. Both British and American sides were digging in independently and showed no desire to be pushed away from Berlin.
At the same time, Soviet military aircraft began to violate West Berlin airspace and would harass – or what the military called "buzz" – flights in and out of West Berlin.
The inevitable happened quickly. In the early afternoon of April 5, a scheduled British European Airways Vickers VC.1B Viking airliner carrying ten passengers and four crew members approached the British airfield known as Gatow. At approximately two-thirty PM, while the Viking was in the airport's safety area leveling off to land, a Soviet Yak-3 approached from behind. Witnesses saw the Viking make a left-hand turn prior to its approach to land. The Yak fighter dived beneath it, climbed sharply, and clipped the port wing of the airliner with its starboard wing. The impact ripped off both colliding wings and the Viking crashed inside the Soviet Sector and exploded in flames, incinerating all fourteen aboard. The Yak-3 crashed near a farmhouse on Heerstrasse just inside the British sector. The Soviet pilot of the Yak also died on impact.
The Gatow air disaster exacerbated tensions between the Soviets and the other Allied Powers. Not surprisingly, both sides blamed the other for the catastrophe.
Soviet officials demanded on April ninth that American military personnel maintaining communication equipment in the Eastern Zone withdraw, thus preventing the use of navigation beacons to mark air routes. The United States refused the request. The next day, unpredictable as ever, the Soviets softened the new rules on Allied military planes. But they continued periodically to harass rail, road, and water traffic.
General Clay countered by ordering U.S. Army aircraft to continue supplying its military forces around Berlin. Within another few days, Clay had two dozen flights a day going in and out of the occupied German capital, building up stocks of food against future Soviet actions.
Then on April twentieth, the Soviets demanded that all barges obtain clearance before entering the Soviet Zone.
Within the Soviet command in the Eastern Zone, the Generals gloated. The Russian brain trust had the Yanks and the Brits back on their heels, muttering about the futility and absurdity of it all.
"Our controlling and restrictive measures have dealt a strong blow to the prestige of the Americans and British in Germany," reported one diplomatic dispatch that arrived by courier in Moscow. “And the Americans have confessed and admitted that an airlift would be too costly. It is a matter of weeks or months before the Americans will be driven from Berlin. It is doubtful that they will stay past September. Of what value is Berlin to them?”
While the Soviet intelligence and dispatch were faulty, it was not difficult to understand how they had drawn their conclusions. Militarily, the Americans and British had greatly scaled back their armed forces in Europe. The United States, like other Western countries, had disbanded most of its combat troops and was largely inferior to the Red Army in Europe.
The entire United States Army had been reduced to half a million soldiers by February 1948. Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector that surrounded Berlin numbered a million and a half highly trained troops. If Russian tanks had started to roll westward, United States’ regiments in Berlin would have provided little resistance against a Soviet attack.
Because of the imbalance, American war strategy had been predicated on a nuclear deterrent: the potential use of hundreds of atomic bombs. But only about fifty Fat Man-specification bombs, the sort used against Japan and the only version available to the U.S. military, existed in the spring of 1948. Worse, or perhaps better, in March 1948, only thirty-five "Silverplate", atomic-capable, Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were available. A nation that had been caught unprepared at Pearl Harbor in 1941 was unprepared for war again in 1948.
General Clay understood the numbers and the strategy very well. But he also had a good idea of what he needed to do: not retreat.
He cabled James Forrestal, the new Secretary of Defense, a new cabinet-level position created by Truman in the autumn of 1947. Forrestal, who had gone to both Dartmouth and Princeton, was part of the Ivy League gaggle of “old boys from top schools” who, for better or worse, had taken over the American intelligence community under Dulles and Donovan. Like Dulles and Donovan, Forrestal had seen more than a few shots fired in combat in his earlier years.
