Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Soviet intelligence offensive against West Germany during the Cold War had three distinguishing characteristics. First, the division of Germany made the Federal Republic (FRG) easier to penetrate than any other major Western state. So many refugees fled to the West from the misnamed German Democratic Republic (GDR)—about three million before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961—that it was not difficult to hide hundreds, even thousands, of East German and Soviet agents among them. Among the bogus refugees were a series of illegals. Some were KGB officers of Soviet nationality who had spent several years establishing false German identities in the secure environment of the GDR, many of whom moved on to operate against north American and other targets. 1Others were East German illegal agents recruited and trained by the KGB, most of whom were deployed against targets in the Federal Republic. 2

Secondly, the FRG was the only Western state on which Moscow received even more high-grade intelligence from an allied agency—the Stasi’s foreign section, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklúrung (HVA) 3—than it did from the KGB. From 1952 to 1986 the HVA was headed by Markus Johannes “Mischa” Wolf, probably the ablest of the Soviet Bloc intelligence chiefs. Wolf was the son of a well-known German Communist doctor and writer who had been forced to flee to Moscow after Hitler’s rise to power. He owed his appointment as head of East German foreign intelligence shortly before his thirtieth birthday to his devoted Stalinism and hence the confidence he inspired in the KGB (then the MGB), as well as to his own ability. In 1947 he told his friend Wolfgang Leonhard that East German Communists would have to give up the idea of the “separate German way to socialism” mentioned in their Party program. When Leonhard, who worked in the Party central secretariat, told him he was wrong, Wolf replied, “There are higher authorities than your central secretariat!” Shortly afterward, the “higher authorities” in Moscow did indeed put an end to talk about the “separate German way.” 4Wolf has never suffered from false modesty. “As even my bitter foes would acknowledge,” he boasts in retirement, “[the HVA] was probably the most efficient and effective such service on the European continent.” 5

The third distinguishing characteristic of Soviet intelligence operations in West Germany was that, in addition to receiving HVA reports, the KGB’s own penetration of the FRG was powerfully assisted by its East German allies. As well as establishing legal residencies in Bonn, Cologne and Hamburg, 6the KGB was also able to run West German operations from its base at Karlshorst in the Berlin suburbs. This was the largest Soviet intelligence station outside the USSR, using East German illegals and other agents supplied by the Stasi and HVA. Though the KGB was, in principle, responsible for funding its Karlshorst station, in the mid-1970s the GDR was contributing 1.3 million marks a year to its running costs. 7

The first major recruitments by the Karlshorst KGB in the FRG which are recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin occurred in 1950. SERGEYEV (also codenamed NIKA), a young West German Communist recruited in that year, was instructed to distance himself from the Communist Party in order to allow him to provide intelligence on the Trotskyists in the FRG, with whom—despite their political insignificance—the Centre remained obsessed for ideological reasons. His file records that early in his career as an agent he provided the intelligence which made possible the abduction of Weiland, a leading Trotskyist, from West Berlin by a special actions snatch squad. 8SERGEYEV became one of the KGB’s longest serving West German agents and by 1963 was receiving a salary of 400 deutschmarks a month. A Centre report on his work claims that, “With his help, in 1951-74, Trotskyist organizations in the FRG and western Europe were cultivated and compromised.” Simultaneously, SERGEYEV served for some years as a respected north German Bürgermeister. Fearing that he was under surveillance, the KGB broke contact with him in 1981, giving him a final payment of 3,000 deutschmarks. 9

Karlshorst’s main achievement in the early years of the Federal Republic was the penetration of the semi-official West German foreign intelligence agency, the Gehlen Org, which from 1956 was officially attached to the Federal Chancellery as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). In March 1950 Karlshorst recruited “for material reward” an unemployed former SS captain, Hans Clemens (codenamed KHANNI), who in the following year gained a job in the Gehlen Org. Over the next decade he supplied what his file describes as “valuable information” on the FRG intelligence community: “This made it possible to prevent the exposure of valuable agents, and to disrupt operations directed against Soviet missions in the FRG.” 10Clemens’s greatest success, however, was to recruit a former SS comrade, Heinz Felfe (codenamed KURT), whom he successfully recommended for a job in the Gehlen Org. 11With the active assistance of Karlshorst, Felfe rapidly established himself as one of the most successful agents of the Cold War. According to a KGB report, his intelligence, when combined with that from the British spies George Blake and Kim Philby, made possible “the elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the GDR” during the period 1953 to 1955. 12

In 1953 Felfe astounded his colleagues in the Gehlen Org by announcing that he had set up an agent network in Moscow headed by a Red Army colonel. Much of the intelligence from the non-existent network—a blend of fact and fiction fabricated by the Centre—was passed on to the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in Bonn. Simultaneously, Felfe was providing Karlshorst with large numbers of FRG intelligence reports. Urgent reports went by radio; the remainder were despatched in the false bottoms of suitcases, on film concealed in tins of babyfood, via dead letter-boxes, or through a Gehlen Org courier, Erwin Tiebel, who was also working for Karlshorst. By 1958 Felfe had established himself as the German Philby, becoming—like Philby in SIS fourteen years earlier—head of Soviet counter-intelligence in the BND. Unlike Philby, however, his motives had more to do with vanity than with ideology. He was, he told himself, the supreme intelligence professional, recognized as the rising star of the BND yet outwitting it at the same time. Karlshorst was careful to boost his ego, encouraging him to believe that his achievements were eclipsing even those of Richard Sorge. “I wanted,” Felfe said later, “to rank as top class with the Russians.” A CIA officer who served in Germany during the 1950s concluded after Felfe’s arrest in 1961:

The BND damage report must have run into tens of thousands of pages. Not only were agents and addresses compromised, but ten years of secret agent reports had to be re-evaluated: those fabricated by the other side, those subtly slanted, those from purely mythical sources. 13

Soon after Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, he singled out Felfe—along with Philby, Blake and Vassall—as the kind of past agent whose recruitment was, once again, urgently needed in order to keep the Soviet leadership abreast of the development of Western policy. 14

THE FRG WAS a major target for KGB active measures as well as intelligence collection. The chief priority of both KGB and HVA influence operations during the 1950s and 1960s was to discredit as many West German politicians as possible as neo-Nazis and “revenge-seekers.” Disinformation almost always works most effectively when it includes a basis of fact. In the early years of the FRG, there was no shortage of real ex-Nazis in positions of power and influence to denounce in active measures campaigns. Among the most effective denouncers was the Reuters correspondent in Berlin, John Peet, who had been recruited as an NKVD agent during the Spanish Civil War. In 1950 Peet defected to East Berlin, somewhat disconcerted by the excessively clandestine preparations made for the defection by his East German case officer. All Peet expected was a phone call inviting him to coffee from an East Berlin professor who frequently visited his West Berlin flat. Instead, the professor rang him and, in what struck Peet as a curiously high-pitched voice, declared, “PRIMROSE has a message for DAFFODIL. 1600 hours on Monday. I repeat, 1600 hours on Monday.” Once in East Berlin, Peet announced at a press conference: