by Alex Gerlis
‘There’s a place we’ve found for you not very far from here, rent paid for six months’ rent paid. You’ll be taken there in a couple of days. After that, you’re on your own – understand?’
There were two other men in the house: Richard, and a very tall young man called Andy, who was in the house when they arrived. Andy, as far as Lassiter could tell, was the cook.
Andy brought Lassiter a large whisky, placing it on the table next to the attaché case. Lassiter wouldn’t have chosen to put ginger ale in the whisky, and certainly no ice, but he was preoccupied with the attaché case, which Castle had now turned in front of him so he could see quite how much money was in it.
Within a minute, whatever they’d put in the whisky took effect. Lassiter became flushed and was overwhelmed by a sudden tiredness, slumping forward, his head resting on the table. Richard approached him from behind, indicating to Ronnie Castle to remain where he was.
Ronnie Castle was surprised just how much noise Lassiter’s neck made as it snapped, and he knew he’d never forget the fleeting look of fear on his face as he appeared to anticipate his final moment.
‘I thought what was in the drink was going to be enough to kill him?’ Ronnie Castle sounded shocked, even upset.
Andy and Richard had already laid Lassiter on the floor on a tarpaulin and begun to undress him.
‘Always best to make sure sir.’
Chapter 31
London and West Berlin
October 1976
The shit, as the former ambassador had put it, began to hit the fan early in the afternoon of the first Wednesday in October, a fortnight after Lassiter’s death.
The first hint of trouble came when the MI6 duty officer at the British Embassy in Paris rang London. The DST – the French equivalent of MI5 – had an agent inside the left-wing newspaper Libération and, according to this agent, the paper was planning to run a story the next morning claiming that the murders in Cologne and Bonn were nothing to do with the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Not only that, but the paper was also saying rather than being a victim of the shooting Cologne, Heinz Fleischhauer was actually the man who’d carried it out. And he was a Soviet agent, who’d been a Nazi war criminal – who also had links with British intelligence. And he was on the run. The report would further claim that Clive Cowley was an MI6 officer who’d also been working for the KGB. And just in case all that was not enough, the body of a young woman had been found in Fleischhauer’s apartment. She’d been murdered, and was a member of the Red Army Faction.
No sooner had this news reached the Assistant Director than Washington was on the line: The Washington Post had the same story. The Assistant Director called in the former ambassador but before he arrived, word came through from Bonn: Stern, the mass circulation German news magazine, was putting the story on its front cover.
Most reluctantly, the Assistant Director spoke to his counterpart at MI5. Would he be so good as to find out if any British papers had the story, please? The answer came back just as the former ambassador arrived in the Assistant Director’s office. The Guardian had the story, according to MI5. ‘Splashing with it tomorrow morning,’ the head of MI5 reported, with ill-concealed schadenfreude. ‘Fancy trying for a D-Notice to stop it? You know we’re always happy to give you chaps a hand when you’re struggling.’
The former ambassador wondered whether this would be pointless.
‘Quite right,’ said the man from MI5 – the Assistant Director of MI6 could hear him smiling. ‘Nothing The Guardian would like more than for us – you – to try a D-Notice on them. Would do wonders for their circulation.’
‘Serves us right I suppose,’ said the Assistant Director to the former ambassador when he’d put the phone down. ‘We thought we’d got away with it.’
‘More to the point,’ said the former ambassador, ‘is who the hell has given them this story? It’s obviously all coordinated. Edgar?’
‘No, no, no – not Edgar’s style, and remember we’ve been watching him like a hawk. He knows his antics should have landed him in a lot of hot water, and even he must be relieved he got away with it. No, this story has come from someone in West Germany – but Christ knows who. It’s all timed to be published tomorrow, and Stern comes out on a Thursday. Half of West Germany reads that bloody magazine and then tells the other half about it. The whole plan’s been designed to make the biggest impact.’
