New, daily updating edition

   Headlines  |  Alternate Histories  |  International Edition


Home Page

Announcements 

Alternate Histories

International Edition

List of Updates

Want to join?

Join Writer Development Section

Writer Development Member Section

Join Club ChangerS

Editorial

Chris Comments

Book Reviews

Blog

Letters To The Editor

FAQ

Links Page

Terms and Conditions

Resources

Donations

Alternate Histories

International Edition

Alison Brooks

Fiction

Essays

Other Stuff

Authors

If Baseball Integrated Early

Counter-Factual.Net

Today in Alternate History

This Day in Alternate History Blog


View My Stats

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drinking Problem:

The Stasi Conspiracy To Poison West Berlin's Water Supply

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 4

Summary: In the previous three installments of this series we reviewed the history of Case Pelican, the infamous Stasi conspiracy to poison the water supply in West Berlin during the late stages of the Cold War; the chain of events leading to its exposure and eventual cancellation; and the ultimate collapse of the East German state as a result of the worldwide anger sparked by the revelation of Case Pelican's existence. In this final chapter of the series, we'll summarize the most popular theories that have been advanced to date regarding the still-unsolved shooting death of Erich Mielke.

 

The only things anybody can agree on beyond a reasonable doubt regarding the shooting death of disgraced former Stasi chief Erich Mielke are that it happened on November 7th, 1989 and that he was near an East Berlin flat when he died. Everything else about his demise has been(and still is) the subject of loud debate, conspiracy theories, and scores of investigations by everyone from the German federal justice ministry to News Of The World; as of the time you're reading this, the list of possible suspects in Mielke's death includes literally hundreds of people. One particularly colorful(and implausible) idea about Mielke's death even alleges it was engineered by so-called “lizard men” to keep him from blowing the whistle about a supposed secret reptilian cabal pulling the strings of world affairs-- an assertion few people living outside the walls of a psychiatric hospital take seriously.

    Rather than attempt to sort through every single one of the hypotheses that have been suggested regarding the gunshot wound which led to Mielke’s death, we’ll focus here on the most commonly advanced theories about Mielke’s passing. In the absence of the gun that actually fired the fatal shot, it is of course extremely difficult to judge which of them will ultimately prove to be the correct one, but with the evidence that is available we can still make educated guesses as to their plausibility(or lack thereof). From the least to the most likely, here are the seven most commonly advanced explanations about Erich Mielke's sudden death.

#1)The “retribution” theory(a former political prisoner or relative/friend of such a prisoner shot Mielke in an act of vengeance)

There's something macabrely satisfying about the idea of Erich Mielke meeting poetic justice at the hands of one of the thosuands of ordinary citizens that were the chief targets of the Stasi's persecution during the GDR's existence. Such a revenge fantasy, though, is likely to be just that: fantasy. Even when taking into account the number of Stasi files destroyed or lost in the months before the Communist regime's final collapse, there's no evidence the average East German knew where Mielke lived in November of 1989, let alone had access to a gun. Indeed, most of what we know about life in Warsaw Pact-era eastern Europe points in just the opposite direction. Whatever individual differences there might have been between the regimes of the Soviet Union's client states in eastern and central Europe, they all shared two common traits: a total ban on private gun ownership and a policy of rigidly controlling what information their citizens could or couldn't have access to. Even in the United States, where freedom of information is considered an inalienable basic human right, finding out a government official's home address can be a bit of a challenge; in Honecker's East Germany, it would have been next to impossible.

#2)The “brother vs. brother” theory(Mielke was liquidated on orders from the chief of West Germany's Bundesnachrichtsdienst intelligence service)

The Stasi and the BND were waging a kind of hidden civil war within a divided Germany from the early 1950s right up until the German reunification pact was signed in the spring of 1990. More often than not, the Stasi would prevail in this civil war; in their most spectacular triumph, they succeeded in planting a mole inside West German chancellor Willy Brandt's cabinet to gather data on the Brandt government's most sensitive communications. Mielke was the primary architect of this mission along with scores of other highly successful covert operations against West Germany, so one might have thought the BND would jump at the chance to liquidate its most gifted and persistent nemesis once Mielke   had fallen from grace.

Surprisingly, however, most of the available declassified records in the old BND archives points in the opposite direction. These records suggest that if anything, the BND was anxious to keep Mielke alive; there were a multitude of questions the BND leadership was convinced Mielke held the answers to, which makes it doubtful they would have sanctioned a hit on the deposed Stasi boss. In fact, a retired BND East German affairs analyst recently disclosed in his memoirs that in the months before Mielke's death a joint BND-CIA-MI6 special task force was being organzied for the express purpose of apprehending Mielke alive and bringing him to Bonn for interrogation about Stasi actions on West German soil during his years as East German state security minister. The task force was disbanded upon confirmation of Mielke's death.

#3)The “wrong place at the wrong time” theory(Mielke was gunned down by an assassin who mistook him for the actual intended target)

In 1996 a German magazine article marking the tenth anniversary of Rainier Weigand's defection to the West suggested a “black ops” agent sent to take out a certain notorious international terrorist shot Mielke dead in a case of mistaken identity. That same year, the U.S. tabloid TV series Inside Edition aired an interview with an ex-Berlin policeman who claimed to have proof that Mielke had been the victim of a gangland hit gone awry. Both the magazine and the TV show had to retract their stories when the sources for them turned out to be frauds; that, however, hasn't deterred a number of other media outlets from proposing the idea of Mielke being killed because he was mistaken for an assassin's or gangster's intended victim. Like the “retribution” theory we've examined earlier, this theory is undermined by the knowledge that private gun ownership was banned in East Germany-- which would have made it very hard, if not impossible, for even the most ruthless gangster to rub Mielke out.

Further casting doubt on the mistaken identity explanation is the ironic fact that Mielke, the boss of an agency dedicated to covert activity, had one of the most recognizable faces of any senior official in the Honecker regime. In order to confuse Mielke with somebody else, one would have to be(as an ex-CIA European regional chief once colorfully put it) either drunk, blind, or blind drunk.

#4)The “outside the box” theory(Mielke was killed by a rogue foreign agent)

The archetype of a “loose cannon” agent playing by his or her own rules is one of the most common tropes in espionage fiction, and such people are by no means uncommon in real-life intelligence agencies either. Since at least the early '90s there have been persistent allegations that a Western or KGB agent either unaware of any prohibition against killing Mielke or explicitly choosing to ignore it went vigilante and assassinated the ex-Stasi director without any prior authorization from superiors-- perhaps even in defiance of orders not to carry out such a killing. Briish parliamentary committees have conducted four probes into rumors of a renegade foreign agent killing Mielke; the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has held no fewer than six inquriries on the subject; and in an act of transparency rare for the usually security- obsessed Putin regime, the Russian government has declassified thousands of pages of KGB archival documents from the Gorbachev era in an effort to find any tangible clues to either confirm or dispel the rumors of a “loose cannon” being responsible for Mielke's demise.

To date, however, every lead in these investigations has turned out to be a dead end. In one particularly embarrasing case, the most recent U.S. inquiry ended up being abruptly canceled when the investigators learned both of their primary suspects had already left Germany long before Mielke's death and one of those suspects had died of pancreatic cancer a full three weeks before the Berlin Wall started coming down. Even so, the possibility of a renegade agent firing the shot that killed Mielke cannot be totally discounted.

#5)The “pink slip” theory(Mielke was liquidated on instructions from or with the blessing of the East German government)

Up until June of 1988 it would have been unthinkable to suggest anyone in the East German Communist elite could act against Erich Mielke. As has been noted in previous chapters he had a close friendship with longtime chancellor Erich Honecker-- in fact, it was partly with Mielke's support that Honecker came to power in East Germany in the first place. But after the controversy over Case Pelican triggered Mielke's ouster as East German minister of state security, he found himself increasingly out on a limb; by the time of his death, Mielke had become nearly a pariah in the eyes of the caretaker regime being governed by Honecker's successor, Egon Krenz. And as the defunct East German Communist government's archives gradually surfaced in the public eye, outside observers would come to see that Mielke's rise to the highest echelons of the Communist elite had earned him a long list of enemies who would have been only too glad to see him meet his maker.

So it's not totally unreasonable to suggest that the powers that were in East Berlin might have ordered or at least acquiesced to the elimination of a man many in the Communist hierarchy had long since come to regard as an albatross around the German Democratic Republic's neck. In fact, a recent British-made documentary about the collapse of the GDR has powerfully argued that Mielke's successor as state security minister, Markus Wolf, secretly arranged to have his mentor bumped off out of disgust for what he saw as the damage Mielke had caused to the GDR's international standing by not nipping Case Pelican in the bud early on. Considering Wolf was a fairly cold-blooded specimen in his own right and he'd participated in-- or even masterminded-- his share of the most lethal anti-Western ops in the Stasi's history, it says volumes that he could be seen by the documentary's producers as a viable suspect in Mielke's death. And an e-book published by a Dutch political commentator last years goes even further than the British documentary, suggesting it was Colonel Wolf himself who fired the shot that killed Mielke. While this claim is difficult to prove in the absence of a murder weapon, few people would be particularly surprised if it turned out to be true.

#6)The “enemy within” theory(Mielke was shot to death by a former colleague with a personal score to settle)

While it might have been difficult or even impossible for the average citizen of East Germany to get a crack at taking out Mielke, his fellow operatives in the East German secret police system would have faced no such obstacles-- or at the very least would have had an easier time getting around them. As we've mentioned previously in this chapter, Mielke had made a considerable number of enemies both during his rise to the top of the Stasi and over his years as its commander-in-chief; from the moment his body was discovered, one of the most commonly suggested explanations for his death has been the idea that a disgruntled former colleague gunned him down in retribution for a perceived past slight. If one subscribes to this notion, it's not too hard to imagine one or more of Mielke's former peers lying in wait to gun him down. Those who subscribe to the 'enemy within' theory suggest said peers either deliberately lured Mielke into an ambush or saw an unexpected opportunity to eliminate him for good and acted quickly to capitalize on it.

Certainly a number of European journalists seem willing to entertain such an idea: in 1998 alone three major French newspapers published articles dealing with the possibility Mielke might have been done in by one or more of his ex- comrades in arms. In 2004, the BBC produced a 90-minute documentary entitled Murder In Berlin which examined the notion one of the officers who originally conceived the ill-fated Case Pelican scheme might have blamed Mielke for the water poisoning conspiracy's defeat and sought to kill him in retaliation for that defeat. And most recently, a two-part series in a Dutch magazine offered the intriguing hypothesis that a renegade Stasi officer related to the Berlin policeman Mielke killed back in his days as a young Communist agitator in the early '30s could well have plotted and carried out Mielke's killing as a kind of delayed vicarious retribution for Mielke's own act of murder.

A significant indication that the present German government has not yet fully dismissed the “enemy within” explanation for Erich Mielke's death is the fact that the federal justice ministry is still offering a € 10,000,000 reward for infomration leading to the identification or arrest of any former East German secret police personnel who may have been involved in Mielke's killing. There are also at least two ongoing inquiries by the German federal police into the possibility Mielke may have been ambushed by some of his Stasi comrades.

#7)The “final exit” theory(Mielke committed suicide)

Of all the explanations that have been proposed for Erich Mielke's untimely demise in the last quarter-century, this one tends to be the most commonnly accepted. Mielke was known to be seriously depressed about his 1988 dismissal as East German minister of state security, and there are rumors Mielke might have been abusing prescription drugs over the months immediately prior to his death. Furthermore, the coroner who performed Mielke's post-mortem autopsy noted in his report that traces of gunpowder residue had been found on the former Stasi chief's hands and the angle of the gunshot wound to Miekle's temple was highly consistent with that of similar wounds one might find in the case of someone who had shot themselves. And finally, during a search of his office in the first hours after his corpse was discovered a brief three- paragraph letter was found which some people have interpreted as a suicide note; in this letter Mielke laments his termination as Stasi chief and says his life has become “a hellish wasteland” since his demotion to the bottom rung of the ladder in the East German secret police system. All that keeps Mielke's death from being officially classified as a suicide is the absence of the gun which fired the fatal shot-- until it can be recovered and fully tested for DNA and fingerprints, no one can say with total certainly who it was that last pulled its trigger.

And even if the gun is eventually found and tested, there may still be some sliver of doubt concerning the reliability of the results of those tests. It has, after all, been a full quarter-century or more since the gun vanished; physical evidence of a crime can get corrupted in much less time than that. Nevertheless, recovering that gun is still a high priority for German federal police officials because of the potential value it may hold for shedding new light on Mielke's demise; simply retrieving a hair from the gun's grip might go a long way towards settling the question of whether Mielke died by his own hand or someone else's.

******

Whatever the truth about Erich Mielke's death ultimately turns out to be, two things are indisputable. One is that the disgraced Stasi commandant in effect doomed himself by not nipping Case Pelican in the bud when the original memos proposing the scheme crossed his desk; the other is that his passing was one of the major nails in the casket of Marxist domination of eastern Europe. For decades the Stasi was the most powerful secret police and counterintelligence bureau in the Soviet bloc, and Erich Mielke was the engine that drove it; his death, while coming at a time when he had fallen from grace, took much of the steam out of the East German Communist political machine. Some of the people who believe that Mielke's death was a suicide have drawn comparisons between the shooting and Nazi propaganda chief Joesph Goebbels' decision to terminate his own life via cyanide in 1945 just as the Red Amry was closing on Hitler's bunker.

One phenomenon gives a strong clue as to the depths of the anger many former East German citizens still harbor towards Mielke. Since 1990, Berlin police officers have documented no less than 240 incidents of the ex-Stasi leader's grave being vandalized by anonymous attackers who usually disappear from the scene of the crime before they can be questioned; the acts of vandalism have run the gamut from spraying graffiti on Mielke's tombstone to defecating all over his gravesite to (in one extreme case)attempting to blow up his cemetery plot using surplus army hand grenades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The End

 

 

Site Meter

comments powered by Disqus