The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [133]
Both men talked about the fact the other was preparing a book on the Amber Room and, according to Enke, agreed to co-author a two-volume edition. Enke wrote: 'The first volume would deal with the history of the room as well as the activities of the imperialist secret services and the counter-espionage engaged in the fight against such machinations.' It sounded like a plotline from Stirlitz. Enke, who, according to his personal file, had as a young man been desperate to become a journalist, was flattered by the attentions of his new and famous acquaintance. There was even an invitation dangled by the celebrated Soviet writer. Enke wrote: 'Julian Semyonov announced a forthcoming visit for me to Moscow for the premiere of a play he has written.'43 It is a shame we cannot see what Semyonov reported to the KGB about Paul Enke.
Believing they had engineered a positive relationship with Julian Semyonov, the Stasi now felt confident enough to reactivate Stein and soon he was used to plant another story. A letter written by Enke on LO September 1981 reported that Alfred Rohde's written assurances of September 1944 that the Amber Room had survived the Allied air raids 'will [soon] be utilized in the article to appear in October in Die Zeit. On this occasion we will remember that 14 October is the fortieth anniversary of the date on which the Amber Room was dragged out from Pushkin on eighteen trucks laden with works of art... We will continue to support [Stein] as much as we can.'44
But the following February, in 1982, George Stein was invited to Moscow without the Stasi's prior knowledge at a time when the Stasi deputy minister's request for a visit to Moscow had been rejected by the KGB. A West German hobby-Historiker was welcomed to the Soviet Union at the head of a commission searching for the Amber Room, while the dutiful Stasi's Amber Room operation remained marooned in East Berlin.
There was now even more need for the Stasi to find the Amber Room and return it to Russia.
'All these comrades are our models and teachers for our work,' Erich Mielke once wrote of the leaders of Soviet Russia.45 He and his ministry would, at least in public, maintain unquestioning loyalty to Moscow Central until the very end.
The KGB made certain. Moscow attached a KGB colonel to every Stasi directorate and all Stasi intelligence was fed back to Moscow and into a super-computer called SOUD (System of Unified Registration of Data on the Enemy) that could place an enemy operative into any one of fifteen categories. Regardless of how it was treated by the KGB, George Stein or no George Stein, the Stasi always gritted its teeth.46
In September 1982, four months after Stein's mission to Moscow, Mielke also flew to Russia for talks with his KGB counterpart, Chairman Vitaly Fedorchuk. East German workers already footed the bill for apartments, kindergartens, cars, furnishings and everything else needed by the 2,500-strong KGB team at Berlin-Karlshorst. And on LO September 1982 Mielke signed a thirty-eight-page protocol pledging absolute loyalty and a further extension of his ministry's financial support. An indication of the enormity of the sums involved comes from a Soviet estimate equivalent to 19,ooo dollars to refurbish just one KGB apartment in East Berlin, at a time when the average East German earned the equivalent of 33 dollars a month.47
So tight-knit were the connections between the KGB and the Stasi that in November 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down, dozens of KGB teams flew into Berlin to destroy documents stored at Stasi headquarters, preventing the exposure of live operations and the links between Moscow and the Stasi leadership.
However, the