Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  Deep inside East Germany, West Berlin was a perfect launching pad for intelligence operations into Soviet-controlled territory. U.S., British, and French national intelligence agencies used a vast array of collection methods to develop a clearer picture of Warsaw Pact intentions on their westernmost frontier. For a newly minted intelligence officer, it was the place to be.

  Not to be outdone, Soviet and East German intelligence agencies—the KGB, GRU, and the HVA, the foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi—aggressively spied on the Allies in West Berlin and West Germany. Nothing was off-limits for them, including attempts to blackmail U.S. and NATO soldiers and diplomats, not unlike what they were doing with their own people, using sophisticated methods to learn about then exploit any perceived weaknesses, including problems at work, financial difficulties, or sexual weaknesses. Elaborate plots were launched to ensnare their victims and trap them inside interlocking rings of deceit.

  On East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, like the grinding gears of massive machinery in constant motion, the main Stasi headquarters functioned at full bore. The gargantuan complex, made up of forty concrete buildings and labyrinths of halls and offices, housed a staff of more than thirty thousand Stasi officers, who worked in some forty departments, assigned round the clock to spying, reading people’s mail, listening in on private telephone conversations, tracking targets, and recruiting agents.

  Main Department VIII, known as Observation, kept an eye on East German citizens through its vast informant network, in which Stasi agents spent their time thinking up new ways to manipulate people and pressure them to spy on one another. Main Department II, Counterintelligence, carried out surveillance, including tracking and wiretapping of foreign diplomats. The Stasi even had a department to spy on its own personnel.

  Throughout the East, the Stasi now employed some 90,000 people full-time, plus nearly 175,000 unofficial informants and some 1,500 others as moles in West German offices and in the West German government.

  Several miles away from Stasi headquarters, on the other side of the Wall, I worked at the American center of operations. The General Lucius D. Clay Headquarters Building, a German Luftwaffe headquarters during World War II, was named for the commander of U.S. Forces Europe after the German defeat. The sprawling three-winged complex now housed the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Berlin Command.

  In my first job as the Berlin Command’s intelligence briefing officer, I briefed scores of senior-ranking officials and politicians, including visiting congressmen and senators, about Berlin-based intelligence operations targeting the Soviets and East Germans.

  One day, I briefed President Reagan’s director of the CIA. Bill Casey didn’t appear especially intimidating as he sat at the head of the long, polished table in the conference room of the deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Casey was polite but sharp and asked a few pointed questions. At the conclusion of the briefing, Casey and his entourage left, and the major responsible for running a number of projects I had just briefed about approached me and asked if I wanted to swap my headquarters desk job for a chance to run real intelligence operations. I immediately accepted, but we both knew it would be an uphill battle as I would be the first woman to join the team. To my great relief, my nomination for the assignment was approved. I moved into my new office in the subterranean, windowless basement of the building.

  The Operations Branch ran a number of collection programs, including ground and airborne intelligence missions. The aerial missions used a helicopter and a small fixed-wing aircraft.

  Flying high, especially on a windy day, in a tiny, UV20 Pilatus turboprop airplane while focusing on the ground below through a thousand-millimeter lens, could be a challenge. The small, light aircraft, flown by seasoned U.S. Army pilots, bounced and lurched in the wind, causing the collectors in the back to fight against the movement and try to dismiss motion sickness in order to snap the perfect picture. Through the wide-open side door, harnessed to the aircraft, mission photographers leaned out of the airplane to photograph targets of interest in East Germany: industrial complexes, equipment storage sites, training areas, rail lines.

  Our photos often gleaned valuable information, but the missions were not without risks. One day as we flew high above Berlin, our pilots carefully tracing the absolute edge of the airspace in which we were permitted by treaty to operate within, a Soviet An-2 biplane appeared almost out of nowhere and flew to within feet of us. As our pilot maintained control of our plane, we could see the Soviet pilot’s face as he tried to intimidate us by repeatedly swerving his aircraft closer in, within clipping distance, then backing off in a crazy game of chicken. With orders to avoid confrontations, our pilots veered off and we returned to Tempelhof Airport.

  Visiting East Germany was off-limits to all U.S. and Allied personnel unless on official orders. The Huebner-Malinin Agreement of 1947, however, allowed a small number of representatives from each of the four countries to venture into each other’s sectors. Thus the U.S., British, and French had teams that regularly went into East Germany; reciprocally, the Soviets had teams that were permitted into West Berlin and West Germany.

  The official mission of these teams was to exercise rights guaranteed under the treaty to travel and circulate. But everyone really knew the main purpose was being used by both sides to collect intelligence.

  The Americans ran two ground reconnaissance programs that went into the East on a near-daily basis.

  The U.S. Soviet Sector Flag Tours collected intelligence in the Soviet sector, East Berlin, and the U.S. Military Liaison Mission, better known as USMLM or the Mission, in the rest of East Germany. The Brits ran similar programs, BRIXMIS; the French, FMLM.

  I was made team chief of the Soviet Sector Flag Tours. Because of the dangers of the mission, team members had always been men.

