Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  Dieter lights a cigarette and sips from the glass of cognac.

  ‘Roth was born in 1939, in Antwerp where his parents were passing through. At least that’s what it says on his birth certificate. We believe he has four brothers, younger than him, and an older sister. A brood of sleeping agents, perhaps? I don’t know for sure. If that is so, we don’t know with absolute certainty if any of them are alive, what happened to them in the war, virtually nothing, in fact. We do have our suspicions, however, which I will tell you in a while. They are suspicions which were nipped in the bud when our investigation of Schmidtke was terminated. At any rate, now Roth is a citizen of Switzerland and lives in considerable comfort in Cologny, a very wealthy suburb of Geneva. They say the lawns around his mansion are clipped with scissors,’ Dieter says. ‘But you know of Roth, of course, Finn, so what about him?’

  Dieter answers his own question before Finn can speak. ‘At the beginning of the sixties he became a trader, mainly in sugar, and was based in London for a while. Then he disappears. When we next hear of him, he’s trading small arms. He’s in Africa, the Far East, Oman. And then it grows, this arms business of his, and Roth is connected to a shipment of artillery, then spares for warplanes, oil, armoured personnel carriers, you name it, but it all originates from East Germany, most of it with KoKo’s implicit stamp on it, exported out of Rostock. Rostock was Schmidtke’s Stasi-controlled port. And Schmidtke had the goods stamped with false declarations and false destinations.’

  Dieter looks hard at Finn. ‘How much do you know of Roth?’ he asks.

  ‘Go on,’ Finn says.

  ‘All right. Roth and Schmidtke are by now as close as brothers,’ Dieter says. ‘Roth travels back and forth to the Soviet Union under the cover of a Swiss sporting organisation. The usual cover. He gets himself on to an international committee of Olympic target shooting. Roth’s little joke. The cover is good for him, as it is for many others in the years of the Cold War.’

  Dieter gets up from his chair and puts a pot on the stove for more coffee and pours two more nips of cognac, but now he continues his story without a break.

  ‘That’s Roth,’ he says. ‘We’ll come back to him in a while.’

  Dieter sees that the coffee has run out and scrabbles in a cupboard for a jar of instant coffee that has, Finn sees, congealed with age and dampness around the rim.

  ‘And then there’s the bank,’ Dieter says. ‘It is called Jensbank and it was founded before the war in a little town in northern Bavaria called Fürth; the town where Henry Kissinger was born, as it happens. After the war, and after the Wall went up, Jensbank was one of very few that operated in both East and West Germany. Most people don’t know that there were banks operating on both sides of the Wall. Well, there were. As I say, the Wall was a metaphor, an abstract in many ways, certainly not as solid as people think.

  ‘Jensbank had more than three hundred branches, on both sides of the Wall. Many were concealed under different names, of course, but they were all Jensbank. And Jensbank dealt in very large funds indeed. Our investigations were stopped when they reached one of the world’s few clearing banks, across the water there in Luxembourg. Jensbank has over fifty secret accounts there, what they call modestly in the banking world unpublished accounts. And there are trusts over there,’ Dieter waves vaguely across the river, ‘and there are trusts of Jensbank in Switzerland and Liechtenstein too, some of which we found our way into, most of which we didn’t. What we saw, however, were huge transactions in cash, before the shutters got pulled down on us.’

  Dieter looks back at Finn as he turns the heat off and the pot sends out its steam into the room.

  ‘Roth, of course, was-is-a big client of Jensbank, its biggest, perhaps, even the reason for its existence in the first place. KoKo was wrapped up in Jensbank too, before KoKo ceased to exist. And what we believe is that two-at least two-of Jensbank’s directors are these mysterious brothers of Roth.’

  ‘What is Jensbank now?’ Finn says. ‘Since the Wall came down?’

