by Douglas Boyd
Although most HVA activity targeted sources in the Bundesrepublik, pressure from the KGB also imposed a high priority for anti-American operations. In Russian, the USA was known as glavny vrag meaning ‘the main enemy’ and HVA adopted an almost literal translation: Hauptgegner or ‘principal adversary’.
During the Cold War many Turkish immigrants came to work in the Bundesrepublik. A garage mechanic named Hussein Yildrim was employed on a US base in West Berlin, where his casual chats with servicemen whose cars he was servicing enabled him to weigh up those who were finding it hard to live on their pay and were desperate for supplementary income. The first important ‘find’ he passed on to the Stasi was Specialist James Hall, stationed at the National Security Agency (NSA) base on the Teufelsberg, where 1,300 highly trained technicians and analysts listened in to top-level telephone and radio communications in the GDR. These included SED party bigwigs’ telephone chats, the GDR and Soviet air force’s VHF transmissions and the daily economic and intelligence briefings of the SED Central Committee – none of which was shared with West German agencies for fear of a leak. Known as America’s ‘Big Ear’, the Teufelsberg was an artificial hill 400ft high, made when millions of tons of rubble from the carpet-bombing of Berlin were dumped on a bomb-proof Nazi bunker that could not be demolished. This highest point in the Allied sectors was called ‘the devil’s mountain’ because it was composed of the ruin of so many homes. Aerials concealed within radomes atop the hill enabled US personnel to intercept and direction-find military transmissions over a wide spread of Warsaw Pact countries, the elevation giving a significant advantage over the much lower British intercept aerials at RAF Gatow.
Specialist Hall fed the HVA – who forwarded it to Moscow – just about everything secret that passed across his desk for five years, receiving a total of $100,000 in return. In 1985 Hall was rotated back to the US for advanced training and returned to Germany assigned to a military intelligence battalion based near Frankfurt. There, he rented an apartment off the base where Yildrim would photograph confidential documents at night, for Hall to return on arrival at the base the following morning. One single document was worth its weight in gold to the HVA. The National Sigint Requirements List was 4,000 pages long and listed the weak points and gaps in US electronic intelligence operations, enabling the Warsaw Pact high commands to exploit these weaknesses and take counter-measures. Hall also passed across details of President Reagan’s Star Wars programme. Unfortunately, when his posting ended and he wished to continue selling confidential material to the Soviets back in the US, his greed got the better of him. He and Yildrim were caught in a sting operation when an FBI agent posed as a Soviet intelligence officer at a hotel in Savannah, Georgia, resulting in a forty-year prison sentence.
An even more ambitious plan was hatched when a US agency in West Berlin worked out how to cause a power cut that would stop transmissions from the control tower at the Soviet airport of Eberswalde, eighteen miles northeast of Berlin. A native Russian-speaker was then immediately to take over the frequency and talk down a Soviet pilot to land on a military airfield in West Berlin, where the runway would immediately be blocked to prevent his MIG taking off again. However, the intricate plan was betrayed by 19-year-old Sergeant Jeffrey, or James, Carney, a trained German linguist working in the USAF 6912th Electronic Security Group at Berlin-Marienfelde. There, analysis was done on intercepts obtained for NSA and US Air Force intelligence at the Teufelsberg listening station in the British sector.
Carney’s NVA career began one night when he got drunk in a gay bar and presented himself at a Volkspolizei checkpoint on the sector border, offering in perfect German to spy for the GDR. Proving his bona fides by identifying the voices of several East German pilots that were played back to him, he was immediately recruited by HVA. Perhaps because his case officer Ralph Dieter Lehmann6 realised that this shy American walk-in with a floppy handshake was an unstable and immature personality, Carney was given the codename ‘Kid’. His motivation was neither ideological nor mercenary, but a huge chip on his shoulder from the belief that his undoubted skill at his intercept job was not better appreciated by his superiors. His high security clearance allowed him to copy and supply to HVA 1,983 documents classified ‘secret’ or above, of which the most important was a 47-page report on Operation Canopy Wing, the code name for an extremely sophisticated American electronic warfare operation to block the command and control communications of Warsaw Pact powers in the event of the Cold War turning hot. It was estimated that handing this to HVA cost the US military the equivalent of $13.5 billion.7
Some of Carney’s documents were simply dropped at dead-letter boxes in the western sectors, to be picked up by HVA couriers; on other occasions, he took them personally into the eastern sector, for which he was paid 300DM or $175 per trip. He continued spying in this way until he was posted back to Goodfellow Air Base in Texas. This was in the era of the US armed forces ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy on sexual orientation. Scared of being ‘outed’ as gay during a routine psychological test, Carney fled to Mexico City and requested political asylum at the GDR embassy. So important were the documents he had passed over to HVA that this was immediately granted and he was smuggled out with some sacks of laundry and put on a plane to Cuba. Once in the GDR, he had a nervous breakdown, was given accommodation in the home of two IMs and a well-paid job with the HVA, translating and transcribing intercepted US forces communications – including those of his old unit 6912 ESG. His identity was changed to Jens Karney, and an apartment that was luxury by GDR standards was made available for him, where he was kept under heavy surveillance with his phone tapped, all mail opened and examined – and no passport with which to leave the GDR. Although he lived with a male lover, which shocked the prim and proper HVA case officers, no action was taken over this.
In addition to ‘Kid’, the HVA had the luck of two other walk-ins from the electronic espionage complex of 6912 ESG. One was code-named ‘Paul’ and ended up like ‘Kid’, serving a long term in the high-security military prison designated the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The identity of the other, code-named ‘Optik’, has never been revealed.8
Rainer Rupp was a 22-year-old high-IQ student of economics in Düsseldorf when recruited by the HVA and steered into a job at NATO HQ in Brussels. Working under the code-name ‘Topaz’, he passed via a courier everything that came his way. After marrying an English wife, who – in the words of HVA spymaster Markus Wolf – ‘did not seem to take on board the significance of the fact that they spent their honeymoon in East Berlin’, Rupp soon had her helping with the photocopying of documents. It was a small step from that to her getting a job in NICSMA – the NATO Integrated Systems Management Agency – and passing over all its classified material. Rupp’s high IQ earned him rapid promotion in NATO, and he was eventually able to pass over eyes-only documents including details of Western plans for first-strike nuclear targeting. Worried about her two children, his wife eventually stopped working for the HVA, but Rupp continued all the way until 1989. Betrayed to German counter-intelligence not by Wolf but another former HVA officer, he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment in 1994 and fined 300,000 Deutschmarks.9 In recounting the story, Markus Wolf asked the philosophical–legal question:
How can it be that after the peaceful unification of two states recognized under international law, the spies of one state go unpunished, whereas those who worked for the other state are sentenced to long prison terms and hefty fines?10
It is a fair point. There was, in fact, a bill presented to the Bonn parliament giving amnesty to employees of MfS, but it was never passed into law.11 It wasn’t only inter-German spying that continued to be punished after the reunification of Germany. With the demise of the HVA, Carney was trained and given employment as a train driver on the Berlin U-Bahn. He was eventually tracked down after his new identity was betrayed by Lehmann, his former Stasi case officer, to the BfV. When Carney’s identity
was confirmed by the tattoos on his arms that he thought made him appear more macho, the combined resources of BfV and USAF Office of Special Investigations (OSI) saw him literally kidnapped at gunpoint and flown back to the USA on a military aircraft. This illegal act provoked a formal protest from the German government, and should have prevented any action against Carney in a US court. He was nevertheless sentenced to thirty-eight years in Fort Leavenworth military prison, but released after serving twelve years. Attempting to return to Germany, he was informed that he was not welcome there and moved instead back to his home state of Ohio, where he lived with an adopted son by cutting lawns and doing other menial jobs.12
Carney’s case has great resonance with the more recent one of Chelsea Elisabeth Manning, who, under her male name and US Army rank of Specialist E4 Bradley Manning, leaked a quarter-million classified files to Wikileaks in 2010 as a protest against the US involvement in Iraq. At Manning’s trial in June to July 2013, she was sentenced to thirty-five years’ imprisonment with a possibility of parole after eight years. An uninvolved observer of both cases cannot help asking why the US armed forces’ appallingly poor security allowed two such low-ranking service personnel to gain access to so many highly classified documents. In addition, Carney was known to frequent gay bars and Manning had openly demanded gender reassignment and sent a photograph of herself dressed as a woman with wig and make-up to her supervising NCO in Baghdad, accompanied by a note reading, This is my problem. Half a century after the introduction of positive vetting procedures in NATO armed forces, their sexual conduct made both Carney and Manning security risks for the work they were doing.
