Overview

After the Second World War, Berlin was partitioned and the western sectors of the city were sealed off by the Wall. Outside in what had been occupied East Germany lurked the largest Russian Army Group in the world, menacing Western Europe. Inside the Wall rotating shifts of American spooks billeted in a Kaserne renamed Andrews Barracks worked round the clock monitoring Russian transmissions and the microwave communications of the East German regime while other detachments and covert agents contended with the East German Stasi, the most effective secret police force that ever existed. This is a fictionalized account of one of those operations. While written from the viewpoint of a covert OP at Andrews, this is a cautionary tale of a businessman's son who became an infantry officer and survived Vietnam only to be sent to Berlin where he was playing out of his league with a professional beauty who specialized in getting her way, the OP drafted to be a translator but behaving more like Harry Palmer from The Ipcress File, and an East German Border Patrol Officer trafficking drugs to the overpaid American troops in West Berlin. Disillusioned, smitten and suffering from his father's financial reverses, the Captain is induced to vouch for a bogus mission into East Berlin whose real purpose is to trap the OP in a lethal game of identity theft. Meaning no disrespect to Radio Free Europe, this scheme failed because of the centerfolds in Hugh Hefner's magazine! The East German Major is shot; his two men defect; and the OP pulls off a career-ender by impersonating the deceased officer to get out and bringing a third East German with him! The international situation is such that the affair is hushed up; the OP is smuggled out of Berlin to be dumped back in the boondocks from whence he came; and with things gone awry, the American Captain is left with, as Robert Burns phrased it, naught but grief and pain for promised joy. Can't say exactly where he went.

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9781512390315

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The author watched America's involvement in South Vietnam grow as a draft-deferred student at a state university. Graduating shortly after the Tet offensive, he enlisted before he could be drafted and after almost two years training, he was sent to Berlin where he worked on projects for the Army and American intelligence services. After Berlin, he went to law school and worked for various oil and gas companies during the boom years following the Arab oil embargo and the passage of the Natural Gas Policy Act. His career ended when oil and gas prices went bust in the 1980's. He began writing after Congress expanded VA coverage for Vietnam-era vets to include non-combat related conditions. His first book The Blue Norther recounted an awkward contretemps with two Dallas cops over a topless dancer although no one got killed that time. This may not count as his third since it is only his second book Advisors, Ambassadors, Agents, OPs and Spooks without the chapters on South Vietnam---there is no reason for Berliners to wade through 250 pages of that to find out what the crews up on Trummerberg and operating out of Andrews were doing at night while the city slept.

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