The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy (Kindle Single) by Stephan Talty

Author:Stephan Talty [Talty, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Published: 2013-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Moabit

Erickson traveled to Germany month after month, ferreting out more plants and passing their coordinates to the OSS. Back in his Stockholm apartment, he would tune his radio to the BBC for the world news bulletin and listen all the way through. In the morning, over coffee, he would scan the pages of the Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, the Stockholm newspaper, looking for reports of bombing raids on the targets he'd discovered. But as 1943 wore on, there were few, if any, attacks on oil targets. Instead, the BBC announcers listed the latest cities to be bombed: Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Berlin (he thought inevitably of Anne-Maria). When he returned to Germany, he visited the same refineries whose locations he'd passed along and found them unmarked, running smoothly, producing oil and gas for the Wehrmacht.

Erickson grew increasingly frustrated. He'd infiltrated the small circle of industrialists that owned a number of oil refineries and plants, even visiting some of the secret locations, always with an escort. (Foreigners were not allowed to travel alone through Nazi Germany; an SS guard had to accompany the American at all times.) But Erickson wanted to see and report on every plant in central Europe. And no one was being granted that kind of access.

The mood inside Germany was increasingly tense; Erickson could see it in the strained faces he passed on the streets and in the bitter gossip of his Nazi friends. He read story after story about the capture of saboteurs, lethal suspicions between the intelligence agents of the SD and their rivals at the Abwehr. Arrests were made en masse. Dozens of Allied spies were put to death at the Bavarian concentration camp known as Flossenbürg, which specialized in espionage cases. Between 1943 and 1945 alone, the People's Court sentenced thousands of people to death on one of the twenty gallows that the Reich had built across Germany, or at the Berlin guillotines, where one execution could be carried out every three minutes. That fall, Berlin's Plötzensee prison was hit by an Allied bombing raid, which damaged the prison walls and destroyed the jail's only guillotine. To prevent escapes, on the nights of September 7th and 8th, 186 prisoners were hurried to the gallows in groups of eight and hanged.

Berlin had the air of a city under psychological siege. Erickson, too, felt his thoughts turning increasingly paranoid. Stockholm offered little relief. Erickson continued to be a social leper there; the cheery, close-knit life of dinner parties and Christmas gatherings that he and Elsa had known was in tatters. He suffered from ulcers. He could never relax completely, not with his wife's deteriorating mental condition a constant reminder of what he was putting her through. At times, Erickson felt he was falling apart himself. "Next time I take a job like this," he joked to Prince Carl, "I'll take some psychoanalytic treatments first." He also worried constantly about Anna-Marie.

Erickson would later portray himself to interviewers and journalists as a smiling automaton that felt no fear. But in reality, he was constantly tensed for disaster.

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