True Spies Debriefs: James Stejskal in Berlin as The Wall fell
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Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, True Spies Debrief.

Here on The Debrief, we catch up with some of our favorite guests from the True Spies archive for a deeper look at the themes, events, and insights that fascinate them. If you like what you hear, subscribe to Spyscape Plus for more exclusive debriefs at plus.spyscape.com. James Stayskull appeared on True Spies to talk about his time serving in U.S. Special Forces Berlin back in Episode 9, Shadow Games.

Although James left Germany in 1989 and has since retired, Cold War Europe remains central to his life today. He's currently at work on two book projects about espionage in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s. James sat down with True Spies producer Morgan Childs to speak about that work.

and about the Rosenholz files, a collection of 280,000 records kept by the German Stasi that mysteriously wound up in the hands of the CIA after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Where do we start? What do you want to talk about? Let's start by talking about Berlin. I'm curious what your relationship is with the city. I know you've lived and worked all over the world, so I'm wondering why focus on Berlin and how you think of it these days.

Probably because it makes such a large part of my life. I lived in Berlin for 10 years working with the army at the time.

And it was just a very interesting time, you know, from about 1977 until 1990. I was in the city. And that's, of course, another formative time in German history. 1989, of course, was extremely interesting because

The East German government basically lost control of its populace. It lost control of its population.

ability to maintain control of its populace. And it all came about because many of the other Eastern European countries had agreed to travel regulations that the European community had been pushing. That is, to allow their citizens to travel without having to have some extenuating circumstance or to have their entire lives vetted.

And the East German government was the last one to sign on to this. But the problem was that nobody knew how to implement it. And one of the East German ministers got up and said, we are going to allow our people to travel without having extenuating circumstances.

And a reporter asked him, "When does this start?" And he fumbled around with his notes and said, "Well, it starts now." And basically, one of the guys on the wall heard this comment, and East German citizenry started clambering up to the gates and said, "We can go travel into West Berlin if we want."

And he heard the minister say that the program was beginning immediately. He just opened up the gate, basically, and said, OK, have fun. And so that was the night that the Berlin Wall opened. And it was all by accident, really. So we should say, I mean, for listeners, you had two stints in Berlin. One was what you came in the late 70s and then a couple of years. Could you refresh our memory there?

I know then you came back in 85. I was there in 77 until 1981. And then went back to the States and was working, working in the States, obviously. And then I returned in the spring of 1984 and stayed up until 1989. And I had just departed.

when I heard about what was going on in Berlin, and I came back to the city. So I was there the next day when the wall opened. So it was quite an interesting time to me. Well, tell me about what the atmosphere was like and what you witnessed. Well, the atmosphere. Berlin was kind of a...

A lot of people considered it like the world's largest prisoner of war camp. Berlin is 110 miles inside the East German territory.

and it had a wall all the way around it. So it was basically you were living in a city that it was not easy to get into or get out of. We either had to go out on an airplane, or we had a special duty train that required special permission to basically go out on. You could drive, but it was all very regulated. You had to stay on the highway, and everything was timed. So...

I used to think when I was walking around the city that I was reliving a Le Carre novel. Basically, the spy who came in from the cold because you had sometimes would be walking along the wall in the middle of the night and you'd hear the trains going back and forth overhead and you knew that right there

50 feet on the other side of you was a communist country. You couldn't do half the things that I could do in West Berlin over there, because it was all so well-controlled.

And it was just a strange atmosphere. So we felt that we were doing something there. And our mission was basically, suicidal or not, was to prepare for World War III. And if World War III came around, to get in the way of the Russians. So to slow them down as they were trying to move west.

That's a whole different story. But that's the kind of atmosphere I was in. You knew who your adversaries were. I kind of likened it to the SOE in Britain during World War II. You were preparing for everything in England and then jumping into France or some of the other European countries. You didn't have to worry about

The Germans, when you were in England, obviously, your mission started when you left the door of the airplane. Well, for us, it was kind of different. We were inside enemy territory, and we were preparing for war in the backyard of the adversary. And that was our mission, was to stay behind. And one of our primary enemies, of course, was the East German Ministry for State Security.

which was a massive, pervasive security organization, both an internal and external security organization. In November of 1989, when everything started to unravel, I kind of likened this to a reverse divorce. East Germany and West Germany now were basically forced to come together to reunify.

