by Douglas Boyd
Although one HVA agent had escaped the net just before arrest in 1984, these were the first satellite country spies to be caught red-handed in Britain since the Lonsdale–Houghton–Kroger network was broken up in 1961. Several of the couple’s trips abroad were followed by large cash deposits in their bank accounts. Under routine questioning, Reinhard was tripped up by his ignorance of the British family of the real Reinhard Schulze, after which, although refusing to talk about their real activities, they admitted using false papers on entry into Britain.
According to a BBC newsflash dated 28 August 1985, the couple appeared before Horseferry Road magistrates court in London, did not request bail and were remanded in custody. Identified as GDR citizens, they were duly charged under the Official Secrets Act with ‘possessing documents detrimental to the public interest’. Both then and during their subsequent nine-day trial at the Old Bailey, they refused to answer any questions about what they had been doing in Britain and the investigating officers were said to be so baffled by the trail of false identities that they had no idea who the couple really were. Yet Schulze requested that the GDR embassy be informed of their arrest and, after they were each sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for preparing an espionage operation for an unidentified foreign power, the Third Secretary at the embassy visited them every week in jail. Under a swap agreement, of which the details were not disclosed, they were released and deported from Britain in 1991.
Notes
1. A. Glees, The Stasi Files, London, Simon and Schuster 2004, pp 365–9
2. Ibid, pp. 6–7, 14
3. Ibid, pp. 7–9
4. Ibid, p. 9
5. Ibid, p. 89
11
DEATH OF THE STASI
On 15 February 1989 the last defeated Soviet troops left Afghanistan, invalidating the Brezhnev Doctrine that the Soviet government would support with all necessary armed force any pro-Soviet government that was under threat. Leonid Shebarshin, head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, controlled all KGB staff in the satellite countries and had taken soundings among them even before the final troops marched out of Afghanistan across the so-called Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan. In July all the rezidenty from Eastern Europe met in Moscow and reported, for the first time more or less honestly, what was going on in their several countries. The news was universally grim, leaving Shebarshin to wonder what could be done about it. The Soviet economy was in such disastrous condition that it could neither bribe the satellite states with aid grants, nor bully them with military force. Some consolation was taken at the conference that the German Democratic Republic seemed still to be ‘steering a socialist course’.
Throughout the summer of 1989, as the rifts between the satellite states and Moscow grew wider in one country after another, Soviet publications with any mention of glasnost were banned in the GDR. But even the universal terror generated by the Stasi – by far the most powerful secret police force of the Warsaw Pact bloc – could not stop informal groups of people, whose numbers grew increasingly large, from getting together in churches and bars at Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin to criticise their government’s Stalinist rigidity. Many were arrested in the early weeks for expressing the heretical view that they should be allowed to travel abroad or even emigrate. So many people secretly watched the forbidden transmissions of West German television that they had no illusions how far their standard of living had lagged behind that of their compatriots on the other side of the inner German border, who, for example, did not have to ‘qualify’ and then wait for three years in a queue to acquire a Trabant, Europe’s worst-performing and most-polluting car.
By August 1989 so many thousands of GDR citizens had escaped by travelling to Hungary and walking across the open frontier that Honecker banned travel to Hungary when it lifted all travel restrictions on 10 September.1 The result? His people – or the more enterprising of them – went ‘for a holiday’ to Prague, where the West German embassy was besieged by hundreds, then thousands, of asylum seekers. There were still over 400,000 Soviet troops stationed in the GDR, but Gorbachev refused to use them to bolster the authority of Honecker’s failing regime.
