Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  “A pilot who refuses to fly with a woman is similar to a duck,” Olson said to Major Pickford one day in front of several other pilots. “Except a duck knows how to fly. If I’m to go up in the clouds with a dumb co-pilot, I’d prefer to pick my own.”

  “You’re out of order, Tommy,” the major said in response. “Knock it off, shut up, and stop creating problems.” Then he walked down a corridor, out of her sight and that of the other flyers and split up with laughter.

  Duck! That was a good one.

  Most of the aircraft on these routes were C-54s and the slower C-47s. Aircraft were to fly in predetermined formations depending on how many aircraft were traveling together, each formation being either C-47s or C-54s. Formations were to fly at five different altitudes spaced by fifteen minutes horizontally and five hundred feet vertically. The system worked better on paper than in the air.

  In the air, there were wild cards. Each of the three corridors was only twenty miles wide as they crossed the Soviet-occupied Zone of Eastern Germany. Once over the Berlin the corridor was trickier: British and American aircraft shared airspace with seven Soviet-operated airfields surrounding Berlin, three of which had landing patterns and circuits intersecting with Tempelhof and Gatow. There was no communication between Soviet air traffic and the seven outlying airfields, and the British or American cockpit aviators had to make visual assessments. With a low cloud cover, such was impossible.

  At the beginning of the airlift, a new cargo plane would appear over Berlin every six or seven minutes. When landing became difficult due to crowded runways or inclement weather, the armada of aircraft became an air traffic controller’s nightmare. Worse, there weren’t enough controllers to start with. Meanwhile, the Soviets were experimenting with new ways to slow down the airlift. First came the electronic interference or jamming of ground-to-air radio communication by Soviet transmitters hidden in buildings in East Berlin.

  Next, “Yak” fighters, Yakovlev Yak-3s or Yak-9s, randomly buzzed Western flights, flying wing to wing sometimes, or cutting across a flight path, or climbing suddenly up from underneath a C-47. The Yaks were easy to control, being small and light, maneuverable, nimble, and high-speed at low and medium altitudes. The Yaks had been the best and the most mass-produced Soviet fighter of World War II. They carried a one-man crew and were lethal: like the earlier Yak-1 that had come up short against the Luftwaffe at Stalingrad, the Yak-1 had a 20-mm cannon that fired through the hollow-driveshaft nose spinner. But it also carried twin 7.62 mm synchronized machine guns in cowling mounts and a cannon in each wing.

  The Soviets now had no shortage of them in the Eastern Zone and plenty of rested, hungry pilots to fly them. The Gooney Birds, lumbering buses in the sky in comparison, drew increased numbers of Yaks every day, sometimes three to six during a single flight.

  Then there were the barrage balloons — large, unmanned, tethered kite balloons that during wartime had been used to defend ground targets against aircraft attack. The balloons, many of which were mini blimps, floated aloft on steel cables, which posed lethal collision risks to aircraft, effectively making the approach to Tempelhof or Gatow precarious every time. Many of the blimps were painted gray or black to make them more difficult to spot in a dark sky.

  The operation may have resonated as exciting, courageous, and uplifting to the folks back home reading newspapers that framed the airlift as heroic, but in official Washington, the opinion of what was going on was much more realistic.

  “The whole operation is doomed to become a disastrous failure,” one air force senior officer said in a note to President Truman. “We might stagger through the summer months. But once the German winter sets in with ice, fog, and snow, the damned Russians and their fellow travelers plus their Red sympathizers here in the U.S. will be having a hearty laugh at the expense of the American taxpayers.”

  “Garbage trucks in the sky flown by airborne trash haulers,” snarled another senior officer, a former combat airman. “The whole operation is a blunder that cannot possibly end well.”

  A recent high-profile screw-up in Berlin underscored the officer’s position. A jumbo cargo carrier loaded with a triple load of coal flew in low over the remains of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, where the 1936 Jesse Owens Olympics had been held. The plan was to dump the load of coal without landing and turn around to return to Rhein-Main, thus completing what would have been three C-47 trips without taking the time to land and unload.