Organisation chart of Dept V Evaluation Unit 1959–76 (after Macrakis).
All the information they betrayed was evaluated by the HVA’s Zentrale Auswertungs und Informationsgruppe (ZAIG) – of central evaluation group, where officers with specialist knowledge in many fields evaluated every item of incoming intelligence on a scale from 1 to 5. So important was this activity that the personnel jumped from thirty-five officers at the start to 500 or more twenty years later.13
The department was headed from 1959 by Paul Bilke, a serious and highly qualified engineer, but his deputy, a former biology teacher named Walter Thrane, who joined the department two years later, was a maverick. Despite the daily use of lies, blackmail, sexual seduction and kidnapping in their work, HVA officers were expected to lead blamelessly moral private lives. Yet, after Thrane’s marriage broke down – ironically because his wife complained of his very long working days – he began frequenting dance halls and picking up girls. Inevitably, this was reported to Normannenstrasse HQ, where he was ordered to sort out his marriage and refrain from such behaviour. As a warning shot, he was also demoted – as a result of which, on 11 August 1962, 34-year-old Thrane and his 20-year-old girlfriend used his authority as an HVA officer to get on a U-Bahn train at the Friedrichstrasse station and get off two stops later in West Berlin.
Strangely, Thrane did not immediately seek protection from the CIA or West German intelligence, which would certainly have been granted. Instead, he visited one of his own undercover agents, by whom his arrival on the ‘wrong’ side of the sector boundary was immediately reported to Stasi Centre. The HVA had, of course, a plan already prepared to kidnap any officer defecting to the West and bring him back for questioning before he could reveal SWT’s secrets to Western intelligence agencies. Within hours, Thrane and the girl were back in East Berlin. Although it rapidly became clear that he had betrayed no secrets while in the West, he was condemned to death without any formal trial and his girlfriend was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for ‘flight from the Republic’. Thrane’s sentence was commuted to fourteen years in prison, over ten of which he was to serve in solitary confinement, for reasons of security. This case triggered a high-level damage-limitation exercise in HVA, which saw the evaluation team brought inside the structure of SWT. On release, Thrane worked as a bus driver in the grim industrial town of Eisenhüttenstadt, refusing even after German reunification to discuss his work for SWT with any representative of Western intelligence.14
Probably, SWT’s best agent was Hans Rehder, nearly all of whose material received the highest evaluation. Category 1 translated to an estimated value of DM 150,000 per document, worked out in terms of research and development rendered unnecessary. It was estimated in 1971 that this highly specialised espionage saved a total of 26 million Ostmarks in the fields of chemistry, electronics and machine tools.15 About one-third of Rehder’s material was immediately passed on by SWT to KGB liaison officers in Karlshorst.
One aspect of this industrial espionage that is often overlooked is that some of the documentation could have legitimately been sold to the GDR. Thus Herr and Frau Rehder cost the companies that employed him a considerable loss over the years of their spying. They were not, however, among the 253 agents working in West Germany who were prosecuted for espionage after the German reunification, having died in 1985 at the age of 73.16
Probably the highest-paid Stasi agent in the Bundesrepublik was Peter Köhler, head of microchip research at Texas Instruments. During a business trip to the GDR, he found a new girlfriend in Erfurt and was persuaded by an HVA officer pretending to be a businessman to start feeding technical information on TI’s development of semi-conductors and the 1MB microchip. It was calculated after the fall of the Wall that Köhler had received DM 500,000 in the course of eleven years’ spying for the HVA.
Other top-level spies worked in companies like IBM, Siemens and AEG but many agents were able to access only low-level material and some even packaged publicly available titbits to keep up the appearance of working for the MfS. Others read the writing on the wall as the ultimate collapse of the GDR approached and quietly withdrew from intelligence activity – or did so when promotion in the ‘day job’ came their way and made the risks no longer acceptable. Borrowed from the KGB, a favourite ploy of HVA case officers working for Markus Wolf was to pick out lonely, and no longer young, single women working for bosses in sensitive situations such as the Bundesrepublik parliament or defence contractors like Messerschmidt-Bölkow-Blohm and Lorenz. A personable and sexually skilled ‘Romeo’ agent was despatched to seduce them, use pillow talk to compromise them and then oblige the victims to continue feeding information that came their way. One of these secretaries supplied her lover/handler with several hundred items of Category 1 aeronautics and space technology.
There is in espionage no rule which says one cannot mix techniques. In one case a ‘Romeo’ seduction was also a false flag operation. It would be unrealistic to expect a spymaster to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but one instance in Markus Wolf’s often misleading autobiography is the case of a super-Romeo identified only as Roland G. An accomplished actor and theatre director, he was given voice lessons to acquire a Scandinavian lilt enabling him to pose as a Danish journalist, frustrated because his country was treated as second class inside NATO. Seducing a strongly Catholic secretary named Margarete who was employed at SHAPE HQ, then at Fontainebleau in France, he procured a steady stream of useful information from her – until the day when she announced she could continue neither her espionage for him, nor their sexual relationship without first being confessed by a priest and then getting married to Roland. He managed to convince her that a reliable Danish priest could be found – which he duly was, in the Stasi local office at Karl-Marx-Stadt. After voice coaching to convert his strong Saxon accent into something like a Danish one and learning a limited number of Danish words to impress Margarete, the ‘priest’ confessed her in a remote country church, after which she continued to feed classified documents to her ‘fiancé’ until he was recalled from West Germany for security reasons.17
Since the emotions aroused in these seductions were real on one side of the relationship, it was never possible to predict the eventual outcome. Another operation recounted by Wolf, which may be true, features a highly intelligent West German postgraduate
student named Gabriele Gast, who was allotted the code-name ‘Gaby’. She had a ‘rough trade’ affair with a Stasi officer while researching her doctoral thesis on the political role of women in the GDR. Gaby’s high potential had also been spotted by a BND recruiter, through whom she was taken on as a political analyst at the HQ of BND in Pullach. On one of her trips to meet her lover in the GDR, and to undergo espionage training, a form of marriage was arranged. It eventually became apparent to Wolf that the main attractions of her affair were its totally illicit nature and the thrill of working at extremely high level for both the BND and the HVA. Few West German agents actually met any HVA officer above their own case officer, but Gaby was accorded the unusual honour of meeting Wolf himself no fewer than seven times, if his account can be believed. At one of these meetings she surprised him by predicting the spate of anti-Soviet protest movements in the satellite states. Although Gaby was assured early in 1990 that all HVA files relating to her would be destroyed on reunification, she was eventually blown by a Stasi officer who bought himself immunity by giving enough information about her activities and personal details for German counter-espionage officers to arrest her.18
Notes
1. K. Macrakis, Die Stasi-Geheimnisse, Munich, Herbig 2008
2. Ibid, pp. 13, 15
3. Kierstein, Heisse Schlachten, p. 25
4. Macrakis, Die Stasi-Geheimnisse, p. 24
5. German spelling of the Russian name Gorbatchev
6. Some sources name him as Hans-Dieter Lehmann
7. BBC News Magazine, 19 September 2013. How this was calculated is unclear. It was possibly the cost of setting up Canopy Wing, which had to be replaced by another programme
