The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  I realised I was in the process of learning one of Betty Monroe’s main lessons, that most intelligence work is social and ‘not to do with hanging around in ditches, dear’.

  Just as Bandi predicted, Budapest became a city of go-betweens, and the different sides showed signs of wanting to talk, even as the civilian slaughter reached its peak. The more prescient Nazis were looking ahead to their alibis. Jewish and Zionist organisations set up in Istanbul and Bandi shuttled between there and Budapest, servicing the emerging local Jewish resistance, while trafficking in the overlapping channels of black market and exchange of intelligence. Both cities became familiar with men like Bandi, Jewish or half-Jewish, criminal or semi-criminal, who counted German intelligence among their clients. It was whispered in back rooms that Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, ran his own Jewish spy ring, which he had transferred to Budapest to keep it safe from the SS. Canaris was known to have cultivated Allied contacts through the Vatican, and there were stories that he was doing nothing to discourage plots to kill Hitler. Karl-Heinz became wary of sharing the Catholic Church as a secure line of communication.

  Summer drizzle in Budapest; bright morning sun on the Bosphorus. The two cities, Budapest and Istanbul, became part of the same mental zone, indistinguishable under the surface. Bandi and Willi and I travelled between the two often enough to keep separate wardrobes. Willi suave in sharkskin suits, Bandi with what looked like half the night before’s dinner spilled down his. According to Bandi, the real reason Willi did the Istanbul run was morphine. Hungarian supplies were running low, as were the Germans’, and he planned to sell to the highest bidder, after running it back to Budapest through Bandi’s contacts in the Hungarian diplomatic service. But Bandi put about so many unreliable stories to obscure his own dealings, and his fog of disinformation was at its thickest in Istanbul. Istanbul in 1943 became the crucible of the Budapest conspiracy, where Allen Dulles and the SS nudged closer together into an alliance that remains unremarked upon even today. As ever, the key players—Dulles and Karl-Heinz—conspicuous mainly by their absence.

  Willi, relaxed among Budapest’s gilt-edged mirrors and red velvet, smelling of eau de cologne and showing a smudge of tiredness around the eyes, with one of his mistresses in tow, a famous actress with brittle eyes and a desperate laugh, both easily overlooked in the face of her extreme beauty. Willi just as easy in Istanbul nightclubs, happy to entertain members of the Turkish secret police, off-duty, making sure of all the options, while being watched by brash American OSS agents trying to cover up their uncertainty, unable to get to grips with old-style corruption.

  Bandi glum in Istanbul, drinking sweet black coffee and admitting for once to having a hangover, said to me, ‘It is time for me to confide in you.’ Bandi had new clients in Hungarian intelligence who wished him to contact the British on their behalf, but the British wouldn’t bite. He complained the Americans were muscling in and he was being forced to use a local OSS agent as a go-between, an untrustworthy Jewish Czech émigré. (An inspection of OSS archives shows that the agent was codenamed Dogwood and Bandi was Trillium, and all other agents were named after flowers, including Jasmine and Iris. I was Daisy.)

  Bandi wanted me to talk to Dulles ‘when you go to Switzerland next week’. He gave me his most carefully cultivated guileless look. I had a mental picture of him and Willi whispering together, and a clear sense of them viewing me as a long-term investment, on ice until now.

  Dulles in Bern, was professorial and waistcoated. He wore sleeve garters on his shirt. He had taken to meeting me with his jacket off and offering me a bottle of beer. Dulles informal, a mark of increasing trust.

  Although Istanbul was outside his territory, I sensed my moves connected to something he had in mind. He played with his pipe and congratulated me on my initiative while making it clear I was acting above my station.

  ‘Mr Grosz is a blabbermouth. He has been in touch with Japanese and Polish intelligence.’ I didn’t know this. Dulles went on, ‘Tread carefully with that fellow. He has served his purpose.’

