The spy who fed me

FOR STEFFEN SCHINDLER, former head of military intelligence at the East German embassy in Beijing, the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall meant he needed to find a new job.

So, the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) top spy in the Chinese capital got into the gastronomy game and now runs a food company and restaurant in Beijing called Schindler's Tankstelle, or Schindler's petrol station.

'It was fairly clear to us that we were on the way out. No one knew what would happen at the time and a lot of us were worried about our personal futures,' says Schindler at his restaurant in Beijing's diplomatic district.

Schindler comes from Meissen in Saxony and speaks in a distinctive, broad Saxon dialect as he tells of his experiences dealing with his comrades in China in the last days of the cold war.

'I was brought in 1989 to solve a problem here; my predecessor had gotten a bit stale. I had previously spent five years in Egypt,' he says. 'Our relations with the Chinese were very good - we were the best of friends,' he says.

Schindler's job introduced him to cold war legends such as master spy Markus Wolf, but he says that strict hierarchies within the East German intelligence services meant it was unlikely Wolf was aware of him.

'I knew Wolf, but he didn't know me. The divisions were very strict between the departments, even between the intelligence services. The competition between the different services was intense,' he says.

An avuncular, good-humoured man in his 50s, Schindler is happy to talk about his cold war experiences but clearly is more interested in his current projects. He is not what you expect a spymaster to look like, but then John le Carre would no doubt tell us that is exactly how a master of espionage should appear.

One of Schindler's earliest tasks was to report on the events of the spring of 1989, when thousands of student demonstrators occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing before they were violently suppressed in early June.

'Let's just say I was very aware of what was going on,' he says.

At that time, the East German government was dealing with growing discontent at home and demonstrations in key cities such as Leipzig - peaceful marches led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall later that year.

'As the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, the wave of change was happening in East Germany, you had things like the demonstrations in Leipzig,' he says.

'Using violence was an option in the GDR and a lot of people thought it was right what the Chinese were doing in Tiananmen Square. Thank God nothing like that happened. We had it in our power to fight back against that, but the decision was made not to use military force.'

The East Germans did a comparative analysis between what happened in Tiananmen Square, how many demonstrators there were and what impact similar action could have on Alexanderplatz, the central square in East Berlin.

'We needed to see what would happen if it happened in East Germany. The equivalent on 'the Alex' would have been 15,000 people, which you had every day of the week, so they decided the threat wasn't too bad,' he says.

'Ultimately what happened, the terrible things we saw with tanks rolling over people and soldiers being burned alive in buses, were examples of self-control being lost on both sides,' he says.

When the Berlin Wall, or the anti-fascist protection barrier as it was known in East Germany, came down, Schindler was surprised at the pace of change, with Germany reunified the next year.

'In military college, we had an exercise whereby we simulated the borders being opened. We had to say how we would react if it were suddenly announced on television that the wall was breached. Our instructions were to always ask our senior officer - a very Prussian reaction,' he says.

As the East German border opened, Schindler's career options were looking bleak. 'One day they told me after 25 years of service that I didn't need to come in to work the next day. 'You can go back to the GDR and sign on the dole', they said.

'I was 42 years of age and needed to do something,' he says.

It was through a loose alliance of fellow military attaches that Schindler found his new calling. He describes how 11 top intelligence officers from a number of embassies, including the United States, Britain, Spain, Canada and Thailand, would meet regularly in Beijing to discuss various issues and have a few drinks. It's a cosy picture which somehow flies in the face of traditional images of cold war face-offs and intrigue.

Job offers in the private sector came from various quarters, including the British military attache. Ultimately, it was his Algerian colleague who mentioned a German meat company operating in Beijing, and soon Schindler found himself back in his motherland learning to be a butcher.

'I had trained as a blacksmith, which wasn't much use. The head of the German meat company said I could re-train as a butcher in four months. Which meant I wasn't qualified to make sausages - that takes much longer.'

He came back to China in 1991 to manage a joint-venture slaughterhouse. 'The owner hoped I could use my connections with the People's Liberation Army to sell meat to them, though they already had their own sources. I only sold to the army once, when I had 200 tonnes of fat-free beef on my hands after the Asian Games,' he says.

In 1992, the venture was set up and thrived until it was torn down in 1998. In 1999, Schindler launched a company specialising in German food, which has proved popular with expatriates from Germany and elsewhere.

'The authorities said you can only sell what you produce yourself, so we set up a food-processing company. It was a big change going into private enterprise after years under communism,' he says.

Last year he opened Schindler's Tankstelle right in the heart of the embassy district. 'Our aim was to set up a German restaurant in Beijing where you don't have to think about what it's going to cost you to have a few beers, whether it's six or eight shouldn't make a difference. We make our money on volume,' he says.

The food in the restaurant is a mixture of central and southern German cuisine, with the occasional Berlin speciality, and Schindler has stayed true to his eastern German roots by serving beers from the former GDR - a tart Pilsener from the Wernesgruener brewery and a rich, dark beer from the eastern town of Einsiedl.

The high standard of the Einsiedler beer is an example of how some things have changed for the better since the end of communism. 'This beer used to taste terrible in the old days, but now it's great,' he says.

However, Schindler feels the whole process of change in East Germany, now referred to as the 'New States' has been overly hasty. 'We had great potential in the East which wasn't taken advantage of. So many people have fallen by the wayside through unification, firms were closed that could have been kept running. It all could have been done in a more considered fashion.

'The euphoria of the wall coming down should not have infected the government, it should have kept its foot on the brake a bit,' he says.

Post-communist Germany has seen a wave of recrimination against leaders of the old regime, with people such as former Communist Party chief Egon Krenz being jailed for his involvementrole in the deaths of people trying to escape to the west.

Schindler has no regrets about his time serving in the army and is clearly angry at the way some of his colleagues have been treated since 1989. 'I was born in 1948, I grew up in the GDR, I went to kindergarten there, went to school there, to college, joined the army there,' he says.

'You can't say with hindsight that I shouldn't have joined the army, that I am somehow to blame for joining the army. If this is the argument, then what we have in Germany is not a reunification but an occupation. I loved being in the military. I grew up with the army, it was a great career. I miss that.'