In the 1950s Wolf’s agency smuggled hundreds of agents into West Germany, mainly through Berlin. When the East German refugee stream increased following the 1953 uprising, Wolf ensured that plenty of Stasi spies swam along with the current. Wolf also convinced many West Germans to spy for the Stasi. Some agreed to do so for ideological reasons, while others did it for sex. Though East Germany was a prudish state, the Stasi became expert in the use of the “honeypot”—the sticky-sweet snares set by attractive young women (and sometimes men), who used their sexual skills to coax secrets out of lonely westerners. Since prostitution was illegal in the GDR, an army of out-of-work whores was available as bait for the Stasi love-traps.
Wolf and his colleagues greatly admired the British secret service, which was the first of the Western intelligence agencies to establish regular operations in Berlin. Britain’s MI6 set up shop in a building belonging to Hitler’s Olympic complex, perhaps an appropriate choice, since some of its native agents were ex-Nazis, among them Klaus Barbie. The homegrown operatives, on the other hand, tended to be recruited via the old-boy network, not necessarily the best way to locate reliable talent. As is well known, some of England’s top spooks—the so-called Cambridge spies—turned out to be double agents in the pay of Moscow. The Berlin branch of MI6 under Peter Lunn was relatively efficient, but it was also by no means mole-free.
In the late 1940s Washington’s new intelligence organization, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), took over the Office of Strategic Services’s Berlin Operations Base (BOB) and developed it into the agency’s primary European operating post. Berlin was key to the CIA because in the presatellite era it offered the best vantage point in the world from which to snoop on the Soviet Union. As one CIA expert noted, “When the Soviet commandant in Bucharest or Warsaw called Moscow the call went through Berlin.” Berlin also afforded American spies their closest proximity to the KGB, their mighty rival. Like missionaries in the bush, the two agencies competed for native souls while trying to convert each other. BOB’s first major “turn” was Colonel Pyotr Popov, a Soviet military intelligence operative who betrayed the names of many of his colleagues working in the West. With its deep pockets, the CIA also funded a number of native front organizations whose job was to destabilize the GDR regime. The Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (Fighting Association against Inhumanity), for example, dropped anti-Communist leaflets from balloons and falsified GDR documents such as postage stamps. Their version of the Ulbricht stamp featured a noose around the dictator’s neck.
In 1950 the CIA secretly set up a West German intelligence service, the “Organization Gehlen,” to it help it operate more effectively on local turf. The group was named after its chief, Reinhard Gehlen, who, as noted above, had headed the Wehrmacht’s espionage operations against the Red Army. Gehlen’s agency was based in Pullach near Munich, not in West Berlin, but like its patron it used the Spree city to smuggle agents into East Germany. Shortly after the outfit was launched the London
From the outset, Bonn had its own intelligence service in the form of the above-mentioned Office for Constitutional Protection, which carried on a bitter rivalry with the Organization Gehlen. The rivalry was fiercest at the top, for Otto John, the BfV’s chief, had sided with the anti-Hitler resistance and worked with British intelligence during the war, while Gehlen had remained loyal to the Nazi regime up to the bitter end. After the war, moreover, John had aided the British prosecution at Nuremberg, which hardly endeared him to unreconstructed nationalists like Gehlen.
“Once a traitor, always a traitor,” was Gehlen’s response when Otto John made his shocking bolt to the East in 1954. The date on which John acted, July 20, 1954, was the tenth anniversary of the ill-starred bombing of Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg. John had come to Berlin to participate in the annual commemoration of the event at Plötzensee Prison, where some of the conspirators had been executed. In the press conference that he held in East Berlin on the following day, John alluded to the resistance when he said that “Stauffenberg did not die for the Federal Republic.” He went on to denounce Adenauer as a tool of the Americans, who, in their “need for war against the East. . . welcome those who have not learned anything from the catastrophe and are waiting for the moment when they can effect revenge for 1945.”
