Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosenharte. ‘I know him.’

  ‘Then, with your cooperation we could do this,’ said the American.

  ‘Don’t assume that. I know him only because we sometimes travel on the same train between Dresden and Leipzig. That’s the only experience I have of him. I have exchanged only two dozen words with him in my life.’

  ‘I think that’s a good thing,’ said Harland, moving the bottle towards him. ‘Have another drink. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.’

  Rosenharte studied him. He seemed likeable and intelligent but it was unthinkable that such a man could occupy a similar position in the Stasi. ‘Tell me, Mr Harland, how old are you?’

  ‘Forty this year.’

  ‘Yes, I thought so. You see, my brother and I were born in 1939, just after the outbreak of war. We will both be fifty in December. At that age you lose the taste for intrigue and adventure.’

  ‘You look five to seven years younger,’ said the CIA man.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rosenharte, acknowledging the obvious flattery with a slightly world-weary expression. ‘Has it occurred to you that the point of these operations is only to show your superiors that you’re busy - to justify your role as intelligence officers? How much work do you generate for yourself with these operations?’

  The American shook his head. ‘You’re wrong about that, Dr Rosenharte. We’re trying to prevent people being killed. Your government has a record of supporting Libyan and Palestinian terrorists. Abu Jamal is just the latest manifestation of this. Misha is the interface of that relationship, passing information, help, inspiration, money, from the Stasi to Abu Jamal. Even by the peculiar standards of East Germany this is criminal behaviour.’

  Harland leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees. ‘What he’s saying is that working to bring these men to justice, or at least to the attention of the Western media, should not be regarded as treasonable behaviour by you and it is certainly not some frivolous work creation by us. Believe me, we are desperately concerned about this man and we’re in deadly earnest.’

  ‘So where are we?’ asked the American. ‘Should we move forward on this? It seems the best way out for you, Dr Rosenharte.’

  ‘If I help you, I want an agreement that you will bring me, my brother and his family out to the West, find us homes, jobs and medical treatment for Konrad. These are my conditions.’

  ‘To get your brother out of prison is a tall order,’ said Harland. ‘We’re not going to promise something that we can’t deliver. But if our plan works, you stand every chance of getting your brother released because we’re going to give you something they really want.’

  They were right, Rosenharte conceded, there was only one way to go. ‘But I have your agreement on the other things. I want them to be given a home. I want treatment for my brother and help to find him useful employment. He’s a gifted filmmaker but he’ll need support - contacts and introductions. I’ll need help to leave the country. I demand less for myself because I have my own career.’

  ‘You have international renown,’ said Harland.

  ‘That’s true in my field for the few papers that have been published in the West. But my work is not published in the GDR because of my brother’s conviction.’ He stopped. ‘Do I have your agreement?’

  ‘Yes, you do. We will meet all your demands.’

  ‘Then I’ll help you. But there is one further condition. When I go back I must take something to convince them that Annalise is an important source.’

  ‘A sample of what she may be able to acquire in the future,’ suggested Harland.

  ‘Then I may be able to persuade Schwarzmeer to release my brother.’ He paused, looking at the eager faces. ‘You are aware who Schwarzmeer is?’

  Harland nodded. ‘Of course, and we already had something like this in mind. In fact it’s extremely good material.’ He nodded to the American. Presumably he had supplied it.

  ‘And whatever happens, you’ll bring my brother’s family out as soon as possible, regardless of whether my brother is still in Hohenschönhausen.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Harland. ‘The Hungarians took down their border with Austria in May. Thousands are leaving the GDR and going through Czechoslovakia to Hungary every day. We’ve already got people out that way.’

  Rosenharte shook his head. ‘You heard Honecker say last January that the Wall will be standing in a hundred years’ time if the reason for its existence is not removed. The reason for its existence is to stop people going to the West! If they allow people to leave through Hungary it makes a mockery of their Wall. So it follows they’ll stop that route.’

  ‘Still,’ said Harland, ‘it shouldn’t present too many problems. How old are the children?’

  ‘Eight and six years old . . . I think.’

  ‘Then no problem at all.’

  ‘So what am I taking back?’

  ‘The only things they care about,’ said the American, ‘are computers, software, programs. Defence programs from Nato would push all their buttons at once. We have something very special - very new - in this line. We’ll give you a disk we have had prepared with the help of Langley and colleagues of mine at Nato.’

  ‘Who’s running this operation?’ asked Rosenharte. ‘The CIA or British Intelligence? Who am I doing a deal with?’

  ‘Me,’ said Harland. ‘The CIA is helping and will benefit from the information that you provide.’

  ‘How many people know about it?’

  ‘As few as possible.’

  ‘It’s well known that the Stasi have penetrated your services, in particular the British. I insist that if I agree to this plan you never refer to me by name or give other information that may yield my identity. This is my principal condition.’

  ‘Naturally, we’ll give you a code name - what about Prince?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Now I want you to order up from room service. A bottle of champagne, two glasses and caviar.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this now. The hotel is secure. The management is well aware of the need for discretion.’

  ‘But not every member of the staff is. There are always mistakes. The Stasi will come back here in six weeks’ time and ask questions. That’s the way they work. They’ll find one person who remembers something.’

  Having taken some money from Harland, Rosenharte moved to the bedroom next door and, with the woman, began creating a scene of abandoned love. They undressed - she to a slip and he to underpants - then lay on the bed until the doorbell rang, at which Anna, as he now called her, gave him a final check, tousled his hair and chucked him the white bathrobe provided by the hotel. An elderly waiter brought in a tray and smiled benignly at the scene of middle-aged passion. Rosenharte gave him a 30,000 lira tip and patted him on the shoulder as he left.

  Whatever the oddness and difficulties of the situation, they were now operating as an effective team. ‘You know,’ she said, her eyes dancing, ‘in other circumstances and if I wasn’t a happily married woman, I’d be very content to be in a hotel room with you, Rudi.’

  This made him smile. She may not have been the beauty that Annalise was, but she was attractive and intelligent, and she was beginning to grow on him.

  ‘But there are just one or two touches I think we should add for purposes of authenticity.’ She reached up, removed the robe from his shoulder and kissed his bare skin twice, each time biting a little.

  He cleared his throat. Things were beginning to stir in him.

  ‘Right, that’s enough of that,’ she said briskly. ‘That’s an old teenage skill of mine. They should come up nicely by the morning.’

  Five minutes later he returned to the sitting room.

  ‘Okay,’ said Harland, rising. ‘Let’s get some air in here. It’s stuffy as hell.’ He walked over to a French window, which led onto a little terrace that was hidden from the street by a wall. Rosenharte noted that the room wasn’t overlooked from the buildings on the other side of the road. L
arge pools of water lay on the terrace.

  Harland returned, sat down and smiled apologetically. These English mannerisms of modesty and selfeffacement were profoundly irritating to Rosenharte because they obviously meant so little. But in other respects he seemed genuine and Rosenharte surmised that they were alike in some ways. He guessed Harland was a bachelor, as well as a loner.

  ‘This is what we know about Misha,’ Harland said. ‘He has a room in a Leipzig university building and he meets with Abu Jamal in a safe house in Leipzig, probably an apartment normally used by the Stasi for meetings with the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter - the Stasi’s civilian collaborators.’

  Rosenharte didn’t need a lecture about IMs. He raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  Harland ignored him. ‘He has also visited Abu Jamal in hospital three times over the summer. The last visit was a few weeks ago. We know that he spends about twelve days a month in Leipzig. The rest of the time he’s on the campus at the Technical University at Dresden, researching explosives and so forth. He visits Berlin only occasionally.’

  ‘That’s more information than I could ever have acquired,’ said Rosenharte. ‘Why do you need me?’

  ‘We want you to make contact with someone who has more evidence to pass to us - proof of the involvement of Abu Jamal and Misha in at least one bombing. More important, this contact may have information about plans for future attacks.’

