Beyond the Call (11 page)

It had been made clear to him that it was a mission of extraordinary diplomatic sensitivity. He must never speak of it to anybody, even within military circles. If the Soviet government discovered that the United States was deliberately putting agents inside Soviet-occupied territory for the purpose of counteracting NKVD and Red Army procedures, it could lead to a diplomatic incident that could affect the course of the war, or even alter the geopolitical shape of post-war Europe. Even the OSS could only provide back-door support.

After his short but stunning introductory briefing by Colonel Hampton, Robert had walked out of the headquarters building an older, wiser, and significantly more worried man than he'd been when he went in. He was given no time to reflect. From headquarters he'd been herded off to the Operations Office, housed in yet another wooden shack, where he met Major Michael Kowal, the man whose assistant Robert was ostensibly going to be.

The two men hit it off immediately.
¹²
Like Robert, Mike Kowal was a veteran bomber pilot. He had completed his combat tour with the 94th Bomb Group, flying B-17s out of Rougham, Suffolk, back in the dark days of 1943, when the Luftwaffe was stronger and the Eighth Air Force fighter escorts only went halfway to the target.
¹³
Kowal believed in a brotherhood of bomber pilots, a breed apart from other airmen.
¹⁴
At 27, he was a couple of years older than Robert. A native of Passaic, New Jersey, Kowal was a lively spirit; he'd been an air-show stunt pilot before the war,
¹⁵
and was the beau ideal of an Air Force flyer: handsome and dark-eyed, with a chiseled jawline and a winning grin. His features were a little askew, as if his maker had set out to create a matinee idol but got the proportions slightly off. A good-looking fellow, though. He had Slavic ancestry, and spoke Russian, which was how he'd ended up on the staff at Poltava in the early days of Operation Frantic.

As operations officer, Kowal was responsible for coordinating aircrew rescue and plane salvage work in Poland. He had been taking part
in the work himself until a few months ago, but was now grounded. The Russians disliked and distrusted Major Kowal intensely, bracketing him with Colonel Hampton as an illicit gatherer of political intelligence (back in November, he'd written a report on Soviet misconduct in Poland). Along with Hampton, the Soviets had barred Major Kowal from flying into Poland, and he was now restricted to Poltava.
¹⁶

Robert was given a hasty briefing on salvage and aircrew rescue. American bombers and fighters, damaged in combat and unable to limp back to their bases in Britain or Italy, often made crash landings in Poland. It was Eastern Command's job to rescue the crews and salvage the planes, and bring both back to Poltava for transfer back to the crews' home units.

The Soviets were happy enough to help with aircrew evacuation, because they had no reason to be suspicious of the crewmen: they were in uniform, carried identification, and their landings had usually been observed by troops. A few crews had been subjected to interrogation, and Russian care was often rough and simple, but they were mostly treated as fellow warriors against the common enemy. The American rescue workers had little trouble getting them out of Poland, so long as they could get to wherever they were being quartered.

Aircraft were a little trickier. The War Department and USSTAF wanted them picked up and returned without delay. Not only were they very expensive, they were also classified technology which the Soviets were eager to acquire. Preaching what he hadn't managed to practice himself, Major Kowal briefed Robert on the importance of being diplomatic with the Russians, but at the same time ensuring that they didn't steal or wreck American aircraft. (Either was possible, depending on whether Air Force intelligence personnel or drunken soldiers got there first.) The practice was to send out a salvage team comprising an American flight crew and mechanics, plus Russian helpers and an interpreter. The Russians were supposed to help, but were likely to look for opportunities to seize the aircraft once it had been repaired.

Kowal's briefing was supplemented by a talk from the intelligence
officer, Captain William Fitchen, a tall, serious fellow with blunt features and a vaguely cheerful demeanor. Another pilot turned staff officer, Fitchen knew more about the current situation on the ground in Poland than anyone. His job was to interrogate rescued aircrews, and he had helped furnish Hampton and Kowal with a detailed picture of how Soviet–American–Polish relations were working out and how the Russians were treating Polish citizens (badly). As a result of his role, Captain Fitchen was another man whom the Soviet authorities in Poltava regarded with deep suspicion.
¹⁷

As he took in these briefings, Robert began to understand why the decision had been made to use this work as a cover for aiding POWs. It gave the officers involved a fairly free run of the country, albeit in company with bird dogs, and an excuse to travel to remote areas. It also allowed for intelligence-gathering, since the information about landing sites that came through from the Red Army was vague, and inquiries had to be made to find the exact locations of planes and crews. Under cover of this activity, Robert's mission was to contact and exfiltrate wandering prisoners.

That, of course, was the real trick, and he had no idea how he was supposed to achieve it.

He began learning the answer to that question in the last of his series of whirlwind briefings. Taking on an even graver air than he had shown so far, Colonel Hampton took Robert aside and escorted him to an office in the headquarters building. ‘I told you you're not going to be dropped into Berlin,' he said. ‘Well, I have two men in this room who were trained for exactly that.'

Robert was warned that the imperative for secrecy applied doubly from this moment on. The men he was about to meet were at Poltava unofficially, clandestinely, without the knowledge of either Russian or American personnel. They were the OSS agents he would be working with, and if their presence became known, a catastrophic diplomatic incident might ensue. Hampton opened the door, and with a sense of trepidation, Robert followed him into the office.

There were two men seated there, and after the dramatic build-up,
they looked about the most unimpressive pair you could imagine. They were nondescript; their clothing was civilian, utilitarian, neither expensive nor cheap, smart nor shabby. They could have passed for tradesmen, shop workers, or laborers. Their faces were unremarkable, not particularly memorable. You wouldn't glance twice at them.

