Another Time, Another Life: The Story of a Crime

by Leif Gw Persson

  “The reason they’re doing a new background check on her now is that the prime minister’s office requested one yesterday. This concerns the absolute highest existing level of secrecy, and they want it to be done with the greatest possible speed and well in advance of the government meeting in fourteen days.”

  “So why do they want one?” asked Johansson, despite the fact that he already sensed the answer. There aren’t that many jobs to choose from, he thought, and his own was already taken.

  “Because the prime minister apparently intends to appoint her as a member of the government,” said Wiklander, “and considering her new security level she wouldn’t be handling consumer issues or social insurance,” Wiklander added. What in the name of God should I do? he thought.

  Christ, thought Johansson. It was already pretty late anyway, he thought, but naturally he didn’t say that. Acting prime minister … coordination minister … or perhaps even foreign minister or defense minister? And it didn’t matter which, considering the problem that had just surfaced.

  “Not a word to anyone, Wiklander,” said Johansson, pointing at his coworker with his whole hand. “Not a word to anyone. Is that understood?”

  Now it was a matter of thinking, and thinking sharp, thought Johansson.

  27

  March 2000

  Seems like old shit has landed in a new fan, thought Johansson half an hour later when he was through thinking. Then he quickly made three decisions, which he made sure to carry out immediately.

  First he informed his boss, the general director, of the unfortunate coincidence between his and Wiklander’s investigation and the prime minister’s impending appointment. Johansson was not stupid, and because he intended to go further, he wanted to make sure he had all the clearance he could need.

  The GD might not have been as cunning as Johansson, for he had seemed almost energized by the news, and when he stated his one, concrete wish, which was to be informed of developments as the case proceeded, it was with curiosity shining from his eyes.

  “Of course, Boss,” said Johansson, who could not have asked for more.

  Next Johansson had a directive issued to his coworkers who were conducting the background checks on Stein. Not a comma—regardless of content or intent—that concerned Helena Lovisa Stein could now leave the building without his approval. And if anyone in Rosenbad was wondering about anything—even if they just wanted to know what time it was—they should be referred to Johansson.

  I need people too, thought Johansson. Not that many, but enough, and only the best. People who can work uninterruptedly until this is cleared up and who can fulfill their assignments despite the fact that the person who leads the assignment may be compelled to withhold information that the team members, for various reasons, may not or should not know about.

  “Do you think you can arrange it?” said Johansson, nodding at Wiklander.

  “Yes,” said Wiklander. “It’s already done. I’ve already assigned everyone we need.”

  The third decision was the most difficult, and so it had to wait until last. Johansson steeled himself and called Berg at home, and surprisingly enough Berg himself answered.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Johansson, “but I need to see you immediately.”

  “Then I suggest you come over to my place,” said Berg. His voice sounded tired and muted, but he did not seem particularly surprised.

  “Sit down,” said Berg half an hour later, pointing toward the empty armchair in his office. “Would you like coffee?”

  “Not unless you’re having some,” said Johansson. You’re dying, he thought, and it was more a statement than an expression of sorrow or even emotion. Pull yourself together, Johansson thought, and it was himself and not Berg he was thinking about.

  “Then we won’t have coffee,” said Berg, smiling wanly as he carefully sat down in a straight-backed chair across from the armchair he had shown his guest.

  “What can I help you with?” Berg asked.

  “Putting some order into old recollections from another time,” said Johansson.

  “It’s about the West German embassy, isn’t it,” said Berg, and this was more a statement than a question.

  “Yes,” said Johansson.

  “Then I’ll tell you the whole story,” said Berg.

  Part 5

  Another Time

  IX

  Erich Honecker had fooled them all. They never believed he would have dared, but he’d done it, and considering the life he’d lived and the dangers he had undergone, maybe it wasn’t really so strange that he had taken the risk. After that, everything he had done followed a simple logic, and in principle it was all based on keeping his opponents in the dark. He had succeeded far beyond expectations, most likely because of something as simple as the fact that those he fooled had lived different, more secure lives than he had.

  At the Party conference in Dresden in September 1977, in his speech to the members, Honecker had distanced himself firmly from West German terrorism, and the old shawm player had not minced words when he did so: “These despicable hordes of anarchists and terrorists who are wreaking havoc in the Federal Republic make it possible for the West German regime to silence the political left in the country under the pretext of battling so-called terrorist sympathizers.”

  Predictable rhetoric, to be sure, but also an official confirmation of what the Western security agencies, all the way from those most closely affected—the West German Federal Crime Agency and Federal Intelligence Service—to the Americans at the CIA and NSA, already thought they had figured out. It was the Arabs who were helping the European terrorists. The Russians, certain of their satellites in the Warsaw Pact, might possibly be suspected of having supplied them with money, weapons, and explosives on some occasion—in a pinch, and by complicated paths—but not the East Germans. They would never have dared. And now Honecker had put his honor at stake that his country was not involved with such things.