  Among the surprise moves I never could have anticipated was Betty Monroe’s unannounced arrival in Istanbul, soon after my return, ‘on holiday,’ she said. The only written record of this trip that Beate can find is a postcard sent back to the house we are sitting in, addressed to Beate’s father. Betty’s broad-nibbed hand suggested an expensive pen and an even more expensive education. She wrote in English: ‘An exhausting trip made worthwhile by this most vibrant of cities. I wish there were more time to explore. The company I’m with is proving very dull! Fond love, Betty.’

  Betty on a hotel terrace, immaculate in a white linen suit, wearing redder lipstick than usual and smart tortoiseshell sunglasses, brown eyes just visible behind green lenses. I remember thinking, Anywhere in the world Betty would know how to work the waiters. Betty eyed me up and down as though she might seduce me. (A fact I omitted to pass on to Beate.)

  Betty informed me that the Turkish Izmir Trade Fair was being attended by Bandi Grosz and a Hungarian intelligence officer named Hatz. Bandi was passing himself off as a representative of the Hungarian Danube Navigation Company, and Hatz was travelling as an exporter of agricultural machinery. Their contact continued to be the American agent codenamed Dogwood, and another man, described by Betty as a ‘fairly useless’ journalist named Coleman.

  ‘Dogwood is indiscreet,’ said Betty. ‘He is also in the business of importing and exporting agricultural machinery so is looking to line his own pockets by doing a deal with Hatz and the Hungarian government.’

  Betty wanted me to deal directly with Hatz without anyone knowing. I was to offer him a clean Swiss contact. ‘Yours not to reason why,’ she said cheerfully.

  Bandi grumbled that he was being cut out but never suspected me. He blamed one of Hatz’s main associates, a shipping agent from the well-connected family, of whom he said, ‘He is supposed to be an agent for the OSS, who have him employed at the Socony Vacuum Company, but I know he is a spy!’

  The Izmir Trade Fair. The Hungarian Danube Navigation Company. The Socony Vacuum Company. I offer these names—remembered when so many others have been forgotten—as an almost nostalgic example of the kind of level on which most of us operated.

  The reason for Betty Monroe’s appraising stare became clear a day or so later. It wasn’t me she wished to seduce. She was calculating whether I was capable of what she called ‘objective intimacy’.

  Again I have omitted reference of this to Beate. My refusal to discuss Nelly Kapp throws a shadow over our relationship. Her suspicion is obvious, and I think how ridiculous that a brief affair, because that is what it was, dating from 1944 can be a cause of jealousy. She knows I am withholding, however much I deny it (and I never lied as well as the rest), and her upset makes it even more impossible for me to admit to it.

  Nelly Kapp was secretary to the local SS man in Istanbul. Betty encouraged me to ‘make myself available’ to Nelly, who was mending a broken heart. Istanbul was a slack posting, and, at Betty Monroe’s instigation, I played afternoon tennis with Nelly and her sporty but dull friends who were all part of an Abwehr crowd of low-grade officials.

  I failed to mend Nelly’s broken heart, which she refused to talk about, but, instructed by Betty, I entertained her and her friends with stories of freedom and democracy, of American friends and Zurich jazz. Nelly once said to me, a remark whose significance I missed at the time: ‘I have a friend who likes jazz.’ She kept asking if I was trustworthy, and she eventually committed herself by telling me that two of her Abwehr friends wished to defect. Would I help?

  I asked Bandi. He contacted Palestinian Jews for whom he couriered, and they organised the defection through Syria to Cairo.

  Nelly wanted to get out, too, and persuaded me to leave with her. By then I was staying a week at a time in Istanbul, and in wartime intimacy was quickly achieved. I remember Nelly’s brightness in an otherwise grey life of subterfuge. Nelly in colourful print dresses buying food in the
market, splashes of dappled sunlight through the stall awnings, like the patterns of her dress. Nelly strolling. Strolling was an activity unknown to me. Strolling equalled peacetime, equalled a woman, equalled the casual purchase, all those things I had never had.

  The defections started early in February 1944. The couple went first, followed by other Abwehr employees happy to leave and with intelligence to sell. News of the defections was slow to reach Budapest. Bandi had misgivings. He was sure that the resulting scandal would harm the Abwehr’s standing, and he had good relations with them. ‘The last thing we want is to have to deal with the fucking SS!’

