Dry Bones
Page 21
“This is my last pitch, I promise.”
Miss O’Keefe was scrawling intently in a marbled-covered composition book. Blushing slightly, she covered it with her forearm. “Mr. Billings said to call soon as you got in. He said it’s important.”
“I’ll call him later.” He sat at his desk, sliced open the envelope with the sterling silver letter opener Roberta had given him for Christmas. The pages inside were covered with handwriting he recognized: clear, neat, precise. Hail, holy penmanship.
Part VI
Amid a Crowd of Stars
New York City
August 15, 1958
Dear Fintan,
Please forgive the indirection with which I’ve gone about contacting you. My hope is that, after reading this, you’ll better understand my actions. I’ve often reflected on and regretted the outcome of the mission you undertook to Prague. I don’t know what memory you have—if any—of the several visits I made during your hospitalization. The attending physicians predicted you’d eventually make a full recovery. Thankfully, I take this to be the case.
As you were undoubtedly made aware by the Military Police, the collision was judged accidental. Yet that you were in Nuremberg at all—that you left London without adequate fuel to reach Prague—was never explained to my satisfaction.
I was informed by the MPs that the other vehicle lacked registration papers of any sort. The driver was never apprehended. The MPs presumed he was a German civilian afraid of the consequences of having collided with an American jeep. They laid blame for the crash on your driver, a reckless, inexperienced recruit who raced the wrong way down a one-way street.
Jan Horak’s contact in Prague waited for you at the rendezvous point. When you didn’t arrive, Horak got word to me, and I used our contacts to assure him I’d make other arrangements. He was arrested two days later by the Communist faction within the Czech intelligence service and charged with having been a Nazi collaborator, which he most certainly had never been.
Despite his arrest, Horak succeeded in smuggling news to London that he’d managed to get Dr. Schaefer’s microfiche in “the right hands” and keep it away from the Soviets. I never received it. Perhaps the message wasn’t from Horak but a ruse on the part of the Soviets, or perhaps the microfiche did reach those within our own camp who had no wish to share it or risk it being made public.
Horak was never brought to trial. He was still imprisoned at the time of the Communist coup in 1949. His fate remains uncertain.
The case of SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Karsten Heinz seemingly resolved itself. Removed from the trial of Nazi doctors, he was brought to London for “special interrogation” about Soviet penetration of Allied intelligence. Shortly after landing in London, Heinz was struck by a virulent strain of “bronchopneumonia,” which was rampant that winter, and died. His case was closed and his name removed from the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS).
Meanwhile, as a result of my earlier sojourn in the South Tyrol, I stayed in touch with a trustworthy cadre within the CIC who kept me abreast of the swelling number of Nazi fugitives—SS officers, Gestapo agents, security and concentration camp personnel and collaborators—who were making their way over the Alps into Italy and embarking from there to South America.
It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that while one part of the CIC was laboring to identify and detain the escapees, another part was expediting their escape. I presumed at first that a few rogue agents, exploiting a lack of administrative oversight, were responsible. Instead, it became clear there was a deliberate policy at work.
In conjunction with elements in the International Red Cross and the Vatican, American officials were abetting the flight of those deemed useful in a crusade against a single-minded, highly coordinated global campaign of Communist subversion and aggression. The supposed utility of the escapees in this struggle took precedence over all other considerations, including their wartime roles.
From the beginning, a thick cloak of secrecy was in place. The confusion that followed the demise of the OSS added to the opacity. Yet all roads led to Rome and Lt. Col. Carlton Baxter Bartlett. Ensconced in the former office of Count Ciano, Bartlett had positioned himself as the spider at the center of this web, instantly able to detect and react to whatever disturbed his skein of silken wires.
As well as being involved in amassing and distributing the money needed to build and sustain electoral opposition to the hugely popular Italian Communist Party, he acted as liaison among the War Department’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), the CIC, and the nascent operations of the Central Intelligence Unit (soon to become the hush-hush Office of Policy Coordination).
There was a degree of irony in this. Over the years, any number of high-ranking officers and would-be successors to General Donovan thought of Bartlett as nothing more than a rotund, soft-centered, sybaritic, self-promoting huckster and manipulator of public opinion who lacked the ambition and ability to have any real role in setting policy and running the nation’s intelligence operations.
For my part, from the moment I met him, I detected in Bartlett no mere flatterer or status seeker. Beneath the aromatic whiff of bay rum, I sniffed the spoor of a creature fueled by ambition, cunning, insecurity, ruthlessness, and paranoia, the qualities possessed by skilled and successful bureaucratic infighters in all times and climes.
Names and dates may change—stakes may vary—but the game is played the same, be it in palaces or presidiums, the bedchambers of imperial Rome and Byzantium or the boardrooms of London and New York. (Consult the works of Procopius, Suetonius, Gibbon, et al., to fill in the details.)
It wasn’t long before the antagonism between Dick Van Hull and Bartlett came to a head. On learning that Karsten Heinz’s prosecution had been postponed, Van Hull used his father’s contacts in Washington to bring the matter to the attention of senior members of Congress and point an accusing finger at Bartlett. Before anything could come of it, Heinz “passed away.”
