The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

As a watery sun hung over Potsdam behind me, it became clear what the RB-66 had been trying to photograph. Outside Magdeburg, the Soviet army had mounted a huge war-games maneuver ground. I found myself weaving between columns of Russian tanks, half-tracks, jeeps, and trucks of infantry. With an East German–registered car, I leaned out with a broad grin and gave them the V-sign. They responded with the same.

They did not realize that when the first two fingers of the right hand were raised with the palm toward the receiver, it was the Churchillian victory sign. To the British, the other way around means “Up yours.” Eventually I parked the Wartburg off the road on a sandy bank and set off through the pine forest on foot. Then I found my charcoal burner.

He was an old man, like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale. I thought he might have a gingerbread house around there somewhere. He considered my request carefully, then nodded.

“Ja, it came down over there.” I walked on to where he pointed, and there it was. Nose down, tail up, most of its fuselage masked by the pine trees, but with the tail fin jutting up to the sky. It had clearly been hit by air-to-air rockets, and all its ejector seats had been used, so maybe the crew was alive. I marked its exact position and went back to the charcoal burner tending his heap of embers. He was perfectly calm, as one who had lived through two world wars and could cope with the occasional crashing bomber. He showed no nervousness about the authorities, but was interested in my pa

ssport. I pointed out and translated the bit in the flyleaf where Her Britannic Majesty “requests and requires” one and all to assist her subject as best they may. Then he spoke quite freely.

There were three crewmen, he said, though he had not seen the first two parachute into the forest. They knew they had been taken prisoner by Russians in jeeps and were lodged in the Soviet army HQ in Magdeburg. His son-in-law, a baker who delivered early bread, had seen them in the jeeps.

The third and last out had landed near him and broken one leg. He was Dutch. No, I said, he was American. The old man tapped his chest on the left side. There was a tab that said “Holland” and two silver bars on the epaulettes. I recalled the US aircrew wore name tags on a white canvas patch, upper chest, left-hand side. So, Captain Holland, the pilot of the falling spy plane, who had ensured his two crewmen were out before ejecting. At the last minute, he landed only two hundred yards from the wreck.

After thirty minutes with my new friend and having delighted him with a pack of Western cigarettes, a universal currency, I had it all. Then the luck ran out. I was stumbling back to where I had left the car when I heard voices among the pine trees. I dropped to my knees in the undergrowth. Too late.

I heard a barked “Stoi” and saw a pair of serge combat trousers ahead of my face. An angry Mongoloid face was staring down at me. These Mongol regiments came from the Russian Far East and have always been used as cannon fodder. I stood up. He was shorter than me, but the tommy gun pointing at my face created its own very persuasive argument.

Surrounded by his mates, I was marched out of the forest to a meadow, where a group of officers was standing around a colonel seated at a trestle table studying a map. One of them looked up, frowned, and came over. He spoke to the soldier in a tongue I could not understand. Certainly not Russian. So, a White Russian officer from a Mongoloid regiment recruited somewhere way out along the Ussuri River. Or maybe the Amur. A long way away.

The soldier explained where I had been found and what I had been doing. The officer spoke in reasonable German and demanded my papers. Figuring the British passport had served its purpose, I offered my East German press accreditation card. He studied it, but the name Forsyth did not mean anything to him, certainly not Scotland.

He asked for an explanation. I dropped into Bertie Wooster mode—hapless, harmless, and very dim. I told him my car had been run off the road and was stuck in a sand drift. I had been told there was a farmer in the woods with a tractor who might pull me out. Then I dropped my car keys and was scrambling around trying to find them when his kindly soldiers guided me out of the forest.

He took my press card and went to show it to the colonel. There was a jabber of Russian. The colonel shrugged and gave him back my card. He clearly had problems more serious than idiot East Germans getting stuck. The captain came back and handed me my press card, and told me to get the hell out of there. I must have been a bit punch-drunk because I said in halting German:

“Herr Captain, it was your trucks that ran me into the sand drift. Your lads couldn’t push me out, could they?”