  A group of official observers, British and American, waited on the ground to witness the event. The aircraft jettisoned its load of coal. The impact of its landing pulverized the cargo, turning it to powder that rose like a black cloud over the stadium and ruined the clothing of the spectators. Miraculously, no one was seriously injured. The plans for using this as a template for a new delivery system were quickly shelved.

  Chapter 26

  Washington – End of June 1948

  Not fans of the airlift were many influential U.S. senators back in Washington, including Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. Vandenberg, a Republican, had become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1947 and supported Democratic President Harry Truman's Cold War policies, asserting that "politics stops at the water's edge." But the coal-and-black cloud kerfuffle at the old Olympic Stadium was too much for Vandenberg. He now made the argument to the president that the United States should get out of Berlin before being unceremoniously forced out.

  Depressed, still sensing uneasy spirits in the White House, sweltering in the July heat, and with his wife having returned to Missouri for the summer, President Truman called a sudden meeting with James Forrestal, his secretary of defense. The meeting was quick, blunt, and grim.

  “What the hell am I going to do, Jim?” Truman asked.

  “You’ll need to make a decision before the fall, before the presidential election,” Forrestal advised the president.

  “Would you be willing to make an unannounced visit over there to get a good look at what’s going on?”

  “Certainly,” Forrestal answered. “But you’ll need to either sustain the airlift through the winter months or withdraw, somehow with honor, before the winter closes in on Berlin.”

  “Is the airlift sustainable? Is there a chance it can succeed?”

  “Maybe one in five hundred. And if failure happens, Berlin will freeze to death or starve to death, whichever comes first. And you will take the political hit. No one else.”

  “Jim,” Truman growled, “I already know that!”

  “I’m not sure which is worse. Freezing or starving.”

  “Nor do I,” Truman answered. “Does it matter?”

  “Well, then?” Forrestal asked. “Maybe it would be best to make a decision sooner rather than later.”

  “I’ve already made it. The United States stays in Berlin.”

  “How?”

  “Damned, if I know, Jim!” Truman snapped. “If I goddamned well knew, don’t you think I’d tell you?”

  With that, Truman rose, stalked out of the Oval Office, and retired for the night.

  The next morning, the news reaching the president from Berlin was even worse. An American aircraft had wandered off course due to a violent storm and had crashed into a mountainside in Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany. There were three Americans aboard. All were dead, including one who was a CIA agent. Soviet soldiers were the first to the wreckage. So far, there was no indication that the Soviets planned to return either the wreckage of the aircraft or the bodies of the dead Americans.

  Not long afterward, the most widely read political columnist in the United States, Walter Lippman, wrote of the future “exorbitant cost of lives of pilots, crews, and money of the airlift.” This was followed by a front-page article in The New York Times, which termed Operation Vittles “a losing position.”

  In Washington, Truman read the newspapers, crumpled them in a fury, threw them into a wastebasket, and kicked the basket out of his office, filling the air with a barrage of pro
fanity that was unfit to print in The New York Times or any family publication.

  Failure hung over the Berlin Airlift the way specters hung over the White House. And President Truman was at a loss for a way to exorcise any of them.

  Less than a day after the crash, having given preliminary orders to get the lift in motion, President Truman had a lunchtime meeting with three men representing three cabinet departments. James Forrestal was the defense secretary and Kenneth Royal was secretary of the army. George C. Marshall was ill, so the Department of State was represented by Robert Lovett, Marshall’s deputy secretary. Marshall was so severely exhausted that his undersecretary, Dean Acheson, likened Marshall to “a four-engine bomber going only on one engine."

  Forrestal, Royal, and Lovett began to present options to abandon Berlin. Typed memos detailing their suggestions were on the desk in the Oval Office.

