Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The KGB source also reported complaints by Schmidt to Bahr and others that Bonn was flooded with specialists sent by Washington with the aim of halting the growth of commercial contacts between West Germany and the Soviet Union. Schmidt rightly believed that the Reagan administration was out to torpedo the negotiations between Bonn and Moscow on the construction of pipelines to bring natural gas from Siberia to the FRG, which Washington feared would make West Germany dangerously dependent on Soviet energy supplies. Moscow was doubtless delighted by Schmidt’s intention to press ahead with the negotiations as quickly as possible in order to present Reagan with a fait accompli. 108

The reliability of the KGB’s German source was authenticated in the report sent to Brezhnev and the Central Committee both by Andropov and by Lieutenant-General Kevorkov, then head of the Seventh Department of the KGB Second Chief Directorate (SCD). 109Kevorkov’s involvement indicates that the source was recruited and controlled not by the FCD but by the SCD, perhaps after being compromised during a visit or posting to Moscow (a characteristic form of SCD blackmail). 110

Despite some lack of enthusiasm for Schmidt, both the Soviet and East German leadership were anxious to prevent a return to power by the Christian Democrats. According to a KGB file, Honecker secretly made known to the Schmidt government in 1978 that East Germany was willing to take action designed to improve the SDP’s apparently declining electoral prospects—for example, by easing travel restrictions between the GDR and FRG. 111There is no evidence of any response from the SDP.

Moscow’s particular bête noire was the charismatic, right-wing Bavarian CSU leader, Franz-Josef Strauss, who was chosen as the candidate of the CDU and its CSU allies for the chancellorship in the 1980 elections. According to the minutes of a meeting in Moscow in July 1979 between Andropov and Mielke, the GDR interior minister and head of the Stasi, “It was acknowledged that Strauss was a serious opponent to Schmidt at the Bundestag elections in 1980. It was therefore essential to compromise Strauss and his supporters.” 112Among the KGB active measures agreed by Andropov and Mielke was operation COBRA-2, which used information gathered by an HVA agent, Inge Goliath, former secretary to the head of the main CDU foreign affairs think tank, to fabricate sinister links between the CDU/CSU leadership and right-wing elements in the intelligence agencies. A total of 1,587 copies of a booklet alleging that BND officers had conspired with the opposition against the Schmidt government were circulated to politicians, trade union leaders and other opinion-formers in the FRG. According to the KGB file on COBRA-2, some of the disinformation in the booklet reappeared in the West German press and caused Schmidt to order a judicial enquiry. 113

The KGB, which had a recurrent tendency to exaggerate the success of its active measures in reports to the Politburo, claimed that COBRA-2 had caused great alarm in the CDU/CSU leadership and had “a positive influence” in ensuring an SDP victory at the 1980 Bundestag elections. 114Though, in reality, Strauss’s election defeat probably owed little—if anything—to Soviet and East German active measures, it undoubtedly came as a considerable relief to the Centre. When the SDP finally fell from power in 1983, the new government was headed not by Strauss but by the less flamboyant Helmut Kohl.

The main aim of KGB active measures during the early 1980s was the attempt to exploit the opposition of the large and militant West German peace movement to the deployment of US medium-range missiles in the FRG. Among the most eloquent opponents of the deployment was the Bürgermeister of Saarbrucken, Oskar Lafontaine, later an unsuccessful SDP candidate for the chancellorship (and in 1998 briefly a controversial finance minister in the government of Gerhard Schrîder). It would have been wholly out of character had the Centre, which only a few years earlier had formed absurdly unrealistic plans to recruit Harold Wilson and Cyrus Vance, not also targeted Lafontaine. In 1981 the operations officer, L. S. Bratus, was sent to cultivate him and—predictably—failed in the attempt. 115The KGB seems, none the less, to have tried to take a largely undeserved share of the credit for the decision by an SDP congress eight months after its 1983 election defeat to oppose the stationing of US medium-range missiles on German soil. A CPSU Central Committee document in 1984 claimed complacently, “Many arguments that had previously been presented by us to the representatives of the SDP have now been taken over by them.” 116

As in other NATO countries, the chief priority of intelligence collection in the FRG during the early 1980s was operation RYAN—the fruitless attempt to discover non-existent Western preparations for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Markus Wolf and, no doubt, some KGB officers in Karlshorst and West German residencies regarded the whole operation as utterly misconceived. None, however, dared to challenge the paranoid mindset of the Centre. Wolf found his Soviet contacts “obsessed” with RYAN and the threat of a NATO nuclear first strike:

The HVA was ordered to uncover any Western plans for such a surprise attack, and we formed a special staff and situation center, as well as emergency command centers, to do this. The personnel had to undergo military training and participate in alarm drills. Like most intelligence people, I found these war games a burdensome waste of time, but these orders were no more open to discussion than other orders from above. 117

Because ST collection was less distorted by misconceptions of the West than political intelligence, its quality was probably higher. Kryuchkov wrote in a directive to residencies in July 1977:

Work against West Germany is assuming an increasingly greater importance at the present time in connection with the growth of the economic potential of the FRG and the increase in its influence in the solution of important international issues.

The Federal Republic of Germany is both economically and militarily the leading West European capitalist country. It is the main strategic bridgehead of NATO, where a significant concentration of the adversary’s military strength can be observed: the total numerical strength of the forces of the Western allies (including the Bundeswehr) reaches almost a million in the country. This situation distinguishes the FRG from the other European capitalist states and makes it the most important component of the military bloc. Within the FRG, military scientific research studies in the fields of atomic energy, aviation, rocket construction, electronics, chemistry and biology are being intensively pursued. 118

As Kryuchkov’s directive indicates, West Germany, though ranked far behind the United States, had become the chief European target for Line X (ST) operations. In 1980, 61.5 percent of the ST received by the Military Industrial Commission (VPK) came from American sources (not all in the United States), 10.5 percent from the FRG, 8 percent from France, 7.5 percent from Britain and 3 percent from Japan. Just over half the intelligence acquired by FCD Directorate T in 1980 (possibly an exceptional year) came from allied intelligence services, the HVA and Czechoslovak StB chief among them. 119

Among Directorate T’s chief targets in the FRG was Germany’s largest electronics company, Siemens, whose scientists and engineers included the KGB illegal RICHARD, 120recruited in East Germany, and at least two other Soviet agents: HELMUT 121and KARL. 122HELMUT was unaware that he was a KGB agent and believed that he was working for the HVA. 123

As in the case of other Western companies, it proved easier to collect ST from Siemens than to exploit it in the Soviet Union, particularly in the civilian economy. The Centre’s paranoid tendencies made it increasingly fearful that the Siemens computers it purloined had been bugged or otherwise tampered with. The FCD’s Fifteenth Department (Registry and Archives) planned to use a Siemens computer to store the information on its card files on three million people. Because of the Centre’s fear that the computer contained some hidden bug which Soviet experts had failed to detect, however, it remained unused in a storeroom for five years. 124Less advanced East German computers were eventually used instead. 125