By Raelynn Hillhouse

The real world of spies is often too far-fetched to make believable fiction. One of my biggest challenges in writing spy thrillers has been to tone-down my own real-life experiences to make "realistic" fiction. You see, I spent many years in the bizarre, shadowy world of smugglers, black-marketers and spies and I know first hand that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

I've crossed the Iron Curtain hundreds of times. Strange things happened there ‹ things so implausible that they would make a seasoned reader hurl a book across the room. But, it's true that:

• In East Germany, a tiny police car packed with five men screeched to a halt not far from where I was traipsing through the woods. I looked on as a guy with dark glasses, a black leather jacket and an attaché case handcuffed to his arm popped from the car, then disappeared into the brush.

• A man opened up a hollow coin (clandestinely, he thought) to flash a secret badge to the Stasi border guard. He didn't know I saw it.

• In a restaurant in Krakow, Poland, I had a stranger come up and ask to swap chairs with me­not places, but the actual chair, with the explanation that there might not seem to be any difference to me, but there was a big one to him. The chairs looked identical, but we can only guess that one was wired a little differently.

• In Prague, I was once awakened in my hotel room by a sound suddenly coming from the nightstand­that of a reel-to-reel tape recorder automatically rewinding.

Attaché cases handcuffed to the wrist, hollow coins, bugged chairs and nightstands ‹ who would ever believe that? It was this Keystone Cops, B-grade-spy-movie aspect of life out in the cold that kept me entertained and going back for more time and time again. And it's this very facet that is the hardest to portray in a spy thriller. The bottom line is that you really can't. You have to tone down reality down so that it seems "real."

RIFT ZONE opens with scenes in which the East German secret police try to set up a young smuggler from the Ozarks in a sting. They hope to entrap her by convincing her to smuggle a decrepit Western-made computer to the West, then nail her at the border for stealing state property. They even follow her through the Wall into the West.

Sound too far-fetched?

It's not. It happened to me.

I grew up in the rural Ozarks, some 30 miles from the fictional home of the Beverly Hillbillies, where my family had settled 200 years earlier. I yearned to learn more about the outside world beyond the hills. When I was 20, instead of loading up the truck and moving to Beverly, I headed for Europe in search of adventure. Soon I found it in Central and Eastern Europe during the last desperate days of communism.

Over the next six years, East German and Libyan intelligence services attempted to recruit me as a spy. (They failed.) I stared down the barrels of Kalashnikovs and I was tailed by secret police from Uzbekistan to Czechoslovakia. I learned how to slip across borders and talk my way through closed checkpoints. My phones were tapped and my hotel rooms bugged. My friends were asked questions about me. And, once, I was caught in the crossfire of East German border guards. I took one in the arm, but, fortunately, it was the crossfire of a snowball fight. Even communist border guards sometimes played games.

In September 1983, I landed in West Germany, with two suitcases and a dictionary. I knew no one, spoke only broken German and could barely order something to eat. It didn't take too many meals of swine feet to expand my dining vocabulary. In a short time my German was fluent and I spoke without an accent. This meant I now could blend in. Blending in was key to what I would soon find myself doing to help supplement my meager scholarships: smuggling. I had to appear so normal and so ordinary that I would fade into the background and not draw undue attention from the secret police. I had heard wild tales of Americans selling U.S. goods on the black market in Moscow. After selling my first pairs of jeans and sneakers in the East, I realized it wasn't a very smart thing to do. Not only was the transaction highly illegal in the communist system, which forbade any form of free enterprise, it was a money losing venture. Given the price of jeans and sneakers in the West, it was nearly impossible to sell them for a price high enough to turn a profit. I looked to find something that was cheaper that I could sell for a higher markup. Capitalism has its rules.

On one trip to Moscow, Pan Am lost a friend's luggage. We sprinted all over Moscow trying to find decent clothes and shoes for him to wear all summer. At GUM Department Store across from the Kremlin, the only underwear we could find had no visible front or back. The People's Own Underwear was unisex. All of a sudden, I realized there was a huge market for something I could sell at a higher markup than blue jeans: lingerie was the ticket. I didn't go for the enticing styles of Frederick's of Hollywood or even Victoria's Secret. I chose the cheap, considerably less flamboyant and certainly less erotic Kmart variety. So it worked like this: I brought ladies' lingerie into the Soviet Union, sold it for rubles, used the rubles to purchase jewels on the black market, then smuggled the stones to the West. In essence, I was turning Kmart panties into diamonds. (And for those of you who are thinking, "My God, she's a criminal," be aware that I've broken no laws in countries that still exist.)

It was all great fun and adventure ‹ I was young and carefree ‹ until I caught the attention of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Although few Americans were allowed into East Berlin other than as tourists on day visas, I had been awarded a scholarship by the East German government to study at Humboldt University for a year. Now I was sharing a flat with some friends in West Berlin. A few weeks before I was to go to the East, we noticed that our phone started making clicking sounds. My friend, Karim, who had grown up in a repressive military dictatorship in Africa, immediately knew what that meant. So did I. Our phone was bugged.