  Actually, the West German terrorists had been helped in ways both great and small for several years—with money and weapons, of course, but also with hiding places and training camps and military trainers from the People’s Army who drilled their West German comrades in advanced weapons techniques. Obviously Honecker himself had not been involved in such primitive activities in the slightest. Not Erich Honecker. That wasn’t how it worked. He had on the other hand given his approval for his old comrade in arms Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, a member of the government, and minister of state security, to take charge of the practical details.

  For Mielke this was an obvious stage in the struggle against the capitalist opponent, and a man with his background had no problems whatsoever with the way the West Germans used the skills and resources he put in their hands. Not the young Communist Erich Mielke, who at the age of fourteen had already taken part in an armed revolt on the streets of Berlin against the conservatives in general and the Nazis in particular. Not the Communist Mielke who was only twenty-one years old when he committed his first political assassination and together with a comrade fatally shot two police chief inspectors and wounded an inspector in broad daylight in Berlin. Not Erich Mielke.

  For Mielke it was a matter of helping comrades in the common struggle, and of the help they in turn could give him. Toward the end of his life, when everything had collapsed around him and he would be held accountable for what he saw as his cause and his life’s work, he had been content to say that perhaps he did not share their outlook on certain strategic and tactical questions, but that in any event they had been close to him in their view of capitalist society. Mielke and his closest collaborators considered the West German terrorists a kind of reserve force, which could be mobilized as resistance men and saboteurs in any war against West Germany and its allies. It was no more complicated than that.

  Men like him and Honecker could keep their opponents in the dark because in all essentials they had a different background from their enemies. Horst Herold, for ex
ample, was the legendary head of the West German Federal Crime Agency (the BKA), a highly talented intellectual, a scholar of Marx, political philosopher, socially engaged crime researcher, and also the hawk that flew highest and farthest and most often caught its prey, and who at last in a purely literal sense would be the death of the West German terrorists. There was a different distinction. Mielke and his comrades had themselves spilled the blood on their own hands. Herold sat behind his desk and let others take care of practical matters.

  “The East Germans fooled the pants off us,” Berg summarized, smiling and nodding to his guest. “Maybe it’s not so strange that they fooled a simple country boy like me,” he continued, smiling again. “But they actually fooled us all. The Americans, the English, the Israelis, the West Germans … they even fooled Herold, who knew them best, who had them closest to him, and who was probably the most talented person I’ve met in this business.”

  Just imagine, thought Lars Martin Johansson, who himself was not to be played with and almost never fell for pretty words.

  “Stasi registries,” he said. “Can you tell me about them?”

  X

  “Do you know about Operation Rosewood?” asked Berg, choosing to start with a question.

  More or less, thought Johansson.

  “It’s been described to me on two occasions,” Johansson replied. “So in broad terms I guess I do.” The problem was more that the descriptions he’d been given also diverged at various and not completely uninteresting points, he thought.

  “Then you’ll get it a third time,” said Berg, nodding.

  And this time of course it’ll be completely true, thought Johansson, but of course he didn’t say that.

  “I’m listening.”

  The relevant registry in this context comprised only a small portion of all the information that the Stasi had collected over more than forty years of operation; it concerned their foreign activities and was managed by the HVA, Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. In concrete terms, in a purely archival sense, it was divided into forty different registries containing information about individuals, events, financial transactions, purchase of materials, and everything else that had to be organized to run, as HVA did, a large movement with espionage as its core activity and political terrorism as a secondary pursuit.

  “What the Americans bought when they conducted Rosewood was simply a list of names,” said Berg. “It was the list of all of HVA’s foreign contacts. Everything from qualified spies to ordinary idiots one might have use for in certain situations. Plus names of a number of individuals who were used by their comrades in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and whom the Stasi had not used themselves but of whom they had nonetheless become aware, and therefore whose names they had chosen to record,” Berg clarified.

  In total the deal had included more than forty thousand different names and almost thirty-five thousand different individuals; the discrepancy was explained by the fact that in this context some of the individuals were entered under several different names, code names and aliases. What the CIA had purchased was the names and nothing else, because if you wanted to figure out to what extent and in what manner a certain individual had contributed to HVA’s operation, you had to search further in other registries by means of the reference codes that were included with the list.

  Yet the registries and archives being referenced were not part of the deal. As a consequence, among other things, certain epistemological problems cropped up, since the name of one of HVA’s most qualified spies might be listed right above or below someone who had only attended a party at an East German embassy and after having a little too much to drink said that he thought “Honecker was a damned amusing guy.” Provided that the spy’s surname was sufficiently similar to the partygoer’s, of course.

