According to Rainer Schanz, the exchange of spies that took place on the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in February 1986 was extraordinarily ordinary. Schanz was then a member of the American ambassador’s bodyguard, and thus became an eyewitness to one of the most famous chapters in the history of the Cold War. Three Czechoslovaks were part of the exchange on the “bridge of spies”, including communist State Security (StB) agent Karel Köcher, who turned 90 today. Schanz also watched with interest the recent exchange of prisoners between Russia and the USA, which reminded him of an event from the 1980s, said the former bodyguard in an interview with ČTK and other foreign journalists right by the Glienické Bridge.
“It will go down in history. Even if none of us are alive, you will always find this exchange of agents on Google. Because it was the last and it was public,” Schanz told reporters on a boat passing under the Glienick bridge.
The bridge over the Havola River connects Berlin’s Wannsee district and Potsdam, and until 1990 the border between West Berlin and the communist GDR ran in the middle of it. East and West had exchanged spies on it as early as 1962 and 1985. The February 11, 1986 exchange, witnessed by bodyguard Schanz, was the last major exchange of agents during the Cold War. Czechoslovak agent Köcher, together with his wife Hana and three other agents, was then exchanged for the Soviet dissident Anatolije Ščaranský and three other people.
Schanz accompanied the then American ambassador, Richard Burt, to the place of exchange on the Glienické bridge. “There was some unrest that day … but it was generally a tense time,” Schanz said. According to him, no one knew exactly when the exchange of agents on the bridge would take place, which is why journalists were on the West Berlin side of the bridge for several days. Some even had RVs on site.
According to Schanz, the attention of the world public was primarily focused on Ščaranský, who later became a minister in Israel and went by the name Natan. “People from the East German Ministry of State Security gave him bigger pants, but they didn’t give him a belt, so they wanted to make fun of him during the exchange. He had to hold the pants so they wouldn’t fall off,” said Schanz. According to him, only after Ščaranský were other people exchanged across the border line on the Glienické bridge, which was barely noticeable due to the snow. “And that was it, it was actually ordinary in an extraordinary way,” added the eyewitness of the events at the time.
Czechoslovak Köcher was an agent of the communist StB from 1962, but from 1972 he worked inside the American Central Intelligence Service (CIA), from where he passed information both to Prague and to the Soviet KGB secret service. But he was discovered in the USA and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985. Köcher was born on September 21, 1934 in Bratislava, so today he lived to be 90 years old. In addition to him and his wife Hana, another Czechoslovak, Jaroslav Javorský, the son of tennis player Jiří Javorský, was part of the exchange at the time, but he went in the opposite direction, from East to West.
Schanz says that he also watched with interest the recent exchange of prisoners in Ankara, which, according to him, resembled in many ways what he himself experienced in 1986 on the Glienicky Bridge. In August, Russia and Belarus, on the one hand, and the US and other Western countries, including Germany, on the other, exchanged over two dozen prisoners. Among them were American citizens Evan Gershkovich, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, and a former member of the Marine Corps, Paul Whelan, or a Russian-American journalist living in Prague, Alsu Kurmaševová. Among others, a convicted murderer and agent of the Russian FSB secret service Vadim Krasikov or agents of the Russian intelligence service SVR Artom and Anna Dulcev came to Russia.
Born in Berlin, Schanz started his career as an ordinary policeman, later he got into the unit that was in charge of protecting important people. During his more than thirty-year career, he took care of the safety of chancellors Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder, and before his retirement, even Chancellor Angela Merkel. He is considered an expert in the protection of politicians in the German media, for example this year he commented for journalists on the progress of the bodyguards of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who was assassinated in May. Schanz wrote a book about his experiences called Der Mann, der aus dem Schatten kommt (The Man Who Comes from the Shadows). In an interview with foreign journalists in Potsdam, he said that of the persons he protected, he had the best human understanding with the Social Democratic Chancellor Schröder. However, Schanz does not want to tell spicy details from behind the scenes of high politics. According to him, the bodyguard – even though he is already retired – must continue to protect the privacy of the people who trusted him.
Source: www.tyden.cz
