Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  Once, Jo kicked at a child who offended her as she strolled on Connecticut Avenue. At another time, she passed out from liquor at the dinner table at a function at the British Embassy.

  Forrestal's personal problems had their corrosive effects on everything he did. There was nowhere he could relax. He arrived at work early and went home late. There was no letup. Once a female assistant had been surprised to find him in his office at ten PM, looking wayward, drawn, and miserable. She suggested that he go home.

  "Go home? Hell! Home to what?” he snapped.

  The companion piece to the stories about Forrestal’s unsteady homelife was a different set of rumors. Namely, he was having a series of indiscreet sexual affairs with many married and single women around town. It was only a matter of time before a Russian or a Republican in a skirt gained access to sensitive information from the Truman administration. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

  But most worrisome of all in these cabinet meetings, Truman not only saw ghosts, but worse, he heard rumors. He had his spies, foreign and domestic. Truman had learned all about Forrestal’s sub rosa support for the presidential candidacy of Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey had even met secretly with Forrestal to discuss the possibility of retaining him in a Republican cabinet.

  Truman looked around the room and seethed. He had a crisis in Europe that threatened to blow up at any moment and he had a Judas among his advisors.

  “The meeting is over,” Truman said as he glared at his secretary of defense and Forrestal impassively gazed back. Truman rose and stalked out of the room.

  That evening, President Truman, deeply depressed, almost as depressed as his defense secretary, withdrew to his private residence. He was alone, except for those persistent, perplexing, and annoying creaks in the floorboards and rustling in the decaying plaster.

  “‘Structural flaws’ be damned! It sure as hell sounds as if something is there,” Harry growled to himself.

  Bess was back in Missouri and Margaret was away on a concert tour. The president was a lonely man, surrounded by people he couldn’t trust, feeling as if the White House was the crown jewel of the American prison system.

  “There is no other way to put this,” Truman wrote in his diary that evening. “I fear that we have lost the peace that our brave soldiers helped us win. Once again, we are very close to war.”

  But overnight, Harry Truman had a profoundly inspired brainstorm.

  He sauntered into the Oval Office the next morning at eight AM and summoned Forrestal, who had been at work since seven.

  “Jim,” Truman said. “How would you like to take a trip? Get away for a while?”

  “Where to?”

  “London. Berlin. Talk to our British friends and get a close look at this airlift we’re maintaining. I know I can trust your judgment. Plus a change of scenery might be good. What do you say?”

  Forrestal didn’t say anything. He just looked back at the president.

  After nearly a quarter of a minute, “Not interested?” Truman asked.

  “No,” Forestall answered, thinking. “Might be a good idea.”

  “Top secret,” Truman snapped. “No press. No news coverage. Fly air force from National to Frankfurt, then take a ride with the airlift boys to Berlin. Talk to the important people. General Tunner. General Clay. General LeMay. Our intel people who are on the ground. We have a few spies there, you know? You do know because you sent them. See what the hell is really going on. Get a look at the Russians up close. See if this is a disaster in the making or if it’s really going to work. Report back in five days.”

  “When would I leave?”

  “How fast can you pack a damned bag?”

  “I always keep one packed.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” said the President.

  “Might be a real good idea,” Forrestal said. “I’ll go.”

  It was a double win for Truman. Not only would he get Forrestal out of Washington’s political glare, but he got him away from his toxic homelife, too. Not only was Truman wary about betrayal within his cabinet, but he worried about Forrestal’s mental balance.

  Chapter 62

  Berlin – August 1948

  Major Pickford summoned Bill Cochrane to his office the next afternoon. When Cochrane arrived, Major Pickford handed an army intelligence file with no explanation of where he had obtained it. But no explanation was needed.

  “Sorry. It’s pretty thin,” Pickford said. “This is all we have on your Russian friend.”

  “Should I take it to the secure room?”

  “Read it here if you like,” Pickford said, indicating a free chair in his office. “Read it aloud if you want,” Pickford said. “See if I care. I already read it. It’s mostly military. Army dossiers don’t muddy the water with the criminal stuff. You probably know more. Or will soon.”

  “That’s a good bet,” Cochrane said. He opened the envelope and had a look.

  Kovalyov, Sergei Russian/ Soviet Military

  U.S. ARMY Intel File Ger/1948/SovMil # 6-231 (Updated 06/29/1948)

  Updates requested where possible/ongoing.

  Sergei (Andrei) Kovalyov is a retired Soviet colonel who most recently served during World War II and the occupation of the Eastern Zone of Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich.

  During the war, Kovalyov commanded a division on the Southeastern Front, later renamed the Stalingrad Front, during the Battle of Stalingrad in summer 1942 and assisted in planning the successful defense of the city. He later led units of the Red Army responsible for the liberation of Western Hungary in 1944.

  Born in Markivka in Kharkov Governorate in 1898 [Ed. Note: today called Ukraine] to a peasant family, Kovalyov was drafted into the Imperial Army in 1915, serving on the Romanian Fronts during World War I. He joined the Red Army in 1918, where he served in the Budyonny Cavalry. He attended the Leningrad Artillery and Tank School and then the Frunze Military Academy, graduating in 1935. In addition to his education, he was appointed to the command of an artillery regiment in Dec. 1929, then a division in 1937, and then the Sixth Tank and Artillery Corps in 1938.

  On Sept. 17, 1939, Kovalyov led his Sixth Tank and Artillery Corps into eastern Poland as part of the operations agreed to between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Later, after war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, Kovalyov took command of a ground warfare division in the prestigious First Red Banner Far Eastern Army in eastern Siberia. He was there at the outbreak of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

  {Examiner’s note: U.S. Army SD/06/14/47 - The Axis fighting force assembled for Operation Barbarossa was the largest “army” assembled in military history. Combat troops included regular soldiers from Nazi Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Italy, & Croatia; additionally anti-Communist volunteers from France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, & Norway, plus Polish conscripts. Later (1944) it also included White Russians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and Estonians.}

  Eight days after the German invasion began, Kovalyov was recalled to Moscow, where he took command of a tank and artillery division on the Soviet Western Front.

  The Nazi Blitzkrieg approach to warfare quickly dominated the Western Front, but Kovalyov motivated his battered troops. His division was the first to halt and resist the German offensive at Smolensk where Kovalyov was wounded. Because of his injuries, he was hospitalized in Moscow for more than a year.

  In Jan. 1942, Kovalyov was appointed vice commander of the Fourth Shock Army, part of the Northwestern Front. During the Soviet Winter Counteroffensive, Kovalyov's army was part of the extraordinarily successful Toropets–Kholm Offensive, which liberated Toropets and much of the surrounding region, helping to create the Rzhev Salient, which became a major battlefield over the next 15 months. On Jan. 20, 1942, Kovalyov was again wounded, this time in the arm, chest, and right foot when dive bombers from an SS division attacked his headquarters. He returned to a military hospital for several more months, receiving a new co
mmand when he limped out of the hospital during the siege of Stalingrad in Dec. 1942.

  During Operation Uranus, Nov. 1942, Kovalyov's forces helped to surround the German Sixth Army from the south linking up with the northern penetration at Kalach-na-Donu. Kovalyov successfully repelled weeks of attacks on his division.

  On Jan. 1, 1943, the Stalingrad Front was renamed Southern Front. After the end of the winter offensive in Mar. 1943, Kovalyov was transferred north to the Kalinin Front, which remained relatively quiet until September, when Kovalyov launched a small, but successful offensive. In December, Kovalyov was once again sent south, this time to take command of the Separate Coastal Army, which was put together to retake Crimea, which was accomplished with assistance from Fyodor Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front.

  In April, Kovalyov once again was sent north, to command a tank and artillery battalion under Marshall Zhukov, whose army was now pushing westward across the wasteland of Poland and eastern Germany. In the final weeks of the war, Kovalyov’s soldiers unleashed a terror upon German civilians that was excessive even for the Red Army. Their vengeful attack on Demmin and its remaining citizens punctuated their drive to Berlin. Witnesses told U.S. ARMY Intelligence units [Ref. USA 1948 -SU445-2) that Colonel Kovalyov’s command was to “kill and crush everything in our path.” The mass suicides at Demmin were no coincidence, faced with Kovalyov’s excesses. His troops arrived in Berlin one week after the advance juggernaut of Zhukov’s army, occupying a slice of the Western Sector of the city. The men under his command were rewarded with the pillaging of the city and its surrounding communities….

  Kovalyov retired from the Red Army in 1947 on full medical disability. He was awarded seven military medals, including three of the two highest distinctions of the Soviet Union: the Order of Suvorov (First Class), the Order of Kutusov (First Class), and the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (First Class.)

  It is widely believed that Kovalyov maintains high influence among Soviet officers, indulges in criminal enterprises, traffics in women, pain drugs, and black-market items such as liquor and vodka, and has the support, when needed, from friends and associates in the NKVD, hence is well-insulated and protected.

  Cochrane replaced the four pages into the file in their proper order. He handed the envelope back to Major Pickford. “Charming fellow,” Cochrane commented.

  “Anything else I can do for you?” Pickford asked.

  “I don’t suppose you have a subminiature camera stashed around here somewhere, would you? Plus some fine-grained film. And a lab that can do discreet processing overnight?”

  “I suppose I can make all of those wishes come true,” Pickford said, not for the first time and not without a sly smile. “How much film do you need?”

  “A lot maybe. Think in terms of two dozen rolls. Maybe three.”

  “Anything else?”

  Pickford wrote down nothing. He was memorizing. Cochrane could tell.

  “Some light burglar tools and two flashlights.”

  “And?”

  “That will do,” Cochrane said. “For today.”

  By now Major Pickford was laughing. He had become Bill Cochrane’s biggest fan.

  “I can make all of that happen,” Pickford said. “I don’t get out of the office much myself, so here’s hoping you have your fun.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I will,” Cochrane said. “How could I not in a place like Berlin?”

  Chapter 63

  Berlin – August 1949

  The noise of British and American aircraft rumbling low over the city, taking off and landing twenty times an hour, might have been disquieting to the population at any other time or in any other place. The military commander of the lift was now Air Force General William Henry Tunner who had previously commanded the India-China Division of the Air Transport Command. Tunner’s command had had the responsibility of supplying China by air across the Himalayas from India through the "Hump.” The operation had also developed a daring scheme to supply anti-Maoist forces in China.

  Few people involved other than the commanders knew how the Berlin lift was now simultaneously both touch-and-go and enormously complex. Spaced three minutes apart, at two hundred miles an hour, the loaded planes left Rhein-Main for Berlin and the pattern of their return was as exact. There were, most of the time, twenty-six planes in the corridor at the same time. With such a multitude of aircraft following on one another’s exhaust, landing techniques had to be faultless. Each point in the journey had to be passed at a precise height, at an exact time, and at a predetermined speed. There could be no variations, no displays of individual temperament. There were casualties, but the deliveries went on.

  To Berliners, however, it was not a racket in the skies above them, even though the engines sometimes roared only a few dozen meters above their rooftops. It was a consoling, welcoming sound, an ongoing soundtrack that told them that they had not been abandoned by the victors of the World War. The continued air traffic meant supplies were arriving — food, clothing, and fuel for heating. If the weather forced empty skies, as it did when summer thunderstorms struck or when rougher, edgier, wetter weather engulfed the city as summer ended and autumn began, Berliners looked fearfully to the horizon and then took comfort when the airplanes arrived again. The air bridge meant survival.

  A young American lieutenant in the Army Air Corps named Dale Halvorsen had grown up on a farm in Utah “with my face down in the dirt all the time," as he used to tell people. He would watch planes fly overhead and wish he could up there with the other men and women flying them. Halvorsen was part of the American generation that believed in working to make his dreams come true. He studied and earned his pilot’s license. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He received flight training with the Royal Air Force before returning to the Army Air Corps where the American military put him to work during World War II ferrying transport planes in England, Italy, and North Africa.

  Halvorsen stayed in the military after the World War, continuing to fly transports, but was moved back stateside. He had moved up in the aviation world and was now flying four-engine C-54 Skymasters, a plane too heavy for any of the landing fields in Berlin. At the end of June 1948, he was stationed at an air force base in Mobile, Alabama. A call came for pilots to participate in the newly announced “Berlin Airlift.”

  On less than sixty-minutes notice, he packed a few clothes, plus a bag full of handkerchiefs to help fight a nasty cold. He stashed his new Chevrolet under a tree near the air base and set out on a route that would take him to Berlin and the Big Lift, where he would return to flying the plane that carried him through the war. He also welcomed the idea of helping people instead of killing them.

  Halvorsen thought he would return in a few weeks. He never saw his car again. The next day, he flew to Newfoundland, then to Frankfurt. The day after that, he made his first flight to Berlin. He was astonished when, on landing, his ground crew and baggage handlers – DPs all of them, lined up to shake his hand and thank him for coming. He expected animosity. He felt none coming in his direction: only gratitude for his being there.

  Halvorsen began his tour in occupied Germany in early July at Rhein-Main. At that time, the Americans and the British lacked enough aircraft for round-the-clock operations, so he flew three round trips daily and had about seven hours off to sleep.

  During one of his downtimes in the middle of the month, Halvorsen decided to do some sightseeing. He hitched a ride as a passenger on a C-47 to Tempelhof airport in the American Sector. Halvorsen noticed a group of children watching through barbed wire as the airplanes landed. Halvorsen loved children and during his transport days, he had often been followed by packs of them, begging for candy.

  But these Berliners were quieter and more polite. Most of them didn’t know what gum or candy was. Using some German bystanders as interpreters, Halvorsen improvised a conversation. What they asked was that the Americans not abandon the airlift when the weather turned bad. They could go without enough food for a bit, the children
told Halvorsen, but then they chose words that seemed to echo the thoughts of their parents.

  “My mother says if we lose our freedom to the Russians,” one ten-year-old girl said, “we may never get it back."

  The remark hit Halvorsen like a punch in the solar plexus. He dug in his pocket for a couple of sticks of gum and distributed them, promising to return the next day with more candy. The kids asked how they would recognize the young lieutenant’s plane.

  “Don't worry,” Halvorsen said. “As I approach, I'll wiggle my wings,” the pilot replied, accompanying the explanation with a smile and a gesture of spread arms.

  Later back at his base, he rounded up as many candy bars as possible from other Americans. Pilots and crew bought extra candy at the commissary with money from their own pockets. Halvorson dug up his unused handkerchiefs and created small parachutes by tying strings to their corners and then attaching those strings to candy bars.

  The next day on approach to Tempelhof, he gave a signal to his onboard crew chief. He wiggled his C-47’s wings and released an invasion force of handkerchiefs as the plane passed over the edge of the cemetery where the kids were huddled. As he touched down, he and his crew managed a glimpse of the German boys and girls joyously clutching their candy. Halvorsen repeated the procedure over the next few days. Soon large crowds had gathered each day, a future generation of Berliners waiting for the American pilot known as "Uncle Wiggly Wings" and Der Shokoladen Flieger - "The Chocolate Flier.”

  Word spread. Lt. Halverson’s friends chipped in with more candy and more cloth. At Rhein-Main and Tempelhof, crews ripped up old shirts and ruined sheets to create more parachutes.

  Halvorsen’s activities were against air force regulations and he knew it. When his colonel found out, the young pilot got called in for a lecture and received an order to stop. But Berlin newspapers in English and German had already printed joyous pictures and stories about Halvorsen's “candy bombs” and the generous Americans. The colonel quickly issued an “as-you-were.” Privately, the Soviets were flummoxed. The Soviets had been trying to make the Americans the villains in the blockade, and Halvorson and his peers had undercut them with Baby Ruths and Milky Ways.