The File (6 page)

In James’s case, I don’t think ideological worries contributed much to his relative lack of interest in the East. When we talk about it again today, he reminds me that
The Guardian
had an Eastern Europe correspondent who
protected her territory more jealously than Leonid Brezhnev. East Germany was part of her patch. If James had tried to cross the Wall she would probably have shot to kill.

Born in 1949, James was an English sixty-eighter. I, six years younger, was not. The ideological evaluation in my Stasi opening report—“bourgeois-liberal”—was just about right. I cared passionately for what I saw, with a rather simplistic romantic patriotism, as the British heritage of individual liberty. And I wanted this liberty for other people. My intellectual heroes were Macaulay, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,”
I used to say, meaning an Isaiah Berliner. With these personal politics, I was never likely to take a sympathetic view of East Germany. But liberal anti-communism was not the primary source of my fascination with the East. I was fascinated because here, in East Germany, people were actually
living
those endlessly difficult choices between collaboration with and resistance to a dictatorship. Here I could pursue the Stauffenberg/Speer question in, as it were, real time.

Here too I found that intimate proximity of high European culture and systematic inhumanity that George Steiner identified in his
In Bluebeard’s Castle
, a book that made a great impression on me when I read it at the age of seventeen. In my diary I called this phenomenon Goethe Oak, after the ancient oak tree on the Ettersberg, near Weimar, under which Goethe had supposedly written his sublime “Wanderer’s Night Song,” but which was then enclosed on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Goethe and Buchenwald, the highest and the lowest in human history, together in one
place. A place called Weimar. A place called Germany. A place called Europe.

This fascination with dictatorship and resistance, with the extremes of good and evil, civilization and barbarism, also led me further into communist-ruled Europe. I traveled through Albania in the summer of 1978, on a Progressive Tour with seven Marxist-Leninist teachers from Leeds, a Scottish engineer and a former imperial policeman called Mr. Godsave. Over a cup of spirit-laced coffee known in communist Albania as a Lumumba—after the Congolese independence leader, Patrice Lumumba—Mr. Godsave confided in me that he had now visited every communist country in the world. Why? “Must get to know the enemy.”

The next summer I drove through all six countries of what was then called Eastern Europe. In Poland I discovered the spirit of resistance that I had long been seeking. outwardly poor, dirty, neglected, though still with pockets of ancient beauty, the country was made magical by its people, now supercharged by the recent, incredible pilgrimage of a Polish pope. In Kraków, over a beef dish presented as “Nelson’s bowels,” giggling, indomitable Roza Woźniakowska told me how, as archbishop of Kraków, the future pope had ordered that a lecture on “Orwell’s
1984
and contemporary Poland,” banned by the authorities, be delivered in church. In Warsaw, the irrepressible Wladyslauw Bartoszewski, who had survived both Auschwitz and Stalinist prisons, informed me at the top of his voice over lunch in a crowded restaurant: “We count on the collapse of the Russian empire in the twenty-first century!” What a contrast to craven East Germany.

Returning to West Berlin, I found that James had decided to leave. He asked if I would like to take over the lease of his flat at Uhlandstrasse 127. Although the war had disfigured the outer façade, now just an ugly cement rendering with strange teardrop gouges for decoration, it was a fine old place inside. You walked up another marble staircase, under Wilhelmine plaster busts and a flower-strewing cherub, to a gray-painted wooden door. This opened onto a long corridor, wide enough to take a grand piano and perhaps fifteen feet high. There were two smaller rooms off to the left, then three beautiful, large, high-windowed rooms, each connected to the next by a handsomely carpentered, high double door. The previous tenants had been political refugees from Iran. They had now gone back to their—as they thought—liberated homeland, but above the big double bed there was still a lurid poster proclaiming “Death to the Shah!”

How could I resist such a place? So I took it on, saying farewell to my little commune in the Traunsteinerstrasse. The diary records my last sighting of Bernd, setting off for a business trip to East Germany. Although theoretically convinced that the German Democratic Republic was the better Germany, Bernd did not much like going there. On this occasion, his car was loaded with cans, jars, bottles, tubes and packets of Western provisions. “You know the food over there is so bad,” he explained, “and the
service
…” Good-bye, comrade.

