The Forgotten 500 (18 page)

“Welcome to Turkey,” the man said.

George and Mirjana knew the worst of their ordeal was
over as soon as they set foot in Turkey. They still had a long way to go, but they were out of German-occupied territory. After hearing about their successful escape from Yugoslavia, ten more Americans took the same path into Turkey. Once again, George and Mirjana found themselves in a group of Americans trying to find a way home, congregated this time in Istanbul. To the south, Syria was in the hands of the Vichy French, working with the Germans, so that meant the only route out was to the east, going to the Indian subcontinent and getting a boat around the Cape of Good Hope. Some of the Americans took that route and made it home in about two months, but George and Mirjana weren’t sure they were up for such a long, arduous journey by boat. And besides, George was quickly running out of money and probably couldn’t afford the passage anyway.

Istanbul was relatively safe and peaceful, so they stayed there for a while, during which time the British military attaché approached George. The British had heard of the couple’s adventure and wanted to glean some information about the occupied territory. George told them all he knew and, in the process, became quite friendly with the British military officers. When they had been in Istanbul for a month, the free French invaded Syria and took control, which made it possible for George and Mirjana to travel through the country on a train called the Taurus Express, to Jerusalem, which was in Allied hands. But when they got there, the authorities would not let them go on to Cairo, Egypt. Too many refugees were taking that route and Cairo couldn’t handle any more. So George and Mirjana were trying to figure out their next step, walking the streets of Jerusalem as they discussed options, when a man approached them. Mirjana was admiring a store’s window display when the man came up and commented on her shoes, canvas sandals common in Yugoslavia. He then asked if she was from Yugoslavia, and after a short conversation the two refugees realized they had mutual friends. He asked Mirjana and George about their backgrounds and then said, “I need people like you. I’m the head of the Yugoslav section of the British General Service Intelligence [GSI], and I need someone to translate for me.”

And thus another door opened for George and Mirjana. The man, Branco Denic, was in charge of broadcasting radio programs from the post in Jerusalem into Yugoslavia, first listening to the Nazi version of the news broadcast in occupied territories and then quickly writing another program that refuted the German lies and told the real news. Mirjana and George both accepted positions with the GSI, translating for the broadcasts, and Mirjana occasionally even went on the air herself to deliver the news. The couple spent a year in Jerusalem and in May 1942 they asked for visas to go to Cairo. Because they had worked with the British intelligence effort, the request was granted.

The plan was to go to Cairo and make their way down the East African coast to Cape Town, South Africa, where they should be able to get a boat back to the United States. But when they got to Cairo, they found the city was in a near panic. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, was making his way across the Libyan Desert and there was fear that he might cut off the entire Middle East. Many embassies were abandoning Cairo as people looked for their own way out. George went to the American embassy repeatedly, asking if there were plans to evacuate U.S. citizens. On three separate occasions, the consul personally told him there would be no evacuation of Americans.

The couple was trapped yet again. They were low on money and even lower on options. In his despair, George realized it was June 28, a major holiday in Serbia known as Vidovdan, which celebrates several historical events occurring on that date. To ease his mind and to pay his respects on Vidovdan, he made his way to a Russian church in Cairo and encountered several older men who were also praying. Some small talk revealed that they were with Pan American World Airways, the principal international airline of the United States at that time. The oldest man of the group was George Kraigher, a Serb who had flown for the Yugoslavian army in World War I. He was now head of Pan Am in Africa.

Kraigher asked if George knew another young American who had been fleeing Yugoslavia as well, and George explained that the man had already found a way home to America. Kraigher said that was too bad, that he was going to offer the man a job.

“In that case, I’d like to apply for the job,” George replied.

