Truman's Spy: A Cold War Spy Thriller Page 5

  On the eighth day of his captivity a terrific Sunday morning rainstorm lashed Oklahoma and western Texas. Urschel did not hear the airplane. He wondered whether the noise of the storm had drowned it out, if the flight had been canceled, or if it wasn't scheduled on the Sabbath. Then, at five forty-five in the afternoon, a few minutes before his evening plate of ham, he heard it again. The date was July 30.

  On the ninth day Urschel's family paid the ransom. The captors packed their unharmed prey into the trunk of a 1931 Chevrolet, drove him several hours over bumpy roads in sweltering heat. Then they dumped him on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. By this time the FBI was already on the case.

  Agents later listened to Urschel's account of his captivity. They focused on the farm, the pigs, and the sound of the airplane. Dozens of agents descended on airline offices throughout the Southwest, poring over schedules and meticulously comparing flight records with the listings of cancellations and diversions for July 30. The search was long, tedious, and plodding.

  But it was also thorough. Agents determined that on the day of the downpour an American Airlines flight from Fort Worth, Texas, to Amarillo had detoured around Wise County, Texas, the center of the storm. The aircraft landed safely in Amarillo. When the storm cleared, it made its return flight over its normal route that afternoon.

  Agents chartered travel along the same air corridor. They determined that at nine forty-five each morning the flight would be directly above two adjacent farms in the town of Paradise, Texas. One of the farms raised chickens. The other raised pigs.

  Its owner, R. G. Shannon, cured hams. Shannon's name rang a loud bell among federal agents. His daughter, Kathryn Shannon, was married to a big-time bad boy named George Kelly. Kelly was better known throughout America by his tabloid nickname, "Machine Gun" Kelly. Kelly was currently holding down the position of public enemy number two on Hoover's much-publicized charts, while John Dillinger remained in the top spot. But one clue led to another in the Urschel case and created a trail.

  Two months later in Memphis, FBI agents cornered Kelly. "Don't shoot, G-men!" Kelly screamed, or so the publicists for the FBI reported. Thus they created a nickname, G-Men, and manufactured a legend when the country was thirsty for one. Reporters at the scene of Kelly’s arrest would make the incident famous, complete with bold, heroic, gun-toting agents surrounding the apparently humiliated criminal.

  J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI rarely let the public forget the Bureau's success in the Urschel kidnapping, even though later accounts contradicted some of the Bureau’s folklore. But Special Agent Thomas Buchanan never lost sight of the larger lesson.

  It had been a relentless questioning of witnesses, investigation of facts, and examination of the details of the crime scene that had solved the case. Not gunfire. In that respect he anticipated an investigation of John Taylor Garrett and the Commonwealth Bank of Pennsylvania to be no different.

  Buchanan enjoyed a fine dinner at Cora's. Over coffee, he read his mail and the evening Washington Star. He walked home, slept soundly, and spent a quiet Christmas day by himself.

  By the next evening, he had recalled that the best path to advancement in the Bureau was to successfully complete the work placed before him. In this case, that meant the Garrett investigation. And he had also decided that he did not feel like putting his position on the line in mid-winter or looking for another job.

  Most of the other agents he talked to in Washington said the Philadelphia office wasn't such a bad assignment. It was in the East, after all, and had the reputation of never being personally visited by Hoover. So Special Agent Buchanan decided he would keep his mouth shut.

  He would go through the motions, gather what evidence he could, maybe even locate Ann and see how she was doing. She was probably married with a family by now. The thought was bittersweet. Maybe seeing her again could finally put a lid on his feelings for her. As for her father, it was preposterous to think that a banker could have turned into a Bolshevik. The very thought made Buchanan shake his head. But, following that thought through to its conclusion, why not take the case?

  CHAPTER 9

  There would be only three of them - Milenkin, Sejna, and Filiatov - an unlikely troika of Soviet agents in America who had never before worked together. They would be in the United States to handle a pair of jobs considered too dirty and too risky for the Soviet residents.

  Viktor Milenkin had been in the United States the longest and knew the country best. He had been born in Ukraine in 1925, the illegitimate son of a prominent Soviet chemist. His mother died in childbirth. At the age of four he had come to the United States with an aunt named Sonya, who became his legally adoptive mother. He was educated in the public school system of Palo Alto, California.

  In 1939 Milenkin and his aunt were obliged to apply for American citizenship or return to the Soviet Union. They chose the latter, repatriating to Moscow. From 1940 to 1942 Sonya worked as a stenographer at the Soviet Defense Ministry. At this time, she became the mistress of a handsome colonel named Andrei Volkov. Volkov was no ordinary officer of the Red Army. Rather, he was very "Western style" - perfectly fluent in English as well as Russian. He had extensive experience in the United States as well. He moved across international borders with ease. It was even rumored that he had a family in England or America.

  Volkov was also assigned to the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye. The GRU, as it was more commonly known, was the chief intelligence directorate of the general staff of the Soviet Defense Ministry. The GRU was the military cousin of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency that would become the KGB.

  Colonel Volkov saw possibilities for his mistress's boy. Like Volkov himself, the teenager had a perfect command of English, a native's knowledge of the United States, and a flawless American accent. So the colonel and those with whom he worked began planning ahead.

  From the time the tide of World War II turned on the German-Russian front in 1944, through the hours of the Soviet victory in Europe, Volkov trained Viktor for an assignment in the West. By this time Milenkin had perfected his cover, had memorized his contacts and had demonstrated his devotion to his work. It was 1948. He was a young man of twenty-three.

  In June of that year, the GRU equipped Milenkin with a freshly printed Swiss passport. He entered the United States in New York, destroyed the passport the next day in his room at the Hotel Astor and assumed the identity of one George Mulligan. Mulligan had been a young American soldier who had died in a Soviet hospital in 1942. Soviet operatives in America had retrieved his birth certificate from Davenport, Iowa, and had been delighted to discover that the young soldier had no surviving family. He was perfect. And so, for that matter, was Milenkin.

  Thus with little fanfare, on a balmy summer afternoon in 1948, Viktor Milenkin checked out of the Astor and walked through Grand Central Station as George Mulligan. He had five hundred dollars in cash. With it, he rented a small apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. Intelligent and well-spoken, he had within another week found employment as an installation man for New York Telephone.

  Here was a perfect cover profession: Milenkin had flexible hours, access to people's homes and private buildings, and no one looking over his shoulder. Every Saturday morning, in accordance with a routine established by the GRU back in Moscow, he would look for "mail" in a piece of discarded piping nestled shoulder-high in the brickwork under the Williamsburg Bridge.

  A month after his return to America, in July 1948, Milenkin found the first message in the base of the bridge. A note summoned him to a meeting in Battery Park the following Monday evening. Milenkin went and was surprised to find Volkov waiting for him, sitting calmly on a bench reading a Wall Street Journal.

  They spoke to each other in English. To speak Russian even in subdued tones would be to invite suspicion, even on a park bench. Volkov explained that a critical operation was about to begin against the Americans. It would be an important campaign with global implications, Volkov said. It would firmly test
the will and resolve of capitalism in the postwar years.

  "Even though you will probably never see me again," Volkov explained to him, "I will personally serve as your control officer within the United States. You will continue to look for messages in the usual place and you will learn a method to communicate back with me. But you will contact me only in extreme emergencies. Your role will be that of a conduit. It is an important role, essential to the worldwide Communist revolution. Thus you must never question an order, never think about a message you may be relaying, and never exceed the role that Joseph Stalin has assigned to you. Is that clear?"

  "Yes, comrade," Milenkin answered.

  The younger man was in awe of Volkov's flawless English. Milenkin thought back to their previous meetings in the Soviet Union and recalled that Volkov had a strange hitch to his Russian. The conventional wisdom had it that he was a Polish Communist whose wartime valor had been rewarded with his current high appointment in the GRU. Milenkin, however, knew better than to pursue such points of curiosity.

  "I'm sure that you're familiar," Volkov concluded, "with the repercussions suffered by those who have not fulfilled their assigned roles within the Marxist master plan."

  Uncomfortably, Milenkin said he was. Even Trotsky in 1940 had paid a penalty for revisionism when Stalin sent murderers to kill him.

  Volkov nodded. Then he patted the younger man on the shoulder and said a few words of reassurance. "I know I can have considerable confidence in you," Volkov concluded. "Just do what you're ordered. Don't try to think things out too much. For a young man in your position, that's where trouble always begins."

  Time went by.

  Few messages came Milenkin's way other than the initial one to confirm the methods of contact in the United States. What bothered Milenkin was that he had heard only once from his mother, Sonya, back in the USSR. Adoptive or not, he loved her as much as any son could. She was the one person he was allowed to communicate with, and the one person allowed to communicate with him. Letters from her, like the other messages, were to come only through Volkov, her former paramour, at the usual drop point in the base of the bridge. It was well known, however, that even Volkov’s office had the occasional leak.

  The silence from back home bothered the young man. But Milenkin - or Mulligan, as he now wanted to be known - settled into his job, made a few friends, went to movies with a female acquaintance here and there, attended baseball games and boxing events, and lived a very ordinary life. Aside from being an agent of the Soviet Union, he was, to all appearances, just like millions of other American men of his generation.

  CHAPTER 10

  In Philadelphia that following Monday morning, homicide detectives Fred Castelli and Mike Foley were, as usual, busy. Going into the new year of 1950, they had had a backlog of six cases. Now they had added the unidentified man found on fire at Barrier Point. That made seven. Fortunately since then, they had been breaking even.

  A woman named Hazel Blackmun who lived on Juniper Street in South Philly had been found at home with her head bashed in. No sign of a break-in, no sign of a struggle. Just a couple of quick, sudden blows. A little digging around the neighborhood pointed to a stepson named Ralph who was in the habit of cleaning out the woman's bank account.

  One afternoon while Ralph was at work, Castelli broke into the toolshed attached to Ralph's garage. There Hazel's stepson had stored a bloodstained hammer and an undershirt with some matching bloodstains. Murder was, as this case demonstrated, the felony most frequently committed by amateurs.

  Then there was the burglary of Quinzani's grocery store two blocks from the Italian market, again in South Philly. Some malefactor had taken it upon himself to visit Mr. and Mrs. Quinzani's cash register one night while they - a couple in their sixties - slept upstairs. The intruder was noisy. Mr. Quinzani - a well-known and much-loved grocer in the neighborhood since 1921 - called the police, then came downstairs with a pistol. Mr. Quinzani was noisy too.

  Shots were fired. Less than a minute later Quinzani was lying on the stairs, bleeding to death while a robber fled through the rear window, leaving a wake of cash in every direction. By the time Quinzani expired at St. Agnes' Hospital, Foley and Castelli were already on the case.

  The killer had parked his car two blocks away on the other side of Ninth Street. Above a cheese and meat retailer at the Italian market, Mrs. Mary Giancobini often sat in the window. Mrs. Giancobini hadn't slept well at nights since her husband died in 1937. So she had seen a dark-haired, wiry man about five feet eight in height flee across Christian Street and jump into a car. She also saw the man push something dark—a pistol maybe—into his jacket. Mrs. Giancobini noticed that the car was from New Jersey and wrote down the license number. But she did not call the police. Instead, she told her son Francesco. Frankie Giancobini had been in and out of prison twice himself. He knew some other people who had unusual professions and he was wise to the streets.

  A day later Castelli's home phone rang.

  "You the guy investigating the Quinzani killing?" a voice asked. Castelli allowed that he was. "The guy who done it. His name was Joey Carter," said the caller. Castelli noted immediately that the concerned citizen referred to Carter in the past tense.

