“What’s up?”
Murphy said. “OZ has been compromised.”
“How?” Murphy was alarmed.
He was alarmed for OZ but even more for the Agency. GBOZ, as he was known in the restricted files, was a senior Stasi officer and only a few Agency officers knew where he worked, let alone his true name. Neither fact was ever mentioned in message traffic. Murphy knew. OZ was the most important asset he had in East Germany: Brigadier General Maximilian Fischer in the Stasi’s foreign intelligence directorate, the HVA. He was one of the Agency’s only high-level penetrations of the Warsaw Pact and his knowledge of the Stasi’s overseas networks was a goldmine that the Agency couldn’t lose. Furthermore, Murphy could immediately think of five major playback operations that could be compromised if OZ were arrested and broke under interrogation.
“We don’t know yet. He sent an emergency message. A hollow coin with a message inside was passed to an officer in East Berlin. Station opened the coin and sent the unencrypted text to Russia House. I just received his decrypted message from them through special channels. He hasn’t been arrested, but he’s under surveillance and wants out. Another complication is that he has closed down his communications network, says it’s too dangerous to send out any more messages. So, right now all we have is one-way commo.”
Murphy knew the case well. He and Wheeler were the only two BOB officers on the highly restricted BIGOT access list for GBOZ traffic—the ‘GB’ showed it was an East Bloc case. East Berlin Station didn’t hold any information on him because of the danger of compromise; they only knew the coin was from a special asset. Even that was dangerous and OZ’s passing it meant he had abandoned his usual communications methods.
“Okay, first, we need to tell him we received his message. He will be listening to RIAS. So, tell him to sit tight and wait for a message at specific times. Figure out a workable schedule. Have Marco fit it in with their regular traffic but don’t tell him anything else!”
Marco was the co-opted American manager of Radio in the American Sector, the broadcasting station that was as popular in East Berlin as in the West. In between the music and news, coded signals were routinely sent over the airwaves. Some were just gibberish meant to keep up the impression of heavy traffic, but some were messages intended for specific agents. One might tell an agent that his message had been received or give him instructions. It was the fastest way to get a message directly to an agent. The only drawbacks were that there was no way to quickly confirm the agent had received a message, and he couldn’t be overheard listening to the station. Murphy was sure OZ would be careful. He had years of experience at evading scrutiny, but something had gone very wrong. Murphy was sure that whatever had happened took place on the Western side of the Wall. It meant a mistake had been made or a traitor talked.
“I’ll pull out his extraction plan and review it. The only problem is that it’s old and hasn’t been updated as far as I know, and his position makes it difficult to get close. Getting him over the border will be even harder. In the meantime, we must walk back the dog. Tell Russia House we will do a scrub of all his sub-agents to see who might have gone bad. Any of our traffic mentioning him or his intelligence needs to be reviewed for errors. They need to do the same. Most importantly, if they haven’t started, headquarters needs to look at everyone on the distribution list. That last one’s an exclusive for the Director only.”
“Got it. I will put together the messages and shoot them to you for release. All in the restricted channel.”
“Good, and tell everyone in the office that we will be working hard on a sensitive issue and that they should go about their work as normally as possible. We may have to pull a couple of people in and read them on to help, but not yet.”
“Anything else?”
“Not right now. I need to think on this. Let’s go over a checklist in two hours. In the meantime, get cracking.”
“Roger, Boss,” Wheeler was up and shutting down the equipment as Murphy left the bubble.
As he walked back to his office, Murphy felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. There were only a few things that got him excited or made him anxious. One was meeting an agent in a dark alley; finding that one of his agents was in danger was another. He’d seen plenty the Agency’s top-tier agents rolled up by the opposition over the years. Most of them ended up with a bullet in the back of their head in Bautzen or Lubyanka.
OZ would not suffer that fate, he vowed. I will make sure of that.
8
Several days after the wiretap mission on the Border Guard tower, Kim Becker strode from his team room and down the stone stairs of Building 817 in the direction of the unit sergeant major’s office.
The unit was housed in a building on the Andrews Barracks compound with a sign outside that said it was the home of the Support Detachment Berlin or SDB. With that name and their tasking statement—We support the mission of the Berlin Brigade— people’s eyes glazed over with boredom, which was exactly the reaction desired.
The unit’s classified designation was Special Forces Berlin and had just ninety men in all. That wasn’t many in the grand scheme of things as there were nearly a million Warsaw Pact troops surrounding the city. But they were, nevertheless, dangerous men. They were the foxes in the chicken coop that was Berlin.
Their presence in the city was a secret that few were aware of outside the US Commander of Berlin and his immediate staff, the Chief of Base, and the Military Intelligence Detachment Commander. Counterintelligence reporting showed that the Russians and East Germans may have suspected that Special Forces men were stationed in Berlin and for that reason it was best to be cautious. You never know what you don’t know.
