Foreign News: The Diligent Deputy

Fellow Bundestag Deputies thought of Socialist Alfred Frenzel, 61, as a dull fellow but a beaver for work. His diligent legislative spadework on any topic assigned him earned him a prized seat on the defense committee. There one of his proudest accomplishments was pushing through the adoption of a new vitamin-enriched bread for the West German army. Said a colleague: “No report was too tedious for him, no inspection trip too long.”

A stout anti-Nazi, Frenzel chaired the Bundestag committee on restitution to victims of Naziism and last week in the Bundeshaus gave such an eloquent address on the topic that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer rose to say: “Herr Frenzel, you have done us a great service.” A few minutes later Alfred Frenzel was arrested as a Communist spy.

Loaded Ointment. For months West German secret police had suspected that there was a security leak in the defense committee. Last week police agents trailed two suspected couriers to the Bonn Airport, seized the pair for questioning after one had booked passage to Vienna. In their luggage the police found a dry-cell battery and a tin of “Vasenol ointment.” Inside the battery were microfilms of a secret, detailed West German defense budget and a secret list of all West German naval vessels. When a government agent tried to open the ointment, it blew up in his face; the tin had been booby-trapped with just enough explosive to destroy the evidence.

One of the couriers, traveling under the name of Altmann, readily identified himself as a Czech army major and his companion as a Czech army captain. Each copy of classified government documents is identifiable by a secret mark, and the marks on the microfilmed papers pointed straight to Frenzel. Tapped on the shoulder in the Bundestag a few minutes after finishing his speech, Frenzel meekly began mumbling a confession during the ride to Karlsruhe Prison.

Caught by Blackmail. A Sudeten German born in Czechoslovakia, Frenzel fled to Britain after Munich and returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of the war with the liberating army. At first he tried to work with the coalition government of Eduard Benes. When he saw that the Czechs meant to expel all Sudeten Germans, he gave up and moved to Bavaria. With his clean anti-Nazi record, Frenzel quickly established himself in Bavaria’s Socialist Party, reached the Bundestag in 1953. But during his period of dickering with Benes, Frenzel apparently made written commitments that would have ruined him politically with other Sudeten Germans, who have settled in Bavaria in large numbers and comprise a large percentage of his constituents. The Communists, taking over after Benes, used the statements to blackmail Frenzel into espionage.

Frenzel told the Communists plenty. Across his desk for seven years flowed defense budgets, tables of organization, precise plans for the purchase of equipment and weapons. In defense committee briefings, Frenzel even heard excerpts from NATO’s supersecret Document MC-70, spelling out NATO goals in manpower and weapons. Said one Western expert: “He got both documents and general policy, and that’s ideal.”

The Socialists hastily expelled Frenzel from the party and hoped that he would not cost them heavily at the polls. West German officials talked of tightening up security regulations, notoriously lax at the lower levels because of the postwar aversion to anything that resembled the snooping of Hitler’s thought-policing Gestapo. But the official estimate is that the Communist countries maintain about 16,000 agents in West Germany and West Berlin, and in the past nine years about 20,000 Communist spies have been arrested. Frenzel was the biggest catch of them all.