Kraigher ended up offering George the job, but on one condition: He had to get a visa to go from Cairo to Sudan, then into Nigeria, and finally to Ghana, where the Pan Am job awaited. They had to get out of Cairo before the Germans arrived anyway, so George and Mirjana headed to the Sudan agency, an office run by the British to provide visas and other diplomatic services for countries in Africa. They found a crowd of four hundred people there clamoring for visas, agitated and yelling at the British guards, some trying to force their way in. The British were not giving out any visas.

Mirjana saw the situation and realized it was hopeless. She broke down. “We’ll never get out of here,” she sobbed. “The Germans are going to come in a couple of weeks and we’ll be taken prisoner.”

George held his wife as she cried and thought for a moment, staring at the crowd mobbing the agency gates, trying to come up with any solution. He knew Mirjana was right. If they just stayed in Cairo, they would be caught. He had to do something.

So far they had been the beneficiary of incredible luck and fortunate coincidences, but now it was up to George to make something happen, to dig deep and find enough courage to bluff his way through the embassy. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off, but he had to give it a shot.

“Let me see what I can do,” George said, pulling away from Mirjana. He walked off and, with all the attitude he could muster, marched up to a guard at the entrance.

“I’d like to see Her Majesty’s consul,” he said, trying to sound as if it were a given that he should be allowed entry.

“What for?” the guard asked.

“I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” George stood there just staring at the guard, trying not to look away. Then he pulled out his identification card from Jerusalem, which identified him as a member of the British GSI. The guard looked at the identification and pushed aside the other people trying to get to the gate, letting George walk on in. Once inside, George answered the receptionist’s query with the same reply: “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” When she directed him to the British consul, Phillip Reed, George was feeling pretty confident about his ruse. Reed asked what he could do for him and George explained that he needed to go to Ghana.

“What for?” Reed asked.

“I can’t tell you. I’m in intelligence and it’s confidential.”

The consul paused for only a short moment and then asked for George’s passport. He had a clerk stamp the passport with visas for both Mr. and Mrs. Vujnovich, wished George luck, and shook his hand before turning to leave. He had been in the building for only ten minutes when he returned outside to find Mirjana. When she saw him return so quickly, she was sure he had been unable to get the visas. She broke down in tears again.

“What’s wrong?” George asked with a grin, holding up his passport as he approached. “I’ve got the visas!”

Mirjana was overjoyed and astounded. “How did you do it, George?”

He couldn’t resist. “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.”

Kraigher was just as shocked
when George returned with the visas, but he was pleased. He gave George and Mirjana first-class tickets to Sudan on the first flight out of Cairo, and when they got to the airport on June 28, George was surprised to learn that the flight was the first evacuation of Americans from Cairo. In the middle of a crowd of thirty Americans milling about was the American consul who had assured George three separate times that there would be no evacuation of Americans. Looking at the crowd of executives from American companies—a sea of camel-hair coats, crocodile-skin shoes, and ten-gallon hats—George immediately realized that the consul had notified only the wealthy and influential Americans in Cairo of the evacuation. People like George were on their own. But they had tickets for this flight, if there was enough room. It looked to George and Mirjana that there were far too many people for the plane, and they were stuck in the back of the crowd. Plus, the consul announced that he would be calling names for boarding and George didn’t expect to be at the top of his list.

They were waiting at the foot of the stairs leading into the DC-3 passenger plane, hoping to make it on the flight, when Kraigher walked up and onto the stairs. He looked over the crowd and said, “Employees of Pan American first. Mr. and Mrs. Vujnovich, please.” They pushed through the crowd and George peered directly into the eyes of the American consul as they boarded the plane first, enjoying the surprised look on the official’s face.

After a couple days of flying, they arrived in Accra, in the Gold Coast, where George took over duties as assistant airport manager, working under Kraigher. About three weeks after arriving, he put Mirjana on a plane that went from Accra to Fisherman’s Lake, Liberia; then to Ascensión, to Natal, to Georgetown, and to South Africa. From there she went to Trinidad and Puerto Rico, and on to Miami. Then she rode a train for thirty-six hours to Washington, DC. With no previous arrangements, she walked into the Yugoslavian embassy and found someone with whom she had mutual friends. She was hired to work at the embassy, and her escape from Yugoslavia was complete.

