The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-SIX THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

The Soviet intelligence offensive against West Germany during the Cold War had three distinguishing characteristics. First, the division of Germany made the Federal Republic (FRG) easier to penetrate than any other major Western state. So many refugees fled to the West from the misnamed German Democratic Republic (GDR)—about three million before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961—that it was not difficult to hide hundreds, even thousands, of East German and Soviet agents among them. Among the bogus refugees were a series of illegals. Some were KGB officers of Soviet nationality who had spent several years establishing false German identities in the secure environment of the GDR, many of whom moved on to operate against north American and other targets.¹ Others were East German illegal agents recruited and trained by the KGB, most of whom were deployed against targets in the Federal Republic.²

Secondly, the FRG was the only Western state on which Moscow received even more high-grade intelligence from an allied agency—the Stasi’s foreign section, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklúrung (HVA)³—than it did from the KGB. From 1952 to 1986 the HVA was headed by Markus Johannes “Mischa” Wolf, probably the ablest of the Soviet Bloc intelligence chiefs. Wolf was the son of a well-known German Communist doctor and writer who had been forced to flee to Moscow after Hitler’s rise to power. He owed his appointment as head of East German foreign intelligence shortly before his thirtieth birthday to his devoted Stalinism and hence the confidence he inspired in the KGB (then the MGB), as well as to his own ability. In 1947 he told his friend Wolfgang Leonhard that East German Communists would have to give up the idea of the “separate German way to socialism” mentioned in their Party program. When Leonhard, who worked in the Party central secretariat, told him he was wrong, Wolf replied, “There are higher authorities than your central secretariat!” Shortly afterward, the “higher authorities” in Moscow did indeed put an end to talk about the “separate German way.”⁴ Wolf has never suffered from false modesty. “As even my bitter foes would acknowledge,” he boasts in retirement, “[the HVA] was probably the most efficient and effective such service on the European continent.”⁵

The third distinguishing characteristic of Soviet intelligence operations in West Germany was that, in addition to receiving HVA reports, the KGB’s own penetration of the FRG was powerfully assisted by its East German allies. As well as establishing legal residencies in Bonn, Cologne and Hamburg,⁶ the KGB was also able to run West German operations from its base at Karlshorst in the Berlin suburbs. This was the largest Soviet intelligence station outside the USSR, using East German illegals and other agents supplied by the Stasi and HVA. Though the KGB was, in principle, responsible for funding its Karlshorst station, in the mid-1970s the GDR was contributing 1.3 million marks a year to its running costs.⁷

The first major recruitments by the Karlshorst KGB in the FRG which are recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin occurred in 1950. SERGEYEV (also codenamed NIKA), a young West German Communist recruited in that year, was instructed to distance himself from the Communist Party in order to allow him to provide intelligence on the Trotskyists in the FRG, with whom—despite their political insignificance—the Centre remained obsessed for ideological reasons. His file records that early in his career as an agent he provided the intelligence which made possible the abduction of Weiland, a leading Trotskyist, from West Berlin by a special actions snatch squad.⁸ SERGEYEV became one of the KGB’s longest serving West German agents and by 1963 was receiving a salary of 400 deutschmarks a month. A Centre report on his work claims that, “With his help, in 1951-74, Trotskyist organizations in the FRG and western Europe were cultivated and compromised.” Simultaneously, SERGEYEV served for some years as a respected north German Bürgermeister. Fearing that he was under surveillance, the KGB broke contact with him in 1981, giving him a final payment of 3,000 deutschmarks.⁹

Karlshorst’s main achievement in the early years of the Federal Republic was the penetration of the semi-official West German foreign intelligence agency, the Gehlen Org, which from 1956 was officially attached to the Federal Chancellery as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). In March 1950 Karlshorst recruited “for material reward” an unemployed former SS captain, Hans Clemens (codenamed KHANNI), who in the following year gained a job in the Gehlen Org. Over the next decade he supplied what his file describes as “valuable information” on the FRG intelligence community: “This made it possible to prevent the exposure of valuable agents, and to disrupt operations directed against Soviet missions in the FRG.”¹⁰ Clemens’s greatest success, however, was to recruit a former SS comrade, Heinz Felfe (codenamed KURT), whom he successfully recommended for a job in the Gehlen Org.¹¹ With the active assistance of Karlshorst, Felfe rapidly established himself as one of the most successful agents of the Cold War. According to a KGB report, his intelligence, when combined with that from the British spies George Blake and Kim Philby, made possible “the elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the GDR” during the period 1953 to 1955.¹²

In 1953 Felfe astounded his colleagues in the Gehlen Org by announcing that he had set up an agent network in Moscow headed by a Red Army colonel. Much of the intelligence from the non-existent network—a blend of fact and fiction fabricated by the Centre—was passed on to the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in Bonn. Simultaneously, Felfe was providing Karlshorst with large numbers of FRG intelligence reports. Urgent reports went by radio; the remainder were despatched in the false bottoms of suitcases, on film concealed in tins of babyfood, via dead letter-boxes, or through a Gehlen Org courier, Erwin Tiebel, who was also working for Karlshorst. By 1958 Felfe had established himself as the German Philby, becoming—like Philby in SIS fourteen years earlier—head of Soviet counter-intelligence in the BND. Unlike Philby, however, his motives had more to do with vanity than with ideology. He was, he told himself, the supreme intelligence professional, recognized as the rising star of the BND yet outwitting it at the same time. Karlshorst was careful to boost his ego, encouraging him to believe that his achievements were eclipsing even those of Richard Sorge. “I wanted,” Felfe said later, “to rank as top class with the Russians.” A CIA officer who served in Germany during the 1950s concluded after Felfe’s arrest in 1961:

Soon after Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, he singled out Felfe—along with Philby, Blake and Vassall—as the kind of past agent whose recruitment was, once again, urgently needed in order to keep the Soviet leadership abreast of the development of Western policy.¹⁴

THE FRG WAS a major target for KGB active measures as well as intelligence collection. The chief priority of both KGB and HVA influence operations during the 1950s and 1960s was to discredit as many West German politicians as possible as neo-Nazis and “revenge-seekers.” Disinformation almost always works most effectively when it includes a basis of fact. In the early years of the FRG, there was no shortage of real ex-Nazis in positions of power and influence to denounce in active measures campaigns. Among the most effective denouncers was the Reuters correspondent in Berlin, John Peet, who had been recruited as an NKVD agent during the Spanish Civil War. In 1950 Peet defected to East Berlin, somewhat disconcerted by the excessively clandestine preparations made for the defection by his East German case officer. All Peet expected was a phone call inviting him to coffee from an East Berlin professor who frequently visited his West Berlin flat. Instead, the professor rang him and, in what struck Peet as a curiously high-pitched voice, declared, “PRIMROSE has a message for DAFFODIL. 1600 hours on Monday. I repeat, 1600 hours on Monday.” Once in East Berlin, Peet announced at a press conference:

From 1952 to 1975 Peet edited the fortnightly Democratic German Report, which spent much of its time denouncing the past records (often supplied by Wolf) of West German politicians, diplomats, industrialists, lawyers, generals and police chiefs. Peet regarded as his “prize exhibit” Adenauer’s most important aide, Hans Globke, who had drafted the infamous official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 race laws.¹⁶

