by Alex Dryden
In this anonymous dead-end town in a backwater of Germany Finn chose the twelve-euro menu and his contact chose the same, and they kept their silence as two Tiger beers were brought across the grubby red and gold, dragon-painted room with its paper lamps that swayed whenever the door was opened on to the grey, damp concrete outside.
Finn doesn’t trust the man who sits opposite him, but he likes him and would like to be able to trust him.
‘A good German,’ as Finn puts it, his tongue firmly in cheek. And then, more thoughtfully, ‘Dieter is someone who looks beyond the narrow tunnel walls of his job. He thinks for himself, he sees the world moving outside the avenue of his own efforts, and that is why perhaps, like me, he eventually lost his job.’
Finn has known Dieter since 1989, from the time when the British seized Schmidtke at Tegel airport in Berlin, and whisked him to London. Dieter was one of the BND intelligence officers who formally received Schmidtke back into the bosom of German justice when the British bowed to Germany’s insistence that he was theirs.
I think Finn thought of Dieter as being an inappropriate introduction for me, unlike most of his sources. It wasn’t just that Dieter was uninterested in women, but simply that it would have made him uncomfortable to sit down and break bread with an officer of the Russian SVR. Finn never said so, but I felt his reluctance in Dieter’s case came from the fact that Dieter could not compromise with an enemy who had not only enslaved the East of his country but who had also corrupted so much of what was good in the West. Unlike the British and the Americans, Dieter had been fighting the KGB on the front line.
Sometimes I’ve thought that Dieter was an invention of Finn’s. But here he was, written on the page; a ghost, but a living ghost of our past.
Dieter is a tall, slightly stooped man with black hair thinning and greying at the sides. He has a sharp, lean face, and a dark stubble shadows the pale skin of his jaw. He rarely smiles, but seems to carry a burden of solemnity that leaches from his expressionless eyes into the slope of his shoulders and the movements of his hands. He speaks tonelessly, as if giving a statement to disbelieving interrogators.
He joined West Germany’s intelligence service, the BND, at the start of the long post-war years of reformation. While the world watched Germany rise from the ashes and saw its industry thrive and dominate, its foreign service, the BND, and its army, unlike its automobiles and electrical goods, were forbidden from going abroad. By constitutional decree, its spies could not spy beyond its borders.
And during all that time, for decades, the East loomed across the Wall, porous only to those sent specifically by us in Soviet Russia-us the West’s enemies-to infiltrate, to corrupt and to threaten West German political figures and the country’s financial and commercial institutions.
‘For our allies,’ Dieter once explained to Finn, ‘for you, the Wall was the front line in the war against Communism, the stark divide. But for us West Germans the Wall was far less clearly defined and permanent. For us, it was not some remote battleground, far from home, but a false wall, a partition in our semi-detached existence as one country. The dream of unification, of a greater revived Germany, never died on either side of the Wall,’ he explained. ‘The desire for communication with the East was overwhelming. We were all Germans.’
Finn raises the bottle of Tiger beer without bothering to pour it into the glass and Dieter responds.
‘Cheers,’ the German says in English.
‘Cheers, Dieter. It’s been a long time.’
‘More than ten years,’ Dieter replies.
Finn studies the face of his old colleague. It is a lived-in face, the eyes those of a man who has taken in more than he has given away.
In his early years with the BND Dieter had seen the Wall go up. The enemy and his German cousins were one and the same. But as a German whose adulthood emerged from the shadows of the Nazi war, he’d learned reserve, kept his own counsel, and seemed to Finn shy and wounded.
‘Nazism didn’t just end,’ Dieter had told Finn, ‘like the curtain coming down on a play. The Nazi migrations after the war sought to keep the flame alive, not just in the well-documented places like South America and other remote parts, but closer to home too. An SS officer who was a friend of my father’s went to Turkey, for example, because it was far enough away from retribution while still being close enough to get a decent bottle of wine.
‘And closer than Turkey there was Liechtenstein, just across our border. Did you know the population of Liechtenstein doubled at the end of the war? Oh yes. It was largely a German and Austrian migration, for anyone from the Nazi regime who possessed the necessary loot and influence.’
For Germans like Dieter, determined to remove the stain of their country’s recent past, the totalitarian mindset of the ex-Nazis, whether across the southern border in Liechtenstein or elsewhere, was closer to that of the East German regime than to the new West Germany. Ideological differences between Communist and ex-Nazi were irrelevant to the trade that could be done between two former hated enemies.
‘Totalitarianism, like money, is not squeamish about whose bed it shares,’ Dieter had said to Finn.
After the British had handed Schmidtke over to the Germans, Dieter had been one of Schmidtke’s interrogators for the next two years, until the investigation into the old Stasi spy was quietly dropped and Schmidtke retired to Tegernsee with a good pension and the protection of his former enemies. Dieter wasn’t happy with the deal and lost his job for being unable to come to terms with it.
A waitress brings menus to the table.
‘I want to go back to the beginning, Dieter,’ Finn says, when they’ve drunk half their beers. ‘I need to see the unbroken line from back then, from 1961, to the present.’
‘What makes you think the line is unbroken?’ Dieter replies.
Finn doesn’t answer.
The soup arrives, another beer is ordered. And then Dieter slowly begins to talk, as if he were having difficulty with the memories. But Finn knows he is like an old actor who’s played a part so many times in the private theatre of his own head that the lines will never leave.
‘When Kommerzielle Koordinierung—KoKo—was set up in East Berlin, just on the other side of the Wall in 1961, their motto was “Necessity has no law”,’ Dieter begins. ‘It was a thieves’ decree. Jewellery, artwork, stamp collections, antiquarian books—anything of value belonging to East German citizens—it was all on KoKo’s menu. But this was state theft and, while some objects of value were simply stolen, in general the state and their Stasi agents applied the classic bureaucratic, totalitarian state methods of theft.
‘To give you an example, Finn, people were told they had to insure their property, such as jewellery, for outrageous sums which they couldn’t afford. When they failed to do so, the property was confiscated. That was one method. The value of a citizen’s private property was hugely inflated by KoKo, in order to inflate the insurance value, simply for the purpose of rendering its owners unable to pay. Sometimes Schmidtke’s men inflated the value by 1,000 per cent. Then, when the owners couldn’t pay, or their persecutors simply tired of this longer bureaucratic route, the agents of KoKo would invoke the so-called Fortune Law that existed in East Germany and that said it was illegal to possess property of such a high value. The state could claim that the private citizen had broken the Fortune Law that regulated the private wealth of citizens.
‘Huge numbers of private homes in East Germany were raided by the Stasi. I have walked with an old man after the Wall came down along the pawn shops and the second-hand shop windows of West Berlin, looking for a smart Swiss wristwatch that was taken from him right at the beginning of this grand theft. He never found it, but others have sometimes found their stolen property since eighty-nine, tucked away in a street market somewhere.
‘The state raked in fifty million Deutschmarks a year from thefts like this and it went on for more than twenty-five years, though with decreasing returns, of course. The East Germans were
hard up. There was an embargo in the West on the export of technology. In the East they needed to fund their own technological development.’
‘And their own intelligence operations in the West,’ Finn interrupts.
‘Certainly, their own operations in the West, many of which concerned precisely the theft of technological secrets. And this theft was mainly from us, in West Germany. So, in the beginning, KoKo stole the valuables, sold them to West Germans and then used the money to bribe West Germans in particular for industrial secrets. But they also used Raubgold, this stolen wealth, to corrupt our bankers, politicians, even us in intelligence. A lot of money was available for bribing West Germans.’
‘Schmidtke told us that KoKo used a holding company as cover, to keep up appearances,’ Finn says, remembering. ‘Art and Antiquities GmbH it was called, if I remember rightly. It sounded very sound, very proper. Dealers in London did business with it all the time. The company, one removed from KoKo, enabled buyers to turn a blind eye.’
‘Oh yes,’ Dieter says. ‘The two Germanys proved that crime pays,’ he says. ‘To both sides.’
‘And Schmidtke was the great bureaucrat in charge.’
‘Schmidtke was the head of KoKo, he organised this Raubgold. And, in doing so, he learned many more valuable things. He learned how companies worked offshore, how the lawyers handle that side of things, which lawyers could be tempted on our side, how tax worked and was avoided, how to launder wealth, which banks were open to corruption. We were complicit here in the West, or at least many, many individuals in powerful positions were complicit. And all the time Schmidtke had the Stasi and the KGB to back him up with threats if anyone looked as if they might step out of line on our side. Some were willing, of course, but others were compromised with threats and blackmail. Politicians, bankers and businessmen were sexually compromised in KGB sting operations, for example. And Schmidtke had lawyers in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein and Geneva; he had bankers in all three countries, and he had politicians, too, here in Germany and elsewhere.’
Dieter sips from his glass as the soup bowls are removed and he lights a cigarette.
‘And this network of Schmidtke’s,’ Finn says. ‘You spent two years investigating it.’
‘Just over two years,’ Dieter replies, as if remembering a bad holiday. ‘But it was vast and complex, hidden behind wall after wall of trusts and false company names. Two years was what it took just to peel back the edge of the carpet on Schmidtke’s network in the West. And then? Then my government didn’t like what it saw appearing from under the carpet and covered it up again.’
‘So…’
‘So I was retired, along with some others, after a decent time lapse from the investigations. We were being wound up individually, just as the investigation was being wound up. They didn’t want us around any more, with our knowledge, in the same room as them.’ Dieter sniffs. ‘And they were afraid of our indignation that the file was being closed. I finally left in 1992 and they rolled the carpet safely back over the rotting stench.’
Dieter looks at Finn. The handsome eyes in the lined, outdoor face sharpen.
‘But of course you are not interested in the robbery of German citizens,’ he says.
‘I’m interested in their persecutor who sits in Tegernsee with a government pension,’ Finn says. ‘I’m interested in why the investigation of Schmidtke’s network was wound up, and in the network itself. I’m interested in the unbroken line from those times to these.’
‘I’ve always thought you were honest, Finn.’ Dieter pushes aside a half finished plate of noodles. ‘I’ve met some of the victims and they are, sure, just victims of theft. They haven’t been murdered or put in camps, their relatives weren’t shot going over the Wall. But they lost out too.’
‘You did your job.’
‘And you? Are you doing your job, Finn?’
Finn doesn’t reply.
‘I think not,’ Dieter says. ‘Or you wouldn’t be talking to me, a retired intelligence officer, like this in private.’
They split the bill and walk to a car park across the bare concrete platz outside the restaurant. The wind creeps through the thread of Finn’s coat and into his bones.
‘So you want the unbroken line from the beginning to the present,’ Dieter says, demanding no reply. ‘You believe something remains of Schmidtke’s network. Of course,’ he says, and Finn isn’t sure what Dieter means.
They get into Dieter’s old blue BMW and turn out through the car park’s barrier and head west along the banks of the Saar.
‘Let me show you what I’ve bought with my retirement bonus, Finn. Or is it my hush money?’ Dieter adds. ‘I’m not as comfortable in retirement as Schmidtke, but I like it nevertheless.’
Outside the town, when the decayed remnants of its mining past have disappeared from view and been replaced by the slow grey-green curves of the Moselle River as it meanders through wooded hills, they come to an unmade track that leads down to the river. Dieter drives the BMW carefully over the rough ground and pulls up the car in a courtyard of stone barns and outhouses, out on their own. They sit in the car with the engine switched off.
‘Do they know, in London, that you’re here?’ Dieter says.
‘No.’
Dieter seems to weigh the implications.
‘Good,’ he says at last. ‘We shouldn’t trust our masters too much, don’t you think?’ Then he snaps open the door and steps out on to the hard ground.
They walk away from the buildings and up the slope of a vineyard with a view down on to the river. It is bitterly cold on the top of the hill and the vines have been clipped down for the winter and protected with straw around their roots. A small fire made from old vine roots puts up a plume of smoke a few fields away.
‘I bought fifty hectares with my lump sum,’ Dieter says as they walk. ‘I sometimes wonder why I didn’t do it back then, back in the fifties, when I could have made my life as a farmer perhaps, with my own wine label.’
A long, slow barge creeps upriver against the current. On the other side, the forests of Luxembourg cloak the hills.
‘These things are better as dreams,’ Finn says.
‘Perhaps so, yes.’
Finn looks at Dieter but sees no resignation, no sense of failure, in the German’s face. He sees someone who has fought the long, slow battle of intelligence all his life, has seen his enemies rehabilitated, enriched even, while their victims either lie dead or are impoverished. But he sees, too, a face which tells him that the battle has been worth fighting nevertheless.
They walk back down to the banks of the river, their shoes coated with heavy mud, and Dieter indicates that they should walk left up the bank and towards the outbuildings which are half a mile away now.
‘Germany was divided, yes,’ Dieter says, as if to himself, ‘but it was divided only for its ordinary citizens in the practice of their everyday lives. That much I saw when we investigated Schmidtke and long before, of course. The Wall was a metaphor as well as a physical thing. It was a political statement. It hit hardest at the ordinary people, not at those with the power and deceit to use it. For those with power and money, and the matchless amorality to exploit it, the Wall was in some ways convenient. For them, the division of Germany was not an obstacle, but a challenge. They didn’t try to physically overcome it, of course, like the many victims of the border guards, but in other ways, through banks and finance, with corrupt lawyers and secret trusts and secret contacts. The Wall sharpened the wits of these people. Over there,’ Dieter points across the river to Luxembourg, ‘and here in Germany and in Liechtenstein and Switzerland, the avenues of finance are always open, Wall or no Wall. In the battle between capitalism and totalitarian communism, capitalism ate its holes in this metaphorical Wall, like lice in the beams of an old house. Until the whole thing was rotten. Money- capital- is like water. It will always find its equilibrium. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the East or West, it will come together, and it did. It is the
ultimate power. It was our weakness in the West, this primitive accumulation of capital, as Marx put it. It opened our doors to every dictator, every brutal regime in the world.’
‘How did it come together, Dieter?’ Finn asks urgently. ‘East and West. What did you learn from Schmidtke?’
‘What did we start to learn.’ Dieter corrects him, and stops walking and turns to look at the river. The barge is approaching level with them, its small bow wave sending thin lines of brown water out from behind it.
‘I can give you three things, Finn,’ Dieter says at last. ‘I can give you a man, a bank and a company. These are just a brief glimpse, a dirty peephole into a large network that is more complex, more closely bound than the guts of a golf ball. Some would say this network is inextricable. As my masters eventually decided,’ he adds drily.
‘But not you, Dieter.’
‘Everything is possible,’ Dieter says. ‘Our enemies knew that and we should be proud enough to know it too.’
They walk back from the field towards the buildings and Finn realises they’ve made the detour so that Dieter can establish who he is now, a retired agent, a viticulturalist. Dieter is making a statement about his present life.
They reach the first of the outbuildings where the car is parked and then Finn sees that there is a small house hidden from the track between them and the river. He is cold and sees Dieter is too. The German fumbles with numbed hands for a key and opens the door to the house and they enter. It is too cold to take off their coats even in the small, low kitchen, and Dieter switches on the central heating and puts logs into a wood burner and lights it while the heating grumbles into action. He puts a pot on the stove and makes coffee and pours two glasses of good Napoleon cognac and, by that time, the wood stove is kicking out a good heat and they remove their coats.
‘The name of the man is Otto Roth,’ Dieter begins. ‘Or sometimes he’s Osvald Roth, or Rottheim, or any number of variations. What’s for certain is that none of these is his real name. Even he probably hasn’t used his real name for so long it’s meaningless. We’ll call him Otto Roth. Nor is his true nationality certain. Some say he is originally a Russian-German, like Schmidtke, but born on this side of the divide. Some say he is Scandinavian, but that his parents were from Russia and worked in the thirties for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. In this theory, Roth’s parents came to Western Europe before the war, maybe during the Spanish Civil War, and were placed as sleepers in the West, to be used some day in the cause of Russia. If so, it was their son who turned out to be the gold seam of Russian intelligence and the investment made in the thirties was perfect. So the Russians have always played a very long game, so long that Roth’s obscurity was assured.’