Over the Wall

3

The Mission

This reality was, however, the genesis from which life was breathed into one of the most effective and longest-enduring intelligence units in modern military history: BRIXMIS - the British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, later rebranded, in response to a Soviet name-changing initiative, to British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Western Group of Forces.

The Mission, as it was universally referred to by the relatively limited circle who were aware of the scope and scale of its roles, was an enduring product of both the alliance that defeated Nazi Germany and the ideological divergence that followed and defined the Cold War until its end.

By 1946, indeed earlier if you search carefully for the nascent cracks and fissures that permeated the anti-Nazi entente, it was clear to all that the wartime band of brothers was fracturing as distrust, fear and a wider and established, deeper-rooted geopolitical mould reasserted and reimposed itself to shape the new European, and global, reality.

Triggered by the precedent of the London Agreement of November 1944, an early prescient commentary on the perception of the growing problems attending this rebirth was the Robertson-Malinin Agreement, signed by the British and Russian military representatives who gave the document their names. It created a framework to guarantee the ease of continuing dialogue and liaison between the British military commander and the Red Army commander sitting in their respective post-conflict German headquarters in their respective military zones of influence within shattered, liberated Germany. It crafted a mechanism and means to 'jaw, jaw', to misquote but anticipate the words of Churchill - a prototypical confidence-building measure. The wording of the three agreements - an American and French version followed hard on the heels of the British-Soviet original - ultimately ensured the longevity of the Allied Military Missions they created. The Missions were enabled to adopt new tactics and approaches, fundamentally to evolve into the intelligence units that they all became - if the agreements' wording neither permitted nor prohibited, that development was generally deemed acceptable.

In the key spirit of reciprocity that underpins diplomacy, the small bilateral military liaison staffs that the agreements gave birth to were guaranteed free and unobstructed movement within their respective zones to deliver messages on each and every day of every ensuing year, with no limit on the duration of this pragmatic, realistic and remarkably far-sighted requirement.

Interestingly, the original 1946 charter indirectly imposed a number of additional, broader tasks pertinent at the time for the first two or three years of BRIXMIS's activity. During this time the Mission was subordinated to the Control Commission Germany, and the team's members were actually paid directly by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, sitting back in King Charles Street in Whitehall, until 1950 when 'ownership' was transferred to what would eventually become the Ministry of Defence. Consequently, personnel were charged with supporting the repatriation of prisoners of war, displaced persons and deserters, and as part of the Commission's de-Nazification programme, they played a part in tracing and extraditing war criminals. More widely, they were active registering war graves and helped adjudicate the settling of minor border disputes. And, perhaps surprisingly, Mission personnel were also mandated to feature in anti-black-market operations. These must have been challenging but professionally exciting and fulfilling times.

Accordingly, the British quasi-diplomatic staff was established, in preference to Karlshorst amidst the rubble of East Berlin, in Potsdam, in Soviet military territory in the south-western leafy suburbs of Berlin. Potsdam was selected as the location for the British Mission's official headquarters - although, in practical terms, Mission members lived in, and the de facto headquarters was situated in, the security of West Berlin - so it could be co-located with the Rear HQ of GSFG before it was moved to the former German Wehrmacht HQ and Army high command in Zossen Wünsdorf. A Russian team, known for ever afterwards as SOXMIS, the Soviet Military Mission, was staffed and eventually housed in Bünde, within striking distance of the British military headquarters, in the heart of the British zone. The Soviets chose not to mirror the Allies' approach of operating from a safe base within their own territory. This is to say that the three Soviet Missions, operating in West Germany within each of the Allied zones of occupation, did not cross and re-cross the Inner German Border (IGB) from base locations within the DDR at the commencement and end of each tour. In the case of SOXMIS, they chose to be fully contained within their compound in Bunde, in contrast to the way the Allied Military Liaison Missions (AMLMs) crossed the Glienicke Bridge from West Berlin touring onwards from the Mission Houses in Potsdam. I suspect this approach was forced upon them, based on a pragmatic logistical assessment and the realities of time and distance.

Key to the agreement, and an enduring feature, was the maintenance of a system of 'passes', limiting the size of each team and effectively restricting the numbers who could transit through each respective military zone at any one time.1 Critically, the passes guaranteed free, unobstructed passage to those Mission members who carried them. The British team received thirty-one passes for eleven officers and twenty additional supporting staff.

Identical reciprocal agreements, but with a smaller allocation of passes, between the Soviets and the US (the Huebner-Malinin Agreement establishing USMLM) and the French (Noiret-Malinin Agreement, FMLM) followed hard on the Soviet-British precedent the following year. In contrast, the US negotiated a mere fourteen passes, perhaps with, I suspect, a keener focus on the reciprocal number of Soviet officers this would allow to enjoy free movement in their zone, and the French eighteen. They too both formally established their Missions in Potsdam, with a back foot in their respective zones in West Berlin. This created a framework whereby British, American and French soldiers had near free access to what became, in 1948, the DDR, and Soviet military personnel roamed the respective zones of their former allies in the Bonn Republic, also known as the Federal Republic of Germany.

Complete freedom of movement was subsequently qualified in October 1951 by the imposition, in all four occupation zones, of PRAs, which guaranteed a degree of protection to areas - approximately 20 per cent of each of the zones - that the hosts wished to remain off limits to casual terrestrial 'enemy' observation. These 'goose eggs' enclosed hundreds of square kilometres of choice military real estate - a combination of sensitive base locations and training areas. Those in the DDR were individually hand drawn onto small-scale maps and passed on to the Allied Missions by SERB (the Soviet External Relations Bureau), which provided, essentially, an administrative interface. By their very nature, these maps were a totally inaccurate tool and certainly not fit for purpose in adjudicating subsequent disputes as to whether a tour was in or out of a restricted area. It was, however, clearly understood that where PRAs landed on Autobahns (the world's first motorways), they could be transited by tours and, indeed, it was acceptable for a tour vehicle to halt on the roadside and for the crew to undertake observation tasks.

Fixing an upper limit on the percentage of territory that could be protected, this could, however, be augmented by limited-duration TRAs. TRAs were a convenient way of greatly increasing the size of areas out of bounds to tours by using them to link individual areas of PRAs when the integrity of a large deployment or training exercise had to be maintained.

A third form of restriction, which tours did not take seriously, has to be noted simply because there were so many of them: mission restriction signs. They had first come into existence also, in 1951 as local initiatives by Soviet commanders to limit Allied Mission access to their establishments and local areas, with absolutely no derived authority from the three original Mission agreements. The practice spread to cover the whole of GSFG, and indeed NVA installations. It is estimated that in 1964 there were well over 1,200 of them country-wide, almost as numerous as Hoxha's Dalek-like reinforced concrete pill boxes sown the length and breadth of Albania. By 1989 the number must have been even greater, but by then no one had the time or inclination to log them. Whilst they generated absolutely no protection to units sitting 'inside signs', they were fairly reliable indicators to a tour that had spotted them that they were approaching a barracks, some other form of installation or training area. New signs likely indicated a new target or, perhaps more likely, the fact they had been erected to replace old signs 'stolen' by tours as mementos and farewell reminders of life on tour. I regret not having 'half-inched' one, but it was another symptom of the 'oh, I'll get one next time' attitude like tomorrow, there is rarely the right next time - it never comes.

As tensions mounted and Cold War ice solidified into its state of seeming glacial permanence, the liaison role of the Military Missions, East and West, rapidly morphed into a new primary...