The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  “We even share our secrets,” said Blackford, cheerfully. His reference was to the American code dispatcher from the Pentagon who, a few weeks ago, had been convicted of selling materials to Soviet agents. Sir Basil looked up.

  “Rufus, you have spoken to Oakes here about our problem?”

  “Basil, I haven’t seen Blackford for a year.”

  “I see, I see. Very well, as my headmaster used to say, let us get into the business at hand in media res. Does the name George Blake mean anything to you?” He was addressing Blackford.

  “No sir.”

  “Well, we have just now got on to him. He has been serving as a double agent for eight years that we know of. And he has been attached to our military intelligence in Berlin. Moreover, we have established, belatedly, that Blake has been in possession of information that emanated from your embassy in Moscow. The chap declines to tell us how he got that intelligence. We have not given up on the effort to get from him that, er, information—”

  “You are appealing to his patriotism?”

  “We are appealing to his—how would my headmaster have put it?—joie de vivre. Meanwhile,” his mien was now totally grave, “we have got a most frightful problem. The crisis of Berlin is coming, there is no final agreement among the Allies about what is to be done, the PM has conferred with President Kennedy, President Kennedy has conferred with De Gaulle, I would not be surprised if President Kennedy and Mr. Khrushchev will be meeting, and the Soviet ultimatum is reiterated with increasing distinctness. You may as well be advised, Oakes, that I have been in charge of Her Majesty’s intelligence in Berlin for over eight years.”

  “You were Blake’s boss?”

  “I was Blake’s boss. And if I were otherwise situated, I would devote my energies to forming the Committee to Restore Hanging for Traitors. But let me review the situation.”

  Sir Basil might have been delivering a lecture on diplomatic history to a class at Oxford, Blackford thought. Although in the art of exposition, Rufus was no slouch. But he didn’t have the rhetorical flair. With gusto, Sir Basil was back at Yalta, and then Potsdam, and then describing the de facto arrangements reached between General Lucius Clay, representing the Allies in Berlin, and Marshal Zhukov, representing Stalin.

  “Let me attempt first a juridical summary, after which I shall follow with a geopolitical summary. But this I do on the understanding that the latter issues from my own understanding—which does not necessarily reflect what I certainly hope will be a crystallizing consensus among the leaders of our respective countries.

  “Under formal agreements, signed by all relevant parties—our own countries, plus France—the City of Berlin, an enclave within East Germany, is jointly governed by representatives of the four occupying powers. No unilateral step taken by any occupying power suffices to abrogate that agreement.

  “Second, all occupying powers enjoy the right of access to the City of Berlin. The whole world is aware that that right of access Stalin attempted to block in 1948. And the whole world knows that President Truman’s airlift prevailed, and that the right of access to all of Berlin, was in effect revalidated, however grudgingly.

  “Third, although not by written agreement but by evolution, early during the occupation civil authority over what is now called East Berlin was ceded to the Soviet Union, while authority over what is now called West Berlin was ceded to the Western powers. Now implicit in that modus operandi was the acknowledgment of the right of internal access. Those who live in East Berlin are free to go into West Berlin, and those who live in West Berlin have been free to go into East Berlin. And, of course, the crisis that’s been generated is the result of the overwhelming traffic of East Germans—not merely East Berliners—into West Berlin. And from West Berlin, to West Germany. That drain is a social, economic, and psychological drain the Kremlin is certainly not willing, and probably not able, to continue to endure.”

  “And their strategem,” Rufus volunteered, “is wonderfully elegant. The Soviet Union will proceed to consummate a peace treaty with East Germany, which thereupon inherits sovereignty over all of Berlin. Thereafter, Mr. Ulbricht, or more correct, Mr. Khrushchev’s Mr. Ulbricht, proceeds to make all the decisions having to do with what may or may not take place in Berlin.”

  “You know,” said Blackford, “I’ve actually forgotten—I was a student at the time. Why did the Allies go along with the fiction that East Germany was a separate country? Because it would logically follow that it could conclude any treaty it desired to with the Soviet Union, right? Or do I sound like Joe McCarthy?”

