West Berliners were understandably appalled by what happened to their fellow citizens in the East on June 17. Some took out their rage on the Soviet war memorial just west of the Brandenburg Gate, but the British troops guarding the site beat them back. Groups from the West placed memorials to the East Germans killed in the uprising, and the West German Senate renamed the boulevard running through the Tiergarten (and past the Soviet memorial) Strasse des 17. Juni—another salvo in the street sign wars.
Like the West Berliners, the government in Bonn was obliged to stand by helplessly as the East German workers’ uprising was suppressed. Chagrined by its impotence, but determined to exploit the affair as a propaganda victory for the West, Bonn ordered that June 17 henceforth be set aside as a day of commemoration for the abortive uprising. For years thereafter West German politicians gave speeches praising the courage of the East German workers who—it was claimed—had tried to overturn the tyranny of communism and end the injustice of German division. Yet almost from the beginning, most ordinary West Germans treated this anniversary not as a moment for political reflection but as just another holiday. Dwelling on the problems of the East brought on unwelcome feelings of guilt. As early as 1954, Fritz Stern noted that many West Germans had begun to “resent the East Germans who stand as a muted reproach to their enjoyment of prosperity.”
Spy Stories
In July 1954, a little more than a year after the East German uprising, West Germany suffered a humiliation of its own, when Otto John, chief of Bonn’s counterintelligence service, the Bundesvervassungsschutz (Office for Constitutional Protection, BfV) slipped from West Berlin into the Hanptstadt der DDR and announced that he had changed his loyalties. While John’s apparent defection came as a huge shock, no one was surprised that he chose Berlin as his jumping-off point. Standing directly on the Cold War fault line but affording relatively free passage across the ideological divide, Berlin in the 1950s surpassed Vienna as postwar Europe’s capital of espionage. Some eighty spy agencies and their various front organizations, disguised as everything from jam exporters to research institutes, worked the city. Spooks were so thick on the ground that a dozen or so of them might find themselves together in the same seedy Kneipe, each trying to ignore the presence of the others. With spy-story writers and espionage buffs also sweeping down on the city, Gold War Berlin became indelibly associated in the popular imagination with cloak-and-dagger operations carried out in half-lit, half-ruined streets.
Markus Wolf, photographed in 1991
Befitting Berlin’s importance to the Soviet Union, the biggest espionage player in town was the Soviet state security committee, the Komitet gosudarstvennoì bezopasnosti (KGB), which maintained over 800 operatives in 1953, and many more after the East German uprising. Its headquarters was a sprawling former hospital building within the Soviet complex at Karlshorst. From there orders went out to agents all over West Germany and Western Europe to steal sensitive secrets, recruit promising new talent, and, of course, to deal in the appropriate manner with fellow spies who had fallen from the correct path.
The Soviets had plenty of help from their East German clients. Because of language and cultural barriers, Russia’s occupation authorities could not maintain surveillance within the GDR or effectively penetrate West Germany on their own. In 1950 Moscow authorized the establishment of a native secret police agency—the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi—whose primary concerns were monitoring and molding the political climate in the GDR. Over the next forty years the Stasi would evolve into a truly Orwellian organization, weaseling its way into virtually every aspect of East German life. (Tellingly, the Stasi was larger per capita than the Nazi Gestapo, and also maintained a much larger army of informal snoops.) As of 1951, the Stasi had a foreign intelligence component, initially called the Institute for Economic Research, later renamed the Hauptverwaltung-Aufklärung (Main Administration for Intelligence, HVA). Its job was to run spies in the West and to counter enemy spy activity within the GDR.
The Stasi’s most brilliant intelligence operative was Markus (Mischa) Wolf, the model for John Le Carré’s redoubtable “Karla.” As the son of Friedrich Wolf, a well-known Jewish-Communist intellectual, young Markus Wolf had fled with his family to Moscow in 1934. He lived there until 1941, learning Russian and managing to identify with his new home despite the purges that were carrying away many German exiles. When Germany invaded Russia he was evacuated to distant Kazakhstan, then to Bashkira, where in a Comintern school he was trained to promote the international proletarian revolution. After the German defeat he was sent back to his homeland to help Comrade Ulbricht bring the revolution to Berlin. Feeling more Russian than German, he could not understand why the Berliners let the Russian soldiers’ orgy of rapine in the city sour their attitude toward the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, he was sophisticated enough to see that the Russians were often out of their depth in the German capital. As an editorial assistant at Berlin Radio, he struggled to convince the Soviet programmers that an exclusive diet of propaganda speeches was driving East German listeners into the arms of RIAS. He began displaying such a keen aptitude for political intrigue that he was made a counselor in East Germany’s new embassy in Moscow. In 1951 he was brought back to Berlin to work in the Stasi’s Institute for Economic Research, its spy agency. After a little more than one year, Wolf was asked to take over the agency’s leadership from its founder, Anton Ackermann, whose advocacy of a separate “German road to Socialism” had alienated Ulbricht.
In the 1950s Wolf’s agency smuggled hundreds of agents into West Germany, mainly through Berlin. When the East German refugee stream increased following the 1953 uprising, Wolf ensured that plenty of Stasi spies swam along with the current. Wolf also convinced many West Germans to spy for the Stasi. Some agreed to do so for ideological reasons, while others did it for sex. Though East Germany was a prudish state, the Stasi became expert in the use of the “honeypot”—the sticky-sweet snares set by attractive young women (and sometimes men), who used their sexual skills to coax secrets out of lonely westerners. Since prostitution was illegal in the GDR, an army of out-of-work whores was available as bait for the Stasi love-traps.
Wolf and his colleagues greatly admired the British secret service, which was the first of the Western intelligence agencies to establish regular operations in Berlin. Britain’s MI6 set up shop in a building belonging to Hitler’s Olympic complex, perhaps an appropriate choice, since some of its native agents were ex-Nazis, among them Klaus Barbie. The homegrown operatives, on the other hand, tended to be recruited via the old-boy network, not necessarily the best way to locate reliable talent. As is well known, some of England’s top spooks—the so-called Cambridge spies—turned out to be double agents in the pay of Moscow. The Berlin branch of MI6 under Peter Lunn was relatively efficient, but it was also by no means mole-free.
In the late 1940s Washington’s new intelligence organization, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), took over the Office of Strategic Services’s Berlin Operations Base (BOB) and developed it into the agency’s primary European operating post. Berlin was key to the CIA because in the presatellite era it offered the best vantage point in the world from which to snoop on the Soviet Union. As one CIA expert noted, “When the Soviet commandant in Bucharest or Warsaw called Moscow the call went through Berlin.” Berlin also afforded American spies their closest proximity to the KGB, their mighty rival. Like missionaries in the bush, the two agencies competed for native souls while trying to convert each other. BOB’s first major “turn” was Colonel Pyotr Popov, a Soviet military intelligence operative who betrayed the names of many of his colleagues working in the West. With its deep pockets, the CIA also funded a number of native front organizations whose job was to destabilize the GDR regime. The Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (Fighting Association against Inhumanity), for example, dropped anti-Communist leaflets from balloons and falsified GDR documents such as postage stamps. Their version of the Ulbricht stamp featured a noose around the dictator’s neck.