Today a CIC agent may find himself posing as anything from a deserter to a diplomat, from a clerk to a colonel. One day he may lounge in a smart London bar; the following week he may be assaulting an enemy invasion beach, utterly G.I. He may be interviewing a beggar or a general, a duchess or a prostitute; he may be wearing a dinner jacket or torn trousers.
THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE1
As Axmann and his fellow refugees from the Berlin government center were scrambling for a path to safety, his eventual nemesis was still in the States. Second Lieutenant Jack Dayton Hunter had completed his training for the Counter Intelligence Corps (“CIC”) and was awaiting his transfer to Germany.
The CIC recruited Hunter in part because he spoke fluent German and knew German World War I military history. As Hunter later put it, “There was a screaming need for American officers with knowledge of German.”2
He was especially attractive to the CIC because while he spoke German, he was neither German nor of German descent. Instead, he was Scottish.3
A history of the CIC explained that “the problem of obtaining men fluent in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and other foreign languages was made more difficult because of War Department policy which directed that no persons of close foreign background would be assigned to or retained in the Counter Intelligence Corps. Many naturalized Americans, in and out of the Army, were fluent in several languages, but the [CIC] was unable to use this source of language personnel because of this strict policy.”4
Of course, there were exceptions to this policy (including those who had fled the Nazis), and it was dropped entirely after victory in Europe, but at the time the CIC recruited Hunter, they were happy to find that he had learned German for reasons that had nothing to do with familial ties.5
Hunter traced back his interest in Germany to a film he saw at the impressionable age of six. His father, Whitney, an engineer, was busy at his job at the American Radiator Company. His mother, Irene, instead of paying for a babysitter she could not afford, took him with her to see Wings (a 1927 silent film about fighter pilots in World War I). The first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Wings captured young Hunter’s imagination and inspired a lifelong love of World War I aviation. “I saw those airplanes and was blown away,” Hunter later said.6 He dreamed of becoming a pilot himself someday.
As a boy, Hunter read everything he could about the Great War (as it was then commonly called) and the fights that took place in the skies over Europe. His favorite ace was the German Manfred von Richthofen (aka the “Red Baron”). He had the most kills of all pilots in World War I (eighty) and achieved lasting fame after death as, among other things, the pilot frequently shown shooting down Snoopy in the Peanuts comic strip.
Hunter wanted to read the Red Baron’s autobiography. In fifth grade, a classmate lent him the original German version of it. Hunter was so desperate to read it that he checked out a teach-yourself-German book from the local library.7
Hunter went on to study German for all four years he was at Ridley Park High School in Pennsylvania, until his graduation in 1939. Another four years of German followed at Penn State, where he graduated with a journalism degree in 1943. In spite of not having the patience to finish music lessons, Hunter taught himself to play the piano so well that he used this talent to work his way through college.
While at Penn State, he’d joined the U.S. Army via the Advanced Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (“ROTC”) there. He had a joke about volunteering for the army that he later used in one of his novels: “I figured the best way to outwit my draft board was to join the Army. They couldn’t touch me there, by golly.”8 But as he later explained, “We were patriots, everybody wanted to join back then.”9
On May 26, 1942, he was activated as a corporal in the infantry, but he was allowed to finish his education. When he graduated college in 1943, the army sent Hunter to the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School (“OCS”) for Infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia. There they would train him to become an officer.
However there was one key fact about Hunter of which the army was unaware. He had concealed from them that he was color-blind.
He’d been born with this deficiency. His grandfather on his mother’s side was color-blind, and while his mother was not color-blind, she passed it on to her sons Jack and Bob.10
Hunter hadn’t thought of it as a serious problem that should keep him out of military service. Instead, for him, it was more like someone lying about his age in order to join the army. He wanted to do his part for his country and didn’t want to be kept out of military service because of not being able to tell the difference between red and green.
There was a standardized test given to check for vision problems. He first had to take it while in the ROTC and again in OCS.11 The test was not set up to catch people who willfully cheated. The same exact test was given every time so it was easy for someone to prepare beforehand. Hunter memorized the answers to the test so that he could pretend not to be color-blind. Even though he could not see the correct answers, he pretended that he did.
What Hunter did not know though was that the military had a very good reason for conducting a test to detect color-blindness. One reason it was an extremely serious issue was that ground troops used combinations of different colors of flares to communicate with airplanes while maintaining radio silence. The inability to tell a green flare from a red flare meant that Hunter could not read these messages.
It was during a field combat exercise that Hunter came to understand that he had made a major mistake by lying on his color-blindness test. Hunter was in charge of a group of his fellow trainees during an exercise when he had to respond to a signal sent via a flare. A green flare meant to attack; a red flare to retreat. He turned to the sergeant who accompanied them and asked, “Sergeant, did you see that flare?” The answer was yes. “What color was it?” The sergeant said green. “Then let’s attack.”12 With this trick, Hunter was able to complete the exercise without exposing his hidden disability.
This close call did make him think though. As he later recalled, “I couldn’t read the color of flares, and realized I was going to get someone killed.”13 He had managed to get through the exercise without anyone noticing that he had no idea what color flare had been sent up, but he turned himself in midway through his training at Fort Benning. He admitted that he’d lied and was ready to accept the consequences of his actions. The army gave him the color-blindness test again, and this time Hunter answered according to what he actually saw, not what he’d memorized. He failed the test.
Now that the military knew about Hunter’s color-blindness, they were not going to complete his training to become an infantry combat commander. As fate would have it, this setback may have saved his life. Many of the guys he trained with died during the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach.14 Survivor’s guilt plagued him for the rest of his life, as part of him felt as if he should have been fighting his way up the beach with his friends in the infantry.
The army sent him to the Army Air Corps Administrative OCS in San Antonio, Texas. Back then, the Air Force did not exist as a separate service branch, but was part of the army (the Army Air Corps). On August 5, 1944, he became a second lieutenant and was given an officer’s serial number: O-545169. The War Department granted him a waiver for his color-blindness, “for appointment for limited service only,” although he was still considered “fit for overseas duty.”15
He was not in the Army Air Corps to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a pilot. Even though he already had flight experience, having taken lessons on a biplane when he was a teenager, the military had other plans for him. They were not going to let someone color-blind serve as a pilot.
Instead, they gave him a job as the public relations officer for the Kearney Army Airfield near Kearney, Nebraska. At the time, it was used primarily as a processing station for B-17s and B-29s.
He lived there with his wife. He had married his college sweetheart, Shirley “Tommy” Thompson, in October 1944, which was before he’d received his officer’s commission.
Fortunately, Hunter escaped this desk job purgatory three months later when he was sent to the War Department Military Intelligence Training Center (“MITC”) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, in late March 1945.
When he entered Camp Ritchie, Hunter was twenty-three. He was born on June 4, 1921, in Hamilton, Ohio, which meant he was eight years younger than Artur Axmann.
