Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  The repair team estimated the cost of renovations might be $1 million. Quietly, Harry Truman approved the renovations, though privately he made jokes that his own “structural nerves” had been damaged, also. The on-site forensic investigations continued while the Truman family was whistle-stopping across the United States campaigning. But Truman’s eyes were not just on his next train station and Washington. They were also on Berlin, where he had suddenly discovered a formidable ally in a man named Ernst Reuter.

  Ernst Reuter, a former Communist, had been drafted during World War I and had been a Russian prisoner of war from 1916 to 1917. He joined the Bolsheviks and caught the attention of Lenin when the Bolsheviks deposed the Tsar.

  Reuter was appointed to the lofty title of People's Commissioner on the Volga with the task of making Communist German colonists loyal citizens of the Soviet state that was being formed. At the end of 1918, he returned to Germany.

  Lenin's assessment of the young German was insightful.

  "The young Reuter is brilliant and has a clear head. But he is a little too independent,” Lenin told other party members. Reuter was also a brilliant speaker. Lenin promoted him to Communist Party secretary for Berlin to encourage him. But Reuter quit the Communists and rejoined the Social Democrats in 1922. He was elected to the Berlin city assembly in 1926, served as mayor of Magdeburg in the 1930s, and had become a member of the Reichstag the following year. After Adolf Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship, he wisely fled to England, as Hitler wanted him slain.

  He returned to Berlin in 1946 and reorganized the Social Democratic Party. He ran for mayor in 1947, but he was not allowed to take office because of Soviet opposition. Reuter had seen Communism Soviet-style, had thoroughly turned against it, and understood Stalin’s intentions. Now, along with three hundred thousand other Berliners in September of 1948, he took to the streets when the city council was disbanded.

  Reuter spoke at the Reichstag and then delivered several fiery orations in public. He put forth an impassioned appeal that echoed across newspapers, newsreels, and television screens around the world.

  “People of the world, look upon this city!” he raged when he spoke in front of a third of a million people in the public square in front of the battered Reichstag. “You cannot, you must not, forsake us! There is only one possibility for all of us: to stand together until this fight has been won, until the fight has finally been settled through victory over the enemies, through victory over the force of darkness."

  In a hotel room in Chicago, Harry Truman listened to the speech on a new television and listened to the dubbing from German into English, just as Bill Cochrane listened to it on BBC radio during his first week of lectures at Cambridge.

  Bill Cochrane agreed with Reuter completely. So did Harry Truman, who jumped to his feet and applauded.

  Lenin had been correct twenty-plus years earlier. Reuther was too independent. But he had also caught the spirit of the times. Reuther’s speech and the third of a million Berliners gathered on the street created an image that could not escape millions of Western viewers.

  It was almost palpable. Opinion around the world began to change. Ernst Reuter and hundreds of thousands of Berliners convinced the Western Allies not to halt the airlift during the miserable winter weather or abandon West Berlin to Soviet domination.

  And Harry Truman, a cold warrior among cold warriors, had found the ally he needed as well as the issue.

  The next day, Truman made staying in Berlin a central part of his re-election campaign.

  “I will never abandon Berlin and I will never curtail the airlift,” Truman raged from his train as he crossed the country. Millions of Americans, who had seen enough of Communism around the globe, began to listen.

  Chapter 78

  Washington, D.C. – October – November 1948

  In October, the ceiling of the East Room of the White House partially collapsed. It required wood supports to remain where its builders had intended it to be more than a century and a half earlier.

  The structure under the main staircase was also crumbling. Mr. Truman’s bathtub had sunk further into the floor. Architects also discovered that the foundations of the interior walls supporting the upper floors and roof were all but nonexistent. As they sank into the ground, the interior walls and floors were pulling away from the exterior walls leaving large gaps. They saw no ghosts, but they determined that the interior of the house was sinking and in danger of collapsing inwards. The entire mansion was unsafe, except, oddly enough, the new Truman balcony. But the Truman family was barely affected: everyone was out campaigning.

  Down in the polls and under fire within his own party, Truman alone remained confident of his victory. Even his secret service detail, looking to curry favor with Thomas Dewey, whom they expected to be elected, abandoned Truman to the backup detail and went to guard Dewey.

  Bill Cochrane, registered as an independent, voted for Truman in absentia at the embassy in London. He went to bed next to Laura having heard that the early returns were going heavily against the incumbent president. The same happened across America. The anti-Truman Chicago Tribune even ran a celebratory, eight-column headline, Dewey Defeats Truman.

  The headline was wishful thinking for those who opposed the feisty president. Early on Wednesday morning, the late ballots rolled in from Illinois, California, and the South.

  In Missouri, Truman learned of his victory at 4:00 AM, when a secret service agent woke him. Later that day, 40,000 people jammed the town square in Independence to salute their native son. On the morning after the election, millions of Americans rose to news of the most surprising comeback in presidential election history. Hundreds of thousands of Berliners celebrated, also. They knew they had an ally they could depend on.

  How had Truman done it?

  The election had been a cliffhanger. Truman had won without getting a majority of the popular vote. But he had cobbled together enough of Franklin Roosevelt’s old coalition to squeak through. His civil rights program attracted Black and liberal voters. Farmers rewarded his backing of price supports. Southern states remained Democratic. Henry Wallace, FDR’s wartime vice president, had taken far-left voters with him and had the support of the American Communist Party. But in doing so, he had insulated Truman from being accused of being soft on Communism. And Tom Dewey had run a lackluster campaign. Dewey woke up on election morning thinking he was the president-elect. It took him days to understand what had hit him.

  The Gallup Organization, the pollsters, did a postmortem and tried to figure out what issue had been lurking that pushed the Truman candidacy to victory.

  One word was repeated over and over: Berlin.

  CHAPTER 79

  Cambridge – December 23-25, 1948

  As the Christmas season came to Cambridge, Cochrane managed to let the events of the year recede in his mind to what he hoped would be their proper place. He often had the sense of watching events play out again, except this time in reverse, and he wondered what he could have done differently. His basic compassion continued to mourn the loss – he had by now accepted it as such – of Heinrich Roth and Anna Schroeder. No one had heard from them, and the two bodies and the Opel fished out of the canal made a strong and unpleasant circumstantial case.

  Deciding that there was no good answer to the question of what he could have done differently and reminding himself that those in the intelligence community sometimes didn’t have definite answers for decades, if ever, he began to grudgingly accept the two deaths. In any operation, there were wins and losses, triumphs to be celebrated, and wounds to lick. So it was with his visit to Berlin in 1948.

  At least, he told himself, he could take consolation in the grander picture. The Americans and the British were dug in for the airlift, tenacious as terriers, even though the winter was cold and rough. General Tunner’s Skymasters had increased coal and food to such a degree that the city was starting to show a surplus. The political bickering and yammering continued in Berlin,
but Ernst Reuter had become the face of “Free” Berlin. In an election held in December, his popularity gave the SPD the highest win ever achieved by any party in a free election in Germany with 64.5% of the vote. The Soviets could no longer block him from becoming mayor. Nor could they get him to a tall building where he might suffer a fall.

  Almost as an afterthought to his tenure in Cambridge, his lectures and discussions at the university had gone very well. He was invited to continue into the second half of his series, which would continue till April. Thereafter, the Cochrane family would return to New York, via a trans-Atlantic passage by ship in early spring; icy winds and turbulent waters not being anything that could be mistaken for enjoyable.

  Laura and Bill enjoyed Christmas shopping in Cambridge, overindulging their daughter, and enjoying Christmas music, and eventually a Christmas Day service at Kings College Chapel. Occasionally, Cochrane enjoyed a pint or two at his favorite pub as well.

  Two days before Christmas, on the evening of the twenty-third of December, Cochrane again found himself at the bar of The Hero of the Thames, standing sullenly at the far end, not talking to anyone, and nursing a pint of brown ale. After too many minutes he realized that he had been listening to the same windbag at a nearby table for too long, a braying colonial voice that rose above the others, a hollow vessel making the most noise.

  He summoned Edward the barman, Cambridge’s version of Helmut.

  “Is that my old friend Egon Henkel,” Cochrane asked.

  “It is, Mr. Cochrane,” Edward answered.

  “Does he still live over on Green Street?”

  “As far as I know. He staggers home in that direction three or four times a week’

  “Do you think you can keep him here for an hour or three?” Cochrane said, looking to serve a receipt upon at least one small part of the world that he didn’t care for. “I have some overdue business to take care of.”

  “Get him drunk or pop something in his drink?” Edward asked with a mischievous wink.

  “The latter, maybe.”

  “Let me refresh his glass,” Edward said.

  Cochrane watched while Edward went into action.

  Twenty minutes later when Henkel slumped forward for a snooze at his table, Cochrane asked Edward to leave his pint right where it was. Edward was happy to.

  Cochrane hustled over Henkel’s flat on Green Street. The flat was above a garage with an old door at the top of a side staircase. The lock on the doorknob virtually gave up when Cochrane gave it a sharp twist.

  He entered. There was light from a street lamp and no shades. He looked in the logical place for a stolen Callot and found it braced on a ramshackle mantle above the fire grate. He grabbed it, tucked it frame and all under his coat, closed the door without touching anything else and went back to the Hero of The Thames in time to watch Henkel come to half an hour before closing time. As Cochrane left he gave Henkel a cheerful good evening.

  The next morning, Victoria Cameron-Butler, the Cochrane’s landlady, found a neat package at her door marked with her name and Christmas wrapped. She opened the package and joyfully received her lost Callot, then mentioned its return to her current tenants later in the day.

  “What a mystery!” Laura said. “Worthy of Agatha Christie!”

  Bill agreed.

  “I’ve lived in Cambridge all my life,” Victoria said. “The city is filled with brilliant people. Sometimes,” she concluded, “I just don’t question anything.”

  Chapter 80

  Washington, D.C. – January-March 1949

  On January 11, 1949, James Forrestal met at the White House with President Truman. The meeting was short and sweet. Truman started by greeting Forrestal warmly. “You are a loyal fellow,” he said. Then he proceeded to fire the man who had built the modern United States Navy and who warned anyone who would listen about Soviet world domination.

