The Company: A Novel of the CIA (18 page)

The next afternoon Ebby checked out a car from the motor pool and drove the two hundred miles down to the village of Pullach, some eight miles from downtown Munich. Arriving at dark, he found Heilmannstrasse, with a ten-foot-high gray concrete wall running along one side, then turned and followed the narrow road that ran parallel to the thick hedges with the electrified fence behind it until he came to the small guardhouse manned by sentries wearing green Bavarian gameskeepers' uniforms. A naked electric bulb illuminated a sign in four languages that read: "SUD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIE-VERWERTUNGS GmbH—Switch off your headlights and switch on your inside lights." Only when Ebby had complied did one of the guards approach the car. Ebby cracked the window and passed him his American passport and Company ID card. The guard took them back to the house, dialed a number and read the documents to someone on the other end. Moments later a jeep roared up to the gate and a lean, balding man with a distinctive military bearing pushed through a turnstile and let himself into the passengers seat of Ebby's car. "I am Doktor Uppmann of the Records Department," he announced. He never offered his hand. "You may switch on the headlights now."

"What about my ID?" Ebby asked.

"They will be returned to you when you leave. I will accompany you until then."

The gate in the electrified fence swung open and Ebby followed Herr Uppmann's directions through the Compound. "This is your first visit here, yes?" Uppmann commented.

"Yes," Ebby said. He could feel a tingling at the back of his neck.

"We are, be assured, eager to be of service to our American friends," his guide said, gesturing with an open palm toward a lighted road to the right.

Ebby turned into the road. "Does anyone fall for the South German Industries Utilization Company sign back at the gate?" he inquired.

The German managed a thin smile. "Doktor Schneider"—Gehlen's cover name—"has a hypothesis: If you want to keep a big secret, disguise it as a boring and inconsequential secret rather then try to convince people it is not a secret at all. You would be astonished how many Germans think we steal industrial secrets from the Americans or the French."

Following his guide's hand signals, Ebby pulled up on the side of a long one-story building. Doktor Uppmann produced a metal ring with half a dozen keys attached to it. With one he turned off the alarm system, with another he opened the two locks on a heavy metal door. Ebby followed him down a lighted corridor. "How long have you been here?" he asked, waving toward the Compound.

"We moved in soon after the end of hostilities. Except for some underground vaults that were added, the compound existed much as you see it today. It was originally built for SS officers and their families and by good fortune survived your bombers." Uppmann let himself into a lighted office and locked the door behind them. Looking around, Ebby took in the sturdy furniture and the gray walls encrusted with squashed insects. He noticed an American poster taped to the back of the door. It read: "Watched from a safe distance an atomic explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man."

"Do you really believe that?" Ebby asked his guide.

Doktor Uppmann looked flustered. "It is merely a joke."

"I have heard it said a German joke is no laughing matter," Ebby muttered.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing."

Uppmann crouched in front of a large safe and fiddled with the dial until the door clicked open. From a shelf in the safe he withdrew a manila folder. He swung the safe's door closed and spun the dial to make sure it was locked, then, straightening, emptied the contents of the manila folder onto a table. "All of these were fabricated by the Abwehr in the last months of the great struggle against Bolshevism," Uppmann informed his visitor. "They are first-class forgeries, in some ways superior to the documents we fabricated earlier in the war. Many of the agents we dropped behind Bolshevik lines were executed because we made the error of using our own stainless steel staples and not the Russian staples which rust after a very short period of time. You Americans have a saying we Germans appreciate—live and learn. Take a close look at the stamps—they are small masterpieces. Only a Russian trained in credentials could distinguish them from the real thing." He slid the documents across the table, one by one. "An internal passport for the Ukrainian Republic, a labor book, a military status book, an officers identity book, a Ukrainian ration book. When filling in the documents you must bear in mind certain Russian idiosyncracies. Whereas the internal passport, the military status and officer's identity books would normally be filled in by secretaries with a more or less elaborate bureaucratic penmanship, the labor book would be signed by the factory managers who, if they rose from the ranks, might be quite illiterate and would scratch their initials in place of a readable signature. There is also the matter of which inks are used in Russia. But I am confident your experts in Frankfurt are familiar with these details, Herr Ebbitt."