Peet’s propaganda was powerfully reinforced by the KGB-arranged defection in July 1954 of Otto John, first head of the FRG security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV). Like Peet four years earlier, John gave a press conference at which he denounced the alleged revival of Nazism in West Germany. In December 1955 John reappeared in the West, claiming that he had been drugged by Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, a doctor working for the KGB. The West German supreme court was skeptical. According to other evidence, John was a heavy drinker who had been observed crossing to the East in a “cheerful” rather than comatose condition, after Wohlgemuth had plied him with whisky and played on his fears of a Nazi revival. In December 1959 he was sentenced to four years in jail, but served only eighteen months. Considerable mystery still surrounds the John case. The head of the KGB Karlshorst apparat, Yevgeni Petrovich Pitovranov, reported to the Centre in July 1954 that John had come for discussions in East Berlin because he “wished to maintain contact with us to discuss political problems and joint action against the Nazis of East Germany.” John’s decision to remain in the East, however, was made under KGB pressure. According to one of the KGB officers involved in the John case:

Among the deceptions used to persuade John to remain in the East was a fake Western news broadcast announcing that he had already defected to the GDR.¹⁷

The HVA and KGB had at their disposal an archive in East Berlin which held Wehrmacht, SS and Nazi records seized by the Red Army. In two large volumes of material on real and alleged war criminals and neo-Nazis, the HVA’s active measures department, Abteilung X, combined authentic archival documents and fabricated evidence to form a damning indictment of the West German political, business and military élite.¹⁸ Abteilung X also concocted an additional, highly discreditable chapter to the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, first head of the BND, in an imitation of his handwriting.¹⁹

The most celebrated West German target of the KGB and the HVA was Willy Brandt, codenamed POLYARNIK (“Polar”).²⁰ From the moment Brandt became Bürgermeister of Berlin in October 1957, he was the victim of a series of active measures operations designed first to discredit and then to blackmail him. Given Brandt’s heroic record of resistance to Hitler, it was plainly unrealistic to include him in the KGB’s list of neo-Nazi conspirators. Instead, by distorting his early career and war record, KGB and HVA active measures sought, at various times, to portray him as a Gestapo informer, an anti-German émigré, a collaborator with SIS and the CIA and even as a former Soviet agent.

In 1931, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Willy Brandt (born Herbert Frahm) had become leader of the youth section of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP), a left-wing breakaway party from the socialist SDP. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Brandt went into exile, traveling to Norway carrying only a briefcase containing the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital, a few shirts and 100 marks. Once in Oslo he established himself as the SAP representative and began a career as a journalist. In February 1937 he traveled to Spain, ostensibly as a journalist covering the Civil War but also to act as liaison between SAP members of the International Brigades and the neo-Trotskyist POUM militia. Brandt quickly denounced the “blind terror” waged by the Communists, on Soviet instructions, against POUM and other left-wing heretics:

Brandt in turn was, absurdly, denounced by the Communists as “an agent of Franco” and “a spy of the Gestapo.”²¹

The earliest reference to Brandt in his KGB file is a description of him in 1936 as a member of the Danzig Trotskyists. The other reports on Brandt during the late 1930s, all of them hostile, accurately reflect the paranoia of the Great Terror. There are fabricated claims that POLYARNIK had been tasked by the Paris Sñreté to infiltrate POUM, that he had betrayed many members of the SDP to the Gestapo and that he was involved in the murder in Spain of Mark Rein, son of a prominent Russian Menshevik, who had in reality been killed by the NKVD.²²

After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Brandt’s attitude to Moscow changed. The NKVD residency in Stockholm, whither Brandt had moved after the German occupation of Norway, reported that there had been a split in the ranks of “Norwegian Trotskyists.” Some, including Brandt, were now willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union to secure the defeat of Hitler. In the autumn of 1941 M. S. Okhunev (codenamed OLEG), an operations officer at the Stockholm residency, called on Brandt but found him out and left his card. The following evening Brandt visited the Soviet embassy and spent three hours talking to Okhunev and the NKVD resident, Mikhail Sergeyevich Vetrov. Brandt said that he ran a news agency whose clients included the American press, was ready to do anything to hasten the destruction of Nazism and would be happy to send stories from “Soviet comrades” to the United States (which had not yet entered the war)—if necessary, disguising their source. Vetrov and Okhunev replied that the most important contribution he could make to the war effort would be to gather intelligence from his Norwegian friends on German forces and operations in Norway. Brandt agreed, and for the next nine months had clandestine meetings once a fortnight with officers from the Stockholm residency. On one occasion he was handed 500 kroner, probably to meet his expenses, and gave a receipt.

Among the intelligence supplied by Brandt from his Norwegian sources was information on the German battleship Tirpitz, which left the Norwegian port of Trondheim in March 1942 to attack Arctic convoys. Brandt informed the NKVD that he had passed the same information to the British, who tried and failed to sink it.²³ He also supplied the Stockholm residency with information on German pressure on Sweden to join the Anti-Comintern Pact and on plans (never implemented) to ban the Swedish Communist Party. In the summer of 1942, after the arrest by the Swedish police of two Czech agents of the residency, TERENTY and VANYA,²⁴ Brandt refused further secret rendezvous with NKVD officers, despite pressure from the residency to continue them. He did, however, agree to come openly to the Soviet embassy, sometimes to meet intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.²⁵

None of this makes POLYARNIK a Soviet agent. The Stockholm residency reported in 1943 that Brandt had also been in touch with British and American intelligence officers in Sweden, as well as with Trotsky’s Norwegian former secretary, who remained deeply suspect as far as the Centre was concerned.²⁶ Brandt’s overriding motive was to provide any information to all three members of the Grand Alliance which might contribute to the defeat of Hitler. In the case of the Soviet Union, he calculated accurately that his best channel of communication with Moscow was via the Stockholm residency.

The first attempt to discredit Brandt after his election as Berlin Bürgermeister in 1957 was a lengthy operation carried out jointly by the KGB and HVA in 1958-9 to use tendentious versions of his wartime record and other fabrications to show him as an agent of British and American intelligence. But, as the file on the operation acknowledges, “This did not produce the desired result, and Brandt’s position as a politician was not undermined.”²⁷ Wolf next proposed reviving the old slander that Brandt had been a Gestapo agent during his Norwegian exile, but the East German leadership ordered the plan to be aborted due to lack of credible evidence.²⁸

In the 1961 West German elections Brandt stood as the SDP candidate for the chancellorship. The campaign was the dirtiest in the history of the FRG. Brandt was assailed by what he denounced as “a right-wing barrage of mud.” The fact that he had spent the Nazi years in exile led to accusations that he was unpatriotic, while his background as a left-wing socialist gave rise to insinuations that he was a crypto-Communist. Brandt was deeply depressed by the “political pornography” used to discredit him. “My opponents,” he later admitted, “were sometimes successful to the extent that they kept me from my work for days on end.” Sensing his vulnerability, the Stasi gave secret but, in Brandt’s view, “vigorous encouragement” to some of the charges fabricated against him.²⁹

Though the SDP succeeded in cutting the Christian Democrat majority (thanks largely to the building of the Berlin Wall during the campaign), the Centre decided to threaten Brandt with far more damaging evidence than had surfaced during the elections. On November 16, 1962 Semichastny, the KGB chairman, formally approved a blackmail operation proposed by Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD. Though there is no mention of it in the file seen by Mitrokhin, the operation was also, almost certainly, approved by Khrushchev, still smarting from the humiliating outcome of the Cuban missile crisis in the previous month.³⁰ The operational plan was for Brandt to be approached by the Izvestia correspondent, Polyanov, to whom he had given an interview earlier in the year. On this occasion, Polyanov would be accompanied by an undercover KGB operations officer who would tell Brandt, “We would like to resume our confidential relations with you in order to develop together sensible solutions to the West Berlin question.” If Brandt refused, he was to be told, “We have sufficient means to cause you unpleasantness, and therefore assume that you will reconsider your position.” The threat was in fact largely bluff. Sakharovsky had been annoyed to discover that the original documents in Brandt’s wartime operational file had been destroyed in 1959 (an inconceivable action had he actually been an agent), among them such apparently compromising items as his receipt for 500 kroner for the Stockholm residency. Brandt, however, would be unaware of this. The operational plan approved by Semichastny confidently asserts that Brandt must believe that “there are materials in our possession which could compromise him.”³¹

Mitrokhin did not see the report on the meeting with Brandt.³² It is clear, however, that—if it went ahead—Brandt brushed the attempted KGB blackmail aside. Semichastny and Sakharovsky had almost certainly intended, with Khrushchev’s approval, to soften up Brandt before a meeting with the Soviet leader. In January 1963, while on a visit to East Berlin, Khrushchev duly invited Brandt to a meeting. Already convinced of the need to reach a modus vivendi between the FRG and GDR as well as to settle the Berlin question, Brandt was willing to accept. Opposition to the proposed meeting from the Christian Democrats in the ruling West Berlin coalition, however, persuaded him to refuse. According to Brandt:

Brandt’s four and a half years as West Germany’s first SDP chancellor, from October 21, 1969 to May 6, 1974, marked the high water mark of the HVA and KGB intelligence offensive in the FRG. Wolf’s greatest success was the penetration of the Chancellor’s office by Günter Guillaume (codenamed HANSEN). In 1956 Guillaume and his wife Christel, both HVA officers, had staged a carefully orchestrated “escape” from East Germany, set up small businesses in Frankfurt to act as cover for their intelligence work and become active, apparently staunchly anti-Communist, members of the SDP. By 1968 Guillaume had become chairman of the Frankfurt SDP and an elected member of the Frankfurt city council, thus becoming the only HVA officer (as opposed to agent) ever to hold public office in the FRG. In November 1969, three weeks after Brandt became chancellor, Guillaume gained a job in his office, initially as an assistant dealing with trade unions and political organizations. Hardworking and efficient, with a jovial down-to-earth manner, he was promoted in 1972 to become the Chancellor’s aide for relations with the SDP, as well as being put in charge of Brandt’s travel arrangements. His reports were so highly rated in the Centre that they were personally forwarded by Andropov to foreign minister Gromyko.³⁴

The key intelligence requirement placed on Guillaume concerned Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which he defined as having “a threefold aim: improved relations with the Soviet Union, normal relations with the east European states, and a modus vivendi between the two parts of Germany.” In his “Report on the State of the Nation” to the Bundestag at the beginning of 1970, Brandt called for “cooperative togetherness” between the FRG and GDR. In the course of the year he became the first chancellor to visit East Germany, and signed treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland.³⁵ “Through Guillaume’s judgments,” writes Wolf in his memoirs, “we were able to conclude sooner rather than later that Brandt’s new Ostpolitik, while still riven with contradictions, marked a genuine change of course in West German foreign policy.”³⁶ Moscow reached the same conclusion. After Brandt’s visit to East Germany, however, Karlshorst reported “a noticeable rise in his popularity,”³⁷ which caused some concern to the GDR leadership. During his visit, as the crowds chanted, “Willy, Willy!,” Brandt mischievously asked the East German prime minister, Willi Stoph, whether the name being chanted was spelled with a “y” or an “i.” Stoph remained stony-faced.³⁸

With the Christian Democrats in open opposition to Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the Centre was now concerned not to compromise Brandt but to keep him in power. By the spring of 1972 a series of defections from the SDP and its Free Democrat allies had reduced Brandt’s majority to four. With more defections in the offing, the fate of Ostpolitik hung in the balance. In April 1972, confident of success, the CDU (Christian Democrat) leader, Rainer Barzel, tabled a motion of no confidence.³⁹ With the blessing of the Centre, Wolf made a possibly critical secret intervention in the Bundestag with the aim of keeping Brandt in power.

Shortly before the crucial vote of confidence, the HVA had recruited a corrupt CDU deputy, Julius Steiner, as an agent with the codename SIMSON.⁴⁰ Wolf paid Steiner 50,000 marks to vote for Brandt.⁴¹ Barzel’s no confidence motion failed by two votes. At a general election in November, Brandt won a more secure parliamentary majority, with the SDP for the first time beating the Christian Democrats in the popular vote.⁴² The HVA continued to run SIMSON as an agent in the new Bundestag. In February 1973 Steiner agreed to a contract with the HVA (euphemistically described as the “Structural Working Group of the GDR Council of Ministers”), under which he was paid a retainer of 3,000 marks a month. Soon afterward (the date is not recorded by Mitrokhin), Wolf reported to the Centre that Steiner was in contact with the BfV, the West German counter-intelligence agency, and thus useless as an agent.⁴³ In June the Munich weekly Quick published a photograph of a bank deposit slip showing that 50,000 marks had been paid into Steiner’s account the day after the April 1972 vote of confidence, thus provoking a public scandal which was quickly dubbed “Bonn’s Watergate” or “Rhinegate.” Steiner acknowledged being recruited as an HVA agent but claimed that he had worked as a double agent with the approval of the BfV, and said that the 50,000 marks had come from the SDP chief whip, Karl Wienand⁴⁴—a charge denied by Wienand (who, it later transpired, was also an HVA agent).⁴⁵ A parliamentary inquiry decided that there was no conclusive evidence of bribery.⁴⁶

By the time of Brandt’s victory in the November 1972 elections, Guillaume was at the peak of his career as a penetration agent, attending all meetings of the SDP party and parliamentary leadership. On May 29, 1973, however, Günter Nollau, head of the BfV, informed Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister, that Guillaume was under suspicion of espionage and had been placed under surveillance. (Their recollections later differed over how serious the suspicions reported by Nollau were.)⁴⁷ Shortly afterward, alerted—according to Wolf’s not wholly reliable account—by the BfV’s clumsy surveillance of Guillaume’s wife, the HVA ordered both Günter and Christel Guillaume to suspend their intelligence work.⁴⁸ At 6:30 a.m. on April 24, 1974 the Guillaumes were arrested at their Bonn apartment. In a curious breach of espionage tradecraft, Guillaume virtually admitted his guilt. Dressed only in a bathrobe, he declared defiantly, “I am an officer of the [East German] National People’s Army!” According to Genscher, “It was basically only Guillaume’s own declaration which convicted him.”⁴⁹

Wolf now argues that his success in penetrating Brandt’s entourage was “equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal.” The political scandal caused by Guillaume’s arrest was the immediate cause of Brandt’s resignation on May 6, 1974. The HVA, Wolf concludes, “unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen.”⁵⁰

THE HVA OPERATIONS in West Germany which had had the greatest influence on the KGB’s own methods were probably those of its “Romeo spies (a phrase invented by the Western media but later taken over by Wolf himself).⁵¹ The KGB had specialized in the sexual entrapment of Western diplomats and visitors to Moscow since the 1930s. The entrapment followed a straightforward sequence: the use of attractive female or male swallows as sexual bait, the seduction of the target, the secret photography of the sexual encounter (and, on occasion, the interruption of the encounter by a supposedly outraged “spouse” or “relative”), followed by blackmail.⁵² Wolf’s tactics were both more subtle and more effective. Love, or a plausible semblance of it, was capable of generating more intelligence over a longer period than brief sexual encounters.⁵³ The main targets of the Romeo spies were lonely female secretaries, most in their thirties or forties, employed in West German ministries and intelligence agencies.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the KGB base in Karlshorst began imitating the HVA’s “secretaries offensive.” Indeed, the KGB files seen by Mitrokhin show that some of the “secretary spies” later thought to be HVA agents were in fact working for the KGB. Karlshorst’s initial targets were female employees in the Bonn Foreign Ministry identified by a KGB agent in the ministry’s personnel department, Gisela Herzog (codenamed MARLENE), recruited in 1954—without, apparently, the use of a Romeo spy. Herzog herself married an official from the French defense ministry in 1958 and moved to Paris. The first victim of the KGB’s secretaries offensive was Herzog’s friend Leonore Heinz (codenamed LOLA), secretary to a foreign ministry department head. Her seducer was Heinz Sütterlin (codenamed WALTER), a West German from Freiburg recruited by the KGB in 1957, whose first name, confusingly, was identical to Leonore’s surname. When Herzog heard in 1958 that the 30-year-old Leonore Heinz had succumbed to Sütterlin’s advances, she became consciencestricken. Probably foreseeing Heinz’s devastation when she discovered that she had been deceived, Herzog wrote to the Centre, “I should like to say that you should not involve LOLA in co-operation with us through Sütterlin. She would be very disillusioned.” “I do ask you,” she wrote on another occasion, “to please leave LOLA in peace.”⁵⁴ The Centre, predictably, paid no attention.

In December 1960 Heinz Sütterlin and Leonore Heinz were married. Over the next year Sütterlin frequently discussed with his wife the danger that the Cold War might turn into hot war. At a time when the West German leadership were building themselves nuclear shelters, he argued that they had to be concerned for their own safety. Leonore agreed to confide in him everything she knew about East—West relations. In 1961, at first unwittingly, she was included in the KGB agent network. Two years later, Sütterlin reported to the Centre that, without mentioning the KGB, he had told his wife he was passing on her information to an organization dedicated to preventing nuclear war:

Though his wife refused payment, Sütterlin received 1,000 marks a month.

From 1964 onward, Sütterlin handed film of documents LOLA had smuggled out of the ministry to the East German illegal Eugen Runge (codenamed MAKS), who was working for the Karlshorst KGB. Runge, in turn, left the film in a dead letter-box which was emptied by the Bonn residency. After Leonore at last realized that she was working for the Soviet Bloc, Runge had a personal meeting with her. He found her unperturbed by her discovery. Leonore said that she trusted her husband absolutely, and that her work in the cause of peace was a job that had to be done. Sütterlin told Runge that Leonore was also motivated by “hatred for the caste of haughty foreign ministry officials” and “derived satisfaction from causing as much damage as she could.”⁵⁵ His comment supplies a missing element in traditional explanations of the success of the HVA and KGB secretaries offensive. Though most of the secretaries began spying for love, their espionage was probably sustained, at least in part, by the arrogance of some of their better-educated and better-paid male superiors.

In 1967 Runge defected to the CIA, betraying both Leonore and Heinz Sütterlin. Runge told his debriefers, “We received [FRG diplomatic] documents before they moved across Leonore’s desk and on to the code room, and we read the reports brought by diplomatic couriers from abroad, mostly even before German Foreign Minister [Gerhard] Schrîder got them.” As her friend Gisela Herzog had feared nine years earlier, Leonore was distraught at the discovery that she had been targeted by a Romeo spy. During her police interrogation, she was confronted with a confession by her husband that he had married her not for love but on orders from the KGB. Soon afterward Leonore hanged herself in her cell.⁵⁶

TWO OF THE other most successful seductions in the KGB’s secretaries offensive recorded in files seen by Mitrokhin—those of DORIS and ROSIE—also involved a false flag recruitment and the use of East German illegals. The false flag, however, differed from that which had deceived LOLA. DORIS and ROSIE believed they were working not for an underground peace movement but for a secret neo-Nazi group.

DORIS was Margret Hîke, a secretary in the office of the West German president, where she worked successively in the mobilization and security departments. Her Romeo spy was the East German illegal Hans-Jurgen Henze (codenamed HAGEN), who assumed the identity of Franz Becker, a West German living in the GDR.⁵⁷ Henze discovered the 33-year-old Hîke by chance. One day in 1968, while looking out of the window of his Bonn apartment, he saw a woman who struck him as a possible civil servant going for a walk alone. Henze stood waiting in a telephone kiosk along her route and, as Hîke passed by, asked if she had change for a phone call. Somehow he also managed to strike up a conversation and, on discovering where she worked, arranged another meeting with her. Gradually, according to Hîke’s operational file, “She fell seriously in love and was greatly attached to him.” Henze explained that he was a postgraduate student writing a dissertation on the work of the president, but needed additional source material before he could complete it. Hîke supplied documents from work to help finish the fictional thesis. Though less infatuated than Hîke, Henze also became emotionally involved in their relationship and for several years “found it difficult to switch to a business footing.” Finally in 1971 or 1972 (the date is unclear from the file), hoping to appeal to Hîke’s somewhat extreme right-wing views, he told her he belonged to an organization of “German patriots,” based in Brazil, who were committed to the cause of national revival and needed inside information on the Bonn government to continue their work.⁵⁸

Hîke said she had guessed something of the sort and agreed to assist the “German patriots.” Henze then persuaded her to sign a contract, allegedly drawn up by his “boss,” under which she agreed to provide information from the President’s office in return for her expenses and 500 marks a month. Among the intelligence she supplied were the mobilization plans of the Chancellor’s office and the major Bonn ministries; details on the government war bunker (which were reported to Brezhnev); despatched from FRG ambassadors in Moscow, Washington and elsewhere; the secret weekly reports to the President from the foreign ministry; a dossier on Brezhnev’s visit to the FRG; and accounts of the President’s meetings with foreign diplomats. Hîke gradually became dependent on the 500 marks she received each month. In order to leave no trace of it in her own financial records, she gave it to her mother to invest on her behalf, telling her that she found it difficult to save herself.⁵⁹ With the help of her mother’s investments, Hîke was able to buy a new apartment (Apartment 85, House 16, am Baitzaplen 37, Oberkassel).⁶⁰

After Hîke signed her agent contract, she ceased to take the risks of smuggling classified material back to her flat. Instead, Henze taught her how to photograph documents in the President’s office with a miniature camera concealed in a tube of lipstick. On one occasion Hîke’s boss entered the room just as she was about to use the camera, but—to her immense relief—failed to notice what she was doing.⁶¹ She usually handed over the film either in Cologne or Zürich. The yavka (secret rendezvous) in Cologne was at 8:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday of each month in Kîln-Bayenthal, at the end of Bayenthalgürtel, about fifty meters from the Bismarck column, by a telephone kiosk next to an advertising pillar. Hîke was told to have a copy of Der Spiegel in her hand if she was ready to go ahead with the meeting; if she needed to give a danger signal, she was to carry a plastic bag instead. The meetings in Zürich took place at 5 o’clock on Saturday afternoons at Rennweg 35, by the window of a china shop.⁶²

Henze was twice awarded the Order of the Red Star for his success in running Hîke as an agent. In 1976 he returned to East Germany but continued to meet her regularly in Cologne and Zürich.⁶³ Hîke was temporarily put on ice in 1979 during a security scare caused by the investigation of another secretary suspected of spying for the East, but was reactivated a year later with the new codename VERA. By 1980 the “product file” of the documents she had provided filled ten volumes.⁶⁴ Though Hîke remained in touch with Henze, she also passed on intelligence through RENATA, a female East German illegal working for the KGB.⁶⁵ Among the intelligence she supplied during the early 1980s were details of talks in October 1982 between Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and US Secretary of State George Schultz over the stationing of Pershing II missiles in the FRG. She also took part in two major NATO WINTEX exercises, during which she had been able to provide intelligence on the FRG wartime command and control system, and was able to report on her experience of working inside the secret wartime government bunker in the Eiffel hills near Bonn.

Hîke was arrested in 1985, and quickly confessed. In 1987 she was sentenced to eight years in jail and fined 33,000 marks, the total sum she was believed to have received from the KGB (probably an underestimate). The judge told her that, in passing a relatively lenient sentence, he was taking into account that she had fallen “hopelessly in love” with her recruiter. The British press was curiously divided in its opinion of Hîke. Though the Daily Telegraph described her as a “dowdy secretary,” she impressed the Observer as a “Glamour Spy.”⁶⁶

The methods used to recruit Hîke were similar to those employed against Heidrun Hofer (codenamed ROSIE), a secretary in her early thirties in the FRG foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND).⁶⁷ While serving at the BND Paris station during the early 1970s Hofer was seduced by ROLAND, an East German illegal with a military bearing who, like Henze, claimed to be working for a neo-Nazi group of “German patriots.”⁶⁸ Hofer’s deception was taken one stage further than that of Hîke. On February 26, 1973 at Innsbruch in Austria, ROLAND introduced her to VLADIMIR, telling her that he was one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi underground. Next day VLADIMIR met Hofer alone, telling her that he had known Admiral Canaris, wartime head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), in which her father had served, and discussed the intelligence which he wanted her to supply. Unknown to Hofer, VLADIMIR was, in reality, a senior KGB illegal, Ivan Dmitryevich Unrau, an ethnic German born in Russia in 1914.⁶⁹

In 1974 Hofer was transferred to BND headquarters at Pullach in Bavaria, where she worked successively for the west European and NATO liaison departments, and became engaged to a BND major.⁷⁰ Following the end of her affair with ROLAND, the KGB used two further East German illegals, MAZON (who pretended to be ROLAND’s father) and FRANK, to maintain contact with her. Both pretended to be members of the neo-Nazi underground.⁷¹ Hofer appears eventually to have realized that she had been recruited under false flag but to have carried on working as a paid KGB agent. On December 21, 1977, possibly as the result of a tip-off to the BND from the French SDECE, she was arrested while driving across the Austrian border to meet her controller. Next day she confessed to being a KGB agent. Hofer showed little emotion until told that her BND fiancé had broken off their engagement. After bursting into tears, she asked for the window to be opened to give her some air, then suddenly leaped to her feet and threw herself from the sixth floor. Though her fall was partially broken by some bushes, she was critically injured.⁷²

Apart from Hîke and Hofer, the most successful KGB recruitment made by an East German Romeo spy during the 1970s appears to have been that of Elke Falk (codenamed LENA). After Falk had advertised in a lonely hearts column, she was contacted by the illegal Kurt Simon (codenamed GEORG), who introduced himself as Gerhard Thieme. It is unclear from Mitrokhin’s notes what, if any, false flag Simon employed to recruit her. However, with his encouragement, Falk gained a job in 1974 as a secretary in the Chancellor’s office,⁷³ taking with her to work a miniature camera disguised as a cigarette lighter and a bogus can of hairspray in which to store her films.⁷⁴ Like Hîke, Falk was a member of the crisis management team during the WINTEX exercises. In 1977 the Centre awarded Simon the Order of the Red Star. Later Falk was moved to the control of two other illegals, one who used the alias “Peter Muller” and a second who was codenamed ADAM.⁷⁵ Falk moved from the Chancellor’s office to the transport ministry in 1977, then in 1979 to the economic aid ministry two years later.⁷⁶ By 1980, when Mitrokhin saw her operational file, it filled seven volumes.⁷⁷ Falk was arrested in 1989 but wrongly described at her trial as an HVA rather than a KGB agent. Though sentenced to six and a half years’ imprisonment, she served only a few months before being released as part of an East—West spy exchange. Falk was alleged to have received a total of 20,000 marks for her espionage.⁷⁸

NOT ALL THE Romeo spies, however, achieved results. Among the failures was one of the KGB’s East German illegals, Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), who assumed the identity of a West German living in the GDR. Kahle’s cover occupations included working as a laboratory technician in Cologne and Bonn universities and as a German language teacher in Paris. During the early 1970s he set out to cultivate four FRG foreign ministry and embassy secretaries, a female clerk at an American embassy in Europe, an American student at a German university who invited him to her parents’ home in the United States and a British secretary at NATO. Kahle’s ten-volume file, however, contains no indication that he obtained significant intelligence from any of them. His main West German cultivation was BELLA, who worked at the FRG embassies in Tehran and, from 1975, in London. According to WERNER’s file, his attempts to recruit BELLA during her tour of duty in London showed “insufficient determination” and were hampered by a number of operational errors, such as attracting the attention of the embassy security officer. Kahle became more interested in MONA, a French technical translator for a firm of Swedish paper manufacturers in Paris, where he was based from 1975 onward. His file records that he had “intimate relations” with MONA and wished to marry her. The Centre, however, became understandably skeptical both of MONA’s intelligence potential and of Kahle’s motives in pursuing her. The KGB also discovered, through tapping the telephone and intercepting the correspondence of Kahle’s mother in East Germany, that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow and anxious about the fate of his crystal and porcelain collections in Paris, of which the Centre was previously unaware.⁷⁹

In 1978 Kahle was duly summoned back to Moscow and given a lie-detector test—on the pretext that it would be valuable experience if he were subjected to a polygraph during his next posting. As a further method of discovering what WERNER had really been up to, an impeccably ideologically orthodox female agent, ANITA, was planted on him—the only known example of a Romeo agent being targeted by a “Juliet.” ANITA’s report confirmed the Centre’s suspicions. When she asked why he thought he had been recalled, Kahle replied with a grin that he had become “too comfortable” in Paris, had made many friends and acquaintances and had acquired a well-appointed, attractively furnished apartment which he was reluctant to leave. He had also broken KGB regulations by leaving some of his possessions with MONA and by borrowing 3,000 francs from her. ANITA claimed to be shocked by Kahle’s “ideological crisis:”

As a result of ANITA’s report, Kahle appears to have been sidelined. He was formally removed from illegal work in 1982.⁸¹

A PART FROM THE secretary spies, the KGB’s most productive penetrations of the West Germany bureaucracy during the 1970s were probably two recruits in the intelligence community. One was awarded the Order of the KGB Badge of Honor (Znak Pochota) for his “fruitful collaboration.”⁸² The other, whose recruitment was personally approved by Andropov himself, was ranked by the KGB’s Karlshorst base as among its most valuable agents.⁸³ By the early 1980s, however, both sources seem to have dried up.