  Truman announced that Louis A. Johnson of Virginia was being appointed to succeed Forrestal as secretary of defense, effective immediately, as soon as the appointment could be approved by Congress. It was a brutal defeat for Forrestal. Johnson wanted to slash America's defense spending.

  Worse, Johnson had served as chief money-raiser for President Truman's election campaign. There were allegations that his appointment was a political payoff, but his experience was solid as his work in veterans' affairs and as assistant secretary of war bolstered his c.v. In the newspapers the next day, Forrestal’s impending departure was reported as a “resignation.” Everyone in Washington knew better. In The Washington Post the next day, a front-page account of the shake-up at the White House reported the resignation "for reasons that were never entirely clear."

  Nevertheless, Forrestal attended Johnson's swearing-in at the Pentagon on March 28. At the White House on his final day in the government, Truman assembled the entire Cabinet and Joint Chiefs of Staff to honor him. Forrestal was touched and moved. When the meeting was over, Forrestal prepared to drive back to a special transition office to answer congratulatory letters sent to him from across the country. His mood was good, almost as if he was relieved to be unburdened of so much official responsibility.

  On the following day, he was warmly received at a special meeting of the House Armed Services Committee. Thereafter, his driver drove him back to his office. Friends followed in two other cars. One of them came to Forrestal’s office later in the day and found him sitting at his desk, staring at the wall, his hat and coat still on.

  “Are you all right, Jim?” the friend asked.

  Forrestal did not reply. He seemed like a man with a concussion, oblivious to events or conversation around him. “You are a loyal fellow,” he muttered over and over as if fixed on the phrase. At the time, no one knew what it meant.

  Then, saying nothing to several friends and aides who had gathered, the man who had built the modern American Navy rose unsteadily to his feet, summoned his driver, and went home to Georgetown.

  Over the next days and weeks, his mental and physical health went into a free fall.

  Normally a meticulously dressed man, exquisitely tailored, he walked around his home and the capital with his clothes in disarray. He barely ate. Often, he didn’t shave for days at a time. Within weeks he was rail-thin and haggard. His skin lost its tone and was hanging loose at his neck.

  As bad as his physical distress was, his mental disintegration was worse. Once a brilliant man, he now rambled incoherently: His home was wiretapped. Hostile strangers were watching him from the sky. The Communists were after him and his wife. The Russians were invading. His paranoia had no limits.

  Family came around to help him. So did friends who summoned mental health professionals. Forrestal resisted at first, then allowed himself to be assisted. Later rather than sooner, Forrestal agreed to be admitted for psychiatric treatment at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

  It was an odd venue considering that Forrestal was no longer a government employee. Even stranger was the fact that access to him was severely limited, something the government denied, but that Forrestal’s brother, Henry, confirmed when Bill Cochrane spoke to him by a special secure long-distance telephone hookup from the embassy in London.

  The phone call took place a few days after Forrestal had been admitted to Bethesda. There had been no notice of the admission in the press. It was “Top Secret” for many reasons, but word had filtered back to Cochrane through various unofficial channels.

  Cochrane put down the phone after speaking to Henry Forrestal.

  He stared out his apartment window in Cambridge for several seconds until Laura found him.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  “No. Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot that’s wrong. I can’t even begin to add it all up.”

  Chapter 81

  Soviet-occupied Germany - March 1949

  They were alive.

  Heinrich Peter Roth understood the remaining gritty streets and back alleys far better than the Soviet soldiers and
Eastern Sector police who were looking for him. No one who was pursuing him for the shooting of ex-Colonel Sergei Kovalyov knew the name of the man they were looking for. Nor did they know the background of his companion, Anna Schroeder, as the couple eluded capture in the first days after their shooting.

  They hid with friends in the Eastern Zone of Berlin for several days following the shooting. They ditched their Opel on the street and never learned what happened to it. They only knew it disappeared and had probably been stolen. Heinrich’s American dollars eventually financed a ride out of Berlin in the back of a covered truck. The driver, not knowing they were wanted, dropped the couple a kilometer from where Roth’s aunt and uncle lived.

  They moved in one night with Roth’s aunt and uncle and stayed, never leaving the premises but living well outside the dragnet in Berlin during which police and soldiers went house to house. It had been dark the night of the shooting at Club Weimar. When the bullets flew, most people ran, they didn’t stop and stare or take photographs. Accounts of witnesses conflicted. From those who had been close to the shooting, Roth was either six feet or six-four. He had been blond or brown-haired. Or he had worn a hat. There had been a flurry of people running and shooting. No one knew. Same for the woman. She was a blonde and she had worked there. It turned out her papers were forged. An abused blonde with fake papers? There were as many of those in Berlin as there were soldiers. Such a description narrowed things down to more than ten thousand women in the Soviet Zone of Berlin.

  There was another important factor to their escape and survival.

  Kovalyov had been widely hated. Germans knew he had been one of the butchers of Demmin. Russians knew him as a thug and a gangster. For many, the world might not have been a better place without him, but it was an easier place. Sometimes military patrols looked for Anna and Heinrich and other times they didn’t. In the winter that followed, the trail froze over along with the weather.