Cohoes native played 25-year role in hot, cold wars
Leo Geleta, former intelligence officer, has stories to tell
The standoff with an East German police officer armed with a submachine gun had gone on long enough for Leo Geleta, a U.S. Army officer serving in an elite military intelligence unit. With a crowd gathering and his patience spent, Geleta did an about-face and started walking to his vehicle.
Geleta, the Cohoes-born son of Eastern European immigrants, expected one of two things to occur next: either the policeman would fire a warning shot — or shoot him in the back.
Neither happened.
“I must have shocked the hell out of him, because it kind of shocked the hell out of me,” Geleta said. “I was thinking, ‘This is my job and I’m doing what my country told me to do.’ It wasn’t very funny at the time, but I laugh about it today.”
That long-ago encounter behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War some time around 1960 was just one of many dicey episodes Geleta found himself in during a 22year military career that took him from a devastated Germany at the end of World War II to equally devastated post-war Japan, from war-torn Korea to postings here in the United States, then back to Europe for run-ins with belligerent, heavily armed Eastern Bloc operatives.
“I’m happy it turned out the way it did because it led to some very interesting experiences,” Geleta, 98, said recently in a phone interview from his home outside Baltimore, where he lives with his wife of 74 years, the former Mary Standarski, also from Cohoes, who turned 100 on Jan. 24.
Geleta was born on July 12, 1923, the youngest of seven children of Ahagia Biskup and Anthony Geleta, immigrants from the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian empire. Anthony worked at the Har
mony Mills textile complex along the Mohawk River in Cohoes and was a founder of the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, serving for years as its choir director.
Leo Geleta graduated from Cohoes High School in June 1941. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor six months later to draw the U.S. into World War II, he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps but was rejected because he was color-blind.
Drafted into the Army Air Forces in 1943, Geleta wanted to be an aerial gunner but his vision deficiency precluded him from that hazardous duty. Instead, he wound up in a fighter squadron’s ground control unit that shipped out to England in early 1944, arriving in France two months after D -Day.
Leo’s unit directed fighter planes to ground targets as the Allies advanced across France and into the Netherlands. After receiving a few days’ leave the week before Christmas 1944, Geleta decided to hitch rides aboard Army trucks to see a buddy from his unit stationed in Liege in neighboring Belgium. Talk about bad timing.
It was Dec. 16, 1944, the day German forces launched Adolf Hitler’s last-gasp offensive that would be known as the Battle of the Bulge. German commandos disguised in American uniforms were reported behind Allied lines, a ruse the Nazis employed to sow confusion and hold bridges for their advancing tanks.
Stopped at a military checkpoint, Geleta was put on a truck and taken to a prison in Liege, where he and other American GIs traveling solo were being detained until it could be determined they weren’t Nazi agents. It was another five days before an officer from his unit arrived, verified Geleta’s identity and accompanied him back to their outfit.
“They weren’t taking any chances,” Geleta said. “I never visited my friend.”
Geleta tried twice to volunteer for infantry duty only to be denied both times. Instead, he was sent to officer candidate school in France. He was still in training to become an infantry officer when Germany surrendered in early May 1945. Geleta spent the next several months on various assignments, including making sure Russian troops adhered to agreed-upon demarcation lines. It wouldn’t be his last encounter with the Red Army.
With his enlistment ending in 1946, Geleta returned to Cohoes with no intention of following in his father’s footsteps at the mills.
“I knew one thing: I had to get away from Cohoes because Cohoes had no future for me,” he said.
He tried to attend college on the GI Bill but was told he was on a waiting list, so he reenlisted after an Army recruiter promised him a posting to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). After completing his CIC training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, Geleta served in the postwar U.S. military occupation of Japan, where Mary gave birth to the couple’s first child, Robert, in November 1949.
When Communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea in June 1950, Geleta requested a transfer to the war zone, where he served in a CIC detachment tasked with interrogating North Korean prisoners of war and worked with a clandestine South Korean commando unit that conducted raids into enemy territory.
After stateside postings that included stints in Syracuse, where son James was born in August 1953, and in California at an Army language school where he learned Russian, Geleta was assigned to the Army Military Intelligence School in West Germany.
While there, a friend asked him if he wanted to join something called the U.S. Military Liaison Mission (USMLM).
“I had never heard of it until then,” Geleta said.
Personnel assigned to the USMLM had Soviet clearance to travel freely in certain areas of East Germany without interference from local authorities, while Russian counterparts had a reciprocal arrangement in West Germany. The liaison mission teams were allowed to monitor each other’s military forces, up to a point, in an effort to keep the Cold War from turning hot.
By the summer of 1959, Geleta was a member of the USMLM unit based in Potsdam, East Germany. Wearing U.S. Army uniforms but armed only with WWII-era military maps and West German-made Leica cameras, Geleta and the American soldier assigned as his driver typically slept in their vehicles during their one-to-three-day missions in East Germany.
Their assignments often involved harrowing confrontations with Communist forces at a time when East-West relations were at their most tense. It wasn’t uncommon, Geleta said, for him and his driver to be detained at gunpoint by East German police or Russian troops before Soviet military authorities arrived to defuse the situation.
One evening in August 1961, Geleta was checking out reports of sudden activity along the West Berlin-East Berlin boundary when he saw Russian tanks barreling out of a Soviet military base. He reported the news to U.S. commanders who asked what he thought of the situation.
“I said that I thought they were going to kick the hell out of us” Geleta said.
What he had witnessed wasn’t the start of World War III but the beginning of the building of the Berlin Wall, a move by East Germany to stem the “brain drain” of skilled workers and professionals fleeing to West Berlin from Soviet-controlled East Berlin.
The USMLM’s Potsdam detail continued its operations until Oct. 3, 1990 – the day the two Germanys were reunited.
Geleta’s assignment with the USMLM concluded in the summer of 1962. He returned to Fort Holabird, where he trained intelligence officers destined for Vietnam.
Geleta retired from the Army as a major on June 30, 1965, then went into the financial services business, working as a stockbroker for Prudential until retiring in late 1988.
He and Mary remained in the Baltimore area, where their suburban home in Dundalk is only about a mile from the former Army intelligence post at Fort Holabird.
As for his proclivity for volunteering – for the Marines, for air combat, for the infantry, for Korea – Geleta sums it up this way:
“I felt I wanted to do my share.”
I knew one thing: I had to get away from Cohoes because Cohoes had no future for me.”
— Leo Geleta