by Douglas Boyd
For all this information, he was awarded DM 400,000. Mielke’s rage at Stiller’s escape did not subside. After having him condemned to death in absentia, he gave orders that the turncoat should be tracked down and brought back ‘dead or alive’. His actual words were, ‘I want him brought back and, if that can’t be done, rendered harmless’.7 Several agents trained to carry out Smersh-type assassinations were placed on standby, but the security screen around Stiller was apparently impenetrable, despite a number of Stasi deep-penetration agents inside the BND and BfV. The claustrophobic high security around Stiller made Helga feel as though she was in prison. When Stiller was allowed to go windsurfing on Lake Garda under guard, to give him a break, she was not included in the party. While there, he picked up a pretty Italian girl for a brief affair, telling her his true identity before the BND bodyguards could haul him back to Munich.
This made his continued presence in Europe insecure, so he was shipped off to the USA for another three-month interrogation by the CIA, followed by a term in a secure language school to improve his English. To set him up in his new identity as Hans-Peter Fischer, he was also given a social security number, credit cards and a quarter-million dollars – which he proceeded to lose in its entirety by gambling on the Stock Exchange, whose workings fascinated him. Perhaps because of this he either chose, or was advised by his handlers, to take a master’s course in business studies. St Louis in the state of Missouri was selected because it was in an area thought not to be covered by any Stasi agents or sleepers. There, he developed an amazing talent for understanding the money markets. His athletic lifestyle and blond good looks impressed younger female students, so he enjoyed every minute of his new life.
Life in what James Jesus Angleton, sometime head of CIA counter-espionage, called ‘the wilderness of mirrors’ is never straightforward. There are indications that the BND courier who serviced Stiller before his flight was a double agent but, for reasons unknown, did not betray Stiller. When this became known in the Normannenstrasse, he was trapped and sentenced to imprisonment for life, but released after four years, presumably in return for cooperating during his debriefing.
Peter Fischer finished his retraining at the age of 34 and was employed by the subsequently infamous investment bank of Goldman Sachs in New York; he also married a much younger American woman said to have connections with the Mafia without telling her that he already had a wife and two children in the GDR. When this came out, she was horrified – and would have been more so had she known that Erzsebet ended up cleaning toilets for a living because her husband was a traitor. After moving to Goldman Sachs’ London office, Fischer specialised in advising the firm’s German clients, living a life of luxury in a fashionable loft apartment with a holiday house on the Côte d’Azur. Of this time, he said, ‘There is great similarity between spying and banking. In each, you work with personal contacts. [In New York and London], I influenced my clients and they … wanted to betray me.’
After the reunification of Germany, he moved to the Lehman Brothers branch in Frankfurt, where his luck eventually ran out. After a series of bad investments, he ‘was let go’, which did not stop him talking his way into setting up a real estate business in Leipzig and continuing his high-life existence and multiple love affairs – and taking part in a film about his double life,8 as well as writing a book about it9 and being featured in three articles in the mass-circulation news magazine Der Spiegel in 1992.
He might have done better to keep a lower profile. As in many divorces accorded in New York State, he was taken for a fortune by his American wife and also received many death threats from former Stasi colleagues who understandably resented his riches while they lived in poverty after the fall of the Wall. Even his wives, who had every reason to hate him, agreed that he had a golden tongue, which enabled Fischer to talk his way back into a job at Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, where he was again fired – this time for sexual harassment, which he denied, and for the undesirable publicity he attracted. After marrying another younger woman, a Hungarian, his last known address was in a high-rise apartment in the suburbs of Budapest, where he may also have a real estate firm.10
When Kristie Macrakis interviewed Horst Vogel, who had been Stiller’s section leader at the time of his defection – and whose career must have suffered severely on that account – he turned, in her words, ‘red with rage’. After he had calmed down, he told her, ‘People love [the idea of] betrayal, but no one loves a traitor.’ Markus Wolf, when he was interviewed by Macrakis, confined himself to saying of Stiller/Fischer, ‘He’s no friend of mine.’11
The motivations of traitors vary from ideological persuasion to hatred of a father-figure to lust for a better lifestyle – the dream of a house in California or Florida with two cars and a private swimming pool incited many KGB and other East European intelligence officers to defect at great risk to their lives. In the case of Stiller/Fischer, the most important factor in his defection was his compulsive womanising, which was unacceptable in the paradoxically puritan MfS, and in the GDR generally, obliging him to seek a society where promiscuity was condoned behaviour in a successful man.
As a sad footnote to the whole affair, there is a book entitled Verratene Kinder12 – The Children they Betrayed – written jointly by Edina Stiller, the daughter Stiller left behind in the GDR in 1979, and Nicole Glocke, a daughter of one of Stiller’s agents in the Bundesrepublik, whom he betrayed to the BfV after his defection. The title says it all. If things do not work out for defectors, they have only themselves to blame, but very often their families are also punished – in their case, for something they have not done.
Nicole Glocke’s father, Karl-Heinz, was 44 at the time of Stiller’s defection, employed as chief economist in the strategically important Rheinisch-Westfälischen Elektrizitätswerken company. Aged 9 at the time, Nicole was at least able to console herself later with the thought that her father had spied through genuine ideological motivation and been betrayed by a traitor. An attractive brunette living in Berlin, she grew up to be a successful journalist and scientific rapporteur for the German Parliament. Edina Stiller, aged only 7 at the time of her father’s defection, grew up in uncomfortable accommodation with her underpaid mother in an ugly industrial town, to which they had been forcibly reallocated as punishment and where they were shunned by all previous friends. She had to swallow an additional bitter pill when she later learned that her father had betrayed his country for the basest of all motives – sex and money. Worse, he had chosen to abandon his wife and two children, leaving with them the reflected stigma of treachery as their sole emotional legacy. It is not surprising that she was unable to trust any man or keep any relationship for long. She grew up to be rather haunted-looking, employed as telephone and telex operator for the Nazionale Volksarmee, dropped by her friends when she became an alcoholic, hiding the empty bottles and other evidence from her mother, with whom she still lived.
She did not see her father for two decades after the awful morning when his colleagues knocked on the door in Berlin with the awful news. Having tracked him down, living in some luxury in Budapest with yet another young partner, she found him devoid of any apparent guilt, but he did help her to make contact with Nicole Glocke, who had already traced him during a visit he made to Berlin. Possibly for reasons of journalistic curiosity, Nicole wrote to Edina in April 2002, saying that she would like to discuss the effect on her life of Stiller’s defection. Edina was amazed that the daughter of one of her father’s victims should apparently feel no hatred for the man who had put her own father in prison and ruined his career. Having got to know each other, the two young women collaborated on the book, which proved a useful therapy for Edina. After the end of the GDR she retrained as a lawyer and notary in the reunited Germany.
Notes
1. Kierstein, Heisse Schlachten, p. 25
2. C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, the Mitrokhin Archive, New York, Basic Books 1999, p. 437
3. Macrakis,
Die Stasi-Geheimnisse, p. 92 (abridged)
