Berlin Memoir, Part 8

[This is the final installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” my account of the quarter-decade I spent as an intelligence officer in West Berlin in the early ’70s.  (Parts 1 through 7 were published on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, and 6 and 29 March 2017.)  In this segment, I’ll mostly be covering the theater activities in which I participated, including an amateur theater troupe I helped launch, and some experiences that grew out of those.  As always, I recommend that new readers of “Berlin Memoir” go back and catch up with the earlier parts because the background informs much of what I recount here, plus a lot of the terms, abbreviations, and events I use and allude to have been explained and defined in the preceding sections.]

I said earlier (see Part 6, posted on 11 March) that some of the amateur actors in Berlin Brigade decided to form a theater group so we could do stuff together on a more continuous basis—workshops, little classes, camaraderie with the British group, and such.  (The wife of one of our founders, an Air Force sergeant, was a Brit herself and she knew some of those folks.  Their group was called BATS: the British Amateur Theatrical Society.)  We formed our group sometime in September or early October 1972 and the Air Force guy got us sponsored by the Skyrider Service Club, Tempelhof’s NCO club, of which he was a member.  We called ourselves TAT: the Tempelhof American Theatre.  (Some had wanted to model our name after the Brits’ group, but amateur has a more derogatory connotation in American than it does in British.)  We even designed a logo in which the two T’s in TAT were stylized Greek masks, one of comedy and one of tragedy.  We put ads and announcements on AFRTS—I was the publicity director—and got stories planted in Stars and Stripes. 

That last had an odd consequence for me: I ended up the “model” for a posed photo to illustrate an article—me standing by a lighting instrument on a floor stand.  (It wasn’t even really a stage instrument.)  When the article came out in July ’73—and I still have a copy somewhere—it appeared in the S&S all over the world, including Asmara, Ethiopia.  One of my W&L roommates, who had enlisted in the Air Force after we graduated, was stationed there and he saw the photo and article and called me!  (Remember, all USAREUR and USAFE facilities are interconnected by the same telephone system.)

TAT’s first show (21-22 December 1972) was a children’s play, The Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle, which was a fairy tale set in China.  It had a character, The Chorus, who's like a children’s version of Our Town’s Stage Manager, and I did that role in yellow-face.  (Today, no one would dare do that—but what did we know?)  I channeled Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (yes, I know—his character was Japanese; again: what did we know?)  As un-PC as it would be today, it was a big hit then.  We were invited to do a cut-down version of the play—maybe it was the whole thing; it wasn’t very long—on a children’s show on AFTV. 

Well, I’d never done anything like that before, so this was an experience.  First off, AFTV was still black and white in the ’70s, so all our fancy make-up had to be redesigned for the gray-scale.  (Yellow-face didn’t read on b&w TV, so I didn’t need that, but everything else had to be rethought.)  No one knew anything about this, so we just experimented in front of the cameras during rehearsal until we got something acceptable.  Then, in one scene, one of us—maybe it was me, I don’t remember anymore—was supposed to appear out of nowhere.  On stage, we just did it conventionally—the actor just jumped out from behind curtains to the accompaniment of a lot of Oooh’s and Aaah’s from the other characters—but I suggested, Why not try to do it with some trick photography?  Again, no one knew how to do this—the AFRTS staff were just airmen and -women with some basic TV training, not pros—so we winged it.  It came out a little jumpy, but it worked—at least for “local” TV.  (We did this all on tape, of course—not live.  I think they aired it a couple of times.  The AFTV show, a local children’s program, also included some interviews—children’s style—if I recall, about who we were and what TAT did and what the play was about and so on.) 

Then we mounted A Hatful of Rain by Michael V. Gazzo (1-4 November 1973).  I was the dope dealer, Mother—played on stage and in the movie by Henry Silva, one of the all-time great screen villains—and I was one nasty sum’bitch.  One day, out near the commissary or something, some Air Force NCO stopped me, and in really angry tones, explained that I was a real bastard and he’d like to take care of me some night in a dark alley—or something like that.  Talk about suspending disbelief!  I had to point out I was a commissioned officer—I wore civvies, remember—and he needed to back off.  (Aaahh, stardom.  Has its burdens, don’t it?) 

Well, Hatful was a big success, too.  (Remember, we had a very culturally deprived audience.  Many GI’s didn’t get out much!)  So the NCO club invited us to do the play for a dinner theater.  Our usual performance space was a large room at Tempelhof with a moveable, blue-carpeted platform that had a red curtain backdrop—intended for lectures, small concerts, and meetings—for our stage (unless we built something more elaborate; one of our actors discovered a talent for scene design and set building after I gave him some pointers—from my vast experience in that field!).  But the NCO club got an actual auditorium (at the Harnack House, Berlin Brigade's officers' club) with a proscenium stage for their dinner-theater event, and we moved in there for one night (11 December 1973).  Now, what no one really considered was that Hatful is not really dinner-theater fare—it’s pretty grotty and stomach-churning melodrama, what with all the shooting up, drug withdrawal, and thuggery.  Not terribly conducive to digesting food.  Nevertheless, we were a hit.

Hatful was also entered in 1973’s Third Annual USAFE Play Contest and we actually won for Best Play.  That prize included a command performance at Ramstein AB, the USAFE HQ in Germany, on 15 December 1973.  So we had to dismantle our set—the first really elaborate one we’d done, with walls and everything, not really designed for touring—and get it and us to Ramstein.  We got the set booked on an Air Force cargo flight, and we would take the Duty Train to Frankfurt where someone from Ramstein would meet us and drive us to the AB, about 85 miles away.  But guess what.  At the very last minute, the set was bumped for a helicopter tail section.  Well, we scrambled and made dozens of phone calls and somehow managed to get the set onto the train with us and arranged for a truck to meet us in Frankfurt to haul it to Ramstein.  

Of course, it was raining, and the set got to the theater banged up and scarred from the train ride and the open deuce-and-a-half.  We were able to fix most things by ingenuity and luck—it was now maybe 7 or 8 p.m. the day before the contest festival (which included presentation of the awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, and so on—a big megillah)—but parts of the walls had been marred so that the paint had come off.  (The flats weren’t muslin-covered frames, but solid constructions of something like homosote.)  We didn’t have any of the paint, and no one could locate any at that hour—even if we could match the wall color.  Then someone—me, I think—noted that the walls were pea-green.  Why not run to the commissary or deli—something was actually still open—and get some pea soup?  By God, that’s what we did, and it worked!  We touched up the damaged set with Campbell’s condensed pea soup!  (As Ken Barnes, the TD at W&L’s Troubs, said: Necessity is a mother.)

So, we finished repairing and mounting the set, and I guess we must have done a quick run-through or something for the cues—but we had no time for a full rehearsal.  So we went on the next day in an unfamiliar theater, not exactly cold, but luke warm.  Everything was going well enough—Dave Hickey, our Johnny Pope, had caught a little cold or stomach flu or something and he was a bit weak so when I pushed him in one scene, he kind of went flying a little, but no harm and no one but us noticed.  However, in one scene I smoke a cigarette which I drop on the floor and stamp out with my shoe.  Except that this theater had a raked stage with some kind of woven-rope floor covering.  Not having rehearsed here, it never occurred to me, and certainly not in the heat of the scene, that when I dropped the butt on the floor, it was going to roll down toward the proscenium.  And that’s what it did—heading straight for the front row of seats.  And I’m trying to “casually” reach my foot farther and farther down the stage to stop it and put it out.  I know that lit butt is going to start the rope floor cover ablaze and the performance and the theater will go up in flames and smoke, sending Brig. Gen. Robert Thompson, the USAFE Chief of Staff who hosted the ceremony, fleeing out into the late-December night (and I’d have a new senior officer with my name on his shit list!).  In the end, I just had to let the butt roll, and nothing happened—except I had a small heart attack up there that night.

(I posted a version of the Hatful anecdote on ROT as “Short Takes: Theater War Stories” on 6 December 2010, and on 20 November 2014, the AF NCO who designed the set, David Rogers, stumbled on it.  He wrote me and filled in some information which I either hadn’t known or had forgotten.  So, here’s more of the story:

(When Dave met the train on which the set came back to Berlin. he said he knew something was wrong when they opened the boxcar door.  He could smell it!   The set had stayed in Ramstein about three days after we left and Dave figured they’d left it outside the theater.  When he arrived to pick it up at the train station in Berlin, there was stuff growing out of it.  My suggestion to paint it with green pea soup did the trick for the performance, but it also was organic enough to sprout mold and mildew over the entire set.  Dave told the folks at the station just to throw the whole set out.

(Dave told me that the reason the actor playing Johnny was so sick—and so was most of the cast and crew—was that Ramstein’s troops recently had gotten their flu shots.  The bugs, Dave said, were everywhere.  During the command performance, Mike, the young man who played Mother’s henchman, Apples, got terribly ill, and the director, Bruce Limpus, tapped Dave to play the part. So he spent a while in the afternoon going through Apple’s lines with me and the cast.  As it turned out, Mike was the real trouper and he went on in his role.  Meanwhile, Dave was up in the light booth, almost falling asleep, running lights for the show.

(Back stage, the green room was a mess, Dave recalled.  Many of the cast members were so sick with the flu that, between stage entrances, they’d go back to the green room and lie down on coats and clothes and anything that would afford a comfortable sick bed.  It looked like a wartime hospital back there, Dave said.

(Then there was the Technical Director for the theater who insisted we put green foliage on the set above the “street entrance” (where Apples and I entered) because it was stark and unappealing.  It was supposed to be stark and unappealing, Dave observed.  It was a seedy part of New York City!  The set dressing  made the set look like a garden apartment that was below ground.   Dave recalled that the TD outranked him, because he didn’t fight her on this.)

By the way—one of the judges for the USAFE contest was Dennis Cole, that renowned actor of refinement and distinction.  Well, Cole arrived in Berlin without enough warm clothing, so they had to take him off to the ’X to shop.  I don’t know what else he bought—he sported a black leather jacket, but I think that came with him—but he did purchase a pair of Corcoran paratroop boots.  Man, he thought those were cool!  He wore them everywhere the whole time he was in Berlin.  What a honcho!

TAT was mostly fun—we had meetings and did scenes and improvs, the Brits came over and did some light pieces, we went to their shop and schmoozed, we mounted a bill of one-acts (19-22 July 1973; I did the father in Chekhov’s Marriage Proposal; the other shows on the bill were Edward Albee’s The American Dream and The Feast by Dan Wright) and Peter Ustinov’s Halfway Up the Tree (29-31 March 1973; I assistant-directed).  But one thing was not fun.  One of our actresses was the daughter of an Army colonel, a medical officer at the hospital.  Her name was Nancy and she was married at the time we started TAT.  It was already her second marriage—she was the same age as I or a little younger—and she had a 7- or 8-year-old daughter from her first; within a month or so, her second marriage broke up. 

The word at the time was that her husband, whom I met once or twice, just up and left, but after I got to know Nancy, I had to wonder.  She and I became friendly and then started to move toward romance.  I got to know her father some; Nancy and her daughter were living with him in the senior-officer housing, and he seemed to approve.  I admit, her track record bothered me a little and the fact that she came with instant family worried me, too—I wasn’t at all sure I was ready at around 27 to become a father to an 8-year-old all of a sudden.  Then, little by little, Nancy started to get possessive and slightly obsessive.  She’d call me at all times of the day and often wouldn’t get off the phone.  She’d call and ask if we could go somewhere right then—and I started to see that she was always leaving her daughter at home, even blowing off things like parent-teacher meetings and such.  I decided to back off any relationship—she was scaring me, frankly—but she kept calling and “running into me” as if she had been waiting for me.  (The term stalking didn’t really exist yet, but looking back, that’s what it was.) 

One time Nancy disappeared from home—her father called to see if she was with me—and was later found walking along the railroad tracks in Berlin.  That’s when I learned that Nancy was a paranoid schizophrenic and had been hospitalized at least once before and had been on medication which she’d apparently stopped taking.  (This is when my original judgment of her husband began to alter.)  Her behavior was all manifestations of her illness, I learned—especially the tendency to latch onto someone about whom the paranoid schizophrenic forms a fantasy relationship based on the flimsiest evidence.  (Believe it or not, this happened to me once again, when I was at the American Academy a few years later.)  Later the day she disappeared, Nancy called me from the hospital.  (I was home on comp time for some extended duty.)  She’d walked off the psych ward and was calling from the ER; she wanted me to come and get her.  I told her I couldn’t do that, trying to be as calm and supportive as I could (acting again), and tried to hang up the phone so I could call her father.  But Nancy wouldn’t hang up and the peculiarity of the German phone system was that if the calling party keeps the line open, you can’t break the connection.  I finally ran down the hall to a neighbor—thank goodness it was the temporary quarters of a married officer and his wife was home—and used that phone to get through to Nancy's father at his clinic in the hospital.  He thanked me for informing him—he was always strangely calm during all this—and sent someone to retrieve Nancy from the ER. 

I don’t remember how long Nancy stayed in the hospital, but she was eventually remedicated and released.  She was supposed to be an outpatient, of course, but basically she went back to her previous life, including TAT.  I tried not to be cruel, but I did everything I could to separate from her—I stayed away from TAT stuff a lot—and Nancy started to latch onto another member of the group.  (I never understood why the guy, an EM and a little younger than Nancy, would get involved with her after all that had happened—none of this had been secret—but I figured it was none of my business.)  Then one evening, I came home from work and Nancy was waiting for me outside my BOQ with a bag of groceries.  It turned out that the bag was all stuff she’d liberated from home; she said she wanted to come up to my apartment so we could “taste things.”  I told her to go home and that I wasn’t going to let her in.  I was both scared and angry, and I didn’t want to get involved in this.  There was no lock on the outside door of the building, so Nancy followed me up to my apartment on the second floor, but I wouldn’t let her in.  I figured she’d go home soon, but she stayed outside my apartment, sitting on the corridor floor and talking to me through the closed door.  I stopped telling her to go and didn’t respond, hoping that she’d give up and go home.  I suppose it was stupid, but I’d never encountered anything like this and I had no idea what to do.  I don’t know why I didn’t just call her father, and I’m ashamed now that I didn’t.  I finally called him and he sent someone to bring her home or back to the hospital.

I can’t say I handled any of this well; I was all of 27 or so and had never met a crazy person before, so what did I know?  I know I was scared, though, and I was angry at Nancy’s parents because they never even hinted that there had been anything wrong until it all exploded more or less in my face.  Not only didn’t her father ever tell me anything about his daughter’s illness, he was a doctor and didn’t give me any instructions on how to handle situations once her condition was revealed.  This time, of course, Nancy stayed hospitalized for some time, but she stayed in Berlin and when she was released, she returned to TAT.  I thought that was a bad idea, since it seemed to me that this was the environment that either triggered her schizophrenia or exacerbated it.  Why she would be encouraged to go back into it was a mystery to me.  Nancy and I remained apart after this, though, so I don’t know what happened later.  She eventually went back to the States, I think, and, of course, I never had much to do with her father anymore so I was out of the loop.  Less than a year later, I left Berlin and the army.  It’s not one of my pleasanter life experiences—and, as I hinted, it repeated itself on a much smaller scale a few years later.  (Some guys are babe magnets?  I was a kook magnet.)

When I was visiting D.C. in April 2004, I went to “my” museum—the International Spy Museum (see “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010).  Now, that was really a walk down memory lane.  I had expected something of a joke—all James Bond and Maxwell Smart or something—or a superficial whitewash, full of gimmicks and mock-ups.  It’s not.  It’s actually a serious museum—entertainment more than edification, to be sure, but not a joke and not all that superficial.  I mean, it’s cleaned up a bit for general consumption—the biggest group of visitors, at least when I was there, is teen and pre-teen boys—but it’s only romanticized a little, and it covers pretty much the whole business.  It was skewed toward the Cold War era when I visited, perhaps understandably; this was before the global terror campaign had really taken hold.  The museum also doesn’t show much of the philosophically nastier, morally compromising aspects of the field—as I’ve noted, we used to remind each other that what spies do is fundamentally illegal—but it’s pretty accurate in what it does show.  There were James Bond and the Avengers about—a replica of one of the Bond cars was on display—but for the most part, these were just what we used to call “eyewash”—dressing to keep things lively.  On the other hand, there was a mock-up of a car showing how several people could be hidden in it—just like the exfiltrators used to do.  The real exhibits are actual artifacts of spycraft (including an Enigma machine).  The museum is something of a rabbit warren inside and when we left one exhibit area and followed a corridor to another, we emerged into a space with a large sign on the opposite wall that read: “BERLIN – City of Spies”!  It was a little stage set—a café table, walls with maps of Berlin, photos of street scenes with Soviet soldiers, and things of that sort—all from the ‘60s.  That’s only a few years before my time there, and little had changed in appearance between then and my day.  Talk about déjà vu!!

The advertising slogan for Berlin tourism used to be “Berlin ist eine Reise wert”—Berlin is worth a trip.  Has it been?

[Well, that concludes my reminiscences about  Cold War Berlin and my days as a Military Intelligence special agent.  I hope you found it interesting.  I’ve published some of these recollections on ROT before and I may yet again.  Past posts concerning this period of my life include: “Der Illegale” (5 July 2009), “Berlin Station” (19 and 22 July 2009), “The Berlin Wall” (29 November 2009), “Short Takes III” (8 February 2012), and “Berlin Stories: Three SNAFU’s” (18 August 2012).  I also posted a prequel about my early days in Germany as a teenager in the ’60s, “An American Teen In Germany” (9 and 12 March 2013) and a commentary on the U.S. intelligence industry, “Top Secret America” (17 September 2010), based on my experience in a tiny segment of that field.]

Berlin Memoir, Part 7

[This is the second-to-last installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” the chronicle of my 2½ years in military intelligence in Cold War Berlin in the 1970s.  Part 7 covers some of the trips I took out of Berlin (after my two-part stint at the German military intelligence school in 1972, which I wrote about in Part 6), both for leave and for temporary duty.  There are also a couple of operational screw-ups at the end of this section.  Once again, I have to suggest that readers who are just being introduced to “Berlin Memoir” go back and read Parts 1 through 6 to catch up not just with the narrative (which to be truthful is fairly haphazard anyway), but the definitions and explanations of terms, concepts, and other references I toss around once they’ve been introduced.  (The earlier parts of “Berlin Memoir” were posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, and 6 March 2017.)]

The MAD-Schule I attended in the summer and fall of 1972 wasn’t the only course I had to take while in Berlin.  I got designated the Station NBC Officer—that has nothing to do with radio or TV broadcasting; it’s Nuclear-Biological-Chemical, what used to be called CBR—and I had to go down to Oberammergau for a class at the U.S. Army School, Europe.  O’gau, as it was known to us GI’s, is a small Alpine town near the Austrian border in Bavaria not far from Munich, and the Army had a school there for various courses.  66th MI, whose HQ was just up in Munich you recall, had several programs there.  The course itself was unremarkable—just like any Army course you can imagine—but it lasted two weeks, and we got some time off now and then.  Since I didn’t have my car—I took the train there and back—I palled around with a couple of my classmates from other units, and we drove up to Munich one afternoon and poked around.  I remember we drove out to the Olympic Village—the one where the 1972 games were held (26 August-11 September) and where the Israeli athletes were kidnapped on 5 September and later murdered, later the subject of Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich. 

I don’t remember exactly when I was in O’gau, sometime in ’72, but considering when I was in Bad Ems, it must have been a couple of months or so before the Olympics.  I recall that the place was pretty empty—not a big tourist draw.  (I had been in Berlin when the kidnapping occurred.  I went to bed that night thinking that the athletes had all been saved—remember that the erroneous report was issued before the truth was revealed—but when I woke up the next morning, I found out that they had all been murdered and that the German police had killed all the kidnappers.) 

Aside from skiing, O’gau is also famous for its woodcarvers.  The most popular souvenirs from O’gau are little figurines carved from wood in the distinctive style of the town and painted (sometimes they’re left unpainted).  They’re usually figures of people in various Bavarian dress—and they’re all over town in every size imaginable.  (There are also a whole range of religious figurines available, including crèches.  Remember that Bavaria, like Austria, is very Catholic.)  However, the USARSCHEUR PX, which also carried a line of the O’gau figures, had commissioned a special version of the traditional carvings.  It was a “Spook”—a man in a black cloak and a big, black slouch hat, holding a silver-bladed dagger.  Think “Spy vs. Spy.”  (The band on the hat is “oriental” blue, the primary color of MI Branch.)  Well, of course, I had to have one of those!  What a hoot.  I have it still, on the bookshelf in my study—one of my best souvenirs of Germany and the Army.  

(I also bought a “real” O’gau carving.  My grandmother had made a trip to Bavaria—I don’t know if she actually went to O’gau, but she probably did—and had given me a little figurine, which I also still have on the other end of that shelf, so I decided to get something slightly less traditional.  I shopped around all over town and saw that the artisans also made other kinds of carvings, including reliefs, which were much less common.  I got an unpainted high-relief panel of four men around a tavern table, slightly impressionistic in style and about 15”L x 12”H.  It hangs over the inside of the door to my study.  It’s one of my favorite pieces.)

My trip to Oberammergau wasn’t a vacation, of course, nor was Bad Ems—though I did take advantage of being away from Berlin to do some recreating.  O’gau, in the Bavarian Alps, was like Garmisch-Partenkirchen nearby—an Army recreation center for skiing in the winter.  There were Special Services hotels in both towns; my family’d even done a ski vacation in Garmisch when I was a kid.  I wasn’t in O’gau during ski season, of course, but it’s still a cute little Alpine town, very picturesque, with lots of Stuben and little restaurants where you could sit and nurse a beer or glass of wine and people-watch or nibble on some cheese or a pastry.  And Bad Ems, frequented by the Kaiser and the Tsar, among other European dignitaries of the 19th century, was a former Imperial spa.  Germans were very devoted to their “cures” and doctors often prescribed spa cures and the patients took this very seriously.  In other words, both towns, though small, were substantial in terms of basic amenities because of the visitors they attracted.  I mean, they weren’t Muldraugh, Kentucky! 

I did get to go on vacations occasionally, too.  As hard as it could be to navigate the paper maze that was necessary to get out of Berlin, I did manage a few times.  There was that Christmas-New Years trip to my friends in France, for one—the one where I took the Train Militaire to Strasbourg.  (I don’t know how I managed to get leave for both holidays—I found out after I got back that SOP was to give personnel one or the other holiday off, but not both.  Just got lucky—someone was asleep at the switch.)  I spent Christmas 1971 with the Humiliens, our French friends from the days in Koblenz, in Villefranche-de-Lauragais, their little town in the Haute-Garonne near Toulouse, and took the train to Paris for New Years 1972 with their son, Marc, who was my age, for a party by the daughter of his godparents.  (I guess that made her his god-sister!)  On Christmas morning, I cooked French toast for my hosts—we had to do a little shopping around to find appropriate bread; I was afraid to try regular French bread.  This was a great astonishment for the Humiliens on two counts: first, the idea that I would (or, I suppose, could) cook for them was a surprise; second . . . well, French toast isn’t French!  They’d never heard of such a thing.  (That’s not so strange: the French, like most Continentals, don’t eat a big breakfast—just coffee and a roll.  That’s why it’s called a continental breakfast, don’cha know.)  Anyway, they were so thrilled, they talked about this event for years to come.  (I have photos of that visit, including one of me at the stove with Ninon Humilien, la mère de famille, kibitzing over my shoulder!)  I also remember that the Humiliens’ housekeeper, an old family retainer who’d worked for Mme. Humilien’s family for years, was incensed that not only a man, but a stranger would be invading her kitchen!  (The housekeeper was pretty old and nearly toothless, and spoke the local langue d’oc patois, so not only I but also Ninon and her family could barely understand her.)

(The trip to Paris wasn’t particularly remarkable, except for one anecdote.  Marc and I stayed at a pension near his godparents’ house, and after we had arrived and were having some dinner in the pension restaurant, he decided he ought to call his parents.  That’s not so strange, of course, but it’s what he said that still tickles me.  We were at the table and he said matter-of-factly, “Je dois téléphoner en France.”  “I have to call France,” he said—as if Paris were not France, but his hometown was.  In his head—this had not been an intentional joke, but a disingenuous utterance which I had to point out to him after he said it—Paris was a strange foreign land.  Of course, he wasn’t totally off base on that.)

Strasbourg (where the French military train from Berlin terminated), by the way, is an odd place in its own right.  It’s the capital of Alsace, which is a French province that was previously German (called Elsass), and has changed hands so many times it’s impossible to untangle the cultural history of the area.  Today, it’s solidly and staunchly French politically.  (During WWII, you may know, when Strasbourg was under German occupation, the display of the Tricolor was forbidden.  The Strasbourgeois, however, knew a way to get around that.  Beds in most European homes were covered not with blankets or bedspreads as we do in the States, but a kind of quilt the Germans call a Steppdecke and the French, a duvet.  It was common practice to air these out every morning by hanging them from the balconies and windows of the houses.  The Strasbourgeois just made sure their brightly-colored quilts were all hung out to air in the right order: blue-white-red.) 

In their cultural identity, however, the Strasbourgeois suffer from MPD.  They make and sell pastry that’s as French as anyone’s (German pastry looks terrific, but is tasteless).  But they make a wonderful wine that not only tastes German, but is sold in bottles that look like German wine bottles.  Even its label is schizophrenic: the name is Gewürztraminer, which sounds German (because it is), but it’s designated vin d’Alsace.  When I went into a shop there—I had a layover between trains—all the shopkeepers, many of whom have German names, spoke French. (I understand that they will refuse to speak German with customers—presumably even tourists from Germany.)  But on the street and among themselves, they speak German!  (In a Beckettian scene, if you order something in French at a counter, the counterman will turn and shout the order to the back in German!)

I must tell you about the Humiliens’ house in Villefranche-de-Lauragais.  It’s amazing.  It was actually Mme. Humilien’s family home and it’s the third oldest building in the little town—about 3,000 inhabitants.  (Villefranche is an old designation for a town that has been declared tax-exempt for services rendered to the king.  There are scores of Villefranches in France—though I suspect they all pay taxes these days.)  Only the Hôtel de France, a few yards up the Rue de la République (and which serves a renowned cassoulet, the regional specialty), and the mairie are older.  The house—what we’d call a townhouse today—was 700 years old in the 1960s.  That’s seven centuries—can you dig it?  That house was already two centuries old when Columbus sailed for the New World!  Much of the house had been redone over the centuries, of course, but there were lots of very old bits here and there: a Louis XII  (reigned 1498-1515) banister on the stairs (the stairs were newer, thankfully), Directoire (1795-1799) and Empire (flourished 1800-1815) furniture.  (I’m not positive, but I believe the basement was part of the 13th-century foundation.)  There was a sedan chair, the age of which I’m not sure though it looked to be 17th- or 18th-century or so, that sat in a nook at the foot of the stairs in the vestibule and which the Humiliens used as a sort of closet/cabinet for their stash of cigarettes and candy and such.  None of these objects had been bought as “antiques,” of course; they had been new when Ninon Humilien’s family got them. 

The Humiliens were carefully restoring things, all in the styles of their original periods.  I don’t know exactly when Mme. Humilien’s family acquired the house—they may have been the original owners—but they had it for at least several generations.  On the second-floor stair landing, there was two glass-enclosed étagères displaying family heirlooms.  Over the cases hung two portraits from the Napoleonic era—Mme. Humilien’s great (or great-great) -grandmother and -grandfather.  Her portrait depicted a cameo broach and his a Légion d’honneur—and those same objects were in the étagère below the paintings.  Neat!  When we first visited the Humiliens, right after Dr. Humilien retired from the army and they had just moved back, they had barely begun the restorations.  In one room, when they stripped off the Victorian-era (early Third Republic in France) wallpaper to refurbish the walls and repaper them, they discovered a small closet that had been papered over.  Inside were old family documents from Napoleon’s day.  Can you imagine having a family history that you can not only trace back that far—not just the early 19th century, but even earlier—but which is all still around you where you live?  Stuff like that just gets me.

I went back to Villefranche in September 1972 to attend Marc’s (first) wedding.  Weddings, actually.  Most French couples get married twice.  This is not just some weird cultural tradition—it’s a national necessity born of the French Revolution.  The First Republic (1792-1804) was so anti-clerical, a tradition that remains till this day, that priests were forbidden to perform legal marriages.  The only legal marriage in France is a civil ceremony.  But most French are still Catholic, so couples get married in a church with all the trappings, then rush off to the mairie or the hôtel de ville (both terms for the town hall) for a civil wedding.  (Sometimes they do it in reverse—either way, it’s the same deal.)  Anyway, I went back for the “event” (and wore my army dress blues to the ceremonies: boy, were they impressed—though mostly with my big, red American car!). 

I also took two trips where I met my parents someplace.  They also came to Berlin a couple of times—once on their way to Eastern Europe.  My dad was a little concerned, first because of his former status as a diplomat and his name having been published in an East German book, Who’s Who in CIA; and second because of my position in Berlin.  It was a little hypersensitive, I guess, but when Dad was at the embassy, a secretary had taken a trip to the East and had written a postcard home joking that she had seen the light in the workers’ paradise and wanted to join the party.  She got pulled off a tour bus somewhere!  Sometimes paranoia has a basis in reality.  You never knew with those guys.

(When it was published in East Germany in 1968, Who’s Who in CIA created quite a stir in the circles of official Washington, especially among foreign service officers.  Who’s Who in CIA purported to name everyone who worked for the spy agency—but it ended up naming almost everyone who ever served overseas, even privately.  In fact, it left out actual CIA people: Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence in those days, is in there, but the woman who was the embassy spook in Bonn isn’t.  If you were anybody, you were in the book.  In fact, if you weren’t in the book—you weren’t anybody.  There was a rush on copies to see if your name was listed—and my dad is in it.  Believe me—or don’t: it’s really too late now, anyway—my dad was not in the CIA.  Though until the day his father died, he thought his son was a spy.  Because my dad’s employer had been the U.S. Information Agency, and Grandpa Jack was born in Europe where, in most languages, ‘information’ and ‘intelligence’ are the same word—Nachrichten in German, for instance—the information service was the intelligence service.  The ‘information’/’intelligence’ overlap was probably part of the reason that the book listed my dad.  Not entirely, though: he had served in the CIC during the Occupation of Germany and, in the Soviet Bloc, all diplomats were "spies" at some level or another—they just assumed all of ours were, too.)

The first time I met my parents for vacation was in England.  We toured the Lake District and the Cotswolds, and it was fun and interesting, but not worth reliving here.  We did stay in an inn in Salisbury or someplace like that which had hosted Charles I (reigned 1625-1649).  Like I said, stuff like that gets me.  We visited Stonehenge on that same trip—you could still walk among the megaliths then—and I was so flabbergasted because that place was already ancient when the Romans occupied Britain.  And no one knew then any more than now what the circle was really for or how it was built.  (I had a similar feeling when I was at Jericho—the overpowering sense of being in the presence of ancientness.) 

The other trip like that was to Greece.  My folks were booked on an Aegean cruise, and we met in Athens a week earlier to tour the mainland.  That was the trip for which I used the Air Force hop out of Berlin—Athenai airport is also an airbase—and on the return flight, which included a leg from Ramstein to Berlin, Gail Halvorsen, the Candy Bomber, piloted the plane.  We had been chatting in the waiting area, walked out to the plane together, boarded, sat down, and buckled ourselves in.  The plane took off, and then Colonel Halvorsen turned to me and said, “Excuse me.  I’m going to fly the plane now.”  I thought he was joking at first—till he got up and walked into the cockpit.  My little brush with actual history. 

The tour of Greece was great fun and very interesting—we hit all the main spots like Delphi and Epidauros, and so on—and we had some wonderful Greek food (acquiring a taste for ouzo and taramasalata along the way), but there’s not a lot to retell otherwise.  I did see Mycenae, Agamemnon’s city, and stood on the ruin of the Lion Gate and looked out over the Plain of Argos toward the sea—the view the watchman in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon sees when he spots the signal fires from Troy telling the Greeks that the war was over.  Two years later, when I was at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I was assigned to do that monologue—and I pictured that view as I had seen it on this trip and imagined it at night with the signal fires appearing in the distance.  That was a trip—if you know what I mean.

The thing about this trip at the time—as opposed to later resonances—was that it was in the fall of 1973.  After I went back to Berlin, my parents boarded a Greek ship for an island-hopping cruise in the Aegean.  The Arab League attacked Israel on 6 October to start the Yom Kippur War and there were reports of attacks on ships in the Mediterranean and Aegean.  I was nervous, of course, and then I heard a report of a Greek cruise ship attacked in the Aegean.  Now, I knew the name of my parents’ ship, Epirotiki Lines’ MTS Argonaut, but I didn’t know its itinerary or the name of the attacked ship, so I immediately started calling the American Embassy in Athens to find out what ship was attacked and who had been on board.  Of course, no one knew anything yet, so I kept calling every day, even several times a day—all U.S. facilities in Europe where there were also military bases were on the same phone system; calling the embassy in Athens was no different from calling Frankfurt or Ramstein—until I finally learned that the ship in the attack was not the one my folks had been on.  Of course, my ’rents had no idea I was panicking—and their ship’s route was diverted to avoid the trouble area.

I’ve related some of the incidental things that were part of working intel in Berlin—many of them routine occurrences.  The walk-ins and phone-ins, records-checks on acquaintances, surveillances and demo coverage, SAEDA briefings, and so on.  I told you we kept a low profile, somewhere between clandestine and overt.  But we did have to do some standard spook things—like keep our phone numbers unlisted (both in the Berlin Brigade phonebook and the regular Berlin directory).  Of course, we had regular military ID’s, which we used to get on the post and into the ’X, and so on, and we had our MI creds—the “box tops”—for official duty.  But we had to have other ID, too—with fake names.  Each of us had at least two cover names, one of which was backstopped with some simple ID docs.  (We couldn’t get fake military ID’s or passports—except for an operation—but we had things like a fake Army driver’s license and some German papers.)  When I arrived at the Station, one of the first things I had to do was submit a list of a few names for potential cover ID’s from which Munich would select two, one of which would be on those low-level docs.  The idea was to choose names with the same initials as our own real names—so anything we carried with a monogram like a key ring or a billfold wouldn’t give us away.  I made up my list; I don’t remember all the names I submitted, though I do remember wanting dearly to put down Rudyard Kipling—but I didn’t.  I can’t remember both names I was assigned—I never used but one and that only once or twice, and never with any papers—but my cover name was Robert Klein.  An homage to the comedian—I guess the Army didn’t recognize his name.  (I think the other name I had, the one I never used, was the name of a high school classmate who had had the same initials as I did—but I can’t remember his name now.)  Anyway, cover ID’s weren’t something you needed for doing background investigations or as a glorified accountant, so most of the time I was in Berlin, I had no need for this.  It’s just part of the spook world I inhabited once for a while.

Sometimes, no matter how well trained you are or how carefully you plan, things go haywire.  The best-laid plans and all.  (And sometimes people are just incompetent.)  We had a phrase to describe the little mess-ups and unplanned distractions that occurred with sporadic regularity: The Five-To-Five Friday Flap—because they always seemed to occur at 4:55 on Friday afternoon, just as we were all leaving to go home for the weekend.  While I was in Berlin this happened a few times, at least once to major effect on the city and the Forces as you now know.  I’ve already recounted the big one; the other two incidents were related to each other because they happened during the same operation—though the incidents themselves weren’t connected.

One of my colleagues was running a CE investigation of an American civilian who was known to be buying popular and rationed items from the PX and selling them on the black market.  This was illegal for numerous reasons, not the least was that PX merchandise is sold tax- and duty-free.  Reselling them to Germans or others not entitled to shop at the government-subsidized stores was against both U.S. and German law, not to mention Army regs.  Illegality, however, wouldn’t have made this case one of interest to Military Intelligence; there had to be some other aspect to it.  The black-marketeer under investigation was also suspected of using the same contacts he made for his merchandise enterprise to sell sensitive and classified documents and information to anyone who’d pay for it. 

The investigation, in which I had had no part, had proceeded to the point where the agent in charge decided it was time to set up a stationary surveillance of the subject’s apartment in Kreuzberg.  The agent had arranged to rent a vacant apartment in a walk-up across the street and a few doors down from the subject’s, and Tech Support set up a whole slew of electronic surveillance equipment: video camera, monitors, VCR’s, microphones—whatever was state of the art in the early 1970s.  Then the Ops Officer recruited all available agents to man the surveillance 24/7, each pair of us taking an eight-hour shift.  My partner and I had the red-eye shift—midnight to 8 a.m.

Kreuzberg isn’t close to the Dahlem district where our office and residences were located, so we drove to the surveillance location.  However, since an American car (especially my candy-apple red Torino) or even a German car with green POV plates would be immediately recognizable and draw attention to our presence in the area, we drove to the HQ compound where we signed out one of the Station’s indigenous GOV’s—German Fords or VW’s—and a set of German license plates (the cars all had dual registrations—one for a POV and one for an indigenous vehicle; the plates were quickly exchangeable depending on our need).  We drove the GOV to a spot a few blocks away and around the corner from the apartment and walked to our post.  Our POV’s were parked back at the HQ area, of course, and it was common to park in the auxiliary PX lot across Clayallee from the compound.  There was insufficient space for POV parking on the compound grounds, and the POV lot was at the far rear of the compound, a distance from our offices at the front of the main HQ building.  During the day, leaving our cars in the PX lot was no problem, but in this instance there were complicating circumstances.

As I said, I had the midnight-8 a.m. shift, so I parked my POV at about 11 p.m. or so.  The ’X was closed at that hour, of course, and the lot was empty—except now for my big, red Torino.  Now, because of the spate of bombings and sabotage attacks by the likes of the RAF, some of which, as I’ve noted, had been fatal, the U.S. Forces had increased their security procedures and vigilance.  Cars entering the HQ compound, for instance, were thoroughly inspected, including using a giant mirror on a dolly to inspect the undercarriage.  A car left unattended in the PX parking lot well after hours attracted suspicious attention from the MP’s, and they attempted to identify the registered owner and find out why it was sitting there after midnight.  As I’ve noted, for security reasons, Berlin Station’s POV’s were all registered in Munich, not in Berlin, so the MP’s weren’t able to identify the car from the local records.  There were no computerized records available in the early ’70s, so determining after hours that the car apparently abandoned across from the U.S. HQ in Berlin was registered in Munich and then finding out to whom it was registered was a slow process, and it was taking too long for the MP’s sense of urgency.  They decided they had to blow up the car on site rather than take a chance it might be loaded with explosives. 

I don’t know how it happened, but the DA at the Station got wind of this impending action.  Because the 66th MI offices were right at the front of the building and compound, and the DA’s office was potentially vulnerable if the explosion was a large one—no one knew what was in the car—perhaps he was warned by the MP’s what was about to happen.  In any case, the DA knew the car in question was mine and got the MP’s to abort their plans.  Of course, due to the security measures in place for the surveillance operation, there was no way the DA could get in touch with me to tell me what had almost happened, so I never learned that I almost lost my car big time until after I returned to the Station after 8 in the morning to sign the GOV and the German plates back in.  I was mightily relieved that things had turned out the way they did instead of the way they might have.  (The Torino had been a college-graduation present from my parents—and Road and Track declared it their 1970 Car of the Year.  I really loved that car.)

That was a close one—but the next slip-up went over the line into disaster.  I was still on the red-eye shift at the surveillance, and we’d been at it for a week or so.  As I said, I was just a recruit on this gig, so I didn’t know anything about any of the arrangements that had been made—or hadn’t been made.  I just reported for duty at midnight and went home at 8 the next morning to get some sleep.  One night, after parking the GOV around the corner from the apartment, I had no sooner entered the room when someone out on the sidewalk started shouting and screaming.  The previous shift hadn’t even left yet, so there were four agents in the apartment still.  (That, actually, turned out to be part of the problem, as we were about to learn.)  Now, the tech set-up in the surveillance apartment included video cameras aimed at the subject’s apartment across the street so we could watch on monitors without posing in the window.  But this yelling was coming from right below our apartment on the sidewalk out front so we rushed to the window to see what the commotion at such an hour was all about.  It was the landlady of the building, screaming and pointing up at the surveillance apartment, gathering a crowd and, pretty quickly, a couple of Berlin cops.  We immediately radioed into the Station and got our police liaison officer to come out and help us handle whatever the matter was.  Whatever was going on, it was obvious we were in some kind of bind—the attention on our apartment alone was certainly a bad development, aside from whatever else might be happening.

It turned out that the landlady had begun to suspect something nefarious and probably illegal was going on in her apartment.  Her clue was that though the apartment had been rented by one young man—the special agent in charge of this operation—she had been watching as a parade of different men kept coming and going at all hours of the day and night.  She never saw the guy who had rented the place, but she noticed that there were half a dozen other men, and no women, who entered and left the apartment and no one seemed to be living there.  She concluded that there was a brothel operating in the apartment, or maybe a smuggling ring, and she wanted it out of her building.  Well, we managed to keep the cops at bay for a while until the liaison officer arrived, and then we pretty much had to let them in. 

As soon as they looked inside, they all knew what had been going on: all that high-tech equipment and the lack of any other furniture or other amenities—no fridge, no stove, no food except for thermoses and bags of food brought from home—told these savvy cops that they’d spoiled an intel operation of some kind.  (Berlin’s being spy central, the local cops were fairly cognizant of what was happening around them.  Besides, as I’ve said before, these guys were pretty competent anyway.)  Everyone pretty much laughed—there wasn’t much else we could do.  We knew we had gotten caught—the Army expression is very vulgar, but very apt: stepping on our dicks.  It hadn’t helped that the SAIC had neglected to inform the police liaison what he was setting up so the cops could be briefed if it became necessary.  As I said, I was just a hired hand on this one, so, after the SNAFU, I just went on home after returning the GOV and the local plates.  End of operation.  (I don’t remember if we ever caught the guy, or even if we even proved he was passing info.  He certainly would have discovered he was under surveillance after this public exposure of our little spook operation on his block.  As I said, it wasn’t my gig.)

(Berlin Station had had one female agent when I arrived, but she’d left Berlin by this time.  Women were only in the process of being integrated into Army operations in the early ’70s and female MI agents were rare—and highly prized.  The Women’s Army Corps, the WAC’s, to which most female soldiers were assigned, didn’t disband until 1978, after which women were assigned to the same branches as men.  If MI took only the best of the available talent, you can imagine the level of the women in its ranks because the pool was so much smaller to start with.  The agent at Berlin Station, an NCO, was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and one of the top agents I ever served with.  While she was still at the Station and I was just starting there, she acted as an unofficial mentor to me for the practical aspects of the job, the part you only learn OTJ.)

[On 13 April 2017, I’ll post the final section of “Berlin Memoir.”  In it, I write mostly about the theater group we started at the air base and some of the events, not just the performances, that grew out of that.  I hope you’ll come back to read Part 8.]

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.]