by Douglas Boyd
That whole morning seemed unreal. Woken in my cell at 6 a.m. by a prison guard bearing the usual breakfast of black bread, some brown jam of unidentifiable fruit and a mug of ersatz coffee suitably called Muckefuck, I had been marched along the echoing corridors of the political prison in Potsdam’s Lindenstrasse, known ironically to its unfortunate inmates as das Lindenhotel. Instead of conducting me into the usual interrogation room, the guard escorted me to a small courtyard just inside the main gate of the prison. There my Stasi interrogator, Lieutenant Becker – I learned his name fifty years later – stood by an ancient black Mercedes saloon with the two heavies. Without a word being exchanged, they got into the front seats, with Becker and me in the rear. The double gates of the prison swung open, the driver accelerated though the archway and, with tyres screaming on the cobbled street, drove out of Potsdam and headed westwards along the autobahn, overtaking every other vehicle because there were no speed limits for a car belonging to the Stasi.
‘Where are we going?’ It seemed a normal enough question to ask, for a prisoner who had been in solitary confinement for six weeks with only a few brief sorties for exercise in a prison yard surrounded by walls 5m high, topped by a sentry post, in which stood a guard with loaded sub-machine gun. No answer, but Becker did produce from his plastic briefcase a paper bag containing a sandwich of sliced garlic sausage on pumpernickel, which tasted like manna to me after six weeks of bland prison food.
‘Hat’s geschmekt?’ he asked. I replied that the after-taste of garlic was delicious, which led to a surreal discussion in which Becker explained that the German word Nachgeschmack means a bad after-taste. It is strange, the details that stay in the memory.
But, at midday, there was no challenge as my elegant lady escort and I crossed from the Marienborn side to the Helmstedt checkpoint. In 2008 I could see that my ‘long walk’ had only been about 200 yards. Safely on the British side of the crossing, I looked back to see Becker and the two other Stasi men getting into their car for the return to Potsdam. The Red Cross lady was thanked for her help by two men in civilian clothes standing by an unmarked car, and then she left us. One of the men was from the British security services; the other said, ‘Welcome back, Boyd. I am Flight Lieutenant Burton of the RAF Police.’
He could have said, ‘You are guilty of high treason and we are going to shoot you.’ I was so dazed, I would probably not have protested.
During my debriefing interrogations by Flight Lieutenant Burton and others in the British occupation forces’ headquarters at München-Gladbach, I had to admit that the first days and nights of my solitary confinement in Potsdam were – and still are – burned into my memory. The last few days were also clear, but the long and occasionally terrifying weeks between, during which I was held incommunicado, were mostly just a blur. As it was entirely possible that I had been injected with a truth drug and betrayed classified information about the top secret work on which I had been employed in the Signals Section at RAF Gatow, there was some talk during my debriefing at München-Gladbach of sentencing me to several years’ imprisonment on my return to the UK.
I was instead flown back to Britain and debriefed for a second time by the very perceptive Air Chief Marshal Sir Hubert Patch, who rightly considered that, although I had been criminally foolish to get myself caught on the wrong side of a hostile frontier, I had to some extent redeemed myself by foiling an attempt by the KGB to get their hands on me. He also gave me a reference for my first job application. Was that goodwill, or a way of keeping tabs on me? In addition, Burton gave me a London telephone number belonging to the security services. He said I was to ‘ring it and ask for Mr Shepherd, if contacted by any peace-loving people’ as the Soviets called their sympathisers and undercover agents in the West.
As a Russian linguist, trained for real-time interception of VHF transmissions of Soviet fighter pilots over-flying the GDR and Poland, I had signed the Official Secrets Act and undertaken not to visit any Warsaw Pact country. Not only had I been into the GDR – a hostile police state, where I had no right to be – but I had been arrested on the wrong side of the border in the middle of the night by Grenzpolizei border troops and Soviet soldiers pointing loaded guns at me on the otherwise deserted railway station of Albrechtshof, a north-western suburb of Berlin.
Several hours after my arrest, the heavy door of cell No. 20 in the Stasi interrogation prison on Potsdam’s Lindenstrasse closed behind me, leaving me to reflect on my situation. I was a prisoner, held in solitary confinement in a political prison in a country with which the United Kingdom had no diplomatic relations. There were no consular or other British officials to visit me and advise me about my rights. Not that it made much difference. Nobody in that prison had any rights. The reader who has grown up in a Western democracy, however imperfect in some aspects, will find it impossible to understand what it feels like to have no rights at all.
In 2006, seventeen years after the collapse of the so-called German Democratic Republic, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s award-winning film Das Leben der Anderen – The Lives of Others – was acclaimed as a shatteringly accurate portrayal of the four decades of grey and depressing life in the GDR. Its central character is Georg Dreyman, a highly privileged playwright. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he goes to the Bundesbeauftragte der Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsministeriums der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik – the office of the Federal Commissioner for the Archives of the Ministry of State Security of the Former German Democratic Republic, understandably abbreviated to ‘BStU’. The fall of the Berlin Wall spurred hundreds of anxious Stasi officers to burn and shred thousands of files containing details of their own activities and those of their undercover agents in the West. Also, thousands of the surveillance files covering most of the population of the GDR were destroyed by delirious crowds invading the Stasi’s offices and prisons after the fall of the Wall, but Dreyman is hoping to find his file intact. He wants to examine it for clues why his lover killed herself. In the BStU reading room, a clerk wheels in a trolley piled high with 2in-thick dossiers.
‘Which one is mine?’ Dreyman asks.
The clerk replies, ‘They all are.’
And so are all the files piled high on two more trolleys. That brief scene lasting only a few seconds is a measure of the relentless spying on everyone in the GDR, for Dreyman had belonged to the elite stratum of society, being a personal friend of Margot Honecker, whose husband, Erich, ruled the GDR. Even that had not saved him from the Stasi’s scrutiny.
Watching Donnersmarck’s gripping film gave me the idea of requesting my own Stasi file.
On the day before my 2008 trip to Marienborn–Helmstedt I visited the former political prison in which I had been held in solitary confinement, to find that it is now a memorial to the 4,000 people sentenced there to forcible sterilisation in the Nazi era and the thousands imprisoned there by the Gestapo prior to 1945, by the KGB 1945–52 and by the Stasi 1952–89. Fortunately, during my incarceration I was unaware of the appalling suffering of many inmates because I was held in a separate wing as a pawn to be traded in due course for some political advantage. Had I then known how brutally the Stasi treated citizens of the GDR undergoing interrogation elsewhere in the prison, I should have been far more frightened.
Revisiting the interrogation room where I had verbally fenced with Becker at all hours of the day and night, I clearly recalled one episode towards the end of my spell in ‘the Lindenhotel’. One morning, I was shown into the interrogation room and there found, instead of Becker, two men and a woman seated at the desk. As soon as the door was closed behind me, the woman said in Russian, ‘My predstaviteli praviteltsva sovietskovo soyuza.’ The sentence meant, We are representatives of the government of the Soviet Union.
Until then I had succeeded in bluffing Becker and his masters that I was a clerk in charge of a bedding store in Gatow. As I read in my Stasi file fifty years later, Becker’s streng geheim telex dated 31 March 1959 announcing the arrest an
d detention of the author was sent over a secure teleprinter link from Potsdam District Office to Stasi Centre in Berlin. It included this passage: ‘[Boyd] explained that his work (in RAF Gatow) consists of filling in forms for catering supplies and equipment and making tea, polishing floors, etc.’3
The three Russians from the KGB or GRU – Soviet military intelligence – confronting me in the interrogation room knew very well what went on in the Signals Section of RAF Gatow. I tried to keep from showing on my face the fear that the Russian words inspired. The interpreter repeated the introduction in English. For the next couple of hours, the two men fired questions at me in rapid succession. From time to time, she pretended to forget to translate a simple question and simply repeated it in Russian. ‘Zanimayetyes sportom?’ Do you play sport? ‘U vas skolko let?’ How old are you? And so on. Each time, pulse racing, I smiled as though it were all a joke while I waited for her to put the question into English.
By the end of the 2-hour grilling, I pretended to believe they had a plan to ‘spring’ me from the prison and release me on the border of the British sector of Berlin, to make my own way back to Gatow. They said they would do this because our countries had been allies during the Second World War. I was warned that I must on no account tell Becker that they had talked to me, in case he spoiled the plan.
In the West, we thought at the time that all the Warsaw Pact countries were united against us, but I took a chance in the belief that the Russians’ warning meant that even the neo-Stalinist Stasi did not like being pushed around by the Soviet forces, whose HQ was at Karlshorst outside Berlin. I kicked up such a fuss with the guards after being returned to my cell that Becker made a visit, to see what was wrong. His angry reaction when I informed him of the Russians’ intrusion told me that I had guessed right and that the half-million Russian troops stationed in the GDR were regarded as occupation forces, not brothers-in-arms.
My Stasi file indicates that, to spite the KGB team for its intrusion, Department 3 of the Stasi’s 7th Directorate recommended on the day after their visit that I be handed over through the East German Red Cross to the British Red Cross – a back-channel used by the two governments from time to time. But I was not informed. As the days and sleepless nights passed without any further visit from Becker, I became increasingly uneasy, and stayed on an adrenalin high until my release.
On the day prior to my return to Potsdam in 2008, I collected my Stasi file, reference Allg/P 11626/62, from the BStU in Berlin’s Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, near the Alexanderplatz. At last, after all those years of wondering, I could check how much, if anything, I had given away. And there it was, in black and white: ‘[Boyd] gave no further information about his work [in RAF Gatow] or his unit. Even the little [personal] information was given reluctantly because it is forbidden [for him] to give military information.’4
★★★
At the time of my unsought adventure, most people believed that there was no political censorship in Britain, whereas the system introduced in 1912 and still in force today enabled Admiral George Thompson, then Secretary of the D Notice Committee, to drop a note to the press and broadcasting organisations ‘requesting’ no mention be made of my youthful misadventure. Thus, few people had any idea that I had been through the Stasi mill and was fortunate enough to come out in one piece. Nor did I volunteer the information, even to my own family, because during the debriefing I had been told not to talk about it to anyone until I had grandchildren. Now I do have that blessing. In any case, the collapse of the USSR makes it all irrelevant today – or does it?
On return to civilian life, the desire to find a job using my fluency in several European languages led me into the international film business, where my Russian and German brought frequent contacts with representatives of East European state companies like Film Polski, Hungarofilm, Ceskoslovenský Filmexport and Moscow’s Sovexportfilm. When I moved on to head the BBC Eurovision office, my contacts there included officials of the Eastern European television services. Since, during the Cold War, all these privileged visitors to the West were routinely debriefed by their national security services on their return home and some were full-time intelligence officers working under commercial cover, this could have been awkward. It never was, so there was no need to call the mysterious telephone number and ‘ask for Mr Shepherd’. Many a pleasurable evening was spent with these colleagues from behind the Iron Curtain, drinking their wine, vodka and slivovitz and eating their national delicacies in smoky restaurants filled with the smells and the sounds of their homelands: folk music and voices arguing.
Did we talk politics? Never. I think they enjoyed being off-duty with someone who could speak their languages, or at least a common tongue more familiar to them than English. I certainly enjoyed their company and kept in touch with some of them for years. Thus, from a little hint here and another there, I experienced the Cold War from both sides. As I had sensed during my time in ‘the Lindenhotel’, they were pursuing the difficult path of occupied peoples who did not love their Soviet occupiers, but had to comply with Moscow’s orders most of the time or risk dire consequences.
Douglas Boyd,
South-west France, March 2015
Notes
1. E. Sheffer, Burned Bridge, Oxford, OUP 2011, p. 67
2. For a more detailed breakdown, see Sheffer, Burned Bridge, pp. 175–8
3. Scans of the file may be found in D. Boyd, The Kremlin Conspiracy, Hersham, Ian Allen 2010, pp. 9, 10
4. Ibid
2
LIFE IS A GAME OF CHESS
The Russian term vozhd corresponds with der Führer in German. As vozhd, or dictator of the USSR, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin, had every reason to feel pleased with himself after the German surrender in May 1945. Despite his pre-war purges that decimated the senior ranks of the Soviet armed forces, Russia had come out of the war in a stronger geopolitical position than before it. That this was largely due to massive American supplies of materiel shipped on the dangerous Arctic convoys to Murmansk and delivered through British-occupied Iran, and to the second front opening with the Normandy invasion in June 1944, did not allay his satisfaction that Russian armies had penetrated farther west than since Cossack troops had pursued Napoleon’s defeated Grande Armée all the way to Paris after the war of 1812. In the process of forcing Hitler’s retreat, Stalin’s armies had repossessed the Baltic states and steamrolled a path through Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to occupy more than a third of the Third Reich, in which Austria – renamed Ostmark after the Anschluss of 1938 – had been reduced to the status of a province. The presence of eight entire Soviet armies on German and Austrian soil changed the political map of Europe. But this was far from being the only change since 1939.
Enjoying a break in the mild Crimean weather at Sochi that autumn, Stalin called for maps after a dinner at which his Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov was present. ‘Dinner’ was at any time he chose, usually late. Although the bluff Georgian peasant who ruled the vast Soviet Union by terror had little else in common with the late Führer of the Third Reich, he too enjoyed forcing his close associates to stay up far into the night as an audience for his lengthy monologues, ignoring their need to be at work in their offices early next day while he slumbered on.
Gloating over the enormous expansion of territory overrun by Soviet forces during the war, he used the stem of his favourite Dunhill pipe as a pointer. ‘In the North,’ he said, ‘everything’s okay. Finland wronged us, so we’ve moved the frontier further back from Leningrad.’1 Wronged us was a typically paranoid way of putting it: the far outnumbered Finns had fought courageously for months to repulse the Red Army’s massive invasion of their country in November 1939.
‘The Baltic states,’ Stalin continued, ‘which were Russian territory from ancient times, are ours again. All the Byelorussians are ours now, Ukrainians too – and the Moldavians [by which he meant Romania] are back with us. So, to the west, everything’s okay. [In the Far East] the Kurile
Islands are ours and all of Sakhalin. [In] China and Mongolia, all is as it should be.’ He prodded the Dardanelles at the bottom of the map with his pipe. ‘Now, this frontier I don’t like at all. We also have claims on Turkish territory and to Libya.’
The ‘claim on Turkish territory’ was a reference to a centuries-old obsession of Russian rulers: to grab control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus, so that the Russian Black Sea fleet could freely come and go into the Adriatic and Mediterranean without having the agreement of the Turks who lived on both sides of the narrow waterway.
Molotov’s own wife was shortly to be sentenced by Stalin to five years incomunicada in a prison camp. He already knew how dangerous making a joke with the vozhd could be, yet was unable to resist quipping, ‘And I wouldn’t mind getting Alaska back.’2
Had they been compiling an alphabetical gazetteer, the next country to be mentioned would have been Albania. This primitive, largely mountainous, country was ruled by Enver Hoxha, son of a prosperous cloth merchant in the southern city of Gjirokastër, who had become a Communist activist during studies in French universities after being sent there by his father, aged 18.
Although Britain had supported with arms deliveries and liaison officers Hoxha’s partisans fighting the Italian occupiers of their country during the Second World War, the Soviet Union had contributed little. Hoxha was, nevertheless, an admirer of Stalin, whom he was taking as a model for his post-Liberation policies. In his capacity as secretary-general of Partia Komuniste e Shqiperisë (PKS), the Albanian Communist Party, he was pushing through agrarian reform in line with Bolshevik collectivisation policy of 1917. ‘All land to the peasants,’ Lenin had proclaimed, before dispossessing them along with the landlords. Hoxha was also ruthlessly eliminating all political opposition. The country’s monarch, King Zog I, had spent most of the war exiled in England with a large amount of his nation’s gold reserves. Britain’s post-war attempt to restore him to the throne by smuggling in armed anti-Communist resistance groups was to end in disaster when MI6 mole Kim Philby betrayed to Moscow not only the plan but the actual timing and coordinates of each group’s arrival, resulting in at least 300 returning Albanian patriots being rounded up at gunpoint, arrested, tortured and executed shortly after setting foot on their native soil.
