“What’s Redmond think?”
I paused for a second before answering Stolz’s question. “Like me. Depends on the day. But whatever he says, I believe deep down he thinks the operation is good. And he has no doubts that we should go ahead with the exfil. That’s my position, too. If PROLOGUE is bad, there’s got to be a reason why they’ve been running him at us for two years. If he’s good, he’ll be pure gold.”
“Can’t we insist that he give us the answer to one hard question before we pull him out?” Twetten asked.
“We’ve tried that for two years. Every time we push him he says he’s holding out till we get him out. Then he’s ours, he says. Who can argue with that? This guy is a KGB counterintelligence officer. We’ve got that confirmed. If we were in his shoes, we’d hold out till we’d been sprung.”
“What did Gerber think of the guy?” Stolz fidgeted a little when he asked the question.
“You tell me,” I said. “Burton and I haven’t talked. And he doesn’t vote in my straw polls. But my spies tell me that he had his doubts. Like everybody.”
“Your recommendation?” Stolz asked. He liked consensus.
“Let’s do it.”
Turning to Twetten: “Tom?”
“What do we have to lose?”
“Then let’s do it.” Stolz showed no reluctance at the decision. “When do we brief the judge?” CIA Director William Webster would have to approve the plan to exfiltrate PROLOGUE. If anything went wrong, it could spark a diplomatic incident.
“Next week, when we get him to sign off on the U.S. passport. He’ll have to take that to Larry Eagleburger.” The CIA could falsify Soviet identity documents, but it couldn’t issue a false American passport for one of its spies without the State Department’s approval.
“Get the package together,” said Stolz, signaling that the meeting was over.
East Berlin, April 15, 1990
Where was that damn colonel?
That was the question that CIA officers in both West and East Berlin were asking. The missing colonel from the American Department of the HVA, East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, was one of the top-priority targets of the CIA’s aggressive new campaign to recruit agents from what was left of East Germany’s security services. He had once been stationed in New York, and the CIA believed that he almost certainly knew the identities of American spies who had worked for East Germany. Like thousands of other officers from the disintegrating HVA and MfS, he had just been fired, and as far as the CIA was concerned, he was now one of the most important unemployed men in East Germany. If the CIA could entice him to talk, he might be able to help roll up long-running spy operations against the United States. But the colonel seemed to have disappeared. Finding him was a major operation.
Paul Redmond’s January visit had shaken up the East Berlin Station, and David Rolph had gotten the message that it was time to become more aggressive. It didn’t take him long to figure out how. Rolph and the East Berlin Station came up with a plan to launch a brutally simple frontal assault on the crumbling Stasi, beginning with a series of cold pitches to as many HVA and MfS officers as possible. Case officers were told to dispense with the usual operational foreplay of spotting, assessing, and gaining access to their targets. Instead, they’d track them down and bluntly ask them if they wanted a last-minute insurance policy against uncertainty. There were few subtleties involved. The idea was to be up front and in their faces, offering a simple bargain: information for cash. More and more HVA and MfS officers were being laid off each day. If the CIA didn’t act now, they might all simply go home and forget the secrets they were carrying around in their heads.
Armed with organizational charts and rosters provided by their Stasi source, as well as other information about the identities of MfS and HVA officers collected over the years, Rolph and his case officers started calling East German intelligence officers at night at their homes. First calling from pay phones in West Berlin and later from East Berlin, the CIA officers reminded each East German intelligence officer of his current plight. “I represent the Western services,” they’d then say. “Would you be interested in working with us?”
The telephone pitches were blunt and bold—and they didn’t work. Invariably, the East Germans would hang up on the Americans, perhaps suspecting that it was a hoax or even a provocation by the Stasi to test the loyalty of its remaining officer corps. East Germany’s culture of suspicion was dying hard. After two or three luckless weeks, the CIA scrapped its telephone campaign and decided to start knocking on doors. In order to reinforce the small East Berlin Station, officers from the West Berlin base joined in as well.
CIA case officers based in West Berlin had only rarely been involved in operations in the East in the recent past. The West Berlin base was subordinate to the CIA’s Bonn Station and focused on intelligence targets on its own turf. But there were so many potential recruitment targets in East Berlin now that David Rolph needed help, which explained why a CIA officer from West Berlin was now looking for that elusive HVA colonel.
Finally, a source in West Berlin was able to help the CIA track the colonel down. It turned out that the man who five months earlier had been a senior colonel in the HVA was now working as a doorman in Berlin, a downward slide symbolic of what was happening to the Stasi—and to East Germany. A case officer approached him, sat him down, and made his pitch. If he would tell the case officer about the American spies he had handled during his long career, the CIA would be generous. The colonel obviously needed money, and now he was being offered more than he could ever make in his new line of work.
The former HVA colonel looked at the American in disgust and responded with the only rebuke he could make. “You obviously know who I was,” he said. “And you now know what I have become. The only thing I have left is my honor. I have no intention of giving that up. Please do not come back again.”
The CIA officer was taken aback and suddenly felt a deep sense of professional respect for the man. No matter that he had served a corrupt and tyrannical regime that was now vanishing around him. The German would be a loyal officer until the end and would do his best to retain his dignity. The CIA officer said good-bye and then took him at his word. From then on, the CIA would leave him alone to fade away into the new Germany.
East Berlin, April 25, 1990
After years of failure and frustration, the CIA suddenly had a new and burgeoning network of spies in East Berlin, all brought on board over the space of just a few weeks. The telephone pitches hadn’t worked, but when the CIA switched tactics and decided to start going directly to the homes of current and former HVA and MfS officers to talk to them in person, the results improved almost immediately.
Not every man was like the HVA colonel, willing to put a dying country before his own future, and soon so many East Germans had agreed to cooperate that we were starting to wonder back at Langley how we could keep up with all of our new East German agents. We had to create a special East German Task Force just to keep up with the flow of intelligence from East Berlin.
To be sure, most were short-term agents. The Stasi officer who had revealed that Curly was a double agent was the only one who seemed destined to become a long-term asset. But the logistics of processing all the new intelligence was becoming difficult. The payments we were willing to make to former Stasi officers were also starting to decline, now that their information was becoming less valuable as East Germany edged closer to political oblivion.
Still, some of our new spies continued to bring unexpected intelligence windfalls when they walked off their jobs laden with secret Stasi documents. One agent outdid the rest: He looted an entire file room before leaving his job and volunteering to work for the West.
Early in the spring of 1990, West German counterintelligence officers based in Bavaria contacted the CIA’s base in Munich, seeking help with a new case. An East German had contacted them and told them he had a friend in the East who wanted to sell documents. Could the CIA, the We
st Germans asked, arrange to meet the man in the East? At the time, West German intelligence was still reluctant to conduct operations on its own in East Germany.
The request was routed to the CIA’s East Berlin Station, and the station’s most junior case officer was assigned to handle the case. The young American officer drove to a small village not far from East Berlin, called a phone number, and gave a “parole” to identify himself. The East German agreed to meet him.
That night, the CIA officer and the German drove separately out to some woods beyond the village, and then pulled their cars over into the dark. As the American walked over, the East German opened the trunk of his car, and the CIA officer saw that it was packed with bundles of documents wrapped in newspapers. As quickly as he could, he began transferring them to his own car. Before long, the CIA had the files in West Berlin ready for inspection.
The bundles turned out to be a vast compendium of the Stasi’s logs of thousands upon thousands of telephone wiretaps that the East Germans had conducted against individuals in West Berlin and West Germany. The files, which included some seventeen thousand index cards, showed the telephone numbers that the East Germans had tapped, cataloged how often their conversations had been recorded, and in some cases included the transcripts of individual calls. The records provided a road map to many of the Stasi’s operations in West Germany. They showed who had been targets of East German surveillance and investigation and so could help reveal how the East Germans had tried to penetrate its main target, the West German government. After sorting through and analyzing the files, the CIA turned them over to West German intelligence to examine.
