Pushkin.

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Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?

Yes, it did, but he was a charming man.

It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the

cold war with the new one. I often ask myself, now, did I know the true Jan at all?

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The place is East Berlin, the year 1983.

We're in an interrogation room in the offices of the Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi.

There's a filing cabinet, a dirty neck curtain at the window, a view outside of grey concrete blocks.

In the middle of the room there's a cheap wood veneer desk.

On it is a phone, an intercom box with an array of call buttons and a big old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Behind the desk is the interrogator.

He wears a uniform, a grey military jacket, a shirt and tie,

a peak cap placed carefully on the desk beside him.

He's a committed communist who swore an oath to defend the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, commonly known to the rest of the world as East Germany.

The interrogator has the authority to do more or less whatever he wants, and he doesn't have to worry about privacy.

He can have people followed, listen to their phone calls, break into their apartments, arrest them.

Usually he's interested in dissidents.

Political types who meet talk about democracy or the environment, or make plans to escape to the West.

But today, he has a different kind of problem on his hands.

...