Forrestal had been born into a strict Roman Catholic family, where harsh discipline had incubated doubts about himself that his many achievements in the military and the government had finally overcome. He had been an amateur boxer in college and then a naval aviator during the First World War. He had become secretary of the navy in May 1944, after his immediate superior, Secretary Frank Knox, died from a heart attack.
Forrestal led the navy through the closing year of World War II and the early years of demobilization that followed. Forrestal was not a tall man, but he was tough-looking, gritty, and manly in the hard-boiled style. At Princeton he had taken up boxing and he continued to box at the New York Athletic Club while he worked on Wall Street, twice breaking his nose. He looked like Jack Dempsey, the prizefighter. Forrestal's early life had been the inspiration for a character named Alfred Eaton, the protagonist in John O'Hara's novel, From the Terrace.
"There is no practicability in maintaining our position in Berlin,” General Clay wrote to Secretary Forrestal. “But I urge you to not consider the situation in that light. We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and Europe. Whether for good or bad, America’s presence here has become a symbol of the American intent. And we should not intend to leave.”
In Washington, Forrestal received the cable, read it with approval, and passed it along to President Truman. Truman phoned Clay the next morning. Clay further explained that he felt Stalin was playing a poker game over Berlin, with the blockade being a major bluff, since they would not want to be viewed as starting a Third World War.
“It’s my opinion that the Soviets do not want a war,” Clay explained. “The way I see it, the Soviets and Stalin are attempting to exert political and military on the West to obtain diplomatic concessions. They’re relying on the West's prudence and unwillingness to trigger a war.”
“That’s what you think, General?” Truman asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I damned well hope you’re right. Because that’s what I think, also.”
The Commander of United States Air Forces in Europe, General Curtis LeMay, had ideas how to deal with the blockade, also. General LeMay, the man who had originated and executed the firebombing of civilians in Japan, had chosen the centrally located Rhein-Main airfield to serve as headquarters for his 60th and 61st Troop Carrier Groups. Rhein-Main was the metropolitan area in Hesse around the intersection of the rivers Rhine and Main. The city of Frankfurt, the largest city in Hesse and Germany's emerging financial center, was the lynchpin of the area. Rhein-Main included Hesse's capital, Wiesbaden.
To friends and adversaries alike, LeMay was known as "Big Cigar," a nickname well earned. General LeMay always had a fat stogie stuffed in his mouth. Big Cigar suggested a more aggressive countermove than General Clay. Under LeMay’s proposed plan, his B-29s would fly with a fighter escort toward Soviet air bases while ground troops were called up and scrambled to reach Berlin. Wisely, Truman was hearing none of the LeMay approach and rejected it out of hand. Secretary Forrestal did the dirty work and spoke to LeMay personally.
Forrestal spoke calmly, concisely, and politely as he rejected LeMay’s strategy.
LeMay, who normally liked to fill the air with airplanes, filled the air with expletives instead.
“Thank you for your opinion, General,” Forrestal concluded. In Forrestal’s opinion, LeMay had never seen a potential fight that he didn’t want to start.
“LeMay is nuts. Crazy,” Forrestal reported to Truman in a memo dated that same afternoon. “All that smoke from burning Japanese flesh in Japan must have warped his mind. Or maybe it’s the cigars and the booze. Left to his own devices, he’ll provoke Stalin and start a war. He has his uses but keep a tight leash on him.”
“Thank you for your opinion, Secretary,” Truman responded, in an ironic echo of Forrestal’s sentiment hours earlier. “As it happens, I agree with you.”
Nonetheless, the commanders in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany were joyous, convinced that they had begun to push the Allies out of the German capital.
In the shady back streets of the Eastern Zone of Berlin at Mühle Strasse 49, two hundred feet south of the Schlesisches U-Bahn station, where a depraved, sleazy establishment named the Red Mill Cabaret had once stood in the Weimar years, there now existed a closed and guarded house of pleasure where Soviet officers quietly took their liberties with captive German females. There the officers partied. They celebrated the beginning of the blockade, oblivious to how badly they had underestimated the resolve of their adversaries.
