Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  Chambers was not enthusiastic. He had just become engaged to an Austrian girl, and, though he had enjoyed a long and varied career as a bachelor, he was now determined to be a faithful lover and husband. Milano, and everyone else, was astonished. This was not the man they had known and envied for so long. Milano insisted. "Just strike up an acquaintance with her," he said. "Pass the time of day, make friends. Use your charm on her." Chambers agreed, most reluctantly, and all that remained was to find a suitable occasion. It came when the mysterious Sylvia turned up at the press conference at which the two defecting Soviet pilots were presented to the world.

  Sylvia was there and played the part of a skeptical reporter to perfection. Just before the conference began, Milano noticed Pete Chambers talking to her. Afterward, he asked how the meeting had gone. Chambers said that he had told her he remembered her from the riding stables. They had talked about horses and sport, but she had given no indication that she wanted to pursue the acquaintance. So far as she knew, he was just another American officer, and his famous charm had apparently failed him on this occasion. He told Milano that the chief reaction he had detected was puzzlement: she had wondered why he wanted to talk to her. He decided to leave the matter for a while but to arrange to be riding at the stable the next time she went there.

  Chambers did his duty. He pursued her to the riding stables, but she once again turned down his suggestions that they get to know each other better. The Americans had to admit that they had drawn a blank. Not all their intelligence coups were successful, and this, they assumed, was one of their failures. Sylvia remained one of the KGB's most dangerous undercover operatives in Austria. However, it is possible that Chambers's approaches may have served a useful purpose after all. Perhaps someone was watching her, someone who knew or suspected that Chambers was connected to American Military Intelligence. Perhaps her superiors, Beria's paranoid KGB, concluded that she might be tempted to defect. A few months later, she was abruptly recalled by her newspaper and was never heard of again.

  As for Pyotr Poncerev, he dropped from sight but continued his work in the shadows. In 1950, three years after his unexplained encounters with Milano, he set a small disinformation operation under way against him. Milano was abruptly summoned to meet the intelligence deputy chief of staff, Colonel Bixell, who sat him down in his office and tossed a photograph across the desk. Some anonymous friend had sent it to him through the mail. It showed Jim Milano, in the uniform of the Signal Corps, sitting in a sidewalk cafe with three Russian officers. The scene was a familiar one in Vienna, which rivals Paris in the number and popularity of cafes where people can while away an hour, or a whole day, watching the world go by and chatting with their friends.

  This was clearly what Milano was doing, and the intelligence chief wanted to know what he was up to fraternizing with the enemy. The only snag was that Milano had never sat on a sidewalk cafe with a Soviet officer, let alone three. The photograph was a fake.

  Fortunately, the fake could be proved, even though the photograph had been doctored by a master. The man in the American uniform looked like Major Milano and the uniform was completely authentic, down to the medal ribbons and the corps insignia on the man's shoulders. But Jim Milano was not in the Signal Corps. He was an infantry officer, and on those rare occasions when he wore uniform, he wore General Staff insignia. Major Poncerev had slipped. Milano and Bixell were left to speculate why the KGB had gone to such trouble to frame him. There was no Signal Corps officer in Austria at the time who resembled Milano at all. This was a wholly concocted photograph, designed to sow suspicion in the minds of Milano's superiors.

  A second photograph turned up two weeks later. Like the first, it had been posted in Vienna, like an ordinary postcard, but with no message on the back. This one showed the bogus Major Milano disporting himself in the Prater amusement grounds, in a sport jacket and slacks, accompanied by a very pretty girl. She was dressed in the dirndl, the Austrian national costume, and her hair was plaited into two long braids. The costume, too, must have been part of Major Poncerev's disinformation campaign or else some subtle Russian joke. Austrian women in central Vienna did not dress up like characters from The Sound of Music in the normal course of events, and Milano and Bixell were wholly at a loss. - -- - - - - - - - - -- -

  Milano called Poncerev and joked with him about the fake photographs. He asked when he would meet the beautiful blonde with the long braids. Poncerev professed complete ignorance, said he had no idea what Milano was talking about, and ended the conversation. He declined an invitation to meet the American for another drink, pleading the press of business.

  One of the most enigmatic and important of all the agents who fell into the net of American Intelligence was a mysterious Bulgarian rug merchant who called himself Kauder Kopp. He was discovered a year after the war, living under a false identity in a house he had rented on the Mondsee, near Salzburg. A local policeman, who had been recruited by the CIC on a retainer, reported that a Bulgarian in Mondsee appeared to be quite different from all other refugees. He had arrived shortly before the end of the war and had avoided all contact with the German Army. He appeared to be rich and to have saved a most elegant wardrobe and considerable possessions. The policeman passed his suspicions on to Vernon Hubert, a case officer in the SSU office in Salzburg. Hubert called in the mysterious Bulgarian, and during the second interview he revealed his identity and offered to work for the Americans.

  Hubert had already heard of Kauder Kopp, and he was high on the list of wanted men: he had been one of the most important of all German spies during the war. The Americans had first come across his traces when they examined the surviving archives of the Abwehr. They found that Kopp had provided his control in Vienna with a long series of high-quality reports on the Soviet Union from 1938 until the end of the war. U.S. specialists carefully interrogated captured Abwehr agents and officials, and many of them who had seen Kopp's reports said that they believed that he had been the chosen contact of a very highly placed Soviet officer who had betrayed his country to Hitler. Kopp's German control officer had been Colonel Heinz Huffner, who had been the Abwehr chief in Vienna. He was interrogated by the Americans and told them that Kopp had supplied a steady stream of intelligence throughout the war and that his reports had been reliable and exceedingly important. Some of his reports on Soviet troop strengths and dispositions had served as crucial information in the planning for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in June 1941, when the Wehrmacht had inflicted over a million casualties on the Soviet army in the first month. The Soviets had been taken completely unprepared.

  Huffner said that he and his colleagues had constantly pressed Kopp to reveal his source, or sources, but he had constantly refused. He had said that their value could easily be checked and that his German control could rely upon him. Kopp was Bulgarian, a carpet salesman whose business contacts spread across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He had no business in the Soviet Union itself, nor could the Abwehr find any evidence in his biography or even in his own interests that would explain how he had become a superagent. The most he had ever told Huffner was that he obtained much of his information by monitoring shortwave radio transmissions between Moscow and the Soviet Mission in Sofia. The Abwehr's own signals traffic monitors, sent there to check on the alleged transmissions, had been able to find no trace of them. Bulgaria had been a member of the Axis. It had joined Germany in its war on Yugoslavia and Greece and had annexed parts of those countries, as well as parts of Romania, but it had never declared war on the Soviet Union. The Soviets had therefore kept a mission in Sofia throughout the war. All its radio traffic had been carefully monitored by the Abwehr and, perhaps, by Kauder Kopp. It seemed most doubtful to Huffner that Kopp's reports could have been based on any information that Moscow might send to its isolated and beleaguered mission in Sofia, even if he had been able to intercept transmissions that the Abwehr missed.

  Many years later, there was a report that Kopp's source had, in
fact, been Japanese. The Japanese intelligence service had had a major outpost in the Balkans, and one of its employees allegedly had been a Japanese reporter who had supplied information to Kauder Kopp. In the way of intelligence services, if Kopp's reports confirmed information supplied directly to the Abwehr by the Japanese, then his reliability would be accepted absolutely. However, this hypothesis has not been confirmed. The other alternative hypothesis was that Kopp had been a KGB plant, feeding false information to the gullible Germans. There were (and continued to be) plenty of instances of Soviet intelligence disinformation, and it is entirely possible that Kauder Kopp was one of them. It would certainly explain how a Bulgarian rug merchant had obtained top-level information. At any event, at the time he appeared, the Germans and Americans believed him to be genuine and acted accordingly.

  Huffner reported to his American interrogators that in March 1945, as the Allied armies were driving across Germany and the Red Army was approaching Vienna, Kopp had suddenly arrived in his office. He did not reveal how he had escaped from the Balkans. He told Huffner that the German Army was certain to capitulate shortly and asked him what plans the Abwehr had made to protect its agents. He wanted guarantees for himself and for one other person, whom he refused to identify. Huffner was constrained to tell him that there was nothing that could be done for him. The ship was sinking, and Abwehr officers were concerned with saving their own skins, if possible. Their agents would have to fend for themselves. Kopp was unlucky in his control. At about the same time, a German spy in Britain, Tate, who had turned himself in to British Intelligence as soon as he landed in England and worked for them for the rest of the war, sent a last radio message to his control in Hamburg, asking him to take care of a suitcase of personal items he had left there. The message was, of course, approved by British counterintelligence. On May 2, 1945, a few hours before the British occupied Hamburg, Abwehr headquarters sent a last message to Tate, informing him that the suitcase had been confided to his sister and was safe. British Intelligence, which had controlled all German agents in Britain throughout the war and had written and sent all their messages back to Germany, noted sardonically that the Abwehr had been loyal, and deceived, to the last. Its chronicler wrote, "If you wish agents to serve you well you must satisfy their personal wishes and personal interests; in their last message to TATE the Germans gave a shining example of how the good case officer should behave, and gave it too in circumstances which even the most phlegmatic must have admitted to have been a little trying!"* Huffner heard no more of Kauder Kopp after his brief visit to the Vienna office. He simply vanished.

  Vernon Hubert, whose family was part of the German immigrant community in South Dakota, spoke fluent German and had spent the war with the OSS in London. He was a very thorough and competent intelligence officer, and as he investigated Kopp's story he became convinced that his new client might become a major intelligence asset. If he had really had a source on the Soviet Army General Staff during the war, the SSU needed to know how he had been recruited and run. Best of all, might he now be ready to spy for the Americans as once he had spied for the Germans, and, if so, how should the SSU set about making contact with him?

  Hubert moved Kopp into a safe house in Salzburg and began the prolonged business of interrogating him thoroughly on all his wartime activities. Hubert kept Milano informed of the case and after a few weeks asked for his help in protecting his new agent. He had become increasingly impressed with Kopp's knowledge and value as an intelligence source and concluded that he might be in danger of kidnapping or worse by the KGB. Hubert assumed that the Soviets had caught a number of former Abwehr agents and perhaps found some of the Abwehr's records in Berlin. Somewhere, most probably, they would find traces of Kauder Kopp and his reports. They would easily deduce that he had agents inside the Soviet Union, perhaps even in high rank in the Red Army-and would go to any lengths to find him and extort the names of his agents from him. Hubert became increasingly worried that Kopp was vulnerable to a KGB attack and finally arranged with Milano and the head of the CIC station in Land Salzburg, John Burkel, that he should move into a building shared with two of Burkel's agents. He was given an apartment immediately below theirs. Hubert had floodlights installed in the building's courtyard that could be switched on from either Kopp's apartment or that of the two CIC men.

  These precautions proved their worth barely two weeks later. At about eight one evening, two cars, each with two men in it, drove into the courtyard. Two of the men went inside, while the others stood guard. The first two went up to Kopp's apartment and started hammering on the door, demanding that he open it immediately. They shouted that they were U.S. Military Police. The two CIC agents heard the noise, immediately turned on the floodlights, and rushed down the stairs, their pistols drawn. They found Major Yevgeny Rustakov, head of the Soviet Repatriation Mission in the American zone, dressed in the uniform of an American MP officer. The other man with him was in civilian clothes.

