Another Time, Another Life

by Leif G. W. Persson

  The German Democratic Republic would soon cease to exist, the actual breakdown occurring at roughly the same time that the nation’s fortieth anniversary was being celebrated. The formal acknowledgment came less than a year later. October 3, 1990, marked the end of forty-one years as—officially anyway—an independent nation; after that the former GDR was transformed into five new states that were subsumed by the Federal Republic of Germany.

  Honecker himself would die in exile in Chile on May 29, 1994, isolated, terminally ill with liver cancer, deprived of all political power, eighty-two years of age, in self-imposed exile on the other side of the globe. Honecker was from the Saar region, the son of a miner from Neunkirchen, where he was trained as a roofer and played shawm in the rock blasters’ wind orchestra. When the Nazis marched into the Saar in 1935, the twenty-three-year-old communist had been forced to flee for the first time. That time he ended up in Paris. His last journey was considerably longer than that.

  In retrospect, in the pale glow of the night-light of history, Western historians and journalists have portrayed the fall of East Germany as the result of a gigantic information error committed by its leaders, a collection of hidebound old-line communists, desperate, blinkered, unable to comprehend the new world outside. Their spiritual father Karl Marx would certainly have dismissed this writing of history as idealistic, romanticized, and factually absurd—and he would have been completely correct—but considering what happened later this is also uninteresting. According to these Western observers—and it is well known that history is first written by the victors—it was “a little slip of paper that started the landslide rolling” (Ein kleiner Zettel löst die Lawine aus), to quote the headline of an article in Berliner Zeitung on the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The slip of paper in question was presented to the assembled world media at a press conference in Berlin, in connection with the meeting of the Central Committee, right before seven o’clock on Thursday evening the ninth of November 1989. According to the same story it had been delivered by Honecker’s successor Egon Krenz to the Politburo’s head of information Günter Schabowski just over an hour earlier, and before this much had happened that would have been more to Karl Marx’s taste had he been the one writing the historical description.

  In May 1989 the Hungarians had started tearing down the barbed-wire fence along the 161-mile-long border with Austria. The fence that had divided Europe for three decades was torn down, and after that everything moved very quickly. It took less than six months to disperse the gloomy inheritance of the Second World War.

  During the summer of 1989 the stream of refugees from East Germany increased dramatically. Thousands of East Germans traveled on vacation to Budapest and stayed a few days before the majority of them made their way farther via illegal routes into Austria and from there to West Germany and freedom in the capitalist paradise.

  On August 19 Hungary opened one of its border crossings to Austria for a few hours, in order to temporarily ease the pressure, and during that time six hundred East Germans took the opportunity to leave the country and cross via Austria to West Germany. The border was then closed again, and for a few days returned to the old restrictions, with desperate attempts at flight, gunfire, and in the best cases refugees who were only wounded.

  By the twenty-fifth of August the Hungarians had had enough, and the country’s prime minister announced that Hungary had decided to give all East Germans permission to leave the country. On the tenth of September Hungary then broke its agreement with East Germany, and in the ensuing weeks tens of thousands of East Germans traveled to West Germany via Hungary. The Soviet Union had in any event not raised any active objections. During the prior year, Gorbachev had instead talked about other matters, about the need for openness, renewal, and political reforms, and within the new Eastern Bloc the Hungarians’ decision was now seen as a welcome initiative.

  At the same time Hungary was not the only way out. In the month of September thousands of East Germans also traveled to Czechoslovakia, where they sought asylum as political refugees at the West German embassy in Prague. At the end of September those who had taken refuge there were unexpectedly given exit permits to the Federal Republic, and within the course of a day four thousand traveled on to West Germany, which had always been their ultimate destination.

  Then the landslide began. Before the end of the year more than half a million East Germans, 3 percent of the country’s population, had left for a new life in the West, and as so often before it was younger people who took the first step. It was the youth and thereby the hope of the future that had abandoned the fatherland.

  The literal-minded may be wondering about that slip of paper. And what was it that actually happened at the meeting of the East German Central Committee on Thursday the ninth of November 1989?

  The main issue at the meeting was a given, namely how they could gain control over the flight of the people to the West. What had been specifically discussed over the previous few months was a proposal from Wolfgang Herger, head of the security department within the East German Communist Party’s Central Committee, which contained two opposing alternatives. Either close the borders of the country to the outside world or grant every East German citizen the opportunity to apply for an exit visa on their passport, and thereby an opportunity to freely leave the country.

  The proposal for the new travel edict was presented for the first time to the members of the Politburo during a break in the proceedings, between twelve o’clock and twelve-thirty on Thursday the ninth of November. During the afternoon it was agreed to let the proposal circulate among the members of the Council of Ministers as well, before being considered by the Central Committee. At four-thirty in the afternoon Egon Krenz read the proposal, there was a brief, rather confused discussion, some changes to the text were made on the spot, whereupon the proposal was accepted in its entirety and without qualifications.

