Gestaldo was sufficiently concerned to mention the matter to Milano and to tell him that he wanted the man transferred out of his command. Blazen had already run up several hundred dollars more in poker debts. The two friends discussed ways of disposing of the unwanted officer, but they were too late: a few days later, Major Park Hancock of the CIC detachment in Vienna, who ran spy operations in the Soviet zone, reported that two of his agents had seen an American officer at Soviet headquarters in Wiener Neustadt. The man was soon identified as Sam Blazen of the MIS. He had deserted to the Soviets to escape from his debts, his superiors, his wife, and his troubles-taking his Austrian girlfriend with him.
This was a serious matter. There were very few American desertions to the Soviets, and Blazen was an intelligence officer. He dealt only with supply and transport matters, but he could certainly offer the KGB some useful information, if only gossip picked up during the poker sessions. Milano convened a crisis meeting with Gestaldo and Hancock to assess the damage. They concluded that this was more an embarrassment than a disaster. Blazen did not know enough to be dangerous and had had few opportunities to learn any really sensitive information. He knew, of course, what the mission of the MIS was, but that was hardly a secret from the Russians. He knew nothing at all-or at least he should know nothing at all-of other intelligence operations. The three officers consoled themselves with the further reflection that Blazen was very stupid and would probably not recognize good intelligence if he saw it.
The three men went immediately to general headquarters to make a report to the chief of intelligence, General Hickey. His chief of staff, their immediate superior, Colonel Bixell, was out of the country, so they went straight to the general. He saw them immediately: it was clearly urgent when the three senior intelligence officers in Vienna demanded to see him at once. The news was indeed serious, and the general questioned them closely, appalled that one of his officers should have deserted. He was particularly concerned at the intelligence implications of the event: Had Blazen taken anything with him? Did he have any information to sell the Soviets that might compromise American operations?
Milano and his friends were able to reassure the general on those issues. Blazen's defection was an embarrassment, not a disaster. Hickey then asked what they intended to do about it. How did they propose to get Blazen back into American custody? Milano replied that as far as he was concerned the Soviets could keep the man. He was no loss to the United States, and the KGB was most welcome to him. Hickey was not amused and bawled Milano out vigorously, insisting that while Blazen might be a deserter, he remained an officer in the U.S. Army, and every effort should be taken to get him back.
Milano was suitably chastened and replied that he would see how best to recover the missing man. The general then said that there was a procedure to follow, the one used every time a Soviet officer defected. He would go to the marshal commanding Soviet troops in Austria and ask if he had Captain Blazen in his custody. The Americans might be able to gauge the Soviets' intentions by their reply: whenever a Soviet officer defected, Milano made sure that he was spirited out of the American zone immediately (he was usually hidden in a chalet in the British zone), so that the American commanding general could truthfully inform the Russians that the missing man was nowhere in his territory. If the Soviets pulled the same line, it would be clear that they intended to keep Blazen.
The three intelligence officers then retired to Milano's office in the headquarters building to consider the situation. Milano concluded that there was nothing to be done immediately. He thought it would be a mistake to make any effort to contact Blazen. If the Soviets thought their prize was worth anything, he would be taken off to the Soviet Union, or at least to somewhere in the Soviet zone of Austria that was less accessible to Western intelligence. If, on the other hand, the KGB merely sucked him dry and spat him out, he would be left to his own devices at Wiener Neustadt. After a suitable interval, he might then be approached by American agents and persuaded-or perhaps forced-to return. There could be no question of kidnapping him while the Soviets were still interested, but in Milano's opinion, they would soon find that he was not worth his keep and drop him.
Gestaldo disagreed. He thought that, however stupid and worthless Blazen turned out to be, the Soviets would still keep him for propaganda purposes. The three men concluded that all they could do at that early stage was to keep a close watch on Blazen. Hancock's agents were instructed to report on every sighting of the man or his girlfriend. General Keyes made his formal request for information to the Soviet authorities. After the usual period of stonewalling, they replied that an American officer who answered the description had visited Soviet headquarters in Wiener Neustadt but that his present whereabouts were unknown.
