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By Root 1904 0

1982 Generalmajor Neiber was actively involved. He proposed a top-level delegation, 'a business trip of a working task force by five MfS members to the Soviet Union's KGB'. Steeped in Mielke's lexicon, Neiber wrote: 'Duration - four days. To take place in May 1982...for the further harmonization, liaison and cooperation in the realization of the planned political and operational measures, necessitated through the Security Process "Puschkin" No. XV 3241/80 as controlled by the office of the Comrade Deputy Minister'. Translation: let's work together, please. Yet even in matters of international significance there was the old Stasi banality. Neiber signed off his report with a coda: 'It has been agreed that the delegation will travel by aeroplane to and from Moscow.'19 An attached letter - 'Berlin 02/1982, For Information Only, to Generalmajor Karli Coburger' - set out the delicate nature of the trip.

The [Soviet] documents relating to persons and objects [that we have received] following a request to the Investigation Department of the KGB, which had been dispatched in October 1980, had been useful only in the partial clarification of some subjects in the range of investigations... The results transmitted remained within a narrow framework and did not lead to clarification of the basic matters of concern in this process.'

Translation: the Stasi request to the KGB for help, made sixteen months earlier, had achieved little.20

Neiber would sort out the trouble. He forwarded a list of key Soviet figures that the Stasi delegation would like to meet: 'Comrade A. M. Kutschumow, Comrade Xenia Agarfornova, Comrade Jelena Storozhenko (Geological-Archaeological Expedition, Kaliningrad), Comrade W. D. Krolewski (search commission, Kaliningrad), Comrade Julia Semjonow (long-term Soviet newspaper correspondent in the FRG and now in based Moscow)'.

In a correspondence file for the Stasi district office in Magdeburg we learn the fate of deputy minister Neiber's trumpeted mission to Moscow.21 It was cancelled at the last minute - by the Soviets. Magdeburg reported to East Berlin that it had uncovered a potential informer, 'Comrade M... who is capable of making a statement clearing up some details about the Amber Room'. Magdeburg was delighted with its find and wanted to know if it should interrogate Comrade M locally or send him to headquarters. But East Berlin advised Magdeburg to do nothing: 'The proposal for [Neiber's] trip to Moscow... has been rejected. Deputy Comrade Minister Generalmajor Neiber has decided that overall charge of the political-operational handling of the entire above-mentioned complex must remain in the hands of the "fraternal authorities"...' Translation: the Stasi was bowing to the KGB. 'With a large degree of probability the main part of the Amber Room had still been stored in 1945 in Konigsberg,' East Berlin informed Magdeburg, effectively telling the district office to stop looking for it in East Germany. All Stasi efforts to locate the Amber Room in East Germany had been a waste of time.

However, the Ministry of Truth files do record that there was another visit to Moscow in the spring of 1982 concerning the Amber Room. A handwritten note dated 22 February reported that Comrade Enke had called in with some startling news: 'A ten-person commission led by FRG citizen George Stein has arrived in the Soviet Union to talk about the BZ.'22

Moscow was courting a West German.

We have come across George Stein before.23 Gerhard Strauss's son, Stephan, had told us that a 'George Stein' had been a frequent visitor to their house in Heinrich-Mann-Platz. We had also spotted the name on a grizzly dossier of deaths (said to be connected with the Amber Room) that had been shown to us by the staff of the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg (although we saw it so briefly we couldn't understand its meaning). And we have seen the name in a Ministry of Truth file, in papers that revealed the Stasi would have been familiar with George Stein too, since he had come to its attention during what Erich Mielke would have described