by Alex Gerlis
‘You will take this to the address on the envelope, you understand Father? You will find more specific instructions inside the envelope. You give me your word as a man of God?’
Even though you don’t believe in him. The priest took the parcel and looked at the address: it would require a special journey, perhaps he could go by train. ‘Of course, Herr Krause. Perhaps …’
‘But you must wait, until I’m dead. That will not be long. What did Dr Berger say?’
The priest shrugged, unwilling to answer.
‘A few weeks? That is what he usually says. Take the parcel, keep it somewhere safe and remain in contact with Dr Berger. When you hear I have died, you will deliver the parcel.’
‘I will do what you ask. Have you thought about your funeral?’
The man glared at the priest, his eyes flashing angrily before he allowed them to close again.
***
It was a Tuesday in the middle of September when Father Lehmann was informed that Herr Krause had died the previous night. The priest waited a week before travelling to Bonn, where he managed to negotiate his way into the main reception of the British Embassy on Friedrich-Ebert-Allee. Being a priest had helped so far, but it did not appear he was going much further.
‘As I say, sir: leave the parcel with me and I will ensure it gets to the right department. I am afraid you cannot go up there, especially not without an appointment.’
‘Well maybe if I could see someone from that department?’
Half an hour later the priest was sitting in a small waiting room on the ground floor with a young man in British Army uniform. The man had begun to open the parcel the priest had handed to him.
‘Please. My instructions are that the contents should be opened in a secure room. And they are to be handed first to someone here who works in intelligence. I was given this by a dying man and these are his strict instructions. Surely it is not too much to ask for his wishes to be respected?’
The man in uniform looked part aggrieved, part mystified. He promised to do his best.
Chapter 3
West Berlin
January 1970
After this, they would have to take her seriously. There’d be no more making fun of her because she hadn’t heard of Gramsci or any other obscure Marxist philosopher or read anything by Engels – actually she had tried to read him but he was almost impossible to follow. They’d stop the jokes about how she only had a poster of Che Guevara on her wall because she fancied him or telling her she was just playing at being a revolutionary, because she was so beautiful. She couldn’t understand the logic of that, especially as whoever was telling her usually had his hands all over her as he did so. Now she was about to show them how seriously they’d have to take her. They would have to start treating her with respect.
The courier left the bank on Potsdamer Strasse just after eleven o’clock, as he did every morning. He glanced around as he left the bank, as he also did every morning, but in a rather casual manner – more to check the weather than for reasons of security. Then he headed south, walking quickly despite a pronounced limp. The limp made her feel even better about what she was about to do: it would be a war wound, she’d decided, which meant he’d be a Nazi.
He swapped the briefcase from one hand to the other a couple of times, so she knew it wasn’t attached to his wrist with some kind of security chain, which she’d assumed it would be when she first started to plan this. They’d be so pleased with her, spotting crucial details like that. He glanced round once more as he turned right into Pohlstrasse, and didn’t spot her despite the fact she was now just a few yards behind him. Then he entered the cake shop, as she’d watched him do every morning for the past week and which she assumed he wasn’t allowed to do. This was the first morning she actually followed him into the shop, and she was pleased that the shop was as crowded as ever. As he reached the counter she edged in behind him.
‘Very well, I shall have two doughnuts!’ This was followed by a confident chuckle, and the woman in the white hat behind the counter smiled politely. It sounded as if he probably said the same thing every morning. It was the first time she’d heard him speak: quite a pleasant voice actually, softly spoken and certainly not a Berlin accent. Now was her opportunity. As he reached inside his jacket for his wallet, he wedged the briefcase between his legs on the floor. She knew she had a matter of seconds and in one move bent down, grabbed the briefcase, and pushed her way out of the shop, almost in a crouching position. She was in the street before she heard shouting, and sprinted as hard as she could. An elderly couple were in the middle of the pavement, blocking her, and she ran straight through them, sending both flying over.
She carried on running, round the block and then to Goebenstrasse where she caught a tram and once on board she slipped the briefcase into a large shopping bag she had folded up in her coat pocket. They would be so impressed at the precautions she’d taken. She got off the tram near the cemetery on Blücherstrasse and walked through Kreuzberg before entering the apartment on Alexandrinenstrasse.
***
Not for one minute had she expected such a furious reaction from the comrades. Rather than taking her seriously and treating her with respect, they were actually incandescent with rage, especially Andreas Baader who was screaming at her, his face no more than an inch from hers.
‘You stupid fucking bitch! You’ve put us all at risk for … this!’ His hand swept along the top of the table, sending the contents of the courier’s briefcase flying onto the floor: a few letters and a number of documents, but no money.
‘You had no authorisation to do this Ute, none whatsoever. What have you done? Stolen a few worthless pieces of paper and then come here, no doubt leaving a trail of clues along the way. You know I’m on the run, Gudrun too. I’m surprised half the fascist police in West Berlin aren’t breaking the door down already. They could be here any minute: when they arrive, you stand behind the door and take the first shot, understand?’
