by Noel Hynd
After the body bearers lifted Forrestal's casket from the caisson, Bishop Wallace Conkling of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago and Rear Adm. William N. Thomas, the Navy Chief of Chaplains, led the way into the amphitheater.
As the Army Band played the hymn Lead Kindly Light, the clergy and body bearers escorted Mr. Forrestal's casket around the colonnade to the apse. In the apse, which was shielded from the sun by a green canopy, waited the Forrestal family, President Truman, Vice President Barkley, and the honorary pallbearers.
Bishop Conkling presided over a twenty-minute service. After the benediction, the Army Band played a hymn, God of Our Fathers, while the body bearers took the casket out the west entrance and secured it to the caisson.
As the procession formed and moved toward the gravesite for the private service, the Army Band played Onward Christian Soldiers. The audience remained in the amphitheater until the cortege had left and President Truman had departed. Bill Cochrane, with the consent of Jo Forrestal, continued with the small crowd to the graveside. Along with a small group of Forrestal’s family and friends, there were maybe fifty individuals. The Marine Band played two of Mr. Forrestal's favorite selections during the final rites: Handel's Largo and Rimsky-Korsakov's Hymn to the Sun. Cochrane couldn’t miss the irony. Two composers: a Russian and a German.
Bishop Conkling read the Episcopal service. The U.S. Army Third Infantry Battery fired a nineteen-gun salute. A U.S. Marine firing squad delivered three volleys. The ceremony concluded when one bugler blew taps, and a second bugler sounded the notes as an echo.
As the echoing notes faded, the service concluded.
Cochrane stood for several minutes. He stayed long enough to watch the casket being lowered into the ground. By that time, those gathered included only a few old Forrestal friends from Princeton and his immediate family. Cochrane turned and walked away, leaving them to their private grief.
Across the street from Union Station, he found a bar and got good and drunk - Jameson Irish whisky, twelve years old, in deference to Jim. Then he caught a late-afternoon train back to New York. Grief and anger overwhelmed him, never a healthy combination.
Chapter 87
New York – May 1949
That same evening, Bill Cochrane arrived in New York City at Pennsylvania Station at 7:12 PM, then walked all the way to his home on East Seventy-Second Street. He was fully sober again by the time he arrived at his apartment door, used his key to turn the lock, opened the door, and walked in.
The light in the foyer was on, which was unusual. The first thing he saw was an unfamiliar umbrella in the stand by the door. He also smelled dinner on the stove. Probably a roast chicken. His mind processed in overdrive. The umbrella was plain and dark, military issue, U.S. Army most likely, with a sturdy handle. It was dry. There was no accumulation of rainwater in the stand, meaning it had probably been there for a while.
He looked up. He didn’t need to sense a visitor. He knew one was there and he knew it was a man, probably a young one, by the rugged umbrella.
“Laura?” he called.
Laura came swiftly around the corner from the living area. “Ah, at last! I was worried.”
His wife came to him, embraced him, and kissed him. “We have an important visitor, Bill.”
“Who?”
“Someone you know.”
Several paces behind Laura, a sturdy man in his mid-twenties loomed into the doorway from the living room. Handsome. Sandy-brown hair. Broad shoulders. The man wore civilian clothes. Cochrane, still holding his wife, stared at the man in surprise. He recognized the face, knew it was friendly, but couldn’t immediately peg the man out of context. It had been a hell of a long day, and this was making it longer.
Then he nailed it.
“Sgt. Pearson?” he said, astonished. A beat, then, “Wonderful to see you. But what in heaven’s name are you doing here?” Cochrane asked.
“I’ve come to get you, sir. You’re needed.”
Apprehensively, “Needed where?” Cochrane asked.
“Berlin, sir.”
A heavy five seconds passed. Then, “What? You’ve got to be joking!” Cochrane answered.
“No, sir. Very serious, sir. General Clay’s orders, acting on an urgent request from Major Pickford, who assigned me to escort you, sir. Military transit from Newark tomorrow morning at oh eight hundred hours.”
“He sent you all the way from Germany?”
“Affirmative, sir. I’m carrying written correspondence from General Clay.” Then, “Centerfielder, sir,” he added.
Stupefied, Cochrane stood in the foyer of his home trying to make sense of everything. Laura spoke next. “Sgt. Pearson explained what this is all about,” she said. “He told me as much as he could reveal. I invited the sergeant to have dinner here and stay over with us. He can use the sofa. That way you’ll have an easier getaway early tomorrow morning.”
“I haven’t even read the correspondence yet,” Cochrane said.
“When you do, you’ll understand,” Laura said. “Bill, you need to go back to Berlin.”
Chapter 88
New York to Berlin – Late May 1949
Traveling in civilian attire, Bill Cochrane and Jerome Pearson, the major and the sergeant, flew from New York to London the next day, stayed over in guest quarters at the American embassy, then flew to Wiesbaden. There, they were pleased to discover that Olson and Taylor would be their pilot and co-pilot to Tempelhof. It almost seemed calm, the final leg of the journey. The Yaks no longer buzzed the American planes. An element of excitement and exhilaration had been lost, much to Cochrane’s relief.
It was an odd sort of homecoming for Bill Cochrane in Berlin. Not only did he recognize the pilots and the flight crews, but they acknowledged him as well. What he did, why he was there, was not something any of them could have readily explained.
Major Pickford didn’t receive him like a long-lost brother, but he did have a smile for him anyway and a solid handshake. So maybe he was like a long-lost cousin. While there were some Russians, Pickford explained privately in his office, who were still furious about the death of ex-Colonel Kovalyov, the angry people were the black-market people and profiteers of war surplus. While those people could be a force to be reckoned with, they did not have the punch of the Red Army behind them.
One needed to be careful with them, but they weren’t high alert. Colonel Markgraf’s people remained a different story. Illicit club, black market or not, either Anna or Heinrich or both had committed a homicide, and it fell under the jurisdiction of the police in the Soviet Sector. An arrest would be made if the perpetrators could be apprehended.
“You realize, of course, that there’s arguably another course we could take with Roth and his lady friend,” Pickford continued as he spoke to Cochrane in his office. “It’s not what I would suggest, but I know how the game is played.”
“What’s that?” Cochrane asked warily.
“We could turn them over to the Soviets,” Pickford said. “In exchange for a heavy favor, for the release of other people being held, for future considerations. It’s just a thought.”
Cochrane felt the blood rising to his face. “You’ve got to be damned well kidding me!” he said. “First, I wouldn’t be alive today if Anna and Heinrich hadn’t taken out Kovalyov.”
“You wouldn’t have been in his line of fire if the girl hadn’t shot at him.”
“All the same,” Cochrane said. “I wouldn’t sell out an agent like Roth in a million years. Let’s say it’s against my religion, all right? If we don’t protect the people on the ground who have been loyal to us, we’re no better than the damned Russians. Isn’t that why we brought Frau Schneidhuber out?” He paused. “I’m offended by your very question.”
Pickford leaned back. “Good. Glad to hear I pissed you off. I feel the same way.” He paused. “Let me just mention, if the Western Sector of Berlin remains a free city, and it appears that it might, we’re going to have to enhance our intelligence role
here. Interested in coming back in the future?”
Cochrane laughed. “Keep a wife and family in an international hot spot?” he asked. “You making a joke? Is that what you’re doing?”
“More or less,” Pickford said.
“Okay, listen. There’s a new secretary of defense and who knows what will happen in Washington. So I’ll think about it. How’s that?”
“Good enough,” Pickford said. “Something else you should think about: the area where you’re going to retrieve Roth and Schroeder is crawling with local militias. Pro-Soviet and some die-hard pro-Hitlers. You and Kern will be taking three vehicles and will need to walk the final kilometer from what I know. You’ll have four of my Balkan guys with you to watch your back. Fair enough?”
“Sometimes, Pickford,” Cochrane said, “I admire the way you think.”
“Remember that in the future,” Pickford said. “It’s like the old-fashioned Indian country in Oklahoma,” he added. “Watch yourself at all times.”
“I’ll remember that.”
They departed the next morning, Kern leading the way in the advance car because he knew the route to Demmin, Cochrane following, each with a bodyguard from the southeastern section of Europe, and two thugs smoking and sipping brandy in the third car, a reinforced vehicle with rifles in the trunk. The three cars separated themselves by about fifty to seventy meters as they drove. They arrived in Demmin in the early afternoon and then continued to where the woods started in the northeast section of the city – the escape route that Anna and her sister had taken in 1945 after their parents had been executed. The bridges of the town had been rebuilt.
At the edge of the woods, Kern and Cochrane set off on foot. It struck Cochrane as odd that having flown four thousand miles from New York to Berlin, he would now finish his business on foot. But that’s how it happened. After a walk of fifty minutes, they went through a final maze of rocks, nearly invisible paths, streams, and stands of trees, and found what appeared to be the wall of a cabin, disguised by foliage, hard against the side of a rock formation.
The door opened. Roth stood before them with a pistol, then grinned.
Schließlich! he said. “Finally!”
Roth tucked the pistol in his belt. Anna appeared huddled behind him.
There were hugs all around. Then the two fugitives packed quickly and they were off before the evening gave way to night. They marched back to the three waiting cars. Kern drove the lead on the return to Berlin. Cochrane drove with Anna and Heinrich. They saw no militias and only one Soviet patrol. The patrol paid them no attention.
The four escorts left before Kern and Cochrane returned to Tempelhof, but Bill Cochrane and his partner returned with their quarry to Major Pickford. Cochrane might have preferred to stay the night in Berlin, but Pickford was insistent that the travelers keep moving.
A Gooney Bird was waiting, ready to follow what appeared to be a normal flight path out of Tempelhof but prepared to take an in-flight diversion from Wiesbaden to Cambridge.
Vic Marino was the co-pilot. The pilot was Lt. Willian Lafferty who had unknowingly flown the first flight of the Berlin Airlift almost eleven months earlier. Cochrane appreciated the irony: the man who had flown the first leg of The Big Lift, was the same aviator who would set him down gently on English soil at the end of his assignment in Berlin.
CHAPTER 89
Washington D.C. – July 1949
A week after arriving back in New York, his superiors at the FBI directed him to meet with an intelligence officer in Washington. New agencies were popping up all over the capital and those in the community wanted to know what Cochrane had to say.
Bill Cochrane’s defense department contact was an intelligence officer named Lawrence deWinter whose office was in a nondescript converted garage in Foggy Bottom, just off 17th Street NW and a few blocks west of the White House.
Bill Cochrane had been through debriefings before, and this one was as straightforward as those things went. He arrived before noon on a day for which plans included a short walk over to the Mall by two-thirty PM to meet an old friend and draw the 1948-49 assignment in Berlin to a close.
DeWinter was slim and balding, with pale skin, a thin brown beard, and an intent, intellectual manner. He met Cochrane with a handshake in a second-floor office where the shades were drawn on a window that overlooked the Potomac, a canal path, and Virginia on the other side. DeWinter came across as a little formal, slightly reserved. There was no sign on the building and no name on his office door. Cochrane knew only an address and a room number and that the man was an intelligence professional like himself. The office was as secure as any, and he could speak freely. The link had come from Forrestal’s successor, after all, and Cochrane had no choice but to react to it respectfully.
There was a handshake and some small talk with deWinter as the two men settled into deWinter’s office. Then there were some questions and answers, but by and large, the results of the operation in Berlin were laudable.