Honecker deplored the break-up of socialist unity because that concept was implicit in the party’s name of Sozialistische Einheitspartei, meaning ‘socialist unity’. One by one, his supporters crumbled until a cabal of Politburo members including Günther Schabowski forced him to resign ‘for health reasons’ on 18 October. The cabal included even Stasi boss Erich Mielke, who placed guards around the room where the Politburo was meeting. In the words of Patrick Brogan, who chronicled these events, he was:
followed into oblivion by a succession of other septuagenarian and octogenarian Stalinists who had governed the country undisturbed for 30 years and were now witness to the complete collapse of their life’s work.2
On 25 October 1989, during a visit to Helsinki, Gorbachev spoke of ‘Finlandisation’ as the way for Eastern Europe. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had said two days previously that Russia at last recognized the right of the other Warsaw Pact governments to choose their own way to socialism, and Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov appeared on the US television programme Good Morning America. Asked to comment on this, Gerasimov explained that the Brezhnev Doctrine had been replaced by the Sinatra Doctrine. ‘You know the Frank Sinatra song “I did it my way”?’ he asked. ‘Hungary and Poland are doing it their way.’3
Once used in the grim corridors of power in the Kremlin, the expression spread like a virus. Poland had elected its first non-communist government; Hungary had opened its border with Austria and refused demands from East Berlin to bar egress to GDR citizens who managed to reach Hungarian territory.
It had been sufficiently oppressive for GDR citizens to be forbidden to travel to the West. Now that they were not allowed to travel to most other Warsaw Pact states either, the effect was that of a pressure cooker without a safety valve. Between 30 October and 4 November 1.4 million protesters marched through the streets in 210 separate anti-government demonstrations, demanding not just the freedom to travel, but even free multi-party elections. When demonstrations are reported, there is usually a discrepancy between the organisers’ inflated figures and those of the forces of law and order trying to minimise the events, but the above figures come from the Stasi’s own records.
Honecker’s replacement, Egon Krenz, promised an easing of travel restrictions after pleading with Gorbachev for help on 1 November and being told that under the Sinatra Doctrine, ‘Eto vashe dyelo!’ – That’s your problem.
The border with Czechoslovakia was reopened and an amnesty announced for all who had left. Confusing announcements were made – that the travel restrictions would be either eased or abolished by Christmas. These caused public unrest to escalate. On 9 November Günther Schabowski was asked at a televised press conference when the travel restrictions would be finally withdrawn. He answered, ‘Immediately.’4 This was not the Politburo’s decision. The official explanation of Schabowski’s lapse is that he had not been adequately briefed on the details of the new policy; it is equally possible that, as a lifetime Communist and dedicated party functionary, his brain could not absorb the details of the new heresy, so he panicked in front of the cameras and reporters, and said the first word that came into his head.
Whatever the reason, that one word released a media storm. Within minutes, GDR citizens were streaming towards the Wall, expecting the barriers to be open. The border guards had heard over the radio or seen on television Schabowski’s press conference. Lacking any contrary instructions, they allowed the first trickle to pass through. With West Berlin television coverage being seen in East Berlin, tens of thousands more rushed to the Wall and walked freely into the West.
Nine years later, when the author was collecting his Stasi file from the BStU in Berlin, he asked Frau Ehrlich, the woman handing over the file, whether she had lived im Westen oder im Osten before the reunification. She replied that she lived in
East Berlin, where her husband had lost his job after being blacklisted by the Stasi for reasons never divulged to him. On the fateful night, she had not seen the televised press conference and knew nothing of Schabowski’s faux pas, but received a telephone call from her mother-in-law, whose apartment overlooked a checkpoint, saying, ‘You must come here right away.’
Incredulous, the two women watched out of the window as the crowds streamed through into West Berlin. Expecting some violent reaction from the border guards or Volkspolizei riot police, they were too frightened to go down and join them. When the author asked her what she had felt then, Frau Ehrlich’s face lit up with remembered joy. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘the most wonderful night of my life.’
