Karen hid her suitcase in a barn behind her father's farmhouse, and, late in the evening of the following Saturday, Nicholas came to fetch her. They walked along the bank of the Danube, constantly in fear of meeting a Soviet patrol, but escaped undetected. They found a small boat at a local landing stage and rowed themselves across the river into the American zone. In the morning, when the villages came to life, they took a bus into Salzburg and sought out the American headquarters. The girl noticed that her lover paid their fares out of his suitcase, which appeared to contain a large sum of money. Borosky told her he had taken the money, 20,000 schillings, from his office safe. He did not consider it theft: as far as the Russians were concerned, the real crime was defection. Helping himself to the money was a trivial offense that would allow them to keep themselves for several months after they reached the West. Besides, he intended to tell the Americans immediately.
When they found the American headquarters in Salzburg, they asked for a German-speaking officer and told him their story. He summoned the local CIC representative, who in turn reported to Dominic Del Greco, telling him that the new arrival had apparently stolen a large sum of money from the Soviet forces. Dominic sent an urgent message to Jim Milano, who was out of town, that he should return at once to deal with a sudden emergency. He did not explain further.
When Milano got back to his office, he found that the Soviets had already reported the defection, claiming that Lieutenant Borosky was a thief. The Americans had admitted that they were holding him, and the Soviets had demanded that he be returned immediately. A CIC special agent, John Burkel, took the two fugitives to a safe house outside Salzburg, where he interrogated the young man thoroughly on the whole matter. He also asked for a first report on the condition of Soviet forces in the zone and whatever Borosky could tell him of their morale, equipment, and plans. Then he told the two to make themselves at home: they would be well cared for while their fate was decided.
Burkel knew the commanding general, Geoffrey Keyes, quite well. He was at the time staying in a hunting lodge that had once belonged to the Krupp family, at Bluhenbach, near Salzburg. It had been taken over by the U.S. Army for the use of the commanding general, and Keyes was there for the weekend. Burkel went to see him, to discover if there was any chance of keeping Borosky, debriefing him properly, and sending him to safety down the Rat Line. Keyes refused. This was not a case of a simple political defec tion. Borosky had stolen money, and the Allied High Command could not condone a theft. Burkel argued that if the man were sent back, the news would immediately be spread far and wide among Soviet troops in Austria and there would be no more defections, drying up an invaluable source of intelligence. The Soviets would obviously present Borosky's return as a great victory, as a sign that the Western powers would in future cooperate in punishing desertions from the Red Army. Keyes remained adamant. He admitted the strength of Burkel's argument but said his hands were tied. The regulations agreed by the four occupying powers left him no choice. This was not a deserter, like the two pilots who had flown to the West, seeking political asylum. The man was a thief and would have to be returned. As for Karen, she could stay.
When Jim Milano returned to Salzburg, he convened a meeting of the Rat Line support group to examine the situation. They concluded that there was no hope of changing General Keyes's mind. Lieutenant Borosky would be returned, and no doubt he would be shot. The Soviets would publicize the case among Soviet troops in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Germany, and there might be no more defections for a long time to come. The next day, Nicholas Borovsky was handed over to the Soviet Military Police at the Urfahr bridge across the Danube. Karen Klaus, devastated by the event, went to live with relatives in Vienna.
For Jim Milano and the rest of the intelligence community, the Soviets were the enemy, and the most dangerous agents were in the KGB. Not only was the Soviet spy agency devoted to ferreting out the secrets of the CIC and the Western military establishment in general, it was also a highly efficient counterintelligence organization constantly on the watch to catch potential defectors and to unmask Milano's operations. The KGB was a dangerous, skilled, and completely ruthless agency, like a combination of the Nazi Gestapo, SS, and Abwehr. It was totally detestable, but sometimes its Western rivals were caught up with it in a sort of professional relationship that was part rivalry, part recognition that agents on both sides had many things in common. John le Carre's books are fiction, but there is a substratum of truth to his premise that George Smiley and Karla are brothers under the skin.
When Jim Milano took the Mozart to Vienna in the fall of 1947 to inform his superiors that the first shipment of visitors was about to leave down the Rat Line, he stayed, as he always did, at the Regina Hotel. It was a comfortable establishment of the second rank and had survived the war. Though rather shabby, it could provide the sort of accommodation and food that officers of an undemanding army of occupation might expect.
After dinner that evening, Milano went out for a walk around the Ringstrasse, the boulevard that encircles the center of Vienna. The main buildings of the Austrian government stand on the Ring, as does a series of grand hotels, places far nobler than the Regina, that the four occupying powers had taken for their own in 1945. The Americans had set up their headquarters in the Bristol, the British in the Sacher, the Soviets, with no sense of irony, in the Imperial, and the French, of course, in the Hotel de France. Milano walked along the Ring, smoking a cigar and heading in the general direction of the Imperial. The wide sidewalks of the avenue were filled with people out for an evening stroll, like Milano himself, and he passed many Allied and Soviet officers. Among them, walking alone toward Milano that balmy evening, was a Soviet officer, and as they approached each other Milano recognized him as Major Pyotr Poncerev, chief of military intelligence operations for the Soviet Armed Forces in Austria. The major and his assignment had been identified by Allied intelligence, a photograph had been obtained and circulated to senior Western intelligence officers, and Milano had no doubt about the identification.
Neither did Poncerev. As they approached, they looked each other in the eye, smiled, and stopped. "I believe I know you," said Jim Milano. "Good evening, Major Milano," the Soviet officer replied in excellent English.
It may have meant nothing that the two men should have encountered each other that evening. The Ring was a favorite promenade for all Vienna, and the various headquarters were within a mile or two of one another. Officers and men of the four armies met and mingled in the streets of Vienna all the time. All the same, Milano was instantly on the alert. He was about to launch his most ambitious and expensive intelligence operation, the Rat Line, and bumping into the head of Soviet intelligence operations, a senior KGB officer, a man who would go to any lengths to discover details of the operation, might not be a coincidence.
The two men chatted amiably enough, and Milano decided to hear what Major Poncerev had to say for himself. He suggested they adjourn to the bar of the Bristol Hotel, the American headquarters, for a drink. The Russian countered with an invitation to the Imperial. Milano, quite determined to keep out of the lions' den, remarked that the bar at the Bristol served excellent hors d'oeuvres and offered a wide selection of whiskeys. Major Poncerev was instantly persuaded. "I've never tried American whiskey," he said. "That's an excellent idea. Let's go to the Bristol."
Once they were installed in a comfortable stall in the Bristol's vast and splendid barroom, Milano introduced Poncerev to the taste of bourbon. The conversation soon moved from comparative alcohols to personal matters. Milano remarked that he had a file on Poncerev, who evidently had one on him, and suggested that they should fill in each other on the details of their life histories. They were not going to talk about their work, even in the most general way, but they could discuss their careers and perhaps exchange glimpses of each other's motivations.
Milano described his immigrant, Italian family, his youth in West Virginia, his progress through school and university, and the
great hiatus in his life that had opened in 1941, when he had been put on active duty (he had been an officer in the reserves before Pearl Harbor). He had merely to say that he had been taken into Military Intelligence once he reached North Africa. He did not explain what that might have involved. Poncerev would know perfectly well the sort of work intelligence officers do in wartime, and, if he did not, Milano was not going to enlighten him. As for his subsequent career, even though Poncerev was clearly well informed, Milano was silent.
