by Noel Hynd
Many German cargo workers in their black coveralls were there. Major Pickford was there, too. Cochrane saw him out of the periphery of his vision and acknowledged him with eye contact, only. The two men could feel tensions increasing, not between them but within the city; and not from the people toward them but because of the air of oppression and mendacity of Soviet forces – military and civilian – as they tried to tighten Moscow’s grip on Berlin. Cochrane arrived right when the service began and there were about fifty people gathered, most of them American, but several Germans. Cochrane took his place at the rear of the small assemblage.
Both Cochrane and Pickford assumed there were infiltrators, Colonel Markgraf’s “rats” as they called them. The professional spy knew better than to be seen in the company of the intelligence officer and vice versa. In public outside of Tempelhof, they chose not to know each other. Even in Tempelhof, it was wise to not be seen together by the German workers. There were always a few turncoats in any group, as well as professional snitches.
The service was short and poignant, no more than twenty-five minutes. When the two clerics concluded, Cochrane turned, raised his head toward the city, and stopped short. He had been paying attention to the memorial and the solemnity of it and had ignored what was transpiring behind him.
The crowd had grown. No, not grown, burgeoned. As he raised his eyes, he saw that what had been temporarily the final row of attendees had been augmented by hundreds who had stopped and joined; taking time from their daily routine, their daily quest for survival, to pay respects to Charley King and Bob Stuber who had come from four thousand miles away to help them. Several Germans waved American flags, a sight that Cochrane never thought he would see in his lifetime. He stood and observed, taken aback in amazement and appreciation at the same time.
He allowed the crowd to disperse. He thought of going to Helmut’s for a drink or a coffee but decided against it. There was another matter he wished to address as quickly as possible.
Chapter 59
Berlin – July 1948
Cochrane spotted Major Pickford half an hour later, at the edge of the tarmac conversing with Sgt. Pearson. Cochrane waited till Pickford had completed his business with the sergeant, then followed him as he entered a corridor near the officers’ club.
Cochrane fell into stride next to him.
“Nice service, wasn’t it?” Cochrane said.
“It was. Sad.”
“Did you see all those Germans?” Cochrane asked.
“Couldn’t miss them,” Pickford said. A few more steps while neither man spoke, then, “I saw you following me,” Pickford said. “What’s on your mind?”
“You have army intel files, right?”
“Enough to lay a road from here to Formosa. What do you need?”
“Whatever you have on a Soviet colonel. Sergei Kovalyov,” Cochrane said. “K-O-V-A-L-Y-O-V,” Cochrane said, softly spelling it out. “I know you have a lot on your plate. We all do. Want me to write the name down?”
“Nope. Got it. Who’s Kovalyov? One of your menacing new acquaintances?”
“More or less.”
“Figures. Don’t know whether we have anything, but I’ll look into it.”
“Thanks.”
“You really are a first-class snoop, Mr. Whatever-your-name is. It’ll take a day or two. See me the day after tomorrow. Two PM. My office.”
“Will do.”
“Do you have plans for tomorrow?”
“Glad you asked. I wonder if one of your motor-pool people could give me a lift out of Tempelhof. Low in the back of a covered Jeep. Something to keep the watchers off my back for a day.”
Pickford smiled in return. “Sgt. Pearson’s my go-to guy for anything like that. Talk to him.”
Major Pickford headed for the officers’ commissary. Cochrane peeled off in the opposite direction, found Sgt. Pearson, and made arrangements for the next morning’s transportation. Then he walked down the corridor that led eventually back out to the street, suddenly hankering for a shot of that fine German brandy that he was newly acquainted with at Helmut’s. On the way, he made a point to be spotted by the plump Eastern Sector security man who followed him to the bar as if nothing was amiss.
