A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  In memory, the atmosphere in Germany in the weeks after the unconditional surrender seems almost as unreal as it did at the time and is now difficult to re-create. The immense relief that the slaughter and destruction had ended was, of course, pervasive. Germany lay prostrate, its major cities reduced to rubble, its industry and transportation system largely in ruins, the central government nonexistent, and the interim local authorities scarcely up to their task. By summer it was already apparent that shortages of food, housing, medical care, and transportation would soon become critical. Black markets flourished, profiteering was rampant, workers and the middle class were reduced to selling valuables and making pathetic attempts at begging.

  The inconvenience suffered by some of the Nazi elite when they were summarily ousted from their property to make room for the occupation forces was slight in comparison with the hardships the stricken population at large was beginning to endure. The shock that followed the revelation of the unimaginably appalling conditions in the concentration and extermination camps further hardened the Allied forces’ reaction to the condition of the civilian population.

  The Quartermaster Corps provided us with ample rations and quarters—ranging from make-do but comfortable billets and communal mess halls to handsome requisitioned villas staffed with servants. Detailed arrangements had been drafted for the occupation of Germany, but in the face of reality even the best plans required overhaul and considerable tinkering. An immediate problem was the intense pressure on the part of the noncareer military personnel to get home and out of uniform. Priority for reassignment was based on length of service, combat time, decorations, and time served abroad. These factors could readily be determined, but when complicated by the legitimate hardship cases and the erratic availability of sea transport, this meant that an office fully staffed on Monday might find itself at half strength by Friday.

  Despite the revolving personnel door, the planned organization of the OSS German Mission headquarters began to take shape. Offices and bases were opened in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and other cities in the American zone of occupation. Although Allen Dulles had been appointed chief of the OSS German Mission with headquarters in Berlin, he was still closing out his activity in Switzerland, and dividing his remaining time between Wiesbaden and the small office that had been established for him in Berlin. The supervision of the day-to-day work was left to Dulles’s deputy, Colonel William Suhling. AWD, as his senior staff referred to Dulles, paid careful attention to the well-being of his numerous anti-Nazi contacts in Germany and elsewhere throughout Europe. This collection of politicians, labor leaders, intellectuals, industrialists, and academics became known as the “Crown Jewels.” The term stuck and lasted beyond Dulles’s subsequent tenure as director of Central Intelligence.

  For the German population and the tens of thousands of displaced persons and refugees, food was the most urgent requirement, but housing was a close second. Transport was another critical problem. Railways were barely functioning and jammed with refugees and displaced persons. Gasoline for private cars was all but nonexistent, and almost any form of motor transport beyond the reach of most. OSS operations officers who had made their mark operating in Nazi-occupied Europe, or recruiting and training agents to be parachuted into these areas and Germany, found themselves delivering food supplies, and acting as chauffeurs and all-around Ganymedes for the middle-aged men Dulles hoped would eventually play a role in rebuilding a democratic Germany. In the process some of these young Americans developed a sound understanding of Germany at a grassroots level.

  Former agents like Fritz Kolbe, who survived the war and had remained in Berlin, were given special care. Modest pensions were established for the destitute and shunned families of the men and women executed after the July plot against Hitler.

  It was in Biebrich that I met Navy Commander Frank Wisner, who arrived from Bucharest still shaken by his firsthand experience of the brutal Soviet occupation of Romania. I worked directly for Frank, who had taken over as intelligence collection chief in the American zone of occupation. Lieutenant Colonel Ides van der Gracht, the architect who had supervised the construction of the Pentagon, was chief of intelligence production, with responsibility for the evaluation and dissemination of intelligence reports. I recall Ides’s exasperation when first reviewing some of our early intelligence disseminations. “In architecture,” he said, “a foot is always precisely twelve inches; in these reports things often seem to be ‘more or less a foot.’ ” While Ides was insisting on precision, I was sorting out priorities and pushing for more intelligence collection. Because of the fluid personnel situation, we both were involved in a version of musical chairs, attempting to fill the operations and administrative vacancies throughout the U.S. zone of occupation from an ever dwindling personnel supply.

  A few of us were billeted in a well-staffed and comfortable—verging on plush—requisitioned villa on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. German houses of that period usually had a study or hallway garnished with mounted trophies of game presumably shot by the owner. Our lodgings were distinguished by a mounted rabbit head on which a taxidermist had affixed a miniature set of horns. The villa immediately became known as the Horned Rabbit Club.

  There was more than enough work to go around, but there was also enough energy for an active social life. Hearty Army rations and liquor were plentiful, and odds and ends of the Sekt, the German version of champagne produced in the Henkel factory, became available on a daily basis. Some of this was so freshly bottled that we referred to it as the 1947 vintage, a beverage that could never have been confused with the most modest French champagne. Quartermaster purchasing agents in the United States appeared to have corralled the entire production of a notably harsh, blended American whiskey, a brand of which none of the OSS tipplers had ever heard and which, if it ever was offered on the American market, had mercifully disappeared by the time any of us got home. The Army PX had also contracted for an ocean of a particularly vile Spanish brandy. After some potentially lethal experimentation we came up with a relatively potable drink. A lavish jigger of brandy mixed with a tumbler of canned grapefruit juice became known as “Franco’s Revenge.”