  Truman listened for less than five minutes, glanced at the papers in front of him, and

  quickly bristled again with the anger that Forrestal had already seen so many times.

  “Maybe you fellas lost your hearing in the last few weeks,” Truman said, “but I thought I spoke very clearly! We stay in Berlin. Period!” he shouted. “You fellows are paid to be smart. Do your jobs! Figure out how we do it!”

  He reached to the papers in front of them, tore them up, and stalked out of the room, once again cursing. The president couldn’t catch a break. Not only was there too much going on in the world but too much was also going on at home. That same evening in Washington, President Truman’s daughter, Margaret, was playing the piano in her second-floor sitting room when a leg of the instrument crashed through the floor in her sitting room and through the ceiling of the family dining room below.

  Poltergeist activity? Well, no.

  The next day, a repair team discovered that the floorboards had rotted, the main floor beam had split completely from age, and the first level ceiling below had dropped a foot and a half. But that was just the beginning. The repair workers determined that the second floor was sinking at its west end. The secret service quickly and quietly relocated the Truman family from the west to the east end of the floor. Steel structural supports were brought in to steady the second floor and ceilings throughout the White House. An official study revealed that the White House itself was disintegrating, not just a floor. “Heroic remedies" would be required.

  “What the hell does ‘heroic measures’ mean with a house?” Truman snapped when apprised of the situation. Truman was having none of it. This was an election year, he was badly behind in every credible poll, the butt of countless crude jokes, and more preoccupied with Soviet intentions in Europe and the civil war in China, not to mention his re-election — if he even survived his own convention in July.

  Personally and politically, it was a nightmare. Truman feared that news of the collapsing White House would serve as a less-than-genial metaphor for his struggling administration. So, for the time being at least, he nixed the major project to save the grand old building.

  Chapter 27

  Cambridge and London – End of June 1948

  Cochrane returned to Cambridge. He spent the next day with Laura and Caroline, then packed in the evening. Laura helped him screen his clothing, removing anything with his name or initials that might compromise his identity. They had been through this process before, didn’t like it, but they did it carefully.

  A morning train from Cambridge was punctual and a subsequent taxi from Paddington Station put him at the St. Ermine Hotel by eleven-thirty. Goff had designated it as their staging area in London.

  The place was banker-class and “business-y”, with a pub off from the lobby. The registration clerk was a Sikh named Ajeet who was wearing a turban. Ajeet had deep, sad, dark eyes and a languorous voice. He had a beard and wore medals on his jacket from a British Indian regiment. His bearing and manner were impeccable. Cochrane could spot a former soldier a mile away or across a desk or counter. He spotted one here. He had a hunch that Ajeet had seen too much of the war. His hands had a nervous shake to them as he moved pencils, pens, and the pages of a registration ledger.

  Cochrane felt at home and out of place at the same time. He had a light lunch in the hotel pub and returned to Stan’s place on Clare Street by two PM.

  This time the weather was better and the door that led to the workroom, the one with the heavy automotive equipment, was open. Stan spotted Cochrane immediately when Bill poked his head in. This time Stan greeted him with a faint smile of semi-approval.

  Cochrane guessed that someone official had spoken to him in the interim, and probably paid him with a pile of cash, which would have been the usual protocol. Bill guessed that it might have been Irv Goff but it could have been one of Dulles’s or Donovan’s or Jim Forrestal’s many anonymous minions.

  Minutes later they were at the center table in Stan’s lab. Under the shaded lamp that hung down, Stan shook Cochrane’s new passports and identities out of a thin brown envelope. The documents plopped on the table.

  Cochrane picked them up. He discovered that in a fresh American passport he was now William Stanley Lewis, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 12, 1910. He saw his likeness staring out. The passport, to anyone reading it, had been issued in New York one year earlier. The repetition of the first name William as a repetition of his own was pure coincidence. But Cochrane went with it. He hoped for a short, easy assignment and not having to hone his reactions to a different first name was acceptable.

