Truman's Spy: A Cold War Spy Thriller Page 3

  When he left the military with an honorable discharge in early 1946, he was restless, as well as haunted, by the war. His experiences were never far from his thoughts. At a VFW meeting, he ran into a retired colonel who had commanded his unit in Sicily. The colonel told him that the FBI was hiring.

  "The work can be interesting, and the employer isn't likely to go out of business," the colonel had said. "If you decide not to make a career of it, it still won't look bad on your résumé. I know some people, Tom. I'll write you a letter of recommendation."

  Buchanan entered the Bureau's training school, in April 1946. A fourteen-month tour in Chicago was his first assignment where, by chance, he occasionally partnered with an old Army buddy, a fellow officer whom everyone called “The Bear.” The latter, a fellow officer, had also served in Italy and had also joined the Feds. It was a pleasant and fortuitous reunion.

  Buchanan did not have the commanding physical presence or bulk that typified many enforcers of American law, nor did he have the traditional gang-busting mentality for which the "G-men" had become the heroes of the gullible public and tabloid press. But he did have an outstanding analytical intellect, a persistent nature and a remarkable instinct for analyzing a crime scene. This he coupled with an easy, calm, honest manner which was his basic nature, though those who knew him best knew he had his flashpoints: he could resort to quick explosive physical force when pushed too far. The overall equation inspired confidence in people and made them willing to talk to him. As a result, for his age, Buchanan was as fine a detective as the Bureau had to offer.

  And yet, and yet.

  He also felt unsettled, a man in transition, but from where to where? The war had deeply disturbed him. He found few people he could discuss it with other than fellow veterans. There was pain that he felt but couldn’t describe, things that had happened in combat that he chose not to remember, and faces of enemy soldiers, some alive, some dead, that he wished would go away but which he knew never would. All of this, he battled every day. Socially, he was normal and perfectly presentable. Privately, he felt his psyche was in tatters and the war had turned him into a reclamation project. But if that was the case, so it was the case with most of the world and almost everyone who had survived the fighting. So he kept it all inside him, as much as he could.

  CHAPTER 4

  Buchanan reached for a fountain pen to sign the report on the land fraud case. It was ten minutes before six on a Thursday evening. Buchanan could call this a day. Not only had he completed a laudable piece of work, but he could also go home. The daily "he's gone" message had buzzed through the Bureau's corridors at four forty-five, signaling the departure of J. Edgar and his handsome, ever-present partner, Clyde Tolson. Tolson was now also an assistant director of the Bureau.

  A few seconds later the intercom rang on his desk. Buchanan hadn't even replaced the cap on the fountain pen.

  "Yes?" he answered.

  "Tom," said a voice. Buchanan recognized it as Frank Lerrick's. "Tom, come down here, please. Something important has come up.”

  Moments later Buchanan walked into Lerrick's office. Buchanan found the graying, craggy-faced, sixty-two-year-old assistant director sitting at his desk. Standing nearby was a wiry, sharply featured, dark-haired man in a gray suit. He was forty-year-old William Roth, chief of the Philadelphia field office.

  Roth nodded to Buchanan as Buchanan came in the door. "You know each other," Lerrick said.

  "We do," Buchanan answered. He and Roth shook hands. They had worked on cases together in the past. Both had spent time assigned to a special operation in southern Illinois.

  Lerrick motioned to a thick manila folder on his desk. It was closed.

  "Sit in that chair over there, Tom, and take a look at this," said Lerrick, indicating the file. He handed Buchanan the file. Thomas took it and seated himself in a corner chair. The only light was from a standing lamp. As Buchanan began to read, Roth took a position at the room's only window, a large eighteen-pane one that faced the Washington Monument. Against the evening sky, yellowish-white beams from a series of floodlights illuminated the monument.

  While Buchanan read, Roth lit a cigarette. From time to time Lerrick's fingers drummed rhythmically and impatiently on the top of his mahogany desk.

  Buchanan read for almost half an hour. The file focused upon a man named John Taylor Garrett and his family business, the Commonwealth Bank of Pennsylvania. Buchanan was twice startled to see both J. T. Garrett and Commonwealth Penn as the centerpieces of an FBI file.

  Spending his final teen and high school years in Chestnut Hill, Buchanan had personally known Garrett, his bank, and his family. John Taylor Garrett was an unlikely subject for a federal investigation. He was the epitome of ”old money.” A distant Garrett ancestor had been on the Mayflower in the 1640s, and a later member of the Garrett clan had moved from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to Philadelphia with the young Benjamin Franklin in the early 1700s. The Garretts had been a family of genteel Protestant bankers and merchants in Pennsylvania since the days of Franklin. The family had money in America before the newly independent colonies even had their own currency.

  And yet, according to the report before Special Agent Buchanan, the inner workings of Commonwealth Penn were a maze of question marks. Garrett, who also had owned a family department store, had taken over Commonwealth Penn in 1934. The bank had been on the brink of ruin. Garrett had not only saved it but had also built it into a respected financial institution. It was not large. But it was prominent and significant, particularly as a privately owned independent bank. All of which made the bank's behavior even more bizarre.

  Garrett was away fighting in the world war for five full years, leaving his wife and two daughters behind. During this time Commonwealth Penn was managed by a board of trustees. Mismanaged by a board would be slightly more accurate, said the report, as the enterprise plunged toward the ground again. The war ended just in time. Garrett came home and got his bank clicking again. Yet at the same time, Garrett turned into a social recluse. He took an occasional meal in his favorite Philadelphia spot - the dining room of The Barclay - and was rarely seen anywhere else. He ceased communication with even the best of his prewar friends.

  While overseeing the renaissance of Commonwealth Penn, he also presided over the disintegration of his own family. As Tom Buchanan well knew, Garrett had two beautiful daughters, Ann and Laura. He had a socially prominent wife who divorced him after the war. At about the same time, both daughters inexplicably moved away.

  The rumor mill in the Delaware Valley had all kinds of explanations for Garrett, his behavior, and the breakup of his family. Some said that he was a conduit for dirty money through the eastern United States. Others insisted that he had been shell-shocked in the war and had come home a mental case. Others alluded to a career in a U.S. Army intelligence unit, complete with unsavory associations, a mistress, and even a second family somewhere else around the globe.

  Buchanan finished the report, closed the folder, and looked up.

  "Okay, look,” he finally said. “If there's a problem with Commonwealth Penn that's the jurisdiction of the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia. If his daughters and wife are missing, that's a matter for the local police."

  "The Philadelphia police can't be trusted,” Roth said. "And we don't want to tip our investigation.”

  "The three Garrett women," Buchanan asked. "Any chance they were kidnapped?"

  "There's no evidence to suggest that."

  "Then what's the point?" Buchanan asked politely. "This still doesn't strike me as the basis of an FBI investigation."

  Silence.

  "May I ask who wrote this?" Buchanan asked. “The report cites some genuine intimacies of the Garrett family. The source was very close.”

  “I wrote it," Roth said. "It's a briefing file; a condensation of a much larger piece of work."

  “With all due respect, I don't see anything indictable here.”

  More silence, then, “Mr. Hoover
thinks Garrett has turned into a Red,” Lerrick said.

  “On what basis does he think that?”

  “Since when does our saintly Director need a ”basis,” Tom?”

  “Exactly," mumbled Roth. “The only thing Mr. Hoover knows about Reds is that he doesn’t like them,” Roth said. “It begins and ends there.”

  Buchanan shrugged. “So what if he did turn into a Red?” he asked. “That’s his personal choice, isn’t it?”

  A dreadful silence held the room. Then, “The Director doesn’t see it that way,” Lerrick said, “and I won’t relate to him that you asked an impertinent question like that. You’re welcome. Mr. Hoover says that John Taylor Garrett went pink during the war. He wants someone to look into this, build a case.”

  "Ah! That's why I'm here, is it? I’m the ‘someone,’” Buchanan said.

  “Tom,” Lerrick said. “You know how this works. Mr. Hoover is of the opinion that Garrett is a Communist. Your job is to investigate, acquire evidence, and prove that the Director is correct.”

  “Sure,” said Roth. “It is so if the Director says so.”

  Buchanan felt anger and indignation rising within him. “A touch of Pirandello, huh?” Buchanan asked.

  “Who?”

  "Never mind. I assume," Buchanan said, "that there's no coincidence here. Nothing having to do with the fact that I was engaged to his younger daughter before the war. To Ann Garrett. Is that it?"

  "Of course, that’s why you were chosen,” Lerrick answered. Then, “You were in love with Ann?” Roth fished. A pause and…

  “Very much so. I entered the armed forces in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, like millions of other patriotic young men,” Buchanan said. “Ann Garrett broke off our engagement in 1944. She said she wanted to get on with her life. I figured she had met someone else. I was sitting in trench twenty miles east of Naples. We had taken a town. Six hundred Italian troops had surrendered. I had just seen one of my best friends have his head blown off by a German mortar an hour after the Italians surrendered. I’ll never forget the day. I never saw her or anyone in Ann’s family again.”

  “Why not?”

  “I felt betrayed. She had broken my heart.”

  “I hope it’s healed by now,” Lerrick said lightly. Buchanan shot him a nasty glance.

  “Look,” Buchanan said. “I don’t want this case. Nothing involving the Garrett family, okay?”

  "I wanted to get you eliminated from the investigation on those personal grounds, Tom," Lerrick explained. "But J. Edgar just laughed at me. He said, 'No, Frank, you have it all wrong. I want a relentless inquiry. And that's exactly what I'll get from a former fiancé.'"

  "You know the Director, Tom," said Roth. "Whenever he can pump a personal or even a sexual angle in a case, he goes for it." Buchanan already had a few personal opinions on the quirky Director. He kept them to himself.

  “Mr. Hoover’s got a fixation on stuff like that; the truth is we recognize it and we live with it,” Roth muttered. “But that’s between us, all right?”

  "Hoover asked if you were in the middle of anything important," Lerrick continued. "I had to answer truthfully. I said that you were wrapping up a current case this week. That did it, I'm afraid. Thereafter, the Director would hear of no name other than yours."

  A final silence held the room.

  "I don't like losing men from this office," Lerrick concluded, "particularly quality men such as yourself. God knows, I never get them back." He sighed. "You're assigned to the Garrett case, Tom. Starting in January you're transferred to Philadelphia.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Buchanan cursed to himself as he pulled his overcoat tight against the cold of the midwinter Washington night. It was eight o’clock. He charged down the steps of the Department of Justice in a controlled rage and hit the sidewalk, still struggling with the belt of his coat. "Of all the outrageous, impertinent, moronic ideas."

  Him? Thomas Buchanan? Investigate the Garrett family?

  Sure, he told himself as he avoided a slick patch of ice on K Street, he could do a fine investigation. He could investigate anyone thoroughly. But why even flirt with the semblance of bias? If he found something significant against John Taylor Garrett, and later went to court with it, his actions would be seen as the vendetta of a young man who had been unsuccessfully in love with Ann Garrett. And wouldn't that come out at a trial?

  Yet if he found nothing, wasn't there the inherent suggestion of a whitewash? A young agent assigned to probe into the Garrett affairs but still wishing not to offend the family. The foundations of any investigation had to be clean and sound. Didn't Hoover know that? Didn't Hoover always say that? Wasn't that one of the first things they had taught back at the National Police Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where Buchanan had reported after the war?

  He cursed to himself again. He stepped off a curb on Pennsylvania Avenue. A piece of packed snow gave way. There was slush underneath. His foot rode the cracked ice to the pavement and a small, unwelcome flood of freezing water rushed into his shoe.

  Roth's words returned. You know the Director, Tom. Whenever he can pump a personal or even a sexual angle in a case, he goes for it.

  Hoover! Lerrick had even admitted that it had been J.E.H. himself who had made the decision. Hoover! That bombastic, unproductive fraud! A political appointment during the illustrious Warren Harding administration, Buchanan muttered, who was still entrenched during the Truman administration. It was common currency around Capitol Hill that the man from Missouri wanted to get rid of him but either did not know how or did not dare. Hoover sure had an instinct for survival, Thomas concluded. In the Washington political jungle, J. Edgar knew how to swing with the top apes.

  Buchanan walked a few more blocks against the bitter Washington wind. He gripped his hat. He had lost more than one good Stetson fedora under the wheels of a Washington bus. Then, gradually, Buchanan began to settle down.

  He tried to be rational. Maybe, he sometimes wondered, the FBI wasn't for him after all. For the past three months he had worked on the land fraud case. He had obtained convictions. At five o’clock that same day he had concluded his report of the case. Then a mere hour later he was assigned to investigate a man who, were it not for the world war, might have been his father-in-law.

  Some step up!

  He turned onto D Street at 9th. Even on these cold District nights he enjoyed walking home. He needed the exercise. And tonight he needed to cool off in more ways than one.

  There were proper channels for grievances and he would go through them. He would get an audience with J. Edgar Hoover and appeal to reason. Give me a case with some big city hoodlums, he would request. Put me on the trail of some of them, he would ask, and I'll give them to you hogtied by Mother's Day. That's what he would do. And if Hoover did not respond, he would resign.

  Crime was all over the place in America, he grumbled. Most of the big cities were feeling the impact of organized crime these days, from union racketeering to murder for hire. The states and the cities were pleading for federal assistance. Rumor was that Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was about to introduce a resolution that would allow the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to investigate organized crime's role in interstate commerce. The FBI stood ready to help.

  Buchanan trudged another block through the Washington night. Why didn't the Sanitation Department get some rock salt on these icy sidewalks? He was a man who still thought of himself as young and fit, but he had nearly fallen twice. His wet foot, freezing as it was, was doing him no favors of comfort, either.

  He came to the corner of his own block. There was a small bar there. It was named The Haypenny and was fashioned after an English pub. It was a favorite of law and government students from Georgetown as well as secretaries from the Department of Justice and the National Archives. There was a large plate glass window in front. Buchanan glanced in.

  Lately he perceived the crowd as growing younger at The Haypenny. Tonight did nothing to dissuade him. He kep
t walking.

  The generational break, he had long since concluded, would be defined by who served in the war and who had been born too late. When he saw groups of happy young drinkers, an uncontrollably morose feeling sometimes gripped him. He thought of young men who had been born the same year as he, 1917, who would lie for all eternity in unmarked graves in Italy and North Africa. But that was past history, too, just like his romance with Ann Garrett.

  His apartment was on the third floor of a clean brick building on the 100 block of 7th Street, S.E. The flat was part of a house that belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Elvin Rafferty. The Rafferty couple were in their sixties. They lived on the first two floors but they had created a separate, locking apartment at the top of the stairs. Rafferty himself did not do much except sit around the living room or, in the summer, camp out on a big wicker chair on the front porch. There on summer afternoons he would turn on a big Philco console radio and follow Arch McDonald's broadcasts of baseball's Washington Senators - home games from nearby Griffith Stadium and road games from seven other disastrous points around the American League.

  "Washington!" Rafferty habitually ranted. "First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League! Next thing you know," he once complained to Buchanan, "they'll be integrating with colored like the Dodgers, the Indians, and the St. Louis Browns."

  "Maybe when they do," Buchanan had answered gently, "they won't be in last place anymore. Those are some fine players in the Negro Leagues."

  “It don’t change the skin color none,” Rafferty grumbled. “Or where the country’s going. Communists, you know.”