2020 17 February 1946
There was a small stage, on which a string orchestra was playing Viennese music. The ballroom itself was filled with officers and their ladies either lined up at a bar or at an hors d’oeuvre–laden table or sitting at tables set for eight.
There was a reception line, with Colonel Robert Mattingly, a tall, handsome, splendidly turned-out thirty-six-year-old standing at its end next to Major General Bruce T. Seidel, U.S. Forces, European Theater EUCOM G-2, and Brigadier General Homer Greene, chief of CIC-USFET.
For the first time, Cronley wondered how the Army was going to deal with the facts concerning Colonel Robert Mattingly’s auf Wiedersehen party, and immediately upon starting to think about that, wondered why they were having a party at all.
The facts were that Colonel Mattingly, deputy chief of CIC-USFET, had been kidnapped by the Russian NKGB not far from the Schlosshotel Kronberg.
At the time, officials didn’t know that he had been kidnapped, just that he had disappeared. Cronley suspected from the start that the NKGB was involved. The NKGB had tried to kidnap two WACs assigned to DCI-Europe in Munich. The attempt had failed when one of the women took a snub-nosed .38 from her brassiere and killed three of the attackers and wounded a fourth, later reported dead.
The incident had been reported in the Stars and Stripes—and for that matter around the world—by Miss Janice Johansen of the Associated Press. But that story, after Miss Johansen had struck a deal with Cronley, had said the “would-be rapists” were escapees from a displaced persons camp, rather than suspected NKGB agents. Cronley had admitted to her that he suspected the attackers were NKGB officers not at all interested in rape, and also he knew no displaced persons who had taken off from DP camps and resembled at all the three bodies he had cooling in the morgue of the 98th General Hospital.
Janice’s story had been about the bravery of the WAC sergeant who had taken down the would-be rapists with a pistol drawn from her brassiere.
The deal Janice had struck with Cronley was that he would tell her, and no other member of the press, everything that was going on vis-à-vis Mattingly, and tell her what would hurt his efforts to get him back if it appeared in print.
They both lived up to the bargain struck. Janice was on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin with her camera when Cronley exchanged the fourth “rapist,” actually a former senior SS intelligence officer whom the Russians had turned, for Mattingly.
He had told her all the details about that: The NKGB had contacted General Gehlen and in effect said, “You have something we want, and we have something you want, so why don’t we talk about it as civilized gentlemen?”
The Russians wanted Gehlen to meet with Major of State Security Ivan Serov in the Drei Husaren restaurant in the Four Power Zone of Vienna. Suspecting the Russians would try to either assassinate Gehlen or kidnap him, Cronley had refused to let him go. He went himself, taking with him Gehlen’s deputy, former Oberst Ludwig Mannberg.
In the restaurant, over a meal that could only be described as sumptuous, Serov showed them a picture of Colonel Mattingly wearing a bloody bandage and chained to a chair. He said that Mattingly would be on the Glienicke Bridge, which connected the Russian Zone of Occupied Berlin with the American Zone, two weeks later at nine in the morning. If the Americans showed up there with NKGB colonel Sergei Likharev, his wife, Natalia, and their young sons Sergei and Pavel, an exchange could be made.
Serov explained that it was important, pour encourager les autres, that Likharev, who had been captured attempting to make contact with a mole in the Gehlen Organization, and turned by Cronley, be returned to Russia. Likharev and his family—Gehlen’s agent in Russia had gotten Likharev’s family out of their Leningrad apartment to Thuringia in East Germany, where Cronley and Kurt Schröder, who had been Gehlen’s pilot in Russia, picked them up in Storch aircraft—were now in Argentina.
Cronley had left the Drei Husaren restaurant rather desperate. He had no intention of swapping the Likharevs for Mattingly. He knew what Serov had in mind for him and his family. They would be examples to other NKGB officers of what happened to NKGB officers and their families who tried to switch sides. And Colonel Likharev, according to Oscar Schultz, who had flown to Argentina to meet him, had lived up to his side of the bargain. He was “singing like a canary,” and the information he provided was “right on the money,” according to Schultz.
/> And then, virtually at the last minute, Cronley had gotten lucky. He had moved the fourth rapist/kidnapper, whom he had dubbed “Lazarus” because he had, so to speak, risen from the dead, from the 98th General Hospital to Kloster Grünau, a DCI installation in a former monastery, where he had learned he was major of State Security Venedikt Ulyanov.
Cronley told General Gehlen that he didn’t think Serov would swap Lazarus for Mattingly, as he was of far less importance than Likharev and his family, but he was all that he had, and he was going to try. Gehlen agreed, and then said, almost in idle curiosity, “Let’s have a look at him, maybe something will pop up.”
Cronley had taken Gehlen and Mannberg to Lazarus’s cell below what had been the Kloster Grünau chapel.
Ludwig Mannberg took one look at Lazarus and breathed, “Ach, du lieber Gott!”
Lazarus had said, “The Herr General will understand why I am not overjoyed to see him again.”
Gehlen had said, “Cronley, permit me to introduce former SS-Brigadeführer Baron Georg von Deitelberg.”
Gehlen had later explained that von Deitelberg had been his deputy in Abwehr Ost until Gehlen had decided that the SS-Brigadeführer’s loyalty was not to the Wehrmacht, but rather to Heinrich Himmler and the SS. He had then assigned von Deitelberg to General von Paulus’s Sixth Army, then attacking Stalingrad.
Realizing that Stalingrad was going to be a disaster, and that Germany was going to lose the war, von Deitelberg had changed sides before von Paulus had to surrender. He had been taken into the NKGB with the equivalent rank to SS-Sturmführer and subsequently promoted.
It was clear to both Gehlen and Cronley that he was the man behind the kidnapping operations, and equally clear he was not about to tell them anything that could be believed about its purpose. And it was also equally clear that the NKGB probably would want him back, both because of his rank and to learn what he had told Gehlen and the DCI while they had him.
He was taken to the Glienicke Bridge at the hour Serov had specified for the Mattingly–Likharev exchange.
As Janice Johansen snapped pictures of everything, Lazarus got out of a Ford staff car. Cronley led him to the white line in the center of the bridge, where Ivan Serov waited for them, standing before the open door of a truck in which Colonel Mattingly sat chained to a chair.
“Turn Colonel Mattingly loose, Ivan,” von Deitelberg ordered. “The operation didn’t go quite as we planned it.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Serov obeyed.
“You realize, Janice, that you can’t use this,” Cronley said. “We have to find out what this kidnapping operation is all about . . .”
“I know,” she replied, “but you are going to have to be very nice to me, sweetie, while I’m weeping for all the money I’m not going to get from Hollywood for this natural-for-a-movie yarn.”