Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  "Passports! Identifications!" they demanded. Their eyes drifted across the other faces in the compartment and settled suspiciously upon Cochrane. He stared at the two young Germans, gave them a look of condescension, shook his head in irritation, and gazed out the window.

  "Tell me, Sergeant," Cochrane asked in flawless German, "how much longer can we waste our time in this stinking little town?"

  The corporal stepped to the Sergeant's side and glared at Cochrane. "You have the insolence to ask us questions?" snapped the Sergeant. "Your passport!"

  The corporal made a slight gesture with his gun. Three other passengers cringed.

  With a gesture of annoyance, Cochrane reached to his passport and tossed it contemptuously onto the floor at the Sergeant's feet. As the corporal covered Cochrane, the Sergeant opened the Swiss passport. He stared at the photograph in the passport and raised his eyes to check it against Bill Cochrane. He found a close enough match. But something was wrong with the man before him and the Sergeant knew it.

  Cochrane's hand went slowly to his breast pocket. The corporal eyed him.

  "At ease, Corporal!" Cochrane muttered sourly.

  Cochrane withdrew the Gestapo shield from his breast pocket. The eyes of the two soldiers went wide with terror.

  "Now would you kindly hand me back my passport and get your asses moving through this train!"

  Cochrane's other hand remained within his coat; the palm pressed against the handle of the pistol. The Luger was Cochrane's only remaining hope if the bluff failed.

  "Thank you, sir!" blurted the Sergeant. He fumbled the passport back into Cochrane's hands. The American snatched it furiously and drove the two soldiers from the compartment with a withering stare. The young Sergeant had rattled too easily to obey army protocol: checking the name on the Gestapo shield against the passport. Had either soldier taken that simple measure, all three of them would have died.

  In Zurich, when Cochrane was certain that the Gestapo was not on his back, he looked for an address that he had memorized months previously in Washington: a print shop in a prosperous residential neighborhood five minutes' walk from the lake. He found it without difficulty.

  The print shop was on a side street, nestled between an antique dealer and a dressmaker. The proprietor, according to the window, was a man named Engle.

  Moments later, Cochrane was in the rear of Engle's shop, the doors closed for greater security. Cochrane needed three passports made urgently and smuggled back into Germany. Engle sighed. Cochrane informed him that Uncle Edgar in Washington would handle the reimbursement.

  "These passports," Engle inquired. "Swiss? Canadian? What must they be?"

  "Swiss would be excellent."

  "I cannot work without photographs."

  Cochrane withdrew the portrait of the Mauer family from his inside pocket. With a pair of scissors, Cochrane trimmed it into three single photographs. These he handed to Engle. Cochrane next printed the address of Frau Mauer's chocolate shop in Munich.

  "The passports," Cochrane continued, "must be sent by private courier from within the Reich and in an envelope that will appear to be a business correspondence. It should be marked 'Personal Attention of Frau Mauer.' And I should stress," Cochrane concluded, "that there may be a certain urgency to this order."

  Engle raised his eyes slightly. "These days, Mein Herr," he said, "there is always great urgency. The world rushes headlong with great urgency. And toward what end?" The old man hunched his shoulders. He sighed. "You are in trouble with the Nazis? Gestapo?"

  No response from Cochrane.

  Engle studied his visitor. "Did you kill one? A Gestapo agent?"

  "Probably more than one."

  Engle arched an eyebrow. For the first time a crafty smile danced across the merchant's face. "Be careful, my American friend," he said. "Zurich is alive with Gestapo and SS. In the last day there has been a marked increase. They seem to be looking for someone." Engle's gaze alighted on Cochrane. "Maybe an American." He paused, then, "May an old man give a young man some advice?"

  "Feel free," Cochrane said.

  "Continue home immediately," said Engle. "Take the least predictable route. I will see that your three friends" - and here the old man glanced down to what Cochrane had written - "the Mauer family, are taken care of."

  Bill Cochrane offered Engle his hand, which turned into a clasp with both of the engraver's hands. "Filthy bloody Nazis," the old man murmured. "Animals."

  Cochrane boarded an express for Geneva that afternoon. It was 5:30 when the train pulled away from the station. In the dining car that night, Cochrane's attention focused on an auburn-haired woman of maybe forty dining alone. He took her to be Swiss, and twice when she looked up she saw him watching her, but against his instincts, he decided that amorous pursuits were not worth the trouble.

  The next morning in Geneva, Cochrane took the first plane out, which went to Tehran, where the Gestapo crawled in alarming numbers and where he again changed passports, becoming Canadian and using an English-language bookstore as a dead drop for his new identity. He dyed his hair black, acquired glasses, and found an ill-fitting brown suit in a flea market. He flew to Palestine and enlisted as a cook's assistant on a British freighter bound to Bermuda. The vessel arrived safely, despite the hazards of submarines. He presented himself to the United States Consulate in Hamilton and talked a skeptical undersecretary into placing a telephone call to Washington. The next day, Washington brought him home, telling him that it all had been worth it, even before they learned what it all had been.

  It was November 12, 1938. He had been away for fifteen months.

  For the next six weeks he was debriefed personally by Assistant Director Frank Lerrick, who generally named only topics, allowing Cochrane to guide him through the Abwehr at Cochrane's own pace. A stenographer recorded everything, and on one day two generals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared also, sat quietly, and listened. Cochrane's testimony filled three locked filing cabinets. The FBI had scored a staggering intelligence coup, so it seemed, and Bill Cochrane had done it.

  "I can see great things for you in this Bureau," Lerrick concluded warmly when all questions had been asked.

  “Good,” said Cochrane. "Now you tell me something," Cochrane said.

  "What happened to Otto Mauer? And his family? I promised to get them out of Germany."

  Lerrick's face went colder than a tombstone. Cochrane lost his smile.

  "Come on, Lerrick!" Cochrane snapped. "I've been talking to you for six weeks. Would you answer my one question?"

  "They are alive. We got them to New York. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

  Bill Cochrane exhaled an enormous sigh. He thought of Mauer, his lovely wife and their son. "Thank God. That's all I asked," Cochrane said.

  A few days into 1939, Bill Cochrane reported for work and awaited a new assignment.

  For the Bureau itself, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, depending whose opinion one sought. The desperado bandits and bank robbers of the Depression era were gone, either dead or imprisoned or somewhere in between.

  Hoover himself had garnered much of the credit. But the gangland fortunes that had been weaned on Prohibition gin and basement beer were placing a stranglehold on the cities from Illinois to New York. The Bureau seemed outmanned, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. Or just plain outfoxed.

  Two foreign agents, personally dispatched by Hoover, had returned from Moscow via Khartoum with no luggage and figurative bullet holes in their hats. Another had been buried in Rome by jubilant Fascisti, and yet another was missing and presumed dead in the Suez. It was a time when Hoover's agents were running into the ground, sometimes literally, all over the globe.

  As for Cochrane's escapade in Berlin and Munich, there were two ways of viewing it:

  One: Cochrane had scored a major intelligence coup. Every bit of information checked and double-checked. The FBI had penetrated a foreign spy service for the first time. The mission was
a success.

  Or, two: Cochrane had left Germany at the speed of light with every contact apparently compromised and scrambling for cover. How and why, he wondered. The mission was, in the end, a disaster.

  Worse, the Gestapo knew exactly who the “banker” was who had befriended people in Berlin and Munich, then left a trail of blood as he killed agents on his way out of the Reich and managed to smuggle the Mauer family out, also. As long as the Nazis were in power, the memory would remain alive.

  Cochrane soon found himself immersed in boring grunt work within the bureau, with few cases that piqued his interest. He was re-assigned to the Baltimore office, where First Maryland National Bank had uncovered a chamber of horrors in, of all places, their auditing room. Cochrane's reception by the other agents in Baltimore was downright frosty. It was common currency that Cochrane had scored some considerable successes for the Bureau but now J. Edgar Hoover was wary of Cochrane’s star power. So as the months passed in Baltimore, Bill Cochrane felt the final days of his youth slipping away. If his services were not appreciated, he could not give other adults lessons in common sense.

