20 December 2007

The LaPlants entertain at home, in Belgrade, 1946

There are those who feel a fondness for the old Bolshies who terrorized and murdered their people. You hear a lot of that from the Osties, the East Germans who yearn for the good old days when the Stasi- the secret police- recruited your husband or your girlfriend to keep their files on you current.

The nostalgia is for the security, and the order, of course. The bad stuff can be put away and forgotten.

I have a friend who is in the process of becoming a landed immigrant here in the States. She is quite a spectacular exemplar of Prussian beauty, tall and blonde and lithe. I was intrigued to find that she had indeed been a Young Pioneer, and that her parents had been planning their escape to the west for years.

One time, the kids were in the car, the route to freedom planned when some border or another was closed, and the escape had to be postponed. In the end, the forces of justice and freedom prevailed as the old system crumbled under its inefficient weight.

My friend is quite pragmatic about the union of her homeland, and unsentimental enough to leave it behind for opportunities elsewhere.

The nightmare of the dissolution of Yugoslavia played out while we were doing something else. There was a one-man shop in the intelligence section of the Joint Staff that followed events in Bosnia-Herzegovina when the rest of us were supporting the war to liberate Kuwait.

He was a lonely fellow, quite earnest, since he had a series of fascinating stories to tell about some unspeakable events as the construct of a unified Yugoslavia fell apart.

It had begun with Tito’s death from cancer in 1980, though it took the winds of change from the east to get things really rolling. Against the greater collapse, national fervor burst forth on the part of ethnic minorities whose aspirations had been stifled, sometimes for centuries.

The whole thing happened in a slow motion daily collapse. Some of the Jugs got out fairly easily. The Slovenes, for example, got dragged into what was called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and some creative nation-building by Woodrow Wilson. They exited as swiftly as possible, first by declaring independence via plebiscite in 1990, and then by war the next year.

The Slovenes took on the Jug Army in a curious ten-day conflict that was overshadowed by events in the Gulf. The indomitable Major who constituted the Balkan Working Group fund a video clip of Slovene partisans who were sitting on crates of brand new weapons. Upon examination, it appeared that they were of German origin, and so new that they had not yet even been issued to the Bundeswehr.

Tito’s pastiche of a country, Serb and Croat, Slav, Hunky and German, Orthodox and Muslim, unraveled with stunning brutality. It should not have been unexpected. Walking the streets of Zagreb at the time, I was struck by the grim sadness of the monuments that predated Tito’s course to a great Communist future.

Evelyn and Rene LaPlante were stationed there in the great transition period as Tito consolidated power. During their first year together in the grand house on the hill above old Belgrade the parties went on as the secret police was rounding up those who collaborated with occupying German and Italian forces during the War.

Collaboration became a pretext for reprisals against Tito’s political opponents. Serbian General Draza Mihajlovic was executed after a Stalin-style show trial and Croatian Roman Catholic Archbishop Stepinac was thrown in hail. It was all orchestrated by the State Security Service, the Uprava Drzavne Bezbednosti, or UDB. They were watching everyone.

The phones in Evelyn’s house were tapped, of course, and everyone was under suspicion. In the case of the LaPlante family, of course, they actually had something to be concerned about, though Rene enjoyed the sometimes tenuous protection of the American Embassy.

In order to keep the dossiers up to date, and to foil Rene’s periodic intelligence collection missions with his genial Irish accomplice Sergeant Crowley, the UDB kept tabs on the maid and the cook, who lived in the apartment downstairs.

Evelyn was great friends with the Petrovich’s who lived across the street. The father was a General in the Jug Army, but that did not save the daughter from arrest. Her crime was being Evelyn’s shopping companion, and for laughing when they had tea together out on the town. The UDB goons wanted to know what was so funny.

Rene was quite a visible figure in Belgrade, and the secret police were anxious to catch him in the act of spying. Accordingly, he worked out an innocuous code he could use with Evelyn on the phone, even though the UDB had it tapped.

The social whirl on the diplomatic circuit was fierce, particularly as the holidays approached in 1946. The number was quite impressive, and when he called home, Rene would ask about the social schedule, like “Are you busy? How many parties today?”

Evelyn would look out the window and down to the rail yard in the central city. She would see if there were tanks loaded up, and tell Rene just how busy she was, and just how many “parties” were in motion.

The UDB knew something was up, and shook down the house periodically. Once, Evelyn returned from one of the interminable parties with Rene to find the secret police occupying the house; all the lights blazing and the maid huddled in fear. She was having none of that. Another time the thugs were pulling down the wall-coverings and Evelyn was having absolutely none of that.

One of the incidents with the police nearly spiraled out of control. Someone broke in to the house and stole her Mink coat, which had belonged to her mother and had been lovingly re-cut to her gentle curves. The police thought it was an inside job and arrested the maid, and Father Rene was down there with his service .45 to get her out. Or maybe it was the sleek little Walther semi-automatic, the details are a little hazy after all these years.

The UGB tried to set Rene up a number of times in a sort of cat and mouse game. Once, a note in Serbian was left on his jeep. It told him to call at a certain restaurant, where an agent would be waiting for him to provide all the secrets of the new Yugoslav army. He was to know his contact because he would be reading his newspaper upside down. Rene was too cagy for that, though it was clear that his activities “incompatible with that of a diplomat” were going to get him in trouble.

That did not include being declared persona non grata, which in later days was a sort of badge of honor for aggressive and hard-nosed intelligence collection. In those days of a new and hard-nosed Tito regime, he would have just disappeared. They all knew the price.

General Partridge, the military attaché, knew it too. He once had a fake passport with exit visa and the uniform of a Major laid out for Rene to spirit him out of the country ahead of Tito’s goons.

Evelyn decided enough was enough, finally. The border opened and closed according to Tito’s whim, and when it opened for a moment in 1948, she got on a train with a friend and their little kids. They took a train, which meant periodic visits by grim faced internal security forces as they passed through the rugged territory.

Finally, they crossed the frontier and arrived at Trieste, the first Free City in the West. When Evelyn got to the Consulate to arrange further transportation back to the States, the consul was amazed. There was no exit visa on the passport- Evelyn had bluffed her way out of the Iron Curtain with her three year old!

The Portland Press Herald covered the event when Evelyn and Annie returned. Her little daughter was a virtual Serb, in traditional dress and speaking as much Serbian as English. Rene followed later returning to secret business at Arlington Hall, ten minutes away from the quiet neighborhood where they settled.

Of course he could not talk about what he had been up to after the girls left.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com