Chapter 6
New York City - Spring 1948
Laura Worthington Cochrane, London-born to a successful physician and his wife, was also more than anxious to spend time back in the country of her birth.
First on her agenda was a long overdue visit to her sister, Beatrice, who lived on the outskirts of Bath, one of Laura’s favorite English cities. The trip was also an opportunity for their daughter to experience the gift of a year of childhood in such a special unique and quirky place as Cambridge.
“Cambridge is bucolic but not quite the English countryside, unless you travel ten yards beyond the city limits. Ten yards farther puts you in a sheep meadow,” Laura said, “where you must watch your step.”
Laura held a strong affection for the place. Both her parents had graduated from the university. “The city is a mixture of the poet and the peasant,” she said as her husband held her in a celebratory embrace. “Not Heaven, but it will have to do.”
“It will do splendidly,” Cochrane agreed at dinner that night after they had put Caroline to bed.
“You agree then, my dear, that intellectual ferment is always stimulating?” Laura added.
“Let’s not get carried away,” Cochrane responded with a smile.
As the next weeks went by in New York, Cochrane planned with his superiors in both the FBI and the various national intelligence agencies that were coming together in Washington and northern Virginia. A few letters across the ocean made a tentative rental of lodgings in Cambridge for their stay. Permission was granted by the appropriate people stateside for his year-plus of absence. He was to be “off duty” for a full year and had been personally ordered to enjoy every damned minute of it by Alan Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover – short of some pesky, unforeseen emergency, of course. In the postwar years, government agencies in America were trying to pare back the number of people they employed, though Cochrane would be on paid “leave.”
“You’re like a mighty battleship, my dear,” Laura said with a wink as their plans fell into place in early March. “You’ll be decommissioned for the time being but kept as part of the fleet. You’ll be kept ready for a return to high seas when needed.”
“I feel more like a tug boat,” Bill answered with the same sense of bemusement. “A small mutt in the harbor, stalwart, proud, and noble, with a keen sense of my role and limitations, but usually pressed up against an obstacle larger than himself, praying for help from the other friendly vessels.”
“No two people see the same thing exactly the same,” Laura answered. “Even us, as much as we think alike.”
The sabbatical at Cambridge presented another opportunity that the Cochranes welcomed. Trans-Atlantic steamship travel had always been a luxury that Bill and Laura had enjoyed before the World War. Yet ocean travel for pleasure had been out of the question from 1941 to 1945. Now it was availabl
e attractively priced, and free of submarines and enemy aircraft. So Bill Cochrane and his wife Laura and their five-year-old daughter, Caroline, used their family’s travel stipend, plus a little extra out of their bank account, to book passage on RMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the stars of the Cunard Line.
Their travel date would be May 14, sailing out of New York City from the West Side piers in Manhattan, headed for Southampton, England. The crossing would take five days. Laura prepared the family’s domestic details, they both obtained new passports, plus a first one for Caroline.
Bill, in turn, wrapped up as many investigations as he could from his workload in New York and gradually handed off all his cases to other agents. To everyone’s astonishment, everything went smoothly. As April passed and May approached, their happy anticipation grew. There was not a problem anywhere on the horizon. Their mood was joyous. Even if the postwar world was a caldron bubbling with turmoil and danger, their personal corner of it was remarkably insulated.
Courses at Cambridge did not start until autumn. The summer months were theirs. Nothing, Bill Cochrane promised himself, was going to interfere. Yet deep down he knew that for a professional spy, nothing was ever that easy.
Chapter 7
Washington, D.C. – Spring 1948
In the American capital, the transition of the United States into peacetime had been halting. The price of victory in Europe and Asia had been astronomical. President Truman was intent on diminishing military services as quickly as possible to curtail the government's military expenditures. But the effect of demobilization on the economy was unknown. Many Americans feared that Truman’s proposals would ease the nation back into another great depression.