Klingensmith was a resourceful, imaginative agent. He discovered that a large shipment of furniture was being sent from the U.S. Embassy in Budapest to the embassy in Vienna. The consignment consisted of the furnishings of the prewar embassy, which had been put into storage when Hungary declared war on the United States, at Hitler's behest, in 1941. The embassy had been closed and had been severely damaged during the fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in 1944 and 1945. Repairing it was going to take months, possibly years, and in the meantime the ambassador had decided to send the prewar furnishings to Vienna for safekeeping. The Hungarians had authorized an Austrian firm to send a number of moving vans to pick everything up.
Klingensmith brought Johnnie back to Budapest in the course of one of his trips into the countryside, where he had ostensibly been looking for the missing Air Force crew. Johnnie had bidden a hurried farewell to the family that had taken him in when Sonia died: they blessed him and wished him luck. There was no trouble getting the boy into Budapest: his papers were in order, he was just a hitchhiker picked up by a passing American diplomat. In the event, they were not stopped. Klingensmith persuaded a U.S. Embassy employee who was in charge of packing up the furniture to allow him into the warehouse, and then they rolled Johnnie up in a carpet and stowed him in the front of the moving van. They carefully stacked furniture around and above the carpet, to conceal and protect the boy. He was told to stay where he was and above all to keep absolutely still when the van stopped at the Russian checkpoints.
The Austrian driver and the American official who accompanied him knew nothing about their unusual cargo. They simply drove the truck from Budapest to Vienna, stopped at Soviet checkpoints at the exit from Budapest, at the border, and then a third time as the van entered Vienna. Their papers were in order: this was a diplomatic cargo. They passed through every checkpoint without difficulty, and Johnnie managed to remain quiet and safe during the day-long trip. In the evening, the van arrived at the U.S. Embassy compound in Vienna, where Park Hancock was waiting. He sent the driver and escort off while he and a couple of his agents examined the van's contents and discovered Johnnie, safe and sound, rolled up in the carpet, just as Cleopatra had been delivered to Julius Caesar. He was taken to a safe house in Vienna, and Milano was informed that the operation had been successfully completed.
All that remained was to get him to Salzburg. He would take the Vienna-Munich train, the Mozart, which passed through the Soviet zone. It was the usual route: whenever Milano had to make a clandestine transfer, usually a deserter escaping the Red Army and destined for the Rat Line, he was dressed in a U.S. Army uniform and given American papers. A day after Johnnie arrived in Vienna, he and one of Hancock's agents were aboard the Mozart. The boy was dressed as an American private, carrying the "gray pass" that American servicemen used when crossing the Soviet zone. The Mozart never stopped in the zone: the railroad's Austrian employees would check all passengers' passes before the train left Vienna and report the number at the Soviet control point as the train entered and left the zone. That was all. It was a simple system, as long as the Russians' suspicions were not aroused. The train left in the afternoon, and Hancock sent a message to Salzburg announcing that the package was on its way.
It was time to inform Maria. Milano summoned her to his office and announced that her son had been found and rescued and would arrive safely in Salzburg the following morning.
She was ecstatic, astonished, tearful, incoherent.
"Oh, my God!" she cried. "You've found Johnnie! Is it true? Where is he? When will he get here? How did you find him?"
Milano tried to calm her down. He explained how his agent in Budapest, by great good fortune and much skill, had discovered the boy and smuggled him out of the country. She wanted to telephone him immediately, but Milano firmly refused permission. All phone lines passed through the Soviet zone, and all calls were tapped by the KGB. Besides, the Mozart had already left the station.
"The train gets in at five every morning. I'll pick you up in the hotel lobby at quarter of and drive you down to the station."
He ushered Maria, still incoherent with gratitude and astonishment, out of his office. The business of intelligence was often sordid and generally dull. It was very unusual indeed that Milano or any of his staff could do anything completely altruistic, could help people for no better reason than that they needed it, and correct one of the ghastly wrongs and crimes of the twentieth century. This time, through good fortune and skill, Army Intelligence had succeeded in restoring a family that had been broken up by the Nazis and saving a young man from the Hungarian Communists. It was all most gratifying.
The next morning, when the Mozart steamed into the station, Milano and Maria Torkey saw a young man in American uniform get off the train, accompanied by one of Hancock's agents from Vienna. It had been ten years since mother and son had been separated. The tides of war had swept her west to America and had passed over the boy's head in Hungary. All the same, there was never any doubt. Each recognized the other immediately, and Jim Milano stood to one side on the platform as the two embraced and wept together.
In the days after that touching reunion on the station platform, Jim Milano assumed that he had heard the last of Maria Torkey and her family and that she would return to New York with her son. He was therefore much astonished a month or so later when she reappeared at his office and invited him to lunch-together with his senior staff. She announced that the civil authorities, who had been quite unable to help her in the search for Johnnie, had done much better on another front. They had returned to her all the property confiscated by the Nazis in 1938, including a large villa in the Austrian Alps at Bad Aussee. This was where the party was to be held: she had arranged with a local restaurant to do the catering.
