Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  Thus was Barney dragged into a new world of conspirators and spies. A few days after the aborted sale, Elsa told him that the English-speaking man in the warehouse, Mark, had a different proposition to make to him. Barney swallowed the bait at once and set off willingly, a fish reeled in by a master angler. This time the meeting was in Elsa's apartment. Mark, correctly judging the stupidity and greed of the young MP, now admitted that he was a Russian. He proposed that Barney should don his uniform and earn some money by arresting suspects wanted by the Soviets. For each arrest, he would be paid 3,000 schillings.

  It would be easy. All he would need was another MP to help him: they always traveled in pairs. But everything else was ready to hand. They had their uniforms, a jeep, and all the weight of the U.S. Army. They would drive around Vienna unsupervised, like scores of other teams of MPs. They could arrest anyone with impunity and deliver their captives to Mark and his friends in that discreet abandoned warehouse in Elsa's street. Barney agreed at once. This sounded a painless way to make money-and Elsa always needed money. Mark gave him an advance on his first pay, and he flashed the money in front of his friend Nick Roundtree and invited him to join the operation. After an evening spent drinking the windfall money, Roundtree agreed.

  The plan was simplicity itself. Mark told them whom to find, and where, and how to do it. A few days later, the two Americans set out to pick up the Polish translator. Their first effort at kidnapping ended in fiasco. They decided to drink to their success before they started, to get up their courage. By the time they reached the street where the Pole lived, they were completely drunk and wisely decided to postpone the effort. Mark was very understanding when they arrived, empty-handed and incoherent, at the warehouse. He sent them out again the following evening, and this time they stayed sober. They knocked on the door of the Pole's apartment and, when he answered, told him that an American officer wanted to see him briefly. He agreed at once, and they drove him to the warehouse, where Mark and two burly men in plainclothes were waiting for him. He vanished there for good, presumably carried off to the Soviet zone to be interrogated by Soviet intelligence on whatever he knew about American operations, methods, and personnel. He was then either shot or sent back to Poland to disappear into the Communist gulag.

  The two Americans were paid their blood money and went out to celebrate. This was easy money. Their next hit, the Austrian woman, was easier still. They arrested her in their jeep as she was walking home one evening. She offered no resistance, was not at all surprised, until they delivered her to Mark and his friends. Then she learned that she had fallen into the hands of the enemy. She was luckier than the Pole: her captors released her after three days' interrogation.

  The kidnappers' third victim, Albert Youngman, fell into their hands just as easily. They presented themselves at his apartment and invited him down to police headquarters. In Vienna in 1949, that was an invitation that no Austrian could refuse. But this time the two MPs did their work in the daylight. The door was opened by Youngman's wife, and other people in the building saw the kidnappers, too. Youngman was spirited off to Soviet Intelligence headquarters in the Austrian countryside, forty miles from Vienna. He was then subjected to a nonstop three-day grilling in which he was asked, over and over again, for every detail he knew or could dredge from his memory concerning the riding stables, the Austrian major, and the various Americans who rode there. The Soviets had photographs of every American and wanted to know their names, their units, and their life histories. How much time did they spend in the stables, whom did they talk to, what were they interested in? The interrogators wanted to know all about Youngman's boss. Where had he come from, where had he gotten the money to start the stables, what were his contacts, how did he spend his spare time, did he ever show any interest in politics or military matters? What did he and Youngman talk about, and did he carry American guests off for private conversations? They showed him pictures of Soviet officers who had frequented the stables: Did he remember these men, did the major devote any unusual attention to them? Had Youngman ever seen him take these men aside for private conversations in the seclusion of his office or go riding alone with them?

  Albert Youngman was baffled by all these questions. He was no more than a simple bookkeeper and general manager. He was unobservant and rather stupid; these were qualities that had endeared him to his boss, a man who believed in taking every precaution. He had seen nothing suspicious and could remember nothing that now seemed suspicious, not even when the Soviet interrogators showed him photographs of officers who had defected and asked if they had behaved strangely at the stables. They pumped him dry and then set him free. He returned to his wife and recounted his experiences to the Austrian major-but resolutely refused to return to work for him. He had no wish to have anything more to do with so dangerous an acquaintance.

  The sudden reappearance of the Austrian lady and Mr. Youngman gave American and Austrian police a clear account of the Soviets' methods of picking up suspects, but they still did not know whether the two MPs were genuine or fake. Stories appeared in Vienna newspapers about a mysterious pair of American MPs who were working for the Soviets and kidnapping Austrians off the streets of Vienna. They were nicknamed the Rover Boys, and there was a full-scale search for them. Sergeant Nelson and Corporal Roundtree soon heard about it: they had bragged of their exploits to other men in their unit, and before long some of their friends who read the German newspapers brought them the bad news. It would be only a matter of time before the counterintelligence agents caught up with them.

