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By Root 1857 0

of the Stasi's theory, which held that the Amber Room had been taken to Germany, was written as Paul Enke was beginning his monumental trawl of archives in Potsdam. It seems bizarre that the KGB would let the Stasi run with this theory for so many years when even at this early stage no one in the Soviet Union believed it. Unless, of course, the entire Stasi investigation into the Amber Room was a lure of some sort, to distract public attention away from Kaliningrad. Or perhaps it was simply an elaborate ruse to weed out old Nazis.

For Striganov, secrecy was a critical issue:

Four days ago in Western Germany people were interested once again with a question of the Amber Room, trying to find out through our embassy whether there is progress, what is new. We should not give them a straight answer. [As Germany was the country that stole it,] they have too big an interest in this matter... The question is: how will our work continue to be secretive? What is going to be done to make sure of this?

He offered some patrician advice: 'One has to think of a cover story, for example the examination of the soil, and this cover story we give to the press so all our real conclusions from the expedition can remain top secret.'

Comrade Jakobovich, the mission chairman, worked on Striganov's idea. Why not say the investigation team was digging for oil and call it the Kaliningrad Geological Archaeological Expedition of the State Historical Museum for the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation (KGA), Comrade Jakobovich suggested?

Striganov liked the title but in his subsequent reply pointed out an obvious flaw: 'There is no oil in Kaliningrad.'

Within three months Jakobovich was replaced by his deputy and the KGA began its secret work. There are no reports here about what the KGA found in its early years, but there is something else, something unexpected, written many years later, that brings Anatoly Kuchumov, the Leningrad curator, back into the frame.

It is a twenty-page statement dated 19 July 1986, by Comrade Jelena Storozhenko, a linguistics scholar and someone whose name we have read before. We go through an index of our characters and see that Storozhenko was one of those who regularly sent greetings cards to Kuchumov. Here we read that Storozhenko took over the chair of the KGA in 1974 and led it until it folded ten years later. Attached to Storozhenko's statement is a covering letter addressed to Anatoly Kuchumov, a person she evidently knew well and trusted. She wrote:

Dear Anatoly Mikhailovich, I am giving you these notes in the hope that they would be printed for the world to see in memory of everyone who to the last of their days devoted their lives to searching for the Amber Room.7

This is surprising. Storozhenko was attempting to publicize the sensitive findings of her mission, whatever they were. When the Russian authorities closed the KGA in 1984, no public statements were made. We already know that even the Stasi was kept in the dark for another two years about the closure of the mission. The KGA's findings were boxed up by the KGB and classified, locked away in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, where they remain to this day. And yet this bureaucrat wanted everything she knew out in the public domain.8

Storozhenko explained her motivation to Kuchumov: 'On 1 January 1984 [the KGA] was wound up and we were asked to hand over all documents.' Her next statement comes as a great disappointment to us. 'We did not find the Amber Room.'

Having concluded that the German episode was a red herring, we have come back to Russia only to discover that here too investigators failed to make any progress on the Amber Room. But Storozhenko was not happy. She wrote in her covering letter to Kuchumov:

No one could doubt that the search should continue and we could offer proposals on how to conduct that search. However, for successful searches it is necessary to have the highest levels of control and organization, otherwise further searches are not worth conducting. It is in the stated interests