Otto's story
Sir: Hugh Trevor-Roper should be congrat- ulated on his excellent article about Otto John ('Why Otto John defected thrice', 12 April). While I was Daily Telegraph corre- spondent in Germany I got to know Otto John; in fact regarded him as a friend, and admired him for his role in the German Resistance. In the years following his extraordinary return from the East, Otto would periodically descend on me in Lon- don — a sad figure, trying desperately to persuade anyone who would listen that on that night of 20 July 1954 he had not defected but had been drugged and abduct- ed to East Berlin.
After hearing his voice on East German radio apparently of his own volition that night, I remember writing that — coming as it did so soon in the wake of Burgess and Maclean — the apparent defection of the head of the new West German MI5 left all of us (even those who didn't know him per- sonally) feeling 'morally winded'. Much as I might have wished to, I could never quite accept Otto's story, and to my mind the mystery, one of the most baffling in the Cold War, still remains. Particularly baf- fling is the aspect barely touched on by Hugh Trevor-Roper: why was Otto John permitted to return by the Soviets, 18 months after his original departure?
He was, as far as I know, the only 'border- crosser' ever to be allowed to do so — aptly entitling his own memoirs Twice Through the Lines. In those dark days, the East/West Berlin approaches were about the most rig- orously controlled in the world. One asks oneself, did the Soviets, for whatever rea- son, want John to return? Had he fulfilled his purpose? Certainly his reappearance in West Germany provided a major embar- rassment for Bonn. One can only hope that, now he is dead, the whole truth will emerge; possibly it will be found by some diligent Soviet-watcher studying the files in Moscow. Meanwhile, like Hugh Trevor- Roper, I like to think of Otto John as truly an Aristotelian tragic hero, a victim both of German history and of the Cold War.
Alistair Home
The Old Vicarage, Turville, Oxfordshire
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