  With it all, the work got done and friendships were made that were to last a lifetime.

  Among those quartered at the Horned Rabbit were Gordon Stewart, later to serve as chief of station in Germany; Stanley Baron, who left CIA to publish a number of well-received novels and become an editor at Thames & Hudson in London; and Rolfe Kingsley, one of the earliest OSS recruits and who remained with CIA until his retirement. Harry Rositzke, the Agency’s first Soviet expert, also shared the premises. Robert Joyce, who replaced Dulles in Switzerland and later returned to senior posts in the Department of State, and Paul Blum, AWD’s counterintelligence chief from Switzerland and an internationally known bookman and gourmet, were among our visitors.

  In August, I left Biebrich to head the intelligence acquisition branch of the Berlin office.

  —

  When I boarded the train from Berlin in 1937, Hitler was near the height of his popularity. While taking credit for having ended inflation and beginning rearmament, he parlayed the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the international success of the Olympic Games into even broader support within Germany than he had enjoyed before becoming chancellor in 1933. In August 1945, Berlin was smashed almost beyond recognition. On my first flight over the acres of destroyed buildings it did not seem possible that the city would ever be rebuilt. As one of our young secretaries put it, “This Berlin’s a real mess.”

  It took a bit of doing—some streets were so nearly destroyed that they could not be recognized, but I located my former bed-sitter on the Wittenberg Platz. Looking out from the shattered building, I could see across the rubble for hundreds of yards in every direction. But those of us who doubted that the city would ever be rebuilt had not reckoned on the energy and determination of the German people in general and the hardy Berliners in particular.

  Of
my landlady and neighbors, I found no trace.

  We established the OSS offices in a building on the Foehrenweg that had served as headquarters for General Ludwig Beck when he was chief of the German General Staff. General Beck was one of the earliest anti-Nazi plotters, and the highest-ranking Wehrmacht officer to resign his commission because of his intense dislike of Hitler. In deference to his age and distinguished military reputation, Beck was allowed to commit suicide twelve hours after the July 20 plot failed.

  Our offices looked out on a dead-end street, an important security consideration in the early days when the occupying powers were still sorting out their sectors, and policing was haphazard. Desperadoes of every sort—discharged Wehrmacht personnel, Russian deserters, displaced persons, war criminals on the lam, desperate SS survivors—roamed the ruins.

  One of the first problems to be settled in Berlin was personnel. It was soon apparent that the chief of one section of the Berlin office was spending more energy trading gasoline, coffee, and cigarettes for serious artwork, jewelry, and what might be called social favors than he was on operations. Much to his surprise, I sent him away with a personal file that ensured his days in intelligence were over. Circumstances were arranged so that he left Berlin with but a fraction of the loot he had amassed.

  When Peter Sichel, a member of the Sichel wine family and early OSS recruit, arrived in Berlin to take over the unit, one of the incumbent section chiefs offered him a thousand dollars for his watch. Peter declined, and gave the man a choice between an investigation of his financial activity and immediate departure from Berlin and OSS.

  “Turmoil” is a word that comes repeatedly to mind in reflecting on the early days of the occupation. Germany had collapsed, defeated, overwhelmed physically, politically, and socially. I doubt that many of us could understand the emotional carnage this caused. Corruption is contagious, and it was no surprise that it leaked into the occupation forces. This was my first experience of crime within the outfit, and I have not forgotten it.

  It was in the small Foehrenweg offices and at meals taken every day at the house in which Allen Dulles was billeted that I got to know the man with whom I was to work for so many eventful years. My first impression, gained on our drive from Paris to Rheims on VE Day, was never to change. Parted gray hair, carefully trimmed mustache, tweeds, and his preferred rimless, oval glasses gave the impression of a boarding-school master, a virile Mr. Chips, rarely to be seen without a pipe in hand. Of course he didn’t always wear tweeds, but as a colleague said, “It’s just that AWD always looks as if he were wearing tweeds.”

  With his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, “Allen” had an easy laugh and a contagious sense of humor—for all of this, “Mr. Dulles” was a demanding boss. When he put down his pipe and leaned forward business was at hand and he meant it. His leadership quality required none of the trappings of authority; there were no bursts of temper or threats of discipline. Despite his seniority and reputation as an outstanding operative, he always exuded a welcoming manner. He was open to discussion until a decision was made; at that point unless additional data became available, the decision would stand. Dulles was a natural raconteur, and enjoyed talking shop and swapping anecdotes with the staff.

  It was in Berlin that I first heard one of the stories he never tired of repeating. When Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, Dulles was a third secretary, the lowest man in the diplomatic pecking order at the U.S. embassy in Vienna. The evacuation train that hustled the embassy staff out of Austria arrived in the Swiss capital early Easter Sunday morning. As befitted his junior status, Dulles was detailed to the legation offices, sorting bundles of files and serving as de facto duty officer for the deposed Vienna staff. Not one to waste time bemoaning his bad luck—his twenty-fourth birthday had passed unnoticed on the trip to Bern—Dulles had found time to schedule an afternoon tennis session with a Swiss girl he had met on an earlier trip to Bern with his parents.

  Mid-morning, the legation duty clerk handed Dulles the telephone. One of the many Russian émigré politicians was demanding to talk with an American official. Dulles identified himself. The Russian asked for an immediate meeting.

  “On Easter Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  In his ten months in Vienna, Dulles had encountered several of the exiled Russian politicians. He was not impressed with the Russian’s demand for an immediate meeting, but offered to make himself available on Monday.

  “Too late, too late,” the Russian spluttered. He was already booked to leave on Monday.

  “Sorry,” Dulles murmured, “but that’s the best I can do.” And so there was no meeting between Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the future director of Central Intelligence. The next day the train which would take Lenin and a handful of fellow Bolsheviks to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg left on schedule. Through the years the details sometimes varied, but Dulles rarely missed an opportunity to use the story to illustrate his deep-seated conviction that intelligence officers must keep the door open, and never miss the opportunity to meet someone new.

  Dulles was occasionally stricken with gout, which, we learned, was as painful as a toothache and less easily managed. He never complained and the only warning that his foot was giving him hell was the sudden appearance of bedroom slippers and a rocky gait. Despite Dulles’s self-control, I learned not to surface any proposal that was less than urgent, or which might seem rashly reasoned, when the slippers were in sight. Only a lighthearted sailor leaves port in view of a hurricane warning.

  In the early days of the occupation the four national sectors (Soviet, British, French, and U.S.) had not been clearly defined and all one needed to move freely around in the ruins of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was a uniform and four wheels. On one bit of personal reconnaissance I sneaked into Hitler’s chancellery. This was in the Soviet sector, but the Russian guards took no notice of an officer in uniform who, in their eyes, was senior enough to rate a jeep. While poking around the banquet hall I picked a few pieces of intact crockery from the shoals of smashed porcelain that made navigation difficult in the huge room. Two pieces have disappeared, but one plate with “Kanzlei des Fuehrer” boldly stenciled in brown is in my study, a reminder of a war the Allies might well have lost had Hitler not hated the Soviets and admired the British.

  The politics of Berlin and the developing problems of the four-power occupation of the Nazi capital were chaotic, and intelligence officers were constantly shifting from one target to another. My work ranged from tracking down die-hard Nazis suspected of organizing clandestine resistance to the occupation—in fact there was no such resistance—to searching for the hundreds of war criminals on our “automatic arrest” lists, seeking evidence of stolen treasure and looted artworks. Along with these responsibilities, we were to monitor Russian military depredation in the Soviet zone and trace any German scientists the Russians had not already seized.

  One of the odd demands, possibly assigned by a historian on the Washington staff, was for details on the last days within Hitler’s bunker. The score or more uniformed historians ferreting about in the shambles of the Third Reich had failed to uncover her, but Fred Stalder, one of our senior German-speaking case officers, unearthed Erna Flegel, a surgical nurse who had been on duty within Hitler’s personal quarters in the Fuehrer Bunker. She had remained on the job until Hitler’s suicide and the deaths of the Goebbels family. This wasn’t a strategic intelligence coup, but Stalder’s report was solid history.

  There were so many, often conflicting, demands for information that it was almost impossible to sort out the priority objectives. The need for headquarters to establish a central authority through which all collection requirements were to be funneled and assigned a priority was one of the first postwar lessons I learned in Berlin.

  Although the United States was still officially allied with the Soviet Union, pressure was building for my small section to learn exactly what the Russians were up to in the Soviet occupation zone and what p
olitical moves they might be planning. It was in these early days that the first traces of Cold War operations began to develop. Three of our staff maintained quiet relations with some of the Russian officers and officials who were more outspoken than Moscow was aware. Clandestine attempts were made to question Soviet defectors—called deserters at the time. Under the existing agreements with the Russians, our military were supposed to return all Soviet subjects immediately to Red Army authorities.

  Allen Dulles was into everything, intelligence and otherwise. Rushing from city to city, from Crown Jewel to some new personal contact, he slowed down only to fire off scores of telegrams and letters barraging American authorities in Washington and across Europe with his views on everything from intelligence and political problems to economic and social matters. While scrupulously attending to the welfare of his former agents and contacts, AWD continued to spot new people he thought capable of helping to rebuild a democratic Germany.