Dry Bones (28 page)

Dulles brushed off the criticism. Worse, he forwarded the letter to Carlton Bartlett, who was serving on the transition group Dulles had set up. Bartlett wasted no time in getting the word out that Pully was “an overcerebralized office-manager type” and a “pushy Jew obsessed with fighting the last war.” A month into Dulles’s reign, Pully was eased out and was hired at ISC.

(For the record, Louis Pohl’s OSS file listed his religion as “NONE”—the same as mine. When I did a little digging of my own, I discovered Pully’s father was a German-American Lutheran and his mother a Coptic Christian. They raised him as a Unitarian.)

I was summoned before a private session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and questioned about innocuous involvements I had as a student. Soon after, at the direction of Allen Dulles’s brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, I was fired and a note attached to my file indicating my security clearance had been revoked.

My brother, a Jesuit at Georgetown, secured me a brief stint teaching. When that went away, I was for all practical purposes unemployable. Pully came to the rescue. He put me on retainer. He paid me out of his own pocket. Nobody else knew. I’m good at keeping secrets and so was he.

Mostly, I researched and reported on various business proposals. Once in a while, on the sly, he’d ask me to look into CIA-related matters, and I’d contact the sources we still had (the Twelve Apostates had been whittled down to two) and find out what I could.

After ISC acquired your agency, Pully asked if I’d like him to put me in touch with you. I demurred, and he let the matter drop. Deep down, I think, as well as knowing the deep regrets I harbored about the harm you suffered on that abortive mission to Prague, he knew we were birds of a feather who’d had our fill of the great world’s problems and were content to tend our own nests.

In January of this year, he called my attention to a news item reporting that, after a hiatus of several years, Carlton Bartlett was returning to the CIA. I wasn’t surprised. He’d cashed out of Bartlett & Partners for a bundle and, it seemed to me, returned to the Serengeti of intrigue and skulduggery—his natural habitat—where his skills placed him among the fittest and most likely to survive.

Pully was convinced there was a deeper significance. He proved to be right.

A few weeks later, he called me in an agitated state. He needed to talk. Could I meet him the next morning, at 6:30 a.m., at Grand Army Plaza? I reminded him that the temperature was in the teens. It would barely be light. Snow was predicted. As far as he was concerned, that was all for the better. Our solitariness would be protection. I kept the appointment. Right away, as soon as I saw him, I knew something important was up.

Remember that phlegmatic demeanor of his: how inside he could be erupting while outside he was always that same stolid stub of a man? Well, this time he was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet—and it wasn’t because of the cold. He took me by the arm and pulled me into the park. I couldn’t tell from his red face whether he was happy or angry. What was unmistakable was his excitement.

As he talked, puffs of frozen air popped from his mouth like bursts from a steam whistle:

—Turlough, you’re not going to believe this.

—Try me.

—Karsten Heinz isn’t dead.

For a moment, the name didn’t register. Cold and fog of sleep slowed my comprehension. Pully could see the confusion in my face. He repeated what he’d said:

—Karsten Heinz isn’t dead.

Even then, the name barely meant anything to me. It had been so long. Then the light went on:

—SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Karsten Heinz? How could that be?

—It’s a flesh-and-blood fact.

Pully led the way deeper into the park. A heavy, wet snow started to fall. On we trudged as he laid out the facts. He’d received a letter from a Swiss couple interested in setting up an American office for their medical supply business, which specialized in developing advanced diagnostic devices. They had patents they wanted to protect as well as prototypes they wished to introduce to the American market. They’d heard Wynne Billings speak at a business seminar in London and were convinced ISC could help. They’d be in New York the following week.

Pully wrote back and set up a breakfast meeting at the Savoy Plaza, where they were staying. Only the man showed up. After he’d spoken with Pully for some time, he confessed that he was there under false pretenses: To wit, he wasn’t Swiss, he didn’t own a medical supply business, and he and the woman with whom he’d traveled to New York—his sister, as it turned out—were determined to capture Dr. Karsten Heinz. Would he be interested in helping them?

Unsure with whom he was dealing, Pully posed questions of his own. Who were they? Where did they get his name? What was their interest in Heinz? Indeed, what made them believe Heinz was alive? What evidence had they? For whom were they working?

Their answers satisfied Pully. They’d stumbled on the trail of an Auschwitz physician, an SS officer, who’d been presumed dead. In fact, he was alive but there seemed to be an impenetrably protective wall set up around him. One source had told them if they were
interested in pursuing the matter, they should speak with Louis Pohl. They went to hear Wynne Billings speak only to provide a pretext for getting in touch.

They produced the dossier they had on Heinz. It spelled out the details of his postwar existence that they’d been able to piece together.

Before he could be returned to Nuremberg, Heinz contracted bronchopneumonia and died. A month later, Oscar Hemmer, a refugee from East Prussia with no Nazi affiliations of any sort—a simple chemist who fled the invading forces of the Red Army—appeared at the offices of the International Refugee Organization in Rome.

His documentation in order, he was issued a Red Cross passport. He subsequently sailed from Genoa on the S.S.
Garibaldi
for Buenos Aires. He settled in that city for several years, working for an Argentinean subsidiary of IG Farben, the German chemical conglomerate, in its research division.

Unlike most other German immigrants, he steered clear of reunions and social gatherings, preferring a quiet, comfortable, solitary life in the upscale suburb where he resided. In 1955, Hemmer returned to Europe and settled in Hamburg. He set up an import-export firm specializing in chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

The dossier pointed to the fact that Oscar Hemmer was the reinvented Karsten Heinz. It also traced his continuing connections to Reinhard Gehlen’s intelligence operation—the Org—which conducted business under the aegis of the CIA. Hemmer/Heinz was consulted on his knowledge of the inner workings of Soviet intelligence. His import-export business was nothing more than a front for his reintegration into the Org.

In 1956, the Org became the Federal Republic of Germany’s official intelligence service: the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Gehlen was appointed director in chief. Out of genuine concern or a desire to play the ends against the middle—most likely a combination of both—Hemmer/Heinz voiced to his contacts in the CIA his suspicion that the BND was hopelessly penetrated by Soviet moles.

His concerns were brought to Carlton Bartlett, whose brief included coordinating operations with the BND. It didn’t take much to convince Bartlett of the worthiness of Hemmer/Heinz’s suspicions.
They stoked his conviction that the Soviets had succeeded in riddling the intelligence agencies of our European allies with agents and satisfied his desire to keep a close eye on Gehlen’s minions.

Bartlett made Hemmer/Heinz his mole in the BND. He authorized him to enlist a cadre of agents to spy on the spies and nose out possible double agents. Hemmer/Heinz wasted no time in forming a tight-knit unit made up of former SS colleagues.

Pully told me all this while the snow swirled around us. The buildings beyond were obscured behind it. I blurted out a condensed version of the conversation you and I had in the Drummond all those years ago. He’d heard it before but listened with rapt intensity.

We stood silently—I’m not sure for how long—until I broke the quiet with a question:

—Who are these pursuers of Heinz? On whose behalf are they acting?

—I’m going to meet with them again today. I’ll fill you in tomorrow.

—Why not now?

—Because I need time to think.

We left the park where we had entered, at Grand Army Plaza. The white flakes stuck to us like paste. We must have appeared as two abominable snowmen who’d stumbled out of some mountain fastness into the middle of the metropolis.

I should have insisted on going with him. I had the distinct impression that this most reasonable and logical of men had fallen prey to his emotions and was about to do something he’d regret. Instead, I let him go.

As incredible as the story of Heinz’s resurrection sounded, I knew it was true. Yet, though I appreciated Pully taking me into his confidence, I was unnerved—even resentful. I didn’t want to get sucked back into this deadly vortex, especially when the stakes were so high. I was content with the life I had.

Alas, my fears about Pully’s state of mind proved correct. This most logical and deliberate of men let feelings race ahead of reason. He contacted Bartlett directly and told him he knew all about Heinz. At first Bartlett pretended ignorance. The BND managed its own affairs, he protested. The story of Hemmer/Heinz struck him
as a “fairy tale probably spun from whole cloth in Moscow.” Even if it did contain a kernel of truth, “it’s not the business of the CIA to hunt for war criminals.”

Pully wouldn’t be put off. He stayed on the attack, challenging Bartlett that “this wasn’t about hunting war criminals but harboring them.” It so blatantly crossed the line between “legitimate counterintelligence and soul-corrupting deceit and manipulation,” it had to be exposed.

I knew Pully had made a dangerous error confronting Bartlett. I knew equally that his intent was not to discredit or subvert our entire intelligence operations but to purge them of the self-aggrandizing opportunists, fearmongers, and ideological zealots (“the warocrats,” he labeled them) who didn’t care about the means—assassination, torture, employment of the worst sort of war criminal—so long as those means served the greater end of “national security,” however they chose to define it.

“If we allow this to go on,” Pully insisted to me, “even if we win, we’ll end up secondhand replicas of the very people we set out to defeat.”

Bartlett appealed to Pully’s sense of loyalty. He asked for the chance to discuss the case. It wasn’t as simple as it first appeared, Bartlett said. “Before the genie was let out of the bottle” and the facts made public, he wanted a chance to give his side. After that, Pully could do as he pleased. They agreed to meet the following evening at the Commodore Hotel. I begged him not to go. But he wouldn’t be dissuaded.

He still believed, despite all he knew, that some basic code of honor applied, that at worst Bartlett would try to bully or bribe him into silence. But Bartlett wouldn’t succeed, he said. Heinz was the final and fracturing straw laid upon the camel’s back.

Their meeting was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. At a quarter past the hour, I got a call at home. It was Pully. He sounded like a raving lunatic. The room was melting. The furniture was talking.

I immediately suspected what was afoot. One of the assignments I’d carried out for him was to delve into a secret program—code-named MKULTRA—set up at Allen Dulles’s direction to test the ability of biological and chemical substances to affect the mind
and alter human behavior. Involving drug companies and universities around the country, it not only had succeeded in producing mind-altering substances but also had used them on unwitting subjects, including prisoners, soldiers, and civilians.

The most intriguing—and, to my mind, dangerous—substance was lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Its use on uninformed human guinea pigs, in more than one case, led to suicide. Those dosed with it experienced a stream of hallucinations that varied from mellow insights to harrowing delusions. It could easily cause those unaware of what they’d ingested to believe they were going mad.

I tried to calm Pully over the phone, reminding him of the investigation I’d done into MKULTRA and warning him that the psychotic episode he was undergoing was almost certainly induced by a drug he’d been slipped. I implored him to lie down. I promised I’d be right over. I reached the hotel just as the police were cordoning off the sidewalk on which lay the broken form of a man who’d thrown himself out an eleventh-floor window.

I didn’t know where to turn after that. The newspapers the next day reported Pully had called the front desk in a state of panic. A “colleague at ISC” was quoted as describing him as “seriously depressed for some time.”

I was unsure how much—if anything—Bartlett knew of my association with Pully. Had he been listening when Pully phoned me? Was he aware of how Pully learned Heinz was alive? Despite Pully’s beliefs to the contrary, it was clear that Bartlett would sink to whatever depths necessary to keep the truth from coming to light.

I hid as best I could. I gave up my apartment and rented rooms by the week in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side. I lived off my savings until my funds were so low I had to go back to work. I took part-time positions as a proofreader and researcher, which is how I came across you.

On temporary assignment fact-checking a feature article on the growth of the private security business, I looked up a citation from an article in one of those silly, self-promoting industry-sponsored rags and, voilà, there you were: “Fintan Dunne: ‘A Soldier’s Soldier.’”

I immediately thought to myself, yes, if there’s anyone I can turn to for help, it’s Dunne. Still—both out of my own reluctance to
risk any further involvement and the conviction that, in the final analysis, it wouldn’t be fair—I hesitated. You’d moved on, put the war behind you. You’d had your last drop.