The File (7 page)

This time, however, my diary has more. Back in the communal flat in the Traunsteinerstrasse, I wrote down
some impressions of “the office, the firm, the service … The jolly secretaries and messengers. The doctor, [looking] like Malcolm Muggeridge … counselling a member on his alcohol problem. Amateurishness. Calculated shabbiness.” “Briefing,” I note, “with the rather absurd—but no doubt sharp—‘Betty.’” It seems Betty, “looking slightly
scatty,”
asked about my parents and brother: “Are they
conscious?”

I register the attractions: “the GG element” (GG for Graham Greene), “the mysteries. The sense of belonging to an élite. The challenge of the game.” But I am also very uneasy. Noting the suave, civilized manner of the officer who gave me lunch, I comment, “Perhaps this is the (certainly less extreme)
English
version of
Goethe Oak”
And then, with reference to my proposed journey through the Soviet bloc, his “sinister and alarming phrase (let fall over the excellent Game Pie) … ‘we would rather have you under our control.’” The entry concludes: “Returning on the plane, reading Bonhoeffer, discovering—rediscovering—the intellectual appetite, I am almost decided in my own mind which way to jump.”

However, the last document in my folder is the copy of a letter, datelined Traunsteinerstrasse, June 21, 1979, in which I merely write, “I should like to postpone joining the service until September 1980.” A cautious move, still keeping the options open. But then I set off to drive for two months throughout the Soviet bloc—under no one’s control. The last entry I can find on the subject in my diary is from November 1979, and reads: “‘We want you under our control.’ So no.” I had, therefore, clearly decided against joining before I went to East Berlin.

In Britain, ties with the secret service have long had a slightly risqué glamour. Well-known writers, biographers and historians, have had well-known past connections with the service, from Somerset Maugham to Alistair Horne and Hugh Trevor-Roper. That was part of the attraction to the undergraduate me. But coming to it now through the Stasi file, and after years of immersion in Central Europe, I am slightly less amused. Even though I never joined, I imagine trying to explain to a Czech or Polish friend, for whom “secret service” immediately sounds like “secret police,” how I could even have contemplated it; the difficulty, the near impossibility, of making them truly understand how it all looked then, to an Oxford undergraduate from the strange breeding ground of an English public school. Just as they would find it difficult to explain some things to me, without traveling back far into the half-forgotten realms of childhood.

In the beginning … was it Kipling’s
Kim
, read as a child? Perish the cliché, but it may be true. The romance of the “great game” on the northwest frontier of India certainly seemed closer to me because my maternal grandfather had served the empire in the Indian Civil Service. When I visited them, my grandparents would enchant me with their own tales from the Raj: the jungle rides on elephants, a tiger jumping over the lane as they walked to the Club.

Then, most certainly, there were my father’s memories of war, his stories of landing with the first wave on the Normandy beaches in 1944, my mother taking me aside—aged what? six? seven?—and showing me the citation for his Military Cross: “… in the bitter and continuous
fighting in the Normandy bridgehead his coolness and disregard of danger were quickly apparent…. His conduct, bravery and devotion to duty throughout the whole campaign are worthy of the highest praise….” For all their formulaic stiffness, the words still move me deeply.

There follows the “character-building” experience of being sent away from home at the age of eight to traditional boys-only English boarding schools. The remembrance-day service at St. Edmund’s; the cold steps up to Chapel at Sherborne, with the names of the war dead chiseled into the walls; daily imbrication with the rhetoric of patriotism, service, sacrifice; real-life war heroes coming back for commemoration. Add Kipling, again—“He travels fastest who travels alone;” ripping yarns by John Buchan; even, in a curious way, the adolescent Tolkien phase; and just a little, I suppose, of Ian Fleming’s two-dimensional, cardboard Bond. Add, too, the everyday laws of survival in boarding-school life, which required you to learn, very young, both self-reliance and the habits of secrecy, like Kim.

How to explain any of this to someone who never experienced it?

I can well understand how people came to join. Given the nature of the secret world, only they can say what it was really like in there—and they are not allowed to. Still, even without knowing exactly what I missed, or avoided, I am very relieved that I did not. I would fight against communism, but in my own way, as a writer.

