by Peter Millar
15.25 Sea changes back into her clothes, while Streamer just pulls on a pair of shorts over his wet swimming trunks (I admit it, I’m a slob). They then pack up their things and at …
15.31 … set off towards the car. Streamer is carrying the basket.
15.41 They both get into the parked car. Streamer puts the basket on the rear seat and drives the vehicle off …
15.42 … towards the motorway back to Berlin and the apartment block.
16.02 They stop in front of the apartment block, get out of the car and at …
16.03 … enter the apartment block. Streamer is carrying the basket.
16.25 Streamer and Sea again leave the apartment block, get into the car and drive along Sredskistrasse, Knaackstrasse, Prenzlauer Allee, Liebknechstrasse, Unter den Linden and stop at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Streamer is driving.
16.35 Streamer parks in front of the Ministry and gets out. Sea stays in the car.
16.36 Streamer enters the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (I was picking up a repeat multiple-visa application.)
16.42 Streamer leaves the MFA, gets back into the car and drives via Werderstrasse, Französische Strasse, Friedrichstrasse, and Clara-Zetkin-Strasse to Otto Grotewohl Strasse where at…
16.48 They get out of the car (the timings show how little traffic East Berlin’s streets had) and at…
16.49 They enter the VERSINA shop. (A shop only open to foreigners where, behind closed curtains, they sold a basic supply of Western quality foodstuffs for D-Marks.)
17.00 They leave the above-named establishment. (The timing reflects how little there was to buy.) Sea is carrying a cardboard box, dimensions approx. 40cm × 40cm × 30cm, which Streamer then takes and puts in the boot. They get into the car and take the most direct route home.
17.09 Streamer parks the car outside the apartment block, takes the cardboard box from the boot and both individuals enter the building at …
17.10
20.00 The operational surveillance is brought to an end.
In other words, they sat out there while we had dinner and left before we went to the pub, thereby missing a whole world of insight into who our real ‘contacts’ were in East Germany, that segment of society they least wished us to get to know well: ordinary people.
But Col Lehmann still found a way to do me damage. In my file he affixed a photograph of the two of us leaving the VERSINA shop. He was probably very proud of it: it had been taken by one of those little bits of kit that the James Bonds of this world are so very fond of: a concealed camera. Concealed in the tail-light of a little Trabant parked outside the shop. It was marked, ‘secret’. But it was the note he appended next to it that caused the most damage to my way of life: ‘On such expeditions, it would appear Streamer makes his wife carry the heavy objects.’ She has never let me forget it. Thanks, colonel; I really owe you for that one.
At the end of this concentrated period of surveillance, however, the man who was in charge of what in the world of John le Carré were called ‘lamplighters’, sitting on my tail day and night, was forced to conclude: ‘During the period of intensive operational surveillance on Streamer from August 2nd, 1982 through August 20th, 1982, we could not identify any active counter-surveillance techniques.’ (I’d long since assumed that if they wanted to follow me they would.) ‘His driving by and large obeyed the rules of the road although he has been observed driving after consuming alcohol.’ (I was young, and occasionally a bit silly. I admit it. Maybe you should have stopped me.) ‘When driving, he usually chatted to whoever else was in the car, and almost invariably took the most direct route.’ (Yes, I wasn’t trying to shake you off because I didn’t really know you were there. If we took wrong turns, it was usually because we’d got lost.)
My file also contained a list of the codenames of the IMs (Informelle Mitarbeiter – part-time collaborators), the everyday leeches who spied on their acquaintances or friends for the state. ‘Constructive analysis of the possibilities of using the Reuters office cleaner as an IM.’ Damnation of Helga? Maybe. Of Frau Neumann? Definitely. There was also a list of ‘contacts’ I had inherited from my predecessor: ‘Armin,’ ‘Tobias’, ‘Walter’, and ‘Walter Fichte’. There was not enough evidence for me to pin down specifically which was which, but I had a clear vision in my head of the ‘friends’ of the colleague who had occupied the post before me, who would turn up uninvited, to ‘keep up the relationship’, to invite me out for a meal or a drink, to offer me titbits of meaningless gossip that suggested insider knowledge but in fact revealed next to nothing. They would ‘leak stories’ that were about to appear in the next day’s official press. Armin tried to feed me a story about an upcoming minor regional party conference. It was hard to tell him I couldn’t care less. He reported to his superiors that I had left lying about ‘as if by chance’ a copy of the West German news magazine Spiegel – was I trying to entrap him? He admitted to them he had found it ‘interesting’.
I had little to do with any of them: I simply wasn’t interested enough in them or their supposed, so clearly calculated, ‘insight’. If East Germany had a story, it wasn’t to be had from these people. The Stasi obviously recognised that their old strategy wasn’t working. Amongst the tasks ‘in hand’ listed was: search for and identify an IM among Streamer’s GDR acquaintances. They would succeed but not as much as they had hoped.
‘Tobias,’ reported that, ‘because of his appearance and attitude, Millar really wasn’t on the same wavelength. But he would do his best all the same.’ I clearly wasn’t fastidious enough. His physical description went down in my file: ‘Approx. 25 years of age, short with long, curly unkempt hair, uncared-for clothes: frayed jeans, tatty shoes, loose shirts, unmanicured fingernails.’ I admit it all. I haven’t changed that much even now.
Contrary to what I – and certainly Alex or Bärbel or many other of my East German friends might have suspected, I was pleased and gratified to find no clear sign of Jochen amongst those who informed on me. For all that they called him ‘two-face’, he did not feature on the list of the Stasi’s IMs. In fact the only reference to him specifically exonerated him: Col Lehmann noted: ‘We have no hopes for using him directly.’ The operative word, however, was ‘directly’. Their key informer was the mother he doted on. In November 1982, Jochen had invited Jackie and me to come and see a play for which he had designed the stage sets. It was the first evidence of any real work he had done in all the time we had known him. I was delighted to accept, not least because the play was being performed in the delightful little medieval town of Quedlinburg in the Harz Mountains. Jochen was delighted we accepted, not least because it appeared he had been counting on us to give him a lift. Him and his mother.
She was a plump, giggly and self-consciously learned academic woman in her fifties, with dyed jet-black hair and saw herself as a self-proclaimed intellectual advocate of the ‘developed socialist society’. She was also a Stasi collaborator, codenamed ‘Pauline’. Her report on the trip was detailed, beginning with the fact – probably to her and her controllers my most shameful failing – that I turned up to collect her from her flat thirty minutes late. En route to Quedlinburg she reported that I ‘did not stick to the speed limits’. I was driving a zippy little VW Golf in a country full of fibreglass Trabants; the motorway speed limit – as opposed to in West Germany where there was none – was 100 kph (62 mph). I was however chuffed to note that she had added: ‘He did however show himself to be a safe and experienced driver.’ Thanks, Pauline.
She noted that our conversation over dinner following the performance concentrated on the play, then about foreign languages and different cultures, adding: ‘It has to be said that at no point did the conversation touch on politics.’ Why would it have done? I knew she was an old commie, but she was also the mother of my friend. I neither wanted to convert her (to what? I was hardly a neo-conservative), nor to offend her. The conversation was joined by an elderly actor who had a daughter who was also a journalist, on the offici
al Communist Party paper, and we sat up chatting and drinking until three a.m. I am thankful to the Stasi for noting what time we got to bed. I certainly have no recollection.
Pauline sat up even later making notes of her initial impressions:
– M appears to have studied at Oxford, probably languages.
– He speaks perfect German with little accent (thanks Pauline), and knows Russian and Polish (bit of an exaggeration on that last one).
– While at Oxford he took part in amateur dramatics.
– He is Irish, his wife English.
– During his childhood he must have lived in Boston, USA (where did that come from?) and France (I must have mentioned my year in Paris).
– He is a keen beer drinker and collects beer labels (what can I say?).
– ‘He only got married after being posted to the GDR.
– M is intelligent, witty and comes across as youthful while polite and amusing in conversation (by this point I’m beginning to dote on her myself).
– Despite several naive attitudes shown in his conversation he is certainly not naive in general.
The next day she reported the details of our walk around Quedlinburg old town, that I paid for lunch for everyone (I put it on my expenses – it was fairly legitimate), and that afterwards I insisted we drove back via Magdeburg to take a look at the cathedral.
While we were there, however, she noted that ‘M disappeared for about ten minutes. No explanation for this was given.’ Col Lehmann has put a large felt-tip double exclamation mark next to this. And he would be right. I had indeed been ‘up to no good’: my detour via Magdeburg was not just to see the cathedral, but because I had been told there was an active branch of the Swords to Ploughshares movement in town, centred on the priest’s house a few hundred metres away. I had snuck off to take a look and chat with a couple of kids who told me I would be best going to a different church. They told me the address and tried to draw a rough map.
Back in the car ‘Pauline’ noted a crude sketch on a piece of paper and reported that I asked her if she knew a ‘Heimholzer Strasse’ in Magdeburg where there was supposed to be an ‘interesting old church’. She told me no, but then adds, ‘It came up that there was a Helmholz Strasse’. Her switch to the anonymous third party is unsurprising: it was her son Jochen who told me. We drove there and located the building the lads outside the priest’s house had directed me to, the St Michael Community Centre. ‘Pauline’ reported: ‘M parked about fifty metres away and went off with his wife, leaving us in the car for about half an hour. Then he returned and we continued the journey to Berlin without further interruption.’ All true. I had for the first time made contact with a Swords to Ploughshare ‘chapter’, if such a word could be used for such a diffuse agglomeration of individuals, outside Berlin. No doubt ‘Pauline’ and the Stasi would have considered it ‘hostile’ behaviour, possibly worse, but to me it was just journalism. If ever a serious opposition movement was to develop in East Germany I wanted to be in touch from the ground floor, and similarly if ever the ‘organs of the state’ decided to clamp down on these disaffected young people by imposing jail sentences on them, I wanted to be sure their friends had ways of getting that information into the Western press. My only regret in hindsight, is that perhaps I should have anticipated that Jochen’s mum wasn’t just the nice old lady she seemed to be.
Col Lehmann was impressed. He noted tersely on the bottom of her report: ‘This source is reliable. Any verification of the information contained in this report must protect the identity of the source.’
She obviously had a long chat with Jochen about me afterwards. Two weeks later, for the first time – a signal mark of the general incompetence of attempts at total surveillance – there is a detailed report on Metzer Eck: ‘We have been informed unofficially that M is often to be seen in the pub Metzer Eck. He is considered a regular and always given a seat on the Stammtisch. He pays close attention to everything that is said and therefore must be considered extremely up to date on popular attitudes and opinions on political matters.’ Lehmann’s deputy Col Franz adds the note: ‘Any verification of this information must protect the identity of the source’.
Right to the very end of my time as resident correspondent they used every means possible to observe every meaningless detail. As we were having our belongings packed up for transport to Moscow a customs official was required to visit the flat to check we were not taking away valuable historical relics. Afterwards he was required to submit a report to the Stasi. He had noticed a West German magazine lying on the table in the office, he told them, obviously shocked. ‘During our presence in the flat, the teleprinter was running,’ he noted further, adding just that extra little professional detail: ‘It was a Kamp brand.’ That good old Prussian thoroughness again. Well and truly wasted.
But by then they were already writing me off, for the time being at least: ‘The transfer of the files to the Soviet fraternal service has been carried out’. There were no prizes for guessing who Big Brother was. Like Kolya said: I was entering the lion’s den.
7
Roads to Moscow
They gave a farewell party for us in Metzer Eck. We were sad to go; they were sad to see us go. This was not a world in which people popped back and forth across borders readily. None of us was really sure when we would meet again. Or if. East Germans were required to go through the same lengthy visa application procedure as Westerners if they wanted to visit the Soviet Union. ‘Big Brother’ liked to limit the number of houseguests
Alex, invariably, managed to make a joke out of it all. ‘How about that,’ he quipped, ‘they could go anywhere in the world and where do they choose? Next door to Siberia’. And then he brought out the pièce de résistance for the long evening of drinking ahead: a vodka bottle frozen in ice, from which he poured viscous shots into small glasses which we knocked back with mock Russian shouts of ‘Na zdorovye’ – one Russian phrase every East German knew – and chased with cold Berlin Pilsener. Alex stood up and gave his mock ‘loyal toast’: ‘Wer denkt das Saufen so viel Freude macht, als wir, die lieben die Sowjetmacht!’, which translates roughly as: ‘Who is more loyal to the Supreme Soviet – than those of us who keep our lips wet?’ And we hooted with laughter. And he poured another round. By which time we had got round to the usual lavatory humour from Dieter: ‘Why does a Russian take three pieces of wood when he goes for a shit? One to balance on, one to lean on, and one to keep the wolves away.’ Everybody cracked up, just as they always did when he told that one. It was a reflex action: even those Germans who lived under the Soviet jackboot couldn’t help thinking that somehow the world had been turned upside down.
Britons on our little offshore island so often think of continental politics – when we think of them at all – either as the ‘meddling bureaucrats’ of Brussels or as the historical ogres who were held off by our most powerful defence: a twenty-one-mile stretch of water. It has often occurred to me that Britain’s relationship with the rest of our continent would be more sane – and less marked by delusions of effortless superiority – if la Manche, der Ärmelkannel (only we call it the English Channel) had dried up. Certainly in Berlin, a city that more than many others has felt the tide of European history lap over it, there was no one without at least a modest understanding of geopolitics. When I told Reinhard, one of the two German correspondents who worked in Reuters’ West Berlin office that I was planning to drive to Moscow in January, he looked at me as if I was stark staring mad: ‘Remember what happened to Napoleon. And Hitler didn’t even get there. What makes you think you will? In a Volvo 340!?’
He had a point. We nearly didn’t. There was thick snow falling already as we drove east on the long straight autobahn through the pine forests that led to the drab little industrial town of Frankfurtan-der-Oder, where I had tried to get comments about life under martial law from the few Poles who crossed over to work. Now we were about to find out for ourselves; we had a seventy-two-hour transit visa.
We spent the night in a dingy hotel where the menu featured little more than barscz, Poland’s typical beetroot soup, a thin red peppery bouillon with only a cheese straw to stir in it. We had a beer and went to bed hungry. The next day it was on to Warsaw, where I renewed acquaintance with a couple of British and American correspondents at a restaurant that served roast duck and red cabbage, if little else. The Solidarity story, they told us, had died on its feet. The spark had been extinguished. Those leaders who weren’t incarcerated knew that if they did not keep quiet they soon would be. There were soldiers everywhere on the streets, but at least they were Polish, not Russian. For the moment.
Day three, we drove east from Warsaw under blue skies but on sheet ice that on one occasion saw me swerve so radically that we spun off the road into a rubbish collection yard. The border post at Brest-Litovsk looked like the bridge of an ocean liner trapped in Arctic ice. The Polish guards didn’t emerge, just waved me in from behind their plate-glass windows. I got out and went into the building to show them our documents. They were sitting around in shirt sleeves over cups of coffee. They didn’t look like they got a lot of business, smiled sceptically and shrugged as if it was not their business to stop fools rushing in where angels would have put their feet up, had a beer and given it a second thought. Then they raised a red-and-white barrier thick with snow that looked as if it hadn’t lifted in weeks and let us out. To be eaten by bears.