It was the only unit of its kind in the American arsenal, essentially an updated Office of Strategic Services that conducted its unconventional operations under the noses of the Soviets. Each man was a specialist, an expert in at least two fields: weapons, demolitions, medical, communications, or operations and intelligence. Those were all fields that OSS operatives would have recognized, but more recently counterterrorism had been added to the mission set.
Once assigned to the unit the men had to master other esoteric skills as well: urban warfare, intelligence tradecraft like surveillance and non-technical communications methods, and surreptitious entry techniques, not to mention language skills. Being able to speak German, act like a German, essentially be German, was part of the job description. Some guys were more appropriately Polish, or Czech, or Turkish—anything but American, British, or French. And they had the documents to prove it. Although the men operated as a team, they had to be adept working on their own. Clandestine behavior required discipline and the mental and physical stamina to work as a singleton under stressful conditions.
They were waiting for war, waiting to take on a mission that no one in their right mind would volunteer for—far behind the lines with all the odds against them. But these men thought nothing of it. Or maybe they did, but they didn’t seem to care because they believed they had a good chance of success. The unit had been preparing for the balloon to go up since the mid-1950s, and daily life was a cyclical regimen of planning, training, reconnaissance of targets, more training, and more planning. It was routine preparation for a mission that might never happen but it was anything but a routine mission. It was not wartime, not yet. They were waiting for the Cold War to go hot.
In the meantime, there were always other interesting projects.
With his recent promotion to master sergeant, Becker had been given the leadership of one of six Special Forces Operational Detachments or “A” Teams in Berlin. It was the team sergeant who put all the trades together to make a cohesive eleven-man team ready for any mission—he was the detail man, the planner, and the enforcer. Then there was the commander, but Team 5 didn’t have a commander at the moment—Vietnam and the army’s reduction in force had seen to that. Unfortunately, army captains were either needed to fight the current war or, if there wasn�
�t one, they were tossed out of the service. It was a vagary of military thinking since captains, unlike lieutenants, were not easy to come by when you needed them. Berlin’s “A” Teams didn’t have a lieutenant; that meant Becker was in charge, which didn’t affect operations much as the officers usually deferred to the senior non-coms anyway.
Everything the men of SDB did was clandestine, unseen by enemy or friend alike, except perhaps when two or three men would go out on the town. They tended to avoid the usual American military hangouts because, invariably, some GI would call them out for no good reason, which generally ended badly for the other guy. When it did go badly for someone in the unit, the solution was a quick reassignment out of the city, but that didn’t happen often.
Becker stopped at the open door and looked into the office. His immediate boss was sitting at his desk poring over several documents. A Montecristo cigar sat in an ashtray, its smoke curling up into the air. Sergeant Major Jeff Bergmann was a big man, above average height, just under six feet, but stocky. He had been a wrestler in his scrappy youth. He was serious but contemptuous of convention, a trait that served him well in Special Forces. He was willing to forgive infractions, but only if the culprit came clean. He was not a man to cross.
Becker knocked on the office door frame. Bergmann looked up. “Kim! Come in.”
Bergmann didn’t stand on formality. Becker walked in and stood at ease in front of the desk.“You wanted to see me, Sergeant Major?”
Drawing on his cigar, Bergmann relished the flavor and then watched as his one long, slow exhale of smoke flattened out into a mushroom cloud formation above him.
“Sit.”
Becker sat. Bergmann stood up and shut the door before he returned to his desk and sat on its edge.
“I reviewed your initial note on the mission. Between your equipment and the material that Teufelsberg is getting off their wireless intercepts, the spooks are happy—the communications spectrum seems to be pretty well covered. I’d like you to put together a more detailed report for the commander to use when he briefs the SOTFE Commander next week. Just a description with no names. Coordinates go into a separate annex. It will go straight into the compartmented files when the colonel is finished.”
“The note didn’t cover the technical details, you’ll need to describe them in the report. You may have to brief the colonel before he goes to Stuttgart. Do you have an elevator pitch for what you did?”
“Sure. We installed two induction loop antennas and transmitters inside a junction box and on the landline inside the tower. The intel shop says the devices are sucking up all of the Border Guard’s landline conversations for that sector. Besides hiding them well, the short-range transmitters should keep the signals from coming up on anyone’s scope. And we had no run-ins of any kind on either side of the Wall. Just for fun, Finch left a pack of Russian Laika cigarettes in the tower. That should confuse the guards when they show up.”
“You should probably leave that last bit out of the official report. One last thing, your men who worked on this with you, tell me again who they were…”
“Fred Lindt, Stefan Mann, Logan Finch, Paul Stavros were with me and they all did well. The rest of the team provided cover and some distraction for the guards in another sector.”
“We need to remember then for future fitness reports and promotions.”
“Definitely, Sergeant Major. They did great.”
“Now, we have a different issue. Take a look at this,” the sergeant major said as he pulled a folder off his desktop and handed it across to Becker.
The folder had a diagonal red stripe across its cover and was bound so its type-written pages could not be removed. There was no indication of where it had come from; it was completely unmarked with the exception of a red TOP SECRET stamp at the header and footer of each page. That meant only one thing: OGA—Other Government Agency—a euphemism for the Agency.
