Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  They waited until 4.15 listening to the radio, then began to walk towards the church.

  It wasn’t just the absence of rush-hour noise - the buses and trams having been taken out of service - or the massive presence of the security forces; there was something profoundly different about Leipzig which Rosenharte likened to a sudden leap in barometric pressure, or the peculiar heaviness that silences birds before an electrical storm. The people now making for the churches had evidently taken all their courage in their hands, many leaving families without knowing if they would return in a few hours’ time. By far the greater proportion was young, but even so, the act of opposition to the state was a big step. They were sombre, yet also unburdened, because it was clear that something would be settled that night, that an outcome, one way or the other, was imminent.

  They reached the church after twice dodging plainclothes Stasi asking for identity cards ahead of them, and struggled through the press of people around the door to find Ulrike standing just inside, gesturing and shrugging to a group of men. Her eyes lit up when she saw him. She continued talking for a few minutes, then broke away, putting her hand to her lips and wishing them all good luck and peace. Not for the first time Rosenharte sensed her ability to switch on a different part of herself.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said as they hurried up the stairway, her fingers digging into his arm. ‘Don’t you see? It’s coming to an end.’

  He said nothing because he didn’t believe her. But he smiled a truce and searched her eyes. Had they stormed the villa? Or was the Arab still safe in his hospital bed? She shook her head as though to say that everything he wanted answered would have to wait until later.

  They climbed to the first gallery and when they had settled in the beautiful old painted pews she popped her head over the parapet. ‘Look, the entire Party membership is down there. They’ve been here since two thirty. That’s why we can’t sit there.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ whispered Rosenharte.

  She bent towards him, her eyes darting around the congregation in the upper gallery. He could smell her hair.

  ‘My informant says Krenz was persuaded by the argument. They are sure. But there’s a rumour that the orders were given out by the Minister for State Security anyway. These may have been countermanded, but we don’t know for certain. We do know that the Stasi are all carrying weapons, and that armed reserves are to be held so they can be used at a moment’s notice.’

  He moved closer so he could speak directly into her ear. ‘What about the Arab?’

  ‘He hadn’t returned by the time I left, so I guess your friends are just going to have to wait, or postpone the whole thing. But that’s not our problem now, is it? We’ve done what we can. I have led them to him. All I know is that I will never see the inside of that villa again. That part of my life is finished.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. She had deceived him about the presence of Abu Jamal in Leipzig and her attendance on him. What else was she concealing? How much could he trust this woman?

  All eyes had turned to the front and a sudden calm settled over the congregation as one of two pastors got up, greeted the packed church and began to read. ‘Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,” not “Happy are the wealthy.” Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” not “Down with your opponents.” Jesus said, “Many who are now first will be last,” and not, “Everything stays the same.”’

  It seemed a little simple to Rosenharte but it was the essence of the protest. The pleasure of watching the Party officers having to listen easily compensated for any doubts he had about the sentiments. Prayers followed. The appeal for calm from Kurt Masur and the Party was read out. On the second hearing Rosenharte wondered if in fact it contained a coded permission to demonstrate. Perhaps what was happening behind the scenes was a dialogue in which the voice of the people was gradually prevailing. It was on this theme that a preacher named Wendell spoke. ‘The reforms will come if we allow the spirit of peace, calm and tolerance to enter us. The spirit of peace must go beyond these walls. Take great care you are not rude to the police officers. Be careful that you don’t sing songs or chant slogans that could provoke the authorities.’

  It might just work, thought Rosenharte.

  At 5.10 p.m., one of the watchers on the far side of the villa reported that a car had drawn up and a man in an overcoat had been helped from the front seat. He wore a cap and carried newspapers and a folder under his arm. A nurse accompanied him inside and stayed for about half an hour, during which she made him a sandwich and set it on the table with a glass of milk.

  An identification was made in the interval between the man lowering himself heavily to the chair and the nurse walking to the sliding window and drawing the curtains before leaving. He was still wearing his cap and a straggly beard covered his chin, but it looked very much like Mohammed Ubayd, better known to the world’s intelligence services as Abu Jamal.

  Three clear pictures were taken as he faced the window in those brief seconds and were received on the new portable Apple Macintosh that Harland had borrowed from Griswald unused. He attempted to send the pictures via the Inmarsat phone to London, but failed each time. Eventually Mike Costelloe left it to Harland to decide whether they’d got the right man.

  ‘This is the cove we’ve been watching, for heaven’s sake,’ said Harp. ‘We all know it’s him. Let’s get on with it.’

  Harland rubbed his chin. ‘It would suit them down to the ground if we lifted some poor bloody sod they’re using as a double.’ He reached for a briefcase where there were two black and white shots of Abu Jamal, and held them alongside the computer screen. The first had been taken in Syria in 1982 and showed him smiling to a female companion as they left a house in the suburbs of Damascus. The more recent picture was snatched by the BND at Lake Balaton in Hungary, where Abu Jamal holidayed with another lady friend while using the name of Mustapha Riffat. This was in 1986 and there were no signs of the kidney and liver complaints for which he had been receiving treatment in Leipzig’s university hospital at the time. The man in the villa was puffier around the jowls and had dark rings under his eyes. Yet there was still much in the line of the eyebrows, the shape of the nostrils and, more important, the force of personality betrayed in his eyes, which made Harland call London and tell them Samaritan was going ahead.