Nobody had a plan of how this was supposed to go. But it's also like you've got one parent who's a nice parent, and you've got the other parent who's

Basically, whatever. And so all the children from the east are clamoring to go west because they know that's where the good parent is. Well, you know, it didn't quite work out the way they thought. But another part of it was that you knew the other partner, the other spouse over in East Germany had a black book.

of all his girlfriends or boyfriends who worked in the West. And by that, I mean the Ministry for State Security was also responsible for foreign intelligence. And they had several hundred spies in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. And

The Western intelligence services wanted very much to get their hands on the files of the East German Security Service. So as the government started to fall apart, one of the more interesting stories you'll hear out of Washington is that George Bush, the president at the time, said, "Well, I hope you guys are working to get the files from the Stasi," the nickname of the Ministry for State Security.

And supposedly, this is the story of where the CIA began to try to figure out how to get a hold of these files. There are a lot of stories about how these files came into the hands of the CIA, and not one of them has been verified as of yet. But suffice to say that...

The Ministry for State Security under Markus Wolf was one of the most effective, efficient foreign intelligence services in the world. And while they had a number of successes in West Germany and Europe, the Western services had very few inside East Germany. And that was because their service was very effective.

So we were very interested in getting a hold of those files. Something else that should be mentioned was that after November,

The East German government was still in existence, obviously, and they were beginning to talk with the West German government on how to get together again, how to reunify the country. But inside East Germany, the Ministry for State Security was trying to figure out how to cover its tracks, basically, because the people had gained control of the government and were now clamoring to get the files that they knew the Secret Service had.

They managed to sequester the files of the internal security service, but the foreign intelligence service was separated from them. And for good reason, for security reasons, they had all their files on their agents separated.

So almost immediately, the files from the internal service were, I'm going to call it, captured by the populace. Could we spend some time on this moment? I mean, I think our listeners are probably likely familiar with the scenes of these really jubilant scenes in late 1989 across Central Eastern Europe and the celebration and the just wave of relief and freedom. But I think people might be more surprised to know about what

some of the contentious events that happened and the anger that was expressed in those days and and the storming of the Stasi headquarters and and how it wasn't all jubilation immediately in November 89. No there was a there was a lot of anger and that's I mean the ability to travel into West Berlin and even West Germany was offset by what had been going on for the past 40 years

And the Ministry for State Security was an enormous organization. I forget the numbers right offhand, but they had basically one security officer for every 180 members of the populace.

And then they had unofficial contacts, which were informants. And it is estimated that of the East German population, one in three persons was an informant.

And that could be inside families, offices, whatever. So it was a massive and full of pervasive security organization. And in 1989, when the populace captured the files within the headquarters, there was over 100 kilometers worth of files stored in the headquarters. And this was all material that they had been collecting on their populace of East Germany. Wow.

Stunning. And almost every person in the country had a file on him or her. So the people were angry about that, and they wanted to find out who was informing on whom. And that was one of the reasons why they stormed the Ministry for State Security headquarters today.

But then they left out the Foreign Intelligence Service because they said, oh, well, they're not concerned about us. Well, that wasn't quite true either. They were into the external security was also recruiting the East Germans to travel into the West. The 2024 F-150 Lightning truck gets dirty and runs clean.

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So you were there immediately after the fall of the wall. Can you talk about why you were there and what those days were like? Well, I was actually in the States. I had rotated back and I was in a new assignment and I was basically getting prepared to take over my job. And it was, we were on basically winter break.

So when the wall came down, one of my local friends who had also served with me in Berlin called me up and said, turn on the TV and see what's going on. So there it was, Tom Brokaw is on the wall talking about everything opening up. I called Pan America and was on a flight the next morning for Germany and showed up the next day and was surprised.

was on the wall on the 11th of November, just to mix in with all this with a bunch of my friends and my comrades. So it was a crazy time. And being able to travel over into East Berlin, now completely unfettered, not worrying about who was following you or anything else was a completely new experience.

It's pretty amazing. On the back wall, in fact, right over the top of my head, you can see a shield. Describe it for the listeners who couldn't. It's a brass shield. It's about two feet by a foot and a half. And on the outside of it, it says Ministry for State Security. And it has an arm with a rifle and then the flag of the East German Republic on it.

Somehow that came into my possession after one of my visits to the Stasi headquarters on Normananstrasse. And I brought it home. While the people were worried about stealing paper, I was thinking about souvenirs. So I brought that back with me.

So it was a crazy time. You know, people talked about going over into the West and buying a banana for the first time in their entire life because that was something they didn't have in East Germany. So it was just, yeah. I think it was on the 14th of December, 1989, the East German, the temporary government, because most of the senior people had been pushed out, decided to dissolve the Ministry for State Security.

And then on the 15th of January was when the people stormed the headquarters, and they broke into the main headquarters primarily. Across the courtyard in a corner was a tall building. I think it's like 20 stories tall. It's called House 15.

And that was the headquarters of what was called the HVA, the Main Administration for Reconnaissance. And that was their euphemism for the Foreign Intelligence Service. Nobody went into that building, allegedly. And those people started destroying their own files, shredding them, burning them, getting rid of them in any way possible.

And so everybody back home on our side of the pond was worried that this was, you know, everybody was going to lose contact with these people and they would have no way to trace them down. What apparently happened was that the East Germans had been preparing for war and they had microfilmed all the files.

and stored them in containers that could be buried in the ground, cached. And there were three sets of those files that were not destroyed, mostly complete. And we, the United States, found out who had one set of those files.

and went about acquiring them. Now, there's a couple of different stories about how they were acquired. One of them was that the East Germans had given a set of these files to the Russians, to the KGB, and that this KGB officer had sold them to the United States for around $65,000.

Nobody can prove that. And all the people that were named in that operation have since died. So it can't be proved. The second version is that they were purchased from some low-ranking Stasi officer that had stolen them and sold them to the Americans. But there is no record or proof of that.

One of the senior Stasi peoples surmised that one of the senior officers had actually sold them to the CIA to protect himself in exchange for not being prosecuted by the West German government. And there were three officers that he named. But once again,

There's no record of that and no ability to prove it. The fourth option was that the files were stolen from the headquarters by the CIA somewhere between the 1st of December and about the end of January. But no one's talking about exactly what happened. I can say what the...

One agency officer said, "When the complete history of the Cold War is written, this will be one of the CIA's greatest triumphs."

I have seen a lot of the reporting from the West German government, the Agency for the Preservation of the Stasi Records. They've gone through, they've received copies back from the CIA 10 years later. They said, "Well, there's not much in here. It's all old files. Maybe we got four or five people that we could prosecute." The problem is, they did not get all the files.

Some of the files went to the other countries that were involved, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark. All the countries that had a name named in those files were given copies of those files by the CIA. And a number of agents were found in other countries and prosecuted by their governments for treason. So...

It was a very lucrative operation that the agency pulled off. It's sort of like finding stay-behind agents in Baltimore. They've been here for 10 years, and you never knew anything. Then you get a letter from the ex-spouse and says, "Oh, by the way, this guy works for me."

I should have you maybe specify, because you've referred to these files as the East Germany's crown jewels, and you're not the only person I've heard use that term. Can you tell us a bit why these files were so important? Like I said, Marcus Wolff was probably one of the most competent people

spy masters of all time. For 30 years, from 1952 until I think 1985, he was head of foreign intelligence. And he was running through his agency hundreds, if not thousands, of agency inside West Germany and Western Europe.

They also had agents that were working in other countries around the world, the United States, in Africa and places like that. So his service was one of the most effective. They managed to put agents into NATO headquarters. They had agents right next to Bernard Guillaume, who was an advisor to the German chancellor.

These Germans had probably the most effective intelligence service at that time during the Cold War. So everybody was interested in finding out exactly who were their agents and how badly had they been burned. So capturing these files were extremely important to the intelligence service. And the West German government was extremely upset when they found out that the agency had gotten a hold of them before they did.

And why is there still a mystery here? It's been 35 years. Why is this still classified? Well, I think there's only one justification for classifying this stuff. The story about purchasing the files from the KGB officer, that would be an easy thing to come out and say that's exactly what happened.

That's why it makes good disinformation. The fact that nobody is alive of the names that were mentioned, just make sure that you cannot properly connect the dots. The other officers that were mentioned, the East German officers, are all dead and gone. So it's impossible to...

confirm or deny through them. So the only reason to protect it like that is to protect a source or a method. Now, the method is probably not really a big deal. They either purchased it for somebody or they stole it from somebody. That's not a real big method. So the only other possibility is they're protecting a source.

And the source could be a German, could be a Russian, or could be an American that they are trying to protect. Now, that's a supposition on my part, but I'm willing to go for it. I do not believe that we stole them from the headquarters because at that time, we did not have a good idea of where those files were.

They were with someone, probably buried in the forest outside of Berlin. They had somebody's dacha. But they are most likely trying to protect somebody. And even because of my classification, my access, I would never be told that until the proper time came out.

That's what I was going to ask. Do you know more than you're letting on? This would probably be knowledgeable to about five people in total of exactly who was involved. I mean, the agency has the ability to hide these things, and I have no doubt that they do a good job of it. I've seen it myself. So I believe that the story will come out, but not for a while yet.

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I'm curious, you were posted in Germany so early in your career, you were in your early 20s. And I have to wonder what being in Berlin at that time in history did to chart the course, not just of your career, but of your thinking and your worldview. You mean like I was an impressionable kid? Well, you tell me. Yeah. At that age, I certainly was. Yeah, no, I was. Yeah.

I mean, I was brought up in the Midwest of the United States, basically a conservative family. My father was military. Going into Berlin and seeing the Cold War situation at such close range of how it was in West Berlin and seeing the corollary in East Berlin was...

an extremely, it's not the right word, but formative experience. I mean, I saw what communism was on the other side and what it wasn't. Then I also saw on the Western side, the difference between the two cities. I mean, it was like night and day between East Berlin and West Berlin. So that had a big impression on me. And then

That was my first really big overseas experience was living in Berlin for so long. I was living on the economy down with the people and everything.

They might have known I was a soldier or not because I was in civilian clothes all the time. So I got to know the people and how they felt. And Berlin has also been a hotspot for left-wing views in Germany in the 30s. Adolf Hitler came from a very conservative background in southern Germany.

And Berlin for him, it was everything he did not want Germany to be. It was all these gay and transvestite bars. This is in the 20s and 30s. And so...

It was also during the 70s and 80s and 90s, a place where left-wing Germans, Germans who did not want to fall in for conscription, would come. So a lot of students were in Berlin so that they could avoid the draft, the free university of Berlin, because you could go to school basically forever there and never graduate. And if you didn't go back to West Germany, you wouldn't be eligible for the draft.

So there were concentrations of all kinds of interesting people there. So living amongst that kind of reflects a lot of what my views are today. I'm a lot more, I think, optimistic.

tolerant of people than I was before I went there, although I was very young. And then subsequently, I spent a lot of time overseas in places like Africa and the Middle East, and that's all affected my worldview. So in some ways, I have lost my America-centric view of life and more of a worldview on things.

Speaking of being open-minded, I'm thinking about all of the people who have had to respond to the publication of information about them since their files have been uncovered. Certainly, there's been this effort to digitize the files that were ripped up by hand after the Stasi headquarters were stormed. But also, as you've mentioned, most people had files and a lot of them are now gone.

publicly available and people who informed in any way, shape or form are now still, even to this day, outed to friends, employers, people who might vote for them in a political context. I wonder if you're continuing to sort of follow this story as it plays out in 2024 and how you think about the sort of public reckoning that's still going on an individual level to this day.

Well, I've had a lot of contact with the organization that's responsible for this, the BSTU. I can't remember the German name for it, but it's the Administration for the Stasi Files.

And they have a huge job in front of them. They're still piecing together these files. Many of the files were not destroyed, but they are trying to put together what they have. And they still have bags and bags of files to go through, which they intend on doing as long as it's funded. And most of the people in Germany want this to continue.

I actually did a file search with them for my book about Special Forces in Berlin, and I wanted to know what the MFS had on the unit. And I made an inquiry of them, and they came back with about 500 pages of documents. Most of them were not about my unit, but it was amazing how much stuff the Stasi did have on the American forces in Berlin.

The files that they have on the individuals are restricted to the people that are involved. So if your name is mentioned in one of those files, you can get access to it. You have to make an application.

And then the file people will pull those files and show them to you. If it mentions another person, then you might have an idea of who was informing on you. Some of those people are referred to by they had registration numbers or code names for their informants. So in a lot of cases, those people have been identified and they do release those names to the subject that's interested.

So that has led to a number of uncomfortable situations, especially when you find out that one of the unofficial snitches was a member of your family or someone that...

worked with and work. There have been cases of the clergy being compromised and other people that you would not expect. So I think it's a painful experience, but it's also kind of a cleansing experience, if you might say. I kind of...

I kind of equate it to what they do in Rwanda after the genocide. Instead of putting all these people on trial that perpetrated it, the people that they managed to identify basically are identified to the populace

And then those people are put up in front of the citizens and they have to make an explanation of what happened, why they did what they did. And basically the only way they're going to be let back into society is if they are contrite and they admit that they were wrong. So that kind of justice I think works in many cases. I'm not sure it would work in the United States. But...

I think in Germany, that's what the populace expects, and they want to see it happen. That's terrific. Fascinating. I know that you're writing a spy guide to Berlin. Tell me what your vision is for that. My vision? I had this vision at the beginning that was basically to write a spy guide, but I had no idea what it would look like. So...

I have a lot of pictures that I took when I was there. And then I have collected a few more pictures, collected pictures from the National Archives of the United States.

pictures from the National Archives in Germany. And I'm kind of putting together a guide that will have an image of something during the Cold War and then a modern day image to back it up. Because there's been a lot of changes in Berlin. Things have been rebuilt and things like that. And the wall is gone now. So that terrain, that topography has all changed.

And then I'm explaining who the people on either side were, what Berlin was like during the time. Major sites in the city, of course, that contribute to its history. Berlin's history as a spy capital goes back basically to the mid-1800s when the Prussian emperor...

And France and Belgium and all those countries were duking it out across the battlefields of Europe. So spies have been a big part of German policy since the 1800s, and especially when Bismarck came into power. So I'm documenting some of those things as a way to lead into the Cold War. And also a little bit of Adolf Hitler because...

Because of Adolf Hitler, Berlin would not have become the divided city and would not have been the focal point for East-West confrontation that it became. So it was a capital of espionage. All the big players were there. I'm telling some of the stories that happened inside the city.

and then trying to document them with individual sites that pertain to those stories. Like there's a McDonald's in Berlin, in West Berlin. It was the first McDonald's that ever showed up in the city. And it was actually used as a meeting site between an East German and an American who was approached to spy on the American army.

But as it turns out, the American really didn't want to spy, but they turned over the East German to the security service and he was arrested. So all those little kind of stories are going to be in there describing how the wall looked and how the East Germans got through the wall to get into the West and how we either did or did not get into the East through the wall. But it's going to be stories like that. So when do you expect it will be available to the public?

I am hoping that it will be in the summer of next year. I've got a fiction book coming out that deals with Berlin, and it's actually sort of the origin story of my fiction series about special forces in Berlin, but it takes place in the 50s and 60s.

Mostly the 50s. And it will be coming out late spring. And then it will be followed by the nonfiction Spy Guide to Berlin. And it's going to be my view of the city. It sounds great. Where does your energy come from? I don't know. How do you manage all these personal projects? Out of this cup of coffee. Yeah.

No, I mean, that's the great thing about being retired, no longer working, is this is my new job. So I can spend most days, three or four or five hours doing research and writing, and it's not that difficult. And then the rest of the time I sleep and, yeah, whatever.

Well, James, thank you for taking time out of a busy schedule to come talk to us. I really appreciate it. It's fascinating. You too, Morgan. Thank you very much. It's great to be here with you guys.

Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief. We hope you enjoyed that conversation between our producer, Morgan Child, and James Stayskill. More Debriefs are available exclusively to SpiceGate Plus subscribers. You'll also be able to access other premium series, like The Resume-Off Files, our ambitious retelling of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes.

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We deployed to Germany and were part of a large exercise there. And one of the guys that was helping us out, he was in civilian clothes. He looked German. He spoke German well. I got to know him a bit and I said, what are you? Who are you? And he said, well, actually, I'm one of you. And so I thought he was from a different special forces unit elsewhere. But he goes, no, no.

Not quite, and kind of left it at that. And it was only through asking some of the people on my team about it that they finally told me. They said, well, actually, there's a unit in Berlin that nobody talks about, and it's a special forces unit. And from that moment, I wanted to be part of that unit. True Spies, the classics, from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.