Red to Black

different names, of course, but they were all Jensbank. And Jensbank dealt in very large funds indeed. Our investigations were stopped when they reached one of the world’s few clearing banks, across the water there in Luxembourg. Jensbank has over fifty secret accounts there, what they call modestly in the banking world unpublished accounts. And there are trusts over there,’ Dieter waves vaguely across the river, ‘and there are trusts of Jensbank in Switzerland and Liechtenstein too, some of which we found our way into, most of which we didn’t. What we saw, however, were huge transactions in cash, before the shutters got pulled down on us.’

Dieter looks back at Finn as he turns the heat off and the pot sends out its steam into the room.

‘Roth, of course, was-is-a big client of Jensbank, its biggest, perhaps, even the reason for its existence in the first place. KoKo was wrapped up in Jensbank too, before KoKo ceased to exist. And what we believe is that two-at least two-of Jensbank’s directors are these mysterious brothers of Roth.’

‘What is Jensbank now?’ Finn says. ‘Since the Wall came down?’

‘Very well connected,’ Dieter replies. ‘It has forty years of business with the East and the Russians behind it. And forty years of parallel business with the West. Since the Wall came down the bank has continued its activities, with a new twist. It has recently been raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Western investors to buy property that doesn’t exist in the former East Germany.’

‘So it’s in trouble?’ Finn says.

‘No, no, there is a cover-up at some high political level. “Mistakes were made” will be the official interpretation, if it ever comes out at all. Maybe there are too many in the West who are too powerful to let it come out, however. No. What is most interesting, perhaps, about Jensbank is that it will probably no longer exist in five years’ time at all. It has done its work. It kept the wheels of commerce rolling on both sides of the Wall during the Cold War. But now?’ Dieter looks at Finn. ‘Now the Wall is down, there is no need for it. The Russians, the KGB, black money from the East is so entrenched in the West now that banks like Jensbank are superfluous. When the Wall came down, the banks of Geneva and elsewhere were able to welcome the new Russia and all its money with open arms. You see, Finn, you have to ask yourself. Who did the Wall protect? Them or us?’

‘The Wall had to come down,’ Finn answers.

‘It was inevitable, certainly. And it has done a great favour to all those in the East trapped behind it. But it has also done a great favour to the movement of capital. The complexity of Schmidtke’s and Roth’s and the bank’s arrangements was a great strain on the enemy. Now that strain has been removed at a stroke. In Putin’s Russia, the freedom of people will, no doubt, be slowly and incrementally curtailed, but the freedom of money from East to West is total. But where does that money come from and what is it doing? Do we, the ordinary citizens of Western Europe, get the benefit of it?’

Outside, the grey late November light is fading. A few dead leaves flutter across the weatherbeaten wooden sills of the house. Dieter fills the glasses with cognac and pours fresh coffee.

‘You sound like an old-fashioned communist,’ Finn says.

‘Ah, we are both communists, but in the true sense, you and I,’ Dieter says, ‘and we both know it is also an impossible dream. It is something, as you said about my fantasy of being a farmer, that is better left to dreams. The twisted reality of a communist state in action is too dreadful as we have seen.’

‘And the company?’ Finn asks. ‘You said a person, a bank and a company.’

‘You’re impatient, Finn,’ Dieter replies. ‘Yes, you want the company, don’t you? That is the real heart of this. Roth and Schmidtke, they are just the backdrop. You know much about them, but not as much as I do, I think. Jensbank is the machine that made it all work.

‘So. On top of Jensbank there is just one company I can give you, you understand. But it is one example of many hundreds, perhaps thousands of companies in Schmidtke’s stable. But the company will give you what you’re looking for. It is a piece of actual evidence that reveals the continuous thread from the past to the present. From the Cold War up to today, and the KGB’s seamless transition from defending the indefensible to becoming a major player in the so-called real world, the world of money.’

Dieter leaves the room and Finn hears him go down some stairs, perhaps into a cellar.

When he returns he is carrying a small brown box the size of a shoebox, wrapped in heavy clear plastic and sealed with clips to make it watertight.

‘It’s damp down there,’ Dieter says. ‘Sometimes it floods when the river rises. But I have kept a few things from the past in a cupboard high up on the wall. I never expected to touch them again. I hope they are not damaged.’

He puts the box on the table between them, without unwrapping it and begins to talk again.

‘We were investigating a company by the name of Exodi,’ he says tonelessly. ‘That was back in 1991, nearly two years into our investigation of Schmidtke. Nearing the end. It was one of many companies bound up with Schmidtke and had a complicated structure like all the others. It was a set of companies, actually. There was Exodi Geneva, Exodi Luxembourg, Exodi in Paris, Exodi in Liechtenstein, and other places. All were set up by the same treuhand, commercial lawyers. The various Exodi companies had a dozen or so structures behind them that led to two lawyers in the Cayman Islands. The whole thing was the usual set of Russian dolls, one inside the other, no ultimate beneficiaries named outside the lawyers.

‘The treuhand who set up the first Exodi, in Geneva, were the same commercial lawyers who we knew had worked before for Roth. They are a Luxembourg-based legal firm, with connections all over Europe. They set up companies for some not-so-savoury Russian interests and we had watched them for a while before we came across Exodi. So we made our investigations and discovered that Exodi was set up in 1991. In other words, it was set up just six months before we came across the name Exodi.

‘Obligingly, the Geneva finance committee sent us the relevant company documents that showed when and where Exodi Geneva was incorporated. 1991. It was all in order. So we went to Liechtenstein to look at Exodi there and it was the same story. Exodi in Liechtenstein had also been set up six months before, in 1991. I interviewed Hutzger personally. He’s the big wheel in the principality’s finance committee, works as one of the government’s anti-money-laundering experts. He’s impeccable where his background is concerned, and his various seats on worthy international committees that fight money-laundering.

‘Hutzger told me that he had personally looked into the origins of this company and the date was correct and they had nothing on Exodi Liechtenstein that alerted them to any wrongdoing.

‘So we closed off that avenue. But by now my government in Bonn was only too pleased when another avenue was closed off, the boxes ticked, the dossiers closed and filed. Our investigations had already revealed too many uncomfortable things about corruption in Germany that threatened to go very high indeed. I now realised Bonn was already intending to stop our investigations into Schmidtke.

‘But I wasn’t satisfied. I don’t know why. You know, Finn, when an instinct tells you just to look again, even though you don’t know why. Anyway, that’s how it was. I wasn’t happy. So I did. I looked again. And I found a very odd fact indeed. Yes, there was a company called Exodi that had been formed in Liechtenstein in 1991. But there was also a company called Exodi that had been formed in Liechtenstein in 1975. It was wound up in 1989. And I looked further. The same was true of the Exodi companies in Geneva and Luxembourg and Paris. They were all founded in 1975 and all wound up in 1989.’

They are silent and Dieter observes Finn like a doctor watching for symptoms.

‘Exodi is two things,’ Finn says at last. ‘One is real and one is fake.’

But Dieter doesn’t reply directly. He holds Finn’s eyes with his and continues.

‘So I checked back at other Roth companies where we’d closed our investigations and I found the same thing. These other companies had been founded in the seventies or late sixties, some in the eighties, but all of them had been wound up in 1989. February 1989, to be precise. I found twenty-four companies with the same history as Exodi before I realised that the pattern was going to extend to many more, perhaps hundreds more companies, all of which we connected in various clear or obscure ways to Roth.

‘I looked back at our files, working on my own now. I saw that in the few cases–maybe half a dozen or so– that we at the BND had gone to Switzerland or Liechtenstein to ask about these other companies, we had been told by the highest officials that they had all been incorporated in 1991, the same as Exodi. They were clean of Cold War connections, in other words.’

Dieter shakes his cigarette packet to extract a cigarette, but it is empty. Finn throws two packs on to the table between them like a winning poker hand and Dieter takes one with a grunt.

‘When the British arrested Schmidtke at Tegel airport in March 1989,’ he continues as a match flares, ‘he had just returned from depositing nearly one billion dollars in bonds into a bank in Geneva. This bank will be important