Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  74

  Final Report

  November 1976

  SIEGFRIED SITS IN front of his latest handler. It’s fifteen years since he was recruited by the Stasi. Now, they want to know if they should still trust him. They’ve got a bad feeling about him, something they can’t pin down.

  The Stasi can’t fault Siegfried’s record: eighty-nine arrests, including thirteen escape-helpers in West Germany. Forty of those arrests were from that first tunnel, the rest in other escapes he’d betrayed since – other tunnels, passport schemes, an escape on a beer lorry. The irony was that because Siegfried hadn’t betrayed the escape tunnel under Bernauer Strasse, no one suspected he was a spy. After all, he’d been inside the escape network, yet the Stasi hadn’t found out about the tunnel. No one guessed that it was because Siegfried didn’t have enough information to betray it.

  And so Siegfried had become bolder. He’d invite Bodo Köhler round for dinner at his flat and pump him for information over cognac; he’d cut Wolf Schroedter’s hair in his salon while asking about his latest tunnel plans; he even told his Stasi handler that Bodo Köhler lived alone, said no one would notice if he was hit over the head, or kidnapped and taken to East Berlin. Siegfried became one of the most productive spies the Stasi had in West Berlin, but in the end, he was too good. He betrayed so many of the Girrmann Group’s operations that they disbanded in 1963. They knew they’d been infiltrated, never worked out who. The West Berlin intelligence agencies once called Siegfried in for questioning, but didn’t find anything incriminating.

  The Stasi thought it was only a matter of time before someone in West Berlin discovered he was a spy, and so they trained Siegfried in one-way radio communication and cipher and sent him to Baden-Baden in West Germany under instructions to infiltrate French occupation circles. Siegfried arrived, then—

  Nothing. Over the next few years, Siegfried went from star-recruit to wash-out. He rarely made contact with his handlers, gave them no information, and they were worried. When the Stasi called Siegfried to East Berlin for a meeting, Siegfried said he was trying his best, but no one in Baden-Baden would give him work as they’d heard about his conviction for homosexuality all those years ago. They wanted to keep their distance. The Stasi didn’t believe Siegfried, accused him of being ‘highly unreliable in all matters’, and, like a disappointed teacher, told him to go away and think about how to change the situation. Unhappy in Baden-Baden, Siegfried had moved back to West Berlin, said he would try harder, promised the Stasi ‘he was game for everything’, but then he went quiet again, started refusing to do things.

  It’s hard to know why Siegfried was behaving like this. There are no letters or diaries of his to draw on. But when you look at what he did next, it seems he was having regrets. In the late sixties, Siegfried did some voluntary work for Amnesty International, joining campaigns to get people out of East German prisons, one of them a prisoner called Günter, who Siegfried had betrayed. But the campaign had no effect – after all, East Germany viewed Amnesty as an extremist organisation. Instead, when Günter was eventually released, Siegfried looked after him, even helped set up a group within Amnesty to take care of former prisoners. When the Stasi discovered that Siegfried was working at Amnesty, ‘the left-wing extremist group’, they were delighted, instructing him to infiltrate their operations and tell them everything he discovered. Siegfried agreed, but then missed three meetings with the Stasi, and now, four years later, on 27 November 1976, they want to know what is really going on.

  The meeting is short. Siegfried gives his usual answer: of course I’ll carry on helping you, whatever you want. But each time his handler asks him to do something specific, he comes up with a reason for saying no.

  Like a sleepwalker jolted awake, it’s as though Siegfried had looked back at everything he’d done and didn’t like what he’d seen. His trajectory had been steep: from the lowest of informants, in just a few years he’d risen fast, busting escape operations, earning bonuses and medals. He was the kind of person the Stasi loved recruiting: someone who got a taste for informing, who went further than they ever imagined; someone who discovered too late that they didn’t have to do everything the Stasi asked.

  Despite the reams of Stasi reports about Siegfried Uhse, it will be impossible to fully understand why he carried on spying for so long. Perhaps it was even unclear in his own mind. Siegfried talked often about his ideological belief in East Germany, but his handlers never quite believed him. The threat of a Stasi prison on account of his homosexuality always hovered in the background, right from that first interrogation, yet many informants who were blackmailed by the Stasi found ways of being less productive than he was. And now, it seems, Siegfried was looking for a way out. Perhaps, even, to atone.

  After the meeting is over, Siegfried’s handler writes a long report, describing the good work Siegfried has done, as well as the frustration of the last ten years. As with a bereft lover, there’s a lot of introspection about what went wrong, why Siegfried pulled away. Eventually, his handler concludes that he must have been turned by the West Berlin intelligence services when they interrogated him. The Stasi officer ends this report, the final file written about Siegfried Uhse, with this sentence: ‘It is… proposed that the connection to the unofficial collaborator should be terminated and the material should be archived in division XII.’

  And so, fifteen years after they’d reeled him in, finally, the Stasi let Siegfried Uhse go. Like a pencil sharpened too many times, there was not much they could do with the stub, except throw it away.

  75

  Airborne

  JOACHIM SITS ON the plane. It’s small, wobbling as it leaves the tarmac and lifts into the sky, high above Germany. Joachim looks at the needle on the altimeter.

  One thousand metres.

  Two thousand metres.

  And there it is: that familiar knot of adrenaline that always kicks in around now.

  Two thousand seven hundred metres.

  Three thousand.

  Joachim may not have achieved his boyhood dream of being an astronaut, but this is close enough. It’s time. The window is open; Joachim checks his straps, takes a deep breath and jumps.

  This is his favourite part.

  Free fall.

  After almost one hundred jumps, Joachim has worked out how to control his body. As he somersaults through the ice-cold air, he twists one hip, arches his back until he finds the perfect position, arms stretched out in front, legs behind, falling through the air-stream towards earth.

  Joachim checks the altitude. Two thousand metres. Not time to pull the parachute yet.

  It had all started with an advert he’d seen in a newspaper for a parachute club. He didn’t know why, but he was drawn to it. He’d gone to the club, practised jumping and rolling from gym vaults until he could do it effortlessly, then a few months later, he’d flown to Hanover for his first jump. That first time he’d felt it – a feeling so intoxicating he knew he’d have to return. And so he’d come back, again and again, to get that hit, the feeling he’s about to experience as he plunges towards the fields and trees and tractors and cows of West Germany, as he hits 1,000 metres, then 800, then 600, his target altitude. And it’s this moment that he does it all for, knowing that what he does right now will determine whether he lives or dies – Joachim who’d been forced out of his home and lost his father; Joachim who’d always felt trapped in East Berlin; Joachim who’d spent months underground, feeling compelled to help others escape – and now, at 600 metres, he feels his freedom more intensely than at any other moment in his life, an exquisite undiluted sensation of total control as he looks up, reaches for the straps on his shoulders and pulls.

  Epilogue

  1989

  ON 9 OCTOBER 1989, rumours spread through the city like wildfire. Tonight is the night, they say.

  Six months earlier, a small group of people had started protesting every Monday outside a church in the East German city of Leipzig. There were only a handful a
t first, calling for free elections, but every week, more turned up: a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, until tonight, when it seems as though everyone in Leipzig is planning on protesting, and all over the city, teenagers, mothers, students, teachers, doctors, bus drivers and grandparents are crouched over paper and cardboard, making posters and putting on layers of warm clothes in case they’re arrested. People are feeling bolder, not because of anything that’s happened in East Germany, but because of what had happened in the country theirs was modelled on: the Soviet Union.

  After a succession of elderly leaders who’d either died on the job or were about to, the Soviet Union was now led by spring chicken (fifty-four-year-old) Mikhail Gorbachev. For the first time, communist Russia was ruled by someone born after the 1917 revolution, and it showed. Gorbachev turned his back on Stalinism, reforming Russia through his twin policies of glasnost (opening society) and perestroika (economic reform). This wasn’t so much idealism as pragmatism – the Soviet Union was in the middle of an economic crisis and this was Gorbachev’s way out. The previous year, in 1988, President Reagan had visited Gorbachev in Moscow, where the two men announced they were now ‘friends’, despite Reagan’s visit to Berlin, where he’d called on Mr Gorbachev to ‘tear down this Wall!’

  Then a few months ago, in July 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced that his army would no longer prop up communist governments in Eastern Europe; people could choose their own rulers. The ‘Sinatra doctrine’, he jokingly called it – people could now do things ‘their way’. And within weeks, they were all doing just that.

  In Hungary, people voted for a new reformist government, which pulled down its barbed-wire fence on the border of Austria. In Poland, semi-free elections were held, the communists losing hundreds of seats. And across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, two million people formed the longest human chain in history, demanding independence from the Soviet Union. One by one, Eastern countries were turning their backs on Stalinism. Only one country remained resolutely, stubbornly Stalinist: East Germany. A country that – despite a secret economy in arms-trading and prisoner-trading (by 1989, East Germany had sold 34,000 prisoners to the West, making 3.4 billion DM) – was now heavily in debt and almost bankrupt. Its new leader, seventy-seven-year-old Erich Honecker, was determined to keep it going at all costs. A crazed doctor trying to keep a dying patient alive.

  As well as the stiff prison sentences for dissidents, there were the sweeteners that Honecker hoped would win people’s loyalty – big events that he thought might keep young people distracted from revolution. He put on a succession of rock concerts – Bob Dylan, Depeche Mode, Bryan Adams, Joe Cocker – and then, in 1988, Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band walked on stage at a disused cycling track and played for 300,000 East Germans, who swayed and sang along to ‘Badlands’, ‘War’ and ‘Born to Run’, waving hand-stitched American flags. Give people enough of these moments and maybe they would come to love the country – that was Honecker’s thinking. Instead, when the concerts were over and people returned home, back to their mundane reality, most felt even more hungry for something different. But they were stuck, stuck behind the one thing that Erich Honecker knew was keeping East Germany alive: the Wall.

  Now, almost thirty years after it was built, the Wall was almost unbreachable, with every inch of it patrolled by thousands of border guards – 320 metres between them during the day, 260 metres at night. They were equipped with 2,295 vehicles, 10,726 submachine-guns, 600 light and heavy machine-guns, 2,753 pistols, 992 tracker dogs, 48 mortars, 48 anti-tank guns, 114 flame-throwers, 682 anti-tank rifles and 156 armoured cars. It’s partly why East Germany was bankrupt: Wall security cost the country 1 billion DM each year.

  But still, the Wall wasn’t perfect. Despite the VoPos and the machine-guns, every year, people managed to escape. Not many, only a few hundred, but enough to spur Erich Honecker into making a secret plan to extend the life of the Wall for another hundred years, modernising it into a more high-tech version, with electric sensors and cameras alerting VoPos to escapees before they even got close to the Wall, preventing the brutal deaths that still occasionally made the news, embarrassing the government.

  Also protecting the border was the Stasi. Back in the 1960s there were a few thousand employees, but now, by 1989, it had swelled to 274,000. One of the Stasi’s main objectives was preventing escapes, which is why 90 per cent of escape plans were betrayed during the planning stage – most people never got close to the Wall.

  Tunnels were now out of fashion; over seventy had been dug in the early sixties, but only nineteen were ever finished and succeeded – including a ‘senior citizens’ tunnel, dug by twelve elderly people from a chicken coop. Most tunnels were betrayed before they were finished, or collapsed, or the diggers ran out of money. Instead, people resorted to ever more imaginative attempts, like Winfried Freudenberg, a baby-faced thirty-two-year-old engineer who built a thirteen-metre-high hot-air balloon from polyethylene sheets, climbed in on 8 March 1989, flew over the Wall, but lost control, rising 2,000 metres into the freezing air, where he hovered for five hours before crashing to the ground and breaking every bone in his body, dying instantly. He would be the last person to die in Berlin trying to escape.

  By now, most accepted the Wall as a fact of life. Despite Kennedy’s speech back in 1963, it had outlasted him and five other American presidents. West Berliners mostly ignored it and were sick of the tourists who still came to see it in their thousands, taking photographs of the vast concrete slabs covered in rose bushes, clematis, murals and graffiti.

  But while the Wall stood strong, a new escape hatch had emerged – the back-door route. With the border between Hungary and Austria now open, East Germans were driving to Hungary in their Trabis and streaming over the border into the West. And by the late 1980s, hundreds of thousands were also applying to leave through exit permits, Honecker allowing a certain number of people to go each year, thinking that it was better to let his opponents leave, rather than stay and cause trouble.

  People who left East Germany often felt smug about getting out. Der Doofe Rest – ‘the stupid leftovers’ – is how some described those who stayed. But over the past few months, as those ‘stupid leftovers’ saw the world changing around them, instead of demanding to leave, they had a new demand that was more worrying for the government: they wanted to stay. They wanted the government to leave instead.

  The pace of change had taken everyone by surprise, but the party was fighting back. Only two days ago, on 7 October 1989, East Germany had celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a huge military parade through East Berlin. Tanks. Red flags. A torchlit procession. And tonight, as the country prepares for the protest, the Stasi is strategising about how to defeat this movement. By now, over thirty years after its creation, the Stasi is a small army with its own aircraft and personnel carriers as well as thousands of anti-tank missiles and machine-guns. And the man still in charge of it is Erich Mielke. Eighty-one years old, he’s as belligerent as ever and plans to keep fighting. But like an injured dog that lashes out as it nears the end, he’s becoming more unpredictable. More dangerous.

  Last night, Mielke had issued a code-red alert, giving his Stasi soldiers licence to kill on the streets. He’d seen earlier that year how Chinese soldiers had shot hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square and he told his Stasi commanders to take note. Then Erich Mielke activated his secret plan for ‘Day X’, the day of crisis that he knew had arrived. He ordered commanders in Stasi branches all over the country to open secret envelopes, inside which were orders to arrest and imprison 85,939 East Germans. Mielke had drawn up a timetable for those arrests so they would be neatly staggered: 840 people every two hours. They were to be put in prisons, concentration camps, factories, schools, hospitals, each prisoner given two pairs of socks, two towels, a toothbrush and – for women – a supply of sanitary towels. Mielke had done everything he could.

  Now, as dusk falls on 9 Octobe
r, he waits. Inside the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig, soldiers stand at windows with loaded pistols, rifles and hand grenades, waiting.

  All over the city, people are making calculations. They know what they’re up against: they’ve seen the riot police with shields blocking the main roads, they’ve seen the soldiers with machine-guns slung across their chests, and there’s talk already that this will be East Germany’s Tiananmen Square. Hospitals are on standby for mass casualties and they’ve brought in extra supplies of blood. People know that if they come out tonight, they might not return.

  Then, one by one, flickers of light pop up all over Leipzig. People carrying candles emerge into the dark streets and start walking to the main square. First, there’s just a few; then, looking out of their windows, seeing the torchlit procession, others feel braver and they throw on warm coats, light candles, say goodbye and leave. Soon there are thousands, then tens of thousands, until 70,000 people are filling the streets, singing hymns, chanting for elections, freedom, democracy, until one chant dominates the others and the crowd shout it again and again:

  WIR SIND DAS VOLK! – WE ARE THE PEOPLE!

  As the crowd swells, people look around, barely believing what’s happening, catching each other’s eyes in disbelief, watching the police who surround them, terrified about what they might do. The last time there was a protest like this was 1953 when Joachim and his friends had marched in the streets and teenagers were crushed under Russian tanks.

  Through secret cameras on street corners, the Stasi watch as the protest builds, trying to work out how to respond. They watch the singing. The chanting. They watch as a handful of police officers join in. And it sinks in that what they’re witnessing is the most terrifying thing they’ve ever seen, the loss of the one thing that was keeping people loyal: fear.