HVA penetrations of FRG intelligence agencies were at least as impressive as those by the KGB. In 1973 Gabriele Gast, who had been recruited by an HVA Romeo three years earlier, joined the BND as an analyst and rose to become deputy head of the Soviet Bloc division in 1987, the most highly placed woman in the maledominated West German foreign intelligence agency. Gast’s motivation was complex. As well as her emotional involvement with her recruiter, she was suspicious of the FRG political system and deeply fascinated by Markus Wolf. According to Wolf, “She needed to feel wanted by me and I gave her my personal attention… Sometimes her messages carried the wounded tone of a lover who feels taken for granted.” Wolf met her personally seven times. His attentions were richly rewarded. “Gaby’s work for us,” he recalls, “was flawless. She gave us an accurate picture of the West’s knowledge of and its judgments regarding the entire Eastern Bloc. This proved vitally important to us in handling the rise of Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s.” Some of the intelligence assessments by Gast which so impressed Wolf also landed on the desk of Chancellor Kohl and, almost certainly, on those of Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev as well.⁸⁴

In 1981 Klaus Kuron of the BfV offered his services by letter to the HVA residency in Bonn. A senior counter-intelligence officer who specialized in running “turned” HVA agents, Kuron was bitter at having been passed over for the top jobs and now found himself in increasing financial difficulty. He struck Wolf as “unembarrassed about his treachery… His was a paradigm of unfulfilled ambitions of a type that fester throughout any civil service.” The HVA skilfully pandered to his wounded self-esteem as well as paying him a total of almost 700,000 marks in the last eight years of its existence.⁸⁵

In 1985 Hans-Joachim Tiedge, the BfV’s counter-intelligence chief, caused even greater surprise than Kuron with his letter four years earlier by arriving drunk and unkempt at the East German border and demanding to defect. Tiedge was a heavy gambler as well as an alcoholic, who had come close to being charged with manslaughter after the death of his wife in a drunken household brawl. “If a case like mine had been presented to me for analysis,” he told the HVA, “I would have recommended that I be fired without delay.” The first prostitute summoned by Wolf to entertain Tiedge after his defection took one look at him and ran away. But, claims Wolf, “Tiedge had a memory like a computer for names and connections, and filled in a lot of the blanks for us—though not as many as he thought, since he was unaware that his colleague Kuron was in our pay.”⁸⁶

PERHAPS THE MOST complex aspect of HVA operations in the FRG concerned its contacts either directly or through intermediaries with politicians. The great majority of meetings between West German politicians and representatives of the GDR were part of a genuine attempt to establish a dialogue, often necessarily out of public view, between East and West. The fact that the Stasi inevitably took a close interest in these encounters is not sufficient to brand those politicians from the FRG who took part in them as collaborators with the HVA. In a small minority of cases, however, such contacts acted as a cover for espionage or something close to it.

The most notorious case of a West German politician acting as an HVA agent is that of Karl Wienand, an SDP parliamentary whip during the Brandt government and one of the closest colleagues of Herbert Wehner, leader of the parliamentary party. After the collapse of East Germany, evidence emerged from Stasi files that Wienand had been an HVA agent from 1970 until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In 1996 he was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment and fined a million marks—the total of the payments he had received from the HVA.⁸⁷ According to Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Wienand was the only person to enjoy the trust of all three members of the triumvirate which ran the SDP after Brandt’s resignation: Helmut Schmidt, the new chancellor, Brandt, who remained party chairman, and Wehner.⁸⁸ Wolf claims that Wienand, whose motivation was “extraordinarily materialistic,” gave him “an enviable insight” into the policies of, and tensions between, the triumvirate at the top of the SDP. That insight also seems to have impressed the Centre. According to Wolf, the KGB itself made an attempt to “do business” with Wienand, but he “succeeded in dissuading our Soviet colleagues” from doing so.⁸⁹

The most controversial case of a senior West German politician in close contact with the East concerns Herbert Wehner. References to Wehner which have been discovered in Soviet and GDR documents since the fall of the Berlin Wall have led to much speculation as to whether, like his colleague Wienand, he was an agent for the HVA or KGB.⁹⁰ The Centre’s file on Wehner (codenamed KORNELIS) shows that he was a “confidential contact” of both the KGB and the HVA, but not a fully recruited agent.⁹¹ Wehner’s contacts with Soviet intelligence went back to his years as a member of the KPD (German Communist Party) leadership-in-exile in Moscow after Hitler’s rise to power. During the Great Terror he had denounced a number of his comrades as traitors,⁹² and was considered for recruitment as an NKVD agent. Wehner’s KGB file, however, reveals that he himself narrowly escaped execution. One KPD official in exile who denounced Wehner, Heinrich Mayer (codenamed MOST), was executed; another, Erich Birkenhauer (BELFORT), was sentenced to twelve years in the gulag. A third denunciation, by MIRRA, a female NKVD agent among the German Communists, almost led to Wehner’s downfall. She reported that Wehner’s behavior appeared to indicate that he was “in contact with the Gestapo.” On December 15, 1937, Wehner (then known as Herbert Funk) was summoned to NKVD headquarters for questioning. A subsequent note on his file records that he was to be given the impression that he was being recruited as an NKVD agent but that the real purpose was to gather evidence against him in preparation for his arrest. In 1938, the former secretary of the Berlin-Brandenburg KPD district committee, Theodor Beutming, confessed to being a member, with Wehner, of a (non-existent) “underground German Trotskyist center” in Moscow. On July 22 Yezhov, the NKVD chief, wrote on Beutming’s confession, “Where is the memorandum on the arrest of Funk?” A memorandum sent to Yezhov shortly afterwards listed a series of German Communists who had identified Wehner, under NKVD interrogation, as a Gestapo agent.⁹³

Wehner seems to have been saved from execution only by the winding down of the Terror and the disgrace, a few months later, of Yezhov. Early in 1940 Comintern sent him to carry out “illegal work” in Sweden, using identity documents in the name of H. M. Kornelis. In June 1941, shortly before Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, the Centre once again considered Wehner as possible NKVD agent material. It was decided not to recruit him, however, when it was discovered that he had included in a report of the previous October an accurate but politically incorrect warning that an attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union was, sooner or later, inevitable.⁹⁴ Wehner was later arrested by the Swedish police and—according to later claims by Markus Wolf—revealed the names of members of the Communist underground in both Sweden and Germany.⁹⁵ On emerging from prison Wehner broke away from the Communists and made common cause with the SDP.

