Berlin полностью

In July 1954, a little more than a year after the East German uprising, West Germany suffered a humiliation of its own, when Otto John, chief of Bonn’s counterintelligence service, the Bundesvervassungsschutz (Office for Constitutional Protection, BfV) slipped from West Berlin into the Hanptstadt der DDR and announced that he had changed his loyalties. While John’s apparent defection came as a huge shock, no one was surprised that he chose Berlin as his jumping-off point. Standing directly on the Cold War fault line but affording relatively free passage across the ideological divide, Berlin in the 1950s surpassed Vienna as postwar Europe’s capital of espionage. Some eighty spy agencies and their various front organizations, disguised as everything from jam exporters to research institutes, worked the city. Spooks were so thick on the ground that a dozen or so of them might find themselves together in the same seedy Kneipe, each trying to ignore the presence of the others. With spy-story writers and espionage buffs also sweeping down on the city, Gold War Berlin became indelibly associated in the popular imagination with cloak-and-dagger operations carried out in half-lit, half-ruined streets.

Markus Wolf, photographed in 1991

Befitting Berlin’s importance to the Soviet Union, the biggest espionage player in town was the Soviet state security committee, the Komitet gosudarstvennoì bezopasnosti (KGB), which maintained over 800 operatives in 1953, and many more after the East German uprising. Its headquarters was a sprawling former hospital building within the Soviet complex at Karlshorst. From there orders went out to agents all over West Germany and Western Europe to steal sensitive secrets, recruit promising new talent, and, of course, to deal in the appropriate manner with fellow spies who had fallen from the correct path.

The Soviets had plenty of help from their East German clients. Because of language and cultural barriers, Russia’s occupation authorities could not maintain surveillance within the GDR or effectively penetrate West Germany on their own. In 1950 Moscow authorized the establishment of a native secret police agency—the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi—whose primary concerns were monitoring and molding the political climate in the GDR. Over the next forty years the Stasi would evolve into a truly Orwellian organization, weaseling its way into virtually every aspect of East German life. (Tellingly, the Stasi was larger per capita than the Nazi Gestapo, and also maintained a much larger army of informal snoops.) As of 1951, the Stasi had a foreign intelligence component, initially called the Institute for Economic Research, later renamed the Hauptverwaltung-Aufklärung (Main Administration for Intelligence, HVA). Its job was to run spies in the West and to counter enemy spy activity within the GDR.

The Stasi’s most brilliant intelligence operative was Markus (Mischa) Wolf, the model for John Le Carré’s redoubtable “Karla.” As the son of Friedrich Wolf, a well-known Jewish-Communist intellectual, young Markus Wolf had fled with his family to Moscow in 1934. He lived there until 1941, learning Russian and managing to identify with his new home despite the purges that were carrying away many German exiles. When Germany invaded Russia he was evacuated to distant Kazakhstan, then to Bashkira, where in a Comintern school he was trained to promote the international proletarian revolution. After the German defeat he was sent back to his homeland to help Comrade Ulbricht bring the revolution to Berlin. Feeling more Russian than German, he could not understand why the Berliners let the Russian soldiers’ orgy of rapine in the city sour their attitude toward the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, he was sophisticated enough to see that the Russians were often out of their depth in the German capital. As an editorial assistant at Berlin Radio, he struggled to convince the Soviet programmers that an exclusive diet of propaganda speeches was driving East German listeners into the arms of RIAS. He began displaying such a keen aptitude for political intrigue that he was made a counselor in East Germany’s new embassy in Moscow. In 1951 he was brought back to Berlin to work in the Stasi’s Institute for Economic Research, its spy agency. After a little more than one year, Wolf was asked to take over the agency’s leadership from its founder, Anton Ackermann, whose advocacy of a separate “German road to Socialism” had alienated Ulbricht.