Opening Moves

Those who talk on the razor edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Logan Pearsall Smith

1035 hrs Friday, 13th July 1945, Department of Justice Building, F.B.I. Office, Washington D.C.

The Captain compiled a written report on the meeting that was concise and accurate, even down to the Russian’s useless joke at the end of the meeting.

The report was placed on the Lieutenant Colonel’s desk on a day he was on sick leave, and so was not processed for sending forward until the following day.

He viewed it with no great interest but sent it forward with grade 1 priority solely based on the stuff about code changing.

It was a low traffic day on the 12th, so the report made its way through to the FBI in Washington in record time.

The ‘stuff’ on code changing arrived and produced a seismic wave at Project Venona, a joint US Army-FBI attempt to decode Soviet communications. Not only was it a heads-up that change was possible it was also indicative of the fact that the Soviets were sensing an extra pair of eyes reading their private thoughts.

The report also took other routes at a more leisurely pace.

It was Friday the 13th by the time it arrived in the FBI building. Agent Drew Hargreaves had drawn the short straw and was undertaking the communications review occasionally done on the letters of all staff at a certain location in New Mexico.

 Having just been wholly bored reading women’s talk for half an hour, he was at the coffee machine when a new report arrived. He signed for it, mainly as he was the nearest and could hardly run away in any case, and took it with him into his booth.

Something different to run his eyes over before he got back the serious business of reading what the fashion of the moment was.

The report had been sanitised and all hint that it originated from a possible defector had gone. That meant that it held little of substance.

Hargreaves opened it and speed-read the page, somewhere in his brain noting ‘Turkish’ but not processing the word as he was compulsively drawn to the final paragraph.

“Sweet Lord on high, sweet lord on high.”

His brain raced with thoughts. ‘Manhattan; the Soviets know about Manhattan. Sweet lord on high. They know about Manhattan.’

“Sweet lord…”

His mind flicked deliberately and accessed his memory covering the word ‘Turkish’ and he read that section more closely.

His left-hand reached out and he re-read the file cover note for the private Los Alamos correspondence he had been reading.

Hargreaves was a god-fearing southern boy, brought up in the State of Mississippi. Crippled in a farming accident at the age of nine, he threw himself into academia, earning top honours in college and subsequently choosing a life of service to the government that had provided his education. He entered the FBI in 1938 and found his niche in intelligence. He was a first-rate analyst and never accepted coincidences.

He also never, ever cursed.

“Fuck.”

And so it was that he held in his right hand a low-level report from Istanbul containing the codename of the most important project his country was undertaking in modern-times, coupled with inference of important spy information going through the same country. In his left hand a file cover-sleeve that indicated that this particular scientist corresponded regularly and at length with a cousin employed at the Turkish Embassy.

One telephone call later, the FBI started a minute inspection of the life of Emilia Beatriz Perlo and her family. Others re-examined all the letters exchanged between the family. By that evening, the Agent in charge realised that serious mistakes had been made and, even though some information was still to come from the renewed friendly contact with Spain, there was enough proof in hand to arrest Victoria Calderon and Emilia Perlo.

Recriminations could come later.

Chapter 15 – THE GERMAN

Fall seven times, stand up eight

Japanese Proverb

1230 hrs Sunday, 15th July 1945, Soviet POW Camp, Ex- OFLAG XVIIa, Edelbach, Austria.

His name was Uhlmann and he was Waffen-SS.

He had soldiered from 1940 through to the difficult days in early 1945 and had the scars to show for his endeavours in a losing cause. Had he not had his personal effects removed by his captors over the weeks, then the casual observer would have noted that he held his country’s highest decorations for bravery, from the Iron Cross second class he had won in Northern France, through to the Knight’s Cross placed around his neck for his actions on the Russian steppes. He started as a soldier in the Leibstandarte-SS “Adolf Hitler” and ended his days as an officer commanding a panzer battalion in one of Germany’s cream SS formations, namely the 5th SS Panzer Division ‘Wiking’.