Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  Cochrane stepped in front of Roth and crouched low. There was a transom above the outer entrance, and it was open. The front doors were closed again. Cochrane could see that the soldiers were sitting on the stone steps with their backs to them.

  Cochrane carried the sack in a trembling hand. They arrived in the basement, still shocked to be alive. They hustled to the windows, closing one, then scrambling through the other.

  Once they were out of the town hall, Roth pulled both completely shut from the outside. They moved along the side of the building to the street behind the Rathaus and looked in each direction.

  No Kern. They moved eastward. Still no Kern.

  They looked to the area where they expected him and saw a tall figure emerge from a doorway. The figure waved. Cochrane began to raise his revolver. But Roth said quietly, “Don’t shoot. That’s Otto.”

  Kern flashed his lantern instead of his headlights. He had lurked in the doorway, Cochrane guessed, to be less conspicuous if a patrol came through.

  Good enough. More than good enough. Kern jumped into the front of the Kubelwagen and started the engine, keeping the lights off, driving by instinct and the penumbra of a quarter-moon. Roth and Cochrane piled into the vehicle.

  Kern crept around the corner and dropped his accomplices at Sgt. Pearson’s other evening rental. There was no time for congratulatory gestures. Every moment in the Soviet Zone was potential suicide at this hour.

  They drove twenty meters apart and were at the American checkpoint within a quarter-hour. They were back safely within the busy confines of Tempelhof by ten minutes after three in the morning. The Germans handed over their weapons to Cochrane to return to Major Pickford. They slept in a bunk room for DPs at the airport and rose at six-thirty AM to take their morning cargo shift. No point in being absent and arousing the suspicion of other workers, though Sgt. Pearson knew of their whereabouts.

  Cochrane passed by the commissary to pick up two bottles of beer and a boxed sandwich. He devoured it all, returned to his residential chamber, double-locked the door, and shoved the sack with the ledgers under his cot.

  He sat down on the cot and heaved an enormous sigh of relief. Once again, everything had gone more smoothly than it might have, and he had survived.

  Chapter 65

  Berlin – 1948

  Cochrane’s private reading began the next morning and continued uneventfully for several days. He slowly began to suspect that he had burgled the town hall and risked his life for nothing. But he was not going to jump to that conclusion until he had examined every document he had extracted.

  In the meantime, Major Pickford sent around some laboratory people to borrow the ledgers Cochrane wasn’t using and photograph the contents. In another office, they also searched the entries for a Horst Schmid, but their focus was on duplicating the volumes and shipping copies back to the United States for inventory and intelligence analysis.

  The question arose of whether to break in again and return the ledgers. Eventually, they would be missed. Then again, there was no way for the Soviets or their East German allies to know who had pilfered them or when. And the risk of being captured on a second visit was enormous. For the time being, the idea of a second visit was nixed.

  The day after the break-in passed without Cochrane finding Horst Schmid’s name and address among the thousands of entries. A second day passed. No luck. He found two entries for Lugeckstrasse, Horst’s street, but the names were not similar.

  As the hours passed, they grew longer and more frustrating. He went out to Helmut’s for lunch and the Tempelhof commissary for dinner. He worked into the evening, hunched over a desk in his chamber like a monk. He bought a bottle of Irish whisky at the commissary and nursed it along. After two days and evenings, he had put a good dent in it.

  Cochrane prayed for that special moment when everything would fall into place when he spotted Horst’s name and the destination where he had been sent. But that moment stubbornly resisted coming.

  The records from 1946 were either very scanty or very heavy. Either the deportations were sporadic, or they had not been recorded completely. Or somewhere else, he told himself, there was another set of books.

  There were huge lapses. January of 1946 was missing completely, for example. Snow? Ice? A steadier set of records picked up again in March of 1947. By this time, he knew, the Soviets had dragged the best of their factory booty all the way back to the Soviet Union by rail. By this time also, it was clear that the occupation of the Eastern Zone of Germany was going to be permanent. No point in dragging everything off to the Worker’s Paradise when the Worker’s Paradise had come to Germany.

  Particularly unlucky were the captive people who had been abducted to work in the distant Soviet labor camps. Most would never be seen again. The others, even if they stood in front of mirrors, wouldn’t even recognize themselves.

  With fatigue and impatience on his third day of reading and searching, Bill Cochrane turned the crinkly yellowish pages of the ledger in front of him. His mind drifted regularly. He fought sleep even in mid-afternoon. His tiredness and frustration were things he couldn’t shake. He often thought of Laura and Caroline enjoying a summer in Cambridge without him. He wondered what he had to do to buy his own freedom from this monster of an assignment. He began to think of himself as an abductee, as well.

  By the time he had been going through these volumes for four days and nights, he cursed Berlin and swore to himself that much as he had liked the city when he had first arrived in the 1930s, Berlin was now a joyless, decrepit, grim place that was filled with poverty, sorrow, oppression, and broken hearts.

  His mind riffed as he worked and completed a study of the ninth of the twelve hijacked volumes. He thought of Laura again, her beautiful face even back when she was married to another man before the war. In his mind, he transposed himself to ten years earlier when FDR was in his second term and when Cochrane was a younger man jumping at shadows, not the least of which was one being a Nazi assassin.

  Bill Cochrane was not a smoker. But he had several packs of cigarettes scattered on his desk. In frustration, he fished a smoke out of an open pack, lit it, took a couple of puffs, and let the butt died in an ashtray.

  He drank more whisky. He pondered uselessly on Fascism, Capitalism, Communism, and Democracy, convinced himself that there wasn’t a single “ism” that wasn’t a crock of bovine manure, and wondered again what in the hell he was doing in that lonely airport room in Berlin.

  He demanded an answer from the back of his mind as the forefront of his mind continued its weary trek through the ledger.

  True enough, he was looking for a gauleiter who had protected him and Frieda and Bettina during the war. If you couldn’t protect those who had protected you, where was personal honor over anything?

  He pushed back from the volumes in front of him. It was all useless. A nest of doubts, uncertainties, and lousy penmanship! And who knew if the records, what there was of them, were even accurate?

  He looked at ledger lines forwards and backward.

  He was nearly asleep when he read the last line on page 48 in volume 10.

  He blinked long and hard. He looked at his watch. His watch told him it was two-thirty in the morning.

  He raised a hand to slam the ledger shut.

  And then there it was, right in front of him, staring him in the face so clearly that he could hardly believe it.

  No alarm bells went off, there was no bolt of lightning other than the ones from the thunderstorms that had bedeviled Berlin in the last few days. But there before him occupying one line, noted in the cramped, condemned handwriting of a functionary who would forever remain anonymous, was the name Horst Schmid at 17, Lugeckstrasse, (Lichtenberg) Berlin.

  Then the notation, “16-43.”

  Backtracking to a different volume, Cochrane established that location 16-43 was a tractor factory in a town named Greifswald that was two hundred fifty kilometers northeast of Berlin on the Baltic Sea. The town sur
vived World War II without much destruction, even though it housed a large army garrison. During the war, it was the site of a camp for prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany called Stalag II-C. In April 1945, Wehrmacht Colonel Rudolf Petershagen defied orders and surrendered the town to the Red Army without a fight. The town had been rewarded by the Soviets with a tractor factory after the war.

  Bingo!

  Cochrane looked at the line in the ledger for several long seconds, maybe a minute, much the way a man might stare at a winning lottery ticket to completely absorb the number.

  But there it was, in dark blue and yellowish white.

  Horst Schmid, 54 jahren, 17, Lugeckstrasse. 16-43, 27/10/46

  He hunched forward, exhaled a long breath of exhaustion, spiritual and physical, and did some quick mental gymnastics. Yes, the listing interplayed nicely with what Bettina had said: time of his disappearance, age, a tractor technician, and useful to manage a factory.

  Bull’s-eye. He hoped.

