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  Return to Berlin

  A Spy Story

  By Noel Hynd

  © 2019 by Noel Hynd

  For

  Patricia

  With appreciation and love

  “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses

  that moment of experience from which to look back or

  from which to look ahead.”

  Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

  *

  “Everything must be paid for.”

  Thomas Mann

  Chapter 1

  Lisbon, Portugal

  December 3, 1942

  Looking up from his game of dominos in the airport lounge in Lisbon, William Thomas Cochrane, an American traveling on a false passport, noted the activity around the boarding gate for his flight to Geneva. Winter was the rainy season in Portugal. But the mid-afternoon storm that had pounded the Portuguese capital had now continued along its way.

  At the airport, skies were clearing, as Cochrane could see through the big glass windows in lounge. The sun had returned and his journey to Geneva would soon continue. The aircraft, an American-made DC-3, sat on the tarmac in the near distance, waiting.

  Cochrane looked back down to his game of dominos. His opponent was a man named Cambulat. The latter sat in a dark suit across from Cochrane and served as his worthy opponent. Cambulat had a Turkish passport. Cochrane knew because he had seen it. They spoke French with each other and had a small audience of one.

  Behind Cambulat stood a man named Valdez, a Spaniard travelling on a diplomatic passport. Ever vigilant, Cochrane had noted that, too, during check-in for the flight. A passport these days didn’t prove who a man was, but it did indicate who a man claimed to be, which could also be informative. For someone like Cochrane, an agent of the American FBI, now attached to the newly created Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, that was as good a place as any to start.

  For a few minutes, there had been a second member of the small audience. A thin man in a long coat stopped by to peer over Cambulat’s shoulder. He watched the game. Perhaps he had been attracted by a conversation in his native language. He exchanged a few words with Cambulat.

  The man had been reading a censored copy of L’édition, so Cochrane pegged him as possibly a Frenchman.

  Cochrane took his accent to be from the south of France. Cochrane tried to draw him into conversation, but the man deflected the attempt. It was amazing how much a man or woman might reveal in a casual conversation at an airport. But the Frenchman smiled and walked away. He didn’t speak again.

  To Cochrane’s left sat Skordeno, a grouchy American who read a three day old edition of The Times of London. Skordeno had turned an icy shoulder to Cochrane the entire time in the lounge. On the other side of the small lounge sat two women. They looked Portuguese to Cochrane but he knew he could have been wrong. They spoke quietly between themselves, voices no higher than whispers. Cochrane couldn’t catch the language. They were well dressed. Probably wealthy, he speculated.

  Portugal remained neutral in the ongoing world war, but the country was a nest of spies, defectors, profiteers, and saboteurs. All walls had ears and concealed mini-cameras were everywhere. So one tried to never draw undue attention to oneself and one didn’t remark aloud on newspaper headlines or accounts of battles.

  More than three years earlier, Adolf Hitler had attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. England and France had declared war on Germany. It was not just the beginning of the Second World War, but also a unique time in Portuguese history. The Portuguese head of state, dictator António de Oliveira Salazar had come to power in 1932 as a fascist and an ally of Francisco Franco in neighboring Spain. The son of a small rural freeholder, Salazar was a failed seminarian and ex-economics professor and an oddball among the European dictators. He was also off to a good start in World War Two.

  In Lisbon, just a few kilometers from the busy airport, Salazar straddled a line every day between Francoist Spain and Portugal’s old ally, democratic England. His concern was to preserve the regime and to maintain the Empire. He knew that any slight mistake could compromise his national independence. Neutrality appeared to be the best way to guarantee the strategic objectives of the Portuguese foreign policy.

  There was a big casino down the coast in Estoril where the roulette wheels and card games never stopped. There was plenty of displaced royalty to keep things going, side by side with desperate refugees, grandstanding opportunists, and beautiful women selling sexual favors to put together money for exit permits. In America, the film Casablanca had just opened, but Lisbon was more Casablanca than Casablanca. Even the airport was alive with spies, smugglers, informants, and all sorts of shady people trying to remember the details of their fictitious new identities.

  Both the Allies and the Axis powers operated openly in Portugal. Shots were rarely fired on Portuguese soil. That was the unwritten rule. The country, and specifically the capital, was a conduit point, a place to come from and to go to. Intelligence was gathered here, but the dirty daily business of killing took place elsewhere.

  In the airport lounge, Cambulat turned over a final domino tile. He looked at it and tried to match it to a piece on the playing surface. But Cochrane’s tiles had blocked his moves, as was common in a domino endgame. The Turk shook his head and smiled.

  He again spoke French with his opponent. “Ah, I concede. You win again.”

  The two men, strangers until the flight had been delayed, shook hands.

  “Another game?” Cambulat asked.

  “Oh, I think I’ve had quite enough,” Cochrane said with good humor. “But thank you for helping me pass the time.”

  “It was a pleasure, sir,” said Cambulat. “You’re an excellent player. I do envy you your set of tiles, however. Do you always travel with them?”

  “I do now and will in the future. I’ve always coveted a handsome old set,” Cochrane replied. “I travel. I have much time to myself. If I tire of reading, I play solitaire or with a stranger or with friends. Or in your case, a new friend.”

  “I’m flattered,” said the Turk. “You have an excellent set of antique tiles. Have they been in your family for some time?”

  “These?” Cochrane indicated his game pieces and the case they were kept in. He laughed.

  “Not at all,” he answered. “I had some time on my hands yesterday in Lisbon and went to the flea market. Mercado de Santa Clara. It’s not far from the center of the city. I found this intriguing set and purchased it for a very good price. You are free to examine them.”

  The Turk picked up a tile. The game pieces were ebony and bone with a fine patina of age and wear. Cochrane allowed his new friend to examine the set. Methodically, Cochrane placed the remaining pieces into a wooden box with a sliding top. The box served as the carrier. There were English and Arabic inscriptions on the box. In faded lettering, there was an English language street address in Cairo. There was co-equal lettering in Arabic, but the latter was not a language that Cochrane understood.

  Cambulat handed the final piece back to Cochrane.

  Cochrane put it into the case and slid the lid in place as he spoke. “This particular set is perhaps a hundred years old, carved and created in North Africa. Egypt it would appear, perhaps around the time of the American civil war. The 1860s. The tiles are carved from animal bones, probably a camel’s, inlaid with ebony. Quite beautiful, don’t you think? ”

  “Very much so,” said the Turk. “Fascinating, sir.”

  The two men shared a handshake and a laugh. The Frenchman looking over Cambulat’s shoulder smiled slightly, turned and sat down. Skordeno moved away in a huff.

  A steward of the airline, a stout man in a suit, emerged from the other side of the boardi
ng gate. He had a flight manifest in his hand. At about the same time, two men in Portuguese civil aviation uniforms, the captain and co-pilot of the impending flight, appeared from a private lounge in the terminal.

  The aviators checked in by signing the flight documents in the steward’s hand. They continued through the gate. The steward announced that the flight would depart in thirty minutes. Boarding would begin in ten. The crew was hoping to get the flight aloft before another row of thunderstorms moved through the area.

  The passengers rose to their feet. They stretched and gathered their baggage.

  Boarding went smoothly. They walked to the plane on the tarmac, escorted by two uniformed Lisbon police officers. Fourteen passengers boarded. Cochrane counted them. Then he took his assigned seat in the fifth row at a window. The seat next to him remained empty.

  There was a shelf above his seat. He took a book from his one travel bag and slid the bag onto the shelf. The bag contained his box of dominos. There was a heavy mesh netting which pulled down and buttoned tight to deter valises from flying loose in flight.

  Cochrane took location inventory of the other passengers: the two women who were together, Valdez, the Frenchman from the Midi, Cambulat and Skordeno. He settled into his seat. He already wished this mission was over. He had bad feelings about it. Hyper-jitters. They were getting worse.

  At the last minute, a reed-thin scholarly looking man with round Lenin-style glasses and sandy hair boarded the aircraft. He carried a briefcase, walked to the front and spoke to a woman who was the air hostess. Her reaction to him was cordial but chilly. The man then returned to the rear of the aircraft near the exit and took a seat.

  The man’s appearance surprised Cochrane because he thought he had heard the gate shut behind them when the original fourteen passengers started for the aircraft. So this last man must have been a very late arrival. But it was wartime, he reminded himself. Allowances were sometime made, some ominous, some innocent. So now there were fifteen passengers. Cochrane had trained himself to keep track of small details. Often, they added up to something significant.

  The plane was warm. Cochrane removed his coat and loosened his necktie. The plane’s engine powered on. The propellers started up and soon the DC-3 taxied to a runway. In another few minutes it was aloft over Portugal. It proceeded northeast over Francoist Spain.

  For the next two hours, the Portuguese airliner rumbled and bounced in a turbulent late afternoon sky at twenty-thousand feet. Eventually it was above the south of France. Cochrane carried a flask with moonshine whiskey in it. The booze had been a gift from a US Army contact for such occasions. He made use of it en route.

  More than halfway to Geneva, the aircraft adjusted its cruising speed. The change was abrupt. Everyone noticed. The airplane turned starboard. Seconds after that, it hooked into a pattern that suggested an impending controlled descent.

  Now the passengers looked around nervously. With a war raging all over the world, much less on almost all fronts on the European continent, there was plenty of cause for anxiety. A wave of it rippled through the seating area.

  The one stewardess on board emerged from a seat in the forward section of the aircraft. She moved from row to row to advise passengers of a change in flight plans.

  Cochrane pushed back the beige curtain at his window. The aircraft was in cloud cover. It was impossible to see the land below. There was only the whiteness of the clouds. Then his heart skipped and his worst fears morphed into a horrible realization. From one gap in the clouds to the next, he could discern the contours of a Messerschmidt about a hundred feet off the tip of the wing of the DC-3.

  It was flying as an escort as well as a not-so-subtle threat. The flight had been intercepted.

  Cochrane stared at the fighter plane. He could see the ominous straight-armed cross that was the emblem of the Luftwaffe. The final moments of his life were possibly coming into focus. The vision riveted him with anxiety: the compact German fighter plane with its single pilot, machine gun, neat little wings and a despicable swastika beneath the pilot’s window.

  He forgot about the stewardess for several seconds. Suddenly he felt her hand on his shoulder. He turned sharply, looking up into the frightened eyes of a young Portuguese woman.

  “There’s also another German plane on the other side of us,” she said to him in French, barely above a whisper. “We have been ordered to land at Marseille.”

  “Pourquoi?” Cochrane answered.

  The flight attendant shrugged.

  “Does this happen often?” Cochrane asked, remaining in French.

  “For me, never before,” she said.

  She crossed herself. Cochrane broke a sweat.

  A thousand thoughts went through his mind. There was little time to process them. He reckoned that they were maybe twenty minutes flying time from Marseille, the rough sprawling industrial and port city on the Mediterranean. More recently, it was a stronghold of the pro-Vichy collaborationist government. For an American spy, Marseille was as hostile a place as any in Europe.

  No matter how he looked at it, this was not good.

  Chapter 2

  Marseille, Vichy France

  December 1942

  Twenty-two minutes later the DC-3 bounced onto the tarmac at Marseille, a three point landing with the rear wheel last. The aircraft slowed on the landing strip. The plane turned toward the terminal. Cochrane saw several police cars waiting. As the aircraft moved closer to the debarkation area, he could see German soldiers, some with machine guns, standing with French police who had sidearms. The security squad was waiting for something important. There was at least one passenger on they wanted from this flight. Cochrane didn’t see how it could be anyone else.

  Cochrane kept his eyes on the tarmac. The reception committee was at least twenty men, all armed. German uniforms. Vichy French. Police. Soldiers. Ominously, there were four in civilian uniforms.

  He drew a breath. He was on the ground in enemy territory. He thought of his mission, his life, and his wife Laura back New York. Now his only real hope was to do nothing except pray.

  The plane stopped. There was some fumbling and banging at the access door to the plane. The door was behind him. He could hear it open. The stairs folded out. The ramp thudded onto the runway. There was barrage of agitated voices in French and German.

  Cochrane prepared for the worst.

  He heard heavy footsteps boarding the plane. Cochrane turned.

  One man in civilian clothes boarded and held a Mauser upright and across his chest. He stood at attention guarding the door. Two others, also in civilian attire, boarded the plane and eyed the passengers. One walked to the front of the plane.

  Cochrane knew Gestapo thugs when he saw them. It was quickly apparent who was in command. It was the last man who had boarded the aircraft.

  The man was short, stocky, and heavy. When Cochrane heard his German, he recognized his accent and speech to be working class Bavarian: reduced speed, a lazy tongue and an avalanche of massacred consonants. Like almost all Gestapo, the man wore a civilian suit as he carried out his duties.

  Cochrane had encountered such men on his previous mission to Germany. He knew that many of them were not even Nazis. But they were the ultimate ruthless bureaucrats who had no issues or hesitations when they carried out Hitler’s orders. He knew to avoid them if possible and be very careful with them if they couldn’t be avoided. Most had been recruited from local police units that had existed during the Weimar Republic and then been broken up with the creation of the SS.

  The man wore a hat. For a moment he removed it so that it wouldn’t be brushed by the aircraft’s low ceiling. His haircut was German old style: the sides shaved, a few short hairs on the top and toward the forehead. He looked like an evil jack o’lantern.

  One of the man’s assistants made a small slip. He addressed him in a subdued voice as, “Kriminalkommissar Wesselmann.” A violation of protocol: Gestapo agents were to keep their actual identity a secret except
from superiors. But Cochrane caught it. The title, Kriminalkommissar, confirmed that the man was Gestapo.

  Wesselmann. Now Cochrane had a name to go with the face.

  And what a face. It was a face that would stay with Cochrane for the remainder of his life. Wesselmann’s face was hard and expressionless, slashed by a set of thin cold lips. He had heavy eyelids above small brown eyes and a flat protruding forehead.

  Cochrane looked more carefully. His hands were the broad square hands of a German peasant, broad paws with thick long fingers. He looked like a strangler. And if he was Gestapo, he probably was a strangler. The Gestapo was a cult of obedient force. There wasn’t a man or woman within the organization who didn’t hate anything that smacked of art, wit, creativity or intelligence. Combined with an adulation of Hitler and his National Socialist Party, it was a loathsome mixture.

  Again, Cochrane knew things from experience: some of these lugs from Bavaria and southern Germany were among the worst. Once, at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich in 1938, Cochrane had eavesdropped on a trio of men at an adjoining table whom he took to be Gestapo.

  “The intellectuals of Germany and France,” the boozed-up leader of the group had suggested to the others, “should be sent down a Polish coal mine and blown up.”

  “Along with the stupid Poles who work in the mines!” roared another of the group.

  They all laughed and drank to the sentiment. It hadn’t been meant as a joke. It had been meant as the start of a wish list.

  The Portuguese captain emerged from his cockpit. He looked apprehensive. The flight attendant stood to the side. She looked stricken. In conversation with the Gestapo agent who had boarded, the pilot nodded obediently. The co-pilot was a smart young man. He said nothing. He kept his distance and avoided eye contact.

  The man in the suit held up a badge in a gloved hand. Cochrane was correct: Gestapo. The flight was a Portuguese airliner going to Geneva. German fighters had forced the plane down in Vichy France. The Gestapo officer spoke German and assumed everyone would understand.