The soldier explained where I had been found and what I had been doing. The officer spoke in reasonable German and demanded my papers. Figuring the British passport had served its purpose, I offered my East German press accreditation card. He studied it, but the name Forsyth did not mean anything to him, certainly not Scotland.
He asked for an explanation. I dropped into Bertie Wooster mode—hapless, harmless, and very dim. I told him my car had been run off the road and was stuck in a sand drift. I had been told there was a farmer in the woods with a tractor who might pull me out. Then I dropped my car keys and was scrambling around trying to find them when his kindly soldiers guided me out of the forest.
He took my press card and went to show it to the colonel. There was a jabber of Russian. The colonel shrugged and gave him back my card. He clearly had problems more serious than idiot East Germans getting stuck. The captain came back and handed me my press card, and told me to get the hell out of there. I must have been a bit punch-drunk because I said in halting German:
“Herr Captain, it was your trucks that ran me into the sand drift. Your lads couldn’t push me out, could they?”
He spat out a stream of orders in the eastern dialect, turned, and went back to his colonel. Six Mongols escorted me back to the Wartburg and pushed. It was not stuck at all, but I kept my foot on the brake, and when I released it, the car shot forward. I turned and waved my thanks at the Mongols, gave them the V sign, and drove away.
I had my story, but how to get it to the West? A laptop would have been useful, but I was forty years too early. It was early evening. I needed a phone and a meal. I needed a hotel. Ten miles later, I found one, a country gasthof left over from the past.
Presenting my German ID and speaking like a German, I took a room, pleading car trouble for the lack of reservation, went upstairs, and placed a call to my East Berlin office. Fräulein Behrendt had checked in at nine that morning, read my scrawled message, and was still there. With headphones on, she took down my fifteen-page dispatch.
I told her to transfer the lot to telex tape, but not to connect to West Berlin and Bonn until she had it all and then run it at maximum speed. She got fourteen pages across to the West before the line very predictably went dead and flashed up Linienstoerung, or “line disruption.” It always did that when the goons did not want something to go through. But as usual, the junior monitors had to check with some senior goon while the story raced through.
I learned later that it had “gone viral,” before that phrase was invented. Client newspapers used it across the globe. Wiesbaden was very happy, and a staff car was dispatched to Magdeburg to demand the three crewmen back. (They came home pretty quickly. The nervousness caused by Lee Harvey Oswald was apparently still alive in Moscow.)
I should have driven back to East Berlin that night, but I was bone-tired and hungry. I ate a hearty supper, went back to my room, and slept until morning. After breakfast, I paid up and emerged.
Outside the main door, I was reminded of those society weddings where the bridegroom’s mates all line up in two columns, forming a walkway between them.
They were all there. Rural police, city police, forest wardens, People’s Police, and at the end, the long leather coats of the ones who took precedence.
The four Stasi were not happy. They had clearly been slow-roasted all night by their masters in Berlin and now they had the swine responsible. One took over my Wartburg, while the other three sandwiched me into the Czech saloon and drove me to their fortress headquarters in Magdeburg.
To be fair, there was no third degree, just a series of very angry interviews and threats. I was not even in a cell but in a bare interview room, with toilet facilities on request. Of course I dropped into Bertie Wooster mode: But, Officer, what have I done wrong? I was only doing my job. Me, a spy? Good Lord no, I wouldn’t work for those people: I work for Reuters. I mean, a German correspondent in England would have done exactly the same, wouldn’t he? I mean, we all do what we are told to do, don’t we? Can I have a widdle?
The senior goon facing me would probably not have had a clue what to do with a hot news story. As he was well over forty, I suspected he had been serving the Nazis twenty years earlier and had switched seamlessly to the Communists. Secret policemen are like that; they’ll serve anyone.
Years after Berlin, the pretty vicious DINA, the secret police of the not-so-saintly Salvador Allende of Chile, transferred without a blip to the service of General Pinochet. They even used the same torture chambers. Only the victims changed.
As he had never lived in a free country at all, asking him to agree with what a free journalist would do was simply embarrassing. I just had to hope that my facade of a lucky but gormless fool, and thus too dim to be a spy, would hold up. It did.
I spent a day and a night in that room. In the morning, I was ordered out and escorted upstairs. I thought we might be going to the execution wall, but it was only the car park. I was told to get in and follow the two VoPo motorcycle outriders. The black Tatra brought up the rear.
Someone in Berlin had decided he wanted this whole miserable (for them) affair quashed. We drove fast back to East Berlin, but not via West Berlin. As East German drivers swerved off the highway as the blaring sirens came up behind them, we made record time, driving round West Berlin to enter East Berlin from the south. Many never knew that there was a second border separating East Berlin from East Germany proper. It was to prevent Western tourists who were allowed through Checkpoint Charlie from driving on into East Germany unmonitored.
As we drove up to the pole across the road, one of the motorcyclists explained to the guards that the Wartburg was going through. They would be heading back to Magdeburg. A figure appeared outside my driver’s window and tapped. I lowered the window. There was a face, and not a happy one.