He spat out a stream of orders in the eastern dialect, turned, and went back to his colonel. Six Mongols escorted me back to the Wartburg and pushed. It was not stuck at all, but I kept my foot on the brake, and when I released it, the car shot forward. I turned and waved my thanks at the Mongols, gave them the V sign, and drove away.

I had my story, but how to get it to the West? A laptop would have been useful, but I was forty years too early. It was early evening. I needed a phone and a meal. I needed a hotel. Ten miles later, I found one, a country gasthof left over from the past.

Presenting my German ID and speaking like a German, I took a room, pleading car trouble for the lack of reservation, went upstairs, and placed a call to my East Berlin office. Fräulein Behrendt had checked in at nine that morning, read my scrawled message, and was still there. With headphones on, she took down my fifteen-page dispatch.

I told her to transfer the lot to telex tape, but not to connect to West Berlin and Bonn until she had it all and then run it at maximum speed. She got fourteen pages across to the West before the line very predictably went dead and flashed up Linienstoerung, or “line disruption.” It always did that when the goons did not want something to go through. But as usual, the junior monitors had to check with some senior goon while the story raced through.

I learned later that it had “gone viral,” before that phrase was invented. Client newspapers used it across the globe. Wiesbaden was very happy, and a staff car was dispatched to Magdeburg to demand the three crewmen back. (They came home pretty quickly. The nervousness caused by Lee Harvey Oswald was apparently still alive in Moscow.)

I should have driven back to East Berlin that night, but I was bone-tired and hungry. I ate a hearty supper, went back to my room, and slept until morning. After breakfast, I paid up and emerged.

Outside the main door, I was reminded of those society weddings where the bridegroom’s mates all line up in two columns, forming a walkway between them.

They were all there. Rural police, city police, forest wardens, People’s Police, and at the end, the long leather coats of the ones who took precedence.

The four Stasi were not happy. They had clearly been slow-roasted all night by their masters in Berlin and now they had the swine responsible. One took over my Wartburg, while the other three sandwiched me into the Czech saloon and drove me to their fortress headquarters in Magdeburg.

To be fair, there was no third degree, just a series of very angry interviews and threats. I was not even in a cell but in a bare interview room, with toilet facilities on request. Of course I dropped into Bertie Wooster mode: But, Officer, what have I done wrong? I was only doing my job. Me, a spy? Good Lord no, I wouldn’t work for those people: I work for Reuters. I mean, a German correspondent in England would have done exactly the same, wouldn’t he? I mean, we all do what we are told to do, don’t we? Can I have a widdle?

The senior goon facing me would probably not have had a clue what to do with a hot news story. As he was well over forty, I suspected he had been serving the Nazis twenty years earlier and had switched seamlessly to the Communists. Secret policemen are like that; they’ll serve anyone.

Years after Berlin, the pretty vicious DINA, the secret police of the not-so-saintly Salvador Allende of Chile, transferred without a blip to the service of General Pinochet. They even used the same torture chambers. Only the victims changed.

As he had never lived in a free country at all, asking him to agree with what a free journalist would do was simply embarrassing. I just had to hope that my facade of a lucky but gormless fool, and thus too dim to be a spy, would hold up. It did.

I spent a day and a night in that room. In the morning, I was ordered out and escorted upstairs. I thought we might be going to the execution wall, but it was only the car park. I was told to get in and follow the two VoPo motorcycle outriders. The black Tatra brought up the rear.

Someone in Berlin had decided he wanted this whole miserable (for them) affair quashed. We drove fast back to East Berlin, but not via West Berlin. As East German drivers swerved off the highway as the blaring sirens came up behind them, we made record time, driving round West Berlin to enter East Berlin from the south. Many never knew that there was a second border separating East Berlin from East Germany proper. It was to prevent Western tourists who were allowed through Checkpoint Charlie from driving on into East Germany unmonitored.

As we drove up to the pole across the road, one of the motorcyclists explained to the guards that the Wartburg was going through. They would be heading back to Magdeburg. A figure appeared outside my driver’s window and tapped. I lowered the window. There was a face, and not a happy one.