by Douglas Boyd
Many German servicemen of all ranks were convinced that the Western Allies would swiftly rearm them to fight ‘the Ivans’, who were patently not going to stay allied with the Western democracies for long after the German surrender removed the only reason for their brief alliance with Stalin. They reasoned that, because the USSR was almost certain to revert to Lenin’s and Stalin’s policy of international sabotage and subversion of the period 1917–39, the best time for the democracies to stamp out Soviet Communism – which they had failed to do with the interventionist forces 1917–22 – was to attack the USSR while it was still weakened by the loss of 30 million military and civilian casualties suffered in the war and the colossal destruction of infrastructure caused by Operation Barbarossa.
The flaw in this reasoning was all too apparent to Stalin. The democratically elected governments of the Western Allies did not have the autocratic powers necessary to declare war on anyone after Hitler’s demise because their conscripted servicemen expected to be sent back to their homes and families as soon as the last shots were fired in Germany. They had, after all, been called up – or were given to believe they were in uniform – for ‘the duration of hostilities’ only. By that was meant hostilities against the Axis forces. Few of them would have welcomed the launching of a new war against the USSR, and millions of discontented soldiers, sailors and airmen voting in the next elections against the governments that were keeping them in uniform was something that no democratic government could contemplate. One of the most notable victims of this was Britain’s Winston Churchill, who was described by Clement Atlee, his victorious opponent in the July 1945 general election, as ‘the great leader in war of a united nation’ yet was deeply dismayed to be voted out of office in that election, a scant few weeks after leading his country to victory.
Patently, other means had to be found to fight the new Cold War. Conveniently established at Pullach, south-west of Munich in the zone occupied by US forces, was a key department of Hitler’s military intelligence, the Abwehr. Promoted to the rank of major-general, Reinhard Gehlen had headed the division Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) – Foreign Armies, East – since 1942, and survived the downfall of his boss, the anti-Nazi Admiral Canaris.1 The admiral’s fall from grace was due to telling Hitler in early 1944 that the war was already lost. His execution on 9 April 1945, when he was hanged naked on a gallows at Flossenburg concentration camp, was for alleged complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July of the previous year. However, Gehlen managed to avoid the savage retribution that fell on hundreds of other associates of the conspirators, and also rode out the uneasy reorganisation as the Abwehr was taken over by SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg and absorbed into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA) – or Chief Administration of Reich Security.
Foreseeing the eventual German defeat as clearly as had his executed master Canaris, Gehlen diverted a part of FHO’s staff to preparing for life after the war. Shortly before the surrender, he went to ground with his closest staff members after burying fifty-plus separate caches of microfilmed files and other documents relating to the Soviet armies and espionage activities inside waterproof canisters in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, with which to buy favourable treatment from the Americans, by whom he intended to be captured. The files also included details of a network of pro-German stay-behind agents in the areas of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia occupied by the Red Army. According to Stasi sources, there were 600 such trained and equipped agents of Gehlen’s organisation in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany alone.
On 22 May 1945 Gehlen voluntarily surrendered to, and was temporarily arrested by, an officer of the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Bavaria. The deal he proposed to his captor would have been outrageous if made to any other agency. It was quite simply to dig up the cached material and place it and his network of agents in Soviet-occupied territory in American hands, in exchange for his release and that of several close collaborators. Gehlen’s name was removed from the list of POWs, so that he ceased officially to exist, thus blocking any attempt by the Soviets to demand rendition of this key figure in the struggles of the eastern front. Four months later, after Gehlen’s proposed deal had been tossed back and forth between General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the former head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and Allen Dulles of the OSS office in Berne, Switzerland. Gehlen knew he had worked out all his moves correctly. In late September, he and three senior staff officers were flown to the US, not as prisoners, but as valued collaborators in preparation for the Cold War. As a small bonus and token of the accuracy of his information, he broke the cover of several OSS officers who were undercover members of the US Communist Party.
Gehlen next surfaced in July 1946, back in Germany under the protection of G-2, the US Army intelligence branch. By the end of the year he had obtained the release of many former Abwehr officers, who became the nucleus of a reborn FHO in Pullach, where control was nominally in the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after it was set up in 1947. Gehlen’s staff and network, initially known to its American supervisors as ‘the Gehlen Organisation’, grew to number nearly 400 officers and several thousand sources. Initially there was an embargo on recruiting former SS personnel. Whether this was on moral grounds or because such men might be susceptible to blackmail by the NKVD or others who knew about an embarrassing incident in their past is unclear. If the latter, it was with good reason – as the affair of Heinz Felfe was to show.2
After the inauguration of the Bundesrepublik in February 1949, West German pressure to control its own counter-espionage service resulted in it being officially handed over to the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1956, when the official title was changed to Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) or Federal Intelligence Service. Gehlen was the BND’s first president, and held that position until 1968, when he was forced to resign after some spectacular breaches of BND security, including penetration by Soviet and East German agents. Of these, Heinz Felfe was the most embarrassing.
