Berlin, East Germany, October 1961
Eight year-old Hans Dietrich had constantly heard the phrase “Checkpoint Charlie” on East German radio and TV but seeing the soldiers, barbed wire and tanks of different armies facing each other was something else entirely. Across the No Man's Land, an American soldier smiled warmly at him from atop a halftrack and he squeezed his father’s hand a little more tightly.
“Go on, smile back at the nice man,” Fritz Dietrich told his son in English as he waved back. In response, little Hans twitched his lips in a simulacrum of a smile and the soldier gave him a playful two finger salute from behind the tank's turret.
Hans was too young to understand very much about geopolitical matters. But that obviously didn’t apply to Papa. He would tell Hans about the time the young American president recently spoke to the Soviet Premier and how Khrushchev had walked all over the vastly more inexperienced leader. The Communist propaganda mill in East Germany had played up that angle big but in this case, the propaganda happened to be true. Before Kennedy walked out of Vienna with Khrushchev’s footprints all over his back, the handsome young President could only impotently sputter in response to the impasse, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”
Outwardly, Fritz Dietrich was a member in good standing of the Communist Party. He held the right views, publicly cheered the Soviets’ growing postwar encroachment over Europe and beyond and never missed a party meeting in his local chapter. In that respect, he was like tens of millions of middle-aged man in virtually every country: Just some poor slob trying to fit in, feed his family and not to stand out.
Unfortunately, his expertise and official standing as a scientist was a major hindrance to anonymity. As a civilian, he’d done research and development for the Nazis during the war, working on some of Hitler’s most secret projects. One of them was the Hell’s Gate project. Since virtually all research papers and test results were destroyed when the Soviets came rolling in, only a handful of people even knew of the existence of Hell’s Gate let alone the startling results. Over the last 16 years, Fritz Dietrich hoped and prayed that the Communists never knew about his collaboration with the old National Socialist Party. He was never a Nazi or a party member. He was just some poor bastard whose scientific research was being appropriated and perverted by another damned government.
Hans realized early on that his father wasn’t a Communist any more than he was a Nazi. Even while at home, he never spoke openly to his wife, son or daughter unless the radio or television was turned up loud and even when he did speak frankly he barely did so above a whisper. He would smile at them and talk about possible KGB bugs in the house and Hans would always imagine black beetles with red hammers and sickles on them. To further confound any Germans or Soviets who may be listening in, Papa would sometimes speak in English or even Esperanto, even though Hans never fully grasped the artificial language.
By this time, a formidable but still-porous wall had actually been built separating East from West Berlin. In advance of such a thing, people began fleeing East Germany and going to the West by the millions. Many of Dr. Dietrich’s colleagues and personal friends had already made the exodus and the Soviet leadership was getting more and more jittery about the “brain drain” that was already weakening the East German scientific establishment and its economy.
Little Hans couldn’t understand why the government would put up a wall and cutting a major city in two. After all, who were they trying to keep out? His father explained wryly, “Son, it’s not who they’re trying to keep out but who they’re trying to keep in.”
“Papa, why are we here? I don’t like it here. I want to go home,” he said in German.
“Look around you here, Hans,” he said by way of reply, sweeping his arm in the general direction of the barbed wire and tanks. “They call this ‘peacetime’ but this is the way Berlin looked when Hitler was in power, during the war. That Churchill fellow said that we live behind an ‘Iron Curtain’ and I cannot disagree with him.” He stopped and looked around, shaking his head then said sadly, “This is no place to raise children.”
Young as he was, Hans got the impression that his father wasn’t merely sightseeing but, rather, looking for something. He never did know if his father found it that day.
East Germany, 1967
By now, Hans was a strapping young man of 14 going on 15. Kennedy and Khrushchev were dead and out of power, respectively, but the country was even more divided when the Berlin Wall went up during the Kennedy years. As his mind grew and took in more of the world around him, Hans gradually came to understand the geopolitical conflict that bisected Germany. What he couldn’t understand was why his intellectual father chose to stay behind and to remain in a country where free thought was suppressed.
He dared asked his father that once while they were helping his mother tend the garden in their modest backyard. His father abruptly stood up and his mother and older sister shot him a look that immediately told him that he’d just stepped into No Man’s Land. His father quickly turned to him and said,
“It is a lot easier for single people and couples to sneak out than it is for entire families. It would have been dangerous to do so even before the wall went up. We will not speak of this again!”
Hans never forgot how much his face burned with chagrin. His father was generally a quiet, soft-spoken man, a true intellectual, and very few were the times he’d addressed anyone in the family so sharply. He thought it was a perfectly valid question. Why not leave? His father was plainly unhappy with his work and with what his half of his country had turned into. He knew the results of their research and tests were getting sent straight to Moscow where it could be perverted for military/intelligence applications. Hans wouldn’t know the exact nature of his father’s work until long after he suddenly died later that week.
Fritz Dietrich, as stated, never missed a local Communist party meeting. That’s not to say, however, that he stayed for the entire meetings. In fact, more often than not, he would slip out and go somewhere else after he’d documented his presence. The whole family knew what he was doing at these secret meetings if not precisely what was being discussed or where and they dreaded the nights when Communist party meetings were scheduled. There was never any guarantee that he’d walk through the door in relative high spirits carrying an apple strudel wrapped in brown butcher paper as always.
One Saturday night in 1967, Hans walked through the front door for the last time. The children no longer ran to the door as when they were younger even though they greatly looked forward to the delicious pastry that Papa would bring home for their dessert. Their mother Greta, however, always greeted him at the door and still took his hat and coat. They heard the key open the door and someone walk in. They heard their mother get up from her needlepoint to greet Papa.
Then they heard Mama scream like they’d never heard any human scream.
Hans and Kirsten looked at eachother and bolted to the foyer. They got there just a split second before their father fell on his face while their mother got down on her haunches and covered her ears as her screaming continued. Blood cascaded out of their father’s mouth and his eyes were completely red. The strudel, blood dripping on the butcher paper, fell to the ground a second before their father.
The doctor who performed the autopsy told the family that Dr. Dietrich’s aorta had suppurated or split. Occasionally that happens, he said, and that there’s nothing that can prevent it. There’d been no evidence of foul play. There were no contusions, cuts or punctures although the pathologist was surprised at the sharpness and cleanness of the split, almost, he said, “as if someone slit the artery with a scalpel.”
By 1976, Hans Dietrich began working for the Stasi and was at 23 one of the most dangerous men in East Germany. The rest of the world had moved on and grew comfortable with the idea of two Germanys, one free, the other Communist. It was a standard chestnut of the Communist propaganda mill that the Americans had failed to check Communist expansion in Germany, in Korea, in Vietnam and even in Cuba off its shores. All of Eastern Europe was Communist thanks to the ailing FDR at the Yalta conference.
As with all rookies, Dietrich started out as a glorified gopher by doing scut work for the senior officials above him. Soon thereafter, however, he began distinguishing himself with a mounting arrest rate and, even more impressively, a high conviction rate. It was astounding how many suspects that he’d brought in those first 12 months who wound up singing like canaries to him.
It seemingly never struck him that he’d become the very thing that his father had despised. And if it had, he knew what his real reasons were for joining the East German Secret Police. If he was going to solve his father’s suspicious death, he’d have to be on the inside. Then, eleven long frustrating years later, he’d gotten his big break.
A Czech intelligence asset of the American government had been picked up by the Stasi in 1987 and had the misfortune of winding up in the same interrogation room as Dietrich. His excellently-forged passport listed him as a West German national but it was obvious from the minute he opened his mouth that he wasn’t a true German. After some brutally earnest interrogation, Dietrich got it out of the Czech that he was, indeed, an asset of the American Central Intelligence Agency’s Psy Ops division.
Among other things, Dietrich discovered to his astonishment that he’d attended the same exact meeting as his father in 1967 on the night he died. He admitted that he wasn’t a regular member of the group yet had somehow successfully passed himself off back then as an authentic German who was just as committed to leaving East Germany as the other dissidents.
In subsequent interrogations it had come out that this guy, whose last name was actually Dubcek, was a highly-skilled courier who’d specialized in placing psychtronic hardware devices on unwitting victims. Dietrich thought the guy was off his rocker until he explained that both the Soviets and the Americans were working along parallel lines. The metal devices, which were often crude and resembled metal children’s toys more than weapons for psychic espionage, could channel and even amplify the powers of a remote psychic from even half a world away. They intended to go after another person posing as an East German dissident but who was in reality a Soviet spy. He just slipped the device into the wrong coat pocket: Hans’ father’s pocket. His father was murdered, said the Czech, by mistake.
Not surprisingly, the suspect soon thereafter died in Stasi custody. When his superiors asked if he’d revealed anything of interest, Dietrich shook his already platinum head and curtly said, “Nein.”
Such a device that no one in the family could recognize or identify was found in his father’s coat pocket the night he died of that esophageal hemorrhage twenty years earlier.
22 years later, Hans was holding it in his hands, furiously swallowing his tears.
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