Daughters of the KGB (16 page)

Since the emotions aroused in these seductions were real on one side of the relationship, it was never possible to predict the eventual outcome. Another operation recounted by Wolf, which may be true, features a highly intelligent West German postgraduate student named Gabriele Gast, who was allotted the code-name ‘Gaby’. She had a ‘rough trade’ affair with a Stasi officer while researching her doctoral thesis on the political role of women in the GDR. Gaby’s high potential had also been spotted by a BND recruiter, through whom she was taken on as a political analyst at the HQ of BND in Pullach. On one of her trips to meet her lover in the GDR, and to undergo espionage training, a form of marriage was arranged. It eventually became apparent to Wolf that the main attractions of her affair were its totally illicit nature and the thrill of working at extremely high level for both the BND and the HVA. Few West German agents actually met any HVA officer above their own case officer, but Gaby was accorded the unusual honour of meeting Wolf himself no fewer than seven times, if his account can be believed. At one of these meetings she surprised him by predicting the spate of anti-Soviet protest movements in the satellite states. Although Gaby was assured early in 1990 that all HVA files relating to her would be destroyed on reunification, she was eventually blown by a Stasi officer who bought himself immunity by giving enough information about her activities and personal details for German counter-espionage officers to arrest her.
¹⁸

Notes

1
.    K. Macrakis,
Die Stasi-Geheimnisse
, Munich, Herbig 2008

2
.    Ibid, pp. 13, 15

3
.    Kierstein,
Heisse Schlachten
, p. 25

4
.    Macrakis,
Die Stasi-Geheimnisse
, p. 24

5
.    German spelling of the Russian name Gorbatchev

6
.    Some sources name him as Hans-Dieter Lehmann

7
.    
BBC News Magazine
, 19 September 2013. How this was calculated is unclear. It was possibly the cost of setting up Canopy Wing, which had to be replaced by another programme

8
.    Kierstein,
Heisse Schlachten, p
p. 70–1

9
.    M. Wolf,
Memoirs of a Spymaster
, London, Pimlico 1998, pp. 299–300

10
.  Ibid, p. 301

11
.  Ibid, p. 326

12
.  Kierstein,
Heisse Schlachten
, pp. 76−7.

13
.  Some sources say staff peaked at 1,000

14
.  Macrakis,
Die Stasi-Geheimnisse
, pp. 44−7

15
.  Ibid, pp. 48, 62

16
.  Ibid, pp. 32−6

17
.  Wolf,
Memoirs of a Spymaster
, pp. 137−8

18
.  Ibid, pp. 142−8

9

W
AR IN THE
A
IR

On 16 August 1951 HVA was given the cover name Institut für wirtschaftliche Forschung (IWF), meaning Institute for Scientific Research. The first head of this new enterprise was Anton Ackermann, another of the returnees who had spent the war in Moscow and returned early to have a career in GDR politics that ended after he unwisely disagreed with SED policy. His Soviet ‘adviser’ Andreij Grauer was so dictatorial, ruthless and unpopular that his own staff nicknamed him ‘Little Beria’. He got on so badly with Ackermann that he was withdrawn by Moscow in the following year.
¹
In September 1953 Markus Wolf – perhaps the most famous spymaster of the Cold War – took command of HVA. Known as ‘the man without a face’ because he was only identified – and that by chance – in 1978, Wolf had also spent the war years in the USSR – in his case, working in the Comintern before returning to Germany posing as a journalist covering the Nuremburg trials.

From 1945 until the building of the Wall in 1961 a steady stream of refugees crossed into West Berlin and the Bundesrepublik. Although low-level security checks were run on them while in the reception camps, it was impossible to catch every HVA-trained agent, who travelled in the stream to take up life as a sleeper or active spy, mainly in Western Germany and the USA. If ever an intelligence service had an easy way of infiltrating spies and sleepers, this was it.
²

One such agent was Harald Gottfried. Code-named ‘Gärtner’, and trained in the use of invisible inks, mini-cameras, codes and radio transmitters, he was inserted in the stream of refugees as a ‘future agent’ in 1956, but produced no results until 1968 because his target area was nuclear research and establishing his bona fides as a loyal West German took several years.

The sheer numbers of Stasi agents in the flood of refugees had, perversely, an inbuilt problem. For obvious reasons, there are no statistics, but there was always a risk when sending agents and sleepers into the West that they would come to like the much more comfortable life, to enjoy the political and physical freedom and, of course, to enter relationships and beget children who would hardly want to return to the greyness and perpetual fear of ‘socialist’ Eastern Europe. In the course of writing this book, the author has interviewed one false refugee from Poland and one Czech who decided never to ‘go back’. Although knowing that there would be no prosecution now for admitting their past, they are still so buttoned-up after decades of clandestine life that they gave little detail as to how and why they came to the West during the Cold War. Secrecy gets to be a habit, as it did for some British friends of the author who were employed on secret work during the Second World War and yet never told their spouses about it during sixty subsequent years of happily married life.

The most successful agent to arrive in the Bundesrepublik as a refugee was without doubt Günter Guillaume. Despite the French surname, he was picked up by the Stasi and approved by the KGB while working as a labourer, living in East Berlin, but employed in West Berlin. Marcus Wolf personally groomed Guillaume, who had the correct anti-Western political views, for his mission. He also had a war-wounded father reputed to have tended the wounds of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt during the war. In 1956, Günter and his wife, Christel, emigrated to West Germany as pretended refugees. Whether or not the story is true that his father wrote to Brandt asking him to assist his son’s career, Günter rose steadily through the hierarchy of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, to become a personal assistant to the West German chancellor. From then on, his slavish devotion to work on Brandt’s staff earned him access to everything that passed through the Chancellor’s office – all of which he passed to East Berlin.

In 1974 the devoted PA was outed by the BfV, triggering a scandal that could not be hushed up and caused Brandt to resign the chancellorship. Guillaume was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for espionage; for acting as his courier, Christel received a sentence of eight years, but the couple was released in a spy swap in 1981. Sources in the Stasi said that Brandt’s political ruin was not intended, but collateral damage – he had advocated rapprochement with the GDR and would have been more useful in office than in disgrace.

When 32-year-old Werner Stiller, the highest-ranking HVA officer to defect, came over to West Germany on 18 January 1979 his SED credentials were impeccable. Active in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) – the Communist successor to the Hitler Youth – since the age of 14, he was a physics graduate trained to seek out nuclear research secrets. His final exam paper was on the subject of electron spin resonance spectroscopy research into the behaviour of free radicals. Together with his Hungarian wife, Erzsebet, he settled in East Berlin, supplementing his salary from a day job as a physicist with nightly training by Stasi officers in techniques like surveillance avoidance and the use of dead letter boxes. In 1972 he was given the rank of full-time MfS
Oberleutnant
in the Sektor Wissenschaft und Technik, with glowing reports from his instructors as a politically active and ideologically sound young man who got on well with colleagues. The only black mark against him was his impulsive nature. With his academic background, it was inevitable that he would be used in the acquisition of nuclear research.

His work was more than a desk job, involving contacts in cafes and safe houses, using money and ideological motivation to run three HVA agents, three West German sources in the Bundesrepublik and thirty IMs in the GDR, particularly targeting the nuclear research facility in Karlsruhe and the data processing programs of IBM in Stuttgart and Siemens in West Berlin that had military implications for the East German Nazionale Volksarmee (NVA). He also travelled to meet his West German agents in Prague, Budapest and other cities where they could go without exciting suspicion. The Stasi actually had a permanent office at Lake Balaton in Hungary because it was a tourist resort that could be visited by people from both the satellite countries and the West. In Vienna Stiller set up a network with connections to Silicon Valley that was able to acquire commercially some strategic items that were embargoed for sale to the GDR. Stiller’s high security clearance was obvious in one or two trips he also made under false identity into the Bundesrepublik itself – normally a no-go area for any officer knowing all the secrets he did.

In January 1978 Stiller was on the way to meet an agent on the inner-German border, and stopped for a nightcap at a hotel in the winter sport resort of Oberhof, where he chatted up the pretty waitress named Helga, who made no secret of what she felt after being refused a visa to attend her brother’s wedding in the West. Was she genuine or a Stasi
provocatrice
? Stiller had to know, so he visited the district Stasi office and found she was genuine. After waiting a few weeks, he paid her another visit and showed her his Stasi ID, to which the universal reaction was fear and loathing. Helga took one look and told him to get out, so he confessed that he was looking for someone to help him make contact with a Western agency. One week later, she telephoned to say she would help. They were both taking a colossal risk, not least because, as Stiller well knew, the West German agencies had many double agents and moles planted by the Stasi and KGB, who might betray their approach. The relationship was complicated by them both falling in love after he explained to her that her known political attitude gave her no future in the GDR, so she ought to flee with him.

He did not tell Helga that he was married, but his domestic life was also complicated, with his wife giving birth to their second child. On the ride back from the hospital with mother and child, Stiller told her that he was leaving her for another woman. She knew enough about the Stasi’s moral code to threaten to tell his boss he was having an affair. Things got even worse for Stiller when his immediate superior Horst Vogel saw Stiller and Helga together in Oberhof and called him into the office, to ask who was his lady friend. Four weeks went by and Stiller was given an explicit warning to sort out his marriage, or else. Although his boss knew instinctively that the liaison with Helga was serious, Stiller still was not sure.

At this point – it was now the end of April – Helga’s brother Herbert paid a visit from the West, with his new wife, and Stiller gave him a briefcase with a secret compartment containing a letter offering to work for the BND. Herbert, however, misunderstood and handed the briefcase and letter to the West German frontier post on his return journey. The letter apparently reached its destination because Herbert was twice visited by a BND officer who said his name was Ritter, in the hope of clarifying whether Stiller’s offer was genuine. Deciding that it was, he sent an oral message to Stiller via Helga on Herbert’s next visit to his sister, when Stiller was on holiday in Hungary with his wife and children.

He must have given Helga some form of code to use on the telephone, since all calls into or from the GDR were monitored. After learning that she had received a message from the BND, Stiller went with her to a dead letter drop under a pile of leaves in a Berlin park. Hidden in a false log, they found everything necessary for their flight across the border, including a letter of welcome from his BND case officer. In Stiller’s safe house, where he had been hiding files and microfilms in a hole in the ceiling since February, they broke open the log and used the list of frequencies to listen to a coded message that evening, decoding this with the key supplied.

A busy exchange of information began in July 1978, with Helga encoding the replies and sending them, written in invisible ink, and some of the microfilms in envelopes directed to cover addresses in the Bundesrepublik. In these letters were the damning betrayals of Stiller’s agents in the West, which he had to give to prove that he was not a Stasi plant. But in betraying his agents, Stiller was taking the greatest risk so far. If the BND had them arrested, the Stasi would arrest him. In fact, on 28 August its mail interception department forwarded a suspicious letter, whose return address did not exist, to the operational-technical section. The coded message of blocks of five digits, written in invisible ink, was swiftly revealed with chemicals and an intensive hunt was launched to track down the spy concerned.