Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story
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Marino in the pilot’s seat threw his throttle forward. The aircraft roared, squealed on the Marston Mat, and began to roll forward. Cochrane couldn’t hear Bettina, but he could read her lips. She mouthed the words “Thank you,” in English and the C-47, reliable as ever, began its ascent into the dawn sky above postwar Berlin.
The C-47 touched down at Alconbury two hours plus a few minutes later. A private car was waiting to take Bettina Schneidhuber and Horst Schmid to London for debriefing, new passports, and reorientation to a Western democracy. An American intelligence officer named Dickerson gave Cochrane a contact number and assured him that he, Cochrane, would have full access to what Dickerson referred to as “our new defectors.”
Dickerson offered a U.S. Jeep and a driver to return to his family at Orchard Street, but Cochrane declined. Anxious to return as quickly as possible in ways large and small to what he thought of as “civilian life,” he phoned for a taxi as any other tourist might.
The ride from the air base to Orchard Street took less than twenty minutes. En route, Cochrane reached into his pocket for some currency with which to pay the driver. When he located a pair of crumpled pound sterling notes, the bullet that had nearly killed him came out of his pocket with the money.
He sighed again and rubbed his eyes, aghast at how near the miss had been. In truth, of course, the spent bullet had hit him. Through luck, he had survived.
When he stepped out in front of his temporary home, Laura was standing in front of the house chatting with a neighbor, watching over two young girls playing hopscotch, on the sidewalk.
Laura did a double take when she saw him. He gave a slight wave. They embraced. Caroline quickly joined them. The scene was much like any other in which a man returns home by surprise after a long trip. On the surface, there was nothing unusual about it at all.
Chapter 74
Cambridge – August - September 1948
For the remaining days of the summer, Bill Cochrane attempted to regain the tranquility and relief from the cares of his profession that he had found upon arrival in England many weeks earlier. At his core, Cochrane was a professional spy. But now he took great daily pleasure in being a devoted husband and father. He went to great lengths to enjoy the companionship of Laura and Caroline. When a restlessness or wanderlust overtook him, which was not infrequent, he suggested two or three-day excursions to Wales, Scotland, out to Devonshire or even to Bath to visit Beatrice, Laura’s dotty sister.
One such visit to the latter solved several problems. The question of a safe, comfortable place to relocate Bettina and Horst had perplexed both British and American intelligence communities in London. The safety of the couple was paramount, but so was accessibility. Both had treasure troves of observations and identities, wartime and postwar information, tucked away in their memories. Friendly inquisitors would be able to keep them busy for years. As it turned out, during the war Bettina and Horst had ushered more than two dozen escapees from Nazi Germany through her home and to safety in the Western Hemisphere. Allen Dulles owed her more than anyone – including Dulles himself — was willing to admit. Nor did anyone wish her to happen onto Soviet radar and start talking to the opposition. A safe landing for the rest of her years was a fine idea.
Beatrice still needed a new couple to replace the older couple, Cronin and his wife, who had been the caretakers at her farm for years. Cochrane suggested a new couple, displaced Germans, recently arrived, who spoke acceptable English and who now went by the surname of Swenson to move in and work the farm. Courtesy of Bill’s contacts at MI6, Herr and Frau Swensen had new passports to support their new identities. All parties accepted Cochrane’s clever matching game. The Cronins retired but stayed in a drafty gardener’s cottage on the estate. The Swensens moved into the Cronins’ former cottage and worked the farm. Bettina was highly proficient with keeping accurate ledgers and managing the finances.
Pleased, Cochrane went to a bookseller in London one day and purchased thirty volumes in English and German that he remembered as some of Bettina’s favorites and had them shipped to her. For a while at least, everything seemed to be working its way favorably forward in the postwar era.
But there was something that continued to nag at Cochrane. It was a big something: the fate of Roth and Anna. Unofficial word filtered back to Cochrane as the final days of August began to drift by and he organized his notes for the seminar that he would give at the university from October to May. No one in Berlin had heard anything about the missing couple. Major Pickford had come up empty and Otto Kern had not received any whisper of a contact. Nor had Sergeant Pearson. There it remained. Cochrane tried to entertain the hopeful, wistful notion that Heinrich and Anna had survived, but as summer drifted away, he was hard-pressed to believe it.
Obviously, he concluded, this was something that he was going to have to live with. It was much like the memory of the bullet that had pierced the armor of the Citroen on the night when all hell broke out at the Club Weimar and overflowed onto the streets. The bullet might just as easily have passed through the thin glass of the rear window and then passed through his brain, had instead come to rest improbably in his hands.
Good luck, bad luck. He retained both as souvenirs of life’s vagaries.
Chapter 75
Washington, D.C. - August – September 1948
The stormy outcome of the Democratic convention in July left Truman behind in all the major American polls. Defeat seemed all but assured. Criticism of the airlift came from all the media and most of the newspapers. An avalanche of editorial opinion was against Truman and pro-Dewey.
