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Semyonov continued: George Stein had been conscripted to defend the city, which he did until he was captured by the Red Army in May 1944, only learning after his release from camps in Uzbekistan and Leningrad that the SS had executed his entire family on discovering their links to the resistance and the 'Red Countess' Marion Donhoff. Putting his tragic past behind him, Stein had migrated to Stelle, married Elisabeth, the daughter of a local farmer, and settled down to grow strawberries, until he crashed his car into a traffic policeman and ended up in Switzerland, bored and compulsively scanning the newspapers.

A photograph of Stein shows a large, jovial man with a harelip and thick-rimmed glasses, ostentatiously smoking a cigarette at a dinner table, a wine glass before him - a bon viveur dining out on a flush of stories.

George Stein

Julian Semyonov revealed that, having pressed the West German government to dig at Volpriehausen, Stein's life was now in danger. Hate mail had arrived at his home in Stelle. Semyonov wrote: 'George Stein has found out through innumerable threatening letters and public hostility how close the criminal past is connected with the present in the Federal Republic of Germany.'

Enke clipped everything Semyonov wrote about Stein and the Amber Room, pasting it into his files. Several translations have notes scribbled in the top left-hand corners, showing that the articles were referred up the hierarchy to the deputy minister and to Mielke himself. Key sentences were underlined, all of which were quotes from George Stein about 'my good friend Dr Paul Kohler in the GDR'. Paul Kohler was in danger of being unmasked as Stasi agent.

Paul Enke had to get alongside Semyonov. The flamboyant, hard-drinking Soviet journalist was well known to the Ministry for State Security. A graduate of Moscow University, Semyonov had begun publishing fiction in 19 5 8 and by the time he was posted to Bonn in the early 1970S, he was the author of a bestselling series of spy novels starring Maxim Stirlitz, a cultured Soviet agent who could speak almost every European language 'with the exception of Irish and Albanian'. While readers in the West were thrilled by Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice and Diamonds are Forever, bibliophiles in the East bought Semyonov's Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and He Killed Me Near Luang Prabang. However, unlike James Bond, the Stirlitz novels were meticulously rooted in historical fact and advanced a propagandist agenda, such as the storyline in which the spy exposed an attempt by Britain and the United States to make a peace-pact with Hitler, opening a united front against the Soviet Union (something that the KGB archives reveal that Stalin had actually believed when he forged the non-aggression pact with Germany of 1939). With access to limitless visas and a capacious expense account, Semyonov travelled the world researching his books. By the time he began to write about George Stein he had served as president of the International Association of Crime Writers. Semyonov insisted that it was his success with Stirlitz that bought him his freedom and connections, but few other writers in the Soviet Union at this time were given carte blanche like this.42

The Stasi Secretariat viewed Semyonov's interest in Stein as a possible threat. Stein was a Stasi source, a useful tool that it did not want to lose to the Russians. The German Amber Room operation was run by the Stasi from the East and not George Stein in the West. The Stasi would have to engineer a collaborative relationship with Semyonov. They would do it 'through the mediation of a female comrade by the name of [name blacked out]'.

We do not know what actually happened between Semyonov and this 'female comrade' (name blacked out), but on 31 October E979 Enke received a series of telephone calls at his home, 'several very urgent requests' to meet Semyonov at the Soviet Embassy at 10 p.m. Enke wrote an account of what happened next for his deputy minister Generalmajor Neiber: 'At 22:00, on return from his official