The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yes, he would,” Felter said.

  “Does your station chief know you know about Katyn?”

  “I’ve never discussed it with him.”

  “What’s he got it in for you then for?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like Jews,” Felter said. “But it’s probably because I make him nervous. He’s not too bright. Just bright enough to know it. He relies pretty heavily on Gehlen’s liaison man.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not going to be replaced,” Bellmon said. “Unless you want to be. You want to come work for me in the Pentagon?”

  “Not right now, but thank you.”

  “Something you want to finish here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I gather it’s important?”

  “I think so.”

  “Red thinks you’re pretty levelheaded, Sandy,” Bellmon said.

  “I think I am, too.”

  “When you’re ready to leave here, let me know. I can use you, and a Pentagon tour wouldn’t hurt your career.”

  “I gather you’re doing something interesting?”

  “Something right down your line, as a matter of fact.”

  “Maybe a little later,” Felter said.

  “Doing something foolish now would be liable to ruin your career,” Bellmon said.

  “I could always go join the Pennsylvania National Guard,” Felter said, and they laughed out loud; and that was the end of the conversation.

  (Five)

  Felter thought about it a good deal in the days that followed. The only way his station chief would have enough balls to actually ask that he be replaced would be if someone encouraged him to do so. And that meant the man from the Gehlen Organization. One more improbable, unreliable, gut feeling to add to the question. Reliability Factor: Zero.

  He also had a gut feeling about his loss rate, but he really had nothing to go on there, either. So far as his loss rate went, he was losing fewer agents than was to be expected (he should have lost more), but he was suspicious about the quality of the people he did lose. He wasn’t losing the quick-money people. He was losing the people who had too much experience to be casually rolled up the way it seemed to be happening.

  In the most recent case, one of his German associates recruited a former Dresdener who had been a black marketer and who for a price was willing to go back to Dresden.

  When Felter submitted the memorandum and request for funds to the station chief, he identified the Dresdener as a former captain of the Sicherheitsdienst who had been in Munich. The memorandum also gave the date when he would cross the line.

  An agent-in-place reported to him three days later that the agent had been rolled up in East Berlin as he boarded the bus for Dresden. They hadn’t even asked for his papers. They had been expecting him. They knew what he looked like, and they knew where to look for him.

  The station chief listened carefully and thoughtfully to Felter’s analysis of the probable explanation for that and then told Felter there was no way his German associate, who had been vouched for by General Gehlen personally, was a double agent.

  What had happened to Felter’s Dresdener was just one of those things. For all Felter knew, they had been looking for him. It was against the law to be a black marketer in East Germany, too. “And in the future, Felter, just put the facts in your memorandums. I’ve been charged with making analyses.”

  The facts were, as Felter saw them:

  (a) He had arranged for his German associate to be out of Berlin, and he was sure that he had stayed out, from the time he had brought the agent’s name up. His associate had not known whether Felter had put the Dresdener to work or not.

  (b) He had typed up the memorandum and request for funds himself, rather than have his clerk do it, and he had omitted to make the usual copies for the file, and he had personally carried it to the station chief.

  (c) It was unlikely that the station chief was a double agent.

  (d) His agent had been rolled up; they had expected him.

  A month from the day Lieutenant Felter entertained Lt. Col. Bellmon at dinner, Colonel Luther Hollwitz, who despite his Germanic roots, was a native-born Soviet citizen at that time serving as deputy chief of station for the NKVD in Berlin, crossed into the American Zone at Check Point Charley, at the wheel of a 1940 Opel Kapitan. He drove to the subway station at the intersection of Beerenstrasse and Onkel Tom Allee in the West Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf in the American sector. He walked a block to the Hotel zum Fister, drank a glass of Berliner Kindl Pilsener in the small dining room, and then walked up the stairs to Room 13. Two minutes after he entered the room, he was joined by the liaison officer assigned to the Office of Production Analysis by the Gehlen Organization. They shook hands perfunctorily, in the European manner, and then sat down in facing, identical rattan armchairs.

  Something came crashing through the window, which opened onto a small fenced-in courtyard. Colonel Hollwitz and the liaison officer from the Gehlen Organization had just enough time to identify the object which had come flying through the windowpane. It was a World War II German Army field grenade, the kind the Americans called the “Potato Masher,” because it looked like that kitchen utensil.

  By the time he heard the dull explosion, Sandy Felter had already dropped from the fire escape to the ground, jumped onto his bicycle, and pedaled through the alley to the sidewalk in front of the Hotel zum Fister.

  Like the other people on the sidewalk, he stopped when he heard the explosion. Like the other people on the sidewalk, he looked around, registered surprise and curiosity, and then, shrugging, went about his business. He eased his bicycle over the curb, and rode slowly away.

  When the Kriminalpolizei investigated the incident, they located sixteen people who had been in the immediate vicinity of the Hotel zum Fister at the time of the explosion. Not one of them remembered the young man on the bicycle.

  Within thirty-six hours, the bodies had been identified, and the decision made “at the highest levels” that the files of the Office of Production Analysis had been wholly compromised.

  The station chief was immediately flown out of Berlin to the United States. The Office of Production Analysis was closed down. The entire contents of its office—personnel, files, desks, tables, even the telephones—were taken under Military Police escort to Templehof Field and loaded aboard three C-47 aircraft of the Military Airlift Command. They were flown to Munich and then trucked to Garmisch-Partenkirchen near the Austrian border. The U.S. Army maintained a recreational area there for its forces. Other agencies of the army and the United States government had taken over salt mines there—literally miles of labyrinthine passages—for other purposes.

  The man who had bought Felter lunch at Governors Island was there also, ostensiby a Special Services Lt. Colonel in charge of the army’s recreation area. And there too was Colonel Red Hanrahan.

  “I’m a little disappointed in you, Felter,” Hanrahan said. “Was that really necessary?”

  “I thought so,” Felter replied. “It was two lives versus thirteen. We would have had to give Hollwitz back. By the time I would have been able to make my case to my station chief, there is no telling what damage would have been done.”

  “Why a hand grenade?” the man who had bought him lunch inquired, with polite curiosity. “What if it had been a dud, as old as it was?”

  “I rebuilt the detonator,” Felter said. “And replaced the charge with C-4.”

  “How thoughtful of you,” the man from Governors Island said dryly.

  “What happens to me now?” Felter asked.

  “You’d be surprised to know how far up this went,” Hanrahan replied. “Before it was decided that you had done what had to be done, under the circumstances.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, sir, with all respect.”

  “Do you know how to ski, Felter?” the man from Governors Island asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Yo
u’ll have plenty of opportunity to learn,” the man from Governors Island said. “We’re going to keep you here, on display, and wait and see if the NKVD has figured this out.”

  “What about my family?” Felter asked.

  “I’m sure you considered that before you acted on your own,” the man from Governors Island said. “To answer the specific question: If we shipped your family home, they would know for sure, wouldn’t they?”

  Hanrahan said: “That decision came from way up, too, Mouse.”

  “I think they’re going to blame it on the Gehlen Organization,” Felter said. “They know that we normally hire out this sort of thing. When they find out this wasn’t done on a contract, they’ll think Gehlen.”

  “Unless they’ve got somebody else inside Gehlen who knows different,” the man from Governors Island said.

  “The only man in Gehlen who knows they didn’t do it is Gehlen himself,” Hanrahan said. “He’s very embarrassed by the whole affair.”

  “What am I going to be doing?” Felter asked.

  “No matter what happens,” Hanrahan said, “you can’t work covert any more. So we’re going to put the Sphinx on your lapels and put you to work overt in uniform. You’ll get your promotion on time, next month I think. The standard procedure, what would normally happen to someone like you whose operation was blown.

  “You could, of course, resign,” the man from Governors Island said.

  “Is that a suggestion, sir?” Felter asked.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “But it’s an option you can consider. You mentioned your family.”

  “I believe,” Felter repeated, “that they’re going to blame it on Gehlen.”

  Lieutenant and Mrs. Felter were assigned quarters on the second floor of a two-family, steeply roofed villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Lieutenant Felter was assigned duty as an instructor (Soviet Army Organization) at the European Command Intelligence School and Center.

  The day after he received his promotion to captain (Sharon was very angry with him; she simply could not see why he had to pay for his own promotion party, which cost nearly three hundred dollars), he learned that the station chief had been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida.

  (Six)

  Captain Craig W. Lowell, Commanding, Tank Company 111th Infantry, PANG, submitted his resignation on 14 December 1949, to take effect 16 January 1950, the day after he would graduate from Wharton and move to New York. Colonel Gambino was sorry to see him go, and said that he would be happy to ask around and see about getting Lowell a job in Philly if he really wasn’t dead set on living in New York.

  Lowell thanked him, but said he had to go to New York.

  When he went home that night from the armory, he stopped in a bar on North Broad Street and had a couple of drinks with his first sergeant, enough drinks so that when he got home he had enough courage to tell Ilse what he was really thinking.

  He didn’t want to go to New York, he said. Spending the rest of his life making money he didn’t need, becoming another Porter Craig, was a frightening prospect that became more frightening as the time to go to New York came closer. Ilse said she didn’t really want to go to New York either.

  He gathered his courage and told her what he really wanted to do was go back in the army. What did she think about that?

  She said that she thought he should do what he really wanted to do. She would be happy no matter what he decided.

  He spent three days writing and rewriting and polishing a letter to the adjutant general. Subject: Application for Recall to Active Duty.

  He included with it, as attachment one, a letter from the dean of students at the Wharton School of Business, stating that although he had been admitted as a special student, he had undergone the curricula prescribed for candidates for the degree of Master of Science, Business Administration. Had he had the requisite baccalaureate degree, he would have been graduated as an MBA, summa cum laude; and if, at any time within the next five years he acquired such a baccalaureate degree, the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania would, on application, award the MBA degree to him.

