The Outsider

by Frederick Forsyth

  One of the nastiest pieces of work in the regime was the press secretary to the Politburo, a certain Kurt Blecha. He had perhaps the falsest smile on earth. But I knew a few things about Master Blecha. One was his birthday, and another was that in the thirties, he had been a red-hot member of the Nazi Party.

  Captured in 1943 on the Eastern Front, he had taken no time to convert to communism, being plucked from the freezing prisoner-of-war camp and installed in the retinue of exiled German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Blecha returned with the Communist veteran on the tails of the Red Army in 1945 to become part of the puppet government, the most slavish of all the satellite regimes.

  At Christmas, Easter, and on his birthday, I sent him an anonymous greeting card at his office. It was bought in East Berlin but typed on a machine in the West Berlin office of Reuters, in case my own machine was checked. It wished him all best, with his Nazi Party membership number writ large and purporting to come from “your old and faithful Kamaraden.” I never saw him open them, but I hope they worried the hell out of him.

  I also learned how to shake the Stasi tail. As the Reuters correspondent, I was allowed through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin, but the secret police tail was not. They always pulled over to the curb as I approached the barrier. Once through, I could race down the Kurfürstendamm, from there to the Heerstrasse and on to the border leading back into the republic of East Germany at Dreilinden.

  It was sometimes thought in the West that Berlin was a border city between East and West. Not so; it was buried eighty miles inside East Germany, with West Berlin surrounded on all sides. Head west out of West Berlin through the Dreilinden crossing point, and you were on the autobahn to West Germany, which was also allowed. Once on it, I could leave the autobahn at the first off-ramp and disappear into the countryside. With a set of shabby local clothes and an East Berlin–registered Wartburg car, eating at roadside halts and sleeping in the car, I could stay off radar for a couple of days.

  There were good stories to be had once outside the cage. In theory, everyone was so happy in the workers’ paradise that there could not be any dissent to report. The truth was that resentment among workers and students seethed under the surface, occasionally breaking out in strikes and student marches—always short-lived and punished as the Volkspolizei, the People’s Police known as VoPos, struck back.

  On returning, I would be summoned immediately to the office of Kurt Blecha, who hid his rage behind his smile.

  “Where have you been, Herr Forsyth? We were worried about you,” was his unconvincing ploy. They felt forced to maintain the fiction that I was free to go anywhere I wanted in their peace-loving freedom state, and being followed was out of the question.

  When asked for an explanation, I claimed I was a keen student of church architecture and had been visiting and admiring some of the ecclesiastical gems in East Germany. Back at the flat, I had books to prove it. Blecha assured me this was a highly laudable pastime, but the next time I left would I please tell them so that they could make introductions?

  We neither of us believed a word of it, but I kept playing the bumbling ass and he kept beaming his crocodile smile. As for my filed stories of unrest among the supposedly content proletariat, if the regime wondered where I got them from, I let them wonder. I arrived in East Berlin in early October. In late November, the world was hit by a thunderbolt.

  THE DEATH OF KENNEDY

  It is said that everyone on earth alive at the time recalls where they were and what they were doing when news came through that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

  I happened to be dining in West Berlin with a stunning German girl called Annette. We were at the Pariser Café, just around the corner from the Reuters office. It was full, and behind the clatter and chatter there was Muzak playing. Out of nowhere, it stopped and an urgent-sounding voice barked:

  “Wir unterbrechen unser Programm für eine wichtige Meldung: auf den Präsidenten Kennedy wurde geschossen.”

  There was a brief lull in the conversation as the Muzak resumed. It must have been a glitch in the music system. A mistake, a joke. Then the voice came back.

  “Wir unterbrechen unser Programm für eine wichtige Meldung: auf den Präsidenten Kennedy wurde geschossen.”

  Then the world went crazy.