At Camp Ritchie, Hunter trained to become a CIC agent. His teachers there included former German military personnel who taught him how to pass for a German military man, among other skills. The teacher from his documents interpretation class referred to this process as training him to be a “Dick von Tracy”—an American spy who could work in German territory.16
There was a lot for Hunter to learn before he was ready to go to Germany. He wrote of his training that “I study Wehrmacht order of battle, Nazi paramilitary organization; I learn to espy military significance in captured trivia, from matchbook covers to booze tabs. I learn how to pick locks, open safes, make surreptitious entries, the opening and re-sealing of mail. I learn infiltration techniques, how to kill with my hands.”17
His fellow future CIC agents were an impressive group. As a former CIC agent wrote in 1946, “The CIC received the cream of the army. Every man in it was an expert on some phase of intelligence work. He might be a skilled linguist, an attorney with experience in ferreting the truth out of a maze of conflicting evidence, a traveler with years of residence in Europe, a missionary who understood the natives and customs of some particular district, an expert on anything from ballistics to zoology, a financial expert who could winnow spies from a mass of bank statements, or a man who was an extraordinarily gifted fellow with a snub-nosed pistol.”18
An article in Reader’s Digest gave examples of the lengths the CIC went to recruit agents with a wide variety of skills. “The [counter intelligence] corps included at various times a forestry expert, a dance-band leader, a Syrian rug dealer, a poet. One difficult investigation required a man with 13 qualifications, among them that he be a Negro and an Elk and speak French. [The] CIC produced him.”19
According to a U.S. Army history of the CIC during World War II, it helped in recruiting such talented personnel that “the lure of the word ‘intelligence’ and the prospect of working in civilian clothes was tempting bait.”20
At Camp Ritchie, Jack Hunter was assigned to Company C of the First Military Intelligence Training Battalion on April 11. Here, he met Werner Michel, a German who had fled his native country to avoid persecution as a Jew. As Michel recalled, “We soon became good friends and I remember his astonishing irreverence and his diabolical sense of humor.”21
They had a highly irregular schedule at Camp Ritchie, as Michel explained, owing to “the MITC commander’s evident idiosyncrasy concerning the length of the training week during the course. He apparently believed that if students studied seven instead of the normal six days, the course would be more effective. Reputedly naming his system after himself (COL. Banfill), we were scheduled to study and train for seven days. The eighth day…was off. This meant that we might be off one week on a Sunday; the next week on Tuesday and so on. These days off were jocularly referred to as Ban Day. As I recall, Jack, as often was the case, made some irreverent and ribald comments about this convoluted arrangement.”22
Besides speaking German and being familiar with German military history, his appearance also made Hunter a desirable recruit for the CIC. With his deep blue eyes, exceedingly fair skin, and blond hair, he could pass for German.
Moreover, he had the sort of face that inspired trust and yet did not stick out in a crowd. Everything about him was nonthreatening, from his height (five-foot-five), to his rounded nose, to his short, straight hair parted near the middle of his high forehead. He weighed only 135 pounds. The overall impression he gave made him seem harmless—more like a momma’s boy than a hardened counterintelligence agent.
A final reason that Hunter made a good recruit for the CIC was his journalism training in college. The CIC liked to recruit those with professional training in journalism (among other fields) as this meant that Hunter knew how to investigate a story. These skills could be used to investigate a case.
In recruiting, the CIC worked to obtain a wide variety of talented future agents. A January 1945 article in The American Magazine explained, “Such drastic selection produced men of astonishing talent, experience, and education. Almost all hold college degrees, and at one time, in the London office alone, there were 8 Ph.D.’s. The composite experiences of one 15-man group were typically startling: Among them, they had raced cars in Italy, played hockey for Harvard, newspapered in Paris, investigated credit ratings in New Jersey, taught English in France, fought legal cases for the Government, studied science in Germany, learned naval aviation, taken scientific photographs in Alaska, investigated the Bund, taught political science, prospected for Gold.”23
With the rise of the Axis threat and the United States entry into World War II, the need for counterintelligence agents had exploded. The CIC’s roots were in the Corps of Intelligence Police, which had been founded in 1917. After World War I ended, it had shrunk in size until it had less than two dozen men. In 1942, it became the Counter Intelligence Corps.
Members of the CIC during World War II who went on to later fame include J. D. Salinger (the author of Catcher in the Rye, who, like Hunter, served in Germany after the war) and the future secretary of state under President Nixon, Henry Kissinger.
The CIC had a number of important duties; its mission was “to contribute to the operations of the Army Establishment through the detection of treason, sedition, subversive activity, and disaffection, and the detection, prevention, or neutralization of espionage and sabotage within or directed against the Army Establishment and the areas of its jurisdiction.”24
During the Second World War, CIC agents conducted background checks for security clearances and hunted enemy intelligence agents. They also helped guard top-secret work like the Manhattan Project. In Europe and the Pacific, CIC agents accompanied American troops to analyze documents as they were intercepted, interrogate prisoners, make contact with resistance forces, and debrief civilians. These agents also taught American troops how to secure locations, locate and gather sensitive enemy documents, and avoid booby traps while doing so.
