Daughters of the KGB: Moscow's Secret Spies, Sleepers and Assassins of the Cold War
Page 29
The streng geheim telex from Potsdam to Stasi Centre announcing the detention of the author.
The author in the exercise courtyard indicating the window of the solitary confinement cell he occupied.
Facade of the Lindenstrasse interrogation prison in Potsdam, now a memorial to all who suffered there. Only the bars on ground floor windows still hint at the suffering that went on there.
When the Red Army marched into Berlin in 1945, this is what it looked like after months of carpet bombing.
The Fuhrer of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the bunker, saying that the German people deserved to be wiped out because they had not been strong enough to beat the Allies in the war.
Sitting safely in the Kremlin was Josef Stalin who planned to use the survivors as pawns in his geopolitical chess game for world domination. During the war, several thousand German Communists had been trained in the USSR to turn the Soviet Zone of Occupation into a prison state.
It was a world of the very old, children and women, most of whom had been raped, like these refugees trudging across the Potsdammer Platz. All healthy men were in Allied POW camps, so there was no one to protect them.
At Yalta in February 1945 Stalin got everything his own way. US President Roosevelt was convinced Stalin was a gentleman who wanted nothing but victory. Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew Stalin’s game but Roosevelt would not listen to him.
At Potsdam in July-August 1945 (left), Roosevelt was dead, replaced by Harry Truman, unprepared to handle US–USSR relations. Churchill was in despair. Before the Conference ended, he was voted out of office and replaced by Clement Atlee. Stalin had won game, set and match.
Despite undertaking at Yalta to allow the populations of the Soviet-occupied states to hold free elections after the end of the war, Stalin had ‘educated’ thousands of their nationals as Communists in the USSR. Their job was to return home with the Red Army and impose Communist governments and secret police forces modelled on the NKVD in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. This gave him a vast buffer zone between the western democracies and the USSR.
In June 1948 Stalin attempted to drive the Western Allies out of their agreed sectors of Berlin by blocking all access by road, rail and canal – and cutting off electricity supplies. To avoid a third world war, the Allies created the airlift, ferrying into the airfields of the three western sectors of the divided city everything from toilet rolls to toffees and children’s shoes to coal. Seaplanes even brought cargo to Berlin’s lakes. In May 1949, Stalin capitulated and access was restored.
After the Russian Zone of Occupation was re-named ‘German Democratic Republic’, life there was increasingly regimented with the two Erichs, President Honecker and Stasi boss Mielke (above) congratulating themselves on their rule of iron.
Even the ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ of the workers on Mayday were joyless manifestations of the cult of personality, with marchers carrying giant posters of Party leaders.
The Stasi Centre on East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse epitomised state terror.
Strikes were forbidden, but on 17 June 1953 workers downed tools all over the GDR and found themselves confronting riot police, the army and Soviet tanks. Many died.
In 1961 it was still possible for a GDR citizen to take a train in East Berlin and get off in one of the western sectors. To block this last route to freedom, on 13–14 August the GDR cut rail links and erected barbed wire barriers on the sector boundaries (above left), guarded by sentries ordered to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross (above right). Desperate people living near the boundaries bundled some belongings into sheets and literally ran for their lives into the West before it was too late (left).
Within a few days the barbed wire was replaced by a concrete block wall (above) that snaked through Berlin’s streets, cutting off parents from children and workers from their jobs (US satellite photo below).
From this office in Stasi Centre, now a tourist attraction (below), Erich Mielke (left) waged a relentless war on his fellow citizens of the GDR and an undercover war targeting the Western democracies, especially the Federal German Republic.
Major General Reinhard Gehlen (POW ID photo left) surrendered to US forces at the end of the war, bringing the Abwehr archives with him. His reward was to be made head of the new West German intelligence service – and Mielke’s sworn enemy.
A bridge of spies … a bridge of sighs, of relief. The Glienicke bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam in the GDR was the scene of many high-security spy swaps during the Cold War. Illicitly taken, the picture above is of a swap in the winter of 1986. Today, the bridge is … just a bridge.
Nikita Khrushchev called West Berlin ‘a swamp of espionage’. Among its denizens were the author and fellow RAF linguists in the Signals Section at RAF Gatow (below) logging in real time VHF transmissions from Soviet and GDR pilots flying aircraft like this MIG 15 (above).
When Josef Frolik (left) spied in London for Czech intelligence, among his informers was an MP nicknamed ‘Greedy Bastard’. But Frolik defected to the West and betrayed all his secrets, maybe.
Otto John (above with his wife) defected to the British during the war, and was promoted in 1950 to head the Bundesrepublik’s counter-espionage service. In 1954 he vanished, to re-appear in GDR accusing Chancellor Adenauer of being a militarist. In 1955 he ‘came home’. Sentenced to four years in jail for betraying secrets, he swore he was innocent.
Perhaps the Poles suffered most. The document (left) counter-signed by Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan ordered the murder of thousands of Polish POWs in 1940.
Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was tortured to death by the UB in 1984.
These Home Army men (above) fighting the Germans in the winter of 1944 (below) were all murdered by Stalin’s Communist Poles.
This Home Army fighter emerging from a Warsaw sewer in summer 1944 is about to be shot by the Germans dragging him out.
Picasso’s ‘dove of peace’ was the symbol of Soviet-backed unilateral disarmament groups in the West. When the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, this dove (above) was behind bars and the slogan read: ‘Socialism, yes. Occupation, no!!!’
On 27 June 1968 journalist Ludvik Vákulík (left) defied the StB and Moscow’s tanks in the streets, publishing a manifesto entitled Dva tisíce slov – two thousand words of protest – signed by seventy leading Czech intellectuals. That took some courage!
ALSO BY DOUGLAS BOYD
Non-Fiction
April Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine
Voices from the Dark Years
The French Foreign Legion
The Kremlin Conspiracy
Normandy in the Time of Darkness
Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass
De Gaulle: The Man Who Defied Six US Presidents
Lionheart
The Other First World War
Fiction
The Eagle and the Snake
The Honour and the Glory
The Truth and the Lies
The Virgin and the Fool
The Fiddler and the Ferret
Cover illustrations: © Londonstills.com/Alamy and iStock © gonullena.
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First published in 2015
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