  Men stood up and swore repeatedly, women screamed. Tables were overturned. Kennedy had been there in June, speaking at the Wall. It is hard to describe to those who came later how he was hero-worshipped, and in this city of all cities. For me there was one priority above all: to get back to the office and seek to discover East Germany’s official reaction. I threw a handful of West marks on the table, ran for the car, and drove through a panicking city to the Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.

  The checkpoint was in the American sector of the four-power-divided city, and in their glass booth the GIs were bowed over their radio. You could have driven a herd of buffalo past them and they would not have noticed. The American barrier was up as always. I drove past it and swerved to the East German control sheds. They, too, had heard.

  The East German border guards were the hardest of the hard and politically proof-tested before they got the posting. If necessary, they would machine gun anyone trying to climb the Wall to escape to the West.

  The story was still recent of Peter Fechter, an eighteen-year-old student who had gotten through the minefield and was halfway up the Wall when the searchlights found him. He was hit by a burst of fire from a watchtower. No one wanted to go through the mines to get him down. In sight of the West Berliners, he hung there on the barbed wire, screaming until he bled out and died.

  The only good news about that awful night in 1963 was to see these brutes bleating with panic. They surrounded my car asking: “Herr Forsyth, wird das Krieg bedeuten?” “Will this mean war?”

  It was two p.m. in Dallas, eight p.m. in London, and nine p.m. in Berlin when the news came through; ten p.m. when I went through Charlie. All examinations of my car and my papers were waived. I got back to the office in record time and checked the incoming tapes. That probably made me the best-informed person in East Berlin.

  The media concentration was on a panicking America, but that fear was as nothing, compared with the situation on the Iron Curtain. I rang the East German Foreign Ministry for a comment. They were fully awake with desks staffed, but not knowing what to say until told by Moscow. So, terrified voices were asking me rather than the way it should have been.

  The point about a Communist state, or any dictatorship, is that independent media are out of the question. So, despite denial after denial, the authorities persisted in the myth that the Reuters man in their midst had some kind of a direct line to the British government. On each of the two occasions I had flown back to the UK during my year in East Berlin, I was given earnest messages for the British Foreign Secretary, whom I had not the slightest intention of visiting, nor he me. When I said I was only going to visit my mum and dad, they tapped the sides of their noses and said, Ja, ja, we are men of the world. Wink, wink.

  By midmorning, word was coming through that the assassin of Dallas was in handcuffs and was an American Communist. The panic deepened. On the streets, terrified passersby glanced at the skies, expecting to see the bombers of the Strategic Air Command heading east with their nukes. Then Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald right in the heart of a police station. If anything was possible to fuel the fires of conspiracy theory, it was that. And indeed the incompetence was pretty hard to believe.

  But the United States kept its nerve. The vice president took over and was sworn in. The bombers remained grounded. The panic slowly subsided, to be replaced by grief as the TV pictures flashed of the funeral with the riderless horse. When another shot showed a small boy saluting his father’s catafalque, all Berlin, East and West, was in tears. Extraordinary times.

  Christmas came. The two Berlins always reminded me
of the fairy story of two hostelries, one ablaze with light, feasting, dancing, and laughter; the other, across the street, dark and gloomy. So it was that first and, as it turned out, only Christmas for me in Berlin.

  West Berlin lived in a slightly hysterical mood all those years while the Wall stood, aware it could be snuffed out within a night if the order was given in Moscow, like a partygoer drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. That Christmas, it let rip. The East Berliners did their best, but the contrast in prosperity of the two political and economic systems was stark.

  It would be another twenty-six years before the Wall finally came down, and two years later the Soviet Union simply imploded. But back then both events were simply inconceivable. Yet in all this grayness and gloom, beyond all the bugged apartments and phone calls, behind the headlights in the rearview mirror, there was one lucky break for the Reuters man, of which I took the fullest advantage.

  When East Berlin insisted on keeping the Reuters news service, a deal was struck. East Germany would have to pay 20 percent of the subscription fee in desperately scarce hard Western currency, and 80 percent in virtually worthless East marks. These would be banked in East Berlin. Problem: they could not be exported or converted—at any exchange rate at all. But no one could stop their being spent—locally.

