“Too bloody right, I would,” he said, then took me out for a slap-up lunch.
Later in September, I packed my traps, had a week’s leave with my folks in Kent, and left by train for Paris and Berlin. Most of the passengers alighted when it stopped in West Berlin. I remained seated and watched the Wall drift beneath as the train rolled into the Communist East.
At the Ostbahnhof station, I disembarked, and the man I was replacing, Jack Altman, was there to greet me. He had had a year of it and was yearning to get the hell out.
He had a car, which I would take over, and a spacious flat-cum-office in the Schönhauser Allee, which I would also inhabit. After lunch, he took me to meet the hatchet-faced officials with whom I would have to dea
l. I noticed that he spoke good German but would never pass for one. In front of officialdom, I made heavy weather of vocabulary and grammar, and affected a clumsy accent. I noticed the officials relaxed at that. This one would be no problem.
He introduced me to the office secretary, Fräulein Erdmute Behrendt, an East German lady who clearly would also be under constant surveillance by the police and the SSD, the formidable Stasi. Two days later, he was gone.
BIG BROTHER
It takes time to accustom oneself to being under surveillance morning, noon, and night. Some people are badly unsettled to know that their office and apartment are heavily bugged; to see the figures in long raincoats pretending to be window-shopping on the streets as they follow you around; to watch the black car with darkened windows moving into position in the rearview mirror on the highway.
My own recourse was to take it as lightheartedly as possible, to realize that even the goons coming up behind are human beings, albeit only just, and we all have a job to do.
It did not take long to find the main “bug” in my office. There was a television, a four-valve model that happened to have five. When I removed the fifth, there was a television repairman on the doorstep within an hour. Before answering the bell, I replaced the fifth valve, then went to make a coffee in the kitchen while he fiddled inside the cabinet. A very puzzled technician left an hour later with profuse apologies for the disturbance.
Opposite the office was an apartment block and, right opposite my own windows, a single black aperture that was never closed and whose lights never came on. The poor mutts sitting beside their telescope must have nearly frozen to death in winter when the night temperature went down to ten below. At Christmas I sent over a bottle of good scotch whiskey and a carton of Rothmans King Size, asking the concierge to send them up to the number I figured had to correspond to the window. That night there was a brief flicker from a butane lighter, and that was all. But it was not all fun and games, and yanking the tiger’s tail needed a bit of caution.
One of the nastiest pieces of work in the regime was the press secretary to the Politburo, a certain Kurt Blecha. He had perhaps the falsest smile on earth. But I knew a few things about Master Blecha. One was his birthday, and another was that in the thirties, he had been a red-hot member of the Nazi Party.
Captured in 1943 on the Eastern Front, he had taken no time to convert to communism, being plucked from the freezing prisoner-of-war camp and installed in the retinue of exiled German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Blecha returned with the Communist veteran on the tails of the Red Army in 1945 to become part of the puppet government, the most slavish of all the satellite regimes.
At Christmas, Easter, and on his birthday, I sent him an anonymous greeting card at his office. It was bought in East Berlin but typed on a machine in the West Berlin office of Reuters, in case my own machine was checked. It wished him all best, with his Nazi Party membership number writ large and purporting to come from “your old and faithful Kamaraden.” I never saw him open them, but I hope they worried the hell out of him.
I also learned how to shake the Stasi tail. As the Reuters correspondent, I was allowed through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin, but the secret police tail was not. They always pulled over to the curb as I approached the barrier. Once through, I could race down the Kurfürstendamm, from there to the Heerstrasse and on to the border leading back into the republic of East Germany at Dreilinden.
It was sometimes thought in the West that Berlin was a border city between East and West. Not so; it was buried eighty miles inside East Germany, with West Berlin surrounded on all sides. Head west out of West Berlin through the Dreilinden crossing point, and you were on the autobahn to West Germany, which was also allowed. Once on it, I could leave the autobahn at the first off-ramp and disappear into the countryside. With a set of shabby local clothes and an East Berlin–registered Wartburg car, eating at roadside halts and sleeping in the car, I could stay off radar for a couple of days.
There were good stories to be had once outside the cage. In theory, everyone was so happy in the workers’ paradise that there could not be any dissent to report. The truth was that resentment among workers and students seethed under the surface, occasionally breaking out in strikes and student marches—always short-lived and punished as the Volkspolizei, the People’s Police known as VoPos, struck back.
On returning, I would be summoned immediately to the office of Kurt Blecha, who hid his rage behind his smile.
“Where have you been, Herr Forsyth? We were worried about you,” was his unconvincing ploy. They felt forced to maintain the fiction that I was free to go anywhere I wanted in their peace-loving freedom state, and being followed was out of the question.
When asked for an explanation, I claimed I was a keen student of church architecture and had been visiting and admiring some of the ecclesiastical gems in East Germany. Back at the flat, I had books to prove it. Blecha assured me this was a highly laudable pastime, but the next time I left would I please tell them so that they could make introductions?
We neither of us believed a word of it, but I kept playing the bumbling ass and he kept beaming his crocodile smile. As for my filed stories of unrest among the supposedly content proletariat, if the regime wondered where I got them from, I let them wonder. I arrived in East Berlin in early October. In late November, the world was hit by a thunderbolt.
THE DEATH OF KENNEDY
It is said that everyone on earth alive at the time recalls where they were and what they were doing when news came through that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
I happened to be dining in West Berlin with a stunning German girl called Annette. We were at the Pariser Café, just around the corner from the Reuters office. It was full, and behind the clatter and chatter there was Muzak playing. Out of nowhere, it stopped and an urgent-sounding voice barked:
“Wir unterbrechen unser Programm für eine wichtige Meldung: auf den Präsidenten Kennedy wurde geschossen.”
There was a brief lull in the conversation as the Muzak resumed. It must have been a glitch in the music system. A mistake, a joke. Then the voice came back.
“Wir unterbrechen unser Programm für eine wichtige Meldung: auf den Präsidenten Kennedy wurde geschossen.”
Then the world went crazy.
Men stood up and swore repeatedly, women screamed. Tables were overturned. Kennedy had been there in June, speaking at the Wall. It is hard to describe to those who came later how he was hero-worshipped, and in this city of all cities. For me there was one priority above all: to get back to the office and seek to discover East Germany’s official reaction. I threw a handful of West marks on the table, ran for the car, and drove through a panicking city to the Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.
The checkpoint was in the American sector of the four-power-divided city, and in their glass booth the GIs were bowed over their radio. You could have driven a herd of buffalo past them and they would not have noticed. The American barrier was up as always. I drove past it and swerved to the East German control sheds. They, too, had heard.