Berlin Memoir, Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berlin Memoir, Part 3

[As I promised in my closing note to “Berlin Memoir, Part 2” (see 31 December 2016), this installment will detail the most significant investigation in which I was engaged during the 2½ years I was stationed in Berlin.  It’s probably no surprise to ROTters who’ve been following this reminiscence that the case involved exfiltration, that peculiar phenomenon in which I’d become the Station expert.  (For an explanation of what exfiltration is and how I got involved in its investigation, I recommend going back and reading parts 1 and 2 of this memoir before embarking on the latest chapter.  That’s also where readers’ll find definitions of the intel terms and army jargon I bandy about.  “Berlin Memoir, Part 1” was posted on 16 December 2016.)]

As I said, most exfiltration cases were minor incidents, especially from the counterintel perspective.  The case involving the Deputy Provost Marshal of Berlin Brigade was an exception.  One other time, however, I hooked a really big one.  The events of this episode, which only took a few hours, were actually set in motion months earlier.  Some time in mid-1971, an ex-GI named “Red” Kappel (I think his actual given name was Martin, but everyone called him Red anyway), now working in Berlin at the PX warehouse, got caught on the Autobahn between Berlin and West Germany driving a car with five would-be refugees concealed in it.  To complicate matters, he was driving his boss’s Caddy, a favorite of the exfiltrators because of its big trunk, implicating this high-ranking Civil Servant—he was a GS-12 or something, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel—in the tangle.  The East German Vopos turned Kappel over to the Soviets and after they took Kappel to Potsdam for a few days, the Soviets returned him to East German custody and he ended up in jail in East Berlin. 

Military Intelligence interest began in this case because when Kappel had been a GI he had had a security clearance, and when he first came to Berlin after he got out of the army, he delivered pizza for a local restaurant and one of his regular delivery stops was Field Station Berlin, the super-secret, mountain-top ASA SIGINT and ELINT facility—our version of what I described at Helmstedt earlier—and no one knew what he might be able to tell someone about that place.  FSB, located on the highest point in Berlin, Teufelsberg, a little mountain in Wilmersdorf created from the rubble of the city’s wartime destruction (which you see being shoveled into wheelbarrows in The Big Lift), bristled with antennas, domes, spheres, and silos—it looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek—and was a major target of Soviet espionage both because of its extreme sensitivity and because it was aimed at them.

We eventually determined that Kappel didn’t really have any info that the Soviets wouldn’t already possess, though at the beginning we didn’t know that.  Security questions set aside, the case became part of the muddle of diplomatic-military-political issues that made up the Cold War.  An American had committed a crime on Soviet-controlled soil, and the Soviets were going to make as big a deal out of it as they could.  My job was to find out who else was involved and how far the participation of any official Americans, GI and civilian, went.  The people running exfiltrations were the same ones who controlled the worst of Berlin’s crime; as I’ll describe later, they were about as nasty as anyone could be and the generals didn’t want any of their people in bed with them.  And smuggling people across the East-West border by someone associated with the U.S. Forces was clearly a provocation to the Soviets at a time when that was a dangerous button to push. 

We already knew about the warehouse manager, but as the investigation developed and other U.S. Forces personnel were identified, I also ended up coordinating with the OSI, the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, which combines the responsibilities of both MI and CID.  I even did a good cop-bad cop interrogation of one AF NCO who turned out to be the lynchpin for exposing the whole team involved in the Kappel operation—he copped out under pressure and named names.  (I was the bad cop.  As we’ll see, I’m very good as playing a hard-ass.  There was also one exercise at Holabird that sort of stunned everyone.  But that’s another story.)  To find out if anyone else was involved we monitored the mail at Kappel’s home and had his phone tapped.  (The rules for this were a lot easier in Germany than in the U.S., and within the military community—and in occupied Berlin, that included civilian employees like Kappel anyway—it was at the discretion of the USCOB.  In Berlin, the three Western generals had supreme authority, though the USCOB seldom exercised it over Germans or Americans with no official connection.) 

Now, Kappel, like many GI’s, had married a German woman.  Beside the fact that she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, a circumstance always considered a potential security risk, nearly every West German had family in East Germany.  Family in the East was a pressure point the East Germans and Soviets were never reluctant to exploit.  Helene Kappel was very vulnerable now, with no income and her connection to the American community and its safety net severed; there was no telling what she might do.  In addition, before her marriage to Red, Helene had been a prostitute.  I can tell you, I learned some interesting German from her mail and the phone tap because when she ran out of money, she went back to her old profession.  She also made contact with the people who had hired her husband to drive the refugees to West Germany (actually they contacted her) and she began to recruit more drivers and car-owners for the organization.   

While all this was going on, though, Kappel was just sitting in an East Berlin jail.  I was on 24-hour call and couldn’t leave my BOQ without telling the Duty Agent where to reach me and calling in every hour or so.  (The Duty Agent, or DA—usually an EM, though for a period when we were understaffed junior officers pulled this duty, too—stayed in the Station all night to answer the phones and respond to an alert by calling the section SAIC’s—Special Agents in Charge.)  My parents came to Berlin for a visit during this time, and they were very impressed at how important I seemed to be because while we were out wandering around the city, I kept ducking into Stuben and bars to use the phone.  Of course, I couldn’t tell them exactly what was going on, but they were very impressed nevertheless. 

All this time, of course, I was writing reports on everything we were learning about the exfiltrators and their operations, as well as the contacts Helene was making and everything else related even remotely to the investigation.  I attended high-level briefings with colonels and generals and ministers—sometimes in that secure room—where I was generally the only junior officer present.  I’d have been impressed myself, if I hadn’t been so afraid of making a mistake.  (I can tell you, I was replaying that previous run-in with the DCSI over the incident concerning the DPM.  The DCSI didn’t like me, and we both knew it.)  I learned at these briefings that my reports were going to the State Department and being read by Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State at the time.  I even had intimations that some of my stuff was going to the White House.  This was a really big deal, and I was the point man.  (Somewhere, in some State Department or DOD archive is a big file with all my reports on this case, plus whatever other people were sending.  That staff study’s probably moldering somewhere, too.) 

Obviously, at one point there ceased to be much more we could do.  Kappel had been caught red-handed (pardon the expression), so there was no denying his guilt.  Except for trying to roll up the exfiltration operations, which we eventually pretty much did, there wasn’t anything left to investigate.  Getting Kappel released became a diplomatic function, so the case went cold except for monitoring sources for word of his whereabouts and potential release.  Everything pretty much went back to normal (which at Berlin Station was frequently hectic and crazy anyway, as you may have learned).  I went back to my regular duties and was no longer on 24-hour call except when I was my section’s duty officer in the regular rotation.  And that’s when it happened.

I was on call for the Counterespionage Section one evening, and I was just hanging out at my BOQ.  (One agent from each section was on call every night and on the weekends.  We had to be available and contactable at all times.  Remember, there were no cell phones, or even beepers, in those days.)  Sometime around 7 in the evening, the DA phoned me at home to come in and take a call.  A guy thought that a recent photo of a wanted Baader-Meinhof member in the newspaper looked like his wife’s brother-in-law (or something).  I talked the guy down, thanked him, and got rid of him.  But as I was preparing to go back home, the phone rang again and the duty agent passed it on to me.  The man on the other end said he was Red Kappel, that he had been released in West Berlin, and he wanted to meet someone. 

Well, this didn’t sound kosher.  Our latest information was that Kappel was still in the East Berlin lock-up, and while it was possible that the East Germans might release him suddenly and without notice, it was highly unlikely.  They were all making too much hay out of holding him.  (Kappel’s eventual release was almost certainly a direct result of Nixon’s trip to Moscow in May 1972.  If they were working at that level, letting him go unannounced, with no bargaining or propaganda, would be pretty silly on their part.  The Soviets could be petty, but they were seldom silly.)  And even if he had been released that way, why would he call Military Intelligence?  Not his wife, not his boss, not the guys who hired him (and probably hadn’t paid him yet), not some friends.  Still, I couldn’t just ignore the call.  I arranged to meet “Kappel” at the PX snack bar across Clayallee.  It was about 8 p.m. now, and the place closed at 9, so it would be neutral, safe, but somewhat private.  We made a date for a short time later.

Now, because this case fell between all the floorboards of military investigations—it wasn’t a security matter, it wasn’t a military crime, and since none of the people involved were GI’s, it wasn’t even a breach of military regs—we shared the case with the military detectives, the CID (Criminal Investigation Division of the MP’s).  I had a CID counterpart, a German-born, naturalized-American warrant officer who didn’t want to be on this case any more than I did.  Karl-Heinz Wiedermeyer also shared with his CID and MP colleagues a tendency to overreact whenever something got a little spooky.  One whiff of spy stuff, and military cops sometimes went off half-cocked.  Not that I was so cool, with my vast experience in counterespionage.  (I once got into some trouble with my CO because I lost my cool when I got stuck with an malfunctioning radio when I was doing security for General Westmoreland at an Armed Forces Day parade.  I started cursing over what I thought was a dead radio, but it was only broken at my end.  They could hear me perfectly well back at base, and cursing on the air is a major RTO—Radio-Telephone Operator—no-no.  So much for cool under pressure.)  I was, however, at least trained for this stuff.  Karl-Heinz wasn’t.  He was a cop, not a spook.  Anyway, I called Karl-Heinz and, because his office was at Andrews Barracks in Lichtenfelde and the ’X and I were in Zehlendorf, we decided that I’d go meet “Kappel” and he’d join us later.  So I went on across the street to the PX complex, and went into the snack bar.

The PX snack bar is a cafeteria.  This one was nearly all glass, with windows all around the two exterior walls, and the entrance in a completely glass wall.  (The fourth side was the food counter and the kitchen.)  At 8 o’clock in the evening, an hour before closing, there was virtually no one there except the workers closing up.  As I entered, I saw one lone guy sitting at the opposite end of the room.  He was at a table, with his broad-brimmed hat pulled down sort of ’40s style, and he was buried in the brigade Daily Bulletin.  Every military post puts this out, with all the announcements, official and unofficial, and it’s a couple of pages long, printed—mimeographed in those days—on legal-sized paper.  A guy in a slouch hat, poring over the DB looks pretty silly, believe me.  The only other people in the snack bar were the cooks and servers cleaning up behind the counter and one teenager turning the chairs up onto the tables in the main part of the room.  Obviously, the guy with the DB was my guy—but he wasn’t Red Kappel.  I’d seen enough pictures of him over the months of investigation to know what he looked like, and this guy was ten years too old, ten pounds too heavy, and a good six inches too sort.  And even with the hat, I could see that his hair was not red (Kappel didn’t get his nickname for nothing).  I had to talk to the guy in any case.  Even with all the deception, he might actually know something we should know.  I doubted that, but I had to make a report anyway, so I had to find out what he wanted. 

I crossed the room and went up to the guy’s table.  I stood across from him, but he didn’t look up from the DB.  Christ, I thought, the guy’s gonna play Sam Spade or something. 

“Are you looking to talk to someone?” I said.

“You CIA?”

“No.”

“You got ID?”  He still hadn’t looked up.

“No.  Do you want to talk, or not?”

“OK.”  I sat across from him.

“You got any ID?” I asked.  He handed me his DOD ID card (though I’ve forgotten now what his name really was).

“I hear the Reds got one of our guys,” he said a little heatedly.

