Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  The doctor's request did not surprise Milano or his colleagues. Indeed it had been obvious for several months that Operation Claptrap would have to be closed down one day, perhaps suddenly. In the event, the doctor preferred an orderly retreat, before the KGB came visiting, and Chambers had come to arrange it.

  Milano was sympathetic and determined-on one condition. "Not on the Rat Line," he said. "That's for special cases-and anyway, it's very expensive. The three of them would cost us $4,500 just for the visas, and while he certainly deserves a bonus, he'd probably prefer it cash on the barrelhead.

  "Besides, there will be no trouble getting him a regular refugee visa. He's a genuine Bulgarian and his papers are all in order, so we don't have to make up a name and identity for him. There are openings for skilled doctors all over the world. I'm sure we can get him admitted somewhere on a regular visa, if we can get him out of Wiener Neustadt safely. Why don't you ask Park Hancock to see to it? All he needs is to load them into a car and bring them over one afternoon. Then bring them on to Salzburg."

  Then Chambers made an additional request: "The good lady has all her family treasures. Silver, porcelain, linen, stuff like that. She wants to take them all with her and asks if you can arrange it."

  "Absolutely not. No excess baggage. We never promised to ship household goods around the world for anybody. She'll have to pack whatever she wants into the car, and that's it. She must leave the rest behind.

  "I'll get Dominic to set to work getting the doctor a refugee visa. I don't suppose there will be much trouble." - - - - - -- - - - - -- -

  Indeed, things worked out well. Del Greco had no difficulty in finding a South American country, in this case Colombia, to take a highly qualified doctor and his family. The three were picked up discreetly from Wiener Neustadt by one of Park Hancock's agents and driven first to Vienna and then to Salzburg-the wife grumbling the while about having to leave so many of her possessions behind. The doctor, however, was pleased at his bonus. He had earned it. He had recruited some of the most productive of all Soviet defectors and agents, and Milano was relieved that he had been extracted from the Soviet zone with so little trouble. No doubt he prospered in Colombia.

  In February 1948, Milano's office was warned that the Communists in Czechoslovakia were planning a coup against the government. The warning came from the French intelligence service, but through an unorthodox route, and-perhaps for that reason-it was ignored. The source was the exuberant and exotic Pete Chambers, who heard the news from a friend he had made in his Bohemian days in Paris before the war, when he was studying music in the hope of becoming an opera star. In Paris, he had acquired an American wife and many friends, one of them a lieutenant in the French army.

  His time in Paris had been a crucial period in his life, quite apart from his brief marriage, and he cherished the memories. In the interval between his departure from France in 1938 and the German occupation in June 1940, he had continued to correspond with his French friend and with his ex-wife. When Paris was at last liberated four years later, in August 1944, Chambers had been with the U.S. Army in Italy. He had seized the first opportunity that offered to return to France to find out what had happened to them. His ex-wife had survived, with difficulty. Chambers had been able to help her in recovering her apartment. She had been turned out of it by supporters of the Vichy collaborationist regime, and, like many people all over liberated Europe, she needed some muscle to get it back. In France, that meant either the Resistance or the Americans: the legal procedure for evicting unwanted tenants would have taken years. Chambers solved the problem for her by arriving at the place with two or three large, well-armed GIs. The collabos left without arguing.

  Chambers's friend, who was a lieutenant in the French Army, had escaped to North Africa when the Germans had occupied France and had joined the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle's resis tance movement. He had returned home in triumph with the general when the French Army had been given the honor of driving the Germans out of the capital. Chambers and he had a happy reunion. They were struck by a coincidence: both had become intelligence officers, Chambers in the U.S. Army, his friend in the Deuxieme Bureau of the French Army. After the war, when Chambers was stationed in Vienna, his friend came to visit him almost every month. The two officers were most discreet, but Chambers deduced immediately that the Frenchman was concerned with an intelligence network that his service was running in Czechoslovakia.

  In theory, that country was still democratic. There was a coalition government in which the Communists were the dominant partners, but they did not rule uncontested, as their comrades in Poland and Hungary did. They were relentlessly pushing their strength in every corner of the administration, particularly the police and the armed forces. The French, like other Western governments, were in constant contact with the democratic ministers, who could see the noose tightening around their necks and were increasingly desperate at their situation. The French intelligence network concerned itself with the Communists and their partners, the Social Democrats. Thus Chambers paid particular attention when his friend, who was in Vienna on one of his regular visits, told him that the Communists, on orders from Stalin, intended to eliminate the democrats from the Czechoslovak government within two weeks.

  The plan was very simple. The Communist minister of the interior, Vaclav Nosek, intended to dismiss the last senior police officers who were not Communists. The Party would then control all the levers of power in Prague. The armed forces were already neutralized: the minister of defense was the fellow-traveling General Ludvik Svoboda, who lived to betray his country to the Russians a second time, in 1968. If the democrats resisted, they would be crushed. If they did not resist, they would be crushed all the more easily. The Party had planned everything most carefully, directed by Valerian Zorin, a special adviser Stalin had sent to Prague to help them. The French officer had already passed the information back to Paris. He suggested that Chambers should alert Washington.

  The next morning, Chambers went to see Milano, who was in Vienna on one of his regular visits. Milano told him to report at once to the director of intelligence at Army Headquarters and to prepare a report to be sent back to the Pentagon. The director listened to Chambers's explanation of the situation and his evaluation of his source. He examined the draft report, ordered a few minor changes, and sent it off to Washington immediately. He then told Chambers to pay a visit to the CIA office in Vienna and repeat his story there. Chambers went to see the head of station and gave a careful report of everything he had been told. The station chief listened politely and asked him several questions about the reliability of his source. Chambers assumed that he would pass the information on to his own headquarters, but he never learned if this had been done.

  Meanwhile, Milano called his old friend Butch Groves, who was a senior British intelligence officer, and arranged to have a drink with him at the Sacher Hotel that evening. Groves's official position was that of a civilian working for British Army Intelligence in Graz and Vienna, in an unspecified capacity. Milano was convinced that he was, in fact, a senior officer with M16. The two men had known each other since they had met in Italy during the war and used to see each other regularly in Austria. Groves's office was in Graz, where the British forces were based, but he often went to the capital, as did Milano himself. Groves was in his mid-thirties, which seemed a great age to Milano at the time, and the younger man respected his abilities and experience in intelligence matters and often consulted him about the techniques of espionage and intelligence.

  This time, they talked about Czechoslovakia. Groves knew something about Chambers and was not impressed. He had heard about Operation Horsefeathers. He may also have heard of some of Chambers's other operations, such as Operation Claptrap. Although these two affairs had been highly successful, Groves did not trust Chambers. He told Milano he thought him "odd at best, kooky at worst." When Milano told him about the reported coup being planned in Prague, he thanked him for the tip but questioned M
ilano closely about Chambers's reliability and his source. The British were notoriously dismissive of the French, and a French report passed on by a kooky American was not likely to be taken very seriously. Milano assured Groves that he had every confidence in Chambers and that he believed him when he vouched for his French friend. He had been one of two French officers who had parachuted to General von Vietinghoff's headquarters when the Germans in Italy had surrendered shortly before the end of the war. Milano did his best but left the meeting with the impression that he had failed to convince Groves of the seriousness of the warning. All the same, he was sure Groves would pass on the news to London.

  There was no follow-up. Neither the CIA, the Pentagon, nor the British came back to ask for any clarification or to demand further information. The warning was apparently ignored-or perhaps the event had already been anticipated by the various governments and an additional report, however persuasive, made no difference. Two weeks later, just as the Frenchman's source had predicted, Vaclav Nosek dismissed eight non-Communist police chiefs. The cabinet ordered their reinstatement, and the minister ignored the order. The democratic ministers protested vigorously at this act of flagrant ille gality-and, in a moment of collective folly, resigned from the government. The president was Eduard Benes, a democrat who had allied himself with Stalin during the war, partly because he had been betrayed by the British and French at Munich in 1938. He had not been able to stand up to Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, and Hitler. When the next crisis came just ten years later, he failed once again. He told the democratic ministers that he would not accept their resignation and would instead use the crisis to form a new government, excluding the Communists. But the Communists were ready and mobilized. A general strike was called for February 24, and Prague was flooded with Communist-led workers from the factories. There were huge, violent demonstrations, and the police and army did nothing to protect the democratic parties, their leaders, and their headquarters. Communists occupied the rival parties' buildings and seized newspapers and radio stations. It was a classic coup, and Benes, after several days of vacillation, capitulated. He accepted the resignations and replaced the departing democrats with Communists and fellow travelers. The Communists had won and they soon imposed Stalinist totalitarianism upon the country.

  It is not at all clear that even if the warning had been taken seriously, the result would have been any different. What could the Americans, the British, and the French have done? The Communists were the strongest party in Czechoslovakia, and the democratic parties lacked the will to confront them-and any force they could rely on. Although there were no Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia, the army was under Communist control, or at least neutralized by its commanders. All the same, the examples of Greece, France, and Italy show that determined democratic parties-in France the Socialists and in Greece and Italy the Christian Democrats-could face down the Communists if they had the courage-and the backing of the United States. Perhaps if the democrats in Czechoslovakia had been warned in advance and assured of unconditional American and Allied support, they would have shown more resolve. In the event, they did not resist seriously, and a long nightmare began that did not end until 1989.

  Milano always got on well with the French in Austria. His contact was a French officer, Captain Muti Gillette, who was on the intelligence staff of the French headquarters in Vienna. Gillette was a close friend of Karl Brewer, one of Milano's agents in Vienna, and the three men spent one sentimental Christmas Eve together in the city. Another useful contact was the secretary of the French commanding general. She was an Austrian girl from Innsbruck who had a boyfriend in Salzburg, and every time she went to visit him or passed through Salzburg on her way to visit her family, Milano's staff always arranged for her to stay at the Osterreicher Hof, the best hotel in town, at their expense. She proved a most useful and cooperative contact in French headquarters.

