The Little Tokyo Informant

by Andrew Rosenheim

  When the path split he took the thinner branch to the right – Thornton Palmer’s instructions had been very clear. Though why they had to meet way out here was a mystery to Guttman. You’ll understand when we talk, Palmer had said.

  They had met once before, for a background talk about Argentina, now part of Guttman’s new South American empire. At the time, Palmer had been Deputy Consul in Buenos Aires, but was back in D.C. for his annual leave. As Guttman remembered, he hadn’t known much about Nazis or German sympathisers – said to be plentiful in Buenos Aires. In fact, Palmer hadn’t seemed very interested in Argentina at all.

  There was no one else in sight – in half an hour it would be dark. Thornton Palmer – what kind of name was that? The WASP ascendancy’s habit of giving themselves two surnames reminded Guttman of a Masonic handshake, exchanged to tip the wink to fellow members of the clan, those upper reaches of American society filled with ancestral names clinging like burrs. Doubtless Palmer belonged there. He’d gone to Yale, hadn’t he?

  On the phone Palmer had said it was urgent, but Guttman had learned long before that one man’s drama could be another man’s yawn. He would have sent somebody else, but there wasn’t anybody he could trust to handle this unorthodox approach. The Bureau was full of bushy-tailed new recruits: the Director had been quick to leverage the possibility of war to persuade Congress to bolster his ranks, and 2,000 agents had become more than 6,000 in less than two years. But they were too green to decide whether Thornton Palmer’s urgency was justified or, as Guttman suspected, so much hogwash.

  The path turned left, making a sharp bend around an unkempt clump of rhododendrons. Ahead, set back on a semicircle patch of grass, a man sat on a bench smoking a cigarette. Guttman recognised him from their previous meeting.

  Palmer must have seen him, but he didn’t move until Guttman left the path and approached the bench. Then he stood up. He was a big man, well over six feet, a good five inches taller than Guttman and equally broad in the shoulder. Well dressed, in a beige suit that looked J. Press, a broad, striped tie and smart English brogues.

  ‘Mr Guttman?’

  ‘Call me Harry, Thornton.’

  Palmer shook hands firmly, like an ex-jock. He had such conventional facial features – straight nose, good cheekbones and a strong jaw – that women would have described him as good looking, though few would have said it with any excitement.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Palmer said.

  ‘Sure. It’s a bit of a hike from Foggy Bottom, isn’t it?’

  Palmer nodded. ‘That’s why I picked it. You might see somebody you know, but I’m not going to.’ He gave a quick, confident laugh and Guttman thought either he was a good actor or he wasn’t nervous at all. Palmer couldn’t have been much more than thirty, but there was an air of self-assurance to him – and a receding hairline – which made him seem older.

  Guttman gestured at the bench and they both sat down. From there they could see the path, twenty yards away, though Guttman didn’t expect anyone to come along this close to dark. He just hoped he’d be able to find his way back to his car. Palmer had thrown away his cigarette, but now he reached in his jacket’s side pocket and brought out a pack of Pall Malls. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Guttman and watched as Palmer lit his own with a shiny silver Zippo lighter. His hand looked steady enough and he blew the smoke out with obvious pleasure. On the path’s far side the creek hiccuped and gurgled over its gravel bed, invisible from the bench.

  ‘So what’s this about?’

  Palmer hunched forward, elbows on his knees, putting his hands together. He had clean-looking hands, which seemed to glow like Ivory soap in the disappearing light. Guttman reflexively clenched his wrists to hide his fingernails, chewed down to the quick, flecked with traces of ink.

  Palmer said, ‘I’ve been told you’re in charge of catching spies working in America.’

  ‘I used to run the Intelligence division, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Yeah. There’ve been a lot of articles about the Nazi agents you guys have rounded up.’

  Guttman shrugged. It was true that the papers had enjoyed a field day earlier that month, when thirty-three members of the Nazi Duquesne spy ring had been brought to trial, hailed by Hoover as the greatest round-up of spies in American history. Hoover insisted the publicity helped keep American citizens vigilant, although there had been other incidents where the Bureau hadn’t performed so well that never saw the light of day.

  ‘Is this about Nazis?’ Guttman asked.

  ‘Wrong side,’ said Palmer airily. He could have been describing a football game.

  Guttman suppressed a sigh. So this is why he was here – Palmer wanted to blow the cover off some Red. Doubtless someone from his Boola Boola days at Yale who’d subscribed to the Daily Worker. ‘So,’ he said, not trying to disguise his disappointment, ‘which Commies do you want to tell me about?’

  Palmer looked taken aback. He said, ‘Actually, I’m here to talk about myself.’

  Nothing in Palmer’s file had suggested anything unusual about him. Guttman said warily, ‘Are you a member of the Party?’

  ‘No. And I never have been.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got much of a problem, Thornton. Lots of people were pretty pink for a while, what with the war in Spain and the Depression here. Even Mr Hoover can forgive a youthful indiscretion, especially if you weren’t a Party member.’

  ‘That’s not what concerns me,’ said Palmer curtly, shaking his head.

  Guttman bristled slightly. ‘So what does concern you?’

  ‘Six months after I started at State I was approached. By the Russians. They wanted me to spy for them.’

  Guttman was nonplussed; he hadn’t expected anything like this. Nazi infiltrators he was all too familiar with, but Soviet agents? It seemed ridiculous. The Russians didn’t even have an ambassador after the signing of the Berlin-Moscow pact two years ago, and before that the embassy had been sparsely staffed. Throughout the Thirties they had been too busy failing to feed themselves (and putting ‘counter-revolutionaries’ on trial) to worry about spying on anybody else, much less a country as remote as America. And the Nazis were flooding through the Ukraine and heading east at a hell of a lick. Even by blitzkrieg standards, the German onslaught had been extraordinary. It was hard to see how Stalin would hold on.

  Sceptical, he asked, ‘Why did they come to you?’

  ‘I think they thought I’d say yes.’

  ‘Because you were sympathetic?’ When Palmer shrugged, Guttman asked bluntly, ‘Were they right?’

  Palmer looked at Guttman. ‘I’m not a spy, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘So what made them think you were ready and waiting to work for a commissar?’

  Palmer looked defensive. ‘Having a conscience isn’t about which class you’ve been born into,’ he said.

  To Guttman, Communism meant complaint – what did the likes of Thornton Palmer have to complain about? He said, ‘Maybe you’d better explain. Let’s start at the beginning.’

  Palmer’s face flushed slightly; it seemed the conversation wasn’t going according to plan. He seemed less confident now and when he spoke it was with the hesitancy of a reluctant storyteller. ‘It began the summer of ’33 when I went to Europe with the Whiffenpoofs.’

  ‘Whiffen-what?’ asked Guttman.

  Palmer gave him a patronising smile. ‘It’s a singing group at Yale. Very famous – well not that famous, I guess. Every summer it tours Europe. My year we started in France, then crossed into Germany. I saw Nazism up close. Not a pretty sight. Then we went to Vienna.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘We gave a concert in the concert hall – the Musikverein. Afterwards there was a reception in the Imperial Hotel, hosted by the Mayor.’

  Guttman wondered what this travel history had to do with espionage. Palmer said, ‘I met a young woman there, an architect. She was beautiful – tall, blonde – and spoke very good English. We were staying
in Vienna another two days and she offered to give me a tour.’

  ‘A tour, huh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Palmer in a half-mumble. ‘You see, I hadn’t known a lot of girls. She was pretty remarkable,’ he added, then looked embarrassed.

  The guy had probably been a virgin, thought Guttman.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Kristin.’

  ‘Kristin what?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Could do,’ Guttman said. When Palmer didn’t say anything, he decided not to press. ‘Was Kristin political?’

