The Tsunami File (38 page)

Conchi got up, looked around for her bag. It was under Smith's chair. Zalm stood up too.

“We will leave you two very serious people alone,” Zalm said. “But maybe we'll have some dinner tonight, Jonah, OK?”

“We'll see, Stefan,” Smith said. “I'll call you.”

Then things began to happen very, very fast.

Delaney noticed that the tall drinker in aviator glasses had still not come back to his table. He instead sat on a bar stool, drinking his beer there and talking with Prasan.

As Conchi and Zalm made their preparations to leave, the aviator apparently decided it was time to pay and go as well. He quickly placed some Thai baht notes on the bar, drained his glass and strode toward the door. Delaney watched him as he went by. The man looked back over his shoulder from the doorway, and then he was out and hurrying across the street.

Conchi kissed Smith goodbye. Delaney also got a brief kiss on the cheek. Zalm shook Delaney's hand. Then Zalm and Conchi started to move toward the door, hoisting shoulder bags. Sun poured through the window. All was silent for a moment.

Then Delaney saw the aviator standing on the other side of the street, looking in at them from a distance through the window of the Whale. Delaney watched him through the glass and the car and motorbike traffic beyond. Then he looked over to where the man had first sat down. The Nike bag was still there on the floor.

“That guy's forgotten his bag,” Delaney said.

“What guy?” Smith said.

Suddenly, all was clear—all was in bright, sharp, sunlit focus. Prasan headed their way from behind the bar to wipe the table and collect empty bottles. Delaney looked out the window again and then back to the abandoned bag. He looked through the window again. He saw the aviator holding a cell phone in his left hand, tapping numbers with his right.

Delaney jumped up, knocking a chair over in his haste. He grabbed Smith by the shoulder and heaved him to his feet.

“Run!” Delaney shouted. “Out, out, out now. Fast!”

“What's up?” Smith shouted.

Delaney half dragged, half carried Smith to the door, staying very low.

“Out, out, out now!” Delaney shouted again. “Bomb, there's a bomb! Prasan, get down, down, get down now!”

When the bag exploded with a terrific boom and flash, time, for a split second, stood still just as witnesses and survivors of such bombings invariably say. Delaney and Smith had just cleared the doorway when the bag blew. Delaney felt the shockwave on his back and the
whump
of hot air pounding his eardrums. Debris and shrapnel peppered his neck and back as he tumbled with Smith out of the Whale and into the street. The top of a bar table cartwheeled out with them.

The plate-glass window disintegrated into a million deadly projectiles. Conchi and Zalm had made it well out into the street before the bomb went off. But they too were showered with flying glass and other chunks of debris. Delaney saw them both go down hard onto the road.

Delaney stayed on the sidewalk where he fell, crawling flat through bits of rubble toward Conchi and Zalm, still trying to drag Smith with one arm as he went. Passersby screamed and shouted and pointed. A local man was down on the sidewalk with them, moaning and holding his hands to a big bleeding gash on his temple. A motorbike had overturned on the road. No cars moved.

Delaney stopped crawling away from the Whale and lay on his side on the street. He didn't think he was very badly hurt. His neck and back were itchy with shrapnel hits and blood and sweat, but he didn't think he was going to die. His ears were ringing and he thought an eardrum might have burst.

Smith lay panting beside him. He was face down, flat on his stomach, but he was alive. In shock, probably, but alive.

“Jonah, Jonah,” Delaney called out. “Are you OK?”

Delaney could hear his own voice only faintly, as if from a distance. Smith didn't answer. His ears, too, were likely damaged by the blast.

Delaney crawled over to where Smith lay. He shook his shoulder gently. Smith moaned, turned his head slightly and made eye contact. His eyes closed again. Delaney rolled over and looked again toward Conchi and Zalm. Conchi was trying to pick herself up from the gutter and the broken glass. She looked badly scraped up.

Zalm, though, was lying motionless. Conchi managed to get to her knees. She tried to pull the Dutchman up and shake him conscious.

“Leave him, Conchi, leave him,” Delaney shouted out. His voice was weak and dry and hoarse. “It's better not to move him.”