Chapter 60
Berlin – August 1948
The next morning, Sgt. Pearson’s Jeep rolled out of Tempelhof shortly before 9 AM. Cochrane lay low in the back cargo area of the vehicle, covered by a burlap sack. Pearson drove toward the busy market area on Friedrichstrasse but stopped short of the main thoroughfare and pulled onto a narrow side street of bombed-out buildings. On the grim street, there were no businesses or pedestrians but several emaciated stray dogs. There were also several corpses of dead dogs: small detachments of drunken, Soviet army personnel prowled the back streets at night in old American lend-lease Jeeps. They were said to use the stray animals as target practice.
On cue, Cochrane emerged from the back of the Jeep and took the seat next to Pearson.
“Any followers?” Cochrane asked.
“I didn’t see anyone, Major Lewis.”
“Well done. And just call me ‘Mr. Lewis’ when I’m in civvies, okay?”
“Well and good, Mr. Lewis.”
They proceeded to a busy open-market area. A light rain was drizzling. Pearson slowed, and Cochrane gathered himself and stepped out. He gave a wave of a hand to Pearson to indicate that he was on his way. Pearson joined the flow of traffic and began the return to Tempelhof. Cochrane fell into the flow of pedestrian traffic and walked easily through the market area where there was a cramped ghetto of outdoor stalls. Perfect. In the distance, as always, there was the roar of C-47s arriving and departing from Tempelhof, one every five minutes now.
Cochrane remembered the market area well from when he had lived in Berlin. He was nearly overcome by the destruction that still lay unaddressed. Much remained gutted. Once again, so much for Hitler’s fake “economic miracle” of the late 1930s and a war financed in part by the gold in the teeth of murdered citizens. A capital city in ruins was what the Nazis had really purchased, among other shameful accomplishments. But he had little time or inclination for such thoughts here and now. There was, after all, a new enemy emerging.
He knew the drill before him well: how to disappear in a crowd in a few steps and a few minutes. He had done this before. Someday something fluky would go wrong and his luck would run out. But that, too, was not something he now wished to consider.
“Ready,” he thought as he drew a breath. “Go!”
He bought a crushable rain hat and cloth tote to carry groceries, paying in Reichsmarks to avoid arousing the suspicion. The tote was yellow, a color meant to be cheerful, but on this tote was horrible. He had selected the color intentionally. He then stopped a few stalls away to buy the last three pears available from a farmer’s wife in a babushka, a gracious red-faced lady with no front teeth. Turning quickly, he felt his back was clear: he spotted no one standing and watching, though the area was crowded.
He popped the rain hat on his head and carried the yellow tote prominently. He had created a quick-sketch profile for any follower of a man in a hat swinging a colorful grocery tote.
There were two large stores on the street with busy entrances, mostly with lines of people hoping to buy food. He went in the main entrance of the larger store, sauntered about, and went into the most congested area where there was a line for bread. To his good fortune, the aisle was narrow, meaning anyone following would have to stay close to keep track of him. Convinced there was no one, he dispensed with his profile by stuffing the hat back in his jacket pocket as he spotted around and moved quickly toward a side exit. He stuffed the pears in his side pockets – one in one, two in the other — and crumbled the small tote and dropped it, confident that another shopper would find the lost bag in less than a minute and take it in a different direction, perhaps luring any neophyte watchers with it.
He was out the side exit cleanly within five minutes after entering the s
tore.
Still no one following.
Relieved, he made his way to the nearest trolley stop, jumped on it just as it completed its discharge and pick up and started to move again. He took the tram seven blocks in the direction he was headed. Once there, he remembered the city hall on Kohlerstrasse in Lichtenberg from before the war. He knew the direction and how to walk there, even though some streets had been obliterated by collapsed buildings. He made his way there on foot by ten-thirty AM.
When he came to the Rathaus and first saw it, he blanched. On a flagstaff in front of the building, hanging off a balcony that showed bomb damage, flew a Soviet flag where once had flown the bold red flag with the swastika. Two Russian soldiers were at the front entrance at the top of three stone steps. One was on each side of the door.
