At four, she rose and returned to the KGB offices, perturbing the night staff with her demand for a secure line to SSD headquarters. When she had it, she spoke to Colonel Voss. He had not left his office at all.
“That picture of Morenz,” she said. “Was it recent?”
“About a year ago,” said Voss, puzzled.
“Where did you get it?”
“The HVA,” said Voss. Vanavskaya thanked him and put down the phone.
Of course, the HVA, the Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung, East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, which for obvious linguistic reasons, specialized in running networks inside West Germany. Its Head was the legendary Colonel-General Marcus Wolf. Even the KGB, notoriously contemptuous of satellite intelligence services, held him in considerable respect. Marcus “Mischa” Wolf had perpetrated some brilliant coups against the West Germans, notably the “running” of Chancellor Brandt’s private secretary.
Vanavskaya called and awoke the local head of the Third Directorate and made her request, citing General Shaliapin’s name. That did the trick. The Colonel said he would see what he could do. He called back in half an hour. It seemed that General Wolf was an early bird, he said; she would have a meeting with him in his office at six.
At five that morning the cryptography department at GCHQ Cheltenham finished decoding the last of the mass of low-level paperwork that had built up in the previous twenty-four hours. In its in-clear form it would be transmitted down a series of very secure land lines to a variety of recipients—some for the SIS at Century House, some for MI-5 at Curzon Street, some for the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. Much would be “copied” as of possible interest to two or even all three. Urgent intelligence was handled much more quickly, but the small hours of the morning was a good time to send the low-level stuff to London; the lines were not so busy.
Among the material was a signal on Wednesday evening from Pullach to the BND staffer at the West German Embassy in London. Germany, of course, was and remains a valued and respected ally of Britain. There was nothing personal in Cheltenham intercepting and decoding a confidential message from an ally to its own embassy. The code had been quietly broken sometime before. Nothing offensive, just routine. This particular message went to MI-5 and to the NATO desk in Century House, which handled all intelligence liaison with Britain’s allies except the CIA, which had its own designated liaison desk.
It was the head of the NATO desk who had first drawn Edwards’s attention to the embarrassment of McCready running an officer of the allied BND as his personal agent. Still, the NATO desk chief remained a friend of McCready’s. When he saw the German cable at ten that morning, he resolved to bring it to his friend Sam’s attention. Just in case. ... But he did not have time until midday.
At six, Major Vanavskaya was shown into Marcus Wolf’s office, two floors above that of Colonel Voss. The East German spymaster disliked uniforms and was in a well-cut dark suit. He also preferred tea to coffee and had a particularly fine blend sent to him from Fortnum and Mason in London. He offered the Soviet major a cup.
“Comrade General, that recent picture of Bruno Morenz. It came from you.”
Mischa Wolf regarded her steadily over the rim of his cup. If he had sources, assets, inside the West German establishment, which he did, he was not going to confirm it to this stranger.
“Could you possibly get hold of a copy of Morenz’s curriculum vitae?” she asked.
Marcus Wolf considered the request. “Why would you want it?” he asked softly.
She explained. In detail. Breaking a few rules.
“I know it’s only a suspicion,” she said. “Nothing concrete. A feeling there is a piece missing. Maybe something in his past.”
Wolf approved. He liked lateral thinking. Some of his best successes had stemmed from a gut feeling, a suspicion that the enemy had an Achilles’ heel somewhere, if only he could find it. He rose, went to a filing cabinet, and withdrew a sheaf of eight sheets without saying a word. It was Bruno Morenz’s life story. From Pullach, the same one Lothar Herrmann had studied on Wednesday afternoon. Vanavskaya exhaled in admiration. Wolf smiled.
If Marcus Wolf had a specialty in the espionage world, it was not so much in suborning and traducing high-ranking West Germans, though that could sometimes be done, as in placing prim spinster secretaries of impeccable life-style and security clearance at the elbows of such bigwigs. He knew that a confidential secretary saw everything her master saw and sometimes more.
Over the years, West Germany had been rocked by a series of scandals as private secretaries to ministers, civil servants, and defense contractors had either been arrested by the BfV or had slipped quietly away back to the East. One day, he knew, he would pull Fräulein Erdmute Keppel out of the Cologne BND and back to her beloved German Democratic Republic. Until then, she would continue to arrive at the office an hour ahead of Dieter Aust and copy anything of interest, including the personnel records of the entire staff. She would continue, in summer, to take her lunch in the quiet park eating her salad sandwiches with prim precision, feeding the pigeons with a few neat crumbs, and finally placing the empty sandwich bag in a nearby trash can. There it would be retrieved a few moments later by the gentleman walking his dog. In winter she would lunch instead in the warm café and drop her newspaper into the garbage container near the door, whence it would be rescued by the street cleaner.
When she came east, Fräulein Keppel would arrive to a state reception, a personal greeting from Security Minister Erich Mielke or possibly Party boss Erich Honecker himself, a medal, a state pension, and a snug retirement home by the lakes of Fürstenwalde.
Of course, not even Marcus Wolf was clairvoyant. He could not know that by 1990 East Germany would have ceased to exist, that Mielke and Honecker would be ousted and disgraced, that he would be retired and writing his memoirs for a fat fee, or that Erdmute Keppel would be spending her declining years in West Germany in a place of seclusion rather less comfortable than her designated flat at Fürstenwalde.
Major Vanavskaya looked up.
“He has a sister,” she said.
“
Yes,” said Wolf. “You think she may know something?”
“It’s a long shot,” said the Russian. “If I could go and see her ...”
“If you can get permission from your superiors,” Wolf prompted her gently. “You do not, alas, work for me.”
“But if I could, I would need a cover. Not Russian, not East German.”
Wolf shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I have certain ‘legends,’ ready for use. Of course. It is part of our strange trade.”