After going through the usual in-processing that every military person goes through when they arrive at a new station, I was shown to the office I would be working out of as a counter-intelligence agent. (For those who may not know what that means, it means that my job and the job of my team was to identify and arrest people who were spying on the U. S. military and the West German military in what was then West Germany.)
The five men I met that day worked with me for the next 16 years and became my five “brothers” - closer than the one biological brother I have. There were two other Americans – Platt and John and three GermanBundeskriminalamt agents (the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA being the West German equivalent of the U.S. FBI) - Kurt, Dieter and Johann. Though I am sure it wasn’t planned that way, each had certain skills that set them apart from the others.
Platt (“The Cunning Linguist”) was a genius at languages. According to various tests given him at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, CA, Platt was considered fluent in 16 different languages in addition to his native English. Platt and I knew each other from our Vietnam service. Platt, however, had some deficiencies as well. He had terrible eyesight, was very absent-minded and was such a bad shot that we tried never to take him into the field unless it was absolutely necessary.
John was a cracks-man. There weren’t very many locks, safes, etc. that he couldn’t open, given time. His dad was a locksmith and John used to help out around his father’s store.
Dieter was the kind of guy who could take down the average wooden door with one “hit” from his shoulder. He was a gym rat and a weight lifter and had a slight resemblance to Arnold Schwartzenegger but spoke much better English.
Johann could have easily been a Grand Prix race car driver. There would be many times in the days to come where his skills behind the wheel helped the team immensely. Besides his general driving skills, he was also amazing in his ability to tail someone in another vehicle without arousing their suspicions, even in downtown traffic.
Kurt and I were the two generalists. We always seemed to be second (or third) best at everything but we had a wide range of skills. I was a better pistol shot, he was a better rifleman, I was a slightly better interrogator and he was a little bit better than I in finding the one thing in a document or a surveillance report that gave us the needed answer. (By the time Kurt retired, he had made it up the ladder all the way to Deputy Director of the BKA.)
All 6 of us spoke English and German equally well, though Kurt had an English accent when he spoke English, having spent many summers while he was growing up visiting relatives in Lincolnshire, England and I had acquired a Bavarian accent from my German teachers in high school in Philadelphia and my acting mentor, Kurt Kasznar, who was originally from Austria.
As I have written, over the next 16 years we 6 men became extremely close. We had some successes, survived some hair-raising moments together, socialized together, our wives and kids became friends with the other 5 guys’ wives and kids (I am the godfather to two of Dieter’s children).
Within the limits of my memory and of what I know to be still be classified and what is no longer classified, at the request of a dear friend who is also a Quora contributor, I’ll try to tell about a few of our “adventures” in the world of Cold War espionage and counter-espionage, terrorism and anti-terrorism in future blog entries.
As they used to say in the movie serials/cliffhangers –
TO BE CONTINUED…
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