This fear and her concerns about eluding the Gestapo drove her call to Charlie. She was afraid that the brief training she had had at the hands of the State Department would not be enough to keep her alive and free. Moreover, she had decided to quit worrying about it and take charge of her own fate. She was confident that taking her time with the Bund would be successful, but time was not a luxury she would have once she got to Germany.
A muffled noise came out of the phone as someone picked up the other end. Charlie picked up, sounding doleful. When he heard Johanna's voice, his tone brightened.
"Well, hello hello. And how is my favorite super-spy?" he asked.
She recounted her experiences with the Bund and her work at getting Kunze's help in repatriating to Germany. She told him she was confident that if she took her time, she would be successful. Leaving out her brother's involvement, she said none of the Bundists seemed the least bit suspicious of her. Charlie praised her efforts so far and said that he was pleased. She didn't respond to the compliments and got into the real reason for her call.
Charlie sympathized with her concerns about the dangers of being in a country at war as well as the danger posed by the Gestapo and the Nazi police state. He also agreed that some more thorough training would be in order before she went off to Germany. She was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he delivered a shock.
"Unfortunately, it's out of my hands now."
He explained that the rumors of the President creating a centralized intelligence agency were true. Just the day before, he had signed an Executive Order creating the Office of the Coordinator of Information, naming William Donovan as the head.
"I don't know Bill Donovan personally," Charlie went on to say. "But Len knows of him and says he's top notch. He's been FDR's personal intelligence advisor for some time now and has been the President's official representative with the British and on some trips around Southeastern Europe. The COI, as it's being called, is taking over most of the intelligence gathering and analysis functions from the War Department, the Navy and State. There's still much bureaucratic wrangling to be done as to who does what, and Hoover's working hard to keep everything he's got under the FBI, so things may take a while to shake out."
Johanna felt her mouth go dry. "What does that mean for me?" she asked.
"You've been reassigned to COI effective immediately. I just learned it myself. I was on the phone with Len when you called." She heard a slight pop as he took a pull on his cigarette.
"So, what does that mean for what I'm doing here? Is this mission still on?"
"According to Len it is. Sorry, but that's all I know. Len doesn't know what's going to happen to him or to Eve and me. We're still in wait-and-see mode. He said to tell you that you'll be contacted soon by someone from COI, so I'd stick around your NYU office there as much as possible until then."
Charlie promised to call if he heard anything new. Johanna hung up and then almost fell on the floor, trying to lean on a chair arm that wasn't there. She grimaced as she righted herself.
Well, that's about as apt a metaphor as I could have come up with. Every time I think I've got a handle on things, I get knocked off balance. First I think I'm headed for a life of books and teaching, then I find myself abandoning my life's work to go to Washington to help with the war. Just when I get used to that idea, I find out it's all a lie and they want me to pretend to be a Nazi and make my way to Germany so I can be a secret agent. I say okay, I'll do it, and just as I think I'm getting somewhere, now this.
I hope someone can tell me what the hell is going on and soon, because I am losing my patience.
14
Johanna decided not to waste her time with the Bund until she heard from the COI. She spent the next few days holed up in her office with some books she had been meaning to read. One afternoon, she took the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about and caught a matinee of Citizen Kane at the City Theater in Greenwich Village.
Apart from the uncertainty, these last days had not been unpleasant. Her brother was keeping his promise not to say anything to their parents about her Bund involvement. She was able to avoid him most days. Her parents went about their usual business, asking few questions about what she did all day, which was just as well. Their lack of interest had always irked Johanna when she was younger, but now it was a blessing.
She had moved the desk over so she could sit next to the open window, positioning herself for the breeze. New York was in the clutches of what the newspapers were calling the "Killer Heatwave" and it was already well over ninety degrees and not yet noon. She sat reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars with a wet cloth draped over her neck. The story of his escape from the Libyan desert was the perfect complement to the summer heat.
There was a knock at the door. At first, she didn't know what to do. She thought maybe she should pretend there was no one here; after all, this office was supposed to be empty. She put the book in her lap and listened.
The knock came again, this time louder, more insistent. She heard the sound of a throat clearing.
"Dr. Falck," a man's voice said. "Are you in there?"
She had been so absorbed in her book that she had forgotten she was supposed to be waiting for COI to contact her.
"Just a minute!" She put the book and wet cloth on the desk and did her best to straighten herself up.
Opening the door, she saw a man in a full three piece suit, a Derby hat in his hand. Even in the extreme heat, he didn't have a bead of sweat on him.
He held out his hand and introduced himself. "Hello, Dr. Falck. My name is William Stephenson. I am a friend of Bill Donovan. Shall we take a stroll?"
Johanna walked silently alongside Stephenson through WashingtonSquarePark, waiting for an explanation. They came up to a park bench in the shade and they sat down.
"So, you're to be part of our little family, I take it?" Stephenson asked.
"It would seem so. May I ask – who are you?"
"As I said, my name is William Stephenson. I work with Bill Donovan, now the Coordinator of Intelligence."
"I notice that you said 'work with' and not 'work for.'"
He smiled. "Indeed I did. As for my employer – all in good time. For now let me just say, with all those ships of supplies and arms soon to be bound for Britain, you didn't think we'd just sit at home, waiting for the postman to ring, did you?"
"Ah," she replied, nodding. "I see."
"Not yet, you don't, but we'll see to that." He handed her a business card.
It said "William Stephenson, Room 3603, 630 5th Avenue, NYC."
"Are you British?" she asked. "You don't have an accent."
"Canadian," he replied with a wink. "A subject of the His Majesty the King just the same."
He stood up and tipped his hat to her. "Would you please meet me at the address on that card first thing tomorrow? Say, eight o'clock?"
Coming out of the elevator on the twenty-fourth floor of 630 5th Avenue in Rockefeller Center, Johanna saw only a windowless door with "Room 3603" in gold lettering on it.
She walked over and tried the knob. It was locked.
Before she had a chance to knock, the door opened and a matronly receptionist with a British accent greeted her and showed her in.
The simple wooden door opened up into the largest office Johanna had ever seen. As far as she could see there were row upon row of desks and filing cabinets with what looked like hundreds of men and women typing, conferring, talking on the telephone and walking back and forth.
Following her guide into the maze, she asked if they took up the entire floor.
"Two floors, actually. We have over one thousand people working here," she answered without turning around.
"One thousand people doing what, exactly?"
She smiled at Johanna over her shoulder. "I'm afraid you'll have to ask Mr. Stephenson those sorts of questions."
Eventually, they came to a row of doors marking small offices against an outer wal
l of the building. They walked halfway down the row, and the receptionist deposited Johanna in front of one of them.
"Go on in, dear," she said and continued on her way.
Johanna opened the door and saw William Stephenson and another man sitting at a small table.
Stephenson introduced the other man, a tall thin Briton similarly over-dressed for the weather. His name was James Brotherton and he had a briar pipe clenched between his teeth. He had a sunburned ruddiness to him. His complexion made Johanna think of his face as an apple, with the pipe as its stem.
Johanna closed the door behind her and skipped over the pleasantries. She had many questions, and she wanted answers from somebody.
"I'd say I've had more than my fair share of cloak-and-dagger in the last twenty-four hours, Mr. Stephenson. First, our cryptic conversation yesterday, then this mysterious office of a thousand people doing God-knows-what. Would it be presumptuous of me to ask for an explanation?"
Stephenson chuckled. By the look on his face, Brotherton seemed embarrassed by her impudence.
"Certainly not Miss Falck. Excuse me – Doctor Falck" Stephenson answered, offering her a seat. "You have been vouched for by all the proper people and you are part of the team now, so please allow me to fill you in.
"As I said yesterday, I work closely with Bill Donovan, your new boss and newly named Coordinator of Intelligence. We, however," he waved his hands to indicate the operation outside, "are not COI. This is the New York office of British Security Coordination. BSC is the British government's Secret Intelligence Service outpost here in the States. We are the center for anti-Nazi activities in the Western Hemisphere.
"This means ensuring the safe passage of your Lend-Lease materiel across the Atlantic to Great Britain, frustration of Nazi subversion and espionage, et cetera. At the top of the list of the et ceteras has been persuading you Yanks to get into the intelligence game for real. Now you have the COI, huzzah huzzah, and we are to assist Mr. Donovan in any way we can. Enter Miss Johanna Falck.
"Donovan was expecting that the COI would be solely concerned with research and analysis, propaganda, subversion and the occasional commando operation, not espionage. I have prevailed upon your President and Mr. Donovan to take on some of these activities from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the War Department's G-2 section and the State Department. The State Department has never been particularly comfortable with espionage, what with all their 'gentlemen do not read each other's mail' rubbish, so they gave it up straight away. ONI and G-2, we still have some work to do. And that," he added with a clap of his hands, "is the story about how you came to us."
Johanna was mildly interested in the background information about BSC and COI, but after only two months in government service, she was quickly losing all concern for bureaucratic minutia.
"All right, I think I understand. Now, can you tell me how what you just said affects what I've been doing for the last two weeks?"
"You will continue on your assignment to infiltrate the DAI via the German-American Bund. We are here to assist you in that, primarily in terms of training for when you get to Germany. It just won't do for you to get snatched up by the Gestapo before you can make yourself useful, now will it?"
"I couldn't agree more," Johanna replied.
"Right. So our first priority is to get you some real training, no more amateur hour. That's where James here comes in."
Brotherton cleared his throat. "We'll get started right away. You will spend the next two weeks with me, learning encryption, message passing, general evasion techniques et cetera," he said in a gravelly voice, pausing to puff on his pipe. "If you apply yourself seriously, you just might live to see us put Hitler's head on a pike outside the Tower of London."
"I'll let you two get started," Stephenson said with a wink.
With that, he left, and Johanna began her training, courtesy of the Secret Intelligence Service branch of MI-6.
15
For the next two weeks, Brotherton gave Johanna much of the same training as MI-6 agents operating in Occupied Europe. First, a crash course in secret writing. She spent three days practicing using passages from novels as encryption keys to encode messages. Though time consuming, it didn't take long for her to get the hang of converting the letters in the text and messages into numbers, adding them together and then converting the resulting sums back into letters.
Once those lessons were completed, she learned how to use a mixture of headache powder and alcohol to make invisible ink. She had laughed out loud at the strangeness and simplicity of this technique. It seemed more appropriate for secret tree house clubs than for a clandestine service. She practiced encoding messages and then writing them in invisible ink on the back of innocuous looking grocery lists and receipts. Taking her completed work, Brotherton showed how they use vaporized iodine to make the writing reappear.
Following the classroom work, Brotherton took her out onto the streets of Manhattan to practice passing messages. He explained that COI and MI-6 would assign her to a courier already operating inside Germany. All she would have to do is meet the courier at a planned time and place and he would take her reports and transmit them back to COI.
"It is critically important that you maintain that schedule with your courier, whether you have a report to submit or not," Brotherton told her. "He is your lifeline to us. If you ever fail to show, we will assume that you have been captured, arrested or worse."
"And then what?" Johanna asked.
"We will do our best to get you out."
"That seems awfully vague."
"Yes, it does."
She took the point. If caught, she was on her own.
At Brotherton's request, Johanna had selected one of her "reports"—an article from the Saturday Evening Post that she had encoded and written in invisible ink on the back of an envelope. Before leaving the BSC office, she had donned a light jacket and placed the envelope, folded up, into a front pocket.
Walking down Fifth Avenue with Brotherton, Johanna waited for the day's lesson to begin. At a corner, standing in the crowd waiting to cross the street, she felt someone brush past her. The light changed, and they crossed. Brotherton stopped on the opposite curb. He turned to Johanna and grinned.
"Here endeth the lesson," he said.
Johanna stared at him, uncomprehending. "Sorry?"
"You have just passed your first report to your courier."
She felt in her pocket. The folded envelope was gone.
That man who bumped into me, she realized. Out of her peripheral vision, she had only noted that it was indeed a man, but beyond that she had no idea who it could have been.
Seeing the look on her face, Brotherton nodded. "Yes, the fellow in the red tie."
He turned and waved to a man standing down the block who waved back and then disappeared into the crowd.
"I never saw him."
"With any luck, that is exactly how your German friend will operate. You will go for a stroll in some public place, the more crowded the better. Your message will be in an accessible pocket and your courier will snatch it out like old Fagin himself."
Johanna, with movies and dime store novels as her only guide, had expected something more complicated. This sounded perfect.
Brotherton continued.
"We will practice that a few more times, but today I wanted to focus on something more difficult and more important. If you are ever found out, the first sign of trouble may be one you'll never see. I intend to make sure that you do. Any competent counter-intelligence officer, once he has identified a spy or subversive, will first follow the suspect for a time to see where he leads. You must become an expert at detecting a pursuer. It will be your canary in the coal mine."
He took her on a walk around midtown Manhattan, teaching her to stop now and then in front of plate-glass windows to see anyone that might be watching her. He showed her how abruptly crossing the street and reversing direction can identify a tail or help to elude one. Most of the
time Johanna spent with Brotherton was on tail detection and evasion.
At the end of the two weeks, Johanna was back in the conference room at BSC's offices. Brotherton and Stephenson were comparing notes on Johanna's progress.
"Well done," Stephenson told her. "Are you satisfied with the training you have received here?"
"Yes," she replied. "Leaving aside that I don't know what I don't know about being an undercover agent, I feel reasonably confident."
"That's about as good as can be hoped for. How have things been going with the Bundists?"
Fifth Column Page 9