Oh, God.  He’s a John Bircher or something.  Where’s this gonna go?  “Where’d you hear that?”

“Around.  I work in the EES beverage shop.  The words out.” 

“OK.  Why’d you want to see us?”

“I got a brother-in-law—well, my wife’s brother-in-law—in the East.  He’s a party member, but he don’t like it there.  I can go over and get him to find out where they’re holding Red.”

“Ah, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea.  We really know where Red is, anyway.  But thanks for offering.”  Somewhere about here, I saw Karl-Heinz look in through the glass doors across the room.  It was near closing now, and all the activity in the snack bar had pretty much ceased.  There was only our James Bond wannabe and me in the room, and that teen mopping the floor.  But Karl-Heinz looked around, didn’t come in, and left.  What the hell, I figured, this isn’t important and I’ll just fill him in later, after I talk this guy down and send him home.  I was a little afraid, considering how ditzy the guy was, that he might be armed and if I signaled Karl-Heinz across the room, “Kappel” might lose it or something.  It wasn’t worth the chance under the circumstances.  I let Karl-Heinz go without making a move or saying anything.

“Well, what if I go over and get my wife’s brother-in-law to help me break Red out?  We could go over and get him before anybody knew.  My wife’s brother-in-law”—he never used the man’s name, it was always “my wife’s brother-in-law”—”has access.  He knows stuff, and he can find out things.”

“Fine.  But don’t do anything until we get back to you.  I have to report to my superiors, you know, and they’ll let you know.  Promise me you’ll wait until you hear from me.”

“Sure.  But I want to help.  We can’t just let them get one of our guys like that.”

Jesus, this guy’s gonna do something dumb, I know it.  He’s seen too many spy flicks.  “Of course not.  We’re doing things right now, don’t you worry.  Believe me, we’re not just sitting on our hands here.  Just don’t do anything without hearing from us.  You might get in the way of another operation, you know.  Don’t even talk to your wife’s brother-in-law yet.  Just wait.”

“Sure.  I understand.  But you’ll get back to me.  I’m ready to do something.  I know I can trust my wife’s brother-in-law.”

I stood up then, and pointed out that the snack bar was closing up.  I walked him out and across Clayallee.  We stopped in front of the entrance gate to the compound.  “Now, remember, you promised not to do anything until you hear from us.  Right?  Don’t even go to the East until then.”

“Right.  I gotcha.  I’ll wait to hear from you.”  We shook hands and he walked away toward Saargemünderstrasse, around the corner of which was the small compound where the EES beverage store was, and where I imagined his car was parked.  I watched him go until he turned the corner, then went into the headquarters compound and into the Station.  When I entered the Station, there were three people in the DA’s little office and the phones—there were ten or a dozen lines—were all ringing.  The DA was there, Karl-Heinz, and another agent from the Station who, it turned out, just happened along and got shanghaied. 

“Karl-Heinz, where the hell did you go?  Why didn’t you come into the snack-bar?  I saw you look in, but you left right away.”

“I, uhh . . . .  What the hell are you doing here?”

“I work here!  What are you doing here?  What’s going on?”

“Where were you?” asked the DA.

“Right where I said I was going to be.  What’s this all about?”

“Wait a minute, let me call off the dogs,” said Karl-Heinz.  Most of this dialogue is recreated from my memory—though it’s very close to what we all said.  But this particular line was precisely what Karl-Heinz said.  That phrase is etched in my brain. 

After a second’s hesitation, the three started dialing and talking again, very nervously. 

“What do you mean, ‘Call off the dogs’?”

“I didn’t see you in the snack-bar.  I thought you got grabbed.  We’ve called your CO, my CO”—that’s the PM—“the USCOB, the Brigade Commander, and the DCSI.  We’ve put out APB’s on you, Kappel, your car, and the Caddy Kappel was driving.  They’re shutting the whole city down.”

“Jesus, Karl-Heinz, did you overreact!  I was right where I said I’d be.  The only thing was, when I got there, I found out it wasn’t Kappel at all, of course.  It was just some nut from the EES.  He heard through the grapevine that Kappel got picked up in East Germany, and he wanted to go over and bust him out.  He was a little hinky, so when I saw you peek in, I didn’t want to signal.  Since it wasn’t Kappel or anyone important to the case, I figured I’d tell you later.”

“Well, I wasn’t looking for you, actually; I was looking for Kappel.  When I didn’t see him, I just naturally assumed . . . .”

At this moment, Colonel Collins arrived.  He was already on his way when the DA called to head him off.  Besides, with the DCSI and two generals informed that I’d been kidnapped, he figured he’d better be in the Station to settle the flap.  Unfortunately for me, the DCSI was also on his way in.  The generals, at least, had been caught in time. 

Colonel Collins picked up a phone and made several calls.  I was still watching this whole scene in amusement and disbelief.  After all, I hadn’t done anything.  Was it my fault that Karl-Heinz had jumped to conclusions and overreacted? 

“Well, the shit’s gonna hit,” said my CO.  “The DCSI wants to see us in his office at USCOB.  The PM’s closed the checkpoints and stopped the military train.  The military part of Tempelhof’s been closed, too.  They got the French and the Brits to lock down their sectors also, and the PM’s been on to the German agencies to shut down the civilian crossing points and exits as well.  It took about half an hour to shut the city down.  It’ll take hours to open it all up again.  The DCSI’s gonna be pissed.”

“But why at me, sir?  I was right where I said I’d be, doing just what I was supposed to do.”  I knew the DCSI was just looking for a reason to chew my tail again.  Would Colonel Collins back me again, as he had done before? 

Well, the DCSI did light into me.  At least he started to.  And Colonel Collins pointed out right away that the flap had not been caused by anything I had done.  The DCSI backed off, but he was clearly not happy about that. 

As we left the DCSI’s office, Colonel Collins told me, “When I heard that you were kidnapped, my first fear was that you had your creds with you.  Then I wondered if you had a weapon.”  I looked at him a moment.  He was really more worried about my boxtops and my .38 than about my safety.  How comforting.

As far as I know, the city untangled itself and was back to normal by morning.  I doubt anyone outside the Station, the PMO, and USCOB really knew what had happened.  Probably some travelers were inconvenienced—mostly military ones, since the civilian stuff probably never got closed before the all-clear came down—but they probably never learned why.  Anyway, I’m the only person I know who had a city shut down for him.  Kinda makes me proud to be an American.  This case had gone on for months—over a year I think.  Then, suddenly, the case was over.  Kappel was released.  The scuttlebutt was that his release had been negotiated during Nixon’s trip to Moscow a few weeks earlier.  (I was never able to confirm that, of course, but that’s what everyone assumed.)

The most this case did was ID some more exfiltration personalities, and drive up the fees they paid for cars and drivers.  Because of the more detailed info my study provided, the Allied forces were able to clamp down pretty tightly on the operations and essentially deny the leaders access to Allied personnel as drivers—they could get through checkpoints with less scrutiny than Germans or other nationals—and cars with Allied plates, especially big American cars in which whole families could hide.  The more difficult it got to get these assets, the higher the payment they offered.  The PX warehouse manager had gotten $500 for the use of his Caddy (which he ended up losing, along with his job with the EES; we figured some Soviet general was tooling around Moscow in the Caddy); as a result of our operation, we pulled the lid so tight the exfiltration organizers were offering several thousand for cars, drivers were getting $10,000 and more, and Helene herself was promised a Mercedes for just recruiting people.  For the rest of the time I was in Berlin, GI’s were out of the exfiltration biz—it was too risky, even for that kind of money.  (As the costs went up, so, of course, did the price paid by the refugees.  It was a cash deal, and I imagine fewer and fewer would-be escapees could afford it anymore.)

[So, how many people do you know who’ve had a city closed on their account?  Not many, I’ll wager.  (My Dad was actually thrown out of a city by the mayor . . . but that’s a different story.)  If this episode whets your appetite for more reminiscences about Cold War Berlin, please come back in a couple of weeks for part 4 of “Berlin Memoir.”  Since I’m posting the installments somewhat haphazardly, I can’t say exactly when the next chapter—which covers some of the other intel activities in which I was involved (just the highlights, of course!)—will appear, but they’ve been coming about once every two to three weeks.]

Berlin Memoir, Part 2

[In Part 1 of my “Berlin Memoir” (posted on 16 December),  I told you about how I happened to start this reminiscence and introduced some of my earliest experiences  in Berlin—including how I ended up there.  This memoir isn’t really presented in chronological order—it’s more a “stream of consciousness”—but I strongly recommend reading Part 1 before embarking on Part 2 or the subsequent chapters because I explain things when I first discuss them and don’t repeat the explanations again later.  (The same goes for translations of German terms I drop and definitions of army jargon and abbreviations I throw around.)] 

When I first arrived in Berlin, people with security clearances like me were not allowed either to go into East Berlin or to drive the Autobahn to the Zone.  When my car arrived at the port of Bremerhaven from the States, I had to hire someone to go there, retrieve my car, and drive it back to Berlin.  (There were NCO’s who made extra dough doing this service.  I’ll bet they were pissed when this restriction was lifted!)  We either had to fly over the SZOG or take the U.S. military train.  We couldn’t use the Bundesbahn, the German railroad, under any circumstances (one reason was that the Berlin railroad depot was an S-Bahn station—controlled by the East Germans even though it was on our side of the Wall; I wasn’t even allowed to go in there), but we could travel by American, British, or French military train.  Ours, called the Duty Train, went to Helmstedt and Frankfurt; the Brits’ went to Braunschweig (Brunswick), which was their border town, and back (I never took it); the French Train Militaire went to Frankfurt, too, and then on to Strasbourg, and I did take it once to visit friends in France one Christmas-New Year. 

We could also fly on any of the Allied military flights, though that meant using the AB’s, of course.  The American AFB was also the civilian airport, Tempelhof (the one in The Big Lift), but the Brits and French had their own, Gatow and Tegel, respectively, and they were out in the boonies.  I never used them.  (Tegel is currently the city’s main international airport—until 2018 when it’s expected to be superseded by the new Brandenberg Airport, now under construction.)  We were also allowed to fly civilian planes in and out of Berlin—but only one carrier was authorized: Pan Am.  This was because it was the only airline that pledged never to land in East Germany under any circumstances; Air France and British Airways wouldn’t make such a pledge.  (No other carriers, including Lufthansa, were permitted to fly into West Berlin.  Aeroflot, the Soviet airlines, flew into East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport, now one of Berlin’s two international terminals.)  I can’t say that that made me feel especially safe, though.  The Army was worried that if the plane made an emergency landing in, say, Erfurt or Dresden or something, the Soviets would grab me and take me off to Potsdam and interrogate me for all the secrets I knew.  Okay, but what’s worse, landing alive in the GDR or going down in flames because the plane can’t make it to Berlin or back to the Zone?  (As far as the Army was concerned, I was expendable.)  I kinda figured, pledge or no pledge, if a Pan Am plane was in trouble over East Germany, that pilot was gonna put it down.  Happily, I never had to find out.

We were never cleared to travel in the SZOG or East Berlin—I regret that I never got to go to the Berliner Ensemble—but after about a year, we could drive in and out of the city.  But we couldn’t drive unaccompanied.  When we arrived at the checkpoint—Bravo going out of the city or Alpha coming back in—we’d have to go to the MP desk and announce that we needed an escort.  That meant we had to wait there until someone driving a military vehicle, an official car, or, as a last resort, a green-plated POV was willing to drive along with us and keep us in sight.  (Yeah, right!)  The idea was supposed to be that if we got picked off by the Soviets or got lost en route, they could go on ahead and report the incident at the other end.  (We could not be escorted by someone else who needed an escort, by the way.)  The truth of the situation was, of course, that as soon as we made the necessary declarations at the MP station and got on the road, no one waited for anyone—there were no speed limits on German Autobahns—so the whole thing was a paper reg.  I never heard of anyone getting pulled over, and I never heard of anyone getting in trouble for not sticking with his escort.

I said I regret not getting to see the Berliner Ensemble, but that’s not precise.  I can’t really regret it—it wasn’t something I could have done and I missed my chance.  The B.E. was, of course, in East Berlin and I wasn’t allowed to go there.  It was never possible, never in my control.  (I’ve gotten to see them since, after reunification when they’ve performed in New York City.  See my report on The Threepenny Opera on 22 October 2011.)  The army encouraged GI’s to go to the East, especially in uniform, to exercise our right to do so under the four-power occupation—and, as the army put it, to “show the flag.”  As I’ve noted, the Occupation Agreement gave each of the four powers unrestricted access to all of the city and among people without the security clearances that I had, hopping over to East Berlin was very popular. 

But the army was too paranoid at that time in the Cold War that people in sensitive positions would be targets for false arrest and kidnapping, so MI personnel and others were prohibited not only from going to East Berlin or into East Germany, but even from merely entering an S-Bahn station in the West because it was considered East German territory.  I kept hoping that the restrictions would loosen up, just as the driving restrictions had—but that was too much for the Cold War era. 

I always had this odd feeling because right over there was a third of the city I was living in, and I’d never seen it.  I’d been to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Warsaw—but I’d never seen East Berlin even though I was as close as a few yards away.  I’d have given almost anything to get to see Brecht’s theater as close to the way he intended as possible after his death.   Also, a lot of the historical city was in the Eastern Sector—and I’m a sightseer.  The East Berlin opera was supposed to be much better than the West’s—I wouldn’t know anyway: I’m not an opera fan.  Shopping was much cheaper, even at the one-to-one exchange rate mandated for West Marks to East Marks.  Antiques were more plentiful, as was crystal (made in Czechoslovakia) and some other items.  I can’t say I missed shopping at the Russian PX—it was a popular spot, lots of souvenirs: Red Army watches were popular, and uniform belts, a couple of which I got through a friend—and the antiquing might have been fun.  (I did get a neat old clock, but I had to get it through an NCO who had a sideline of buying them in the East, restoring them, and reselling them to guys like me.)

Showing the flag in one way or another was a very significant result during the Cold War, and Berlin, being what it was politically and geographically, was a center of this effort.  The civilian air service into Tempelhof was as much a symbolic part of this as it was a matter of transportation, and the decision of Air France and British Airways to combine their flights but not abandon them was certainly a manifestation of it.  (Around the time of my arrival in Berlin, France and Britain jointly decided that there wasn’t enough air traffic into the city to maintain separate services and they combined flights by alternating the flag carrier.)  So were the Berlin Orientation Tours of GI’s from the Zone and the encouragement of Berlin personnel to go to the Soviet Sector in uniform. 

Another aspect of the effort were the highly visible “liaison” patrols each force sent into the others’ sectors of the country to keep the lanes of access open.  One of the more specialized and less-known army units in Berlin was the U.S. Military Liaison Mission, essentially an overt intel unit.  All four of the occupation powers had their versions of this organization, whose ostensible mission was to serve as liaison between the parent force and the forces of the other three powers.  To do this, USMLM ran regular patrols in high-powered, four-wheel-drive vehicles, painted OD but in a matte finish that wouldn’t reflect light and carrying special equipment such as a powerful radio with an extra-long antenna and both high-intensity headlights and a set of infrareds, into the SZOG all the way to Potsdam.  (Each of the other occupying forces had the same kind of vehicles, though they were models indigenous to the home country.  The Brits, for instance, drove similarly-painted Land Rovers.  While the three Western Allies directed their patrols toward Potsdam, the Soviet HQ in East Germany, I don’t really know where the Soviet patrols went, other than West Berlin.) 

The actual mission of the liaison patrols was to keep an eye on the Soviet and East German troops scattered around the SZOG, and each patrol took a different, carefully planned, circuitous route from Berlin to Potsdam in order to make a sweep of as many Red Army installations as they could cover, taking photographs whenever they could of the units’ equipment, disposition, manpower, facilities, and so on.  The patrols, which ran 24/7, kept tabs on the units’ readiness, training, maintenance, and routine so that they could act as an early-warning system for possible hostilities: if a number of Soviet units were out of their barracks at a time when they weren’t usually scheduled for maneuvers, it might be an indication that troops were assembling for some kind of attack or raid.  The USMLM patrols had detected this very occurrence in 1968 when units of the 40th Tank Army surrounding Berlin had moved out to spearhead the assault on Czechoslovakia to quash the Prague Spring.  Along with the busloads of Soviet soldiers and airmen which arrived regularly at the American PX in Dahlem—the Red Army didn’t allow its soldiers to wander around West Berlin on their own; they organized their forays and controlled where the soldiers went and what they brought back to the East—the liaison patrol vehicles, with their distinctive non-reflective paint jobs, were among the most visible reminders of where we were and what was going on there.

Living in Berlin was crazy-making, as you might guess.  We were on an island 110 miles inside East Germany, surrounded by a wall.  Two walls, actually—it was a double wall with a no-man’s land in between.  (Outside the Wall, the city was surrounded by the Soviet 40th Tank Army, as I mentioned.  Not a brigade or even a corps—an army.)  You couldn’t go very far in the city—and West Berlin alone was two-and-a-half million people at the time—without literally running into the Wall.  It made you claustrophobic.  GI’s stationed in Munich or Frankfurt, when they needed to get away, could get a pass or leave and just split.  Drive or take a train, all they needed was a couple of days’ notice to get their papers and they could go off wherever they wanted pretty much on a whim.  For us to leave Berlin—and this wasn’t just for the folks with clearances; it was everyone—we needed special movement orders, dubbed “Flag Orders” (because they had a full-color symbol of the flag—Stars and Stripes for GI’s, Union Jack for Brits, Tricolor for the Froggies—at the top of the page), and that took up to a week under ordinary circumstances. 

Then, of course, for us with the clearances, we had to get reservations on the Duty Train, a military flight, or a civilian plane (until we were permitted to drive out), and that was difficult to do at the last minute.  You could hang around Tempelhof and wait for an Air Force hop if you were willing to go anywhere, of course, but that made planning trips tough.  (I did do this once, though.  I met my parents in Athens and flew into Athenai AB.  It was the return trip that Colonel Halvorsen piloted into Berlin.)  And leave travelers were low-priority: you could be bumped for official travel (including cargo) or someone with a higher rank (which wasn’t hard when you’re only a first looie).  There was no such thing as a spur-of-the-moment trip out of Berlin—it took planning and paperwork no matter if it was a month or a day. 

And of course, people stationed in the Zone could drive out of the city or town for a few hours when they were off duty without any paperwork—just take a country drive or go sightseeing in the area for an afternoon.  I couldn’t do that in Berlin—there was no place to go!  Very claustrophobic.  The trade-off was that Berlin had the best of everything—the best PX, the best O-clubs and NCO clubs, the best recreation facilities, the best hospital, even the best quarters—of any place in USAREUR (U.S. Army, Europe).  Generals from the Zone used to come to Berlin to play!  The Berlin Army Hospital, by the way, had the best mess hall I have ever heard of—except one my dad told me about during the war years.  It was so good—they even had Chinese and Hawaiian food sometimes—that when we had business at BAH (checking medical records was part of our personnel investigation routine), we tried to work it out so we’d be there for lunch.  Beat the PX snack bar—across the street from our office—all to hell!  GI’s in Berlin even had some unusual perks: in uniform (which didn’t include MI agents), for instance, they could ride the busses and U-Bahn for free.  We also got our housing for free, courtesy of the German government—because Berlin was still under occupation—and they were excellent!  My BOQ, for example, was a one-bedroom garden apartment.  Married NCO’s had apartments in high-rises that German civilians would kill to live in.

Berlin was pretty far north, though.  During the winter, the sun wasn’t up yet when I went to work and it had already set by the time I went home.  My last job in Berlin was in a basement office.  If I didn’t get out for lunch, which happened occasionally, I’d never see the sun all day.  That could get depressing after a while.  Seasonal affective disorder wasn’t commonly known back then, but there was a lot of alcoholism in Berlin.  There were also suicides, maybe one every other month or so.  I don’t know if there were more of those in Berlin than elsewhere in the military, but it wouldn’t surprise me.  (We often had to investigate suicides to determine if there was a security reason for it, especially if the soldier had had a clearance or access to anything sensitive.  I never saw one that was, though.) 

The pressures of military life, especially for the very young, were exacerbated by the strangeness of the alien environment, the isolation of Berlin, and, for the personnel of Berlin Station perhaps more than others, the added stress of the secrecy and sensitivity of our routine.  One of our soldiers, a teenaged specialist who ran the photo lab, got himself hooked on heroin—and he did it deliberately in order to get mustered out of the Army.  He had been good at his job—he helped me immensely and expertly on a big project that involved a great many photographs, including copies of old prints—and, by all accounts, was a good soldier and a nice, bright kid; his act shocked us all when he revealed his addiction.  How desperate must he have been to choose one of the worst drugs he could think of and to set out purposely to become addicted.  There were certainly easier ways of getting out of the Army, less lasting and destructive.

Actually, even as far north as Berlin is, the weather’s not much worse in the winter than it is in New York—just darker.  It’s not Alaska, though—the sun does come out.  It’s funny, but when I knew I was being sent to Berlin, I figured it was cold up there.  It never got hot in Koblenz or Bonn, in the middle of the country (and the same latitude as Labrador), so I figured Berlin, way up north, would be cold.  I was arriving in late July, but I figured it’d be cool, so I packed fall clothes—nothing for summer.  I arrived in a normally warm late-summer season not unlike New York—all the rest of my belongings were still in transit by ship, of course, so all I had was what was in my suitcase.  And it was all wrong for the weather.  I sweltered until I could get to the ’X and buy more appropriate jackets.  (Remember, we wore civvies—business suits and sports jackets.)  I guess I was lucky the ’X didn’t operate like civilian stores back home—by July and August they’d have been stocking fall clothes and I’d have been SOL.

Temperature-inappropriate clothing was not my only wardrobe malfunction, though.  My last gig had been at Fort Holabird, the Intel School in Baltimore.  (I was at USAINTS from March to June 1971.  We were the last class to go through there after the Intel Center and School opened at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.  Holabird, a former transportation post built in 1918 in Dundalk, down near the Baltimore docks, was where the Watergate crooks were imprisoned after it was vacated by the Army.  Let me tell you—they were well and truly punished by having to stay there!  What a hole.)  Anyway, Baltimore is—or was—a men’s clothing manufacturing center.  (A family friend from Baltimore was in the business—he made uniforms, of all things.  I got my dress blues from him, and he made me a gift of a new Class A felt cap as a going-overseas present.)  There were lots of men’s apparel factories in Baltimore, and they all had outlets. 