  “I will handle that one, Basil. Blackford, in answer to your question: a) Yes, you do sound rather like Senator McCarthy; b) East Germany’s ostensible sovereignty is subordinate to the antecedent rights of the occupying powers. Just as West Germany, although it is in most respects sovereign, would not have the authority, let us say, to deny us facilities for Radio Free Europe, so East Germany cannot deny us rights to Berlin we won in the course of winning a world war.”

  “Bravo, Rufus,” said Sir Basil, standing and stretching his long frame. “I could not have put it better myself. The Sophists would have awarded you a first prize.”

  Blackford had not spoken to Rufus since the Bay of Pigs, and wondered how the Sophists would handle that one. But retroactive diplomatic resourcefulness didn’t help in handling current problems.

  “Our instructions are very clear, gentlemen.” Sir Basil was still standing, and might have been addressing a regiment. “We must repair the damage done by Blake. Above all, we need intelligence. Our objective: Find out what Khrushchev actually plans to do. Find out what he plans in the way of using force if needed to accomplish his purposes, which are to seal off Berlin and stop the stampede from East Germany. And, if possible, find out exactly when he plans to move.”

  And then, addressing Rufus, he picked up his umbrella and coat at the corner of the room. “You will call me tomorrow—correct, Rufus? And I will leave you now with Mr. Oakes. Gentlemen,” he said, letting his voice frame the desired cadence as he opened the door and stepped out, followed by his clerk.

  Rufus and Blackford sat down opposite each other.

  “Want more tea?” Blackford asked.

  “No. Thank you.”

  There was a pause. Blackford stood and began to pace the floor. “Seems to me, Rufus, that those bastards are always on the offensive. It would be nice for us to move every now and then, right?”

  “We moved at the Bay of Pigs, Blackford.”

  Blackford stopped. He thrust his hands into his pockets and said nothing for a moment. “Bull’s-eye, Rufus. That’s right. We took the offensive in Cuba.”

  “Remember, Blackford, our friends in Moscow enjoy advantages we don’t enjoy, in this case the fiction that East Germany is an independent country. And they are closing in. They have been talking now for months and months, laying the background. ‘Peace treaty’ … ‘peace treaty’ … ‘peace treaty.’ That itself has an impact, like the repeated use of ‘disarmament.’ Khrushchev is mobilizing right now, and he plans to move. Exactly when and exactly how are what we have to try to find out.”

  “I wish it followed that if we did succeed in finding out, our people would come through with the right strategy.”

  “That’s not our business.”

  “Oh hell, Rufus. I don’t need to talk to you as one agent to another agent. Why don’t we agree that once every five years we can take off our official hats and exercise normal American freedoms to analyze public policy?”

  Rufus said nothing. In saying nothing he definitively cooled Blackford, who said now, with resignation:

  “We got big assets in Berlin these days? Haven’t been there for a while.”

  “The biggest asset we have in Berlin at this moment is Henri Tod and his Bruderschaft. We have our own contacts too, but Tod’s people are something. And that is the principal mine right now. Your first stop. You will need an extensive briefing on Tod. A very unusual young man. There i
s a great deal to do.”

  “Do we have anybody—over there?”

  “You mean in the Kremlin?”

  “Well, come to think of it, yes, in the Kremlin.”

  “If I answered that question, Blackford, you should turn me in to the Director, who would—quite properly—fire me.”

  “Rufus, old shoe, if ever they fire you, I’ll defect and we can start our own country. Meanwhile we might use our sources to lay on an atom bomb or two, so that we can be impregnable.”

  Rufus permitted himself to smile.