Within a week, the agents were reporting that Blazen and the woman were staying at a seedy hotel in Wiener Neustadt and appeared to have no occupation and no plans. They had been seen wandering around the town, apparently unescorted by any Soviet officer. After the first few days spent at Soviet headquarters, Blazen had stopped visiting the place, and it appeared that the Soviets had lost interest in him. Two weeks after that, Blazen's girlfriend presented herself at CIC headquarters in Vienna and asked to speak to the commanding officer, Park Hancock. She told him that Blazen wanted to return. The Soviets, after interrogating him closely and presumably discovering how little use he was to them, had refused to accept him as a deserter and had left him to his own devices in Wiener Neustadt. The two fugitives were virtually destitute, with no hope of finding a job or escaping. They had no alternative to returning: Blazen was ready-to- face the music.
Hancock sent a coded message to Milano in Salzburg, describing the woman's report. He replied that the whole matter should be handed over to the military police. The intelligence services were to have nothing further to do with the case. Colonel Bixell and General Hickey were informed and approved the decision. Blazen's girlfriend was told to tell him to hand himself over to MP headquarters in Vienna. He arrived there the next day, chastened and miserable, was arrested, and in due course was court-martialed for desertion. He was sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor, to be served at the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Years later, in 1954, long after Milano had left Austria and the intelligence services and was back in the Regular Army, he was posted to Fort Leavenworth to attend a Staff College course. The college was next to the prison, and one day, as he was walking to class, he noticed a group of prisoners working a trash truck. One of the team was former captain Sam Blazen, heaving garbage cans into the truck and picking up the litter on the ground. There was a big letter "P" on the back of his jacket.
When the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia staged its coup against the government in February 1948, suppressed the democratic parties, and established a Stalinist state, the Western Allies in Austria found themselves under siege. Soviet troops occupied about a third of the country: their zone of occupation completely surrounded the capital. The southern borders of Austria were flanked by Yugoslavia, which was still a member of the Soviet alliance, and by Communist Hungary. After the coup in Czechoslovakia, the northeastern border was in the hands of the enemy. As a result, the American, British, and French forces in Austria felt themselves exceedingly vulnerable.
There were some mitigating circumstances. For one thing, Austria was a sideshow. The main issue would be decided in Berlin and the Fulda Gap. For another, the Red Army itself did not occupy Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Army was not particularly redoubtable. Then the strategic balance shifted. On June 28, 1948, four days after the beginning of the Berlin Blockade, Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform, the international Communist organization. It was a melodramatic event, falling on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the event that had precipitated the First World War. The West, of course, welcomed the breach between Stalin and Tito, and in Austria it meant that the long southern frontier with Slove
nia was no longer an immediate danger: the Red Army would not come that way again, as it had in 1945.
The main danger was Hungary. The Soviet 17th Mechanized Guards Division was posted in the Soviet zone of Austria and along the border, west of the Danube and north of the Alps, and there were no physical barriers to stop it if it ever drove across the Austrian plain. It was one of the crack units in the Soviet army and was the most important of all American Intelligence targets. The Order of Battle Section of Army Intelligence had an office devoted to studying every movement of every unit in the division, always on the lookout for any suggestion that it was deploying to attack. One of the big events for the American intelligence community in Austria every year was the Guards' annual maneuvers, when every possible source of information was brought to bear on the target. The Order of Battle Section, at this period, was run by Captain Harold Craven. He would send queries to Milano, documents known as EEIs (Essential Elements of Information). Milano would then pass them on to one of three people: the chief of operations for the CIC in Vienna; the chief of operations for the CIC Headquarters in Salzburg, Paul Lyon (who was also the man who ran the Rat Line); or Milano's chief agent in Vienna, Pete Chambers. The other intelligence organizations, the MIS (interrogators), and the Civil Censorship Detachments were constantly on the lookout for any information on the 17th Guards and passed it on to Milano or directly to Craven. The British, in Graz, had also developed techniques and sources for gathering information on the Guards, and they pooled their findings with the Americans.
