If it had not been for 15 minutes... Chapter 10

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Many years later we discovered yet another one of the miraculous circumstances that made our defection a completely amazing story. The certified unbreakable cryptographic code that had been used by us in deciphering the radio messages from the West was compromised and broken by the Stasi in the early fall of 1979. Therefore, if the West had sent the defection instructions in a radio message we would have been caught immediatly. The fact that the West used a dead letter drop was another one in a series of amazing circumstances.  

As I understand it,  the Stasi got a hold of the cyphers in the following manner:  A West German agent took a flight that crossed East-Germany and had a layover in East-Berlin. The Stasi took that opportunity to arrange for the plane to experience some "mechanical difficulties" which gave them all the time needed to rifle throught he baggage in the plane. I don't know why this agent was carrying the microfilm cypher set and who knows what else in his baggage. The bottom line is that it was found and proved to be instrumental in the code being broken. As of approximately Sept 1979, four months prior to our defection,  none of the West German messages were completely secure. Perhaps this was one of the contributing factors to the discovery of another defector approximately 1.5 years after we left. This unfortunate officer, Colonel Teske,  was summarily executed. The fact that the Stasi knew where to look, and which plane to delay only goes to show how thoroughly compromised the West German intelligence service was at that point.

Our ultimately succesful defection, in my opinion, is largely due to circumstances beyond human control. Call it Fate, call it Guardian Angels, call it Higher Being or call it God - I truly believe that after one examines the evidence, one has a very hard time in making a case against that opinion. Something or someone watched over us. Time and time again the Stasi was on to us and time and time again the BND screwed up. Its amazing we made it out alive.

January 14th 1979 - the cold front had lessened a little. Instead of -25 it was now about -10 degree Celsius. Still cold. With our bags packed the night before, Mom ordered a taxi and with one last look around we left the apartment that she had worked so hard to make into a special place. My heart was beating a tad bit faster and mom was just a little nervous but we couldn't let on that this was anything other than a normal trip. The taxi made its way down the mountain to the Oberhof train station where we caught a 10 AM train to Berlin.

15 minutes after we left in the taxi, Kratsch's henchmen were knocking on our door with an arrest warrant. If it had not been for those 15 minutes we would not be here today.

The ride to Berlin was uneventful. We took a taxi to the Stasi safe apartment, snuck very quietly up thee floors and spent the night there. Early the next morning we bought tickets to Warzaw, Poland, and made our way onto the Paris-Moscow long distance train. I still remember feeling somewhat more nervous when we crossed the border, although having been to Poland twice a teenager I knew that traffic leaving East-Germany in that direction was not checked as thoroughly as trains going West from the Soviet Union or Poland.

After a 12 hour train ride we arrived at the Hotel "Syrena" in Warzaw. The way my mother explains it, my signature was found as late as 1991 by researchers who followed our trail for a West German television show. Funny, I don't even remember signing us in..... What I do remember was the custom of Polish people to order hard liquor with their meals. Anytime we had lunch or dinner and looked at the table of the other hotel guests we saw people ordering full, half or even quarter bottles of vodka with their meal.

Tuesday Januay 16th 1979

Back in Berlin Kratsch knew that my mother was involved but he still did not know who the inside man was. Was it a diplomat? Perhaps a high ranking member of the Free German Youth Organization? Little did he know that the man he was after worked for the same department of the government as he did. Somehow his researchers determined that the suspect drove a Lada and based on the mail dragnet, lived in the general area of the Marienburger street (which is the address of the safehouse). Kratsch issues an order to find all owners of Lada cars in the general area of Marienburger street.

Stiller - who had been driving a Lada - was now driving a Wartburg and was not interviewed.

Wednesday January 17th 

 Markus Wolfe is lecturing in the officers mess in front of an audience of elite party members of the the MfS. Schroeders report later describes that Stiller was seen taking copious notes. Stiller was the party representative for his section, a post given only to most ideologically trusted indivduals. You had to be a 1000% communist in order to represent your section or division.

Thursday, January 18th

 At 5PM Stiller makes a phone call from the Stasi safehouse to his wife. She had been threatening divorce again. He asked if she would reconsider. She doesn't. "Thats it then" Stiller says as he hangs up the phone in an uncharacteristically short manner. The plan, according to the BND was for Stiller to get on a train that crosses the border with West Germany and simply leave the country as a tourist. BND courier Dietrich Nestroj had left a new set of papers at the dead letter drop. To illustrate how thoroughly infiltrated the BND had been at this point in time, after the fall of East-Germany several files were discovered that showed the Stasi knew something was being planned - and knew exactly where. According to file G/318/1/79 eastern double-agents reported that the BND had rented several rooms at the Hotel "Koerner" and in the motel "Atlas" in Hannover. According to the report, between 2PM and 3 PM that afternoon several members of the BND's central office in Pullach are seen arriving these locations under the protection and cover of local members of the BND.

Officially Stiller is supposed to be on a business trip to Halle. After 6PM he makes his way into the HvA offices and up to his section on the fifth floor. He has a large briefcase with him. The keys to the office of his boss are unprotected in a metal case along the wall. Stillers goal is to leave with as much "stuff" as possible. The material he wants to get is located in a reinforced steel filing cabinet of his boss Guenther Jauck. Stiller had tools in his briefcase.

He takes a hammer and steel chisel and attempts to break into the steel cabinet with mighty blows. Just picture this. Here is a defector in the middle of the offices of the equivalent of the CIA making a huge racket by attempting to break into a steel cabinet. Can you believe it?

Stiller's plan was to bring not only the names of his own agents whom he was recruiting and running in the West , but the names of all the western agents working for the five sections of this division. He continues to deliver blow after blow, but the cabinet doesn't budge. (The crime scene report of the Stasi noted on the next day that a 3 centimeter section of the upper left door had been bent). Stiller gives up. The cabinet is impenetrable.

As he turns to leave his eyes fall on the steel cabinet in the secretaries office. A quick push and turn moves this much less reinforced piece on an angle and a shake causes the lock-pins to drop out of place. He opens the cabinet.  The following items were quickly transferred into the briefcase (According to the Stasi crime scene report .)  

- 7,180 West German Mark

Stillers most important discovery was a set of blank forms used to give agents the permission to cross into West Berlin via the "baggage channel" at the Friedrichstrasse trainstation. He decides right then and there to change the enire defection plan and to take his fate into his own hands.

Just for background information, West Berlin has a public transportation system, similar to the BART in San Franscisco (only older) , which crosses into East Berlin in several places. Its trains run in sub-terrenean tunnels or across the surface much like the BART.

Stiller completes the empty forms back at the Stasi safehouse. Its a routine he has done many times already. Next her jumps into his Wartburg and drives to the trainstation at Friedrichstrasse. He knows the way. His destination is a very nondescript looking door at the south side of the train station. It has a sign that reads " Service Entrance - Only Employees of the German Train Service allowed ". Of course the sign is merely a camouflage that hides a channel point for agents being sent into the West.

Behind the door is a baren foyer, at the wall immediatly to his right was another door - this one without any handles - to the right of the door a small window with drawn curtains and further to the right a doorbell. Stiller pressed the bell briefly.

Behind the curtain the border patrol officer of the day, Colonel Manfred Bruekner rose to his feet and opened the window to be faced with a Stasi ID card, held by Stiller. Bruekner pressed the automatic door lock, a brief buzzing sound and Stiller pushed the handleless door open.

Bruekner examines the man in front of him. He has two bags. Bruekner checks the mans papers which consist of typical Stasi forms used to allow an agent to enter the West. Bruekner eyes glide across the form and stop at the box titled "Purpose". It reads "operational reasons" - but according to orders from the MfS, the proper wording should include the note "Baggage Channel". This form clearly didn't. Stiller didn't loose his cool " It might take until next year for our retarded secretary to get it" he reasoned. Bruekner evaluated the situation. Should he call the officer of the day at the MfS? Would it be a problem to call for such a small discrepancy? Should he really keep a soldier of the invisible war from his important mission? Certainly that would be an invitation for trouble. (Many years later a former colleague of Bruekner explains that the agents of the MfS where practically demi-gods to the border patrol. They could not do anything wrong and their word was practically law).

Bruekner pushes another buzzer and a steel door at the end of the office opens with a metallic click. Stiller steps through the door and enters into a remnant of the twilight zone of cold war - with a single step he was in a labyrinth of halls, stairs and doors that even though located practically smack dab in the middle of East Berlin was indeed Western territory and freely accessible to western train passengers. In short it was an ideal place to make an agent of the East dissappear while crossing into the West.

It is 8:41 PM when Stiller stepped onto the train platform of the No 6 Train, which traversed between the West Berlin city sections of "Kreuzberg" and "Wedding" - with an intermediate stop right underneath the East Berlin city section "Mitte". The platform is empty. Above Stiller, built into the ceiling, the Stasi surveillance cameras are recording all of his moves.

"These were the longest minutes of my life, it was almost as though I stood beside myself and watched myself act" Stiller recalled at a later date. Funny, I used almost exactly the same choice of words in describing a moment in our defection a few days later. The train arrives, and with a couple of steps Stiller enters the closest compartment. "Watch your step" a voice rings out over the trains PA system as the doors close.

What happened next during this eventful night was never officially released by the West Germans, except the Stasi did find out in detail what transpired via a Western agent who defected to East Berlin in 1982. He described in minute detail the absolute chaos that ensued when Stiller took matters into his own hands. Nobody in West Berlin had any incling what was going on, nobody knew about the defection that Pullach Central had been working on. The official Stasi version of what was told did not include one small detail. As Stiller was riding along on the subway the train slowed down considerably. "They have to know by now " Stiller reasoned with himself, his fear returning full force. And in order not to get caught he jumped off the train as it puttered along ever so slowly. In retrospect, nobody at the Stasi knew that anything was amiss - not for several hours anyway.

Stiller jumped of the train in close proximity to the West Berlin airport "Tegel". He makes his way into the airport and enters the office of the airport police shortly after 9 PM. Upon closing the door he proceeded to astonish the "desk seargent" and assorted airport police on duty by reaching into his coat and producing a gun. He explained to the thunderstruck officers that he is defecting. Everybody was completely frozen. It took several seconds for reality to return to the small office in Tegel. While the airport police was completely out of their league and had no idea what to do next, they did manage to contact representatives of the CIA and the French intelligence services. As you may recall Berlin was divided among  the victorious nations after WW2 and the allieds still maintained a considerable presence in West Berlin in 1979.

By now the small office of the airport police contained no less than 10 CIA and French intelligence agents. Stiller astonished the group even further by producing a small case of beer and two bottles of vodka from one of his traveling bags. Everyone is googeling from afar , trying to get their hands on the material that Stiller brought across. He did not let anyone outside of the BND touch it. "Even the file with microfilms and micro-fiches was at least 2 centimeter thick" recalled an eyewitness to the event. Stiller atempts to reach a contact in Coburg via telephone, but the line continues to be busy for what seemed like hours. Finally he gets to speak to someone at the BND. After appropriate congratulations he is told  that our defection is not going very well.

With all the excitement the night passes by fast and the BND moved Stiller to Munich very early  the  next morning .  Later that  same day he is taken to Cologne where he met with Heribert Hellenbroich who at that point in time was in charge of the "Verfassungsschutz" department, which roughly translates to "protection of the constitution". I suppose the closes similar organization in the States might be the Dept. of Treasury or perhaps FBI. Hellenbroich went on to become the director of the BND in 1985.

"There he stood before me" recalled Hellenbroich " still dressed in classic East-German "communist" clothing. My very first decision about Stiller was to send him to a men's clothing shop to pick up something decent to wear." The longer Hellenbroich reminisces the more animated he becomes. " It was absolutely fantastic working with Stiller on that day. We had the BND, BKA and the Verfassungsschutz all meeting together with him in one room without any trace of the usual rivalries between departments. The thing that I noticed most about him was that even though he had just undergone an extreme level of stress, Stiller was still cool and collected. He was extremely bright with a memory that wouldn't quit. "

In an effort to misdirect any search efforts by the Stasi, the BND feeds a disinformation story to the West German TV stations. That night several news organizations reported that we had all made it across into the West. Even though mom and I were still stuck in Warzaw with no place to turn to, waiting for the next step.

Continue to Chapter 11

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