Herr Doktor Uppmann led Ebby to a lounge at the end of the corridor. Waving him toward an easy chair, he fetched a bottle of three-star French cognac and two small glasses from a painted Bavarian cabinet. He filled them to the brim and handed one to Ebby. "Prosit," he said, smiling, carefillly clicking glasses. "To the next war—this time we get them together."

Ebby, trembling with anger, rose to his feet and set the glass down on a table without drinking. "I must tell you, Herr Doktor Uppmann—" He took a deep breath to control his temper.

Uppmann cocked his head. "You must tell me what, Herr Ebbitt? That your father was killed in the war? I see you are surprised to discover I am familiar with your pedigree. As a matter of absolute routine we perform background checks on all visitors to the compound. My father, too, was a casualty of the war—he was taken captive at Stalingrad and did not survive the long march through the snow to the prison camp. My younger brother, Ludwig, stepped on a land mine and returned from the war with both of his legs amputated above the knees. My mother cares for him at our family estate in the Black Forest."

Ebby murmured, "Did you know?"

"Did I know what?"

"Did you know about the Final Solution?"

The German rested a finger along the bridge of his nose. "Of course not."

Ebby said, "How could you not know? A little girl named Anne Frank hiding in an attic in Amsterdam wrote in her diary that the Jews were being packed off in cattle cars. How come she knew and you didn't?"

"I was not involved with the Jewish question. I did then what I do now—I fought Bolsheviks. I served on the intelligence staff of General Gehlen—three and one-half years on the Russian front. One thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days, thirty thousand six hundred hours in purgatory! Bolshevism is the common enemy, Herr Ebbitt. If we had had the good sense to join forces earlier your father and my father might still be alive, the Bolsheviks would not have swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe as well as a large portion of Greater Germany—"

"You swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe before the Bolsheviks—Poland, the Sudetenland, Yugoslavia."

Uppmann bridled. "We created a buffer between the Christian West and the atheistic Bolsheviks." He turned to stare out the window at the lighted streets of the Compound. "Hitler," he whispered, his hollow voice drifting back over a shoulder, "betrayed Germany. He confused the priorities—he was more concerned with eliminating the Jews than eliminating the Bolsheviks." Uppmann turned back abruptly to face his visitor and spoke with quiet emotion. "You make the mistake of judging us without knowing what really happened, Herr Ebbitt. My class—the German military class— despised the crude corporal but we agreed with his goals. After the Versailles Diktat we Germans were a Volk ohne Raum—a nation without space to develop. I tell you frankly, German patriots were seduced by Hitler's denunciation of the odious Versailles Treaty, we were drawn to his promise of Lebensraum for the Third Reich, we shared his passionate anti-Bolshevism. Our mistake was to see Hitler's chancellorship as a passing phase in chaotic German politics. Do you know what Herr Hindenburg said after he met Hitler for the first time? I shall tell you what he said. 'Germany could, never be ruled by a Bohemian corporal! That is what he said." Uppmann threw back his head and gulped down the entire glass of cognac. Then he poured himself a refill. "I personally saw Hitler at the end in his bunker—Herr Gehlen sent me to deliver an appreciation of the Russian offensive against Berlin. You cannot imagine... a stooped figure with a swollen face, one eye inflamed, sat hunched in a chair. His hands trembled. He tried without success to conceal the twitching of his left arm. When he walked to the map room he dragged his left leg behind him. The one we called the Angel of Death, the Braun woman, was present also: pale, pretty, frightened to die and afraid not to. And what did Hitler have to offer the German people at this tragic hour? He issued an order, I myself heard him, to record the sound of tanks rolling over roads, cut gramophone records and distribute them to the front line with commands to play them over loudspeakers for the Russians. We were reduced to stopping the Bolsheviks with gramophone records, Herr Ebbitt. This will never—I repeat to you the word never—happen again."

Ebby covered his mouth with a palm to keep from speaking. Herr Doktor Uppmann took this as a sign of sympathy for the story he had told. "You maybe begin to see things in the new light."

"No!"Ebby closed the gap between him and the German. "It makes me want to throw up. You didn't wage war, Doktor Uppmann, you inflicted holocausts. Your solutions to Germany's problems were Final Solutions."

Uppmann appeared to address his words directly to a photograph of Gehlen hanging on the wall. "The Jews won the war and then wrote the history of the war. This number of six million—they picked it out of a hat and the victors swallowed it to diabolize Germany."

"The only thing left of your thousand-year Reich, Herr Doktor Uppmann, is the memory of the crimes you committed—and the memory will last a thousand years. It makes me sick to my stomach to be on the same side as you— to be in the same room with you. If you will conduct me to the main gate—"

The German stiffened. A muscle in his neck twitched. "The sooner you are gone from here the sooner we can get on with the struggle against Bolshevism, Herr Ebbitt." He downed the last of his cognac and flung the empty glass against a wall, shattering it into pieces. Crunching the shards under foot, he stalked from the room.

The official complaint was not long in working its way up the German chain of command and back down the American chain of command. Summoned to explain what had happened, Ebby appeared before a three-man board of inquiry. The Wiz came up from Vienna to sit in on the hearing. Ebby made no effort to water down what the officers in Frankfurt Station were calling "The Affair." It turned out that Ebby had punctured the abscess. Company officers across Germany heard the story on the grapevine and slipped him memos and Ebby boiled them down to an indictment, which he read aloud to the board of inquiry. "When General Gehlen was allowed to get back into the business of intelligence," he began, "he agreed in writing not to employ former Gesrapo officers or war criminals. Yet he has surrounded himself with ex-Nazis, all of whom are listed on his masthead under false identities."

"I assume you are prepared to name names," snapped the CIA officer presiding over the hearing.

"I can name names, yes. There are SS Obersturmfuhrers Franz Goring and Hans Sommer. Sommer's name will ring a bell—he got into trouble with his Gestapo superiors for organizing the 1941 burning of seven Paris synagogues. There is SS Sturmbannfuhrer Fritz Schmidt, who was involved in the executions of slave labor workers at the Friedrich Ott camp near Kiel in 1944. There is Franz Alfred Six, the SS Brigadefuhrer of Section VII of Himmler's RSHA, convicted at Nuremberg to twenty years imprisonment for having ordered executions of hundreds of Jews when he commanded a Jajdkommando in July and August 1941; he was released after four years and immediately employed by Gehlen's Org. There is Standartenfuhrer Emil Augsburg, who headed a section in Adolf Eichmann's department handling the so-called Jewish problem. My guide when I turned up at Gehlen's compound goes by the name of Doktor Uppmann. His real name is Gustav Pohl. He was a staff officer in Gehlen's Foreign Armies East but he wore a second hat—he was the German Foreign Office's liaison to the SS during the invasion of Russia. According to evidence presented at Nuremberg, Pohl participated in the creation of the SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads ant shot Jews, including women and children, as well as Commissars, into the graves that the condemned had been forced to dig."

At the side of the room Frank Wisner appeared to be dozing in a wooden chair tilted back against a wall. "Now I did warn you, Ebby," he called out, his eyes still closed. "You can't say I didn't. I warned you I'd kick ass when things didn't work out the way I thought they ought to." The Wiz righted his chair and came ambling across the room. "I'm 'bout to kick ass, Ebby. Let me fill you in on some facts of life—you know who the OSS officer was who negotiated with Gehlen to get hold of his goddamned microfilms? It was me, Ebby. I negotiated with him. I swallowed my pride and I swallowed my bile and I swallowed whatever scruples the weak-kneed crowd came up with and I made a deal with one devil the better to fight another devil. Do you really believe we don't know that Gehlen employs ex-Nazis? Come off it, Ebby—we pick up the tab over in Pullach. Jesus Christ Almighty, here you got a Joe 'bout to jump out of an aeroplane into Communist Russia and you suddenly have qualms about where you're getting the ID your Joe needs to avoid a firing squad. Myself, I'd crawl through dog shit on all fours and kiss Hermann Goering's fat ass if he could supply me with what my Joe needed to survive. In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head, Ebby? In Berlin Station you got all hot under the collar because Harvey Torriti—who happens to be one of the most competent officers in the field—needs a ration of booze to get through the day. In Frankfurt Station you get all hot under the collar because of the company the Company keeps. Didn't your Daddy ever teach you that the enemy of your enemy is your friend? And while we're on the subject of your Daddy let me tell you something else. Before he parachuted into Bulgaria he was hanging out in Madrid doing deals with Spanish fascists to get the skinny on German raw material shipments. Hell, your Daddy was made of harder stuff than his son, that's for damn sure. So which way you gonna jump, boy? You gonna go all out for your Joe or you gonna fill our ears with slop about the occasional ex-Nazi in the woodpile?"