Comment on Wretchard T. Cat on Facebook: "Laura Rosenberger on Twitter"

Espionage kills good people. Some years ago your tax dollars, and glad for them, sent me to Munich. Oddly enough the Navy has a facility there, and ships are heavy. We have it because Munich was in the American Zone during the Occupation after WW-II. If you look at Google Maps for the city you will see on the East side of town a district called Bogenhausen. That is the best part of the city, like the East Side in NYC. There is a small park called the Shakespeare Park, because Germans are crazy and with the 19th century attitude towards "Kultur" they thought that Bill had to be German. That is where Adolph and Eva took evening walks. Facing the park is a house with a big flagpole. It was built in 1905 by a beer baron who was Jewish. He left town very fast in 1933. Smart guy. The house was taken over by the Hohenzolleren-Emden family, a cadet branch of the old royal family and a naval hero of the old regime. From what I read a respectable man. He was kicked out in 1944 and the SS moved in, so bad things happened in the basement and after the war the house, being owned by a banned organization, became the property of the US government. Once a year on the 4th of July we run up the flag and put on uniforms and hand out hot dogs to all and sundry. The rest of the time we sit there quietly in civilian clothes.

I get orders to report for Active Duty for Training from my Reserve Unit. My Welcome Aboard went, "Only tourists walk into the Hochbrau House. Real Muncheners go to the Augusteiner Garden. You are here to work." In three days I finished three weeks worth of work. It's government. So I asked for more work, which almost induced heart failure as no punk junior officer had ever asked for more work apparently. They gave me a clipboard and told me to take an inventory of the government property, desks chairs file cabinets etc. These were all solid ugly 1950s-'70s GSA issue. Down next to that basement, which had been turned into a weight room, I found the furnace room with boxes waiting for disposal. They were full of maps, now declassified, that were issued by the US Army during the war. They showed southern Poland, including the rail lines and the camps. We knew where they were. Another map was of the Adriatic coast from after the war. The map showed beach markings and times. It was clearly an operational chart for inserting agents.

Before WW-II the United States had almost no Intelligence Service. The State Department filed reports and the FBI kept an eye on Latin America. The military had attaches, and ONI had an adventure in Cuba but very little by way of Commando or HUMINT capacity. The acknowledged masters at that were the British. We became their pupils when the war broke out and the British helped set up train the American OSS. During the war the OSS sent agents to meet with the Partisans fighting nazis across Europe. After the war the Iron Curtain came down and suddenly we had no idea what was happening in Eastern Europe. This was during the transition period between the wartime OSS and what became the CIA. Someone got the bright idea to send some of our guys back to see their old friends and gather some information. John le Carré wrote a novel with a similar plot.

Remember that we were very close to the British and to some extent under their tutelage. There was a liaison officer between British and American Intelligence. His name was Kim Philby. He was a Soviet Spy, one of the Cambridge Five Ring along with MacLean Burgess Blunt and Cairncross. The Russians were waiting on the beaches for our men. Every man on that operation died. I was holding their death certificate.