The Other Side of the Curtain

I don’t know how you found me, Miss Smith. I’ve been keeping a low profile since it all went to hell back in ’89. From one day to the next, there wasn’t any demand for men like me anymore. Suddenly, we were the villains, even though we had only been doing what we thought was right. But all that didn’t matter anymore. I got off lightly, compared to some of my former colleagues. I lost my job, yes, but at least they didn’t lock me up. They even gave me modest pension and left me alone to live of the crumbs falling from the Capitalist table…

But enough about me. You wanted to know about Shoushan Kariyan, whether I remember her. The Leipzig Expo, 1966. Of course, I remember. How could I ever forget?

You look a lot like her, do you know?

The Leipzig Expo was the biggest event of the year, not just for us but for all of East Germany. The Expo was a time when the iron curtain opened a crack wider than usual and things could slip through. In both directions. For us, naturally, it was also a time of heightened vigilance.

They used to say that at Expo time you could not spit in Leipzig without hitting a Stasi agent. They were right. I should know. Because I was one of those agents, working for the Ministry of State Security, in charge of observing foreign visitors. Foreign meant Westerners, of course. Citizens from the Communist brother states were the responsibility of the office across the floor.

When I was called in by my superior Colonel Pretzow a month before the Leipzig Expo, I already knew what was coming. I would receive my assignment. It was the same every year. I was assigned to one of the Western visitors to the Expo. I would then position my agents and microphones around them to make sure that they couldn’t even take a single step without us knowing about it.

That year, my assignment was an American. A man called Smith with an unpronounceable first name. Industrialist, head of a large corporation, extremely rich. And a woman named Shoushan Kariyan, who was billed as his personal assistant. I knew what that meant, of course. She was Smith’s lover, pure and simple. Another example of how the Capitalists exploited the working class.

At first, I was quite thrilled to get an American. A pleasant change from all those West Germans of previous years. Besides, it gave me the chance to show off my language skills.

“This assignment is of exceptional importance, Major Gottwald,” Colonel Pretzow said before dismissing me, “by special request of our brothers in the Soviet Union.”

By “Our brothers in the Soviet Union” he meant the KGB. Which meant that they were running the show, that they would take all the credit, that they were treating us like errand boys as usual. I hated that. But it was not my place to say anything against it.

As always, I thoroughly familiarised myself with the dossier, learning everything I could about the people I was to watch. I started with the photos. According to his passport photo, Smith was a man of about forty, brown eyes, extremely pale hair cut in that ugly mop style so popular with Westerners at the time. Shoushan Kariyan was a woman of twenty-five with large dark eyes and black hair pulled back from her face. According to the file she was a Lebanese national, ethnic Armenian, which was unusual. Apart from that and her age, we had nothing about her, which was even more unusual. But then, she wasn’t the focus of the mission. Smith was.

And we did have quite a lot of information on him. Smith was something of an eccentric, it seemed. In his youth, he had been an adventurer of some kind. Now he was content with financing expeditions into little known parts of the world and spending a lot of his corporation’s money on research into bizarre subjects.

Moreover, there was evidence that he was not entirely on friendly terms with the Capitalist system. There had been an altercation with his government fifteen years earlier, involving Smith’s refusal to fire an employee who has been a member of the Communist Party of the USA. Hmm, that meant Smith might be a lot more sympathetic to our side than one would expect from such a prime representative of the Capitalist system.

Inside my head, a plan was beginning to form. Maybe, just maybe there was the possibility to persuade this Mr. Smith that Capitalism was not the way of the future. If I could persuade him to defect, a man so highly placed, so important, then a promotion was guaranteed.

Of course, the job was meant to be an observation assignment only. The dossier even included an explicit warning not to approach Smith in any way. Apparently, “our brothers in the Soviet Union” considered him extremely dangerous. But what did they know? They were much too occupied playing cat and mouse with the CIA to worry about trivial matters like Mr. Smith. And if I could succeed where they had failed…