Berlin Memoir, Part 6

[Thank you for returning to ROT for the sixth installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” a chronicle of my adventures on and off duty while I served in West Berlin as a counterintelligence agent in the 1970s.  Part 6 covers several of the activities in which I engaged both as part of my MI assignment and in my leisure time; a large section of this segment of “Berlin Memoir” is devoted to my attendance at a German military intelligence school.  For readers who haven’t been following the series, I strongly recommend going back and reading Parts 1 through 5 before going on to Part 6 below.  I use some jargon and some German expressions which are defined and explained in the earlier sections and some topics mentioned below are more fully described in the first sections.  (Parts 1 through 5 were posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, and 20 January, and 9 and 15 February 2017, respectively).] 

I had a little taste of the absurd side of MI duty in Berlin on my way to the city.  I flew out of McGuire AFB in Bordentown, New Jersey, on a MATS flight.  (Not a troop carrier, but a chartered airliner—we had seats and everything.)  I had to wear my uni, of course, but that flight only went to Frankfurt where most of the other GI’s, the majority of whom were EM’s, were supposed to assemble for transfer to their units by truck or train.  I changed to a Pan Am flight to Berlin, and my sponsor had told me that I was expected to arrive in Berlin in civvies.  So I had to duck into a restroom and change from my Class A’s into a suit.  I was already doing spook stuff.  (I remember the suit I wore—it was one of the Baltimore acquisitions—a light gray, pin-striped double-breasted with stovepipe trouser legs.  I believe the shirt I wore with it was a dark blue one with red and yellow stripes and a long collar.  My tie was probably wide, and some bright contrasting color.  Chuck Lurey was the first to remark on my, ummm . . . sartorial splendor.  That was my first hint.)

I said there was occasional actual danger.  There was, but it was very occasional.  I mentioned that every month or so, there’d be a firing incident at the Wall or Checkpoint Charlie.  I was never near any of those, of course, but they were part of our consciousness.  Of course, you know about the fear of kidnapping.  This was actually going on, though most kidnapping victims were German businessmen grabbed by anarchist cells like the RAF.  (As I also reported, they also liked to blow things up.  Aside from the Farben building in Frankfurt where the young officer I had met was killed in a blast, on 2 February 1972, the Movement 2 June, affiliated with the RAF, set one off at the British recreation center on the Wannsee in Berlin—and killed Irwin Beelitz, a sweet old man, a German who was caretaker at the facility, had no connection to anything governmental except that he was paid by the Brits, and whom everyone loved.) 

The Soviets seldom actually kidnapped anyone, but the fear existed that, if we were caught in the SZOG or East Berlin, we could be arrested on some pretense and carried off to Potsdam or Moscow and interrogated.  This, of course, was the rationale for the pledge demanded of civilian airlines that they wouldn’t land in East Germany, the prohibition on travel into East Berlin and the SZOG (and entry into an S-Bahn station), and the later requirement that we get escorts to drive through the SZOG.  It was also the backstory of the incident that closed down Berlin because my CID partner reported that I’d been kidnapped.  Of course, people were killed while I was in Berlin, but by the RAF and other radical groups, not by the East Germans or the Soviets. 

There was, however, also a large population of Turks in Berlin—originally guest-workers who stayed on.  They constituted the criminal element in the city the way the Italians did here in the ’30s and the Colombian drug gangs did in the ’80s.  They were violent, nasty, and heavily armed, and into most criminal activities that could be imagined, including smuggling, gun-running, dope trafficking, white slavery, pornography, and so on.  Just before I arrived in Berlin, there had been a pitched battle downtown between the cops and a Turkish gang armed with machine guns.  Nothing like that happened while I was there, but, again, it hung over us when we were out in the field.  We weren’t usually armed, so we were vulnerable if anything did happen.  I remember doing a surveillance in Kreuzberg, one that ended disastrously (if humorously).  Kreuzberg was like the South Bronx of Berlin, and was heavily populated by Turks.  We drove German-plated cars to the surveillance apartment, but we parked some blocks away and walked to the apartment.  I had the red-eye shift, midnight to 8 a.m., so it was the middle of the night when I arrived.  I had my heart in my throat more than once getting to the surveillance, as I did a few other times in districts like Kreuzberg when I was alone.  Nothing ever actually happened, but it all didn’t do my heart much good.

By the way, because of a security concern similar to the kidnapping fear, if an MI agent ever had to go under anesthesia, we had to be monitored in the OR by another agent.  (I recall an incident like this on the TV M*A*S*H with that kooky CIA officer Colonel Flagg, played by Edward Winter, who made recurring appearances.  Parenthetically, that show ran on AFRTS and was quite popular.)  This was because the usual anesthetic was sodium pentothal, which is also “truth serum.”  The Army was worried that someone might start questioning us about classified stuff while we were under!  The agent wouldn’t stop the procedure, but he would prevent any untoward interrogation.  (I never actually heard of an instance of this provision having been invoked in Berlin, though I’m sure it was somewhere.)

Life in Berlin, outside of work, was terrific.  I said that by this time, city life had redeveloped, and there were lots of restaurants, good shops (the Kurfürstendamm—Ku’damm to GI’s—was a world-famous shopping street, the 5th Avenue of Berlin), many museums (a wonderful one, the Dahlem Museum for both art and ethnology, was right in our neighborhood), and other sites (the Charlottenburg Palace, the Kaiser’s residence in Berlin, was like a Germanic Versailles).  Since I was not shy about going out and about, like some GI’s often are, and because I spoke German, I explored all over the city, both with my colleagues and friends and by myself.  (I remember wandering around downtown West Berlin looking for a somewhat obscure site that was the preserved warehouse-like room in which the would-be assassins of Hitler had been briefly imprisoned before they were executed.  I found it then—I doubt I could ever find it again on my own.) 

Our quarters in Berlin, which I said were the best in USAREUR (and, maybe even anywhere, including stateside), were full apartments.  BOQ’s were one-bedrooms in a garden-apartment complex about a half mile down the road from the PX and commissary.  It was like living in a suburb somewhere in the states.  Married officers had larger places nearby, and NCO’s with families had equally nice apartments in high-rises further out.  Senior officers with families had houses in a development that looked exactly like a residential community outside an American town somewhere.  (Except all the buildings were German—there was a very recognizable architectural style of post-war German construction from the ’50s and ’60s.  It was very familiar!  Many Amis in Germany used to call the States “the land of the round doorknobs” because all European doors had handles, not knobs.  I always thought of the U.S. as the land of the sash windows—as opposed to the casement windows that swing in from hinges along the sides.  It’s impossible to keep anything on a windowsill with those kinds of windows and you can’t keep the curtains closed with the casements open.)

Our EM’s by the way, got a really good set-up.  For obvious reasons, they couldn’t be assigned to a barracks with other GI’s so they had to be housed some place else.  They could have been set up in some separate apartment, say one of the NCO high-rises, but I suppose that would have drawn too much attention.  Putting them up in a civilian house was viable, I suppose, but the expense and the security problem were probably prohibitive.  But we had a ready-made situation which would be mutually beneficial.  The Station EM’s were housed in the safe houses we had around the city.  They got a house to live in, with a kitchen and separate bedrooms, a living room and dining room, even a yard—all the luxuries—and we got someone to keep up the appearance of residents in the house so it wouldn’t attract attention as an empty house into which various Amis occasional snuck.  (When an agent needed the house for an interview, the GI’s living there just made themselves scarce in some other part of the house.)  Each house had a senior NCO (who was assigned a station car for transportation) and he and the other EM’s would act as security for the property as well.  Can’t beat it with a stick!  (I can’t say for sure that no other unit in 66th MI had this set up, but I don’t think any did, at least not in Germany.  In the Zone, our units were treated much more like the line units—most wore uniforms on duty and weren’t even as low-profile as we were.  Stations in Vicenza, Italy, or Rota, Spain, may have had similar arrangements—for the housing, not necessarily for the rest—because they were so much smaller bases of U.S. Forces.  I don’t know that that was true, however; Berlin is the only place I know that did this.  I said it was the best duty station in Europe.)

We were a sociable bunch at Berlin Station—lots of parties.  I’m sure this was as much because we were forced to associate mostly with each other as it was because Army families just like to party.  As I’ve said, our parties included both the officers and the EM’s, and one of the NCO’s was famous for the way he signaled the end of the party at his BEQ.  He just lay down on the floor and went to sleep.  Guests could stay on if they wanted, but he was plainly saying he was ready for the party to end.  And it did—for him. 

Shortly after I got to Berlin, my sponsor, who had gotten married just before I arrived, threw a cocktail party to introduce his new wife to everyone “officially.”  Now, both Chuck and Ro Lurey were military brats—his dad was a retired Army colonel (I think that was his rank) and hers was a former Marine major, both of whom had gone into USAID after retirement.  Chuck and Ro had met in Laos, where their parents were serving, as teenagers or young college kids.  Naturally, they featured some Laotian delicacies among the hors d’oeuvres.  So, we’re all smokin’ and jokin’, just standing around cocktail-party style and chatting, and I’m nibbling at finger-food like everyone else.  At one point, I’m standing next to a bowl of carrots.  They just looked like raw carrots—what we’d now call “crudités.”  I’m talking with someone, and I reach over and grab a couple—and I’m surprised to find that they’re soft, but I didn’t think anything more of that and popped one in my mouth.  And my mouth caught on fire!  I mean, like I downed a lit glass of grain alcohol or something.  What I had had no idea of was that these were Laotian pickled carrots, as sharp as the hottest pepper.  I remember a Perry Mason episode in which Perry, Della, and Paul go to a Mexican restaurant for dinner after a case, and Paul brags about how he can handle any of the spicy Mexican peppers, and swallows one.  There’s a beat.  Then he leaps for a pitcher of water and just downs the whole thing.  Well, that’s what I felt like.  My host said later that he had seen me out of the corner of his eye as I reached for the carrot, but he figured I knew what I was doing so he didn’t say anything.  WRONG!  Big joke, huh?

We also had the Harnack House, the O-club.  As I said, it was one the best in USAREUR, maybe the whole Army.  (There were enlisted personnel clubs and NCO clubs, which were also top flight, but I didn’t sample them myself, of course.)  We officers all ate at the O-club fairly often, if not for dinner then for lunch—and most of our more formal unit functions were there.  But the one really unique thing there was a special meal after a special event.  Berlin has a counterpart of Central Park, though it’s much wilder: the Grunewald.  The Germans love their outdoors—they’re inveterate hikers and walkers and Germany was one of the few countries in Europe that never deforested its countryside—and the Grunewald was more like woods than a simple park.  (The name means “green wood” or “green forest.”)  And it had boar, known among the GI’s as “grunie pigs,” living in it.  The boar population, however, was uncontrolled and every year it got too large for the park to sustain.  So there was an annual boar hunt to which senior Allied officers and diplomats were always invited—from all over Europe, not just Berlin.  It was a big deal.  At least one boar is given to the Harnack House, and after the hunt, there is a special dinner of roast boar.  Now, I was nowhere near high enough on the food chain to get into the hunt—not that I’d want to; I’m not a hunter—but the roster for the dinner is much broader, and I am an eater.  So I went.  (Tastes like pork, but stronger.)

The O-club also did other special events, of course  I remember that it did a Seder at Passover, and because Chuck is Jewish but his wife is Catholic, he wanted to introduce her to some of our practices—but in a protected and comfortable way.  So he asked me to go with them to the Harnack House Seder, so there’d be people she knew around her.  We also went to a service at a Berlin synagogue—though I don’t remember if it was the same Passover, some other holiday, or just a Friday Sabbath service.  It was the same deal—I’d go along so that there’d be at least two of us around whom Ro could feel comfortable.  Unfortunately, what Chuck hadn’t realized was that the synagogue he selected was a conservative congregation and Ro had to sit separate from us with the other women.  So much for protection in numbers. 

There were also some less orthodox—if you’ll pardon the alternative use of the term here—amusements in which we indulged occasionally.  (I did some amateur theater in Berlin, as you’ll see momentarily—but I’m thinking of slightly different diversions here.)  I’ve mentioned that living in Berlin got claustrophobic at times, and though the Army and the other occupational forces offered outlets, as did the city itself, we could go stir-crazy sometimes if we hadn’t been out of the city for a while—especially if we’d been working overmuch for a while, like when I was on 24-hour call for an extended time.  I was still pretty young then and still prone to adolescent excesses.  Physics suggests that if you put too much pressure on one place, something’s likely to pop out somewhere else, and I guess that’s what happened to a bunch of us. 

On 15 and 16 August 1973, we got a visit from the U.S. Army Synchronized Swim Team.  That’s what used to be called water ballet—and the team was all WAC’s.  I don’t recall if I actually went to the “performance” (I’m not sure what you call it) or not—probably not, since I don’t remember it.  But one of my friends, who was especially adept at that kind of thing, had hooked up with the team afterwards.  A group of us—mostly junior officers, but a few NCO’s were included—gathered to party.  (Yup, we were fraternizing.  Just one of the no-no’s on our list by the end of the evening.)  Nothing lewd, just a moveable drinking and eating event.  Think frat party on wheels.  Somewhere along the line—I’m sure we’d consumed a fair amount by that time in the evening—someone from our gang, a Special Services officer who was in charge of Berlin Brigade’s recreation facilities, announced that he still had the keys for the pool.  “Whoooaaa!  Let’s go swimming with the WAC’s,” we all decided at once.  And why not?  It’s not like it was against any rules or anything.  Not much! 

Well, we organized car pools on the spot—I don’t remember where we were at that moment; probably someone’s BOQ—and off we went to the Andrews Pool, so called because it was at the Andrews Barracks.  “Hey!  Let’s go skinny-dipping!” someone suggested.  So we did.  (There were some wives along, too, by the way.  But what the hey.)  So there we were, maybe a dozen or so junior officers and NCO’s, a couple of wives, and the WAC swim team skinny-dipping and partying at the empty recreation services swimming pool after hours.  I don’t recall that anyone brought booze to the pool, but we’d had enough before to last well into the night.  I won’t describe what went on, but I’m sure you can give it a good guess.  We stayed there until after dawn started to show and the buzz began to wear off, which suggests to me that it was after the show on the 16th because the swimmers wouldn't have to perform the next day.  I was one of the first to leave—I’d begun to prune up, not to mention sober up—and I took one or two partiers with me (I was one of the drivers—not to say “designated drivers”); I don’t know how long anyone else stayed at the pool.  Astonishingly, as far as I know, no one ever learned of our midnight escapade.  Considering how many of us there were and how much we’d all had to drink during the evening, that’s amazing.  It’s possible, I suppose, that the word got out but no one decided to do anything about it—but I doubt that would have been the case, considering the number of regs we broke.

In any case, I was in Germany (again), and I was going to partake of German culture.  Not just the food, either.  I mentioned in passing that I had attended the Bundeswehr intel school.  I had been sent as a guest-officer to the MAD-Schule.  (MAD was the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, the military counterintelligence service of the Bundeswehr.  Unlike MI, which is solely Army intel, MAD was an all-service organization.  It is now called the Amt für Sicherheit der Bundeswehr, the Office for the Security of the Bundeswehr.)  That was something of a fluke, as it turns out.  I don’t know how often the Bundeswehr—the combined military of the FROG—invited foreign officers to any of their schools, especially the MAD-Schule, or if they ever invited any but Americans, but they had invited two to join the class in the summer and fall of ’72. 

The requirements for the program were that the guest had to be an officer (there were also NCO classes, but I don’t know if guest NCO’s were ever invited, too), have at least a year left on his tour, and speak German.  And, of course, be available during the dates of the two-part course.  That apparently narrowed the available pool at 66th MI enough so that Munich reached out to Berlin for one officer.  Since the point for us was to get to know some German MI officers and perhaps to establish personal relationships with some who might later be in positions of real authority, it was something of a wasted invitation because there was no Bundeswehr in Berlin—it wasn’t permitted by the Occupation.  The point for them was pretty much the same thing, so it wasn’t much use for an officer stationed in Berlin to make the trip and take the slot.  But better use it than lose it, so there I was, with a good two years left to go in Germany (or so we all thought at the time) and speaking German well enough to do the course.  Off I drove to Bad Ems.  (Coincidently, Bad Ems was across the Rhine from Koblenz, the town I had lived in ten years before as a teenager so I got a little nostalgic trip “home” thrown in.  I planned my arrival so I could spend the night in Koblenz—at a pension right by the Deutsches Eck, down the Rheinanlagen from where we used to live—and I could check out the town and then report to the MAD-Schule in Bad Ems fresh and in uniform the next morning.) 

I didn’t actually go off to Bad Ems right away.  The Bundeswehr isn’t any more efficient sometimes than the U.S. Army—despite Germany’s rep for efficiency.  (Germans knew exactly when a piece of mail was supposed to be delivered after it was sent.  If it was even one day late, they’d call the post office and complain.  Made it hard for us to intercept mail.)  I was supposed to go just as rehearsals had gotten underway for the American Community Theater production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (5-7 May 1972).  I had been cast in one of the supporting roles—for the life of me, I don’t remember who—and I had to tell the director that I’d been ordered away on TDY and would have to drop out.  This being a military base, they were used to that, but no one was thrilled with having to recast the role—and I had wanted to start working with the group and this would have been my first chance.  A week or so later, though, word came in that the class had been rescheduled and I wouldn’t be leaving until after the production.  I went back to the director and offered her my services as a volunteer, just so I could get into the group.  To my surprise, she asked me to resume my role.  I don’t remember if they just hadn’t recast it yet or were unhappy with the choice, or what. 

It didn’t really matter, because a few days later, the director kept me after a rehearsal and told me that they were very displeased with the actor playing Chance Wayne, the male lead, and would I take over the role.  (The only thing I remember specifically about this guy is that in the hash-smoking scene in the beginning—we used chunks of stale brownie—he didn’t have any idea what it was like to smoke hash or get high or anything.  The director and the rest of us sort of tried to “teach” him what it was like—great, big pot-head that I was, don’cha know—but he never really got it.)  Believe me, I was flattered—besides being a lead, Chance is, as one of my teachers later would describe it, a sex-pot role.  (Paul Newman played the part in the Broadway première.  That wasn’t my usual casting, even before I got gray, grizzled, and fat.)  However, I wasn’t real comfortable about the idea of displacing an actor already in rehearsal, so I said I’d do it on one condition: that I not be around when they told the guy playing the part then.  Coward, right?  Dot’s I’m!  (Turns out he was relieved—he was way over his head and knew it.  He was pleased to take a smaller part, probably mine, but I don’t remember that detail.)  So, anyway, we went back into rehearsals and got ready to do our show.

There were a few incidents connected to the show that are amusing.  (In hindsight!)  First and foremost, I had a Princess Kosmonopolis who liked to shorten her lines—more and more each time.  It wasn’t that she didn’t remember them—she was fine in rehearsal—she just seemed not to like to say them.  Unfortunately, there was a lot of exposition in our scenes in the first act, and she was dropping lots of information about the backstory.  So I kept picking up her lines and adding them to mine.  Why I never said anything to the director—or why she never noticed it or, if she did, said anything to the actress, I’ll never know.  Little by little, then, I was developing a monologue! 

Then there was the night that I had heard from backstage scuttlebutt that the assistant director, an Entertainment Specialist in the Special Services office (which ran ACT), had told a few people that he was going to walk on in the bar scene as an unannounced extra.  Well, I was furious, and went off looking for him.  He got the word that I was, and he actually hid from me.  I think he actually thought I might kill him.  (He was one of those who was in awe of my MI status—and I never disillusioned him.)    I found him hiding upstairs from the auditorium, in the Entertainment Section offices, and I gave him a severe tongue-lashing.  I let him think I might kill him if he set foot on the stage.  Dat’s right.  I’m baad.  Uh-huh, uh-huh. (With gratitude and apologies to the late, great Gene Wilder.)

There had been an earlier incident where I wore my MI hat.  Well, cloak I guess.  Someone in the Special Services office—the Entertainment Director, I think—came to me because that same guy had been telling people he was a spook.  He’d even taken to wearing a fedora!  I never made it official, but I gave him one of my “stern talking-to’s”—like those SAEDA briefings I mentioned earlier.  I put him on notice—like a traffic cop who says, “I’ll let you go with a warning this time, but don’t let me catch you speeding again!”  He being a PFC or whatever, was ummmm . . . shall we say, chastened?  He thought I was King Shit after that.  I just let him.  (Now you also see what I meant when I said I’d been acting a role all the time I was in the Army.)

Finally, one night—I believe it was the night my parents were visiting and came to the show (my mom wasn’t too thrilled with the castration stuff at the end of the play, I can tell you!)—the crew person who was supposed to close the curtain at the end of the first act didn’t show up and no one noticed.  That act ends with Chance and Princess going back to bed, ostensibly to make love—but the curtain’s supposed to close as we’re getting back in the bed.  Well, we’re moving toward the bed—no curtain.  We’re getting in bed—no curtain.  We’re in bed—NO CURTAIN.  The lights are off—NO CURTAIN!  “What shall we do?” one of us whispers.  “I don’t know,” the other replies.  No one noticed the curtain was still up—or they didn’t know what to do about it.  “Well, should we just get up?”  “Yeah, I guess.  What else can we do?”  So, finally, that’s exactly what we did.  In the semi-darkness, we simply climbed back out of bed and tip-toed off the stage.  At which point I did my Hulk routine again, and went apoplectic about who let the curtain go unattended, why didn’t anyone remedy the situation when it developed, and I better not find that crew person alive anytime soon.  (As I’ve admitted, I was good at bluster.)

