1989 (14 page)

Up until now, however, incidents of such detailed ‘tailing’ had been sporadic, the files revealed. Even so it produced details which to a British mind might suggest they were trying a little too hard, but I fear to a German mind (East
or
West) implied potentially seditious intentions: ‘He has crossed the road illegally while the pedestrian light was red.’

Now, however, they turned the searchlight on, big time. For up to ten days at a time, teams of watchers would follow us from before dawn to long after dusk. They would begin their day seated in a car parked somewhere outside our flat on Schönhauser Allee, wait for us to emerge and then stick on our tail, to produce at the end of each day a minute-by-minute account.

Their diary for August 4th, 1982, in the middle of one such ten-day surveillance routine, read as follows:

They had a long and fruitless wait. It had been a late night in Metzer Eck the night before and the weather was warm and listless, one of those Berlin summer days when the hot cobbles repel and the deep green of the Brandenburg countryside dotted with little lakes
beckoned. When we finally crawled out of bed, we decided to go on a picnic. The Stasi came too. 

Clever counter-espionage measures? Not quite; my wife was map-reading.

In other words, they sat out there while we had dinner and left before we went to the pub, thereby missing a whole world of insight into who our real ‘contacts’ were in East Germany, that segment of society they least wished us to get to know well: ordinary people.

But Col Lehmann still found a way to do me damage. In my file he affixed a photograph of the two of us leaving the VERSINA shop. He was probably very proud of it: it had been taken by one of those little bits of kit that the James Bonds of this world are so very fond of: a concealed camera. Concealed in the tail-light of a little Trabant parked outside the shop. It was marked, ‘secret’. But it was the note he appended next to it that caused the most damage to my way of life: ‘On such expeditions, it would appear Streamer makes his
wife carry the heavy objects.’ She has never let me forget it. Thanks, colonel; I really owe you for that one.

At the end of this concentrated period of surveillance, however, the man who was in charge of what in the world of John le Carré were called ‘lamplighters’, sitting on my tail day and night, was forced to conclude: ‘During the period of intensive operational surveillance on Streamer from August 2nd, 1982 through August 20th, 1982, we could not identify any active counter-surveillance techniques.’ (I’d long since assumed that if they wanted to follow me they would.) ‘His driving by and large obeyed the rules of the road although he has been observed driving after consuming alcohol.’ (I was young, and occasionally a bit silly. I admit it. Maybe you should have stopped me.) ‘When driving, he usually chatted to whoever else was in the car, and almost invariably took the most direct route.’ (Yes, I wasn’t trying to shake you off because I didn’t really know you were there. If we took wrong turns, it was usually because we’d got lost.)

My file also contained a list of the codenames of the IMs (
Informelle Mitarbeiter
– part-time collaborators), the everyday leeches who spied on their acquaintances or friends for the state. ‘Constructive analysis of the possibilities of using the Reuters office cleaner as an IM.’ Damnation of Helga? Maybe. Of Frau Neumann? Definitely. There was also a list of ‘contacts’ I had inherited from my predecessor: ‘Armin,’ ‘Tobias’, ‘Walter’, and ‘Walter Fichte’. There was not enough evidence for me to pin down specifically which was which, but I had a clear vision in my head of the ‘friends’ of the
colleague
who had occupied the post before me, who would turn up uninvited, to ‘keep up the relationship’, to invite me out for a meal or a drink, to offer me titbits of meaningless gossip that suggested insider knowledge but in fact revealed next to nothing. They would ‘leak stories’ that were about to appear in the next day’s official press. Armin tried to feed me a story about an upcoming minor regional party conference. It was hard to tell him I couldn’t care less. He reported to his superiors that I had left lying about ‘as if by chance’ a copy of the West German news magazine
Spiegel
– was I trying to entrap him? He admitted to them he had found it ‘interesting’.

I had little to do with any of them: I simply wasn’t interested enough in them or their supposed, so clearly calculated, ‘insight’. If
East Germany had a story, it wasn’t to be had from these people. The Stasi obviously recognised that their old strategy wasn’t working. Amongst the tasks ‘in hand’ listed was: search for and identify an IM among Streamer’s GDR acquaintances. They would succeed but not as much as they had hoped.

‘Tobias,’ reported that, ‘because of his appearance and attitude, Millar really wasn’t on the same wavelength. But he would do his best all the same.’ I clearly wasn’t fastidious enough. His physical description went down in my file: ‘Approx. 25 years of age, short with long, curly unkempt hair, uncared-for clothes: frayed jeans, tatty shoes, loose shirts, unmanicured fingernails.’ I admit it all. I haven’t changed that much even now.