The Uhlandstrasse flat was wildly expensive for a student. In fact, ever since I came to Berlin I had been enjoyably but rapidly spending a small inheritance left me by my paternal grandfather, a sometime president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, whom I knew
only from the stern black-and-white portrait photograph on the piano at my grandmother’s house. I somehow don’t think he would have approved of the fruits of his Victorian thrift being spent in Ax Bax, Romy Haags and Foofie’s, let alone in Warsaw or Tirana.

The letters from my bank manager were now becoming a little stiff. To retrench a little, I started filling the flat with subtenants. First, in the two front rooms, came Isabella, the German girlfriend of my American flatmate from the Traunsteinerstrasse. Then came Daniel Johnson, palely handsome, Nietzsche in hand. He would burst through the double doors of a morning, beaming, to tell me he had located another German pessimist. Finally, we took in Mel, a Polish sculptor, and his wife, Dot. They had fled Poland, leaving everything behind, and sought political asylum in Germany. “Poland good, Poland Communist bad!” Dot explained in her pidgin German. I knew exactly what she meant. Drinking brandy for breakfast, and reading the bureaucratic German of the terms for a sculpture competition, Mel suddenly exclaimed,
“Luftwaffe London!”
The sculpture he submitted for the competition showed a man and a woman clinging together, their backs turned against a frightening new world. Mel and Dot. Down the road, there were still the cafés and the pretty girls, whom Daniel would startle with remarks like “Have you noticed that Steiner uses the word ‘moment’ in the Hegelian sense?”

At the end of 1979 I prepared to move from this cheerful tower of Babel to East Berlin, where I had been offered a place as a research student attached to the Humboldt University, under a new cultural agreement recently signed between Britain and East Germany.

B
Y THIS TIME
, O
XFORD AND
L
ONDON SEEMED VERY
far away. Occasionally I would fly back to Britain for a few days, visit my parents, lunch at
The Spectator
, go to the theater, have dinner with friends and struggle, as on so many subsequent returns, to answer the impossible, only half-interested question: “What’s it like … ?” I would take the train to Oxford, talk to my supervisor and buy some books at Blackwell’s, then return to London to sit the Civil Service exams and, on a subsequent visit, to be interviewed for the foreign service.

Now foreign service normally means diplomatic service. But in Britain it can also mean something slightly different: the secret service. Here’s something I had not thought about for years until I set out to investigate the Stasi file. I have to dig deep into my memory, into my diaries, even into a dusty old suitcase stashed away under the eaves of our house, to recover the details and to reconstruct that distant me.

When I was nineteen or twenty years old, and an undergraduate at Oxford, I was quite interested in the subject of spying. I was inspired by the true stories of daring exploits in the Second World War. Thirty years after the
end of the war, the whole extraordinary history of British espionage at that time was at last being written, especially by some of the Oxford dons who had been involved in it. I had a growing sense that there was still a kind of war on, against Soviet communism rather than Nazi Germany. I was intrigued by the life stories of the Englishmen who spied for the Soviet Union: Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the still-unidentified “fourth man.” I also loved the novels of Graham Greene—and spying was the main industry of Greeneland.

I used to talk about all this for hours with one particular undergraduate friend, over coffee in my rooms looking onto Broad Street. His father, I later learned, worked for MI5, the British domestic security service. Not that this was an obsessive interest for me, as it clearly was for Graham Greene, but it was one among many, besides theater, modern architecture, literature and politics.

Then I have a picture in my memory of the front quad of Exeter College on a beautiful sunlit morning. I am approached, somewhere on the Chapel side, by the rector of the college, a large, genial, tweedy man. What exactly he said, in his confidential rumble, I cannot remember, but the gist of it must have been that he had heard that I might be interested in this sort of thing and should he perhaps have a word with someone in London….

