Defense Official Arrested in Bonn as Suspected Spy

A senior civil servant in the West German Defense Ministry has been arrested as a suspected spy for Communist East Germany, authorities announced Thursday.

Military sources identified him as Juergen Westphal, 48, a member of the central policy staff of Adm. Dieter Wellershoff, the armed forces chief of staff.

Westphal is suspected of being in the employ of East Germany and of giving that Communist-led nation information about long-range military planning in the West, authorities said.

In a parallel development, Margarete Hoeke, 51, a former secretary in the president’s office, was charged with treason and with spying for the Soviet Union since 1971.

Kurt Rebmann, the chief federal prosecutor, described as “especially serious” the case of Hoeke, who worked as a secretary for various West German presidents from 1959 until her arrest in August, 1985. She also was charged with corruption and disclosure of official secrets.

The arrest of Westphal was the first of a senior government employee on suspicion of espionage since the major spy scandal of 1985, during which Hoeke was jailed. That scandal shook allied confidence in West German security and set off a major reorganization of counterintelligence here.

Westphal was taken into custody Tuesday at the Defense Ministry in Bonn after an investigation that produced evidence that he was recruited by an East German intelligence officer last summer.

The suspected civil servant had been working at devising a system to make the various computer systems in West Germany’s armed forces compatible with one another, military sources said.

He was also involved in long-range planning on use of West German military reservists, authorities said, and had been in his post since 1980.

A physicist, Westphal had been under surveillance since he was approached last June by an East German agent, who later paid Westphal money during a meeting in Vienna on Aug. 15, authorities said.

Last year’s spy scandal was touched off when a top counterintelligence official, Hans-Joachim Tiedge, defected to East Germany. In the wake of his defection, the entire West Germany intelligence apparatus was shaken up.

Hoeke was arrested Aug. 24, 1985, only a few days after Tiedge failed to appear at his office and then turned up in East Germany, asking for asylum. Prosecutor Rebmann said Thursday that Hoeke had seen more than 1,700 classified documents from various ministries concerned with security matters, as well as the country’s foreign intelligence agency, from 1971 until her arrest.

She probably passed on material to the Soviet KGB from those documents as well as from reports by West German embassies, Rebmann added.

In the case of Westphal, Rebmann said that because the civil servant had apparently been in contact with East Germany only a relatively short period of time, “this is not a grave case.”

Last month, West German Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann charged that East German intelligence officers had played a dominant role among the East Bloc countries in recruiting espionage networks in the West, partly because of language and cultural similarities.

Zimmermann said 32 suspected East Bloc agents were arrested in West Germany in the first 10 months of this year, compared with 18 in all of last year.

In an interview with the Bild newspaper, Kurt Wuerzbach, a senior Defense Ministry official, said that Westphal may have agreed to work for East Germany because he had personal problems.