“Jonah!” Conchi shouted. “Jonah!”

“He's OK,” Delaney said. “He's OK.”

“Jonah,” she called out again. She sat back on the sidewalk, hugging her knees and crying.

In the distance, as he lay in the street, Delaney heard sirens coming, still far off. Two local policemen ran up to the scene, handguns drawn, staying low. They shouted to each other and to the crowd in Thai.

In English one of them shouted to Delaney: “Bomb? Bomb?”

Delaney heard the words as if from a great distance, as if in a dream. “Yes,” he said. “Bomb.”

“Who are you?” the policeman asked, coming closer.

“Journalist,” Delaney said. “Journalist.”

BERLIN, 28 May 2005 (Deutsche Press) – The growing scandal over the true identity of German super-spy Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich claimed another political victim on Wednesday with the sudden resignation of Interior Minister Edmund Heilbronner.

Heilbronner, 59, who is one of the most powerful ministers in the SPD government of Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, had until now been resisting repeated calls by some opposition parties and the media for him to resign in the wake of spectacular revelations in
Die Welt
newspaper on 30 April that Heinrich, long regarded as a hero for his many years of supposed work in the then East Berlin as a spy for the West, was in fact a Stasi double agent.

The
Die Welt
story, written by the newspaper's Political Editor Gunter Ackermann, revealed that some seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Heinrich's subsequent installation in Bonn as a highly paid civil servant, his true identity was covered up when certain declassified Stasi files came to light. The story also reported that Heinrich did not die in a house fire near Bonn in October 2001 as previously reported, but in fact drowned in the tsunami disaster in Thailand on 26 December 2004.

In another revelation, the
Die Welt
article revealed that Heinrich had conducted a secret homosexual affair with BKA President Ulrich Mueller for at least several years while living in Bonn, and that the police chief had been forced to leave his post in disgrace in 2001 when the relationship was discovered. The Interior Minister and the BKA said at the time that Mueller had opted for early retirement in France, where he now lives. No other explanation was ever given.

Announcing his resignation on Wednesday to journalists at a packed news conference, Heilbronner insisted he had done nothing illegal and claimed that the decision to cover up the truth about Heinrich's Stasi affiliation and to subsequently provide him with a new identity in Thailand in 2001 had been taken by unnamed individuals from the previous CDU administration. “My party came to power in 1998. That was after the Stasi files in question became known in certain circles and after the decision to hide the truth about Heinrich's work for Stasi,” a defiant Heilbronner said, reading from a written statement. “It is the previous CDU government that did not take adequate care to check on Heinrich's past and the true nature of his activities in the years before he left East Berlin in 1990. It is the CDU that is responsible for this debacle.”

“I am resigning my cabinet post today only because as Interior Minister I must take responsibility for the decision not to immediately reveal the security threat and potential blackmail threat posed by the homosexual relationship between Heinrich and Mueller when this became known in certain circles.”

Heilbronner refused to say whether he had resigned voluntarily or had been ordered to do so by Chancellor Schroeder. He also refused to answer questions about whether he or any members of his government were aware, at the time Ulrich Mueller was forced to leave the BKA, of Heinrich's past as a double agent.

The Heinrich scandal comes when a federal election is on the horizon and opinion polls show Schroeder's SPD substantially behind the opposition CDU, led by the party's new leader Angela Merkel.

However, the CDU's party chairman Oskar Kaufmann, who served as senior adviser to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl before the previous government lost power in 1998, has also resigned over the Heinrich scandal. Kaufmann, 70, claims that so-called out of control elements in Germany's BND security service were responsible for the original decision in approximately 1997 to cover up Heinrich's work for Stasi and then to fake Heinrich's death in 2001 and set him up with a new identity in Thailand.

Kaufmann claimed when he resigned last week that these unnamed agents became alarmed in 2001 after it appeared the United States Central Intelligence Agency had deduced—using the recently decrypted “Rosewood file” the CIA had taken into its possession in the chaotic days after the fall of the Wall in 1989—that Heinrich continued to dupe the BND and the government for a number of years after his return to the West.