Well, that was the start of my theatrical career in Berlin.  The ACT, which later became the Berlin Entertainment Center, went on to do John Murray and Allen Boretz’s Room Service (6-9, 14-16 July 1972) and Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company (30 May-3 June 1973) and some others I wasn’t in, like The Caine Mutiny Court Martial by Herman Wouk (1-3 February 1974; with my friend Rich Gilbert as Lt. Stephen Maryk).  I remember the guy who played the doctor in Room Service one night when he was supposed to be in the bathroom (off stage) came wandering back on stage because he had gotten a splinter in a finger.  Amateurs!  (A bunch of us later decided we wanted more continuity than a show-to-show association, so we started an independent theater group and got the NCO club at Tempelhof to sponsor us.  That’s how I got to meet Colonel Halvorsen.) 

But I did go off to the MAD-Schule eventually.

MAD Spezial Lehrgruppe “Abwehroperation” für Offiziere (MAD Special Class “Counterintelligence Operations” for Officers) was a two-part course over the summer and fall of 1972, and I was one of two U.S. officers in the class—the other being a captain from Munich, Doug Waters.  The rest of the class were German army, navy, and Luftwaffe officers, mostly majors and lieutenant colonels and the naval equivalents, and that was an experience.  I don’t mean the classes—they were interesting, of course, but purely from a professional perspective, nothing amusing.  Going to class in German, especially an esoteric class like intel, was a trip, but it was a terrific exercise for me.  The German officers—who were all older than both Captain Waters and me—were rather astonished to find that we could get on so well in German.  (When I was a kid in Koblenz a decade before, I learned that Germans love the idea of foreigners learning their language.)  And that’s where the revelations started. 

I’m assuming that this bunch was pretty much typical—I don’t see why they wouldn’t be.  The school was a self-contained facility in the little hot-water spa of Bad Ems on the banks of the Lahn (Bad means ‘bath’ in German; all towns with that in their names are or were thermal spas)—there was no military base to which it was attached like the Armor School at Ft. Knox or the Intel School at either Holabird or Huachuca.  (Even the language school in Monterey was at the Presidio, a satellite of the huge Ft. Ord on the other side of town.)  So we had a little mess—good food, by the way—and an O-club.  Well, a bar.  After classes, we’d all gather there for drinks and conversation—everyone was very gemütlich (an untranslatable word which here is best rendered as ‘convivial’)—and then we’d return after dinner.  Man, could those German officers drink!  My American colleague gave up trying to keep up with them pretty quickly—they kept buying rounds, and you can’t really say no.  So I’m drinking mine . . . and his to keep the Germans from feeling slighted.  And not only are they buying round after round, but they keep changing liquor.  (They even drank some bourbon, in deference to us Americans.  I’m surprised they had any in stock.)  They also bought a round of Ratzeputz, a German liqueur I had experienced in my earlier days in the country.  The name means something like “cleans out your stomach” and it’ll eat the enamel off your teeth.  It’s pretty vile. 

Okay, so we’re all getting pretty plastered—nothing rude, but loose.  We’re comparing backgrounds and home lives and so on, and then the Germans start to sing.  Now, these guys weren’t all in the same service as I said, or from the same part of the country, but they all knew the same songs.  And they knew them all the way through.  They asked us to sing some American songs, and do you know that between the two of us, we didn’t know one song together all the way?  Germany is a singing society—or it was until that generation, at least.  Germans would sing when they got together.  (Russians are like that, too.)  We just don’t. 

There were no classes on weekends and the school pretty much closed down.  Everyone went back home then; even Doug Waters went back to Munich.  But I couldn’t go back to Berlin.  Even if the drive weren’t prohibitively long (370 miles—about six hours without the checkpoints), the paperwork would have been impossible to negotiate.  So I stayed in Bad Ems and took trips.  Like I said, you can’t do that in Berlin—so I took advantage of the situation, and sightsaw.  One weekend, I drove up to Aachen—Charlemagne’s capital (known in French as Aix-la-Chapelle).  Another weekend, I did day trips in the area.  Remember, I had lived near there 10 years earlier, so there were places I knew about but hadn’t gotten to back in those days.  I also poked around Koblenz to see if I could find any of the old places I remembered, but the town had changed so much physically that I wasn’t able to find a lot of them.  It was a very strange experience—going back after a decade—especially that decade.  From the ’60s to the ’70s, Europe changed a lot, and Koblenz reflected every aspect of that change.  I hardly recognized the town—a real city by 1972. 

When I first arrived in Koblenz on that June day in 1972 and I was driving around looking for a place to stay, I inadvertently got myself onto an elaborate cloverleaf I never remembered from the 1960s which forced me onto the Pfaffendorf Bridge across the Rhine to Ehrenbreitstein.  I looked for the former Amerika Haus on Schlossstrasse, my father’s office back then—but couldn't find it.  I located our house because I remembered the address, but the house, which was some kind of office—a lawyer, I think—didn't look the same.  The whole experience was disheartening.  Over one of the weekends, I ate in two of the old restaurants we used to enjoy.  One was the Königsbacher brewery where we used to love to go for basic, plain German food.  The restaurant was really the mess hall for the brewery workers, but it was open to the public.  We had great meals served at long wooden tables with benches, no adornments, and I was stunned to find that the old dining hall had been replaced by a fancy terrace restaurant overlooking the Mosel where the closest thing to German food on the menu was Wiener Schnitzel, which is Austrian.  What a drag.  (Thomas Wolfe was right: You can’t go home again.) 

The other restaurant, near the railroad station, was Die Ewige Lampe (The Eternal Lamp).  It almost looked as if it hadn’t changed.  While I was waiting for my meal, the waiter got into a dispute with an American couple nearby.  They had asked for water and the waiter had brought them a bottle of mineral water.  They demanded tap water and wouldn’t accept the waiter’s explanation that they would be unhappy and that the restaurant wouldn’t serve them tap water.  I felt compelled to step in and explained, “I used to live in this town and believe me, you don’t want to drink the tap water here.  It’s hard as rock, full of iron, and tastes vile.  It’s undrinkable.  You can’t even make tea with it.”  Whether they believed me or not, they did give up the fight and the waiter brought me a brandy after dinner.  (That’s true about the water in Koblenz.  It won’t make you sick or anything, but it’s unpalatable—and eventually turns everything, like my mother’s dishes, rust-brown.)

The MAD course was a two-parter, and we went during June and July for the first stage.  We were there over 4 July, so Doug Waters and I decided that we had to throw a Fourth of July barbecue for our German classmates.  Even by 1972, barbecuing the American way—over a grill outdoors then eating outside pretty much with your hands—was still un-German.  (My mom had done a cook-out for some ladies of Koblenz, and they didn’t quite know how to manage it.  They ate hamburgers with knives and forks and then wanted to wash the paper plates.)  Well, since Doug, who was married after all, went back to Munich for the weekends, I was tasked with doing the shopping.  I drove up to the commissaries in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden—where my family used to do their big periodic shopping trips from Koblenz—and stocked up on steaks, hot dogs, and burgers.  I got number-10 cans of baked beans and all the fixin’s for a traditional Independence Day barbecue.  We had a half day on Tuesday, the Fourth—a coincidence, as far as I know—and the morning was devoted to Sport.  We had done this before, and gone to a swimming pool for the day, but this time we were going kegeling—German bowling.  Wouldn’t you know it, most Kegelbahns were also bars! 

That morning was rainy and gray, and it looked like the barbecue was going to be a wash-out.  But we came out of the Kegelbahn and the sun was shining.  One of the German officers cracked, “Is it Jesus or the good Lord himself who loves America?”  And off we went to our cook-out.  The mess hall had come up with a grill, and we set up everything outside—the Germans sprang for the beer—and the cook-out was a blazing success.  (All that beer didn’t hurt.)  What went over best, I was surprised to find, was the baked beans.  Man, those guys just loved that stuff.  I had over-bought a little, and they served the rest at mess until it ran out.  I think they even prevailed on me to get more from the commissary.  I think I created a bunch of addicts!  But we paid those guys back for all their jovial kindness and cordiality—even if we never could keep up with their singing—and stood America in good repute with a small group of folks. 

They really were a gemütlich bunch, and they had a good deal of fun among themselves, too.  We took a field trip one day up to Bonn—back home again (again)!—so the Germans could take advantage of being so near the capital to stop in at the Bundeswehr HQ/Defense Ministry and do a little career schmoozing.  As we were driving through the city in the bus, one of the officers shouted out, “There’s the Bavarian Embassy!” and everyone laughed uproariously.  One of our number was Bavarian, and they all explained that the office we passed was the Bavarian tourist office—but that Bavaria was so much like a different country, that they teased the guy about needing an embassy in Bonn like a foreign state.  (Bavaria’s sort of the Texas of Germany.  It’s also Catholic while the rest of the country is Protestant.) 

The senior officer of the class, Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Siegfried Rühfel, was from the Allgäu, another region in southern Germany.  Allgäuers, like Swabians, speak a dialect of German that is so different from Hoch Deutsch as to be unintelligible.  All through the course, the other officers used to tease this guy—who outranked us all, mind you—about needing a translator.  The Americans spoke better German than he did, they’d say.  (The officer didn’t actually speak his native dialect among us; the worst he had was an accent not much different from, say, a Southern or Southwestern accent in American English)  None of this was biting or nasty—it was all good-natured, and returned by the recipients in the same vein.  As I look back on this, it’s a little astounding, because it was all in German—not just the classes (my notes were in German, too—it didn’t make sense to try to translate on the spot; it would take to much concentration away from listening), but all this drinking and schmoozing.  Some of the Germans must have spoken some English—most Europeans spoke some other language than their own, and many spoke several; English was already the most important international language, so I’m sure there were several who spoke it at least a little.  But I don’t recall ever getting into a full conversation in English

When I got back to Berlin, of course, I had to make a written Intelligence Report on everything I picked up.  (I’m sure the IR’s lying in some DOD archive, too, along with my exfiltration staff study.)  It was mostly about the personalities—the instruction wasn’t news.  We had taken snapshots all the time—well, not me, but the German officers—and I turned in a set with ID’s of all the Germans.  (I still have a set—taken at the Independence Day party—with the officers’ names all written on the backs.)   The funny thing is, in some Bundeswehr archive somewhere, there’s a file on an American junior intel officer with red hair and a mustache who could speak German, but didn’t know all the words to any songs.  (And who drove a big, red American car!)  A lot o’ good it did ’em.  I was gone in two years.  (And whose fault was that?)

[I hope ROTters are enjoying this visit to a portion of my past.  I guess it’s obvious that my 2½ years in West Berlin—back when there was such a place as West Berlin—was a significant experience for me.  Even the most ordinary-seeming events seemed intense to me then, partly, I imagine, because it was Cold War Berlin and partly because I was very young and really being a grown-up for the first time. 

[I invite you all to come back for "Berlin Memoir, Part 7," to be published on 29 March 2017, which will cover a couple of trips I took out of Berlin and some SNAFU’s in which I was involved as a result of my duties back in the divided city.]

Berlin Memoir, Part 5

[In Part 5 of my “Berlin Memoir,” I try to describe some of the unusual—you might even say weird—experiences that occurred daily, or at least weekly, in the West Berlin of the Cold War.  As you’ll see, living in this little island of democracy inside the German Democratic Republic, especially as a Military Intelligence agent, could be . . . well, odd is a moderate way of saying it.  If you haven’t read the first four parts of this series, I suggest you go back and catch up on them before setting out on part 5.  It provides background for much of what follows and I explain and define some things in the earlier sections that come up again in the rest of the series.  (Parts 1 through 4 were posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, and 20 January and 9 February 2017.)]

The city of Berlin is a slightly peculiar entity in itself.  It’s a very old city—something like 750 years now, I think—and, like New York, it grew out and swallowed up other towns which became boroughs of the city.  Unlike New York, with its discreet five boroughs, Berlin had some two dozen (reduced in recent years to about a dozen), and some of the official boroughs had neighborhoods that seemed more like separate boroughs.  When someone asked a Berliner where she lived, she’d usually start with the borough or neighborhood: Tempelhof (where the airport was), Kreuzberg (where a surveillance fiasco in which I was involved happened), Zehlendorf (where the U.S. HQ was), Spandau (where the infamous prison that held Rudolf Hess was), and so on.  The Wall split Berlin in two parts, each with its own boroughs; the Soviet Sector was approximately one-third of the old city (about a million people) and the Allied Sectors about two-thirds.  (The reason that the three Allies shared two-thirds instead of the obvious three-quarters of the city—the same had been true of Germany as a whole—was that at the Yalta and Potsdam wartime conferences, the Soviets rejected an equal share in the Occupation for France, so the U.S. and Britain agreed that the French zone would be ceded from their areas.)  The Wall did not always conform exactly to the border dividing the eastern section from the west; the Soviets built the Wall within its territory and sometimes construction, roads, or the Spree River meant that the Wall was many yards east of the actual border. 

One aggravating result of this formation of the city is that streets with the same name could exist in several boroughs but not be connected at all—like Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn.  But the reverse is also true: the same road might change names as it passes through each borough.  If someone gave you an address to find in Berlin, you needed to know in which borough it was in order to find it.  Driving in Berlin was hard enough—an old city with unplanned street layouts and narrow and crowded streets, not to mention my big, American car.  (I had a red 1970 Ford Torino I got after I graduated from college.  Man, it was a pretty car!  And did it attract attention on the streets of Berlin and the roads of West Germany!  Candy-apple red with airplane bucket seats, a black interior, and a fastback.  Mmm-mmm.)  I’ll never know how I learned to drive around that town—but I did.  (There was a tiny little stretch of Autobahn in Berlin, and I used to take the Torino on it and let ’er loose for a couple of miles to let the engine run after weeks of cramped city driving.  There are—or were in those days—no speed limits on Autobahns, even within Berlin.  I’d get ‘er up to 100+ mph for a few minutes, once up and once back.)

The Wall went up beginning in August 1961 and took about a year to construct—though it was always under alteration and sections were rebuilt and sometimes shifted from time to time.  Mostly, however, the Wall was a constant presence in the city and in the minds of Berliners for 28 years.  It was grey concrete and ugly—a scar across the middle of the city.  I arrived in Berlin just before August 1971, the tenth anniversary of the Wall’s construction, and was immediately added to the Station’s contingent of observers for the massive demonstrations that were planned for the commemoration.  One of the tasks we had was demo coverage—watching political demonstrations to note who was there and what anyone said or did.  I know that this sounds totalitarian, and I suppose in the abstract it is.  But we only observed—we did not disrupt any demonstration, hassle any participants, bug anyone’s office or home in connection with a demonstration (we did for other reasons), or in any way try to prevent a demonstration. 

Remember that Berlin was not only the spy center of Europe, so keeping an eye out at such large political gatherings was no more than watchfulness, but the city attracted large numbers of young anarchists and militant activists who were performing terrorist acts all over Germany.  (Students in Berlin were exempt from the German draft, so many West German young men came to the city for university.)  I mentioned the RAF/Baader-Meinhof Gang; there were other, smaller cells, too, such as the Movement 2 June and SPK (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv – Socialist Patients’ Collective).  These folks had a habit of blowing things up and kidnapping people.  And people like Michael “Bommi” Baumann (1947-2016) and Red Rudi Dutschke (1940-79), radical student revolutionaries, were active in Berlin.  Prudence dictated that we keep an eye on them, especially when something as charged as the Wall was the subject of an action.

Those 1971 demos—there were two, one leftist-oriented in favor of the Wall and one rightist, opposing it—were both aimed at the same spot: the saddest place in Cold War Berlin—the Peter Fechter Memorial.  Fechter was a 19-year-old laborer in East Berlin who made an escape attempt with a friend in 1962, one of the first after the Wall was erected.  Fechter and his friend hid in an abandoned building next to the Wall on the eastern side—the Soviets kept the area uninhabited, unlike the FROG which encouraged people to move into the area near the western side—and watched the Vopos (Volkspolizei, or “people’s police,” the East German police and border guards.).  When they thought there was a gap in the coverage, they made a run for it, scaling the fence that formed the eastern side of the no-man’s strip (sometimes, for obvious reasons, called the death strip) on the eastern side of the Wall.  They made it over the fence and through the death strip, and Fechter’s friend made it over the Wall into West Berlin, but Fechter was shot in the hip as he scaled the Wall and fell back into the no-man’s land.  Western Observers, including journalists and some U.S. military, were prevented from helping Fechter by the Vopos who threatened to shoot anyone entering the strip.  No one from the East went to Fechter’s aid, though he screamed in pain for help for several hours as he bled to death.  When he died, the Vopos did enter the no-man’s land to recover his body.  A memorial plaque was mounted in front of the Wall on the Western side at the spot where Fechter fell and died. 

Both demos, numbering several thousand each—maybe even tens of thousands—were headed for that same spot.  Everyone knew that if they got there together, there’d be a street battle between the leftists and the rightists, and no one wanted that.  (We observers, following along with one or the other march, also knew that we didn’t want to get caught either between the two groups of protestors or between the protestors and the police.  We had a special code word to shout at the police line as we ran toward them for protection—we were not armed, of course—so they’d let us through their ranks and not shoot us in mistake for attacking protestors.) 

This was the most astonishing example of competence, resolve, and steadfastness I have ever witnessed.  When signs of violence broke out—some stones thrown, some sticks that had been holding up protest signs snapped off and swung—the police moved in to clear the streets.  They had been lining the streets—just standing still along the curb, in riot gear, with tall shields, and the biggest German shepherds I have ever seen—until the violence started.  Now they just moved in slowly, walking with their shields in front of them, forming a moving wall.  They simply herded the protestors, from whichever side, down the streets and into the subway entrances.  The message was clear: You can stay in the subway station or you can get on a train and come up somewhere else, but you’re not coming back up here. 

Not one billy club was swung, not one weapon was drawn (much less fired), not one cop shouted an epithet or insult (some of the protestors did, though—but the cops didn’t overreact).  They just calmly and professionally—and evenhandedly—cleared the streets and restored order before things got out of hand.  Bang, it was over.  No riot, no serious injuries, no nothin’.  The protestors got to march, carry their signs, make their statement—and they would have been able to make their speeches or whatever if they hadn’t turned potentially violent—and the police kept order without any excess.  Now, the Berlin police had infantry training—the German army was not permitted to operate in Berlin, so the cops were paramilitary stand-ins if necessary—but I was still impressed with the way they handled this situation.  Think of it: a generation earlier, the predecessors of these cops were the guys who roughed up and killed civilians in the streets.  But these cops were in better control of themselves and their turf than any U.S. force (or the National Guard—Kent State had been just a little over a year earlier) at the time.

One odd thing about the Wall (and old Berlin, too) that has no real counterpart in New York is that, though the Wall did surround the Western Sectors of the divided city, it also had little orphans.  All of Berlin isn’t contiguous: there are little communities that are legally and politically part of the city, but which aren’t attached.  Like little islands—maybe that’s where the parallel to New York lies.  Think of land-locked versions of Governor’s Island, Roosevelt Island, and North and South Brother Islands.  Each of these little satellite communities of the Western Sectors was also surrounded by a wall, since they were still Allied territory in the midst of the DDR.  (Eastern satellites didn’t need this, of course)  Some of these enclaves—they’re not towns, but neighborhoods—were connected to West Berlin by walled corridors so residents could get back and forth and the enclaves could be serviced by Berlin police and firefighters.  I don’t know how many of these little islets there were, but it was at least half a dozen or ten, I’d guess.  I never visited one—I don’t even know if I could have.

Berlin attracted young people, both political and not, because of a couple of very salient reasons.  When I was there, in the early ’70s, West Berlin was a vibrant and active city, with a full social and cultural life—a real city of two-and-a-half million inhabitants.  (East Berlin was a little grey and lifeless, even 25 years after the war.)  In contrast, when my parents visited Berlin in the early ’60s—they were there, by the way, for Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech—they reported that the city seemed artificial, that life was sort of staged and forced, like a Potemkin city. 

I mentioned in passing that Berlin Station had to participate in BB alerts, like any other unit.  I also said that there was an agent on duty all night and over holidays and weekends—like the CQ in ordinary line units.  He spent the night in an office just inside the building entrance and between the building entrance and the second entrance, controlled by an electronic lock which required a numerical combination to open, into the unit’s offices.  The DA office was furnished with a bed, a desk, a TV, a file cabinet (mostly empty)—and a bank of telephones, perhaps a dozen or so.  Some of the phones were ordinary BB lines—one of them “9666,” our public number.  (9666, colloquially known as “Trip-6,” was the Military Occupational Specialty for counterintel officers, which is what we all were.  There were similar or equivalent MOS’s for enlisted personnel.  This was also the license number of the CO’s staff car.) 

Other phones on the Duty Agent’s desk were special lines which were used for sources to call in with information and to arrange meets with their handlers.  Since in most cases, these sources had cover stories, and sometimes so did the handlers, these phones all had to be answered with specific cover phrases, as if they were extensions at some business, say, or some innocuous agency.  (During the time when junior officers pulled this duty, none of those phones ever rang when I was DA.  I suspect some were part of defunct operations.)  One phone was, of course, the red alert phone.  That rang once a night to check the communications system, and the DA had to answer it with a prescribed phrase: the name of the unit and the DA’s initials in phonetic alphabet.  So, when I was DA, I’d have to say, “66th MI.  Romeo-Echo-Kilo.”  It invariably rang when I was sound asleep—which I assume was intentional. 

(There was one other piece of equipment in the DA’s office at night.  Until I handled money, at the end of my tour in Berlin, except for the firing range, this was the only time I went armed.  At the end of the day, the assigned Duty Agent drew his weapon and six rounds of ammo—we carried .38 caliber Police Special revolvers—from the unit armorer.  Standard procedure while on duty was to keep the pistol loaded, but the cylinder open, and stand it on the desk, propped up by the open cylinder.  Since every DA drew the same rounds, I sometimes wondered if they’d even fire if the need ever arose.  Lord knows how old they were!)

I never got an alert call while I was DA, but during the time I was in Berlin, we had three or four full alerts.  Since we wore civvies to work, we kept uniforms at the Station to change into, so we all reported to the locker room when we got the call.  Each unit has an assignment for the outbreak of hostilities, and we are all supposed to go about preparing for that mission in an alert.  The infantry and armor units all gear up and go to the points they are expected to defend, the MP’s get into their positions to guard the compounds and other sites and to control the streets, and so on.  Our mission was to round up potential enemy agents who have been previously identified, secure sensitive personnel and get them on ’copters out of the city, and assist with the security of VIP’s and U.S. facilities. 

Obviously, in an alert, there’s not much of that we can actually do—I can just see us running around Berlin, pretending to arrest suspected commie agents.  That would go over big.  So we ended up sitting around our locker room, after putting on our “unmarked” fatigues—the ones with the U.S. device where the branch and rank insignia ought to go—and making jokes until the alert had ended.  The recurring theme of those jokes is what would probably happen if an actual war did break out in Central Europe.  As I’ve mentioned, Berlin is 110 miles inside East Germany, surrounded by the Soviet 40th Tank Army, a total of about 300,000 Red Army soldiers plus whatever East German units were out there, and any additional Warsaw Pact troops that happened to be in the region.  The Soviets, not being stupid, probably wouldn’t fight for Berlin—why waste the men and time.  We decided what they’d do is simply roll some tanks up to Checkpoints Bravo and Charlie, hang a sign on the boom gates that read “Berlin POW Camp,” and move on to the real war on the border and beyond.  That would be the end of our participation aside from some Warsaw Ghetto-type uprising or a sort of hyper-Great Escape. 

(By the way—those U.S. insignia for our fatigues?  By this time, all insignia on fatigue uniforms were “subdued”—no shiny silver or brass or bright yellow chevrons.  The Vietcong had developed a habit of taking potshots at anything that glittered in the jungle.  But there’s no such thing as a subdued U.S. device—they only came in brass because they’re only officially worn on dress uniforms, not fatigues.  So we each had to get a couple of pair of U.S.’s and turn them in to the unit clerk; he’d get them painted matte black so we could put them on a set of fatigues to stash at the Station for alerts, range-firing, and other activities that required that uniform.  I think I still have mine put away somewhere.  Needless to say, since this uniform configuration didn’t officially exist, we got some stares and wry remarks when anyone saw us dressed in it.  Most people figured we were CIA or something.  Of course, we could neither confirm nor deny . . . .)

I said that aside from the firing range—I think we went out there once officially; I went privately once to fire Dad’s souvenir Luger he brought back from WWII—the only other time I was armed beside DA duty was when I carried Army cash.  When an officer is carrying money, such as a payroll, he must be armed.  When I was reassigned to the spook bank for Intelligence Contingency Funds (ICF) in the Station’s basement, I would periodically have to buy Marks, Francs, and occasionally other currencies.  We bought Marks at the Army Finance Office in another part of the main compound, so I didn’t have to leave the grounds—but I had to wear my sidearm.  Just like the cops on TV, I had a holster on my belt, under my suit jacket.  A .38’s not large, especially the snub-nosed Police Special, but it makes a noticeable lump on your hip beneath the jacket.  So, I walked into the Finance Office the first time I had to buy Marks, feeling pretty self-conscious to start with, and, of course, there were lots of other people in there transacting business.  The FO is where the GI savings accounts are maintained, the credit union is, payments are made for such things as late pay or special disbursements, and all kinds of money business.  And in I walked, packin’ iron.  So what did the NCO behind the counter shout?  “I’ll take the guy with the gun first!”  Well, I felt like Butch Cassidy fixin’ to rob a bank!  Everybody in the place turned to took—no, stare at me.  And my gun!  I felt like I was packin’ a howitzer!  “No, that’s all right.  I’ll just wait.”  Haw-haw!!

The first time I had to get Francs, which we bought at the American Express bank in the PX across the street—where everyone had his personal checking account and what have you—I didn’t know what to expect.  I still had to carry the weapon, but this time I was going out in public.  Thank goodness, nothing happened—but I was very self-conscious.  Very self-conscious.

Needless to add, this was not a job I liked much.  Not that it wasn’t important.  It was extremely important.  But it was booooring.  First of all, it’s nothing but numbers.  Keeping books, checking requests for disbursements (I did get to know about all the really spooky stuff people in my old unit and its sister unit next door were doing, which I didn’t need to know before—but most of it turns out to be routine), reconciling conversion losses and gains (when the dollar amount is different from the amount of Marks or other foreign currency because the exchange rates are never an even ratio), counting up the cash on hand, and such.  The most excitement I had was when we had to prepare for an audit, quarterly by the Class A Agent from Group or semi-annually by the Class B Agent from USAREUR. 

Second, since I’m not a banker or an accountant and I got slammed into this job without any preparation, I couldn’t really run the day-to-day routine until I learned it OTJ.  So I had a Spec 4 clerk who had been there for some time, and he did most of the daily stuff—it was his job anyway.  He was all of 19, by the way—we had lots in common (though he was a nice enough kid).  Third, the job was what it was—I had to wait in my office until someone needed money for an op.  I couldn’t develop ops, I couldn’t make work; I just waited, drank coffee (not a habit I ever really developed except here), and read the newspaper or the Sears catalogue when it came. 

Fourth, I was no longer part of Berlin Station.  The ICF Class A Custodian (that’s what I was) is part of HQ—which, you remember was in Munich.  None of my old colleagues were, well, colleagues anymore.  Fifth, my office was in a vault in the basement.  Even if a former colleague wanted to come by to chat—I was way out of the way, with a big vault door to greet them.  As soon as the Army started riffing people, when the reduction in force began after combat in Vietnam ended, I started asking around if I could get out even though my tour in Berlin still had six months to run and I still had a few years on the obligation I incurred to get Trip-6 and Europe.  (Berlin was a lagniappe, but I worked the system to get Europe.)  Also, my name was on the promotion list for captain, and it used to be that an officer had to stay in for, I think it was a year, in order to accept promotion.  I figured I earned that promotion—it took long enough, I thought—and I was damned if I was going to be cheated out of it if I didn’t have to be. 

I was hoping that the Army, which was paying people who were riffed something like $10K for each year over five, I think, they served (unless they were riffed for incompetence), would jump at the chance to get a freebie.  If you got out at your own request, the Army didn’t pay.  I’d been in just over five years, seven counting senior ROTC—which did count as enlisted reserve—so the Army’d have had to pay me $20K or so if they riffed me.  I found out that I could accept my promotion—the requirement to stay in had been dropped when the time-in-grade for eligibility was extended—and that the Army would release me from the remaining obligation, though I’d still have to be in the inactive reserve for the remainder of my obligation.  I put in my papers.  (I might have stayed in the Army longer if they hadn’t made me an accountant.  Maybe we were both better off in the long run.)

As a parting shot, I recommended that the Class A Custodian, which had to be an officer—it was actually supposed to be a captain—should be redesignated as an extra duty for someone.  It seemed wrong to waste a trained and experienced officer like that for so little activity.  I believe they accepted my suggestion, though, of course, I wasn’t around to see if they implemented it.

I was promoted to captain on 1 December 1973, shortly before I left Berlin.  I had planned a big party at the Officers’ Club, the Harnack House, to celebrate my 26th birthday (“Closer to 30 than to 20”) in ’72, but first Harry Truman died (26 December 1972, the day after my birthday) and then Lyndon Johnson died (22 January 1973), and O-club parties were cancelled or postponed.  So I had a combined belated-birthday/promotion/departure left-over party: we tried to drink up all my remaining booze.  (We did pretty good, as I recall.  And I kept a well-stocked bar in Berlin—it was sooo cheap to get the best stuff.)  At the promotion ceremony in the CO’s office—I wasn’t part of the unit officially, but they were my administrative support since the umbilical didn’t stretch as far as Munich—I used my dad’s WWII railroad tracks.  I had had him send them to me just for that purpose.  I still have them.  (My dad made captain in WWII, and it took him about three years, I think—but he started as an EM.  It took me nearly four years, and I started as a second looie.  I got first looie about 12 months in—while I was at Monterey.)

(Speaking of my dad. there was one very personal peculiarity for me to this assignment in Berlin.  Because there hadn’t been a peace treaty to end WWII, Berlin was still under occupation until 1990 when a formal peace was finally negotiated.  While the Allies had relinquished political responsibility for what became the Federal Republic in 1949, Berlin remained occupied territory for half a century.  That meant that my service in Berlin in the ’70s made me eligible for the Army of Occupation Medal.  That’s the same ribbon my dad was awarded for service in the Occupation of Germany—he was in Cologne after VE Day—30 years earlier.  I always found it a little ironic that my dad and I both wore the same military decoration from the same war, a generation apart.  Maybe I’m the only one to find this an odd comment about the state of our modern world.  I recall there’s a Cold War Recognition Certificate that was authorized a few years back.  I qualify and I think my dad did, too, since it recognizes all Federal service, military and civilian; I had some vague idea of getting us both the same award—there’s no official medal to go along with it, though I think someone has put out an unofficial one—for some sentimental reason.  My mom didn’t feel like I did, so I never followed up on this notion.)

I had decided to go to acting school after leaving the service by this time—I had contacted Lee Kahn, the professor of theater at W&L, my alma mater, for advice and he was going to help me prepare audition pieces and, of course, recommend me to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where he was a member of the board (and a grad school friend of the director at the time, Charles Raison).  When people asked me what I was going to do when I got out and I told them I was going to acting school, they thought that that was a helluva change from the military.  “Why?” I asked.  “I’ve been playing the part of an Army officer for five years.”  (Mine wasn’t the oddest change in career path by any means.  A friend in Berlin, who had been an infantry officer and part of our theater group—his dad was a general, and was furious about this—got out and went to clown school!  No comment.)

I’ve said that while I was living in Germany when I was a teenager, back in the early ’60s, I knew while it was happening that I was having an adventure.  When I was in Berlin, my feeling was a little different.  I had this sense that I was into something special and edgy.  It wasn’t so much danger—there was some, but, of course, nothing to compare to what was happening in Southeast Asia.  Maybe I was just taken with the romantic notion of the world’s second oldest profession—I had read all the James Bond books and, of course, the movies had already been around for a decade.  Not to mention Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, Mission: Impossible, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and so many other fictionalized renditions.  (I’ve already mentioned our unofficial theme song, “Secret Agent Man.”)  But I had this pervasive sense that I was involved in something special.  The fact that other people with whom I came into contact treated me somehow differently—some with a kind of hostile resentment, some almost with awe—didn’t hurt, that’s certain.  (Flashing our “box tops”—what we called our badges and credentials, also known as “B’s & C’s”—was a lot like being in a neat movie.  Special Agent K*****, Military Intelligence.  I used to watch The FBI and now I was in it!)  But on top of any of this, was the feeling that I was actually doing something fairly important—even the background investigations.  My decisions would affect the security of the country, even if it was at the lowest level.  Drilling with an idiot stick or driving a tank in an exercise just didn’t match that, not in Berlin.  Of course, I was all of 24 when I arrived in Berlin, and my sole Army duties up till then had been going to class: armor school, language school, intel school.  Now I was getting to do something, and something for which I was specially and uniquely qualified—and I’m sure that had a significant effect on my attitude.  But, man, I got to know things—things other people weren’t supposed to know.  How cool was that?

Being back in Germany was also part of my consciousness.  As soon as I got off the plane at Tempelhof and drove off with Chuck through the city—remember, the airport is right downtown: you drive through the city as soon as you leave the arrivals terminal—I felt a surge of nostalgia.  (I had never been to Berlin when I lived in Germany before, but a German town is a German town in many ways.  If nothing else, all the street and store signs were in German.)  It felt like, not being home again, but being someplace very familiar.  I’m sure I was projecting, but nevertheless . . . .

(I remember watching Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, about two angels who hang around Berlin and watch as the humans live their lives until one of them decides he wants to become human and experience life himself.  The movie was released in ’88 and meanders around odd parts of Berlin, including some sites near sections of the Wall.  I’m not sure I can make this make sense—I’ve never articulated it before—but at one point, one of the angels crosses a street and passes in front of a row of buildings that all looked as if they dated from the immediate post-war period—’50s and ’60s or thereabouts.  It was only a few seconds of film, and it wasn’t in the least significant to the movie, but it made an odd connection for me.  For those few seconds, the scene could have been anywhere in West Germany where those kinds of buildings were ubiquitous in the early days of my family’s time there.  They were just little shops—bakeries, groceries, tobacconists, and such; I don’t even know what they were, but it could have been any street in any West German town where new buildings had been erected to replace older ones that had been destroyed in the war—they went up fast as Germany was recovering, and they all looked alike. 

All of a sudden, and just for a second or two, I was right back there in ’63 in Koblenz in those first weeks and months when my brother and I moved there to join my folks.  (See my two-part post, “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.)  It was the oddest kind of nostalgic sense—sort of Proustian, I guess.  I reexperienced a feeling I remember having, but had never tried to describe or even, really, recognized until much, much later.  It was this absolutely certain feeling that here I was, doing this extraordinary thing—living in a foreign country—that I knew was both unique and special and exciting.  I was doing this really, really different thing—and I knew it.  All this came back to me in that brief piece of movie, just because the setting looked vaguely familiar, the Germanness of it all, the strangeness, was actually palpable.  That’s the feeling that came back driving away from Tempelhof that first day in Berlin.)

*  *  *  *

From 18 June to 12 July 1981, the New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater) presented a stage adaptation of  Wie Alles Anfing (How It All Began) by one of the anarchist militants whom I mention above, Michael “Bommi” Baumann.  I saw the show and on 1 July 1981, wrote the following brief report (slightly edited), which I’m appending here as a sidebar to Part 5 of my “Berlin Memoir”:

Based on the 1979 autobiography of former West German terrorist Michael “Bommi” Baumann (1947-2016), How It All Began was developed by the May 1981 graduating class of the Juilliard School’s Theater Division.  It was started as a class project and both dramatically and thematically, that is what it remains in the Dodger Theater production at The Other Stage (later the Susan Stein Shiva Theater) at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater.  It appeals neither as good theater nor as good socio-history.

Pieced together from excerpts of Baumann’s book Wie Alles Anfing (How It All Began, published in Germany in 1975 and in the U.S. in 1979 as Terror or Love?) and other bits of research from the period of the mid-’60s to the early ’70s in West Germany and West Berlin during the heyday of Baumann, the Red Army Faction (AKA: The Baader-Meinhof Gang), Baumann’s Bewegung 2. Juni, and various other terrorist and anarchist groups, the student actors improvised, rehearsed, and taped the scenes and transcribed them into the collage presented here before a tar-black set resembling a ghostly version of a Feydeaux farce, with several doors, windows, and alcoves which provided access to the myriad characters of Baumann’s terrorist life in Berlin.  Most of the scenes were staged by director Des MacAnuff in the center of the floor with locale-differentiation accomplished by the use of odd pieces of furniture.  Since most of the actors played multiple roles (including several women playing men), it was not always easy to know where we were or whom we were watching.

In the end, though earnest performances were turned in by the young cast (including Val Kilmer as Baumann, Linda Kozlowski as his lover, Benjamin Donenberg as “Red” Rudi Dutschke, Jessica Drake as Ulrike Meinhof, Pamela M. White as Andreas Baader, and Mary Lynn Johnson as Gudrun Ensslin), nothing unique was accomplished, and it all remained a somewhat curious foray into the milieu of the leftist terrorist without having learned much at all that we did not already know.

One thing that I found most disturbing was the (apparently) inadvertent near-romanticization of Baumann and his RAF comrades.  Though passing lip-service was given to the violence these anarchists (their own term) perpetrated on often innocent people (an elderly night watchman in Berlin killed in the bombing of a recreational yacht basin; two sergeants and a captain blown up at the U.S. Army headquarters in Frankfurt), they were allowed to come off as lost little children, searching for vague justice—sort of Robin Hood-cum-Peter Pans.  It was my experience while I was in Berlin between 1971 and 1974 that they were no such things.  I knew that captain in Frankfurt: he had a wife and two little girls.  he was not a threat—or even a symbol; just a man.  Baumann, Baader, and Meinhof were not attractive, romantic outlaws, and they stood for nothing concrete.  They were violent and politically fuzzy-minded.  One important bit of research the young students missed was the reaction of the people for whom the RAF claimed to fight.  There was little support outside their radical student enclaves at Berlin’s Technical and Free Universities.  They were not the German counterparts of our war-protesters or even the radical Weathermen.  This missing element rendered How It All Began a vaguely troubling experience.

[I hope ROTters will return on 11 March 2017 for "Berlin Memoir, Part 6," which will continue with my life as a GI in West Berlin and some of my escapades on and off duty.]

Berlin Memoir, Part 4

[This is the fourth of eight installments of my recollections of serving in West Berlin, Germany, as a Military Intelligence officer during the early 1970s, a high point in the Cold War.  “Berlin Memoir, Part 4” covers some of the small events of my work and the oddities that were part and parcel of that world.  If you haven’t read parts 1 through 3, I recommend going back and catching up on them before starting on part 4, not only for the background, but because some things are explained and defined in the earlier sections and it might be hard to follow what I’m talking about from here forward without that information.  (Part 1 was posted on 16 December 2016, part 2 on 31 December, and part 3 on 20 January 2017.)]

Working in Berlin was different from working anywhere else.  We did things in Berlin that our sister units in the Zone or elsewhere in USAREUR never heard of.  I said that Berlin got the best of everything—it also got the best personnel.  MI was one of the branches that took only the most qualified applicants, and the best of the best were assigned to Berlin.  I had colleagues, NCO’s, with multiple graduate degrees.  One of my own NCO’s, a buck sergeant, had been Phi Bet in college.  The average education level in my unit was five years of college.  That was the average.  Me, with my measly four-year BA, was below average.  Our unit clerk was one of the most articulate guys I ever met—and he was a corporal or something.  (We had mostly hard-stripers in our unit—only a few specialists.) 

Because of this, and the fact that our unit was so small and we were so segregated because of our jobs, we did quite a bit of fraternizing.  We were a little isolated, though.  First of all, we weren’t part of Berlin Brigade, so our chain of command was different.  Second, we wore civilian clothes and that separated us from the other GI’s in Berlin.  Third, and most significantly, we couldn’t talk to outsiders about our work—and Army people almost always talk shop when they’re smokin’ and jokin’.  There’s a certain level of paranoia that goes with doing intel work in Berlin.  (All those spies I mentioned before weren’t there for their health!)  Anything to do with Berlin was automatically classified higher than the same thing would be anywhere else in the Army.  I had clearances so far above TS, I didn’t know what many of them meant.  That’s not a joke.  My clearances had so many acronyms and initials, I couldn’t remember them all (and I can’t remember most of them at all now).  You ever hear of OFCO-RODCA clearance?  I had that.  (Sounds like some dire disease, don’t it?  The acronyms stand for Offensive Counterintelligence Operation and Reporting of Defense Collection Activities.)  In some cases, the acronym itself was classified! 

You work around that stuff, it’s hard to socialize with people outside your field.  And if you do make a friend from outside, especially outside the forces, you have to run a file check on him or her.  (Like that guy in The Big Lift!)  Now that’s the basis for a lasting friendship, much less a romance.  “Listen, honey, before we get too serious, I have to do a background check on you.  Would you mind filling out this personal history form?”  That’s a buzz-kill for sure.  While even wives were kept out of the loop when it came to work, they were at the parties like anywhere else.  But it was so awkward to bring a date that no one ever did.  If the Wall made the city claustrophobic, our own security practices made the unit claustrophobic, too.  (This didn’t mean we couldn’t socialize outside the unit.  Dating or friendships were perfectly fine—they just had to stay outside unit functions, even unofficial ones.  And, of course, you couldn’t say much about what you did OTJ.  And you did have to do that file check.  I did one on a woman I met, a Brit—and she turned out to have a very unsavory record.  Nothing criminal or spooky—just very, very flaky—enough to be in the files.  Had to stop seeing her, but I couldn’t tell her why.  “Sorry, Babe.  I had you checked out, and there are some things in your record that won’t do.  See ya.”  That was awkward.)

Anyway, working MI in Berlin wasn’t just nutsy from our own perspective.  There were nuts beyond our control, too.  (I mean the ones who weren’t wearing green suits!)  Berlin Station wasn’t a covert unit, just low-profile, as I said earlier.  We had offices with our name on them—right at the front of the HQ compound, just inside the gate.  In contrast, our sister unit (the 9668’s), the positive intel outfit of 66th MI in Berlin, was covert and lived in unmarked offices near ours.  The “non-existent” CIA unit in Berlin—they weren’t supposed to be there—were in “mismarked” offices hidden away in “Building 7” at the rear of the compound.  Unless you knew what they were, you’d assume they were some esoteric tech-support unit.  (Something to do with maps, I recall.) 

My friend Rich Gilbert, now a lawyer in D.C., who had been an infantry officer in BB and then was in the Public Information Office, told me that there was one thing about my job that used to aggravate him.  Not that I couldn’t talk about what I did or that occasionally I’d have to run off suddenly because of a phone call.  That was just SOP.  It was a look I got when he started telling me about some crazy thing that he came across at work.  For instance, he’d start to tell me about this odd unit he heard about that he’d never run across before and that he didn’t know what it did.  He said I got this look that said to him, “Oh, yeah?  Well, I know what that unit really is—and I can’t tell you.  But you just go on and talk.”  Sometimes he’d stop in mid-sentence and say, “You know all about this, don’t you?  It’s some spook agency, right—and you can’t say anything?”  I guess I’d just smile and keep my mouth shut.  I mean, he knew I couldn’t say anything.  It wasn’t my fault.  One time he launched into one of these monologues—and he was talking about the CIA’s cover ID.  (Ironically, there’s a TV series, on one of the streaming networks I believe, about the CIA in Berlin today, and it’s called—can you guess?—Berlin Station!)

One night some time back I watched a TV show in which the FBI was a central presence.  At one point in the story, a local cop, despite having been warned off, inserted himself into a federal operation and almost compromised it and nearly got a UC agent killed.  In order to get him to back off, the FBI ultimately had to reveal the existence of the UC agent, but this potentially endangered the operation and the agent, so the cop had to be neutralized.  The feds decided to bring him into the Joint Terrorism Task Force—but he would be assigned to the “Legal Attaché in Sri Lanka.”  The Legal Attaché, or LEGAT, was the cover designation of the FBI overseas.  (You remember that the FBI isn’t supposed to operate in foreign countries, just as the CIA isn’t supposed to operate in the States.  Hence the cover name.)  LEGAT was one of the agencies we commonly queried for a records check in a background investigation.  (I also heard a character on another TV show, an FBI agent, refer to an overseas office of the Bureau this way, but the character pronounced it l∂-GAT, as if it were related to the Anne Rice vampire, Lestat.  Silly wabbits.)

Well, anyway, we weren’t undercover that way.  We were the contact point for intelligence for the U.S. Forces in Berlin.  If something came to us and it was in the jurisdiction or operational area of another unit or agency, we made the referral and served as go-between for the initial contact if necessary.  Everyone knew where we were—we had a listed phone number (only one, however; our individual office phones were unlisted—and we answered them with the last four digits of the number, not our names or the unit’s name) and even the German Labor Force guards at the gate knew how to reach us.  This was expressly for “walk-ins”—people off the street who came to the HQ compound and said they had something to report.  If they were old enough to remember WWII or the Occupation, they asked for the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA) or the CIC (the Counterintelligence Corps, the forerunner of Military Intelligence Branch); if they were younger, they asked for the CIA.  No one ever asked for MI as far as I know—but that’s whom they got.  When a walk-in came to the gate and told the guard he wanted to talk to the CIA (or CIC), they sent him to a small outbuilding just to the right of the gate, right next to the corner of the main building where our offices were located.  This was our debriefing and interview room for outsiders, before we let someone into our offices proper.  You’ll see why this disconnect was necessary.

As you might imagine, 99% of walk-ins were nonsense.  Many, even a majority I’d say, were nuts.  The following anecdotes are either from my own experience or from stories my colleagues told—but based on my experience, they’re all true.  One guy I talked to came to report that the Soviets had agents on the moon (no shit) and that he was in contact with them by “eye television.”  (By the way, all these interviews were conducted in German, so there was always one agent and one German legman as translator/interviewer.  My German—and I spoke way better than most other GI’s in the unit—would never have been good enough to get through most of this stuff.  I do remember, though, that what this guy said was Augenfernseh—that’s a literal translation for “eye television.”)  What he meant was that he received images in his mind transmitted from the moon by these Soviet agents.  (Schizophrenia, anyone?)  This same guy also wanted us to know that the Russians were leaving poisoned cigarette butts on the streets so GI’s would pick them up and smoke them.  (I used to see GI’s picking up discarded cigarette butts all the time.  I mean, who could afford 35¢ a pack?  Riiight.) 

As soon as we arrived to interview the walk-in, we’d get his ID documents and all other pertinent info.  The legman, who was an experienced interviewer/interrogator—ours had worked for us longer than any of the GI’s in the unit and probably most of the DAC’s—patted the guy down and we searched any bags he brought.  Meanwhile, before we even started to talk to the guy, the agent called the office and give them the ID info so they could run records checks and search our files.  Some of these walk-ins were frequent fliers: they’d come in before.  Not surprisingly in other instances, we often learned that the walk-in was a mental patient who had walked away from some minimum-security asylum.  When that was true—and I recall that it was in the case of the “eye television” guy—we’d call the hospital and they send someone out to get the guy back.  We’d have to stay with him and talk to him to keep him occupied until the van arrived, never more than a few minutes later.  When there was no such record, we’d talk the guy down—thank him for his help, tell him we’d look into the matter, and say we’d contact him if we needed anything more.  Then we’d escort him back to the gate and see him off the compound.  These were usually guys who’d seen too many James Bond movies.  If we thought the guy was nuts even if he hadn’t come from a hospital to start with, we might get him taken to one.  Rarely, we’d have to call the cops.

Another walk-in was a woman who used to come in every six months or so—had been showing up for a couple of years.  I even remember her name—Hanna Bregemeyer.  Her story was that someone had stolen her identity and was going around being her.  She insisted that we report this to the UN (the UN?) so that they’d make the other person stop being her.  (Are you following this?)  Because her identity had been stolen—we’re not talking stolen ID documents here, by the way (this was long before real identity-theft was ever heard of)—she refused to carry official papers.  She made her own documents.  It turns out that her actual name was Hanna Meyer; B. Reg. stood for bürgerlich registriert, a made-up term she used to mean “registered by the citizen.”  If I recall, she came along one more time while I was in Berlin, then she seemed to disappear.  (Maybe someone finally stole the rest of her.  Who knows?)

One of my friends told me of a young man who came in and reported that spies were poisoning him.  That’s not so weird, as you might guess by now, but what was frightening was what he had brought along as proof.  He had a couple of tote bags with him, and my friend opened one to reveal that it was full of little bottles of the guy’s blood.  When the legman opened the guy’s other bag and found that it was full of handguns, he was summarily bundled off to jail—and probably a hospital after that.

Most walk-ins were just poor souls who wanted some attention.  Some were nuts and some were just lonely.  One I spoke to was a 19-year-old kid who’d run out of money, been thrown out by his girlfriend, and just lost himself.  He was pathetic, but not dangerous.  He even broke down crying as the legman questioned him.  No one I ever saw or heard of had any real information.  Anything like that came from other routes.  These included phone-ins, which were seldom any more productive than walk-ins.  That dork who said he was Red Kappel was a phone-in, you’ll remember.  So was the guy who claimed to know one of the Baader-Meinhof gang. 

But sometimes . . . .  One evening when I was on call, I was called by the DA to come in and take a phone call.  The call was from a German man who worked for the U.S. Forces in Berlin and who said he had been in contact with East German agents.  He was scared for several reasons, not the least of which was that German law made contact with Soviet or East German agents a crime.  (The FROG had political crimes on the books.  Membership in the Nazi or Communist Parties, for instance, was illegal.)  I arranged to meet the guy in one of the remote districts—Tegel, I think it was, in the French Sector—at an U-Bahn station.  I got one of our legmen (they were called this, by the way, because they did a lot of the legwork) and went out after the guy.  No show.  We waited around, checked out the area nearby, but no one was around who fitted the description the guy gave us.  We gave up and went back home. 

A few days or a week later, the guy called again, during the day.  I remember it was February 14, Valentine’s Day.  The legman and I went out after him again, and this time he showed at the meeting place.  We took him out to one of the safe houses we used for serious interviews—not the little building on the compound grounds we used for walk-ins; this was a house in town—and sat him down in the dining room at the big table.  The man was scared shitless—he was shaking and nervous and nearly unable to talk.  But we finally got his story—and it’s pretty typical except that his went further.  He had taken a vacation in Bulgaria and had met a woman.  This, too, was common: trips to the Eastern Bloc were much cheaper than similar trips to Western Europe; Black Sea vacations in Bulgaria were very popular among working Germans.  She was from East Berlin, and they arranged to meet there when they got back home.  (West Berliners weren’t actually permitted to cross into the Eastern Sector, but many got around this by registering as a resident of some West German city, using a friend’s or relative’s address.  This was illegal, of course, but very common.) 

So, the man went over to East Berlin and met his new girlfriend at her apartment.  They started up a romance and this continued for several visits.  One day, the man showed up at the woman’s apartment and found a visitor.  An East German intel agent was waiting for him.  “Here’s the situation,” the agent explained.  “Help us out with a few little things and we won’t report you to the West for this meeting.”  Remember, contact with an agent of EGIS (the U.S. Army term for the East German Intelligence Service; in the DDR, it was known as the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—Ministry for State Security—or, infamously, the Stasi) was a crime in West Germany.  Of course, if the guy had simply gone back to the West and reported the meeting and the circumstances, nothing would have happened—the West German Kripos (Kriminalpolizei, or criminal police) knew what went on in the East. 

This was a very common scenario.  But the EGIS agent counts on the fear and ignorance of the target, and if it doesn’t work—well, nothing’s lost but a little time.  If it does work, they get someone on the hook for little effort, and they can play it out as long as it lasts.  Again, nothing has been expended but a little time.  If the guy goes for it, they get him to hand over some seemingly innocuous document—a BB phone book, a tank manual—nothing classified or obviously sensitive.  Maybe they do that two or three times, then they move up a notch.  “If you don’t cooperate more, we’ll report everything you’ve done to the West.  You’ve helped us out now, so you’re not innocent.”  Then they’ll tell him to get a job with the U.S. or other Allied forces—any job will do.  This man was an upholsterer so he got a job with the maintenance service for the U.S. facilities in Berlin. 

When he had done that, the EGIS agent gave him a “concealment device.”  That’s spook-speak for a secret pouch for hiding and carrying documents.  And that was the clinching evidence that this man’s story was true—the device wasn’t something you got at the local stationery store.  It looked like a pencil case, but it had a hidden pocket you could only open with a pin and knowledge of where to maneuver it.  Obviously the EGIS agent was going to start getting the man to steal more important papers and smuggle them into East Berlin.  But that’s where the man got too scared to continue.  He stopped going to East Berlin, but then he started to be afraid of the West German police.  That’s when he called us the first time—but he was too scared to follow through.  In addition, he was an alcoholic, and he started drinking so heavily that he was fired for being drunk on the job.  That’s when he called us the second time and met us.  During the interview, by the way, the man got so nervous that he reached for a vial of pills in his jacket pocket.  The legman literally pounced on the man and grabbed the pill vial.  He was afraid they might have been poison—this guy was that scared.  (They weren’t; they were antacids.)

We finished the interview, got the man’s story, arranged to be in contact again.  I wrote up the interview, turned in the report, and briefed the Ops Officer.  A while later, the “guys who aren’t there” inquired if we would get them together with the man.  They had decided that the story was credible enough that it would be worth trying to double the man.  He was turned over to the folks in Building 7, and we were out of it.  (Berlin Station wasn’t an intel-gathering agency; we were a counterintel unit.  Positive intel was the responsibility of other units; we only ran sources—that’s what they were called—if it was a counterespionage operation.)  The “Company” wasn’t very good about sharing info—they didn’t play well with others—so we seldom learned what they were up to.  Some time later, however, we heard about the upholsterer—the Company got him his job back—but his alcoholism had gotten so bad that even the CIA couldn’t keep him in his job.  He was fired again, and without a job with the U.S. forces, he wasn’t much use to EGIS.  He tried to get a job with the French and the Brits, but failed.  EGIS cut him loose, and so did the CIA.  I have no idea what became of him after that.

Most Germans had family on both sides of the border—either in East Berlin or East Germany.  The division of Germany after the war split almost every German family, and even those without relatives in the East had close friends or circumstances like the upholsterer.  Except for West Berliners, West Germans were free to cross into the East to visit, and thousands did regularly.  (Berliners, however, could travel elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc—just not East Berlin until after 1973.)  A typical scenario would go like this:  Hans from Frankfurt would go every month to visit his mother’s elderly sister in East Berlin.  He’d bring cigarettes, wine, food, other small gifts—some of which were considered contraband.  Maybe he’d also give her money, probably in West Marks because the black-market exchange rate was much better than the official one-to-one rate he’d get if he bought East Marks at the border.  Hans’s aunt could get much more for the West Marks than he could—but possessing western currency was illegal in the East.  One day, Hans would arrive at his aunt’s apartment, and there’d be a strange man in the living room—an EGIS agent.  “We’ve been monitoring your visits to your aunt,” he’d tell Hans.  “We know what you’ve been bringing into the DDR.  Would you like us to arrest your aunt?  Take away her identity papers so she can’t buy food?  Have her evicted from her state-owned apartment?”  Of course, Hans couldn’t let that happen.  “The next time you come over, bring a U.S. military phone book.  It’s not even classified—just a little favor.” 

Maybe the EGIS agent would ask Hans to get a job with the Allies or in a Western embassy.  It would always be something easy and relatively innocuous.  It was both a test and a hook.  If Hans bit, EGIS would ask him for increasingly sensitive stuff, plus the threat to reveal his cooperation to the Western authorities.  (Another way of setting the hook they liked to use was to exploit alcohol, gambling, or drug problems, homosexuality, illicit affairs, indebtedness, and petty or trumped-up crimes committed in the East.  The recruitment always involved a threat and coercion—these were not politically-motivated or paid agents.)  If the hook worked, the Soviets and their friends would get a source in the West for almost nothing.  Whatever benefit they got was all gravy.  If Hans didn’t bite, if he reported the contact, or if it wasn’t a family member he was visiting—say, a woman he met (a very common occurrence)—and he just stopped coming East, the Soviets lost nothing in the attempt.  More than likely, they wouldn’t even bother to punish the relatives in the East—too much trouble—or they’d do something petty like harassing them for a few months, just so the word would get back to Hans in the West. 

Another scenario was to approach minor criminals in the East like burglars, bootleggers, pimps, or prostitutes who had been caught.  The KGB or EGIS offers a deal: “Go over to the West, get into some position where you can get useful info, and bring it back to us periodically, and we’ll let you go.”  Who wouldn’t agree to that?  Be a refugee in West Germany versus sitting in an East German jail for some months or a year.  Duh.  So what if the recruit cops out as soon as she gets to the West—what have they lost?  They get rid of an undesirable who is now the problem of the FROG.  If the recruit actually does get info and passes it back . . . well, all the better.  It’s a win-win situation—and no expenses except some phony documents for the “refugee” and transportation to some border location.  (This is, of course, why we had screeners at Marienfelde to interview refugees.  You’d be surprised how often someone would admit right away that they’d been sent over by EGIS or the East German cops.  I’m sure it sounds paranoid, but, take my word for it, it was real and common.  And more often than not, mostly harmless—except perhaps to the psyche of the person who’d been approached by EGIS.  It must have been a very strange existence for people like that, caught between the East and the West that way.  And the Soviets used a shotgun approach: fire as many pellets as you can—a few are bound to hit a target.  For many, many reasons—ethics being only one—we could never get away with that.

(Approaching GI’s and other official U.S. personnel was slightly different.  The Eastern agents still looked for exploitable weaknesses like indebtedness or an addiction, but there had to be money in the bargain as well—often in very large sums.  Seldom were the American sources impelled by ideological commitment, though that happened now and then, but other emotional motivations played a role, such as anger or resentment and family loyalty.  This last was particularly effective with naturalized Americans with family still living in Eastern Bloc countries.  The risks, however, for the Soviets or East Germans in the event of failure was much greater.  They nonetheless tried, and surprisingly often considering how limited our attempts to recruit sources in the East were.  Even when a successful recruitment was unlikely, the Soviets and their surrogates used the same logic: the more attempts, the more the chances of success—and a failed recruitment was a small loss.)

The Cold War was a wondrous time—if you’re Franz Kafka!

The upholsterer case was the closest I ever came to an actual spook operation.  (My brush with real spookery was somewhat reminiscent of a German TV mini-series that aired while I was at the German military intel school in Bad Ems: the three-part TV movie, Der Illegale: Biografie eines Spions—“The illegal [agent]: biography of a spy.”  I blogged about this show and its connection to my stint at the Bundeswehr MAD-Schule in “Der Illegale,” posted on 5 July 2009.)  I did some surveillance, some demo coverage, lots of interviews, and a smattering of other tasks—before they made me an accountant.  I even did a couple of stake-outs from a car—like you see on TV.  Do you know what a cop or an agent does when he’s in a car trying to watch someone and he has to go to the bathroom?  It’s a bit of esoteric lore you don’t often learn, but I did.  In Germany, the law requires bars and restaurants to allow pedestrians to use their bathrooms, so that’s option number one—but you can’t really drop the surveillance and leave the subject unobserved.  What if he or she goes on the move while you’re away from your car?  So, the agent keeps a bottle in the car—it’s much harder for female agents than males for obvious anatomical reasons.  Now you know.  It may sound a little disgusting, but it’s a practical necessity. 

I did one vehicle surveillance that involved a brief car chase—a mini-Bullitt.  (Very mini.)  My partner and I had been watching an apartment for a potential visitor we suspected was an EGIS agent.  He’d been courting a lonely, middle-aged German secretary in an Army office.  No one had actually ever seen the man, but the secretary’s phone was tapped and her mail was monitored, so we knew about his visits from the woman’s conversations with her friends.  But he never communicated with her directly, either by phone or mail; he sent her flowers by Fleuropa (the European counterpart of FTD) and made their dates via the messages accompany the bouquets.  I inherited the case, which had been running for a couple of years or more, and it seemed obvious that nothing was happening anymore.  The woman had retired and there hadn’t been any contact from the mystery man for months. 

I determined that we probably ought to end the eavesdropping and close the case, but then the woman reported a new contact from her beau—more flowers arrived—and reported the he was going to come to her apartment for a date.  I set up the vehicular surveillance to see if we could finally see the guy and try to ID him.  We sat across the street from the woman’s apartment at the time set for the date and waited.  No one showed up.  The woman was on the phone indicating that she still expected her gentleman caller, however, so we hung around until a man did arrive and go into the building.  He stayed a little while and then left, and we took off to follow him in his car.  We did just like the cops do on TV until we were able to get a look at the driver, and when he didn’t match the description we had of the subject, we abandoned the chase.  In the end, I concluded that if there ever had been a real man in the secretary’s life, he had long since vanished and she had kept him “alive” with tales to her friends and flowers she sent herself.  In any case, since no breach of security had ever been detected, and since the woman’s access had ceased when she retired, I closed the case.  But I got to do a car chase!

As I said, running sources wasn’t our job (that’s what the 9668’s were there for), which was to keep the other side from doing to us what we were trying to do to them.  We were basically a security unit.  We had three main sections at Berlin Station, aside from Ops, Files, Tech Services (photography, bugging and miking, lock-picking, polygraphy, and so on), and CCU (which, despite its similarity to a medical abbreviation, stood for the Classified Control Unit—a big vault where all our classified files were kept.  The teams were Counterespionage, Countersurveillance, and Personnel Investigations (usually referred to by their initials: CE, CS, and PI).  CE, as you might guess, was tasked with preventing the Soviets and their crew from planting agents in our midst; CS was responsible for detecting, clearing, and preventing listening devices, bugs, electronic spyware, and so on in the facilities in our jurisdiction; PI was just what the name suggests: conducting background investigations on personnel up for security clearances (including getting higher clearances and renewing clearances).  PI was the bread-and-butter of Berlin Station (and all MI units like it around the world).  It was the largest section, and the busiest.  I was briefly OIC of PI Team—before they made me an accountant!  (Piss me off.  I waited for over a year for my own section, doing stints in both CS and CE as an ordinary Special Agent—the same as the NCO’s on the job, with a boss who was maybe six months my senior.  Then I finally got a section on 1 February 1973 and a few months later, on 25 May, Colonel Collins handed me orders to take over the spook bank in the basement!  Believe me, I am not an accountant.  I can only balance my checkbook because I have a calculator!)

[I hope you’ve found my reminiscences of Cold War Berlin interesting and worthwhile.  As I’ve been saying, this series isn’t being released on a regular schedule, so part 5 will appear on 19 February 2017.  So come back sometime later this month to see what comes next.  In “Berlin Memoir, Part 5,” I will talk about some of the common activities of my daily—or at least weekly—life as an MI officer in West Berlin.  I think you’ll find a lot of it absurd almost to the level of Kafkaesque.  I hope you’ll catch it.]