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Authors: John J. Davis

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BOOK: Blood Line
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“Get out!” Leecy exclaimed. “You’re joking. I’ve never heard of the existence of any such group during WWII. They didn’t talk about it in my history classes. Dad, is she telling me the truth?”

“It’s the truth. Just listen to what she has to say. I promise it’s all true.”

Valerie continued. “I wouldn’t lie about this stuff. I’ve been waiting sixteen years to tell you this story. I wanted to tell you the same way that Leona told me, but that’s not going to happen now. Just sit back and listen, okay?”

“Okay,” Leecy said.

“The USO was formed in 1941 by President Franklin Roosevelt. When it became clear the United States was headed into the war, FDR combined the resources of several different organizations working to support the troops and called that newly created entity the USO. Your Great Aunt Edith and Great Grandmother Leona joined the USO, along with many other young women. Not long after the two sisters joined the USO, they were approached about joining another group. Leona told me that she and her sister were visited in the apartment they shared by two men. These two men explained how the sisters’ involvement with the USO provided the perfect cover for what they wanted them to be a part of. The two men, and the organization they represented, were recruiting Jewish men and women to be part of a secret group that would work to help German Jews escape from Europe.”

“Wait,” Leecy interrupted, “so, Granny Granny and Great Aunt Edith were both part of this secret organization?”

“Yes and no. The men represented a group of wealthy Jewish businessmen with connections in Europe and Israel who didn’t think enough was being done to help the German Jews escape the atrocities being reported from Europe. Both Leona and Edith agreed to join the group, but Edith was badly injured during the training and had to drop out. Leona went on alone and trained near their home somewhere in the city of New York. She went to a warehouse somewhere in the old meatpacking district everyday for the grueling training. Do you remember the steak place we ate at a few years ago? I think it was somewhere down there. Leona said the training was often brutal work, but admitted to having a preternatural ability for the job.”

“Granny Granny was a badass?”

I could see the smile on Valerie’s face.

“Yes, Leona was a badass. When her USO tour left the port of New York in early 1942, she was a very qualified singer and dancer, and also a trained killer who could hit the bull’s-eye of a target from sixty to one hundred fifty yards away with a number of weapons of the day, choke a man twice her size unconscious, throw a knife with deadly accuracy, and break an arm or leg or hand. She knew how to disable a car, plane or boat, send Morse code, build small efficient incendiary devices, and also perform basic field emergency medicine.”

“Really? Little Granny Granny the ballerina could do all of that? That’s so cool. Oh my god, why haven’t you told me about this before? Man, I could’ve had the best show-and-tells in school.”

“Well, it all seems so silly now, but I didn’t want you to be afraid of me. Because like Leona, I can do all those things and more.”

“Holy crap, Mom, are you kidding me? That’s nothing to be afraid of; that’s awesome,” Leecy said. “Tell me more about Granny Granny.”

“Okay, the two men that represented this much larger organization followed along with Leona’s USO troop and arranged for her to be in certain places at certain times to help with the smuggling of Jews across borders, and when needed, spy on the enemy and collect intelligence. Neither was easily accomplished. When she was helping smuggle Jews to safety, she herself was in constant danger. The spying wasn’t easy, either. The sophisticated spy equipment that exists today wasn’t available back then. Leona was often sent on missions to collect intelligence about prisoner transports with nothing more than paper and pencil. This was long before cell phones or computer encryptions. She used hand passes to transfer the information through a chain of spies, which were mostly women.”

“Leona always preferred a very public place like an alehouse or club for passing information. She’d conceal her messages in the lining of her handbag and switch bags with another female operative at a specific location and time. All of that was planned to the last detail prior to any mission.”

“She was the female James Bond!” Leecy said.

“Yes, in a way, I guess she was,” Val said thoughtfully. “She told me it was the greatest time of her life. She used all her skills as an actress to cross checkpoints with false papers. That reminds me of her map. I wish we had the map she made with us, because it shows all the USO stops and some of her mission locations. Leona didn’t talk about all her missions with me, but I do remember the details on two of them.”

