The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  He was in an excellent mood, and he greeted with equal effusiveness the leader of Poland, the leader of Hungary, the leader of Romania, the leader of Bulgaria, the leader of Czechoslovakia, and the leader of the German Democratic Republic, at whose virtual insistence Khrushchev had brought together his proconsuls to discuss, of course, the crisis of Berlin. Khrushchev had decided what would be the outcome of this meeting, but he had developed, for international and domestic reasons, the techniques of democratic practice; indeed, he rather delighted in them. “Eh, Comrade Kadar, and what do you think of our five-year plan?” as if he cared what Comrade Kadar thought about Khrushchev’s five-year plan, though he’d have cared to know if Comrade Kadar harbored any disloyal thoughts about Khrushchev’s five-year plan, or about anything else Khrushchev had determined upon. Still, after all the cult-of-the-personality business involving Stalin, and the jockeying to oust Malenkov, Khrushchev liked it this way, and was never more confident than during this season, notwithstanding that the non-invitation to Enver Hoxha of Albania seemed finally to certify that that idiotic man had fallen for the malevolent inventions Mao Tse-tung was dispensing about the Soviet Union.

  Yes yes, he reassured Gheorghiu-Dej, he had greatly enjoyed his visit to Romania in 1959, and he wanted Gheorghiu-Dej to come to Moscow under circumstances less hectic than this one. Would Comrade Khrushchev be scheduling a meeting with President Kennedy? Well, he didn’t yet know, not for sure. Yes, he said to Ulbricht, who was anxious to make at least one comment in the course of the two days that did not relate directly to Berlin, yes he was indeed very pleased and very proud that the Trans-Siberian Railroad had been electrified between Moscow and Irkutsk. And no, the spy trials in London of Gordon Lonsdale and George Blake and the Krogers, four anti-imperialists who loved mankind better than native fascist rulers, would not result in the cancellation of the planned British trade fair scheduled to be held in Moscow. “I occasionally feel the need to cancel a summit conference,” Khrushchev said jovially, referring to the disaster in Paris the preceding June, “but I am very selective about my cancellations.” Khrushchev then tried to cheer up Walter Ulbricht, whose general glumness was affecting the natural gaiety of the company. “Did you hear the one, Walter”—Khrushchev was given to using first names, after initial formalities—“about the couple sitting in Gorky Park, and the boy says to the girl, ‘It’s raining.’ And she replies, “No, Rudolf, it’s snowing.’ And he says to her, ‘Sonya, Rudolf the Red knows rain, dear.’” Khrushchev laughed uproariously, as did everyone within earshot. Ulbricht forced a chuckle, and then said he wondered whether the joke translated into English, and Khrushchev retorted that it had not yet been established even that Marxism translated into English! The crowd roared. The chairman of the party in Bulgaria said he would like to make a toast, and the two dozen guests politely stopped the chatter, and then Todor Zhivkov said, “Chairman Khrushchev, this is the year in which Yuri Gagarin from the socialist motherland will stun the world by orbiting the earth in a satellite, while the leader of the imperialist world hopes only to transport a Mr. Alan Shepard from Cape Canaveral to Nassau!” There was a general clamor, hoots of derisory laughter, and then Chairman Khrushchev led them to the other end of the room, where the buffet had been prepared. He had privately decided against a seated dinner, on the grounds that in such circumstances business matters tend to come up, and business matters he wished to put off until the morning. Meanwhile they would eat the smoked salmon, and the caviar, and the fresh bread, and the cucumbers, and the roast duck and the vodka. It was somehow understood that the host did not want raised the subject of Berlin.

  It was a very different Chairman who, the next morning in the stately Chekhov Room, brought to order the Warsaw Pact’s political consultative committee. He came right to the point, and said that the assembly would listen to Comrade Ulbricht.