  ‘Who’s the individual who can give you this information?’

  ‘We don’t know. All we have is a code name: Kafka.’

  ‘Then how will I find this person?’

  There was silence. He looked at Harland and noticed that one of his eyelids was flickering involuntarily. Harland tried to still it with his fingertip. ‘You are not going to find them,’ he replied at length. ‘He or she will find you.’

  ‘If this arrangement means that you have to give them my name, I can’t allow it. What will happen if this person is questioned by the Stasi? They break people. They broke my brother in Bautzen. He was a strong man, very fit, but Bautzen wrecked his health.’ He paused. ‘I think it would be better if you told me everything, don’t you?’

  Harland inhaled deeply. ‘We wouldn’t dream of giving your name to anyone. Besides, how could we give your name to someone whose identity we don’t know?’ He stopped and leaned back in his chair. ‘We want this evidence very badly, but we are equally concerned for your safety.’

  Rosenharte shook his head sceptically.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘A month ago, a woman was visiting Leipzig as part of a Christian Fellowship group. This person has done some work for us, mostly as a courier. Before leaving Leipzig to travel to West Berlin she carried out the usual checks on her luggage to make sure nothing incriminating had been planted on her. She didn’t find anything until she reached a hotel in the West. She had received a message telling her to look again. What she found were some very interesting documents and a letter to us.’

  ‘And you believed this?’ asked Rosenharte incredulously.

  ‘At first we were inclined to think that this was one of the Stasi’s little pranks, but then the names in the documents proved very useful. In fact, the US government was able to make an arrest of one man and to begin tracking another. Both are connected with Abu Jamal. It turned out to be very valuable intelligence indeed - but you see we had no idea who had given it to us. The documents were wiped of fingerprints, there was no handwriting - nothing to betray the identity of the donor.’

  ‘So why didn’t you send your courier back to Leipzig?’

  ‘We did. She came back with a message delivered the same way. Kafka wanted a German, someone with good cover who could travel to Leipzig as often as they liked without raising suspicion. Then a senior member of our outfit remembered you and we did some research and found that everything fitted perfectly.’

  Rosenharte did not hide his bafflement. ‘Why did he remember me?’

  ‘He was in Brussels in 1974.’

  ‘You recalled that you had something on me and thought you could force me to do this?’

  ‘No,’ said Harland. ‘We are not going to force you. We need you to be committed because you want to be. In exchange we will do as you ask as regards your brother and his family.’

  ‘I need to think about this, but first I want to know how this person will make contact.’

  ‘We must have a decision by morning. If you’re not going to do this, we’ll have to make certain arrangements in order to protect you and your story. To answer your question about the contact, there are procedures for you to follow in a specified order. I cannot tell you these until I know that you’re coming on board.’

  Rosenharte nodded. ‘I’ll take some rest now.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Harland. ‘We’ll make ourselves scarce until about seven - does that suit you?’

  Rosenharte slept little. By dawn he understood that cooperation was the only way, because at least it offered some hope of freeing Konrad and slightly better odds of bringing Else and the two children to the West. He had to do it, even though Harland’s operation seemed vague and a little crude. He had no expectation of success, but by the time he had tried and failed to make contact with this person in Leipzig, Else, the boys and - with much luck - Konrad would be in the West.

  At six thirty he gave Harland his decision. By seven he and Anna had played their role for the benefit of the young man who brought them breakfast, which they consumed like a married couple, saying little.

  He returned to the room to find Harland and the American bent over coffee and a basket of pastries.

  He did not return their greeting but instead lit a cigarette and launched into the thing he had been turning in his mind. ‘When the real Annalise died you decided to keep her alive. I can easily imagine that was an extensive operation. Why? What purpose did it serve?’

  Harland picked the crumbs from his chinos. ‘She transferred to Nato in the early part of 1975 to the Department of Defence Policy and Planning, where she was mostly involved in the translation of documents and preparation of papers for summits.’

