The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  X

  (One)

  Headquarters, The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps

  Center

  Camp Holabird

  1019 Dundalk Avenue

  Baltimore 19, Maryland

  15 August 1948

  First Lieutenant Sanford T. Felter spent the eighteen months following his visit to Craig Lowell at Fort Knox in school. First there was six months at the U.S. Army Language School at the Presidio of San Francisco. Next came six months at the Advanced Infantry Officer’s Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. And finally there was to be six months at the CIC Center, “Dundalk High,” in Baltimore.

  The Army Language School was, and is, the best language school in the world. The instructors are persons wholly fluent in the language to be taught; and for many of them, the language they teach is their mother tongue.

  From the first day, all instruction is in the language to be learned.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant,” Felter’s advisor said. “What I have just said was in Greek, in case you didn’t know. Henceforth, all instruction will be in Greek. The Greek phrase for ‘repeat after me’ is—” and he gave the phrase. “Repeat after me: Good morning, Major.”

  “Good morning, Major,” Felter said in Greek.

  “Very good,” the major said in Greek. “That means very good.”

  “Yes, sir,” Felter said in Greek. “I know. I picked up a lot of it while I was in Greece.”

  “Can you read it as well?”

  “Yes, sir. I read it a little better than I speak it. I’m told I have a terrible accent.”

  Following a written and oral examination, Felter’s service record was amended to add “Greek language proficiency: Fluent, written and oral.” Permission was received from the adjutant general, with the concurrence of the assistant chief of staff G-2, to submit Lt. Felter to instruction in the Korean language, in lieu of Greek.

  The Felters shared a neat little brick duplex with a Chinese-American lieutenant from Hawaii who was an instructor in Cantonese. Orally, there was a great difference between the two languages, but there was, Felter found, a strong similarity in their written forms.

  Felter was graduated from the Korean language course “with distinction,” and as a result of an examination, he was also determined to be “fluent” in written Cantonese and “semifluent” in spoken Cantonese.

  They drove back across the country. Sharon was pregnant (it had probably happened that night at Fort Knox; the Mouse prayed that the alcohol in his blood would not affect the fetus), and the trip was punctuated by frequent stops for her to spend a day in a motel bed.

  The quarters available to first lieutenants attending the Advanced Officer’s Course at Fort Benning were nothing like the duplexes in the Presidio. And the philosophy of instruction seemed to be to physically exhaust the students in one overnight field training exercise after another. Finally, Sandy convinced Sharon that it would be better for the baby if he moved into the BOQ and she went home to Newark.

  The only pleasant memory the Mouse had of Fort Benning was the day he was called into the Student Officer Company orderly room and told by a visibly surprised major (who knew he was en route from the Army Language School to the Counterintelligence center and had logically concluded he was one more pencil-pushing Jewboy) that a general order from the Department of the Army had been received awarding him the Expert Combat Infantry Badge and the Bronze Star with “V” (for Valor) device for his service in Greece.

  Years later, Felter learned that Big Jim Van Fleet had gone from Greece to Washington and patiently demanded over a period of six months, day after day, that the army owed those who served with divisions and regiments in Greece more than the hypocrisy of an Army Commendation Medal. He finally wore the bureaucracy down.

  Camp Holabird was much nicer than Fort Benning. There were no quarters on the post for junior lieutenants, but Holabird was right in Baltimore in the Dundalk section, and he and Sharon and Sanford Felter, Jr., spent the time in a nice little rented apartment.

  It was like going to civilian work, and the duty hours were eight to five. Baltimore was close enough to Newark so that his father and mother could drive down and spend an occasional weekend with them, or sometimes his mother would come alone on the train. And it was just a couple of hours from Philadelphia where Craig was enrolled in the Wharton School of Business; and so they saw a lot of the Lowells. When, his curiosity aroused, he asked Craig how he’d gotten into Wharton, without having an undergraduate degree, Craig had said they made an exception for people who owned banks.

  Some of the things Felter learned in the CIC Center were fascinating, and some of them were sort of funny. Privately, he thought of parts of it as the Official U.S. Army Burglar and Safecracker School.

  But the life was good. For one thing, there were a lot of Jews there. During the war and immediately afterward, there had been a lot of Jewish refugees from Hitler in the CIC; and even now there were still enough Jewish refugees from Germany getting drafted who spoke German and were needed in the CIC.

  There were enough practicing Jews for a Sabbath service under a rabbi-chaplain at the post chapel, and the Mouse and Sharon also participated in the congregational activities. There weren’t that many Jewish officers, but because most of the CIC people worked in civilian clothes or with the blue-triangle U.S. Civilian insignia on their uniform, there were far less restrictions against being friendly with enlisted personnel than there were at other places in the army.

  For a while Sandy was worried that he had been categorized as a Jew and would wind up in Germany chasing Nazis and doing security checks on German girls who wanted to marry Americans. But in his fourth week of training, while the others were being instructed in the filing system of the National Socialist Democratic Worker’s Party, he and a major who had never before spoken to him were taken to a small office and began a course which explained the inner administrative procedures of the Russian State Security Service.

  He learned that the Jewish personnel who were bound for Germany and the de-Nazification program were referred to as “the temporary help” and was a little worried that it was an anti-Semitic comment. But he thought it through. That’s all they really were. They were not involved in the business he was being trained for. What the temporary help were involved in was the punishment of the Nazis. The Nazis no longer posed a threat to the security of the United States. The communists did.

  When he was graduated, he was given a special $350 allowance to buy civilian clothing and a little leather folder with a badge and his photograph on a plastic identification card that said, THE BEARER IS A SPECIAL AGENT OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CORPS. They also issued him a five-shot Smith & Wesson. 38 Special revolver with a two-inch barrel.

  He was first assigned to the 119th CIC Detachment, First Army, which was in an office building on West 57th Street in New York City. He wanted to rent an apartment in New York, but Sharon said there was no sense throwing money away. They could live with his parents, and besides he would hurt his mother’s feelings.

  So every morning, early, he would ride the bus to Pennsylvania Station in Newark and take the commuter train to New York and the subway up to West 57th Street.

  What the 119th CIC Detachment did mostly was run complete background investigations on people who wanted to get a Secret or a Top Secret security clearance. Special agents went around to where they lived and asked questions, and they went to their schools and talked to their teachers.

  Felter did that for a couple of months, and then he was named deputy agent in charge of the detachment, which meant that he handled all the administration. There were thirty-six special agents, most of them sergeants, with a couple of warrant officers and one other officer. Everybody was in civilian clothes.

  It wasn’t what he had envisioned it would be like as an intelligence officer, and he began to wonder if he had been letting his imagination and his ego run away with him when he had thought he was going to do some
thing important. Nevertheless, there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

  And then, all of a sudden, he was called to a meeting at First Army Headquarters on Governors Island and introduced to a gray-haired man with an accent like Craig Lowell’s. The man bought him lunch and talked German, Russian, and Polish to him. Felter knew he was being checked to see how well he spoke those languages, but he had no idea why.

  And then the man said, “A friend of yours told me you can be a mean sonofabitch on occasion, Felter. Is that true?”

  “I can’t imagine who would say that about me,” Felter said, truthfully.

  “Paul Hanrahan,” the man said, “is our mutual friend.”

  “Oh, Colonel Hanrahan. He said that about me?”

  “He sends his best regards,” the man said.

  “Where is he now?” There was no reply to the question.

  “Felter, how would you like to go to Berlin for a couple of years?” the man said.

  “Oh, I’d like that,” Felter said.

  (Two)

  Mr. and Mrs. Sanford T. Felter and little Sandy flew to Germany on Pan American Airways. As a Department of the Army civilian employee, accountant, GS-9 (equivalent, if he had been an officer, to captain), employed by something called the office of Production Analysis, Mr. Felter was entitled to company-grade officer quarters, a PX card, and other privileges, including access to the U.S. Army Hospital for himself and his family.

  For three months he debriefed line-crossers from East Germany, at first with regard to the placement of Russian military formations. Then, as he acquired knowledge of East Germany and Poland, he began to specialize in information regarding the Volkspolizei, the paramilitary East German police force.

  From there he moved naturally to a position immediately under the station chief himself. This entailed the recruitment of Germans and others who—because they hated the Russians, or else for the money—were willing to cross the border the other way to provide specific answers to his (or Washington’s) questions regarding various facets of East German military and economic activity.

  Sharon liked Berlin. Zehlendorf, where they lived, hadn’t suffered the destruction other parts of the city had; and their quarters were the nicest they had had so far, even nicer than the duplex at the Presidio.

  But she really didn’t understand when he told her that he was sorry, but he wanted her to discourage the overtures of friendship from the wives of officers he had known at West Point. They would obviously be curious to know what he was doing and that awkward question could not be answered. Neither did Sharon understand why she had to have a driver for the car and was forbidden to leave the little compound in which they lived on foot, unless Sandy or the “driver” she had been assigned were with her.

  “Karl is a very nice man,” she said. “And I know he wasn’t a Nazi. But he scares me. Why does he have to carry a gun, Sandy? Why are you carrying a gun, Sandy?”

  He could hardly tell her that the reason that she had been assigned a “driver” and that he was never without a gun was that the bastards on the other side often expressed their displeasure with their American counterparts by staging hit-and-run automobile accidents or by throwing acid in their children’s faces.

  Sharon spoke German, of course, and that made it easier for her to make friends with the German women who worked with Sandy, and even with women she met when she shopped. She adjusted.

  When it became evident that the East Germans had every intention of transforming their border guard and the purely military elements of the Volkspolizei into an army (as, indeed, the West was transforming the Grenzpolizei, the customs/border guard, into a new Wehrmacht, ultimately to be called the Bundeswehr), Felter, on his own initiative, began compiling a dossier on its potential officers. The station would also get one from the Gehlen Organization, of course. Felter thought it would be good to be able to compare the two.

  Many of the officers would obviously come from the present officers of the Volkspolizei, but there were not enough of those to lead an army. That left the Russians with two options: They could promote beyond their abilities officers and noncoms presently serving in the Volkspolizei whose loyalties to communism generally and the Kremlin specifically were beyond question; or they could draw upon the pool of captured officers they still (despite weak, pro forma, denials to the contrary), held scattered all over the Soviet Union.

  Felter made regular inquiries concerning these officers, for it would not have surprised him if Katyn had been repeated many times in the blank expanses of northern Russia. Though he was never able to pin anything down, he heard rumors of large-scale massacres; and that buttressed his belief that the Soviets had decided upon another plan of action. If a man were confined to hard labor for many years and then offered the chance to put on again an officer’s uniform—and particularly if he were not required to take an oath of allegiance to a communist state per se, but simply to a German government—he could be quite valuable to the Soviets.

  Such men couldn’t be trusted with command, of course. That would take someone of sound ideology. But there were any number of staff positions that needed filling, and filling them with qualified officers would free ideologically sound officers for command.

  The Soviets ran the risk, of course, that among these “nonpolitical officers” would be some whose imprisonment had politicized them against the Soviet Union and their East German vassals. Such officers would be susceptible to approach from the West, either for purely ideological reasons or purely selfish ones. The Russians would watch for such men carefully, but two, or ten, or a hundred would slip through their net. Sandy Felter was determined to catch as many of them as he could.

  This sort of thing was technically the responsibility of the Gehlen Organization, and any activities in this area by Sandy were supposed to be coordinated with the Gehlen Organization. The prescribed channel to effect liaison was through his station chief to the Gehlen man serving as liaison with him. Sandy Felter, with nothing to go on but a gut feeling, did not trust the Gehlen Organization liaison man, although the man enjoyed the full support of the station chief.

  Fully aware that what he was doing was twice forbidden (going out of channels and establishing what were known as “private files”), he began to collect the names of prisoners known to be alive in the Soviet Union. When he had the names of fifty-three such officers in the grades of major through colonel, he carried them with him to the Gehlen Organization’s compound in the American Zone outside Munich. And then he took a chance. He gave them to a fat analyst who looked for all the world like a jolly butcher. He told him the names were from a private file and that he hoped to expand the file. The fat jolly German told him that he could not, of course, accept material out of channels, but if Felter would come back in fifteen minutes, he would return his list to him.

  When he picked up his list, there was stapled to the back of it three pages—photocopied—of a similar list. Where the names on the added list were duplicated on Felter’s list, there was a brief biography of the individual name and a file number.

  In the months that followed, he furnished the jolly butcher with two hundred more names, and he received in return more than one hundred other names he did not have. One of the names rang a very loud bell.

  Greiffenberg, Paul.(?) Oberstleutnant(?) NKVD # 88–234–017. Sicherheitsdienst Folio Berlin 343–1903. Camp No. 263, Kyrtymya(?) 18Mar46. (File 405–001–732).

  He picked up the Berlin telephone book. There were twenty-two people (including all spelling variations) named Greiffenberg. Paul was Ilse’s father’s middle name. P.P.’s name was Peter-Paul, with a hyphen. It had been Oberst, not Oberstleutnant. It had been von Greiffenberg, not plain Greiffenberg, and there were twenty-two plain Greiffenbergs in Berlin, so the name was not uncommon. Most importantly, Bellmon had told him that Oberst Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg had been shot down by the Russians outside Zwenkau. It was highly unlikely that what he had was anything more than a coincidenc
e.

  But he asked for File 405–001–732, a routine request for information from the Gehlen Organization, sent through his station chief to the Gehlen man.

  The station chief didn’t pay attention when the request was sent in, but when the file in due time arrived, he blew his top and ate Sandy’s ass out. He told him to stick to what he was supposed to do, keep up on the Volkspolizei, and forget about long-time prisoners.

  “For Christ’s sake, Felter,” the station chief concluded, “The last note on this guy is March 1946. By now he’s probably been shot. They do that, you know.”

  Felter never got a chance to look at File 405–001–732; and the next time he got to the Gehlen Organization, the jolly fat butcher was not there. You did not ask where people were.

  He kept building up his list, however; and whenever he had a chance to debrief a returned long-time prisoner, he always brought up the name of Colonel Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg. Nobody had ever heard of him.

  (Three)

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  21 April 1949

  Craig Lowell, in a tweed jacket, a tieless white button-down-collar shirt, gray flannel slacks, and loafers, walked across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania to the MG, Ilse’s car, in the parking lot. The enormous old Packard had gone shortly after they’d come to Philadelphia. Ilse didn’t like to drive it, for one thing, and for another, he rather disliked having people stop and stare at it when he drove it around town.

  He bought a Jaguar. He wanted the Jaguar, but he didn’t like the trade-in offer the dealer made, so he did something impulsive with the huge yellow automobile. He had it delivered to Broadlawns with a red ribbon tied to the hood ornament, and a card taped—along with the bill of sale—to the wheel:

  Dear Andre,