  They could have escaped to the Soviet zone, but Mark was suddenly unavailable. The Rover Boys had worked well for a short while, but they had been indiscreet and incompetent and were bound to be caught sooner or later. The Soviets preferred to cut their losses immediately, and they wrote off the unfortunate Americans. Elsa vanished. She had taken her share of Mark's payments and had doubtless been paid separately and generously for introducing the two Americans to her Soviet friends. She vanished into the underworld, and the CIC never found her. Nelson and Roundtree tried to escape their fate by going to the CIC themselves, to claim that they had been approached by the Russians to kidnap people in the Western zones and had virtuously refused. Each swore a solemn oath to the other that he would never reveal the truth, that they had in fact succumbed to Soviet blandishments and used their uniforms to work for Soviet Intelligence. Their courage and firm resolutions lasted no more than a few hours. Each man was interrogated separately, by efficient and hard-faced cops who produced Albert Youngman, his wife, and other witnesses who identified the two as the men who had kidnapped him, and the Austrian woman, who was equally certain in her identification. Each broke down and confessed. They were court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years apiece.

  In the summer of 1948, an American agent, working temporarily in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, achieved a remarkable double: he recruited a group of former German and Hungarian antiCommunist agents to work for the Americans, and he found and rescued a young Austrian who had been left there by his Jewish mother in 1938. The agent was Harry Klingensmith, who had been recruited by Park Hancock in Vienna. The U.S. Embassy in Budapest looked on Klingensmith's work with great suspicion, and its attitude was typical: Milano and his colleagues constantly had trouble persuading the Foreign Service to allow his agents to operate under embassy cover. This was before the days of the CIA and its establishment of residents in every embassy in the world.

  Klingensmith had made contact with the remnants of the Abwehr network in Budapest. These were Hungarians who had worked for German Military Intelligence during the war. Some of them had been seconded from Hungarian Intelligence, and their loyalties must have caused the Germans many doubts: in the last year of the war, Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian regent, had tried repeatedly to get Hungary out of the conflict and escape from its alliance with Germany. He could see perfectly well that the Nazis were going to be defeated and had tried to save what could be saved for himse
lf and his country. The Gestapo had been well informed, and in March 1944 Hitler had ordered his armies to occupy Hungary. Eichmann had followed the Wehrmacht to Budapest and had begun the destruction of the Hungarian Jews. Horthy had remained titular head of state but had been stripped of all real power. The following October, as the Red Army had crossed the Carpathians and entered the Hungarian plain, Horthy had proclaimed an armistice and tried to surrender to the Allies. Hungarian Fascists had arrested him and shipped him off to Austria, then mounted a last, desperate defense of Budapest. It had finally fallen to the Red Army in February 1945.

  The Abwehr had, of course, continued its intelligence gathering until the last. Its Hungarian employees had been left behind at the end of the war. They had supported Germany to the bitter end, some no doubt because they were Fascists, some patriotic ones because they feared for their country's survival if it fell under Stalinist control. In the three years after the war, they saw their worst fears realized as the most ruthless of all Eastern European Communist regimes, headed by Matyas Rakosi, imposed itself upon the country. Rakosi coined a phrase to describe the standard Communist process in Eastern Europe: he called it the "salami tactic," the cutting away of one democratic or civil liberty at a time, slice by slice. Now, in 1948, Harry Klingensmith began cautiously making contact with one or two of the agents and proposed building a new antiCommunist intelligence network. At the height of the cold war, Milano and his colleagues in Austria, who supervised the recruitment and maintenance of the network, had no scruple in using former German agents for the purpose.

  At the embassy, Klingensmith's official task, which was tolerated by the Hungarian government, was to try to discover the fate of the crew of an American bomber that had crashed near Budapest in the last months of the war. It had been on a bombing run from Italy against an oil field in Austria, at Zisterdorf, and had been hit by German flak. The pilot had radioed that he could not make it back to base and would try to land behind Soviet lines in east Hungary. The Soviets denied ever seeing the plane or knowing anything of its crew. Klingensmith reported that he had heard of a crash site near Lake Balaton, just north of Budapest. The Hungarians could not object to Americans investigating the reports, and they allowed Klingensmith to stay a month to complete his investigation. In the event, he failed to locate the crash site, but he used the time, and his ability to move around the country, as cover while he made contact with members of the Abwehr network and made arrangements to pay them and communicate with them. This was the most important and dangerous of all clandestine tasks; the best agent is no use if he cannot report to his handlers and if his handlers cannot contact him to ask specific questions.

  One morning during this interesting period, while Jim Milano was sitting peacefully in his office in Salzburg, smoking a cigar and studying an agent's report, his secretary came in to tell him that there was a woman who wanted to see him on a private matter. She had given her name, Maria Torkey, but had declined to state her business. Milano, on the theory that anything would be preferable to analyzing an unreliable agent's report, had her sent in.

  She was a handsome middle-aged lady who spoke excellent English with a slight accent. She said that she had been born in Hungary, which Milano had already guessed, and now lived in New York City. She had escaped there after Hitler had occupied Austria in 1938. Milano waited patiently to hear what this had to do with him.

  "I'm Jewish," she said. "My original first name was Miriam; I changed it when I married. My husband was Christian. We were both from Budapest, and he had estates south of Vienna, so we lived in Austria. He hated the Nazis and didn't make any secret of the fact. He was killed by the Gestapo after the Anschluss, in the fall of 1938. We had a nine-year-old son, Johnnie, and I was terrified that he would be killed, too. So when my husband was murdered, I sent him with our maid, Sonia, who was Hungarian, to her village near Lake Balaton, in Hungary. I had to stay, to try to settle our affairs after my husband was killed, but then some friends in the government told me that I was about to be arrested by the Gestapo because I was Jewish. All my property would be confiscated. My friends told me I had to leave at once, that I couldn't get to Budapest to look for my son. So I just packed a few things and escaped over the border to Italy. I got to Trieste, where I managed to get a ship to London.

  "I'd spent three years there as a child, so I had friends who took me in. I was desperate about my son, but there was no way I could contact him without giving him away to the government. Hungary was allied to Hitler, and he would certainly have been shipped back to Austria if they had found out about him. Then I met an American sailor who was stationed at the naval section of the U.S. Embassy. We got married, and he took me to New York when he was sent home just before Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the marriage didn't last: we were divorced five years ago. I've been working for the government in New York ever since.

  "Now at last I've managed to return to Austria to look for my son. Will you help me?"

  "Why do you think I could help you? Can't the consulate or the embassy in Budapest do anything to find the boy?"

  "I've spent a month here trying. The embassy in Vienna says there's no chance at all that I can get a visa to Hungary, and I daren't write to Sonia. Anyway, I don't have a proper address for her. I've been staying at the Osterreicher Hof here, and I saw you were also a guest. Last night, I had dinner with the consul in Salzburg, Peter Constant. I told him how discouraged I was and that I would probably have to go back to New York. He said I should speak to you.

  "He said he didn't know exactly what you do, except that you are listed as an economic study group in the phone book. He didn't say much more, but he sort of hinted that you might be able to help me somehow."

  Torkey was lucky. Milano had an agent in Budapest-Harry Klingensmith-and he was touched by her story. He thought he might possibly be able to help. All the same, he would have a word with Peter Constant about taking his name in vain, and especially dropping hints that he was in the intelligence business.

  "I'll see if there's anything I can do," he said. "I seriously doubt it, so you mustn't get your hopes up. But we'll try. The Economic Development Office chiefly works in Austria, but we might have some contacts in Hungary. I'll see. Give me every detail you know about Sonia, her full name, last known address, any other contacts you might have. I'll get back to you in a week or two if there's anything to report. Or you can call here from time to time, to see if there's any news."

  Maria was touchingly grateful. Her son was the most important thing in the world to her, and she had lost him for ten years. Milano was the first American, let alone Austrian or Hungarian, official who had given her any hope at all. She had come prepared with all the details she knew written out: she handed the paper over, thanked him profusely, and left.

  Klingensmith had another two weeks on his visa. He had succeeded in setting up the essential communications arrangements for the reconstituted Abwehr network but had made no progress with the missing American B-24 crew. Milano sent a coded message, giving him all the details of the Torkey case and telling him to spend two or three days seeing if he could find the boy. Meanwhile, Milano noted that Maria was, indeed, staying at the hotel he used as his base in Salzburg and seemed to be spending a lot of time with a civilian employee of the Army, Frank Bozen, who worked as a translator at a base in Germany. Milano concluded that their interest in each other had nothing to do with intelligence matters.

  A few days later, he had a coded message from Klingensmith. He had begun his search for Johnnie by checking the lists of local employees of the U.S. Mission in Budapest, looking for one from the town near Lake Balaton where Maria had sent her son. There were two, both middle-aged women who had lived in the place during the war. Klingensmith interviewed them both, after first checking their credentials: he had no wish to confide his concern to some spy of the Hungarian secret service. One of the women knew nothing of Sonia Zerka, Maria's former maid, but the other, a translator in the embassy who spoke good Engli
sh, remembered her from the war years. She reported that Sonia had died a year earlier. The informa tion was both encouraging and worrying: to begin with, there was no indication at all of what might have happened to the boy. Klingensmith would have to go look.

  Milano decided not to report the news to Maria. She continued to call on his office every day or two and was always assured that the hunt for her son was continuing and that she should return again. Milano decided that he would tell her nothing until he had some concrete news for her.

  Then Klingensmith sent another message that he had found the boy. He had gone to the village where Sonia had lived and had easily discovered that her son, a boy of about nineteen, was living with a relative of Sonia's nearby. The relative worked in the famous Tokay vineyards, and the boy had just finished school. Klingensmith went to see them and reported that there was no doubt of the identification. Johnnie remembered his mother perfectly, knew the family names, and remembered being taken away from home by Soniaand that he had been forbidden ever to mention his real mother during all the terrible years since then. He was delighted that his mother was looking for him: he had assumed, after all the horrors of the war, that he would never see her again.

  Milano replied that Klingensmith should look into the possibility of smuggling Johnnie into Austria. The Hungarians and Russians should not be informed: they would refuse to give the boy a visa and would certainly arrest him if he were caught trying to leave. Furthermore, Milano ruled that the U.S. Embassy should not be informed, either. The State Department resented and distrusted everything to do with clandestine intelligence and would certainly oppose any effort to get Johnnie out of the country. Milano and his colleagues had no such scruples.