The File (24 page)

So far was I removed from my youthful fascination with the secret service that I had almost forgotten about my own brief dalliance with it. Around the time I started work on my Stasi file, however, I had an indication that they had not quite forgotten about me. One day I received a mysterious telephone call from a man who said he worked for that same nonexistent section of the Foreign Office that had made the original approach back in 1976. There was something he would like to talk to me about, if I could spare the time. We arranged to meet for tea in a London hotel.

He soon came to the point. There were, he said, from time to time students or visitors to Oxford whom they suspected of working for hostile powers. Would I consider keeping an eye on them? I told him that I would not. Although I could see the sense of what he was doing, I wished to have no such secrets from my friends, colleagues or students.

As soon as you stop to think about it—which most of us don’t, most of the time—you realize that of course they must work like that. Of course there must be people, in Oxford, at other universities and in other walks of
life, who have this second, part-time job, this bit of secret life. All secret services, everywhere, need their contacts and informers. And if that information led to the capture of an IRA bomb team, or of someone from the Middle East sent to assassinate Salman Rushdie, then the informer would have done a good thing and probably also a brave one.

Nonetheless, I found this approach disconcerting because it showed that after all these years they were still somehow tracking me and, at the same time, because it suggested they had not been tracking me closely enough. If they had read my work properly, they would surely have realized that I was not for this game. Or perhaps they just assumed that what people wrote was one thing, but what they did, quite another. Which, of course, they often are.

At the time, this was little more than an unpleasant quarter of an hour in the middle of a busy day. Now, however, I revisit the incident in my mind as I contemplate the need for a little further investigation of our own secret realms. What have our lot been up to? What might I have been doing had I taken that unmarked bus? Is there any truth in the arguments that Markus Wolf made to me as we walked around the center of now reunited Berlin? What
is
the essential difference between the security service of a communist state like East Germany and the security service of a democracy like Britain?

Reading about spying is a great British hobby. The sheer volume of books on the subject is matched only by those on sex and gardening. Investigative journalism,
memoirs, scholarly studies, spin-offs from television and radio documentaries, not to mention the endless novels and thrillers. Of my Stasi file has a note from department XX/4. ‘Romeo’ arranged a meeting on 25.2.80 between ‘Beech-tree’ and the correspondent in Warsaw Timothy Sebastian.” Friends now tell me that I must read Tim Sebastian’s Stasi spy thriller,
Exit Berlin
.

The trouble with all these shelves of stuff is: how can you ever really know what is fact, what fiction, and what still lies hidden? To get anywhere, I must go beyond the printed word. So after swimming around in this murky sea of print, I talk to some of those who have written well about our British secret world, to some who have now left it, more or less happily, and to politicians who, during the Cold War, had ministerial responsibility for the secret services.

My inquiry takes me down to Cornwall, for a walk along the cliffs with David Cornwell (alias John le Carré) and a memorable supper at which the Russian ambassador pays his respects to the greatest Western spy novelist of the Cold War. I pass on into neat English country gardens, where distinguished retired gentlemen talk to me with measured frankness. Altogether, I find in this world a curious preserve of old-fashioned gentleman Englishness: plus fours, checked shirts, waistcoats, neatly rolled umbrellas, perfect manners and lawns. Light-years away, aesthetically, from the kitsch-filled bungalows, beer bellies and synthetic tracksuits of their Stasi opponents. Less a secret state than a secret garden. I meet again the man who inadvertently put me off the service over lunch at “South of the River” in 1979: cultured, witty, full of good stories and discreet charm.

My search then takes me out of these secret gardens into the gleaming white foyer of Thames House, past a large, handsome crest showing a pugnacious lion with a mermaid’s tail above the proud motto
Regnum Defende
, and through some automated high-security doors faintly reminiscent of
Star Trek
. To achieve the latter stretches of this journey, I reluctantly agree that the conversations will be “off the record.”