  At 5.55, Harp and Harland transferred to a dirty cream-coloured Lada saloon while a BND agent named Johann Horst climbed into the driving seat of the truck. Both vehicles rolled to the end of the street without turning on their engines or lights. Ahead of them was the gathering darkness of the oak woods, wedged into the city from the south. Everything seemed clear. Harland listened to the watchers reporting in for the last time. A shadow against the mesh curtains had told them that Abu Jamal was still in the main downstairs room at the table reading. Four of the BND team were in the garden at the rear of the villa. Having fed a tiny microphone into the room through a hole bored in the window, they were now quite sure that no one else was in the house.

  Harland nodded to Harp, who flashed his headlight at a truck that moved off ahead of them. Five minutes later Harland said, ‘Right, let’s get on with it, shall we?’

  Because of Abu Jamal’s obvious infirmity, Harland had decided that it would be hopeless to try to remove him over the fence and into the park. They would have to enter and leave through the main door, which meant that the most risky part of the operation would take place the moment they arrived in the narrow road in front of the villa.

  It took seven minutes to reach the street, at which point Harp cut the engine and turned off his lights. Harland pressed his fingers to the earpiece. Two members of the BND who had been hidden nearby were now approaching the Stasi car parked directly under a streetlight opposite the villa. One bent down and showed his ID card. Harland heard the surly response of the driver in his own earphone. The second BND man approached the passenger side and made a gesture for the man to wind down his window. At this, both men covered t
heir faces and sprayed the inside of the car with aerosol canisters. The gas acted immediately and the Stasi officers slumped forward. Harland knew that the additional dose of flunitrazepam, now being administered by a jab in the arm, meant they wouldn’t wake until six the next morning at the very earliest, by which time they would find themselves deep in the countryside with a couple of flat tyres and a bust distributor.

  One of the BND men straightened and waved Harland forward, while the other struggled to heft the driver out of his seat and into the back. This accomplished, he got in and drove the car off.

  Harland waited for a few seconds before pulling down a ski mask and running to the front door where the other German, now also masked, was trying a series of skeleton keys in the lock. The mechanism succumbed very quickly. By the time he and his German companion had reached the main room, four others were standing round a bemused Abu Jamal who had not had time to move from the table. One of the Germans told him formally that they were executing warrants issued by the French, German and American courts for numerous acts of terrorism, and on the basis of evidence of his plan to carry out further attacks in the West. Abu Jamal looked around the masked faces, astonished. He began to protest in good German that he was an engineer named Halim al Fatah from Egypt. He was in Leipzig legitimately receiving medical treatment and he knew nothing about terrorism. He offered to show them a passport. His head turned from one masked face to another before he let out a stream of indignation - he was too ill to be moved; his guards would be checking any moment; anyone laying hands on him would be arrested and shot as spies. Harland found himself noticing that Abu Jamal dyed his hair and eyebrows and that his lower lip protruded to show a very sick-looking mouth.

  He nodded and two of the Germans lifted him up and hustled him out of the front door to the Lada, which Macy Harp had turned round. In a few minutes Abu Jamal would know nothing of his journey through the suburbs to the truck that would take him south. He wouldn’t wake until he reached the BND HQ at Munich-Pullach half an hour away, where he’d be given a medical assessment before interrogation.

  Harland watched them go, then shut the door. They needed to search the villa. Despite the use of the arrest warrants, there was absolutely no intention by any of the governments to impede the investigations into Abu Jamal’s operations by consigning him to a drawn-out judicial process. His life expectancy was too short and the threat too large for this to be considered. But documents could be important, partly to prove the active support of Honecker’s regime but mostly because the West needed the vital intelligence to trace Abu Jamal’s network before word leaked out that he had been abducted. At best they had forty-eight hours before the news would pass from East Germany to its embassies all over the Middle East.

  They moved around the villa sweeping everything of remote interest into a holdall, but they didn’t find the cache that Harland and the lead German intelligence officer, Claus Neurath, knew must be there. Twenty minutes into the search, Harland thought back to Abu Jamal’s arrival that evening. He was wearing an overcoat that they had forced him to put on before he was bundled into the car. And he was carrying a sheaf of newspapers, which could easily have been used to conceal something. One of the watchers thought he had seen a folder under his arm.