  He included a letter from Colonel Gambino, who wrote that Captain Lowell was the finest company-grade officer he had ever known, and that he recommended him without qualification as a superb leader of men, as an outstanding administrator, and as a maintenance officer of proven ability. Gambino didn’t believe all of this bullshit, of course, and he suspected correctly that Lowell thought of him as a dumb wop. But fair’s fair: The snotty fucker had taken over the fucked-up tank company, straightened it out, got the fucking tanks running and the tubes shooting, and brought back a fucking SUPERIOR rating from summer camp.

  After thinking it over carefully for a day and a half, Lowell’s letter to the adjutant general included this sentence:

  “4. The undersigned is aware that he is underage in grade and is willing to accept a reduction to first lieutenant in the event this application for call to extended active duty is favorably acted upon.”

  When there was no reply, he went through with the move to New York. Porter Craig was helpful. He personally took Craig and Ilse around and showed them half a dozen apartments in properties owned by the estate. Ilse wasn’t enthusiastic about any of them.

  “I know,” Porter said. “The Mews.”

  “What the hell is a Mews?” Craig asked.

  Porter showed them. Ilse was enthusiastic. The Mews, a block off Washington Square in the Village, was a row of town houses on a cobblestone alley. The whole block was owned by the estate, which meant the alley itself was a private street, like Shubert Alley. A private security guard kept the public out. You could park your car in front of the place when you didn’t want to put it in a garage.

  Ilse thought it was a good omen that the Mews weren’t quite finished. She could pick the color of paint she wanted and decorate it herself. Until it was ready, they moved into a suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a block away.

  Lowell went to work downtown. Porter Craig very gently suggested that he spend some time looking around, to get a feel of the operation, and see if some facet of it didn’t really interest him. Porter had taken over Geoffrey Craig’s office, but their grandfather’s name was still on the door. What he was doing, Craig realized, was waiting until it became evident to Craig himself that Porter should assume the chairmanship of the board. Geoffrey Craig had been chairman of the board and chief executive officer. Porter was functioning as “acting” chairman of the board. Logically, since Porter knew more about what was going on than Craig did, he should become chairman, and they could give Craig a title, maybe president, which would reflect his share of the holdings, but leave Porter in charge.

  Porter had obviously decided, and Craig rather admired him for it, that he should lean over backward to avoid an awkward confrontation. Craig had already come to the same conclusion, that Porter was obviously better qualified to run things than he was, and that a confrontation would be likely to cost both of them money. The thing to do, he decided, was let Porter have his way, but not to hand it to him on a silver platter. Let him sweat a little, first.

  Craig went to the 169th Infantry, NYNG, to see what he could do about joining the New York Guard. They had their full complement of officers, he was told, fully qualified. They would enter his name on a waiting list, but frankly, Mr. Lowell, we just don’t believe that any vacancies are going to occur for which you would be qualified as a captain. Your chances would be much better if you were willing to apply for a second lieutenant’s table of organization position. We really feel that first lieutenants should have between three and seven years of commissioned service, and our junior captain has eight years. You have two years of active service, and a year in the Guard. You see my point, I’m sure.

  When he told Porter, over lunch, about this, Porter laughed gently at him.

  “You really should have come to me,” Porter said. “If you really want to be a weekend
warrior, I’ll have a word with the governor.”

  “I need a recommendation from you to the governor?”

  “All I would do, Craig,” Porter said, “is remind the governor who you are.”

  “You mean who I am in terms of how much Grandpa left me?”

  “All right, if that’s the way you wish to put it.”

  “I’m a qualified armor officer,” Craig said.

  “By your own account, your qualifications didn’t seem to awe Colonel Whatsisname.”

  “Fuck it,” Lowell said. “To hell with it.”

  “If you change your mind, let me know,” Porter said. “Although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why you would want to waste your time doing that.”

  “I said, fuck it, let it go,” Craig said.

  “If you’re not going to be a soldier, don’t you think it’s time you cleaned up your language?” Porter asked.

  Lowell looked at him, half angry. He smiled. “Very well,” he said. “Diddle you, Porter.”

  “That’s an improvement,” Porter said, and they laughed together.

  The army finally got around to answering the letter Craig had sent to the adjutant general.

  HEADQUARTERS

  DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY

  OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT CHIEF OF STAFF FOR

  PERSONNEL

  The Pentagon, Washington 25, D.C.

  15 May 1950

  201-LOWELL, Craig W Capt

  O–495302

  Mr. Craig W. Lowell

  Apt 2301

  2601 Parkway

  Philadelphia, Penna.

  Dear Mr. Lowell:

  Thank you for your letter of 17 December 1949, volunteering for extended active duty.

  A careful review of your records, and the personnel requirements of the Army for the foreseeable future has been conducted by this office.

  Under present policy, no applications for extended active duty from commissioned officers who have not been awarded a bachelor’s degree from a recognized college or university are being accepted.

  Furthermore, your total commissioned service and time in grade as a first lieutenant does not meet the established criteria for your present grade of captain. Your records will be reviewed sometime during the next fiscal year by a panel of officers who will recommend to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Personnel whether or not you should be retained as captain, Army of the United States, in a reserve capacity, terminated, or offered a commission in a grade commensurate with your age, length of service, and other factors. You may expect to hear from them directly in approximately six (6) months.