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:”
It would do him no harm to refresh his knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, and especially the course on the political economy of socialism. He was not imbued with a class instinct, as he had been brought up in a petty bourgeois environment. Life in the West had left its mark on him; as the saying goes, “dripping water wears away stone.” His beliefs could be those of the French Communist Party. The dictatorship of the proletariat was like a red rag to a bull for him; he was not convinced of its necessity and he had little faith in the advantages of the socialist planned economy. WERNER had only encountered the chocolate icing side of the West. He had been in contact with people who were contented, rich and successful. He had not seen unemployment and poverty.80
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 Ju
ly 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 alone edited the reports on conversations with Wehner for passing on to Honecker. Since drafting was not his strong point, he often locked himself in his room for a whole day to put the Wehner reports into the proper form. Hardly anything in the GDR was more secret than these reports. Apart from the three copies for Honecker, Mielke and myself, there was also a re-edited and censored version of the reports which was sent to our Soviet colleagues.
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:
Comrade [V. I.] Kevorkov [of the Second Chief Directorate], who has just returned from the FRG, gives a different account of the situation. You should synchronize your watches, as for us this is not a trivial matter.106
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 grou
nds 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 Sword and the Shield Page 78