As for what counterintelligence itself means, a former CIC agent, Ib Melchior, explained it this way: “Military Intelligence is the gathering of information about the enemy—his plans, his strength, his operations—evaluating it, and disseminating it. Counterintelligence is preventing the enemy from gathering such information about you and from carrying out clandestine operations against you.”25
Another former CIC agent, John Schwarzwalder, gave a similar definition of this kind of work: “Counter Intelligence is the art of catching spies. It is also the science of denying the enemy the information he has to have and the monotonous routine work involved in making military installations secure against the enemy’s attempts at sabotage.”26
While doing this work, Hunter and his colleagues had to be discreet because much of what they did was classified. As the New York Herald Tribune reported in 1947, “The CIC has more adventure stories buried in its secret files than a month’s output of blood and thunder comic books. Unfortunately for the reading public, these bona fide cloak and dagger stories are not for publication.”27
Once in occupied Germany, a CIC agent had virtually unlimited powers. The restraints that the FBI had in the United States, such as needing to get a warrant before arresting someone, bugging someone’s phone, or searching someone’s house, did not apply. Prisoners did not even have the right of habeas corpus. In other words, they had no right to go before a court to have their imprisonment reviewed.
While suspects being interrogated in the United States had a constitutional right to speak to an attorney, those questioned by the CIC in Germany had no such right. One CIC agent wrote that when he detained two seventeen-year-old Hitler Youths, “they wanted to see a lawyer before they talked since they had heard that such was the American custom. They were disabused of this concept.”28
Hunter, like other army personnel, could even commandeer a German’s private residence and use it for his own purposes.
In the United States, the Third Amendment forbids the government from forcing people to quarter soldiers during peacetime, or in time of war, unless it’s done “in a manner to be prescribed by law.”29 In occupied Germany, not only did soldiers stay in civilians’ houses without their permission, but also they often kicked out the lawful occupants entirely. The CIC often arrived first in a town and would take the best property for themselves, upsetting higher-ranking army officers who felt entitled to such housing.
A tongue-in-cheek flyer, handed out to some returning army personnel, purported to cover the subject of “Indoctrination for Return to U.S.” and included this clause: “In traveling in the U.S., particularly in a strange city, it is often necessary to spend the night. Hotels are provided for this purpose.…The present practice of entering the nearest house, throwing the occupants into the yard and taking over the premises will cease.”30
Now that the war was swiftly coming to an end in Europe, the CIC’s focus there shifted from fighting the Nazis to locating high-ranking Nazis and war criminals, as well as ensuring that there was not a Nazi insurgency during the coming occupation. As part of this task, Hunter had been taught how dangerous HJ could be. A classified counterintelligence document from 1944 explained that “the Hitler Youth is not a Boy Scout or Girl Guide organisation. It is in no respect comparable to any organisation for young people known to the Western World. It is a compulsory Nazi formation, which has consciously sought to breed hate, treachery and cruelty into the mind and soul of every German child. It is, in the true sense of the word, ‘education for death.’ Under no circumstances should the Hitler Youth be taken lightly or be considered a negligible factor from an operational or occupation point of view.”31
This handbook on the HJ gave examples including the following: “A thirteen year old boy manned a machine gun against advancing Allied tanks on the Rhineland frontier, while his mates passed the ammunition. An execution squad composed of 14–16 year olds shot Polish civilian hostages. A monument was erected to a boy still living, commemorating the fact that he denounced his father ‘loyally to the Führer’: (the father was executed for treason).”32
At the same time as the war in Europe was coming to a close, a race began between the Western Powers and the Soviets for the resources of Nazi Germany. These included technical documents and devices as well as scientists themselves. Of especial import were atomic and rocket technologies. The Nazis had been behind the United States in atomic research, but way ahead of it in developing rockets. The Soviets, with whom America had been allied in fighting the Nazis, were quickly becoming competitors, and would eventually become enemies.