“BERLIN WANTS TO SEE YOU,” Herman said when he arrived at the safe house. This piqued my interest, but I waited for him to continue.

“We are getting close to decision time. Can you get a leave of absence from the university for three weeks?”

I sat down on the back of the couch and thought a moment.

“Sure, but only if I get some kind of official document,” I said.

“No problem.”

Herman showed up for our next meeting with an official requisition ordering me to report to a military installation near Berlin for three weeks of extraordinary defense training.

As we discussed the details, I felt my blood flowing with excitement.

“What can you tell me?” I asked Herman as we sat at a small table in the kitchen.

“You’ll meet with agents in Berlin and possibly be introduced to one or two senior officers,” he said. “And for this assignment, you will have a clandestine meeting with an unknown counterpart in a big city. I’ll give you a place, a time, and a passcode that you’ll need to memorize.”

I knew this was my first opportunity to enter into the murky, but ever so enticing, world of undercover operations. There would be no fallback plan. If I missed the meeting or messed up the details, the entire trip would have to be scuttled, with uncertain consequences for my career as a secret agent. Punctuality was never a problem for me so I had no doubt that I would make the meeting. I’ve often jokingly said that I have a clock where others have a heart.

I took the train to East Berlin and traveled to the meeting site in the Karlshorst district of the city. It turned out to be a residential area, and there was little traffic. My contact and I would both carry a copy of the East German sports weekly in our left hand as a sign of recognition.

At the appointed time, I approached the street corner, identified my contact, and greeted him with the passcode sequence: “Excuse me, I am looking for Lindenstraße.”

“Is that where Helmut lives?” he responded with the corresponding code.

Having established our credentials, we introduced ourselves as “Dieter” and “Boris.”

Boris was a stocky man of average height, in his late forties, with a typically round Russian face. He proved to be much like Herman, even-tempered and very kind and friendly.

He walked me to his car, and we discussed our meeting schedule for the next three weeks. We would meet every three days at a specified time and location in the Lichtenberg section of Berlin. He then told me to take two days to familiarize myself with the city and find accommodations—and that the KGB would pay the rent.

I quickly found a private house where I could rent a room and spent the remainder of my free time exploring my new surroundings.

Ah, Berlin, our great capital and a metropolis of international prominence. This was where the action was—and I was here!

By 1972, parts of East Berlin had been freed from some of the architectural constraints of the Stalin era, which dominated the main boulevard, the Karl Marx Allee. In particular, the Alexanderplatz, a large public square at the center of the city, had undergone a massive overhaul and now boasted the second-tallest TV tower in the world (which is still the tallest freestanding building in Germany today), a world clock, an ornate fountain, and other architectural details that gave this part of the city a certain modern feel not found anywhere else in the GDR.

A visitor from the West would quickly notice the lack of a human touch—there was no commerce, no entertainment, nothing to do but wander about and perhaps sit at the edge of the fountain for a chat—but for those of us in the East, Alexanderplatz was a sign of real progress and a source of great pride. As soon as twilight approached, however, the people quickly scattered, leaving the square a spooky, bleak expanse of lifeless monuments in a scarcely lit city that seemed to draw inward as darkness descended.

During my three weeks in Berlin, Boris and I spent many hours discussing the details of an undercover existence. He emphasized that the mechanics of spying could all be learned, but the psychology was a different matter.

“You will have to disappear from your current life, and nobody—not even your mother—will know where you’ve gone. As far as most people are concerned, you will have vanished into thin air. Wherever you go, you will be in hostile territory. You will have to befriend your enemies and pretend to be one of them. Communication with Moscow will always be indirect and will always take time, and you will have to make many decisions on the spot without the benefit of advice.”

I listened intently, nodding my head occasionally as Boris studied how I took in the information. Looking at a passing streetcar filled with East Berliners, I realized that normal life was not the path for me.

“Lastly—and I want to be quite honest about this—a large percentage of undercover spies get caught and go to jail. Could you handle this? Are you hesitant or afraid? Think about all of that, and try to put yourself into that scenario. This should be the very foundation of your decision.”

