COLONEL LEON NOORY
An Interview by Jack Edmonds
I first met Leon Noory at the 1998 Tulln reunion in Kissimmee, Florida. He was in the reception room talking to a group of Tullnites who were being regaled by stories of his adventures as an intelligence officer while stationed at Tulln Air Base and in Vienna, Austria. We met again at the 2005 reunion in Albuquerque and several chats about those days and his personal experiences.
|
|
|
Colonel Leon Brite Noory was an Air Force Intelligence Officer during WW II with the 15th Air Force. He entered Linz, Austria in 1945, as part of General Albert Snavely’s group. In February 28, 1946, he was transferred to Tulln Air Base and was responsible for security, intelligence, as well as Base historian. In 1948, he was separated from the Air Force to take a civil position in intelligence with the USFA in Vienna. In 1950, Captain Noory was recalled to active duty and Made Chief of the Foreign Accrediting Office in Vienna and served in the Wing Intelligence Office.
At Tulln, he was responsible for security checks on everyone who arrived or was transferred from the base. On one occasion, a Pan American Airlines (PAA) Constellation Captain had the engines running and was ready to taxi out for takeoff, but he had not filled out the required security form for all departing aircraft.
Lt. Noory had the Pan American ground crew put the chalks back under the wheels and would not let the aircraft depart until the PAA captain disembarked, went to the operations office, and obtained a security clearance. The angry captain argued that he wasn’t required to fill out such a form. With the backing of Noory’s superiors, the pilot ended up filling out the form and was then approved to depart Tulln.
|
Sometimes people were flown into Tulln Air Base secretly, including American agents. The Americans did not want the Russians to know who these people were nor their purpose for being in Vienna. Traveling via Russian controlled roads was too dangerous to for some of them. To assist in this secrecy, these people were flown in a small single engine aircraft (L-5, Stinson Voyager; L-19, Cessna) to a small dirt landing strip in downtown Vienna. Because the runway followed the curve of the Danube River, landings and takeoffs were very difficult, requiring the utmost pilot’s skills. Scheduling these secret flights were part of Noory’s duties. When the weather was bad for flying, these people were driven to and from Vienna over and through the Vienna woods. This gravel road was in poor condition, even for a Jeep, but it was safe enough to transport these particular people, undetected, through that part of the Russian Zone.
During Noory’s assignment in Vienna, his intelligence group established a “US Businessmen’s Tourist Mission” for the purpose of identifying and securing the US Zone from Russian Agents and agents from other countries.
A front was set up to provide information about “American businesses” and as a tourist office. The office was rigged with hidden cameras and microphones. Each person who wanted information about American business offers had to fill out a USFA information card. The card required detailed personal information, including a photo and right thumb fingerprint
These people were enticed with free gasoline, free clothing, billets, etc. in the American Zone. This was done by telling each one person that their card information would be evaluated, by the American business mission sponsors. If the information that was presented on the card met the group’s requirements, that person would receive coupons for certain free materials cashable at any American business in the American Zone.
Through this guise, American intelligence agents were able to identify over 2,000 foreign agents before the mission was shut down.
NOORY’S CHILDHOOD AND BACKGROUND
Leon Noory was born Mesopotamia on April 20, 1913 in ancient town of Mardin, between Tigress and Euphrates rivers, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Although Madrin is located inside of Turkey today, many of the country borders no longer exist. His passport birthplace reads “Iraq”, a fact that he dislikes. This means he is, sometimes, subjected to strip searches when he travels by air.
Noory’s personal recollections of his homeland are not happy ones. Being an Armenian Christian was especially bad. He remembers the hunger and hardships of living there.
More than 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed by the Ottoman Empire during WW I in what has been called the Armenian genocide. In 1915, the Turks beheaded his great-great-maternal grandmother. She was 125 (according to records in the local Catholic Church). Before she was beheaded, she was forced to watch as the Turks beheaded 6 generations of her children and children’s children, including a six month old great, great, great, great grandchild..
Noory’s father left Mardin shortly after Leon was born. He fled to the United States to escape the genocide of the Turkish persecution of christens within the Ottoman Empire. The rest of the family hoped to follow him there, but it was 13 years before the family could be together again.
Christians were forbidden to attend any school controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Leon was home-tutored by his uncle.
In 1922, Leon, his mother, his older sister, and brother escaped on camels across the desert from Turkey to Aleppo, Syria with help of tribal Arabs. Once in Syria, he attended a church-sponsored school and studied Arabic and French. He became fluent in the French, English, Arabic, and Turkish languages. Through all this, they had become a stateless people---people without a country.
On March 4, 1926, his father, John Noory, now a US citizen living in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, was reunited with his family in Providence, Rhode Island. It had been a long sea voyage on a cattle boat to reach America.
Leon received his citizenship through the immigration law which allowed children to obtain their citizenship through the naturalization of his father on September 28, 1925. This law was only effective between 1924-1926. Leon Noory had become an American citizen from day one on U.S. soil.
Leon always seemed to march to a different drumbeat---a drumbeat that he generated for his own cadence. During the poverty of the Great Depression, Leon found many ways to make money. When he was 15, he walked all the way to Boston to enter a yo-yo contest and spun the yo-yo 28,895 times in 5 hours and 31 minutes without a stop. He was finally asked by the judges to stop as he had walked all night, had not eaten since morning, and was tired. Noory was awarded the silver championship cup and was given trainfare home and a good supper. He scalped the train ticket for $3 and “thumbed” a ride home.
Noory enlisted in the US Army Air Corps as a cadet on April 18, 1941, two days before his 28th birthday. It wasn’t easy to get in because age 27 was on the old side for a cadet. Also, his birth certificate was written in Turkish! The Army Air Corps waived the age requirement because he was an accomplished linguist, and because he had been in his senior year at Georgetown University studying for a Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign Service. He became the first foreign born commissioned officer of all the military services. Although he has passed his military flight training, he was considered too old for flight duty. He became a bombardier during the war and received additional training in becoming an intelligence officer.
Lt. Noory got into a betting pool with 200 others in predicting the date and place where the Allies would invade Europe. He won! He selected June 5, 1944, in which airborne troops started parachuting into France. He named the place of the invasion, Cherbourg, France. This accurate prediction caused him to be arrested by the FBI and questioned in length about how he knew of the invasion date and place. At that time, only 4 people knew this information: President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, General Eisenhower, and General Montgomery! How could a 2nd Lieutent know this information???
At the age of 26, he petitioned the District Court in Washington, D.C. to have his birthrate changed because it was the same date as Hitler's, whom he strongly disliked. The court denied his petition saying changing one's name is not the same as changing one's birthday.
When Congress passed the War Powers Act, created free
mail for wartime soldiers, Noory, bombardier-in-training, thought scribbling
“free” on an envelope was tacky and wanted to "dress up" the letters. He
contracted with a printer to make Free Victory Stamps (stamp blowup, left)
without checking with the US Postal Service first. Sheets of 50 stamps “sold
like hotcakes” (10 cents a sheet) at Post Exchanges---until the Postmaster
General’s office stopped their use. The reason was that these stamps might confuse the postmen, and they
were not regulated by the government.
Leon Noory is the only American officer to be promoted to the rank of full Colonel at the age of 58! After 10 years on active duty and 23 years in the Air Force Reserve, Colonel Leon Noory retired and now lives in Florida.