Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  Milano sent two agents ahead, one a Russian specialist, one a German specialist, who were ready to interrogate the defector. He estimated that it would be necessary to keep him, and Trudi, in Bludenz for at least a month while he was exhaustively interrogated on everything he knew about the Red Army. Transcripts of the interrogations would be sent daily to the Pentagon, where the experts would study them and would undoubtedly have many further questions to put. Later, when the worst of the manhunt had subsided, the two fugitives would be moved to a safe house on the outskirts of Salzburg, where they would be prepared for the trip to Italy and the ship that would take them to the safe anonymity of South America.

  The first step was also the most dangerous: getting the two out of Vienna. They were picked up separately and carried off to one of Brewer's secret residences. There they were disguised: getting out of Vienna meant passing directly under the noses of Soviet security and taking the Mozart, the train from Vienna that passed through the Soviet zone before reaching the comparative safety of Salzburg. The Russian was given a new name, Dexter, with passport and other papers to match. He was given an American sport jacket and slacks and a stick-on mustache. His blond hair was dyed black, and he carried bags and belongings that would make him appear to be just another American. He had a gray pass, papers that showed that he was a civilian employee of the U.S. Army. Trudi was renamed Josephine. She wore a dull red wig, a turtleneck sweater, and a long, pleated skirt. She looked positively dowdy, not at all the glamorous vamp who had seduced the Russian officer. Her papers, all perfectly in order, showed that she was an American citizen, Dexter's wife. She provided her own wedding ring. They were then driven to the station and put aboard the overnight train for Salzburg, accompanied by two of Hancock's agents. American officials, under Brewer's watchful eyes, waved them through, and the Soviet guards paid them no particular attention. Captain Andreyev had not yet been reported missing.

  They arrived the next morning in Salzburg, tired but elated. The worst was over. The reception committee, consisting of Paul Lyon and Charlie Crawford, drove them straight to Innsbruck, in the French zone, where they were taken to the villa occupied by the CIC's liaison officers. They were given lunch and a room in which to spend the afternoon: they were to be driven to Bludenz after dark, and the Americans were determined that as few people as possible should see them.

  Late that evening, a couple of cars drove from Innsbruck up into the Alps and delivered Dexter and Josephine, with their minders, to the safe house. The Newmans were there to welcome the party. The house was a large one, which was fortunate: there were eight or a dozen people there at all times, including Trudi and her lover, the two interrogators, the Newmans-and a couple of agents to guard them all. Mrs. Newman was delighted and busied herself in the kitchen to feed the crowd with supplies brought in from Salzburg or provided on a barter basis by the French intelligence office. No doubt the CIC would be able to return the favor at some later date. Trudi helped Mrs. Newman with the cooking, showing a quite unex pected aptitude. If she found it ironic that an active Nazi was being helped by a Jewish family who had barely escaped the Holocaust, she never revealed it. She was not needed by the interrogators, who were laboriously debriefing her lover in Russian, and was glad to make herself useful.

  Three days after Trudi and Yuli fled Vienna disguised as Josephine and Dexter, Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Stepanovich Konev, commander of Soviet Forces in Austria, presented himself at American headquarters. Andreyev had been missed, and the Soviets wanted to know where he was. The marshal demanded to see General Keyes, who had replaced Mark Clark as commanding American general. He wanted to know if a junior member of his staff, Captain Yuli Andreyev, was being held by American forces anywhere in the American zone. Keyes replied that he knew nothing at all about the matter and would make urgent inquiries. The Russian was obviously upset and worried: if the man had deserted, it would be a serious matter for the entire Soviet headquarters.

  Within hours, General Keyes was able to tell him that there were no Russian officers being held anywhere in the American zone, nor had any defected. He was telling the absolute truth, as far as he knew it: Milano had made sure that none of his superiors knew anything about Trudi and her boyfriend, and, when they asked, the CIC was able to reply truthfully that it had no one answering that description anywhere in the zone. The Soviets may or may not have believed the general. Certainly, when a U.S. general gives his word, it is bound to impress a Soviet marshal. On the other hand, the Soviet general staff did not necessarily know anything at all about the activities of the KGB, so at the very least they must have suspected the Americans of deceit. There was a general alert among all Soviet agents in Austria and on the borders, and the KGB made strenuous efforts to find the missing man, but without success. Milano and his team had been very careful.

  The interrogation lasted five weeks. Andreyev proved a most useful source of information on the Red Army's order of battle, readiness, morale, and plans. He was a mine of information on the very topics that most interested the Pentagon. There was a constant stream of top secret coded communications between Salzburg and Washington before the captain was at last pumped dry and Milano judged that it was safe to move him and Trudi back from Bludenz. It was time to activate the Rat Line. Draganovic had been told that the Americans required two refugee passes for South America for a man and wife. They would go directly to Rome, to be passed through regular refugee channels: Paul Lyon considered that his charges would be safer in Rome than if they were smuggled through Genoa or Naples. The priest replied that he would be delighted, merely, as usual, requesting that they bring their marriage certificate with them. The Good Father assumed they were Catholic: the whole operation was based on the fiction that every client of the Rat Line was a Catholic refugee.

  Trudi was told that if she wanted to leave Europe it had to be as Dexter's wife. Milano had promised her, months earlier, that she would be able to choose whether to go with Andreyev or not, but circumstances had changed. It would be much safer for him to travel as a married man. She agreed. Whatever her feelings for her lover, she concluded that he would be useful to her in starting her new life in Brazil.

  First, they returned to Salzburg from Bludenz. Once again, they took two days on the road, stopping for the night at Innsbruck. When they reached Salzburg, they were put up in a villa some miles outside town, staying with several American agents. They were not prisoners, but they were not allowed out anymore than they had been in Bludenz. Indeed, they had to hide more carefully now, even though the Soviets were presumably despairing of finding their missing officer. They were to spend no more than a week in their new hideaway before being taken across the border to-Udine-and Rome.

  Milano's next task was to organize the wedding. It had to be a top secret ceremony but also a properly legal one. The happy couple would be traveling under new names and with new papers, but their marriage certificate would be perfectly genuine. What is more, they had to be married in a church, to satisfy Draganovic, and by a magistrate, to satisfy local requirements. Austria, like most European countries, recognizes only civil weddings, which are carried out in the local town hall and are usually followed by a church ceremony.

  The Americans took it all most seriously. After all, top secret weddings were most unusual, if not unprecedented. Milano recruited a local priest to perform the ceremony. He was known as Father Joe, and he officiated at a small church near the villa where Dexter and Josephine were to stay. Two of the American agents who used the villa, Charlie Crawford and Paul Lyon, were Catholics and attended Mass from time to time. They had made friends with Father Joe and occasionally brought him back to the villa for dinner. They had an excellent cook, and he appreciated their attention. When the time came, he was quite ready to marry the two fugitives. Trudi was Catholic, though she had probably not been inside a church for a decade. Andreyev had been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, though he had been brought up as an atheist in Soviet Russia. Father Joe s
aw no impediment to their marriage, provided that Yuli promised that their children would be brought up Catholic. He raised no objection and cheerfully signed the Latin document required on such occasions.

  Milano asked his two secretaries, Eileen and Pat, to make all the arrangements. They hired an accordion player, laid in a stock of wine, and urged the villa's cook to spare no expense. The wedding was on a Saturday morning. Milano took Dexter and Josephine to the town hall with the necessary two witnesses and a number of his men to provide security. They were the first couple to be married that day, and the whole procedure took half an hour. Then the wedding party went to the church, where Father Joe was waiting for them. The two women acted as bridesmaids: Pat had found corsages for herself, Eileen, and for the bride. The MIS supply officer, Jim Alongi, acted as best man, and Jim Milano gave away the blushing bride. As he took her down the aisle on his arm, the accordion player played "Here Comes the Bride." Afterward, there was a party for them at the villa.