  Carter was a two-bit hood from Trenton. And he could currently be located, the caller concluded, at Front Street and Snyder Avenue, right next to a furniture warehouse in the trunk of his brown-and-white Nash Rambler. Castelli and Foley found him, his throat cut, his testicles chopped off, his gun—the murder weapon—stuffed in his mouth, and the remainder of the money from Quinzani's cash register wrapped in brown paper for return to the victim's widow. Thus the Quinzani slaying was resolved, at virtually no expense to the taxpayer.

  Some cases, such as the slaying of Hazel Blackmun, have straightforward resolutions. Others, such as the Quinzani murder, all but solve themselves. Still others, such as the grilled man at Barrier Point, require more inquiry and legwork.

  Thus Castelli and Foley began the Barrier Point inquiry where the Quinzani investigation had concluded. In bars, grocery stores, and barbershops south of Snyder Avenue or over morning coffee at the Melrose Diner on Passyunk, they put out the word. This being South Philadelphia, someone always knew something.

  On the 1900 block of Mifflin Street, for example, around the corner from where Fred Castelli lived, resided a woman named Maude Romero. She was a widow from the war. On Saturday evenings she would draw every shade in her row house, assemble a stack of Sinatra 78's on the Victrola, tart herself up with some perfume from Bravo's Pharmacy on South 17th Street, and cook dinner for two. Then her policeman, Sgt. Castelli, would visit for the night. Maude was six years Castelli's senior. But she kept in shape and passed for thirty-seven in four important categories: age, hips, bust, and carnal enthusiasm. There were many men in the neighborhood who would have liked to have been in, among other things, Castelli's shoes.

  Castelli and Maude tried to keep their affair a secret. Castelli used the back door to her home and they went to Mass at Holy Redeemer separately on Sunday morning. They kept things so quiet that the whole neighborhood - including their priest, Father Manzi - knew they were sleeping together. Captain Heintz was even in the habit of phoning Castelli at Maude's if anything urgent came up on weekends.

  All of which illustrated Castelli's current problem. "No one in this city can keep his mouth shut. Everybody knows where I go for a good piece of tail," he growled to Mike Foley three weeks into the New Year. "And yet not one person will tell me who got grilled in the navy yard.”

  No, no one was talking. It was possible that no one knew.

  There wasn't even a hot rumor. No citizen of the city's underclass was reported missing, no one had vanished from a hotel room, no low-rent hood was vacationing in Cuba with a sudden windfall, no one had been scratched off any loan shark's debt books, and no names were unaccounted for on anyone's hit list. Fred Castelli and Mike Foley had never experienced any murder quite like this one.

  Eve
n the bullet that had killed the man returned from its ballistics inquest with peculiar biographical notes. The murder weapon was unassociated with any previous crime in Philadelphia. And the markings upon the death bullet suggested that it had been fired from a low-caliber handgun of military origin, though not necessarily American.

  Castelli moaned long and low when he learned this. There was so much junk artillery floating around since the war. "It makes my life murder," he liked to joke. But nothing amused him or his partner about the Barrier Point case. The victim was a cipher. The killer was a spook. In any event, the absence of any information helped him draw one supposition. Whatever had happened, its genesis had been outside of the normal working activity of his district. And that meant that the Barrier Point case could elude a resolution for a long time.

  CHAPTER 11

  Alexandr Filiatov and Marina Sejna arrived in the United States more than a year after Milenkin.

  Filiatov had cut his teeth during the final days of the war. As a sergeant in the Russian infantry, he had been in one of the first divisions to reach Berlin from the east. In the final days of the Third Reich, teams of Soviet, British, and American hit squads fanned out across Berlin looking for SS officers and Nazi officials deemed unworthy of postwar trials. Filiatov's division commander, knowing an efficient killer when he saw one, recommended him. A tractor mechanic before the war, Alexandr Filiatov finally had work he enjoyed.

  In the days after the peace of April 1945, Filiatov remained in the army. The military life provided free food, heat, a uniform, and a few extra rubles each month with which to get drunk. His division stayed in Poland for many months. A Polish government-in-exile in London had been recognized by the United States. But Joseph Stalin - the Exalted One - had other ideas.