  ‘Very well connected,’ Dieter replies. ‘It has forty years of business with the East and the Russians behind it. And forty years of parallel business with the West. Since the Wall came down the bank has continued its activities, with a new twist. It has recently been raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Western investors to buy property that doesn’t exist in the former East Germany.’

  ‘So it’s in trouble?’ Finn says.

  ‘No, no, there is a cover-up at some high political level. “Mistakes were made” will be the official interpretation, if it ever comes out at all. Maybe there are too many in the West who are too powerful to let it come out, however. No. What is most interesting, perhaps, about Jensbank is that it will probably no longer exist in five years’ time at all. It has done its work. It kept the wheels of commerce rolling on both sides of the Wall during the Cold War. But now?’ Dieter looks at Finn. ‘Now the Wall is down, there is no need for it. The Russians, the KGB, black money from the East is so entrenched in the West now that banks like Jensbank are superfluous. When the Wall came down, the banks of Geneva and elsewhere were able to welcome the new Russia and all its money with open arms. You see, Finn, you have to ask yourself. Who did the Wall protect? Them or us?’

  ‘The Wall had to come down,’ Finn answers.

  ‘It was inevitable, certainly. And it has done a great favour to all those in the East trapped behind it. But it has also done a great favour to the movement of capital. The complexity of Schmidtke’s and Roth’s and the bank’s arrangements was a great strain on the enemy. Now that strain has been removed at a stroke. In Putin’s Russia, the freedom of people will, no doubt, be slowly and incrementally curtailed, but the freedom of money from East to West is total. But where does that money come from and what is it doing? Do we, the ordinary citizens of Western Europe, get the benefit of it?’

  Outside, the grey late November light is fading. A few dead leaves flutter across the weatherbeaten wooden sills of the house. Dieter fills the glasses with cognac and pours fresh coffee.

  ‘You sound like an old-fashioned communist,’ Finn says.

  ‘Ah, we are both communists, but in the true sense, you and I,’ Dieter says, ‘and we both know it is also an impossible dream. It is something, as you said about my fantasy of being a farmer, that is better left to dreams. The twisted reality of a communist state in action is too dreadful as we have seen.’

  ‘And the company?’ Finn asks. ‘You said a person, a bank and a company.’

  ‘You’re impatient, Finn,’ Dieter replies. ‘Yes, you want the company, don’t you? That is the real heart of this. Roth and Schmidtke, they are just the backdrop. You know much about them, but not as much as I do, I think. Jensbank is the machine that made it all work.

  ‘So. On top of Jensbank there is just one company I can give you, you understand. But it is one example of many hundreds, perhaps thousands of companies in Schmidtke’s stable. But the company will give you what you’re looking for. It is a piece of actual evidence that reveals the continuous thread from the past to the present. From the Cold War up to today, and the KGB’s seamless transition from defending the indefensible to becoming a major player in the so-called real world, the world of money.’

  Dieter leaves the room and Finn hears him go down some stairs, perhaps into a cellar.

  When he returns he is carrying a small brown box the size of a shoebox, wrapped in heavy clear plastic and sealed with clips to make it watertight.

  ‘It’s damp down there,’ Dieter says. ‘Sometimes it floods when the river rises. But I have kept a few things from the past in a cupboard high up on the wall. I never expected to touch them again. I hope they are not damaged.’

  He puts the box on the table between them, without unwrapping it and begins to talk again.

  ‘We were investigating a company by the name of Exodi,’ he says tonelessly. ‘That was back in 1991, nearly two years into our investigation of Schmidtke. Nearing the end. It w
as one of many companies bound up with Schmidtke and had a complicated structure like all the others. It was a set of companies, actually. There was Exodi Geneva, Exodi Luxembourg, Exodi in Paris, Exodi in Liechtenstein, and other places. All were set up by the same treuhand, commercial lawyers. The various Exodi companies had a dozen or so structures behind them that led to two lawyers in the Cayman Islands. The whole thing was the usual set of Russian dolls, one inside the other, no ultimate beneficiaries named outside the lawyers.

  ‘The treuhand who set up the first Exodi, in Geneva, were the same commercial lawyers who we knew had worked before for Roth. They are a Luxembourg-based legal firm, with connections all over Europe. They set up companies for some not-so-savoury Russian interests and we had watched them for a while before we came across Exodi. So we made our investigations and discovered that Exodi was set up in 1991. In other words, it was set up just six months before we came across the name Exodi.

  ‘Obligingly, the Geneva finance committee sent us the relevant company documents that showed when and where Exodi Geneva was incorporated. 1991. It was all in order. So we went to Liechtenstein to look at Exodi there and it was the same story. Exodi in Liechtenstein had also been set up six months before, in 1991. I interviewed Hutzger personally. He’s the big wheel in the principality’s finance committee, works as one of the government’s anti-money-laundering experts. He’s impeccable where his background is concerned, and his various seats on worthy international committees that fight money-laundering.

  ‘Hutzger told me that he had personally looked into the origins of this company and the date was correct and they had nothing on Exodi Liechtenstein that alerted them to any wrongdoing.

  ‘So we closed off that avenue. But by now my government in Bonn was only too pleased when another avenue was closed off, the boxes ticked, the dossiers closed and filed. Our investigations had already revealed too many uncomfortable things about corruption in Germany that threatened to go very high indeed. I now realised Bonn was already intending to stop our investigations into Schmidtke.

  ‘But I wasn’t satisfied. I don’t know why. You know, Finn, when an instinct tells you just to look again, even though you don’t know why. Anyway, that’s how it was. I wasn’t happy. So I did. I looked again. And I found a very odd fact indeed. Yes, there was a company called Exodi that had been formed in Liechtenstein in 1991. But there was also a company called Exodi that had been formed in Liechtenstein in 1975. It was wound up in 1989. And I looked further. The same was true of the Exodi companies in Geneva and Luxembourg and Paris. They were all founded in 1975 and all wound up in 1989.’

  They are silent and Dieter observes Finn like a doctor watching for symptoms.

  ‘Exodi is two things,’ Finn says at last. ‘One is real and one is fake.’

  But Dieter doesn’t reply directly. He holds Finn’s eyes with his and continues.

  ‘So I checked back at other Roth companies where we’d closed our investigations and I found the same thing. These other companies had been founded in the seventies or late sixties, some in the eighties, but all of them had been wound up in 1989. February 1989, to be precise. I found twenty-four companies with the same history as Exodi before I realised that the pattern was going to extend to many more, perhaps hundreds more companies, all of which we connected in various clear or obscure ways to Roth.

  ‘I looked back at our files, working on my own now. I saw that in the few cases–maybe half a dozen or so–that we at the BND had gone to Switzerland or Liechtenstein to ask about these other companies, we had been told by the highest officials that they had all been incorporated in 1991, the same as Exodi. They were clean of Cold War connections, in other words.’

  Dieter shakes his cigarette packet to extract a cigarette, but it is empty. Finn throws two packs on to the table between them like a winning poker hand and Dieter takes one with a grunt.

  ‘When the British arrested Schmidtke at Tegel airport in March 1989,’ he continues as a match flares, ‘he had just returned from depositing nearly one billion dollars in bonds into a bank in Geneva. This bank will be important to your investigations, Finn. It’s a Swiss branch of Jensbank and it has a long, historic trade with the KGB. I will give you the name. But anyway, we know that, from now onwards, Roth was put in charge of that money. The Swiss accounts were to be controlled by Roth after Schmidtke deposited the cash. You see, Schmidtke knew that the writing was on the wall for him and he just managed to make these deposits before the British arrested him. The end was fast, the Wall tumbled earlier than they’d expected. But by the time it fell the decks were cleared. The past was erased. We were ready to close in on Schmidtke when the British arrested him.’

  ‘And we missed our chance to get Roth,’ Finn says, ‘at the moment when he received this money and before he had time to obscure its origins.’