  Ulbricht stood and delivered his carefully thought-out speech. It lasted for very nearly one hour, and told of the seductions with which the imperialist forces were coaxing away into West Berlin, and then on to West Germany, what threatened eventually to add up to the entire professional cadre of East Berlin. He permitted himself an occasional hyperbole. How, for instance, could one set out to build a gibbet if every carpenter in the Democratic Republic of Germany had gone West? He gave the figures for the outflow—two hundred thousand in 1960. This was something, he said, that threatened the very life of the country. And to the extent that his country was threatened, so were his partners in the Warsaw Pact. Indeed, so also was the mother country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For that reason, he wished to make a proposal.

  The leaders looked to the head of the table. Khrushchev said nothing.

  What was the proposal? someone asked.

  Well, said Ulbricht, he wished to call to the attention of the present company something some of them may have known and forgotten. Back in the early fifties, when the unpleasantness had taken place and there had been a strike against the government, he and Wilhelm Pieck had instructed engineers to devise a plan physically to partition the City of Berlin. In fact, when American intelligence officials became familiar with that plan, they dubbed it “Operation Chinese Wall.” The plans for that operation were highly detailed. The exact boundary had been traced, making a line twenty-eight miles long. Along this line, Ulbricht explained, would be erected a barbed-wire barrier. Passage points between East and West would be reduced to three. Perhaps two. Conceivably just one. Only that way would the hemorrhage be stopped. Ulbricht did not divulge that Operation Chinese Wall called for erecting a wall made of brick and mortar over the barbed wire. Save that bit for some other time.

  There was silence. Khrushchev was also silent. But Khrushchev knew that the silence would not last. He had planned ahead. Comrade Kadar of Hungary rose to say that he thought the move certainly provocative, probably dangerous, and in any event drastic in its potential for propaganda exploitation by the West. Ulbricht replied that Kadar’s Hungary had, apparently without mortal psychological difficulty, survived the border controls operated by the Hungarians along the Austrian frontier. Gheorghiu-Dej of Romania said that it was obvious to him that the West would simply not tolerate what would amount to a repeal of Western rights of access into East Berlin and, by inference, the right of East Berliners to go West. To precipitate a crisis with the brand-new American President—who had campaigned in part on the necessity to be tough, and who in his warmongering inaugural address had said that the United States would pay any price, bear any burden to—he forgot just how Kennedy had put it—to further imperialist interests—to challenge such an American President who had made so straightforward a commitment—would be foolhardy.

  At this point Chairman Khrushchev spoke. He said he had listened carefully to the exchanges that had now gone on for almost two hours. That his own view was that it was unwise to challenge the Americans in a local theater; that the Warsaw Pact powers were better off with the ultimatum the Soviet Union had delivered: namely, that before the year’s end the Soviet Union would, with or without joint action with its wartime allies, conclude a peace treaty with East Germany. But, said Khrushchev, it was necessary, before proceeding practically with that demarche, to weigh its consequences. To confuse the grander strategic idea of a peace treaty that after all would give to the German Democratic Republic the right to run the entire city of Berlin, with the lesser issue of East Berlin itself, was not, in his judgment, a good idea. However, said Khrushchev, he would certainly be guided—he would certainly be advised by—his partners in the Pact. So he would like for them to take a vote. He would not, he said, himself participate in that vote.

  He went around the table.

  The vote was unanimous to reject Operation Chinese Wall.

  Khrushchev announced that lunch would be served in the adjacent room.

  He called Ulbricht over to the corner and lowered his voice. “It will not be made public knowledge for a little while. But I am going to see Kennedy. After I talk with
him, I will have a better idea of how we can deal with him. Meanwhile, you have my word for it that we will increase our troop strength in the Berlin area.” He patted Ulbricht on the back, there’s a good fellow. Ulbricht was silent during the lunch, after which the consultative committee broke up, and Ulbricht flew back to Berlin, and instructed his Minister for National Security, Erich Honecker, to begin to assemble, but with the utmost secrecy, a huge deposit of construction materials.