  He sought a job in private enterprise. He was, after all, a banker by profession, spoke a foreign language or two, and knew he could count on the Bureau to barter him a fine letter of recommendation in exchange for his resignation. He applied for work at three New York banks. Morgan Guaranty made him an outstanding offer. That settled it.

  He would move to New York. He would receive a salary that was more than fair. He would find himself a comfortable apartment and, he hoped against hope, a special woman. He would settle down, remarry, acquire an inch or two around the waistline probably, and mind his own business while the rest of the world tumbled sublimely into hell in a Fascist basket.

  He had made his contribution. Who could blame him in his position for now settling on a little peace and quiet?

  So on a steamy summer afternoon, he typed out his letter of resignation from the Bureau, a chore he had been putting off for several days. And it was at that moment, as luck would have it, that his secretary, Patricia, entered the room with an outlandish suggestion: J. Edgar himself was on the line, beckoning him, summoning him, no, ordering him to Washington as soon as humanly possible.

  "Fine, indeed," Cochrane thought to himself, setting down the telephone and gazing at the completed letter on his desk. He looked at the calendar and made a mental note. August 3, 1939. "I'll deliver my resignation in person."

  Within twenty-four hours he was assigned to a spy and saboteur codenamed ‘Siegfried’ who was apparently inflicting losses on Allied shipping and threatening the life of President Roosevelt. It was a case Cochrane could get his teeth into.

  Cochrane tore up his letter of resignation and, in defense of his country, threw himself back into his work.

  Chapter 18

  Toulouse, Vichy France

  December 1942

  Cochrane could not control his body from trembling. He stood on the cold tarmac, an intensified rain sweeping across landing strip. The body of Skordeno lay on the ground on one side of him. A long pool of blood exited from a head wound that had removed half his skull. On the other side of him, also on the ground, lay the body of Cambulat, the Turk with whom he had played dominos. Wartime was a merciless unrelenting era. Cochrane needed no such reminders. Two dead men were reminders enough.

  He drew a breath, still wondering if he were about to be shot. He felt a hand on his right shoulder. “You!” said Wesselmann in German. “Back on the aircraft.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cochrane said. His mouth was parched. His lips could barely move.

  “Quickly!” the Gestapo agent said. “There are flight schedules to maintain.”

  The second in command used the nose of a pistol to move along the fourth man who had been herded to the tarmac.

  Cochrane started to move. Then Wesselmann grabbed his arm. “Wait! Passport again.”

  “What?”

  “Show me your passport again. Slowly with your left hand.”

  Cochrane reached into his pocket and withdrew the forged Canadian passport. Wesselmann looked at the information page again and the binding, his eyes flicking back and forth from the information to Cochrane’s eyes.

  “Something occurs to me. You said you lived where?” Wesselmann asked.

  “Toronto.”

  “I used to visit there,” he said. “I had an uncle. Tell me two main thoroughfares in Toronto.”

  “Yonge Street. Marlborough Street.”

  “And two nearby towns?”

  “Bramton and Mississauga.”

  “Which way is Kitchner?”

  “To the southwest.”

  “Distance?”

  “By private motor car. Maybe an hour. Or two. Depending on weather. Time of year.”

  “Snow. Of course.”

  “Are there many Jews in Toronto?”

  Cochrane simmered. “I don’t keep track of such things.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  Cochrane knew he was being provoked. He could me meek or anger could rise to his defense. “Why are you questioning me?” he finally asked. “If I’m delayed, I’ll need to advise my contacts in Berlin. They will learn that you interfered with official business of the Reich. You will be the loser, not I.”

  Wesselmann eyed him again. The German retained the passport.

  “There is something wrong with you.”

  “No, there isn’t. Give me my passport.”

  A local police team arrived with two gurneys. They began the messy job of removing the two dead men on the ground.

  “This passport is fraudulent. Or it is real. If it is fraudulent, it is the best forgery I’ve ever seen.” Wesselmann said. He closed the document.