The results are frustrating. The great advantage of a dead secret service is that its secrets are no longer secret. About the Stasi we can know. The trouble with live secret services is that they are still secret. My “South of the River” host describes his experience of spying against the Soviet Union as being like inspecting an elephant in the dark with a penlight. I feel rather like that now. Those who agree to see me are glad to present their case, but openness and secrecy remain opposites and, even as we talk, they are visibly torn between the two. So all I emerge with are a few flashlit glimpses: here a glistening flank, there a horny proboscis.

Yes, East Germany was a “hard nut to crack,” say the gentlemen from MI6—“the friends,” as I gather they are sometimes known in Whitehall. However, they did well in the rest of the Soviet bloc. They had the Poles “almost wrapped up.” Yet they were no more prescient than anyone else in anticipating the really big political changes in the East. I probably did better as a journalist on the spot. Nonetheless, they did get at some of the other side’s important official secrets, especially military ones. And this made a small but significant difference to policy. (Three former foreign secretaries cautiously agree.)

They joined the service for all the reasons you would
expect: the myth, curiosity, love of adventure, travel and “doing something for the country,” as father had in the last war. The job could be very boring. Walking around the backstreets of yet another city, looking for safe meeting places and dead-letter boxes, you sometimes wondered, What the hell am I doing with my life? And there were the office politics. But a lot of the work was terrific fun. That boyish word “fun” occurs often in these conversations. One senior retired gentleman of the service recalls: “People used to say, ‘I can’t believe that they’re paying me for doing this.’” Such fun and games.

Were they more scrupulous than the other side? Well, they say, we didn’t do assassination or kidnapping, and blackmail only rarely. It was so important for
morale
, says the senior retired gentleman, that our methods were
moral
. A very big word to use of this twilight world. I remember that Colonel Eichner of the Stasi described the British secret service as “gentlemanlike”—but he meant this by contrast with the CIA and the West German BND. Include the CIA’s record in Latin America and the moral distinction between methods (West) and methods (East) is still more blurred.

One bug is very much like another. A retired officer describes to me an authorized secret break-in to a suspect’s flat in London—“A lot of fun,” he says—while a uniformed policeman stood guard down the road. His account uncannily recalls the description I have just heard from Dr. Warmbier of a secret Stasi break-in to his flat in Leipzig. Retired officers of both sides want me to understand that their best agents were always the volunteers—people who did it for their own reasons, personal, political, whatever—not those who were bought or
blackmailed. The common wisdom of the trade. Both describe to me, in almost identical terms, the unique quality of the personal tie between agent and case officer. “It’s a wonderful relationship,” says the senior retired gentleman from MI6. “You can talk about anything, your job, your personal problems, your wife, and be quite sure that it will be kept secret.” I glimpse the paradox at the heart of all spying: the key to betrayal is trust. And the proudest boast of the retired Stasi officer is that he has not betrayed his agents.

So was it the different ends that justified the same means? Good when done for a free country, bad when done for a dictatorship? Right for us, wrong for them. Well, they don’t necessarily think that spying abroad for another country was so very wrong, up to a point. For them, professionally, the other side was “the opposition” and not “the enemy.” But beyond that point, yes, it depends whom it was done for.

Here is a slippery slope. How many crimes of the twentieth century, those of communism above all, have been sanctioned by saying, “The end justifies the means.” Yet the argument cannot be dismissed. Take the extreme case. To try to assassinate Hitler, as Stauffenberg did in 1944, was a great and noble act. To try to assassinate Churchill would have been villainous and wrong—although the man who attempted it might have shown as much daring and courage as Stauffenberg, and might even have believed as fervently in the lightness of what he was doing. Same action, different moral value.

However, not only do the ends have to be good, the means must also be proportional to those ends. There is no simple rule about what justifies what. Each case is different,
in each there is an invisible line. Did British spies cross to the wrong side of that line? Of course they did. But how far and how often? Without seeing the files, we outside can never know. But even those who were once inside, or are still inside, will also have forgotten, or re-remembered, as the kaleidoscope of memory keeps turning.

If the ethical line was crossed further and more often in the Cold War than we would today like to think, then I can guess at a few reasons. People were inspired by collective and family memories of war, and by literary models of the secret soldier. Even if we didn’t talk much, anymore, about “the Cold War,” many still believed that there was a kind of war on—which in a way there was. Things are justified in war that are not in peace. But what if you are somewhere between war and peace? Moreover, at the back of the mind, half examined, was “my country right or wrong.” But what if the country was not right? Or right in general but wrong in the particular case?

Too much moral refinement can be crippling. You cannot stop for a philosophy seminar in the middle of a fight. But then you live with the consequences.

Whatever can be said of our spies abroad—or of anyone else’s—the harder case is that of the domestic security service in a democracy. Here, ends and means are almost inseparable. Spying on your own citizens directly infringes the very freedom it is supposed to defend. The contradiction is real and unavoidable. But if the infringement goes too far, it begins to destroy what it is meant to preserve. And who decides what is too far?

Nothing that I have so far glimpsed of the British security
service remotely suggests an apparatus like the Stasi. Not the numbers working for them. (MI5 has about 2,000 employees. Add 2,000 for Special Branch and then 16,000 for outside agents and informers—assuming, for the sake of argument, a ratio of four to one, compared to the Stasi’s two to one. You can still only reach a figure of roughly one out of every four thousand adults in Britain, compared with one in fifty for East Germany.) Not the range of targets. (The Stasi had no IRA to cope with: in fact, they supported terrorists almost as much as they countered them.) Not the ways of pressuring people into collaboration. (A major motive for the informers on my file was simply getting permission to travel abroad. Imagine that here: “Now, Mr. Evans, before we let you fly to the Costa Brava for your summer holiday, perhaps you’d just tell us a thing or two about Mr. Jones….”) Not the fear inspired. (Do we suspiciously eye the man at the next table in the pub? Is anyone in mainland Britain—apart, I hope, from terrorists and foreign spies—really afraid of MI5? When my English informer “Smith” tried to explain to me how small and relatively harmless he thought the Stasi was, he said, “something like MI5.”)

Nor can one equate the consequences for those who are spied on. (In East Germany: loss of university place, like Young Brecht; loss of job, like Eberhard Haufe; reprisals against your children, as happened to Werner, and imprisonment, as in the case of Dr. Warmbier, with the court’s sentence decided in advance—by the prosecution.) Or the political system they serve. (The Stasi was officially called “the shield and sword of the Party,” and its first task was to keep that single party in perpetual
power. Even if MI5 officers have tended to lean to the Right, and some quite far to the Right, this has not prevented the democratic alternation of power between two parties, Conservative and Labour, which have in turn formed the government they serve.) And certainly not its place within the whole system. (The Stasi was not just an all-pervasive secret police; by the end it was also trying to keep the whole system working.)

A little rhetorical equation with the Stasi is so tempting: spine-chilling, sexy, a good sell. And so wrong. I’m reminded of an argument I had in the 1980s with some on the Left—“my left-wing friends,” as “Michaela” recorded my putting it—who called their British pressure-group for political reform Charter 88, by analogy with the Czechoslovak human rights movement Charter 77, or their British journal
Samizdat
This was, I felt, to misappropriate the honors of people who were risking imprisonment and even death for their beliefs. It was like pinning to your own chest a little badge that says “hero.” Meanwhile, Václav Havel of Charter 77 was in prison again, and the Solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko had been horribly murdered by agents of the Polish security service. Perhaps semantic degradation is the inevitable fate of all such terms. I now see in an English newspaper a reference to the government whips in the House of Commons as “that Stasi-like crew.”

However, there is an opposite fallacy: to make our own condition look better by contrasting it with something so much worse. “Mummy, this porridge is revolting.” “But, darling, think of the children in Africa who have nothing to eat.” I note with interest that, in her lecture,
Mrs. Rimington of MI5 herself deploys the contrast with the Stasi. If you wish to make gray look white, put it against black. Compared with the Stasi, anything looks good. But the real comparison is with other countries in the West.