  5

  At the corner of Breite and Mecklenburgische Strasse Blackford Oakes got off the bus. It had been a year since Blackford had lived in Berlin, on assignment, and he knew the city, through which he had roamed so thoroughly, well. He was pleased that his German, studied and practiced so intensively in the fifties, continued to serve him. Not a bad idea to search out something pleasing to him, he pondered. Little else was going well, professionally or personally. The quarrel with Sally in Washington, about which he had got so inflamed, seemed now trivial in the lowering threat of a new war in Europe. On the other hand, what strikes some as trivial, others will die for. Ten million people were inflamed enough to die in the first world war, and Blackford had to reach into the recesses of his memory to remember exactly what that war was all about. Die against Hitler, yes. But the Kaiser? Worth dying to frustrate the Kaiser?

  On the other hand, some people were saying the same kind of thing even now. Worth dying mainly to frustrate the Kremlin? Sally simply didn’t think so, never mind that she was briefly swept up in the enterprise. But her ultimatum had been firmly stated: he must leave the Agency—or leave her. He wanted her more than he wanted the Agency, but he could not leave it under such circumstances.

  Besides, he reasoned, his desire for Sally was personal. His desire to frustrate the Kremlin was also personal, but also something else—what exactly, he could not say. Was he, he taxed himself, experiencing an afflatus? Oh dear. Just about everybody he knew with a personal sense of mission was something of a bore. Was he becoming a bore, he wondered? He wasn’t preachy, true. On the other hand, engaged in black operations for the CIA you could hardly go around carrying a sandwich board reading, “DO YOU WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THE LATEST SOVIET ATROCITY?” And the men and women with whom he mingled didn’t feel the need to opine, regularly, on the subject of why it was they were engaged as they were. He knew that one or two, or maybe ten times one or two, of the men he had worked with were simply working at this job instead of working at another job. But he knew also that this was not so with such as Rufus, or Anthony Trust, who had got him into the Agency as a senior at Yale. They did understand themselves to be engaged in the organic job of maintaining peace, and freedom. And they were engaged in important work. So why, Blackford wondered as he entered the house on Mecklenburgische Strasse, did he need to reiterate this to himself at this point? Because, he conceded, the long ache for Sally needed to be sublimated.

  Useful word, that. What word did they use to describe that phenomenon before Freud came along with sublimate? He would think about that. As a matter of fact, he probably could find out from Henri Tod. After six hours with him yesterday, Blackford Oakes was satisfied that Tod knew just about everything there was to know about the operation of the Democratic Republic of Germany, and probably knew most of everything else.

  Really the most unusual young man Blackford had ever run into. Young? Well, Rufus’s dopesheet said Henri had been born “December 1927”—which made him exactly two years younger than Blackford, who was thirty-five. At some point, Blackford thought, I must ask him whether Henri was also born December 7—Blackford’s birthday and a day that will live in infamy; only it won’t, Blackford smiled to himself. The guy who led the raid against Pearl Harbor had recently visited Pearl Harbor and was practically treated like a hero.

  Blackford rang the bell for apartment 3B, and a woman’s voice came out over the little loudspeaker on the bell panel: “Who is it?”

  Blackford replied, “This is Mr. Eccles. I’m expected.”

  The identification had been given him when he dialed a number that morning. The buzzer released the lock, he climbed up three flights of stairs and again rang the buzzer on the right-hand door, and was admitted.

  He smiled at Sophie, and said good morning. She returned the greeting and led him past the sitting room and dining room to the study. To the study of Henri Tod, who was sitting in his easy chair, reading the East Berlin daily. Tod motioned Blackford to a chair and said, “My sources have informed me that Gromyko met with Thompson yesterday, and the day before. And now the Soviet Foreign Minister and the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union have agreed that their principals will meet. Early in June.”

  Tod spoke in English with only a trace of a German accent, though the British accent was pronounced. He was dressed in gray flannel pants and a crew-neck wool sweater. His face was Semitic in general appearance, olive-skinned, long fine nose, brown eyes, his hair dark, lank. His teeth were pearl-white, his words were intensely articulated, but quiet in modulation. Blackford had struggled yesterday to recall whose voice Tod’s reminded him of, but gave up after a while … Was it the man in Casablanca? Ingrid Bergman’s husband, what’s-his-name?