But of course, that was their aim. Their dull jackets and coats, worn-looking pants, and slightly frayed shirt collars had been painstakingly fabricated to German or Polish patterns at the OSS clothing depot in Brook Street, London, where they had the resources and skills to fake anything from a laborer's overalls to a German army uniform or a Gestapo suit, using materials brought in from the OSS office in Stockholm, where German-made articles of clothing, luggage, and personal effects could be purchased.
¹⁸

How these two men had got to Poltava past the NKVD, Robert had no idea.
¹⁹
He was told nothing about the men other than Colonel Hampton's allusion to parachuting into Berlin.
²⁰
Possibly they had been seconded from the Eagle project. Eagle had been set up to train Polish soldiers as behind-the-lines agents to infiltrate German industry in the guise of workmen.
²¹
More likely the two men had been drawn from the pool of Joes who formed the more highly developed Operation Tissue, also trained to infiltrate Germany. They were tasked for intelligence-gathering rather than sabotage, and their training was in communications, cryptography, espionage, forgery, lock-picking, and surveillance; their specialist combat training was limited to self-defense, which they received on top of core agent training in close combat and weapons. The agents were fed into the country from the OSS Westfield Mission in Stockholm, from where they went via sea routes into Denmark and on into Germany. Agents from the Tissue project were infiltrating enemy territory at this very moment.
²²

All Robert knew about the two men was that they were OSS, and that they had been diverted from their original mission to be his contacts. Their purpose was to go deep into Soviet-occupied Poland, making contact with locals and gathering intelligence on liberated Allied prisoners of war: their condition, health, the locations where
they had concentrated, and what, if anything, the Russians were doing to help them.

The two agents gave Robert an intensive, efficient briefing. Completely free of the camaraderie and military etiquette of his previous briefings, it was nothing but business: straight and concise. There wasn't the time, nor were there the facilities, for any kind of practical training, so their advice had to be sufficient. They instructed him on contact procedures and codes, providing him with a basic system of communications protocols which he had to memorize there and then. They advised him on outdoor survival and gave him tips on fieldcraft. He believed that his upbringing ought to equip him for the job – all those winter weekends spent deer-hunting in the Pennsylvania hills had given him an understanding of outdoor living. What was entirely new to him was the instructions on avoiding pursuit, throwing off a tail, and most crucially of all, how not to get yourself killed.

Above all, he was told, the most important thing was not to antagonize the Soviets, especially not the NKVD. And if he sensed that he
had
antagonized them, he should on no account accept any kind of hospitality or transportation from them. There were all kinds of hazards in an occupied zone that had recently been a combat area, and it was only too easy to explain away a sudden death as an accident or the work of German agents. Robert's passport made him immune to arrest, but all the more vulnerable therefore to murder.

Robert didn't sleep well when he eventually hit his bunk that night. His mind kept going back to his talk with Colonel Helton at Debach, and the scale of the lie they'd both been told. So much for being ‘safely out of the combat zone'. He wondered if there was any way out of it, any reason or excuse he could give that would make it clear that he couldn't possibly undertake this mission, that they'd got the wrong man. But everything that made him unsuitable – the fact that he was a pilot, not a spy, his lack of familiarity with the country and its politics – made him precisely the man they needed.

His course was set.

I
N FRONT
of the brick gatehouse, the road crossed over the railroad just before the track ran in under the larger of the two archways. The jeep bumped over the sunken rails and followed the road through the smaller arch, waved past by the Russian sentries standing by.

What Robert saw inside that place would stay with him for the rest of his life.

He knew what the camps here had been used for. Everyone knew about Majdanek, and this appeared to be more of the same. And yet Auschwitz had attracted little attention in the Western press since its liberation – it was just ‘another Majdanek', and was overshadowed in the news by coverage of the Yalta Conference.
²³
Few people had seen it with their own eyes. What was unprecedented about this place was its sheer scale. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was vast. Beyond the gatehouse, the road and the rail tracks ran on and on, straight as a die, the tracks dividing to straddle a long station platform. On either side, behind more layers of barbwire fencing, stood rank upon rank of barracks buildings. A few appeared to have burned down, but most were standing, hundreds of them in rows that stretched out to the left and right and marched away into the far distance.

There had been a thaw here lately; the snow was thin on the ground and turning to slush, adding to the air of grim, gray misery that pervaded the place. The jeep drove slowly on. It was hard to believe that this camp was just one part of a complex of dozens of camps that had sprouted in this corner of Poland like a malignant infection.

For Robert, Auschwitz-Birkenau remained in his memory as a collection of disjointed images. The shed where bodies, thin to their bones, naked, frozen stiff, were piled up, spilling out of the broken door – prisoners who had died of starvation, whose corpses the SS hadn't had time to destroy in their retreat. In another building Robert saw stacks of cans with bright red-and-yellow labels. The initial impression that this was a store of canned food was dispelled by the skull-and-crossbones symbol on the labels.

Robert picked one up. ‘Giftgas!' the label said, and ‘Zyklon'. He asked Maiya to translate the label. ‘
Giftgas
means poison gas,' she said.
‘This here is saying, “To be only opened and used by experienced persons.”' There was a manufacturer's logo on the other side, beneath which was a warning that the product was authorized for use only in regions of the Reich east of the Elbe River, in Poland, the Baltic states, Scandinavia, and Sudetenland. The Nazis who had been captured and interrogated were claiming that the gas was used for disinfecting the inmates' clothing. But as Maiya told Robert, its true purpose was the extermination of human beings. They went to look at the place where it had been done.