Since I knew by then I was going to Berlin and that I would be wearing civilian clothes, I stocked up on all the latest styles of suits and jackets and shirts.  Now, remember, this was the early ’70s—remember what the styles were then?  I was into Mod and boldly colored shirts, wide ties, very tailored jackets.  I had some six- and eight-button double-breasteds, some boldly pin-striped fabrics—I even had one suit that had a take on the Norfolk jacket—with a belt in the back.  How was I to know that when I got to Berlin, the dress code—unwritten, of course—was FBI-plain, with dark suits, narrow lapels, thin ties, and white shirts.  After the second day of being in the office, just being introduced and getting oriented, I got a message from the CO through Lieutenant Lurey that my attire was inappropriate and that I needed to get some conservative jackets and shirts.  (The other agents, by the way, were delighted with my clothes.  It was the first chance they had to see what men were wearing back home and they wondered how I dared wear them to work.  In a few months or a year, the ’X and the Army had caught up some with the States and I was able to get back into my Baltimore wardrobe.  By then I wasn’t alone—other new agents, both officers and EM’s, had joined the unit and came with stateside styles.  I was a trend-setter, don’cha know.)

My CO, a funny little light colonel named Pat Collins, didn’t hold my fashion faux-pas against me for long, fortunately.  (He, by the way, had a penchant for black leather trench coats.  He should bitch!)  After I’d been in the unit for a while, I got an assignment which was to end up dominating the rest of my time at Berlin Station (until I became a spook accountant, that is).  This concerned “exfiltration,” the process of helping Easterners escape into West Berlin and West Germany.  Well, Colonel Collins asked me to put together a report on what we knew at that time about the personalities and methods of exfiltration, which was no longer an officially sanctioned activity for U.S. personnel.  (In the late ’40s, the ’50s, and the early ’60s, exfiltration was an official, if clandestine, project of the U.S. government to bring out scientists, engineers, and other useful and high-profile people.  By my day, most of those kinds of people who wanted to leave had been brought out, so the U.S. disbanded the operation.) 

I went through the files with the help of one of the German legmen who did the interviews at Marienfelde, the refugee processing center in Berlin—he knew all the incidents of exfiltration and could guide me to the appropriate case files—and I wrote up a one- or two-page report summarizing what we knew.  Colonel Collins read it and decided it was worth expanding and asked me to add more detail for a report he could take to a staff meeting with one or the other of the generals.  That meeting was later that day, so I pulled together my notes and dictated an expanded version of the report to one of the secretaries who typed it as I dictated.  Talk about hot off the presses!  Colonel Collins went to his staff meeting, and the report so impressed the general—whichever one it was—that he ordered up a full staff study.  (The colonel was also taken with what he saw as two of my special talents: one, that I always seemed to have a little more info in reserve whenever he needed it; and, two, that I used “civilian” words like ‘aegis’ and such.  Some people are easily impressed—as we shall see.) 

From then on, I was the station expert on exfiltration.  I soon knew everything we had on the activity, most of the names involved, many of the cases, and all of the methods employed.  One day, as I was walking down the first-floor hallway, Colonel Collins—in his black leather trench coat—came down the stairs and greeted me: “Here’s Collins’ Commando.”  (Fortunately for me, no one else was in the corridor at the time.)  Any case that smacked of exfiltration was sent to me.  I was the go-to guy for exfiltration, and my staff study, which ended up a big book with illustrations, photos, and charts, became a best-seller in the intel community—not just in Berlin but across USAREUR.  (This was the project with which that young photo technician helped me so expertly—the one who hooked himself on heroin.) 

We had to produce a sanitized version of the study for the Brit and French military intel and the German cops, BfV (Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the West German counterpart to our FBI), and BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst – Federal Intelligence Service – the equivalent of the CIA) because they all wanted copies.  I was almost-famous—except no one knew who I was.  (I  don’t think my name appeared on the study actually.  Some people knew it was mine by word of mouth.  Not that it was a secret, so when someone found out it was my study—like the time I was at the British intel unit for something or other—he got all excited.  My first—and so far only—taste of celebrity!)

One weekend after I had become the unit exfiltration expert, a frat brother from college who was stationed in Frankfurt called to tell me he was coming to Berlin and asked if we could get together.  He was coming up with a colleague, a captain who’d served with Colonel Collins.  When they got to Berlin, they went to see the colonel first, then came over to my place.  “Man,” said my classmate, “your CO thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”  Apparently, Colonel Collins spent much of their time together extolling my great accomplishment.

This episode has a tragic coda, however.  As you may know, this was the time of a lot of domestic terrorism in Germany, mostly perpetrated by an anarchist group called the Red Army Faction—more commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.  The RAF—ironic initials—liked to blow up U.S. and Allied facilities and kidnap German businessmen.  A couple of months after my schoolmate and his colleague came to visit, at about 7 a.m. on 11 May 1972, the RAF set off a bomb at the I. G. Farben Building in Frankfurt.  That’s where the HQ of the U.S. Army in Frankfurt was located, and my friend’s colleague was killed in the blast.  He had two little daughters, one only 12.  In all of the Vietnam war years, he was one of only three people I knew who was killed by violence.  I don’t even remember his name now.

My little exfiltration staff study did include one semi-major coup.  The common wisdom was that there were established gangs who organized and carried out the exfiltrations—like mini-Mafia families.  One of the things I did in the study was put together what the Germans called a WKW Schema.  (WKW stands for Wer Kennt Wen—“Who Knows Whom.”)  It’s a line-and-block chart that shows the connections among all the personalities involved, tracing contacts, phone calls, collaborations, and so on.  I discovered—and proved—that the gangs were a myth.  There were, in fact, a half dozen or so exfiltration leaders who could organize a team to carry out an operation as needed, but there were no permanent organizations.  The same operatives would work for any number of leaders, and all the leaders knew one another and cooperated with one another.  This was a revelation—no one had figured this out because no one had ever pulled all the info together into one place before so that the pattern became obvious.  So, from that moment on, I was the expert. 

Most exfiltration cases were small matters, investigated quickly and disposed of without much effort.  One exception was the case involving Berlin’s Deputy Provost Marshal.  (The Provost Marshal, or PM, is the military equivalent of the chief of police.  The Provost Marshal’s Office, known as the PMO, is the military counterpart of police headquarters.)  We had gotten a report, from one of the German legmen who was interviewing refugees at Marienfelde, that a refugee couple had been sneaked into Berlin in a green-plated car.  (The private cars, or POV’s, of GI’s in USAREUR and USAFE bore bright green license plates with black lettering.  Very distinct from the long, thin black-on-white German plates in shape and size, POV tags resembled stateside plates.)  The couple reported what time they had gotten into the city—or their arrival at Marienfelde provided this info, I forget, but we knew pretty accurately when their car had crossed Checkpoint Bravo.  They had only seen the car from the rear—because they were climbing into the trunk when the car stopped on the Autobahn in East Germany (which is how they knew about the green plates, of course)—but they described it as a particular German model (I forget now what they said it was).  From the crossing lists, we determined the likely suspect—the Deputy PM! 

I had to go over to Andrews Barracks, the compound in Lichtenfelde where the PMO was located, and scope out the parking lot.  I found the DPM’s car—a blue AMC Javelin, which looked from the rear almost exactly like the German model the couple described.  (They’d never have known a Javelin, of course, so they saw it as a model they knew.)  I had a Polaroid and, just my luck, as I was taking photos of the DPM’s car, out of the PMO the major walked.  “What are you doing taking pictures of my car?” he demanded.  I stammered some unconvincing lie—and he knew something was up.  Not that there was much he could have done: one advantage of Berlin’s geographic isolation was that you can’t just slip out and lam.  I went back and wrote up my report, including the evidence of the crossing lists and my judgment that the DPM’s Javelin looked from the rear exactly like the German car the refugee couple described, submitting the photos as evidence.  Our Ops Officer, a captain who was our second-in-command, the equivalent to the XO in other units—Colonel Collins was out of town, a fact which would play a part in what was to follow—decided that since this was a case involving a member of the forces, it was legitimately a military police matter. 

(Exfiltration was an odd duck, legally.  It wasn’t against any U.S. or West German laws, but it was against U.S. Army regulations.  But that only affected uniformed personnel; civilians weren’t subject to military regs.  That’s what made it so hard to control.  When a civilian was caught doing exfiltrations, the USCOB had to step in and exercise his authority over all matters within the American Sector.  He expelled the person from Berlin.  But a soldier could be disciplined under Army regs, so this major was subject to investigation by his own people—the MP’s.) 

I compiled my report and immediately shipped it off to the PM for his action.  Later that evening, at one of those briefings I had to attend in the secure room, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence of USCOB, a full colonel, asked off-handedly about the case.  I told him what my conclusions had been, and said that my Ops Officer instructed me to pass the case off to the PM for action.  “You sent it classified, didn’t you?” he asked, clearly assuming the answer.  “No, sir, I didn’t.  There isn’t anything classified in the report.  I sent it FOUO.”  That’s “For Official Use Only,”  not a classification, but a use designation.  “You sent a report implicating a senior officer of the PMO through Brigade distribution unclassified?  That’s potentially embarrassing information and anyone can look at it!”  He was livid.  I was terrified. 

“Classification isn’t authorized to avoid embarrassment, sir,” I gulped.  I was right, and I knew it, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help me now.  I had a bird colonel furious at me, and there was nothing I could do.  I was entirely alone in that room.  I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I was pretty sure I was dead.  Believe it or not, I don’t remember what happened right after that.  The DCSI must have sent me back to my unit to wait for his decision or something, because I ended up in the Ops Officer’s office—it was late by now, but for some reason the Ops Officer was still in the Station.  He assured me I was in the right, but he was only a captain himself.  He did point out that as Ops Officer and, in the absence of Colonel Collins, the acting CO, all materials sent out of the unit went out under his signature.  He was ultimately responsible, and I had merely done what I was instructed to by my superior.  I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish, except maybe get us both hanged—but I guess I felt better that a) he’d stand with me and b) he would affirm that I was right according to the regs. 

But just then, the cavalry rode in!  Colonel Collins got back from his trip and came straight to the office.  I don’t remember if he’d already heard of the flap or had been headed to the office anyway and learned of it when he got in—but he backed me to the hilt, told the DCSI that not only had I done what I was told to do, but had done it exactly right.  (Collins’ Commando!)  I don’t know what I did after that, but if I didn’t get very drunk, I sure should have.  Still, ever since that incident, even though I was 100% correct, the DCSI didn’t like me.  I guess as much because I beat him, in a way, as because I had caused potential embarrassment to the forces.  (The major was shipped out to Helmstedt, I believe, to that satellite outpost of the Berlin PMO and soon left the army.  He knew his career was over even if he wasn’t prosecuted.  I figure he deserved whatever happened to him—for being stupid if nothing else.)

[I hope the visit to West Berlin in the 1970s has been interesting so far and that you’ll come back to the blog for Part 3 in a few weeks.  I pick up then with the biggest investigation I handled while I was at Berlin Station—that one case takes up the entire chapter.  I imagine you’ll see why when you read it.  (I should remind readers that everything I’ve written in this memoir is true and as accurate as my memory will permit.  If anything you read strains credulity, it’s not because I embellished or fabricated, but because the world of Cold War Berlin, the army, and Military Intelligence was just . . . well, different.  The 2½ years I spent as an MI Special Agent at Berlin Station wasn’t like anything else I’ve lived through in my 70 years.)]