Wolf found the post-war Wehner “a person of irreconcilable contradictions.” Though playing a major role in turning the SDP from a Marxist into a social democratic party, Wehner remained nostalgic for his Communist roots. In 1973 he had an “intensely emotional” reunion with Ulbricht’s successor, Erich Honecker, with whom he had worked as a young Communist in the Saarland almost half a century earlier. Honecker went to enormous pains to arrange the details of the reunion, trying to ensure that a cake prepared for tea at a hunting lodge tasted exactly like one baked for Wehner many years before by Honecker’s mother.⁹⁶ After Wehner’s death in 1990, Honecker claimed that, although he had rejected Communism, “his goal was still the union of the labor movement and the building of a socialist German republic.”⁹⁷

According to Wolf, secret contacts with Wehner began in the mid-1950s but were initially regarded with great suspicion by Ulbricht, who absurdly suspected him of being “a British spy.” Contact became easier when Wehner became Minister for All-German Affairs in 1966 and began regular meetings with the East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who negotiated on “humanitarian questions” with West German officials. Vogel took his instructions directly from Erich Mielke, the GDR Minister of State Security, and reported to him after each meeting with Wehner. According to Wolf:

Mielke boasted to the Centre that Wehner’s regular briefings gave the Stasi a direct line to the heart of the West German power structure.⁹⁸ Mitrokhin’s notes contain none of these briefings. They do include, however, one example from KGB files of the trust placed in Wehner as a “confidential contact.” He was informed in 1973—apparently before the news became public—that the editor of the weekly magazine Quick, Heinz Van Nouhuys (codenamed NANT), who had been recruited as an HVA agent, was in fact a double agent working for the BfV.⁹⁹

Brandt later concluded that Wehner had been negotiating with the GDR behind his back.¹⁰⁰ It is unlikely, however, that Wehner ever consciously betrayed what he saw as the interests of the FRG. “From his youth onwards,” Wolf argued, “he regarded conspiracy as an instrument of power politics and sometimes physical survival. From his first contacts with us… he no doubt felt that he was always the stronger party in the political game.”¹⁰¹

Though the KGB appears to have left the running of Wienand entirely to the HVA and never regarded Wehner as more than a “confidential contact,” during the 1970s it had a hitherto unknown agent, codenamed CARDINAL, an SDP official who had been talent-spotted by another KGB agent, MAVR, a West German film-maker. The intelligence provided by CARDINAL included reports on FRG politicians and industrialists, the issues to be raised by Brandt during his visit to Moscow in 1973, Brandt’s resignation in 1974, the subsequent state of the SDP leadership and FRG relations with China, Israel and Portugal. As well as being rewarded with an icon and other gifts, CARDINAL was paid 5,000 dollars in 1974, the same sum in 1976 and 11,635 deutschmarks in 1977. Then the doubts began. A detailed study of his “intelligence” by the Centre revealed nothing of significance which had not also appeared in the West German press—apart from some items which the KGB suspected were disinformation. It was concluded that CARDINAL and MAVR had been seeking to ingratiate themselves with the KGB in the hope of gaining its assistance in winning valuable contracts in the Soviet Union. Contact with both was abruptly broken off.¹⁰²

Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB attempts to penetrate the Christian Democrats (CDU) are thinner than those on the SDP. He does, however, identify two agents within the CDU, both recruited in 1972; SHTOLPEN, a party adviser,¹⁰³ and RADIST, a member of the West Berlin city assembly.¹⁰⁴ No details are available on the intelligence which they provided. Mitrokhin also identifies a leading member of the Free Democrats (FDP), codenamed MARK, who had been recruited as a Soviet agent in East Germany in 1946 on the basis of what were alleged to be “compromising circumstances” arising from his wartime service in the Wehrmacht. A few years later MARK succeeded in fleeing to the West, where he rapidly embarked on a new career as a politician. In 1956 the KGB resumed contact with him and remained in touch for the next twenty-four years. However, there is no evidence that during that time MARK supplied any significant intelligence. A later Centre assessment concluded that he had passed on information slanted in favor of the political interests of the FDP and had tried to use his contacts with the East to further his own career. In about 1975 one of MARK’s parliamentary colleagues told Aleksandr Demyanovich Zakharov, a KGB officer stationed in Karlshorst, that MARK’s earlier association with Soviet intelligence had been “a youthful error.” In 1980 the Centre finally decided that there was no point in remaining in contact with him.¹⁰⁵

Both the recycled newspaper stories provided by CARDINAL and the quarter century wasted in trying to extract intelligence from MARK provide further evidence of the limitations of the KGB’s political intelligence analysis. Mitrokhin records one occasion on which Andropov issued what amounted to an official rebuke for the poor quality of FCD assessments on the FRG. In October 1977, as part of the preparations for Brezhnev’s state visit to West Germany in the following year, Kryuchkov submitted an alarmist report on the likely security problems, claiming that no fewer than 250 terrorist and extremist groups in the FRG were capable of attempting the assassination of the Soviet leader. Andropov replied acerbically:

In the event, Kevorkov’s less alarmist assessment proved correct and Brezhnev’s visit in May 1978 passed off without incident.¹⁰⁷

MITROKHIN’S INFORMATION ON the KGB’s West German agents, though extensive, is not comprehensive. There is, for example, intriguing evidence in the files seen by Mitrokhin of a KGB agent in the entourage of Egon Bahr, one of Helmut Schmidt’s most trusted advisers and a leading architect of Ostpolitik. (There is no suggestion that the agent was Bahr himself.) On February 5, 1981 Andropov sent Brezhnev and the CPSU Central Committee an intelligence report (no. 259-A/OV ), marked “of special importance,” which recounted a telephone conversation on January 27 between Schmidt and Ronald Reagan, whose inauguration as president of the United States had taken place a week earlier, and gave details of Schmidt’s subsequent discussions with Bahr and other advisers. To Schmidt’s irritation, Reagan asked for a month’s delay to the chancellor’s visit to Washington, previously arranged for March 3, on the grounds that the President was not yet ready “for a serious discussion of foreign policy problems.” Schmidt told his advisers that this was a deliberate delaying tactic by the new Reagan administration “designed to enable Washington to gain time to build up its armaments with the aim of overtaking the USSR in the military field.”

The KGB source also reported complaints by Schmidt to Bahr and others that Bonn was flooded with specialists sent by Washington with the aim of halting the growth of commercial contacts between West Germany and the Soviet Union. Schmidt rightly believed that the Reagan administration was out to torpedo the negotiations between Bonn and Moscow on the construction of pipelines to bring natural gas from Siberia to the FRG, which Washington feared would make West Germany dangerously dependent on Soviet energy supplies. Moscow was doubtless delighted by Schmidt’s intention to press ahead with the negotiations as quickly as possible in order to present Reagan with a fait accompli.¹⁰⁸

The reliability of the KGB’s German source was authenticated in the report sent to Brezhnev and the Central Committee both by Andropov and by Lieutenant-General Kevorkov, then head of the Seventh Department of the KGB Second Chief Directorate (SCD).¹⁰⁹ Kevorkov’s involvement indicates that the source was recruited and controlled not by the FCD but by the SCD, perhaps after being compromised during a visit or posting to Moscow (a characteristic form of SCD blackmail).¹¹⁰

Despite some lack of enthusiasm for Schmidt, both the Soviet and East German leadership were anxious to prevent a return to power by the Christian Democrats. According to a KGB file, Honecker secretly made known to the Schmidt government in 1978 that East Germany was willing to take action designed to improve the SDP’s apparently declining electoral prospects—for example, by easing travel restrictions between the GDR and FRG.¹¹¹ There is no evidence of any response from the SDP.

Moscow’s particular bête noire was the charismatic, right-wing Bavarian CSU leader, Franz-Josef Strauss, who was chosen as the candidate of the CDU and its CSU allies for the chancellorship in the 1980 elections. According to the minutes of a meeting in Moscow in July 1979 between Andropov and Mielke, the GDR interior minister and head of the Stasi, “It was acknowledged that Strauss was a serious opponent to Schmidt at the Bundestag elections in 1980. It was therefore essential to compromise Strauss and his supporters.”¹¹² Among the KGB active measures agreed by Andropov and Mielke was operation COBRA-2, which used information gathered by an HVA agent, Inge Goliath, former secretary to the head of the main CDU foreign affairs think tank, to fabricate sinister links between the CDU/CSU leadership and right-wing elements in the intelligence agencies. A total of 1,587 copies of a booklet alleging that BND officers had conspired with the opposition against the Schmidt government were circulated to politicians, trade union leaders and other opinion-formers in the FRG. According to the KGB file on COBRA-2, some of the disinformation in the booklet reappeared in the West German press and caused Schmidt to order a judicial enquiry.¹¹³

The KGB, which had a recurrent tendency to exaggerate the success of its active measures in reports to the Politburo, claimed that COBRA-2 had caused great alarm in the CDU/CSU leadership and had “a positive influence” in ensuring an SDP victory at the 1980 Bundestag elections.¹¹⁴ Though, in reality, Strauss’s election defeat probably owed little—if anything—to Soviet and East German active measures, it undoubtedly came as a considerable relief to the Centre. When the SDP finally fell from power in 1983, the new government was headed not by Strauss but by the less flamboyant Helmut Kohl.

The main aim of KGB active measures during the early 1980s was the attempt to exploit the opposition of the large and militant West German peace movement to the deployment of US medium-range missiles in the FRG. Among the most eloquent opponents of the deployment was the Bürgermeister of Saarbrucken, Oskar Lafontaine, later an unsuccessful SDP candidate for the chancellorship (and in 1998 briefly a controversial finance minister in the government of Gerhard Schrîder). It would have been wholly out of character had the Centre, which only a few years earlier had formed absurdly unrealistic plans to recruit Harold Wilson and Cyrus Vance, not also targeted Lafontaine. In 1981 the operations officer, L. S. Bratus, was sent to cultivate him and—predictably—failed in the attempt.¹¹⁵ The KGB seems, none the less, to have tried to take a largely undeserved share of the credit for the decision by an SDP congress eight months after its 1983 election defeat to oppose the stationing of US medium-range missiles on German soil. A CPSU Central Committee document in 1984 claimed complacently, “Many arguments that had previously been presented by us to the representatives of the SDP have now been taken over by them.”¹¹⁶

As in other NATO countries, the chief priority of intelligence collection in the FRG during the early 1980s was operation RYAN—the fruitless attempt to discover non-existent Western preparations for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Markus Wolf and, no doubt, some KGB officers in Karlshorst and West German residencies regarded the whole operation as utterly misconceived. None, however, dared to challenge the paranoid mindset of the Centre. Wolf found his Soviet contacts “obsessed” with RYAN and the threat of a NATO nuclear first strike:

Because ST collection was less distorted by misconceptions of the West than political intelligence, its quality was probably higher. Kryuchkov wrote in a directive to residencies in July 1977:

As Kryuchkov’s directive indicates, West Germany, though ranked far behind the United States, had become the chief European target for Line X (ST) operations. In 1980, 61.5 percent of the ST received by the Military Industrial Commission (VPK) came from American sources (not all in the United States), 10.5 percent from the FRG, 8 percent from France, 7.5 percent from Britain and 3 percent from Japan. Just over half the intelligence acquired by FCD Directorate T in 1980 (possibly an exceptional year) came from allied intelligence services, the HVA and Czechoslovak StB chief among them.¹¹⁹

Among Directorate T’s chief targets in the FRG was Germany’s largest electronics company, Siemens, whose scientists and engineers included the KGB illegal RICHARD,¹²⁰ recruited in East Germany, and at least two other Soviet agents: HELMUT¹²¹ and KARL.¹²² HELMUT was unaware that he was a KGB agent and believed that he was working for the HVA.¹²³

As in the case of other Western companies, it proved easier to collect ST from Siemens than to exploit it in the Soviet Union, particularly in the civilian economy. The Centre’s paranoid tendencies made it increasingly fearful that the Siemens computers it purloined had been bugged or otherwise tampered with. The FCD’s Fifteenth Department (Registry and Archives) planned to use a Siemens computer to store the information on its card files on three million people. Because of the Centre’s fear that the computer contained some hidden bug which Soviet experts had failed to detect, however, it remained unused in a storeroom for five years.¹²⁴ Less advanced East German computers were eventually used instead.¹²⁵

As well as benefiting from the HVA’s extensive ST operations in the FRG, the KGB’s own Line X agents spanned almost the whole of West German high technology. In addition to those in Siemens, Mitrokhin’s notes identify twenty-nine other agents of varying importance, some of them working for such major firms as Bayer, Dynamit Nobel, Messerschmitt and Thyssen.¹²⁶

The great majority of these espionage cases never came to court. One of the few which did was that of Manfred Rotsch (EMIL), who was betrayed by a French agent in Directorate T.¹²⁷ As head of the planning department in the FRG’s largest arms manufacturer, Messerschmitt—Bîlkow—Blohm (MBB), Rotsch betrayed many of the secrets of NATO’s new fighter bomber, the Tornado (built by MMB jointly with British and Italian manufacturers), the Milan anti-tank missile and the Hot and Roland surface-to-air missiles.¹²⁸ Rotsch was a highly professional well-trained spy, communicating with his controllers by microdot messages.¹²⁹ His cover too was impeccable. While living an apparently conventional family life of almost tedious tranquility in a Munich suburb, he joined the conservative Christian Social Union and stood as a CSU candidate in Bavarian local elections.¹³⁰ Mitrokhin’s brief note on EMIL indicates that he had already been recruited by the KGB before he left East Germany, ostensibly as a refugee, in 1954.¹³¹ Rotsch thus may well have been the longest-serving KGB agent planted in the FRG with East German assistance. Arrested in 1984, he was sentenced in 1986 to eight and a half years’ imprisonment but exchanged a year later for an East Berlin doctor serving a long prison term of solitary confinement. Though housed with his wife in a luxury East German lakeside villa, Rotsch had grown attached to his life in the West. Within a few months, both returned to their house near Munich and a frosty welcome from their scandalized neighbors.¹³²

STASI AND HVA offices were full of busts of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, commemorative plaques embellished with the sword and shield of the Cheka and other trinkets presented at convivial gatherings of GDR and Soviet intelligence officers at which operational successes against the FRG such as the East German Manfred Rotsch’s thirty years as a KGB agent were celebrated and toasts were drunk to the future. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, however, the near 40-year collaboration between HVA and KGB, the most successful (though characteristically rather one-sided) intelligence alliance in the Soviet Bloc, ended in East German charges of betrayal by Moscow. Most appeals for help to the Centre after the collapse of the GDR by former HVA officers and agents who feared prosecution in the West were met by an embarrassed silence from the KGB. On October 22, 1990 Wolf wrote to Gorbachev:

Gorbachev, however, did precisely that. Wolf appealed to him to insist on an amnesty for the Stasi and its foreign intelligence service before agreeing to German reunification. Gorbachev refused. “It was,” says Wolf bitterly, “the Soviets’ ultimate betrayal of their East German friends, whose work for over four decades had strengthened Soviet influence in Europe.”¹³³