Chapter 8
The first few messages that came across were more than anything designed to ferret out any sort of trap. The BND was very careful and wanted to make sure they weren't being set up by the Stasi. Hence the questions pertained to Werners identity, his job, his office his section of the department. All of this could be verified by the BND indepently.
Have you ever noticed that human beings can get used to the most absurd situations and in a relatively short period of time feel as though the most unusual circumstances are normal? Whenever you get a faster computer, pretty soon it seems normal or slow. Whenever you get a faster verhicle, it doesn't take long and you are used to it.
This seemed to be the case for us. Never mind the absolutely fantastic set of circumstances that we found ourselves in, it became something of a routine. If we had known that at any given point several dozen agents where combing the land for us, it certainly wouldn't have been routine. However, we lived in blissful ignorance.
Growing up in East-Germany, the people I knew fell into two rather large categories. Those who didn't believe the governments propaganda and generally knew, or suspected, that the entire country's political structure was one big mess, and those on the opposite end of the spectrum, who genuinely believed that the government was correct. As is the case everywhere in the world, like attracts like. The kids who came from households of Party officials or otherwise government connected parents would pretty much "tow the party" line. The rest of us went along with the dominant paradigm out of enlightend self-interest. That meant in front of the authorities we would pretend to be good citizens. Of course this pretense only went so far, considering we were trying to dress as Western as possible, listen only to West-German radio and watch only West German TV. I remember a funny incident that illustrates how different our little town in the mountains was from large parts of the rest of the country.
Because we had contact with Western tourists and businessmen, there was a very lively black market thriving in my little hometown. If you had the right connections you could get West German records, by paying 50-100 East German Marks. For the purpose of this disussion, without getting into details of exchange rates and Cost of Living Indices, it felt to us as the equivalent of $50.00-$100.00 might feel to an American. If you knew the right people you could get Levis jeans and jackets as well as other Western goodies. So one Saturday morning I was making my way across town, decked out in my usual jeans, Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jean jacket, when a young man who looked to be in his mid-20's approached me. I could tell he had just recently arrived in town on vacation. He asked for directions to one of the sights. As we walked along and discussed his intended hike for the day he stopped, turned to me and said: " You know this is going to sound odd but I will ask it anyways. Everywhere I turn, people are dressed in jeans. What do you guys do up here? " Perhaps he was from a smaller town or perhaps he hadn't been to East-Berlin which certainly rivaled my hometown in "westerly" dress.
Had I known about some of the statistics that caused the MfS (Stasi) to bring their bloodhounds onto our scent, I certainly would have been much more worried at this point. You may recall that I mentioned earlier one of the methods we communicated with the West was through the use of pre-written letters, in which we wrote our messages using invisible ink, yes thats right - good old invisible ink. Many kids learn how to make one form or another as part of experiments or as the result of reading books. I just recently found out that the Stasi district office in charge of the south-easterly portion of the country (which coincidentally was the area from which most of our letters were mailed), would literally open 1,500 -2,000 letters addressed to Western countries each and every day. That's about half a million letters - opened, read and most freqently micro-filmed for samples of handwriting. So the government broke its own postal law about 500,000 times a year.
If your relatives wanted to help and send some cash to you, the MfS would simply keep it. And to top it off, 3%-5% of all letters originating in the West would never make it to their addressee's.
Come to think of it, I got lucky in that respect as well. Just a year earlier, for the record breaking period of three whole letters, I had a pen-pal in the US. A friend of mine worked at the local post office in the summer and had written down an American return address he had seen on a package.
He wrote a letter to that address. Turns out the person who mailed the package from the US was a school teacher. She took the letter to her class and several kids wrote back asking to hear from East-German school kids. How cool was that ?!
I will never forget how hard I worked on producing 10 lines of poor broken English which earned me an answer letter from Nancy Julginity of Springfield PA. After much wrestling with the dictionary I deciphered that she was 16 years old, enjoyed school, loved Bruce Springsteen with a passion and could not understand how a system like the one I lived in could continue to exist. I tried to explain it to her but was never able to get the words added up correctly in English. On the bright side, my very first record I bought in the West was a Bruce Springsteen Album released only in Europe called "Working Class Dog" . It had a Pitbull dressed in a white shirt and red tie on it I think. I've been a Bruce fan ever since.
Remember how you felt as a kid when you couldn't wait for Christmas to come? Well, it was pretty much the same sort of expectation with which I was hoping that soon , very soon , we could leave for West Germany.
By the way, I think I mentioned before that East-Germany in the late seventies was in many regards similar to Western countries in the early sixties. Actually, come to think of it, there were some aspects that I really wish I had available for my daughter as she grows up in Los Angeles in this day and age. For example I could go hitch-hiking as a 16 year old teenager without worries of being accosted. Even more, as a young boy my friends and I would play in our neighborhood or across the entire town without fear of crime. The worst criminal behavior that we might see - if you call it that - would be a couple of drunk middle aged men, walking down the street arm in arm on Father's Day, singing bawdy drinking song. Or better yet, watch those same sloshed citizens loose all inhibition and jump into the town fountain for an impromptu bath.
Unbeknownst to us, this period entailed a great deal of hectic activity for the BND as well as an unforeseen player in this game - Lieutenant-General Guenther Kratsch. Chief of the "Spionageabwehr" ( Counter Espionage ) department of the Stasi.
On the 28th of August 1978, a mere month after the initial dead letter drop exchange, the Stasi got incredibly lucky. As part of the Stasi's examination of letters that went to the West, they came across one of Werner and Mom's very first letters . It got caught because the West German supplied pre-addressed envelopes listed an address that seemed suspicious to the East. Bingo! Jackpot! Within hours Kratsch had a report on his desk, issued by the Chemists of Section 34 in his division, that this letter included secret writings. The secret communication, found between the lines of the hand (pre) written letter entailed 129 groups of 5 number sequences, all encrypted.
The Stasi opened a file on this case. Over the years, even after our defection, all the way until the fall of East Germany the file , code named "Borste" (bristle) would continue to grow. The Stasi never stopped looking for us, all the way until the very end in 1989/90 - not so long ago when you think about it.
One way the Stasi was able to quickly catch on is the fact that the BND's cover addresses in the West were generally all located within the same geographical area. The Stasi was aware of this area, as well as an arrangement between the BND and the Bundespost (West German Postal Service) to forward to Pullach all correspondence sent to the cover addresses. Lastly, Stiller's and moms letters were all directed to only go to cover addresses, thus greatly increasing the Stasi's chances of an intercept.
Kratsch orders Major Johannes Schroeder on the job. His top spy catcher, Schroeder is equipped with the necessary warrants to even order the at-will collection of the contents of certain mailboxes for analysis. Schroeders main goal at this point was to find the mailbox used by mom and Stiller and thus to narrow down the geographic region were we lived.
In the four months between August and November of 1978 the Stasi successfully intercepted eight seperate letters in this manner. Each was opened, analyzed, documented and then sent on to keep up appearances. Schroeder thought he had narrowed the mailboxes in question down to one particular box located at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. He ordered clandestine camera equipment to be installed in the area and every single person who approached this box was filmed. Time passed without a successful capture. Kratsch had to make daily reports to the Minister of State Security Erich Mielke. And every day the same questions from Mielke: "How is it going? Where are they? Have you found them? Are really working the case? Do you need additional personnel? Whatever the case maybe do not under any circumstances allow for anything to befall the German Democratic Republic !"