  The Flag Tour team consisted of some fifteen U.S. soldiers, infantrymen, intelligence specialists, and professional drivers who were handpicked for their ability to be cool under pressure and have good judgment. The soldiers came from all walks of life and backgrounds—a tall Texas farm boy with a heavy southern drawl, a streetwise Latino from the Bronx, a bookish African American college graduate, a rough-and-tumble horse rancher from Georgia.

  Critical to the mission was that they all work together as a close-knit team and have one another’s backs at all times. Teams of two, a tour leader and driver, drove into the East in olive-drab American sedans. Although required by agreement to be identifiable by Allied license plates and a national flag decal, nevertheless the decal was small and the cars were subdued, designed to blend in and not attract attention.

  Both Flag Tours and USMLM traveled in the East on city streets, on highways, and on rural roads and dirt trails as well—anywhere they could get a good picture or collect a valuable nugget of information. These missions were a vital opportunity for Washington to get information from up-close observations behind enemy lines. Our job was to have a good look around, to observe without being seen, to monitor and photograph anything that would help the Allies better understand the threat posed by the Soviets and East Germans.

  Flag Tour missions crossed into the east through Checkpoint Charlie, the border crossing point made famous in John le Carré spy novels and scores of Cold War films.

  Soviet and East German security agents were on top of us from the moment we crossed into the East. As missions gleaned valuable tidbits of information, constantly adding new pieces to the puzzle, they sometimes came with risks in the form of Stasi, VoPo, or KGB car chases, detentions, even deliberate rammings to force us to retreat or to scare us off. Soviet and East German soldiers were ordered to report Flag Tour sightings and encouraged to detain us, especially if we were found in sensitive areas, getting too close to something they didn’t want us to see. We constantly weighed risk versus gain, but invariably it was hard to calculate the danger of any given situation and sometimes we would get caught or our team members would get injured. East German citizens were told to report U
.S. Flag Tour sightings so that we could be tracked. We were spies, they were told, there to gather information that would ultimately be used to attack and destroy East Germany.

  As Flag Tour team chief, I met up regularly with USMLM at their administrative headquarters in West Berlin to coordinate and plan operations into the East.

  On one of my first trips to their offices, I met Major Arthur Nicholson. Nicholson was a boyish and academic-looking officer with a friendly demeanor and an easy smile. A veteran of more than one hundred tours, he was a rising star who had a reputation for being one of the army’s top, specially trained Russian Foreign Area Officers. He was married and had a young daughter.

  From the start, it was clear that Nicholson supported my selection as the first woman to serve in my job when some others did not agree with my appointment, and even resented the fact that a woman was assigned to the role of team chief of intelligence operations in the East. A consummate professional, kind and supportive, Nicholson was one of only a few who took time to mentor and professionally guide junior intelligence officers, including me. I was still new to my job when I first met Major Nicholson, who showed me around and introduced me to the mission team members. It was during that visit I learned that several months earlier French Mission Warrant Officer Adjudant-chef Philippe Mariotti had been killed in a car-ramming incident in East Germany.

  Stasi photograph of Mariotti car-ramming

  Courtesy of BStU

  One hundred and fifty miles southwest of Berlin, in Karl Marx City, Paradise Bungalow was now producing an abundance of food, allowing Heidi and Reinhard to become independent from having to rely on the state for food. They relished their newfound freedom and turned a bumper crop that year of fresh vegetables and fruits, including zucchini, peas, and a variety of berries that were turned into ample quantities of jarred sauces and preserves. Soon their plum and cherry trees would be big enough to yield fruit, too.

  More allotment gardeners erected sheds and cabins, so Reinhard helped to connect the patchwork of privatized bungalows to the nearby municipal power lines, giving them all access to electrical power for their radios and lights at night.

  By now a teenager, Cordula continued to attend her special sports school and train on the national junior swim team. Like most young people her age, she craved good music. One day, she made a surprising and most welcome discovery.

  She turned on the family’s KR 450 radio to hear Honecker making an address from the annual National Youth Festival.

  “You, the revolutionary guards,” he exclaimed, “fighters for peace and socialism! Your unshakable will now more than ever is required.” Uninterested, Cordula turned the dial, working it back and forth through the squelching until she picked up a faint trace of music. The reception poor, she came in closer, tuning the dial to hone the signal, and suddenly she had it. She had picked up West Germany’s Bayern 3 broadcast from Munich, and the radio channel, it seemed, was airing something called the International Hit Parade. For the first time, Cordula heard Michael Jackson and Madonna, and West Germany’s Nena singing “99 Luftballons.” She listened to celebrity interviews and stories about sports teams in the West, teen social issues and relationships. The Hit Parade, she learned, was aired at the same time every week. It quickly became Cordula’s favorite program and, as often as she could, she listened in.

  Back in Berlin, one of my first missions opened my eyes to the dangers that came with the new job. In East Berlin, we had been directed to take a closer look at a rail line where we had been tipped off by USMLM to watch for trains coming through loaded with the latest high-tech Soviet air defense systems. We knew there had been a military training exercise in the area and were told to be on our toes. The sun was setting when we made our way onto a winding path, which snaked into the woods and onto the back roads.

