Security Questioned : W. Germany: Easy Prey in Spy ‘Game’

The headquarters of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a grim gray-and-white building surrounded by a steel fence topped with barbed wire, looks like an urban fortress.

In a sense, it is just that, for this is the center of West German counterintelligence. Its 2,200 employees must feel surrounded by spies, for these days West Germany seems to be the espionage capital of the world.

Inside, behind a triple set of security gates, the staff is glum. Hans Joachim Tiedge, head of the agency’s East German department, turned up a little over a week ago in East Germany, where it was announced that he had defected.

“Naturally, we are all shocked,” Hans Gerd Lange, a senior officer in the agency, said the other day. “It makes for a very bad situation. He (Tiedge) was responsible for the fight against the East German secret service.”

Key Scandal Figure

Tiedge is the principal figure in a spy scandal that has caught the world’s attention. His defection, along with other recent developments, has underscored East Germany’s ability to plant agents inside ministries of the Bonn government and within the counterintelligence service itself.

Estimates of the number of East German agents operating in West Germany and West Berlin vary widely. Some authorities put the figure at 3,000, plus perhaps another 12,000 low-level informers.

West Germany’s resources are severely strained by such a flood of spies, and strained even further by the defection of an official as important as Tiedge.

“It’s not hard to see why West Germany is a prime target for Communist intelligence agencies,” Lange said. “West Germany is on the border with East Germany and Czechoslovakia. It is the most important European member of NATO. It is vital to the West.

Same Culture, Manners

“Further, Germany is a divided country, whose people speak the same language and share the same culture and manners. Many Germans in the West come from the East. Many still have relatives there, and East Germans can feel at home here. Unlike agents of other powers--Russians in the United States or vice versa--they are not going to be immediately identified as foreigners.”

Because of West Germany’s role as an economic power, other experts say, the East is extremely interested in political intelligence--what the Bonn government is thinking and planning; how it perceives East Germany and the Soviet Union.

Military intelligence is similarly crucial, for West Germany’s armed forces--half a million men--are the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s main bulwark against a potential Communist attack in Central Europe.

The United States, Britain and France station sizable military forces in West Germany and West Berlin. Information on the strength and readiness of those forces is valuable to East Bloc countries.

Furthermore, West Germany is a center of high-technology development. Such advances are of great interest in the East.

Because of the crucial military, political and economic roles that West Germany plays, governments in both the East and West maintain large intelligence establishments here. The CIA reportedly has its largest and most active overseas station in West Germany. The same is said to be true for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

Foreign embassies in Bonn house large numbers of intelligence specialists, many of them under diplomatic cover but all pursuing the “great game” of spying and counterspying.

While Bonn, the West German capital, is headquarters for foreign intelligence operations, Munich is also a focal point, for over the years it has become an important propaganda and listening post.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two radio stations financed with U.S. money, broadcast in various languages to the East Europe satellites and to the Soviet Union from Munich. Both have scores of emigre employees from Communist Bloc countries.

Kohl Oversees Agency

At Pullach, a suburb of Munich, the West German Federal Intelligence Agency is headquartered, with a staff estimated at 6,000. This agency, which deals with overseas intelligence, is directly responsible to Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

It is independent from the counterintelligence service in Cologne, which is under the direction of the Interior Ministry, but cooperation between the two is said to be close. The man who has been dismissed as head of the intelligence agency, Heribert Hellenbroich, was until recently head of the counterintelligence service.

Hellenbroich, 48, changed posts on Aug. 1, and he is blamed in the current scandal for not relieving Tiedge even though it was widely reported that Tiedge had serious family and financial problems that led to excessive drinking.

The work of the counterintelligence service is complicated by the ease with which East Germans can move into the West. In recent years, the East German government has allowed some of its citizens to emigrate, and this year about 40,000 of them have crossed over into the West.

West Germany, which takes the position that Germany is only temporarily partitioned, puts up few obstacles to any East German refugees entering the West.

It is no trick for the East Germans to place their agents among the emigrants. They can go directly to work as spies or they can become “moles” or “sleepers”--that is, they can serve quietly in obscure government posts until they have reached positions--in some cases even as secretaries to Cabinet ministers--that give them access to sensitive, high-grade intelligence.

