Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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.” 82The other, whose recruitment was personally approved by Andropov himself, was ranked by the KGB’s Karlshorst base as among its most valuable agents. 83By 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. 87According 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. 88Wolf 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. 90The 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. 91Wehner’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, 92and 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 July 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