Secretary to 5 Presidents : Woman Tells W. German Court She Spied for KGB

A former secretary to five West German presidents went on trial for espionage Monday and admitted passing state secrets to the Soviet KGB, initially out of love for her recruiter.

Prosecutors say the case of Margarete Hoeke, 52, arrested in August, 1985, at the height of a Communist spy scare in the government, was one of the most damaging in the nation’s history.

Hoeke is charged with betraying classified foreign policy and military information to the Soviets over a 15-year period, sometimes with the use of a miniature camera hidden in her lipstick.

“She had access to confidential, secret and at times highly classified information and betrayed all that to the point of severely disadvantaging the foreign policy” of West Germany, chief prosecutor Joachim Lampe said in his opening statement.

In her first appearance before the Duesseldorf state high court, Hoeke said, “I myself cannot understand why I did it, because it just doesn’t fit with my personality.”

Hoeke, who worked for five presidents starting in 1959, testified she grew up feeling unloved by her family. She said she was single and lonely when befriended in the late 1960s by a suspected KGB agent known as Franz Becker.

Hoeke acknowledged that she fell in love with Becker, whose whereabouts are unknown, and maintained a relationship with him until 1973.

“That he was six years younger than me disturbed me at first, but he always seemed to dispel my doubts,” she testified in a soft voice. “He told me he wasn’t interested in younger women.

“I did whatever he (Becker) wanted me to do. I didn’t do it out of conviction,” she said. “I had a bad conscience, but I just had the feeling that I simply had to be with him.”

Lampe said that Hoeke started funneling sensitive government documents to Becker starting in 1971 and continued spying for regular payment after their personal relationship broke up. Prosecutors say Hoeke was paid about $18,330 plus jewelry and foreign vacations.

The indictment says she provided the KGB with documents on Bonn’s attitudes and tactics on important security issues and passed on information detailing differences of opinion within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Other material dealt with West German civil defense, NATO maneuvers and West German intelligence service dossiers, it adds.

Testimony is scheduled to go into July, with a verdict expected late next month.