Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [106]
The HVA was the overseas espionage service of the Stasi. Its director, Markus Wolf, the son of a Jewish doctor and playwright, is intelligent and urbane, and was the model, apparently, for John le Carré’s spymaster Karla. Wolf’s HVA was subject to its minister, Mielke. But Wolf and his men always saw themselves as a breed apart. Although they were organised according to military rank like the rest of the Firm, they wore suits instead of uniforms, were highly educated and enjoyed a privileged existence. ‘Because we were responsible for the west,’ Herr Bohnsack explained to me, ‘we could travel and we were quite different. Our diplomats could speak languages and were cultivated. We all scorned Mielke; we had our Wolf, the tall slim elegant intellectual.’
Herr Bohnsack trained as a journalist and worked for twenty-six years in disinformation. Much of Division X’s work was directed against West Germany. It collected sensitive or secret information from agents in the west and leaked it to cause harm; it manufactured documents and spliced together recordings of conversations that never took place in order to damage persons in the public sphere; and it spread rumours about people in the west, including the devastating rumour that someone worked for them. Division X men fed ‘coups’ to western journalists about the Nazi past of West German politicians (several major figures were brought down this way); it funded left-wing publications and it managed, at least in one instance, to exert an extraordinary influence over the political process in West Germany itself. In 1972, the Social Democrat head of the West German government Willy Brandt faced a vote of no-confidence in parliament. Division X bribed one and possibly two backbenchers for their votes in order to keep him in power. Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, the head of Division X, described its work simply as ‘an attempt to turn the wheels of history’.
Herr Bohnsack starts with a joke. He told it at lunch back in 1980 to a group of his colleagues at the restaurant reserved for the highest ranks of the Stasi. He leans back and smiles, like an uncle with a secret. ‘The USA, the Soviet Union and the GDR want to raise the Titanic,’ he says, lifting his eyebrows. ‘The USA wants the jewels presumed to be in the safe,’ he nods, ‘the Soviets are after the state-of-the-art technology; and the GDR’—he downs his Korn for dramatic pause—‘the GDR wants the band that played as it went down.’
We laugh. ‘Was it normal to tell jokes like that?’ I ask.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, ‘quite normal, but it depended who was there. As soon as I’d told that one I thought: oh brother, that was a bit foolish of me because there was a general at the table.’ He runs a hand over his head. ‘After lunch the general took me aside and said, in a quiet voice, “Next time Bohnsack, I wouldn’t tell a joke like that.” And that was way back in 1980! They were sensitive about the whole thing going down even then.’
‘Were there Mielke jokes?’
‘Yes, lots,’ he says. ‘But the worst Mielke ones weren’t jokes, they were true.’
Herr Bohnsack was invited to the party the Stasi threw for themselves and their Russian comrades to celebrate the forty years of the GDR. It was 3 October 1989, the height of the demonstrations and unrest. ‘There were about two thousand people at the party,’ he says. ‘Mielke made his entrance’—he raises one arm behind his ear and does a two-fingered walk through the air—‘down some stairs in the corner surrounded by his generals. Like a ghost, or the god in the machine.’ Mielke made a speech. ‘For four hours