Contrary to what I – and certainly Alex or Bärbel or many other of my East German friends might have suspected, I was pleased and gratified to find no clear sign of Jochen amongst those who informed on me. For all that they called him ‘two-face’, he did not feature on the list of the Stasi’s IMs. In fact the only reference to him specifically exonerated him: Col Lehmann noted: ‘We have no hopes for using him directly.’ The operative word, however, was ‘directly’. Their key informer was the mother he doted on. In November 1982, Jochen had invited Jackie and me to come and see a play for which he had designed the stage sets. It was the first
evidence
of any real work he had done in all the time we had known him. I was delighted to accept, not least because the play was being performed in the delightful little medieval town of Quedlinburg in the Harz Mountains. Jochen was delighted we accepted, not least because it appeared he had been counting on us to give him a lift. Him and his mother.

She was a plump, giggly and self-consciously learned academic woman in her fifties, with dyed jet-black hair and saw herself as a
self-proclaimed
intellectual advocate of the ‘developed socialist society’. She was also a Stasi collaborator, codenamed ‘Pauline’. Her report on the trip was detailed, beginning with the fact – probably to her and her controllers my most shameful failing – that I turned up to collect her from her flat thirty minutes late. En route to Quedlinburg she reported that I ‘did not stick to the speed limits’. I was driving a zippy little VW Golf in a country full of fibreglass Trabants; the
motorway speed limit – as opposed to in West Germany where there was none – was 100 kph (62 mph). I was however chuffed to note that she had added: ‘He did however show himself to be a safe and experienced driver.’ Thanks, Pauline.

She noted that our conversation over dinner following the
performance
concentrated on the play, then about foreign languages and different cultures, adding: ‘It has to be said that at no point did the conversation touch on politics.’ Why would it have done? I knew she was an old commie, but she was also the mother of my friend. I neither wanted to convert her (to what? I was hardly a
neo-conservative
), nor to offend her. The conversation was joined by an elderly actor who had a daughter who was also a journalist, on the official Communist Party paper, and we sat up chatting and drinking until three a.m. I am thankful to the Stasi for noting what time we got to bed. I certainly have no recollection.

Pauline sat up even later making notes of her initial impressions:

The next day she reported the details of our walk around
Quedlinburg
old town, that I paid for lunch for everyone (I put it on my expenses – it was fairly legitimate), and that afterwards I insisted we drove back via Magdeburg to take a look at the cathedral.

While we were there, however, she noted that ‘M disappeared for about ten minutes. No explanation for this was given.’ Col Lehmann has put a large felt-tip double exclamation mark next to this. And he would be right. I had indeed been ‘up to no good’: my detour via Magdeburg was not just to see the cathedral, but because I had been told there was an active branch of the Swords to Ploughshares movement in town, centred on the priest’s house a few hundred metres away. I had snuck off to take a look and chat with a couple of kids who told me I would be best going to a different church. They told me the address and tried to draw a rough map.

Back in the car ‘Pauline’ noted a crude sketch on a piece of paper and reported that I asked her if she knew a ‘Heimholzer Strasse’ in Magdeburg where there was supposed to be an ‘interesting old church’. She told me no, but then adds, ‘It came up that there was a Helmholz Strasse’. Her switch to the anonymous third party is unsurprising: it was her son Jochen who told me. We drove there and located the building the lads outside the priest’s house had directed me to, the St Michael Community Centre. ‘Pauline’ reported: ‘M parked about fifty metres away and went off with his wife, leaving us in the car for about half an hour. Then he returned and we
continued
the journey to Berlin without further interruption.’ All true. I had for the first time made contact with a Swords to Ploughshare ‘chapter’, if such a word could be used for such a diffuse
agglomeration
of individuals, outside Berlin. No doubt ‘Pauline’ and the Stasi would have considered it ‘hostile’ behaviour, possibly worse, but to me it was just journalism. If ever a serious opposition movement was to develop in East Germany I wanted to be in touch from the ground floor, and similarly if ever the ‘organs of the state’ decided to clamp down on these disaffected young people by imposing jail sentences on them, I wanted to be sure their friends had ways of getting that information into the Western press. My only regret in hindsight, is that perhaps I should have anticipated that Jochen’s mum wasn’t just the nice old lady she seemed to be.