The Pigeon Tunnel (6 page)

8

A legacy

The year is 2003. A bullet-proof, chauffeur-driven Mercedes picks me up at crack of dawn from my Munich hotel and drives me the half-dozen miles to the agreeable Bavarian town of Pullach, industries brewing, since lapsed, and spying, which is eternal. My appointment is for a working breakfast with Dr August Hanning, at that time reigning
Präsident
of the German Intelligence Service, the
BND
, and a sprinkling of his senior colleagues. From the guarded gateway we pass low buildings half hidden by trees and decked in camouflage netting to a pleasant white-painted country house more typical of Germany's north than south. Dr Hanning stands waiting on the doorstep. We have a little time, he says. Would I care to take a look around the shop? Thank you, Dr Hanning, I would like to very much.

During my foreign service in Bonn and Hamburg more than thirty years earlier, I had had no contact with the
BND
. I had not, as the jargon has it, been ‘declared'; least of all had I entered its fabled headquarters. But when the Berlin Wall came down – an event unforetold by any intelligence service – and the British Embassy in Bonn, to its amazement, was obliged to pack its bags and remove itself to Berlin, our Ambassador of the day bravely took it into his head to invite me to Bonn to celebrate the occasion. In the intervening years I had written a novel called
A Small Town in Germany
which spared neither the British Embassy nor the provisional Bonn government. In predicating – wrongly – a West German lurch to the far right, I had contrived a conspiracy between British diplomats and
West German officials which had led to the death of an Embassy employee bent on exposing an inconvenient truth.

I was not therefore expecting to be anyone's dream of the ideal person to be ringing down the curtain on the old Embassy, or welcoming in the new, but the British Ambassador, a most civilized man, preferred to think otherwise. Not content with having me deliver a (I hope) jolly address at the closing ceremony, he invited to his residence beside the Rhine every real-life counterpart of the fictional German officials that my novel had maligned, requiring of each of them, as the price of a fine dinner, a speech delivered in character.

And Dr August Hanning, posing as the least attractive member of my fictional ensemble, had risen sportingly and wittily to the occasion. It was a gesture that I took gratefully to heart.

We are in Pullach, it is more than a decade later, Germany is thoroughly reunited, and Hanning is waiting for me on the doorstep of his handsome white house. Though I have never been here, I know, like anyone else, the bare bones of the
BND
's history: how General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of Hitler's military intelligence staff on the Eastern Front, had at some unclear point towards the end of the war spirited his precious Soviet archive to Bavaria, buried it, then cut a deal with the American
OSS
, forerunner of the
CIA
, whereby he handed over his archive, his staff and himself in return for instatement as head of an anti-Soviet spying agency under American command, to be called the Gehlen Organisation or, to the initiated, the Org.

There are stages in between, naturally, even a courtship of sorts. In 1945 Gehlen is flown to Washington, still technically a
US
captive. Allen Dulles, America's top spy and founding Director of the
CIA
, looks him over and decides he likes the cut of his jib. Gehlen is treated, flattered, taken to a baseball match, but preserves that
taciturn and remote image that in the spy world passes all too easily for inscrutable depth. Nobody seems to know or care that, while spying for the Führer in Russia, he fell for a Soviet deception plan that rendered much of his archive valueless. It's a new war, and Gehlen is our man. In 1946, now presumably no longer captive, he is installed as chief of West Germany's embryonic overseas intelligence service under the protection of the
CIA
. Old comrades from Nazi days form the core of his staff. Controlled amnesia relegates the past to history.

In arbitrarily deciding that former or present Nazis were loyal by definition to the anti-communist flag, Dulles and his Western allies had of course deluded themselves on the grand scale. As every schoolchild knows, anyone with a murky past is a sitting duck for blackmail. Add now the smouldering resentment of military defeat, the loss of pride, unspoken outrage at the Allied mass bombing of your beloved home town – Dresden, for instance – and you have as potent a recipe for recruitment as the
KGB
and Stasi could possibly wish for.

The case of Heinz Felfe speaks for many. In 1961, when he was finally arrested – I happened to be in Bonn at the time – Felfe, a son of Dresden, had spied for the Nazi
SD
, Britain's
MI
6, East Germany's Stasi and the Soviet
KGB
in that order – oh, and of course for the
BND
, where he was a prized player in games of cat-and-mouse against the Soviet intelligence services. And well he might be, since his Soviet and East German paymasters fed him any spare agents they had on their books for their star man inside the Org to unmask and claim the glory. So precious indeed was Felfe to his Soviet masters that they set up a dedicated KGB unit in East Germany solely to manage their agent, process his intelligence and further his brilliant career inside the Org.

By 1956, when the Org acquired the grand title of Federal Intelligence Service, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, Felfe and a fellow conspirator named Clemens, also a son of Dresden and a leading player in the
BND
, had supplied the Russians with the
BND
's entire
order of battle, including the identities of ninety-seven field officers serving under deep cover abroad, which must have been something like a grand slam. But Gehlen, always a poseur and something of a fantasist, contrived to sit tight until 1968, at the end of which time 90 per cent of his agents in East Germany were working for the Stasi, while back home in Pullach sixteen members of his extended family were on the
BND
payroll.

Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a better job of pretending to be a cut above a public that has no choice but to pay top price for second-rate intelligence whose lure lies in the gothic secrecy of its procurement, rather than its intrinsic worth. In all of which, the
BND
, to say the least, is not alone.

We are in Pullach, we have a little time, and my host is giving me the tour of this handsome, rather English-style country house. I am impressed, as I suspect he wishes me to be, by the imposing conference room with its shiny long table, twentieth-century landscapes and pleasing outlook on to an inner courtyard, where sculptures of strength-through-joy boys and girls on plinths strike heroic postures at each other.

‘Doctor Hanning, this is really remarkable,' I say politely.

To which, with the faintest of smiles, Hanning answers, ‘Yes. Martin Bormann had pretty good taste.'

I am following him down a steep stone staircase, flight after flight of it, until we stand in Martin Bormann's personalized version of Hitler's
Führerbunker
, complete with beds, telephones, latrines and ventilation pumps, and whatever else was needful to the survival of Hitler's most favoured henchman. And all of it, Hanning assures me with his same wry smile as I stare stupidly round me, officially listed as a protected monument under Bavarian state law.

So this is where they brought Gehlen in 1947, I'm thinking. To this house. And gave him his rations, and clean bedding, and his Nazi-era files, and card indices, and his old Nazi-era staff, while uncoordinated teams of Nazi hunters chased around after Martin Bormann, and the world tried to absorb the indescribable horrors of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. This is where Reinhard Gehlen and his Nazi secret policemen were installed: in Bormann's country residence that he won't be requiring any time soon. One minute Hitler's not-very-good spymaster is in flight from the Russian fury, the next he is the pampered favourite of his new best friends, the victorious Americans.

Well, perhaps at my age I shouldn't have looked so surprised. And my host's smile tells me as much. Wasn't I once in the profession myself? Wasn't my own former Service energetically trading intelligence with the Gestapo right up to 1939? Wasn't it on friendly terms with Muammar Gaddafi's chief of secret police right up to the last days of Gaddafi's rule – terms friendly enough to pack up his political enemies, even pregnant ones, and see them rendered to Tripoli to be locked up, and interrogated with all the best enhancements?

It's time for us to climb back up the long stone staircase for our working breakfast. As we arrive at the top – I think we are in the main hallway to the house, but can't be sure – two faces from the past greet me from what I take to be Pullach's wall of fame: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Hitler's Abwehr from 1935 to 1944, and our friend General Reinhard Gehlen, the
BND
's first
Präsident.
Canaris, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi but no fan of Hitler, played a double game with Germany's right-wing resistance groups, but also with British Intelligence, with whom he remained in sporadic contact throughout the war. His duplicity caught up with him in 1945, when he was summarily tried and horribly executed by the
SS
: a brave and muddled hero of some sort, and certainly no anti-Semite, but a traitor to his country's leadership for all that. As to Gehlen, also a wartime traitor, it is hard to know in the cold light of history what is
left to admire in him beyond deviousness, plausibility and a con artist's powers of self-persuasion.

So is that
all of it
, I wonder, surveying these two uncomfortable faces? Are these two flawed men the only role models from its past that the
BND
has to offer to its shiny-eyed new entrants? Think of the treats that await our British new entrants to the secret world! Every spy service mythologizes itself, but the Brits are a class apart. Forget our dismal showing in the Cold War, when the
KGB
outwitted and out-penetrated us at almost every turn. Hark back instead to the Second World War, which to believe our television and tabloid press is where our national pride is most safely invested. Look at our brilliant Bletchley Park codebreakers! Look at our ingenious Double-Cross System, and the great deceptions of the D-Day landings, at our intrepid
SOE
radio operators and saboteurs dropped behind enemy lines! With such heroes as these marching before them, how can our new recruits fail to be inspired by their Service's past?

Above all: we won, so we get to write the history.

But the poor old
BND
has no such heart-warming tradition, however mythologized, to offer its recruits. It can't crow, for instance, about the Abwehr's Operation North Pole, otherwise known as the England Game, a deception that over three years fooled
SOE
into dispatching fifty brave Dutch agents to certain death and worse in occupied Holland. German achievements in the field of decryption were also impressive – but to what end? It can't celebrate the undoubted counter-intelligence skills of Klaus Barbie, former Gestapo chief in Lyon, recruited to the
BND
's ranks as an informant in 1966. Barbie, it emerged only after a prolonged Allied cover-up, had personally tortured scores of members of the French Resistance. Sentenced to life, he died in the prison where he had perpetrated his worst atrocities. But not before he had apparently been recruited by the
CIA
to hunt down Che Guevara.