/ARTS WEEKLY/GERMANY: Hot Secrets of Cold War Revealed

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Apr 22 2003 (IPS) - Espionage can hardly be considered an ideal form of contact between peoples. But it was once such a part of everyday life in divided Germany that citizens – east and west – seemed at times to take it almost for granted in the Cold War years.

Post-war Germany was at the centre of the tug-of-war between the victorious war-time allies, furnishing the soil for an intelligence jungle which sometimes confused even those who were supposed to be in the know.

Who worked for whom, and for what reasons, proved as difficult to determine as the definition of what constituted treason in the first place. With the Fatherland split, which fatherland was a German betraying?

Not that any such considerations put a brake on the spy trade, as two German historians, Dieter Krüger and Armin Wagner, both employed at the Bundeswehr Military Research Office in Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, readily confirm.

Authors of a book about German spymasters titled ‘Conspiracy as a Profession’, Krüger and Wagner team up to analyse the roles played by eleven post-1945 German spymasters – six of them in the former communist east, five in the capitalist west.

Several authors noted for their research on espionage topics contributed the spy portraits in the book, which opens with a reference to James Bond movies and the generations of film-goers who grew up with Her Majesty’s special agents.

No such luck for these spy chiefs. "In our book we’re not dealing with the much less colourful daily activities of agents, but with their bosses – the men in charge of the German secret services – in both East and West after 1945, and the events that stamped their lives in preceding decades.

Conspiracy is their profession in the divided Fatherland. But their individual experiences are all strikingly different – much like the secret service organisations they represented under dictatorship or democracy.

Erich Mielke, East Germany’s Minister of State Security could rely on 80,000 full time agents, and 180,000 unofficial collaborators to monitor the daily lives of the state’s 17 million citizens, claim the authors.

For years Mielke had led people to believe he’d spent the 1939-45 war in the Soviet Union heroically battling fascism. But as the historian’s book reveals, he had survived in France and Belgium, first returning to Berlin on June 14, 1945.

While the biographies of Mielke, Reinhard Gehlen(BND) and Markus Wolf, the former East German foreign intelligence chief, are relatively well known, some of the German spy chiefs "are almost forgotten today," says Krüger. "We want to refresh peoples’ memory about them."

Co-author Wagner adds: "We needed to make a comparison between what the spy chiefs in the east were doing and what their counterparts were up to in the West. I say that because German history does belongs together, even though our country was divided."

The career of one of the more controversial spy chiefs reviewed in the book is that of Otto John, who was appointed the first man to head the West German Counter Intelligence Organisation (Verfassungsschuetz) in 1949. He stunned the spy world in July, 1954, by defecting to east Berlin in July, 1954.

John spent 18 months in the east, before resurfacing in West Berlin again, hidden in the boot of a Danish journalist’s car. Charged with treason, he claimed he had been drugged and forcibly abducted to the east. The court rejected his explanation and jailed him for four years.

Germany was in the Spy Game’s big league in the 1950s and 60s. There were 16,000 players on one side alone. They were communist spies, undercover men, secret agents, deserters, decoy girls and thugs in diplomats’ clothing.

Opposing them in the western half of Germany were countless thousands of pro-western agents directed by the man called Herr Doktor – Major-General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the West German "Bundesnachtrichtendienst" (BND). For years as the spy book makes clear, he was one of the most carefully guarded men in the world.

By 1966, the Interior Ministry was reporting that West Germany had become a prime target for communist intelligence networks. "The number of agents operating in the country and West Berlin is certainly without parallel in the whole of the western world," stated a Bonn security report.

It wasn’t only the Germans. The Americans, French and British were all playing the same game. Espionage flourished as tensions rose after the Wall was built in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear confrontation a year later.

‘Conspiracy as a Profession’ traces how the East and West German states built up their secret service organisations after 1945 at a time when the country was de facto under allied occupation.

Three almost forgotten (communist) espionage chiefs are portrayed in the book, as are three early West German spymasters – Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Fritz Tejessy and Gerhard Wessel.

Another rarely remembered post-war spy chief is Ernst Wollweber (1898-1967). He championed communism all his life, and in the 1930s and early 40s courageously fought the Nazis, planning and executing daring dockyard sabotage actions in Holland, Germany and Scandinavia.

The authors have had rare access to secret documents. Krüger, 50, was director of the Berlin Document Centre from l994-96 where all the Nazi Party membership files are held south of Berlin. Co-author Armin Wagner, 35, trained as a Bundeswehr officer before he became a historian. He has written two other books on communist era themes.

‘Conspiracy as a Profession – German Secret Service Chiefs in the Cold War’ is published in Berlin by the Christoph Links Verlag. Price:19.80 Euros.