  Little did he know. Karl-Heinz’s diary contained the laconic note: ‘10.02.44. The Abwehr defections are having the desired effect. The Reichsführer informs me that the Abwehr will be disbanded. All duties will be handed over to the SS [Karl-Heinz’s emphasis]. The final transfer of power will take several months in order to preserve what some wit has called “the delicate lines of communication”. Things really could not be turning out better!’ A further note makes the object even clearer: ‘11.02.44. Canaris fired! The thought of him shafted is almost too much for the Reichsführer. As our armies retreat the Reichsführer expands. Departmental lebensraum! Now we shall have Budapest to ourselves!

  I happened to bump into Willi straight after Bandi. When I told him I was thinking of getting out with Nelly, he bought me a drink and wished me luck. ‘See you after the war,’ he said, making out we were both men of the world, with an ironic, casual half-salute by way of farewell.

  The night before I was due to return to Istanbul, I was arrested by the Hungarian secret police and questioned about my association with Bandi Grosz and others, including Willi. I was held over the seventh and eighth of February. Nelly was due to leave on the eighth. I heard later she delayed until the ninth. I didn’t get there until the fourteenth, still feeling lucky at being released. I had put my arrest down to chance. Random pickups by the Hungarian police were frequent, especially of those they suspected of intelligence connections. What I refused to accept was that it might have been Willi’s doing, with my connivance, given what I had let slip. I had not told Nelly of my own double role. I was also ten years younger than she. (The casual streak of misogyny, mistaken for adventurousness.)

  • • •

  Beate surprises me not at all by possessing the same sharp mind as her mother. She understands the difference between running and being run, understands the nature of collusion, and of collaboration in its different forms, comfortable and uncomfortable. She appreciates my denial of, and identification with, Willi Schmidt, and my misgivings because—perhaps as with Willi, too—my deeper involvement began earlier than I had thought or had been led to believe.

  Beate asked, quite reasonably, what I thought I had been doing and accepted my answer that I was not sure, beyond being involved in the tentative opening approaches by various enemy parties, ultimately answering to Reichsführer Himmler or Allen Dulles, with Willi the wild card.

  That Reichsführer Himmler would want to communicate with Dulles Beate took as a given. She also understood that Himmler needed to find someone who was not a representative of official Allied policy. ‘I can see’, she said, ‘how the straightforward motive must be the hardest to read.’

  She found inconsistencies intriguing. She thought they were largely deliberate as they gave everyone the leeway to lie, perhaps even to themselves. When I told her that she had a very clear understanding of how self-deception was necessary to the process, she looked as though she was about to say something but left it at a wry smile.

  She was also capable of remarkable foresight. ‘Of course’, she remarked, ‘the obvious way to have kept Dulles in line would have been blackmail.’

  From certain angles she resembled her mother, the sense of throwback uncanny. A wormy part of me thought, If not the mother, at least the daughter. I took this uncharitable nugget as a sign of my recovery.

  She asked, ‘How much can these moves be predicted, and how much are they chance?’

  I wanted to ask her the same question, only with reference to us. If conspiracy is an affiliation of silences, then she and I must be conspirators. I want to reach out, want to brush against her accidentally, want one of us to drop our reserve, but I am out of moves for the moment.

  Beate von Heimendorf

  ZURICH

  I HAVE OFFERED MOTHER’S postcard from Istanbul as the sole piece of evidence of her trip. Not so. She noted approvingly in her diary that Nelly Kapp’s heart was broken swiftly but effectively by Willi Schmidt in an intense two-week affair during which he posed as a German trade official whose sudden disappearance Nelly was led to believe was the result of defection. That Hoover’s role had been to encourage the seed of defection already planted by Willi. That the Abwehr defections were planned as part of a larger strategy whose purpose Mother does not reveal. Of her own stay in Istanbul, she remarked (of Hoover?): ‘Each night I sucked him dry.’

  Of Bandi Grosz, she wrote, ‘Everyone has plans for Mr Grosz!’

  I remind Hoover of my mother, which is not what I want for the basis of our alliance. With Mother today I saw nothing of the woman Hoover sat with in Istanbul on a terrace overlooking the Bosphorus.

  I try to avoid the subject of my mother with Hoover. The irony is that the more he reaches for the truth, the more I am obliged to lie, to protect her. I hate her legacy and my obligations to it, hate my circumspection which prevents me from being honest.

  I understand completely how it would be possible to live life in wartime in the conditional. I recognise the world Hoover talks about, with its emotional checks and balances, and deceptions. These are things familiar to me in a different context: a world of doubt and deferral, where, in a sense, the present does not count, where hope and fear discount any sense of now. Each evening we sit in Mother’s study, trying to catch the moment, Hoover exhausted from each day’s immersion (the word he uses) while I think of the tangled briars around my heart, and everything I want to and cannot give. I move with a sense of physical trepidation when I am near him. He is old as well as older, and I cannot tell if I would succumb or flinch were he to become intimate.

  Each night before going to sleep I wonder if I should not stay. Instead I drive home, a model of bourgeois propriety, and read Mother’s papers for half an hour, making my own reluctant excursions into her past, realising that I am putting myself in her position, of being several moves ahead of him. Better that he never knows. I tell myself that I am shielding him rather than Mother. Sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.

  The weather continues to be miserable, the city a grey wash. Everything feels as though it is in the wrong time. Even the leaves look as though they should not be out in such a beastly climate.

  I followed Mother’s instructions and sent the letter as she asked while she was still well. The respondent’s name is Mr Ballard. Mr Ballard came to the museum, and we talked.

  Very occasionally Hoover mentions his wife. Tonight he told me a story about how they had gone to see a film on his daughter’s recommendation and they had to leave almost straight away because he was feeling sick. He said it had taken him a long time to identify its correct cause as revulsion. The film had contained a severed ear, found in the grass, and brought back memories of the Ustashi lieutenant in Zagreb. He had never returned to see the film, but discovered after his wife had died that she had gone back the following day with a man who may or may not have been her lover.

  I am not sure what to make of the story or of what he meant when he wrote (I had not meant to look): ‘I entertain the fantasy, given whose daughter she is, that she might be my interrogator and, despite the softness of our surroundings and her manner, that this is my final debriefing.’

  Karl-Heinz Strasse

  BUDAPEST, 1944

  19.03.44. We arrived quietly this Sunday morning before church bells in a dark column a mile long and met with no resistance. The Hungarians, so uppity until now, have capitu
lated without a murmur.

  21.03.44. Let’s all gang up on Fatty Goering! The secret negotiations I am here to conduct for the takeover of the Manfred-Weiss steelworks will give the SS its own industrial power base. In exchange the owning family—which is, unfortunately for it, Jewish—will be allowed to emigrate, after agreement over its various donations, leases, and agency fees. Until the dotted line is signed, neither the Hungarians nor Goering are to know.

  22.03.44. Loose ends to tidy. The Hungarian intelligence officer Hatz will be recalled to Budapest, arrested, and questioned (by me). Likewise Bandi Grosz. Both to be released once they understand what their roles are. Hatz to be allowed to resume duties as a staff officer on the condition that he volunteers for service on the Russian front(!). Grosz is on standby.*

  24.03.44. The Jews are finding a voice. They are sniffing around Wisliceny, having heard that he takes a bribe (unlike Eichmann). Up to a point. He tends to pocket the money and go back on his word. Fifty thousand dollars he walked away with in Slovakia, and still the trains rolled. They have offered him two million dollars for a guarantee of no ghetto or deportations, with a down payment of $200,000, based on the Slovak precedent. Once my current negotiations with the Weiss family are over, I shall leapfrog Wisliceny and present myself as the best person for the Jews to talk to. By then I will be able to show them that I am a man of my word.

  29.03.44. The Weiss family is very understanding, grateful even for its unique position of being allowed to barter its future. It has loaned me two large town houses side by side on Andrassy Street to make my job easier. Of course, the family suspects a trap. They all fear they will betaken away and shot once they have handed everything over. It takes all my considerable powers of persuasion to convince them that we are, as the English would say, ‘playing with a straight bat’.