Collision of Evil (21 page)

“Herr Hirter? Excuse me, but I have a letter for you. A gentleman left it at the front desk earlier and asked that we give it to you as soon as you returned.” The pretty flaxen-haired receptionist in a stylish burgundy and gold dirndl handed the envelope to him, smiled with a flash of perfect teeth, and returned to the reception desk.

Hirter looked at the envelope with his name written across the front in large but shaky block letters. He turned the letter over and saw the name scrawled on the reverse. August Sedlmeyer. What did the old man have now, he wondered, easing open the flap. Extracting the single piece of vanilla stationary he read the German script. “Kaltenberg” was the sole word that he whispered to himself.

“Kaltenberg,” Caroline read aloud from the message on her computer screen, “SS-Stuermbannfuehrer.” She raised her eyebrows and tapped her nails on the desktop. The name had been sent in by Robert Hirter for tracing. Some World War II Nazi? She couldn’t imagine how it could be relevant to the pursuit of the terrorists or to the murder of Charles Hirter. Still, headquarters should support field requests and not second-guess operational matters. She decided to take the trace request personally to the German desk; her friend Laura Castleman worked there and could offer advice. Laura was steeped in German history, spoke the language fluently, and had completed two tours in the country under diplomatic cover.

Caroline walked at a brisk pace down the wide corridor opposite the main courtyard. On the wall opposite the courtyard, the portraits of past directors of Central Intelligence gazed down on passersby. Some of the portraits smiled, others were fixed with solemn expressions. The wall of paintings captured the exotic and often controversial history of the CIA. There was Allen Dulles, master spy, Cold-War architect, and the man forced to leave office by JFK following the Bay of Pigs debacle. Nearby was flinty-featured Admiral Stansfield Turner, widely despised within the service as a dilettante. He had instituted a reduction in CIA personnel, which had damaged morale and from which it had taken years to recover. Under Turner, nonetheless, CIA had performed some of its most daring operations in Iran in unsuccessful attempts to get American Embassy hostages released. Farther up the corridor of large oil portraits, Bill Casey stared down, looking as rumpled in art as he had in
life. Casey had been Ronald Reagan’s aggressive DCI, launching covert action in countries as dispersed as El Salvador and Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan. Like a number of DCIs before and after him, Casey was utterly consumed by the craft of intelligence. Caroline reflected that she did not aspire to such career greatness. It was the fabric of the work that she enjoyed, the shadow world of espionage and secrets; management responsibility was something that failed to excite her.

Caroline located Laura Castleman’s cubicle. Laura, red-haired, short-necked and overweight, was gazing at photographs spilled across her battlefield of a desk, sharing space with a coffee thermos, a gnawed blueberry donut on a paper plate, and stacks of papers.

Glancing up at her visitor she said, “Hey Caroline, welcome to my world.” Sweeping thick fingers through hair that had not been washed that morning, Laura raised her eyebrows and sighed theatrically. “The new German intelligence chief assigned to Washington is visiting headquarters tomorrow for lunch with the DCIA in the executive dining room. I’m trying to work the details with protocol. What time do the Germans arrive at the front gate? Who meets them at the visitor’s center and issues the “escort required” badges? Are briefings in German or English? Do we have talking points for the DCIA? Will there be an exchange of gifts? I’d rather be running a surveillance operation in the rain in Hamburg than wasting my time with this crap.” Laura surveyed her desktop, spotted the donut remnant and took another bite. “Anyway,” she continued, her jaws working slowly, “what can I do for you, Caroline?”

Caroline found a chair and cleared it of a stack of documents. “The last thing I want to do is drop more work on you, but I was wondering if you could run a priority trace on a German name for me. The name is Kaltenberg; written like this.” Caroline slipped a piece of paper across the desk to her friend. “He could be dead. Kaltenberg was apparently an SS officer during the war. If we have anything on him, it’s probably archived. And, not to be pushy, close of business today would be nice.” Caroline flashed a smile.

