by Noel Hynd
In the days that followed, their relationship assumed an odd formality. They slept on separate sides of the same bed, dressed and undressed at differing times, and generally treated each other with the cordiality of roommates or as a couple who had briefly been lovers long ago.
On the night before her departure, she lay wakefully in bed and toward 3 A.M. was on the threshold of sleep. She felt him move suddenly and his hand was just below her breasts. She turned more toward him. Delirious words were forming in her mouth and she almost spoke.
Then she realized that his hand was still. She shuddered. It was almost inanimate. Mercifully, he thrashed a second time in his sleep—as if disturbed by some formidably chaotic dream—and his hand flew away. He settled himself facing the other direction and Laura was left alone with her crushed expectations.
All twenty months of her marriage flashed before her in a final fit, off-line and flickering, like an unbalanced film projector gone irretrievably berserk. Then she closed her eyes and clenched her teeth as tightly as she could. She suppressed the fury, the emotion, and the frustration that were within her. After a passage of several minutes, it did not seem that bad anymore.
The consolation of going home was there, at least, so she managed to sleep. She was comforted greatly by a recurrent vision of her happy girlhood in Wiltshire.
On the next day, a frightfully hot one, Stephen saw her to her ship at the Cunard pier in New York. She had no idea when she would ever see America, or her husband, again. That evening in the ship's dining room, she happened to note the date of her sailing. It was printed at the head of the evening's menu:
July 3, 1939.
PART THREE
William Thomas Cochrane
The United States of America
1934-39
SIX
Like Washington to the south, Baltimore in 1939 sweltered through a dreary, steaming August.
William Cochrane sat studiously in his office and used two fingers to peck at the black Royal typewriter at his desk. His glasses were sloped downward toward the bridge of his nose. He frowned slightly as he peered through them and attempted to finish this second letter. The first one, addressed to the Director of Personnel, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, New York, was already sealed and stamped. It lay to the right of the typewriter.
Bill Cochrane's suit jacket from Dunhill Tailors in New York hung on the back of his chair. It was past four in the afternoon, and though his necktie was straight—there was a line in the F.B.I. manual about always having one's necktie straight—his white shirt was starting to lose its crispness. The room was warm.
Cochrane's fingers held still for a moment as he chose the proper phraseology. One weighed one's words carefully when writing to J. Edgar Hoover himself. Then, he finally decided. Might as well just get on with it. No pleasantries. As few final endearments as possible. Just the facts. He typed the final sentences.
And so it is with reluctance that I submit my resignation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effective as of 5 P.m., August 30, 1939. It has been my pleasure to be of service to the Bureau over these past six years. I pray that I have also been of some aid to my country...
He drew a breath and reread. There, he thought to himself, that does it. Just the proper note of humility and patriotism. He studied the letter from the top to bottom again. Why was this so difficult? He wondered. He had made his decision almost six weeks ago.
There was a knock on his door and his secretary entered. She was a thin, earnest girl named Patricia. For a moment she stood in silence, waiting for Bill Cochrane to lift his attention from the piece of paper before him.
The man she watched for those few seconds, the man she worked for, was thirty-three years old with sandy, blondish hair. His eyes were sharp and his complexion slightly ruddy and sun-beaten, the result of long weekend hikes through the Maryland countryside. He looked younger than his years, however. Dwelling upon the typewriter and sheet of paper before him, he looked like a young professor or maybe a law student.
Then he looked up. His preoccupation broke and from somewhere came a handsome smile. "Yes, Patty?” he asked gently.
"Washington," she said, indicating the telephone. She spoke in a voice not too distant from a whisper. "I think it's Mr. Hoover."
He laughed.
"Doubt it," he said. "Unless he's looking for someone to head up a new office in Topeka."
Patricia smiled and rolled her eyes. She pulled the door closed as she left. Cochrane reached to the telephone, picked it up, and leaned back in his swivel chair. Now that his resignation was typed there were few horrors that a direct call from Washington could hold.
