“When the war broke out, the SD and the Abwehr decided to share Mielke. The trouble was, we’d lost him. So Heydrich sent me to France in the summer of 1940 to get him out of Gurs or Le Vernet, which is where we thought he must be. Which is what happened. I got him out of Le Vernet and across the sea to Algeria. From there, German agents managed to facilitate his return to Russia. I was his case officer at the SD for the next three years as he worked his way up through the party hierarchy. I lost contact with him in 1945, at the end of the war. However, he managed to track me down at the same time that he was recruiting German officers for the Stasi, and he helped me to escape back to Germany, where I negotiated a deal with some Amis in the Counterintelligence Corps on behalf of both of us.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“Money, of course. Lots of money. After that, I helped handle him in Berlin and Vienna until the CIC came to the conclusion that my SS background made me a possible embarrassment to them. So they assigned Mielke a new controller and got me out of the country on a ratline, via Genoa, to Argentina. And then Cuba. I’d still be in Havana but for American incompetence. Having gone to all that trouble to spirit me out of Germany, they sent me back there. A case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. And now here I am with you.”

“Is Mielke still working for the Americans?”

“I can’t imagine why not. Someone that highly placed? He was the mother lode of all their intelligence on the GDR. But they weren’t sharing. Even the GVL had no idea that Mielke was spying for the Amis. Gehlen knew the Amis had a very highly placed agent. When the Amis refused to reveal who this was, Gehlen decided to quit and throw in his lot with the West Germans.”

“So why would they risk letting you go to tell us?”