The Mole Trap: A Checkpoint Charlie Story
Edith knocked on the door of Weller’s windowless office, which was nothing more than a furnished storage closet in the cellar of SIS Berlin Station.
“Come in.”
She opened the steel door and moved to the single chair on the near side of Weller’s desk, the only guest chair that could fit into that cramped space. He had asked her to come. He had actually sent a scribbled note through interoffice mail instead of just having one of his boys deliver the message on their way up out of their dungeon. Now he looked up at her as if her presence was a problem for him to solve.
She got the feeling this was going to take a while, so she sat down in the red and white diner chair. Its cushion cover was hard and torn and pinched her thigh unless she leaned to the right a bit. His office was full of worn cast-offs like that – a metal tray with a scratched-up Coca-Cola logo, a miniature jukebox that didn’t play music – things he’d acquired then neglected to take care of. He treated himself the same way, dressing in an old suit that needed pressing, failing to shave most days, with eyebrows so in need of a trim that she had a hard time looking anywhere else.
“I have a strange request, Edith,” he said. “Hear me out before you say no and run off to the chief.”
She nodded. It was strange that he would ask her to do something and not pass the request through channels, but she was intrigued. For weeks she had been stuck processing routine military intelligence reports from along the wall – guard counts and schedules, vehicle routes, new construction projects – so she was happy to have something else to do.
There had been small breaks in her imposed boredom. Jerry May had stopped by a few times to make small talk, but it was sometimes difficult for an agent to determine when the talk was actually small. Anything to do with work was probably off limits, and most of them had little life outside. Margaret Powers happened to be around and the two of them could at least commiserate about being a woman in the service. They shared the same experiences of being one of the boys when on an assignment, but in the office they were just seen as clerical assistants, or romantic interests, or in Edith’s case, often a mother figure. Margaret was younger and much more interested in the fineries of life, though, so their conversations usually didn’t go further.
“I need your help,” Weller said, “because you’re currently lying low after the Simanis extraction.”
She nodded again, not understanding where he was going. She had managed to get Peter Simanis, a Latvian nuclear physicist, across the wall, but she’d had to hide out in East Berlin for a few days before she found the right time to cross herself. That mission could have gone better.
“Two days ago, one of my boys pulled a note from the drop in Tiergarten. A note from the Americans.” He retrieved a small envelope from a drawer, held it up for her to see that its outside was blank, and then put it back.
That made no sense. The SIS and CIA shared diplomatic packages. The heads of service got daily briefings on each other’s activities. Even in Berlin, each had a liaison officer assigned to the other service.
“Why didn’t that come in a pouch, or directly from Mel Anderson?” She asked.
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He nodded like a teacher, like she’d asked the right question. He looked around at his windowless office walls, at the worn Kitsch on his shelves, at the door behind her, as if he expected the KGB to be lurking in the cellar of Berlin Station. The fact that Weller and his housekeepers had offices down there wasn’t a sign of their status, or a punishment. Weller’s predecessor had requested it. A lot of sensitive information passed through the station, and almost all of it through the hands of Weller’s people. They were in the cellar because it was the most secure, lowest traffic area of the building, if a bit damp.
“Because,” he said, “our American friends suggest that we might have a mole.” He paused once again and then pointed at her. “I need you to find them.”
Edith tried to piece it together. If there was a mole, it was plausible that the Americans might see signs. And if the mole was a field agent, then passing that information through the normal channels might tip them off. The Americans would know that a note in the dead drop with no destination would be opened by Weller for routing. They must have had good reason to believe he was clean.
But she worked for the director. She was a field agent. “How do you know that I’m not the mole?”
He laughed and his bushy eyebrows danced. “We don’t, of course, but we do keep track of you lot. It’s part of our job, you know.” He placed his hand on a small stack of folders at the side of his desk, as if all the information was in there. “And you seem the least suspicious. Plus, you’re on hold for a while, so the chief won’t wonder why I’m pulling you in for some simple delivery work in the city.” He nodded, acknowledging the question she hadn’t yet asked. “We want you to deliver a package to a CIA courier in Spandau. At first glance it looks like a juicy piece of Intel left over from the Simanis drops, but it’s actually ten-year-old refugee interviews.”
She started to see the plan, how this might work as bait. “You want me to deliver it for you, but follow normal procedure.”
He smiled and pressed his right fist against his desk. “Exactly.”
“Which means I sign out in the log, which the field agents have access to. What activity do I log?”
“Special delivery.”
“And you’ll have boys watching in Spandau.”
His other fist went down on the desk. “I take back everything I’ve said about you lot. You’ve got it. As an added incentive, I logged the note from the Americans, but it never showed up in the chief’s inbox.”
If there was a mole and they were nosey enough, they would see that something came in from the Americans, never made it out of Housekeeping, and then Edith was sent right out for the courier drop. As long as they didn’t figure out it was a trap, they wouldn’t be able to resist taking a peek. But she still had questions.
“What if the chief wonders what this is and why it passed right through without him getting a look?”
“He would just come down here and ask me about it. Unless he’s the mole, of course.”
She couldn’t be sure that Weller himself wasn’t misrepresenting the mission, but it felt right to her. If she refused now, she would still be mixed up in it all, because she knew about the mole. And she would just be going back to filing reports.
“When do I do this?”
“Now, if that’s convenient for you.”
He gave her the details and she made her way to Carol Arland, the dispatcher, also down in the cellar. Edith gave the code name and Arland handed over the package – an interoffice envelope with a string closure. She tucked it into her big handbag. One floor up, she checked out with the duty officer and just wrote “special delivery” in the destination column. Whoever saw that would figure out that something was going to the Americans.
She left SIS Station and headed west on foot. She crossed the Havel and followed its west bank up into Spandau, taking her time. She was carrying a document that could tear the SIS in Berlin apart from the inside, but at least she didn’t have to set foot in East Berlin. She was surprisingly calm. She even considered stopping in one of the shops near her destination, but assumed Weller hadn’t included that in his timing. She watched for his boys but saw no sign of them, which just meant they were good at their job.
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Weller had described the CIA drop in detail. It was the back of a drawer in a wall of drawers in an electronics shop just off the Markt plaza in Old Spandau. You could pull it halfway out and tuck documents over the back. She assumed that retrieving the documents meant pulling the drawer all the way out and would require a distraction, but that was the Americans’ problem. Or the mole’s.
There was a young couple in the store, looking at televisions, and she recognized neither of them. She dug through drawers with their neat wooden compartments of resistors and capacitors, pretending to check a list of components on her envelope. She pulled out the designated drawer, folded the envelope, and slid it over the back as she made a show of checking the labels on the small collection of diodes.
She closed the drawer, bought some resistors and a small microphone, and left. She would give the items to Facilities when she got back and file for expenses. Maybe they could use them in one of their bugs or wire taps. Maybe the mole would figure out where she had been based on the receipt she turned in.
She should have gone right back to the station, or at least left the area, but she was curious, and had little else to do, so she stepped into a pastry shop on the plaza and bought coffee and a slice of cake. She sat at a small table near the window and watched people outside, half expecting to see Weller’s boys chasing down one of her fellow agents. But nothing happened, and the coffee and cake were gone before she could even appreciate them. She left and spent a few more minutes in the plaza and was about to head east into Charlottenburg when she happened to glance back toward the electronics shop. Margaret Powers was entering the plaza. She caught Edith’s eye and went still. Her face drained of any expression and she reached into her own handbag.
Either Margaret was in Spandau on some other business, or she just happened to be shopping there in the middle of the day, or she was the mole. Every explanation seemed unlikely in its own way, but then there was that look. Margaret was the mole, and she knew that Edith knew.
That part of Spandau had no secret alleyways, just wide streets and solid, impenetrable rows of storefronts. Even if Edith could head east, out through the back door of some small shop, she’d be stuck at the banks of the Havel. There were only two nearby bridges across the river out of Spandau, one north and one south. She ran south and knew that Margaret knew where she was headed. She ran because something about the way Margaret had reached into her bag didn’t feel like she was reaching for the envelope. There was a weapon in that bag. She prayed that Weller’s boys had a handle on the situation.
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She ran across the heavy steel Charlotten Bridge, in the opposite direction that German soldiers had run across to escape the Russians and surrender to the Allies at the end of the war. She glanced behind and Margaret was there, closing in on her on a bicycle she must have stolen in the plaza. She was riding down the pedestrian path along the side of the bridge. She was steering with one hand and couldn’t hide the fact that her other hand was awkwardly holding a weapon inside her handbag.
Someone grabbed Edith as she ran. She didn’t scream because some part of her training had worked that out of her. Large arms pulled her to the side, behind one of the beams descending from the steel arches that supported the bridge, into cover. She assumed it was one of Weller’s boys keeping her safe, but she fought against his pull enough to peer around the beam and see that Margaret had drawn a Luger from her bag.
She never got to fire it. An old German man leaning against the bridge’s railing deftly stuck his cane out between the bicycle spokes and Margaret flew forward, tumbling. She landed hard, but stood immediately and began climbing over the railing to jump into the river. The old man was immediately on her and had her weapon in hand. The man holding Edith let go and ran in that direction. She ran along behind and grabbed Margaret’s handbag, which was out in the roadway and about to be run over. The interoffice envelope full of worthless intel was folded and tucked inside.
Weller’s two housekeepers got Margaret to her feet and made it look like they were checking her injuries as she screamed for help. Her left leg was scraped and bleeding and she held her left arm with her right. The gun had disappeared from sight. Traffic stopped, and it seemed like some well-meaning German might intervene at any minute and mess things up. Edith stepped forward and tried to give the handbag back to Margaret, who pushed it away.
“You’re okay, Fraulein,” Edith said. “We’re going to get you to a doctor.”
That seemed to satisfy the onlookers that Margaret was in good hands. Traffic started to flow. A black Rambler pulled up and Weller’s boys loaded Margaret into the back seat, still screaming and struggling. One of them nodded to Edith to get into the front, to continue their charade. She did, and had to withstand Margaret’s glare on the back of her neck until they dropped her off a few blocks from the safehouse in Charlottenburg. She had no idea where they took Margaret, and she didn’t want to know.