"There's only one problem," she said, "and it will amuse you. After my husband was murdered and I had escaped to England, the Nazis gave the villa to a prominent composer, Johann Dustoff. He was a great favorite of Dr. Goebbels and used to compose marches, fanfares, and things for Party rallies, odes to Hitler, that sort of thing. He moved into the villa with his wife and three children-and they're still there.
"Only in the meantime he got divorced and married another woman. That was during the war, when housing was a problem, even for senior Nazis, so the first wife got the divorce court to order the villa divided in two: Herr Dustoff got the upper floor, Frau Dustoff number one got the ground floor. She stayed there with her children while her ex-husband installed his new wife upstairs, and they've had a baby. Now they've given me my house back, but both families asked the court to let them stay for a while, to give them time to find new housing. It's even more difficult than it was during the war, and there's not much demand for Nazi composers these days.
The court gave them six months and ordered Frau Dustoff One out of the ground floor of the villa. So she moved upstairs, with the children, and joined her ex-husband and his new wife.
"So the man is living with two wives-and four children."
Milano was entranced: "Sounds like the plot of a comic opera," he said. "I'm sure it couldn't have happened to a nicer man."
"Anyway," Maria continued, "the two parts of the house are quite separate, and I'll expect you all for lunch on Sunday. I'll have a surprise for you, so don't be late."
It was a pleasant break from the usual drabness of Salzburg on the weekend. Milano and several of his colleagues, together with their wives and girlfriends, all drove out into the Alps at the appointed hour. The villa was high in the mountains, near the Hallstatter See, with a magnificent view of the mountains. It was a beautiful house, and the ground floor had a superb living room, dining room, kitchen, bath, and three bedrooms. All the Torkey family furniture, silver, pictures, and porcelain had survived intact. Maria said that she had been astonished and delighted to discover that the composer and his wife had taken such good care of her possessions-though, of course, they had believed for years that everything belonged to them.
/> The party was a great success. There were ten people there, and Maria was an excellent hostess. The caterers had provided for everything on a lavish scale, and the wine and brandy flowed abundantly. Her friend Frank Bozen was there, too, and at the end of lunch Maria made an announcement. The two of them were going to get married and move back to the United States. They would live in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where the Bozen family ran a ham curing and bacon business. The whole party stood up, cheered, and drank to the happy couple-and to Johnnie, who would have to learn English in a hurry. Milano wondered how a cosmopolitan Jewish lady like Maria Torkey, who had lived all her life in Budapest, Vienna, London, and New York, would adapt to the life of a ham producer in Arkansas. He kept his doubts to himself.
Then Maria made her second announcement: "I owe everything to Jim Milano and the rest of you, for finding Johnnie and getting him out of Hungary. So I'm arranging for you to have the use of this place for the rest of your time in Austria. You can use it for whatever purposes you want-and you'll have the whole of it in six months, when the Nazis move out from upstairs."
Milano protested that she was far too generous. Johnnie had been found by a series of lucky breaks, and he disclaimed all credit. Lending him the villa was quite unnecessary-she ought to sell it. Maria would not hear of a refusal. The villa was his for as long as he stayed in Austria: she would sell it when he left, unless Johnnie wanted to use it. Milano's colleagues were far less reticent than he. They praised Maria's generosity and insisted that he accept. The villa would be a very useful safe house for some of their clients, they said-and would serve admirably for R and R for the whole Operations Branch.
So for the next two years, Milano had the use of a luxurious, wellappointed villa in the Austrian Alps, a quite unexpected reward for a good deed. The house served as a hideout for a number of Soviet deserters and a useful conference center for planning sessions by the various departments of the American intelligence community. It was also very popular, as his colleagues had known it would be, among officers and agents in need of rest and recreation in the peace and tranquillity of the Alps.
Another incident that had little to do with intelligence occurred at this time. Milano's office first got wind of it from the daily press summary that was circulated to the various sections of the headquarters staff. The paper consisted of brief synopses of articles in the Austrian press. Pieces that caught the eye of one of the officers would then be produced and, if necessary, translated for him. No one had the time to plow through all the papers published in Vienna, but there was a constant stream of useful information to be gleaned from them. On this occasion, there was an item reporting that an American named Julius Hahn had been shot and killed by a Russian sentry. He had been driving near the border with the Soviet zone and had apparently taken a wrong turning. It had been pouring rain, and Hahn had failed to stop when challenged. The Russian soldier had then fired on the car, killing him.
The car had crashed, and a woman passenger, Emma Superina, had been injured and taken to a hospital in the Soviet zone. The article noted that she was a Yugoslav refugee living in a camp at Sankt Johann. There were several large camps in that town, and she was housed in one chiefly occupied by Yugoslav royalists who had escaped at the end of the war. The operations staff noted the incident with no particular interest. It was apparently an accident and would be dealt with by the Allied and Austrian police forces.
Then John Burkel, the CIC station chief in Salzburg, got a call from the American consul in Salzburg, Patrick Connelly. The consul was most anxious for news of Frau Superina's health and safety. He requested that the CIC should keep him informed of all developments. It was not an entirely unusual request: Burkel worked closely with Connelly on the endless problems of refugees' visas. Burkel asked if Milano knew of any connection between this Frau Superina and any U.S. intelligence operation. There was none.
