Truman's Spy: A Cold War Spy Thriller

  TRUMAN’S SPY

  A Cold War Thriller:

  America at Midcentury

  By Noel Hynd

  (February 2020 edition)

  {21320-k}

  "We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail... J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”

  Harry S. Truman

  PROLOGUE 1944-1945

  During the summer of 1944, with the Second World War in its final year, President Franklin Roosevelt returned from a trip to the Pacific and spoke to the nation by radio from the Bremerton, Washington, U.S. Navy Yard near Seattle. He suffered an attack of angina pectoris, a severe symptom of coronary disease, midway through his talk. He clutched his chest at the podium and barely made it through his speech. Few of his listeners noticed what had happened and the press agreed not to report the incident.

  Six days later, Roosevelt met with Senator Harry S. Truman on the White House lawn. The two men had lunch in shirtsleeves. By this time Truman had been chosen to be the President’s Vice Presidential running mate that fall, replacing Henry Wallace.

  It was one of the few times the men met in person during the campaign. After the luncheon, the press asked Senator Truman about the President and his health. “He’s still the leader,” Truman answered. “Don’t let anyone kid you. He’s sharp as a briar.”

  Privately, Truman wasn’t as sunny. “He had the pallor of death about him,” Truman confided to friends. During the luncheon, the President’s speech had been slurred. When he had tried to pour cream into his coffee, he had missed the cup altogether.

  Still, like many terminally ill people, Roosevelt refused to acknowledge his mortality. The Presidential campaign went on and the Roosevelt-Truman ticket defeated Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, and Charles Brinkman, 402 Electoral College votes to 92. In January of 1945, Harry Truman became Vice President of the United States.

  Eighty-two days later, Truman was presiding in the Senate when he brought the gavel down on the day’s business at 4:46 PM He then walked through the gray corridors of the Capitol and arrived at the office of House Speaker Sam Rayburn. There, at the end of each session, legislators would gather to sample Rayburn’s private supply of bourbon. Before Truman could sit down, Rayburn advised him that Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, had phoned. Truman was wanted at the White House. Truman excused himself and promised to be back shortly. He knew the President was out of town. He had no idea why he was being summoned.

  Truman went to his office to pick up his hat, and then headed for his car. He skipped his Secret Service escort. His driver took him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where Eleanor Roosevelt was waiting for him in a second floor sitting room.

  The First Lady rose to meet Harry Truman and put her arm around him. She spoke softly.

  “Harry,” she said. “The President is dead.”

  She explained that Franklin Roosevelt had died after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia.

  Mr. Truman's first reaction was to express concern for Mrs. Roosevelt.

  “Eleanor, is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

  She shook her head and answered. "Harry, is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now.”

  Stunned and stone-faced, the members of Roosevelt’s cabinet who were in Washington assembled in the Cabinet Room of the White House. At six thirty-five that evening, Harry S. Truman took the oath of office as the thirty-third President of the United States. Only then was the news released to the public, as well as the millions of American troops in combat zones around the world.

  Shortly after taking the oath of office, the new President met with reporters.

  “Boys, if you ever pray,” Truman said, “pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had all fallen on me.”

  Ironically, in spite of the new President’s seemingly all-inclusive simile, even more had just fallen on him than he could possibly have imagined.

  CHAPTER 1

  There wasn't a mile of the county roads that he already didn't know by heart, Chief of Police Mark O'Connell thought to himself. It was mid-December of 1949. The former special agent of the FBI had been in this new job for less than two months. It was strange how things worked out, he pondered, as he listened to the squeak of the well-worn windshield wipers on his police cruiser. He had always thought that he would retire from the FBI at age sixty with high honors and accolades. Then he and his beloved Helen could enjoy their retirement. Maybe they would go to Florida, he had always thought. Maybe they would buy a small motel and spend a busy, profitable retirement in God's bright sunlight.

  Instead, he had been hounded out of the Bureau. His departure had been sudden, arbitrary, and - to his way of thinking - grossly unfair. Not that he had had any recourse other than to leave. Then, shortly after his enforced retirement, he had accepted an offer from the town of Peterton, Oregon, to become their chief of police.

  Peterton was a friendly, rainy community of forty-six hundred people, fifty-two miles southeast of Portland. It was populated primarily by the descendants of liberal New England Protestants who had migrated from the East Coast to the West across the northern United States late in the nineteenth century. And it was a predictably amiable blue-collar sort of place, complete with two gas stations, a hardware store, a general store, three groceries, a lunch counter, a restaurant where children were always welcome, and a branch of one of the smaller state banks.

  The Dobbs Lumber Company, which operated a sawmill five miles away in Harrisville, was the main local employer. Peterton was a place of good hunting, great fishing, and little crime. It was not at all a bad place to live or to be a police officer, particularly if a man liked his relaxation.

  The previous police chief, a gregarious, well-liked soul named Bill Lucy, had grown old gracefully in his job. Chief Lucy had retired after twenty-six years, having never seen a gun fired in anger. What more could a peaceable former FBI agent want?

  He slowed down his car on State Highway 45. There was a truck pulled to the side of the road, its lights flashing. Its right rear tire was on the highway's soft shoulders.

  O'Connell pulled to a stop. He switched on the flashing red lights on the roof of his car, a signal of caution to any vehicle approaching from ahead or behind. He stared at the empty cab of the truck. There had been no crash. The truck was intact. Its engine was running. So what was wrong?

  Recently O'Connell had entertained a lot of strange ideas. When he had started this new job, for example, he had had the feeling that he was… well, being watched. Or followed. Or something. It was instinct more than anything, a sixth sense developed during his fourteen years of fieldwork for the Bureau and three years as a soldier in Europe. It was something he could not shake.

  His wife, Helen, told him he was creating worries for himself.

  "We're better off here," she said. "A good job. A respectable community. Better for the kids." They had two children, a boy, four, and a girl, eighteen months.

  “No excitement and no challenge," he had countered.

  "We have a nicer home here than we've ever had before," Helen said, putting things in perspective. "And you have better working hours. You have dinner with your family every night. If we need extra money, I'll get a job. The lumber company needs bookkeepers."

  "My wife work?" he had asked. "No, ma'am. Not unless I'm dead and buried." The rain swept into his face that night as he stepped from the car, a he
avy flashlight in his left hand. He recognized the truck as belonging to one of the logging camps.

  “Why then…? Who then…?”

  He walked to the front of the truck and stood in its headlights for a moment. That creepy, eerie feeling returned. He now knew he was being watched. He knew he was under observation by a pair of unseen eyes that very moment. He put his right hand on the stock of his service revolver and…

  A man's voice called unexpectedly out of the darkness.

  "Mark!"

  O'Connell squinted toward the woods. He felt his heart kicking in his chest. He saw a movement and began to draw his weapon.

  "Hey, Mark? Take it easy, would you?"

  O'Connell shined his flashlight toward the voice. A bearded trucker stepped from behind a clump of small trees. O'Connell recognized him. He was a big, hulking man named Walt Kowell. Kowell lived in Hibbing, the next town toward Portland, and worked for Dobbs Lumber.

  Kowell's rain slicker was disheveled. His hand was at the fly of his trousers.

  "Can't a man take a leak around here without someone calling the cops?"

  O'Connell felt a surge of relief. His pistol had been a quarter of the way out of its holster. He pressed it back in.

  "Kind of jumpy, huh?" Kowell asked. "I don't think Bill Lucy drew his iron in thirty years."

  "I'm not Bill Lucy," O'Connell snapped. "And that's no place to leave a vehicle on a rainy night."

  O'Connell saw Kowell recoil. The man's bemused expression vanished. The rain poured down upon both of them.

  "I saw your truck," O'Connell said in a more conciliatory tone. "So I stopped. Couldn't you wait till you got home?"

  Kowell shrugged sheepishly. "Not today."

  Another car went slowly by, framing them in its headlights as it passed. O'Connell waved the car on, indicating that there was no problem.

  "Come on, Walt," O'Connell said. "Get your rig out of here before someone skids into you. That's all I'm worried about."

  In another three minutes Kowell's truck had disappeared down the road. O'Connell turned back toward town. It was six o’clock in the evening. He had completed his drive along the roads immediately surrounding Peterton, a trip he made at the end of every tour of duty. Now he could go home to dinner. If anyone had a problem, the police chief could be reached at home. Or one of his two deputies could put in the time to solve it.

  The nearly fatal problem for Mark O'Connell, however, was having too much time to think. At age forty-two, he had recently fallen into the habit of examining his life in assiduous detail. He had put in all those years in federal law enforcement and he had fought with distinction during the war. His résumé sparkled. Until recently all of his career decisions had looked good.

  He had served the FBI in the Atlanta office as well as in San Francisco, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Seattle. Up until 1949 he had never had a blemish on either professional record, military or Bureau. But in 1949 funny things began to happen.

  Those funny things, as he called them, were now the matters he struggled to put out of his mind. There had been the Great Handsaw Caper - as it had disparagingly become known in the Bureau - at the Krieger-McGhie Army base in Spokane, Washington. There had been the Great Wobbly Witch Hunt in Tacoma, a massive waste of time fully sanctioned by the FBI. And finally there had been “Operation Morning Glory,” a Bureau-sanctioned investigation which had stretched from San Francisco all the way up to British Columbia. All of these, as the special agents liked to recall, were full-fledged wild goose chases.

  But Mark O'Connell's instincts told him that somewhere among these three cases he had been onto something - something so subtle or so complex that even he, with all his experience, couldn't recognize it. And whatever it had been, it had made him a marked man.

  Helen told him repeatedly that he was imagining things. She even suggested that he should see a psychiatrist. "Professional counseling" is what she called it. After fourteen years of stress, who could blame a man for needing help sorting things out? A lot of soldiers needed just such treatment, and not even that much of it, when they had come home from Japan and Germany. No one held anything against them.

  "I'm sure the citizens of Peterton would be pleased to know that their chief of police is seeing a head doctor," O'Connell answered. No, he wouldn't go. But temporarily he discovered a form of therapy.

  At an army surplus store in Seattle, O'Connell found an old Dictaphone with a generous supply of recording reels. So instead of talking to a psychiatrist, he sat at home many nights and talked to himself. He stayed up well into the black hours of early morning on more occasions than he could count. When there was nothing else to do, and when the recent past seemed a more oppressive burden than he could bear, Mark O'Connell sat in the solitude of his cellar at an old workbench by the oil burner. He sipped local Oregonian beer from long-necked amber bottles and put his thoughts on the Dictaphone.

  He carefully marked each reel and stashed the full ones in a tool chest. This went on for a month. Then the horrible feeling gripped him again, starting in early December. He was possessed by this unrelenting sense that the more he talked into the Dictaphone, the more scrutiny he was under. After that, every night had its own madness. He became obsessive about pouring his thoughts into the recorder, starting with the Handsaw case, moving through the Wobblies, then concluding with “Morning Glory.”

  As he spoke, more thoughts came back to him. Little details that he had never put into his final reports at the Bureau, tiny observations that hadn't even merited being set in writing in his notebook.

  During the days his nerves were taut, his expectations askew. He began to see the signposts of every ordinary working day - a truck traveling too slowly through town, a telephone that rang unanswered, a neighbor's light flashing on and off for five seconds - in apocalyptic terms, the handwriting of a dire conspiracy against him.

  Once, sitting alone in his basement at two forty in the morning, instinct told him to turn. He did. His gaze rose and quickly settled upon the dark two-paned cellar window at the summit of the cellar wall about ten feet from where he sat. For a moment a bolt of fear shot through him. He was sure that through the darkness the face of a crouching man had been staring back at him.

  He yelled, whirled in his swivel chair, and pulled a forty-five-caliber pistol from his drawer. He charged up the stairs and bolted through the living room of his home. He threw on the outdoor floodlight and burst outside through the storm door.

  He stood on his doorstep, a preposterous figure in bedclothes, slippers, robe, and handgun, perusing a quiet, misty night in the peaceful Northwest. He stood motionless for several seconds. There was not a rustle of a footfall on the wet leaves, not a car engine, not a crunch of a branch under a shoe.

  He turned and reentered the house. In the dim kitchen he bellowed with fright a second time when he felt a human hand fall on his arm. He jumped.

  "Mark! Mark!" It was Helen.

  "What in God's name…?" she began. She stared at the gun. "I heard you scream," she said.

  "I thought I saw someone," he said. "Someone was looking through the cellar window." She thought about it for several seconds. Quietly he closed the kitchen door and extinguished the outside light.

  "Did you see anyone out there?" she asked.

  "No."

  Helen exuded a long sigh. Then she reached towards her husband and held him. O'Connell clicked on the safety catch of the pistol and pushed the weapon onto the kitchen table. He held his wife firmly.

  "I wish you'd talk to someone," she said softly. Several seconds passed.

  "Okay," he said at length. "After Christmas. In January."

  "You mean it? You promise?"

  "Yes," he said. And he meant it. Helen was right, as wives so often were. It was time to get help.

  But was he imagining things?

  The next morning he installed new bolts to the doors of his home. As for the basement window, he placed a cardboard screen across it. No one - re
al or imagined -would be peering through.

  That same evening he was again in his basement talking into the recorder. Okay, so it was nutty, but he felt better making a spoken record. And as for the recorded reels themselves, the more than two dozen that he had now completed, there was no use leaving them sitting around. He placed them all in an orange crate, removed a loose panel from the basement wall, and hid the entire collection.

  For the next few days, Christmas took his thoughts in a more pleasant direction. On a day off he took Helen to Portland to see the holiday lights and do some shopping. Helen bought some toys for the children and an electric razor for him. He slipped away for a few minutes to buy his wife a wool sweater, plus some eau de toilette - the new fad from France - from one of the perfume counters. Even after eleven years of marriage, he wasn't sure what Helen wore. But it smelled nice on the salesgirl, so he bought it. It would soon be Christmas and he wanted something nice for the woman he loved.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the third week of December 1949, Washington, D.C. was shivering through its coldest winter in a dozen years. Ice hung from the cherry trees along the Potomac. A mantle of snow adorned the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. Even Pennsylvania Avenue, where traffic crawled in both directions, seemed more like New Hampshire than the center of the American government.

  In the White House during the waning days of the old decade, things were warmer. Sixty-three-year-old President Harry S. Truman dug in for an increasingly acrimonious battle with the Eighty-first Congress. He fought with the nation's legislators over everything from increased social security benefits to public housing to his scaling back of military expenses in the post-war era.

  If Truman looked for solace in the tide of world events, he found none. In 1949 the President had succeeded in breaking the eighteen-month Soviet blockade of West Berlin with massive American airlifts of food and medical supplies. But Joseph Stalin was freshly invigorated at home. He had so thoroughly terrified the heads of his puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe that he merrily launched a new generation of purge trials in Russia.