  That was not the only indirect approach Milano used to maintain contact with Allied authorities. Shortly after he and his colleagues set themselves up in Salzburg, the Italian government opened a mission there. Its chief function was to help the repatriation of the thousands of Italians who had been left stranded in Austria at the end of the war or who passed through the country from Central Europe. Late in the war, after the Allies occupied southern Italy and Mussolini set up a Fascist republic in the North that was wholly dependent on the Germans, thousands of Italians were sent to Germany to work for the Todt organization. That was the institution that built munitions factories and fortifications all across Europeincluding the Atlantic Wall. Milano and his assistant, Dominic Del Greco, both being Italian Americans, helped the Italians set up their office. They supplied gasoline, C rations, cigarettes, and other necessities, on the self-interested calculation that the head of the office, Giorgio Smokvina, an Italian despite his name, might be useful later. Indeed, after a year in Salzburg, he became the first Italian consul there and was most helpful over the years in supplying Italian visas to the clients of the Rat Line.

  Of all Allied organizations, the American intelligence services in Austria collaborated most closely with the British. Those two services kept up the closest possible relations during the war and afterward, until a series of British traitors absconded to Moscow. At one point, the most important of those secret spies, Kim Philby, was head of British intelligence in Washington and the closest confidant of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's head of counterintelligence. These subterranean struggles of moles and defectors never troubled the CIC in Austria, at least not in Jim Milano's day. He never had any doubt of the loyalty of his British colleagues, and, so far as is known, that confidence was justified. The Americans in Salzburg kept their most private operations, including the Rat Line, to themselves. Even so, if there had been a British mole in Austria, he might easily have discovered enough to ensure a nasty reception for escaping Soviet defectors in South America.

  Milano himself had a particularly close relationship with the British, starting with his earliest days in intelligence in North Africa. He had been adjutant to the 7769th MIS battalion when it had gone ashore at Fedala, Morocco, in November 1942 as part of Operation Torch, the Allied attack on French North Africa. A British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Norman Cavendish Boyle, had been seconded from British Intelligence to take command in January, to direct the unit's training program. Boyle was the very model of a British colonel: tall, thin, with white hair and a mustache. He could have been played by Alec Guinness. He was a regular officer who had gone straight from Sandhurst to the trenches in 1914. He had been wounded twice in World War I and had served in India between the wars. In 1939, despite all the strings he could pull and all the pleas he could offer, he had been judged too old and medically unfit to command an infantry battalion and had been given an intelligence posting instead. In due course, he had been sent to train a fledgling American intelligence unit, composed of men who had all the qualifications but none of the training they needed. It is a great tribute to him that he succeeded so well, and particularly that his American subordinates remember him with much affection.

  One incident showed the man's style. Eight Americans had gone on a boar hunt in the hills around their base and returned emptyhanded. On the way, they passed a Moroccan chicken farm and helped themselves to a number of birds. It was a common enough military tactic, a means of supplementing the depressing diet served in the battalion mess hall. However, the Moroccans did not take kindly to being robbed and protested to Colonel Boyle. He summoned the battalion in formation and announced that he would not tolerate such nonsense in the future. Then he walked along the ranks and glared each man in the eye, one after the other, mustache bristling, demanding of each of them: "Do you understand me?" In every case, the intimidated GI replied, "Yes, sir." After that, he had no trouble from his command.

  He turned the unit over to his American second-in-command at the end of 1943 and returned to the British army. Milano met him again a year later, when Boyle was a lecturer at an inte
lligence course organized by the British army at Castellammare di Stabia, near Sorrento, on the Bay of Naples. The course was designed to prepare Allied intelligence officers for their duties in the occupation of Austria: Milano's unit had already been designated for that task. The course dealt with such matters as war criminals and what to do with them, the Nazi Party, paramilitary organizations in Austria, displaced persons, and the history, geography, and politics of the country. It was a well-organized, well-run course, and the instructors, including Boyle, were on top of their subjects. Clearly, a lot of work had gone into preparations for the occupation, well before the end of the war. Half the students attending the course were British and half American, and the friendships that were formed at Castellammare proved invaluable in later years, when the graduates had to work together.

  Milano moved to Caserta the following month, where detailed planning for the occupation was being done by the Armed Forces Headquarters intelligence staff. His own task was to select the location where each of the U.S. intelligence operations would be based and decide on its strength. Those decisions depended upon a clear definition of their mission. At Caserta, too, he worked closely with the British officers who were getting ready to administer their zone in Austria and to carry out all the multifarious intelligence tasks that would be required. The planning group for the U.S. and British occupation of Austria was headed by a British officer, Colonel Peter Lovegrove, and Milano worked closely with him.

  The day after the war in Italy ended, there was a final session of the Allied Austrian planning staff in Caserta, under the supervision of Colonel Lovegrove. The last details were settled, and Milano then prepared himself for the drive over the Brenner Pass into Austria. As the meeting broke up, Boyle turned to Milano and told him that he could expect some recognition from the British government for all his work in Italy. He did not elaborate, and Milano was too astonished to ask just what he meant.