A former SS-Obersturmführer, he worked for British intelligence for some years post-war until being sacked due to doubts about his loyalty. Despite his dismissal, Felfe joined the BND in 1951 and rose rapidly due his ability to uncover low-level Soviet spies, sacrificed by Moscow to conceal his own activities. This record saw him promoted to take over the BND’s entire ‘Gegenspionage Sowjetunion’, or anti-Soviet counter-espionage department. In this sphere, his department had the unrivalled advantage of being able to insist on interrogating every German POW returning from incarceration in the Soviet Union, which provided a constant stream of updates on the recovery of Soviet industry, political conditions, the rise and fall of prominent politicians and military figures – right down to the names of individual officials with whom the POWs had had dealings.
Like his mistrustful MI6 handlers in the British zone of occupation, the CIA liaison officers with the BND also had doubts about Felfe, who openly expressed anger at the 1945 American bombing of Dresden, his home town. He also did not conceal his disgust at what he regarded as the decadent softness of democratic society. In addition, he lived in a style far above what could have been afforded by his BND salary, buying a weekend home on the Austrian border, from where it was easy to slip across the frontier for clandestine meetings with Soviet couriers. His fall came not because routine surveillance revealed suspicious behaviour – since he knew personally all the BND’s ‘watchers’, they could not be used in his case – but through indications from a Soviet defector in 1961. Günther Maennel was a captain in the counter-espionage branch of the MfS who had been paid $20,000 by the Gehlen Organisation as an incentive to stay in place. In debriefing he produced proof of many spies of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) – or Chief Administration Intelligence – in high positions in the Bundesrepublik and, although he did not know Felfe’s name, his description of him made it easy to identify the leak at the top of Gehlen’s hierarchy.3
/> In the game of betrayals Maennel v. Felfe, it was discovered that Felfe had betrayed to the KGB more than 100 German agents in the USSR and satellite countries, and sent to Moscow, during the ten years he was spying inside Gehlen’s organisation, copies of some 16,000 top secret BND documents in the form of microdots. These contained not only everything about his own department’s anti-Soviet activities but also much confidential information about other departments of the BND, the customarily watertight internal security having frequently been waived for him because colleagues considered him a protégé of Gehlen himself.
The main target of Gehlen’s organisation came to be the Stasi itself. Although little leaked out to the general public, there was a no-holds-barred war between the two services. In April 1953 former Wehrmacht officer Werner Haase was brought to Pullach by some old comrades and taken on, charged with heading station 120A in West Berlin. His work was to place reliable agents in the GDR. On an autumn evening less than six months after he was posted to Berlin, he was crouching with a colleague beside the Landwehrkanal, a waterway that divided the US sector from East Berlin. The two men were apparently playing with a toy motor boat. It was in fact towing a thin cord across to the other side, where one of Haase’s agents was waiting. Catching the boat, he pulled on the cord, which was towing a telephone cable, the aim being to splice this into priority lines in the east, to snoop on MfS traffic. The team was being watched by a Stasi kidnap team, which overwhelmed Haase before the operation was ended and drove him rapidly through a crossing-point into East Berlin. At a show trial before the Supreme Court of the GDR, Haase was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was swapped for a captured Stasi agent after serving just three years.4
A stranger adventure played out across the frontier between the two Germanies was that of Otto John. A lawyer by training, he managed not to be caught up in the arrests after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944 – for which his brother Hans was executed – by travelling to Portugal in the service of Lufthansa. From there, he was spirited away to Britain on a flying boat just before he was to be forcibly returned to Berlin. In an internment camp for German personnel, he met a Berlin-born British journalist named Sefton Delmer, who recruited him to work in black propaganda over Soldatensender Calais – a transmitter beaming morale-lowering and often specious news items to German forces in Europe, interspersed with popular music. A typical ‘news item’ to worry the men at the fronts was that foreign workers in the Reich were having sex with their wives whilst they were away. After the cessation of hostilities John assisted in screening senior German POWs in the endeavour to repatriate first those who had been anti-Nazi and could contribute to the political reconstruction of Western Germany.
In October 1954 John was invited by Theodore Heuss, first president of the Federal Republic, to become director of the newly established BfV. This was the new West German internal security organisation, still suffering from the backlash of what was known as ‘the Vulkan affair’, in which forty-four people had been accused of spying for Eastern Germany, but were released because of insufficient evidence. Other candidates for the post of director had been rejected by one or other of the three Allied High Commissioners, who did approve John. He, however, found many high-level enemies among fellow-countrymen who regarded him as a traitor for having worked for the British. On a visit to Berlin, John was drugged by an acquaintance named Dr Wohlgemuth, an agent of Soviet Intelligence, and recovered consciousness to find himself in a safe house used by the newly established KGB in the Karlshorst suburb of East Berlin. The director of West German counter-intelligence was a considerable catch for the Soviets, who not only pressed John for insider information about the work of the BfV but also wanted him to ‘work for a new Germany with them’.
