Frankey, Abel & the Torpedo

It was Armistice Day. Just outside Vienna, in the Russian occupation zone, a U.S. Army jeep turned into a side road. Between the dark, heavy-set U.S. soldier at the wheel and the slight, fair-haired soldier on the right cowered an Austrian civilian named Oswald Eder. "Where are you taking me?" he cried. The smaller soldier jammed a gun into his ribs and snarled: "Shut up!" The jeep stopped, and at gunpoint, his escorts forced Eder into the waiting arms of seven Russian agents who set upon him with fists and revolver butts.

Kidnaping and beating are nothing unusual in occupied Vienna, where the bare description of a day's events is apt to read like a Raymond Chandler thriller; since 1945, Russians have kidnaped 660 people in Vienna, usually political "suspects." What was unusual and shocking about the abduction of Oswald Eder on Armistice Day was that it was executed by American G.I.s who had hired themselves out to the Russians.

Big, happy-go-lucky Sergeant John Frankey and his quiet little buddy Corporal Paul Abel were supply noncoms in C Company of the 796th M.P. Battalion. Frankey, 29, came from Brockton, Mass., had been a lifeguard, and had gone to the University of Wisconsin for two years. Abel was 26, from Bolivar, Mo. A onetime farmhand, he had only been through grammar school, but he knew how to do things in the city: he had once helped Frankey steal a $1,300 radio transmitter from an M-8 U.S. armored car. When they first tried to sell their loot, black-marketeers started them on an easier way to easy money: they introduced them to two Russian officers in civilian clothes.

The Russians offered the G.I.s 7,000 schillings ($269) to kidnap Eder, who was a night watchman in a Vienna radio-manufacturing plant and, in spy parlance, a "torpedo," i.e., an agent who informed against the Russians. For a while he had also informed the Russians about the West, but the Reds discovered that he took pay from both sides. They decided that he had better be put out of the way. Frankey and Abel accepted the commission. They lured Eder into a borrowed jeep by telling him that he was wanted by U.S. authorities. After Eder had been delivered, the Russians paid off promptly and promised further jobs. Last month, when U.S. counter-intelligence agents broke up a Soviet-run kidnap ring in Vienna, Frankey & Abel got scared. Last week to Army interrogators they confessed that they had kidnaped Eder, were locked up to wait for court-martial.

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