Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  The general listened to the story in silence, except for the single comment "Wow!" when Milano told him that Patsy and Pete were now safely on their way to Argentina. When Milano had finished, there was a long silence while the general digested the story. Then he questioned Milano closely on the details: he was particularly concerned to learn how they had covered their tracks, fearing that if the State Department had heard the name James Milano, then perhaps other people in the U.S. government, or beyond, might also have heard of him and might even have heard of the Rat Line.

  Milano could not be sure how his name had come to the surface in connection with Patsy's troubles in Chile and could not offer the general any very firm reassurance. He promised, however, that he would look into it and try to find the source of the leak. In his single lapse in candor of the conversation, he refrained from telling Bolling what he planned to do as soon as he got back to Salzburg.

  When he had finished, Bolling stood up. "Thank you, Major," he said. "Your briefing has been most illuminating. I don't have to tell you that you are to repeat none of it to anyone. I'm counting on you to continue supplying intelligence on our Soviet friends and being discreet about it. Your plane is waiting for you at National. I will deal with the State Department."

  Milano was astonished, grateful, and relieved. Bolling was going to cover for him, and he could return to work. He thanked the general and made a request: "I've not been home for two years," he said. "My parents live in Morgantown, West Virginia, two hours away. Could I go visit them for a couple of days before returning?"

  The general's reply was formal: "Permission denied. I want you back on the job immediately-and I don't want anyone to know you've been here. Good-bye, Major, and keep up the good work."

  Milano, of course, had no choice but to obey. He said his farewells to the general and then tried one last shot: "General," he asked, "what are you going to tell the State Department?"

  General Bolling smiled at him. "Jim, really that's none of your business. Now just go on your way, and have a pleasant trip."

  Milano spent a second night on a plane and by midafternoon the next day was back in his office, with his senior staff once more around him to discuss the situation. General Bolling would square the State Department, but they needed to find the source of the leak and stop it. Milano had had plenty of time to reflect on the question and had come to a conclusion.

  "It can't have been in Chile," he said. "Patsy and Pete didn't know my name. They're just a pair of ignorant Russian peasants, and even if they'd spilled all the beans they knew they couldn't have compromised us. The leak must come from Genoa: someone there picked up something and passed it on to those two embassy sleuths who were nosing around. That's where the trouble is, in the embassy in Rome."

  There was a long, pregnant pause as the group contemplated the situation. Finally, Dominic Del Greco, who was the most innovative and unscrupulous of them all, broke the silence. "So you're going to break into the embassy and steal it," he announced with a mixture of triumph and amusement. There was an explosion of delight from everyone else. Of course, that was what they had all been thinking, and now Del Greco had said it out loud. After forging a general's signature, stealing a jeep, and bribing a chief of police, burglarizing the U.S. Embassy in Rome was just one more step in crime.

  Milano glared at them. They were taking it altogether too frivolously.

  "Okay, Dominic," he said. "So how do we do it?"

  "We need to consult the professionals, of course. This is no job for amateurs, and whatever happens, we've got to keep our fingerprints off it. I think we might have a word with Bill Afano in Trieste. He spent the war in Rome and has a lot of interesting contacts."

  Afano was an Italian American who had gone to Italy in the 1930s and stayed there. After the war, the U.S. Army had investigated him for possibly treasonable activities, but he was over military age and had apparently done nothing to help Mussolini. He had, however, acquired a great variety of useful contacts. He was now on the books of Army Intelligence in Italy, with CIC in Trieste.

  Milano made the approach himself, driving down to Trieste the next day. Because of its disputed status it was one of the centers of cold war espionage at the time, and Bill Afano was kept busy. He was a professional, he had no sympathy for the bureaucrats at the embassy, and he quite understood Milano's problem. No doubt about it, the file must be stolen and all trace of it removed.

  What is more, he knew just the man to arrange it. Evan Goodenof ran a bar just off the Via Veneto near the U.S. Embassy in Rome. He was a Slovenian who had moved to Trieste ahead of Josip Broz Tito's partisans in 1945 and had acquired Italian citizenship. He had made several fortunes on the black market and had a reputation as the one man in Rome who could provide anything, however scarce, at a price. He was certainly well connected, both with the Rome police and with the Mafia, which was beginning to reappear after Mussolini had tried to suppress it-not to mention the other mobs that proliferated in Italy at the time. Some of his closest friends were Italian-American bootleggers and gangsters who had been deported to Italy. What was more, together with his sister he ran one of the best bordellos in Rome. Altogether, thought Milano, a most useful contact.

  He prevailed on Afano to go down to Rome to see Goodenof. It turned out that many of the officials at the embassy frequented his bar, which was comfortable and discreet and served American liquor at very reasonable prices. In fact, the prices were so reasonable that several unattached young Americans had run up dangerous bar tabs. Perhaps, Goodenof suggested, one of those middle- or lowlevel embassy officials might be susceptible to a tactful approach.

  This was a delicate question for Jim Milano. He could not make the pitch himself. On the other hand, he could not be sure of Goodenof's tact and discretion. It would be a worse disaster than the Chilean affair itself if the man rejected the suggestion and reported to the ambassador that someone named Major Jim Milano was offering money to have his file stolen. Bill Afano recommended Goodenof highly, saying he was not only wholly reliable but also very discreet, a man of sound judgment who would choose the right man and approach him in the right manner. In the end, Milano heeded his own advice-"Make the damn decision"-and authorized the attempt.

  He sent one of his junior men, Jim Alongi, down to Rome as contact man. Alongi was more than willing to leave Salzburg for a lengthy stay in the Eternal City. He was the unit's administrative and supply officer, and he longed to get involved in operations. Besides, he hoped to resume his friendship with a girl he had met in Naples the previous year.

  Afano made the introductions to Goodenof, and Alongi stated his case. He was interested in any file anywhere in the embassy that included the name Jim Milano or mention of Chile or a fracas involving two Russian refugees who had gone there from Genoa. He needed every file in this category: leaving anything behind would be worse than leaving them all. What is more, he needed all mention of the files removed from the file locator system, the card indexes. Goodenof understood perfectly and understood why Alongi did not think it necessary to say who Major Milano was or why he was so anxious to retrieve these documents. He said that there was one junior clerk at the embassy who had run up a $900 bar tab and apparently had no hope of paying it off. He was reluctant to demand payment too insistently, since he valued his embassy contacts. Alongi got the impression that Goodenof was thinking of many matters besides liquor. All the same, business was business and the man had been told that his supply might be cut off.

  The man was clearly an alcoholic, and this was a serious matter. Goodenof proposed that he should suggest that the bar tab would be canceled and that the man would be offered a line of credit, perhaps a further $100, in exchange for the files. Alongi would, of course, provide the money-and pay Evan Goodenof a fee for his services. Another $1,000 would be acceptable. The total of $2,000 was a large sum, but Alongi agreed at once.

  The embassy man was a communications clerk named Archie, and Goodenof offered him the deal. Naturally,
he did not spell out what files he wanted until Archie had accepted, which he did immediately. What were a few papers compared to canceling a debt?and $900 was the equivalent of two months' pay. He claimed that he had access to the file room and could easily go through every index and find anything anywhere in the most confidential files in the embassy.

  Alongi had arranged for Goodenof to call a contact number in Salzburg to report on his success and had given him a few code words to use to convey the message. It would not do to discuss it over an open telephone line. Goodenof was delighted at this fragment of the spy business. About two weeks after their conversation in the bar, the call came. Goodenof talked of the weather-and offered the anonymous voice on the end of the phone a turkey sandwich if he were ever in Rome. That was the code for complete success. Archie had found the files, had stolen them, and they were now in Goodenof's safe.

  Alongi was sent posthaste back to Rome, to pick up the files and to pay off Goodenof. He took $2,000 with him, even though the bar bill had been run up in lire and Goodenof would no doubt do very well with the exchange. He was indeed delighted and offered Jim Alongi a bonus, a reduction of 50 percent on the services of his finest call girls. His usual price was a hundred dollars a night, but his new American friends could take their pick for a mere fifty. They were scandalized. As Jim Alongi observed, the going rate was a mere two dollars back in Brooklyn, or five dollars for the prettiest girls. Fifty dollars for a whore was outrageous. They declined, but politely. They never could tell when they might need the services of Evan Goodenof again.

  Archie had done his job well. He had found that there was only one file that mentioned Major Milano or the Chilean affair, and he had extracted it, together with its locator card. Alongi returned to Salzburg in triumph. Archie was paid off and his bar tab canceled. He soon ran through his $100 credit, and Goodenof was faced with the problem of whether to extend him a further grace period. Fortunately, his drinking habits had been observed by his superiors, and he was sent back to the United States to dry out.

  The file that had been acquired with so much trouble and risk proved two things: the embassy sleuths were strikingly incompetent, and the Rat Line had not been seriously compromised. One of the embassy investigators had been told by a port patrolman that he had overheard the name "Major Milano from Austria" mentioned by a police inspector talking to a man in civilian clothes. He could offer no further information and could not say who the civilian was. He had noted Milano's name because it was a familiar, Italian name. The embassy investigator had spoken to the inspector, no doubt Inspector Giuseppe Salvatore, who had stoutly denied knowing anyone of that name. Surely the patrolman was mistaken.

  The embassy sleuths had not been able to pursue the matter any further. They had not even discovered that Patsy and Pete had returned to Genoa and had then disappeared. They had merely filed their report and returned to Rome-where their superior had reported to Washington that an American major named Milano, presumably in the Army in Austria, might be involved in the Chilean affair. General Bolling would take care of Washington, and Milano had taken care of Rome and Genoa, so his trail was now covered everywhere and he could resume the serious business of gathering intelligence on the Soviets.

  Jim Milano and his friends were old hands at the game. They had served a long, hard apprenticeship in the U.S. Army, in North Africa and Italy during the war and in occupied Austria afterward. By the time of the Chilean incident, they had had several years' experience of handling Soviet defectors, Austrian and Italian officials, and their own superiors. They were not about to let something like this interfere with their long-established procedures.

  The United States by its nature has an unequaled advantage over all other nations in matters of intelligence. It can at any moment find among its citizens immigrants or the children of immigrants who are intimately familiar with the language and customs of any country in the world. As America was sucked toward the Second World War in 1941, its armed forces reached out to German Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americans, and others whose families came from all the warring nations of Europe and the Orient, recruiting from among them cadres of smart, enthusiastic young men and women to build a formidable intelligence service. Peacetime conscription was introduced for the first time in September 1940, passing the House of Representatives by one vote, and the great expansion of the armed forces began at once.

  Jim Milano was then twenty-one, a recent graduate of West Virginia University. Like so many other young men of his generation, he had seen the war coming and had joined the Army Reserve during his university years, rising to the rank of lieutenant. His parents were Italian. They had emigrated to the New World, along with millions of their compatriots, in the decade before World War I. Milano's father had been brought over by his father, along with a brother, in 1907, when he was fourteen. Like many immigrants, the grandfather had found the adjustment too difficult and had returned to his wife in Italy after two years, but his sons had already adapted to their new country, and they had stayed. Milano's mother had been brought over as a three-year-old by her parents in 1905.

  Both immigrant families had joined the large Italian community in West Virginia, working in the coal mines. Milano's father and uncle were miners and farmers. They had married Italian girls, spoke Italian at home, and carried on Italian traditions in Appalachia: they ate pasta, drank wine, and went to Catholic church on Sundays and holy days, quite unlike the Scotch-Irish who peopled the hills and hollows of the region. They had known hard times in Italy, and when the Depression came down upon them in America, they survived on their savings, their lifetime habits of frugality, and their farms. They raised chickens, vegetables, and fruit, including grapes to make their own wine, and were thus protected from the worst calamities that afflicted the miners when the mines closed.

  Jim Milano, like the children of so many different immigrants of every nation and creed, had risen in the world through education and hard work. He had kept in touch with his roots, not only his Italian heritage but his recent West Virginian legacy: he had paid his way through college by working down in the mines during the summer vacations. He had studied chemistry at the university, and no doubt that would have been his career if the war had not supervened. In October 1941, he was called to active duty in the Army for a year, a duty that was abruptly extended for the duration plus six months after Pearl Harbor. A few months later, the Army Personnel Department came looking for language specialists, and he offered himself as a bilingual Italian American. After the necessary tests and training, he was taken on as an intelligence officer.

  He was to be an interrogator of prisoners of war. He was not to know that in the spring of 1942 a great debate was raging in the Allied High Command over the Americans' first direct contribution to the war in Europe. The Americans wanted to get their armies ashore in France as soon as possible. They accepted, with reluctance, that a landing there in 1942 was out of the question but insisted that the United States must play its part at once. The decision led inexorably to Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. That meant conflict, perhaps open war, with the Vichy French in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and it certainly meant war with the German armies, commanded by Erwin Rommel, and the Italians. Jim Milano, though he did not know it, was sure to take part in the American war effort from the start. There were going to be many Italian prisoners to examine.

  The U.S. Armed Forces were expanding vertiginously. In 1940, the Army could cope with 300,000 recruits. In two years, it was training 4,360,000. Time was to show the deficiencies of raising a citizens' army from scratch. Milano was assigned to the Military Intelligence Service (MIS). He and other MIS personnel were attached to various units of the Western Task Force that was being assembled at Norfolk, Virginia, and other East Coast ports for the invasion of Morocco. The Eastern Task Force was gathered in the estuary of the River Clyde, in the west of Scotland, and was destined for Algeria and Tunisia. The invasion took place in November 1942. Milano
landed on D plus 2, November 10, at Fedala, Morocco, with the combat unit he was attached to. The landings were initially unopposed, but there was some hard fighting with the French before the Vichy commanders concluded, after forty-eight hours, that their duty to Marshal Philippe Petain had been sufficiently observed and signed an armistice. The Americans and British then occupied the rest of Morocco and Algeria: they had to fight for Tunisia, which the Germans occupied as soon as the Allied invasion began. After the excitement of the landings, therefore, the American forces in Morocco had to regroup and prepare for their next tasks, while the real war rumbled on far to the east, in Tunisia. The British, meanwhile, were fighting their way across Libya after stopping Rommel at El Alamein on the border of Egypt in October 1942. The MIS personnel who participated in the North African landing were formed into the 7769th MIS Battalion.

  It was an opportune moment for Milano's unit to complete its training, and a British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Norman Cavendish Boyle, was seconded from the British army to take command. It was an interesting assignment. There were 180 officers and 150 enlisted men, an unusual balance reflecting the unusual mission they were charged with. All the officers and most of the GIs were bilingual: there were eighty-five Italian and eighty-five German specialists among the officers, the balance being French speakers. Ninety-five percent of the officers were university graduates, thirty had master's degrees, and there were seven Ph.D.s and three Rhodes scholars. It was adistinguished group.