Kleiber looked round. The cabin attendant, and the man who had greeted him by name, were strapped into their seats two rows behind him. There was no one else in sight. He rested his head back on the seat and looked out of the window. The landscape tilted away more and more as the jet pulled its nose back into a steep climb, to gain altitude for the flight over the Alps.
The sun painted the peaks bright yellow as the sheer-sided valleys sank into limpid pools of blue shadow. There was nothing comforting about such beauty, thought Kleiber; it was daunting. For countless years the slowly moving glaciers had chiselled at the mountains; now only the very hardest crystalline substructure remained. It was just one more example of the way that nature favoured the strongest-or the most adaptable. The cocktail contained too much brandy and not enough bitters for his taste, but no matter. He looked at the spectacle below them. A direct route to Venice would take them right over the highest peaks of the Alps. He spotted the Matterhorn, its gaunt, angular shape like some hungry beggar among its plump, snowy brethren.
Kleiber passed a hand over his eyes and felt a feverish sweat upon his forehead. Even the champagne glass pressed there did not cool his brain. He felt giddy and tried to hold his drink more tightly, but in spite of his grip the glass fell from his twitching fingers and smashed against the metal bulkhead. He saw the bubbling champagne splash across the toes of his boots and felt the nausea and the curious sensation of endlessly falling that he had known before only after reckless drinking. He pushed a hand over his mouth as he felt the vomit; he could not undo the buckle. His tie seemed to be choking him and he felt the sweat dripping down his face. He reached forward to… he reached forward… and then there was only falling and blackness, and eventually only blackness.
‘He’s gone, Melvin. Where in hell did you get those Mickey Finns?’
‘ New York. A bartender on Third Avenue. Used to be a singles joint but lately it’s turned really rough.’
‘Remind me not to go there.’
‘They wouldn’t let you in, Todd. You got to be eighteen.’ Kalkhoven’s assistant grinned. The pilot was looking round. Melvin Kalkhoven gave him a thumbs up and the pilot began talking to the ground, asking for a change of route to Frankfurt am Main.
Todd Wynn began to pick up the broken pieces of glass from the smashed champagne goblet, Kalkhoven went back to get the US Army blankets and the stretcher. By the time they got to Frankfurt, the unconscious Wilhelm Kleiber would have to be ready for transfer to a US Air Force medical transport aircraft. The documentation was all ready. Kleiber had become Captain Martin Moore, an infantry officer stationed in Berlin, now suffering from an unidentified virus disease and being returned to a specialist hospital in the USA for tests.
The decision to abduct Wilhelm Kleiber had been taken at the highest level of American intelligence. On Wednesday, August 1, the deputy director of Central Intelligence had taken what by now was being called ‘the Parker File’ to the director’s seventh-floor office in the CIA building in suburban Langley, Virginia. The transcript of Kleiber’s conversation with Parker, recorded the previous evening, was an important factor in the decision.
The deputy director asked for freedom to handle this case in the way that the project chairman proposed, but the involvement of Yuriy Grechko-a Soviet embassy official-in Edward Parker’s espionage activities meant that the decision would have to be agreed to by the President’s closest advisers. The director discussed the file with his deputy for ninety minutes. At the end of what was actually a briefing, the director left, using his private key-operated elevator and chauffeur-driven black Lincoln for a pre-lunch meeting with the Secretary of Defense and the President’s national security adviser. Eventually it was decided that President Carter’s well-publicized successes with the Soviet leaders at the SALT talks in June were not a good reason for modifying in any way the CIA’s actions to limit Russian espionage against the US. The CIA was given permission to act against the spies ‘with maximum vigour.’
The new importance that the project had now been given, and the need to tackle it on a worldwide basis, meant moving it out of the Domestic Operations Division and giving it a new file number. However, the project chairman and Sam Seymour, the file editor, retained their roles. So did Melvin Kalkhoven, the field agent.
It was Kalkhoven who planned the seizure of Wilhelm Hans Kleiber. Kalkhoven flew from Washington to Frankfurt on the night of Wednesday, August 1, in order to obtain the full cooperation of the German security service. The BND’s officer in Hamburg (who was responsible for direct contact with London and liaison with the British Secret Intelligence Service) was not told of this development. Neither was the British SIS informed. As with all such high-priority matters, it was dealt with on a strict ‘need-to-know’ basis.
Melvin Kalkhoven made urgent contact with a well-known German business man-Helmut Krebs-and asked him if his name might be used in connection with a security operation. Krebs, a man of impeccable credentials, well known in Washington, readily gave his consent. Together Krebs and Kalkhoven arranged how phone calls should be placed to discover the whereabouts of Wilhelm Kleiber. Repeated urgent messages left with Kleiber’s office and at his home finally produced results.
There are thirty-six telephone links between Germany and Switzerland. Each link has 500 telephone lines. Thus it was necessary to tap-or at least monitor calls on-some 18,000 separate phone lines during the period when Kleiber’s office staff or family would be expected to pass on to him the fictitious message from Krebs.
The telephone call that Kleiber received from his Munich office enabled the telephone monitoring department-Amt 3-of the federal intelligence service of West Germany to give CIA field agent Kalkhoven a transcript of Kleiber’s conversation and the address of the lakeside house near Geneva where he took the call. It confirmed that Kleiber had swallowed the story about Krebs. The CIA office in Frankfurt, having already secured a luxuriously fitted Jet Commander, now had it flown to Geneva and put a CIA crew on standby there.
Kalkhoven’s brief included a strict instruction that the final phase of the operation must have top-level approval. So, at five a.m., Friday, August 3, the duty officer on the Operations floor at Langley received Kalkhoven’s coded telex marked NIACT (to get action before the following morning). Decoded, the message read, ‘He whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.’
The seriousness of abducting a German national from Switzerland and the repercussions it could bring, meant another long meeting with the deputy director and the project chairman. The reply did not reach Geneva until the following day. It was 2.25 p.m. on Saturday, not much more than two hours before Kleiber phoned asking for an immediate meeting, when Washington ’s reply got to Kalkhoven. The text of the cable from Langley approved of the Kleiber kidnap plan and revealed a new dimension of the project chairman. ‘Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.’ But, as Kalkhoven pointed out, that is New Testament.
By the time the prostrate body of Wilhelm Kleiber was loaded into the Military Air Transport Service Boeing C-135 at Frankfurt, Melvin Kalkhoven was holding a handful of messages and instructions. The CIA knew about the raid that the Swiss police had made upon Kleiber’s lakeside house, and their contact inside the Swiss intelligence service office in Berne believed that the tip-off had come from London.