“Tell me,” Leecy said.

I noticed Valerie was reducing speed and looking to her left like she was searching for something very specific. I only saw woods dense with foliage. Valerie turned left and drove between the branches of pine trees and found what looked like a long abandoned road now covered with weeds and small saplings.

“This road used to be the main road to Atlanta. My great grandmother on my mother’s side of the family told me how she once traveled it on horse and buggy. It looks like local hunters have maintained it over the years. Maybe we’ll be able to navigate it for a few more miles,” Valerie said, as she slowly accelerated over the first of what appeared to be hundreds of small trees growing in the middle of the old wagon trail.

“Tell me about the missions,” Leecy said again.

“Okay, okay,” Valerie said, smiling at Leecy’s enthusiasm. “It was 1943, and Leona was in a group of two women and four men sent into Frankfurt posing as a medical team to extract twenty Jewish men and women being held for transport to Auschwitz.”

“Their plane took off from a small airfield in Sicily, which was already in Allied hands, and they received their briefing about the mission during the flight. The flight was terrifying because the pilots flew very low over the war-torn fields and landed in a field with lanterns marking the area. Other members of the organization met the plane. She and the other women on the plane dressed as nurses. Two of the men dressed as doctors and the other two as German soldiers. They were loaded onto trucks marked as medical transport and driven into Frankfurt.”

“This is crazy. They could’ve been shot down or captured, and all for twenty prisoners!” Leecy interrupted.

“Well maybe, but sometimes one’s life is worth the risk. Anyway, at that time the city of Frankfurt had been bombed, but not to the point of complete destruction. The heavy bombing of Frankfurt didn’t occur until 1944. Leona told me she was most afraid at the first checkpoint, but the medically marked vehicle was waved through with minimal inspection.This was two years before Patton and his Third Army arrived in Frankfurt, so the German army held the city, okay?”

“I’m with you.”

“Leona said she and her group were targeting a prisoner holding facility in the heart of the city. Once the truck they were traveling in cleared the first checkpoint, the truck stopped, and the second phase of the plan went into action. The drivers removed the medical Red Cross insignias from the doors of the truck, revealing the swastikas that had been painted underneath. The truck was now displaying the proper markings for military transport. The men inside the rear of the truck tore off their medical insignias and armbands and became officers of the SS. The women remained disguised as nurses. It was common practice for the Nazis to bring in medical teams to calm and reassure prisoners. Leona’s group used that to their advantage. They drove into Frankfurt and back out with twenty rescued Jews. They made it back to the plane and flew home to Sicily. Not only that, Leona’s first husband was among the men she helped escape that night.”

“What? Great Grandpa Ernst was among that group of people? I mean, that’s pretty amazing. Did she marry him right away? She must’ve been scared the entire time.”

“Yeah, I think she was scared, but Leona was tough. She wanted to help. She didn’t marry Ernst till after the war. She said they exchanged names on the trip out of Frankfurt. But he, along with the other rescued Jews, was put on a ship bound for the US. When he arrived in the States, he promptly enlisted in the army. He was sent back to fight in the war a year later. Ernst found her after the war by tracing her through the USO.”

“What’s the other mission she told you about?” Leecy asked.

“There were dozens of missions, I knew, but the only other one she told me about in any detail was in the winter of 1944. By then, the Free French and Allied troops had invaded France and taken back Paris. Leona’s USO group was stationed somewhere outside of Paris. The mission she volunteered for was the rescue of two OSS officers who were trapped in Frankfurt. Two men had been forward scouts for the pending military action by Allied forces that would eventually lead to Patton’s Third Army rolling into Frankfurt, and these two OSS officers had been pinned down in the city, unable to effect escape. The city had been ravaged by bombings, and what was once a beautiful medieval city was left in ruins.

“For this mission, Leona posed as a German citizen. She carried false papers hidden in her purse saying that one of the men was her husband and the other her brother. She had to walk into the city this time, but with the proper papers, she said she could go anywhere. Leona told me how people, families, just seemed to wander in and out of what was left of the city seeking shelter, food, clothing, anything. She’d never seen such destruction and hopelessness before, but she had a mission to complete and that helped her maintain focus. To find the OSS men, she used the description they’d given of the area where they were hiding that had come from the last radio transmission the two men made. She searched the entire first day for the two men, finding them just before the curfew siren. This mission was one of the times she used her combat training.”

“Wait. What does the OSS stand for, and what do you mean she used her combat training?” Leecy asked.

“The OSS was the Office of Strategic Service, an American secret intelligence agency that was the predecessor of the CIA. By combat skills, I mean she had to kill a man.”

“What? Just stop, okay? I’m having a hard time believing my Granny Granny killed anyone. And I thought her group was there to help the German Jews, not American intelligence officers.” Leecy said.

“Well, first of all, she did kill a man in Frankfurt, and several others in other missions. Secondly, the OSS officers were part of the effort to end the war and stop Hitler. Her group had heard about the situation and wanted to rescue the two OSS men. Whatever the reasons for taking action, the point is she took action. In a war, not everything is cut and dry or black and white. Lines are blurred and hard choices are made, because they have to be made.”

“I get it. I think. It’s just not the Granny Granny I knew,” Leecy said.

“This is why I worried about telling you my secrets for so many years.”

“No, Mom; it’s not like I’m upset or anything. It’s just hard reconciling my memory of her with these stories. Back to the story.”

“Okay. When Leona found the two Americans, they were both injured. She used her medic training to bandage the wounds and gave them food and water to build their strength. Leona told me that on the evening of the third day, they’d planned to make their way south out of Frankfurt to the airfield she’d used in the other mission. But a German civilian found her out.”

“What? How?”

“The German Military knew they were somewhere in this neighborhood and made daily announcements of a reward if they were turned in. So when this local man stumbled into the ruins of the building where they were hiding, she knew they were in trouble. She saw the look of recognition come over his face. She spoke German fluently and tried to convince the man that her cover story was true, but she could sense he didn’t believe her and was just waiting to get away and turn them in. So she offered herself to the man. She seduced him,” Valerie said.

“Oh my god!” Leecy exclaimed. “How terrible!”

At that moment the Jeep came to a full stop in front of a downed tree. Valerie turned off the Jeep.

“Leona told me she let the man embrace her and take her down on the floor, and as he removed his pants she stabbed him between his ribs, puncturing his heart with a dagger she kept hidden in her clothes. The two Americans used some of the dead man’s clothing to complete their disguises, and the three of them left the building. With their false papers in hand, the three of them walked through the remains of the city for miles before they were picked up by some locals and given a lift on the back of a horse-drawn wagon. And speaking of walking, it looks like that’s what we’re going to be doing,” Valerie said as she pushed open the driver side door and got out of the Jeep.

I was still in my semi-reclined position against the back door of the Jeep when Leecy turned to face me, asking, “Is she serious?”

“About what?” I answered.

“About Granny Granny killing a guy like that?”

“Oh, yeah; she’s quite serious. Wait till she tells you about her years with the Mossad.”

“Who are you people and what have you done with my parents?”

I was pushing open the rear door when I answered her, saying, “I love you too, sweetheart.”

Chapter 4
Chapter 4

Leecy and I joined her mother at the front of the Jeep to stare at the fallen tree blocking the road.

“Well, it’s too big to move out of our way, so we’ll have to walk. I figure we have about five miles before the woods give way to East Park. We’ll need a car and somewhere to stay the night,” Valerie said as she glanced at her watch. “It’s 3:15 p.m. The sun won’t set till after eight o’clock. Let’s grab our Go bags and stuff them with the extra supplies we bought and move out.”

I checked the reception on my mobile phone and saw there were no bars. There was nothing I could do about that. I could only hope if there still was an Agent Wakefield she would leave a message.

“Here, come get your backpacks.” I said. “I’ve packed them as full as they’re going to get. What do we do about the Jeep?”

“The Jeep will be fine,” Val said. “No one is coming out here till the fall when deer-hunting season begins. We can come back for it later.”

“Quick question. You did say each bag has $25,000 in it? I get to keep that money, right?” Leecy asked.

“Not a chance,” I said.

“Okay, worth a shot. So tell me about after the war, and what does all that have to do with you, Mom?”

Val shouldered her pack and climbed over the downed tree before she answered. “Right, so after the war, your Granny Granny continued to tour with the USO for a while. According to that cloth map she made as a keepsake, they went to places like Nuremburg, Munich and Stuttgart, and a bunch of smaller towns throughout Germany.”

Valerie wasn’t waiting for us to climb over the tree. She had one speed and that was full speed. Leecy and I jogged to catch up to her. I took up my usual spot when we were hiking as a family: at the rear of the line of Grangers.

“When the USO disbanded in 1947, Leona had been back in the States living and working in New York since 1946. She wouldn’t marry Ernst for another two years. She was busy pursuing her career as an actress when the same two men that had recruited her years before paid her another visit in September of 1947.”

“Oh no, what did they want her to do this time?” Leecy asked.

“This time they had good news. Good news, that is, with a caveat. They laid out plans for a new secret organization that would be in what we now know as Israel.”

“But there was no Israel in June of 1947. I studied that in history. The UN General Assembly passed the partition of Palestine resolution in August.”

“Right, A-plus for your studious efforts. But Jews had been living in Palestine for years before the UN vote. There were several underground outlaw groups fighting the British, before they finally left, and the Palestinians, who had been living there for generations. You’ve heard of the Irgun, who were responsible for the famous King David Hotel bombing in 1946?”

“Right!” said Leecy. “That was awful.”

“Yes, but it had a big impact on popular opinion both for and against. But these men who recruited your Granny Granny Leona weren’t from the Irgun, but another group still in the planning stage within the Labor Party government formed by David Ben Gurian. A group that started out as the Central Institute of Coordination, and eventually became known as Mossad. They offered her a job in the new organization, but she declined. Then they upped the ante and said they’d provide financial assistance of any kind to any member of her future family, assuming she would have one of course, as long as they agreed to become part of the Mossad. She asked them why such interest in her future family. Why sign up her children or her children’s children when they’d have all of Israel to select candidates?”

“Yes, that’s weird, Mom. What did they say?” Leecy asked.

I smiled at the questions. Not because I knew the answer, but because I understood the reasoning behind the approach the then fledgling Mossad was taking.

“They said it was Leona’s bloodline.”

“Bloodline?”

“And they were right,” I chimed in.

“Yes, dear. They wanted to recruit the best and brightest; to pursue the future generations of those bloodlines deemed to be extraordinary to protect Jews and Jewish interests around the world. The men told her the new organization wouldn’t forget what she had done during the war and would be waiting to answer her call. They left her with contact information. She never saw them in person again.”

“So the Mossad paid for your education and you worked for them?”

“Yes, that’s correct. I was sixteen, same age as you are, when Leona told me the stories I’ve just told you. She took me to the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, Atlanta. We had tea. She said she hadn’t thought twice about the offer when her sons were born, or when my brothers were born. No, she said it never entered her mind to act on the offer till she held me in her arms. She said she knew in an instant what my future would be.”

“So, spill it. What happened? What did you do?”

“I jumped at the chance. Not because I wanted to be a spy. No, I wanted to go to college, and Dad’s business was struggling. There was no way he could afford to pay tuition. So, I told Leona, ‘let’s do it.’ The next thing I know, I was an early enrollee at Yale, and there was only one request made of me while I was there.”

“What was that?” Leecy asked.

“I had to learn Russian.”

“Russian? Why Russian?”

“All in due course,” Valerie said and then continued. “So, I was at Yale and it’s the fall of 1985. I loved school and, like you, I never seemed to have enough to do. But the great thing about college is you can take on as much work as you can handle. I was racing through my classes with a double load each semester. The only wrinkle was that during holiday breaks in the schedule I didn’t get to come home; I was sent to Mossad training camps. My first camp was in upstate New York near Lake Placid.”

“Sounds like you just studied all the time and never had any fun,” Leecy said.

“I had fun. Plenty of fun. For me it was exhilarating. I was with other girls like me. We all shared similar backgrounds and did everything together. I was learning a fighting style called Krav Maga. I learned how to shoot everything from a pistol to a sniper rifle. Actually, I learned how to fire several different sniper rifles, like the Russian Mosin-Nagant, the US Army XM21, and the Israeli ImiGaltaz. I also learned basic pharmacology: drug interactions, drug contraindications and side effects, which in most cases resulted in death. I was doing what I loved to do, which was learning. I soaked it all up like a sponge. About midway through my first training session, I was given a dossier.”

“You mean a file on somebody?” Leecy asked.

“Yes, a file on a target to be precise.”

“That didn’t take long.”

“Well, I wasn’t there to learn to bake a cake. Anyway, the first assignment was easy. See, the dossier wasn’t just given to me. All of my fellow students also received a copy.”

“Why?”

“We were told to memorize the contents of the dossier and develop a strategy for eliminating the target in a way that wouldn’t attract the attention of the police, or arouse any suspicion of foul play.”

“Why would the Mossad care about police attention? They’re known for high profile public assassinations. It’s how they send the message to their enemies.”

“You’re right, of course, but that’s not always the case. This target, as well as the next three I was eventually given, were to be handled in a much more discrete fashion. The death was what was important, not taking credit for the death.”

“Okay, so give me the details.”

“Like I said, every girl was given the same task, and we had to present our solutions forty-eight hours after receiving the dossier. My solution was chosen. I’d made use of the extensive background information on the target’s daily habits and routines, as well as the target’s medical history. In January of 1986, I traveled to Buenos Aries and dispatched a Nazi war criminal that had escaped detection for almost forty years.

“Waiel Hiemlich, the Nazi in our dossier, had been tried in absentia at the Nuremberg Trials and found guilty of murdering Latvian Jews. He’d been sentenced to death, but escaped Europe and lived in seclusion in Argentina. The Mossad found Hiemlich by spreading lots of money around the region. I arrived on a Monday evening and made my way through the city to a hotel near the café the target frequented every morning. He would drink two cups of coffee and smoke two cigarettes to start his day. My plan was simple. I knew from the medical portion of his dossier he suffered from hypertension and refused to take medication for the condition. That fact coupled with his smoking was a deadly combination, and one I could use to my advantage.

“I arrived at the café early Tuesday morning before the target. I wore a loose fitting blouse and bikini top underneath, and short shorts and sandals. The pictures I’d seen of the target showed a thin, older man, very reminiscent of his younger self. I hoped my attire would help provide the distraction I needed. I didn’t have to wait long before I saw the target approaching the café. He took a seat at the outdoor table next to mine and even greeted me. The information in his file proved accurate, and as a waitress appeared as if on cue with his first cup of coffee, I leaned over towards him, letting my breast caress his shoulder, and asked him for a light. As I held my cigarette, I slipped a tiny capsule of colorless, odorless epinephrine into his coffee as he produced his lighter. He lit my cigarette and one of his own, and we chatted in Spanish and sipped our coffees. When he ordered a second cup, I leaned over again and dropped in another dose of epinephrine. Then I got up slowly and said goodbye with a smile and a light kiss on his cheek.

“As I walked away from the café, I heard the screams from the waitress. I was back at school before the Buenos Aires newspaper reported the death of the local man as a heart attack. A copy of the article was slipped under the door of my dorm room at Yale.”

“Did you feel bad killing an old man?”

“Not a bit. This man was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Latvian men, women and children. All Jews. Not a soldier among them. And he was free, living a comfortable life without a drop of guilt or remorse. He’d already lived longer than he should’ve.”

“You mentioned three other missions. Can you tell me about those?”

“I didn’t have another mission for a while. My training continued and by the middle of my second year at Yale, I knew I would have enough credits to graduate early. Like I said, I hadn’t had much contact with the family back home, because the schedule I was keeping was intense, but I knew the family business was struggling. So, I called Leona and asked her to ask her contacts about my attending graduate school. Whoever they were, they were all too happy to pay once again and like before, there was only one caveat: I had to get an MBA, a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, with a specialty in international economy. I agreed and they paid, so off to Wharton I went. My plan was two-fold. One part of the plan was to save the family business by growing sales overseas, and the other was fulfilling my obligation to the Mossad. I owed them one year of service for every year of education I received. That was the deal I agreed to.”

“By the start of my first year at Wharton, I’d been able to pitch my new plan for INESCO’s future to your Uncles David and Isaac. Then the three of us convinced our father. I was on schedule to graduate in the spring of 1989. I was on cloud nine. I was a graduate from Yale and a soon-to-be graduate of the Wharton Business School, and all in four years. INESCO was moving in the right direction, and I was working with the Mossad fulfilling my four-year commitment.

“My second assignment was a little more complicated. I was sent to Beirut to assassinate a Lebanese scientist working to help Palestine develop a long-range missile program. It was the summer of 1987, and the Lebanese Civil War had been ongoing since 1982. My pre-mission briefing took place in a hotel near the Wharton campus. I met with half a dozen members of the Mossad over a two-day period. The importance of drawing little or no attention at all to my mission’s objective was reinforced repeatedly. Two assassinations in Athens in 1986 had garnered too much press. I was directed to take out the target without any blowback on Israel.

“The target was Fakald Juli. The report said he had a personal security guard of five to six men at all times, except when he slept or was visited by prostitutes, but even then he wasn’t really alone, just out of sight of the guards. It seemed that Fakald had a bad habit of liking sex outdoors, so he’d take these women out on the balcony.

“Big mistake.

“I was flown into the Israeli-controlled security zone and my contact drove me to an empty, bombed-out building in the heart of the Syrian section, directly across from the target. The two buildings were separated by a one square block park. Really just a few trees and shrubs, but no grass to speak of, just dirt.

“I was left alone in the third floor apartment with a twelve hour window to do the job. The sun had set and it was dark outside. It was six p.m. local time. War was sporadic by 1987, but it was still very dangerous. I was scared of being found. I knew what opposition forces would do to me. So, I busied myself setting up my Sardius sniper rifle with suppressor and night vision scope. I knew from my intelligence report that he took a lover about every three days. If the pattern held true, he would be at it again that night. All I had to do was wait.”

“You’re in war torn Beirut in 1987 trying to assassinate someone in the dead of night from how far away?” Leecy asked.

“300 meters, give or take.”

“Jesus Mom, if you’d been captured they would’ve tortured you or worse.”

“Well, I wasn’t captured. As a matter of fact, I was never even seen. Fakald appeared naked on his balcony with his back to my position at two a.m. He was dead a second later.”

“What about the prostitute? He wasn’t out on the balcony alone, was he?”

“No, she was there. She was just out of my line of sight, and ran back into the room screaming for his bodyguards. I took the rifle with me when I left the room, after signaling my contact to pick me up. We were back inside the Israeli safe zone in minutes, and I was on a plane within the hour. The killing was treated as an accident, because of all the regular shooting and street fighting in that area. There was no blowback on Israel. We were in the clear.”

BOOK: Blood Line
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