Poncerev was equally candid and equally circumspect: he told of his childhood and youth but offered no details at all of his career in the KGB. He had been born in Saint Petersburg during the First World War, when the city had been known as Petrograd. It had been rechristened because its original name had appeared too Germanic. In 1924, it had been renamed again as an imperishable memorial to Lenin. Poncerev barely remembered his parents. His father, a builder, had been killed in an accident in 1918, shortly after the Revolution. His mother had died of tuberculosis a year later, as the horrors of civil war and famine had fallen upon the country. The child had been taken in by a convent orphanage, run by an aristocratic woman who had lived in England but had decided to devote her life to charitable works. She had taught him English, encouraging him to read the works in the school's small English library. By the time he was sixteen, he had been sufficiently qualified to win admission to a technical school. That had been in 1931. Poncerev did not say what had become of the aristocratic nun and her orphanage. No doubt she had been sent to the gulag and the orphanage turned into a school for young Communists. It was, indeed, entirely possible that the conversion had taken place in the 1920s, when the last traces of the ancien regime had been swept away, and the young Poncerev had therefore been one of the first young Russians to be molded into "Soviet Man," according to Lenin's and Stalin's directives. He had impeccable proletarian credentials and his parents were safely dead, so he could not be accused later of hereditary counterrevolutionary leanings.
Poncerev had become an electrician and in due course had been drafted into the army. He had done well and had been sent to officers' training school. This must have been in the mid-thirties, when the senior ranks of the army had been decimated in the great purges. There had been many openings for bright young men to step into dead men's shoes, and one of the growth areas of the Soviet econo my, and the army, was the KGB. Poncerev, of course, told Milano none of this. But he was of the age, the class, and the rank to serve Stalin and his sinister henchmen, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhev, and Lavrenti Beria, who needed young men like Poncerev to carry out the great purges and direct the death camps. KGB officers who survived those frightful years had to be utterly ruthless and loyal to Stalin. As for his later career, Poncerev told Milano simply that he had served two years in the infantry during the war and had then been an assistant to the military governor of Moscow, where his command of English had been useful. There had been large delegations of Americans and British in Russia, and the KGB had needed English-speaking officers to keep an eye on them. After the war, he had been posted to the army of occupation in Austria and had come, one warm summer evening, to drink bourbon with Jim Milano in the Bristol bar.
Before they parted, Milano issued a challenge. "You Russians seem to think pretty well of yourselves in this business. So let's see how good you are. I come to Vienna from time to time: next time I'm here, give me a call." It was a challenge with a purpose: Milano was interested to discover how closely the KGB kept a watch on him and particularly how closely they watched the Mozart, the daily train between Salzburg and Vienna.
Poncerev was delighted to accept, but he set a price. "I have always wanted to read Gone with the Wind. Could you get me a copy?" Milano promised that he would do so and escorted his rival to the door. It had been a most instructive evening. He had learned that the Russian intelligence chief was very smart, very good at his job, and very well informed. His age and career path suggested that he had some dreadful deeds to his credit. He was an altogether formidable opponent.
A few weeks later, Milano returned to Vienna. He took the Mozart from Salzburg and dropped his bag at the Regina Hotel for breakfast. He had brought a copy of Gone with the Wind with him, just in case his Russian colleague should reappear. He had scarcely given the waiter his order when the maitre d' approached him. "You are Major Perry?" he asked, that being Milano's alias. "Sir, you are wanted on the telephone in the lobby."
It was Major Poncerev. "Good morning, Jim," he said, with no trace of triumph in his voice. His service had done its work. Milano was suitably impressed, and congratulated Poncerev on his success. "I've brought your book," he added. "How do you want to pick it up?"
"Why don't you come to my apartment," Poncerev replied. "It's just behind the Imperial, and you could drop in for a drink."
Milano agreed at once. This was a challenge, and he had always met challenges without flinching. It was only when he was back at his table, eating breakfast, that he began to have second thoughts. This was not perhaps the smartest thing he had ever done, to accept an invitation to visit a senior KGB operative in an apartment in the Russian sector of Vienna. He finally decided that he would keep the appointment, but would notify his office where he was going and why, and arrange to have backup, a couple of beefy young men from the Vienna station to keep him company. They could stay in the street and await developments while he was seeing Major Poncerev.
Milano had urgent business with his headquarters in Vienna, and devoted the rest of the day to it. In the afternoon, he told Major Karl Brewer of the CIC Vienna station of his rendezvous with Poncerev, and asked for backup. Karl was not at all happy at the idea. He reminded Milano that the Soviets had been known to kidnap people in Vienna and spirit them out of the country. Milano, with the optimism of youth, assured him that all would be well and set out for Poncerev's apartment, trailed by the two bodyguards.