This may have been the case with three women involved in the ongoing spy scandal: Sonja Lueneburg, 61, longtime secretary to Martin Bangemann, economics minister and a leader of the Free Democratic Party; Ursula Richter, 52, a secretary in the Office of Expellees (German emigres from Eastern Europe)--they are both missing--and Margarete Hoeke, 51, a secretary in the office of President Richard von Weizsaecker. She has been arrested on espionage charges.

The West Germans are not dealing with amateurs on the other side of the Berlin Wall. East Germany’s espionage activities are directed by the brilliant Gen. Markus (Mischa) Wolf, 62, the deputy minister for state security, who has been a spy master for 27 years.

Wolf runs a professional, efficient operation, according to Western sources, and he is backed up by the considerable resources of the Soviet security police, the KGB. Over the years, his agents have scored notable successes, among them:

- In 1954, Otto John, director of West German internal security, suddenly appeared in East Berlin and publicly condemned the West. A year later, John reappeared in West Germany, saying that he had been drugged and kidnaped and that he had managed to escape. John was convicted of treason and sent to prison. He was released in 1958, still maintaining his innocence.

- In 1961, Alfred Frenzel, a Social Democratic member of Parliament, was exposed as a spy and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He has since been released in an exchange with East Germany.

- Also in 1961, Heinz Felfe, who had risen in the counterintelligence service to become head of the Soviet department, was arrested for spying. He was sent to prison but, like Frenzel, was freed in an exchange.

- In 1967, Leonore Suetterlin, a secretary, discovered that her husband was a KGB agent who had married her because of her access to sensitive material in the Foreign Ministry. She committed suicide.

Guillaume Case

- In 1974, in the most dramatic case to date, Guenter Guillaume, a top aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt, was charged with espionage, along with his wife. The scandal led to Brandt’s resignation. Guillaume and his wife were sent to prison but were released in an exchange of spies in 1981.

- In 1976, West German counterintelligence unearthed about 20 underground “moles,” among them Lotar-Erwin Lutze and his wife, Renate, who as employees of the Defense Ministry were privy to top-secret NATO documents that they passed along to East Berlin. She was freed in 1981 in an exchange; he is still in prison.

- In 1979, half a dozen secretaries in government ministries either were arrested or disappeared into East Germany. One of those who went east was Ursel Lorenzen, a secretary with the West German NATO delegation in Brussels.

- In 1984, Manfred Rotsch, an engineering official with West Germany’s largest defense firm, Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm, was revealed to be a KGB agent of 17 years standing. He had passed along such critical information as the specifications for the Tornado fighter-bomber and for anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles.

Last week, after it was disclosed that a new round of secretaries had disappeared, there was widespread speculation that they had been recruited by East German lovers. Almost immediately, a poster went up in government offices warning:

“There Is a Code Word That Opens Safes-- LOVE .”

The motive behind espionage, Western experts say, is not always the same.

Amour and Ideology

“Some do it for love, some for money, some for ideology,” one expert said. “Some try to get out from under but are blackmailed with threats of exposure. But agents sent over from the East are highly trained and ideologically motivated. They want to make sure they don’t fall for the pleasures of a decadent, capitalistic society. And they rarely do.”

West German sources say that some East German agents might turn themselves in after years on this side of the border but are reluctant to face the stiff penalties involved.

Every year, according to a senior official, West German counterintelligence picks up 20 to 40 East German spies with enough evidence to take them to court.

The current scandal is certain to damage West Germany’s relations with the intelligence services of NATO and its member governments.

“On the other hand,” a Western diplomat said, “none of our governments has been perfect. Besides, most of us have come to accept the fact that West Germany is a very leaky place when it comes to secrets, and we keep the very important secrets very close within the community.”

After the Guillaume incident, virtually everyone involved called for tougher new security investigations, especially for people in sensitive positions. However, no legislation was enacted to carry this through. Among other problems, lie detector machines, which are used by the CIA, are illegal in West Germany.

Moreover, all West German political parties, left and right, support the individual’s right of datenschutz --the protection of information. Security investigating officers are limited in the kinds of questions they can put to government employees, and this, they complain, restricts their ability to investigate a person’s past or present contacts.

Conservative and liberal politicians alike are opposed to any measures that might be likened to police-state tactics. This opposition takes its toll on the morale of officials responsible for rooting out spies and makes it difficult to recruit top people.

“There is no question,” one official said, “that we should improve our security clearance system, but this is not a security problem; this is a political problem. And that may be the price we pay for living in an open society on this side of the Wall.”