Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  The boundary between France and Switzerland ran down the middle of the street. The milkman looked at the wall, which bordered the Swiss side. He found the spot he wanted and pushed in the bricks with his foot. The bricks tumbled into Switzerland and left a hole. The milkman took the two bags from his passengers and threw them over the top of the wall. Someone on the other side caught them.

  “Allez. Allez! Vite! Vite!” the man ordered.

  The girls went first through the hole in the wall. A pair of confederates on the other side pulled them through. Cochrane went next. Goff was last. They were in Switzerland and it felt great.

  They dusted themselves off. One of the Swiss replaced the bricks in the wall while the other hurried them along to a local street. The group of four was on the outskirts of Basel. They were near the end of a line for the bus that would take them into the city. They trouped to the bus stop. The first bus of the day was waiting. Its driver was sitting in it, getting his purse and tickets ready. There was also a conductor. The transit men looked at the four passengers strangely but said nothing. They had seen stranger things in the past and knew not to ask questions in wartime with Vichy France just on the other side of a six foot wall.

  Cochrane produced Swiss francs for the fare.

  At six o’clock in the morning, with Swiss precision, the tram pulled away from the curb. There were two other passengers. The route took them to the main train station in Basel on the appropriately named Centralbahnstrasse. They took the first available train to Bern, arrived shortly after 10 AM. They took a taxi over to Dulles’s headquarters.

  Dulles was standing in front of the building, smoking his pipe, arms folded across his chest on a sunny but clear morning.

  Cochrane and Goff stepped out of a taxi. Dulles looked at them and glanced at his watch, as Cochrane paid the driver and threw in a fifty franc tip as a gesture of international understanding.

  “What took you so long?” Dulles asked.

  “Are you telling me you were expecting us?” Cochrane asked, stopping in his tracks.

  “In fact, I was. Oh, hello, Irv,” Dulles said, giving Goff a wink.

  “How did you know we’d be here today?” Cochrane asked.

  Dulles shrugged. “My spies are everywhere,” he said. “Dot dot. Dash dash. Beep beep. Quite a mess you fellows left on the west bank of the Rhine. The Gestapo can barely understand what happened. Well done! Congratulations.”

  Dulles then made a fatherly fuss over the two girls and led everyone into his residence. One of his contacts in Provence had just shipped him two bottles of Remy Martin and a celebration was well in order.

  Chapter 56

  Bern, Switzerland

  March 1943

  As the next few days passed in Switzerland, Bill Cochrane had a strange sense of having dreamed the whole encounter in Berlin, which of course he hadn’t. It had happened, he had lived it. Frieda, Ilse and Irv Goff were also in Switzerland, the latter champing at the bit to get back to North Africa.

  There were several days of debriefing for Cochrane in Bern, most of them at the complex at Herrenstrasse. The other OSS employees had taken special note of him. They knew he had done something important and were treating him with great deference and calling him, “sir,” though they had no idea what he had done.

  He didn’t mind. He took time out on his third day back, however, to pick up the watch for Laura at Monsieur Lesser’s emporium. Through a coded message to General Donovan in New York, Dulles confirmed that Cochrane had returned from his mission alive and well, exhausted but uninjured and victorious, and would soon begin a trek come in a roundabout manner. Donovan personally phoned Laura in New York to convey the good news. He spoke quickly on the call, lest she hear his voice and immediately assume the worst after he identified himself.

  The death of Hans Wesselmann of the Gestapo cast its own strange shadow. Cochrane gave Dulles a full report of what he had seen and heard. Messages from a well-placed source in the government, Frieda’s father in other words, continued to come through the nighttime blips. The purloined material focused on placement of troops, locations of Wolf Packs in the Atlantic, the movement of naval defenses from the Pacific region around Murmansk, and the strengths of various units in Normandy. But because Wesselmann had kept his own counsel on Koehler, little written record remained of the latter’s suspected “defeatism” and contact with the OSS.