  By this time, his beleaguered mind was out of control and doing its own sprints. He thought back to much that had transpired in 1943 and then held that up against the more recent image of “Ilse Groening” – or Bettina – sitting on an upper corridor watching everything that was going on at Club Weimar.

  Watching. No one had spelled it out at the time or in the present day. Not only had Bettina been part of Dulles’s and Irv Goff’s network of subversives to transport people out of Nazi Germany but she was among his watchers at street level, also. If that had been the case with Bettina, then it had also been the case with Horst Schmid. Their postwar reward was to be evacuated to the West. Better to do that, anyway, than to let the Soviets get their hands on them and potentially turn them against the west or bury them in their camps.

  Bingo, again!

  Cochrane sighed. Whether his theory was true or not, it worked. He poured himself a final two fingers of whisky and closed the volume with a file card in it marking the page. He washed quickly, collapsed into bed, and fell into a deep sleep within minutes, pondering his next move with Major Pickford.

  Chapter 66

  Berlin – August 1948

  Bill Cochrane was still sound asleep less than six hours later when a frantic knocking on his door awakened him. The sharp knocking on his door persisted, followed by an urgent voice in a modified shout. “Major Lewis, sir? You in there? Need to speak to you, sir!”

  Then there was more knocking.

  Cochrane emerged abruptly from a deep unsettled sleep.

  He shot up quickly in his bed. He checked the pistol that he kept at his bedside. It was still there, apparently untouched. His gaze went to the door. He could tell that the bolt was still thrown, and the latch turned.

  He groggily reminded himself that he was on a secure wing of an airbase secured by the U.S. Army and that it was peacetime. But what the hell? The knocking came again.

  He rose quickly. As a precaution, he grabbed his pistol and went to the door. There was a peephole.

  “Who is it?” he shouted.

  “Sir! Sgt. Pearson, sir!” came the response. “Urgent!”

  Cochrane recognized the voice and opened the door.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Pearson said. “You have a visitor, sir!”

  Cochrane glanced around and saw no one else.

  “Where?”

  “Command headquarters, sir. General Clay’s office. Do you need me to guide you, sir?”

  “No. Been there. I know where it is.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but the general says make double time. Right now, sir.”

  “Got it,” Cochrane said.

  “I’m to accompany you, sir,” Pearson said. “Important guest, sir!”

  Cochrane went to his wash area and threw cold water on his face. He pulled on his suit, less a necktie, and they went out into the corridor and quickstepped to the administrative headquarters of Tempelhof, past armed MPs.

  The armed MPs were not unusual. Cochrane had been in this area before and had met twice with General Clay. But when he passed several more American soldiers and civilian security people, he knew that the visitor had high rank. Less than two minutes later, Sgt. Pearson peeled away. A lieutenant colonel named Cloutier met Cochrane and escorted him past General Clay’s secretary and into the general’s office.

  When Lt. Colonel Cloutier preceded Cochrane through the general’s door and held it open, Cochrane entered the room. The man at the main desk, flanked by an army flag and an American flag normally would have been General Clay. Today Clay was seated in a chair to the side. Cochrane recognized the man at the desk, one of the most powerful men in the American chain of command at that moment, a man he had known personally and socially for several years.

  “Hello, Bill,” Secretary of Defense James Forrestal said.

  “Hello, Jim,” Cochrane said. “Or, excuse me. ‘Mr. Secretary’,” he corrected himself.

  Forrestal’s hair was immaculately combed and parted. His eyes were sharp but heavy. He looked haggard and stressed and was most likely jet-lagged. Cochrane knew that he had been in Washington as recently as two days previously. Now he was here. This had to be important.

  “‘Jim,’ is fine,” Forrestal said. “Not enough people call me that anymore. Please sit,” he said, indicating a visitor’s chair before the desk. Cochrane had been in it before. He sat. He also noticed that there were no stenographers there to take notes. Doors closed behind him, and Cochrane was alone with General Clay and the defense secretary.

  “How are things? How’s your wife?” Forrestal asked.

  “Fine, Jim. Thank you.”

  Like everyone else, Cochrane had read the rumors circulating around the defense secretary’s personal life. He refrained from asking. Instead, “I hope you’re taking time to take care of yourself, Jim. I know things have been difficult,” Cochrane said.

  “I’ll get through things,” Forrestal said. “I’ll manage.”

  Forrestal looked down at some file reports on General Clay’s desk. There was a silence in the room. Forrestal had spread a two-page document in front of him and read it with heavy concentration. A thousand conflicting thoughts battered Cochrane as the silence persisted.

  Forrestal's life, Cochrane mused, was pure Roaring Twenties, carrying over into the Sputtering Thirties and War-weary Forties. His world revolved around money, power, glamour, treachery, and sex. He had gone into bonds after the first World War and made a fortune. He was worth five million dollars by 1932. But Forrestal’s prominence and success also attracted the attention of a 1933 congressional panel investigating his wealth. The panel asked pointed questions about his creation of a company in 1929 into which he put $896,000 of tax-sheltered income. The insinuation was clear: he had evaded taxes. Nothing came of the charges.

  Cochrane knew that savage flames burned within Forrestal. The experience before the investigators affected him for weeks afterward, weakening his confidence, triggering fights with his family, and causing him to scratch at psoriasis scabs on his neck till he drew blood.

  Thoughts of Forrestal’s family triggered another story from the past in Cochrane’s mind. In 1933 Forrestal had built, at the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Beekman Place, a five-story Georgian-style house with a brick library and circular staircase. One night during the Depression, his wife, Jo, was walking home alone from an event at the Plaza Hotel. On the street outside their home on Beekman Place, gunmen relieved her of jewelry, worth fifty thousand dollars, while Forrestal slept a few dozen feet above the scene of the crime.

  The story had always stayed with Cochrane. Why had Jo been out late alone with so much jewelry? Why had her husband not had someone watching over her? Even in New York’s “good” neighborhoods, these things happened. Cochrane had only read about the incident when it was reported in The New York Times. It was his first signal that, as much as he liked Jim Forrestal, things with Jim could go haywire and become weird at any time.

  Worse, anti-Forrestal gasbags on the r
adio used the incident to attack him, asserting, without any evidence, that he had known his wife was being robbed but “hadn’t been man enough” to come out and protect her.

  Other more recent incidents played out like a newsreel before Cochrane. He had heard back-channel stories from his friends in the intelligence community that after the end of World War II, the National Security Council authorized the recruitment of members of former Ukrainian execution squads, who had worked for the Nazis exterminating Jews and Red Army supporters, to work clandestinely within the Soviet Union assassinating Communists.

  The group went by a German name: Nachtigall. Or Nightingale.

  Ironically, while one wing of the American intelligence community was secretly bringing Nightingale’s leaders to the United States to train them, another wing was working to bring them to trial in Nuremberg. Forrestal’s passion against worldwide Communism was so intense, that he helped bring about the program, which eventually failed. Cochrane, as he admired the Rolex on Forrestal’s wrist, wondered if his friend had any misgivings about recruiting Nazis.

  Cochrane felt his mind rocketing from one epiphany to the next.

  He wondered about the reality before him: a gentleman with a Rolex, a much-admired Princeton alumnus, who had come up from working-class origins, was instrumental in postwar planning and purportedly using Nazi death squads to whack Red sympathizers. But then again, as he took a second look, the man before him was his old friend, Jim, who had worked for FDR.

  Cochrane was in the middle of these thoughts when Forrestal looked up.

  “So, Bill?” Forrestal said tersely. “You’ve been on the ground in the Soviet Sector as much as any American operative for the past five weeks. Did you know that?”

  “Not till now.”

  “And you’ve seen much of the city. You’ve been in and out of the Soviet Zone, done us a little dirty work, and you’ve seen the airlift up close.”

  “Correct,” Cochrane said.

  “Share your thoughts with me.” There was a hint of a smile from the defense secretary. He leaned back, folded his arms, and gave Cochrane a full grin.