  “I take both of your statements as high compliments,” Cochrane said. “Heil Hitler!”

  With a cautious hand Cochrane reached forward and put his hand on the passport. Wesselmann did not release his grip. Then he did, grudgingly. “Heil Hitler!” he said.

  Cochrane took back the passport. He returned it to his pocket.

  “Board the plane!” the Gestapo agent demanded.

  Cochrane walked back to the entrance door at the rear of the aircraft.

  “You’re welcome,” he heard Wesselmann say to his back. Cochrane did not respond. Nor did he look back at the two dead men on the tarmac. He returned to his seat and pulled down the window shade. A few moments later, he heard the rear exit door slam shut. The female flight attendant locked the door into place. She looked ashen. She exchanged a horrified glance with Cochrane but said nothing.

  The aircraft’s engines came to life. No one said anything. Daylight was dying. Cochrane knew they would go aloft but the back end of the flight would be at night, always risky in the late winter.

  Ten minutes later, they taxied down the runway, turned and were aloft. The air was again turbulent. The attendant passed through the cabin with paper cups of water. Cochrane accepted his but at a moment when the air calmed down, he stood, opened his valise and found the flask that Colonel Sawyer had given him. He sat down and pulled a long swig or it. Then another and then a third. It helped.

  “Jesus,” he muttered to himself, thinking of the dead men on the runway.

  The flight was ninety minutes and turbulent. Cochrane tried to leaf through a copy of Time magazine, but his attention wasn’t there. He had learned the brutality of the Nazi administration before the war and had witnessed it when he tracked down a saboteur in 1939 and 1940. But he had underestimated how much the brutality of the regime had been jacked up for wartime.

  He raised the shade. There was darkness outside. Few lights were on the ground. He assumed there was cloud cover.

  The DC-3 approached Geneva from the southwest. Cochrane was relieved when he could feel the aircraft begin to descend. He reassured himself. Pilots, he knew, loved the DC-3. It had a low stall speed and was highly maneuverable.

  He saw a flash of light from the ground. It was a sear
chlight from Geneva. The DC-3 went into its final descent. The front landing gear went down. The aircraft being a taildragger, the rear wheel hit the ground first, followed a moment later by the two wheels at front. The pilot applied the brakes and the aircraft eased into its landing.

  Swiss Customs was rigorous.

  All of Cochrane’s papers were examined carefully. Every bit of his luggage was inspected. Swiss customs agents stamped his fake passport. He passed through to quiet a portico where taxis awaited.

  He found a taxi that took him into the city of Geneva. He planned to stay there overnight, then continue by train the next morning. If connections went smoothly, which they actually did occasionally, he could be in Allen Dulles’s office in nearby Bern, the capital, the next afternoon or evening.

  He remembered his instructions, which seemed like a world away and an eternity in the past. He gave the address for the Hotel des Alpes in French. The driver, a small man with a thin moustache, a red face and a gray beret, knew the hotel.

  Cochrane arrived at the hotel and registered. For a few extra francs, two sandwiches and a half bottle of wine were arranged for him in the hotel lounge, even though the lounge had

  closed. He arranged also for the desk clerk to make sure he was wakened by seven the next morning.

  Dead tired, but at least not dead, he breathed easier. The fifth floor, he knew, was a safe house for OSS operatives. That was why Donovan had steered him there. He could expect the same in Bern.

  Later on the fifth floor, Cochrane examined his room. He found it comfortable and acceptable. When the hallway was clear, he examined the layout. There were two emergency getaway routes: one down the back stairs and another down an outside fire escape. He hoped to use neither.

  He bathed and collapsed into a comfortable bed. He was one day into his journey. Who knew how long it might take or even whether he would come back from it alive? The horror of the two men shot dead on the tarmac in Marseille still blazed through his head. It could just as easily have been him whose brains were blown out and scattered amidst the sleet on the gritty tarmac.

  He thought of his wife, Laura, sleeping soundly in the early morning in New York he hoped. He fell asleep holding that thought and emotion. What would happen to her if he never returned was not something he wished to even consider.