Night Raid in Berlin

In the faintly lit West Berlin sidestreet, a man sat behind the wheel of a dark sedan, waiting. A pretty girl carrying two bottles of Coca Cola crossed the sidewalk, glanced back at the sedan before letting herself into the house at 11 Heilbronner Strasse. The heavy, wrought-iron door clashed behind her, and she started up the narrow stairs. Above her there was a sudden sound of thudding feet and labored breathing. At the top of the stairs, a man appeared carrying the limp body of an elderly, bald-headed man. Behind him was a man she knew well--43-year-old Heinz Glaeske, an architect who lived with his wife and mother in a third-floor apartment.

"What's the matter?" the girl cried. Glaeske put his finger to his lips, said nothing. Behind him came a dark-haired girl who muttered: "We must hurry to the first-aid station." The girl they had passed watched the group as they loaded the limp body into the sedan. She shrugged--strange things happen in divided Berlin--went up to her room and drank her cokes.

Two hours later, Frau Glaeske and her mother-in-law returned to their apartment to find the door half open, blood on the floor, and blood on the wallpaper as high as their heads. In the corner, their poodle lay covered with blood, whimpering. One of his front teeth had been knocked out. In the empty apartment, the telephone rang insistently.

One woman answered the telephone. What had happened to Dr. Alexander Trushnovich? a woman's voice demanded. It was his secretary. He had told her to ring him at the Glaeske apartment at 9 o'clock. She had been ringing at ten-minute intervals for two hours.

Thus, one night last week, in a manner as bizarre as a movie script, the Communists kidnaped one of the West's most effective operators in the clandestine war fought in Berlin's cafes and back rooms.

The Plotter. From a dingy room in the British sector reeking with the smell of cooking, 60-year-old Dr. Trushnovich ran the NTS in Germany, an organization of White Russians and their sympathizers. Like NTS, Dr. Trushnovich was neofascist. But his NTS members hate Russia's Red rulers with cold ferocity, devote every waking hour to plotting the overthrow of the Soviet regime. Born near Trieste, Trushnovich fought with the White Russians against the Red army, helped the Nazis against Russia in World War II, and after the war founded a relief camp for Russian escapees. Trushnovich's NTS concentrated on planting seeds of discontent in the Soviet army of occupation in East Germany. His balloons dropped leaflets over Soviet troop areas, his agents boldly tacked up posters in East German railroad stations. Because they were in Russian, East German police left them on the walls, thinking the Russians had put them up themselves.

When Heinz Glaeske sought out the NTS, Dr. Trushnovich welcomed his help. Released by the Russians in 1949, Glaeske had founded an organization for former Soviet prisoners who would give NTS valuable information. What Dr. Trushnovich did not know was that Glaeske was a double agent: a member of SED, the East German Communist Party, he had already betrayed three Western agents.

When Glaeske telephoned last week and asked him to come to his apartment that night, Dr. Trushnovich went unquestioningly. There, West German police think, Glaeske had a Communist slugger waiting with a steel whip to cut Trushnovich down.

The Notebook. Next day the German Communist radio blandly announced that Trushnovich, "a leading personality of the fascist White Guard organization, NTS, which works on orders from the American secret service" had come to East Berlin and turned himself over to Communist authorities, bringing with him "documents" proving his espionage activities (NTS said he brought no papers, but unfortunately was carrying a notebook listing names and addresses of NTS contacts).

"A major Communist coup," admitted one Western intelligence operative. Berlin's police chief called it "the most serious kidnaping since the abduction of Dr. Walter Linse," a top official of the anti-Communist Free Jurists (TIME, July 21, 1952). The U.S. commandant in Berlin bluntly charged "clear evidence of complicity" by Soviet officials in this "outrageous abduction," and the British demanded an investigation. But few had any hope of seeing Dr. Trushnovich again, unless and until he appeared in a Communist court, vacant-eyed and slow of speech, in the inexorable pattern the Communists have made cruelly familiar.

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