High-Ranking German Held as Spy Suspect

Germany, no stranger to spy scandals during the Cold War, was rocked today by the arrest of a second suspected East German spy who was in the heart of Bonn’s intelligence community.

The federal prosecutor’s office said the arrest of the top counterintelligence official was “a particularly grave case of treason.”

And the German magazine Stern described the arrest last week of a woman who helped prepare Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s weekly intelligence reports as the most serious espionage case in the history of post-war Germany.

Government officials, clearly embarrassed that their intelligence network had been compromised for years, were unwilling to talk about the arrests but acknowledged there will probably be more cases now that Germany is unified.

“Certainly there are countless agents in Germany,” said an Interior Ministry spokesman at today’s regular government news conference.

The spokesman said information came from former East German agents who came to the West after the fall of the hard-line Communist regime in East Berlin late last year.

The senior official under arrest, identified only as Klaus K., was a veteran of 28 years in counterintelligence. The federal prosecutor’s office said he had been paid since 1982 to give information to East Germany’s former Ministry for State Security (Stasi).

He received about $2,500 a month and in eight years had amassed around $320,000 from the Stasi, a statement said.

In his position in Bonn’s counterintelligence service, the 54-year-old man from the Cologne area was suspected of passing on “top secret” information revealing what Bonn knew about East German spying activities. His last contact with Stasi agents was in February in Austria, the statement said.