Adrian Voss

Adrian Voss doesn't write sentences you have to read twice to admire. He writes sentences you can't stop reading. What pulls you forward isn't a bolted-on cliffhanger, but the knowledge gap: by the end of a chapter, you understand more than one of the characters does — or you sense that a character has grasped something you yourself don't see yet. That exact question — what has one of them realised that the other is missing? — is what makes you say in bed at night: Just one more. And then another. And then it's three in the morning.

What sets him apart from other thriller writers: the territory. Voss writes about Europe, particularly the Swiss NDB and the East German Stasi. For a long time, next to nothing was known about the NDB, the Federal Intelligence Service. Until scandals went public, like Crypto AG in Steinhausen, which for decades sold manipulated cipher machines to over a hundred countries — on behalf of the CIA and BND. Other examples include the Fichenaffäre and P-26. The Fichenaffäre revealed that state security had compiled 900,000 index cards on its own population. P-26 was the secret resistance organisation that parliament only learned about when a parliamentary investigation report blew its cover.

Similarly, little was known about the Stasi — the Ministry for State Security of the GDR — for a long time. Only with the fall of the Wall did the picture emerge. 91,000 full-time employees, an estimated 189,000 unofficial informants — per capita, the largest surveillance apparatus in history. Markus Wolf ran foreign espionage so effectively that Western agencies didn't even have a photograph of him until the late seventies — the man without a face. Department M opened 90,000 letters daily. The Zersetzung programme systematically destroyed lives without the victims ever holding a shred of proof. Günter Guillaume sat in Willy Brandt's outer office — and no one had noticed in time.

Adrian Voss grew up in Bern, in a neighbourhood so unremarkable that it would be the perfect place to hide an intelligence agency. He didn't know that as a child. He knows it now.

After his Matura, he went to Geneva — International Relations at the IHEID, the institute that trains diplomats who later negotiate agreements in back rooms that no one hears about. Geneva taught him two things: first, that neutrality is a business model. Second, that the most interesting conversations happen after the conference, in the corridor, in lowered voices.

Then journalism. Security policy, intelligence services — the topics where press officers say: I can't comment on that. He learned that this sentence is almost always a lie — not because they're hiding something, but because they don't know themselves. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and both hands belong to different departments.

His first major investigation was the Fichenaffäre — the state surveilling its own population. Shortly after, the Wall fell and the Stasi files became public. The comparison with the Stasi was obvious — and he wanted to know whether it held up.

So he went to Berlin. He sat in the Stasi Records Archive on Normannenstrasse and read files that people had compiled on their neighbours, colleagues, spouses. In the Rosenholz files, he found connections reaching into Swiss government offices — traces that no one had followed up because no one had read them side by side.

At some point, he realised that the best stories weren't the ones he could publish. They were the ones that lived between the lines. In Bern as in Berlin — the same silence, the same locked doors.

That's when he started writing novels.

Today he lives between Bern and Berlin. In Bern, because that's where power resides — quietly, behind sandstone façades. In Berlin, because that's where the files are and the scars are visible. He writes on the train. When he comes from Berlin, the stretch from Zürich to Bern is his office. He says the rattling helps him think. That's probably even true.

On his desk in Bern sits a Hagelin CX-52, an old Swiss cipher machine. In Berlin, a folder of copied Stasi files lies beside it. Visitors sometimes ask whether the machine works. He says: Depends on what you mean by works.

In the intelligence world, there are no Rambos. No classic villains. Everyone I've researched — agents, handlers, analysts, traitors — I could understand. Not condone. Understand. Their position had a logic, a reason, a necessity that you only see when you get close enough.

That's what drives me: the shades of grey.

Take Switzerland and the GDR. At first glance, two states couldn't be more different. At second glance, they're alarmingly similar. Switzerland — at the centre of Europe, surrounded for centuries by great nations that could have swallowed it at any time. It had to assert itself. And it did — in its own way. Discreetly, profitably, and without ever talking about it. The GDR — bled dry by reparations, no reconstruction programme, installed as a puppet and the Eastern Bloc's first line of defence. A war loser that had to reinvent itself in a hostile environment while the West did everything — economically and through propaganda — to see it go under.

Two states that had to operate in a difficult environment. Both built intelligence services that went far beyond what the public knew. Both surveilled their own populations.

In my novels, the reader eventually asks: Yes, but how would I have acted? At first glance, it's clear — you know exactly what would be right. But when you think about it, when you see the constraints, the dependencies, the consequences of every decision — then it goes quiet. Then there's no more right and wrong. Only decisions you make, and ones you regret afterwards.

These layers of grey, this what if — paired with the fascination that hardly anyone has truly told these stories this way before. That's what drives me.