Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  27

  Shift-work

  JOACHIM IS AT the front of the tunnel. In jeans and bare-chested, he’s digging out the earth as he lies on his back, droplets of sweat falling onto the mud floor. He’s halfway through a shift, feeling calm as he works his arms and legs, his muscles now used to what’s required of them, the pushing, pulling, digging and hauling.

  He stops a moment and looks back at the cellar, now around twenty metres away – the length of a small room. With the extra tools and diggers, they’ve been making good progress: as one digger hacks out clay, another shoves pieces of wood into the walls to hold the earth back, so the tunnel doesn’t collapse. The wood came from the father of a university friend who owned a sawmill. He’d given them the wood free of charge as long as he could get friends out through the tunnel. One morning, his son came to the cellar, took off his jacket, revealing sticks of dynamite with trailing fuses, then pulled out a double-barrelled shotgun. ‘Will these help for digging?’ The diggers dragged him out of the cellar – are you insane? – thanked him for the wood, told him never to come back.

  Now, sitting at the front of the tunnel, the cart full of earth, Joachim calls to the others in the cellar. He needs them to wind the winch and pull the cart of earth along the tunnel, back into the cellar. But there’s no reply. The tunnel is now so long that when he’s at the front, people in the cellar can’t hear him. Solve one problem, he thinks, and you create another.

  That day, after the end of his shift, Joachim walks to an American army shop in West Berlin. He’s looking for a radio or telephone, something to help them communicate when they’re in the tunnel. On a shelf along with walkie-talkies and old scraps of uniform, he sees them: two US army telephones, from the Second World War. Dark green with black handsets. They look perfect. Joachim buys the telephones and takes them to the cellar, where he inserts batteries and sets one telephone into the wall of the tunnel, covering it with cloth so no mud gets in. The other telephone he attaches to a wall up in the cellar, the two connected by a black cable that he fixes to the top of the tunnel with a hook. Then he crawls to the front of the tunnel, winds the telephone and – Brr Brr! He hears it ringing in the cellar. Smiling, Joachim shows the other diggers how it works and they all joke about how this is one of the only private telephones between East and West Berlin. Now, when Joachim is at the front of the tunnel with a cart full of earth, all he has to do is use the phone to alert the team in the cellar. They then turn a winch to pull the cart through the tunnel, up the shaft, where they take it off the winch, empty the earth into a wheelbarrow, dump it in a corner, then send the cart back down into the tunnel.

  There are now eight of them: Mimmo, Gigi, Wolf, Joachim, Hasso, Uli, Joachim’s friend Manfred (who they call the Tall One) and another digger called Orlando Casola, a friend of Mimmo and Gigi’s who’s so shy he never says a word, wearing sunglasses all the time, even in the cellar.

  The eight men soon find a steady rhythm. Divided in groups, they work eight-hour shifts, their rota written on a piece of paper on the wall. Each shift, they come to the cellar with a packed lunch or tea, change into old clothes and begin. One digs, another fits the wooden supports and a third man dumps the earth in the cellar. After eight hours, they’re exhausted, arms shaking, eyelashes clumped with mud.

  At the end of his shifts, Joachim returns to his university dorm and collapses into bed, hands curled protectively around the ends of his blistered fingers. Within seconds, his eyes close as he drops into the darkness of a dreamless sleep.

  28

  A New Name

  SIEGFRIED UHSE, THE hairdresser-turned-spy, gulps a mouthful of beer and looks across the table at Lehmann. He can never work out what Lehmann, his handler, thinks of him, but he hopes that tonight he will prove what a good spy he is.

  Since his visit to the House of the Future two months ago, Siegfried had met Lehmann regularly at a safe house called ‘School’, where they began every meeting with a coded exchange:

  Lehmann: Excuse me, were you at Bela’s party yesterday?

  Siegfried: No, I was with Anni at Birgit’s place.

  Then, over dinner and cognac (always cognac) paid for by Lehmann, Siegfried would tell him what he’d been up to. And there was always lots to tell. First, there was his job at the army base, where Siegfried worked six days a week, attending to American soldiers, trying to coax information as he performed buzz cuts. He’d already found out about a three-day manoeuvre involving 3,000 American soldiers, then he’d flirted with a female guard at the gate to the barracks, somehow persuading her to give him an access pass. Walking around the barracks, Siegfried memorised the layout, later drawing a sketch and giving it to Lehmann. Then there were his regular visits to the House of the Future, where Siegfried had got to know Bodo Köhler and his team of escape-helpers.

  You can tell Lehmann is impressed. Like a proud teacher, in his reports he writes extensively about Siegfried’s character and the qualities he’s discovering in his latest informant.

  He is a very friendly and helpful person. He always appeared modest at the meetings but was pleased when he was offered a good meal at the meeting… he seems… shy on the surface, however this is deceptive as he is objective and determined in discussions… he has good general knowledge, he is mentally fit and active and he knows how to intensify this by refinement. He makes good connections with people, especially men. He always follows the instructions of the employee but also makes suggestions to carry out various tasks. He has not yet refused any assignments.

  These last two sentences are particularly interesting. Some Stasi spies who felt pressured into informing found ways of resisting – agreeing to carry out certain tasks, but making sure they never discovered anything the Stasi could actually use. From Lehmann’s reports it’s clear that Siegfried isn’t one of those spies. He’s proactive, goes beyond what he’s asked to do. But why?

  Lehmann seems to have the same question, as every time they meet, he asks Siegfried why he’s doing the work. Siegfried says he finds it ‘beneficial for his personal life’; his only regret is that he hasn’t been more successful. He says he’s not doing it for ‘material gain’, though the Stasi are now helping him with rent for a new flat and paying him a regular salary – around 100DM (worth roughly £9) every week. Given that Siegfried enjoyed an expensive lifestyle, one he could barely afford, it’s hard not to suspect that money was part of it.

  Siegfried says the main reason is political. Lehmann isn’t so sure. He writes that Siegfried isn’t clear about what his politics are, that ‘he has an open mind but has to be corrected in some respects’. In Lehmann’s accounts of their conversations, Siegfried’s political ideas seem rehearsed, as though he’s parroting lines he’s heard in the newspaper or on TV: ‘East Germany is the real German state,’ Siegfried says, ‘and the objectives of the GDR are the ones that appeal to me most.’ Then Siegfried says something revealing: ‘It is always right to join forces with the strongest.’

  Perhaps there was something in this. Perhaps, having been shamed in his initial interrogation, made to feel like a pervert with those questions about his sex life, finding self-worth through pleasing the most powerful force in his life made sense. A kind of Stockholm-syndrome. Or perhaps this is reading too much into one line. It’s tempting to do that with Stasi files.

  Whatever his motivation, Siegfried’s work for the Stasi goes so well that Lehmann promotes him. No longer is Siegfried just a Contact Person – an entry-level informant. Now he’s a Geheimer Mitarbeiter – a ‘Secret Informant’. To mark his promotion, the Stasi allow Siegfried to change his codename and this time he chooses one that suits him better, this spy who is determined to prove his worth.

  Agent Fred becomes Agent Hardy.

  And it was Agent Hardy who’d called this meeting on 22 May 1962, phoning Lehmann to say there was something important to tell him, something that couldn’t wait till their next meeting. Siegfried wasn’t sure that phoning Lehmann was the right thing to do;
he was still working out the rules – there was no handbook to consult, no list of dos and don’ts. Lehmann hadn’t said much on the phone, just gave Siegfried the address of a bar in East Berlin. Siegfried had jumped onto a train, crossed the border and taken the U-Bahn to Magdalenenstrasse. As he walked towards the bar, Siegfried realised he was just a few streets away from the Stasi headquarters. Lehmann must have been working there when he called him.

