The Treasure of Vianden Castle

Publisher Marketing: 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.