The Tsunami File (18 page)

Not all the Interpol files, fingerprints or otherwise, contained extensive detail. Sometimes a fingerprint match would yield up a complete history, criminal and personal, of a person of interest. Or sometimes, a fingerprint set would be sent to Interpol by a national police force or an antiterrorism squad along with little detail at all, sent simply to set off an alarm if it cross-matched with prints taken from a crime scene somewhere or from a suspect traveller crossing a border point somewhere that had been set up to check fingerprints from afar.

In such cases, Interpol was merely being asked to act as a go-between, letting Country A know that a person of interest had left prints at a crime scene in Country B, or had been arrested in Country C, or had crossed a border into Country D. Sometimes, setting off such international alarm bells was all that a national police force or intelligence service might want Interpol to do. Sometimes, for very good investigative or judicial or other reasons, it was enough for a country just to know where someone was, without sharing too much detail with authorities in other countries or with Interpol in Lyon.

Sometimes, a good fingerprint examiner like Jonah Smith, would interrogate the Interpol database from a place like Phuket, Thailand, and would see on his screen thousands of kilometres away from Lyon that, yes, there was a possible match. Sometimes, in such cases, the file would tell a good fingerprint examiner a subject's name, nationality, date of birth and little else. But sometimes even that was enough. Sometimes even that little morsel of information was enough to break the logjam in an investigation, to open up new realms of investigative possibility, to yield new questions that needed to be asked and new people who might be able to answer them.

This, Smith announced proudly in Delaney's hotel room, was precisely what had happened in the
Deutschland
matter. The good-quality prints that Zalm had given back had thrown up about a dozen possible matches. Smith had downloaded these from the I-24/7 system into his computer in Phuket and then used the AFIS matching software to look at them more closely.

He eventually narrowed the field down to two possibles, using minutiae in the fingerprint ridges and other details in the print to get closer and closer to a genuine match. For a good fingerprint examiner like Jonah Smith, 12 points of similarity was the minimum standard required for certainty. Sometimes, he insisted on explaining to Delaney and Zalm, these days, FBI men or others were happy with 10 or even just 8 points of similarity. This Smith insisted on telling them, was simply not good enough. Not for certainty.

In the
Deutschland
matter, Smith told them proudly, he had found no fewer than 14 points of similarity between the fingerprints taken off the body in Phuket and a set in the Interpol database. This, Smith said, was more than enough for him.

Alarm bells rang. He was sure he had found a match.

With a flourish, and a grin like a show-off police cadet, Smith spread a computer printout on the table before them, pushing bottles of Singha beer aside. Delaney and Zalm peered at it over his shoulder. The document contained few details, but, in Smith's professional opinion, it was cause for celebration. The document said:

Subject known to Interpol.

National Police Contact:
Bundeskriminalamt, Weisbaden, Germany.

Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich.
Male. German National.

Date of Birth:
Dresden, former German Democratic Republic—18 May 1940.

Deceased:
Bonn, Germany—8 October 2001.

T
he possibility that the body of a tsunami victim lying in a mortuary container in Phuket, Thailand, in March 2005 was that of one Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich, born 18 May 1940 in Dresden, in the former East Germany, and who died, supposedly, on 8 October 2001 in Bonn, West Germany, was enough to set off a series of alarm bells.

The alarm bells were in Gunter Ackermann's head. First when his telephone rang unbearably loud and unconscionably early in the morning, Berlin time. Then they started ringing again, loudly, when Delaney told him what he had discovered.

Delaney had thought he would first check out the Klaus Heinrich name in news databases, before calling Ackermann. But then he decided he would ask Ackermann about the name right away.

“Gunter, I'm sorry, I know it's really early over there,” Delaney said when Ackermann eventually answered his phone with an incomprehensible oath. Delaney had tried a home number first and then, when that wasn't answered, Ackermann's cell phone.

“Francis, for God's sake, what can you possibly want?” Ackermann growled.

Delaney heard a muffled woman's voice saying: “
Wer ruft denn um diese Zeit noch an, Schatz?
”

“If you called me any earlier, Francis, you would have caught me in the physical act of love,” Ackermann said.

The woman's offstage voice said: “
Schatz, steh jetzt nicht auf, sag denen sie sollen verschwinden
.” Ackermann said: “
Tut mir leid, Liebling. Gunter kuemmert sich darum
.”

To Delaney, Ackermann's language was not so charming: “Francis, call me back later, for God's sake. I will kill you for this,” he said.

“Gunter, no, don't hang up. I have something quite interesting on this
Deutschland
body over here,” Delaney said. “Don't hang up.”

“Can't this wait for a civilized hour?”

“No, Gunter. This is good. Listen to me. The body I've been talking about. I have a name now. German.”

