Espionage: The Biggest Net

A big element in Moscow’s effort to squeeze West Berlin has been Nikita Khrushchev’s complaint that Berlin and West Germany form one vast launching pad for spies. In support of that charge, a wave of spy cases has appeared in the Soviet courts since early September, when Marvin Makinen, a 22-year-old American studying in West Germany, drew eight years in prison for allegedly photographing military installations while on a tour of Russia. In rapid-fire order, two Dutchmen and two West Germans were grabbed, sentenced and jailed on similar charges.

Last week two more West Germans went before Kiev’s military tribunal: a shoe salesman named Adolf Werner and his wife Hermine, accused of entering Russia under cover of seeking material for U.S. picture magazines. Actually, the Russians insisted, Werner was shooting radar stations, radio antennas and army camps, and filled his notebooks with invisible writing (he supposedly carried invisible ink refills for his ballpoint pen). The court decreed 15 years’ imprisonment for Adolf Werner, who confessed partly, and seven years for his wife.

Whatever the merits of the Soviet prosecutor’s charges in the Werner case—U.S. intelligence denied them—Moscow’s noise seemed largely intended to camouflage the Communists’ own espionage operation headquartered in East Germany. According to a remarkably detailed U.S. State Department report released last week, it probably is the largest concerted spy system in history.

Layer upon Layer. The East Germans’ own Ministry for State Security (MfS), with headquarters in East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, has a staff of 22,000 dedicated primarily to subversion, sabotage and penetration of the West. The Czechs maintain in East Berlin large branches of their Interior Ministry’s State Security Service as well as Staff Section II of their Defense Ministry; Hungary is there with the dreaded AVH and Katpol intelligence groups; the Poles, Bulgarians, Rumanians, and even North Koreans and Red Chinese have East German bases for operations in West Berlin and West Germany.

Operations are coordinated by the Russians’ own big spy agency, which is massively represented in East Germany: the Committee of State Security, or KGB, latest label for the Russian secret police, once known as OGPU, NKVD, etc. The East German branch of Russia’s KGB has at least 1,000 recruiting agents and specialists at Karlshorst, an East Berlin suburb, not counting the military espionage groups of Russia’s Ministry of Defense with offices at Schwerin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Chemnitz and East Berlin, each staffed by at least 25 Soviet officers.

On the Waterfront. Given this kind of manpower, the Communists can divide their tasks with corporate efficiency. East Germany’s MfS, for example, has its Main Department I, with 900 agents scattered through East Germany’s armed forces to ensure the military’s reliability; the agents recruit East German soldiers and sailors to spy on one another. Espionage in the West is the responsibility of Main Department II, with its basic staff of 800 in East Berlin to recruit and receive reports from thousands of agents it maintains in West Germany and other NATO countries. One subdivision, the Department of Harbors, alone has scores of agents in Western Europe assigned to the task of photographing NATO fleet units, drawing diagrams of docks and planting spies on Western ships.

Still another division, Department “R,” created early in 1960, devotes its entire time to the U.S., British and French military missions stationed in Potsdam. One section in Department “R” directs agents who live or work near the headquarters of the Western missions; another section is assigned to tail Western Allied mission officers everywhere they go in East Germany, while a third group devotes all its time to thinking up new harassing actions against the Western officers who man the Allied missions in East Germany.

There is one MfS unit with a special and rather embarrassing function; it is the bodyguard section, 6,300 strong, which has the single purpose of protecting East German Communist leaders from their own people.

New Tricks. Just outside East Berlin is the Reds’ highest training school for top agents—the kind who are equally adept at blackmail, crime, romance and business administration. Here the cream of East Germany’s spy material spends a year under the intelligence elite (the HVA, or the Main Administration for Intelligence), headed by Russia’s renowned Brigadier Markus Wolf.

Forty candidate-students go through each course, including six months of politics (dialectical materialism, the class structure of other countries, etc.) and six months of training in the latest, most sophisticated techniques in electronic and audio surveillance, as well as new tricks in assassination technique, photography, crowd swaying, key copying. It is not an easy course; each year half the students fail. The 20 who finish successfully are sent immediately into West Germany and other Western lands as resident agents; since 1955, roughly 120 of these master spies have been sent out from East Berlin to enter East Germany’s highest foreign service.

Tipped in Time. Their successes—and failures—are classic. Early this year an American girl (called “Eleanor” by the U.S. agents who worked on the case) on the staff of the U.S. forces in Germany met a Communist agent called “Paul” at the Embassy Club, a U.S.-run community center in Bad Godesberg. Paul called himself a naturalized American; romance developed, until Eleanor was blackmailed into promising to hand over to the Russians her boss’s telegrams; thinking it over, she took her problem to the U.S. authorities, who promptly broke up the plot. In another case of blackmail, an East German girl named Rosalie Kunze was forced to serve as a spy in Bonn’s Ministry of Defense or risk exposure of her recent abortion; for months, as secretary to the deputy chief of West Germany’s navy, she pumped classified documents to the Communists; but when she finally confessed, her information led to the arrest and conviction of at least six important Communist espionage agents living in West Germany.

In the past nine years, the West Germans alone have arrested more than 18,000 Communist spies operating in the Federal Republic. Thousands more have been picked up in other Western countries, often as a result of the penetration that Allied intelligence agencies have made at many levels of all the Communist espionage groups. Other tips come from the steady stream of defectors to the West; most are small fry, but now and then a big fish comes along. Only last week, the West Germans disclosed that Guenter Maennel, a senior official of East Berlin’s HVA, had recently sneaked across the boundary, bringing with him details of his espionage unit in East Berlin as well as the names of 14 Communist agents in Africa, Scandinavia and the Middle East.