Laura finished with the donut and nodded. “Yeah, I can run a
trace and get it to you soon—providing we have anything on him. But since when have you terrorism folks started chasing geriatric Nazis?”

“We don’t. The name came up in the course of a terrorism case. It’s bizarre, but I need to chase down every lead. Anyway Laura, you just earned breakfast at a time and date of your choosing.”

Laura smiled, contemplating the eventual culinary reward.

Good to her word, Laura electronically forwarded trace information on Kaltenberg to Caroline by late afternoon. There was more than Caroline had expected. She scrolled through the material, much of it of wartime vintage.

Last name: Kaltenberg, First name: Horst. Date of birth: 12 October 1908. Place of birth: Potsdam, Prussia. Father’s profession: apothecary, killed on the Western Front during the Easter offensive, 1918. Mother: Siegrid Kaltenberg nee Mueller. Died in Potsdam, 1943 of cancer. Horst Kaltenberg had no siblings.

Career: Educated at the University of Berlin, diploma in chemistry. Joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP — Nazi Party) in 1928. Selected for the SS in 1931 by high-ranking SS officer Sepp Dietrich, who would later command the division
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
. Kaltenberg served in Berlin, Bad Toelz, and fought with the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front. Kaltenberg’s name was connected with war crime allegations in the Ukraine, but the charges were never substantiated. According to a postwar debriefing of another SS officer, Kaltenberg’s Berlin assignment was related to a top secret (
Streng Geheim
) scientific project. According to the same source, Kaltenberg had been selected for this assignment based on his chemistry expertise, NFI (no further information).

Captured German military records indicated that Kaltenberg had been wounded in the arm by shrapnel on the Eastern Front in mid1944 and returned to Berlin to convalesce. His wounds were serious but not life-threatening. He was sufficiently recovered by November 1944 to be assigned to a place called Dyernfurth-am-Oder, east of Berlin, but no details of that assignment existed. German tactical
orders acquired in Berlin after the war suggested that Kaltenberg led a Waffen-SS unit from Berlin into Bavaria in 1945, possibly to reinforce a last-ditch “alpine redoubt” in the mountains.

At that point, Kaltenberg vanished from official German records, a not uncommon development in the last weeks of the war. U.S. military intelligence officers reviewing the files of mid-level SS officers in 1947 concluded that Kaltenberg had probably been killed in action somewhere in Bavaria. Nonetheless, his death could not be confirmed, and there was a possibility that, like other wanted SS officers, Kaltenberg had gone to ground and established a new, clean identity. There was no record of Kaltenberg from 1945 until 1962.

In 1962, a human source of undetermined reliability volunteered information to a CIA officer in what was at the time West Germany that Kaltenberg had in the immediate postwar period assumed the identity of Dr. Johann Bergdorfer, using false documents manufactured by the SS prior to the collapse of the Third Reich.

According to the German source, himself a former SS soldier, “Bergdorfer” worked as a chemical broker in the Middle East in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. He maintained a residence in Freilassing, Bavaria, across the border from Salzburg, Austria. Bergdorfer allegedly conducted business in Egypt, Turkey, and Syria.

The German, who provided this information to the CIA in exchange for a small, one-time cash payment, added that Bergdorfer had converted to Islam at some point, not out of any real belief, but as a cynical device to buttress Middle East business prospects. Whether his Moslem business partners believed in the sincerity of the conversion was impossible to say.

There were no additional trace results. The Kaltenberg/Bergdorfer file ended with the information from 1962. This was hardly astounding, Caroline thought. In 1962, Nazi Germany was an episode from the past, and the Cold War was in full swing. The Soviets, not the Nazis, were the focus of allied intelligence attentions. No one cared whether some former SS officer had reinvented himself as a salesman. There were other fish to fry, Slavic not Aryan.

Caroline considered the information. There was one element that she found interesting, the link between Kaltenberg and the Middle East. That would seem to be the only remote connection to the Hirter case. The suspects in Bavaria were Middle Easterners, some of them originating from the countries where Kaltenberg had apparently been engaged in his business pursuits. Kaltenberg’s chemical background was also unusual, but she was unsure whether it meant anything. It would be up to Robert Hirter and the Germans to weigh the merits of the information on the SS officer. She prepared the trace results in cable format marked “immediate.”

Hirter and Waldbaer stared at the name Horst Kaltenberg, which Waldbaer had written with black magic marker on a whiteboard in his office.

“What are you thinking, Kommissar?” Hirter asked.

Waldbaer cupped his hands under his chin and narrowed his eyes. “I think we can find out more about this apparently fictitious Herr Bergdorfer. Although he had false documents and a new identity, Bergdorfer would nonetheless have had to register in Germany. You can’t just live here anonymously. If he lives in Freilassing, which is about an hour ride from here, we can find him. If Kaltenberg/Bergdorfer was responsible for putting stuff in the cave, this could be a great lead. He would have to know what was stored up there in the rocks for all of these years.”

The Kommissar picked up the phone on his desk. “Sergeant? I want the address and any other information we have on an individual located in or near Freilassing. Name: Dr. Johann Bergdorfer. Quickly, please.” Waldbaer hung up the phone and gave Hirter a smile. “I’m driving to Freilassing once we get the address. Want to come along?” The query was purely pro forma.

The names of the cell members had been watch-listed for electronic intercept in a memo from CIA Headquarters. Four days later, Caroline received an e-mail from a technical collection unit
advising that an Ibrahim Baran had purchased a ticket in Ankara for a flight to Munich in three days time. A first call to the travel agency had been placed from the pay phone that had been previously intercepted. Ibrahim was traveling alone, as best as could be determined.

An hour after having received these details, Caroline found herself in the office of Randolph Stockbridge, on the sixth floor of the CIA building. The office was spacious, respectably appointed with government-issued Drexel furniture, but bare of personal touches of any sort. The space was entirely utilitarian, providing no clue on the makeup of the current occupant. It confirmed Caroline’s sense of Stockbridge as a private person, aloof and professional, though invariably courteous.

As was often the case, Stockbridge on this occasion provided an example of studied elegance. His French blue Brooks Brothers shirt was exactly the right match for his well-tailored gray suit, and his red and gold silk tie matched the gold cufflinks surmounted with a red crest. Stockbridge gave a brief tug to his cravat as he took in Caroline’s report.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “You know what to do with this, right?”

“Not really,” Caroline replied guilelessly, “That’s why I’m here. What do you think we should do? Ask the Germans to scoop him once he lands in Munich?”

Stockbridge shook his head. “No. That won’t do. In fact, I’m not sure the Germans even have sufficient legal grounds to detain him. Let’s avoid Germany for now. Put the focus on Turkey, that’s where Ibrahim is, and things are more rough-and-tumble over there, which is good for us. We have Ibrahim’s full name and flight information. Have our people in Ankara contact the Turks, read them in, and see if they want to grab the guy for joint interrogation.”

“Anything else?” Caroline inquired.

Stockbridge gave her a look suggesting that she shouldn’t require further elaboration. “The Turks are pretty cooperative on terrorism
matters these days. They haven’t forgotten the assist we gave them in operations against their Kurdish extremists. Let’s see how they want to play it, but we need to debrief this guy, with or without the Turks. Let’s not waste time—draft a message now to our people in Ankara, so that we have an action plan before Ibrahim gets on that flight.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you were to explain exactly what you would like us to do, Mr. Peters.” The voice spoke in English, the words accented with a Turkish lilt. Ahmet Saygun paused to take a sip of sweetened tea.

Peters, the blond and sunburned CIA officer across from him, smiled thinly and glanced at his surroundings, the unremarkable spartan office space of the Turkish intelligence bureau in Ankara. The sole window was closed against the noonday sun and the un-air-conditioned room was close and dank. Peters, too, sipped at the tea that had been provided him by his host. “Well, I can only recommend some possibilities for your consideration, this is your country and you can decide your operational preferences.”