Finn doesn’t trust the man who sits opposite him, but he likes him and would like to be able to trust him.
‘A good German,’ as Finn puts it, his tongue firmly in cheek. And then, more thoughtfully, ‘Dieter is someone who looks beyond the narrow tunnel walls of his job. He thinks for himself, he sees the world moving outside the avenue of his own efforts, and that is why perhaps, like me, he eventually lost his job.’
Finn has known Dieter since 1989, from the time when the British seized Schmidtke at Tegel airport in Berlin, and whisked him to London. Dieter was one of the BND intelligence officers who formally received Schmidtke back into the bosom of German justice when the British bowed to Germany’s insistence that he was theirs.
I think Finn thought of Dieter as being an inappropriate introduction for me, unlike most of his sources. It wasn’t just that Dieter was uninterested in women, but simply that it would have made him uncomfortable to sit down and break bread with an officer of the Russian SVR. Finn never said so, but I felt his reluctance in Dieter’s case came from the fact that Dieter could not compromise with an enemy who had not only enslaved the East of his country but who had also corrupted so much of what was good in the West. Unlike the British and the Americans, Dieter had been fighting the KGB on the front line.
Sometimes I’ve thought that Dieter was an invention of Finn’s. But here he was, written on the page; a ghost, but a living ghost of our past.
Dieter is a tall, slightly stooped man with black hair thinning and greying at the sides. He has a sharp, lean face, and a dark stubble shadows the pale skin of his jaw. He rarely smiles, but seems to carry a burden of solemnity that leaches from his expressionless eyes into the slope of his shoulders and the movements of his hands. He speaks tonelessly, as if giving a statement to disbelieving interrogators.
He joined West Germany’s intelligence service, the BND, at the start of the long post-war years of reformation. While the world watched Germany rise from the ashes and saw its industry thrive and dominate, its foreign service, the BND, and its army, unlike its automobiles and electrical goods, were forbidden from going abroad. By constitutional decree, its spies could not spy beyond its borders.
And during all that time, for decades, the East loomed across the Wall, porous only to those sent specifically by us in Soviet Russia-us the West’s enemies-to infiltrate, to corrupt and to threaten West German political figures and the country’s financial and commercial institutions.
‘For our allies,’ Dieter once explained to Finn, ‘for you, the Wall was the front line in the war against Communism, the stark divide. But for us West Germans the Wall was far less clearly defined and permanent. For us, it was not some remote battleground, far from home, but a false wall, a partition in our semi-detached existence as one country. The dream of unification, of a greater revived Germany, never died on either side of the Wall,’ he explained. ‘The desire for communication with the East was overwhelming. We were all Germans.’
Finn raises the bottle of Tiger beer without bothering to pour it into the glass and Dieter responds.
‘Cheers,’ the German says in English.
‘Cheers, Dieter. It’s been a long time.’
‘More than ten years,’ Dieter replies.
Finn studies the face of his old colleague. It is a lived-in face, the eyes those of a man who has taken in more than he has given away.
In his early years with the BND Dieter had seen the Wall go up. The enemy and his German cousins were one and the same. But as a German whose adulthood emerged from the shadows of the Nazi war, he’d learned reserve, kept his own counsel, and seemed to Finn shy and wounded.
‘Nazism didn’t just end,’ Dieter had told Finn, ‘like the curtain coming down on a play. The Nazi migrations after the war sought to keep the flame alive, not just in the well-documented places like South America and other remote parts, but closer to home too. An SS officer who was a friend of my father’s went to Turkey, for example, because it was far enough away from retribution while still being close enough to get a decent bottle of wine.
‘And closer than Turkey there was Liechtenstein, just across our border. Did you know the population of Liechtenstein doubled at the end of the war? Oh yes. It was largely a German and Austrian migration, for anyone from the Nazi regime who possessed the necessary loot and influence.’
For Germans like Dieter, determined to remove the stain of their country’s recent past, the totalitarian mindset of the ex-Nazis, whether across the southern border in Liechtenstein or elsewhere, was closer to that of the East German regime than to the new West Germany. Ideological differences between Communist and ex-Nazi were irrelevant to the trade that could be done between two former hated enemies.
‘Totalitarianism, like money, is not squeamish about whose bed it shares,’ Dieter had said to Finn.
After the British had handed Schmidtke over to the Germans, Dieter had been one of Schmidtke’s interrogators for the next two years, until the investigation into the old Stasi spy was quietly dropped and Schmidtke retired to Tegernsee with a good pension and the protection of his former enemies. Dieter wasn’t happy with the deal and lost his job for being unable to come to terms with it.
A waitress brings menus to the table.
‘I want to go back to the beginning, Dieter,’ Finn says, when they’ve drunk half their beers. ‘I need to see the unbroken line from back then, from 1961, to the present.’
‘What makes you think the line is unbroken?’ Dieter replies.
Finn doesn’t answer.
The soup arrives, another beer is ordered. And then Dieter slowly begins to talk, as if he were having difficulty with the memories. But Finn knows he is like an old actor who’s played a part so many times in the private theatre of his own head that the lines will never leave.
‘When Kommerzielle Koordinierung—KoKo—was set up in East Berlin, just on the other side of the Wall in 1961, their motto was “Necessity has no law”,’ Dieter begins. ‘It was a thieves’ decree. Jewellery, artwork, stamp collections, antiquarian books—anything of value belonging to East German citizens—it was all on KoKo’s menu. But this was state theft and, while some objects of value were simply stolen, in general the state and their Stasi agents applied the classic bureaucratic, totalitarian state methods of theft.
‘To give you an example, Finn, people were told they had to insure their property, such as jewellery, for outrageous sums which they couldn’t afford. When they failed to do so, the property was confiscated. That was one method. The value of a citizen’s private property was hugely inflated by KoKo, in order to inflate the insurance value, simply for the purpose of rendering its owners unable to pay. Sometimes Schmidtke’s men inflated the value by 1,000 per cent. Then, when the owners couldn’t pay, or their persecutors simply tired of this longer bureaucratic route, the agents of KoKo would invoke the so-called Fortune Law that existed in East Germany and that said it was illegal to possess property of such a high value. The state could claim that the private citizen had broken the Fortune Law that regulated the private wealth of citizens.
‘Huge numbers of private homes in East Germany were raided by the Stasi. I have walked with an old man after the Wall came down along the pawn shops and the second-hand shop windows of West Berlin, looking for a smart Swiss wristwatch that was taken from him right at the beginning of this grand theft. He never found it, but others have sometimes found their stolen property since eighty-nine, tucked away in a street market somewhere.
‘The state raked in fifty million Deutschmarks a year from thefts like this and it went on for more than twenty-five years, though with decreasing returns, of course. The East Germans were hard up. There was an embargo in the West on the export of technology. In the East they needed to fund their own technological development.’