V
My journey from New York to London would have left Ulysses looking for a couple of aspirin. Eight hours after leaving LaGuardia Airport at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday the fifth, I had only traveled as far as Botwood, Newfoundland, where the U.S. Navy Coronado flying boat stopped to refuel. At 5:30 P.M., the four-engine plane was back in the air and heading east across the Atlantic like an outsized goose flying the wrong way for winter.
There were three other passengers: a British general named Turner; Joel Beinart, a USAAF colonel from Albuquerque; and John Wooldridge, a naval commander from Delaware, all three of them tight-lipped men whose demeanor seemed to indicate it wasn’t just walls that had ears but the fuselage of a transatlantic aircraft as well. Not that I was feeling very gabby myself. For much of the journey, I read the Katyn files given to me by the president, which put the kibosh on any conversation.
The Wehrmacht file on Katyn had come via Allen Dulles from the OSS office in Berne. It was the most exhaustively detailed of the files, but I wondered how Dulles had come by it. In my mind’s eye I pictured some blond, blue-eyed Ubermensch from the German embassy in Bern just turning up at the OSS office one day and handing over the file as if it were nothing more important than the Swiss daily newspapers. Or had Dulles met up with his opposite number in the Abwehr for a glass of hot wine in the bar of the Hotel Schweizerhof? If either of these two scenarios were true, then it seemed to imply a degree of cooperation between Dulles and German intelligence that I found intriguing.
An astonishing number of photographs accompanied the findings of the so-called International Committee. Assembled by the Germans, it included the professor of pathology and anatomy at Zagreb University, Ljudevit Jurak, and several Allied officers who were German POWs. It was obvious that the Nazis hoped to exploit the massacre to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. And, whatever happened, it was impossible to see how, after the war, the British or the Americans could ask the people of Poland to live in peace with the Russians. That possibility seemed no more likely than the chief rabbi of Poland asking Hitler and Himmler to come over for a Passover drink and a couple of hands of whist.
At Katyn there had been a systematic attempt by the Russians to liquidate the national leaders of Polish independence. And it was clear to me that Stalin, no less than Hitler, had wanted to reduce Poland to the level of a subject state within his empire. Just as important, however, he had wanted revenge on the Poles for the defeat they had inflicted on the Red Army and on its commander-Stalin himself-at the Battle of Lvov in July 1920.
I had witnessed the Russian hatred of the Poles at first hand and in circumstances that even now, more than five years later, I still found troubling. No, “troubling” didn’t really cover it; potentially dangerous was more like it. To have one skeleton in my OSS locker was a misfortune, but to have two looked like a serious predicament.
The Coronado gave a lurch as we hit some turbulence, and the naval commander groaned.
“Don’t worry about that,” said the USAAF colonel. “Try to think of an air pocket as something to catch the plane rather than to trip it up.”
“Would anyone care for a drink?” asked the British general. He was wearing breeches, tall riding boots with buckles, and a thick belted tunic that looked as if it had been tailored before the year
1900. A woolly-bear caterpillar clung tenaciously to his upper lip underneath a hooked nose. With fine, peaceful, well-manicured hands, the general threw open a large and well-provisioned hamper basket and took out a flat pint of bonded bourbon. A minute later the four of us were libating the benevolence of the gods of transatlantic air travel.
“Is this your first time in London?” asked the general, offering me a shoe-sized sandwich from a shoebox- sized tin.
“I was there before the war. At the time I was thinking of going up to Cambridge to do a doctorate in philosophy.”
“And did you? Go up to Cambridge?”
“No, I went to Vienna instead.”
The general’s Wellington-sized nose wrinkled with disbelief. “Vienna? Good God. What on earth possessed you to do that?”
I shrugged. “At the time it seemed like the place to be.” And added, “I also had some family there.”
After that the general regarded me somewhat as if I might be a Nazi spy. Or a relative of the Fuhrer perhaps. Hitler may have been the leader of Germany, but the general didn’t look as if he had forgotten Hitler had been born in Austria and had spent much of his young adult life knocking around Vienna. If I had said I had shared rooms at Wittenberg with Faustus he could not have regarded me with more suspicion, and we fell silent.
Arriving in Vienna at the age of just twenty-three, my Sheldon Travelling Fellowship supplemented by a very generous allowance from my mother’s even richer aunt, the Baroness von Bingen, not to mention the use of her very elegant apartment in the city’s exclusive Prinz Eugen Strasse, I had been almost immediately involved with the Vienna Circle-then the intellectual center of liberal European philosophy and notable for its opposition to the prevailing metaphysical and idealist trend of German philosophy. Which is just another way of saying that all of us were the self-annointed apostles of Einstein and relativity theory.
Moritz Schlick, my near neighbor in Vienna and the Vienna Circle’s leader, had invited me to join the group. The circle’s aim was to make philosophy more scientific, and while I had found it hard to feel much in common with them-several of the circle’s members were theoretical physicists, about as easy to talk to as men from Mars-it soon became clear that just to be involved with philosophy and the Vienna Circle was in itself a political act. The Nazis were set on the persecution of all those who didn’t agree with them, including the Vienna Circle, quite a few of whom were Jews. And after the election of the pro-Nazi Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor of Austria, I decided to join the Communist Party. It was a party to which I belonged until the long, hot, and, for me, promiscuous summer of 1938.
By then I was living and lecturing in Berlin, where I was engaged in an affair with a Polish aristocrat, the Princess Elena Pontiatowska. She was a close friend of Christiane Lundgren, a UFA film studio actress who was herself sleeping with Josef Goebbels. Through Christiane I ended up meeting Goebbels socially on several occasions and, because of my Communist Party membership, of which neither Goebbels nor the princess was aware (nor, for that matter, did they know anything of my being half Jewish), it was not long before I found myself approached by the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, and asked if I would spy on the German minister.
The idea of spying on the Nazis held considerable appeal. It was already clear there was going to be another European war. I told myself I would be doing my anti-Fascist bit in the way others had done during the Spanish Civil War. And so I agreed to report on any conversations I had with Goebbels. But after the Munich agreement in September of 1938, I became more actively involved. I agreed to accept an invitation to join the Abwehr, the military intelligence wing of the German army, with a view to supplying more detailed information to the NKVD.
In order to magnify my informal standing in the Abwehr, the NKVD provided me with some information that, at the time, I thought to be harmless. Later on, I discovered, to my horror, that the NKVD had used me to give the Nazis the names of three members of the Polish Secret Service. These three agents, one of them a woman just twenty-two years of age, were subsequently arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, tried by a German People’s Court, and guillotined at the notorious Plotzensee Prison in November 1938. Sickened at having been used by the Russians to rid themselves of people they regarded with no less hatred than they regarded the Germans, I severed my contacts with the NKVD, resigned my lectureship at Berlin University, and returned home to Harvard with my tail between my legs.
The plane lurched again and then seemed to wallow like a small ship in the trough of an invisible wave.
I now regarded my former membership in the German Communist Party as a youthful indiscretion. I told myself that if I was ever in Berlin or Vienna again it would be because the war was over, in which case what the OSS might think of my former political allegiances would hardly matter very much.