“No one who had served in the Kohl government at the time ever gave authorization in 2001 for Herr Heinrich to be provided with a new identity in Thailand or anywhere else,” Kaufmann said in his resignation statement. It is not clear why the Americans did not make public the truth about Heinrich if they knew it in 2001 or earlier. A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Berlin would say only that the developing spy scandal was “an internal German affair.”

Both the SPD and the CDU have been resisting calls from the Greens and from political commentators for a full public inquiry. More resignations, and possibly criminal charges, are thought to be inevitable in the affair.

In a related development that could further tarnish reputations on both sides of the country's political divide, the BKA said on Monday that federal police now wish to question one Horst Reinhard Becker, who is a staff pathologist at the main army hospital in Frankfurt. Becker was detained last week by police in Phuket, Thailand, where he has been working on the German victim identification team established after the tsunami disaster that killed thousands of people, including many European tourists and expatriates.

The
Die Welt
article that revealed the Heinrich scandal alleges Becker falsified a German autopsy report to show incorrectly that Heinrich died in the Bonn fire in 2001. The article alleged that Becker then travelled to Thailand earlier this year to try to prevent proper identification of Heinrich's body after the tsunami. Becker was taken intro custody shortly after publication of the newspaper article but has so far not been charged with any offence.

In a press release, Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) spokeswoman Ruth Connolly said: “The operation's joint commanders will undertake immediate inquiries into allegations by
Die Welt
and by an Interpol officer in Phuket that one or more members of the German team at the disaster site tampered with or removed material from a DVI file in order to hide the true identity of the individual in question.”

The Interpol officer who made the Heinrich identification in Thailand, seconded Scotland Yard fingerprint expert Jonah Smith, was almost killed when a small explosive device was detonated in a popular bar in Phuket on 4 April. Neither the Thai police nor the DVI operation spokeswoman would comment on whether Smith may have been targeted by those trying to keep the Heinrich story a secret.

A 26-year-old Thai man working in the bar died in the bombing, and more than a dozen other people, including a Canadian magazine journalist on assignment in Phuket, were injured by shrapnel and flying glass.

PARIS, 29 July 2005 (Newswire) – The disgraced former head of Germany's federal police agency, Ulrich Mueller, has been killed in an apparent botched burglary at his home in southern France, police said on Friday.

Police in the French town of Privas said Mueller, 68, was shot once at point blank range by a heavy gauge shotgun in a ground floor bedroom of his house in the hills outside Saint Lager Bressac in the Ardeche region. His body was found early on Thursday morning by a housekeeper when she arrived for work.

An investigation is underway, a police spokesman said, but detectives were proceeding on the assumption that Mueller, who was infirm and used a wheelchair, was shot after confronting an intruder in his home.

However, a local radio report said the housekeeper, Veronique Chagny, had told police nothing appeared to have been stolen and there were no signs of forced entry in the large house where Mueller lived alone.

Mueller retired to the Ardeche in 2001 after a long and successful career with the German federal police, known as the BKA. In April of this year, an article in the Germany's respected
Die Welt
newspaper, citing Mueller himself, an Interpol official and “a reliable Canadian source with inside knowledge of the situation,” revealed that the BKA chief had been forced to resign when it became known he had a long-running homosexual affair with one of the former West Germany's most famous spies in the East.

The article alleged that the spy, Klaus Heinrich, had in fact for many years been a Stasi double agent.

French police dismissed suggestions Mueller may have been murdered in revenge for his providing information to
Die Welt.

“There are many breakins in the isolated houses of foreigners in rural France,” Captain Laurent Chevrier of the Privas detachment said. “We have no reason to believe that Monsieur Mueller was murdered.” Also in April of this year, a Paris-based architect who had worked on the renovation of Mueller's home was seriously assaulted in the house by robbers. Pierre Rochemaure, 47, received serious head injuries from the beating and was in a coma for several days before eventually being released from a local hospital and returning to Paris.

There have been no arrests in connection with that incident. Police said it is too early to tell whether the perpetrators of the April break-in and beating may also have been responsible for the Mueller shooting.

The BKA press office in Weisbaden, Germany, said the police agency would have no comment on Mueller's death.