Fifth Column

by Christopher Remy

  As she watched the busy Monday morning traffic for Charlie's black Plymouth to take her to her first day of work, she realized how much the traffic noise and busy streets reminded her of New York. For the past ten years, she had thought of bucolic Northampton and Ann Arbor each as home, but the sights and sounds of the city gave this place a familiarity, though she had never been here before. A delivery truck passed by and she suppressed a smile at how the smell of diesel exhaust, of all things, reminded her of her childhood.

  The truck passed and Johanna spotted the red wheels and white sidewall tires of the Dalys' car behind it. Eve waved from the passenger seat. It pulled up to the curb and she got in.

  As Charlie pulled back into traffic, Eve pointed to Johanna's folded newspaper.

  "So, what do you think?" she asked.

  "Sorry?" Johanna replied.

  Eve reached over the seatback and unfolded the paper. In a gigantic font, the headline read "Hess: I'll Save the World."

  "What the hell is this about?" Johanna exclaimed.

  Charlie chuckled.

  "Rudolph Hess flew from Germany to Scotland on Saturday night," he explained. "He says he's there to negotiate a peace settlement between Hitler and the British."

  Johanna, Charlie and Eve sat and waited for Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coordination of Intelligence Leonard Pollack in his office. Pollack's office was a brightly lit corner of a brick office building on E Street. It was also hopelessly cluttered. Shelves lined one wall, jammed with books and papers; the desk was buried in drifts of paper that teetered on the edge of an avalanche.

  While they waited, sipping over-strong coffee provided by a secretary, Charlie told them stories about his college days, all prominently featuring Len Pollack as his comic foil. Johanna had heard these stories before, but laughed in spite of herself.

  Pollack and Charlie had been undergraduates together at Princeton. While Charlie had continued with a career in academia, Pollack had gone on to GeorgetownUniversity's Walsh School of Foreign Service. As Charlie told it, Pollack's ambitions for a career in the diplomatic corps were dashed once it was discovered what a gifted administrator he was, thus guaranteeing him a life in the bureaucracy. Listening to Charlie's stories, Johanna half-expected the young Len Pollack to walk in the door, still the serious twenty year-old scolding his roommate for being drunk during their study session.

  Instead, when Pollack came into his office Johanna thought he looked like he had split the difference between his twenty year-old self and the sixty-year old man he was. Tall, with Brylcreemed black hair, he strode into the room, flashing a smile full of perfect teeth as he greeted the three of them. Johanna smiled when she saw that he shared Charlie's sartorial tastes: his blue chalk stripe suit was crisply pressed with a bright red pocket-square to match his perfectly knotted tie. As he walked by her, she caught a flash of a gold watch chain draped from one vest pocket to the other.

  "Sorry I'm late, meeting ran over. Five minutes of information takes an hour to communicate, apparently," he said, sitting down at his desk. He pushed a pile of manila folders aside to make a space.

  Johanna expected that there would be a few minutes of reminiscing between old friends, but they immediately got down to business. Pollack leaned over his desk and folded his hands, looking at Johanna.

  "I know from my conversations with Charlie and Eve that they've given you a pretty good idea of what we're trying to do here."

  Johanna nodded.

  "Good." Pollack waved to a secretary passing in the hall and pointed with a smile to an empty coffee cup in the clear spot on his desk. "I also know that they've told you how critical this job is, but in the interest of scaring the hell out of you, I want to reiterate it. The United States of America has almost non-existent intelligence capabilities. Oh sure, War, Navy and State each has their own information gathering and analysis apparatus, but they all distrust each other and don't share. The end result is that the President has nobody to pull it all together, make sense of it and give him advice on what to do. As far as I'm concerned, that's the same as having no intelligence at all."

  Pollack took a fresh cup of coffee from the secretary with a nod of thanks. He fished a pack of Chesterfields out of his jacket pocket, shook one out and lit it with a desk lighter that he excavated from one of the piles.

  "The State Department has had an office of Intelligence Coordination for some time now, but it's strictly for attempting to make some sense out of the deluge of info we get from all of our embassies, diplomats, et cetera. The job I've been given is to provide more valuable intelligence for Secretary Hull and thus the President. That's where you come in, my dear," he said, pointing his cigarette at Johanna.

  "Eve has done an outstanding job of recruiting a handful of people at the top of their fields," he continued. "You are my Germany desk. As soon as you leave here, you are going to get your very own broom closet here in the basement and we'll dump an avalanche of reports, transcripts, diaries, rumors and God knows what else on you. Your job is to make some sense out of it."

  Johanna pulled out her note book and pen, poised to write.

  Pollack pulled deeply on his cigarette and exhaled through his nose, sending two jets of smoke to dissipate over the debris on his desk. A few flecks of gray ash settled on his sleeve and he carefully wiped them off.

  "What we're looking for is for you to take that mess and give us answers to questions like: what are the Nazis after that they haven't already got? What do Hitler and his high command think about the US?" he listed, ticking each item off on his nicotine-stained fingers. "What are they doing to support Fifth Column and subversive activities in the US? You get the idea."

  She nodded as she wrote down his instructions.

  Pollack rummaged through a desk drawer and produced an ashtray. He stubbed out his cigarette and finished off his coffee in one swallow.

  "And more than just finding all the needles in all the haystacks, we want you to provide us with analysis. Give us some historical and cultural context to help make sense of what you find. We want the same kind of original thinking that you put in your dissertation. Well done, by the way."

  Johanna thanked him. "I'll do my best."

  Pollack nodded and replied, "I'm sure you will. I'm also sure you realize that since this is all new, there are no rules, no procedures to follow. We'll be making it up as we go along and there's a good chance things will be pretty disorganized for a while. If that doesn't bother you, everything should be alright."

  "Fine with me," Johanna replied, closing her note book.

  "Excellent."

  Standing up from his desk and steadying a leaning pile of file folders, Pollack smiled at Charlie and Eve.

  "Well, if she's half as smart as you say she is, this war is as good as won before it even starts. Which may be sooner rather than later. Looks like our Navy boys will be escorting British supply convoys before too long."

  As they all stood up to leave, Pollack reached out into the steady stream of people passing in the hallway and flagged down another secretary. He asked her to show Johanna to her office and then pulled Charlie and Eve back into his office and shut the door.

  Johanna followed the secretary down a series of hallways and stairwells to what must have been an old storage room. Some boxes had been stacked up against one wall of the dim windowless room and a desk was pushed up against the other. A green shaded lamp on the small wooden desk gave the only light, casting deep shadows over everything. The secretary explained to Johanna that the boxes were full of files and they were her first batch to sort through. Another would be coming early next week. Johanna thanked her and the girl went on her way. Pulling the first box off the pile, she put it on her desk and opened it to reveal a mass of papers, books and envelopes.

  Anyone else might have despaired at the volume of material, but as Johanna began to sort through it she felt that she was truly in her element. This must be how archeologists feel. Unearthing bits and pieces and trying to make s
ense of it all. She began to think this job would not be at all unlike the one she had walked away from. When Eve knocked on her door later that day, she looked up and realized that it was five o'clock. She had completely forgotten about lunch.

  5

  By the end of her first month, Johanna was no longer afraid that taking this State Department job would be derailing her career. The work was fascinating and never failed to hold her interest or enthusiasm. There might even be a book in it someday when she returned to academia. The thought of continuing on in intelligence work had even crossed her mind. What she was afraid of, however, was that all of her work was of no use whatsoever.

  Sifting through this material was like working on a giant jigsaw puzzle – go through thousands of unconnected pieces and a picture begins to emerge. The problem was that the picture was horribly incomplete and contradictory. For all of the mountains of intelligence regarding Hitler and his intentions, Johanna realized that much of what the State Department knew about the Nazis was based on little more than rumors and unverifiable second-hand information.

  Making matters worse, it was clear from the newspapers that events were not waiting for her to make sense of things. Hitler had invaded Russia. Did that make Stalin an ally now? Not a single piece of intelligence that she had sorted through had hinted at this development. All German consulates in the US had been closed and a U-boat had sunk an American merchant marine ship. President Roosevelt had declared "an unlimited national emergency."

  She was feeling like the war was a deadline for this work, one that was moving up quickly.

  One day at the end of June, she decided that something must be done. She left her office and went upstairs to see Charlie Daly and found him in his office at his desk, engrossed in paperwork. He had obviously added to his wardrobe since arriving in DC – today he could have passed for a British lord in his tweed with yellow and green regimental tie.

  She knocked on the open door to get his attention. Charlie showed a look of consternation that softened when he saw who it was.

  "Well, hello. Up from the dungeon I see," he said, waving Johanna to a chair in front of his desk.

  She handed him the report that she had been preparing, a summary and evaluation of several radio broadcasts given by various Nazi higher-ups. She sat in silence as Charlie skimmed it.

  "Hard to believe that lunacy really comes out of their mouths, isn't it?" he said with a wry grin. "Here's a good one: 'We will not be intimidated by the criminal Roosevelt and his cabal of Jewish intriguers such as the Jew Harry Hopkins.' I'm sure Mr. Hopkins will be very surprised to learn he is Jewish. Unbelievable."

  Johanna leaned forward in her chair. "Believability is just what I wanted to talk to you about."

  Charlie steepled his fingers under his chin. "What's on your mind?"

  "I know you and Mr. Pollack say that the sources of our intelligence are to be considered reliable. But doesn't accepting that premise go against everything we're taught as historians?"

  "I'm not sure what you're getting at."

  "Let's say you are evaluating a history of the Franco-Prussian War. Doesn't an evaluation of the author count for just as much as the evaluation of the content? What if you read the whole book and then discovered that the author was a French general later court-martialed for dereliction of duty during a decisive battle. Doesn't that throw his account into question? Wouldn't it make you wonder if his history of that battle was told in a way that puts his own actions in the best possible light?"

  Charlie nodded, "Yes, of course. I think I see where you're going with this, but continue."

  "How can I make assumptions about the veracity of intelligence if I can't evaluate the source? Even if I suspect the information is false, having every confidence in the person reporting it to me would make me tend to believe it."

  Charlie shook out a Chesterfield from a pack on his desk and lit it with a gold lighter, a new habit picked up from Len Pollack. "I sense a suggestion coming."

  Johanna made a disgusted face and waved his cigarette smoke away from her. "Not a suggestion, just a question – do we recruit spies? Is that just in the movies? Wouldn't being able to evaluate the source of intelligence help in evaluating the intelligence itself?"

  "Not necessarily, but it should follow that a trusted source should yield trusted intelligence," he said, switching on a desk fan sitting on the window sill behind him. He turned it around to blow the smoke out the open window.

  "So, is anyone trying to do anything about it?"

  "The War Department's G-2 and the Navy Department's Office of Naval Intelligence have spies, to be sure. Probably some very good ones – unimpeachable ones, perhaps. Unfortunately, they don't do us any good here. So the real question is: does the State Department recruit spies? The answer is: not really. Some spies fall into our laps from time to time, but no active recruitment exists."

  "That doesn't make any sense to me. Even if spies don't provide us with any better information than we're already getting, being able to evaluate the intelligence in light of the source would be a tremendous help."

  "Let me see what Len is doing tomorrow morning, maybe we can talk to him about it. I'll let you know."

  Johanna nodded, "OK."

  As Charlie blew smoke into the fan with a guilty grin, she held her nose and walked out.

  6

  The next morning Johanna and Charlie arrived at Len Pollack's office at seven o'clock, only to find him already at his desk with an ashtray full of cigarettes and a large stack of papers in his outbox. He was on the phone and he waved them in.

  "Mmm-hmm. Right. Right. Then just tell him we don't know what we don't know," he said into the receiver and hung up. "Clairvoyance is in short supply in this business," he said with a smile.

  Pollack lit another cigarette and after offering coffee he asked Johanna to repeat what she'd told Charlie the day before.

  When she finished, he stared at her for a moment and asked, "Charlie and Eve have told me quite a bit about your background. You were born in Germany, near Munich?"

  Johanna, confused by the sudden change in subject, nodded.

  "And you immigrated with your parents and brother when you were six years old."

  "Yes, that's right, but…."

  Pollack held up his hand, "Just bear with me for a minute. Your parents settled in the Yorktown section of Manhattan, a mostly German neighborhood. Did you and your family get to know many people in the area?"

  "My father owns a delicatessen. Many of the people in Yorkville are regular customers. We did get to know quite a few people, yes. Why do you ask?"

  "All in good time. Did you speak German at home and with your neighbors?"

  "For the most part, yes."

  "I notice that you don't have a trace of an accent now."

  "I worked hard to get rid of it." This line of questioning obviously had a purpose and Johanna didn't like it where it was going.

  "Do you think you could pass for a native speaker?"

  "I went to Germany in '36 and again in '38 for my studies, and everyone assumed I was German, so I guess the answer is yes."

  Pollack nodded and sat in silence, looking at her. She realized Charlie was looking at her as well.

  "You can't be serious," she said, looking from one to the other. "You want me to be a spy."

  Pollack played with the daisy in his lapel and said nothing. Charlie also sat silent.

  "I am in no way qualified to be a spy. Whose crazy idea was this?" she asked.

  Pollack stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and lit another.

  "Actually, it was Charlie's idea," he said. "That's why he recruited you to work for me."

  Johanna turned to Charlie with a quizzical look.

  "I thought I was recruited to analyze intelligence and write reports."

  Charlie shifted in his seat. "I had you spend the last month looking at that intelligence so you would have exactly the reaction you did in my office yesterday. If I h
ad approached you with this idea in Ann Arbor, you never would have done it. I wanted you to see how critical it was that we have someone we could trust on the scene, collecting crucial information."

  Johanna shook her head in disbelief. "I'm sorry, I just don't understand. I don't know how to shoot a gun or send secret messages. This is insane."

  Pollack chuckled. "You would be an agent, not a spy. There's a difference. We don't want you to break into Hitler's boudoir and photograph his diary. Nor do we want you to go slitting throats behind enemy lines. We want you to do exactly what you did for your doctoral thesis. Observe and comment. That's all."

  Charlie leaned forward in his chair. "We've arranged for you to accept a job at NYU. That will just be for show. Your real job will be to infiltrate the German American Bund. Then you will…."