Another Time, Another Life (33 page)

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 could 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.

“According to the Stasi, it was these four who had helped the terrorists at the embassy,” stated Berg. “But how they knew is mere speculation, and as I’m sure you already know I have a somewhat more nuanced view of the issue.”

“Welander and Eriksson, to some degree Tischler, but in any case not Stein,” said Johansson.

“Just about,” Berg agreed. “Two who were active, one who was unwitting, and one who was exploited.”

It only began to get really interesting when Berg compared corresponding information from the SIRA archive he came across a few years later. If the information in Rosewood was assumed to be reliable—and according to Berg there wasn’t the slightest room for doubt on that point—these four should also be found in the SIRA archive, in the best case with an accompanying description of what their efforts had actually consisted of. It was highly interesting, not least to Berg because it gave him a convenient opportunity to assess his own analytical acumen in retrospect.

“You’ve surely figured out the answer already,” said Berg, looking at Johansson.

“None of them were there,” said Johansson. Easy as pie, he thought.

“Exactly,” said Berg, nodding. “None of them was there. Not a
comma about any of them, and that was pretty strange, because there were a number of reasons, beyond what had happened at the West German embassy, that at least Welander’s name should have been there. Eriksson’s too for that matter. When my predecessors recruited him, they made a serious mistake.”

Oh well, thought Johansson. It’s probably not Eriksson and his recruitment that’s eating you up inside.

To put it briefly, SIRA was not to be relied on, and someone who had contributed to that circumstance was the now deceased doctor of philosophy and associate professor of sociology at the University of Stockholm, later an employee at Swedish Television, Sten Welander. And in all probability his best friend from childhood, the banker Theo Tischler, had given him the money he needed to carry out the necessary erasures in the original database of the SIRA archive.

“Perhaps you’ll have some coffee after all?” said Berg, looking inquiringly at Johansson. “This is not a bad story, but it does take awhile to tell it.”

“Yes,” said Johansson. “Maybe it’s time for a cup.” Although a Danish is probably out of the question, he thought.

On Friday the eighth of December 1989, Sten Welander traveled to East Berlin, together with a photographer and a colleague from Swedish Television, to do a feature story on the immediate consequences of the East German collapse and the fall of the Wall. This was an idea that had been in the works throughout that autumn and pursuing the story would have been extremely timely on the evening of the ninth of November. There had been a number of meetings, considerable bickering had broken out on the editorial staff, and several younger colleagues—of which Welander was only one—had felt called to immediately go to East Berlin.

The fact that Welander was finally the one sent off on the first round was owing to his being able to present a proposal for a very specific, and, in terms of content, sensational and disturbing program on the East German security service, the Stasi, which until then had held the population of East Germany in an iron grip. According to Welander, the Stasi had files on millions of East German citizens, had persecuted hundreds of thousands of them, had locked up tens of thousands in prisons and mental hospitals, and, with the utmost secrecy, had had hundreds executed. In addition, Welander had evidently developed contacts with dissidents and persecuted East Germans who could testify to their misery and—as icing on the cake—people from the Stasi who had already promised to come forward and let themselves be interviewed. In brief, the proposed coverage was almost too good to be true.

In the wake of management’s consent and the curses of some of his
colleagues, Welander and his little team got on the plane and flew to Berlin. What they didn’t know was that on the same plane were people from both SePo and the Swedish military intelligence service, or that for the past twenty-four hours SePo had been listening in on his and Tischler’s home phones, and that people had even been assigned to shadow Tischler on his ever more restless walks between his apartment on Strandvägen, the office down on Nybroplan, and the central city’s finer restaurants.

When Welander arrived in Berlin, he immediately snuck out of the hotel and met his Stasi contact at a nearby beer hall in West Berlin, a captain by the name of Dietmar Rühl who had never been involved with operational activities, since his area was administrative issues and personnel matters. The surveillance of Welander and the contacts he made had been taken over by the local division of the West German secret police as soon as they landed, and as a friendly gesture their Swedish colleagues had been allowed to follow along.

Welander and his East German Stasi contact appeared noticeably stressed, almost harried, and from time to time they acted as though they were playing in some old spy film from the days of the cold war. They sat with their heads close together at the back of the place and palavered for more than an hour before they got up, shook hands, and left a few minutes apart. Rühl was seen to be carrying a thick brown envelope, contents unknown, and walked quickly back to East Berlin. A relieved Welander snuck back to his hotel. The whole meeting was well documented with photos taken by BKA’s counterespionage department.

During the next few days Welander met with Rühl a few more times in East Berlin. Welander seemed to have more or less foisted the TV reporting onto his two colleagues. On the third evening a shouting match erupted between him and the other two in the photographer’s hotel room, whereupon Welander excused himself by saying that his contact at the Stasi had demanded to meet him alone, a necessary condition for his cooperation. The editorial discord that broke out at the hotel was of course recorded on BKA’s surveillance tape.