It was probably the worst night of Erich Mielke’s life, who spent it in the bedroom adjoining his office at the Normannenstrasse HQ. On 7 November he resigned. On 13 November he addressed the Volkskammer, or parliament, as Genossen, meaning ‘comrades’, and was shouted down by a chorus of ‘We are not your comrades’. Reduced to stammering, ‘Ich liebe doch alle Menschen!’ – but I love everybody – the man who had screamed at his subordinates to club and beat the demonstrators in the streets was baffled to be greeted with laughter and catcalls. The only acceptable SED leader with any popular support, Hans Modrow, was elected prime minister of a country that had a budget deficit equivalent to US $70 billion and an inflation rate well into double figures.
When ordinary people could at last visit the secret and formerly guarded town of Wandlitz, to the north of Berlin, where the party fat cats had lived, their anger reached new levels. While they had suffered all the privations of the failing SED-planned economy, the Honeckers, Mielke and twenty other political leaders had enjoyed sybaritic luxury in Western-style villas with swimming pools, no rationing and large domestic staffs. The trade union leader had even arrogated to himself a 5,000-acre hunting reserve in Mecklenberg and a 200-acre farm to breed ‘wild’ boars for the hunt.5 Modrow, just as out of touch with reality as the other SED leaders, planned to restore the Stasi. When the news leaked out, popular anger was such that crowds stormed the local offices and the HQ in Berlin, pushing their way in and hurling entire filing cabinets out of the windows so that nearby streets had a snowstorm of paperwork floating through the air.
In October 1993 86-year-old Mielke was put on trial, not for the deaths caused by the Stasi during his long tenure but for the murders of two Berlin police officers in 1931. Captains Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck were shot with a revolver by Mielke in front of witnesses during, or just after, a street battle with Nazi supporters. In 1947 two ex-police officers recognised Mielke at a public function and requested that the investigation be reopened. The original records, which had survived all the war damage, were passed to the Kammergericht for action, which was blocked by the Soviet representatives on the Allied Control Commission. They confiscated the papers and handed them to Mielke. For whatever reason, instead of destroying them, he kept them in his personal safe, where they were discovered when his house was searched in 1990. Sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for the two murders, Mielke served less than two before being released on the grounds of senile dementia.
As to what happened to the thousands of Stasi officers between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the formal reunification of the two German states, CIA officers in West and East Berlin were ordered to recruit as many as possible in the hunt for details of agents who had penetrated US security. Their first panicking technique was to consult a personnel list supplied for cash by one reliable source, and then use the telephone directory to cold-call one officer named on the chart after another. This met with almost universal failure, apparently because the professionally paranoid Stasi men thought the phone calls were entrapment by their own colleagues. Knocking on doors and proving CIA identity met with better results, as some of those contacted in this way robbed the Stasi Centre registry and offered the loot for money. An odd sideshow of this episode was when the BfV, reluctant to get directly involved in the GDR, asked the CIA office in Munich to handle a Stasi officer with something special to sell. A junior CIA officer rendezvoused with the contact: two men with two cars parked on a lonely country road. In the boot of the Stasi car was a card index whose 17,000 cards detailed transcripts of wire taps and records of telephone numbers – a gold mine for Bundesrepublik counter-intelligence. After sifting the material in the hunt for American references, the CIA turned it over to the BfV.6
As for the most critical Stasi files – including those listing real name and cover name, address and activity of spies implanted in the West – intelligence insiders believe that a small group of MfS officers kept their heads when all around them was falling to pieces immediately after the breaching of the Wall and transported these files in microfilm form to the East Berlin airport at Schönefeld, whence they were immediately flown out to Moscow and safe keeping with the KGB. The problem with intelligence stories is to know what is genuine and what is disinformation. That story continues with the CIA buying the files back in Moscow from a crooked KGB officer through a middleman for $1 million. An alternative version has the files being literally carried into a US embassy ‘somewhere in Europe’ and offered at the more modest price of $75,000. Conveniently, all the players in these scenarios died shortly afterwards.
There was also some private enterprise afoot, with at least one officer raiding his own office safe in the Centre and carting the contents to his allotment out in the suburbs, where he burned everything, to the amusement of the other allotment holders.
Whatever the truth, without in any way condoning the Stasi or its personnel’s ruthless sense of duty, one has to acknowledge the sheer professionalism of the officers who flew the main archives to safety when all around them the state they had served was disintegrating and there was a risk that the uncontrolled anger of their hundreds of thousands of erstwhile victims might cost their lives. It contrasts tellingly with the dereliction of duty shown by the CIA officers at Saigon in 1975 who ran away to save their own skins without destroying the lists of their informers. As a result, thousands of men and women the CIA had used against their own people were swept up by the incoming NVA can-bo commissars and consigned to the firing squads or the living hell of ‘re-education camps’.
Despite all the secrecy of the previous four and a half decades, some physical evidence of the Stasi’s activities was clearly visible in bricks and mortar. It owned 2,655 separate premises of various kinds and 18,000 apartments including safe houses for clandestine meetings. The vehicles in its garages included 12,000 cars and 5,456 ‘equipped vehicles’ used for surveillance, filming and photographing its targets, which explains how everyone posting a letter in East Berlin on a particular day could be recorded on film. Of its 85,000 personnel, 2,171 were employed steaming open and reading mail; 1,486 were intercepting telephone calls; 2,244 were interrogating suspects and/or recording interrogations; 12,000 were employed on the frontiers; 8,426 were on electronic intercept duty; and nearly 5,000 were bodyguards or on guard duty at various state premises.
Less visible but equally eloquent was the cash salted away in Zurich by the Stasi through an Austrian company called Novum and the Austrian Communist Party, for purposes unknown. This is thought by some informed sources to add up to the staggering sum of DM 50 billion. Even if a lower figure of DM 26 billion – of which only DM 2 billion have been recovered7 – is accurate, that is still a large amount for an intelligence service to have in ready cash. Who has it now?
Notes
1. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 14
2. Ibid, p. 39
3. Ibid
4. M. Bearden and J. Risen, The Main Enemy, London, Century 2003, pp. 395−6
5. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 41
6. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, pp. 435−8
7. Glees, The Stasi Files, p. 118
PART 3
STATE TERROR IN
CENTRAL EUROPE
12
THE POLISH UB
CRUSHING A SUFFERING NATION
After carving up the homeland of the Poles on paper under the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty in 1939, Hitler’s first large-scale Blitzkrieg was launched against Poland on 1 September 1939. The Poles resisted heroically but the impossibility of their situation was epitomised by the image of Polish horse cavalry pitted against German tanks. To complete the destruction of the Polish state, on 17 September Soviet armies poured in from the east. As combat ended, Stalin proceeded to install a reign of terror in ‘his’ half of Poland. An estimated 1.5 million of the 13.7 million inhabitants were tortured, imprisoned, murdered or deported to the Gulag with the aim of terrifying the survivors into submission to their new Russian overlords. This enormous total included many thousands of Poles in uniform, who should have been protected by the rules of war.
After the frontier adjustments following the Second World War, Poland is now 95 per cent Catholic and Polish-speaking. In 1939, however, one-third of the population was Russian, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Byelorussian, Lithuanian, German or Jewish. This dramatic change is due in part because the country suffered more than any other in the Second World War, losing one-fifth of its population to German and Russian bullets, the gas chambers, malnutrition and exposure in Siberia and starvation at home. On the German side of the new internal border, which divided the country roughly in half, the initial targets were Jews – and children. A little-known horror within all the statistics is the kidnapping of blond, blue-eyed children, who were brought up in special SS-run orphanages, where they were forbidden to speak Polish, so they would become German-speaking cannon fodder and breeding stock. The ‘rejects’ from these establishments were starved to death in so-called Auslandkinder Pflegestätten or shipped to one of the death camps for disposal.1 The murderous carve-up between the two dictators came undone when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, driving out the grotesquely ill-prepared Soviet occupation forces2 and installing his programme of ethnic cleansing nationwide.