 

 

 

Vujnovich stayed in Africa
, a decision that Mirjana was not entirely happy with, because he enjoyed his job with Pan Am. Even after such a long ordeal to get out of occupied territory, Vujnovich was reluctant to go home because he felt that his job with Pan Am promised more than anything that awaited him at home. Besides, the war was on and chances were good that he would be drafted and sent overseas anyway. Better to stay here on his own terms, he thought.

The American war effort did reach out for Vujnovich before long. About the same time that Mirjana left, Pan Am was militarized for the war effort and became part of the Air Transport Command. Employees like Vujnovich were offered a military commission or a ride back to the United States with no job and the prospect of being drafted. So George accepted a commission as second lieutenant. Kraigher became a colonel. Vujnovich was soon transferred to Lagos, assisting with the delivery of planes to be used in the war, and eventually assumed command of the base. He excelled at his job, and then one day he was visited by two American civilians who asked him to join the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. He would be useful because he spoke the Serbo-Croat language and knew the region well.

Vujnovich didn’t even know what the OSS was, so the men explained that it was a special agency that reported directly to the president. He probably would be promoted if he joined the OSS, they told him. Vujnovich thought it sounded like the chance of a lifetime, so he said yes and found himself in Washington, DC, for a week. He had some time with Mirjana and then he was sent to the “Farm,” the ultrasecret OSS training facility on a sprawling estate about twenty miles north of Washington, DC. This was where he learned close-combat skills, code work, and other espionage techniques. After a month at the Farm, Vujnovich was an expert in skills like reading maps and judging latitude from the sun. The instructor in close combat was a former police chief in Shanghai, and he taught Vujnovich how to break a man’s arm or leg quickly, and how to make a man hurt so he would do anything you wanted. Once Vujnovich was fully trained, he had to take the final exam that was required of everyone leaving the Farm: a real-world assignment that would test what he had learned during his stay. His instructors gave him a challenging assignment: Go to the Bethlehem Shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland, and find out what ships were being built and how many. This was in wartime 1943, and such defense information was supposed to be closely guarded. He was given a small pressing tool for copying documents and a special phone number to call if he were caught and the police got too rough with him. If they didn’t beat him too badly, he was supposed to maintain his cover as long as he could. Calling for help from the OSS because you received a standard police beating might mean you failed your exam.

Vujnovich set out on his task and decided right away to use a technique called “negative information,” which involved stating information you know to be false in hopes that the other person will correct you and reveal secrets. The shipyard was in need of workers, so it was no problem getting a job there with a fake identification card he made himself. He befriended a coworker and joined him for a beer one day after work, casually mentioning that he had worked in another shipyard that was turning out one Liberty ship every five days, a pitifully slow rate during a war. “It doesn’t look like Baltimore is much faster than that,” he said.

This was Vujnovich’s entrée into finding out exactly what the Baltimore yard was doing, because most individual workers weren’t supposed to know details about production rates, and if they knew, they weren’t supposed to talk about it.

The other worker was eager to brag about the shipyard’s fast pace and told Vujnovich he was wrong, that, by God, they were completing a ship a day and they were damned proud of it. Vujnovich scoffed at the idea, so the man bet him a beer that he could prove it. He brought over another worker who confirmed the information. The man won his beer and Vujnovich became an OSS officer.

After his training, Vujnovich was able to spend a month and a half with Mirjana in Washington, where she was living with a naval officer and his wife on the west side of town. He had to leave before they found out that Mirjana was pregnant. Then the OSS flew him back to Cairo and on to Bari, Italy, where he arrived on November 20, 1943. The British Eighth Army had liberated Italy only about three weeks earlier. By the time he arrived in Bari, Vujnovich had been promoted to first lieutenant.