***
The staff at Rostt Legal had remarked how Herr Stern hadn’t seemed himself in recent weeks. Normally such a composed man, since the end of August he’d appeared distracted: arriving an hour or even two later than he normally did, leaving early, and cancelling far more appointments than he was keeping.
The consensus in the office on Fasanenstrasse was that he must be ill – seriously ill, quite possibly with a terminal diagnosis. Among the secretaries this became the source of much speculation. One secretary had recently lost an uncle to a brain tumour and she recognised many of the symptoms. Another was certain it was lung cancer – she had noticed Herr Stern coughing on more than one occasion. Herr Stern’s own secretary was reluctant to be drawn into anything so unseemly as gossiping, though she did confide in anyone who’d listen how Herr Stern barely ate his sandwiches these days and left his coffee cups half full: stomach cancer, she’d confidently whisper.
On the morning of Friday 1st October Georg Stern was sitting at his desk. It was half eleven in the morning and in front of him was an array of newspapers and magazines, the murders of Heinz Fleischhauer and Clive Cowley three weeks previously still dominating the front pages. The consensus was that the murders showed how the Baader- Meinhof Gang was an even more dangerous threat than before. They seemed to murder at will, not enough was being done to stop them. It was bad enough that they targeted American servicemen and German police officers, but murdering a BfV officer and a British diplomat on the same day showed what they were capable of.
Georg Stern was sceptical at the ease with which the murders were attributed to the Baader-Meinhoff Group and, when he saw the photograph of the dead man the papers all published – and he knew for sure this was Richter, he was furious that no mention had been made of the man’s Nazi past. He wanted Fleischhauer to be exposed as Wilhelm Richter.
He had some excellent contacts which he’d developed over the years, people who trusted him and owed him favours. These contacts included lawyers who represented Red Army Faction prisoners being held at Stammheim Prison near Stuttgart. He avoided the lawyers of the more prominent members. But he knew one of the other lawyers and, through her, a meeting was carefully arranged for the following morning.
Stern was to go to the Tiergarten and there, by the statue of Lortzing, he would meet a very tall man called Frederick who’d have a dog with him. If Frederick was wearing a long black scarf, then all was safe. The dog turned out to be a black and tan coloured Doberman, pulling hard on its short leash, eager to protect his master from Georg Stern. The dog’s pointed ears were pricked up, as if in shock at what was going on.
‘Let’s walk now: keep half a pace in front of me and don’t turn round. When we reach the end of this path I will go to the right and you will turn left, so you don’t have long. What do you want to know?’
‘The killing of Heinz Fleischhauer in Cologne and the British diplomat in Bonn…’
‘What of them?’
‘Were the Baader-Meinhoff Group responsible?’
There was no reply for a while, although Stern could still hear the man’s footsteps and the dog breathing noisily behind him, like it was choking. It occurred to Stern perhaps he shouldn’t have said ‘Baader-Meinhoff’.
‘No. The Red Army Faction was not responsible.’
‘But according to the press the Red Army Faction was…’
‘The press prints many lies about the Red Army Faction.’
‘So why not deny it?’
A pause, the dog panting hard. ‘Why should they? But if you’re so interested in this case, there is somet
hing you should know: the police found the body of a young woman in Fleischhauer’s apartment. He’d murdered her. The authorities made the body disappear. She was involved with the Red Army Faction.’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘There’s a family called von Morsbach in Augsburg: ask them. Your time is up.’
They’d reached the end of the path now, and Georg Stern heard the man’s footsteps drop away, then heard him call out. ‘Wait!’
Stern slowed down, allowing the man to catch up, still not looking at him.
‘And you should ask the authorities in Cologne for the identity of the man shot in the street.’
‘I thought it was Heinz Fleischhauer?’
The man gave a derisory ‘huh’. ‘The Red Army Faction has contacts everywhere, Herr Stern. The man who was shot in the street in Cologne was in his twenties and did not match the description of Fleischhauer, even with most of his head blown away. If you want to find out the truth ask why the autopsy lasted less than ten minutes and his body was cremated that afternoon, eh? The woman from the apartment, her body was cremated at the same time.’