  In the meantime, however, information still came through and the OSS in Bern had a new tool for deciphering. Not only had Frieda brought two code books, but she had memorized the formulas and the sequences which her father used. Dulles’s people were thus able to use her numbers and calculations to unzip and decode messages almost on the spot. Over the next few days in Switzerland, she made a written record of everything she knew. Her knowledge was turned over to Dulles’s POW code decipherers. It all worked well until late 1943 when her father was ordered back to sea and the espionage operation abruptly ended.

  Ilse made contact with her extended family in the Zurich area. Dulles asked Cochrane if he could escort the girl to Zurich where the family would meet her and take things from there. He was happy to do so. Frieda Koehler meanwhile was installed courtesy of a local matron in with a Francophone Swiss family. The father was a music teacher and the mother was a violinist with the Bern Symphony. The house was filled with books and had a piano. It was perfect placement. Frieda started going to a Swiss lycée in Bern. She excelled, to the astonishment of no one.

  Irv Goff returned to North Africa. It was a no secret that the events that had started with Operation Torch would soon morph into an invasion of the boot of Italy. Dulles had big plans for Goff and appointed him to be the OSS as liaison officer to the Italian Communist Party. Even before even leaving Switzerland Goff started drawing up training programs that would use anti-Fascist Italian volunteers to wage guerrilla warfare behind the German lines in northern Italy. When the United States Fifth Army of Lieutenant General Mark Clark began moving north after invading Italy in September of 1943, Goff’s guerillas ambushed several of the SS units in retreat. As a side activity, since he could never remain inactive for too long, Goff created an infiltration team that parachuted fifty radio operators and meteorologists into enemy-held areas to provide daily weather reports for the Allied air forces. Working with the Italian Communists, Goff built the most effective intelligence operation in northern Italy.

  One day in late April Cochrane turned up at Herrenstrasse and was ushered into Dulles’s office. “Don’t even bother to sit down,” Dulles said. “Good news for you and some bad news.”

  “What’s that?” Cochrane asked.

  “You’re on your way home!”

  Apprehensively, Cochrane answered. “I assume that’s the good news. What’s the bad news?”

  “You’re going the long slow way,” he said. “I don’t want to risk sending you back through Portugal. There’s always the chance the Gestapo is watching the route you took to get here. Plus Lisbon has descended into low comedy. I have reports of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor dining and golfing there with a banker named Ricardo Espirito Santo. Richard the Holy Spirit. The Huns have a hare-brained thing called Operation Willi: a plot to kidnap the abdicated king and use him for propaganda. God knows, no one would spend good money to ransom an idiot like that. Churchill would probably pay the Germans to abduct ‘David’ and his promiscuous domineering missus and shoot them. The Duchess had a long affair with Von Ribbentrop, you know,” said Dulles, who had as fine a taste for scandal as anyone.

  “So where am I going?” Cochrane asked.

  “Italy,” Dulles said. “By train and truck. But you’ll have your dominos partner with you and a bodyguard. I told you it was both good and bad.”

  It was. The time had come for Goff to head back to North Africa and he was doing it by a slow route too. But it was a route Goff himself had designed. They took a train to Ticino in Switzerland, then enlisted partisan smugglers whom he knew in the low stretches of the Ital
ian Alps. They boarded a truck which crept down the eastern coast of Italy, staying in rural communities either with partisans or local mafia. It worked well and the food was great when there was any. No one was shooting at them. Cochrane gave away the last of his packs of American cigarettes and never took his protective eyes off the girl whom he was taking to America.

  They arrived in Bari on April twentieth. There was a Portuguese ship there picking up cargo, a freighter captained by a pro-American OSS operative. Dulles had arranged passage for two people in separate staterooms. Frieda and Cochrane split with Irv Goff at that point. Goff flew to Algiers. They later learned that he had arrived safely. The freighter passed unmolested through the Strait of Gibraltar but then went out into the open Atlantic and continued to Bermuda, the British Colony, arriving ten days later.

  The next day, Cochrane and the teenager in his custody flew to New York.

  General Donovan sent a Jeep to Idlewild to retrieve them.

  Laura was waiting for Bill at the gate. She rushed to him and embraced him when he stepped through. Donovan had also contacted Frieda’s aunt and uncle from Wisconsin, the family that Frieda had come to live with. Not surprisingly, their last name was Wagner. Donovan took everyone out to dinner at Sardi’s the next night. Then people began to go their separate ways.

  Bill Cochrane received two months paid leave, a high medal from the OSS, plus a personal letter from President Roosevelt. The time off was more than necessary to unwind.

  In his first days back in New York, Bill Cochrane behaved much like a man who had suffered a death in the family. He spent much time buried in his books and enjoying his whiskeys. What bothered Laura was the distant look she often saw on his face when he didn’t know she was watching her. It was as if he had seen far too much while in Nazi Germany and was unable to forget the worst of it. He was able to tell her the story of Friedrich Koehler, at least part of it, and how he and Irv Goff had transported the girl and one of her friends out of Hitler’s inferno. But he didn’t offer many details for years, and Laura didn’t ask for them.

  Eventually though, the shadows lifted. Bill’s gracious good nature returned. His spirits perked up, that distant look disappeared and he turned his attention back to his work for the OSS. There was, after all, still a war that needed to be won.

  Chapter 57

  Washington D.C.

  June 1943

  Bill Cochrane saw Frieda again one more time in June of 1943. Some OSS people phoned him from Washington and said that Frieda was in the capital for a few days. The girl was going back out to the Midwest to live with her relatives. For safety’s sake, she was going to assume a new identity, as was their family. There had been some ugly threats by some crackpots in the American Bund and one could never be too careful. Those were all the details that General Donovan would give Bill Cochrane, aside from the fact that there were threats that had to be taken very seriously. The Wagner name wasn’t going to work. The cover of the new identity would be thorough, be lasting and run deep.

  But in Washington, Frieda asked if she could say goodbye in person to the man who had guided her to America and safety. The answer from a grateful OSS was yes.

  Cochrane took a train from New York to Washington. He and Frieda met for lunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel. She was looking more grown up suddenly and announced that she had just turned seventeen. They enjoyed a fine lunch and a good conversation. But after a while it became strangely stilted, as if there were now things that she didn’t dare discuss. But on a better note, Frieda mentioned that she had exchanged air letters with Ilse in Interlaken. The two girls hoped to stay in touch and get together again after the war. Whether or not that happened, was not something that Bill Cochrane ever learned.

  Lunch ended. Frieda needed to leave for her home in the Midwest. Cochrane had new discussions scheduled with General Donovan in New York. They both stood. There was an awkwardness. They looked at each other. A kiss would be too much, a hug not enough. Suddenly, the inhibitions fell away and they embraced each other long and hard. She pulled away. Her eyes were moist.

  “Good luck to you,” Bill Cochrane said. “I hope it turns out as well as it can for your father. I like to think there’s some goodness in everyone.”

  “There’s goodness in him. Only I can see it,” she said. “Or remember it. He risked to get me out of Germany. I can always say that in his behalf.”

  “Yes, you can. We’ll try to keep in touch,” she said.

  “Goodbye for now,” she said. She turned to go.

  He watched her. Then he stopped her.

  “Oh, listen, Frieda,” Cochrane said, reaching for the attaché case that he had carried from New York. “I nearly forgot. I have something for you. I think you should have this. Keep it as a souvenir, a good memory, I hope, Consider it a private understanding between us, a talisman, perhaps something that will continue to bring you good fortune in the future.”

  Cochrane opened the attaché case. He reached in. His hand settled on the wooden case of dominos that had travelled with them across Europe and across an ocean.

  “The dominos?” she asked.

  “The dominos.”

  “I never thought I’d see these again,” she said.

