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‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he says, ‘that was for criminals.’

‘Well who were the people you were doing the “Operational Control” on?’

‘They were enemies.’

‘Oh. How did you know they were enemies?’

‘Well,’ he says in his soft voice, ‘once an investigation was started into someone, that meant there was suspicion of enemy activity.’ This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy. ‘We searched for enemies in all the areas I mentioned: in the factories, in the state apparatus, the church, the schools and so on. In fact,’ he says, ‘as time went on there was more and more work to do because the definition of “enemy” became wider and wider.’

I put my pen in the crease of my notebook and peer into the gloom in his direction. Herr Bock says other professors at the academy spent their careers expanding the reach of the paragraphs of the law so as to be able to encompass more enemies in them. ‘In fact, their promotions depended on it,’ he says. ‘We talked about it among ourselves up on the sixth floor over there,’ an arm gestures towards the building opposite. ‘And I don’t mind telling you that some of us actually thought the paragraphs became a little too wide.’ I nod. If, by the mere fact of investigating someone you turn them into an Enemy of the State, you could potentially busy yourself with the entire population.

‘Too wide,’ he continues, ‘to be properly carried out. Within available resources I mean.’

‘What qualities did you look for in an informer?’ I ask Herr Bock.

‘Well,’ he says, leaning back and clasping both hands behind his head, ‘he had to be able to adapt to new situations quickly and make himself belong wherever we put him. And at the same time he had to have a stable enough character to keep it clear in his mind that he was reporting to us. And above all else,’ he says, looking straight at me, his eyes distorted and magnified through the glasses, ‘he needed to be honest, faithful and trustworthy.’

I look back at him. I feel my eyes too, getting wider.

‘I mean only towards the ministry, of course,’ he corrects himself. ‘We weren’t interested if he betrayed anyone else…’ He leans his head to one side, in thought. ‘In point of the fact he had to, didn’t he?’ he says. ‘Perhaps,’ he continues, ‘this ability is not a great quality in a human being. But it was vital for our work. I have to say that it is the same in all secret services.’

But it is not. Few secret services have informers reporting meticulously on activities at kindergartens and dinner parties and sporting events across the nation.

‘What was in it for the informers?’ I want to know how much they were paid.

‘It was pitiful actually,’ Bock admits. ‘They were hardly paid at all. Every week they had to meet with their handlers, and they were not paid for that. Every now and then they might have been given some money as a reward for a specific piece of information. Sometimes they were given a birthday present.’

‘So why did they do it?’

‘Well, some of them were convinced of the cause,’ he says. ‘But I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody. You know—someone was listening to them for a couple of hours a week, taking notes. They felt they had it over other people.’

To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

Herr Bock is still talking, and I am still taking notes. Every meeting with an informer had to take place in a covert location. ‘In fact,’ he says proudly, twisting his neck towards the stairs, ‘I have a covert location here