Tunnel 29 Read online

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  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton, an Hachette UK Company

  First US Edition: August 2021

  By arrangement with the BBC

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  Typeset in Bembo MT Pro by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936581

  ISBNs: 978-1-5417-8884-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-8882-4 (ebook)

  E3-20210709-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  1 The Beach

  2 The First Escape

  3 The Long Walk

  4 The Rebrand

  5 The Smuggler

  6 The Radio

  7 The Tank

  8 A Thousand Little Things

  9 The House of One Thousand Eyes

  10 Operation Rose

  11 Mousetrap

  12 Snow

  13 The Escapes

  14 The Boy in Short Pants

  15 Valley of the Clueless

  16 Binoculars

  17 The Watch-tower

  18 The Camp

  19 The Spy

  20 The File

  21 Evi and Peter (and Walter and Wilhelm Too)

  22 The Girrmann Group

  23 The House of the Future

  24 The Factory

  25 Concrete

  26 The Cemetery

  27 Shift-work

  28 A New Name

  29 The Bomb

  30 Blisters

  31 The TV Producer

  32 The Deal

  33 New York

  34 Cameras

  35 Umbrellas

  36 Death Strip

  37 Wilhelm, Again

  38 Ground Rules

  39 The Leak

  40 The Second Tunnel

  41 The Lovers

  42 The Day Before

  43 7 August

  44 Hohenschönhausen

  45 Mole-hunt

  46 Silence

  47 The Show Trial

  48 The Butcher

  49 Claus’s Story

  50 Paris

  51 Numbers

  52 The Last Visit

  53 The Messenger

  54 Investigations

  55 Maps

  56 Reuven

  57 14 September

  58 Walter and Wilhelm

  59 The Search

  60 Film-reel

  61 The Bug

  62 The Pushchair

  63 The Party

  64 The Canoe

  65 The Plane

  66 The Second Party

  67 The Press Conference

  68 The Library

  69 A Message

  70 The Film

  71 The Letter

  72 Hamlet

  73 The Gold Mercedes

  74 Final Report

  75 Airborne

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Afterword

  What They Did Next

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Locations

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  About the Author

  For Henry, Matilda and Sam

  And my childhood family

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  ‘Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.’

  Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

  Foreword

  WHEN I FIRST meet him, I can barely talk. It’s eight flights up to Joachim’s apartment and by the time I’m up there, holding my microphone to record our first meeting, I’m puffed out.

  Joachim laughs and invites me in. I’d phoned him a week earlier (in October 2018), said I wanted to come to Berlin to ask some questions about something he’d done almost sixty years ago. The phone call was short, his English was limited, my German was even more limited, but in that conversation one thing struck me. Most of the people I’ve interviewed in my career as a journalist tend to generalise, summing up their experiences through their emotions. Joachim was different: he spoke in details, remembered smells, sounds, measurements, colours. I was intrigued and asked if I could come and meet him the following week. He said yes.

  We walk round his apartment. It’s light and airy, full of plants, and his shelves are dotted with puppets, buddha statues and porcelain cats. Above the door to the bathroom there’s a white enamel plate with the number seven on, wrenched off the wall by Joachim in the middle of the night, he tells me, from an apartment block on the other side of the city. The apartment block where it all happened.

  We walk over to the full-length windows and I admire the panoramic view, the city coming to life below us in the early winter sun. Joachim’s flat is on the edge of things, where the apartment blocks and high-rises of inner-city Berlin meet the conifers and pines of Grunewald forest. We stand there a moment and Joachim gestures in front of us, pointing into the distance where the Berlin Wall once stood. I think of those images from 1989, the night when people climbed on top of the Wall, danced on the concrete, then hacked into it with hammers, pulling it down. Every year that ends in a nine, we replay that moment, but I’ve always been more interested in the other end of the Berlin Wall story: 1961. The year it was built.

  What happens when a government builds a barrier that cuts a city or country in half? That question was in the back of my mind when I was working as a journalist in Egypt and the police built a ten-foot-wall in front of the Ministry of Interior and protesters pulled it down. It was in my mind when I was living in Jerusalem and spent hours queueing at checkpoints to cross into Gaza or the West Bank. People talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall as the end of an era, and in one way it was: it marked the end of the Cold War. But a new era soon began: the age of walls. Right now, walls are in fashion – over seventy countries (a third of the world) have some kind of barrier or fence. Some run along borders, others separate areas within countries, or even within cities. Whatever their scale, with their guard-towers, death strips and alarm systems, many draw inspiration from the Wall of all walls – the one built in Berlin in the
summer of 1961.