Not police, Cochrane noted. Soldiers. Whatever was in this building, he reasoned, was of importance; otherwise, the Soviets would have allowed their German lackeys to guard it. That wasn’t happening here. They carried SKS semi-automatic carbines, not war-weary Mosin-Nagant museum pieces but spiffy new weapons. That told Cochrane something too.
The soldiers were young. They were Red Army, not KGB. They weren’t checking IDs on people going in and out. Cochrane walked boldly up the front steps. He gave them a respectful Soviet army salute. One of the heavy stones wobbled awkwardly under Cochrane’s footsteps. The soldiers smirked. He returned their smile and kept going.
He found himself in a wide-entrance rotunda. There was a sixteen-foot bust of Lenin that presided with worldwide, socialist menace in the center, a giant spider in its own lair. The walls were crumbling and cracked from bombing, but instead of repair work, the damage was covered by huge banners bearing Communist, patriotic slogans in German. Cochrane had packed a small Kodak camera with him, one that looked like a little square black box, but this was not the spot to behave like a tourist.
Instead, he took himself on a free tour of the inside of the building.
Local people wandered freely in the Rathaus, which helped Cochrane. He assessed quickly. There were stairs leading down to a basement behind Lenin’s massive stone skull. Another set of stairs led up. No directory. Neo-socialist chaos. German organization hadn’t set in yet, if it ever would. His first impression was that the building seemed more Russian-administered than German. He went down the stairs. The basement was deserted but had two windows that looked up to the alley behind the Rathaus. The windows had been painted shut and locked. He broke the dried paint and undid the locks. The panes were dusty where the locks were positioned. Probably no one ever checked them. Good.
He then walked up to the first floor above street level. He spotted the office of Fritz Hunsicker and avoided it. The second floor was mixed, closed offices with unmarked doors, open offices with administrators sitting at desks surrounded by volumes of records, no one coming or going. He went to the top floor to get a look. Years of experience told him he had hit paydirt. There were two locked doors to an adjoining room at the rear of the building. Three Russian soldiers were sitting on a bench. Their SKS carbines were lying carelessly at their sides or across their laps. They were engaged in loud conversation when Cochrane hit the top of the stairs and took a step toward them. They stopped talking immediately and grabbed their carbines. One who appeared to be a few years older than the others swung his carbine upward while still seated. He aimed it at Cochrane’s heart from a distance of fifteen feet.
He stood. Then the others stood.
Cochrane froze. He raised his hands halfway, keeping them away from his pockets. He was all too conscious of the Czech pistol at his belt. If the soldiers searched him, he was on his way to prison. He broke into a fierce sweat.
The ranking soldier spoke in German. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m looking for Fritz Hunsicker. Administration.”
“There’s nothing for you on this floor. It’s private. Leave. Go to the first floor.”
“Certainly,” Cochrane said.
Easing, Cochrane returned to the first floor, where he found the German clerk in his office. Hunsicker expressed surprise when he recognized him. He expressed more surprise when Cochrane asked again where records were kept of where displaced Berliners had been relocated.
“Those records are on the top floor,” Hunsicker said.
“May I visit them?” Cochrane asked. “It would mean so much to a family I know who left Germany before the war. I can be generous.”
Hunsicker shook his head.
Cochrane reached to his billfold and took out five American ten-dollar bills.
“Out of the question,” Hunsicker said.
Cochrane said nothing but gestured with his hands. He offered a hundred.
Hunsicker became agitated. “Please leave,” he said, lowering his voice.
“Very well,” Cochrane said, picking up on the ominous air. “A pleasure to see you, however, comrade.”
Cochrane reached into his pockets and pulled out the pears he had purchased. He put them on Hunsicker’s desk, turned, and left. Two plainclothes security people were outside Hunsicker’s office. Cochrane tipped his hat to them as he avoided contact, went down the stairs, and was out of the building and hustled off the block within a minute.
Chapter 61
Berlin - August 1948
By early August, the airlift had been in effect for close to six weeks.
It had sustained more than two million Berliners with enough food, water, and heat to survive. Yet it was still on tenuous ground and flying through turbulence.
Sustaining the citizens of Berlin through the warm summer months and preparing them for the dark and cold of the impending winter were two different things. The weather would become more erratic at the beginning of October. The shorter, darker days would also be a problem. Heavy rains and ice would make flying a perilous occupation, prone to crashes and loss of life.
The Soviets were also becoming more aggressive in their harassment of British and American aircraft. The Yaks that buzzed transport craft were flying closer, sometimes crossing paths with less than a hundred feet to spare in mid-flight. The black balloons launched by the Red Army that flew and floated erratically in the murky skies would be both more difficult to spot and more numerous. And emergency quantities of water and fuel for the summer would be insufficient in the winter.
“The easiest thing to do, the best thing for the United States,” said an opposition senator on the senate floor on August tenth, “would be to walk away from this hell hole. If Stalin wants Berlin so bad, he can have it.”
The disengagement notion was more popular inside the Washington Beltway than out in the heartland of America. Trying to defend a defeated city a quarter of the way around the world, surrounded by Warsaw Pact troops, was logically a non-starter.
The tensions behind the scenes were winding ever tighter, as well. As a countermeasure against the Soviet blockade, the British, Americans, and French had initiated a trade embargo against East Germany, cutting off any material that would allow their factories to run. The embargo also targeted other Soviet bloc countries. But more ominously, three groups of American strategic bombers had been sent to airfields in England. Whether or not the bombers could deliver a nuclear hit was not something the Russians knew or were willing to risk.
They had no sooner landed than the Red Army presence in Soviet-occupied East Germany had increased by a hundred thousand men, including state-of-the-art tank divisions.
The postwar peace hung by a thread. The Soviets remained bellicose. But no British or American aircraft had been shot down or forced down. Yet. That didn’t mean there was any shortage of people filling Truman’s ear with advice about Berlin, however.
Among them was James Forrestal, his secretary of defense. Privately, Forrestal was acting as erratically as a herd of stray cats. Increasingly anxious, day to day seemingly closer to the verge of a nervous breakdown, Forrestal focused his fears on “Communists and Zionists.” Forrestal’s lack of support for the
creation of Israel was costing him and his party plenty of political capital. Truman knew he needed pro-Israel votes to win in November. Yet he valued the opinion of Forrestal and George Marshall, who agreed with Forrestal. Increasingly, Truman felt wedged into an impossible position.
Forrestal sat sullenly at a cabinet meeting with the president during the first week of August, occasionally glancing at his Rolex and staring out the window as Truman sought policy input from the room on how to proceed in Berlin. By anyone’s measure, Forrestal had a chip on his shoulder when it came to Truman.
“I don’t know why you’re even asking,” Forrestal said eventually, interrupting the secretary of state and drawing aghast glances from other cabinet members. “The Soviet Union is going to attack us. Everyone knows that. That’s Stalin’s plan.”
“So if they attack us, do we use the bomb?” asked someone else in the room.
“The American people will vote us out of office and then lynch us one by one if we don’t use it,” Forrestal answered.
Forrestal would sit at cabinet meetings and sound the same notes about “America’s enemies,” some very real and others sometimes imagined, and contribute little in the way of suggestion or promise.
Never mentioned in cabinet meetings, but always present as an undercurrent, were the public rumors about Forrestal’s personal life. Some of the details were leaking into the newspapers. Forrestal’s family was disintegrating at home. His wife, Jo, was drinking heavily. The drunkenness was sometimes public, and she would rant to anyone – reporters, strangers, opposition senators – that Communists and Zionists were after her and her family.
Paranoid fantasies?
Difficult things to believe but true?
A reflection of the things James was telling her?
No one knew. Everyone had an opinion.
A psychiatric advisor and family friends frequently called Forrestal from work to deal with his wife's bizarre behavior.