  One of the two agents held the Russians at gunpoint while the other phoned for reinforcements. Within minutes, the CIC duty officer and three other CIC agents arrived, including Major Garry Hartel, who was the unit's liaison with the Russians. They were quickly followed by three MPs and an Austrian policeman. They arrested the two Russians who had remained outside the building and ordered the four prisoners back to CIC headquarters. Major Rustakov refused, insisting that the Americans had no jurisdiction over him or his men. The CIC men grabbed him and forcibly handcuffed him. He and his comrades were then taken to CIC headquarters, where John Burkel was waiting for them. He called USFA Headquarters in Vienna and gave a summary account of the incident. He said he would keep the four Russians prisoner until he received instructions from Vienna. They were provided with cots to sleep on and were given a meal. In Vienna, the duty officer alerted the commanding general, General Keyes, and at a meeting the following morning, he decided to expel the entire Soviet Repatriation Mission. The attempted kidnapping of a displaced person by Soviet officers masquerading as Americans was intolerable. The marshal commanding Soviet troops in Austria was informed of the imminent expulsions, together with the generals commanding British and French forces. The Russian coldly told the American general that he knew nothing of the matter and would investigate.

  That afternoon, the four prisoners were driven back to their hotel, where they were permitted to collect their possessions. They were told that any effects they left behind would be packed up and sent after them. They were then allowed to drive in their own vehicles to the bridge over the Danube at Urfahr, in a convoy escorted by American MPs. Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Sawyer, commander of the MP detachment in Linz, accompanied the convoy and delivered the members of the Soviet Repatriation Mission to Soviet officers at the bridge. He asked for a receipt.

  Some days later, the Soviet marshal called on General Keyes and informed him that the errant Major Rustakov had acted entirely on his own responsibility and would be punished accordingly. He requested that a new Soviet Repatriation Mission be permitted to return to Salzburg. After consulting the Pentagon, General Keyes agreed. As for Kauder Kopp, he was spirited out of Austria altogether, though not by Jim Milano's Rat Line. He was far too important an agent to be put into danger again, and the SSU took care of him. The CIC heard no more of him, and history does not record if he ever reactivated his secret source inside the Soviet army-if he had one.

  The fact that the KGB came hunting for Kauder Kopp, of course, hugely increased his value in American eyes. Other cases were much more difficult to resolve. The Americans never hesitated to use former German agents to spy on their former Soviet allies. The question came up as soon as the first intelligence operations got under way in the summer of 1945. The Soviets were showing ever-increasing signs of hostility, and the Americans, along with the British and French, needed to use every source of information they could find to discover what their new adversaries' intentions were. The men in the field, of course, debated the morality of working with agen
ts who, a mere two or three months earlier, had been serving Hitler. Some of them, no doubt, had been conducting intelligence operations against the Western allies and might have been responsible for American soldiers' being killed or wounded. All of them had been serving one of the most evil regimes in history: Allied personnel in Europe at the time were horrified by the revelations from the concentration camps and were still under the influence of years of wartime hatred for the enemy. The CIC, MIS, and SSU officers had to overcome their natural antipathy for their former enemies so that they could work with them in the new, cold world of East-West rivalry. Fortunately, American intelligence officers in Austria had to deal chiefly with Germans who had been working against the Soviet Union. They soon came to terms with whatever scruples they felt.

  However, there were general, unwritten guidelines they were meant to observe. In no circumstances were they to deal with, first, known or suspected war criminals; second, members of the Gestapo, the German secret police; third, members of the SA (Sturmabteilung), who had been the original Brownshirts, or storm troopers, the muscle men of the Nazi Party; or, fourth, members of the SS (Schutzstaffel), who had developed later than the SA as the elite military arm of the Party. These rules were laid down from the beginning, but as time went by it sometimes became necessary to bend them. In one case, a man who had been an intelligence officer in the SA offered his services to the CIC station chief in Linz, Tom Lucid. He claimed to have a residual network of informants in Budapest. As we have seen, this was a matter of crucial importance to American Intelligence, because it was the stamping ground of the Soviet 17th Mechanized Guards Division. The question arose whether this proffered intelligence should be used, despite the ban on recruiting former members of the SA.