4. Ibid, p. 93
5. Wolf, Memoirs of a Spymaster, p. 177
6. Macrakis, Die Stasi-Geheimnisse, p. 95
7. Article by C. Fuchs, in Der Spiegel, 5 February 2013
8. Der Agent, ARTE-TV, 2 February 2013
9. Im Zentrum der Spionage, Minden, Hase u. Koehler Verlag 1986 and 1994.
10. Article by C. Fuchs
11. Macrakis, Die Stasi-Geheimnisse, p. 102
12. N. Glocke and E. Stiller, Verratene Kinder, Berlin, Links Verlag 2010
10
HVA VERSUS MI5
The old German Communist Party KPD had a safe base in London before the Second World War, when a number of its leading lights moved there to keep out of the Gestapo’s clutches. They included Jürgen Kucyzinski, employed for a while at the London School of Economics, considered by many at the time and afterwards as a second Lenin School. Kucyzinski’s daughter, code-named ‘Sonja’, repaid the political asylum granted her parents and herself by transmitting to GRU Centre in Moscow the despatches of the notorious Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed British nuclear secrets to the USSR, was imprisoned and then sought asylum in the GDR on his release. There were many other future members of SED and other East German bodies who spent the war safely in Britain before re-emigrating after 1945 to work against their wartime host country. Before and after the inception of the GDR it became difficult to infiltrate East Germans into Britain, but there was an easy alternative: they were first allowed to ‘escape’ to the Bundesrepublik and afterwards came to Britain with no visa requirement after obtaining West German identity documents.
In 1959 the GDR Foreign Ministry was allowed to set up a trade mission in London, ostensibly to promote business between British companies and potential clients in the GDR. Incorporated under the name KfA Ltd, the mission afforded cover to military intelligence and other HVA officers, its last head becoming the first ambassador to the Court of St James when Edward Heath’s government finally granted diplomatic recognition to the GDR in February 1973, just a few months after joining the European Community. From then until the reunification of Germany in 1990 the accredited ‘diplomats’ in the GDR embassy – in premises at 34 Belgrave Square, an address selected deliberately to be confusingly near to the Bundesrepublik embassy – were for the most part Stasi officers using their diplomatic status as a cloak for spying and subversion. The embassy was, for them, Residentur 201. Presumably the staff in the British embassy in East Berlin were also spying – and being spied on themselves. Who won that game of mirrors will never be known by the common public.
After the expulsion of ninety Soviet ‘diplomats’ and the declaration as personae non gratae of fifteen others who were out of the country in September 1971, the GDR embassy staff arriving seventeen months later were, in a sense, replacements for the missing KGB men. So it is not surprising that at least 50 per cent of their work was directly for Moscow. Like the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence), they increased their effectiveness by using many left-wing Britons to help in the theft of intellectual property and the subversion of British political parties and trade unions. These included members of the CPGB, who were prepared to do favours for the ‘socialist’ countries and ignore the KGB’s and Stasi’s appalling human rights record. Many other fellow-travellers, as they were called, later professed surprise that contacts which they considered part of a fight against fascism were actually assisting the espionage service of a state which considered itself – or was considered by Mielke – to be at war with Britain, the country which was referred to in internal documents as der Feind – the enemy.
In the same way that satellite state intelligence officers were routinely warned off direct contacts with CPGB members, which ‘belonged’ to the KGB, so certain party members were ordered not to have any direct contact with Iron Curtain intelligence services or travel to Eastern Europe for the subsidised holidays and medical treatment they could have enjoyed there. Barbara Einhorn, a sociologist at Sussex University, was one academic who had many contacts with members of the GDR embassy, almost certainly knowing that some of them were intelligence officers. Her husband, Canon Paul Oestreicher of Coventry Cathedral, formerly active in Amnesty International, was also involved. Einhorn, who held a New Zealand passport although having German parents, was arrested and interrogated for five days at Hohenschönhausen prison after being picked up for contacting GDR dissidents Ulkike Poppe and Barbel Bohley. She shrugged this off as an unfortunate mistake although would presumably have been enraged to be locked up for several days in Britain simply because she had been talking to someone.