  ‘And some you fed to the Stasi through a new controller?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact a man named Kurt Segler, a gardener at Nato headquarters. It proved a very reliable arrangement.’

  ‘But the Stasi are not fools. They’d have suspected something when the substitute Annalise gave them false information.’

  ‘That was the whole point.’ He stopped and gave Rosenharte an oddly apologetic look, indicating the seriousness of the secret. ‘It never was false information. We used her as a truth channel.’

  4

  The Song Bird

  Rosenharte understood the function of a truth channel immediately but Harland went ahead and explained it anyway. ‘Everything she predicted did in fact take place. She was the most accurate source they had ever had. You see, we needed a way of telling the Russians what our actual intentions were. We knew that if they trusted Annalise as a spy, we could feed them stuff that was unambiguous about the Western position.’

  Rosenharte’s attention had wandered during Harland’s exegesis to a black and white bird that was calling from the corner of a roof opposite the hotel. The American had followed his gaze. ‘Are you a birder, Dr Rosenharte?’

  ‘A birder? Ah, yes, I like to know what I’m seeing. Birds were a passion of ours when my brother and I were boys. I was just reminding myself that Trieste is on one of the major migration routes for nightingales in the spring. Did you know that?’

  ‘What’s that bird over there?’

  ‘In German it is called a Mittelmeersteinschmätzer.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘In Latin it is Oenanthe hispanica. A wheatear is I believe its name in English. It has its own call but sometimes it imitates the song of other species.’

  ‘Can you still imitate a song?’ asked the American. ‘Because that is what we need you to do when you
get back into East Germany. Or have you been out of the business too long?’

  Rosenharte nodded slowly. ‘I have no other option if I am to get my brother’s family out. You should understand that that is all I care about. So, yes, I will sing the tune of another bird.’ In that moment Konrad came to his mind and he thought how this encounter would benefit from his brother’s gift of witty encapsulation. It was after all a very bizarre situation.

  ‘But you look concerned.’

  He got up and poured himself some coffee from the breakfast flask - even lukewarm it was unlike anything in the GDR - and stirred a lump of unrefined sugar into the liquid. ‘You bring me here to dine with a woman who has been dead for a decade and a half; I’m given fake love-bites by her substitute. You inform me that the entire operation was originally set up not to deceive my side, but to tell us the truth. You ask me to meet a source in Leipzig whom you have never met and cannot vouch for. Now I find myself talking metaphorically about bird calls. I was thinking that life doesn’t get much stranger than this.’ He stopped and examined each of them in turn. ‘And I was asking myself if I need to be insane to put my trust in you.’

  Harland nodded sympathetically but Rosenharte saw his eyes hadn’t lost their purpose. ‘For instance,’ he continued, ‘on the truth channel everyone knows that the Stasi does not simply accept what it’s given. They make tasks for their agents to gain specific intelligence. They wanted me to test Annalise in that way during the autumn of 1974, just before she died.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Harland. ‘Similar demands were made on Annalise’s substitute and in the spring of ’75 we orchestrated appropriate responses which seemed to satisfy the Stasi. It was a collaborative effort, involving several nations.’

  ‘Then I should know what other information she gave them.’

  ‘In outline, yes, but let’s face it this isn’t exactly pillow talk. You wouldn’t have spent the night discussing these things. But I’ll give one or two examples of the way we used her. During the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks, cables, handwritten notes and letters between heads of Nato states, even one from Reagan, were leaked. On 15 March 1985 when Chernenko died she supplied them with documents and telegrams between the US government and Nato and the agenda of meetings between defence ministers held by the new British Secretary General Lord Carrington. That was her last job for us. But this had been going on for a long time. Back in December 1979, for instance, an exchange between Jimmy Carter and the Secretary General of Nato concerning the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was made available so the other side knew that the West’s protestations were deeply felt and that they would act if there were any further territorial incursions. But all this only worked because they believed she was their spy.’