She was trembling violently and sobbing. There were perhaps a dozen of them in the apartment. Gudrun Ensslin was also there – she and Baader had been on the run for the past few months – but she was uncharacteristically quiet. The others were the typical crowd, some she knew by their first name only, others whom she’d not seen before. For a while there was silence apart from her sobs. Although no-one said it, they were all thinking the same thing: she’d been back in the apartment for over an hour and if the police were going to come, they’d have done so before now.
‘I’m sorry, maybe I made a mistake but we all agreed we have to do everything in our power to dismantle the state. There are so many former Nazis in positions of authority; I thought this was a perfect way of attacking them. I …’ Her voice trailed off, unsure of what to say. Her defence of her actions sounded feeble and she feared she was about to be rejected by the group. That would be calamitous: she’d rejected her family to be here and now her friends – her comrades – were about to reject her.
‘Go with Hans,’ said Baader. ‘Give us a minute to talk.’
Hans was a young guy from Hamburg who’d joined the group after he’d escaped from a juvenile prison. He didn’t appear to know too much about politics, but everyone liked him. She’d slept with Hans a few times and was quite fond of him. It was evident his job now was to keep an eye on her. They sat on the bed in the room she sometimes slept in, both smoking. Hans said a few times in his soft voice that she was not to worry, and started to stroke the inside of her thigh. Just as she was thinking they may as well go to bed, the door burst open and Ensslin walked in.
‘Out,’ she told Hans.
‘You – stay here.’ When they were alone she spoke in a more reasonable tone than Ute had expected. ‘Don’t be too upset about Andreas,’ she gestured with her lit cigarette behind her, in the direction of where Andreas would be. ‘We’re all nervous Ute: we could be arrested any minute. Look, he’s not the intellectual brains of our group but we need him to …’ she paused
to inhale and come up with the right words ‘…organise us and motivate us. He sometimes overreacts. What you did today was stupid, but it shows your heart is in the right place. Marx said history is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends and at least you’re doing something and are obviously committed to the cause. Andreas – and I – think we can trust you. But we need you to trust us too.’
She got up from the bed where she’d been sitting alongside Ute and walked over to the window before turning round to face her. ‘Your family are in Augsburg, yes?’
Ute nodded and felt a wave of nausea sweep over her.
‘We need you to disappear for a while. We’ll be getting a new identity for you. A few of our comrades are doing this. We don’t know what your mission will be yet but, after the nonsense of today, just remember to do what you’re told. Trust us. Don’t come up with any more clever ideas of your own. Understand?’
She nodded. ‘And when will this be?’
‘I’m not sure, but the way things are going I don’t imagine it will be too long.’
Chapter 4
Paris, France
March 1970
‘I’ve never liked the French.’ He stared suspiciously into his coffee cup, tilting it and then swilling its contents around carefully as if checking for evidence of poison. ‘Never liked them, and trust them even less – a duplicitous lot. Anyone you speak to who was here during the war says it was a wonderful posting, even easier than being in the Reich – until the first signs of the so-called liberation and then suddenly the French all claimed they’d been in the Resistance, that rabble …’
Two men in a bar in Paris, at the intersection of Rue d'Hauteville and Rue la Fayette in the 10th arrondissement, the imposing Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul framed in the rain-splattered window where they sat. The man who’d never liked the French was the younger of the two, perhaps in his early forties.
The other man was noticeably short, even when sitting down, and appeared quite a few years older than his companion. ‘Maybe you should keep your voice down,’ he told the younger man. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you? It’s bad enough that we’re speaking German in Paris. It wasn’t that long ago …’
‘I could hold a decent conversation in French, Schäfer. You’re the one who only speaks German.’
‘And Russian: I’m fluent in Russian, you know that.’
‘Well that certainly wouldn’t draw attention to us would it? A conversation in Russian … you’d better remind me of your cover story.’
‘Swiss, from Zurich – I’m here for a business meeting. We’re old acquaintances, bumped into each other, decided to have a drink, you know the story … you look worried.’
The younger man swivelled round to check no-one was in earshot. ‘Worried? Of course I’m fucking worried Schäfer! Turns out Otto Schröder spotted me in Frankfurt less than two years ago … Jesus Christ Schäfer, if it were you you’d be worried enough …’
‘Keep your bloody voice down. Remember that I am mentioned too, though admittedly only in an historical sense. I told you, we’ve been able to confirm that Schröder – or Krause as he called himself – is now dead. As for that bloody document he wrote, well – we were lucky. The British Embassy in Bonn are only interested in Communists so they sent it to London and it went straight to my man in MI6, which is how I got it and why we have nothing to worry about.’
‘Easy for you to say, but I can’t afford to be so confident.’
Schäfer gripped the other man’s wrist. ‘Look, stop being irrational. Don’t you realise – if anyone was going to act on this document, they would have done so immediately? The fact that the British got it three, four months ago and still nothing’s happened shows that no-one attached any importance to it. You have nothing to worry about.’
‘And that bloody Jew in Berlin, what about him, a real turn up for the books, eh Schäfer? You managed to recruit a fucking Jew into the SS – in Berlin, in 1944: some achievement that …’
The barmaid was glancing in their direction.
‘That’s enough – and keep your voice down. If we do anything about him it would create too much attention and we can’t have that. He doesn’t want anyone knowing about his past, any more than we do. I want to reassure you that there is nothing to worry about. It was a close shave, but no more than that. We need to concentrate on the work we do now. What do you have for me?’
Schäfer felt something push against his legs under the table. ‘It’s all in there,’ said the younger man. ‘Nothing that will get you the Order of Lenin or whatever they give your lot these days, but useful to have anyway. Background briefings rather than anything top secret - oh, and there’s another report on the Vietnam War.’
‘Saying?’
‘Not very much … troop withdrawals, that kind of thing. They don’t think they’re going to win the war. Or lose it, for that matter. Nothing you probably don’t know already.’
‘Source?’
‘All US Embassy.’
‘All useful though, thank you. Anything else?’
‘Apparently the British are very excited about a new agent they have at the Polish embassy in Bonn.’
‘Who?’
‘Tadeusz Wójcik: he’s the senior Polish intelligence officer in the Federal Republic, the MSW head of station at the Embassy.’
‘Wójcik! Fuck. Been in post for just under a year. I’ll have to tell Moscow straight away. Good work. What’s the matter? You look unhappy.’
‘Everything I give you Schäfer, it all benefits the Soviets. That’s not what I’m meant to be doing, is it? What about our mission? I never hear anything about it these days.’
‘Be patient, Goalkeeper, it’s all about being patient. I keep telling you, everything you give me helps establish how important and how credible you are and, when the time comes, that will stand us in good stead. In any case I was about to tell you something important, I …’
‘I don’t know, Schäfer. Here I am, an officer in the Federal Republic’s security service – your man inside the BfV – and you’re just not using me properly. I know you tell me to be patient, about our mission and all that, but in the meantime I have expenses. Everything I give you, it all comes at some kind of price.’
‘The usual sum was paid into your account in Zurich this morning.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘You can check if you like.’
‘I believe you. You can’t afford not to pay me, Schäfer. After all, I give you so much and get so little in return.’ He paused, ‘what was it you were going to tell me that’s so very important?’
‘No need to be sarcastic. You’d better order us more coffee.’
Schäfer waited until they’d been served, and moved his chair closer. ‘Have you ever come across the Military Liaison Office at the BfV?’
He shook his head. ‘Never heard of it. Are you sure that’s what it’s called?’
‘Of course I’m sure. It’s so secret most people in the BfV won’t have heard of it. It reports jointly to the President of the BfV and the Chief of Staff of the Federal Defence Forces. Its job, as the name suggests, is to provide a line of communication between the BfV and the armed forces. We need you to get into that section…’
‘… which is so secret I’ve never heard of it. What do I do, go and knock on the door and ask when I start?’
‘Shut up and listen for once Goalkeeper. There’s a specific reason we need to get you in there. All top secret NATO material is handled by the Military Liaison Office. NATO has a plan called Operation Open River, which is concerned with the defence of Western Europe. Essentially, it lays out what it calls ‘the trigger points’ – what NATO would interpret as hostile actions by Warsaw Pact states against NATO members in Europe. As you know, NATO’s policy is that if one member is attacked, then NATO itself will respond. Operation Open River goes into very specific detail about this policy: it identifies areas of weakness along NATO’s eastern border, and locat
ions which it regards as being especially sensitive from a military and strategic perspective. As far as Andropov is concerned, it is essential the Soviet Union gets its hands on this document.’
‘And the BfV is the only source for it?’
‘It’s not a straightforward situation Wilhelm. Operation Open River is updated every quarter, and it’s vital we have access to current versions. There are master copies of course at NATO headquarters in Brussels, but we have reason to believe our cell there it may have been compromised. We need to see copies from more than one source to see if they corroborate each other, that we are not being fed disinformation. We especially need access to the plans for Operation Open River which have been sent to those NATO states which have land or sea borders with the Warsaw Pact, these plans are known to be especially detailed and are specific to each country. As far as Greece, Turkey, Norway and Italy are concerned, we have very good sources: we see every version of Operation Open River. But for Denmark and West Germany, it is more problematic. If you can get into the Military Liaison Office then that will give us access to another, more reliable, source for Operation Open River.’
‘And help the Soviet Union … it’s like I was saying before, it’s all about helping those fucking Communists!’
‘You need to understand this: if the Soviet Union can lay its hands on the Operation Open River plans, then the chances of a war in Europe between the east and west are greatly increased. The Soviet Union will have a better idea of where to attack. And when that happens there’ll be chaos in Europe, and we’ll be ready to step into the vacuum. All the people like you, who went undercover at the end of the war, will come together… it will all be as planned Goalkeeper, people will understand that the Führer was right all along, a new Reich will emerge, we …’