Cochrane had guided Bettina Schneidhuber to England and had brought her romantic partner of many years along in the bargain. Dulles’s debt to her – and the debt of the United States — could now be marked as paid.
The tenure in Bath of Bettina and Horst had been brief but they had now been set up in a comfortable flat in Cambridge not far from the university and not far, as it turned out, from 30 Orchard Street and The Hero of the Thames.
Through Cochrane’s contacts, Bettina did some tutoring in German language and literature for students at the university. Horst mostly stayed at home and kept his mouth shut. He had a frightened look in his eyes when he heard the planes overhead or saw military people from Alconbury. But he was getting used to his new life and was grateful for it.
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht, fresh from testifying in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, had made a triumphant return to East Berlin, the new worker’s paradise, earlier in 1949 where he had established his theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, triggering a new postwar interest in his work. A theater group in Cambridge received some friendly advice from an anonymous source that one Frau Swenson, now living locally, was an expert on the German playwright and poet. The group reached out and hired her as a technical advisor for a new production of Mother Courage.
“Imagine that!” Laura said to her husband when they received the news of Bettina’s good fortune. “How lucky for Bettina.”
“And how fortunate for the people of Cambridge,” Cochrane said. “They will quickly learn how charming Herr Brecht is, as well as how didactic and boring is his work.”
Anna Schroeder and Heinrich Roth remained “disappeared” from the face of the earth, presumed dead. They might just as well have been the two corpses that were fished out of the Landwehrkanal and officially that’s what they were. But they were now Alyssa and Stefan Cerny, DPs who had come to England after the war.
They had new British passports to prove it. They married, lived quietly on Beatrice’s farm outside Bath after Horst and Bettina had moved on, and quickly became the new, efficient managers of her farm. They were known to MI5 and MI6, not by their full background and not by their real names but as Alyssa and Stefan. From time to time, agents came by with questions about East Germany and postwar Soviet military, places and people, a subject upon which they were frighteningly knowledgeable. In their new role, as well as their cover occupations, they kept busy. A modest monthly stipend from MI6 helped.
Olson and Taylor married. They and Marino rotated back stateside when their tours in Berlin were over. As for Bill Cochrane’s legacy in Berlin this time, he left Major Pickford the elements of a fine, small, postwar network of spies and intelligence gathering. Petty corruption rose to a form of art.
As American intelligence increased after the war, budgets expanded for covert activity. Five hundred dollars a month was allotted to Major Pickford’s street people. For fifty dollars a month in Deutschmarks. Vogelsang and Keller shared their access to tens of
thousands of clerical records in East Germany while for the same amount each month Hunsicker and his cohorts would report on anything interesting pertaining to medical units. A few extra dollars in various directions equally corrupted the new Stasi headquarters where eavesdropping devices had been so carefully planted by a former cargo unloader with a degree in electricity.
Deiter Hoffman, the onetime bumbling street cop, rose in the East German police and was on the tab for a similar amount. Young Sgt. Pearson earned two more stripes and rose to Master Sergeant a few weeks after Cochrane’s departure. He circulated among the DPs and was a key recruiter of local talent. Kern also stayed. He was the cutout or go-to for all of Pickford’s operations, in addition to his fine work dropping electronic bugs into special places.
DeWinter was more than impressed and put forth the hope that Bill Cochrane could be talked into going back to Berlin by 1950, essentially the same suggestion put forth by Major Pickford. For the time being, however, Cochrane was having little to say about it. He was happy to be back on American soil and out of such a dangerous trade.
Or so he said.
Chapter 90
Washington D.C. – July 1949
Recalling all of this as he walked out of the sorrowful building in Foggy Bottom on that hot July day, Cochrane had the notion that this might have been his last assignment abroad and that he might never see Berlin again. If so, he reasoned, so be it. He was content to have as his main assignment in life to be a good wage earner, a faithful, dutiful husband, and a devoted father. Those assignments were no small tasks.