  It was late by the time Siegfried arrived at the eckkneipe, or ‘corner bar’. Filled with regulars who drank there most nights, always in the same seat, Berlin’s corner bars were a kind of shared living room for people who lived in nearby streets, who came there to drink and smoke into the morning, squished around vinyl-topped tables. Through the smoke, Siegfried sees Lehmann sitting in a corner. Pushing through the drinkers, he sits opposite. Lehmann is excited to know what Siegfried has for him.

  Exhilarated, knowing this is the best piece of intelligence he’s discovered so far, Siegfried tells Lehmann how a few days ago he’d gone to Joan Glenn’s house – the American student who helped organise the Girrmann Group’s escape operations. While he was there, Joan had told him something she shouldn’t have: that a ‘violent breach at the border’ was about to happen. And the people involved were armed. Siegfried was desperate to know more – he wanted to know the time and place – but he didn’t want to ask too many questions, was scared of losing Joan’s trust.

  Lehmann listens. The information is tantalising. Siegfried has told him enough to know that something bad is about to happen at the Wall, but not enough to do anything about it.

  At the end of the meeting, feeling uncertain, Siegfried asks if he’d done the right thing in phoning Lehmann. Like a teacher encouraging a keen pupil, Lehmann reassures him: ‘It was the right thing to do,’ he says; ‘with information like this you can always call me.’

  Sitting in that cosy living-room corner bar, his belly full of beer, you can imagine the warm glow this must have given Siegfried the spy, who so desperately wanted to please his handler. The two of them then set a date and time for their next meeting, just over a week away at 5.30 p.m. on 30 May, at ‘School’.

  29

  The Bomb

  Four days later

  MIDNIGHT ON 26 May. Two VoPos in khaki uniforms and black leather boots are patrolling the Wall along Bernauer Strasse, Kalashnikovs cradled to their chests. It’s quiet and they hope it stays that way as they count down the minutes to the end of their shift.

  Then they hear it: an explosion. Months of training kicking in, they run away from the Wall, towards the sound of the blast, but a few seconds later, they hear another, much louder explosion from behind. Then two more. They’d been duped. The first explosion was a decoy to distract them: when they sprint back to the Wall, they find a six-foot hole, shards of rock and concrete lying in the street. Nine months since the Wall was built, this is the first time anyone has blown a hole in it, and the story makes headlines all over the world, including in the New York Times:

  FOUR BLASTS IN 15 MINUTES RIP REDS’ WALL IN BERLIN

  Underneath that New York Times headline there’s a photograph of two West Berlin policemen looking through the hole. You can’t see their faces, which is a shame. If you could, you might have seen the one on the right smiling, as it was him who’d set off the blast, working for the Girrmann Group.

  The policeman – Hans Joachim Lazai – had come to them with the idea himself. He’d been on duty at the Wall nine months ago when Ida Siekmann had jumped out of her window to her death, and that moment had replayed itself again and again in his mind. As the months went on and Hans felt more powerless, he’d snapped. He wanted to do something, something dramatic at the Wall that would make a statement. He’d heard about the Girrmann Group and went to them with a proposition: were they up for blowing a hole in the Wall?

  Of course they were. And Hans was the perfect man to do it. As a former riot officer, he’d been trained to work with explosives, and as a policeman, he could get close enough to the Wall to light the blast. That May night, Hans lugged six kilos of plastic explosives to the Wall, along with sandbags to ensure the blast pushed east towards the Wall, not west. After setting off the decoy, Hans lit the fuse for the blast with a cigar. As he later said: ‘I intended this signal not just to cause a sensation in the West, but also to give the people in the East a sign of hope – you have not been forgotten!’

  This was the ‘violent breakthrough’ that Siegfried had been warned about, but the warning he’d given Lehmann had achieved nothing. It taught Siegfried an important lesson: to be the perfect spy, you needed to get right into the heart of an operation and know every detail. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  30

  Blisters

  ULI, ONE OF the new diggers, holds his breath. He mustn’t move. Down in the tunnel, eyeing the bubble of air on the theodolite, he moves the small tripod to steady it and locks the legs in place. Spirit level fixed.

  He breathes.

  Now for the vertical plummet on the bottom. Again, he holds his breath, adjusts the knobs, locking them in place, and moves his eye towards the lens. He looks for the crosshairs, that point in the middle that will tell them if they’re tunnelling to the East or if they’ve been digging at an angle without realising. With articulate fingers, he twists the wheels on the sides of the theodolite, fixing it in place. He pencils down the angles, horizontal and vertical, then sits back. Breathes again. There are some perks that come with being engineering students: borrowing a theodolite and tripod from the university’s engineering department while digging an illicit tunnel is one.

  When the tunnellers cross-reference Uli’s results with their map, they see to their relief that they’re digging the right way. But they’re not as far as they’d hoped. The digging has been hard, harder than they’d imagined. They’d chosen the route for its firm clay so the tunnel wouldn’t collapse, and this is the drawback: spending hours hacking into clay that feels like concrete, pulling out small handfuls at a time. Some days, after an eight-hour shift, lying in that mud-tomb, arms enfeebled with exhaustion, they realise they’ve only dug ten centimetres.

  But no one complains. They’ve got used to this strange new existence: spending whole days in the dark of the cellar (it’s too risky to have breaks outside), napping on a mattress in the corner, relieving themselves in open sewer pipes and living off sandwiches and coffee.

  At the end of each shift, as Joachim clambers out of the tunnel, back into the cellar, his whole body pulses. Muscles ache that he didn’t even know existed. The worst pain is in his hands. Translucent domes have bubbled up on the end of each finger that make digging excruciating when they pop against the spade. Joachim finds himself seeking out cold surfaces, pressing his fingertips against them to soothe his skin.

  Two weeks digging, and despite the long hours, the exhaustion, the blisters, they don’t have much to show for it. The tunnel is still firmly in the West and at this rate, Joachim reckons, it will take them a year to get to the cellar in the East. They need better tools and more people. But there’s only one way of getting that.

  31

  The TV Producer

  August 1961 – nine months earlier

  REUVEN FRANK TOOK his seat on the plane. It was half empty: not many people were flying from New York to West Berlin. The plane lumbered towards the runway, bumping across the tarmac before lurching forwards and lifting into the sky. As it gained altitude, Reuven looked at the flight time: twelve hours. Twelve hours to work out what he was going to film in Berlin.

  Reuven Frank hadn’t set out to work in TV. He’d started out in newspapers, the night city editor at the Newark Evening News in New Jersey, when one day he’d got a phone call from a friend at NBC (the National Broadcasting Company), a radio network in the US that was branching out into TV. Was he interested in coming to work for them?

  No he wasn’t. Back then, Reuven couldn’t see the point in TV, nor could any of NBC’s radio staff who, in 1
950, were all suspicious of this strange new medium.

  Would he at least come to NBC headquarters in New York and take a look?

  Like most journalists, Reuven found it hard to say no to anything, and so in August 1950, he’d come to the corner of Park Avenue and East 106th Street, walked into the NBC building and sat down in the screening room, a lone bespectacled figure surrounded by hundreds of velvet seats.

  Then—

  A click. And the purr of a projector coming to life. On the screen in front of him, footage of Russian and American soldiers appeared. This was Berlin, a city he’d seen plenty of photographs of, but now he was looking at moving pictures. Behind him, at the back of the theatre, he heard whispering, two men conspiring in hushed tones.

  ‘Open with a shot of the crowd for about seven seconds. Then a couple of scenes of the jeep driving up, then the general gets out for about five…’

  It was the NBC news writer and his film editor, cutting a short news piece. Reuven Frank watched the screen as they played around with the footage, deciding where to start, how long to give each scene and where to end, turning incoherent fragments of film into a story. He’d never seen anything like it. In that moment, the power of TV hit him in the stomach. ‘I thought: what a wonderful way to live!’ Reuven Frank immediately gave his notice to the Newark Evening News, and two weeks later, he started at NBC as a TV news writer where he discovered that NBC management had as little faith in TV news as he’d once had.