Yorkshirewoman Fiona Houlding (code name ‘Diana’) was recruited while teaching English in Leipzig in a ‘Romeo’ seduction by HVA officer Ralf-Jürgen Böhme.1 Dr Robin Pearson, a student from Belfast at Hull University (code name ‘Armin’), collected information for his HVA contacts there and in Edinburgh, Leeds, London and York.2 He also travelled to Leipzig University, where everyone he met had to report their conversations to the Stasi. Other British collaborators may have had different motives to make contact with the HVA spies. John Sandford of Reading University claimed to believe that repeated meetings with men he must have known worked for East German intelligence were a way of building bridges which might influence the Stasi to moderate its persecution of dissidents inside the GDR. Perhaps an academic could be so unworldly, but it is hard to believe that a reasonably well-informed person like the Labour and Lib-Dem MP Lord Roper, then director of studies at the Chatham House think-tank – officially designated the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs and frequented by senior government figures – could employ a highly productive HVA officer, code-named ‘Eckart’, as a research assistant there. He later claimed this was a Foreign Office-approved exercise in bridge-building. Lambeth councillor Bill Bowring; journalists Derek Furse and Dick Clements, editor of the Tribune; Bruce Kent and Professor Vic Allen of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Professor Emeritus David Childs of Nottingham University and a host of other MPs and academics also talked freely to the GDR ‘diplomats’.3
As historian Anthony Glees points out, in making these connections they were breaking no law and may have betrayed no classified state secrets if they had none to betray, but all was grist to the Stasi mill. British informers and agents of influence retailing details of power struggles inside the political parties and hints on strategic policy must have been aware that any GDR citizen behaving similarly with Western intelligence officers would have seen the inside of a Stasi interrogation cell, with all the humiliation, pain and anguish that entailed4 – and which lasted far longer for a GDR citizen than for Ms Einhorn. Yet Glees has been attacked on more than one occasion for ‘outing’ the HVA’s contacts in Britain – perhaps by well-meaning liberals who believed the GDR Justizministerium’s allegation that there were no political prisoners in the GDR.
At least one of the staff of Residentur 201 was an expert in weaponry and explosives. This was during the bloodshed in Northern Ireland. The HVA had links with the IRA, which used the Czech plastic explosive Semtex. Like the Hungarian intelligence officers in London, the GDR diplomats were also suspected of affording facilities to Middle Eastern terrorist organisations. In 1983 Heinz Knobbe, described as the ‘deputy ambassador’, was expelled from Britain for activities incompatible with his diplomatic status.5
On 19 July 1985 the British Secret Intelligence Service ‘lifted’ double agent KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievskii by spiriting him across the Soviet–Finnish border in a split-second operation that could only work once. Gordievskii having been the rezident in the Soviet embassy in London, it is likely there was a connection between his arrival in the West and the apprehension one month later of a ‘typically suburban’ couple using the names Reinhard and Sonja Schulze, although some sources aver that the tip-off came from the BND. Whichever is true, they were arrested at their rented home, 249 Waye Avenue in Cranford, near London Airport. The husband was a talented kitchen des
igner, highly valued by his employer and liked by his clients; his wife worked as a technical translator. Reinhard had come to Britain with a West German passport in 1980, concealing the fact that he also held papers in the name of Bryan Strunze, the British-born son of a German father and English mother, who disappeared on a visit to the GDR. The false Schulze rented an apartment for a few months, but then disappeared to follow a correspondence course in interior design. Although without visible means of income, he seemed to have plenty of cash. After leaving the country briefly, he returned with Sonja, posing as his fiancé, whom he said he had met while on holiday in Ireland. They married in Hounslow Registry Office, where he gave his age as 32; she stated hers as 29 and gave her maiden name as Ilona Hammer.
After renting the house in Cranfield, they were an unremarkable couple to the neighbours and a pair of grey ghosts to monitors in Government Communications Headqaurters (GCHQ). The British government had intercepted messages from a short-wave transmitter somewhere near Berlin giving the newly-weds their instructions, but were unable to decipher the Morse code blocks of five-figure groups. When the house in Waye Avenue was raided by Special Branch officers, a large collection of detailed maps was found, especially focusing on flight paths into Heathrow and other important British airports, together with many British town plans. Various agencies took the house to pieces, and the most incriminating find was inside a can of aerosol in the garden shed, where partly used one-time pads were concealed. These had served to decipher the incoming Morse transmissions picked up in Cheltenham. Whether they permitted the deciphering of the recorded transmissions by staff at GCHQ was not revealed, but it would have been usual procedure to destroy the used sheets associated with those transmissions. A short-wave receiver and tape recorder were also found, but no transmitter. Well secreted in the lining of a holdall was what appeared to be an escape kit containing false papers for the couple under different names and a supply of cash.