Yet the records that the CIA really wanted—files from the most sensitive espionage cases of the HVA and MfS, including their joint operations with the KGB—were still out of reach. The crowds that had surged into Normannenstrasse in January hadn’t gotten them, either. Instead, the protesters had ripped open file drawers filled with the records of the banal, neighborly betrayals that had sadly been so commonplace under the Communist regime.
Only later did the CIA pick up hints that a few handpicked Stasi officers had already trucked the most sensitive files to East Berlin’s Schoenefeld Airport. From there, the boxed files were to be transported to Moscow. The Stasi was turning over its crown jewels to the KGB for safekeeping.
The most sensitive Stasi files were out of the CIA’s reach—for now.
It would take years for the CIA to obtain those sensitive files after they were in KGB custody, and when the agency did, it would find a wealth of information about East German intelligence operations against the West.
The political wheels were now grinding inevitably toward the eventual absorption of East Germany into West Germany, but the CIA was still very interested in recruiting high-ranking HVA and MfS officers, particularly those who could reveal the identities of any additional American spies. So the most attractive targets of the cold pitch campaign were always the HVA and MfS officers who had been involved in operations against the United States. At the top of the target list was HVA Colonel Jürgen Rogalla, chief of the American Department of the HVA.
David Rolph had never held out much hope that he would be able to convince Rogalla to spy for his old adversary. Like the HVA colonel, Rogalla was a hard-core Stasi man. But the agency was determined to give it a try, and Rogalla was tentatively given the code name GTPULSAR.
Rolph was surprised when, on his second attempt to contact Rogalla, the burly colonel invited him into his apartment in downtown East Berlin. Rogalla ushered him into his living room, and after the two sat down to chat, Rolph outlined his pitch. The CIA, Rolph told Rogalla, would be very generous if he agreed to help. Rolph tried to make it clear that a high-ranking officer like himself would be treated well by the CIA. While lower-level Stasi officers had received only modest cash payments, Rogalla’s cooperation would qualify him for resettlement in the United States.
Rogalla asked a few questions, saying he wanted to make certain he understood what Rolph was offering. Finally, he told Rolph he needed time to think about the offer and asked the CIA officer to come back to his apartment in two days. Rolph was wary of coming back; he knew that Rogalla could be setting him up for an ambush arrest or even for a roughing up by the KGB. But he agreed, and two days later he was back in the East German intelligence officer’s living room. Rogalla asked Rolph to go over his offer once more. Once he had finished, Rogalla told him that he had decided not to accept the CIA offer. Rolph thanked him for his time and was preparing to leave when Rogalla asked him to stay.
“I have someone here that I would like you to meet,” he said.
“No, thank you, that’s okay,” Rolph said. “I should be on my way.”
“I have been patient with you,” Rogalla said. “Now I would like you to please be patient with me.” Then he turned to the curtain separating the apartment’s living room from its small kitchen. “Herr General,” he called. “Please come in.”
With dramatic flair, the curtain was then swept aside and out stepped a silver-haired and impeccably dressed General Werner Grossman, chief of the HVA and successor to the retired legend, Markus Wolf.
Grossman shook hands with Rolph, and as they sat down to talk, Rolph felt a sense of relief that he hadn’t been arrested or that a squad of Stasi goons hadn’t stepped from behind the curtain.
“We know what you and your officers are doing,” Grossman told Rolph. “We know that you are harassing our officers and our retirees, and you are embarrassing them in front of their families.”
So the cold pitches were starting to bother them, Rolph thought. Probably because they are working. His mind was racing.
“We know that your service is better than this,” Grossman lectured Rolph with Teutonic bluntness. “This kind of activity is unprofessional. You must stop this at once.” He looked sternly at Rolph. “If you do not stop this harassment, we will go to the police. And if you persist after that, we will take this to the press.”
Rolph looked at Grossman, dumbfounded. How sad, he thought. A year ago, this man could order men to their deaths. Now, the worst threat that the chief of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung could level against the CIA was that he would talk to a newspaper reporter.
“General Grossman, it was a pleasure to meet you, but I have to tell you I have a job to do. You can do what you feel you have to do.” With that, Rolph stood, shook hands with Grossman and Rogalla, and walked out.
Rolph’s cable arrived on my desk the following morning. I shared it with the DCI, who had long since forgotten his statement a few months earlier that my team in East Berlin could be replaced if that was what was needed to exploit the situation.
I cabled David Rolph, telling him that his meeting with Rogalla and Grossman was clearly a unique event in the annals of CIA history and in any case officer’s career. I then followed up with a private channel cable, ending it with a historical perspective:
1. IN ADDITION TO OUR OFFICIAL RESPONSES TO YOUR SUPERB REPORT ON YOUR MEETING WITH ROGALLA AND THE GENERAL, I WOULD ONLY ADD THAT YOUR ACCOUNT WAS TREMENDOUSLY MOVING AND ALMOST REMINISCENT OF THE MIXTURE OF HONOR AND FATALISM SHOWN BY ANOTHER GENERATION OF GERMANS AT STALINGRAD. YOUR GENERAL GROSSMAN COULD HAVE EASILY BEEN VON PAULUS. ABOUT ALL WE NEEDED WAS A FINAL MESSAGE FROM THE FUHRER SAYING SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF HIS LAST MESSAGE TO PAULUS. “HUENDE WOLLT IHR EWIG LEBEN?” *
2. THIS IS HISTORY AND YOU ARE PART OF IT.
East Berlin, Late May 1990
With German reunification just four months away, it was time, we decided, for the CIA to have a little chat with Markus Wolf, the one man who embodied East German intelligence. A mythic figure in the world of espionage, Markus Wolf had run the HVA for most of its existence until his retirement in 1986.
His circumstances and stature had taken a turn for the worse in the last six months, and in the current climate he seemed likely to face a tough investigation not only of his involvement in the suppression of the citizens of East Germany,
but also of his contacts with international terrorist groups. Arrest and imprisonment were now very real threats for East Germany’s legendary spymaster, which meant that it was a good time for the CIA to make him an offer.
An American businessman with commercial interests in East Berlin had been in contact with one of his friends, and we’d asked the businessman to serve as the go-between. Wolf was asked if he would be willing to meet with the CIA, and he said yes, he would be willing to hear what we had to say. By now Wolf was familiar with the process. Earlier in May he’d received a similar offer from the West Germans—“Give us your top sources in West Germany and you’ll be free from prosecution and a considerably richer man,” they had told him, hoping to tempt him with the lure of material and personal security. Wolf had listened patiently and turned them down. Now it was time, he decided, to hear out the Americans and close the loop.
Gus Hathaway came out of retirement to make the approach. Hathaway and Rolph’s deputy met Wolf at his dacha in Prenden, outside of Berlin. Hathaway identified himself as the representative of the Director of the CIA, William Webster, and wasted no time in getting to the substance of his visit. Wolf’s wife, Andrea, would later dismiss Hathaway as a “typical bureaucrat.”
Hathaway found Wolf willing to listen, but not interested in coming over to the CIA. He treated the exchange as an entertainment—countering Hathaway’s offer of resettlement in California with the statement that life in Siberia wasn’t too bad, either. Wolf was all elusive affability and still a master of his game. He would later describe Hathaway as deadly serious in his efforts to get him to shed light on the terrible losses the CIA had suffered five years earlier.
After that brief meeting, no one ever returned to see if Markus Wolf had changed his mind. Hathaway left a typed card with a contact number in New York and a parole for Wolf to use should he ever want to get in touch, but we never heard from him again.
The Main Enemy Page 48