  At five-thirty the head of information, Schabowski, came into Krenz’s office to hear if there was anything in particular that Krenz wanted him to announce to the media at the press conference that was to begin in half an hour, and that to be on the safe side would also be broadcast live on East German TV.

  According to Krenz himself Schabowski was supposed to “emphasize” the decision about a new travel policy. This was world news, a sensation. According to Schabowski he was “not supposed to emphasize anything in particular” but rather simply hand out a bundle of papers with the usual mixture of high and low, mostly just verbiage.

  If the latter version is true, this at least explains Schabowski’s peculiar behavior during the press conference. Toward the end of it he was asked whether the new travel policy, which had been discussed publicly for the first time a few days earlier, should not actually be seen as a great mistake.

  The reply Schabowski gave was verbose, hard to understand, beside the point, and astounding in its significance. In brief he said that the Central Committee had decided that every East German citizen was now free to leave the country. The people’s police had been instructed to immediately issue visas for foreign travel to those who so desired, at all border stations between East and West Germany including those in Berlin. And considering what happened later, this was not bad news.

  VI

  Major Manfred Sens of the East German border police was free that evening. He was sitting in the living room at home in his apartment on Strassburger Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg in the north part of East Berlin, and was following the broadcast of the Central Committee’s press conference on his TV. Toward the end of the broadcast, after the customary questions of typically variable quality, something happened that, according to what he himself is reported to have said, caused him to choke on his evening coffee. It was when Günter Schabowski spoke about the new travel policy that had just been adopted.

  Major Sens was assistant head of the border post at Bornholmer Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg, not far from his home, which was convenient considering that he immedi
ately put on his uniform and went there. When he arrived, his colleague and chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger, was already on the scene, as growing hordes of Berliners started to stream in. A large number of them Sens recognized too because they were his own neighbors. What was worse was that neither he nor Jäger had any idea what to do, and the situation quickly threatened to get completely out of control.

  At nine o’clock in the evening Jäger phoned the minister of security to ask for advice. The minister’s spokesman suggested that the most belligerent should be let through, miserable advice that for lack of anything better was followed nonetheless. The agitation in the mass of people had only increased as the pressure on the guards became more intense, and at ten-thirty in the evening Major Sens capitulated and personally opened the border gate to West Berlin. During the first hour twenty thousand people are estimated to have crossed the border at Bornholmer Strasse alone, at the same time as corresponding scenes played out at all the other border crossings in the city.

  It was Major Sens’s last duty at the border post. As a citizen of the Federal Republic he would receive new employment as a ticket-taker in the subway, which in any case was a freer, better-paid job than the position as a coat checker at the historical museum on Unter den Linden, which is what his old colleague Jäger got, right next to Neue Wache where Jäger, at one time in the bad old days, had commanded the military honor guard.

  And for none of them—whether in a status-related or in an economic sense—was their experience of capitalism much like the paradise that many of their countrymen had imagined. On the other hand, both of them got considerably more than the generally allotted fifteen minutes of fame that was also said to characterize free life in the West.

  VII

  Within the leading intelligence services of the Western world the situation that became a reality in the fall of 1989 had been predicted going back ten years, and the only mistake that had been made was that the majority of the analysts who worked with the issue had set the breaking point even a few years earlier.

  The one who had done best at the CIA was Mike “The Bear” Liska, despite the fact that he was neither an analyst nor working at that time with any of the departments responsible for the member states of the Warsaw Pact. In the spring of 1984 there had been a large internal conference at headquarters in Langley during which the invigorating question of the timing of the opponent’s collapse was at the top of the agenda. Over two cram-packed days featuring primarily economic analyses the nation’s combined intelligence elite were present in full force.

  At the usual follow-up gathering on the last evening, bets were made on the timing of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it would be Liska who both kicked their asses and made himself a decent pile of cash to boot. “Give the motherfuckers five years and their usual bonus for getting it wrong twice,” said Liska, and when the list of wagers went around he put a hundred dollars on “late autumn ’89, most likely November.” The majority of those standing around shook their heads and thanked him for the money and all the beer they would drink at his expense long before then.

  • • •

  Michael Liska was born in 1940 and grew up in a suburb of Pest some twelve miles south of the Hungarian capital. When the Hungarians fomented an uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956, he took part in the armed struggle on the streets of Budapest, and when the whole thing was over he fled by the usual route. Crossing the northern border with Austria and via a refugee camp in West Germany he ended up in Akron, Ohio, having just turned seventeen in his new homeland, the United States, where he was taken care of by fellow countrymen who had emigrated two generations earlier.

  After completing university studies he applied to the Marine Corps, trained as an officer, and even before graduation day was directly recruited for the fleet’s intelligence service. He remained there for almost ten years until the CIA made contact and made him an offer he could not refuse. In addition to his native Hungarian, he also spoke fluent Russian and German, so his mission was also a given. During the following ten years he would spend more time in West Germany, Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe than in his second homeland, the United States.

  Liska was a classic operator, an intelligence officer with responsibility for a large number of field agents who were working behind enemy lines, and his successes finally became so numerous that his supervisors no longer wanted to risk having him out there in the field; instead they brought him home to headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and made him head of the Scandinavian division. And it was in that capacity that he participated in the “collapse seminar” in the spring of 1984.

  Four years later, in the spring of 1988, he suggested to his top superior that he should be relocated to one of the working groups that had been trying for the past several years to put some order into the logistics needed before the opponent’s impending breakup.

  “We’re close now,” said Liska, and because his boss had an excellent memory and knew that Liska’s was now the only name remaining on the renowned betting list, he had asked him to propose his mission himself. “East Germany,” said Liska.

  “Why East Germany in particular?” his boss asked in surprise. According to the analyses he had studied, the GDR was more likely the hard core of the collapsing Soviet empire. “What do you have against Hungary, by the way?” With his background, wouldn’t that be almost an ideal area to tackle? “Or Poland, or Czechoslovakia too for that matter? Why East Germany, for heaven’s sake?” Because it was the GDR that would be the first domino to fall, answered Liska. “They’re going to break like a dry twig,” said Liska, and that was how it turned out.

  Liska was given money to set up his own movement. His first step consisted of putting together the ten or so colleagues he had come to rely on most over the years, and he located the head office for his little firm in Stockholm, just close enough but at the same time far enough away. He felt comfortable in Stockholm. It had a little of both Akron, Ohio, and south Pest, Liska thought, and he would know, having lived in Sweden’s capital for a few years in the late seventies when he was posted to the American embassy in Stockholm.

  “Okay,” said Liska at the first meeting with his colleagues. “I guess you’re wondering what we’re doing here.” From the expectant nods he understood that this was a completely correct assumption. “I’ve got the idea,” he continued with a deliberately drawling Midwestern accent, “that our dear comrades in the German Democratic Republic are going to be turned upside down.” He deliberately paused and dug in his left ear with his ballpoint pen. “And then I thought we should take the opportunity well in advance to buy their lists of the various collaborators they’ve made use of over the years.” Liska took the pen out of his ear and inspected it thoughtfully. “So what this is about in concrete terms is that we have to find some person or persons on Normannenstrasse willing to earn a few bucks,” he said and smiled. It was no more difficult than that.

  VIII

  The East German security service, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi as it was called in everyday usage, was without comparison the largest security organization within the Eastern Bloc. In relative terms, and depending a bit on how you counted, it was between ten and thirty times larger than the Russian KGB.

  At the time of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, the Stasi had 102,000 employees and about half a million so-called external colleagues—informants, infiltrators, provocateurs, and not counting plain old gossips—in a country with a population of seventeen million people. When the defeat of communism became a fact and there was a green light to inspect the Stasi’s registry of individuals, it turned out that security files had been compiled on more than six million of the Republic’s own citizens and almost a million foreigners.

  It was information about the latter that interested Liska and his comrades in the security agencies of the Western world. It was enemies of Western democracies they wanted to get at, and what they were searching for above all else was the in
formation being stored at Stasi’s own foreign intelligence service HVA—Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—with 4,286 employees, headquartered at Normannenstrasse 22 in East Berlin, under the leadership of the legendary “Carla,” Lieutenant General Markus Wolf.

  The Germans had a well-founded reputation for being precise to the point of pedantry, and the filing of various types of information had long been one of their best areas. In the HVA register, according to what the CIA thought it knew, the names of fifty thousand individuals in round numbers were stored who in various ways had helped the East Germans with their “foreign affairs” over the years, from the most qualified spies to the most vacillating sympathizers; it helped that the registry was computerized.

  Thus it was not a matter of having to move tens of tons of files, which would have been an impossible task; instead the desired information fit comfortably on large-format computer tapes. At the same time the data was not too big to fit into an ordinary briefcase or even under a uniform jacket in a pinch, obviously assuming the carrier was sufficiently well motivated.

  Liska knew from his own experience that almost anything—and anyone—could be bought with money. The disposition of this information was a matter, quite literally, of power over fifty thousand lives, and not just any lives. Assuming that the Western intelligence agencies could find out who these individuals were and what they had been working on, there was also the possibility of affecting the existence of hundreds of millions of other people in both a positive and a negative direction. And for that no price was too high, thought Liska.

  Liska was of course not the only one who had this idea. There were a number of others who had been thinking along the same lines for several years, and not least within the organization to which he himself belonged. Therefore the usual bureaucratic catfights had also started to break out within the organization, and when the fog finally cleared, the visible results consisted of a steering group of three individuals who had the power and the money; a reference group of experts and those people who simply had to be humored; a project group that would do the job itself; as well as a number of auxiliary groups, one of which Liska headed; these latter groups would be responsible for the coordination of various field efforts: the one goal, a number of people, a bag of money that for once was ample, and of course the highest imaginable level of secrecy. Everything was, in other words, for the most part as usual, and of course it had been given a project name, Operation Rosewood.