Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  After cutting ties with the sister she had met only once but who had become a source of strength, her role model for courage and independence, Heidi consoled herself by knowing she had done the right thing for Cordula. Heidi asked her siblings to keep her informed of any news from their sister.

  In Washington, my mother received the letter and had no idea what it meant but knew that, for Heidi to cut off all contact, something big had to have happened.

  In the national sports training facility in East Berlin, athletes assembled from all over the country, from Leipzig, Erfut, Cottbus, and Karl Marx City. A ministry-level sports director took to the stage and the room fell silent. Holding a microphone, he turned to address the room packed with the latest fresh crop of the nation’s best athletes. His voice weighted, his speech measured, he delivered his words with great calculated effect:

  You are no longer common citizens of East Germany. You are now the nation’s elite.

  You have been selected to represent the top tier of our society. Your performances in your sport will bring great rewards to you, your family, and to your country.

  With this honor, comes great responsibility. Each of you has been chosen for your athletic ability to be not only the best in East Germany, but to be the best in the world.

  Your job is to work harder than everyone else. Let no one outdo you. Commit yourself completely and without reservation every day toward every task. You are the pride of our country. Make your trainers proud. Make your country proud.

  Athletes training for the Olympics had special benefits. Besides travel, they enjoyed foreign goods, things that were unavailable to average East German citizens, like the latest electronic gadgets and household appliances, Western shoes and clothing, cars, and so-called specialty foods. While average citizens stood in line for a limited selection or patchy supply of food, the athletes enjoyed nutrition necessary to build strength and muscle mass, their diets included Western imports, such as bananas, oranges, and a variety of energy-fueling carbohydrates and strength-inducing proteins.

  They also had access to world-class athletic equipment. For Cordula that meant riding superbly designed bicycles with hand-crafted Italian frames with top-of-the line Japanese components. Sports and cycling apparel were engineered with the most advanced aerodynamic synthetic fibers of the day: polyurethane, Lycra, and polyester blends, including lightweight, high-performance fabrics. Footwear, cycling, and running shoes were West Germany’s Adidas World brand, the leading-edge sports shoe of the day.

  Athletes trained in optimal conditions, had strictly controlled diets, and were constantly tended to by the country’s top sports physicians and physiotherapists, who were always on site to treat, mend, and see to their every need. Some twelve thousand coaches served East German athletes, compared to fifteen hundred that managed athletes in West Germany—nearly ten times as many. Hundreds of psychologists were responsible for individual and team dynamics and for making sure the athletes toed a strict ideological line.

  For Cordula and all the athletes, it was a whirlwind of excitement. Although the perks were amazing, more than anything she felt proud to be among the best athletes in one of the most rigorous, hardworking, and successful sports programs in the world.

  Fully incorporating their cutting-edge sports methodologies, in every training session trainers drove their athletes to the absolute limit, demanding they give their best every single day, and the athletes themselves felt compelled to excel, always aware that anything less than consistently superior performance would get them tossed out of the program and replaced at the snap of a finger by someone who could reach higher. Constantly pressured to achieve superb results and with the regime relentlessly driving them, the athletes could see propaganda-laden billboards and banners hanging from almost every surface of every Olympic training gym, urging them on and reminding them at every turn, WE ARE WORLD CHAMPIONS! and WIN! WIN! WIN!!!

  Cordula prepares for a race.

  Courtesy of the Willner family

  One day in the fall of 1985, Cordula, the Olympic training team, and their coaching staff came to East Berlin to train at a velodrome not far from where I was conducting intelligence operations.

  After a good night’s rest in their dormitory near the Marzahn Sports Complex in East Berlin, they had breakfast and began the day with a surprise. Before practice, the trainers would treat the girls to a VIP tour of East Berlin.