  Everyone drank to the health of the bride and groom and to their future in South America. In the midst of the party, the villa housekeeper pulled Milano aside and took him into the room Trudi and Yuli had been using. One of the housekeeper's jobs was to check the bags of departing guests. Particularly after the incident of the defector who had concealed a pistol and used it in Chile, Milano wanted to be sure that the people he sent down the Rat Line were carrying nothing they should not. The housekeeper had examined Trudi's suitcase and had found a derringer pocket pistol with two bullets in it. Milano went back to the party and asked the bride if he could have a word with her. She came out into the hallway, and Milano asked her just what she was doing with a pistol. She was astonished.

  "You don't miss anything, do you?" she replied. "I've had it for years. A friend of mine gave it to me during the war: I didn't know when it might come in useful. If you'd double-crossed me, I was going to shoot you and then use the last bullet on myself."

  "That would have been a splendid end to everything," Milano replied.

  "Can I have my gun back?" she asked.

  "Certainly not."

  Trudi looked him in the eye, laughed, and said, "You know, if things had gone a little differently, we would have made a splendid couple."

  Milano was left speechless for a moment. Then he took Trudi firmly by the arm and back to the party. Late that evening, escorted by two of the most senior agents, Trudi and Yuli departed for Udine, Rome, and South America. Like all the other clients of the Rat Line, they then vanished from the face of history. The Americans never learned how they adapted to life in Brazil, whether Trudi joined the large German colony there, or even whether she and her Russian lover remained married. From Milano's point of view, she had amply earned her passage and her new identity.

  Vienna was a dangerous place after the war. Gray, desperate people inhabited a dingy, run-down city strewn with the wreckage and rubble of war, barely recalling the glories of Old Vienna. There were spies of every nationality, black marketeers, profiteers, smugglers, criminals of every sort, and refugees from every country in Eastern Europe. There was a steady undercurrent of violence. Every Viennese appeared to be engaged in shady dealings of one sort or another or at least knew people who were. The whole grim and grimy city was controlled by aloof and intrusive Allied military governments. It was divided into four zones, one for each of the wartime allies, and the center of the city was administered jointly by the four powers. There was no wall dividing Vienna, and military personnel from all the conquerors moved freely throughout the city. There was a multitude of police forces and military security organizations, and in all this confusion the criminals and spies moved easily among the zones, hiding in one and operating in the others. Many people of dubious antecedents disappeared all the time, never to be heard of again.

  Usually, none of this concerned the Special Intelligence Section of the Counter-Intelligence Corps. If people disappeared, that was their bad luck or their choice. People would surface in Vienna, working some racket or pursuing some phantom road to riches, and then vanish just as suddenly, either because they had found the crock of gold or to keep ahead of the police or the competition: remember Harry Lime in The Third Man. If bodies were found floating in the Danube or dumped in city parks or in any of the wilderness of bomb sites, that was only to be expected. Milano and his colleagues began to worry only when their own people started to disappear.

  The first to vanish off the streets of Vienna, late in 1949, was a Polish refugee who was on the books as an interpreter. The CIC needed such people to help it cope with refugees from any of a dozen countries who had tales to tell, or might. There were many Poles among them, and the interpreter was kept busy. He was called to the door of his apartment late one evening, stepped outside for a moment, and was never seen again. Then it was the turn of an Austrian woman who worked for the Vienna station. She left for home one afternoon, and she, too, vanished without trace. Perhaps the first incident was a settling of accounts in the Polish emigre community. Perhaps, in the second case, the lady had found a new protector and wished to escape her current American boyfriend without explanation. But the third disappearance was an Austrian who worked in the riding stables Pete Chambers was using to spy on the Russian officer corps and to look out for possible defectorsOperation Horsefeathers. Two men wearing the uniforms of American military policemen called on the unsuspecting Austrian one evening and took him away. When his wife went looking for him in the morning, there was no news of him to be had in any of the police offices in Vienna. The disappearance in a short period of three people connected to American intelligence operations was highly suspicious. As a fictional spy once said, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

