“I’d be delighted, sir,” said Schellenberg. “In Moscow we know Mielke attended the Lenin School under the name Walter Scheuer. Then he was given the name Paul Bach, and we assume this was the same Paul Bach who gave evidence against many of the German communist cadres following the Stalinist purge at the Hotel Lux in May 1935. Naturally, the Gestapo was at the same time monitoring the Mielke family home; and soon after the murders of Anlauf and Lenck the family moved from the Stettiner Strasse apartment to an address in Grünthaler Strasse, where, in September 1936, Mielke’s younger sister Gertrud received a postcard from Madrid. This seemed to confirm what we already suspected, which was that Mielke had gone to Spain as a Chekist. During the civil war, he was going by the name of Captain Fritz Leissner and was assigned to a General Gomez, whom we know rather better as Wilhelm Zaisser, another German communist. It seems these bastards spent more time killing other Republicans than they did killing any Nationalists; and it’s no accident that the Thirteenth International Brigade, also known as the Dabrowski Brigade, mutinied soon after the Battle of Brunette in July 1937 because of the appalling casualties inflicted on them as a result of the incompetence of their officers.

“Following the Republican defeat in January 1939, Mielke was one of thousands who crossed the border into France. The French started locking them up almost immediately. In October 1939, one of our agents, who was posing as a member of the French Communist Party—they were also interned in the same concentration camps as the German communists—met a man he believed to have been Erich Mielke at the Buffalo Sports Stadium, in the south of Paris, which the French were using as a provisional camp for undesirable aliens. He said that Mielke told him he’d been transferred from another provisional camp, the Roland Garros Tennis Stadium. Soon after that, Mielke was transferred again, to one of two rather more permanent concentration camps in the south of France: the camp at Le Vernet, in Ariège, near Toulouse, or to Gurs, which is in the region of Aquitaine. We believe he’s still in one of these camps. He knows we’re looking for him, so naturally he’ll be using a false name. And while conditions in these camps are generally held to be abominable, nevertheless, since the Soviet Union signed the nonaggression pact with Germany, they might actually be the safest place for him. Stalin has already sent back here several German communists in order to demonstrate his goodwill toward the Führer. And it’s quite likely he would do the same with Erich Mielke. So, with France now in the hands of the Third Reich, this is our best chance in almost a decade to capture him.”