East German Foreign Intelligence

Myth, Reality and Controversy

Kristie Macrakis, Thomas Wegener Friis, Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Kristie Macrakis, Thomas Wegener Friis, Helmut Müller-Enbergs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135214494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Intelligence & Espionage
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited book examines the East German foreign intelligence service (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or HVA) as a historical problem, covering politics, scientific-technical and military intelligence and counterintelligence.

The contributors broaden the conventional view of East German foreign intelligence as driven by the inter-German conflict to include its targeting of the United States, northern European and Scandinavian countries, highlighting areas that have previously received scant attention, like scientific-technical and military intelligence. The CIA's underestimation of the HVA was a major intelligence failure. As a result, East German intelligence served as a stealth weapon against the US, West German and NATO targets, acquiring the lion's share of critical Warsaw Pact intelligence gathered during the Cold War. This book explores how though all of the CIA's East German sources were double agents controlled by the Ministry of State Security, the CIA was still able to declare victory in the Cold War. Themes and topics that run through the volume include the espionage wars; the HVA's relationship with the Russian KGB; successes and failures of the BND (West German Federal Intelligence Service) in East Germany; the CIA and the HVA; the HVA in countries outside of West Germany; disinformation and the role and importance of intelligence gathering in East Germany.

This book will be of much interest to students of East Germany, Intelligence Studies, Cold War History and German politics in general.

Kristie Macrakis is Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Thomas Wegener Friis is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Denmark's Centre for Cold War Studies. Helmut Müller-Enbergs is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark and holds a tenured senior staff position at the German Federal Commission for the STASI Archives in Berlin.

Part I
Intelligence and counter-intelligence

Introduction

East German foreign intelligence as history

Thomas Wegener Friis, Kristie Macrakis and Helmut Müller-Enbergs

Intelligence agencies are loath to allow scholars or journalists to view their operational files. While some intelligence agencies de-classify portions of their older material, methods and sources of work are usually exempt from such disclosure. This clearly creates a problem for intelligence history research. Discussions are often based on chance comments, intelligence failures, government-sponsored or senate or parliamentary select committee reports and public-relations information sent out by the agencies themselves.

Empirical research backed up by archival material is rarely possible. Few intelligence agencies are ready to deposit files in an archive for public use. Even when they have deposited such material, the contents have been selected by people with the same intelligence mindset that wants to block research into operational files.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, new possibilities opened up for research on the history of intelligence in Eastern Europe, in particular on the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS, or “Stasi”) and its foreign intelligence arm, the Hauptverwaltung A (HVA), the main directorate for intelligence.

Despite the fact the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) had a foreign intelligence agency, its activities have been overshadowed by post-Berlin Wall revelations concerning the nefarious deeds of its internal secret police in the MfS.

In recent years, widespread public attention was drawn again to the MfS with the release of the fictional, Oscar-winning film, the Lives of Others. This only reenforced the image of the MfS as synonymous with all-encompassing surveillance, repression and intrusion into “the lives of others.” With 91,015 full-time employees and 189,000 agents or informers in a country with 16 million citizens, this meant that a large proportion of East Germans were involved in state security.¹ It was one of the Cold War’s largest secret police, second only to the Soviet KGB, and it has attracted most of the attention.

Unlike the United States, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and internal security were all under the bureaucratic roof of the MfS. This meant that the foreign intelligence unit—the HVA (modeled on the KGB’s First Directorate for Intelligence “I” and created by Soviet advisors)—was technically subordinate to the Minister for State Security, Erich Mielke.

East Germany began organized espionage against West Germany about 60 years ago. Paralleling the contours of the Cold War, a modest activity escalated into a large-scale intelligence effort against the West. Although East German intelligence made headline news in the West on account of its “failures”—the discovery of the spy couple Christel and Günter Guillaume in Chancellor Willy Brandt’s office and the defection of HVA officer Werner Stiller in 1979—it was also seen as a highly successful spy agency. The image of a highly successful spy agency was re-enforced by the mysterious spy chief, Markus Wolf, the “man without a face” because Western intelligence did not have his picture. The image-building in the media continued after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From humble beginnings, the HVA became one of the most, if not the most, successful intelligence service, East or West, of the Cold War. But this was a post-Cold War revelation. Western intelligence often ignored it and underestimated its prowess, leaving the East Germans to serve as a kind of stealth weapon for their KGB masters. To cite just one example, German authorities estimate that Wolf s legions, by themselves, acquired some 80 percent of all Soviet bloc intelligence on the all-important NATO target.

After the collapse of the GDR, the revealed extent of its spy activities exceeded the expectations and fears of most observers. Research from the 1990s revealed that both internal security and foreign intelligence efforts were more than double what Western intelligence officials had estimated. While pre-1989 figures estimated that the total staff at the MfS, including the HVA, was about 22,000, the actual number was 91,015.² While officials thought the HVA had fewer than 2,000 officers at headquarters, the figure was closer to 3,299 at HVA headquarters and the GDR’s 15 district offices, or 4,777 including officers on a special mission and officer-agents at headquarters.³

In addition to new figures, during the 1990s various groups—from prosecutors to journalists to historians—approached the topic from various perspectives. A plethora of new details emerged from court cases, news reporting and historical work in the archives that sometimes led to controversy.

In Germany, the debates were often highly politicized. The historian Hubertus Knabe put forth the strong thesis that East German intelligence had “overrun” or “infiltrated” West Germany with spies and could steer the course of politics and the media. Another politicized controversy surrounded the question of the MfS’ campaign to discredit West German politicians with Nazi pasts during the 1950s and 1960s.⁴

While journalists in the United States and the United Kingdom largely reproduced the German debates, several historians began to look at the history of the MfS as intelligence history.⁵ The attempt was greatly accelerated by the release of new material relating to foreign intelligence in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In Germany, discussions about East German espionage also took place at scholarly conferences. Noteworthy was the conference sponsored by the Stasi File Authority in Berlin in 2001, where scholars, experts and practitioners from Germany and America shared their knowledge about the history and operations of the HVA. Officers from the HVA had also already organized highly publicized conferences and big public events on the topic for several years. Taking these parallel developments into consideration, the University of Southern Denmark decided to host a conference in November of 2007 bringing together former senior HVA officers and historians to examine the actual record of East German successes and failures.

Although the event took place some 20 years after the public discussion on the topic began, this step proved to be a huge one for Germany, as the conference, and the participation of the “Stasi” practitioners became highly controversial in the German press. The chapters in this volume are based on presentations by American, British, Dutch, Danish and German historians who presented the conference.

The contributions in this volume represent knowledge that can be designated as the third phase of research on East German espionage. The first phase was not historical research at all; the knowledge that emerged before the fall of the Berlin Wall was part of the espionage wars. Intelligence agencies’ knowledge about East German foreign intelligence was usually based on information from defectors and interrogations—i.e. knowledge that is hard to back up with hard empirical research in the files. Even when defectors brought files with them, those records represented a small piece of the puzzle.

The HVA was permitted to destroy most of it files before German unification on the grounds of protecting sources and methods. But a great deal of information still exists in archives that survived, as well as in court cases, memoirs and interrogation reports, all of which has enabled historians to garner a comprehensive, if not complete, overview of East German foreign intelligence, as the present volume shows.

The third research phase began in June of 2003 when the CIA allowed access to an HVA microfilmed card file. This material was dubbed “Rosenholz” (Rosewood) by West German officials and provides information about all the people documented by the East German intelligence agency.

During the second phase of research only the agent network existing in West Germany in 1988 could be catalogued. These 1,553 West Germans and West Berliners—called unofficial staff members—were catalogued by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (West German counter-intelligence) when they were allowed to take notes with pencils on the material in the United States for legal purposes (Rosenholz I). The material could not be given to researchers working at the Stasi File Authority because it was considered top secret. Researchers were only allowed to see “Rosenholz” material after June 2003, when the CIA provided the West German government with a copy of the card files on a CD-ROM (Rosenholz II). This new material stimulated important new research, now made available for use in this volume.

Together with other material from the archives, such as the HVA information reports provided to the party leadership and the electronic database, the “System for Information and Research on Intelligence” (SIRA), historians can now recreate agent networks, intelligence foci and gathered information. Despite these great strides in releasing information, some areas remained black boxes because the CIA only returned index cards with German names. We expect a fourth research phase when the CIA returns all of the HVA card files with non-German names from countries such as America, France or Greece.

Overview of topics, themes and chapters

We have assembled an international group of scholars to examine East German foreign intelligence as a historical problem in the intelligence areas of: politics, scientific-technical and military intelligence and counter-intelligence. Themes and topics that run through the volume include the espionage wars; the relationship to the KGB; the successes and failures of the BND in East Germany and the reverse; the CIA and the HVA; the HVA in countries outside of West Germany; disinformation; and the role and importance of scientific-technical and military intelligence gathering.

In addition to showcasing the inter-German espionage conflicts on German soil, the chapters in this volume broaden the scope of East German foreign intelligence to include the United States and Northern European and Scandinavian countries like the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark as targets. We highlight areas that have received scant attention before, such as scientific-technical and military intelligence, while the central topic of counter-intelligence runs through numerous chapters in this volume.

Intelligence agencies spend a large amount of time playing the spy game with their adversaries. The five opening chapters demonstrate how the spy-vs-spy game was played out on a variety of theatrical stages, from the overarching intelligence/counter-intelligence Cold War dialectic played out between the superpowers or their surrogates, to the inter-German spy wars on German soil, to CIA activities in East Germany itself.

Nigel West’s opening chapter paints broad background strokes on post-...

Table of contents

• Studies in intelligence series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Intelligence and counter-intelligence
• Part II Political intelligence
• Part III Scientific-technical and military intelligence
• People index
• Place index
• Cover names and operations index