The CIC detachment in Vienna also ran Austrian agents to gather information on the Guards and made a small but significant contribution. However, Pete Chambers supplied 75 or 80 percent of the information that was gathered on the unit. This was the ultimate purpose of Operations Horsefeathers and Claptrap and all of Chambers's other maneuvers. His most difficult challenge was to recruit agents to send across the border. This was before the full panoply of barbed-wire barriers, watchtowers, minefields, and ceaseless patrols had made the Iron Curtain all but impenetrable. It was still possible for Chambers's men to slip across at some remote location, stay a few hours or a few days, and then return with whatever snippets of information they had gleaned. It was a dangerous business and became more difficult with every passing month. But it was a vital mission: every clue provided by Chambers's agents was carefully examined as a piece of a vast, ever-changing jigsaw puzzle.
During that perilous spring of 1948, the Soviets and their Hungarian allies were strengthening their control of the border. They set up a series of radio posts along the frontier to communicate with their patrols. Chambers's agents sometimes managed to listen to these broadcasts, which were mostly in cipher, and noted that the radio messages were most frequent and longest whenever there was a change in the guard. They guessed that orders were being given and noted, and they reported that if they could intercept the messages regularly and decipher them, they would discover the Soviets' movements along the border and thus be able to send American agents across safely. Chambers saw this as a challenge and soon found an answer to the problem. He invited Milano to his headquarters in Vienna to hear the proposal.
Chambers wanted to make use of the unusual abilities of William Wagner, the son of a Harvard professor and now a contract employee of the CIC. Wagner had studied mathematics at the University of Virginia and had been drafted into a signal intelligence battalion during the war in Italy. He had been set to work intercepting Italian and German military radio signals and then breaking their codes. Signal intelligence (known to the trade as Sigint), was one of the most important, successful, and secret of all Allied intelligence operations. At its most advanced level, the interception and decoding of top secret German and Japanese communications was one of the key weapons that won the war. The Germans had developed an encryptation machine known as Enigma, which they believed gave them unbreakable codes. The machines were used to send messages between the High Command in Berlin and its field commanders, between the naval command and naval units, and between Luftwaffe headquarters and the German air force field units. Enigma machines were also used by Japanese diplomats, reporting from Berlin to Tokyo on whatever the Germans were telling them of their plans and operations. Polish Intelligence obtained one of these machines before Poland was overrun in 1939 and passed it on to the British (who later recovered another Enigma machine from a captured submarine). British specialists then managed to decipher most Enigma messages that their signals units could intercept. They used the first, primitive computers for the task. The product was classified Top Secret Ultra, and its existence was not revealed publicly until thirty years after the end of the war. It provided a vital edge to Allied commanders in many battles, including the sinking of the Bismarck. In June 1944, decoded Japanese diplomatic messages confirmed that Hitler believed the Normandy landings were a feint and that he would keep the bulk of his armor ready for a later attack on the Pas de Calais.
The British shared all their intelligence, including the Enigma decodes, with the Americans (but not with the Soviets or the French). The expertise and techniques of decoding, chiefly used at Bletchley Park in Oxfordshire and at Navy Headquarters in Hawaii, were also used in the field to break lesser codes used by German and Italian forces. The U.S. Army established large listening posts behind the lines, advancing them as the front moved forward. Each was accompanied by radio technicians and cryptanalysts. William Wagner was one of those working in that program. As the end of the war approached, he was at U.S. Intelligence Headquarters at Caserta in northern Italy. Army Intelligence was then planning for the occupation of Austria and decided that it would need telephone monitoring equipment. It recruited a few men from Signals, including Wagner. He wanted to go to Austria because his parents had taken him to Salzburg and Vienna in 1936 and he had liked the place and wanted to return. He joined the censorship detachment, and until his discharge he worked in the telephone monitoring office. It was a less demanding task than cryptanalysis, involving selecting phone calls to be monitored and then transcribing significant passages in the overheard conversations.
