HIGH TIMES IN
I AM away in Europe for a few weeks and will be filing this column from Denmark, Germany and Portugal. I’ll do my best to share some of the highlights of the trip.
As I write this I’m hurtling along in a train between Berlin and
Munich at 282km/h. A bit different than the sedate speeds set by Queensland Rail.
Foremost in my mind from Denmark’s Bornholm Island off Sweden should be the lunches of smoked fish and pickled herring washed down with Bingo Gringo beer in outdoor cafes overlooking tiny, stone harbours where fishermen for centuries have been hiding their boats from the wild storms blowing across the Baltic. Instead the memory first and foremost is of being stuck in a lift 11 storeys up in a Cold War building built by the Danes to spy on the Russians. It is no longer in active service but its tower and maze-like system of cement rooms are filled with Cold War spycraft memorabilia. Pride of place is the Russian MIG jet fighter flown by a Polish defector who landed the plane on the Bornholm airstrip in 1953. It was a major coup for the west to have one of the then cutting-edge fighters fall into its hands. The CIA was straight on the phone to Danish defence officials, asking them how long it would take them to get the prized jet to the US. The Danes told the American spooks to go take a hike. The MIG was staying in Denmark. It’s still there on Bornholm.
The Cold War facility now has been turned into a tourism operation. There is a photo outside of James Bond in his Thunderball pose. Inside the grounds there is a mini-golf course while the land around the 70m-high spy tower has been turned into a go-kart track. Neither the mini golf nor the go-kart track appears to get much use and are ridiculously incongruous, as is the nod to James Bond, given the goings-on in the complex from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989-90.
The inside of the complex is all Cold War austerity. There were two people at the front desk inside, a middle-aged woman and a young man, when we arrived. The woman was engrossed in a paperback and did not look up when we entered with our friends.
The second attendant, a male in his late 20s, looked up from whatever game he was playing on his computer to take our money. Bornholm was bombed by the Germans during World War II before being occupied by German troops. It was bombed again by the Russians in May 1945 when the German garrison commander refused to surrender to the Soviets.
The Germans left the island but it did not mean Bornholm was free. Instead the Russians moved in as occupiers. They stayed until well into 1946 and then mysteriously withdrew, leaving the Bornholmers, finally, to themselves. Bornholm became NATO’S eyes and ears of the Baltic, listening in to Russian radio traffic and monitoring Russian vessels, including submarines, in the surrounding waters.
Two years ago, a Bornholmer out walking his dog on the beach got the surprise of his life when he walked around a headland to find a Russian submarine high and dry in shallow water. The Russian captain was standing with his head outside the conning tower and nervously waved a greeting at the Bornholmer, who, from all accounts, will dine out on the story until his dying day. The Russian captain, the Danes surmise, will most likely be breaking rocks in a Siberian Gulag until his dying day.
We had finished our self-guided tour of the lower-level rooms of the museum, leaving the best part to last. This was the view from the top of the tower looking out over wheat fields, now in full harvest. With a bit of luck, we might even spot the conning tower of a Rusky sub slicing through the grey waters of the Baltic.
There were two ways to get to the top. We could take the winding stairway or the lift. We opted for the lift. The lift was pure Cold War. Two metal doors and hard surface walls painted an institutional shade of something that could pass for Cold War grey. Up we went, clacketyclack, until at the 11th level it gave an almighty shudder, a kind of spasm, similar you might imagine to what a large animal like a dinosaur under attack from Neolithic tribesmen might give as it expels its last breath.
And then with another shuddering spasm and a leg-lifting jerk upwards, it died. There were