When the news of John’s presence in East Berlin reached the media, there was uproar – the more so when he broadcast what seemed like his motives for defecting. He was whisked away into the USSR for a long period of kid-gloves interrogations. Returned to East Berlin under constant surveillance, he began working out a way of escaping back to the West, and eventually managed to evade his watchers when driven across a checkpoint in disguise by Danish journalist Henrik Bonde-Henriksen. Not surprisingly, John was arrested by his former colleagues in the BfV and, nine months later in August 1956, placed on trial for betraying state secrets. It was never proven that he had betrayed any secrets, nor that he had gone voluntarily to East Berlin, but the no-appeal trial by judges trained under the Nazi regime dragged on until mid-December. John was finally sentenced, not to the two years’ imprisonment demanded by the prosecution, but to four years in prison. He served thirty-two months of this before being released in the normal way with one-third remission for good behaviour.5
Another high-profile spy trial was that of Günter Laudahn, who managed to leave the GDR illegally in 1962 and was spotted by the CIA while in the refugee reception camp at Berlin-Marienfelde. Each side in the Cold War was obsessed with acquiring one of the other’s cutting-edge fighter aircraft. After giving a clear account of his escape and much other information about life in the GDR, Laudahn seemed an ideal recruit and was eventually employed as a courier, the most dangerous link in any espionage network. This was in April 1966, when he was tasked with the theft of a MIG-21 fighter of the GDR’s Luftstreitkräfte (LSK). The operation was both delicate and highly complicated, not least by the need for the pilot to fly through a forbidden zone near the border, where any LSK aircraft was likely to be intercepted and shot down by faster Soviet fighters. So, there was a provision for the MIG to be escorted by USAF jets once over that zone. Where this might have led is anyone’s guess, but fortunately the LSK pilot got cold feet and betrayed the plot. When Laudahn returned to the GDR with false papers, which were spotted at the checkpoint, he was followed night and day until his arrest. In the Supreme Court of the GDR, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.6 After spending several years in solitary confinement at Bautzen, he too was swapped at the Glienicke Bridge.
As a footnote, there was a rumour circulating at RAF Gatow when the author was stationed there that one Soviet or East German MIG fighter had actually landed on the runway, which was identical to that at the pilot’s true base in the GDR because both had been constructed in the 1930s as Luftwaffe airfields. Whether he was talked down by false ground control instructions from West Berlin is unknown. Once on the ground, and realising from the absence of the other aircraft of his squadron that he had made a navigational error, the pilot managed to take off again before the runway could be blocked. But that was just a rumour …
Notes
1. He had been involved in two unsuccessful pre-war attempts to depose or kill Hitler
2. See N.J.W. Goda, ‘CIA Files Relating to Heinz Felfe, SS Officer and KGB Spy’, https://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/goda.pdf, for the ‘desensitised’ CIA account
3. Dobson and Payne, Dictionary of Espionage, pp. 210–11
4. Kierstein, Heisse Schlachten, p. 35
5. O. John, Twice through the Lines, New York, Harper & Row 1972, pp. 178–316
6. Kierstein, Heisse Schlachten, pp. 75–6
8
WAR ON THE WEST
As historian Kristie Macrakis comments in the introduction to her mammoth history of the Stasi,1 most authors have concentrated on the organisation’s internal repression of the population of the GDR. It was, however, from the day it was established, intended by Moscow to exercise the dual roles of internal repression and external espionage which the KGB outstation in East Berlin had been carrying out since 1945.2 Four months after the foundation of the GDR, in February 1950 the MfS assumed both functions. There was, however, a third role to be filled. On 20 July 1951 Wilhelm Pieck noted in his diary:
8 p.m. Visit at home from Grauer and Slawin – Discuss creation of a counter-intelligence service, its head to have ministerial rank.
The two KGB officers he met that day were charged by Stalin with setting up under the umbrella of the MfS an espionag
e agency, which became the HVA. Its functions were:
(a) to steal from the West – particularly the Bundesrepublik – political, military, economic and technological intelligence;
(b) to disseminate disinformation in West Berlin and the Bundesrepublik;
(c) counter-espionage in the GDR, including infiltration of agents into Western intelligence networks.3
As head of MfS, Erich Mielke laid down in a top secret paper that ‘It is the aim of the Ministry for State Security to acquire ever-increasing quantities of scientific and technical intelligence from West Germany and other capitalist countries.’4 This task was allotted to a most unlikely master-spy. White-haired and unassuming, Heinrich Weiberg rode to work at the huge Normannenstrasse HQ of MfS on a bicycle. Instead of lunching with other high-ranking colleagues in their luxury dining room, he ate a hot dog at the snack bar outside the building. Notwithstanding his modest habits, Weiberg held the rank of major-general and both founded and headed the impressively named Sektor für Wissenschaft und Technik (SWT), whose exclusive function was stealing technical secrets from the West. Its work was given high priority by the SED leadership because it was seen as imperative if the appalling state of factories and research facilities in the GDR were to improve to anywhere near the level of technical development in the West. His top agent was Hans Rehder, code-named ‘Gorbatschow’,5 a West German physicist employed by Telefunken and AEG, whose wife, Martha, acted as courier to pass on to HVA much invaluable military, IT and semiconductor research over a 28-year period without the husband-and-wife team ever being detected.
