A series of strange events Part 2

At the end of our specialty training, which gave us an MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) dabbling in secret, Keystone Cop-like operations, we were visited by a colorless man in a gray suit, who, one by one, took us into a closed room to tell us our fate. He introduced himself as Mr. somebody or other, which I came to feel afterwards wasn’t his real name to begin with.
As I sat down across from him, he informed me that I was going to be sent to Berlin Germany to the US Army Europe Security Detachment. I would not tell anyone that I was an MI officer, and that my orders would show me as being in the Quartermaster Corps. I responded to this by asking why not just send me as being infantry, since I already legitimately had the ribbons and badges that proclaimed me as such. Besides, if anyone asked why a grunt was going to a “spook” unit, I could just shrug my shoulders and say, “You know the army.” He agreed.
He then gave me a name, also fictitious, of someone in Virginia for my parents to contact in case of emergency because the Red Cross would not know my whereabouts. My name would not be on the register of the US Army. I was nobody. Furthermore, when I arrived in Frankfurt, I would be met by someone and not go to the replacement depot. I felt like Scrooge being told I would be visited by spirits.
We were cramped aboard a Trans Caribbean Airlines 707 headed to Germany when the career E-7 beside me asked where I was going. His question to my response was as I had predicted, “What are you doing going to a spook unit.” My pre-planned answer set everything right.
Upon landing in Frankfurt, we dragged our duffle bags down the corridor following signs pointing us to the replacement depot, when two young men in civilian clothes stepped forward, and said, “Captain Millar, please come with us.” The E-7’s jaw dropped, and we said good-bye.
Without introducing themselves, and obviously not enthusiastic about working on a Sunday, they took me outside to a van, and drove to a nondescript apartment building, where I was instructed to change into civilian clothes, and spend the rest of the day the way I wanted. I conned 5 DM, about $1.50, off them and walked around until 5 PM, when they collected me for a trip to the train station to board the 7 o’clock duty train for Berlin.
The duty train had been created by the agreements between the Soviet Union, England and the US at the end of the WWII, and was allowed to pass through East Germany unmolested by either the Russians or the East Germans. It was the only way, I found, that I would be allowed to leave West Berlin, unless I chose to fly.
While I was hanging out, waiting for the train to leave, along with a multitude of uniformed Americans, a somewhat scruffy but unremarkable young man approached me and asked if I spoke English. I told him I did. He began to regale me with the classic story I had heard from many deadbeat hippies when I was a student. “I’m going to school here and my father has just had a heart attack. I need five marks to get out to the airport.” Not wanting to give him anything, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a US quarter, guaranteed to not get him on the bus. “That’s all I have,” I said. In a flash, he grabbed it, held it up in front of me and palmed it. “I’ve gotten everything I need,” he said, “Believe me, you don’t know how much I dislike doing this.” And then he disappeared into the crowd.
Short a quarter I boarded the train and forgot about it.
Several months later, in Berlin, I was in the parking lot of the US Consulate, where our unit was stationed. As I was entering my duty car, this same person approached me with the same story. “I’m a student here, and my father’s just had a heart attack. I need $2 to get to Tempelhof Airport.” I stared at him a moment and replied, “That’s funny, in Frankfurt it was 5 marks to get to the airport.”
With that he blanched. “You know me,” he said. “I do, and if I see your ass around here again, I’m turning you over to the MPs.” Several weeks later I saw him again, headed straight for him, and when he saw me, he disappeared at a dead run.
I’ve often been told that you’re not paranoid if they really are following you, but when I returned to the States, living with my ex-wife and attending graduate school, the local police chief, to whom she had been recommended as a possible school crossing guard came to the trailer one night to talk to her. Caught up in his own importance, he told us how he had driven by, done a license plate check, and realizing that I was 26 years old, ascertained I was probably a veteran and contacted the Army’s counter-intelligence office in Portsmouth, NH. “I should have gone there first,” he said to my wife. “They not only had everything on him, they had a whole file on you.”
At that point I turned to him and said, “That’s really odd…… We weren’t married until after I was discharged.” His face revealed he had talked too much.
I’ve often wondered who that young man was. The coincidence of him hitting me up in two cities, particularly in an area of Berlin where tourists didn’t hang out, was pretty far fetched. That leads to question, then, of what was he doing? Several former intelligence people to whom I have related this story believe he was working for another of our agencies. And why me? I’ll probably never know.