  “There were times I thought I’d never see home again,” he said. “I’ll tell you something. When we were landing at Idlewild from Bermuda, I had to hide my eyes from you. I looked down and saw the Statue of Liberty in our final minutes in the air. I almost cried. Not seemly if a man cries, you know.”

  “I saw you. You turned away but not fast enough,” Frieda said.

  “I might have known,” he said. He shook his head. “Jesus,” he said with a grin.

  “Jesus,” she mimicked with a laugh. Then they both laughed.

  “Frieda, I promised the gentleman I bought these from in Lisbon that I’d pass them along at the appropriate time,” Cochrane said. “I think they guided us to safety. Now you’re new to America. May they guide you in your new country. Here.”

  He held out the box.

  “They should go to your son or daughter,” Frieda protested.

  “I have neither at this time,” Cochrane answered. “I’d give them to my son or daughter if I had one, but I don’t. So there. Please. No more discussion. Take them. I insist.”

  Frieda smiled, accepted them, made a motion to leave, then turned back. She leaned to him and put an arm around him and kissed him in the cheek. She stepped away, then mischievously sat down again. “Okay,” she said. “Join me. One more time.”

  Sitting together in the busy dining room, Cochrane watched as Frieda slid back the top of the case of dominos. They tiles lay face down in the container. She selected one, withdrew it from the pack and clasped it in her hand without looking.

  “This is for both of us,” she said. “For the rest of our lives. Are you willing?”

  “If you are. Go ahead,” Cochrane said.

  “All right.”

  She placed the tile on the table. She turned it over. It was the double six. They looked at it and laughed.

  “We’re going to be fine. Both of us,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”

  “You too.”

  She stood again. She leaned forward and they embraced a final time. Then she pulled away. “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes were moist. “For everything.”

  Then Frieda turned. Bill Cochrane watched her leave the restaurant. She went through the door and was gone. The silence she left behind almost took the air out of the room. Through the window, he could see on the street, striding purposefully toward her next destination, whatever it was. There was a chaperone waiting outside, a Captain Mildred Curtis from the Women’s Army Corps. Captain Curtis often worked with the OSS to keep an eye on adolescents. The Captain took her to a Jeep that was waiting.

  Just as a Jeep had picked him up in New Jersey several months ago and brought him into the war, a US Marine stood by a similar vehicle. He opened the door for the young lady who approached. Cochrane wat
ched Frieda charm the young driver. The Jeep’s flashers were on. Cochrane got a final glimpse of her as she stepped into the vehicle: tall and strong with a beauty and intelligence that glowed from within. Essentially, another man’s lovely daughter. Eventually, Cochrane hoped, Frieda would be the equal partner of a man who would love and respect her.

  The Marine closed the door and hustled around to the driver’s side. He pulled out into the Washington traffic and was gone within seconds.

  Silently, Cochrane left the Hay-Adams. He found a taxi which took him to Union Station for the train back to New York. As for Freida, she wore her new identity as a cloak, presumably against the past and possibly against the future.

  Bill Cochrane often thought of her. But he never heard from her and never saw her again in his life.

  Chapter 58

  New York City – Manhattan

  October 23, 2019

  At Logan’s in Tribeca, Caroline Dawson – Bill Cochrane’s daughter - sat enthralled as Ellen McCoy, the historian, finished the story that had centered on her late father. They had been there for three hours. The lunch staff had changed to the dinner staff. Ellen McCoy had been speaking almost nonstop and Caroline had rarely thrown in a sentence sideways.

  “So you never knew of any of this?” Ellen asked.

  “No. I know a lot about my father and his career. But I knew nothing of this story. It’s completely new to me.” She paused. “May I ask how you knew so much when I didn’t?”

  Ellen smiled. “I’m an historian at the University of Illinois,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of research,” she said. “Library of Congress. Freedom of Information Act. Declassified documents that are now online. Plus tracing you down, of course.”