Today, this seems to me more like the opening scene of a film than anything that actually happened in my own life.
“The sunlit quadrangle of an Oxford college, green turf, golden sandstone walls. A tweed-suited don walks around the quad. He stops a fresh-faced undergraduate beneath the Chapel. We hear their parting words …
‘a word with someone
in London….’ ‘Thank you, Rector …’
Cut to a bare office in London …”

In a folder buried in a suitcase under the eaves of our house I discover a letter dated June 8, 1976. The letter-head gives the anonymous-sounding title of a section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office not listed in any official publications and an address in central London. “I understand that you would be interested to learn about the possibilities of a career in Departments for which [the section] has a recruiting responsibility.” Encloses a form, suggests “an exploratory talk.” “Should you have to make a special journey to London I will of course refund your second-class rail fare.” Signed with a name: a real name that I find again in the 1995
Diplomatic Service List
.

Now I see a bare office, a faintly shabby, balding man, with a scar on his chin. Of the conversation I remember only that he made a great point of impressing upon me that a career in this service would bring no outward status or honors, no titles or gongs. At the time—aged twenty-one—I found this merely funny. I still find it funny, but I can now imagine slightly better what it might feel like to be a middle-aged member of that service, ostensibly a diplomat, watching your perhaps less able contemporaries, the proper diplomats, making their steady progress up the hierarchy—counsellor, minister, ambassador—and up the Order of St. Michael and St. George: CMG, KCMG, GCMG, or, as the old joke has it, Call Me God, Kindly Call Me God, God Calls Me God. I look at my interviewer’s own entry in the 1995
List
, and find five successive postings as first secretary. Nobody calls him God.

I was anyway too young for the service, and went back to studying history at Oxford. According to my dusty folder, I reapplied shortly before leaving for Berlin in the summer of 1978. I even have a photocopy of my application forms. Under “Main Interests (political and social activity, principal reading, arts, sciences)” I find “International affairs; the two Germanys; Eastern Europe … Principal reading: Current affairs & contemporary history; modern European literature; English literature and general criticism; press.” I also confess my membership in the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, a mildly fellow-traveling organization that I had joined simply because I was interested in China. (My “little red book” of quotations from Chairman Mao still sits on the shelf.) As character referees, I name the rector, of course, then my great-uncle, Sir Hugh Linstead, a retired MP, and my godfather, a barrister, Queen’s Counsel and soon to be a High Court judge. Eminently respectable, respectably eminent.

When I sat the civil service examinations in autumn 1978 (“‘constructive thinking’ accounts for only 10 percent of the marks,” my diary notes), and then went for the so-called Civil Service Selection Board in early 1979, it was for both the diplomatic and the secret branches of the foreign service that I was applying. These were two of several options I was considering, as many recent graduates do, until life’s die is cast. I then flew back from Berlin for one day, on May 17, 1979, to have an extended interview for the secret service. My diary notes only “
2½
hours. The Interview. A great game,” and that I then returned, via an exhibition at the Royal Academy and a telephone call to Melvin Lasky (editor of
Encounter
and a veteran cold warrior), to Berlin, “disturbed by the Interview.”

Thinking back, I see a room somewhere in Whitehall—deep carpet, red leather, dark wood, some men sitting behind a table. Among them I recognize a senior Oxford history don. All I recall of the actual interview is a passage where I was asked to pretend to be a British “diplomat” meeting a possible contact in a restaurant or bar in Barcelona. The contact was played by one of the men behind the table, and the only thing I distinctly remember of this make-believe conversation is my saying, at frequent intervals, “Have another drink.” This seemed to please the board.

In my folder, however, I find a further scrawled note on this meeting. The note is partly illegible, but besides mention of “the Barcelona spiel,” I find something about Libya and “views on Eurocommunism,” and then the stark entry: “Betraying a Friend.” Was I asked the old question about choosing between betraying a friend and betraying your country, or what?

From my diary, it seems that I flew back from Berlin on June 11, 1979, for a medical check and security examination in the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, often known as MI6), then an anonymous office block just south of the river Thames, and for lunch at a restaurant called South of the River. Of this visit I remember little except the reception area and offices that were remarkable because they were so unremarkable. Gray filing cabinets, crowded desks, nondescript men in suits: like the housing department of a borough council.