  “Nonetheless,” said Berg judiciously, “the Rosewood registry became an indescribably powerful weapon, a fantastic basis for continued intelligence work.… I’m willing to bet my professional reputation that Rosewood was the only straight deal that has ever been made with the information that was in Stasi’s registries.”

  Over the years since the collapse in autumn 1989 a number of such deals had been made, most of them very small and very obscure. But Rosewood was by far the biggest, the first, the only straight deal that was made, and the best.

  “What was procured at that time was gold,” said Berg. “Pure gold for people like us,” he added collegially, nodding at his successor.

  Oh well, thought Johansson with the mixed feelings that easily followed from his not having had the time to get accustomed to who his new friends were. To whom did “us” refer?

  Things were more complicated with the SIRA archive.

  “System Information Recherche der Aufklärung,” said Berg in his impeccable German. “System for Information Search within the Espionage Service,” he translated prudently, because he was far from certain of how simple and rural his successor really was. It’s probably just that he looks that way, so I’ll have to hope he doesn’t take offense, thought Berg.

  The SIRA archive held not only names of spies, collaborators, and ordinary fellow travelers, but also information about their various contributions. The problem was the reliability of the information. There were even highly placed evaluators in the Western security services who maintained that the entire SIRA archive was a gigantic swindle, an enormous disinformation campaign in which what was true in the material—and that was of course most of the information—was only included to grant credibility to what was not.

  Berg did not share the latter opinion. That was “seeing ghosts in the light of day,” according to Berg. Who would the initiator behind the disinformation have been? he asked. Since the Eastern Bloc had fallen apart, there was simply no such entity left. At the same time there was a lot in the original SIRA archive that had been eliminated or changed. Quite certainly there was also fabricated information that had been added to the material, and the reasons were not particularly hard to understand.

  When East Germany fell apart in late autumn of 1989, the more than a hundred thousand employees at the Stasi had no problem whatsoever keeping a straight face. The most common topic of conversation in the break room was how many years’ imprisonment one’s coworkers would get, and alone at home there was plenty of time to ask the same question on one’s own account. What could be found in the archive was of course not uninteresting in that context, and for once it was so fortuitous that their political employer had given them the responsibility to see to the destruction of the Stasi archives themselves.

  Undoubtedly there were a good many opportunities both to improve their own individual legal situation and—for those employees who were more entrepreneurial—to earn a few bucks at others’ expense or even to garner a small profit by rescuing a fellow human being or two from impending misery. But there was a shortage of time. You didn’t need to be a political theorist to calculate that soon the enemy would have taken over the operation, and then it would be too late for either one thing or the other, and definitely too late for deal-making.

  “According to information in the media,” Berg scrunched his long nose, “an employee at the Stasi archive—he has a different superior nowadays—right before Christmas 1998 is supposed to have succeeded in procuring extensive computer files that should have been destroyed after the Wall came down in 1989. And just a month before the new millennium this news became public knowledge.

  “Of course this is pure nonsense, as you know,” said Berg. “It’s enough to visit an ordinary Swedish public library to understand how twisted such a story is. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t understand how these journalists think. Is he supposed to have stumbled across some box that was hidden away, perhaps way down in the cellar?”

  What was called the SIRA archive in the media was material that was originally found in various Stasi registries that for various reasons had escaped being destroyed. The history of the archive was shrouded in darkness, and the only thing that co
uld be said with certainty was that the data, in the form in which it was recovered, could not have existed as a separate archive or even as working data. It must have been compiled late in the game, perhaps even after the Wall came down. Hence, there were suspicions about its reliability. After it had been obtained, the deciphering and analysis of the data went on for several years before it was decided that it was time to “let the media get wind of the matter.”

  “Personally I’ve known about Rosewood since the early nineties,” said Berg, “and the first time I got information from the Americans that they had gathered out of the Rosewood data was in 1993.”

  “That was nice of them,” said Johansson, who at one of the courses he had attended had heard that not even the German security service was allowed access to the Rosewood material until the Germans agreed to trade information they had gathered from SIRA, which, according to the same source, would have been only a few years ago.

  “Oh well,” said Berg dryly. “The first time for me was 1993, and I had a little something to trade for, so it was not purely altruistic impulses that drove them to share the information.”

  Trade in the information from the SIRA archive had, according to Berg, first begun a few years later, but the commerce had accelerated toward the end of the nineties, and this applied to both Rosewood and SIRA.

  “And this is when it gets interesting in relation to the occupation of the West German embassy in April 1975,” said Berg, looking shrewd. “Really interesting,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” said Johansson.

  In 1993, Berg, mostly out of curiosity, he maintained, had traded for information from Rosewood about Swedish involvement in the West German embassy drama. After analysis that information appeared simple and unambiguous. The Swedish connection consisted of four names. In alphabetical order by surname, Eriksson, Stein, Tischler, and Welander. But naturally there was not a peep about what their involvement consisted of.