“You had a German name before, Stahlman, and it was bullshit,” Ackermann said. Delaney heard the click of a lighter and the faint breeze of a cigarette being lit and smoke inhaled in Berlin. And one last plea from Ackermann's very sleepy lady friend.

“You ever heard of a guy named Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich?” Delaney asked.

“Klaus Heinrich? It's a common name where I come from, Francis. And I have just woken up.” “Born 1940 in Dresden. Died 2001, Bonn.”

“Bonn,” Ackermann said. “2001.”

“Or Phuket, Boxing Day 2004. Depending on your point of view.” “How old is this guy?”

“Come on Gunter—1940, 2004. He'd be sixty-four. If he hadn't drowned in Thailand three months ago.”

Delaney could hear Ackermann smoke as he pondered this.

“German, around sixty, Klaus Heinrich. Dead in 2001 in Bonn,” Ackerman said eventually. “2004, in Phuket, Gunter.”

“I think I know who that could be, Frank,” Ackermann said. “If it was Bonn. This could be good.”

“Who could it be?” Delaney said.

“Klaus Heinrich. Germany's super spy. Dead 2001 in Bonn. Exactly. I'm waking up now.” “What? What do you mean, super spy?”

“Klaus Heinrich. For God's sake. Where were you in October 2001? Do you never read the newspapers?”

“I was getting ready to go to Afghanistan in October 2001, Gunter. And you were too. Everybody was heading to Afghanistan to watch the Americans bomb terrorist training camps.”

“Well, that didn't stop me from reading the bloody papers before I went, Francis. Klaus Heinrich. The spy who came in from the extreme cold. Literally. You must remember, for God's sake. He was our big spy man, West Germany's most famous spy, some would say. He spent years of his life working undercover in East Germany for our side. Then after the Wall came down in 1989 and everything collapsed over there, he came back in and was a big bloody hero. One of the few guys our side had ever managed to place over there as a mole. Stasi had hundreds of spies over on the West side and we couldn't ever manage to place more than a few over in the East. Klaus Heinrich was a very, very big hero after the Wall came down.”

“I don't remember that story at all, Gunter,”

Delaney said.

“For God's sake, you Americans are ignorant. Parochial, pathetic fucking . . .”

“I can't remember every news story from 1989, Gunter. And I'm Canadian.”

“You are an asshole, Francis Frank,” Ackermann said. “Especially in the morning. I don't care what nationality you are.” “What happened to this guy?”

“Oh, they gave him a bloody big reception and pinned a medal or two on him and put him in a nice, high-paying little job in the Foreign Ministry or something, over in Bonn. Nice town. They set him up for life. He was an academic by trade, if I remember now. On paper anyway. I think he gave some lectures in the West, after, too.” “But what happened to him?”

“Well, he died, Frank. Don't tell me you don't remember this. If it's the same man you're talking about. It was a bloody big story over here. He worked in Bonn from about 1990 or so, had a very nice little life, big hero, nice life, and then he died.

October 2001. I remember it very well. Everybody was working like bastards, after the 9/11 thing in New York, for weeks after. There was no news story in the world except 9/11, 9/11, al-Qaeda. Then this silly bastard gets himself killed and finally we had a nice German story to put on Page One for a change. Heinrich died in a big nasty fire out in the woods somewhere. A cottage or a cabin he had outside of Bonn somewhere. I would have to check where. It was very big story at the time.”

“In 2001.”

“Yes, Frank, yes.”

“They find the body? They never found Stahlman's body.”

“Of course they found the body. He was fucking famous. The police were all over it. It was front page.”

“A house fire.”

“Yes, Frank, yes. Some of us thought for a while that some hard-core former Stasi spy, or two, or ten, might have killed him for playing around with them for so many years in the East. But there was a big investigation. The fire marshals said a heating stove had blown up. They didn't see anything criminal about it. Everybody wanted to know and they did a very careful investigation. There was an arson investigation, a murder investigation, an autopsy, everything. He just died when his damn heating stove blew up.”

“So who's this over here in Phuket then?”

“It can't be the same Klaus Heinrich, Frank.

I don't see how. Not possible.”

“We've got fingerprints off his body. We've got a match on the Interpol database.”

Ackermann paused, in his bed in Berlin. Delaney could hear him smoking his cigarette as he pondered the situation.

“Then you may be onto a very good little story, Francis Frank. If that's really Klaus Heinrich in a body bag over there.”

Ackermann, as usual, was absolutely correct in matters of history and current affairs. Delaney got online immediately after hanging up the telephone and checked databases for the Klaus Heinrich story. Ackermann had said he would stand by to help out. As any good German journalist would be more than happy to do in such matters.

There were in fact lots of news stories in the databases about master spy Klaus Heinrich coming in from the cold after 1989. A simple Google search of his name and the keyword
spy
was all that was needed. There were far fewer stories about his death in a house fire in the autumn of 2001, however, if only because the world media machine was locked in on, fixated on, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But the Heinrich stories were there in 2001 as well, for those who took the time to look.

