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However, what we have before us is something completely unexpected. Although the date has been obscured on the first document, it is not difficult to work out the year from the text. It is not an MGB interrogation of Gerhard Strauss but an official report written by him for Dr Paul Wandel, concerning Strauss's trip to Kaliningrad in December 1949. So now we get to see the Hotel Moscow interrogation from the other side of the desk.

This version is strikingly different from Kuchumov's. In it Strauss accused Kuchumov of holding him under virtual house arrest after being interrogated. He said that he was detained in Kaliningrad for several weeks while his Soviet counterpart decided on an inadvisable excavation.

Strauss wrote that 'the ground is hard as rock due to the sub-zero temperatures. Several days were taken up with clearing a passageway through the [castle's] former Albrecht Gate for the required Soviet excavator to pass through. It was far too big.' Strauss claimed that Kuchumov was so desperate to find the Amber Room, he excavated at random:

I told him it was pointless without a proper set of plans for the castle, which I could find in Berlin. He shouted at me, accused me of knowing less than him about the layout of somewhere I had worked for years. It was most exasperating. Several days were wasted digging out the rubble that covered the remnants of the south-wing cellars. I tried to tell him that he would find only collapsed chambers there, but he did not believe it until he saw them for himself.5

There is no mention here of the gossip, the second-hand intelligence, the desperate lists of names, the scene of Strauss stammering under the weight of Kuchumov's questions. But then Kuchumov failed to mention the shortsightedness of embarking on a major dig in the midst of a Kaliningrad winter. We have no idea who is telling the truth.

It is only when we look up a biography of Paul Wandel, the recipient of Strauss's report, that we truly appreciate its significance. An early supporter of the German Communist Party (KPD), Paul Wandel had fled to Russia in August 1931. In Moscow, he had been selected for the Lenin School (for spies), entrance to which was limited to only the most promising cadre. Wandel graduated to the Marx-Engels Institute, where he was introduced to a senior German comrade, Wilhelm Pieck. During the war, Wandel acted as Pieck's personal secretary and in his spare time broadcast anti-fascist propaganda directed at weakening the morale of the Wehrmacht. After the return of the KPD leadership to Berlin in July 1945, the German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht appointed Wandel and Pieck to his inner circle, Wandel becoming Minister for Education and Pieck the GDR's first President.6

By writing to Paul Wandel, Strauss was effectively reporting his thoughts on the Amber Room to President Pieck and, by extension, to Ulbricht, General Secretary of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Although it was barely a year old, the SED Politburo must have been as concerned with the fate of Amber Room as SovNarKom. We are beginning to appreciate the political muscle pushing the ongoing search for the Amber Room. We cannot yet comprehend why.

'May I have?' The functionary is back and has her hand out. 12.30 p.m. 'We are closed for the day.'

The next morning. In one of the anodyne white rooms at the Ministry of Truth, a file awaits us. Inside are more chewed-up pages, stamped, blotted, scribbled over, but we can see that all of them are authored by Dr Gerhard Strauss. In Kaliningrad, Strauss performed so poorly that he seemed to us to have nothing to contribute to the search for the Amber Room. An incidental witness who would fade away. And yet before us, in classified documents submitted to his superiors in the GDR, Strauss appears unstoppable, generating piles of intelligence about the Amber Room. Vain, naive, treacherous, arrogant, whoever the real Gerhard Strauss was, he was