‘So Heinz Fleischhauer…?’
‘Heinz Fleischhauer got away.’
And with that, Frederick’s footsteps and the Doberman’s panting faded quickly into the distance.
***
There’d been no hint in any of the newspapers that the man shot in Cologne was anyone other than Heinz Fleischhauer. Little personal information about Fleischhauer had been divulged: divorced, no family, many years of public service, the omission of the word ‘distinguished’ was possibly revealing, if you noticed it.
The meeting with Frederick suggested a course of action which Georg Stern could not take lightly, so he’d first called a contact in Cologne – a Federal Prosecutor he considered to be a friend. Are there photographs from the shooting? What is this about the body being cremated that afternoon – was there no autopsy? And a woman’s body in his apartment?
‘Drop it Georg, drop it. No questions.’ And his friend had then put down the phone.
So the following morning – the Sunday – he tried one more contact, a senior diplomat at the United States Embassy in Bonn. The diplomat sounded helpful: leave it with me, call me first thing in the morning.
But the diplomat called back that night, at almost midnight, and he sounded uneasy. ‘If I tell you Georg that I’m calling from a phone kiosk in a seedy bar in what passes for Bonn’s red light district, and that to get here I drove around the city for an hour to be sure I wasn’t being followed, then maybe you’ll get the picture. This is the last conversation we’re going to have about this business, got it? I didn’t realise I was going to be risking my fucking neck, probably literally.’
Georg Stern said he understood and was sorry if…
‘ … I spoke to my pal in the CIA here. He said three things: one, don’t ask any questions about the Cologne murder, zero. Two, Clive Cowley was MI6 but also KGB for Christ’s sake. He said the impression he gets is that the Brits are relieved he’s dead.’
‘And the third thing?’
‘He said if I don’t drop this I may as well start choosing where in Africa I fancy being transferred to.’
***
Georg Stern arrived early at his office on the morning of Monday 4th October, after a sleepless night. The realisation of what he had discovered kept him awake, as had so many memories.
He thought about the night he’d left his parents’ apartment in Charlottenburg; of Horst Weber and his parents’ terrible grief when they found out about his arrest; the night he returned to the house in Wedding to find the Webers dead; and about the dreadful night when he arrived at the house near Magdeburg and of how willingly – even eagerly – Richter had shot Axel Werner. And then he thought about the terrible events that followed: the murders – the war crimes – they’d committed in Dortmund; his escape from the Gestapo in Essen; the months hiding in the cellars and sewers under the city, his return to Berlin, finding his mother and hearing about the murder of his father, the encounter with Otto Schröder in 1968. And finally, he thought about the mysterious man who had turned up in his office just a few weeks ago to confront him about his past, and tell him that Wilhelm Richter was still alive.
It clearly suited too many people – important people – for Wilhelm Richter to disappear, to be forgotten about, to get away with everything he’d done.
Georg Stern could not allow this.
He opened a small notebook he kept in the top drawer of his desk. His priority would be Stern magazine, and if they were going to get the story into that Thursday’s edition he needed to get a move on. He had three other numbers too, of contacts he’d made over the years: French, British and American newspapers, ones he could trust.
Wilhelm Richter would not be forgotten about after all.
The End
Author’s Note
The Berlin Spies is a work of fiction, and any similarities between characters in the book and real people should be regarded as purely coincidental.
Having said that, there are references in the book to a few well-known historical figures, and hopefully their identities will be obvious. For example, Walter Ulbricht was actually one of the leaders of the German Communist Party (the KPD). He spent the war in exile in Moscow and afterwards returned to Germany, where he eventually became the head of the East German Government.
Likewise, various references are made to Yuri Andropov. Although his role in this story is entirely fictional, he was Head of the KGB between May 1967 and May 1982, before becoming General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
The Red Army Faction – or Baader-Meinhoff Group, as it is sometimes known – was active in the period 1971-1993 and was prominent in September 1976, when the killings in The Berlin Spies in Cologne and Bonn are attributed to them. Their role in this story is also fictional, though to aid authenticity the book does feature some actual members of the Red Army Faction (all now dead). Similarly, there was a spate of bombings carried out by the Red Army Faction in May 1972, though the bombing of the British Army base at Rheindahlen in Mönchengladbach is fictional. The base was attacked by the Provisional IRA in 1973 and 1987. The main leadership of the group were arrested in June 1972, around the time in the book when Werner Pohl disappears. The cell in Düsseldorf and ‘Frederick’ in Berlin are all fictional. By the time Sabine/Ute is arrested in August 1976, Ulrike Meinhof had already committed suicide at Stammheim prison, in Stuttgart. Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were among those who apparently committed suicide on the same night in October 1977: whether these deaths were in fact suicides is the subject of much dispute.
The BfV was founded in 1950 as the internal security service for the Federal Republic, and continues as such after German reunification. Its headquarters are on Innere Kanalstrasse in Cologne. All the BfV characters in the book are fictional (as are all the MI6 characters). The Military Liaison Office and Operation Open River are also fictional (as far as I am aware).
As The Berlin Spies is based on actual events in the Second World War and the Cold War, I have tried to ensure that the context of the book and the historical references within it are accurate, along with many dates and locations. I hope the reader will find it helpful if I refer here to some of these in more detail.
In Chapter 8 reference is made to Wilhelm Richter taking part in the massacre of Jewish prisoners on the Baltic coast. While Richter is a fictional character (as are all the other SS officers mentioned in this context), there was indeed a massacre on 29th January 1945, near the village of Palmnicken, of around five thousand Jewish prisoners who were on a forced march from the Stutthof Concentration camp.
Reference is also made in that chapter to a subsequent series of trials held in Gdansk between April 1946 and November 1947, of SS members who were stationed at Stutthof. These trials did take place: 84 of the 88 people put on trial were found guilty of war crimes, and 23 of them were executed.
Viktor describes h
is work investigating German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The figures quoted are accurate: there were around three million German prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union, many of whom died in captivity. The majority of these POWs were released by 1950, but a number (perhaps more than 25,000) were classified as war criminals, and the last of these were not released until 1956.
In Chapter 22 reference is made to a serial killer in Berlin. This is loosely based on a Nazi Party member called Paul Ogorzow, the so-called S-Bahn killer, who murdered eight women between October 1940 and July 1941.
The existence of renegades – British prisoners of war who defected to the Nazi cause – is fairly well known. There were others who worked for the Nazis in Germany (William Joyce or Lord Haw Haw being perhaps the best known). The Captain Canterbury character in The Berlin Spies is loosely based on a real renegade called Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman. Freeman was a Sandhurst-trained officer who became a pilot in the RAF before leaving it and joining the British Union of Fascists. He reluctantly re-joined the RAF at the start of the war (he said he didn’t want to fight against Germany) and was captured in Belgium. So pronounced were his pro-Nazi views that he did not last long as a prisoner of war, ending up in Berlin where he worked for the Foreign Broadcast Department of the German Foreign Ministry. At his subsequent court-martial his former German boss described him as ‘a confirmed fascist and of Anti-Bolshevik and Anti-Jewish ideas.’ In 1945, Freeman joined the Waffen SS. He was prominent on a MI9 ‘British Renegades Warning List’ and was captured at the end of the war. Back in the UK he was court-martialled by the RAF in September 1945 and found guilty on three out of four charges, including serving in the Waffen SS, working for the Germans and accepting money from them. Freeman could have been sentenced to death for both of the first two charges, but for some reason was sentenced to just ten years in prison.
I’ve long been intrigued by the case of Freeman and have been trying to find out what happened to him after his release in or around 1956. Despite many hours of research at the National Archives, Freedom of Information requests and other research, I have drawn a blank. If anyone reading this knows anything about what happened to Freeman, I’d be most keen to hear it.