  The Special Intelligence Section set to work to discover what had happened to its employees. Agents interrogated the missing people's wives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. They went to the riding stables in the Soviet zone, but discreetly. It was one of their own front operations, and they feared that its activities had been compromised or would be compromised by their inquiries. The stables were directed by an Austrian officer who had been a major in a prewar cavalry regiment. Every day, Soviet officers and officials would come out to the stables, located in a quiet, leafy suburb of the capital, and ride in the ring for an hour or two or take one of the horses for a ride through the Vienna woods. The Austrian major made friends with them, ran errands and performed services for them, supplying them with drink, special foods, cigarettes-and more sensitive services. There was no shortage of women hungry enough to befriend a Russian officer in exchange for cigarettes or money, and the major had plenty of contacts. Every so often he would approach a Russian he thought susceptible to seduction, usually a man who was about to be recalled home, and offer to arrange a safe refuge for him with his American friends. He was a man of excellent judgment and never made a mistake. Many of Milano's best sources were defectors recruited by the Austrian major. Later they were sent to South America down the Rat Line.

  It would be a calamity if the Soviets discovered that the stable was an American intelligence operation. The missing man, Albert Youngman, had been an ordinary employee. He had kept the books and helped the major administer the place. He had played no part in clandestine operations and had known nothing of the major's role in the secret world, but it was always possible that he had suspected something or had discovered some significant piece of information that a Soviet agent would understand. The stables sometimes received hidden subsidies from American intelligence funds, and the bookkeeper might have noticed unexplained credits and suspected their origins.

  There was another reason to be concerned. There had used to be constant kidnappings in Vienna: the Americans had not been averse to seizing people in the Soviet zone and spiriting them to the West, and immediately after the war the Soviets had regularly kidnapped people from the other zones, using the local police, who were heavily infiltrated by the Austrian Communist Party. The Ameri
cans and their allies had soon purged the police, and the regular kidnappings had come to an end. Now, suddenly, it seemed as though the Soviets had developed a foolproof method, with agents masquerading as American MPs. They would be very hard to catch, because they could so easily move back to the safety of the Soviet zone.

  The story had in fact begun several months earlier. Sergeant Barney Nelson of the U.S. 297th Military Police Battalion had made a comfortable life for himself in Vienna. He had encountered the young widow of an SS officer, one of tens of thousands of soldiers' widows in Austria, who filled every sexual fantasy that a twentyyear-old from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, had ever dreamt. She was older than he and far more experienced. She taught him everything she knew, and her every lesson was a revelation to the naive and stupid young American. Her name was Elsa, and like many Viennese she added to her income by dealing in the black market. At the same time, she demanded all the money Barney Nelson could give her, extorting three quarters of his pay and constantly asking for more. He was the supply sergeant for his battalion, and he began stealing from its stores. That was a dangerous and difficult operation, and Elsa was not satisfied with his achievements.

  He once bragged that he had an off-the-books radio transmitter in his store and suggested that she might sell it for him. He knew nothing of radio technology, and perhaps he exaggerated the set's qualities. Elsa was impressed and arranged for some friends to look at it. Barney got a buddy of his, Corporal Nicholas Roundtree, a farm boy from Louisiana who was also an MP, to help him load the transmitter into a small truck and bring it around to a spot near Elsa's apartment in the British zone. It was a desolate part of town, an empty street lined with warehouses and deserted lots, and Elsa guided the two MPs in their truck through a side gate into one of the warehouses. Three taciturn men were waiting to examine the transmitter. They used no names, and Barney was not told their nationality. One of them spoke English with a foreign accent, the others were silent. They looked the transmitter over carefully and concluded that it was worth nothing. They thanked Barney for his trouble and sent him back, disappointed, to return the machine to store.