Cold War Spy Trader Denies Extortion : Germany: Lawyer who brokered East-West swaps is accused of forcing former clients to sell their assets to gain freedom.

Former East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, the Communist government’s top Cold War spy trader and broker of political prisoners, on Monday denied charges that he blackmailed former clients into selling their assets in order to gain freedom.

The 69-year-old Vogel told a Berlin court that the 21 cases of extortion he is accused of committing are “blind to history and estranged from the reality of law.” He also faces a perjury charge in one of the cases.

Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall five years ago this week, Vogel was one of the Communist world’s few millionaires and a respected East-West go-between who negotiated freedom for 33,755 East German political prisoners in exchange for $2.3 billion from the West German government.

Among his biggest spy deals was the 1962 exchange of American pilot Francis Gary Powers, shot down on a reconnaissance mission in a U-2 plane over the Soviet Union, for Rudolf Abel, an agent of the former Soviet Union’s secret service who was jailed in the United States.

In 1986, Vogel negotiated the trade of Soviet Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky--now Natan Sharansky--for Communist spies held in the West. And he handled the cases of about 200,000 other East Germans allowed to emigrate for reasons of family reunification.

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Vogel is accused of forcing former clients to sell their houses, automobiles and other properties below value in order to arrange their emigration papers. The properties then allegedly ended up in the hands of Vogel’s friends and party and security police officials.

Vogel argues that back then East German law required the sale of property as a prerequisite to emigration, and that his clients often begged him to get rid of their possessions so they could leave the country.

He says the properties had little market value under the Communist system, but that his clients want them back now that capitalism has returned to the east and they are worth much more.

“At the time, nothing could be quick and unbureaucratic enough (for my clients). None of the clients then would have thought of accusing me of a breach of form,” he said.

Prosecutors view Vogel as a member of the East German ruling elite and, as such, partly responsible for its repression. The court said he was not a decision-maker but “a high-ranking tool” of the regime.

Vogel, on the other hand, sees himself as someone who worked to mitigate injustices of the old system, helping thousands of East Germans gain their freedom.

Vogel denies the prosecution’s charge that he worked for the Stasi, or secret police, from 1953 to 1989, although Stasi files released since the collapse of the Berlin Wall have shown that the secret police had given him the code name “Georg” and that for decades he collaborated closely with the agency that held the political prisoners whose fate he was negotiating.

“One had to talk to the powerful and not to the powerless. Because I had contact with the powerful, (people) came from East and West and from all over the world to me, and I don’t let myself be reproached for this today,” Vogel said.

The trial, which officially opened Wednesday but recessed until Monday, is expected to last at least 30 days. Vogel faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted.