Red Front Connection

By Stacy John Haigney

WWI veteran Spicer leaves his native New York to join a Soviet spy service to combat fascists in Weimar Germany during the late 1920s. Despite his loyalty to the cause and successful exploits on its behalf, his moral principles and his devotion to a woman compel him to flee his spymasters and become the potential quarry of fascists and communists alike. Stacy John Haigney has created a thought-provoking thriller which should be enjoyed by anyone intrigued by the demimonde of espionage in the Europe of the 1920s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781528963923

Stacy John Haigney

Stacy John Haigney's recent retirement from four decades of practicing law has freed him to pursue his life-long ambition of writing historical fiction. 'Red Front Connection'--set in and around the Weimar Republic of Germany--is his second novel. He was born and still resides in New York City.

Book preview

XXXVIII

About the Author

Stacy John Haigney’s recent retirement from four decades of practicing law has freed him to pursue his life-long ambition of writing historical fiction. ‘Red Front Connection’—set in and around the Weimar Republic of Germany—is his second novel. He was born and still resides in New York City.

About the Book

WWI veteran Spicer leaves his native New York to join a Soviet spy service to combat fascists in Weimar Germany during the late 1920s. Despite his loyalty to the cause and successful exploits on its behalf, his moral principles and his devotion to a woman compel him to flee his spymasters and become the potential quarry of fascists and communists alike. Stacy John Haigney has created a thought-provoking thriller which should be enjoyed by anyone intrigued by the demimonde of espionage in the Europe of the 1920s.

Dedication

Dedicated to Messrs, Greene, Orwell, Koestler, Le Carré, and Furst.

Copyright Information

Copyright © Stacy John Haigney (2019)

The right of Stacy John Haigney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528922838 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528922845 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528963923 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2019)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

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Chapter I

Spicer had been forewarned that the only question Krantz was certain to ask him was why he had joined the Party in the first place. He’d known this for over a week but still wasn’t sure how he would respond, even though the interview would begin at any moment. He sat in a wobbly, wooden chair adjacent to a door with a frosted glass window bearing the stenciled German words for ‘Assistant Shop Steward’, behind which Comrade Krantz presumably sat. The tiny waiting room—there was only one other chair—was bereft of adornment; its grey walls hadn’t been painted in years.

Perfect for Party work, Spicer observed wryly to himself, we’re only comfortable with each other in drab surroundings.

It had been no mean feat finding this place. It was buried two floors below the main concourse of the Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof. He had been in Strasbourg when he received the summons. His instructions were to get off the train at 1 a.m. and to look for a door near the western end of the station, ten feet to the right of a Spaten Beer advertisement. It turned out that the station had at least half a dozen Spaten posters and many doors displaying the notice he was looking for: ‘Entry by Unauthorized Personnel VERBOTEN.’ The door would be unlocked until 2 a.m. Since the train arrived a half-hour late at 1:30 a.m. Spicer had no time to waste in finding it. If he didn’t get there by 2 a.m. the door would be re-locked, and Spicer would be guilty of a serious breach of Party discipline. It was five of two when he finally found it, turned the knob, and entered into the dense gloom of the train station’s subterranean warren of clerical offices. A little goblin-like man holding a flashlight was waiting for him behind the door.

He was the epitome of a proletarian Party-member: slight, stooped, and shabby, wearing the little quasi-nautical peaked cap favored by German workers. This made Spicer feel a bit self-conscious in his bourgeois grey suit and fedora hat. He addressed the little man with the words he’d been given,

Is this the Lost and Found? My suitcase has gone missing.

The man nodded, saying, This way, comrade.

As the little fellow led him through the twists and turns and back stairways of this dismal underworld, Spicer felt like a new arrival in Hades being shown the way by Charon the Ferryman. At length, they arrived at the waiting room to the Assistant Shop Steward’s office where Spicer was now sitting, hoping to formulate his response to Krantz’s inquiry about the reasons for his Party membership.

He was unconcerned about any other questions Krantz might ask him. His life story was fairly straightforward and he knew of nothing he had done or failed to do that might give the OGPU pause in assigning him to ‘special work’. But he’d been around the Party long enough to know that any effort to give a truthful explanation of his motivation for joining could lead to fatal misunderstandings. What did these European comrades know about the Irish Bronx, and the innumerable insults to his intelligence and dignity he had to endure there on a daily basis? Thuggish older brothers and their friends pummeling him whenever they caught him with a novel or a history book. Insufferably smug priests and pasty-faced nuns describing, with gloating satisfaction, the eternal tortures of hell which would be his fate were he to indulge in, or think about indulging in, ‘sins of the flesh’. Girls, more afraid of damnation than he was, ensuring that he would be good and horny when he finally did make it to hell. Horrified denunciations of godless socialists and anarchists who drew their plans against the Church. A father who embodied countless negative Irish-Catholic stereotypes, and a mother whose panacea for it all was more novenas. And…

The door flew open, and a tall man in a greatcoat with an English workingman’s cap pulled down over his eyes, hurried out and passed through the door to the corridor without a word. As soon as the door closed behind him, a hoarse voice called out from the office,

"Entrez, Camarade Spee-say."

Hat in hand, Spicer stepped into the office. Krantz was seated behind a crude wooden desk covered in surprisingly neat piles of papers. The only additional furniture was another insecure wooden chair facing the desk. To look at, Krantz was almost precisely what Spicer expected: short, slightly rotund, bespectacled, somewhere between 40 and 60 with thinning hair which somehow managed to be black. So was his moustache and cheap suit. Spicer reflected, with a trace of guilt for making such a bourgeois observation, that Krantz’s physical type seemed to flourish everywhere in the Party. Men who looked like Charles Lindbergh were indeed scarce among the Vanguard of the Revolution. Being almost six feet with no obvious deformities made Spicer feel uncomfortably conspicuous among them.

"Bon soir, Camarade. C’est ‘Spy-ser’ pas ‘Spee-say’."

"Pardon me, comrade. Would you prefer that we went on in English oder auf Deutsch?" Krantz’s accent might have been Mitteleuropean or Balkan.

English, if you don’t mind. I haven’t had occasion to speak it for a while.

It says in your dossier that you grew up in a proletarian family in the Bronx of New York. You don’t sound like you did.

I’ve been at great pains to rid myself of that accent, comrade. And not for reasons of bourgeois vanity. No one takes a person with a Bronx accent seriously.

Alright, then. Let me go through your dossier and find out if you can confirm or correct what we think we know about you. Was your neighborhood what they would call ‘tough’?

I have no standard of comparison, but it was what I would call tough.

But, in a sense, you were able to escape. You attended an all-scholarship Jesuit School in Manhattan.

That’s partially true. If Regis High School hadn’t opened, I would have ended up in some place with a name like ‘Cardinal Hayes’ or ‘Don Bosco’, where dumb dagos and thick harps get to stay stupid together. The education was better, but I detested most of the priests and still had to go back to the Bronx every night. My brothers and some of their neighborhood pals thought it was their job to make sure I didn’t get too many smart-ass notions. It was good preparation for basic training.

You enlisted right after you graduated from High School in June, 1917. Patriotism?

No. I wanted to get away, period. I had gotten a scholarship to Fordham University, but that would have meant staying at home for another four years.

So you ended up in the 77th Division. Is it true that you were part of the ‘Lost Battalion’ in the Argonne?

Yeah, I was a corporal; got through it without physical damage. Nothing has seemed too difficult since then.

You stayed with the American Expeditionary Force in Europe for nearly two years after the war. Why didn’t you go home?

"I was a good French student at Regis and I became fluent while we were training in France. My captain made me the unofficial interpreter for the company. When the war ended, my proficiency in French resulted in an offer of sergeant stripes and a posting with an intelligence unit. Even on an NCO’s pay, the living in France was good, and it wasn’t the Bronx. I picked up German very quickly, and soon they had me interrogating prisoners. I enjoyed it. A lot of the krauts I interrogated were sympathetic to the Sparticists and other revolutionary socialists. Where I came from, politics was supporting Tammany Hall and maybe the Irish Uprising. The only ‘big picture’ opinion I ever heard was that Holy Mother Church was threatened by Bolsheviks and ‘the like’.

"These jerries were a revelation to me. Many of them were uneducated draftees who hadn’t read Marx, but managed to seem astonishingly eloquent and insightful when expounding Party doctrine. They made me feel frivolous in my political ignorance. There also were a lot of right-wing punks who relished military life and acted as if they had been cheated out of victory. I enjoyed telling these thugs the gory details of some of the hand-to-hand combat I had engaged in with a few of their bygone Kamaraden.

By the time my hitch was up, I was pretty sympathetic to leftwing politics, but I felt I didn’t know enough to pledge allegiance to any specific doctrine or cause.

But that was to change, said Krantz while offering Spicer a packet of English cigarettes, "after you returned to New York and enrolled at CCNY. N’est-ce pas?"

Spicer picked up a box of matches from the desk and lit one of the Players. "Yes, that’s right. I came back without letting even my family know I’d returned. I got a small apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, taught French and German at a public high school, and studied History and Economics in night classes at CCNY.

"My conversations with the sincere but uneducated soldaten in France were no preparation for my sudden and complete immersion in the world of Jewish intellectualism at the CCNY cafeteria.

"Here were kids whose fathers had been farming tracts in shtetls 25 years before, discoursing about everyone from Rousseau to Gorky with nuance and fervor. Before they taught me the dialectic, they made me care about justice. The Church of my upbringing gave a lot of lip service to the plight of the poor, to the importance of mercy and love, etc., but I don’t recall a single priest ever mentioning that America’s millionaires had any responsibility for the horrific conditions the proletariat subsisted in.

These guys from Brooklyn and the Lower East Side showed me how the rich thwarted reform legislation, particularly laws aimed at improving working conditions and raising wages. They cited statistics proving how little paying decent wages would detract from the wealth of the greedy bastards. You name it: union-organizers massacred by Rockefeller, Negroes burned alive in the South, horrible industrial accidents due to reckless cost-cutting; these Jewish kids had the facts, and it was all news to me.

Spicer bent forward to stub out his cigarette. He took a surreptitious glance at Krantz to gauge any reaction to his monologue. There was no way of telling whether anything he said had registered: Krantz was expressionless and virtually motionless. His thick, steel-rimmed spectacles had misted over in the dampness of the room, rendering him as inscrutable as an idol of Buddha. Spicer lit another Player and went on,

"For me, these disclosures were traumatizing. You may scoff at my naiveté, comrade, but I’d grown up under the vague impression that America had somehow moved past the amorality of the Old World. As a European, you probably never expected the government of whatever country you were born in to act in good faith. So you’ll have to trust me, when I tell you that nothing added to my anger more than the realization that I’d been played for a sucker.

At any rate, my cafeteria mates succeeded in getting me into a chronic state of indignation. Then they gave me a reading list. After I devoured most of it, I became a respectable participant in their endless roundtables. It was at this point, perhaps one month into my second term, that a student named Friedman, a dapper little guy with a pince-nez and a goatee, asked me to meet him for a cup of coffee at a luncheonette two blocks from the campus.

At this point, Krantz broke in. "Let’s save some time. I have Comrade Friedman’s report. He described you as an ‘apt candidate’ for indoctrination and recruitment into the Party. You grasped the substance of the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky and others. You displayed a notable aptitude for refuting the doctrinal points of the Anarchists, Mensheviks, and so-called Social Democrats. Your work in Army intelligence gave you an appreciation, unheard of for an American, of the mentality of German workers across the political spectrum.

At Friedman’s invitation, you joined the Communist Party of the USA in September 1923. You’ve been a member in good standing since then, active in local branch affairs and a regular, pseudonymous contributor to ‘The Daily Worker’.

Krantz took a pipe out of a drawer in the desk. He said nothing more until he had completed the pipe-smoker’s ritual of loading, tamping, lighting, and taking gentle test puffs, until the desired smoke flow had been achieved. He then continued,

"Up until now, we have recruited Americans to perform clandestine work only within the USA. Frankly, in our experience, Americans are not, um, adaptable to European customs, languages, and so forth, and until your curriculum vitae was forwarded to us, it had never occurred to us install an American agent anywhere on the Continent.

