by Peter Millar
Would there have been a demonstration at all if I hadn’t reported it in advance? Probably? Possibly? I asked Volker in the car on the way back how widespread the talk in Berlin had been amongst the Swords to Ploughshares crowd. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he replied. ‘I think it was just something somebody said would be a good idea.’ I almost crashed the car. ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, but it was good, wasn’t it? I mean they organised it well. Lots of people turned up, and stuff.’ If I hadn’t been driving I would have closed my eyes. In the end the ‘demonstration’ had passed off peacefully. The police – cowed to some extent by the presence of several West German television camera teams – contented themselves with looking menacing. The demonstrators did nothing more than sing a few songs and hold hands rather longer than the police would have liked them to. And a few of them had their photographs taken. Not by the press.
The same ‘amateur photographers’ also took pictures of me. Their colleagues of course had been doing that for some time, occasionally with more interesting cameras than I had imagined. But then just how much attention the men and women who made up the ‘Sword and Shield of the party’ had been paying to me, I would only find out some years later, when the sword had been blunted and the shield discarded.
6
Spooks
It is one thing to assume you are being spied on round the clock, that there are microphones in the walls of your flat and men in plain clothes tailing you. It is another thing again to know it for sure. And something else altogether to see the proof of it, in black and white, words on paper and photographs taken by hidden cameras.
The whole time we lived in East Germany – and even more so when we moved to Moscow – we took the secret state for granted. For a while it was tempting to try to spot any signs of surveillance. To do things like suddenly turn around on the street and walk back in the direction we had just come from, to go down into a U-Bahn station and come out the other side, without actually catching a train. But after a while it gets boring, especially if you never spot a tail. Even then you know that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, just that they are professionals and you are a rank amateur. Which is just as well, because if you are a professional, they will spot that too. And draw the appropriate conclusions.
The result is that like everyone else living in such a society, after a while the fact of being spied upon – however frightening and intrusive it may seem to someone who has never experienced it – becomes something you simply live with, like an unpleasant pattern on the wallpaper in a rented flat.
It was only afterwards, when it was all over, when the Wall had come down and the Stasi were no more, that I – like tens of thousands of ordinary East Germans, got concrete proof of the extent to which the everyday facts of my life had absorbed the attention of an industry which itself employed tens of thousands. Although in the last frantic days of communist rule the Stasi had gone into overdrive, shredding the evidence of their existence. In vain. There had been too many of them, for too long, and they had generated a mountain of paperwork that would have challenged even the bureaucrats of any British government department. Small wonder, when there was a file larger by far than any medical records, on virtually every single man, woman and child in the country.
The building complex in East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, not far from what had once been Stalinallee, served the Stasi as not just headquarters but a city within a city, home to 33,000 people, complete with well-furnished apartments and shops stocked with Western consumer goods. There was, therefore, a particular irony when after the Wall came down – and the flats were redistributed to ordinary citizens – that their headquarters were chosen as a museum to their abuse of power. The Stasi’s files were given into the custody of a government-financed independent body under the control of an East German Lutheran pastor, to whom anyone who suspected they might have a file (which was nearly the entire East German population) might freely apply for access, in a reading room in the old Stasi headquarters. It was there that I turned up on a sunny summer’s day in the mid 1990s, more than a decade after the Stasi first opened their file on me, to look inside it. All 286 pages of it, marked MfS Hauptabteilung II – gesperrte Ablage. (Ministry for State Security, Chief Directorate II – Counterespionage – restricted access), archive number: 14904/83.
My codename was Strömer – Streamer – don’t ask me why. I had started out as Insel, Island. Because I was young and alone? Then quickly metamorphosed into Streamer. Because they didn’t know which way I would flow? Because they found it hard to keep track of me? Maybe. Maybe not. Somebody somewhere for some reason decided I needed a watery theme. My wife Jackie became Sea. Karin, one of our East German friends with a brother jailed for trying to escape to the West, was Jellyfish. Because of her ‘unkempt’ hair, as noted in her description in my files? The men from the Ministry of State Security obviously liked neat haircuts. It was hard to put reasons to it all. Other acquaintances and friends became ‘River’, ‘Brook’, ‘Trout’. An old university friend, by then the wife of a Bristol greengrocer, came to visit for a long weekend and received the codename ‘Mussel’.
My case-officer was a Colonel Lehmann. He collated, typed up and ordered all the information, summaries not transcripts of telephone calls, of ‘private’ conversations picked up by the microphones in the wall. Twenty-nine of them, Reuters estimated when they finally took the walls apart to find them after the Stasi had ceased to be. The flat next door, allegedly inhabited by a ‘policeman’, but which I had long suspected was the home for their battery of tape recorders, had indeed been just that. It was no surprise, however, that we never saw anyone entering or leaving. There was a secret staircase from the back of the bar downstairs which gave direct access. The men who took turns working their shift monitoring our lives would pass through the bar each day on their way to and from ‘work’. Their overseer was a Lieutenant Weichelt. Perhaps he stopped at the bar for a quick one. I was glad I had made somewhere else my ‘local’.
Weichelt thought there was a strong possibility I was aware my flat was bugged. Bright bloke. I had honestly never considered any other possibility. But then I had seen those Michael Caine movies and he hadn’t. If I had referred repeatedly to ‘Harry Palmer’, he would probably have listed him as an ‘important contact’. He noted that I appeared to employ, ‘a few standard methods’ of making his life difficult. In fact the tone of his report is one of sustained resentment, as if by turning on the taps in the kitchen or the radio in the living room I was somehow not playing by the rules: ‘He uses sonic disturbance, e.g. loud music, to create difficulties for the work of ministry operatives.’ Bless. Actually, lieutenant, you were right, but sometimes I just turned it up loud because Robert Plant sounds better like that.
Anyone who is granted access to their Stasi files may see certain names and/or addresses ‘redacted’ in the modern jargon, in other words blocked out so that they cannot be read. This is not censorship on behalf of the modern German government, but done because one of the guiding rules laid down by the Lutheran pastor who first took over the onerous custody of the files was that ‘nobody should discover from sight of their own files that their neighbour was committing adultery’. In other words the ‘product’ of the communist state’s snooping should not become a snoopers’ charter for latter-day busybodies. Nonetheless I did discover pertinent things about some of the people I knew and why the Stasi were particularly obsessed by my contact with them.
A keen example was the only one of my predecessor’s ‘contacts’ I had kept in touch with, simply because we got on well together and I spoke his language: Nikolai (Kolya) Makarov, was – is – a Russian artist of considerable merit, whose sombre but technically impressive paintings today hang in leading Western galleries. Back then he was not long married to an East German woman and just beginning to make a name for himself. I knew his father was ‘something important’, relatively hush-hush back home in Moscow, but Kolya didn’t talk about it. I vaguely suspected he might be related to the
Nikolai Makarov who had designed the Makarov pistol, which was to handguns what the Kalashnikov was to machine guns. But I never actually asked. It would have seemed an abuse of our friendship. Kolya never liked to talk much about his parents or Moscow, so it would have been rude to push.
But my own Stasi file told all: ‘Makarov is the son of a former liaison officer between the KGB and (Stasi) Chief Directorate I (which dealt with the Minister for State Security himself, the obnoxious Erich Mielke)… During his student days, Makarov belonged to the dissident movement in Moscow. For this reason his father was obliged to leave the KGB. It is not known to what extent Millar uses Makarov as a source of information. But we must also consider the possibility that Makarov is using Millar for subversive goals.’ There is nobody who creates spy conspiracy theories better than the spies themselves. Kolya didn’t have any information, except about where to get decent oil paints. And he certainly had no intention of ‘using’ me for subversive goals. All he wanted was to make a living out of his inspired, eccentric, ever so slightly depressive art. And sell it for D-Marks. Happily history was on his side.
But then Col Lehmann was building up a bigger picture here: ‘Operative control measures on Streamer give growing evidence of deliberate contacts with persons from the circle of relatives of members of the Ministry for State Security or the National People’s Army … Millar’s activity is the expression of an increasingly intensive, direct and clearly secret-service-controlled attack by enemy forces against the socialist security organs.’ You have to love it: the Stasi saw themselves as victims. But then Lehmann had his ‘evidence’: he knew who I knew. The difference was that he assumed I knew as much as he did about them. The chief corroboration for his theory that I was some sort of MI6 plant focusing on relatives of the guardians of communism, was not just Kolya, but Volker the gravedigger’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Kathrin. We had always assumed, from her exasperated unspecific references to ‘my bloody dad’ that he was something in the police or more likely the Stasi. Here was proof: according to my file her father was not any old common or garden domestic informer or dissident interrogator, but the nearest thing East Germany had to James Bond. He had been seconded to the East German Embassy in Zanzibar under diplomatic cover and had spearheaded a successful covert mission to entrap a CIA officer. Bloody hell! Kathrin just moaned about him being an old fuddy-duddy.
Col Lehmann’s need to prove I was something more than I seemed pointedly noted ‘similarities but also differences’ between my predecessor’s more orthodox attitude to journalism (one that has served him well in his subsequent career) and my own, and were suspicious of them. ‘In contrast to his predecessor who looked for information from so-called prominent dissidents, Millar looks for information from people who are neither well known in the GDR or internationally, including those in church circles. His frivolous appearance which would make it difficult for him to make contacts amongst official circles, by contrast makes it easier for him to make illegal contact with young people and those connected with the church.’ (An example of how already for the Stasi the church was linked to the seeds of opposition.)
‘Millar’s contacts seem to be primarily people he meets in pubs round about, people who represent a sort of Berlin backstreet community’ (how the communists scorned the working class!) ‘and who have a hostile attitude towards the GDR’ (as they would have had towards almost any government). ‘He seems primarily interested in getting to know people of his own age or younger (students and young adults).’ Hey, I was one too! But there were gratifying words as well: ‘It would appear that Millar is successful at making honest relationships with GDR citizens of the above mentioned social sphere.’