  3

  The bell on his desk rang timidly, almost hesitantly. As if especially trained to be obsequious. Walter Ulbricht, Chairman of the Council of State of the German Democratic Republic, and First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, responded. Responses were available in any of a number of combinations. If his secretary saw a single green light, that meant that she had permission to relay her message into the little loudspeaker on Chairman Ulbricht’s desk. If she saw a red light, that meant that she must abandon, until exactly thirty minutes later, any attempt to communicate with Chairman Ulbricht. Thirty minutes later the executive secretary had instructions to begin again, from scratch. If, in response to the little buzzer, two green lights were flashed, that meant that if the visitor Chairman Ulbricht was expecting had arrived, he should without further ado be admitted, always assuming that the secretary had established that the visitor outside his door was, undeniably, the person expected. If a green and a red signal were shown, this meant that the visitor, or the message, was to be passed along in exactly five minutes—i.e., that the Chairman could not, for whatever reason, be interrupted at this particular moment. If both red lights were shown, that meant that the Chairman had changed his mind about seeing the visitor to whom an audience had been granted, and his secretary was to tell the visitor to seek another appointment at another time. On the other hand, if the initial ring had been other than for the purpose of announcing a visitor, then the secretary, upon seeing the green and the red lights, was to re-signal the Chairman, by ringing again the anemic bell. “Why don’t you get those little machines that make the lights blink on and off, Uncle Walter?” Ulbricht’s personal aide-de-camp, Caspar Allman, had asked him a few days before. “That way you could double the number of messages you could give Hilda.”

  “I have thought about that,” Ulbricht replied, not looking up from his desk, and wondering for the one thousandth time why he had agreed to take on his widowed sister Ilse’s impossible son. Walter Ulbricht was certainly making up for executing the boy’s father, he thought, though Caspar’s extraordinary fluency in five languages protected the Chairman from charges of nepotism. As if Old Pointy Beard, as the Berliners referred to him (not in his presence—the Chairman would have tattooed his nose, if Lenin had), needed to protect himself from anybody this side of the Kremlin. “And I shall think about it some more if I incline to think about it more. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes, Uncle Walter,” the young man said, leaning back on his chair by the mini-desk at the corner of the office, and swatting at a fly that had got on his beardless face, but missing it.

  Today being Monday, Chairman Ulbricht looked with particular resignation at his watch. The time was exactly eight o’clock. This meant that he would now be briefed by his chief of staff. He depressed both green buttons, and Herr Erik von Hausen opened the door and came in.

  Von Hausen was a small man, fastidiously dressed, in somber blue. He wore pince-nez which, every few minutes, drawing his handkerchief from his side pocket, he would wipe, carefully refolding the handkerchief and replacing it in his pocket.

  Ulbricht motioned him to the usual chair, a gesture von Hausen acknowledged with a “Good morning, Mr. Chairman.” And, to one side, “Good morning, Caspar.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Caspar replied.

  The Chairman said nothing. He leaned back slightly in his straight chair, the signal that von Hausen was to begin, which he did.

  It was the day for the weekly report the Chairman dreaded most hearing. An account of how many East Berliners, and East Germans, had emigrated to West Berlin. The figure for the third week in April, 1961, was an astonishing five thousand and fifteen. Of these, 42 percent, von Hausen went on, had resided in East Berlin. The balance had come into East Berlin from outside the city to one of the eighty-eight transit points, whence they were taken by the West German police to the great processing center at Marienfelde, where they registered their desire either to stay in West Berlin or to fly west, to West Germany.

  “What is the current count on the number of East Berliners who work in the Western sector?” Ulbricht asked, tapping his finger on his desk.

  “The figures are not exact, Mr. Chairman. Between 53,000 and 53,075.”

  “Can’t you get more exact figures than that?” Ulbricht needed to express his exasperation in some way.

  “Those figures strike me as pretty exact,” Caspar Allman volunteered.

  The Chairman turned his head slowly in the direction of his nephew. “Your views on the matter are neither solicited, nor interesting, nor welcome.” Caspar shrugged his shoulders, reached over to pick up the copy of the Neues Deutschland, and said nothing.

  “I tell you, von Hausen,” the Chairman declaimed, “pending a final solution to this problem, we have got to increase the difficulties of these cowardly traitors when they set out to desert their fatherland.”

  “Do you have any suggestions, sir?”

  “Run over for me what we are currently doing to discourage the traffic.”

  Von Hausen leafed through a black notebook, adjusted his glasses, and began to read: “Respecting the flow of citizens from outside Berlin, we have sharply limited the schedule of buses and trains entering the city. The service is erratic, punctuality is discouraged. It is no longer possible in East Germany to count on making any connections if the objective of the voyage is to travel to Berlin.”

  “Good.”

  Von Hausen went on: “When passengers board trains or buses, their traveling papers are inspected. Any irregularity is instantly taken as disqualifying, and the passenger is let off at the next station.”

  Caspar turned down the paper he was reading. “Why not stop the train and make them get off wherever they are? That would make things much more inconvenient for them, wouldn’t it?”

  Ulbricht’s instinct was once again to rebuke his nephew. But before doing so he gave thought to his proposal. “Not a bad idea, von Hausen. Not a bad idea. They might find themselves, with their baggage—which I assume is extensive—fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest telephone. Yes, yes. Good idea, Caspar. What about the day workers coming over to this side?”

  “Well, sir, as you know, we have done the following. We do not, effective last week, permit them to buy anything at any East Berlin store unless they pay in East Berlin marks for it, and of course East Berlin marks are trading on the black market at six to one. So if they want to buy something here, they need to pay six times as much for it. What would you think, sir, of adding an additional requirement, that they produce working papers to show that they have earned their marks in the Eastern sector, and also show an exchange slip certifying that any Western marks were exchanged at the official one-to-one rate?”

  “That is a capital idea, von Hausen,” the Chairman said.

  “Why not tattoo all workers who cross the border into West Berlin?”—once more, Caspar Allman turned down his newspaper.

  The Chairman stared at his nephew. It occurred to him that the suggestion was ironic. But then it occurred to him that perhaps it was not. From time to time during the months his nephew had been taken on as personal aide, he had shown a rather ingenious turn of mind. The Chairman decided to be patient.

  “That would not be feasible, Caspar. In the first place, the exercise is elaborate. In the second place, it would attract entirely too much attention. It isn’t as though it could be done to all fifty-three thousand East Berliners in on
e evening. There is the further problem that tattoos are not easily erased, making it difficult for the traitors to become integrated after their rehabilitation.”

  “Just trying to be useful,” said Caspar, going back to his newspaper and resuming the crossword puzzle.

  “We need”—the Chairman began to stride along the length of the room, his head bowed in concentration—“more public … emphasis on the nature of the treasonable activities of the Germans who go over to the capitalist-imperialist side of town. I have studied the breakdown you gave me last week. The number of doctors. Of engineers. Of technicians. We are a society of only seventeen million people. Who, at the rate at which this lesion is proceeding, will build our bridges tomorrow, cure our ills, repair our telephones?”

  “Could we perhaps hire them to work here?” Caspar volunteered.

  “You idiot! Hire our own workers to come back to their native country, and to do there their own work!”

  He reached his desk chair and sat down, in silence. “The problem,” he said, his voice steady, “is the problem of Comrade Khrushchev. He must be made to recognize this. Meanwhile we must do what we can do, pending a final solution.… Von Hausen, assemble your staff and come up with supplementary discouragements we might use. Either at the border-crossing points or this side of them. I want that emigration figure halved during the month of May. Halved. We will discuss other matters at our afternoon meeting.”

  “Yes, Mr. Chairman.” Von Hausen bowed his head slightly, and left the room.

  The Chairman turned to his nephew. “Ah, Caspar. The problems of governing are sometimes of very near superhuman difficulty. What we must do, of course, is close the Berlin border. Permanently.”

  “I thought that was illegal under the postwar arrangement?”

  “What is illegal and what isn’t illegal is a matter of definition. We have excellent legal interpreters here and in the Soviet Union.”