Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  Smiling, they listened to the radio eking out fuzzy electronic squelches with a barely audible but definite “Love Me Tender.”

  With no one around within earshot, they sipped champagne into the night, talking and panning the cloudless sky, which seemed to twinkle with a thousand silver stars as they reveled in their tiny slice of paradise and freedom in the middle of a country that was not free.

  It would be the first of many overnights in the bungalow, nights in which Heidi would always sleep deeply, her dreams often filled with themes of flying, of soaring like a bird in the vast open sky, looking down over the land and then flying over the border and onward into the horizon, free to soar wherever she wanted, to places unknown and undiscovered.

  Occasionally Oma came to Heidi in her dreams, her paeans of wisdom resonating: “Our souls are free. Keep up the Family Wall. Take care of each other. Justice will win. Someday you will see Hanna again. . . .”

  Throughout East Germany, more and more citizens were tuning in to the West. Sitting up close to radios and televisions turned down low, East Germans began to learn the truth about the growing Solidarity movement in Poland, about life in West Germany, as well as listening to music from the West. They marveled at Western innovations like VCRs and Walkmans, becoming aware that West German products, electronics, appliances, cars, and clothing were of far better quality; East German versions were not only inferior but also prohibitively expensive as well. Even though the regime had told them otherwise, that Western products were expensive, poor in quality, simply unnecessary, and contributed to the delinquency of people, they could see for themselves that it was not true.

  Little by little, though the regime continued to insist its citizens had everything they needed, people began to awaken—to piece together the truth about the world outside and about life in the West, which, they came to realize, was far less menacing than they had been led to believe. But for many, there was still a lingering fear and almost an innocence of the unknown that lay on the other side of the Wall.

  Reinhard breaks ground where he will build the bungalow.

  Courtesy of the Willner family

  But the truth was, beyond the empty shelves and poor selection, Heidi and Reinhard, like millions of other East Germans, did not really care about material things. It was really only freedom that they longed for.

  PART FOUR

  19

  ASSIGNMENT: BERLIN

  INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS

  (1982–1984)

  The West won’t contain communism. It will transcend communism. We will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

  —President Ronald Reagan

  I graduated from college in 1982 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer. I chose the army in part because I came from a family that wanted to pay back, who loved what America stood for and believed in service to a country that was built on the principles of freedom and opportunity. I also wanted to do something different with my life, and saw a career in intelligence as an interesting way to try to make a difference.

  At around the same time I was raising my right hand to take the oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” in Karl Marx City, Cordula was taking an entirely different kind of oath. A teenager entering her adult years, she was raising her right hand to take the Jugendweihe promise to dedicate her life to serving the East German regime. Since her mother, Heidi, had taken the oath back in 1964, the words to the pledge had been changed and now had a much more militant tone, with the words “embracing peace-loving people” replaced by “to defend socialism against every imperialist attack.”

  Cordula continued to train alongside other new recruits in the East German junior swimming program. Heidi and Reinhard worked at their jobs during the week and relished their weekends at the bungalow, constantly improving and beautifying their private little world, which grew more lush as the years went on.

  Roland, Tiele, Manni, Helga, and Tutti’s families went about their lives, working, raising their children as best they could, taking vacations inside East Germany when they could, to the Arendsee lake, up to the Baltic coast or down to the Thuringian Forest.

  Opa spent his days quietly in Klein Apenburg, much of the time on his “Opa’s resting place” bench. At the age of eighty-three, when he could no longer care for himself, he was placed in a retirement home in Poppau. Once there, he asked Roland to get him a tape recorder so that he could “chronicle the family history.”

  He filled these tapes with details about his ancestors, talked about German history and philosophy and recited poetry. He mentioned nothing about his struggles under the regime, choosing instead to speak about things that had made him happy during his lifetime, especially his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. Perhaps most remarkably, he remembered with the greatest fondness the students he had taught over the years, recalling with delight and tenderness their amusing antics, such as when “six-year-old Karl Schinkel had found a baby sparrow and wanted to put him in a box and teach it how to sing and lay eggs.”

  After college graduation, I reported for intelligence training.

  It was the first time I had ever seen the desert. I was mesmerized by the open sky, its vast, wide-angle beauty. On a hot day on a remote Texas highway, the road ahead seemed endless.

  Truckers honked and waved as I passed by, a carefree young girl, with the windows rolled down, singing along to the radio in a ten-year-old blue Ford Granada with Virginia license plates, the old family car my parents had given me for my trip west. It was the first step of my journey into adulthood. I was now some sixteen hundred miles from home and on my third day of traveling cross-country alone. Somewhere on the long stretch of mostly uninhabited road between Amarillo, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, my long hair blowing wildly about in the breeze, I sang along, aimlessly and with abandon, to country songs I barely knew as I barreled westward down Interstate 40.

  Carefree and independent on the wide-open rural Texas highway was a liberating place for a twenty-one-year-old to be. With an abundance of youthful optimism, I was excited to be heading off into the world to face whatever adventures came my way. The endless sky, the never-ending horizon, and the mystery and allure of the desert seemed a perfect welcome to the great unknown that lay ahead.

  Times were changing for women in the military. Though many men were still uneasy about it, some doors were opening and women were starting to play more of a role in the army. In 1973, the first women graduated from U.S. Army Airborne School and in the early 1980s, the first female cadets graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The Women’s Army Corps, the WACs, was disbanded and female soldiers and officers were allowed to join the ranks of the regular army, serving in a limited number of career fields. Luckily for me, intelligence was one of them. Women were still restricted, however, from serving in combat or on enemy soil.

  After nine months of intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, I was sent to Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where I was one of three women in my Airborne Training class of more than 250 aspiring paratroopers.

  Training was led by tough, seasoned instructors called Black Hats, whose job it was to set a high standard and weed out trainees who weren’t mentally or physically up to the task. As the class’s female officer, I was constantly in the Black Hats’ crosshairs. They put me in the spotlight, seemed to enjoy testing me relentlessly, making me do extra push-ups when any of my fellow trainees were found guilty of any tiny infraction. They put me in a leadership position as first squad leader, first planeload commander, and gave me the “privilege” of being the first to jump from the airplane every time. After three weeks of training, I graduated. My brother Albert, by then an army captain, and my father, who wore his uniform, came to “pin on my wings” at the graduation ceremony.

  After Jump School, I was given my first a
ssignment: Berlin, deep inside East Germany.

  My family, especially my mother, was shocked by my assignment, given that I had reported my East German relatives on my security forms. Eddie, my father, advised that if anyone from the East should ever try to make contact with me, I was to report it to my superiors immediately. If foreign intelligence, including the Stasi, approached me, threatening to harm the family in the East if I did not comply with their demands, in an effort to shut down any threat to the family I was to convincingly respond, “I don’t know these people. They mean nothing to me.”

  In the fall of 1983, I flew to Berlin on a Lufthansa commercial flight. After passing over West Germany, our aircraft entered East German airspace, flying through one of the three prescribed twenty-mile-wide, 10,000-feet-altitude flight corridors required for civil and Allied military air traffic to and from Berlin.

  As we flew over the Inner German border, down below lay the heavily fortified 860-mile divide that separated the two halves of Germany, its length running from the Baltic Sea in the north to Czechoslovakia in the south. On the west side of the border, vigilant German and Allied forces patrolled, guarding against a Soviet invasion.

  During the flight, many thoughts raced through my mind as I wondered what awaited me when I landed. I tried to focus on the West Berlin guidebook on my lap, but found it hard to concentrate. I looked out the window as my mind drifted, questions about my East German family entering my thoughts. Other than what we had learned from Albert’s brief visit, and the sporadic, uninformative letters we received from the East, we knew little about the family.

  Who were they? Who were they really? What were their lives like? How were they coping, living in a police state? Had they suffered any consequences from my mother’s escape? Were they targeted, harassed for other reasons? My mother had a fighting spirit. Did they as well? If they did, did their moxie ever find them on the wrong side of the regime? Did they ever confront the regime or did they survive by lying low and avoiding attention, toeing the Party line? I wondered if any of them were true communists or if they just played the game to survive.

  Realizing that I would never know the answers to any of those questions, I shook off those thoughts, picked up my book again, and tried to focus on the incredible adventure upon which I was about to embark. But before long my mind wandered again and I put the guidebook back down in my lap. I just hoped they were all right and were courageous in the face of adversity.

  I was, of course, strictly forbidden from trying to make contact with the family in the East. Any contact they might try to make with me would likely be a Stasi provocation or, if done on their own accord, could put their lives at risk. My mother’s letters to them mentioned nothing about my career in the army, in intelligence, or even my assignment to Berlin.

  I couldn’t help but think about the irony of my situation: some three decades earlier, at the age of twenty, my mother had escaped the East, and now, at the age of twenty-two, I was going back deep into the very country from which she had fled. I was grateful to my mother for having taken the risk to run. What would my life have been like had I been born behind the Iron Curtain?

  As we descended into West Berlin, I looked onto the fields and villages below. Suddenly the Berlin Wall came into view. Pockmarked with watchtowers, barbed wire, and armed guards patrolling the death strip, it was daunting and utterly foreboding.

  I reported in to the Berlin Command and spent my first weekend learning the lay of the land. West Berlin was alive and bustling with activity. On the Kurfurstendamm, or Ku’Damm, West Berlin’s main commercial boulevard, West Berliners enjoyed an amazing variety of restaurants, pubs and cafés, galleries, theaters, and parks. I went to the Kempinski for Kuchen, then to the zoo. Hundreds of people were doing their Saturday-morning shopping in the crisp autumn air. There were delicious smells everywhere of freshly brewed coffee, baked goods, whole chickens cooked on rotisseries, and Würstchen frying on outside grills.

  Kaufhaus des Westens, KaDeWe, Berlin’s “Department Store of the West,” the largest department store in continental Europe, was a great display of opulence, a fantastic example of consumerism that showcased West Berlin affluence and free-market wealth. Its eight floors dazzled with the finest in crystal, glassware, and housewares; every level carried fully stocked shelves of cosmetics, perfumes, the latest Versace and Armani fashions. The top floor held a jawdropping selection of German and international foods, the choicest meats, seafood, cheeses, champagnes, wines, exotic fruits from all over the world, and the most exquisite desserts I had ever seen. I had yet to discover West Berlin’s fifty square miles of lakes, forest, parks, and beaches.

  West Berlin was a place to see and be seen. With its scintillating nightlife and parties, film festivals and cabaret shows, and eclectic avant-garde culture, it attracted people from all walks of life from all over the world, including famous movie stars and rock stars. Its economy clearly thriving, the city stood as a symbol of progress, freedom, and prosperity.

  As I walked along the Ku’Damm, West Berliners and throngs of tourists bustled about under the colorful holiday decorations, enjoying life in a city they loved. Amid the signs and bright lights from the shopping district and theater marquees, West Berlin was a shining, modern city.

  The next day, I went to the Berlin Wall. The west side of the Wall was covered in graffiti. Urban artists, using the concrete façade as their canvas, had ignited a kaleidoscope of creative energy, of political and artistic expression. Alongside vividly colored, sometimes cartoonish images, spirited messages called for “Freedom!” or made simple commentary like “Why?” Other messages such as “Let them out!” berated East Germany as not so much a country as a prison. People from all over the world came to bond with others in a shared sense of disgust at what the Wall represented, or to simply splash color to offset the lifeless gray of oppression on the other side.

  Along with other tourists, I climbed an observation platform and looked over the Wall into the East. The difference between the two sides of the city was jarring. Where West Berlin’s heartbeat was strong, East Berlin’s heartbeat had all but stopped. But for the presence of VoPo security patrols and very few cars, the city streets were murky and gray, the emptiness stretching as far into the distance as the eye could see, looking like an abandoned set from some old black-and-white 1930s film.

  That fall, the Soviets shot down a South Korean commercial jetliner that had veered into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 on board. President Reagan referred to the brazen shoot-down as a massacre and as a crime against humanity. In speeches that year, Reagan began referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” saying that communism “was the focus of all evil in the modern world.” Reagan also unveiled the “Star Wars” missile defense initiative, aiming to develop new technologies to protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack. In response to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching Western Europe, the United States began to deploy Pershing intermediate-range missiles to West Germany, an upgraded nuclear missile system that worried the Soviets.

  Over the Berlin Wall: view of the lifeless East

  Courtesy of Rüdiger Stehn

  Both sides continued to introduce a steady stream of modern military capabilities in a dangerous game of military one-upmanship. The Soviet-made T-80 tank with its never-before-seen exploding reactive armor faced off with new U.S. M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry vehicles on both sides of the Inner German border.

  The largest, most concentrated armored force in the world now stood on East German soil, ready to strike NATO through the so-called Fulda Gap into West Germany. Five armies, some twenty divisions, air regiments, missile units, and nearly half a million troops, all backed up by Warsaw Pact forces in Poland and Czechoslovakia, faced a much smaller NATO force that was outnumbered and outgunned. With such a large and battle-ready force, NATO feared Moscow could launch an attack against the West at any time. Forces on both sides remained e
ver-vigilant.

  In November 1983, NATO conducted a large-scale war game simulating a nuclear attack, which alarmed the Soviets. In Exercise Able Archer, tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops participated in the drill, which used realistic-looking dummy warheads and practiced realistic launch protocols. With East–West tensions already on edge and, given the ongoing deployment of Pershing missiles to Europe, Moscow became concerned that the exercise was a possible actual prelude to war.

  When NATO forces went to radio listening silence and the Soviets could no longer track communications, Moscow became alarmed that a preemptive attack by NATO was imminent. They put their forces on high alert. Ten days after it began, the exercise ended, leaving the Soviets greatly relieved, with NATO probably not fully appreciating how close the two sides had come to war. Many historians agree that it was perhaps the closest the world has come to nuclear war.

  Given the unpredictability of the Soviet threat, it was critical that the Allies have a clear picture at all times of the enemy’s intentions and activities. East Germany, an area roughly the size of Ohio, was teeming with hostile military activity that the United States and her Allies needed to carefully track in order to guard against attack.

  It was no wonder then that by late 1983, Berlin was a hotbed of espionage and had become known as the “spy capital of the world.” Western intelligence agencies used Berlin as a main base for information collection, often resulting in a dangerous game of cat and mouse. Every intelligence collection method imaginable was used to monitor the Soviets, from listening in on Red Army and Soviet diplomatic communications to gleaning reports from a network of agents recruited to work on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It was an unforgiving environment where, in some cases, one small mistake or false move could easily put your or someone else’s life in danger.