For their next recce, they cycle right out of East Berlin, into the countryside, until they reach a small village with a cluster of houses. At the far edge there’s a sign:
GRENZGEBIET! BETRETEN VERBOTEN! BORDER AREA! NO TRESPASSING!
This is promising. Cycling round the sign, they come across a field that slopes down, then rises in the distance. In the furthest part of that field they see small dots moving. Cows? Manfred pulls out a pair of binoculars, looks through the glass and grins. ‘Tractors!’
He inspects the wheels, the doors, the paint, and to Manfred, who’s been trained in mechanical engineering while on military service, it is obvious. ‘West German tractors!’
If they can get to that field, they’ll make it. Manfred scans the horizon with his binoculars. They need to know what else is there, what to watch out for. Further in from the tractors there’s a line of trees. Then hay bales. Cows. A barn. Then suddenly – a mass of grey concrete. Manfred recoils, whizzing the wheel with his finger, trying to focus, and that’s when he realises what he is looking at: a watch-tower.
Raising the binoculars slowly, scared of what he might find, Manfred squints through the glass lenses, edging up and up until he sees a window. Spinning the wheel, he refocuses, and that’s when he sees them, a pair of eyes looking straight back at him through binoculars.
Border guards.
Jumping on their bikes, hearts banging against their chests, Manfred and Joachim cycle frantically round the sign, back to the road, waiting for the noise – a car sent to find them, or a warning shot – swivelling their heads to see if they’re being followed, but they’re not. They make it home a few hours later.
That night they decide that this field with its watch-tower is their best chance. It’s too dangerous to keep doing recces and there’ll never be a perfect escape route. They make plans to leave, work out who to tell, what to take. Then they wait. Their best change of escaping is on a dark night, that’s the only way to get past that watch-tower.
And so, for the third time in his relatively short life, Joachim finds himself preparing to escape.
17
The Watch-tower
IT’S DUSK ON 28 September, two weeks after that recce. Joachim and Manfred are at the pub, drinking with friends, and when they leave, Joachim looks up and sees them. ‘Oh man. The clouds are gathering.’
He knows it’s time.
At home he changes, putting on two pairs of trousers, three jumpers and a winter coat – clothes for his first winter in West Berlin. Then he puts a few things in a plastic bag: his school certificates, birth certificate, ID card. He’s doing all this in secret, doesn’t tell his mother or sister: this way out of East Berlin is too dangerous for them, he doesn’t want to say anything that could get them into trouble when the police come. If his mother is suspicious about all the activity over the past few weeks, she doesn’t say anything. She’s learnt there are things she’d rather not know.
A friend gives Joachim and Manfred a lift into the countryside, leaving them just behind that no trespassing sign. They creep towards the field, lie down on the grass, and wait for their eyes to adjust to the dark. They’ve chosen their night well; it’s almost pitch-black, the moon and stars obscured by low clouds, scudding overhead. The VoPos won’t spot them easily. The downside is that Joachim and Manfred can barely see where they’re going.
Crawling down the hill, they are blind to everything except what’s ten metres in front, and as they crawl, all they can think about is that watch-tower. Crouching down, they take it in turns to watch while the other person clambers forward, their East German military training finally proving useful, until eventually, they reach the bottom of the field, their clothes wet with dew.
Joachim checks his watch. It’s three in the morning; they’ve been crawling for four hours.
The night is quiet. All Joachim can hear is the sound of his own breathing. Stretching his hands in front of him, he searches the undergrowth for something he’s sure should be there, his skin prickling with fear when he can’t find it. ‘The barbed wire – where is it?’
He’s expecting something to mark the border – a fence, barbed wire, anything that would indicate they’re crossing into West Berlin – but there’s nothing. Just brambles and bushes. And something else – water. Joachim lowers one foot gently. It’s a river; perhaps the border is just beyond it. He puts his other foot into the water, then—
WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK!
There’s a deafening noise, it sounds like an explosion or machine-gun fire, but then he sees them – hundreds of wild geese taking off into the night, swirling and gliding through the sky, the flapping of their wings making a terrible noise, a noise so loud that Joachim and Manfred are sure the border guards in the watch-tower will hear.
Squinting into the dark, heart thumping, Joachim looks for any movement. All he can see are the silhouettes of trees; behind any of them could be a VoPo. It’s too dark to know if they’re alone, but they’ve come too far to go back and so he slips into the river, the shock of the cold water pulling his breath in. They wade through it, no idea how deep the river gets, so they hold their bags high as they push through the water, and to their relief, just as the water hits their thighs, the ground slopes up. Scrambling up the bank, they run in a crouched position, their thigh muscles trembling, their multiple pairs of wet trousers whipping and smacking around their legs. They don’t know where they’re running to, they can’t see the tractors, can’t really see anything, but they run and run and run until, finally, it begins to get light.
In the dawn glow a gravel track appears, trees either side. Instinctively, they join the path, trudging along until, out of the pink haze, a cluster of buildings emerges. As they reach the first, Joachim sees a blue light glowing in a window: a fire station perhaps?
But there’s no time to keep guessing because, as Joachim looks into the window, he realises he’s looking at the outline of a man’s head, a man who’s sleeping, head perched on his hands. And it’s only then that Joachim realises he has no idea where they are, whether they’ve made it to the West or whether they’re still in the East, this man in front of them a VoPo.
Somewhere in the fog of his dreams the man must have heard something, for right now, he is opening his eyes. Startled, he is quick to compose himself, and as the hairs on Joachim’s neck bristle, the man leans forward.
‘Well, boys, where have you come from in the middle of the night?’
18
The Camp
THEY STUTTER, NOT knowing what to say.
The man looks back at them, a smile curling around his lips. ‘Boys, stop looking for words. I know exactly where you’ve come from. There were two young men just like you. Came through here a couple of days ago, escaped like you. Congratulations, you’ve made it!’
Joachim falls into Manfred’s arms and they fall to the ground with relief. Lying there, Joachim notices that his heart feels light, as though a stone has fallen from it.
They look up and read the words on the banner, high above:
DIE FREIE WELT HEISST SIE WILLKOMMEN! THE FREE WORLD WELCOMES YOU!
This is the entrance to Marienfelde Refugee Camp in the American sector in West Berlin. It’s where anyone who escapes into West Berlin comes after they arrive, for though they have only crept a few miles to the other side of their city, this is who they are now: refugees.
It’s now around eight in the morning, and Joachim and Manfred are tired, wet and cold. All they want are warm clothes, food and a bed, but they must join the queue of refugees waiting to be processed by the staff at the camp – mostly church workers and wives of Western soldiers. There are twenty-five apartment blocks here, each three stories high, and most are full, following the deluge of people in the months before the Wall was built. Sometimes there were as many as two thousand a day: farmers, teachers, doctors, factory workers, parents, crying babies, grandparents.
Then, hidden among them are the spies, sent by the
party to find out what is happening in the West. The camp is full of them – as well as agents from the American CIA and the British MI6, poised to interrogate new arrivals at the refugee camp and mine them for information about East Germany. For Berlin is now the spy capital of the world. With the threat of nuclear war, the West and the Soviet Union are desperate to understand more about each other – their armies, weapons, any plans for attacks. But with the world carved in two, it’s almost impossible to sneak spies into each other’s territory – except in one place: Berlin. Seventy intelligence agencies operate in the city, all in the business of recruiting and training informants, assigning listening posts and drop zones, then sending their spies into the East or West. But since the Wall appeared, the flow of information into West Berlin is drying up: it’s become harder for spies to wander in and out of East Berlin and there are fewer people escaping to West Berlin. Anyone who makes it is a precious resource.
Joachim is now at the front of the line. He gives his name and age and a man takes him down a corridor to a small room. Inside, a man in dark trousers and crisp white shirt sits at a desk.
‘And how did you get here?’ he asks, no introduction, as Joachim sits opposite. Joachim is intrigued. The man’s German is flawless, but the accent isn’t quite right. He tells the man his story, how he’d grown up in the East and wanted to leave.
‘And what were you doing before you left?’
There it is again. That accent, that hint of somewhere else. American? CIA? It’s a good guess. The CIA had just started a new initiative, putting German-speaking officials into the camp to interview all new arrivals. Joachim tells the CIA officer about his escape – the field, the river, the watch-tower. The man looks bored; he’s heard these escape stories a hundred times. Then he asks Joachim what he’d been doing in the East, and Joachim tells him about his university course. ‘And then there was my time in the army reserves.’
CIA guy looks up. ‘Which unit?’
‘Torgelow, in Mecklenburg.’
Now the intelligence officer looks interested; here’s someone who’s recently been in the East German army. He might know things, however small, which could be useful. He stands up, walks to the back of the room. ‘Which military company was this?’
‘Telecommunications,’ says Joachim. ‘News division.’
The American walks to a large metal unit at the back of the room and opens the top drawer. Inside, a neat row of index cards. He pulls one out. ‘Is the company chief in that unit still Senior Lieutenant Schmidt?’
Joachim is impressed; the CIA officer knows the names of all the senior army officials in the unit Joachim had been trained in, though their titles are out of date.
‘He’s now a major,’ says Joachim, feeling useful.
The American looks back at him, smiles for the first time. ‘There’s a house, not far from here. We can put you up for a few days. The food’s better there. You’ll have your own room, somewhere to sleep. Just have a few more questions.’
Joachim says no, he wants to go and find his aunt and uncle in West Berlin, but the CIA officer is persuasive, putting Joachim in a car and driving him, his plastic bag and his drenched clothes to a small house in Grunewald, a forested area in the far west of Berlin.
Joachim doesn’t know why he’s here, what this place surrounded by pine trees is, but there’s a bed to sleep in and right now that’s enough. He drops into bed, and soon his eyes close, his breath deepens, and finally he sleeps, his first night in West Berlin.
The next morning he wakes to the smell of toast. Downstairs, breakfast is laid on a small table and there’s a man and two children sitting in silence. Later Joachim will discover that the apartment is a CIA safe house, the man at the table a high-ranking official from East Berlin who’d defected to the West, but in this moment he doesn’t care about any of that. Instead, he’s distracted by what’s on the table: a generous spread of cereals, toast and jam. Picking up a piece of toast, Joachim butters it, smears on a rancid-looking jam, takes a bite and…
Inside he melts.
It’s marmalade but not like anything else he’s ever tasted. He takes another bite. It’s pineapple, the man tells him. Joachim has never eaten it – after all, citrus fruits were rare in the East – he’d only seen pineapple in photos. Now, here he is, eating a sugary, gooey version of this rare fruit and he’s addicted. He eats pineapple marmalade for breakfast, lunch, then supper, answers a few more questions, then goes to bed, dreaming marmalade dreams.
19
The Spy
29 September 1961
AS JOACHIM SLEEPS, a few miles away a hairdresser called Siegfried is queueing at a checkpoint, waiting to cross the border into East Berlin. Siegfried clutches his bag, hoping he’ll make it through without attracting attention. Around him, the trains whistle and screech, the sound bouncing off the iron roof of Friedrichstrasse station, swirling down through the maze of platforms.
Friedrichstrasse is the busiest border crossing between West and East Berlin. In a quirk of East German rules, the authorities allow anyone with a West German passport to cross into East Berlin to visit friends and family, but not West Berliners. At the end of their visit, they must return home to West Berlin. VoPos patrol the platforms, machine-guns in their hands, watching as people make their way to the checkpoint next to the station, a huge hall nicknamed Tränenpalast – the ‘Palace of Tears’. For this is where visiting relatives say goodbye to those stuck in the East – wives leave husbands, brothers leave sisters, mothers leave daughters. A trapezoid of glass, the ceiling reaches high into the sky, dwarfing the border-crossers, who are funnelled into narrow booths as they go through security.
Siegfried stands in line, his bag heavy with the weight of what he knows should not be in there. When he’s called forward, he squeezes through the booth, a green-uniformed-TraPo (transport police officer) monitoring from behind the glass. Siegfried hands over his West German passport, then waits, as they all do, for the buzzer that means the door into the East is about to open, but the sound never comes, for the TraPo is motioning to Siegfried’s bag.
Pulse racing, Siegfried obediently opens his bag, revealing hundreds of smuggled cigarettes and several bottles of alcohol.
In a side room, Siegfried answers the TraPo’s questions about the smuggled cigarettes and alcohol, bluffing about going to a party, knowing his story sounds ridiculous. After an hour, the TraPo takes him into another room and there, sitting behind a desk, is a man. No uniform.
Siegfried’s stomach bottoms out.
The man sitting in front of Siegfried is a Stasi officer, one of hundreds of thousands of employees spread between the Stasi’s fourteen regional offices. Like most Stasi employees, he’s been taught martial arts, how to use disguises to follow suspects (mostly wigs and fake moustaches) and how to conduct interrogations. It’s not a bad life; his salary is generous, he shops in special supermarkets stuffed with Western food, and he knows that if he does well he can go on luxurious holidays, perhaps one day own a villa in a private compound with a swimming pool and cinema. But to keep these perks, and stand a chance of promotion, he must reach a target: recruit twenty-five new informants every year. If he fails, he could be demoted. For it is these informants that set the Stasi apart from every other secret police force in history.
The Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or IMs – ‘unofficial employees’ – are not Stasi employees working in Stasi offices, but they are ordinary people who spy on colleagues, friends, husbands and parents, even their own children. These informants are considered so important to the Stasi that they refer to them (rather poetically) as their ‘breathing organs’. And these informants are everywhere: in hospitals, schools, universities, charities, businesses, environmental groups, hotels, gay bars, knitting clubs, even the Church (some estimate that as many as 65 per cent of church leaders were working for the Stasi).
Informants are separated into different categories depending on their importance: there are IMs, FIMs (unofficial coll
aborators running other unofficial collaborators), GMSes (low-level IMs), IMBs, IMEs, IMKs, all sending information into the ZAIG – the Stasi’s central processing group in Berlin.
And what makes this network of informants so effective is the sheer number of them: 173,000. In Hitler’s Germany, there was one Gestapo agent for every 2,000 people; in the Soviet Union, there was one KGB agent for every 5,830 people; in East Germany, there was one informant for every sixty-three people, and if you include part-time informers, some say there were as many as one informant per six people. Even the police, military and border guard units were stuffed with informants. They were there the night the barbed wire went up, spread among construction workers and soldiers, making sure they obeyed orders, and it was Stasi informants from the Twentieth Directorate who’d climbed onto the roofs of Dresden, looking for Western-pointing aerials, drawing up that list of names in Joachim’s newspaper.
Helping Stasi officers achieve their target of finding twenty-five informants a year is their training in the science of recruitment. Directive 1/79 sets out different strategies they can use. First, the directive says, try political persuasion to win people through loyalty. If that doesn’t work, bribe the potential informant with money or medicine. If that still doesn’t work, there’s the more forceful approach: blackmail.
The Stasi officer knows he has a good chance with Siegfried. He’s been caught smuggling cigarettes; the threat of prison will probably be enough to turn him. But the officer is about to discover something even better: he asks Siegfried where he was taking these cigarettes.
‘They are for a woman in the East,’ Siegfried says.
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