Heinrich had come in after a long and brilliant spying career deep undercover in East Berlin. A couple of profiles published in late 1989 and after German reunification in 1990 noted, as the all too brief Interpol file had also noted, that he had been born in Dresden, German Democratic Republic. But the media had much more detail, apparently, than Interpol. Heinrich had moved to the West alone, as a university student, in 1959, just before the Wall went up a year later and everything in German politics and world politics profoundly changed. Many thousands of East Germans had made the same move, prior to 1960. Such migration westward was one of the reasons for the wall being built in the first place.

In 1990 interviews, Heinrich said he had left the GDR because he found it “stifling,” as so many were finding it at that time and afterward. He finished his PhD in political economy at the Free University of Berlin and then, it appeared, he had been recruited sometime in the early sixties by the Bundesnach-richtendienst, West Germany's intelligence service, like a lot of bright young people at the time.

The difference, in his case, as Heinrich appeared only too happy to tell Associated Press and
Die Welt
and the BBC and anyone else who interviewed him, post-1990, was that he eventually managed to insinuate himself back into East Germany as a BND mole.

He had been a radical, a far left university student, in West Germany. Or so it appeared. He had marched in the 1968 student protests that shook Europe, had got himself arrested, even though somewhat past prime student age by then, and had been active in student Communist groups and other far left groups of various descriptions. Then, at the height of the Cold War and the East-West tensions, he defected to the East, with much fanfare and blazing front-page stories in the GDR and Soviet press.

Heinrich, it seemed, was a young man who could not bear being stifled, anywhere. West German capitalism, he had now decided, was stifling him unbearably. He had made a mistake in 1959, he said. He could no longer in good conscience live in West Germany and he wanted to go home to the GDR where he could feel truly at home and make his contribution to the socialist paradise. And perhaps visit his ancient mother in Dresden. Or so he said at the time.

Heinrich left West Germany just months before the spectacular story broke of a Stasi spy, Gunter Guillaume, having made it to the very top echelons of Willy Brandt's Social Democrat government. Guillaume had managed to have himself appointed a top aide to Brandt himself. That scandal brought Brandt down as Chancellor in 1974, and brought Stasi and its enormous, Byzantine network of spies inside and outside East Germany, into very sharp focus. Everywhere it was said that Stasi had completely outmanned and outclassed the BND in the spying game.

But one Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich was providing a success story at the time that no one in West German intelligence wanted to put on any front page—not yet. In fact, said the post-1990 news and feature stories, Heinrich was never anything other than a loyal member of the BND, despite his highprofile defection back to the GDR, and for years this deep undercover super spy sent back a constant stream of excellent-quality intelligence to the West.

East Germany had, very unwisely as it later turned out, embraced their brilliant high-profile defector with great enthusiasm and given him a political science lectureship at Humboldt University in East Berlin, where everyone was ideologically sound indeed. Heinrich moved from there into very powerful circles, acting as a sort of informal government adviser on all things West German, rubbing shoulders with senior bureaucrats and politicians and like-minded academics and intellectuals. His sources in the GDR were excellent, he had access to highlevel discussions and reports and files, and no one, it seemed, ever suspected that this Dresden native was anything other than what he appeared.

In those first chaotic days and weeks after the Wall came down in 1989 and thousands of Stasi files were seized that showed in detail the breathtaking level of infiltration of West Germany by East German spies, the Klaus Heinrich story, about the man who had duped the best Stasi minds for more than a dozen years, was a welcome counterweight to the impression that Stasi had outmaneuvered the West at every Cold War turn.

Heinrich was the kind of hero West German intelligence sorely needed at the time and they used him for all he was worth. Until, of course, a defective heating stove blew up in Heinrich's little cabin in the Siebengebirge hills and his brilliant career finally, spectacularly, ended.

As Ackermann had said, there were the inevitable suggestions at the time that Heinrich had been assassinated by Stasi stalwarts in retaliation for his betrayal. But those stories soon faded away, partly because from every possible level in West Germany there came assurances that the house fire had been no more than what it appeared. That Heinrich had died accidentally at the age of 61 from smoke inhalation and horrific burns, leaving a charred corpse in the ashes for all investigators to examine for suspicious bullet wounds or knife wounds or poisons or whatever other signs of displeasure a Stasi assassin might have left behind.

The stories faded away after the very thorough official investigation. They faded also because the world's attention was understandably elsewhere at the time. In October 2001, the death in the Rhine countryside of a former West German Cold War super spy in a house fire was news from another era. It was not a story to hold media interest for very long. The media, post-9/11, had far too many new preoccupations to spend very much time writing feature stories and analysis pieces about the death of one Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich.