Clandestine

Chapter 6 - Give us your Weak

I arrived at La Guardia Airport in New York City on February 28, 1962. I looked around for the Statue of Liberty but all I could see was a receiving line of yellow taxicabs, one of which took me to the Empire Hotel in Manhattan where accommodation for my first two weeks in America had been arranged.

I had a British passport and was arriving on a work visa to the United States. I had no specific job, little money, and only a hotel reservation to my name yet I had no troubles at customs, and no duration limits were imposed on my stay. The British Armed Forces arranged my transportation to America; however, once in the States I was on my own. I was informed that, within a week, a man named Simon von Hammersfield would contact me and assist with my orientation.

My first week in New York City was spent as a tourist. I sailed the harbour, traversed the Brooklyn Bridge, and visited Ellis Island and the Empire State building (which wasn’t far from my apartment). After living in Berlin and spending a great deal of time in London I was expecting to be unimpressed by New York City but I admit I was captivated and startled by the energy of the city. Everyone in New York is on the move and the entire town marches to the beat of a drum that is one step quicker than the standard heart rate. I was fascinated by the cab drivers and the dizzying pace at which they circumnavigated the city, honking their car horns at will.

Americans in 1962 were coming to terms with their superpower status. The Second World War had left Britain proud but in smithereens. It was the United States that would match the Soviet Union in firepower and diplomacy over the next half century. You could tell that this burden was going to present an issue for the nation. The American media had not yet come of age, and their reactionary reporting on issues made the nation quiver in fear. I have never witnessed a country that lived in a state of perpetual alarm quite like the United States.  Communism was the threat to their way of life, or at least this is how it was portrayed by the radio, television, and newspapers of the time. It was disappointing for me to see the polarization of issues in America, having come from Berlin where everything existed in many shades of grey. In the U.S., issues were North versus South, Republican versus Democrat, Communism versus Free Enterprise, and Black versus White. You’re either with us or against us! It was this attitude and the absence of true debate that always seemed to trouble me about America.

Still, for me the positives of America outweighed the negatives. In 1962, the United States was still very much the land of opportunity. People came to the U.S. to live in freedom and to seek their fortunes. I watched the American political agenda with interest. Kennedy was a puzzle to the establishment. He was supposed to be drumming up fear from the Communist presence, at home and abroad, but instead he was asking the nation to think differently about peace, race relations, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. His presidency had gotten off to a rough start, and those in the intelligence community in Berlin watched the events at the Bay of Pigs invasion with interest. The disgrace made it seem that the U.S. military was not on the same page with the president. It was an embarrassing episode for any nation, never mind one that was emerging as a superpower. The fall guy for the mission was Allen Dulles who at that time was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, my soon-to-be employer.

In most nations there are many Intelligence Agencies running in parallel and in concert; the United States is no different in this regard. There are intelligence divisions in the army, navy, FBI, coast guard, and other national organisations. For a government to stay on top of the current state of intelligence in all of those organizations would be impossible, and this is precisely why the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947. The American intelligence instruments were shown to be woefully inadequate during World War II and a new plan was needed to co-ordinate the various intelligence platforms as well as safeguard the U.S. from foreign threats.

However, in creating such an apparatus, the government of the United States (specifically the president) had given sweeping powers to the Director of the CIA. Funds from the federal budget flowed to the organization without accountability, and the dissemination and retrieval of information fell into the hands of a splintered and de-centralized system. The failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs showed that despite this shiny new star on top of the intelligence tree, the U.S. had gotten no better at intelligence since the time they missed a couple of hundred Japanese planes flying to Hawaii.

About a week into my stay in New York I received a call from Simon von Hammersfield who invited me to meet him, his wife, and a few friends at Toots Shor, apparently a famous restaurant on West 52nd Street in Manhattan. I met Simon and his wife, Gertrude, at the restaurant on Thursday evening. He was there with another couple and their son. Simon was a tall, sturdy man quite obviously of German descent. They were a cultured and dignified couple, obviously wealthy and astute in the affairs of state. There were six of us at the table, and Simon had the ability to hold conversations with each of us without missing out on any detail. Any time my glass approached its midpoint, Simon glanced in the direction of a waiter who dutifully filled it with wine.

The conversation ebbed and flowed. Simon introduced me as a visitor from Britain. He talked to me about Germany and his hometown of Potsdam and asked me about my time in Berlin. I did not dig far into Simon’s background but it was obvious that he was an international businessman who once had ties to the Nazi party. This was exactly the type of person who was contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1940s -- people who owed their freedom to the United States government and who might have similar anti-communist outlooks.  Towards the end of the evening I found myself alone with Simon and within 5 minutes he had briefed me on everything I needed to know. He had arranged a job for me at a Western Union station on the Upper West Side. He gave me a card with the street address and phone number. On the back of the card were his name and three phone numbers at which he could be contacted. He told me that I would not be working at Western Union for long and that in a few months I would be headed to the south to do some legwork. He advised me that he had paid my rent at the Empire Hotel until the end of April. Lastly, he gave me an envelope…to get started. He then turned and engaged his guests in a discussion about brandy. As the evening came to a close, Simon let me know that he would be hosting a party at a club on the east side the following Friday night and that he was hoping I might like to attend, to meet some friends. I said that I would and got into a taxi for a ride back to the hotel. I wasn’t in the door more than 2 minutes before I opened the envelope. Inside was $10,000 in cash.