Despite his increasingly acrimonious relationship with James Forrestal, Truman called him again to the Oval Office after his return to the United States from Europe. “Run through what you saw and who you talked to,” Truman requested. “Tell me again.”
Forrestal reiterated his concern about Communist expansion.
“And the airlift?” Truman asked.
“All our people on the ground in Berlin are for it.”
“And that spy you talked to? Whatever his name is?”
“We refer to him as ‘Lewis.’”
“Lewis is the man’s name, is it? He’s for the lift?”
“One of its biggest supporters.”
Forrestal then spent several minute reciting from memory exactly what Bill Cochrane had told him.
“Is he a Democrat or a Republican?” Truman asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Like hell, it doesn’t. Is he still there?”
“He’s been withdrawn, Mr. President. Had a gunfight with a Russian gangster-soldier. Or someone working with him did. Killed the Russian, according to my reports.”
“Ha!” barked Truman. “Killed a Russian thug! That’s the best-damned thing I’ve heard today!”
The incident had been front-page stuff in Berlin, and the British and Americans had to fend off a barrage of protests from the Soviets. But the Russians had to tread lightly in public over the incident. How could they admit that so many of their people had been in the establishment without acknowledging they were profiting by the hard currency it brought in?
But time was running out for the airlift as well as Truman’s shot at re-election. After the conference with Forrestal, Truman phoned his campaign manager, Herb Ackerman.
"I’m tired of being locked up with ghosts, crumbling floors, and people I can’t trust,” Truman said. “I want to get out of Washington and talk to the people. What can we do?”
“Go for a train ride,” Ackerman said.
Truman and Ackerman devised an eye-popping schedule that would keep the rails warm for weeks. There would be three major campaign spins. The first would be clear across the country from Washington, D.C. to California. Then there would be a six-day tour of the Midwest, followed by a third and final, hard-hitting, opponent-bashing, Red-insulting ten days through the big population centers of the Northeast and then a return trip hom
e to Missouri.
The tour began. A lot of hecklers came out. So did many opposition voters. But so did tens of thousands of ordinary Americans to see and hear their president. During the tour, a newly confident and increasingly relaxed Harry Truman presented himself to the people in August 1948. He spoke their language, had tough anti-Communist opinions, and understood their needs.
He used tough language, punched the air with his finger as he spoke, and gave voters the impression that he was on their side. He relentlessly accused the Republican Congress of being "do-nothing" and failing to meet the needs of the American people.
“Give 'em hell, Harry!" became a battle cry for the hard-fought, uphill battle of the campaign. In response, Thomas Dewey barely campaigned at all. To Dewey’s mind, there was no way in the world that he could possibly lose. So why even engage with the feisty little brawler from Missouri? All Dewey had to do to win was stay above the fray, not rock the boat, and he could coast to victory. Or so he reasoned.
Chapter 76
Cambridge and London – September 1948
Twice a week in Cambridge, usually on a Monday or a Thursday, Bill Cochrane departed from his normal daily routine with his family and with his friends at The Hero of The Thames. On these days he took the train to London.
Sometimes he would travel alone. Other times Laura and Caroline would accompany him. Then his wife and daughter would break away to do the pleasant tourist things, such as see the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, the London Zoo, and so on. Traveling with a family was a great cover for a spy. He always knew his back was clear when he left Cambridge and boarded the train.
In London, by prearrangement he would often wander away from his family, go into Liberty’s or Selfridges or Fortum’s, move quickly out of a side exit — his specialty to elude watchers — and when he was assured his back was clear, get himself to the American embassy on Grosvenor Square.
There, in a special telex room where the operators now knew him, he communicated with Major Robert Pickford at Tempelhof.
A few things had happened since his departure. Otto Kern, in a de facto sort of way, had stepped into Cochrane’s shoes. Kern had been promoted out of cargo unloading and was an assistant to both Sgt. Pearson and Major Pickford. Kern operated under the code name of “Centerfielder,” a term Cochrane had designated for him because a German national would never have picked it. So much to befuddle any enemies.
Now Kern had assumed the management of a functioning espionage network that Cochrane had founded and initiated but had abandoned — at least for the time being — having left Berlin and along with his “Lewis” identity.
Now, recently, Kern had been discreetly showing up at the town hall offices in Lichtenberg, der Rathaus, armed with a pocketful of Deutschmarks and an assortment of American tens, fives and ones There he greased the pipeline of information from the mortician’s office, in the persons of Vogelsang and Keller, and in the town hall, represented by Fritz Hunsicker. All three men made a point of socializing with others in their professional departments and finding out what was going on in other districts. It was nuts and bolts stuff, but useful. Any little tidbit helped. Any rumor shed a ray of light. It was solid product and Kern returned it to Major Pickford. It was a micro-triumph: the Americans were gleaning day-to-day information from the pro-Russian administration without even sending another American national into the building. As for the loss of the deportation records, no one had discovered it yet. The books were rarely sought and hence not yet missed.
Usually, the news for Bill Cochrane from such visits was somewhere between meager and nonexistent. But on one of Cochrane’s visits to the telex room during the first week of September, the news was somewhere between somber and catastrophic.
The Eastern Sector police, Colonel Markgraf’s people, had fished a battered Opel from the 1930s out of one of the canals. It had been there, they reported for a couple of weeks. A few days later, a pair of decomposed bodies turned up or at least were first delivered to the coroner’s office. It was not unusual for dead people to emerge from the canals in the Eastern Sector but these were of note: the body of a woman in her twenties, blonde hair or the remnants of such, and a large man of maybe about the same age. They had been beaten and shot. The conjecture was that they had died around the same time, sometime early in the month, hence the decomposition.
The news, with officially unconfirmed identities, hit Cochrane like a kick to the gut. He winced. He grimaced. For several seconds he stared at the telex, unable to react, hoping he had misread, fighting back his emotions. But he had not misread.
Cochrane telexed back within minutes. Could any further nonofficial identification of the bodies be made? Major Pickford reported negative to that. Kern had asked the same question and had further enriched the coroner’s office, meaning he had bribed Herr Vogelsang.
Kern, or “Centerfielder,” as the report across the telex identified him, had seen the gruesome photographs. The bodies could very well have been those of Heinrich Roth and Anna Schroeder. Maybe, maybe not. The photographs were unofficial and of poor quality and the bodies had taken a horrible abusing even before going into the water.
Obliquely, Centerfielder had also sent word through Major Pickford, that he had heard nothing from “his cousin” since the “birthday party” earlier in the summer.
Sadly, the information died there along with the corpses in the canal, Pickford telexed in return. He wasn’t giving up hope and neither was Centerfielder. But that was “all she wrote” for now, Pickford said. It was all Pickford wrote, also.
Cochrane stood very still and tried to assimilate what was before him. He had been the recipient of devastating reports before and hoped to never receive one again, though he knew the sentiment was unrealistic. Nothing insulated anyone from dire news, he knew, and nothing ever would, particularly in times like this, in a misbegotten world like this. There seemed to be two eras that he was living through: wartime and not-quite-wartime. There were few rules, no morals, and great evil and brutality were rarely answered with basic justice.
But here in front of the telex machine, there was nothing he could do. Nothing. Sweat gathered in beds on his forehead, he felt a wave of nausea, and then both reactions were gone. What he had read seemed to cast an absolute silence upon the telex room, at least for a few moments. Gradually the clatter came back. So did voices from the outside corridor beyond the closed door. A girl, an embassy employee, wandered by on the other side of the door singing a Frank Sinatra tune in a merry voice.
Cochrane left the embassy and went to Hyde Park. There was a bench where he would always meet his wife and daughter near the speaker’s Sunday soapbox in the southeast corner of the park, the place where Marx and Orwell had often hectored the unwashed masses.
Today, as was the Cochrane family’s habit, Laura and Caroline were there waiting for him. He hugged them both extra hard. Laura knew immediately something was wrong. They went for an early dinner then took the evening train back to Cambridge.
Bill feigned good cheer, but Laura knew better. One look at her husband, the man beneath the smile, told her that something grave had happened, not just bad but horrible. He knew she knew. He could hide everything from the rest of the world, but nothing from the woman with whom he shared his life.
After they had put Caroline to bed that night, Bill told Laura what he had learned. She reacted with predictable horror.
After Laura was asleep, he lay next to her, deep in thought, turning over the reported events in his mind, touching her hand as she slept, and replaying everything that had happened in Berlin this year. He picked relentlessly over the pieces.
He got up, had a double whisky, and came back to bed.
He finally nailed something else that bothered him.
Normal Soviet behavior in situations such as the blowback from Club Weimar would have been to keep the car, use it, and incinerate the bodies. The reported scenario via Vogelsang’s report didn’t make complete sense.
Soviet security goons or East German police may have captured them, tortured them, executed them, and then tossed the bodies into the canal days or weeks later near the Opel as a lesson to others, knowing that the dead and dismembered would be fished out eventually along with their wrecked automobile. Any self-respecting east-west intelligence analyst could wrap a pretty pink silk bow around that one and present it to his mom on Mother’s Day.
It made perfect sense. Cochrane went to the washroom and threw up.
Returning to bed with these unlovely thoughts in his head, Cochrane disappeared into sleep around five AM, only to wake up the next morning, entertaining the same horrid visions, which persisted through the next day and, for that matter, for many months thereafter.
Chapter 77
Berlin and Washington, D.C. - September 1948
Survival of a free Berlin, at least the Western part, became precarious as the summer ended in Europe. In September, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the pro-Soviet Communist Party in the Soviet Zone, marched on the Berlin City Council. Pro-Western council members had been elected and the Communists found the results unacceptable. Demonstrators invaded the city council and forced it to adjourn. The demonstration was seen as a victory for pro-Soviet voices.
Equally precarious was the structure of the White House. A team of architects announced that the White House's "structural nerves" had been damaged. The second floor would need to be rebuilt, but that overall the building was in "good shape.”