Truman's Spy: A Cold War Spy Thriller Read online

  The January 1947 "elections" in Poland were dominated by Stalinists, who not only ran for office but also counted the votes. The Soviet Army remained present to see that the new government of Poland was protected from the democratic aspirations of the Polish people.

  Around this time the NKVD was on a talent search in the satellite countries. They found Filiatov in Gdansk, kicking around the docks, getting into fights with Polish longshoremen, and looking for a bosomy ex-barmaid named Teresia who was scared to death of him. Over her, or at least over the physical rights to her, Filiatov had already redesigned one steamfitter's face with a broken bottle.

  The Soviet Army transferred him back to Warsaw. There his war record was checked. When he passed muster for the type of operations the state security people had in mind, he was sent back to Moscow for a more thorough look. It was Colonel Volkov who did the evaluation. Volkov was a rising star in Soviet intelligence: his operations against the West had paid dividends for several years already.

  In Moscow, in the oppressive gray office building at 10 Dzerzhinski Square where the Soviet secret police made their home, Filiatov was cashiered out of the infantry and into the military intelligence section, under the control of the GRU. In Hungary that same year, he strangled a non-Communist labor organizer in the back room of a Budapest union hall. And in a doorway outside a Sofia nightclub early the following year, Filiatov shot an obstinate member of the Bulgarian Socialist Party who had criticized Moscow's agricultural policy in the Balkans. The criticism had been made during a church confession, but these things did have a way of getting back.

  All of this brought Filiatov certain rewards. He was promoted to captain in the Soviet Army. He was returned to Dzerzhinski Square and immersed in an intensive English course. He was given a small apartment in Moscow. And to keep the apartment cozy and interesting for the star pupil, he was given a Russian wife. Again, this was Colonel Volkov's idea. A woman, he theorized, would also give the GRU an extra leverage against Filiatov. "If Filiatov steps out of line," Volkov explained to his own superiors, "we can always take her away from him. Females are useful like that."

  She was a girl more than she was a woman. Her name was Marina Sejna. She was pretty, blond, nineteen years old, and the niece of an admiral in the Atlantic fleet. She also spoke some English, which would later be improved with an extensive course in Moscow. She was also, as Filiatov would later boast to friends, "factory fresh" when he received her. A civil ceremony was performed on August 15, 1948. The official consummation was performed less than a half hour later when Filiatov dragged his tearful, frightened new bride into his apartment and, never a man of subtleties, rammed himself into her on a divan in the sitting room. Here was the one step along the way that gave pause to the colonel: a pregnancy would greatly complicate things, particularly if Marina wanted to keep her child. The next day the doctors implanted her with a device that she did not understand.

  "There will be time for babies sometime in the future," Comrade Volkov told her, "as long as you faithfully do your duty to the Soviet state."

  For Marina Sejna, this was a portion of the grand scheme that the party had in store for her. At first she contemplated hanging herself. But she soon discovered that as long as she gave in immediately to her husband's sexual whims and desires, she would be spared his other brutalities. So she dared not complain. Worse things had happened to other young women, she knew, both during and after the war. She even came to think of Filiatov as her protector. In a strange sort of way, with her uncle ranking high in the navy, her family influence protected Filiatov.

  So Alexandr Filiatov and Marina Sejna settled into Moscow. They learned English. She was better than he but helped him along. This, in turn, even prompted some tenderness on his part. Time went by. At a moment in history when many Russians suffered, they were not unhappy.

  After they had reached a certain level of accomplishment in English, they began to study American culture. They listened to tapes of American radio and were shown selected American movies, particularly those which showed - as their instructors explained it - bourgeois capitalist excesses or the genocidal warfare waged against the once-peaceable tribes of Native Americans.

  Secretly, however, Filiatov enjoyed watching outnumbered brigades of white men mowing down wave after wave of feather-clad tomahawk-waving Indians. In spirit, the "B" westerns reminded him of the Eastern front against the Germans.

  Midway through 1949, Volkov met with them again. He told them that they would soon be leaving their Moscow apartment to commence an important assignment abroad. They would be rewarded with an even better living location if they were able to complete their mission successfully.

  So in October, a few days before the thirty-first anniversary of the Great Revolution, Marina was given pistol training. "You may someday need to save your husband's life," she was told. Shortly after that, the couple was equipped with Finnish passports.

  Pistols. Passports.

  Marina was under no illusions what her husband was. Nor did she have any real doubts as to the purpose of her own training. So it came as no surprise when a military aircraft took them to Leningrad. There they met a bus that transported them through several brick, concrete, and barbed wire checkpoints and across the border to Helsinki.

  From there they flew to London and from London to Toronto. In a Greek restaurant on Queen Street two days after arrival, Colonel Volkov met with them a final time. The rendezvous had been prearranged in Moscow.

  Volkov told the couple that he had extensive networks of Soviet patriots in the United States, all working for the worldwide revolution of laboring people. Then Volkov handed Filiatov an envelope containing two new passports and the couple's new identity.

  They were now Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Abelow. Their cover story was that they had been displaced persons after the war but had been legally able to immigrate to the United States. Mrs. Abelow already had a sister who was an American citizen, or so the tale went. The passports were excellent forgeries, even bearing exit stamps from the United States five days earlier. Volkov bragged that he had an official stamp that an American friend had stolen from a desk in the U.S. State Department.

  Filiatov and Sejna returned to their hotel and memorized their new identity. The next morning snow fell heavily in Toronto. The couple traveled by rail to Windsor, Ontario. The day after that was Thanksgiving Day, 1949, a holiday in the United States but a normal business day in Canada.

  Comrades Filiatov and Sejna took advantage of the slow day at the American immigration control to walk across the Ambassador Bridge and enter the United States.

  That easily, the assassination team was completely assembled within the borders of the United States. With Milenkin in place in New York and Volkov left behind in Ontario, Alexandr Filiatov and Marina Sejna boarded an eastbound train in Detroit. They already had their first assignment in the United States. Thereafter, they disappeared.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Commonwealth Pennsylvania Bank…” said Special Agent in Charge, William Roth, “was a tiny little operation in Dublin Township out in Bucks County back in 1933. “Roosevelt closed the banks for fourteen days after he came into office. Commonwealth Penn came within twenty-four hours of not reopening."

  Thomas Buchanan sat across a desk from him at the Philadelphia office of the FBI. It was three thirty on the afternoon of January 2, 1950. Several neat manila files were piled in front of Buchanan, but he had spent most of the day listening.

  Roth enshrouded himself in smoke, emptied an ashtray, and continued with ancient history. "At the end of the Depression," Roth said, "Commonwealth Penn had five employees: a president, a vice president and three tellers; no guards, no secretaries, not even a cleaning lady. The president and vice president took turns with the key to the bank's only building. They would unlock and lock the doors each day, serve as loan officers, and answer the phone if it happened to ring. The tellers would sweep the floor, dust the potted plants, and empty the wastebaskets. I dou
bt if they had more than eight hundred depositors. The place was a local joke. And as jokes went,” Roth continued, “Commonwealth Penn was pretty funny.”

  Roth had all the numbers. "At the end of 1933, deposits were $316,000 and the purported capital was a very flat $100,000. But the bond depreciation was $298,000 and there were bad debt losses of $89,000, not yet taken,” he said. “Add it all up quickly in your head, Tom. What's that mean to you?"

  "The bank was broke," Buchanan said. "It should have gone belly up."

  "Should have,” said Roth. “Would have. But the banking law was different back then. A stockholder in the bank could be liable to the depositors for double the face value of the stock he owned. In Commonwealth Penn's case, that meant the bank was worth more dead than alive - except to the president and vice president - a pair of incompetent brothers named Paul and Joel Schusterman."

  "How had they come to own the bank?" Buchanan asked.

  "How else do morons come to own things?" Roth asked. "They had inherited it. I call it the lucky-sperm syndrome.'"

  "Any family money?"

  "A little," Roth said. "An uncle had made a bundle in the oil business in western Pennsylvania in the 1870s. The money had filtered down through the family, but these clowns were running out of it." Buchanan listened indulgently.

  "Go on," he requested.

  "Paul and Joel Schusterman wanted to keep the bank's doors open until they could think of something brilliant. They weren't equipped to think of something brilliant, of course. But they got lucky. John Taylor Garrett came along." Here Roth paused long enough to snuff his cigarette and check a date in one of the folders in front of him. "May 3, 1934," he announced. "That was the day everything changed at Commonwealth Penn."

  That was also the day, as Roth described it, that John Taylor Garrett began walking on water with other people's money. Apparently Garrett had been bored to death running the family department store for the last decade. He had been on the lookout for another venture. So he spotted the Commonwealth Bank of Pennsylvania and its impending financial collapse. Here was a natural. The bank was right in Garrett's bailiwick and easy to be had. So Garrett made an offer to buy the bank. He had a pile of family trust money behind him as well as the cash flow from the department stores. But he wasn't planning to use much of his own resources.

  Garrett offered the Schusterman brothers a deal. He would assume their debts and Commonwealth Penn's liabilities if they signed everything over to him. The brothers couldn't see how Commonwealth Penn could go in any direction except down. So they accepted the offer and jumped what they perceived to be a financially sinking ship.

  "The second thing Garrett did was hop a train to Washington," Roth continued. "He went to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Familiar with it?"

  Buchanan shook his head.

  "It was a government agency, founded during the Herbert Hoover years but beefed up by F.D.R. It floated loans to businesses to keep them from going under. But the loans had to be collateralized, which was why the Schusterman brothers couldn't get one. You wouldn't have loaned a number two Ticonderoga pencil to those two guys. But John Garrett left the RFC with a loan for $150,000. Know what he talked the feds into taking as security? Eighty-five thousand dollars of preferred stock in Commonwealth Penn, plus a note for $65,000 from Garrett himself, secured by the title to his own home. The latter, I'm told, you are familiar with."

  Buchanan nodded. "I've been there," he said. As an understatement, the remark was a conceit. But Roth was wise enough to let it go.

  Buchanan recalled the sixty-acre estate with its Pennsylvania stone manor house, its stables, tennis courts, guest and gardener's cottages. The Garrett enclave was a big, delicious chunk of the American dream, surrounded by woods, streams, and meadows.

  He could picture it well. He had last seen Ann Garrett there in June 1942, one day before he had gone into the Army. She had worn a red dress with bare shoulders that night. At age twenty she had never looked lovelier. Nor had she ever looked more grown-up. Ann Garrett and Thomas Buchanan had been engaged for a month and in love for more than a year. Looking back on it - from the perspective of a WPA-era federal office building almost eight years later - those months before the war seemed to glisten with an unreal, magical perfection, a dreamlike quality that he should have known would disappear.

  Their plans were to marry as soon as the war was over, or as soon as he came home. Whichever came first. He had borrowed his father's big dark green Packard and had taken Ann dancing at a rambling summer ballroom at the Bucks County Cricket Club. Afterward…

  Bill Roth jarred Thomas back to the present.

  "After the visit to Washington by Garrett, Commonwealth Penn's capital was reduced to a more realistic $40,000 and the losses were written off. On paper John Garrett was in hock to Uncle Sam. But he also had himself a small, clean bank."

  Buchanan tried to concentrate: there wasn't much in the way of business in Bucks County back then, Roth explained, which meant Garrett had to create some fast. In the eyes of the public, Commonwealth Penn was still a shaky operation, not the type of place a family wanted to put their money. But Garrett, thirty-six years old at this time, reasoned that his community was one of homes. He further saw that the county was expanding. So Commonwealth Penn went into real estate.

  "Most banks at the time were scared to death of builders' loans," Roth said. "They were afraid the builder's house wouldn't sell. But Garrett outwitted the larger banks. He would issue the loan to the builder, then kick a few bucks back to the builder when the builder brought the buyer in for the mortgage. Then he would write the mortgage. Any mortgage. Well, he had guessed right again, because the government began guaranteeing the mortgages under the new FHA law. Soon, he had written more mortgages than he could cover through deposits. So he went on the road again, up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Florida, selling the guaranteed mortgages to larger banks. When he ran out of larger banks he started peddling the investment to insurance companies. As soon as one bought, they all wanted to buy."

  Garrett built branches in five other towns. He repeated the procedures, always a few weeks ahead of the larger banks. By 1938 he had bought out two small competitors. By 1939 Commonwealth Penn had assets of $7,000,000. And by 1941 the bank was in eight figures, worth about $12,000,000.

  "It bears remembering," Roth concluded, "that Garrett was Commonwealth Penn. It was a one-man show, and he was it. So he was worth approximately what the bank was worth. Plus what the family trust had been valued at to start with."

  "Sounds simple," Buchanan said. "How to make a fortune in banking."

  Roth crumpled his cigarette pack and prowled through the top drawer of his desk for a new one. "It is simple, Tom," he answered. "If you have twenty-twenty foresight and are five times as smart as all your competition."

  Roth rejoiced. His hand settled on a fresh pack of Chesterfields.

  "What happened next?" Buchanan asked.

  "Someone started a war. At the end of 1941, the United States was drawn into it."

  Buchanan remembered that too.

  "And if Garrett went away to war like everyone else," Thomas guessed, "that left a one-man bank without its one man. No leadership, in other words."

  "Exactly," Roth said. "Ever been in a boat without a rudder? That was Commonwealth Penn in Garrett's absence."

  The bank drifted, Roth said, continuing the metaphor, straight onto the rocks. Garrett left a three-man board of directors in charge of the institution's business, the smallest-sized board then permissible under Pennsylvania state law. One of the board members was Garrett's family attorney, a personable old geezer who would have been more at home writing wills or defending drivers accused of making illegal left turns. Another board member was the department store's accountant, who knew how to tally up sums of money but not how to make it. And the third was Garrett's nephew, who was twenty-two years old and straight out of Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. The kid had a recently punct
ured eardrum that would keep him out of the war. But he needed a job.

  "For all the board accomplished," Roth said, "Garrett might just as well have invited the Schusterman brothers back into the chicken coop."

  Deposits fell off. Competitors sprang up like mushrooms following a spring rain. The Philadelphia banks established outposts in Bucks County and systematically picked off Commonwealth Penn's base of business. The main branch was even held up at gunpoint by a deranged sailor, a source of considerable amusement in local banking circles: Why rob a bank where one could just as easily obtain a large unsecured loan, then default?

  A few beads of sweat ringed Roth's forehead near his hairline. He stood long enough to open a window a crack. Outside, overlooking Chestnut Street and the federal courthouse, it was dark. A tiny current of cold air sliced into the office.

  “Commonwealth Penn tried to play catch-up,” Roth resumed. “The bank hired some new loan officers. They were like arsonists summoned to a roaring blaze. They wrote loans to anyone who came in the door. Soon bad-risk borrowers were traveling from as far away as Pittsburgh with untenable business plans. No matter. They all came away with credit. When the bank examiners came in November 1944, they discovered that sixty-two percent of the new loans written in 1943 and 1944 were to applicants who had been turned down by at least one other bank somewhere in Pennsylvania. Another ten percent had been turned down in Delaware, Maryland, or New Jersey. And by June 1945," Roth said, working on a fresh Chesterfield and moving toward a conclusion, "the bad paper was thundering home to roost. A quarter of the commercial credit was in default and the bank was virtually insolvent. Take a guess what happened next."

  "You tell me," Buchanan said.

  Roth explained. Garrett reappeared, Roth said. Only this time Garrett did not have the mortgage and building businesses to save him. The bank floundered. But Garrett mesmerized the state examiners, kept the institution open, and eventually generated a respectable loan demand in the postwar economy. But by then he did not have the resources to cover the loans he wanted to write. So off he went on the road again, trying to sell loans the way he had once sold mortgages: Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. Then Maryland, Ohio, and Florida. This time the magic was gone.