Bonn Secretaries Prime Targets for Spymasters of Eastern Bloc

At midday on a recent Friday, Ursula Richter, a 52-year-old government secretary described as attractive and reserved, invited a few colleagues into her office for a glass of sparkling wine.

She seemed “somehow different,” some of those present said later, and tears came to her eyes when she remarked that she planned to spend the next week on vacation with a woman friend.

That was the last that was seen of Richter in West Germany.

Security officials believe that she has fled to East Germany and that she is a key figure in the most recent in a series of spy scandals involving government secretaries.

The week before Richter disappeared, another secretary was reported missing--Sonia Lueneburg, 61, who for 12 years was the personal aide to Martin Bangemann, the minister of economics and leader of the Free Democratic Party in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s center-right coalition government.

4 of 6 Fled East

In 1979, in the space of a single month, six women secretaries were accused of spying for East Germany after a top East German agent defected to the West. Four of the six fled to the East.

No one yet knows for certain why Richter and Lueneburg have disappeared. Security sources speculate that they may have learned that West German counterespionage agents were checking on them.

According to informed sources, the West Germans had Richter under surveillance when she disappeared.

In Bonn, woman secretaries appear to be a prime target for East German spy recruiters. And for politicians and bureaucrats, the possibility of finding that a trusted secretary is a spy has become a recurring nightmare.

Most officials trust their secretaries. Peter-Kurt Wurzbach, an official in the Defense Ministry whose secretary, Eva Maria Kauling, has worked with him for five years, told a reporter, “I have unreserved trust in her, and in her colleagues.”

Over the years, however, the record shows that a dozen secretaries in sensitive West German government ministries have spied for East Germany. A newspaper here, parodying the title of a popular spy thriller, recently headlined a story about turncoat secretaries: “Tinker, Tailor, Secretary, Spy.”

Secretaries are not the only people who get involved in spying for agencies behind the Iron Curtain. West Germany has been a kind of happy hunting ground for East Bloc spymasters, who give high priority to acquiring intelligence about a Western country on or near their borders.

10,000 Active Contacts

According to Western intelligence sources, East Germany may have as many as 3,000 agents in West Germany and perhaps an additional 10,000 active contacts or informers. The Soviets also have agents here, the sources say.

Women secretaries make attractive prey for East Bloc agents. As happens in other national capitals, there are many single, often lonely women working for government ministries and for political leaders, and at least some of them are susceptible to smooth-talking, apparently unattached men. East German agents haunt the cafes and bars of Bonn looking for such women, security sources say.

Once a secretary passes any sort of sensitive information to such an agents, she finds it difficult to get off the hook, for she can be threatened with exposure and disgrace.

Some of the secretaries involved in espionage, according to intelligence sources, are professional East German agents who were sent to the West years ago as “moles” or “sleepers,” often by way of a third country to acquire a background with no ties to East Germany.

Moving up the Ladder

They take jobs that may be lowly but offer promise, attaching themselves to a rising politician or going into a government ministry--Defense, Foreign Affairs, Interior--and gradually moving up the ladder to positions of responsibility.

Bangemann’s secretary, Lueneburg, worked for him for a dozen years, learning much about confidential party affairs, then went along with him when he took over the Ministry of Economics last year.

Richter worked in the accounts department of the League of Expellees, a pressure group of refugees from the East that is close to Chancellor Kohl’s party, the Christian Democratic Union. More important, security officials say, she may have been directing other personnel acting as agents, wittingly or unwittingly, for the East Germans.