  To get to the rail line undetected, we had to come in through a back way, through a patch of allotment gardens. The dirt road, meant for tiny East German cars and wheelbarrows, was extremely narrow and so the driver maneuvered our car cautiously, taking great care not to nudge a fence or drive into someone’s cherished garden.

  A woman kneeling, working in her garden, looked up as our sedan passed slowly by. When she noticed the tiny American flag decal on our car, she slowly stood. Instead of fear or aggression, she stood up tall, a look of solidarity washing over her face. As we moved slowly by, she looked at me and tipped her head in a barely noticeable but deliberate, measured nod, a show of support, the corner of her lips curling up into a faint smile.

  Everything was going according to plan. All was quiet as we carefully proceeded onward. Suddenly the stillness was shattered by the thunderous revving of a large diesel engine at close range, the vehicle gunning in our direction. From a hiding place in the woods, some fifty feet away, a large, eight-ton, military-green TATRA truck lurched from its hiding place in the forest and came roaring toward us at breakneck speed, its power and large size easily capable of crushing our sedan.

  My driver slammed the car in reverse and we sped backward in a spray of gravel and dirt. The TATRA lurched again, fighting to get to us, and just missed ramming our front passenger’s side as it smashed through carefully groomed gardens, taking a chain-link fence with it. It was a close call. We were relieved as we made our way back onto the main road, then went on to check out a few other points of interest before returning to Checkpoint Charlie.

  Spies on spies. These photographs of the author’s team on an intelligence-collection mission in East Berlin were taken by the Stasi secret police. The caption reads: “Spy activity by members of U.S. military intelligence on train facilities in the capital of Berlin.”

  Courtesy of BStU

  I told no one in my family about what I did in Berlin, except for my brother Albert, now a U.S. Army helicopter pilot (with a security clearance). When he visited me in Berlin I put him on a Flag Tour, which thankfully went off without incident.

  Stasi photograph of USMLM on mission in East Germany

  Courtesy of BStU

  BRIXMIS on mission in East Germany

  Courtesy of BRIXMIS Association

  20

  FACE-TO-FACE WITH HONECKER

  MISSION IN LUDWIGSLUST

  (1984–1985)

  The situation in the world today is highly complex, very tense. I would even go so far as to say, it is explosive.

  —General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev

  One day, Major Nicholson invited me and a few other junior intelligence officers to the USMLM house in Potsdam, East Germany. The Potsdam House was the jump-off point for USMLM teams setting out on tour in East Germany, and was also where mission personnel hosted receptions and ceremonies in their official capacity of furthering cooperation with their Soviet counterparts.

  In the world of intelligence operations against the Soviets, USMLM tour officers and their British counterparts, BRIXMIS, were considered the best in the business. They were highly trained army, air force, and marine officers, usually majors, who spoke Russian and had academic backgrounds in Soviet studies, many having earned advanced degrees from the most prestigious universities. The French also had collection teams that were renowned for their daring.

  I marked the upcoming visit on my calendar, and looked forward to seeing the Potsdam House for the first time.

  By now, fifteen-year-old Cordula was swimming every day, training intensively among the country’s best young junior athletes and hoping to one day get a chance to compete for a spot on the national team. East Germany entered every international competition with something to prove. In the 1980 Olympics, with the U.S. boycotting in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the East Germans came in a strong second place in both total medal and gold medal counts, just behind the Soviet team. In 1984, the Soviet Union, along with other Eastern Bloc countries, including East Germany, shot back by not participating in the Los Angeles Olympic Games due to what they called “anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the Unit
ed States.” Despite missing the 1984 Summer Games, East Germany’s total Olympic medal count between 1968 and 1988 would rival that of the Soviet Union and United States, and also outnumber West Germany’s count by three to one.

  With East German sports soaring to new heights, the world held its breath every time East German athletes competed; everyone expected something spectacular to happen and records to break. The immensely proud citizens of East Germany ecstatically cheered their country’s phenomenal athletic successes, becoming temporarily distracted from the limitations of their lives and the hardships plaguing their country.

  But behind the scenes, what Honecker and the country’s cadre of trainers knew and the rest of the world, East German citizens, and even the athletes themselves often did not was that, while the regime and the country reveled in its newfound superstar status, all along the East Germans had been cheating. This was the world’s first example of state-sponsored doping. While some of their athletes’ successes could unquestionably be attributed to pure talent, radical cutting-edge approaches to stretching the limits of the human body, and super-intensive training practices, some of their top athletes were also gaining an unfair advantage by being fed performance-enhancing drugs.

  As this information came to light, a pall fell over all East Germany’s athletic accomplishments, and a spotlight of scrutiny cast doubt every time an East German shattered a world record. Now the police state with the dismal human rights record added another failure to its list and saw its global reputation plummet.

  On October 7, once again the haunting gray hues of the country gave way to an explosion of color to show off the military might of the communist state, this time to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of East Germany. As usual, Honecker trumped up the country’s progress, proclaiming, “This country is nowadays one of the most advanced industrial nations in the world.”