Then he brought the tilting chair back down to earth. Patricia had been right. Cochrane recognized the clipped, nasal-pitched voice of the Devil himself. There was something, Hoover told him, that the F.B.I. needed to discuss with him personally. That evening. In Washington.
"I want you to drop whatever you're doing and get down here immediately," Hoover ranted. "I'm having a car sent to take you to the train station."
Cochrane looked at the cracking green paint on the wall of his office. He thought of his current assignment in Baltimore and his previous one in Washington. He looked at his letter of resignation.
"You bet," he said.
He was about to add that there were one or two things that he wished to take up with Hoover, too. But by that time, Cochrane was listening to a dial tone.
Twice previously William Thomas Cochrane had addressed a letter to J. Edgar Hoover. The first had been sent in early 1934, about twelve months after an aging Paul von Hindenburg had bestowed the chancellorship of Germany upon a former Austrian house painter. The headlines in the daily newspapers had prompted Cochrane to write.
The letter read:
Dr. Mr. Hoover:
I am a banker and an investigator for the international division of the Georgia National Bank in Atlanta. I speak French and German fluently. Judging by the course of world events, it seems to me that your F.B.I. will soon need men for specialized jobs in Europe. Do you think you might find a use for me? I'm bored here.
Sincerely,
Wm. T. Cochrane
Hoover admired the sender's nerve in writing directly but had little other reaction to the letter. Plenty of people wrote to him asking for jobs. Half of them were certifiable lunatics.
But Hoover noted the official stationery of the Georgia National Bank. The word "international" did catch his eye. And French and German, he reasoned. Hoover began to think. Washington was buzzing with rumors about America having to get into the espionage game, something the United States had never done in peacetime, either officially or unofficially. Hoover lived and slept with the vision of other investigative agencies being founded, principally at the expense of his own.
So the director's hand stayed for a moment above the wastebasket. Hoover picked up a pencil and drew neat script letters upon the upper left corner of the correspondence.
"Frank: See about this," he wrote.
Then he sent the letter along to Frank Lerrick, the Bureau's gaunt, short and unsmiling director of personnel, a Hoover crony since the 1920s.
The initial reports concerning William Cochrane returned to the director of the F.B.I. within five weeks. They were decidedly mixed. But Hoover reviewed them with interest.
On the negative side. Cochrane's personal politics were unobtainable, primarily because he never discussed them with anyone. There was little chance, however, that he would turn out to be some crimson-hearted Bolshevik. By family and background, Cochrane appeared to be a conservative, quiet, introspective, softly spoken man, actually more equipped to handle investigations in an office and on paper than out in the field where a misstep could cost an agent his life.
Cochrane's father had been a major during the world war of 1914 -'18, which was seen as a plus. His mother was a librarian. Cochrane was born and raised in Virginia, where his father had been the editor of The Charlottesville Eagle after the Great War. He w
as the middle of three brothers. He had gone to college at William & Mary, where he had acquired the manners of a southern gentleman. There, proctors left the rooms during examinations and, in theory at least, a young man was to learn a sense of honor as well as his academic lessons.
Cochrane graduated magna cum laude in European history, then obtained a graduate degree in business at the University of Pennsylvania, way up north in Philadelphia.
But certain countercurrents caught Hoover's eye. Cochrane had traveled abroad. He had also acted at a theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Cochrane had played Sam Evans in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude and had even been a favorite of O'Neill himself, who occasionally lurched by for a performance.
One of Cochrane's former directors had gone on to bigger things in New York. To an investigating agent, the director had mentioned, "Cochrane's fine gift at impersonation as well as a stellar memory."
Other details stood out. In keeping with family tradition, Bill Cochrane had served in the military, a peaceful stint as an ordnance officer at Fort Bragg, South Carolina. And then there had been the tragedy about his family life. He had married in late 1932 to a young woman named Heather Andrews, the only daughter of a moneyed Atlanta family who traced their roots far back to prerevolutionary Georgia.
"So he's married?" asked Hoover. “He’s not a queer, is he?”
"Widowed," said Lerrick. "As of July of last year." They sat in Hoover's office with the report on Cochrane on the desk between them. "A highway accident. Their car was hit head on from the right side by a truck with a drunk driver. Cochrane came out of it badly banged up. But, uh, his wife did not come out of it at all."
Hoover pursed his lips.
"Some people think he's compensating for the loss of his wife by throwing himself headlong into his work. Know what I mean? Burying himself with work to forget?"
Hoover nodded. "Maybe it's why he wrote to us. New job. Change of location. Helps a man sometimes. Other times it makes him more zealous."
Hoover lofted his thin eyebrows, then relaxed them. Zeal did not bother him if it could be harnessed on behalf of the Bureau. "What else?" he asked.
Lerrick sat by quietly as Hoover rustled through various written accounts concerning Cochrane. The director took his time and concluded a careful reading of the personnel inquiry. Cochrane, he read, had intelligence and an outstanding knowledge of international banking which, when combined with his fluency in two European languages, presented certain special talents to the agency.
But the summary on him concluded:
He has talent and intellect. But there is a serious question as to whether he could take the toughening up and physical discipline needed to become an agent for this Bureau. Similarly, book smarts and acting talent do not call upon the street smarts which would also be essential to this position. His emotional stability is also a question at this time, due to the recent loss of his wife.
"Then what is the conclusion of our inquiry?" Hoover asked.
"His letter should be kept on file. Maybe he'll be needed someday. Maybe not. I, uh, don't think he's material for us. Not right now, anyway."
"Better think again. You had two agents investigating him?"
"Yes. That's correct."
Hoover asked for their names. Lerrick gave them.
"Have them reassigned before they embarrass us again," Hoover said. Then he tossed before Lerrick a second correspondence that he had received from William Cochrane. With the letter were clipped a series of black and white photographs which Cochrane had shot with a miniature camera concealed in his suit pocket. The photographs showed the two F.B.I. agents who had been following him over the course of two weeks. The note, on the stationery of the Georgia National Bank, read simply:
Mr. Hoover:
If this is the quality of your surveillance teams, our enemies should be greatly comforted.
Sincerely,
Wm. T. Cochrane
Lerrick took the prints and thumbed them with suppressed anger. "So he's clever. I wonder how tough he is."
"Find out," Hoover requested.
In June of 1934, Bill Cochrane entered the National Police Academy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He neared completion of the five months of training that had a dropout rate of 43 percent. He drew excellent marks in all fields: crime scene analysis, visual memory, forensic chemistry, firearms, description, identification, unarmed attack, and self-defense. From his days as a U.S. Army ordnance officer, he knew enough about high-level explosives to practically teach a course himself. He struggled with judo and bordered on mastering it. But one criticism remained.
"You still behave," Alan Farber, the academy's assistant judo instructor remarked sourly to Cochrane one afternoon, "like some piss-elegant Southern gentleman. Every time you throw somebody you're always saying, 'Sorry'!"
"Is that right?" asked Cochrane.
"You bet it's right, sissy boy. And you can bet your pansy ass that it'll be in my report on Friday when I write it."
"Which hand do you write with?" Cochrane asked.
"Right! Why? What's it to you?"
"Just wondering. Sorry."
“That’s what’s wrong with you. Always apologizing!”
The next day, in a self-defense session, Farber's right hand was broken by an overzealous student who threw the assistant professor nine feet in the air during a drill on knife attacks.
"He's starting," typed Alan Farber with his left hand in the final report, "to look like an outstanding recruit. Maybe some good hard field work would roughen up a few of the smooth edges. It would also measure how good an agent he might someday become."
So upon graduation, Cochrane was sent to Kansas City, where he was soon going cheek-to-jowl with a gang of railroad-yard thieves. Then he was reassigned to Chicago, where he passed an engaging six weeks. Some Sicilian gorillas were edging into the funeral-home business at the expense of some honest German-American undertakers on the North Side, making substantial contributions to the overall funeral industry at the same time.