  Joachim gestures to a table where the two of us sit. I clip a microphone onto Joachim’s navy fleece and ask what he ate for breakfast, the standard radio question to check his levels. As he tells me about his smoothie and scrambled egg, I jack the microphone right up. His voice is quiet, modest. Up close I notice his elfin ears, his bright blue eyes that squint closed when he smiles. I calculate his age: eighty. Then I press record.

  That evening we talked for three hours. I returned the next day and we talked for five. It went on like this for over a week, me asking questions, Joachim answering them with breathtaking detail, his wife bringing cups of tea, gently squeezing his shoulder as she set them down. Over the following three years, I tracked down others involved in this story, interviewed them and read their letters and diaries, then discovered thousands of Stasi files that give you the kind of minute-by-minute detail that, as a journalist, you usually only dream of. I discovered a replica tunnel, the same dimensions as Tunnel 29, and recorded inside it; I wanted to know what it felt like to be underground, digging in the space the width of a coffin, and wondered why someone would choose to spend so long down here.

  This research changed what I thought I knew about many things: the end of the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War, the building of the Berlin Wall, the birth of TV news, and what it means to become a spy and betray the people around you. The result is this book.

  Any dialogue that appears comes directly from those interviews as well as from Stasi meeting reports and interrogations, and I’ve drawn on oral histories, maps, memoirs, court-papers, declassified CIA and State Department files, and print, TV and radio reports to fact-check names and dates as well as for additional research. Any errors are mine.

  Joachim

  THE FIRST THING that hits him is the smell. Coal-dust. Then he feels it. It pours out, onto his head, his shoulders and into his eyes until he’s blind with it. But he keeps going, hacking into the floor above with an axe, the ceiling shaking, everything shaking, the noise so deafening he can feel it in his bones. Then, suddenly: fresh air. He’s made a hole, one big enough to climb through. He puts the axe down and picks up his gun: if they find him, he’s not going alive. Smearing the coal-dust from one eye with the back of his sleeve, Joachim prepares to climb into the room, no idea what’s up there. He pauses and in the silence he finds himself thinking, not for the first time, how had it all come to this?

  1

  The Beach

  12 August 1961 – Rügen Island, East Germany

  JOACHIM PULLS HIS foot back from the water. It’s cold, even in August. His friends are splashing in the sea, teasing him, calling him to come in, but he hates cold water and they know he won’t.

  He thinks back to last night. Workers beer. Sweat. Bodies tightly packed in against each other. Fumbling and kissing in the corner. He’s never had a holiday like this, not once in his twenty-two years and he doesn’t want it to end. Bright green forest covers the chalk cliffs behind him, white-tailed eagles wheel overhead and the sea is so clear he can see tiny fish flitting through the water.

  Just one week left, then it’s back to East Berlin. Three hundred kilometres south, it’s a different world. Grey. Edgy. Even more so over the past few months. They’ve all noticed the changes: more border guards on the streets, the soaring numbers of people escaping to West Germany, as though they know something. There’s electricity in the air, that hum before a storm.

  Joachim looks up to see his best friend Manfred wading out of the water. They’ve known each other since they were six, smoked their first cigarettes together, dreamt up elaborate tricks at school. Manfred always got into arguments, but Joachim was that child at school who never got caught, always knew where the line was – never crossed it.

  That night, Joachim and Manfred change into jeans and T-shirts, comb their hair and set out across the sand to the beer tent. Another evening in this beach-side paradise on the edge of East Germany, a couple of twenty-two-year-olds in that weightlessness of a long summer with nowhere they have to be.

  What they don’t know is that, right now, they’re exactly where the government want young men like them: young men who might make trouble if they knew what was about to happen. For dozens of tanks are rumbling towards East Berlin and tens of thousands of soldiers are creeping into trucks, armed with Kalashnikovs, machine-guns and anti-tank missiles. Any minute they’ll receive their orders and then it will begin.

  The next morning it’s the sound that wakes him – the whine of a loudspeaker crackling into action. As he hears the efficient sound of tents being zipped open, Joachim climbs out into the campsite and walks towards the loudspeaker, now blaring out the brassy pomp of military music. Then, a man’s staccato voice: ‘Das Ministerium des Innern der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik veröffentlicht folgende Bekanntmachung…’

  Joachim can tell straight away. It’s a government announcement and he tunes out, bored. But then the voice changes, becomes more urgent: ‘Wollankstrasse, Bornholmer Strasse, Brunnenstrasse, Chausseestrasse…’ The man is listing streets in Berlin, streets Joachim has run around in since he was little, and now he’s interested. He can’t work out why the man is talking about them, but then he hears it – the voice says: ‘The border between East and West Berlin is closed.’

  Joachim’s stomach registers adrenaline, but his head is catching up, trying to work out what’s happened: if the border between East and West Berlin has been closed, that would mean the city has been cut in half, but how can you split a city overnight? It would mean severing everything – electricity, trams, trains, sewage – and it’s such an obscene notion that Joachim and his friends ignore the announcement and go to the beach.

  The following morning, the campsite buzzes with rumours: barbed wire; soldiers on the streets; tanks; machine-guns. Suddenly, Joachim feels a long way from home, and, like a storm chaser, he wants to be in the middle of whatever is happening. After breakfast, Joachim and his friends pack up their old Citroën, zooming back to East Berlin in one stint, arriving at dusk.

  As the car weaves through the streets, something doesn’t feel right. It’s quiet. Too quiet. Hardly any people on the roads, few other cars. Eventually, after zigzagging down streets lined with linden trees and functional concrete buildings, they reach Bernauer Strasse, the mile-long road that straddles the border. Climbing out of the car, Joachim and his friends walk towards a sign, a sign they’ve passed hundreds of times crossing the border from East to West Berlin:

  YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE DEMOCRATIC SECTOR OF BERLIN

  It’s always made them laugh, that word, democratic. Nothing that democratic about East Berlin, Joachim would say. Usually there’d be a couple of policemen standing by that sign, but now, silhouetted in the glare of a single street-lamp, Joachim sees a group of men in green uniforms and steel helmets. But it’s not their uniforms that scares him. It’s what they’re holding across their chests: machine-guns. Barely breathing, Joachim watches as one man turns and strides over: ‘What are you doing? Get out of here! If you don’t…’ The man gestures with his machine-gun.

  Joachim turns to leave and that’s when he sees it: a twist of barbed wire glinting in the streetlight. He has no idea what’s happened, what these men are guarding, but somehow he knows that in one night, everything has changed.

  2

  The First Escape

  February 1945 – East Germany

  JOACHIM WAKES TO find his mother stuffing photographs, jewellery and clothes into a suitcase, his one-year-old sister perched on her hip. Downstairs, Joachim’s father is ransacking cupboards, piling fruit and tins into bags, hauling mattresses off beds and taking it all outside where everything is soon coated in snow.

  Joachim doesn’t know why they’re leaving; he knows something is wrong but there’s no time to ask questions. His parents pack everything onto their cart, two horses tethered in front puffing out white smoke-clouds of condensation into the cold air. Joachim clambers up, burrowing under a
woollen blanket alongside his grandmother, baby sister and mother. Then his father climbs onto the coachman’s seat, nudging the horses into a trot.

  Joachim listens to the wheels as they squeak through the ice, watches the snow sift through the trees, dappling their horses white. The farm recedes behind them and Joachim has no idea if he’ll ever see it again, if he’ll ever do those morning walks with his father, racing to keep up on his tiny legs as they checked on the cows, horses, pigs and geese. At the end of a gravel lane, past the fruit trees, where the farm turned into forest, Joachim and his father would watch the stags rutting, their burnt-red fur glinting in the dawn light. He can’t understand why they’re leaving it all behind.

  What Joachim’s father can’t tell him – because how do you tell a six-year-old any of this – is that they’re on the run from the Red Army. He’d heard about them last night on the radio, the Russian soldiers coming from the East, raping women and torching farms, and he’s desperate to get his family to Berlin before the Russians find them.

  What he doesn’t know is just how close the Russians are already. Only a day’s ride behind, the first troops of the Red Army are marching, leading a column that stretches hundreds of miles. Underneath their feet, the ground shakes, like the first stir of an avalanche, for there are an obscene number of men: six million soldiers. There are soldiers with padded leather helmets driving monstrous T-34 tanks that flatten the snow; there are commanders driving Chevrolet trucks with mortars on the back; there are cavalrymen on long-haired ponies and camels; then, on foot, a million criminals released from gulags, spurred on by rousing Russian war music that blasts from loudspeakers.

  And they are fast.

  The Russians are veterans of winter battles, and this weather – averaging minus twenty Celsius – is to their advantage. While German soldiers in thin socks lose toes to frostbite, the Russians know to bandage their feet in linen to protect them from the cold. At night, Russian sappers clear minefields; during the day, their tanks blast across snowdrifts, and these tanks are so enormous that when they come across escaping families in carts, they crush them under their huge metal tracks.