Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Hîke said she had guessed something of the sort and agreed to assist the “German patriots.” Henze then persuaded her to sign a contract, allegedly drawn up by his “boss,” under which she agreed to provide information from the President’s office in return for her expenses and 500 marks a month. Among the intelligence she supplied were the mobilization plans of the Chancellor’s office and the major Bonn ministries; details on the government war bunker (which were reported to Brezhnev); despatched from FRG ambassadors in Moscow, Washington and elsewhere; the secret weekly reports to the President from the foreign ministry; a dossier on Brezhnev’s visit to the FRG; and accounts of the President’s meetings with foreign diplomats. Hîke gradually became dependent on the 500 marks she received each month. In order to leave no trace of it in her own financial records, she gave it to her mother to invest on her behalf, telling her that she found it difficult to save herself. 59With the help of her mother’s investments, Hîke was able to buy a new apartment (Apartment 85, House 16, am Baitzaplen 37, Oberkassel). 60

After Hîke signed her agent contract, she ceased to take the risks of smuggling classified material back to her flat. Instead, Henze taught her how to photograph documents in the President’s office with a miniature camera concealed in a tube of lipstick. On one occasion Hîke’s boss entered the room just as she was about to use the camera, but—to her immense relief—failed to notice what she was doing. 61She usually handed over the film either in Cologne or Zürich. The yavka (secret rendezvous) in Cologne was at 8:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday of each month in Kîln-Bayenthal, at the end of Bayenthalgürtel, about fifty meters from the Bismarck column, by a telephone kiosk next to an advertising pillar. Hîke was told to have a copy of Der Spiegel in her hand if she was ready to go ahead with the meeting; if she needed to give a danger signal, she was to carry a plastic bag instead. The meetings in Zürich took place at 5 o’clock on Saturday afternoons at Rennweg 35, by the window of a china shop. 62

Henze was twice awarded the Order of the Red Star for his success in running Hîke as an agent. In 1976 he returned to East Germany but continued to meet her regularly in Cologne and Zürich. 63Hîke was temporarily put on ice in 1979 during a security scare caused by the investigation of another secretary suspected of spying for the East, but was reactivated a year later with the new codename VERA. By 1980 the “product file” of the documents she had provided filled ten volumes. 64Though Hîke remained in touch with Henze, she also passed on intelligence through RENATA, a female East German illegal working for the KGB. 65Among the intelligence she supplied during the early 1980s were details of talks in October 1982 between Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and US Secretary of State George Schultz over the stationing of Pershing II missiles in the FRG. She also took part in two major NATO WINTEX exercises, during which she had been able to provide intelligence on the FRG wartime command and control system, and was able to report on her experience of working inside the secret wartime government bunker in the Eiffel hills near Bonn.

Hîke was arrested in 1985, and quickly confessed. In 1987 she was sentenced to eight years in jail and fined 33,000 marks, the total sum she was believed to have received from the KGB (probably an underestimate). The judge told her that, in passing a relatively lenient sentence, he was taking into account that she had fallen “hopelessly in love” with her recruiter. The British press was curiously divided in its opinion of Hîke. Though the Daily Telegraph described her as a “dowdy secretary,” she impressed the Observer as a “Glamour Spy.” 66

The methods used to recruit Hîke were similar to those employed against Heidrun Hofer (codenamed ROSIE), a secretary in her early thirties in the FRG foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND). 67While serving at the BND Paris station during the early 1970s Hofer was seduced by ROLAND, an East German illegal with a military bearing who, like Henze, claimed to be working for a neo-Nazi group of “German patriots.” 68Hofer’s deception was taken one stage further than that of Hîke. On February 26, 1973 at Innsbruch in Austria, ROLAND introduced her to VLADIMIR, telling her that he was one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi underground. Next day VLADIMIR met Hofer alone, telling her that he had known Admiral Canaris, wartime head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), in which her father had served, and discussed the intelligence which he wanted her to supply. Unknown to Hofer, VLADIMIR was, in reality, a senior KGB illegal, Ivan Dmitryevich Unrau, an ethnic German born in Russia in 1914. 69

In 1974 Hofer was transferred to BND headquarters at Pullach in Bavaria, where she worked successively for the west European and NATO liaison departments, and became engaged to a BND major. 70Following the end of her affair with ROLAND, the KGB used two further East German illegals, MAZON (who pretended to be ROLAND’s father) and FRANK, to maintain contact with her. Both pretended to be members of the neo-Nazi underground. 71Hofer appears eventually to have realized that she had been recruited under false flag but to have carried on working as a paid KGB agent. On December 21, 1977, possibly as the result of a tip-off to the BND from the French SDECE, she was arrested while driving across the Austrian border to meet her controller. Next day she confessed to being a KGB agent. Hofer showed little emotion until told that her BND fiancé had broken off their engagement. After bursting into tears, she asked for the window to be opened to give her some air, then suddenly leaped to her feet and threw herself from the sixth floor. Though her fall was partially broken by some bushes, she was critically injured. 72

Apart from Hîke and Hofer, the most successful KGB recruitment made by an East German Romeo spy during the 1970s appears to have been that of Elke Falk (codenamed LENA). After Falk had advertised in a lonely hearts column, she was contacted by the illegal Kurt Simon (codenamed GEORG), who introduced himself as Gerhard Thieme. It is unclear from Mitrokhin’s notes what, if any, false flag Simon employed to recruit her. However, with his encouragement, Falk gained a job in 1974 as a secretary in the Chancellor’s office, 73taking with her to work a miniature camera disguised as a cigarette lighter and a bogus can of hairspray in which to store her films. 74Like Hîke, Falk was a member of the crisis management team during the WINTEX exercises. In 1977 the Centre awarded Simon the Order of the Red Star. Later Falk was moved to the control of two other illegals, one who used the alias “Peter Muller” and a second who was codenamed ADAM. 75Falk moved from the Chancellor’s office to the transport ministry in 1977, then in 1979 to the economic aid ministry two years later. 76By 1980, when Mitrokhin saw her operational file, it filled seven volumes. 77Falk was arrested in 1989 but wrongly described at her trial as an HVA rather than a KGB agent. Though sentenced to six and a half years’ imprisonment, she served only a few months before being released as part of an East—West spy exchange. Falk was alleged to have received a total of 20,000 marks for her espionage. 78

NOT ALL THE Romeo spies, however, achieved results. Among the failures was one of the KGB’s East German illegals, Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), who assumed the identity of a West German living in the GDR. Kahle’s cover occupations included working as a laboratory technician in Cologne and Bonn universities and as a German language teacher in Paris. During the early 1970s he set out to cultivate four FRG foreign ministry and embassy secretaries, a female clerk at an American embassy in Europe, an American student at a German university who invited him to her parents’ home in the United States and a British secretary at NATO. Kahle’s ten-volume file, however, contains no indication that he obtained significant intelligence from any of them. His main West German cultivation was BELLA, who worked at the FRG embassies in Tehran and, from 1975, in London. According to WERNER’s file, his attempts to recruit BELLA during her tour of duty in London showed “insufficient determination” and were hampered by a number of operational errors, such as attracting the attention of the embassy security officer. Kahle became more interested in MONA, a French technical translator for a firm of Swedish paper manufacturers in Paris, where he was based from 1975 onward. His file records that he had “intimate relations” with MONA and wished to marry her. The Centre, however, became understandably skeptical both of MONA’s intelligence potential and of Kahle’s motives in pursuing her. The KGB also discovered, through tapping the telephone and intercepting the correspondence of Kahle’s mother in East Germany, that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow and anxious about the fate of his crystal and porcelain collections in Paris, of which the Centre was previously unaware. 79