  Harland went to the front door, turned and looked at the route that Abu Jamal must have taken into the house. He knew that there had been no time for him to go into another room between being sighted with the nurse at the front of the villa and his appearance in the main room. On the left was a toilet, which contained no conceivable hiding place, and on the right, a little further on, a kind of dresser which was fixed to the wall and included coat pegs, a mirror, a clothes brush that hung from a hook beside the mirror and three drawers at the bottom. Harland searched inside the drawers and felt underneath the dresser but found nothing. He stood up, slipped his hand behind the dresser and pulled up a stiff black plastic wallet. It could have been a free gift from a bank or an insurance company and indeed he noticed the remains of a gold-printed logo on the cover. He withdrew the papers inside and handed them to Neurath, a good Arabic speaker, who whipped through them then clapped him on his back. There couldn’t be any doubt about it - they’d found the file that Kafka had spoken of in her first communication with the West: the money file, which proved the extent of Abu Jamal’s operation and the range of his contacts in Europe and the Middle East.

  This was placed inside the holdall, then they prepared to leave via the sliding door. First Harland went round and switched off the lights in the house. When he returned to the main room he saw Neurath flattened against the wall, making agitated downward motions to silence him. He froze. Someone was at the door. Neurath flashed his head round the corner to look at the entrance and raised two fingers. He had seen their shadows on the frosted glass. Whoever it was had entered and they were now making their way down the corridor. In the half light Harland saw that the BND team were all aiming guns in the direction of the corridor. Before he had time to slip backwards into the doorway that led to the stairs, there was a brief commotion in which the two men were surrounded and pushed to the floor with pistols to the back of their heads. Hardly a voice was raised. Harland glanced down at the man nearest to him, a lean blond in a suit. He recognized him immediately from the files as Colonel Peter Zank of the Main Department for Counter-Intelligence, and cursed under his breath. But he said nothing to Neurath for fear of betraying his English accent. In any case it was clear from the look that darted from the slits in Neurath’s ski mask that he knew who Zank was, and moreover he had already decided on precisely the course of action to be taken. Zank and his partner were hauled up, placed on chairs, bound with the ropes, gagged and unceremoniously injected with flunitrazepam. Both men were laid sideways on the floor facing away from each other a yard apart. The last lights were extinguished and the party left the villa through the sliding door and stole through the park to a spot where two cars were waiting with a couple of the best drivers in West Germany. The operation had gone well, but Harland wasn’t celebrating. Zank’s presence in the villa meant he and his department had made the vital connections. Rosenharte and Kafka were in mortal danger and he had no way of contacting them.

  He hoped like hell they’d have the sense to leave the city that night.

  26

  The Miracle of Leipzig

  Towards the close of the service Rosenharte’s gaze drifted across the nave of the church to the galleries on the south side and came to rest on the face of the man he had seen outside Ulrike’s home - Colonel Biermeier’s swaggering young sidekick. Unlike the rest of the Stasi and the Party membership, he had managed to infiltrate the genuine part of the congregation in the galleries and as before was showing every sign of devotion. Rosenharte scanned the rest of the congregation for Biermeier and Zank, but didn’t see them. The light was fading outside and the recesses of the lower gallery were completely in shadow. Maybe they were there or directly below them. He nudged Ulrike and pointed in the man’s direction. She touched his thigh and said she’d talk about it later.

  A few seconds before the end of the peace prayers, they slid from their seats and went down the stairway so that when the final blessing was over they were at the main entrance before the rest of the congregation. What greeted them as the doors opened was by no means a riotous mass, but rather a sea of faces, many lit in the dusk by candles that people shielded in their hands. Ulrike had told him about this - if the people were holding candles there could be no mistaking their peaceful intentions. A gentle cheer went up. Rosenharte wondered if the crowd sensed that many of the first people to emerge were in fact Party members who had sat stiffly through the service, trying desperately to defuse the sense of moment that filled the aisles. They had failed, and now, as the congregation spilled out into the square, the rush of benevolence made even the grim loyalists smile.

  Ulrike took all this in with an ecstatic, slightly manic grin, then linked arms with Rosenharte and Kurt and surged thr
ough the crowd towards the other end of the church. Several well-known figures seemed to be making for the same spot. Ulrike nodded and called out to them. She seemed to know everyone of any importance there. When they reached what appeared to be the head of the march, she withdrew her arms and told Rosenharte and Kurt that she was joining the people at the front. They should walk just behind her so they didn’t lose touch. The demonstration moved off northwards from the Karl-Marx-Platz towards Leipzig’s main station. At a high point in the road Rosenharte and Kurt turned to see the huge swell of people behind them. They had no way of estimating the numbers, but guessed there were anything between 70,000-100,000 Leipzigers on the streets. As before, the overwhelming majority were under thirty years of age. Some of them shouted, ‘We’re staying here!’ and ‘Join us now!’ as they passed onlookers and buildings where the lights were on, but once the crowd was moving, things settled down. It seemed the people had decided that the best way of making their point to the formations of helmeted riot troops and soldiers glimpsed along the way was to pass them in silence.

  The aim was to march round the four sides of the Georgi Ring without being stopped - and so achieve the symbolic encirclement of the city. Along the first leg, which took them through a wide canyon of bleak apartment and office blocks, Ulrike broke away from the front rank and came back to them. She pointed to the top of the church that they were passing on the right, and said that a cameraman had hidden in the clock tower to record the demonstration. By the following day the film would be broadcast in the West. She didn’t want her face on every TV screen.