Poncerev lived in an elegant old apartment building that had survived the war and had been taken over by the Soviet occupation authorities. When Milano rang the bell, the door was opened by a strikingly beautiful Russian female lieutenant in full dress uniform. She welcomed him in perfect English and took him into the living room, explaining that Poncerev had been delayed but would be there shortly. She served Milano vodka and caviar on fresh toast but declined to join him. They had talked about Austria, Vienna, and its cultural offerings for about twenty minutes when Poncerev at last arrived. The lady lieutenant disappeared, leaving the two men together.
Milano congratulated his host on the lady's beauty, but Poncerev refused to be drawn. Milano therefore produced the book and solemnly handed it over. Poncerev expressed his delight and then surprised Milano by offering him a book in exchange, an Englishlanguage History of the Civil War in the USSR, 1917-22. It was no doubt a polite gesture, though the book would be quite worthless as history: Soviet histories of the Revolution and Civil War, from the late 1920s until the late '80s, were mainly works of fiction. The edition Milano received was devoted largely to eulogizing Stalin and inflating his role in events.
The two adversaries spent half an hour in banalities, and then Milano got up to leave. They agreed that they should meet again, this time in Milano's Vienna apartment for dinner. Milano suggested that the Russian should bring his beautiful lieutenant along to add a little glamour to the occasion. Then he left, noting with approval one of Karl's men in a doorway across the street.
It was a bizarre and puzzling episode. Milano had wondered if Poncerev wanted to sound him out about spying for the KGB or would try to pump him for information. Nothing of the sort had happened. The meeting had been purely social and meaningless. He never saw Poncerev again-or the lovely lieutenant.
But Poncerev did not forget. Perhaps he had been weighing up Milano and had reached some conclusions from the meetings. His job was to infiltrate American Intelligence, or at least the American military establishment in Austria, and he set to work with a will. He suborned cleaning women working in Am
erican offices and the homes of American officers (though he never succeeded in infiltrating American headquarters, as Major Chambers's friend Sonya had infiltrated Soviet headquarters). He sent his most prepossessing young men to work seducing American secretaries (see Chapter 9), and he may well have been behind the recruitment of the unfortunate American MPs, the Rover Boys (see Chapter 16).
The next encounter in this shadowy war between the two intelligence services was more straightforward. Milano was notified that a maid at the Regina Hotel, where he usually stayed in Vienna, had been summarily fired. She had been passing on details of his movements to a Soviet agent. There was not much information she could impart, besides the comings and goings of Milano and his colleagues, but it was a breach of security all the same. It explained how Poncerev had been able to call Milano immediately after his arrival in Vienna and claim his reward: he had not been spying at the railroad station; he had simply bribed the maid.
She had been caught because she had been observed meeting a suspected Soviet agent in a restaurant near the hotel. When she had been pulled in for interrogation, she had confessed immediately. The Soviets had recruited her to report on Milano's arrivals and departures, on guests he brought to the hotel, and whatever she might overhear of their conversations. The CIC was intrigued, but not surprised, that the KGB should take so much trouble. This is how effective intelligence operations succeed, by paying close attention to the most mundane details.
The most interesting aspect, however, was not the maid's petty espionage, it was the chain of information it had been spun into. The maid reported to a suspected Soviet agent, who in turn reported to one of the most prominent of Soviet citizens in Vienna, Sylvia Kusmich, the Pravda correspondent in Austria.
She was a striking woman who wrote not only for Pravda but also for various left-wing Austrian papers. She had a clear agenda of discrediting the Americans and promoting Soviet policies. Perhaps she was part of some devious KGB plot to weaken Milano's position and thus to subvert American intelligence operations. He convened a meeting of his Vienna colleagues to discuss the Sylvia problem. He discovered that she was one of the Soviet residents who frequented the famous riding stable. It was rather a long shot, but Milano decided to try what American charm might do to with the beautiful Sylvia. Pete Chambers still went to the riding stables once or twice a month. Now Milano suggested that he make the lady's acquaintance and see where that led him.
Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line Page 18