  “The Bruderschaft certainly gets around. I am crestfallen that you have not ascertained the exact place and day in which they are going to meet.”

  Tod smiled. “The exact date has not been set. But it will be early in June.”

  “Where?”

  “Vienna. Khrushchev wanted Helsinki, but Kennedy held out for Vienna. Thompson stressed that after all, Vienna has been faithfully neutral, and therefore Khrushchev shouldn’t object. Kennedy has got a memo from Secretary McNamara on the Berlin situation, but I don’t know what’s in it. Yet. Now, Blackford, what do you have for me?”

  “Nothing you don’t know. The military people—General Watson, Colonel von Pawel—are waiting for Washington to formulate a range of responses. Maybe the McNamara report you’re talking about will flesh out policy. As things now stand, our people don’t know what the exact response is going to be to whatever it is Khrushchev and Ulbricht come up with. And we’re supposed to tell Washington exactly what it is that they are going to come up with. If you want the truth, Henri, I think it’s this simple: The United States does not have contingency plans addressed to the sealing off of the Berlin border. Our contingency plans, I think, relate to grander stuff. A Communist ring around West Berlin. Isolating the city again; 1948. Does the Bruderschaft have contingency plans?”

  Blackford only half playfully referred to Tod’s organization of secret young operatives as though it were a foreign army.

  “Let’s go to lunch.”

  Several things about Henri Tod became clear to Blackford in the weeks that followed, during which they were so frequently together. The breadth of Henri’s operations went far further than those of Blackford. The Bruderschaft he had organized was on the order of a resistance movement. And for that reason, no formal affiliation with official Allied operations was permissible. The Bruderschaft, indeed, engaged in activities in East Berlin and East Germany that were plainly unlawful under Communist law, and would have been even under Western laws, had they applied. But the Bruderschaft and Allied intelligence agencies had very much in common a desire to know one thing, namely what did Khrushchev intend to do in and around Berlin; and when did he intend to do it? How the West would respond was of course of vital interest to Henri Tod. But he never gave the West’s representative any reason to believe that he would be bound by the West’s conclusions in this matter. Henri Tod therefore desired a certain explicit alienation from Western operations; and Western operators desired an equally explicit alienation from the operations of the Bruderschaft. This dichotomy figured in the relations between Henri Tod and Blackford Oakes, and Blackford was formally careful not to inquire into the operations of the Bruderschaft, even as Henri drew the line carefully in his questions to Blackford. But the obsessive question being the one that brought them together—What would Khrushchev do?—there was
much to share, and reason to spend many hours together.

  Blackford saw in Henri signs of the disciplinarian. But it was not gratuitous, reflecting rather his sense of what was expected of him, not least of what he expected of himself. There was, Blackford noted one evening when the conversation digressed, a haunting distraction there. Something that lay in the back of the mind of Henri Tod. Conceivably, not even Tod knew exactly what it was, or exactly what hold it had on him. The devotion to him of his colleagues was not only an act of gratitude for the spirit he represented—the unity of free Germans—but a recognition of Tod’s personal courage. He regularly put himself on the duty roster, engaging in dangerous activity, armed always with the cyanide capsule in the event he was captured. But he would be detected in acts of personal kindness. There was the widow of young Ochlander, who had been captured, tortured, and executed. Although she had removed, with her young son, to France to live, she regularly received personal letters from her late husband’s leader, and these she took to copying and sending to her husband’s closest friends. They in turn gave the letters discreet circulation. And in them Henri, who had known the widow only slightly, gave evidence of his great reserves of sympathy, of his desire to assuage suffering, of his determination to convince Hilda that her husband’s sacrifice had made an important contribution. Several times when a member of the society, fighting for his life in a hospital bed or—when the nature of the operation that had caused his wound kept him from a hospital—lying in a safe house, tended to by Bruni or by other doctors brought in, the companion posted to sit by the patient during the night would, at two or three in the morning, look up to find Henri Tod, silently entering into the room, who would nod the attendant out. “Go and get some sleep. I will stay here.”