  Before I left London to take up the post, the Reuters chief Jerry Long explained all this to me and asked me with a straight face if I could try to reduce the blocked account, which stood at over a million East marks. Even with the office costs and Miss Behrendt’s salary, it just kept growing. With an equally straight face, I promised to do what I could.

  The problem was, there was almost nothing to buy. In Communist solidarity, Cuba maintained a shop that sold superb cigars for East marks. Cuban produce was banned in the United States, but quite acceptable as a getting-to-know-you offering to an American officer in the West Berlin garrison.

  Czechoslovakia produced high-quality long-playing records of classical music, and Hungary very good pigskin luggage. Both maintained a loss-making “prestige” shop in East Berlin. Eventually, even the East German border guards lightened up. They would say nothing about the cargoes going west in the boot of the Wartburg and I would say nothing when a sack of fresh oranges disappeared while I was in the customs shed on the way back. And there was the caviar.

  Each Soviet satellite country maintained a prestige restaurant in East Berlin. There was a Haus Budapest with Hungarian cuisine, a Haus Sofia for Bulgaria, and so on. The Haus Moskau served borscht, Stolichnaya vodka . . . and caviar. That first Christmas, I really helped Reuters reduce its surplus marks pile with a mountain of Beluga and enough Stoly to ensure all the bugs in my bedroom could record were the snores.

  HELPING OUT THE COUSINS

  Secret police forces reckon that two or three in the morning is the lowest point of the human spirit, when reactions are at their lowest. That was about the hour that the alarm went off on a certain morning in March 1964.

  A direct phone line between the Reuters office in East Berlin and West Berlin or Bonn was forbidden. My colleagues could contact me only by telex, which of course could be monitored by the Stasi, and left a printed record, which could be read later in case a phone call could be so quick that it might be over before they woke up.

  But in my office, an alarm bell was fitted to summon me from bed to the machine in case of an emergency. This was definitely an emergency. The Soviets had shot down an American plane outside Magdeburg.

  The armed forces hate to have to ask the media for help, but US Air Force HQ at Wiesbaden, West Germany, was in quite a state. I punched out a quick ticker tape asking for more details. While I waited, I got dressed. So far as sleeping was concerned, the night was over.

  What came back thirty minutes later made more sense. The downed aircraft was an RB-66, which I knew from my own air force time to be a twin-engined (jet) light bomber converted to photographic reconnaissance. Less politely put, a spy plane, gorged with long-lens cameras pointing down and sideways.

  Its mission had been to patrol along the frontier, training angled cameras at something east of the border, inside East Germany. But in this case it had strayed over the border. Any promotion for the navigator was now highly problematic, though that was not his immediate problem.

  There had been a quick panic call, then silence. Seconds later, around ten p.m., the blip on the USAF’s radar had vanished. At one-thirty, Wiesbaden asked Reuters if their man in East Berlin could find it. The reason they needed to know was the Four-Power Treaty.

  Under the terms of the treaty, the Western Allies based in West Berlin had the right to send a patrol car into the Soviet Zone (now East Germany), provided they stated the exact destination. They could not just go a-roving. Without a precise location for their missing spook, they could not leave West Berlin. They also wanted news of the crew: alive, injured, dead, certainly in Soviet hands somewhere.

  It was a needle in a haystack, but the orders were clear. Get out there and find it. While waiting for my details, I had packed a gunnysack with bread, cheese, and two flasks of coffee, and written a hasty message for Fräulein Behrendt. Then I left in the Wartburg car for Checkpoint Charlie. As ever with the East Germans, speed was of the essence.

  They were methodical and ponderous. They got there in the end but, contrary to spy fiction, they moved like snails. I suspect I was probably in West Berlin before the tail car had got back to the Normannenstrasse HQ to prod the night-duty officer awake. Thirty minutes later, I was out the other side of West Berlin on the westward autobahn and swerved off at the sign to Dessau. From there it was bleak, night-black farmland. I used my pocket compass to keep heading west along B-roads and winding lanes.