  As Cochrane flicked the pages, he saw one previous “trip” out of the U.S. to Bermuda in 1946. It was a perfect piece of work. The companion piece to the U.S. passport was a Canadian one. Cochrane felt well at home with it, having functioned many times as a spy with a fallback Canadian alias. He had rarely had to use the fallback fraudulent identification documents, but those times when he had needed to, the documents were critical.

  Cochrane fingered the two pieces of work in his hands, getting the feel of them, making certain that they felt and looked right. To a capable immigration office of any country, a misplaced staple or the wrong tone of blue or red ink could be a dead giveaway.

  “Excellent,” Cochrane said, looking up. “I may keep these now and put them to use?”

  “Yes. Good luck,” Stan said. “Berlin horrible. No food. No water. No electricity. No heat.”

  “No Hitler, either” Cochrane answered.

  “Stalin worse than Hitler,” Stan growled.

  Cochrane chose not to engage the statement, though he might not have disagreed with it. He shook Stan’s hand, pushed the passports back into the envelope, and tucked the envelope carefully into his jacket.

  “Ha!” said Stan. “Never soft. Communists. Liars and murderers. Don’t trust. Never.”

  Cochrane used a call box to contact Irv Goff, who was waiting at a phone guarded by an MI6 friend who owned a pub in Kensington. The prearranged tradecraft was uncomplicated: the connection point in London for the upcoming operation, the St. Ermine’s Hotel in Westminster, was a five-minute walk from the Houses of Parliament. Goff would come by that evening and go over some final details before Cochrane’s departure for Berlin.

  Chapter 28

  London – End of June 1948

  That evening, Irv Goff appeared at the St. Ermine Hotel carrying a small attaché case. Once he had joined Cochrane in his room and pulled down the blinds, he dumped onto the bed a packet of currency, money in American dollars and British pounds sterling, German currency of both sorts, and three cartons of American cigarettes, Lucky Strikes.

  “What’s all this?” Cochrane asked.

  There was also a pistol, American-made, in the attaché case. Goff picked it up and tucked it into his belt.

  “Money to keep you alive,” he said. “If you need more, talk to Major Pickford with the American military command in Berlin. He’s one of Forrestal and Dulles’s people. There’s a residential wing for our military people at Tempelhof. Major Pickford stays there and so wil
l you. More secure than the city at large.”

  “He knows of this operation? You’re sure?”

  “He knows and he’s in daily contact with Washington. He’ll be able to contact me or higher up, like Forrestal, if it’s necessary. If we’re lucky it won’t be.”

  “You never know,” said Cochrane. “Now. Why all the cigarettes?”

  “Use them as bribes when you need to. A good smoke is a good smoke,” said Goff, suddenly a philosopher. “You can take all the currency reform and negotiations that are going on in Germany these days and drop them into one of those fetid Berlin dumpsters where you find bodies. American cigarettes are the most sought-after currency in Berlin right now. Major Pickford will resupply you as you need them. Just give a shout.”

  “Don’t your Russian friends have their own cigarettes?” Cochrane asked.

  “They would if they had any tobacco,” Irv said. “But the Turks and the Russians aren’t friendly these days.”

  “No reason they would be,” Cochrane said. “They live in fear of Joe Stalin sending in the Red Army.”

  “Oh, that’s not going to happen,” Irv said. “Joe’s got his hands full with Europe. Vienna. Berlin.”

  Cochrane leaned back from the table. “You talk of cigarettes being used as currency in Berlin. You sound knowledgeable. You’ve been there recently?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How recently?” Cochrane pressed.

  Goff said, “I’m just back.”

  “What does ‘just’ mean?”

  “Stopped there before I came to see you. Then again, it took me two of the three days just to scare you up in Cambridge. Ever think of getting a phone?”

  “In England? These days? You must be kidding,” Cochrane scoffed.

  “Not kidding,” Goff said. “Just forgetting. I thought you might be hiding from old adversaries, real and imagined.”