Through the months of planning, weapons and keys had been pre-positioned, escape routes and diversions were planned, plans were devised and revised, again and again, until they knew the final plan and could execute it in their sleep. Each man was smart enough to improvise, and deviate from the plan, if they absolutely needed to. Everything that could be done had already been done in support of this operation. All that was left was the execution of the plan.
He boldly and confidently strode through the halls of the infamous prison, barking orders and making his way to the basement dungeon, where the target and his cohorts were being held, only occasionally being challenged and being passed through. As he reached the final checkpoint, he fingered the hilt of the blade strapped to his wrist, and ordered the NKVD guard to open the cell block. The guard stated that he needed permission from the guard commander to do that. As the hapless guard turned to reach for the telephone, he never saw the blade that slashed his exposed throat, causing geysers of blood to gush from the carotid artery that had just been so brutally severed. The fake NKVD officer merely stepped a safe distance away to keep the blood from splashing against his pristine uniform. As the guard finished bleeding out, he wiped the blade of his knife against the poor bastard's uniform and grabbed his keys. Before unlocking the cell door, he cut the electrical wire that connected the lock to an alarm that sounded when the key made contact with the wire. Having done that, he unlocked the cell door and announced to everyone there that they were getting out. At first, having been blinded by the dim lights from the hallway, they could now see clearly that an NKVD officer was standing before them, and they immediately thought that this would be the end of them.
As he unshackled each of them in turn, he told them that they had absolutely no time to waste, they must leave immediately or be executed on the spot. Only momentarily shocked, they readily complied and followed Shtein.
His team, having taken their supporting positions earlier, before his entry, were now in their NKVD uniforms and now joined him, armed like a guard detail, allowing for the appearance of “Shtein” transferring the high-value prisoners, presumably for final interrogation and “liquidation.” As the final member of the “guard detail” joined them, he and “Shtein” began quietly conversing, the new stranger speaking a heavily foreign-accented Russian, like a German. The prisoners certainly looked all of the pitiful part they were encouraged to play, if they were going to pull the caper off. As they neared the front gate of the Lubyanka, the first alarm began to sound and orders were given to lock down the prison. Fighting their way out had always been a necessary part of the plan.
The fake guard detail, dragging their prisoners with them, assaulted the front gate, firing their submachine guns and automatic rifles, slowly making their way to the front gate. They braved the withering fire from the NKVD soldiers inside the prison....then there were very loud explosions that came from the front gate that concussed everyone who was within range. “Shtein” and the guard detail recovered as quickly as they could and continued to drive on to the obliterated front gate, still dragging the prisoners along, but beginning to take heavy casualties now. Quickly crossing the courtyard of the prison, they were in sight of their smoky, smoldering, ruined objective. The foreigner gave “Shtein” an order and detailed two of the “guards” to go with him. “Shtein” and his men pulled the prisoners with them, while the rest of the “guard detail” remained behind and delayed the real NKVD soldiers from catching them. It seemed that this was an integral part of the escape plan all along.
The fake NKVD officer and his men got the prisoners across the ruined gate, into the square, boarding waiting trucks which sped off into the night. During the next few days, while they were on the run, they had heard what the fate of their compatriots, that so bravely stayed behind to allow them to escape, was: Soviet propaganda claimed that in their desperate assault on Soviet order and murdering heroic Soviet soldiers in the process, they had ultimately been unsuccessful in their mission, and had all taken the coward's way out. They knew that it was all a lie. However, what was true was the identity of the dead ringleader as reported by the Soviet TASS News Agency: the leader of the dastardly attack was none other than the infamous Otto Skorzeny, architect and commander of the Gran Sasso raid, which freed Benito Mussolini from a mountain-fortress prison and delayed complete Italian capitulation to the Allies until the end of the war. The crude photos of NKVD soldiers posing with Skorzeny's mutilated and desecrated corpse were splashed in full gory detail all across every copy of Pravda and Izvestia they came across. They all felt he deserved better.
As they crossed the Soviet frontier into China, “Shtein” took the occasion to reintroduce himself to the men he had broken out of prison, which included Wilfried Strik-Strikfeld, Helmuth von Pannwitz, Timofey Domanov, Andrei Shkuro, Pyotr Krasnov, and last but most definitely not least, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov. These were the most influential anti-communist Russian leaders of the Russian Liberation Movement, whom the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was promised military assistance to aid in their escape from custody, and from the Soviet Union. Most of them had an idea who “Shtein” really was, but none of them had ever really met him personally. “Shtein” was none other than the renowned Abwehr spy “Artur Holmston” and commander of Sonderkommando R and the First Russian National Army, General Boris Smyslovsky.
As Smyslovsky and the other leaders of the Russian Liberation Movement reached the Chinese Turkestan city of Urum-chi, they marveled at the training facility there had already been set up and the expatriate Russian troops and Soviet Red Army deserters that were already being armed and formed into units. The generous American and Chinese military aid helped make all this possible, and now they would begin to hold up their end and infiltrate the Soviet frontier, to strike at the very heart of the communist juggernaut and bring it down, for good.
Lubyanka Prison
*****
0615
15 August 1946
Colonel Archimedes L.A. Patti's office
Temporary CIA offices
U.S. Legation Building, Kunming,
Yunnan Province, Republic of China
After a period of settling in, Colonel Patti immediately started accumulating intelligence on Soviet and CCP spies and agitators in the southeast borderlands of China. With the crack team of Americans of southeast Chinese, Han Chinese and Indochinese descent that he had assembled, he immediately began making inroads into the plans the Soviets had to completely turn the Republic of China toward its camp. After he began collecting substantial information on disruptive protests and assassination plots, he began to forward this information to the new Chinese government and its new armed forces, helping to foil most of the activities, due to their transparent nature.
He was enormously surprised when, upon his arrival in Kunming, he'd received a letter from, soon followed very shortly afterward by a brief visit by, the republic's new president, Sun Li-jen. He was even more surprised to find him exceedingly knowledgeable and cogent on all the global issues, past and present, that have brought the world to this dire state. When he went back over his research on the new president of China, he saw the engineering degree from Purdue University and the military science degree from the Virginia Military Institute. It all made sense then. The man put nation before himself and was obviously no slouch. It was also in this meeting that Colonel Patti was informed that the only Chinese oversight that he would have would be to deliver his intelligence reports, via diplomatic courier, directly to the President of China first, unlike the days of SACO, where everything was “joint” in name only. Otherwise, he and his team would not be molested in their activities. Apparently, the same message had been conveyed to all the other intelligence teams operating within Chinese borders.
As an additional obligation, President Sun requested of all U.S. intelligence teams operating in China that they train three trusted Chinese nationals, to form the nucleus of his own new intelligence service. Patti saw no problem with this, but
that nagging feeling in the back of his mind just would not go away, prompting him to think “Things are going so well now, when will the other shoe drop?”
The reason for all of the packing material was that this office would soon be moving north, to the US Embassy being reopened in Peking, where he would soon be established as Bill Donovan's special representative to President Sun. He was tasked to facilitate intelligence-sharing between the two nations. Running a bigger office was something that he could not do by himself, so he needed to find quality help, and fast, if he was to get the office up and running by the first of September.
Colonel Archimedes L.A. Patti, as a Captain in Kunming, 1944
Chapter Nine:
The Latest Intelligence Summary
0815
21 August 1946
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter's Office
Temporary CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
With the two new shiny stars resting upon his newly braided epaulettes, Rear Admiral Hillenkoeter reviewed all the reports, making the decisions as to what gets forwarded to General Donovan, and what he handles himself. So many operations to review, and yet he has the dreadful feeling that it is not enough, and that it will never be enough , especially against the superbly trained and extremely professional intelligence apparatus of the Soviet Union. But it was his job to find a weakness in their spy game, and to brutally and fatally exploit it.
And as such, he believes that he has finally found it: there are half a dozen lower-level aides working Truman's White House, that were hold-overs from the Roosevelt Administration, that were identified as being present while sensitive information was being exchanged or presented, or otherwise transferred. Instead of arresting these suspected spies right away, they were given false information to relay, then they observed Soviet actions to see if this information had been capitalized upon. Once it was, and all the spies had been confirmed, the weakest ones were quietly brought in for questioning and “turned”, made double-agents working on behalf of the CIA, while the rest were allowed to continue their activities, albeit under strict covert surveillance. He's been working on false information to feed these White House aides to pass on to the Soviets to conceal the real operations that they are working on. As for rooting out the communists among their own ranks, work has been slow and steady, and a new National Clandestine Service, meant to replace the Jedburgh teams, was almost in place.
As far as the other operations are concerned, there has been no word from his sources in Reykjavik about Otto Skorzeny's irregulars (the pretense of calling them regular military forces has been dispensed with, as there is no longer a German Army to represent, and the fact that the Geneva Convention is being roundly ignored by all sides). For a long time, Hillenkoeter begrudged them all the training that they received at the “black” military camp outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, and nothing to show for it, thus far. It was all that Hillenkoeter could do to keep himself from ordering an assassination on Otto Skorzeny, and his lieutenants, but Skorzeny knew anyway that he truly had nothing to lose. Within the last month, though, Skorzeny has redeemed himself quite spectacularly. The Lubyanka Raid was done without his knowledge or approval, but in helping release major Russian opposition leaders, he has created a brand new dimension to the war. Despite his personal animus toward Skorzeny, and his network, he mourned their loss, as they proved themselves to be extremely useful in the audacious type of operations that they obviously excelled in. As for the China-Southeast Asia operations, he had a vague knowledge of the goings-on, but nothing specific, and all of those communications were handled through General Donovan's radio operator, for the General's ears only. Apparently, despite his junior rank, Wild Bill wants Colonel Archimedes Patti to be his personal intelligence envoy to the new Chinese President, Sun Li-jen, and the transitional Chinese government.
Apparently, Sun and his new government have progressed in their house-cleaning far faster than his own sources had initially estimated, and had pushed their cordon against the communists further north than it had been, as the result of an ongoing campaign. It is rumored that Sun has even fractured the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, by appealing to certain leaders' better natures and sense of patriotism. Hillenkoeter couldn't help but be impressed by this man's political acumen and sense of patriotism. Perhaps it is a result of his American higher education, and he smiled at that thought. He knew that even though Sun Li-jen was American-educated, the man was thoroughly Chinese, and his government would have to be completely respected. The prejudices of the past could no longer be tolerated. He would advise this to all who would listen.
In the Asian-Pacific Theater, events in Indochina appear to be moving at an accelerated pace, as Trinh Minh Thé's Vietnamese National Army is growing exponentially, and posing a great military and political threat to Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh fighters in the North. Trinh Minh Thé's aggressive campaign against them is making headway, especially in the area around Hue, the ancestral imperial capital of Viet Nam. Similarly, Prince Sihanouk's forces in Cambodia are making similar progress against a faction of the Viet Minh called the “Red Khmer Front”.
On the subject of the Philippines Islands, the handover to home rule and the independence of the Republic of the Philippines Islands became official on 4 July 1946, as previously scheduled, with Manuel Roxas being inaugurated as the Republic's first president. Initially, the handover of power was to include a complete withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces from the Republic, but in light of the new war, Roxas sought assurances that his country, being a strategic gateway to the rich resources of the East Indies, would not be invaded again. Roxas wanted his brave, but under-equipped and poorly-led, army to be trained to the same high standards of the American Army that liberated his nation just last year. So, to this end, Roxas asked the Filipino Senate to amend the terms of the status of forces treaty that they had ratified before the handover to include bases for U.S. ground forces and a training mission to be accepted to train the Filipino Army to be a world-class military. As if to punctuate the need for continued U.S. involvement in the Philippines, four large bombs went off the night of the inauguration, two in Manila, two in Quezon City, all planted and exploded by the indigenous communist group, the Hukbalahaps (“Huks” for short). Combined Filipino-U.S. Operations continue to hunt them down and kill or capture their fighters. Hillenkoeter raised his brow at this.
The next items he perused concerned Japan and Korea. SCAP (Supreme Commander, Allied Powers), General of the Army, Walter Krueger, reports that Operation Musashi was proceeding apace, with four new Japanese self-defense battalions being declared fully-trained every three months, with twelve fully-trained, fully equipped battalions spread out among the main islands, especially in target areas such as Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya and Sapporo. There are some U.S. battalions detached to act as HQ battalions, but the majority are the newly trained and armed Koreans, and there has been some friction between the Koreans and the Japanese, due to their recent history. He hopes that these animosities will subside over time. In the meanwhile, Krueger will have a talk with the Korean commander in Japan about curbing his troops' 'enthusiasm'. Training and rotation of Korean ground, air and sea forces is actually proceeding ahead of schedule, with Korean troops taking the lead in their own defense, south of the demarcation line at 38° North Latitude, with minimal U.S. supervision.
Turning his attention to Southern Europe, he already knew how treacherous the situation was along the Pyrenees Line, where there were no less than seven Soviet breakthroughs, all beaten back by unified NATO forces, only at great cost. The controversial decision of the NATO commander in Spain to use escaped German Nazi-SS partisan hunters to pacify the resurgent Spanish communist republicans perplexed him, somewhat, but he probably would have made the same call, had he been in that very same position, given Eisenhower's tacit approval of the tactic. Perhaps, this was Eisenhower's way of ridding hi
mself of these troublesome hardcore Nazis by throwing them into the breach against the hardcore communist Spaniards to free up troops for the frontlines. Increasingly, those frontline positions are being filled British and Continental troops, mostly the raw Spanish troops, with a sprinkling of seasoned veterans of the civil war and Blue Division volunteers. However, with more time on the line, you notice the quality of the military training steadily increasing, the troops becoming more proficient in repelling Soviet “Deep Battle” attacks by the judicious use of artillery and sniping their officers and NCO's, effectively killing their leadership and breaking up assaults. Things still look dire there, but are starting to look up as the situation stabilizes.
As for the rest of southern Europe, the greatest boost to Allied morale was docking in Barcelona of an entire Italian fleet battlegroup, with the Italian Royal Family aboard, minus the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, who was already in poor health, and died of natural causes, while in transit. His son, Crown Prince Umberto, was hastily crowned King Umberto II aboard the flagship of the rebel battlegroup, the battleship Giulio Cesare. They have already established, with the blessing of Dictator Franco, a government-in-exile, in Barcelona, and have already begun combat operations against the meager Soviet naval forces that were able to transit the Straits of Bosphorus into the Mediterranean Sea, before Turkey closed the Straits to all Soviet shipping. The new Italian monarch is taking to the radio waves to exhort his countrymen to resist the communists in their country, as they resisted the fascisti that led their kingdom into ruin. He plead for the armed forces to follow the shining example of Fleet Captain Giambruglia, who brought most his family safely to Spain. That situation remains fluid and he will be keeping tabs on it, and the new Social Republic of Italy's relations with the Vatican, as they have demanded that the Vatican surrender its territory to Italian forces and renunciation of their claims to Papal independence from the Italian Republic.
World War Three 1946 Series Boxed Set: Stalin Strikes First Page 47