In both situations, Cochrane worked under the command of one Richard Wheeler, known as "Big Dick" throughout the F.B.I. outposts of the Midwest. Wheeler, a big, affable Missourian, was already a rising star of the Bureau and making himself a legend.
Wheeler did not allow petty legalities to stymie an investigation. Once, at 3 A.M. on a rainy Chicago morning, Wheeler had posted Cochrane as a lookout as Wheeler, bearing a screwdriver in his teeth, had climbed a telephone pole. At the summit, Wheeler joyously invaded a junction box, rearranged things, and for the next two weeks manned a pair of headphones in a nearby apartment that tied into the funeral home of one Vito DeMaria.
Previously, in Kansas City, also with Cochrane under his bearish arm, Wheeler demonstrated how two federal agencies could work closely for the greater good of the public: he removed twenty-five dollars a week from Bureau petty cash and passed it along to the mailman who had railroad yards. In this way, Dick Wheeler read his victims' mail every morning before they received it.
"How can you do that?" Cochrane asked, the new boy on the block.
"I can't," said Wheeler. "So I do it anyway." When Cochrane grimaced, Wheeler expanded. "Very common practice, Bill," Wheeler said. "Look. Those bad guys out there do whatever they want. So I do, too."
"Apparently," Cochrane answered.
"One thing you'll learn if you stay on this job long enough," said Wheeler instructively. "No one argues with results."
"Apparently," Cochrane repeated.
Then Bureau headquarters in Washington sent Cochrane swimming into some deeper water. He went to New York posing as a County Antrim gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army. In lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, Cochrane put together a good infiltration effort among the Jewish mobsters along Delancey, Hester, and Canal streets—Meyer Lansky, Waxey Gordon, and Whitey Krackauer—and from the nether side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lepke Buchalter, Gurrah Shapiro, and Mendy Weiss. These were the presiding experts at runni
ng weapons in and out of New York. And there were few shortages of customers. Everyone, back in those days, had someone he wanted to shoot. Sometimes, even an entire group of people.
While he was at it, Cochrane uncovered and blew the whistle on several middle-range operations associated with the same gangs, mostly shlom jobs in the garment centers that had to do with sash weights and lead pipes massaging the skulls of labor organizers.
"There's only one problem with Cochrane," observed the other agents who worked out of the New York F.B.I. office on Cardinal Hayes Place. "He can't keep his nose out of someone else's case."
By mid-1937, the other agents in New York and the jagged-fingernail set along Hester Street received the fulfillment of their most earnest wishes. The need for American agents abroad had reached a crisis point. President Roosevelt himself was concerned about access to information in Europe should the United States be drawn into another world war. The U.S., after all, had never engaged in espionage abroad. There was something inherently unseemly about it. Nonetheless, the President took two steps.
He asked a Wall Street lawyer and world war hero named William Donovan to travel to Europe and study how an intelligence service might be established. And second, he launched a personal directive to J. Edgar Hoover to establish a foreign branch posthaste.
At the invocation of the word "foreign," J. Edgar Hoover remembered Bill Cochrane's letter of 1934. He abruptly recalled Cochrane to Washington to prepare for European service.
"What's been our success rate so far in Europe?" Cochrane asked Frank Lerrick toward the end of a second week of reorientation.
"Success rate? What do you mean?"
"Other agents?" Cochrane asked. "How are we doing?"
"There, uh, are no other agents. You're the first."
There was a long, long silence. "Oh," Cochrane finally said. "Thanks for the honor."
Cochrane traveled by the Polish liner Pilsudski from Washington to Bremen, working under the cover of an American businessman sympathetic to Hitler's National Socialist Party. His only orders from the F.B.I. were, "Find out what you can, and don't get caught. More than likely, we won't be able to get you out."