On one point, my roommates could all agree: I was the cause. In those days we really didn't care that someone was listening to our conversations. We were students and, frankly, the only secret we felt we had to protect was Karim's compulsion to date more than one woman at a time. Still, we speculated a lot over coffee or beer about the bugging. Was it the Americans wanting to know what I was up to in the East? Did the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi, want to check me out before they let me loose to study in their tightly controlled, closely guarded communist fiefdom? Or could it even be the Brits? After all, West Berlin was officially under military occupation and we lived in the British sector of Berlin.

A few weeks later the phone call came. Ominously, it was from the East.

Of course, a call from East Berlin to West Berlin in those dangerous days was rare. At that time, East and West Berlin had a combined population of about 3 million people and there were less than a dozen phone lines between both halves of the city.

The call was from Egon, my point person, my case officer at the League for International Friendship, the Stasi-front organization that was sponsoring me. Egon wanted to discuss my visa for the upcoming year. He also had a favor to ask. I was hoping to hear the good news that my request would be granted and I would be receiving a rare privilege: permission to cross freely between East and West Berlin. I had been told my visa was under consideration ‹ something clearly related to the favor. I steeled myself for what was coming. Egon wanted me to help the League by lugging a broken Xerox machine through Checkpoint Charlie to his special repairman in the West. He wasn't asking me to smuggle it west, but to openly transport it there. After that, he said, he was sure he'd be able to help me with my visa. His request raised more red flags than a May Day parade on Red Square.

The communist regimes were hopelessly paranoid when it came to the idea of a free press. (Fall 1989 proved their paranoia was justified.) They didn't want to risk the idea that anyone could copy and disseminate anti-government propaganda. As a consequence, there weren't many copy machines on the communist side. To use one or even work near one, you had to have a security clearance. Such a clearance would never be granted to an American. In fact, the moment I was around any copying machine ‹ broken or not ‹ I would be in violation of East German laws. It was unthinkable. It was a setup. And I didn't know what to do.

My experiences with the American Embassy had not been positive. My passport, covered in stamps from communist borders, raised as many suspicions with them as Egon did with me. I knew I was on my own. I could either head back to the hills or see how things played out.

At the same time the next afternoon, the phone rang again. It was Egon. My stomach knotted. I tried to excuse myself from the deal because the repairs would be too expensive and I didn't have much Western cash. No problem. Despite the fact that Western currency was forbidden to him, Egon claimed to have plenty in petty cash to foot the bill. Egon had a solution for my every excuse. He even volunteered to write a note to the Stasi border guards, asking to excuse me from the various laws I was violating. Yeah, right.

One gray September day in Berlin, I crossed east to begin my studies. Egon talked to me this time in person about the copier. I hedged. Standing on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, making excuses to the Stasi, changed drastically what had seemed like a big game to something terrifyingly real. The Wall had that effect on people.

I knew from firsthand experience that the secret police really did make people disappear. A couple of summers earlier, I had studied in Romania. I arrived in Transylvania on the Orient Express and, on the last leg of my journey, met a young Romanian student, Alexander, who studied in my destination city. We conversed in French, discussing the world beyond Romania that he longed to visit someday. I was reminded of myself, growing up in the Ozarks a few years earlier, talking to foreigners at every chance to learn about the outside world. When we arrived in the city of Cluj, Alex helped me find the dorm where I was to stay. I got to know him, his brother and sister, a medical student. I didn't realize that in neo-Stalinist Romania it was illegal for Romanians to have contact with foreigners. Any accidental contacts had to be reported to the police within 24 hours.

One morning, I was supposed to meet Alex for coffee. He didn't show up. I went to the place where he lived. His neighbors wouldn't make eye contact with me. His sister walked away. No one would speak to me. His little brother indicated there had been a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

I have no idea what the secret police did to him ‹ or if he survived.

Now I stood in East Berlin a few years later, trying to avoid cutting a deal with someone I knew worked for one of the world's most notorious secret police organizations. The reality of the spy game was sinking in. I began to wonder what I was getting into or if I would ever get myself out of it.

I did slither out of it. And I lived to tell about it in the opening of my first spy thriller. So when a reviewer at a major paper wrote, "She [my heroine] is pressed into service (somewhat unbelievably) by the East Germans," I understood why truth really is stranger than fiction: truth doesn't have to worry about reviewers.


© 2004 and 2005 Raelynn Hillhouse

Raelynn Hillhouse has been recruited as a spy by both Libyan and East German intelligence. (They failed.) A former professor and Fulbright Fellow, she has run rum, smuggled jewels, and laundered money between East and West. The American Booksellers Association (Book Sense) selected her debut novel, RIFT ZONE, as one of the best books of 2004.

Portions of this article first appeared in SPIRIT OF ALOHA, the inflight magazine of Aloha Airlines.