The File (2 page)

Daniel Johnson, son of the writer Paul Johnson, is today an established figure on the London
Times
. He was then a fiercely intellectual Cambridge postgraduate, working on a doctorate about the history of German pessimism—of which he was always delighted to discover another specimen. We shared a spacious late-nineteenth-century flat in the borough of Wilmersdorf, Uhlandstrasse 127. Daniel had forgotten his keys.

The “maze” and “columns” were, I presume, those of the regimented torchbearing marchers of the Free German Youth, the gloriously misnamed communist youth organization. As for “her political activity”: Claudia belonged to the instantly recognizable generation of 1968. That evening she told me how they used to chant at the riot police a jingle that neatly captures the ’68 mixture of political and sexual protest. In free translation it goes: “Out here they are pigs/In bed they are figs.”

I last caught a glimpse of her, sometime later, in the graveyard of the Berlin-Dahlem village church, at the funeral of the student leader Rudi Dutschke. She was still wearing her red beret. Or have I just imagined that final detail?

The Stasi’s observation report, my diary entry: two versions of one day in a life. The “object” described with the cold outward eye of the secret policeman, and my own subjective, allusive, emotional self-description. But what a gift to memory is a Stasi file. Far better than a madeleine.

T
HE
“OPK”
ON THE FRONT COVER STANDS FOR
Operative Personenkontrolle
, Operational Person Control. According to the 1985 edition of the
Dictionary of Political-Operational Work
, prepared by the Juridical Higher School of the Ministry for State Security, an Operational Person Control was to identify anyone who might have committed an offense according to the Criminal Code or who might have a “hostile-negative attitude” or who might be exploited for hostile purposes by the enemy. The central purpose of an OPK, the dictionary explains, is to answer the question “Who’s who?” Each file begins with an “opening report” and a “plan of action.”

My opening report dates from March 1981. Prepared by one Lieutenant Wendt, it gives my personal details, notes that I have been studying in West Berlin since 1978 and lived from January to June 1980—actually it was October—in “the capital of the GDR.” (The authorities of the German Democratic Republic always insisted on using this formula for East Berlin.) I travel frequently from West Berlin to East Germany and Poland. I have repeatedly “made contact with operationally
interesting persons.” Consequently “there are grounds for suspecting that G. [for Garton Ash] has deliberately exploited his official functions as research student and/or journalist to pursue intelligence activities.”

Lieutenant Wendt then reviews the information that counterintelligence department II/9 has pulled together for this purpose from all the other departments of the ministry. Raw material follows later in the file: observation reports; summaries of intelligence from the files on my friend Werner Krätschell, a Protestant priest, and on the British embassy; photocopies of articles I wrote about Poland for the West German news magazine
Der Spiegel;
copies of my own Polish notes and papers, photographed during a secret search of my luggage at Schönefeld airport, from where I was flying to Warsaw; even copies of the references written by my Oxford tutors for the British Council. In all, there are 325 pages.

Wendt’s report pays special attention to information supplied by the Stasi’s own informers, known as
Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter
—literally “unofficial collaborators”—or IM for short. They were subdivided into several categories: security, special, operative, conspirative, even the informer for running other informers. Since 1989, the initials IM have entered the German language. SS is the synonym in every European language for the loud, violent, outright bestiality of Nazism. IM has become, in German, the synonym for the routine, bureaucratic forms of infiltration, intimidation and collaboration that characterized the German communist dictatorship; the quieter corruption of mature totalitarianism. In the early 1990s it was a regular occurrence for a prominent East German politician, academic, journalist or priest to be
identified through the Stasi files as an IM, and to disappear from public life as a result. IM is the black spot.

But first they have to be identified. For the secret police assigned aliases to their informers as well as to those they pursued. In fact, most informers did it themselves, for one of the rituals of initiation as a regular IM was to choose your own secret name. It emerged after unification that one Lutz Bertram, a well-known, blind East German disc jockey, had informed for the Stasi as IM “Romeo.” If he and I had met, I suppose Romeo could have informed on Romeo.

My opening report summarizes the information gathered by IM “Smith,” IM “Schuldt,” and especially by IM “Michaela” and her husband, KP (Contact Person) “Georg,” previously married to Alice, “known as ‘Red Lizzy.’” Lieutenant Wendt notes that “Red Lizzy” had herself earlier been married to Kim Philby, Britain’s most famous Soviet spy.

He finds that “G. works purposefully and with scholarly thoroughness” but displays “a bourgeois-liberal attitude and no commitment to the working-class.” “Outwardly G. Makes a pretty casual impression and overall seems ‘a typical British intellectual.’ (The strange compliment is from IM “Smith.”) However, I have sought contact with people who could be of interest for intelligence purposes and given contradictory accounts of what I am doing. On my journeys to Poland I almost certainly “maintain connections with antisocialist forces.” So they need to find out more, with a view to possible prosecution under Article 97 of the Criminal Code. Article 97 says that anyone who collects or passes on “information or objects that are to be kept secret” to a foreign power,
or a secret service, or other unspecified “foreign organizations” is to be punished with a jail sentence of “not less than five years.” “In especially serious cases a lifelong jail sentence or a death sentence may be passed.”

The “plan of action” that follows has four parts. First, there is the deployment of IMs, starting with “Smith”: “Taking account of the subjective and objective possibilities of the IM, conditions for the resumption of the lost contact with Garton Ash are to be created.” A written proposal is to be produced by April 15, 1981. Responsible: Lieutenant Wendt. “Schuldt” and “Michaela” are also to be reactivated: written proposal from Lieutenant Wendt by May 1. Furthermore, “an IM of the HVA I—adviser of G. at the H[umboldt] U[niversity] B[erlin]—” is to be brought in to “the operational treatment.”

The HVA was the foreign intelligence service of East Germany. Its full name was
Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung
, which, since the more usual meaning of
Aufklärung
is Enlightenment, could be translated as the Department of Enlightenment. Headed by Markus “Mischa” Wolf, it was famously fictionalized as “the Abteilung” in John le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
. Its first department, HVA I, was responsible for spying on the West German government in Bonn.

Next the plan turns to “operational observation and investigation.” The measures to be taken include further investigation of Mr. and Mrs. Kreisel, the couple from whom the Humboldt University had rented my room with a view. A third category, “further measures,” gives instructions for a “search” by Main Department VI, responsible for controlling cross-frontier traffic, and for
department M to begin a “post-control.” “West Berlin address of G.,” it says, but this presumably refers to letters coming from my West Berlin flat, since only in exceptional circumstances was the Stasi able to open someone’s post in the West. And then, again for Lieutenant Wendt, the task of compiling a report on whether to turn this OPK investigation into a full-blown Operational Case, or OV. OV was the top category of operation, covering known opponents and critics of the regime. My friend Werner Krätschell, for example, appears here as OV “Beech-tree.”

Finally there is “cooperation with other service units.” Here coordination is proposed with department XX/4 (charged with infiltrating the churches) in respect of my contact with the Reverend Beech-tree. Inquiries are to be made “to the Soviet security organs about possible current interest of the British Secret Service in information on the Philby case.” “Concrete coordination” is to be pursued with AG4 to see if it would be possible to “attach” informers to me during my visits to Poland. AG4 was a Stasi working group established to follow the alarming development of the Solidarity revolution in Poland. Responsible: Major Risse.

Signed by Lieutenant Wendt, and countersigned by Lieutenant Colonel Kaulfuss, head of II/9, the department covering all West European intelligence services.

So that was their “plan of action,” then. My plan of action, now, is to investigate their investigation of me. I shall pursue their inquiry through this file, try to track down both the informers and the officers on my case, consult other files, compare the Stasi record with my
own memories, with the diary and notes I kept at the time, and with the political history I have since written about this period. And I shall see what I find.

The cumbersomely named Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic is usually called the Gauck Authority for short, after Joachim Gauck, the forceful and eloquent East German priest who heads it. My file comes from the Gauck Authority’s main archive in Berlin, which is, in fact, the former central archive of the Ministry for State Security. The ministry had a huge complex of office buildings, occupying a block and a half on the Normannenstrasse in the east end of East Berlin. The minister’s offices and private apartment have been kept much as he left them: his desk with the many telephones (secret, top secret, ultra top secret), his tidy little bedroom, a tray of clay models presented to him by children at the Richard Sorge kindergarten. There’s a clay banana, a gnome, a little dog marked “Jeanine,” a lemon from “Christin.”

Most of the other buildings have been given over to new purposes. All the external windows were once specially sealed so that no secret papers could be smuggled out by a double agent, or simply blown away by some careless draft. Now the windows are unsealed. Where the Kaulfusses and Wendts plied their dreary trade, there are now ordinary offices, a supermarket, Ritters Sport-sauna and an employment agency. But the archive is working still.

In the catalog room, middle-aged women in bright pink sweaters and nylon trousers patter around in plastic
sandals among the huge card-index machines. I say machines, because they are motorized. The actual card-index boxes are suspended from axles, like the cars on a Ferris wheel. Press the button for K and the big wheel grinds around until the K cards are uppermost. The FI6 index—the abbreviation refers to the type of card—contains real names, but they are ordered according to the Stasi’s own phonetic alphabet, so that, for example, Mueller, Muller, Möller and Müller are all filed together. (If you pick up names by bugging or wiretapping you don’t know exactly how they are spelled.) From here, the ladies in pink patter off to check the F22 index—arranged by case numbers—and sometimes also the officers’ individual casebooks, before finding the actual files in purpose-made stacks on one of the building’s seven specially reinforced floors. Pitter-patter, pitter-pat, go the plastic sandals, as the archive churns out its daily quota of poisoned madeleines.

Down the corridor, they show you the “tradition room.” Medals, busts of Lenin, certificates of merit, banners celebrating the work of “Chekists,” the Soviet term for secret-police officers: “He alone may be a Chekist who has a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands (F. Dzerzhinsky).” On the table there are what look like jam jars. Each one is carefully labeled and contains a small piece of dirty yellow velveteen. These are samples of personal smell, taken so that, if need be, bloodhounds could be given the scent. According to the Stasi dictionary, the correct term for them is “smell conserve.” I stand there, stricken with a wild surmise. Perhaps somewhere in this vast building my own past smell is still conserved like jam?

Nearby there is what they call the “copper cauldron,” a cavernous, metal-lined room in which the ministry had planned to put a vast new computer system, containing all the information on everybody The metal was to insulate it from outside electronic interference. Instead, the copper cauldron now contains hundreds of sacks stuffed with tiny pieces of paper: documents torn up in the weeks between the beginning of mass protest in the autumn of 1989 and the storming of the ministry in early 1990. On the plausible assumption that the Stasi would have started by destroying the most important and sensitive papers, the Gauck Authority is now trying to reconstruct them, shred by shred.

It’s a weird place, this Gauck Authority: a ministry of truth occupying the former ministry of fear. Back at the administrative headquarters in central Berlin there are long, echoing corridors with new West German lights and plastic flooring but still a faint residue of that unmistakable East Berlin smell. Lugubrious, beer-bellied porters at the door, elaborate visitors’ passes, regulations, small-print forms in triplicate, expenses—all the ponderous apparatus of German bureaucracy. And the habits of a bloated welfare state. As in so many German institutions, every second employee seems to be out to lunch, or on holiday, or “at the doctor’s.” The time-honored recognition signal of the German office worker,
“Mahlzeit!”
(Have a good meal!), echoes down the corridors. “May I use your shredder?” one secretary asks another. For a moment you imagine a successor ministry piecing together these shredded documents, in a kind of infinite regression.

Meanwhile, every page of every document you get to
see has been
renumbered
by the Authority’s archivists, with a neat rubber stamp over the Stasi’s own careful handwritten pagination. It’s like a parody of German thoroughness. One extreme follows another. Probably no dictatorship in modern history has had such an extensive and fanatically thorough secret police as East Germany did. No democracy in modern history has done more to expose the legacy of the preceding dictatorship than the new Germany has.