"Your unique qualifications impel us consider departing from past practice, at least in your case. Your combat experience and your work in military intelligence give you a head start in becoming adept in our, um, ‘milieu’. You are a decent shot with rifle and pistol. You speak German and French with complete fluency and almost no accent. I am told that, when you received our invitation via Comintern to participate at a covert conference in Strasbourg, you expressed enthusiasm about returning to Europe to other members of your New York branch.

"Perhaps more important than these qualifications, you can move freely about Europe under the cover least likely to arouse suspicion: as an American traveler! Businessman or tourist, it makes no difference. Americans are ubiquitous in Europe and, if I may say so, no one takes them seriously. You can even travel, from time to time, on your own passport!

"We have use for an agent with that kind of mobility. You are of course aware of the doctrine of the Soviet Union, as professed through Comintern, that world revolution is imminent, and that the only serious obstacle to the establishment of the International State is cowardly social democracy. This ahistorical movement diverts all too many workers from joining the revolution in favor of fantasies of establishing socialism through parliamentary machinations. Accordingly, Comintern policy is focused on discrediting the social democrats, rather than combatting reactionaries and fascists. Monarchists and other old-fashioned right wing groupings have no attraction to a significant portion of the proletariat, and will thus gradually die off of their own accord.

"The fascists, on the other hand, are clearly just a passing fad among many proletarians. They are obviously ignorant buffoons, and will eventually be the laughing stock of the Western World. That they are entrenched in Italy is evidence of nothing more than the Italian penchant for the ridiculous. Such uniformed clownishness has little appeal in serious countries on this side of the Alps. You’ve only to look at the head of the leading faction of German fascists—a little Austrian corporal with a moustache that looks like he had a nosebleed that dried—to see how dismal their prospects are here."

At this moment, Spicer recognized Krantz’s accent: Hungarian. He probably had been part of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet government of Bela Kun, which was easily overthrown by the Romanian Army which paved the way for the empowerment of the preposterous Admiral Horthy in 1919. OGPU, the Comintern, and other organs of the USSR were probably teeming with Hungarian refugees from Horthy’s takeover. These thoughts must have given Spicer a distracted expression, because Krantz interrupted himself to ask,

Are you following me, comrade?

Of course, comrade. You were making the point that traditional reactionaries will disappear and the fascists are too absurd to make serious headway outside of Italy. Spicer kept to himself his thought that, whether Horthy was considered a traditional reactionary or a fascist, he had made very substantial ‘headway’ in Krantz’s native land.

"Like any sovereign state, the USSR does not pursue a one-tracked foreign policy. Although we are confident that our strategy of concentrating our propaganda and other efforts against the Social Democrats is correct, that policy has created some morale issues among our comrades throughout Europe, especially in Germany. It is difficult for some comrades to take the long view promulgated by Comintern, when they are confronted on a daily basis by fascist bullies. These swine not only break up their meetings and harass them on the streets but have even succeeded in luring some feckless comrades into joining them, always by appealing to their basest instincts.

So to ensure that the Party’s morale and membership are not further diminished by fascist provocation, OGPU has been directed to provide covert assistance to Party branches in various European locales. That is where you come in, comrade. You will receive a few weeks training at one of our secret facilities and then you will be given your first assignment.

Krantz then abruptly rattled off information which would get Spicer to an estate in Alsace, where he would learn the specifics of his work and how to execute it. They parted with a few brusque words, and Spicer found himself back on the main concourse of the train station a few minutes later. It was 3:30 in the morning, and the next train to Strasbourg was not until 10:45. Spicer felt an acute desire for a beer, but no cafés or bierkellers would be open. With nothing better to do, he stepped out onto the sidewalk of Adolph Strasse and took a leisurely stroll toward the Rhine. There was no traffic, and the only visible living creatures besides himself were maimed veterans of the War—sleeping, huddled together in alleys and on door stoops. In the morning, they would be beseeching passersby for spare pfennigs; just another reminder to Spicer of the pitilessness of Capitalism and the fact that he was on the right side, which in turn brought him to the realization that Krantz had not, in fact, asked him why he had joined the Party.

So much the better, Spicer thought to himself, we were both spared the embarrassment