But they attributed somewhat greater ambition to me than I ever actually harboured: ‘The particularities of Millar’s circle of contacts suggest that he is involved in attempting to create a political underground in the GDR. It is not currently possible to ascertain if these efforts are something of his own making or if he is acting in accordance with a set of orders.’ They saw snakes in my background: ‘There is a political-operational relevance in the “break” between Millar’s field of study at university and his choice of career; this suggests the intentional intervention of third-party individuals or institutions.’ It was hardly stupid to assume that MI6 went headhunting at Oxford, particularly amongst linguists, to steer them into the service, although you might have thought if they’d wanted to infiltrate East Germany they wouldn’t have gone for a French and Russian graduate. And then the Stasi never for one moment were capable of putting themselves in the place of a young British graduate in the recession-hit seventies desperate to find work as anything other than the ‘advertising account executive’ which was all the university careers officer could suggest.
‘It is therefore important to put more effort into identifying and analysing Millar’s contacts. To this end, we recommend stepping up the activities of Chief Directorate VIII’ (charged with surveillance of persons believed to pose potential risk to the state), ‘including increasing the efforts put into voice identification by Department 26’ (the microphone men). Department 26’s report of 26.1.1982 indicates Millar is in possession of the addresses and telephone numbers of contacts we have not as yet identified.’ Ha! Ha! They never got their hands on the little address book I never let out of my sight. And what did I have in it? The addresses and telephone numbers of people who in their world scarcely existed: friends!
At some stage it was decided to put Lehmann’s conviction that I was a spook to the test. Up until now, the file revealed, I had indeed been subject to surveillance on the streets, even though, gratifyingly, considering I was not employing any ‘counter-surveillance’ methods by that stage, they occasionally lost me. Just after midday on June 22nd, 1981, for example, only a few months after I had arrived, a certain Major Bonitz followed me from the flat – on foot at that stage as I had still to pass my driving test – to the Eisenberg furniture shop on Senefelder Platz. I see from his notes I spent only two minutes there – I have no recollection of the event other than vaguely recalling trekking round East Berlin a couple of times seeing if I could order some new furniture for the flat from local sources rather than West Berlin.
Major Bonitz – or his team – followed me to Warenhaus-Centrum, the city’s rather sad excuse for a socialist department store, on Alexanderplatz. No luck there either; it was closed. After that I tried the ‘Intershop’ hard currency outlet in the Stadt Berlin Hotel, where I apparently filled out an order form for some item of furniture. I no longer recall what it was, and the Stasi failed to take a note. In fact they were slipping up in a big way here. Within twenty minutes of me entering the Intershop they were forced to note: ‘13.12 Contact with subject lost.’ I can only suspect Major Bonitz got distracted by all those Western goodies on display. Bizarrely the case log continues blank until ‘16.30 Operational surveillance terminated,’ apparently without them ever having caught sight of me again.
Up until now, however, incidents of such detailed ‘tailing’ had been sporadic, the files revealed. Even so it produced details which to a British mind might suggest they were trying a little too hard, but I fear to a German mind (East or West) implied potentially seditious intentions: ‘He has crossed the road illegally while the pedestrian light was red.’
Now, however, they turned the searchlight on, big time. For up to ten days at a time, teams of watchers would follow us from before dawn to long after dusk. They would begin their day seated in a car parked somewhere outside our flat on Schönhauser Allee, wait for us to emerge and then stick on our tail, to produce at the end of each day a minute-by-minute account.
Their diary for August 4th, 1982, in the middle of one such ten-day surveillance routine, read as follows:
07.30 Operative surveillance of Streamer at his apartment block continued. VW Golf car parked in front of block.
They had a long and fruitless wait. It had been a late night in Metzer Eck the night before and the we
ather was warm and listless, one of those Berlin summer days when the hot cobbles repel and the deep green of the Brandenburg countryside dotted with little lakes beckoned. When we finally crawled out of bed, we decided to go on a picnic. The Stasi came too.
13.05 Streamer and Sea leave Apartment Block Schönhauser Allee 27 via stairwell 2 and get into the above-mentioned vehicle. Streamer is driving. They follow the route: Schönhauser Allee, Berliner Strasse, Granitzstrasse, and eventually join the slip road to the autobahn at the Pankow-Heinersdorf junction.
13.15 They join the autobahn, heading north towards Rostock.
13.28 They leave the autobahn at the Birkenwerder junction then rejoin it heading back towards Berlin.
Clever counter-espionage measures? Not quite; my wife was map-reading.
13.35 They leave the autobahn at the Mühlenbeck junction and head towards Summt.
13.38 They park the car in Summt at the North Bank car park for Lake Summt, and walk to a stretch of beach next to the Lake. Streamer is carrying a basket.
13.42 They find a place to lie down on the beach, and strip down to their bathing costumes. They then lie down to sunbathe and look through newspapers and magazines.
15.00 They get up and go for a swim in the lake. After about five minutes they leave the lake again, (it was cold, and I’m not German!) and go back to sunbathing.
