Scrambled egg - and spying in Berlin - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 14 October 2011

This afterthought was triggered because I needed to consult my diaries to answer an email I got yesterday asking a question about my time in Berlin. Whilst doing that I noted that it was 32 years almost exactly to the day since I had returned to Berlin after a few days of routine briefings in London at MOD and that in turn reminded me of a curious incident a few days later involving scrambled egg (on an RAF officer's cap) and an air marshal.

Because of the sensitive nature of my work I was not permitted to travel across the Berlin Wall (Die Berliner Mauer) to visit the Soviet Sector of Berlin although, curiously and rather illogically, I was allowed to travel on my own, when the need arose, along the full length of the 160 km central road corridor that ran from West Berlin to Helmstedt in West Germany. I was not permitted to use the southern corridor towards Munich or the northern one to Hanover.

On this occasion in 1979 I used the overnight ferry from Harwich to Hamburg (or, as the Germans call it, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg), rather than the shorter route across the Channel from Dover to Calais. I had not been to Hamburg before and it was a spectacular early morning passage along the ever-narrowing River Elbe right into the heart of the city. Sadly, there was no time for sight-seeing because I was due back in Berlin so as soon as my car was off-loaded I set out on the long journey south through West Germany to Helmstedt and thence eastwards to West Berlin.

A few days later I conducted an air vice-marshal on one of the regular tours of the Berlin Wall that I did for visiting VIPs. I always wore RAF uniform for those tours and did the driving myself in an RAF Staff Car so that, if we wished, we could have classified conversations as I pointed out various places of interest. The air vice-marshal was also in uniform but we didn't put the two-star plates to which he was entitled on the front and back of his car because he didn't want to attract undue attention to himself. Towards the end of the tour, having already visited many of the 'public' places of interest in the British and French Sectors, he asked to be taken down to the southern end of the American Sector to take a look at a USAF 'facility' close to the Wall.

After about half a minute I called out to the air vice-marshal through the open window that if he looked carefully, but casually, at the East German watch-tower about 200 metres away he would see at least two guards inside watching the pair of us through binoculars. I added that one of the guards would certainly take photographs of us because they always did.

On hearing that, and before I could stop him, my visitor reached into our car and quickly swapped his RAF cap for mine. The air vice-marshal's cap had, of course, a double row of gold braid denoting his air rank; mine was a standard RAF officer’s cap without any gold braid. "I don’t want to be recognised," he said by way of explanation, forgetting that my cap on his head was not correct for the badges of rank he was wearing on his tunic sleeves. When I pointed that out, he quickly got back into the car and asked me to drive off.

Somewhere, Soviet intelligence agents must have mulled over the strange photographs they had showing a squadron leader staff car driver wearing an air officer’s cap, and an air vice-marshal wearing a squadron leader’s cap. I’ve often wondered what they made of those photographs – and I wish I had copies!

More of my Berlin stories on my main website here.