“Herr Forsyth,” it said, “do not ever come back to Magdeburg.”
And do you know? I never have.
OUTBREAK OF WAR
I recall with exact accuracy the date when I almost started the Third World War, for reasons that will become plain. It was April 24, 1964, and it was two o’clock in the morning. I was in my car, twisting and turning my way through the coffin-dark streets of East Berlin back to my flat from a visit to a charming young member of the State Opera Chorus.
I was in a suburb of the sleeping city that I did not know well, and had no map, so I simply headed toward the glow in the sky that was West Berlin, expecting anytime to happen upon a major boulevard that I knew would lead me back to the Stadtmitte district, where the Reuters office was situated.
I was still about a mile from it when I came to another road junction, a crossroads that I needed to go over. Standing foursquare across my path was a Russian soldier. He heard my engine approaching from behind him, turned, and held up a hand in the no-mistake “Halt” signal. Then he turned to face the other way. Because it was chilly, I had the windows up, but now I lowered the driver’s-side window and thrust out my head. That was when I heard the low rumble.
As I watched, the first vehicles appeared, coming from the right, meaning the east, and heading across the junction toward the west. They were lorries packed with soldiers, and it was obviously a very large convoy. It just went on and on. I got out of the car and watched for a few minutes. The trucks were then replaced by low-loaders carrying tanks. Nothing else moved. Apart from the Russians, the streets were abandoned.
Wishing to get home, I hung a U-turn and went back, seeking another way past the blockage.
Ten streets farther on, it happened again. Another fur-capped soldier at a crossroads, arms spread, barring traffic from crossing. More armor appeared, moving from east to west, which is to say toward the Wall. Then towed artillery. Now perturbed, I retreated again, found another side street, and continued home. By now, I was zigzagging all over the place, trying to get through.
The third time, the slowly rumbling traf
fic on the crossing involved more low-loaders but carrying mobile bridges. Then more mechanized infantry with motorcycle outriders. Though no expert, I calculated what I had seen as between four and five divisions of the Soviet army, in full battle order, moving through the darkness toward the Wall.
During the autumn of 1962, world attention had switched to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it had been the received wisdom for years that if war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO ever came, the spark would come from the embattled and surrounded enclave of West Berlin.
The besieged half city was teeming with spy agencies, agents, infiltrators, and defectors. One West German spy chief, Otto John, had already been snatched from the streets of West Berlin (or so he said, when he later reappeared to explain himself to a skeptical world). In 1948–49, West Berlin had almost been snuffed out when Stalin closed the access motorways and tried to starve the Western outpost into surrender. Only a huge airlift had saved it.
Every day, West Berliners lived in fear of the moment when twenty-two divisions of Soviet-based military in East Germany would get their marching orders. That was why their mood was always slightly hysterical and their partygoing and sexual mores entertainingly louche.
And finally, with Kennedy dead and Khrushchev locked in a power struggle with rivals in the Kremlin, the spring of 1964 was as tense a time as had ever been. Not long before, the Russian tanks of Marshal Konev and the US tanks of General Lucius Clay had been parked barrel to barrel at Checkpoint Charlie with the Reuters man dodging between them.
What I had seen was not merely rolling, it was rolling toward the Wall. In silence, apart from the low rumbling, at two a.m. In rising anguish, I made it back to the Reuters office-cum-apartment and rushed upstairs. The question running through me was simple: What the hell do I do?
There was no question of calling anyone to consult. Telephonically, West Berlin and West Germany were cut off. All the East German ministries were closed.
Do nothing? Say nothing? And what if the worst fears were confirmed by the dawn’s early light? Finally I hit upon what I felt was the only thing I could do. Report exactly what I had seen, nothing more, nothing less. No embellishment, no suggestions, no speculation. Just the facts.
So I tapped out the story, watching the yards of hole-punched ticker tape spool out of the telex machine until there was nothing more to say. Then I hit FAST TRANSMIT and watched it disappear toward Bonn. By four a.m. I was in the kitchen brewing some very strong coffee. I kept returning to the office to check the machine for a response from the Bonn office, but there was none. I suppose their machine was on “automatic on-pass” to London. Actually, it was. I did not know what was going on west of the River Elbe, so I drank coffee and waited for what might become Armageddon as a watery sun rose over Pankow. Only later did they tell me what had been triggered by those yards of punched tape.
It seemed the night staff at Reuters in London had awoken with quite a jolt. In the suburban homes of the top men in Reuters, telephones rang, and the dispatch from East Berlin was read out to them. The story was not sent on to the agency’s clients worldwide, and thank heavens for that.
Night-duty officers in the British ministries were roused and they awoke their superiors. It was ten p.m. in Washington when the encrypted calls from London came through. Intelligence agencies were besieged with queries. They were as puzzled as the politicians. There had been no steady deterioration before that date.
Eventually, Moscow was contacted, and bewildered officials in the Kremlin put breakfast on hold to check with their own generals in East Germany. That was when the riddle was solved. Relief surged back across the Continent and the Atlantic. Those about to go to bed did so. Those about to get up did that, too.
A puzzled Soviet commander-in-chief of Warsaw Pact forces in East Germany explained that it was only a rehearsal for the May Day parade, scheduled exactly one week later.
In a rare extension of consideration for the citizens of East Berlin, the Soviets had decided to hold their multi-division military party in the middle of the night, when the streets were empty and, being Communists, it never occurred to them to tell anybody.
Of course, once the banal and ludicrous explanation was out in the open, a rain of derision fell upon the Reuters East Berlin office. My only response was to apologize but with the codicil: Well, you didn’t know, either. Which was grumpily conceded. Eventually, it seems a multi-ministry and multi-agency concordat was agreed not to mention it ever again. And so far as I know, from that day to this, it never has been.
HEADLIGHTS
The post of Reuters correspondent for East Germany involved a very large parish: East Germany itself, with compulsory residence in East Berlin, plus Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Visits to Prague and Budapest were not frequent, but mandatory. To Budapest I would always fly, but Prague was close enough for me to motor in my ghastly pink East German Wartburg car. This I did in the midsummer of 1964.
As always, I checked in to the Jalta Hotel on Wenceslas Square and greeted the bugging devices I knew would be somewhere throughout the suite. Elsewhere, crouched over their turning spools, would be the goons of the StB, the Czech secret police. Mr. Stanley Vaterlé, the ever-genial chief of reception, could be relied on to make the right phone call if I handed in my room key and asked for my car key. As I drew out of the guest car park, the StB car would swing in behind me. It was routine procedure, and both parties cheerfully pretended not to notice.
There was a sweltering heat wave that July, and the Jalta had air-conditioning, so after dinner I elected to go down to the basement, where the regime permitted a Western-style disco, which took only Western currency and was patronized by Western businessmen. There were also hostesses, usually university students making pin money on bar tips to help themselves through university or some other college. That night, I met Jana.
She was gorgeous, a twenty-one-year-old who could have stopped traffic on the highway. Her champagne glass was duly topped up; we got talking, then dancing. I was twenty-five; most of the other males were middle-aged, overweight, and beaded with sweat despite the cool air, whether from lust or exercise, it was hard to say.
Dancing till dawn was not quite the Communist way, and at about midnight a voice announced that the joint would close in a few minutes. I paid up and we went to the lobby. If matters were to go further, as I much wished they could, there was no question of my suite upstairs. Each landing had a gorgon behind a desk outside the elevators, noting comings and goings. Western decadence was not on the menu. But I had a car, even if it was an East German horror. And I knew of some lakes outside the city. To my surprise, my suggestion of a night drive was accepted.
I collected my car keys, winked at Stanley, who beamed back, escorted Jana to the Wartburg, and we set off. By then I knew Prague well enough to weave and swerve my way out of downtown, through the suburbs and into the countryside. After thirty minutes, I found the lake. Taking a plaid blanket from the boot, we walked to the water’s edge. It was two a.m., but still stiflingly hot. So we stripped down and went into the cool water naked.
We skinny-dipped for half an hour before climbing out and spreading the rug in the long, warm grass. Then, like any healthy young animals, we made love; rather extensively, to my recall. I used to smoke in those days, and after exhausting ourselves, I lay on my back with Jana half-asleep on my left shoulder, watching plumes of blue smoke drift up into the starry sky. Then a remarkable thought occurred to me.
I had never driven through Redland, apart from those times in East Germany when I had deliberately shaken my Stasi “tail” just to annoy them, without the ever-present black-windowed Tatra saloon slotting in two or three cars behind. Even at night, if there were not enough other cars to permit that, and the goons dropped back, pretending not to be there, you could always see the wash of their headlights in the rearview mirror. Except that night: no headlights.
I must have moved in my surprise
, for a sleepy voice in the crook of my left arm asked, “What’s the matter?” I explained, adding: “Whatever happened to the StB?”
And the sleepy voice replied, “You just made love to it.” As I drifted off to sleep, I recall thinking, “If this is the Czech secret police, bring it on.” Well, we all have to make a living.
BEER WITH A CAMP GUARD
Weimar is a small, charming town steeped in culture. Composers and writers of world renown worked there centuries ago. But outside Weimar is a hill and on top of the hill is a wood. Unless things have changed, the trees comprising the wood are beeches.
Beech in German is buchen, and a wood is called a wald. So when the Nazis built a concentration camp in the middle of it they called it Buchenwald, a place of unredeemed horror. After 1949, the East German government decided to preserve it as a place for public visitation. While I was posted there, I motored south from Berlin to see it.
Of course it was a weirdly horrible way to spend a day. There was a car park outside and a place to pay the visitor fee just outside the main gate. Just about everyone else streaming through the gate surmounted by the swastika was in an organized group, quickly taken in tow by the professional guides. Solitaries were rare, for without a running commentary, much would remain unexplained.
There was a school party just ahead of me, so I attached myself to it, and no one seemed to notice. Perhaps the officials thought I was a teacher and the teachers thought I was on the camp staff. I could hear the accompanying lecture quite clearly, and of course understand it. It was all minutely organized along the permitted paths that made up the tour.
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