That afternoon, a second call came in concerning the lady. This time it was the commander of American troops in Vienna, Major General Robert Fredericks, who wanted to be informed of Frau Superina's condition. He was most anxious that the Soviets be persuaded to release her immediately. Fredericks was a distinguished soldier. He had commanded a division in Italy during the war and had taken part with it in the invasion of southern France, Operation Anvil, in August 1944. He had led his division up France and into Germany in the last great Western offensive. He had been posted to Vienna in 1948, when most of the American military brass had moved to Salzburg during the Berlin Airlift. He had been given command of the garrison that was left to represent the United States in the encircled capital.
Then a third request for news of Frau Superina came in, this time from Colonel Bixell, the senior Army Intelligence officer in Vienna. He had been asked by the CIA for any information he had on the lady. The agency had just come into existence and was beginning to establish itself around the world and had set up a bureau in Vienna. - - - -- - - - - -- - - - - -
Milano and his staff were greatly puzzled by all this high-level interest in a Yugoslav refugee. There was a mystery here. They were intelligence officers, and their curiosity was aroused. If no one wanted to tell them what this was all about, they would see if they could find out for themselves. John Burkel was told to send one of his agents to Sankt Johann to investigate Frau Superina, and messages were sent to Allied intelligence operations in the British and French zones and to the American outstations in Vienna and Graz, asking them all if they had anything in their records that might be useful.
The first to report back was Burkel's man, who had been to Sankt Johann and inquired there. He had found that Frau Superina was a registered Yugoslav refugee at one of the camps. She was a royalist and claimed that her husband had been killed fighting for Draia Mihajlovic's Chetniks, who had started as a resistance movement against the Germans in 1941 but later in the war had been allied with the invaders. In 1945, when Tito's partisans had started wreaking vengeance on the Chetniks, she had fled to Austria. She had obtained a job as a seamstress at a dressmaker's shop in Sankt Johann. The agent said that by all accounts she was a strikingly beautiful woman, aged thirty-nine, who was a model citizen in every way. No one knew anything more about her.
As for the unfortunate Julius Hahn, who had been killed by the trigger-happy Russian sentry, he was an ordinary enough American bureaucrat, a member of the International Refugee Organization. The two had been dating occasionally, and at the time of the accident had been returning to the refugee camp from an evening spent in a local restaurant. Burkel's agent could find no evidence that either of them had any connection at all with any intelligence service.
The French in Vienna and the American CIC in Graz reported that they had nothing on anyone named Superina. The British at Klagenfurt said they knew nothing of Emma Superina, but that in one of the camps in their zone there was a Yugoslav couple named Superina who were accompanied by a nephew, a boy of nineteen, named Michael. They were all ardent royalists, and the man had applied for visas to South Africa. The boy claimed that his parents were dead and that he had no relatives other than his uncle and aunt. Archie Morehouse, who was head of the British Field Security Service in Austria (the equivalent of the American CIC), reported that the U.S. Embassy in Vienna and the American consul in Salzburg had inquired as to the welfare of the Superina family. The consul, Patrick Connelly, had telephoned Morehouse himself and told him that he was particularly interested in young Michael Superina and would be most grateful if his application for a visa could be helped along.
Evidently there was some connection between Frau Superina and young Michael: it was quite beyond coincidence that the same high American officials should be interested in both of them if they were not related. Milano still had no idea what the solution to his mystery was, but he was making progress. Then came one of the most remarkable episodes of stupidity that he ever encountered.
His operations chief in Vienna, Park Hancock, reported that Frau Superina, whose injuries were not serious, had been m
oved from the country hospital where she had been taken after the accident. She had been sent to a civilian hospital in the Soviet sector of Vienna. Hancock informed General Fredericks of the transfer, and Fredericks promptly sent an official request to the Soviet High Command that she be transferred to an American hospital. After the usual delay, the Soviets denied the request, saying that they needed the woman for their inquiries into the shooting incident. The general immediately summoned Hancock to his office. When Hancock arrived, he found Fredericks examining a street map of Vienna that was spread out on his desk. He pointed to the hospital where the woman was being treated and demanded that Hancock discover what room she was in and what security arrangements the Soviets used there. The general said that he was told that the building was surrounded by a six-foot brick wall. Hancock was to have the wall inspected and check that there was no barbed wire or broken glass on the top.
Hancock promised to have the information within two days. He had many agents in the Soviet sector and would have no trouble checking up on a hospital. At the appointed hour, he was back in the general's office, reporting that Frau Superina was in Room 102. She had it to herself. It was on the ground floor, on a corridor on the outside of the building, facing Wahringerstrasse. The wall was two meters high, and there were no other obstacles. The Soviets usually had two sentries at the hospital's main entrance, apparently because there were often prisoners or military cases there.
Hancock made his report and left. He was puzzled at the sort of information the general had requested. He considered the possibility that the man might be planning a rescue but concluded that the idea was too preposterous. Even a Regular Army officer could not be that stupid.
Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line Page 25