In due course, his turn came to be demobilized. He left the army as a sergeant but remained in Austria and, like many others, became a contract worker for the CIC. He proposed that he should drop out of the business of intercepting telephone calls and instead analyze the cryptintelligence capabilities of the German Army. The Pentagon approved the idea. It wanted to know everything possible about Wehrmacht Intelligence during the war, particularly how far it had penetrated Allied intelligence operations and deciphered Allied codes. Wagner set to work to discover everything possible about the organization, capabilities, and equipment of German wartime intelligence. In the process, he discovered many out-of-work German agents, who told him everything they could about their wartime activities. This was not pure altruism: they needed work and were only too willing to offer their services to American Intelligence. They were usually strongly anti-Communist and saw no objection at all to working for their former enemies.
Wagner, a mathematician, was fascinated by the theory and practice of cryptanalysis. According to Chambers, he would talk for hours about the great coups of past wars, including the German intercepts of Russian radio communications at the outbreak of World War I, which had led to the first great German victories in East Prussia, and British success in deciphering German naval codes in the same war. Wagner would describe the American triumph in deciphering Japanese codes in the Second World War: on December 7, 1941, the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had read the Japanese declaration of war before the Japanese ambassador had. It had been transmitted, in code, to the Japanese Embassy in Washington to be delivered to the State Department-and had been intercepted and decoded by the Americans more rapidly than by the embassy staff. The attack on Pearl Harbor, however, had been a surprise because for once the Japanese Navy had maintained absolute radio silence. In 1943, American radio intercepts and cryptanalysts had discovered that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, w
ho had directed the Pearl Harbor operation, was on a tour of inspection in the Solomons. The Americans had ambushed and killed him. All this was in the public domain; what the public did not know was how U.S. Naval Intelligence had obtained the Japanese "Purple" codes. If Wagner knew about Top Secret Ultra, he kept his silence.
Chambers had heard all Wagner's stories at length, and, when the problem of the radio transmissions along the Hungarian border came up, he decided that Wagner might be just the man to solve the problem. He put the idea up to Milano, who agreed at once that the radio expert should be brought in. The alternative would be to ask the Army Security Agency (ASA) to set up an interception and decoding program in Vienna. The ASA (which later developed into the National Security Agency, the largest, most sophisticated, most secretive, and most expensive branch of U.S. Intelligence) then based its European operations in Frankfurt, Germany. Milano and Chambers were both certain that they would get no help from there in anything so low-level as intercepting the exchanges of Russian border guards. Even in those early days, the ASA concerned itself only with much more serious issues.
Wagner was delighted to be consulted. He had nothing of the military man about him: he looked much more the typical professor, with unkempt brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses sliding down on his nose, and always the same tweed jacket and green pants. He immediately proposed that he be allowed to recruit some of the retired German intelligence agents he had been interviewing for his own project. They would need the garret of a high building in Vienna, which would give them an unimpeded radio view of the border forty miles away. He said that he could get hold of surplus radio receivers that had been used on B-17 bombers, and with three or four radio operators he could maintain round-the-clock watch over Russian radio traffic. He would need two or three German cryptanalysts and was confident he could break the Russian codes. They would not be the sort of high-level, impenetrable codes used by the High Command for top secret communications. All the local units needed were serviceable low-grade codes. They did not know how good the Western Allies were at code breaking and did not suspect that a few men with antiquated Air Force radio receivers could decipher all but the most difficult of Russian codes. Milano had only one caveat: he insisted that the CIC give a thorough security clearance to each of the Austrians Wagner intended to employ.
Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line Page 21
