The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

by John le Carré

  When I say ‘my seat’, this is merely because the gallery, which was small and perched like a box at the opera on the back wall of the Bundestag chamber, was always in my experience unaccountably empty save for a CIA officer called, unconvincingly, Herr Schulz, who, having taken one look at me and sensing probably a contaminating influence, sat as far from me as possible. But today there was just the one plump gentleman. I smile at him. He beams fondly at me. I sit myself a couple of chairs along from him. The debate on the floor is in full flood. We listen, separately and intently, aware of one another’s concentration. Come lunch break we stand up, fuss over who goes through the door first, make our separate ways downstairs to the Bundestag canteen, and from different tables smile politely to one another over our soups of the day. A couple of parliamentary aides join me, but my neighbour from the diplomatic gallery remains alone. Our soups consumed, we return to our seats in the gallery. The parliamentary session ends. We go our ways.

  Next morning when I arrive, there he is in my chair again, beaming at me. And come lunchtime there he is all alone, taking his soup, while I gossip with a couple of lobby journalists. Should I invite him to join us? He’s a fellow diplomat, after all. Should I go and sit with him? My urge to empathize is, as so often, groundless: the man is perfectly happy reading his Frankfurter Allgemeine. In the afternoon he doesn’t appear, but it’s a summer’s Friday and the Bundestag is putting up the shutters.

  But come next Monday, I have barely sat down in my old seat when he enters, one finger to his lips out of deference to the uproar below while he offers me his spongy hand in greeting: but with such an air of familiarity that I am seized with a guilty conviction that he knows me and I don’t know him; that we’ve met each other on Bonn’s endless diplomatic cocktail merry-go-round; that he’s remembered the encounter all along, and I haven’t.

  Worse still, to judge from his age and bearing, there is every probability that he is one of Bonn’s numberless minor ambassadors. And one thing minor ambassadors don’t like is other diplomats, especially young ones, not recognizing them. It takes another four days for the truth to declare itself. We are both note takers: he in a ruled notebook of poor quality, held together by a red elastic band that he eases back into position after each entry; I in a pocket-sized pad of plain paper, my jottings lightly strewn with furtive caricatures of the Bundestag’s leading players. So it is perhaps inevitable that one dull afternoon during a recess I should find my neighbour leaning mischievously across the empty chair between us and enquiring whether he may take a peek; at which no sooner granted than his eyes squeeze themselves into slits behind his spectacles and his upper body squirms with mirth as, with the flourish of a magician, he spirits a dog-eared visiting card from his waistcoat pocket and observes me while I read it, first in Russian, then, for the benighted, in English:

  Mr Ivan Serov, Second Secretary, Embassy of the USSR, Bonn, West Germany.

  And hand-printed along the bottom in spidery capitals of black ink, also in English: CULTURAL.

  Even today, I hear our ensuing conversation from a distance:

  ‘You want drink some time?’

  A drink would be great.

  ‘You like music?’

  Very much. I am in fact tone deaf.

  ‘You married?’

  Indeed I am. Are you?

  ‘My wife Olga, she like music too. You got house?’

  In Königswinter. Why lie? My address is there in the diplomatic list for him to read any time he wants.

  ‘Big house?’

  Four bedrooms, I reply without counting.

  ‘You got phone number?’

  I give him my phone number. He writes it down. He gives me his. I give him my card: Second Secretary (Political).

  ‘You play music? Piano?’

  I’d like to, but I’m afraid I don’t.

  ‘You just make lousy pictures of Adenauer, okay?’ – with a huge pat on the shoulder and roars of laughter. ‘Listen. I got too small apartment. We make music, everybody complain. You call me once, okay? Invite us your house, we play you good music. I am Ivan, okay?’

  David.

  Rule One of the Cold War: nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it seems. Everyone has a second motive, if not a third. A Soviet official openly invites himself and his wife to the house of a Western diplomat he doesn’t even know? Who’s making a pass at who in this situation? Put another way, what had I said or done to encourage such an improbable proposal in the first place? Let’s go over this again, David. You say you never met him before. Now you say you may have done?

  A decision was reached, not mine to ask who by. I should invite Serov to my house exactly as he suggested. By telephone, not in writing. I should call the number he gave me, which was the official number of the Soviet Embassy in Bad Godesberg. I should state my name and ask to speak to Cultural Attaché Serov. Each of these seemingly normal acts was spelt out to me with huge precision. On being connected with Serov – if I am – I should enquire casually what day and hour suit him and his wife best for that musical event we discussed. I should aim for as early a date as possible, since potential defectors were prey to impulse. I should be sure to convey my compliments to his wife, whose inclusion in the approach – whose mere acknowledgement – was exceptional in such cases.

  On the telephone, Serov was brusque. He spoke as if he vaguely remembered me, said he would consult his diary and call me back. Goodbye. My masters predicted that it was the last I would hear of him. A day later he called me back, I guessed from another phone since he sounded more like his jolly self.

  Okay, eight o’clock Friday, David?

  Both of you, Ivan?

  Sure. Serova, she come also.

  Great, Ivan. See you eight o’clock. And my best to your wife.

  Throughout the day, sound technicians dispatched from London had been fiddling with the wiring in our living room, and my wife was worried about scratches in the paintwork. At the appointed hour an enormous chauffeur-driven ZiL limousine with blackened windows rolled into our drive and came slowly to a halt. A rear door opened and Ivan emerged, rump first, like Alfred Hitchcock in one of his own movies, pulling a man-sized cello after him. Then nobody. Was he alone after all? No, he was not. The other rear door is opening, the one I can’t see from the porch. I am about to have my first glimpse of Serova. But it’s not Serova. It’s a tall, agile man in a sharp, single-breasted black suit.

  ‘Say hullo to Dimitri,’ Serov announces on the doorstep. ‘He come instead of my wife.’

  Dimitri says he loves music too.

  Before dinner, Serov, evidently no stranger to the bottle, drank whatever was offered him and wolfed a plateload of canapés before playing us an overture from Mozart on his cello, which we applauded, Dimitri loudest. Over a dinner of venison, which Serov greatly relished, Dimitri enlightened us about recent Soviet accomplishments in the arts, space travel and the furtherance of world peace. After dinner, Ivan played us a difficult composition by Stravinsky. We applauded that too, again led by Dimitri. At ten o’clock the ZiL rolled back into the drive, and Ivan left bearing his cello, with Dimitri at his side.

  A few weeks later, Ivan was recalled to Moscow. I was never allowed to know what was in his file, whether he was KGB or GRU, or whether his real name was indeed Serov, so I am free to remember him in my own way: as Cultural Serov, as I called him to myself, jovial lover of the arts, who now and then flirted wistfully with the idea of coming over to the West. Perhaps he had put out a few signals to that effect, without any great intention of seeing them through. And almost certainly he was working either for the KGB or the GRU, since it’s hard to imagine he would otherwise have enjoyed such freedom of movement. So for ‘cultural’, read ‘spy’. In short: just another Russian torn between love of country and the unrealizable dream of a freer life.

  Did he see me as a fellow spy? Another Schulz? If the K
GB had done their homework, they could hardly have failed to spot me for what I was. I had never taken a Diplomatic Service exam, never attended one of those country-house jamborees where potential diplomats are allegedly tested for their social graces. I had never been on a Foreign Office course, or seen the inside of the Foreign Office’s headquarters in Whitehall. I had arrived in Bonn from nowhere, speaking indecently fluent German.

  And if all that wasn’t enough to mark me out as a spook, there were the hawk-eyed Foreign Service wives, who maintained as beady a watch on their husbands’ rivals for promotion, medals and eventual knighthoods as any KGB researcher. One look at my credentials and they knew they needn’t worry about me any more. I wasn’t family. I was a Friend, which is how respectable British foreign servants describe the spies they are reluctantly obliged to count among their number.

  8

  A legacy

  The year is 2003. A bullet-proof, chauffeur-driven Mercedes picks me up at crack of dawn from my Munich hotel and drives me the half-dozen miles to the agreeable Bavarian town of Pullach, industries brewing, since lapsed, and spying, which is eternal. My appointment is for a working breakfast with Dr August Hanning, at that time reigning Präsident of the German Intelligence Service, the BND, and a sprinkling of his senior colleagues. From the guarded gateway we pass low buildings half hidden by trees and decked in camouflage netting to a pleasant white-painted country house more typical of Germany’s north than south. Dr Hanning stands waiting on the doorstep. We have a little time, he says. Would I care to take a look around the shop? Thank you, Dr Hanning, I would like to very much.

  During my foreign service in Bonn and Hamburg more than thirty years earlier, I had had no contact with the BND. I had not, as the jargon has it, been ‘declared’; least of all had I entered its fabled headquarters. But when the Berlin Wall came down – an event unforetold by any intelligence service – and the British Embassy in Bonn, to its amazement, was obliged to pack its bags and remove itself to Berlin, our Ambassador of the day bravely took it into his head to invite me to Bonn to celebrate the occasion. In the intervening years I had written a novel called A Small Town in Germany which spared neither the British Embassy nor the provisional Bonn government. In predicating – wrongly – a West German lurch to the far right, I had contrived a conspiracy between British diplomats and West German officials which had led to the death of an Embassy employee bent on exposing an inconvenient truth.

  I was not therefore expecting to be anyone’s dream of the ideal person to be ringing down the curtain on the old Embassy, or welcoming in the new, but the British Ambassador, a most civilized man, preferred to think otherwise. Not content with having me deliver a (I hope) jolly address at the closing ceremony, he invited to his residence beside the Rhine every real-life counterpart of the fictional German officials that my novel had maligned, requiring of each of them, as the price of a fine dinner, a speech delivered in character.

  And Dr August Hanning, posing as the least attractive member of my fictional ensemble, had risen sportingly and wittily to the occasion. It was a gesture that I took gratefully to heart.

  We are in Pullach, it is more than a decade later, Germany is thoroughly reunited, and Hanning is waiting for me on the doorstep of his handsome white house. Though I have never been here, I know, like anyone else, the bare bones of the BND’s history: how General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of Hitler’s military intelligence staff on the Eastern Front, had at some unclear point towards the end of the war spirited his precious Soviet archive to Bavaria, buried it, then cut a deal with the American OSS, forerunner of the CIA, whereby he handed over his archive, his staff and himself in return for instatement as head of an anti-Soviet spying agency under American command, to be called the Gehlen Organisation or, to the initiated, the Org.

  There are stages in between, naturally, even a courtship of sorts. In 1945 Gehlen is flown to Washington, still technically a US captive. Allen Dulles, America’s top spy and founding Director of the CIA, looks him over and decides he likes the cut of his jib. Gehlen is treated, flattered, taken to a baseball match, but preserves that taciturn and remote image that in the spy world passes all too easily for inscrutable depth. Nobody seems to know or care that, while spying for the Führer in Russia, he fell for a Soviet deception plan that rendered much of his archive valueless. It’s a new war, and Gehlen is our man. In 1946, now presumably no longer captive, he is installed as chief of West Germany’s embryonic overseas intelligence service under the protection of the CIA. Old comrades from Nazi days form the core of his staff. Controlled amnesia relegates the past to history.

  In arbitrarily deciding that former or present Nazis were loyal by definition to the anti-communist flag, Dulles and his Western allies had of course deluded themselves on the grand scale. As every schoolchild knows, anyone with a murky past is a sitting duck for blackmail. Add now the smouldering resentment of military defeat, the loss of pride, unspoken outrage at the Allied mass bombing of your beloved home town – Dresden, for instance – and you have as potent a recipe for recruitment as the KGB and Stasi could possibly wish for.

  The case of Heinz Felfe speaks for many. In 1961, when he was finally arrested – I happened to be in Bonn at the time – Felfe, a son of Dresden, had spied for the Nazi SD, Britain’s MI6, East Germany’s Stasi and the Soviet KGB in that order – oh, and of course for the BND, where he was a prized player in games of cat-and-mouse against the Soviet intelligence services. And well he might be, since his Soviet and East German paymasters fed him any spare agents they had on their books for their star man inside the Org to unmask and claim the glory. So precious indeed was Felfe to his Soviet masters that they set up a dedicated KGB unit in East Germany solely to manage their agent, process his intelligence and further his brilliant career inside the Org.

  By 1956, when the Org acquired the grand title of Federal Intelligence Service, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, Felfe and a fellow conspirator named Clemens, also a son of Dresden and a leading player in the BND, had supplied the Russians with the BND’s entire order of battle, including the identities of ninety-seven field officers serving under deep cover abroad, which must have been something like a grand slam. But Gehlen, always a poseur and something of a fantasist, contrived to sit tight until 1968, at the end of which time 90 per cent of his agents in East Germany were working for the Stasi, while back home in Pullach sixteen members of his extended family were on the BND payroll.

  Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a better job of pretending to be a cut above a public that has no choice but to pay top price for second-rate intelligence whose lure lies in the gothic secrecy of its procurement, rather than its intrinsic worth. In all of which, the BND, to say the least, is not alone.

  We are in Pullach, we have a little time, and my host is giving me the tour of this handsome, rather English-style country house. I am impressed, as I suspect he wishes me to be, by the imposing conference room with its shiny long table, twentieth-century landscapes and pleasing outlook on to an inner courtyard, where sculptures of strength-through-joy boys and girls on plinths strike heroic postures at each other.

  ‘Doctor Hanning, this is really remarkable,’ I say politely.

  To which, with the faintest of smiles, Hanning answers, ‘Yes. Martin Bormann had pretty good taste.’

  I am following him down a steep stone staircase, flight after flight of it, until we stand in Martin Bormann’s personalized version of Hitler’s Führerbunker, complete with beds, telephones, latrines and ventilation pumps, and whatever else was needful to the survival of Hitler’s most favoured henchman. And all of it, Hanning assures me with his same wry smile as I stare stupidly round me, officially listed as a protected monument under Bavarian state law.

  So this is where they brought Gehlen in 1947, I’m thi
nking. To this house. And gave him his rations, and clean bedding, and his Nazi-era files, and card indices, and his old Nazi-era staff, while uncoordinated teams of Nazi hunters chased around after Martin Bormann, and the world tried to absorb the indescribable horrors of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. This is where Reinhard Gehlen and his Nazi secret policemen were installed: in Bormann’s country residence that he won’t be requiring any time soon. One minute Hitler’s not-very-good spymaster is in flight from the Russian fury, the next he is the pampered favourite of his new best friends, the victorious Americans.

  Well, perhaps at my age I shouldn’t have looked so surprised. And my host’s smile tells me as much. Wasn’t I once in the profession myself? Wasn’t my own former Service energetically trading intelligence with the Gestapo right up to 1939? Wasn’t it on friendly terms with Muammar Gaddafi’s chief of secret police right up to the last days of Gaddafi’s rule – terms friendly enough to pack up his political enemies, even pregnant ones, and see them rendered to Tripoli to be locked up, and interrogated with all the best enhancements?

  It’s time for us to climb back up the long stone staircase for our working breakfast. As we arrive at the top – I think we are in the main hallway to the house, but can’t be sure – two faces from the past greet me from what I take to be Pullach’s wall of fame: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Hitler’s Abwehr from 1935 to 1944, and our friend General Reinhard Gehlen, the BND’s first Präsident. Canaris, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi but no fan of Hitler, played a double game with Germany’s right-wing resistance groups, but also with British Intelligence, with whom he remained in sporadic contact throughout the war. His duplicity caught up with him in 1945, when he was summarily tried and horribly executed by the SS: a brave and muddled hero of some sort, and certainly no anti-Semite, but a traitor to his country’s leadership for all that. As to Gehlen, also a wartime traitor, it is hard to know in the cold light of history what is left to admire in him beyond deviousness, plausibility and a con artist’s powers of self-persuasion.