Daughters of the KGB (2 page)

P
ART
1

S
ETTING THE
S
CENE

1

T
HROUGH A
G
LASS
D
ARKLY

Each year, 3 October is a German national holiday known as
der Tag der deutschen Einheit
– the day of German Unity. It celebrates the reunification of the country in 1989 after forty-four years of being split in two by the front line of the Cold War. The date is not an exact anniversary of any particular event, but was carefully chosen to avoid reminding people of embarrassing events in recent German history.

On 3 October 2008 several thousand people were celebrating the reunification at what had been the border crossing-point between Marienborn in the so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Helmstedt in the Federal Republic when the country was divided roughly north to south by the Iron Curtain after the Second World War. Living conditions to the east of the ‘inner German frontier’ were so grim under the neo-Stalinist government implanted by, and controlled from, Moscow that a total of 3.5 million GDR citizens fled to the West between the end of the war in 1945 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
¹

By 1952 the population haemorrhage threatened the economic survival of Stalin’s German puppet state and the green border was made increasingly escape-proof by barbed wire, watch-towers, minefields, searchlights, trip-wires connected to locked-off machine guns and SM-70 Claymore-type mines with a
lethal
range of 25m. There were also stretches where attack dogs roamed free and the foot patrols of border guards had orders to shoot to kill – the infamous
Schiessbefehl
that cost so many lives.

★★★

To the many thousand troops of the Western Allies who drove along the autobahn to Berlin during the Cold War, the Marienborn–Helmstedt crossing was known as Checkpoint Able; Baker was at the other end of the autobahn, where it entered West Berlin; the more famous Checkpoint Charlie was on the line where the American sector of ‘the divided city’ confronted Communist East Berlin.

On that sunny, rather windy, autumn afternoon in 2008 at Marienborn/Helmstedt family groups were picnicking on the grass and people of all ages queued to visit the small museum at this former flash-point where World War III might have begun. The motorway having been diverted once the checkpoint was redundant after the reunification of Germany, people wandered across the vehicle lanes that had often been clogged with Allied military convoys and commercial traffic deliberately delayed by Soviet troops or GDR border police. Others photographed a solitary watch-tower that had been left standing to remind visitors that Checkpoint Able had been one of the few tightly controlled gaps in the long internal German border stretching 866 miles from the shores of the Baltic all the way to the Czech frontier. Whereas two-thirds of escape attempts had previously taken place across this ‘green border’, the number of documented attempts there after the border was closed in 1952 plummeted to fewer than 100 per year, of which only about six were successful.
²
Many of the other would-be refugees paid with their lives.

For most of the Germans present on that day in 2008, the occasion was a pleasant family day out. Doubtless, some of the older visitors had unhappy memories, having lived
im Osten
– to the east of the border – under the most repressive Communist regime in Europe. I shared their mixed feelings, walking with my wife away from the crowds towards a small, rather temporary-looking building to the left of the traffic lanes. For other visitors curious enough to peer through the grimy windows, there was no evidence of the crushing bureaucracy of which this had been the westernmost outpost, but looking through that glass darkly took me back nearly half a century.

On 12 May 1959, aged 20, I was sitting in that office on a wooden chair facing an officer of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – the Ministry of State Security, usually abbreviated to ‘Stasi’ – who had been interrogating me for six long weeks. Also present were his escort of two Stasi heavies in ill-fitting suits and a distinguished-looking English lady in the smart blue uniform of the International Red Cross, who had come to escort me back to the free world. For twenty minutes, she fielded all attempts to get her to make any political remark by her ready stream of small talk about the weather, the pleasure of drinking tea as opposed to coffee and so on. As the clock on the wall showed the agreed handover time of midday, she rose to return to the Helmstedt side of the crossing, in what was then the British zone of occupied Germany.

With nothing against him personally, I shook hands with my interrogator. It was the Cold War that had made us enemies. If he had sometimes had me hauled out of my cell for questioning in the middle of the night or very early in the morning, it was not often enough to constitute harassment, but it did make me wonder whatever sort of life he led, if those were his normal working hours.

Walking with the Red Cross lady, whose name I never learned, out of the door and towards the western side of the checkpoint, time slowed down. It seemed a long walk, and I was frightened that this was a dream, a delusion or some kind of psychological trick that would end with a sudden shout of ‘
Halt! Stehenbleiben!
’ at which I would turn round to see a frontier guard with his machine pistol levelled at me – and raise my hands, waiting to be taken back to my cell.

That whole morning seemed unreal. Woken in my cell at 6 a.m. by a prison guard bearing the usual breakfast of black bread, some brown jam of unidentifiable fruit and a mug of ersatz coffee suitably called
Muckefuck
, I had been marched along the echoing corridors of the political prison in Potsdam’s Lindenstrasse, known ironically to its unfortunate inmates as
das Lindenhotel
. Instead of conducting me into the usual interrogation room, the guard escorted me to a small courtyard just inside the main gate of the prison. There my Stasi interrogator, Lieutenant Becker – I learned his name fifty years later – stood by an ancient black Mercedes saloon with the two heavies. Without a word being exchanged, they got into the front seats, with Becker and me in the rear. The double gates of the prison swung open, the driver accelerated though the archway and, with tyres screaming on the cobbled street, drove out of Potsdam and headed westwards along the autobahn, overtaking every other vehicle because there were no speed limits for a car belonging to the Stasi.

‘Where are we going?’ It seemed a normal enough question to ask, for a prisoner who had been in solitary confinement for six weeks with only a few brief sorties for exercise in a prison yard surrounded by walls 5m high, topped by a sentry post, in which stood a guard with loaded sub-machine gun. No answer, but Becker did produce from his plastic briefcase a paper bag containing a sandwich of sliced garlic sausage on pumpernickel, which tasted like manna to me after six weeks of bland prison food.

‘
Hat
’
s geschmekt?
’ he asked. I replied that the after-taste of garlic was delicious, which led to a surreal discussion in which Becker explained that the German word
Nachgeschmack
means a
bad
after-taste. It is strange, the details that stay in the memory.

But, at midday, there was no challenge as my elegant lady escort and I crossed from the Marienborn side to the Helmstedt checkpoint. In 2008 I could see that my ‘long walk’ had only been about 200 yards. Safely on the British side of the crossing, I looked back to see Becker and the two other Stasi men getting into their car for the return to Potsdam. The Red Cross lady was thanked for her help by two men in civilian clothes standing by an unmarked car, and then she left us. One of the men was from the British security services; the other said, ‘Welcome back, Boyd. I am Flight Lieutenant Burton of the RAF Police.’

He could have said, ‘You are guilty of high treason and we are going to shoot you.’ I was so dazed, I would probably not have protested.

During my debriefing interrogations by Flight Lieutenant Burton and others in the British occupation forces’ headquarters at München-Gladbach, I had to admit that the first days and nights of my solitary confinement in Potsdam were – and still are – burned into my memory. The last few days were also clear, but the long and occasionally terrifying weeks between, during which I was held incommunicado, were mostly just a blur. As it was entirely possible that I had been injected with a truth drug and betrayed classified information about the top secret work on which I had been employed in the Signals Section at RAF Gatow, there was some talk during my debriefing at München-Gladbach of sentencing me to several years’ imprisonment on my return to the UK.

I was instead flown back to Britain and debriefed for a second time by the very perceptive Air Chief Marshal Sir Hubert Patch, who rightly considered that, although I had been criminally foolish to get myself caught on the wrong side of a hostile frontier, I had to some extent redeemed myself by foiling an attempt by the KGB to get their hands on me. He also gave me a reference for my first job application. Was that goodwill, or a way of keeping tabs on me? In addition, Burton gave me a London telephone number belonging to the security services. He said I was to ‘ring it and ask for Mr Shepherd, if contacted by any peace-loving people’ as the Soviets called their sympathisers and undercover agents in the West.

As a Russian linguist, trained for real-time interception of VHF transmissions of Soviet fighter pilots over-flying the GDR and Poland, I had signed the Official Secrets Act and undertaken not to visit any Warsaw Pact country. Not only had I been into the GDR – a hostile police state, where I had no right to be – but I had been arrested on the wrong side of the border in the middle of the night by Grenzpolizei border troops and Soviet soldiers pointing loaded guns at me on the otherwise deserted railway station of Albrechtshof, a north-western suburb of Berlin.

Several hours after my arrest, the heavy door of cell No. 20 in the Stasi interrogation prison on Potsdam’s Lindenstrasse closed behind me, leaving me to reflect on my situation. I was a prisoner, held in solitary confinement in a political prison in a country with which the United Kingdom had no diplomatic relations. There were no consular or other British officials to visit me and advise me about my rights. Not that it made much difference. Nobody in that prison had any rights. The reader who has grown up in a Western democracy, however imperfect in some aspects, will find it impossible to understand what it feels like to have no rights at all.

In 2006, seventeen years after the collapse of the so-called German Democratic Republic, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s award-winning film
Das Leben der Anderen
–
The Lives of Others
– was acclaimed as a shatteringly accurate portrayal of the four decades of grey and depressing life in the GDR. Its central character is Georg Dreyman, a highly privileged playwright. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he goes to the Bundesbeauftragte der Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsministeriums der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik – the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Archives of the Ministry of State Security of the Former German Democratic Republic, understandably abbreviated to ‘BStU’. The fall of the Berlin Wall spurred hundreds of anxious Stasi officers to burn and shred thousands of files containing details of their own activities and those of their undercover agents in the West. Also, thousands of the surveillance files covering most of the population of the GDR were destroyed by delirious crowds invading the Stasi’s offices and prisons after the fall of the Wall, but Dreyman is hoping to find his file intact. He wants to examine it for clues why his lover killed herself. In the BStU reading room, a clerk wheels in a trolley piled high with 2in-thick dossiers.

‘Which one is mine?’ Dreyman asks.

The clerk replies, ‘They all are.’

And so are all the files piled high on two more trolleys. That brief scene lasting only a few seconds is a measure of the relentless spying on
everyone
in the GDR, for Dreyman had belonged to the elite stratum of society, being a personal friend of Margot Honecker, whose husband, Erich, ruled the GDR. Even that had not saved him from the Stasi’s scrutiny.

Watching Donnersmarck’s gripping film gave me the idea of requesting my own Stasi file.

On the day before my 2008 trip to Marienborn–Helmstedt I visited the former political prison in which I had been held in solitary confinement, to find that it is now a memorial to the 4,000 people sentenced there to forcible sterilisation in the Nazi era and the thousands imprisoned there by the Gestapo prior to 1945, by the KGB 1945–52 and by the Stasi 1952–89. Fortunately, during my incarceration I was unaware of the appalling suffering of many inmates because I was held in a separate wing as a pawn to be traded in due course for some political advantage. Had I then known how brutally the Stasi treated citizens of the GDR undergoing interrogation elsewhere in the prison, I should have been far more frightened.

Revisiting the interrogation room where I had verbally fenced with Becker at all hours of the day and night, I clearly recalled one episode towards the end of my spell in ‘the Lindenhotel’. One morning, I was shown into the interrogation room and there found, instead of Becker, two men and a woman seated at the desk. As soon as the door was closed behind me, the woman said in Russian, ‘
My predstaviteli praviteltsva sovietskovo soyuza.
’ The sentence meant, We are representatives of the government of the Soviet Union
.