  ‘It wasn’t called Red Vienna for nothing. This was in its dying days. Kristin was a believer: she worked for Karl Ehn, the architect of the Karl Marx-Hof housing project, and her own apartment was in the complex. It was huge, you know; it stretched for nearly half a mile. Everyone there was working together to create a new kind of community.’ There was a hint of passion in Palmer’s voice for the first time. ‘It was probably the purest experiment in socialism ever seen, and it scared the hell out of the rest of the world.

  ‘Then the tour moved on. I wrote. She wrote. I missed her like hell. When we got to Rotterdam there was a telegram from Kristin, begging me to come back to Vienna. So I did – and when I got there I stayed two months. I’d graduated that spring and was supposed to start work at Brown Brothers right after Labor Day. Instead I showed up just before Halloween. The bank – and my folks – were none too pleased.’

  ‘What did you do in Vienna?’

  ‘I met people. Kristin had lots of friends. Most were Austrians, of course.’

  ‘Communists.’

  ‘Socialists, Communists, progressives – nobody wore a tag, everybody was of the Left. Considering what happened later, they were right.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘One of her friends was Russian and he was tremendously worried about the rise of fascism in Europe.’ He looked at Guttman almost reprovingly. ‘As he had reason to be.’

  ‘His name was … ?’

  ‘Milnikov. Or that’s what he said it was. I have no idea if he was telling the truth. He’d been chased out of Germany, that I do know, and he was always on the alert, even in Vienna.’

  ‘And he tried to recruit you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. He worked on me, that’s fair to say; his big bugbear was what he called Western Liberals. He thought they were too naive to understand the struggle that was going to take place in Europe between right and left. He said a person had to choose, had to take a stand, had to act – and not just theorise.’

  ‘Is that how you were feeling anyway?’ said Guttman, trying to sound sympathetic.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. You see, the summer before I drove with a friend out to the West Coast. We went the southern way, through Oklahoma, and I saw suffering there first-hand. The Grapes of Wrath has nothing over the reality – all those people who went to California didn’t find things much better there. So Milnikov must have decided I was making all the right noises. I probably was – you have to understand, I never thought I’d see him again. Especially once I got the boat at Rotterdam and sailed home.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay with Kristin?’

  ‘Kristin was going to come to the States the following spring. Then we’d get married. That was the plan.’

  And go farm apples in Vermont, thought Guttman cynically, but he said nothing. He sensed this story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

  ‘I wrote her every day and she wrote back, but halfway through January her letters stopped. At first I thought it was because she was so busy – the reports made it sound like a civil war was breaking out in Austria. Whole parts of Vienna were under siege. When I hadn’t heard anything for three weeks I started to get worried. I didn’t know what to do. I tried calling – it was quite complicated; the overseas switchboard is routed through London or Paris. The operator couldn’t get through. Then I tried to reach some of her friends but I couldn’t locate anybody. I was getting desperate when suddenly Milnikov showed up in New York.’

  ‘What a coincidence.’

  Palmer shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem that odd at the time; he was visiting with a Soviet Trade Delegation. When we met he told me he had terrible news. Kristin was dead – she’d been killed in the street-fighting after the Government reclaimed the Karl Marx-Hof buildings. Over two hundred people had been killed. Kristin was one of them.’

  Considering his first love had been murdered, Palmer’s voice sounded curiously unemotional. ‘For a while I was really shook up. I didn’t know what to do – though I knew I couldn’t stay at the bank when the world seemed to be falling apart. Fascism was on the rise all over Europe and I wanted to help fight it. But there wasn’t any place to fight – you have to remember, the war in Spain was almost two years off. Still, I knew Europe would be the battleground and I thought I should go there.’

  ‘What changed your mind?’

  ‘Milnikov. After the Trade Delegation left he stayed in New York – I didn’t realise why until much later. He said if I really wanted to defeat the fascists then I shouldn’t go to Europe – I’d just end up getting killed when the fighting started. I needed to play a part that was more important, where I could influence events and make sure America didn’t go the way of Germany or Italy. Father Coughlin was reaching his peak and the Silver Shirts had formed and Gerald L. K. Smith was talking about running for President – there were more fascist groups starting up than you could shake a stick at.’

  ‘Did this Milnikov say how you should fight the good fight?’

  Palmer looked annoyed. ‘Not then –’ he started to say, then stopped. After a pause, he resumed. ‘I took the Foreign Service exams six weeks later. I passed them easily enough and I had some good contacts – half my mother’s family were diplomats. Joining wasn’t a problem.’

  I bet, thought Guttman. People weren’t stupid at State – not stupid at all. But they tended to be well-born and well-connected.

  ‘I worked in Washington for the first six months. I didn’t hear from Milnikov during that time; I assumed he’d gone back to Moscow. But then one day he called out of the blue and said he was in Washington, working on trade relations – we’d just signed the first agreement ever with the Soviets. We had dinner and we talked about Europe. By then the war in Spain had started and Hitler had moved into the Rhineland. Milnikov must have sensed my frustration – I was in the Western European Division, but felt I was just spinning my wheels, watching from the safety of a desk while the fascists made their move. After dinner we went to a bar and it was then he made his proposal.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He wanted me to feed him information.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  Palmer looked impatient. ‘They didn’t want the baseball scores, Mr Guttman. They wanted cables, reports, assessments, all kinds of things.’

  Guttman raised his eyebrows.

  ‘It could have been done easily enough. Take them home, photograph everything, transfer them onto microfilm and let them off at safe drops round the city. Security is so lax that it wouldn’t be noticed if they were gone overnight, not if the next day I put them back. No one would ever be the wiser.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Guttman, mentally noting that something had to be done to tighten things up at the Department of State. He could envisage how delighted Hoover would be to tell Cordell Hull what a loose ship he was running.

  There was no point beating about the bush. Guttman said, ‘So did you?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ The young man looked sternly at Guttman. ‘I told you that. I’m not a traitor.’

  ‘But you were sympathetic – you felt you weren’t doing enough to fight the fascists.’

  ‘I wasn’t, and we weren’t. But that didn’t mean I would work for the Russians. Look, I’d heard enough things about people being recalled to the Soviet Union, then disappearing forever. In Spain, once the civil war started, some comrades were keener to shoot Trotskyites than kill Franco’
s soldiers. And of course there was Kirov and all the show trials.’

  ‘So what happened when you said no?’

  ‘Nothing. Milnikov was obviously disappointed and said if I changed my mind I should get back to him. Then I got posted to Argentina.’

  Guttman sat back, trying to take it all in. He said, ‘Why didn’t you report any of this?’

  ‘Hard to say. I suppose I still believed in the cause of antifascism – but not in the creed of the Communist Party.’ He paused. ‘And I was scared about what might happen.’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘No, to my Aunt Matilda,’ he said dryly.

  ‘So why are you talking about this now?’

  ‘Events.’

  ‘The Nazi invasion?’

  Palmer laughed. ‘Hardly. That’s been positively heartening.’ He threw his cigarette down, but didn’t stamp it out and it glowed like a ruby lozenge in the dark. ‘Look, the pact with Berlin killed any sympathy I’d ever had for the Russians. I know all the Party arguments justifying it, but it’s all baloney. At the very heart of things Russia has no moral core. Not under Stalin. I’d have been helping a regime that is in every substantial way as bad as the Nazis.’ He looked defiantly at Guttman. ‘I mean that.’

  Lighting another cigarette, Palmer took a big drag and sat back on the bench. Guttman said, ‘Tell me, did Milnikov try to recruit other people at State?’

  ‘I don’t know. If he did then he also did a good job of keeping us apart. That way if you guys found one spy, you wouldn’t find the others.’

  Guttman’s disappointment must have shown, for Palmer added, ‘I do know one man he approached. He’s one of the reasons I’m here.’