The die, however, had been cast. Van Hull’s father received an anonymous letter detailing his relationship with Lt. Michael Jahn. The letter predicted a formal inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Operation Maxwell and left no doubt that his son—now regarded as a war hero—would be exposed as a “deviant whose actions had been motivated not by selfless patriotism but by the insatiable demands of his own perverted lusts.”
Up until this point, Van Hull had ignored Bartlett’s warnings not to interfere in “covert intelligence operations and decisions relating to national security clearly outside your purview.” With Heinz dead and the threat hanging over him of a public airing of his homosexuality, which would deeply wound his father, Van Hull resigned his commission and returned to New York.
Soon after, my work with the CIC came to an end—thanks to Miss Ginny Thompson. You remember her, I’m sure. She ran the OSS’s London communications subsidiary—so sweet, so American, a charming coquette with a frame hard to ignore or forget. One fine summer’s night, she disappeared. I presumed she’d eloped. Alone and unwed, she surfaced in Moscow a few weeks later.
Her real name was Anna Nekrasov. She was born to Russian parents who’d emigrated to Paterson, New Jersey. When Anna was 12, as the Depression reached its deepest depths, her parents moved the family back to the USSR. When she came of age and went to university, she was recruited by the NKGB and slipped into England.
The paperwork at the OSS office in London indicated that I had been responsible for her hiring. It was true I’d cosigned the papers but only after Bartlett directed me to. (His infatuation with Miss Thompson/Nekrasov was no secret.)
Bartlett denied having given me such an order. Since it was my word against his, I knew the best course for me was to avoid controversy, resign, and be done with it. I returned to the State Department, where, given my Foreign Service experience and stints in the OSS and CIC, I was made Special Assistant for Intragovernmental Affairs and Public Information.
I wasn’t long at it when I was informed of an agreement ratified by the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee to expand a program put in place by the Joint Chiefs that authorized entry into the U.S. of approximately a hundred German scientists. (If my memory is correct—admittedly, an increasingly iffy proposition—I brought up Operation Overcast during our discussion at the Drummond.)
The new project, code-named Operation Paperclip, increased the quota dramatically. It also turned a blind eye to the past, stipulating only that those admitted to the U.S. should not include “any person or persons planning the resurgence of German military potential.”
It quickly became apparent that, as was the case with Overcast, the bulk of those seeking entry to the U.S. as part of Paperclip had been active Nazis and enthusiastic participants right up until the Third Reich’s Götterdämmerung. By act of Congress, such individuals, many deserving indictment as war criminals, were to be denied entry to the U.S. Accordingly, I made sure their applications for visas were denied.
The JIOA reacted swiftly. Lt. Col. Bartlett was recalled to Washington, where he supervised “revising” the bios of all those denied visas. It turned into an exercise in creative writing. All mention of promotions or honors bestowed for their wartime service to the Reich were excised, as was membership in the SS (in which, for instance, Wernher von Braun, head of the rocket program, had been appointed an “honorary” Sturmbannführer).
Aware of the potential for public controversy, Bartlett and the JIOA went on the offensive. A press release announced that a number of “world-famous and low-paid German technicians” were coming to the U.S. in order “to share their expertise and experience with their American counterparts.” It was hoped they’d eventually seek to become American citizens.
The release stipulated that “each of these visa applicants has been selected after a careful and thorough vetting of his background,” which was true, of course. What went unsaid was what this vetting had uncovered.
The next thing I knew, I was exiled to the Department’s ultimate Thule: the Educational and Cultural Division, where I was tasked with preparing instructional and informational materials for distribution in the academic community. That’s when our mutual friend Louis Pohl—Pully—got in touch with me.
During the time I’d spent under him in the OSS, in Washington, Pully made our small unit into a model of accuracy and efficiency in analyzing the strength of the enemy. A clear-eyed, unwavering realist, Pully was an implacable foe of fearmongering, scare tactics, and hysteria, the policy of exaggeration and overreaction that he considered a fig leaf for self-aggrandizers whose ultimate end, though masked behind the invocation of “national security concerns,” was the accumulation of power.
At war’s end, he was transferred to the CIU and focused on providing the civilian and military leadership with the facts it needed to gain and maintain a sober, hardheaded appreciation of the economic and military capacities of the USSR and its satellites, as well as their strategic intentions.
Pully took me aside and asked if I’d help keep track of the out-of-control buccaneering and adventurism that was becoming routine behind the scenes and warping our intelligence operations. Specifically, given the personal relationships I still enjoyed within the Department, he asked if I’d provide him with details of the ever-widening programs to incorporate former members of the Nazi military, scientific, and intelligence establishment into U.S. operations.
I did as he asked not just out of friendship but also because I shared his concern. One project seemed to metastasize out of another. Operation Birchwood recruited members of Göring’s planning office and the SS to forecast Soviet economic trends. Project Apple Pie authorized “taking functional advantage of”—in other words, hiring—key personnel from “the belly of the beast”—Amt. VI (Department 6) of the SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Main Security Office under Reinhard Heydrich.
The capstone, so to speak, was Operation Bloodstone, which eventually became the basis for a whole series of ill-fated CIA-sponsored programs. Bloodstone skimmed off the cream of Nazi high-level intelligence experts and collaborators who had well-earned reputations for their ruthless and dedicated service to the Third Reich in the hopes of creating an armed resistance behind the Iron Curtain.
In many cases, the dossiers of these recruits were simply redacted to remove any hint of their involvement in war crimes. In others, their names were dropped from CROWCASS, as if they were deceased, and new identities were invented.
As far as the public knew, a handful of German and Eastern European refugees, with no connections to Nazi atrocities or mass murder, had been recruited to help fend off the Communist menace. The few journalists who made further inquiries were brushed off with the assurance that “no Nazi zealot or anyone connected to Nazi war crimes” had been recruited, hired, or brought to the U.S.
Although Pully never directly told me so, I realized he was building a case—from as many sources as he could—for sweeping reform of the country’s intelligence operations. I’m unsure when and to whom he intended to make that case. Given the crisis over Berlin, Mao’s victory in China, and the outbreak of the Korean conflict, Pully understood how easy it would be for Bartlett and his underlings to paint him as a fellow traveler or “pinko.”
As the level of hysteria intensified, he held his fire. But he never lost his interest. Aided by a dozen agents and analysts who shared his concerns (a group he collectively referred to as the “Twelve Apostates”), Pully continued to compile his own chronicle of developments within our national security apparatus.
His career within government came to an end after he sent a guarded letter to the new head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, expressing his fear that, under the auspices of the Office of Policy Coordination, the agency was ballooning into a vast, undisciplined bureaucracy manned by those of doubtful competence and assisted in far too many cases by foreign recruits whose backgrounds disqualify them for any role in our national defense.
Dulles brushed off the criticism. Worse, he forwarded the letter to Carlton Bartlett, who was serving on the transition group Dulles had set up. Bartlett wasted no time in getting the word out that Pully was “an overcerebralized office-manager type” and a “pushy Jew obsessed with fighting the last war.” A month into Dulles’s reign, Pully was eased out and was hired at ISC.
(For the record, Louis Pohl’s OSS file listed his religion as “NONE”—the same as mine. When I did a little digging of my own, I discovered Pully’s father was a German-American Lutheran and his mother a Coptic Christian. They raised him as a Unitarian.)
I was summoned before a private session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and questioned about innocuous involvements I had as a student. Soon after, at the direction of Allen Dulles’s brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, I was fired and a note attached to my file indicating my security clearance had been revoked.
My brother, a Jesuit at Georgetown, secured me a brief stint teaching. When that went away, I was for all practical purposes unemployable. Pully came to the rescue. He put me on retainer. He paid me out of his own pocket. Nobody else knew. I’m good at keeping secrets and so was he.
Mostly, I researched and reported on various business proposals. Once in a while, on the sly, he’d ask me to look into CIA-related matters, and I’d contact the sources we still had (the Twelve Apostates had been whittled down to two) and find out what I could.
After ISC acquired your agency, Pully asked if I’d like him to put me in touch with you. I demurred, and he let the matter drop. Deep down, I think,
as well as knowing the deep regrets I harbored about the harm you suffered on that abortive mission to Prague, he knew we were birds of a feather who’d had our fill of the great world’s problems and were content to tend our own nests.
In January of this year, he called my attention to a news item reporting that, after a hiatus of several years, Carlton Bartlett was returning to the CIA. I wasn’t surprised. He’d cashed out of Bartlett & Partners for a bundle and, it seemed to me, returned to the Serengeti of intrigue and skulduggery—his natural habitat—where his skills placed him among the fittest and most likely to survive.
Pully was convinced there was a deeper significance. He proved to be right.
A few weeks later, he called me in an agitated state. He needed to talk. Could I meet him the next morning, at 6:30 a.m., at Grand Army Plaza? I reminded him that the temperature was in the teens. It would barely be light. Snow was predicted. As far as he was concerned, that was all for the better. Our solitariness would be protection. I kept the appointment. Right away, as soon as I saw him, I knew something important was up.
Remember that phlegmatic demeanor of his: how inside he could be erupting while outside he was always that same stolid stub of a man? Well, this time he was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet—and it wasn’t because of the cold. He took me by the arm and pulled me into the park. I couldn’t tell from his red face whether he was happy or angry. What was unmistakable was his excitement.
As he talked, puffs of frozen air popped from his mouth like bursts from a steam whistle:
—Turlough, you’re not going to believe this.
—Try me.
—Karsten Heinz isn’t dead.
For a moment, the name didn’t register. Cold and fog of sleep slowed my comprehension. Pully could see the confusion in my face. He repeated what he’d said:
—Karsten Heinz isn’t dead.
Even then, the name barely meant anything to me. It had been so long. Then the light went on: