For CIA officers serving in the Soviet bloc, being under surveillance was such a constant part of life that it sometimes helped to humanize their ever-present shadows. So they came up with nicknames for their followers, like Curly. Occasionally, there were even opportunities for small exchanges of professional courtesy between the hunters and the hunted. At the end of his tour of duty in Eastern Europe, one CIA officer stopped on his way to the airport and left a package by the side of the road. Inside was a case of beer, a going-away present for the surveillance team that he knew would shortly stop to examine his last dead drop.
Curly had one distinct habit: He usually drove the same car. Even in a country with such nondescript automobiles, the team in East Berlin could eventually recognize Curly and his car on first sight. One day while taking a walk near his East Berlin home, Rolph’s predecessor as East Berlin station chief noticed a car parked outside an apartment building in his neighborhood. It was Curly’s car, he was certain.
From then on, the CIA station chief made a point of looking for Curly’s car each time he went out for a walk, and he saw it parked at the apartment complex in his neighborhood several more times before he transferred to a new assignment. The station chief left behind a report for Rolph, his successor, about his discovery. It wasn’t much, but it was the only shred of information about the Stasi surveillance teams that the CIA had to go on.
At first, Rolph thought Curly might park his car at the apartment complex because it was the site of a hidden Stasi observation post, since it was so close to the CIA chief’s home. Rolph was now living in the same house and frequently took walks to see Curly’s car for himself. But eventually he started to think that Curly might actually live in the apartment building. He probably parked his car there when he drove home at night.
Rolph decided he had to make sure. Early one morning, a CIA officer dressed like an East German worker mingled with the other commuters waiting at the bus stop right outside the apartment complex, hoping to catch sight of Curly emerging from the building on his way to work. Sure enough, Curly eventually walked out, got in his car, and drove off, confirming Rolph’s suspicion and giving the CIA the lead it needed.
The discovery of Curly’s home address offered the CIA a rare chance to approach an East German surveillance officer away from work—and the prying eyes of his supervisors and other MfS officers. Rolph had to consider the best way to approach Curly without spooking him. If the pitch wasn’t handled just right, Curly might suspect that it was a provocation by his bosses to test his loyalty. It was decided that Rolph’s predecessor as station chief, whom Curly knew on sight, should come back from West Berlin to carry the message.
At about 6:00 A.M. on a workday, just before Curly left the apartment building, the former station chief left an envelope under the windshield wiper on Curly’s car. Inside the envelope was a letter with a lucrative proposal for him to become a spy for the United States. The American then stood across the street and waited for Curly to come out of the apartment complex to drive to work. The former East Berlin station chief took the extraordinary measure of waiting around after leaving the letter because he wanted to make certain that Curly saw him when he picked up the note. The whole point of the former chief’s involvement in the operation was to make sure Curly saw a man he knew to be a CIA officer—he’d then know that the letter wasn’t part of a ruse engineered by the Stasi.
When Curly came out to his car, he found the envelope and looked across the street at the American. As Curly read the instructions that had been left for him to contact the CIA if he wanted to become a spy, the former station chief quietly disappeared.
Two days later, David Rolph drove past the site where Curly was supposed to leave a sign if he wanted to work for the CIA. He was ecstatic when he saw a chalk mark that signaled Curly was ready to spy. Over the next few months, Rolph’s deputy and Curly met repeatedly in hotels around West Berlin, as the German poured out everything he knew about Stasi surveillance. The case marked the first time the CIA had recruited an active duty surveillance officer in East Germany. The excitement in Langley was palpable. Lonely, backwater East Berlin might finally begin to pay off.
Curly became such an important agent that Rolph grew worried when he was out of touch for very long. After losing contact with him for a time, Rolph’s deputy decided to wait for him at a bus stop across from his apartment early one morning, to make sure that everything was all right. When Curly showed up, the two had a long talk and then hugged like long-lost friends. The CIA officer wrote a cable to headquarters describing the meeting and explained how his talk with the German had convinced him that Curly was a legitimate agent.
“I looked into his eyes,” the CIA officer wrote, “and I realized that he was good.”
Warsaw, July 20, 1989
Gromoslaw Czempinski had seen it coming for months. As a professional intelligence officer, Gromek, as his friends called him, was an astute judge of politics and people, and he could tell that the regime he’d worked for since he’d joined the service in 1972 was finished. Beset by economic stagnation and increasingly militant strikes, Poland’s Communist rulers had grudgingly opened roundtable negotiations with Poland’s burgeoning democratic movement—Solidarity—and had finally agreed to hold elections in June. The Party seemed to think it could manage the outcome and limit Solidarity’s political influence. The fix, they thought, was in.
But Czempinski knew better. Poland’s foreign intelligence service had well-placed spies inside Solidarity—better than those reporting to the SB, the internal security service—so Czempinski and his colleagues had a pretty good inkling that Solidarity was on the verge of a sweeping victory. The Communists were in for a surprise.
The foreign intelligence service decided not to wait for the final results. Months before the elections, officials throughout the Intelligence and Counterintelligence Bureau, where Czempinski worked, started to destroy documents in anticipation of the end of Communist rule. The destruction of the files, mainly those involving individual agents and informants, started in January and was conducted on a massive scale before the first vote was cast in June.
Among the most sensitive files were those dealing with Solidarity. When the trade union movement first burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, the foreign intelligence service had created a special branch to monitor ties between Solidarity and the CIA and other Western organizations. They had developed a network of agents inside Solidarity to help gather information about financial connections with the CIA, and by 1989, Polish intelligence was convinced that the links between Langley and Solidarity were extensive. The problem was, they overstated the case. While the CIA had provided covert assistance—printing presses, money, and some specialized equipment—so did the AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church. In any event, Western support was not the crucial factor in Solidarity’s ultimate triumph.
Still, key Polish intelligence officials were convinced that the CIA would continue its covert actions for as long as it took to topple the regime, and they didn’t think there was anything their government could do to stop it. Their belief in the intimidating power of the CIA sapped their confidence and played into their fatalistic conclusion that the downfall of the regime was inevitable. So by the time of Solidarity’s stunning and sweeping victory in June, Polish intelligence had destroyed virtually all of the files of the special branch devoted to spying on Solidarity. Aleksandr Makowski, one of the officers running the special branch, wanted to be able to say truthfully, when the new Solidarity government took over, that “the files were apparently gone.”
Even with the most sensitive and incriminating files now destroyed, Czempinski and his colleagues had no idea what their fate would be under the new government. A tall, hawk-nosed man with a piercing stare, Czempinski had, until this revolution, enjoyed a rapid rise through the ranks of Polish intelligence. He’d studied economics in college before he was recruited to join Polish intelligence in 1972. He took some pride in the fact that he was o
ne of the first graduates of Poland’s new espionage training school and that his first assignment, a tribute to his performance in school, had been to Chicago, at the heart of the American empire. In 1976, a defector gave the CIA and FBI the identities of the Polish intelligence officers stationed in the United States, so Czempinski was recalled to Warsaw before the Americans had a chance to kick him out. He then moved into counterintelligence and by 1989 had become chief of the counterintelligence branch of the foreign intelligence service. He had always been praised for his boldness and imagination, but now his career was in the hands of the steelworkers, union leaders, and former lawyers who had spent time underground or in prison for their defiance of the regime he had served. Czempinski was an optimist and a survivor, but even he had doubts about the future.
Langley, September 18, 1989
“What’s going on in Leipzig?” I said to no one in particular at the morning staff meeting with the group managing Eastern Europe. It was the third week in a row that the East Germans had held their Mon-day demonstrations setting off from the twelfth-century St. Nicholas Church in the old city. They’d kicked off the demonstrations on September 4 with fewer than a thousand marchers chanting, “Down with the Stasi”; three weeks later, their numbers had swollen to around ten thousand. The Stasi had tried to crack down, but they’d been too timid and it didn’t seem to be having any effect.
“Who knows,” Redmond answered curtly. “But it’s pretty clear Honecker’s losing control.”
The harsh truth was that we didn’t have any spies in place who could give us much insight into the plans of the East German government or, for that matter, the intentions of the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin. Still, it was pretty clear that Eric Honecker, secretary general of the German Democratic Republic, was in a bind. When the Hungarians snipped the barbed wire and opened a route to the West, thousands of East Germans made their way to Hungary and streamed across the border into Austria. Honecker had blocked travel to Hungary, but that had only convinced the desperate East Germans to try to get out through Czechoslovakia. The West German embassy in Prague was now swamped with asylum seekers.
“Honecker knows Gorbachev won’t bail him out,” said Steve Weber, the division COPS, or chief of operations. “Sees him as worse than Brezhnev—part of the problem, not the solution.”
The Soviet Union still had more than half a million troops in Eastern Europe, including about four hundred thousand in East Germany, the rest mostly in Hungary. But Gorbachev didn’t seem to want to use his troops to restore order. Honecker had apparently told him that if it was up to him, the Berlin Wall would still be standing in a hundred years. Gorbachev let him know he wanted no part of that. He was on his own.
“The White House is playing its cards pretty close,” I said, thinking back to my last meeting at the NSC a week earlier. “They think—actually, they hope—they’ve been able to convince Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that we’re not trying to steamroll them in Eastern Europe. What they’re angling for now is that no one overreacts and tries to stop whatever’s happening.”
The White House, like everyone else, was trying to develop a strategy on the fly, reacting to the fast-moving events day by day. No one in Washington had any sense of control or even of what the options would be in a month. What I did know was that the policy makers would soon be turning to us for answers, and we didn’t have them. Things were moving so fast that it was hard even to know the right questions to ask.
That morning’s session ended with a sense of expectation. Something was about to explode in East Germany, but nobody at Langley or across the river in Washington had a clue what it was. One thing I did know was that we’d have to find a way to get a handle on things, to get ahead of the daily rush of events. We’d have to turn things around pretty quickly if we wanted to have a prayer of giving the NSC what they wanted. “Let’s understand what we’re about from here on out,” I’d said in closing. “And that’s trying to be relevant.”
I’d had a few months to take a close look at the division and now had a good idea where the strengths were, as well as the weaknesses.
In the front office, Redmond, the deputy division chief, was the operational continuity. He quite literally knew where the bodies were buried, but that was part of the problem. He was smart, no mistake about that, but he was so caught up in the 1985 problems that I wasn’t sure I’d have him with me for the long haul.
Steve Weber was another matter. Weber had been born in Hungary before World War II and had been a kid when the war ended and the Communists took over. He’d ended up on the wrong side of the Hungarian security services and found himself in a forced labor battalion in the late 1950s. Somehow he’d forged a travel document and made his way to the West, where he was picked up by U.S. Army intelligence. After a few years working on the margins of the espionage world, Weber was recruited by the CIA, and now, a quarter century later, this Hungarian refugee was my COPS, with the equivalent rank of a two-star general. Only in America, I thought every time I looked at Weber. I’d decided I could rely on the smooth, gray-haired Hungarian operator for unvarnished counsel.
My counterintelligence chief, John O’Reilly, was a total iconoclast. Nothing was sacred to O’R, as we called him, and nobody was safe from his sharp wit. In his rabbit warren of SE counterintelligence, he surrounded himself with the quirky vestiges of espionage history, including an eight-by-twelve glossy of James Jesus Angleton staring through his horn-rimmed glasses. On a table below the photograph was a Buddhist prayer wheel that visitors couldn’t resist picking up and spinning as they sought counsel from the counterintelligence chief. O’Reilly had been in SE counterintelligence for years. He had the history of the division down cold and the scuttlebutt even better. He’d already sensed that the center of gravity was shifting and that SE had a new role to play. I decided I’d bring O’R up to the front office. I wanted him closer when things started getting interesting.
East Berlin, October 1989
David Rolph’s deputy walked into the CIA’s East Berlin Station on a Saturday afternoon with a pale and stunned face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Curly’s bad. He’s been controlled since the beginning.”
The CIA officer had just returned from West Berlin, where he’d held his first meeting with another Stasi officer, who’d volunteered by dropping a letter into his car. The Stasi man had started off the meeting by saying that he knew Curly was working for the Americans, and he also knew when and where they met. Curly had reported the initial approach and had been working as a double ever since. After hearing of the CIA’s approach to Curly, this second Stasi man decided that he would step in and become a legitimate agent.
While Curly turned out to be a Stasi-controlled operation, this second Stasi volunteer was genuine. The recruitment pitch to Curly hadn’t worked, but his report of the contact—complete with the amount of money the Americans were offering—planted the seeds of espionage in this second Stasi officer’s mind. He in turn would soon become the most important American spy in East Germany, turning over thousands of pages of documents from inside the Stasi, including organization charts and rosters of MfS and HVA officers. Those rosters would come in handy within a few weeks, when the East German nation began to crumble.
Langley, October 18, 1989
Steve Weber stuck his head in my office and said, “Honecker just resigned.”
“What!”
“Yeah. Reasons of health, is what they’re saying.”
“Who’s taking over?” I asked.
“Egon Krenz, his deputy.”
“What’s next?” I asked, knowing there was no ready answer.
“No telling,” Weber said.
East Berlin, 1900 Hours, November 9, 1989
David Rolph was still at work in the early evening when he heard that a spokesman for the East German government had just said something on the radio that caught him—and the entire East German nation—by surprise. It was a statement, made casually
and off the cuff, that helped bring down the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.
For weeks, protests in the streets of East Germany’s major cities had been growing, and the new East German leader, Egon Krenz, found that none of the regime’s tried-and-true tactics were working to stem the tide of discontent. The mass exodus of East Germans through Hungary and Czechoslovakia over the proceeding months had been stanched only by draconian new travel restrictions; now East Germans were not only prevented from traveling to the West, they were barred from much of Eastern Europe as well. Anger welled up as a result. Between October 30 and November 4, an estimated 1.4 million people marched in 210 separate demonstrations around the country, according to the cold calculations of the ever watchful MfS.
And as the ranks of the protesters swelled, so did their demands. In addition to freedom to travel, they now wanted freedom at home. They wanted free elections and official recognition of the growing opposition groups.
Krenz had promised to ease the travel restrictions, but Party and government bureaucrats feared that a mass exodus would result, one that would threaten East Germany’s continued existence. Krenz talked with Gorbachev about the situation on November 1. Like Honecker before him, he was told that Moscow wasn’t going to provide economic or military support to keep the regime afloat.
Krenz’s halfway measures for limited changes in travel rules served only to further incite the demonstrators. He was running out of maneuvering room. Under intense political and time constraints, the East German Politburo once again tried to hammer out new travel regulations in early November. The new regulations were designed to ease the pressure on the regime, but they were definitely not intended to provide unlimited freedom to travel to the West for East German citizens.
It was at this point that confusion stepped in to play a critical role. Krenz asked Politburo member Gunter Schabowski, then serving as Party spokesman, to announce the new rules. Schabowski was an unfortunate choice. He hadn’t been adequately briefed on the details of the new regulations and hadn’t even carefully read the text of the government’s proposals before he spoke to the press at about 7:00 P.M. on November 9.
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