  Dawn came and the country folk awoke while their city-dwelling masters slept on. The first to appear were farmworkers. I stopped to ask if anyone had heard of a plane belonging to the “Amis” (Americans) coming down nearby. I was completely ignored. At the third halt, instead of saying I was the press from Berlin (official and therefore government), I said “from London.” Immediately, the cooperation and helpfulness were unrestrained. I just flashed the British passport to prove my claim and they all tried to help. The denizens of the workers’ paradise really hated the place.

  At first no one had an inkling, then someone thought it was “over there”—pointing west toward Magdeburg. A group of road workers told me there had been flames in the sky to the west and mentioned a small village, which I found on my road map.

  As a watery sun hung over Potsdam behind me, it became clear what the RB-66 had been trying to photograph. Outside Magdeburg, the Soviet army had mounted a huge war-games maneuver ground. I found myself weaving between columns of Russian tanks, half-tracks, jeeps, and trucks of infantry. With an East German–registered car, I leaned out with a broad grin and gave them the V-sign. They responded with the same.

  They did not realize that when the first two fingers of the right hand were raised with the palm toward the receiver, it was the Churchillian victory sign. To the British, the other way around means “Up yours.” Eventually I parked the Wartburg off the road on a sandy bank and set off through the pine forest on foot. Then I found my charcoal burner.

  He was an old man, like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale. I thought he might have a gingerbread house around there somewhere. He considered my request carefully, then nodded.

  “Ja, it came down over there.” I walked on to where he pointed, and there it was. Nose down, tail up, most of its fuselage masked by the pine trees, but with the tail fin jutting up to the sky. It had clearly been hit by air-to-air rockets, and all its ejector seats had been used, so maybe the crew was alive. I marked its exact position and went back to the charcoal burner tending his heap of embers. He was perfectly calm, as one who had lived through two world wars and could cope with the occasional crashing bomber. He showed no nervousness about the authorities, but was interested in my pa
ssport. I pointed out and translated the bit in the flyleaf where Her Britannic Majesty “requests and requires” one and all to assist her subject as best they may. Then he spoke quite freely.

  There were three crewmen, he said, though he had not seen the first two parachute into the forest. They knew they had been taken prisoner by Russians in jeeps and were lodged in the Soviet army HQ in Magdeburg. His son-in-law, a baker who delivered early bread, had seen them in the jeeps.

  The third and last out had landed near him and broken one leg. He was Dutch. No, I said, he was American. The old man tapped his chest on the left side. There was a tab that said “Holland” and two silver bars on the epaulettes. I recalled the US aircrew wore name tags on a white canvas patch, upper chest, left-hand side. So, Captain Holland, the pilot of the falling spy plane, who had ensured his two crewmen were out before ejecting. At the last minute, he landed only two hundred yards from the wreck.

  After thirty minutes with my new friend and having delighted him with a pack of Western cigarettes, a universal currency, I had it all. Then the luck ran out. I was stumbling back to where I had left the car when I heard voices among the pine trees. I dropped to my knees in the undergrowth. Too late.

  I heard a barked “Stoi” and saw a pair of serge combat trousers ahead of my face. An angry Mongoloid face was staring down at me. These Mongol regiments came from the Russian Far East and have always been used as cannon fodder. I stood up. He was shorter than me, but the tommy gun pointing at my face created its own very persuasive argument.

  Surrounded by his mates, I was marched out of the forest to a meadow, where a group of officers was standing around a colonel seated at a trestle table studying a map. One of them looked up, frowned, and came over. He spoke to the soldier in a tongue I could not understand. Certainly not Russian. So, a White Russian officer from a Mongoloid regiment recruited somewhere way out along the Ussuri River. Or maybe the Amur. A long way away.