Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  Claus is scared. He stutters, repeating the same answers over and again, but after the horror of the betrayed tunnel, nothing he says can persuade the diggers he’s not working for the Stasi. With each answer, the diggers get more worked up, and suddenly they rush towards him and there’s a moment where it seems as though he might fall back into the hole, but instead they push him sideways onto a plank and Claus screams as a nail pierces his backside.

  ‘What are you doing? I just want to help, please let me help!’

  One of the diggers grabs a piece of rope, ties Claus’s hands together. ‘Are you armed? Where’s your gun, where are you hiding it?’

  Claus stutters, ‘I don’t have one. All right, yes I do. It’s in my apartment.’

  ‘Where is it? Keys! Give them to us!’

  Claus pulls out his keys, gives them to Gigi and Hasso, who drive to his flat and search it. No gun.

  Back at the cellar, they hover over Claus, shouting at him, ‘Why are you lying? Where is it?’

  ‘It’s hanging behind a cupboard on the wall in my flat,’ says Claus; ‘it’s on a piece of string.’

  They drive back to his flat, find the gun, bring it to the cellar. More questions.

  By midnight, they’re all exhausted. They have no idea what to do: they can’t kill Claus, but they don’t trust him. As night falls, the city quietening, Wolf thinks of something. He leaves the cellar, drives home, picks up his phone and makes a call.

  An hour later, Wolf is on the road, Claus in the back of his windowless VW van, hands tied. Wolf drives past Brandenburg Gate, around Checkpoint Charlie, then takes the road south through the city towards Tempelhof airport. Just before the airport, he turns off down a gravel lane towards a large building. Inside, a group of men who are expecting him. Wolf pushes Claus towards them, thanks them for their help, then leaves. He’ll have his answer in the morning.

  It’s early when Wolf’s phone rings. It’s the men from last night – the Verfassungsschutz, West Berlin’s intelligence agency. Since the tunnellers knew nothing about interrogating people, how to work out if someone was working for the Stasi or not, he’d taken Claus to people who could. The intelligence agents had grilled Claus all through the night.

  ‘And?’ asks Wolf, ‘what do you think?’

  Their answer isn’t very helpful. There’s no proof that Claus is a Stasi informant, they say, but no proof that he isn’t. So be careful.

  That morning, Joachim meets the others at the cellar. They agree that it’s unlikely after everything that happened that Claus will return; he’ll have been scared off by the whole experience. But a few hours later, there’s a knock on the door and Claus appears, smiling.

  ‘Wow, that was quite a night,’ Claus says. ‘You guys have the most amazing connections! It was pretty tough, but I don’t blame you; it’s better to be careful isn’t it. I’m back now though, and I’ve got nothing to do with the Stasi – so please let me work with you?’

  The diggers look at each other, shocked at Claus’s cheerful persistence. Here’s a man who’s been tied to a chair, had a nail stuck in his bottom, been interrogated – twice – yet now he’s back for more.

  Claus looks back at the diggers, sensing their uncertainty. ‘I’ll do two shifts in a row, even three. I won’t leave the cellar if you like; you can watch me all the time!’

  Joachim says they need a moment to think. Walking to the corner of the basement, they weigh it up. So far there’s nothing to suggest that Claus is a Stasi spy, and even if he is, there’s not much they can do about it if they’re not prepared to kill him.

  ‘What if we let him dig,’ says Joachim, ‘but we don’t tell him where we’re digging to. Or the date of the escape?’

  It’s a clever idea. Even if he was a spy, without those details, the Stasi wouldn’t know when or where the escape was happening. Plus, just looking at Claus’s huge frame, it’s hard to say no. They don’t have long left to dig the tunnel and here’s a man, built like an ox, who wants to help.

  ‘Okay,’ says Joachim to Claus, ‘you’re in.’

  50

  Paris

  August 1962

  CLIMBING OUT OF a taxi, dressed in an expensive suit, Reuven Frank walks towards the Parisienne restaurant, shiny shoes clicking on the pavement, the door opened effortlessly by a bellboy in red. In front of him, one of the most gorgeous rooms he’s ever seen – red velvet seats, small intimate tables topped with art-deco lamps, a piano in the corner, and beautiful people everywhere. It’s everything he’d hoped he would find at Maxim’s, the most famous restaurant in the world.

  Walking through the room, he sees the two of them, his Berlin correspondent, Piers Anderton, and NBC bureau chief, Gary Stindt. A few days ago, Gary had called Reuven, said he needed to talk. Since they’d agreed never to discuss the tunnel on the phone, whenever Piers and Gary wanted to talk to him, Reuven had to fly to Europe. It had happened once before, after the tunnel sprang the leak. Reuven had come to London, dined with Piers and Gary at the Savoy Grill, flown home the next day. It felt extravagant but Reuven Frank loved the romance of it, talking in hushed tones in luxurious European restaurants about the most daring escape operation under the Berlin Wall.

  Sitting down at Maxim’s, cocktail-eyes flicking round to see if there are any famous diners here tonight, Piers and Gary tell Reuven what’s happened: water is coming into the tunnel. Again.

  Reuven’s heart sinks. The first leak had almost destroyed the tunnel; it was only down to the West Berlin water authorities that they’d been able to continue. With the tunnel so far under East Berlin, West Berlin’s water department can’t help now.

  Piers looks down. He’s devastated. He’d been going to the cellar for months, knew the diggers intimately, had seen them shake with exhaustion with each dig, felt their fear of the VoPos, of being buried alive; and now, it could all come to nothing. Then there was the other problem: if the tunnel was destroyed, what would happen to their documentary? They had 12,000 feet of footage boxed up in the bureau storeroom. It was worth nothing if the tunnel collapsed and no one escaped.

  Reuven sits back. There’s a long silence. He is desperate for an ending; most of his documentaries end in complexity and injustice, and he wants this story to do something different, give people the kind of ending that rarely happens in real life. Perhaps he’d been hoping for too much.

  ‘Remember,’ says Reuven, ‘we didn’t set out to make a programme about a tunnel. We set out to make a documentary about people who wanted to escape. And if this tunnel fails, well, we can still tell that story.’

  Reuven talks about the tourists who swarm along Bernauer Strasse, taking photos of the Wall. ‘Let’s show these people who buy their Wall souvenirs what the Wall really means. We can tell them about other escapes as well as this failed tunnel: people who’ve jumped to their deaths, the forged passports, the idealistic student escape-helpers.’

  His voice trails off. It’s a valiant attempt at a pep talk, but they all know it: if the tunnel fails, their documentary will fail too.

  Though they have footage of other escapes, all they’d been able to film was the aftermath: open manhole covers, policemen talking, a blank wall. Like every news crew, they were always too late to film an escape in progress.

  Eventually they change the subject, sit back and enjoy the expensive taste of the wine, the smell of perfume and the sound of the room filling around them. Reuven asks for the bill, but before he pays, there’s one final problem to discuss. The one back home.

  A few weeks ago, a State Department official had come to see Reuven’s boss, the head of NBC. He’d heard rumours, he said, that American TV networks were trying to film escapes in Berlin. CBS had been trying to film an escape tunnel – a different one – and he’d been to their office to tell them to stop. Was NBC filming one too? If so, they, too, needed to stop.

  The White House was still terrified about Berlin, President Kennedy still obsessed by the city that he thought was the most likely plac
e to spark nuclear war. After all, ten months ago, back in October 1961, they’d seen how a spat in Berlin could bring the world to the brink of war.

  It had begun with a petty argument about American access to East Berlin. Walter Ulbricht was harassing American diplomats, hoping that if he made their life difficult when they drove into East Berlin, he could push the US out of Berlin entirely. He was banking on President Kennedy not retaliating. But he bet wrong. Kennedy had a new advisor in West Berlin: General Lucius Clay, the man who organised the American airlift in 1948 that kept West Berlin going during the Soviet blockade. The city had never forgotten him: West Berliners wrote letters to General Clay, and when they saw him in the street, they’d race over to say hello and shake his hand. General Clay thought Kennedy should have intervened when the barbed wire went up, but now he saw this spat as Kennedy’s chance to show West Berliners that he still cared, by fighting for the city and standing up to Walter Ulbricht.

  And so the next time East German soldiers made life difficult for American diplomats entering East Berlin, General Clay’s response was tanks: four of them, bulldozer blades mounted on the front, driven right up to the border of East Berlin, guns pointing towards the VoPos. And over one week in October 1961, Clay sent those tanks to the border every time an American official was harassed by East German soldiers. At the end of that week, on Friday 27 October, the Soviets retaliated, sending ten T-54 tanks to the border, where they sat, engines running, guns pointing towards the American tanks on the other side.

  This was a historic moment: never before in the Cold War had American and Soviet soldiers faced each other at point-blank range. American helicopters and Soviet MiG fighter planes buzzed overhead. Journalists from West Berlin, who’d heard that something dangerous was happening, scampered round the edges, taking photos. Further back from Checkpoint Charlie, hundreds of West Berliners stood huddled in the cold, desperate to know what was happening, aware it was dangerous to be there, but too afraid to sit at home, waiting passively for what might come. Rumours flew through the crowds: maybe the Soviet army was marching towards West Berlin right now to take their half of the city.

  Behind the scenes, President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev telephoned their representatives in West and East Berlin, asking questions, trying to work out their next move. Only a few months ago, Khrushchev had begun new nuclear tests, and that week he was secretly preparing to test the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built – a thirty-megaton nuclear bomb that had a thousand times the explosives used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The fear of nuclear war had reached fever pitch; only a few days earlier, Time magazine had run a story with the headline:

  [NUCLEAR] SHELTERS: HOW SOON – HOW BIG – HOW SAFE?

  In Berlin, as the afternoon darkened, an East German commander switched on six searchlights, blinding the American soldiers. Tank warfare was now light warfare. Retaliating, the Americans switched on their own much brighter searchlights, dazzling the Soviet soldiers in their mud-covered tanks, the border now brightly lit as if for a play.

  Night set in. It was cold. Hour after hour, the soldiers in tanks either side of the border looked at each other down their barrels, feeling the responsibility of the live ammunition in their tank racks, trying not to think about what could happen if a shaking finger accidentally pulled a trigger. Every so often a soldier would climb out of their tank and wander around to warm up, then clamber back in.

  Back in their capitals, each president was making bigger moves. Khrushchev put his nuclear strike forces on special alert status, the first time he’d done so over a dispute with the US. Kennedy put American aircraft and warships on full alert throughout the world, ordering four submarines with sixteen warheads to be submerged in the North Sea.

  Back in Berlin, the tanks sat there. The Soviet soldiers sat there. The American soldiers sat there. All of them straining to keep their eyes open, their bodies shutting down in the cold.

  Just before dawn, Berlin time, Kennedy sent his brother, Bobby, to negotiate with a secret intermediary, a Soviet spy who passed messages to and from Khrushchev. No one knows exactly what was agreed in that meeting, as the material is still classified, but at 10.30 a.m., after a sixteen-hour stand-off, Khrushchev pulled back his Soviet tanks. Thirty minutes later, American tanks withdrew. And so ended what many describe as the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.

  The US had stood firm, atoned for its anaemic response to the Wall, made it clear it would not be pushed around by Nikita Khrushchev or Walter Ulbricht. But there was a more sobering lesson: in the tinderbox of Berlin, a petty disagreement about American access to East Berlin could bring the world to the edge of nuclear war.

  Since that week in October 1961, there’d been an unspoken agreement between the Soviet Union and the US. Neither wanted the situation in Berlin to spin out of control, leading to an accidental nuclear war. Instead, there was now stalemate.

  It’s why American soldiers had stood by as Peter Fechter lay dying. And right now, ten months later, it’s why the White House wanted to stop TV crews meddling in escape operations. American soldiers could stand by and watch as an East Berlin bricklayer died a slow death in front of the cameras, but it would be harder to sit back if an American reporter got caught in the crossfire of an escape operation gone wrong.

  Back in that meeting at NBC headquarters, Reuven Frank’s boss had bluffed, not said anything to the State Department official about the film or the tunnel. He wanted to keep going, as did Reuven Frank, as did Joachim Rudolph, all of them determined to see the escape through, whatever the cost.

  At the end of the night at Maxim’s, Reuven Frank pays the bill, walks back to his hotel, and as he drops off to sleep in his Parisienne sheets, he knows that the next time he’s back in Europe, the escape will either be on, or the tunnel destroyed.

  51

  Numbers

  UNFURLING THE MAP, the diggers spread it out on the cellar floor. On a piece of paper are the latest numbers from the theodolite – the surveying instrument borrowed from the university’s engineering department. The numbers will tell them where they are, what’s above them. From the tunnel they can hear water trickling in. It’s coming in more slowly than the first leak, but this time, with no way of fixing it, they guess they only have a week before the tunnel collapses. The only solution is to dig up from where they are right now. But where is that?

  Joachim reads out the numbers. Scanning the map, the diggers cross-reference those numbers with buildings, street names, muttering quietly, calculating on the hoof, trying to work out where they are. Their fingers eventually close in on a street and an apartment: number seven Schönholzer Strasse.

  They’re just one street away from their target basement, the one Mimmo and Gigi checked out in the East, the one they have a key for. It doesn’t look far on the map, but in tunnel time it would mean weeks digging. No chance of making a mad dash for it. Instead, tunnelling straight up is their only option. Sitting back, they discuss what that means.

  First they must smash into the cellar of a building they know nothing about. Once in the cellar, the diggers will have to force their way into the apartment. Finally – the most dangerous part – since they don’t have a key to the apartment, they’ll have to open it from the inside to let the escapees in. And the reason this is so dangerous is that Schönholzer Strasse is just one street away from the Wall, which means it’s patrolled by VoPos, all the time, looking for people trying to sneak across the border. The escapees will have to walk past those VoPos, trying not to look conspicuous as dozens of them approach the same apartment and disappear inside.

  The diggers fall silent. The odds are terrible. Every week there are reminders of what can happen when escapes go wrong. In the past month, three people had been killed trying to escape, the last one a forty-year-old carpenter called Ernst. He’d climbed to the top of a cemetery wall that led to the border. It was studded with broken glass to stop escapees. Cat-like, Ernst had weaved through the glass,
ignored the border guards shouting at him to come down, and he’d almost made it, preparing to leap over the Wall, when a VoPo fired a shot from 100 metres away. Ernst fell, his body landing between two graves, his eyes open to the sky. After what happened with Peter Fechter, the VoPos were quick to move in, dragging his lifeless body away before journalists could film him lying there. But the VoPos couldn’t remove all the evidence, for the bullet that killed Ernst had entered his head through his cap, and as Ernst fell off the Wall, his hat had floated over the top into West Berlin, where it fell to the ground. It was punctured by a single hole. ‘The man with the cap’ – that’s how people who saw it described him. A few days later, a cross adorned with flowers and wreaths appeared on Bernauer Strasse near where Ernst was killed, just a short walk away from the diggers’ cellar where they sit now, preparing to make the most difficult decision of the escape operation so far.

  Digging up into a cellar on Schönholzer Strasse is crazy, they know it is. But somehow, they’ve ended up here, with this final choice: digging straight up or abandoning the tunnel forever. The diggers sit in silence, lost in memories of the months underground, the VoPos patrolling above their heads, risking everything to get this far. Friends of theirs are sitting in Stasi prisons, just as they could be if they carry on. Perhaps this moment, right now, is the time to back out.

  But Joachim barely registers this moment as a choice, for what was the point in any of this if they give up; they just need to think, work out how to protect themselves.

  And so the diggers agree to give it one last shot. But this time they will keep the final details of the escape plan secret – only the core group of diggers will be told the address of the cellar in the East. The only thing left is to set a date: Friday 14 September.

  52