As I absorbed these words, I was surprised at the lack of fear I felt.

Before we parted company, Boris reached into his briefcase and pulled out a stack of West German magazines. My eyes widened at the sight. I had thumbed through plenty of Western periodicals with Herman, but he had always taken them with him when he left.

“Read them,” Boris said. “There will be more.”

I loved reading those publications. Unlike our magazines and newspapers in the East, they were colorful and entertaining. I chalked up their anti-Communist rhetoric to capitalist propaganda and viewed my reading as gathering useful information about real life on the other side of the wall.

One morning, when I met Boris in his car, he handed me a manila envelope.

“You are going to the West,” he said.

I remained unfazed on the outside, but excitement was coursing through my veins. I was being allowed to go where most East Germans could not. The wall ensured that. The West was a world that was taboo for us—and the explorer in me could not have been more thrilled.

From inside the manila envelope, I slid out an East German passport and thirty Deutschmarks, the equivalent of about $50 today. This was the first time I’d had Western currency in my hands. The colorful pieces of paper were the equivalent of a magic wand; they could buy all kinds of wonderful goods that were otherwise not available to us.

The next day, I entered West Berlin by way of the Friedrichstraße subway station. The crossing was guarded only by Soviet military, making it an ideal spot for the KGB to slip people in and out of West Berlin.

Even though the uniformed guard who studied my passport was from a friendly force, my heart still pounded as I waited. Finally, he handed my documents back to me and waved me through.

As I emerged from the subway, I felt as if I had entered a different world. In the first hour of exploration, I noticed a certain cheerfulness in the way West Berlin presented itself, and it made me realize how poorly maintained the historic buildings were in the eastern part of the city and how drab the multistory East German tenements were. West Berlin’s architecture and streets were clean and modern. Even the people looked nicer, and they were much better dressed. Moreover, the streets were packed with automobiles of every variety, with makes and models I’d never heard of. Much later, when trying to explain the difference between the eastern and the western sides of Berlin, I would say, “The East was a movie shot in black and white. In the West, they had color.”

The purpose of this trip was strictly to get my feet wet. Boris had told me to walk around, visit some stores, smell the air, and get used to the place. It was all innocent enough, but as I walked and observed, my nerves were a jumbled mess. The mere knowledge that I was on a training mission for the KGB made all the difference. My heart skipped a beat every time I noticed a policeman in his inconspicuous light blue uniform. In the East, we could recognize the Polizei from a distance by their bright green uniforms, but not here. Could they sense that I was not one of them? Did it show on my face or in the way I walked? Would they recognize me as an unwelcome intruder and haul me in for interrogation?

My last stop before returning to the East was an outdoor snack stand, where I consumed a delicious bratwurst chased down with an equally delicious glass of beer. Then I walked to the train station, went through the checkpoint, and crossed back into East Berlin. As I came out on the other side of the wall, I had a sense of pride. I’d done it!

Months later, I ran into an old high school classmate who had been recruited by the Stasi to go undercover in West Germany. As we talked, I sensed that he knew I was involved in something—either the Stasi or something else—but he seemed to have that knowledge without our directly talking about it. I told him nothing about my trip to West Berlin, but he told me a story about being let go by the Stasi after falling apart on a practice trip like the one I had taken. There was no direct punishment for him, he said, but he lost his chance to be part of the German secret service and was unable to resume his career in engineering, which he had started before signing up with the Stasi.

My foray into West Berlin had served its purpose. I had proven to myself and to my handlers that I could withstand the psychological pressure of being on the other side.

On my next to last day in East Berlin, Boris told me I would be introduced to a very important KGB official. When he picked me up at the usual meeting spot, we drove to the Soviet military complex in the Karlshorst district.

Boris drove up to a fenced-off complex with a guarded entrance. He parked the car and motioned for me to follow him. As I took in the scenery, a complex of large buildings with weathered gray-green facades, every trace of cheerfulness drained from my demeanor. This was serious.

Once past the guards and inside the main building, we walked along a dark hallway and entered what seemed to be an anteroom to a larger office. Boris and I sat down on a wooden bench and waited in respectful silence. Ten minutes later, an attractive young Russian woman opened the door to the office and waved us in.

“Войдите пожалуйста,” she said. “Please come in.”

I followed Boris inside the spacious office, which had a large dark wooden desk in the center. On the wall were two portraits: Vladimir Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky—founder of the Cheka, the early predecessor of the KGB. Dzerzhinsky also had a presence on the desk in the form of a bronze bust.

Behind the desk sat a surprisingly diminutive man in his late fifties. He was dressed in a rumpled suit over a white shirt with an unattractive tie. The little hair he had left was cropped short and combed straight back.

This fellow is a big shot? I thought.

Then he spoke.

“Guten Tag,” he said in a loud, steely voice in highly accented German. Those were apparently the only two words in German that he knew because the remainder of his communication to us was in Russian. But there was no question as to who was in charge here. He waved Boris and me toward two upholstered chairs off to the side.

This little man, in all probability the director of the espionage section of the Soviet contingent in Berlin, started the “interview” with a five-minute lecture on the class struggle and the importance of the KGB in the fight against the enemy of the proletariat. My school-level Russian allowed me to follow at least part of what he said, and I managed to respond with a few befuddled nods. But most of the time I had to rely on Boris to provide the translation.

After some compliments concerning my academic achievements and recognition of the praise I had received from Herman and Boris, he wasted no time in going for the kill.

“So, are you ready to sign up? It is time to make a decision. Are you in or out?” This part of his communication needed no translation; it was accompanied by the universal thumbs-up and thumbs-down gestures.

I was not prepared for this direct frontal assault, and now this imposing little man was staring at me, waiting for an answer.

“I—I really like the idea, but I don’t think I am trained well enough.”

The director let out a hearty laugh that quickly degraded into a lengthy coughing fit. He had probably smoked too many of those poisonous Belomorkanal Papirosi cigarettes, which were the cheapest and most popular Russian cigarettes during the war and for many years thereafter.

Taking a gulp of water from a glass on the desk, he said, “Don’t worry about that. We will give you all the training you will need. For now, we need a decision. True revolutionaries are decisive. You have until tomorrow to let us know.”

With that, he waved dismissively toward the door, indicating that the meeting was over.

I kept silent for most of the car ride to the Hirschgarten rapid transit train station, where Boris dropped me off. I had witnessed my first display of ruthless authority.

Before I left the car, Boris reminded me, “We need your decision by tomorrow. Consider this an ultimatum.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked somewhat innocently. “You’re not giving me any more time to think this through?”

“No. The boss has spoken, and when he speaks we had better listen. We shall meet here tomorrow at three, and I expect a firm answer.”

Usually, the walk from the drop-off point to my temporary residence was a ten-minute jaunt along a winding dirt path through a nearby park. This time, however, I took my time, walking as slowly as possible.

It was a typical fall day in Berlin. The trees had lost all their leaves, and the empty branches stretched toward the overcast sky as if reaching for an answer to the question “What’s next?”

To my overactive imagination, this was an almost surreal scene. I desperately wanted those trees to be alive, to be someone I could talk to and get advice from. But advice was not forthcoming. I had arrived all alone at this ultimate fork in the road, with no possibility of turning back.

On the one hand, I had been looking forward for years to a career as a college professor, and I had worked hard to achieve my goal. Moreover, I liked teaching. I liked being a somebody and being in the limelight. I liked chemistry, I liked living in Jena, and most of all, I liked being part of my basketball team.

To become an undercover spy, I would have to give all of this up. I would also have to completely disappear, leaving behind family and friends to possibly never see them again.

As I kept walking, a decision began to form in my mind. This opportunity was one of the greatest honors imaginable. There were no human ties strong enough—not even the ties to my beloved game of basketball or my teammates; not to my friend Günter, or even my mother—to counter the lure of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something special and be somebody special.

Kim Philby expressed my innermost thoughts precisely when he was asked why he joined the KGB. He said, “One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.”[2]

The next morning I met Boris for the last time before my departure from Berlin.

“Have you come to a decision?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m committed. Let’s do this.”