Becker skimmed the file quickly and then re-read the pages closely. The information inside surprised him. He closed the folder with the knowledge that the previous evening’s mission might have been their last easy operation. He looked up and waited.
Bergmann continued, “We don’t have all the details, but the chief of base asked me if we could help. The colonel is okay with us taking on the mission. What do you think?”
“I was afraid you’d ask me that. I think we might pull it off if we get all the support we’ll need.”
“We’ll get it, no problem.”
“Is it as important as this file indicates?” Becker didn’t want to take on any high-risk, no-gain operations.
“It is of national importance. I know what you’re concerned about, but the priority is super high, as is the risk. I want you to think through some possible options and let me know by day’s end. And this is code word stuff, it has an even more restricted classification than last night, so don’t share the info with anyone,” and he extended his hand to get the file back.
“I didn’t know the classifications went much higher.” Becker stood and relinquished the folder. “I’ll get back to you ASAP, Sergeant Major.”
Bergmann was already back in his chair reading as Becker left the office.
9
A prisoner snatch inside East Berlin? That’s either crazy, stupid, or both.
Becker remembered the last snatch he’d done. It had been a couple of years before in a land far, far away. He had been the One-Zero, the leader of a Studies and Observations Group Spike reconnaissance team called “Cobra,” a small team of men in very hostile territory on the Ho Chi Minh trail. It was one of the last SOG missions carried out by Americans in Laos before cross-border operations were forbidden. Becker doubted the tactics he used there were applicable to East Berlin but this new mission brought back the bad memories.
His team had set up a demolition ambush along the trail and waited for three days before they could spring the trap on a small North Vietnamese Army patrol. The intel had given them a fortyeight-hour window to try and grab a prisoner—any longer than forty-eight hours on the ground would inevitably lead to their discovery—but they had hung on and waited. They had studied the aerials and had located the perfect terrain, close to a major artery of the trail with high-speed trails intersecting or paralleling it. They had to avoid the larger North Vietnamese Army—NVA—contingents that trooped by along the main artery in a near-constant stream. Even a section of Soviet T-54 tanks rumbled through while the team’s three Americans and three Chinese Nung mercenaries dug deeper into the moist, decaying detritus that covered the jungle’s floor, hiding themselves from discovery. They had noticed that the high-speed trail to the north was regularly traveled by smaller groups who were either couriers or others that stayed away from the larger concentrations on the road. They set up on a bend in the high-speed trail where low-lying hills separated it from the main road. It also offered a fast escape from the ambush area toward terrain that they could hold until the choppers arrived to pull them out.
Finally, just after dawn of the third day, there was a lull in the traffic on the main road. One of the flankers signaled the approach of a good target on the high-speed trail. It was made up of eight porters pushing bicycles loaded high with supplies and led by several NVA soldiers. In the center were more soldiers. The configuration of the group was perfect for their set-up. Claymores, attached by detonation cord to a dual-primed explosive ring main that would set them off on command, were positioned along both sides of the trail bend with a gap in the middle. The back-blast from the claymores near the center would stun but hopefully not kill one or two of the enemy in the middle.
The word was passed by string-pull signals and the team waited for the patrol to walk into the kill zone. To say tensions were high was an understatement. Each man had his own way of dealing with the anxiety, but the moment before an ambush is initiated deep inside enemy territory is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Becker tried to push those thoughts aside and focused on the task ahead. The
flankers watched for more troops to approach, the rear guard watched everyone’s backsides to make sure the team itself wasn’t ambushed, while the assault element focused on their individual targets as the enemy came into view.
Becker, as the One-Zero, got the honor of kicking things off and, with a quick squeeze of the clacker, fired the six claymore mines simultaneously. Each claymore’s explosive charge fired around 700 small steel balls in a sixty-degree arc. A total of 4,200 balls flew out at 1,200 meters per second in a pattern that covered the trail to around 2 metres high. The blast and the hail of superheated metal vaporized almost everything along the trail. Most of the enemy were dead, two were badly wounded, and only one soldier in the group survived unscathed, but he was in no shape to fight.
As soon as the blast wave had passed, the team raised their heads and two men ran forward with their specially issued, suppressed High Standard HDMS pistols at the ready. Granted, suppressed weapons were superfluous after the explosion of the claymores, but it was standard procedure and why make more noise? A couple of rounds finished off those who might present a threat, while the best candidate for extraction—actually the lone survivor—was subdued. Handcuffed and blindfolded, he was rushed off the trail while the assault team set up a hasty ambush, this one unmanned with only booby-traps to slow down the reaction force that would surely be heading towards their position.
Davis, the team’s radio operator, called for extraction as the team ran up the ridge line that paralleled the trail towards their designated landing zone. The LZ was an old bomb scar less than two clicks away and with any luck they would not find a blocking force between them and helos. Base responded that the standby birds were en route. Base was always more responsive when a prisoner was mentioned.
A Question of Time Page 6