  ‘Just so. But to Exodi,’ Dieter continues. ‘The Exodi companies demonstrate two things. First that many or maybe all of the companies Schmidtke and Roth controlled were wound up in 1989 and then re-formed in 1991 under exactly the same names. They were not formed for the first time in 1991, as the documents we looked at, courtesy of the Swiss and Liechtenstein authorities, showed. It was a nice deceit. You look into the origins of a company that you have concerns about and you see it was formed after the period concerning your investigations. It does not occur to you that it may have a history before that. You have nice, clean, official documents in your hands, from impeccable officials, that tell you the date of incorporation. Why look further?

  ‘But the second thing Exodi demonstrated to me is truly alarming. This second thing is that two of the most senior financial officials in Liechtenstein and Switzerland were able to say, without openly lying, that Exodi was formed in 1991. It was formed in 1991. But not for the first time. Did they know they were lying, these two impeccable officials, Hutzger and his opposite number in Geneva? If they did, it was perfectly deniable.’ Dieter pauses awkwardly, as if he has allowed himself to run on too long to an unwilling listener. But Finn is far from unwilling.

  ‘Why did they re-form these companies in the same name, after they were wound up?’ Finn says. ‘Why not just make new companies?’

  ‘For exactly that reason. When I found on my second search that the Exodi companies had been originally founded in 1975, I also found information from that time about the activities of Exodi that related to money-laundering, corruption, fraud. All these activities had KGB traces. But if you looked at the history of these companies, as it was given to us in the documents from Geneva and Liechtenstein, their history only began in 1991. So we must be wrong, that was the implication. Any information about Exodi and the KGB must be wrong. And that’s what they wanted us to believe.’

  ‘They wanted you to believe the fake Exodi,’ Finn says. ‘But you were right, Dieter. Exodi existed before. And the highest officials in Liechtenstein and Switzerland were covering it up.’

  ‘Deniably. And without actually lying, yes. And my government in Bonn decided to believe it, knowingly or unknowingly. And again, deniably, without actually lying.’

  ‘And Bonn closed the investigations.’

  ‘Swiftly.’

  ‘And you, Dieter? Did you take what you found to your masters?’

  ‘It was too late by then and I guessed I would not be thanked for it. I saw which way things were going. The government was using us, its security service, to give it a cloak of respectable investigation into the past, but it didn’t really want us to investigate anything to its end. The glimpses of the truth we’d already found were too frightening.’

  Dieter begins to untie the watertight clips, takes off the plastic coat, and pulls the box out from inside it. He pushes it across to Finn.

  ‘Take these. They’re microfiches; perhaps a hundred and twenty companies of Roth’s and Schmidtke’s. They show their real history before 1989. They are your link from the past to the present, Finn. Look at the Exodi companies.’

  Finn doesn’t tou
ch the box.

  ‘Take it. I don’t want them now,’ Dieter says. ‘Once, I thought I would use them, not any more. When you no longer trust your own government…’ He pauses. ‘Now I spend my time drinking the odd bottle of fine Moselle in the evening. And I’m writing short stories for my brother’s granddaughters, just children’s stories. You, Finn, it’s your turn to keep this box safe.’

  Finn takes the box, puts it back in its thick plastic sheath and attaches the clips back on to it.

  ‘I don’t want to be connected in any way with what you’re doing,’ Dieter says firmly. ‘I’m retired and I live for my great-nieces.’

  ‘I may need your help, Dieter,’ Finn says. ‘More help,’ he adds.

  Dieter sighs and stands up and walks to the window.

  ‘How will we communicate?’ he says at last without turning back.

  Finn draws an old thin hardback book from his coat pocket. He places it carefully on the table. Dieter turns and walks back and sits down again.

  ‘Lessons in English,’ Finn says. ‘Published in 1941, very few copies left.’

  Dieter opens the book and reads: ‘Long Live International Youth Day. Long Live the Communist Party. Long Live Comrade Stalin.’