  As usual, the streets of East Berlin were eerily desolate, devoid of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, aside from the occasional policeman or roving patrol car. Wearing their stylish azure-blue team jackets emblazoned with the white letters DDR (East Germany) and country patch with the state crest, the privileged athletes, flanked by their trainers and a couple of security men, walked up the famous Unter den Linden. Once the center of downtown Berlin, the storied chaussée had been a thriving cultural center, an elegant boulevard lined with blossoming, fruit-bearing linden trees and teeming with life as people strolled about on the green or passed lively cabaret houses, embassies, and crowded cafés on their way to the opera or museums. But, like the rest of East Berlin, Unter den Linden had fallen into disrepair.

  Despite the recent construction of high-rise apartment complexes and nominal restoration of some of the older buildings, the boulevard remained a bleak street with drab façades and tenantless buildings, the entire area empty of the life that had once flourished there. Cordula and the group moved westward, down the avenue. Before she came to the end of the road, she saw it.

  Rising out of a haze in the distance stood the colossal Brandenburg Gate, the iconic symbol of German strength and unity. Originally built as a gateway through the heart of Berlin, and the city entrance leading to the palace of the Prussian monarchs, the towering hundred-foot-tall golden sandstone monument, with its twelve Doric columns and patinaed Quadriga—a statue of the goddess of Victory commanding a chariot of horses—now stood in the East, all access through the colonnade blocked by a thick, massive concrete structure, the Berlin Wall. Beyond the Gate and the Wall lay the city of West Berlin.

  Fifty yards from the monument, the trainers halted their athletes at the rope that cordoned off further access. Being so close to the border, the site was strictly off-limits to the East German public. On this day the area was deserted, except for the presence of the vaunted athletes, their minders, and a few armed guards who lingered nearby, prepared to act should anyone attempt escape. Standing in the gray morning mist, the athletes looked on, Cordula seeing the border for the first time.

  They stood in silence, contemplating the view, gazing along the spotless expanse of concrete to the Gate, the Wall, and on into the West, while the trainers stood quietly by, stealing glances at the girls, trying to detect even the slightest expression of want in their faces.

  One of the trainers broke the silence, reminding the girls how fortunate they were to live in a country that had built a barrier to protect its people from the evil and depravations that lurked beyond it. As he spoke, Cordula nervously eyed West Berliners and tourists on an observation platform peering over the Wall into the East, and she was relieved to be at a comfortable distance from the frightening West. With international competition only weeks away, the trainer uttered the usual bromides about defection, deriding the “poor, misguided souls” who had tried to escape to the West. He added the usual warning: “It can only result in tragedy for those who attempt it and for those they leave behind.” He left them with one last message, one the athletes had long since learned by heart: “Leaving the East is a betrayal. It is the ultimate betrayal to yourself, to your family, to your teammates, to your trainers, and especially to your country, which has placed its complete trust in you and has given you everything.”

  By now the trainers had good reason to be concerned, as hundreds of athletes had already defected.

  After seeing the sites, Cordula and the team moved to the Werner Seelenbinder velodrome, where they trained in the gym and on the track over the next couple
of days. At around the same time, in West Berlin, our two-man Soviet Sector Flag Tour team headed out on another intelligence collection mission in East Berlin.

  The morning fog dissipated, replaced by a cool, overcast day. Less than a mile from the Brandenburg Gate, and four miles west of the velodrome, my driver and I approached Checkpoint Charlie in our sedan. He picked up the mike and called in a communications check with our base in West Berlin. I checked one last time to ensure that our equipment, cameras, binoculars, maps, and notes were all out of sight, windows up, doors locked, then zipped up my jacket, pulling the collar up closer around my face. I acknowledged my driver, he nodded back, and we moved through.

  As usual Checkpoint Charlie was quiet, desolate, and charged with a chilly, foreboding tension. All color seemed to fade as one approached the infamous checkpoint, the world’s foremost perilous front line in the Cold War and the absolute edge of where the free West and communist East stood head-to-head in an ideological showdown. Preparing to enter hostile territory, we always faced the reality that any mission could take an unexpected turn, putting us smack in the middle of a hostile detention, a dangerous car ramming, or worse. With no lifeline other than occasional, spotty radio connection with our headquarters, our teams went into the East alone, fully understanding the risks and knowing that there could be little chance of rescue should something go wrong.

  Approaching from the West side of the checkpoint, we moved forward slowly, bypassing armed American Military Police, and continued forward. Besides the MPs, only one other person stood on the West side of the checkpoint, a gaunt, young German woman holding a placard that read: “Hunger strike until they return my children to me.”

  We drove onward, passing staggered concrete barriers and barbed wire and the sign written in four languages, warning “You are leaving the American Sector,” cautioning those going any farther that they would no longer be protected by the safety of the West.

  As we made our way through the barren corridor, high above our heads, up in the watchtower, East German sharpshooters scanning the Wall for escapees in the death strip below now trained their attention on us. Through binoculars, they tracked us, following our careful, measured movement through as we reached East German border guards. At the East checkpoint, a stone-faced guard picked up the phone receiver and made a call, alerting surveillance of our crossing. Then he raised the metal gate barrier and we slipped onto East German territory.

  As usual, surveillance picked us up immediately after we crossed over. Sometimes it was VoPos, sometimes other security or intelligence services driving Ladas, Volgas, or Trabants, but this time it was Stasi, a two-man team in a small, pale green unmarked East German Wartburg, that fell in neatly behind us and followed at a close, tailgating distance. We turned onto a main street, Leipzigerstrasse. Before us, East Berlin streets lay open, as usual devoid of traffic. We accelerated, then turned onto a side street. They stayed with us, but we sped up. Then we turned again and stepped on the gas, the team on our tail working hard to keep up, which they did for a while, until we outran them a couple of miles down the road, their tiny underpowered, two-stroke engine no match for our powerful Ford.

  Up the road, as we expected, another tail waited on a side street, ready to pick up where the last left off. It sputtered into action, flying out from its hiding place, and raced behind us for a while, its gears grinding as it tried to keep up with our pace. The car followed for a stretch, but a mile or so in, it broke down on the side of the road, smoke pouring from its engine.

  Once in the clear, we drove along for a few miles through the center of East Berlin, breathing in the heavy air, thick with the acrid smell of burning coal, as we made our way on a vacant stretch of road that, despite being in the middle of a city, saw few other cars and only an occasional human form. Against a sooty, gunmetal sky, autumn always made East Berlin appear even more sad and lifeless. Roads, sidewalks, and storefronts were all but deserted, buildings decrepit, some boarded up, windows sealed off with concrete blocks, rooftops laced with barbed wire, some with spiky shards of glass.

  Farther into the city, mass-produced Soviet-styled utilitarian high-rise apartment blocks were presumably filled with East Germans, but strangely, few people could actually be seen. Befitting a police state, East Berlin, the capital of East Germany, was a colorless city made up of harsh hues of black and gray, a microcosm of an entire nation that was hiding under a strange veil of secrecy.

  At the velodrome, Cordula and the rest of the East German women’s cycling team prepared for an intensive training session. The coaches began the day by putting the girls through a series of short exercises. Their single fixed-gear bikes having been carefully calibrated, tuned, and inspected by a cadre of technicians, the athletes, dressed in skintight Lycra, took up their positions on the track. Sitting astride their bikes, balancing and steadying themselves between their trainers and the railing, they readied for the launch, the first of a dozen runs they would make that day.

  East German city landscape: high-rise concrete apartment blocks with Honecker poster in the foreground

  Courtesy of Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

  With stopwatch in hand, one of the trainers blew a whistle and the girls took off, accelerating as they made their way around the 250-meter pinewood track, their thin tires affixed to the track’s steep, slippery surface by centrifugal force. Winding their way around the track, they picked up speed as the trainers shouted, demanding better technique and maximum effort. The girls worked harder, increasing speed on the straight, angling to whip around the curve. At the second pass they began posturing for position, and by the beginning of the next lap, their trainers were shouting, “Weiter! Schneller!” egging them on to go even faster. The girls responded with each push of the pedal, jostling for control of the track and finally exploding in a burst to finish the heat.

  As the track portion of their training day neared its end, all six team members were pitted against one another in a series of sprints designed to breed internal competition and keep the top riders on their toes.

  A few miles away, my driver and I reached the district of Karlshorst, home to East Berlin’s Soviet military headquarters and to the Soviet Sixth Independent Motor Rifle Brigade. Believing we had not been followed, we continued on to our target.

  We left the main highway and took a narrow trail through a thick forest, a trail that our team had used once before that had been carefully chosen during hours of mission planning to help conceal our movement so we could reach our target unobserved. We moved deeper into the forest, trying to avoid ruts in the road and winding our way along the bumpy dirt path never intended for use by a passenger car, all the while scanning the wood line for signs of danger.

  Everything seemed to be going according to plan as we approached to only a few hundred feet from our objective.

  Just as we moved into position from where we were to observe activity taking place near the headquarters, a single Soviet soldier, weapon raised, stepped directly into the path of our oncoming car only giving us enough space to hit the brake and come to a halt. Other soldiers appeared, taking up positions around the car, surrounding us and cutting off any chance of escape. Now a fair distance inside the forest and well outside of radio range from our headquarters in West Berlin, we were in a bit of trouble.

  With the soldier in front still blocking our path, another strutted over to my side of the car, holding a pistol as he chambered a round. I slowly looked up to see that he was a lieutenant, no older than me, and like me, he was in charge. Pumped up with an air of exaggerated self-importance, he nodded, taking his time to relish the moment, his catch, an achievement that would likely win him praise from his commander and his fellow soldiers. A condescending smirk spread across his face.

  I returned to looking straight ahead and sat motionless. The next thing I knew the muzzle of his loaded pistol tap-tap-tapped against the glass only inches away from my head. He ordered, “Atkroy okno.” (Roll down the window.)


  I slowly held up my hands in the air in a gesture of defeat, but did not do as he commanded.

  “Seychass!” (Now!) he shouted, the muzzle of the gun fixed against the glass and pointed at my head.

  I showed no reaction to his aggression, but my mind raced to process the situation. Sitting deep inside an East German forest, we had few options, but I knew that the longer we sat, detained at gunpoint by this band of young, excitable Soviet soldiers, the greater the likelihood that things would spiral out of control.

  I slowly panned the scene, trying to take in any details I could turn into a possible advantage. I noticed that they did not appear to have a radio, so I slowly moved my hand toward our Motorola radio handset, careful not to provoke, each inch of the way sensing his reaction, as he stood there, as they all stood there, guns at the ready, staring, riveted to my every move.

  Though we were by now out of transmission range, I picked up the mike and, ever so cautiously, feigned a call back to our base in West Berlin, gambling that the lieutenant might think twice about making any rash move if he believed I had reported our situation and location.

  “Base, this is one-o-four. I have a situation to report. We are being detained in the vicinity of Karlshorst by armed Soviet soldiers.”

  Back at the Marzahn velodrome, Cordula and her teammates prepared for the next round of races. On the track, the athletes once again mounted their bikes. The clock started, the whistle sounded, the trainers released, and the cyclists took off. This run a controlled exercise to sync technique with speed, they worked their first laps at a measured pace. Increasing their rotations, they moved faster, picking up more speed. By the fourth lap they were full-on, pushing with everything they had, their tires defying gravity on the track’s sloped walls, as they blocked and postured for advantage. Then, just when they believed they were at maximum exertion, one of the trainers pushed the button on a cassette tape player hooked up to a loudspeaker system and cranked up the volume, the loud music signaling them to take it up another notch. The trainer continued to increase the volume until the speakers could no longer take it and the sound became distorted. It triggered a reaction, the one the trainers were looking for, the cyclists’ speed and thrust now forced to an impossible level as they moved faster and faster, forging full-on with everything they had as they rode to the earsplitting lyrics of Queen’s “We will, we will rock you,” the bang-bang-boom, bang-bang-boom of the bass fueling them. Pushing, stretching, pedaling as fast as they could go, fighting as they gapped, dropping back an inch, they surged forward, trying desperately to control their bikes, finally exploding in one last burst of speed until the trainers clocked it out with Andrea, as usual, riding cleanly to the finish and winning the race, the other girls streaming past, one after the other in her draft.