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May 2005 The Accidental Spy
by Kathy O'Toole Losing his family to the Nazis, German-born Klaus Schmidt rebuilt his life in the Bay Area and also found himself gathering intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.Real spy stories are more bizarre than the plots of novelists, a former CIA inspector general wrote last year. That is apropos of the story Klaus Schmidt tells in his autobiography, A Spy for Life (AuthorHouse, 2004). Schmidt, MBA ’53, is better known in the San Francisco Bay Area as a former dean and professor at the business school of San Francisco State University. In that position he tried to develop international friends to further the school’s goals. His contacts in East Germany and the Soviet Union led the U.S. government to ask him to be a conduit for information in the 1970s and ’80s, and he eventually was asked to negotiate with Soviet officials on a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Schmidt’s life of international intrigue begins, however, with his childhood in Hitler’s Germany, where he was the son of an industrialist whose factory was converted to making fuses for Hitler’s war machine. At first his family of four lived well in a huge house, but as the tide turned against Germany, his parents were forced to take in boarders and often did not have enough to eat. A sense that his parents’ marriage was on the rocks, along with Allied bomb drops, brought on panic attacks in the younger Schmidt that have recurred throughout his life. In 1944, fearful that Hitler’s henchmen were looking for scapegoats to blame for war failures, the Schmidts plotted a winter escape that ended in tragedy. Swiss border guards forced Klaus’ parents, brother, aunt, and uncle back into Germany on foot, where they were captured by the Gestapo and eventually executed, with the exception of the uncle, who escaped. Klaus, at 14, was left standing at the border in charge of his younger cousins. After the war, the United Nations took possession of refugee records from Switzerland. “I spent a lot of time researching, but there is no record of my parents ever having crossed into Switzerland,” Schmidt says. “The most plausible reason they were turned away, the one that I hypothesize in the book, is that they thought my father was really Messerschmitt, the Mr. Boeing of Germany, and since Hitler was not entirely rational, they feared what Hitler would do if they let him in.” After the war Schmidt became a U.S. citizen, yet he was asked to make repairs on his parents’ Eisenach home behind the Iron Curtain. In vivid detail he describes crossing the heavily fortified border and visiting his family’s home and graves. On another trip his intelligence contacts ask him to spy on a military unit. “Behind a wire fence were somewhere between 35 and 40 tanks. Many had a track removed, some had no turrets, and a pile of engines rusted on our right. Two cranes held what had to be new replacement engines in the air. This did not hit me as a quick-strike-ready force. Not one mechanic in sight, working or smoking. Nobody.” Later during his negotiations with the Soviets, Schmidt witnessed some shortcomings of his adopted country. “We reached a point where we knew pretty well the Soviet troop strength and how long a pullout would take. My Russian contacts basically agreed, but then my instructions became more stringent,” Schmidt recalls now from his retirement home in Maine. “I got a call from the White House and was told we had to let the negotiations fail because there was an election and if it looked like we had appeased the Russians, it would weaken President Carter’s campaign. This question of political survival affecting what we do was extremely disturbing to me then, and still is today.” When Ronald Reagan won the election, Schmidt says, a high-ranking official at the Russian Consulate asked to meet at a Union Street café in San Francisco. “‘Are we going to war?’” he recalls the official asking. “I said ‘No, during an election we talk big, it gets very blustery, but I don’t see any danger Ronald Reagan is going to get on his white horse.’ The Russians could not grasp that election rhetoric is different from reality.” Given the darkness in his life, Schmidt works hard to cultivate humor, and that shows in many places in his book. At one point, he describes entertaining the East German ambassador, who comments on the hot fashion of blue jeans. “Of course, we make our own, but the people want Levi’s,” the ambassador says. Schmidt counters with the obvious—that Levi Strauss & Co. is headquartered in San Francisco and offers to call its chief executive, Walter Haas. Despite East Germany’s desperate shortage of hard currency, Schmidt writes, the ambassador ordered 10,000 pairs. |
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