Bonn Swaps East German ‘Super Spy’ for 4 of Its Own

West Germany today swapped an imprisoned East German “super spy” for four of its own agents serving long prison terms for spying in East Berlin, news reports said.

The West German news agency DPA said it was told by sources that the five-person spy swap between East and West Germany occurred this morning at a crossing point on the West German state of Hesse’s border with East Germany.

The Bild newspaper, in an advance text of a report to appear in its Thursday editions, also reported the spy swap.

The West German government, according to longstanding policy, would not confirm the trade.

The reports said East Germany received “super spy” Lothar Erwin Lutze in exchange for two agents of West Germany’s federal intelligence service and two agents of its counterintelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Lutze was serving a 12-year prison term for spying on his employer, the West German Defense Ministry, and giving East German intelligence 630 secret documents on the NATO pipeline system and military readiness.

Lutze was arrested in 1976 and convicted in June, 1979, by the State Supreme Court in Duesseldorf.

Federal prosecutors said he was recruited by East German intelligence as early as April, 1960, when he was a young West German soldier. In 1972, they said, he recruited his wife, Renate, who was a Defense Ministry secretary.

She was sentenced in June, 1979, to six years in prison but was released in a 1981 spy trade.

DPA quoted its sources as saying West Germany received the best part of the deal because the four West Germans were top agents while Lutze, who had already served most of his sentence, had little current information to provide. However, they said East Germany’s Intelligence Ministry for State Security apparently placed high value on retrieving Lutze.

Increasing numbers of spies have been traded in recent years. The biggest East-West postwar swap was staged in Berlin in June, 1985, when four convicted East Bloc spies held by the United States were traded on Glienke Bridge, linking East and West Berlin, for 23 Western agents imprisoned in the East.