No, he didn’t mean smell-ums as in smelling bad. He meant smell-ums as in the typically American tendency to turn every ugly acronym we can get our hands on into an even uglier albeit pronounceable word. In this case the acronym was SMLM, as in Soviet Military Liaison Mission.

These guys were spies. Spies in uniform, that is. And they were about as inconspicuous as the Berlin Wall itself. In other words, they were about as conspicuous as you could get. Both “sides” had them, by the way. And they played this peculiar cat-and-mouse game that I have never yet found the proper word for. Espionage doesn’t work for me here because they were just way too visible. Surveillance doesn’t really cut it, either.

Anyway, they were in uniform, as I said, and they drove around in these noisy Volga sedans, four guys to a car, wearing these monstrous Soviet hats and talking to Fearless Leader on their monstrous radios and taking pictures of anything and everything of interest in West Berlin they could find only it wasn’t the girls, strangely enough.

Unless they were American girls, maybe. In uniform, I mean. They wanted to know what “we” as in “us” or to be exact the “US” Military Forces in West Berlin were up to. They knew precisely what the US Military was up to, of course. They just wanted to know it real good, you know? They also knew precisely where they could and could not go. You know; casernes, training areas, convoys etc. were taboo. They had it in writing and the whole bit. But that’s were the fun starts and the cat-and-mouse game thing actually begins.

The whole idea was to go there, of course. And whenever American military personnel spotted these guys, they were supposed to report them immediately to their friendly neighborhood American Military Police Officer or to other “spookier” types and/or “detain” them, should the Soviets actually be there where they weren’t supposed to be. Of course the game wouldn’t be any fun if the Soviets actually let anybody detain them so they never did. Let anybody detain them, I mean. Not if they could help it, that is. And this led to several accidents and incidents over the years.

Reliable sources inform me, for example, that large American “five tons” (huge trucks transporting mobile offices) on convoy on the AVUS were known on occasion to actually block and lock in smell-ums into tight little areas along that thoroughfare that they had had absolutely no intention of ever going to. But then the American MPs would show up and write down the score and let them go and the game could start all over again.

American forces loved playing the game, too, of course. Their Military Mission in Potsdam was continually under Soviet surveillance, for example, but word had it that Mission personnel leaving unexpectedly in the middle of the night with a different vehicle than the one with which they arrived could be very effective in shaking off their Soviet shadows. And the Americans were also known to openly invite their smell-um counterparts to extravagant parties and furnish them with generous amounts of whiskey in the hopes that these good old boys would maybe start talking.

But this game wasn’t without its casualties, either. Unfortunately, there were also ugly and even deadly incidents. Tragically, not too long before the end of the smell-um era, American Major Arthur Nicholson was shot and killed near Berlin while “playing the game”. Unofficial reports suggest that he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity of taking some close-ups of new Soviet tank technology and that the sleeping Russian guard he had managed to sneak past woke up and panicked at the wrong moment.

But that was then and this is now. And although I personally would just truly love to take a test drive in one of those awful Volga sedans (and probably could here, if I wanted to, come to think of it) the game these Cold War guys used to play has long ago lost its relevance – thankfully so.