I then had no further contact at all with MI6; or at
least, I should more cautiously say, no conscious contact. From time to time, as I traveled around different countries, I casually reflected that the Nigel or Dick or Catherine from the British embassy, who had just so genially offered me lunch or a drink, was perhaps a spy. Doubtless one or two of them were, but they were certainly not telling me—and, anyway, I found it much more interesting to talk to the locals.

Yet such is the myth that surrounds the British secret service that British journalists, writers and scholars working abroad are very often thought to be spies. Those German journalists in West Berlin suspected that James Fenton, of all people, might be a spy, and it was not just the Stasi who suspected me. So, for example, did Polish friends I made in Berlin. Meanwhile James and I sat in a bar idly wondering whether Stephen X. or Kevin Y. did not, perhaps, do a little work on the side for MI6. In many cases, this was probably idle gossip, put about by some hostile agency or malicious rival, or just the product of imaginations stirred by the myth. But in some cases it must have been true. Some “journalists” and “students” were more than they seemed.

So I am not surprised or outraged that the Stasi decided to take a closer look at me. What is shocking is the way they were spying on their own people and getting them to spy on one another: that vast army of surveillance, intimidation and repression, in which my own “Schuldt,” “Smith” and “Michaela” were just a few foot soldiers. But the mere fact of this investigation of me is, in itself, still just about within the range of a “normal” security service’s work. In a lecture delivered in 1994,
shortly after I started work on this book, the then head of Britain’s security service (MI5), Mrs. Stella Rimington, observed: “Some governments will try every means—including enrolling their students at British universities—to bypass international agreements to obtain what they want. We are now working closely with others to identify and prevent their efforts.”

Moreover, while I had no secret agenda for the British government, I did have a secret agenda of my own. Using a pseudonym in
The Spectator
, and obviously not telling the East German authorities what I was up to, I was collecting material about the East German dictatorship. And the more I learned, the more I disliked it. Was I making secret preparations for attempted literary subversion? I certainly was.

To a communist state like East Germany, built on total control of the media, censorship and organized lying, any probing research or critical journalism was subversive. Western journalists were routinely covered by Stasi counterintelligence department II/13. Partly this was because they were looking for spies under journalistic cover, but it was also because, for the Stasi, the distinction between journalist and spy was not clear-cut. For them, a Western journalist and a Western spy were both agents of Western intelligence-gathering, and both alike threats to the security of the communist system.

Of course, all governments are always tempted to stifle awkward inquiry and to demonize critics as “subversive.” Western governments often erred in this direction during the Cold War. Still, what I was doing in East Germany would never have been considered “subversion” in West Germany, Britain or America. The difference was
not, to be sure, between the pure white of a completely free press and the solid black of a wholly unfree one, but between the light gray of the largely free and the dark gray of the largely unfree. In East Germany, that gray was pretty dark.

For me, unlike for the Stasi, there is a very clear line between working secretly as a spy for a government and working (sometimes secretively) as a writer. Yet there are still disconcerting affinities between the two pursuits. The proximity is even indicated in the language. The title of the West German secret service, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, translates literally as “federal news service.” Conversely, some of the earliest German newspapers were called
Intelligenzblätter
, “intelligence sheets,” and the first issue of the nineteenth-century
Spectator
proclaimed that “the principal object of a newspaper is to convey intelligence.” As the man from
Spekta
, I was a spy for “intelligence” in that older sense. A spy for the reader.

I was far from alone in this. Many journalists writing about dictatorships do similar things and most journalists do some of them. And not just journalists. Writers of other kinds also find themselves in this territory. In his autobiography, Graham Greene reflects that “every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.” But how unscrupulous may he be? What means are justified to serve the end of “literature”?

T
HE EVENING BEFORE
I
FINALLY PASSED THROUGH THE
Wall I threw a party for the friends and acquaintances I had made in West Berlin, opening the high double doors that linked the rooms of the flat at Uhlandstrasse 127. According to my diary, I finally went to bed at a quarter to five on Monday morning, January 7, 1980, got up again at a quarter past six, finished packing, wrote a few last letters and then drove through Checkpoint Charlie and the East German frontier post (“all smiles”), along a snowbound Unter den Linden, past the Alexanderplatz and up the Schönhauser Allee to my new home in the working-class borough of Prenzlauer Berg, Erich-Weinert-Strasse 24.

In the file, IM “Schuldt” reminds me how it looked. Typing neatly, single-space, he records: “It is a relatively small room (for an older building) with a window giving onto the street. The door to the room is closed from inside with a security lock that appears to have been fitted only recently. Apart from a bed, a table and a pair of chairs, one notices above all a large sideboard on which the tenant has—as I discovered—mainly put books. Newspapers were laid out on the table (I noticed, above
all, several copies of
Sonntag)
on which marginalia bore witness to intensive reading. Beside them were several dictionaries.” What he didn’t remark upon, perhaps because he was so used to it, was the general dinginess, the ocher walls, the brown linoleum on the floor, the cheap plastic lampshade and the freezing winter cold.

In this room, with the dark bulbous sideboard, I lived for nine months, leaving East Berlin on October 7, 1980, the thirty-first anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. The anniversary was, as usual, marked by a military parade, which—as usual—the Western allies vainly protested was in violation of the four-power status of Berlin, agreed with the Russians in 1945 and still theoretically in force. On my way to watch the parade, I met a cheerful black American GI wandering across the Alexanderplatz with a huge teddy bear, a souvenir of the Moscow Olympics. While giggling Young Pioneers—the communist girl guides and boy scouts—handed chocolates and flowers to the soldiers of the “Friedrich Engels” Guards Regiment, I saw a British officer in khaki uniform and green beret leaping around with a portable stepladder, filming the whole affair. Later, the Engels Guards marched off with carnations stuck in their rifle barrels.

The history books record that the period from January to October 1980 saw a further intensification of the East-West conflict. In May, West Germany reluctantly joined the American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics in protest against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—although the American message had apparently not got through to that GI on the Alexanderplatz. At the end of August, a wave of strikes in Poland
culminated in the deputy prime minister’s signing an agreement with the strikers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. This agreement accepted the workers’ right to form independent trade unions, a concession unprecedented in the history of communism. The new union would be called Solidarity. Some writers have referred to “the making of the Second Cold War”—a striking phrase, but the Cold War had never really ceased.

My own life now began to engage directly with this outward history. First in East Germany, then in Poland during the Solidarity revolution, public and private intertwined. The physical distance from my large flat in the West to my small room in the East was less than ten miles; the psychological distance was several thousand. I popped over to the West quite often: my file records the precise date and time of every single border crossing. West Berlin friends telephoned or came to see me in my dingy quarters.

Yet I find myself earnestly noting, just ten days after going to live in the East: “I have something more than an indifference to [illegible] contacts with my Westberlin life…. It is an
active aversion
. Why? Because most of their concerns are (relatively) not
important
. It is
important
that human beings are diminished and mangled in the name of Equality and Peace and Justice. It is
important
that someone is sent to prison for years simply for wanting to leave the state in which he happens to have been born. It is important what happens in Afghanistan.” And a month later, after a telephone call from Irene: “Ach,
that
world, of telephone ‘relationships’ and eternal ‘relationship’ problems.”

In East Berlin, I was still meant to be working on my
thesis about Berlin in the Third Reich. The file contains references written by my Oxford mentors, Tim Mason and Tony Nicholls, for the British Council, which had arranged my stay as the first visiting research student under the new cultural agreement. Tim Mason was an inspiring teacher and, most unusual among Oxford historians, a Marxist, though of a distinctly unconventional, English-empirical kind. Indeed, he plainly did not qualify as a Marxist in the Stasi’s judgment, for he is assessed in my file as writing “from a bourgeois democratic position.” On the wall of his room in St. Peter’s College hung a poster showing Marx and Engels declaring “Everyone’s talking about the weather—we don’t!” This perfectly summed up Tim Mason’s bottomless contempt for English middle-class triviality, his high seriousness and painfully acute puritan work ethic. Tragically, he would take his own life some years later.