Interrogation Nation: Refugees and Spies in Cold War Germany 1538101513, 9781538101513

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Interrogation Nation

Interrogation Nation Refugees and Spies in Cold War Germany Keith R. Allen

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, Keith R. (Keith Richard), author. Title: Interrogation nation : refugees and spies in Cold War Germany / Keith R. Allen. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016057002 (print) | LCCN 2017022744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538101520 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781538101513 (cloth : alkaline paper) Subjects: LCSH: Germany--Politics and government--1945-1990. | Germany (West)--Politics and government. | Germany (East)--Politics and government. | Refugees--Germany--History--20th century. | Spies--Germany--History--20th century. | Questioning--Political aspects--Germany--History--20th century. | Internal security--Germany--History--20th century. | Cold War--Political aspects--Germany. | Western countries--Foreign relations--Soviet Union. | Soviet Union--Foreign relations--Western countries. Classification: LCC DD257.4 (ebook) | LCC DD257.4 .A5886 2017 (print) | DDC 327.120943/09045--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057002

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Contents

Abbreviations

vii

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Migrants, Spies, and Security in Cold War Germany

xv

Part I: Places 1 The Allied Enclave of West Berlin 2 Debriefing in West Germany

3 31

Part II: Personalities 3 British Initiators: Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB) 4 American Liberators: The Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) 5 West German Administrators: The Federal Intelligence Service (BND)

79 125 155

Part III: Practices 6 Westward Migration and East Germany’s Stasi 7 Shared Approaches to Security Questioning 8 Conclusion: Refugee Screening—the Past as Prologue

177 207 233

Appendix: The Changing State of Archival Access

241

References

253

Index

269 v

Abbreviations

ADN

Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst

AN

Archives Nationales, Paris

AP

Associated Press

AsD

Archiv der sozialen Demokratie

Befra

Befragungsstelle

BfV

Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution)

BGP

Bayerische Grenzpolizei (Bavarian Border Police)

BIO(G)

British Intelligence Organization (Germany)

BKA

Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Police)

BMG

Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutsche Fragen

BMV

Bundesminsterium der Vertriebenen

BNAV

Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren (federal emergency reception procedure)

BND

Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service)

BSSO

British Services Security Organization

BStU

Der Bundesbeauftrage für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Federal Commissioner for Stasi Files)

BUNAST

Bundesnachrichtenstelle (BfV’s Federal Information Office)

BV

Bezirksverwaltung (administrative district of the Stasi) vii

viii

Abbreviations

CDU

Christlich Demokratische Union

CFSO

Canadian Field Security Office

CIA

United States Central Intelligence Agency

CIC

United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps

CIG

Central Intelligence Group, immediate predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency

CSDIC

Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (U.K.)

CSU

Christlich-Soziale Union

DDR

Deutsche Demokratische Republik

DGSE

Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (French Foreign Intelligence Service)

DIA

Defense Intelligence Agency

DIS

Defense Intelligence Staff

DOD

Department of Defense (U.S.)

DRC

Defector Reception Center (U.S.)

EURCOM

U.S. European Command

FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigation

FDGB

Freier Deutscher Gewerksschaftsbund

FDJ

Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth)

FDP

Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party)

FHO

Fremde Heere Ost (literally, Foreign Armies East), unit of the German Army High Command (OKW) charged with eastern front intelligence, headed by Reinhard Gehlen from 1942 until nearly the war’s end

FRG

Federal Republic of Germany

GDR

German Democratic Republic (East Germany)

GPU

Gossudarstwennoje polititscheskoje uprawlenije (Soviet Secret Police)

GRU

Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye (Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff)

HA

Hauptabteilung, Main Directorate (of the Stasi)

HBW

Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen

HICOG

U.S. High Commissioner for Germany

Abbreviations

ix

HVA

Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (East German Foreign Intelligence Service)

IM

Unofficial collaborator, Stasi

IO

Interrogation Officer (U.S.)

IRD

Information Research Department (U.K., Foreign Office)

JIC(G)

Joint Intelligence Committee, Germany (U.K.)

KGB

Komitat Gosudarstvenoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security, the Soviet Intelligence Service)

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany)

KÜNAST

Küstennachrichtenstelle (BfV’s Coastal Intelligence Office)

KZ

Konzentrationslager (concentration camp)

LDPD

Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands

LStU

Landesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen

MAD

Militärischer Abschirmdienst

MB

Ministestvo Bezopastnosti (Russian Ministry of Security)

MdI

Ministerium des Innern (of East Germany)

MfAA

Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten

MfS

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

MGB

Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Soviet Ministry of State Security)

MI5

Security Service (U.K.)

MI6

Alternate designation for SIS (U.K.)

MID

Military Intelligence Detachment (U.S.)

MIS

Military Intelligence Service (U.S. Army)

MVD

Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (Ministry of Internal Affairs)

NARA

National Archives and Records Administration (U.S.)

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NKVD

Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs)

NSA

National Security Agency (U.S.)

NSC

National Security Council (U.S.)

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party)

Abbreviations

x

NVA

Nationale Volksarmee (East German Army)

NTS

Narodno Trudovoj Sojuz (Russian émigré organization)

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OdF

Opfer des Faschismus (victim of fascism)

OKW

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the German Armed Forces)

OMGB

U.S. Office of the Military Government for Bavaria

OMGUS

Office of the Military Government of the United States

ONI

Office of Naval Intelligence (U.S.)

OPC

Office of Policy Coordination, precursor to the CIA

OSI

Office of Scientific Intelligence, CIA

OSS

Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA

PLO

Palestine Liberation Organization

QDP

Quadripartite Debriefing Program

Qu.

Quelle, Source

RAF

Rote Armee Fraktion, Red Army Faction

REG

Returnee Exploitation Group

RFE/RL

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (U.S.)

RIAS

Radio in the American Sector

RSHA

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office)

SAG

Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaft

SAPMO-BA Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv SBZ

Sowjetische Besatzungszone (Soviet Zone of Occupation)

SD

Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service. Nazi Party intelligence service

SED

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (East German Socialist Unity Party)

SHAEF

Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces

SIS

Secret Intelligence Service (U.K.)

SOE

Special Operations Executive (U.K.)

SMA

Soviet Military Administration

Abbreviations

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)

SS

Schutzstaffel (Protection Detachment), a uniformed arm of the Nazi Party under Heinrich Himmler

SSU

Strategic Services Unit, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency

Stasi

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (East German Ministry of State Security)

StB

Státní bezpečnost (Czechoslovak State Security Service)

STIB

Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch

TNA

The National Archives (U.K.)

UN

United Nations

UNHCR

United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees

UNRRA

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association

USAREUR

United States Army, Europe

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

VEB

Volkseigener Betrieb

VfZ

Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte

VP

Volkspolizei, East German People’s Police

VS-NfD

Verschlusssache–Nur für den Dienstgebrauch

ZBW

Zweigstelle für Befragungswesen

ZK

Zentralkomitee

xi

Acknowledgments

The debts of gratitude I have incurred in compiling this study are far greater than those mentioned briefly here. I wish to express my appreciation for the financial support I received from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), augmented by a short-term grant from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Research and writing were completed during my affiliation to the Department of History at the University of Giessen, with finishing touches added during a brief stay in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. Among the many patient readers I wish to acknowledge are Vadim Altskan, Larry Fuhrman, Michael Gordin, Donna Harsch, Mel Hecker, Arne Hoffrichter, Axel Klausmeier, Anna Kvíčalová, Dirk van Laak, Jeannette van Laak, Simone Lässig, Allen Mikaelian, Caitlin Murdock, Mary Nolan, Christine von Oertzen, Claire Venghiattis, and Hugh Wilford. Especially valuable comments came from anonymous reviewers. This is a much better book because of their thoughtful comments. Its shortcomings remain entirely mine. Many individuals aided my work in ways too varied to discuss here. I remain exceptionally grateful to the many archivists who assisted me in making this challenging research project possible. Among those I wish to thank especially are Paul Brown (National Archives and Records Administration), Michael Köllner (Stasi Records Agency), Hartmut Obkircher and Ute Simon (German Federal Archives), Jörg Schmalfuss (Archive of the German Technical Museum), Bianca Welzing-Bräutigam (Landesarchiv Berlin), and Uwe Zuber (Landesarchiv NRW). Librarians also aided me in piecing together the jigsaw puzzle. Particularly helpful were Lisabet Mielke and Ricardo Riecke at the Library of the German Federal Archives in Berlin. I thank the German Ministry of the Interior for making case files of the federal xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

emergency reception procedure available to me, as well as the Freedom of Information Offices at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom and the CIA and FBI in the United States. For proofreading and edits I acknowledge Beth Ina’s and Jen Kelland Fagan’s advice, as well as the support of the Rowman & Littlefield staff in Boulder. Sincere thanks to Rebeccah Shumaker, Chris Fischer, and Susan McEachern. I wish to thank the Berliner Kolleg Kalter Krieg and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich for providing me with the chance to present my findings to scholars. My wife, Christine, and son, Anouk, were there every step of the way, as always. They know how much I appreciate the life I share with them. I dedicate this book to my fantastic niece, Bella Frost.

Introduction Migrants, Spies, and Security in Cold War Germany

This book tells the overlooked story of refugee security screening in postwar Germany. It traces connections between the appearance of millions of individuals in defeated and divided Germany and the examination of newcomers by a shifting array of Anglo-American and West German security services. The confluence of two interrelated phenomena—the arrival of waves of migrants in occupied Germany’s western territories during the global military and ideological struggle known as the Cold War and the questioning of select individuals by competing German and foreign security agencies—shaped political arrangements that prevail in Europe to this day. Refugee screening in Cold War Germany, this book argues, laid the foundation for vetting practices still in use. This account demonstrates that screening programs established during the darkest days of the Cold War outlived the previous global era of brinkmanship by more than a generation. The scope and depth of questioning foreshadowed current debates about alleged security threats flowing from the arrival of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other states on the one hand and mass electronic surveillance conducted by the United States and United Kingdom on the other. This book reveals the places, personalities, and perspectives associated with refugee interrogation in Germany following World War II. By combining analysis of newly declassified archival materials from Britain and the United States, as well as West and East Germany, the book examines the repercussions of multinational surveillance in the lives of many different individuals seeking refuge in western Germany across the second half of the twentieth century. Intense scrutiny of thousands of technicians, politicians, xv

xvi

Introduction

released political prisoners, espionage agents, defectors, and various other “escapees,” “line crossers,” and “deserters” yields fascinating personal stories. A complex amalgam of actors and factors determined approaches to individual migrants. The most important considerations in shaping the screening of those simultaneously regarded as potential threats and assets were warfare, political skirmishes, and a mixture of domestic and regional security objectives, including but by no means limited to fears of alien infiltration. Instances of conflict and cooperation engendered by the twinned movements of refugees and intelligence services in postwar Germany are at the heart of this account. Large-scale multinational operations to vet newcomers in occupied Germany emerged during the final months of World War II and continued until 2015, when several European states, including Germany, were struggling to come to terms with the consequences of the largest influx of migrants since the late 1940s. Newcomers initially welcomed to the Federal Republic of Germany in dramatic gestures during the autumn of 2015 were soon believed to pose new threats to public order, with a palpable sense of fear stoked by terror assaults on innocents from Bamako to Brussels. 1 In Germany as in many other countries, those fleeing warfare, economic deprivation, and political repression faced intensifying efforts to gauge not only the threat they pose, but also the opportunities they may present for supporting intelligence actions considered vital to “security interests.” Migration and military conflict, as well as murky ideological objectives, have long shaped the vetting of newcomers in Germany. The Cold War witnessed remarkable entanglements of spies and refugees in both postwar German states. During the second half of the twentieth century, as this book shows, the interactions of intelligence agents and newcomers in West Germany did not just upturn lives, but also had a lasting influence in determining the exercise of citizenship and sovereignty. Long after the Berlin Wall’s construction in August 1961, in fact decades after its demolition in November 1989, Germany’s federal government defined surveillance of newcomers as a matter of North Atlantic, not merely domestic, security. As a result, the personal fates of many migrants and their families in occupied Germany became entangled in the often-inscrutable agendas of intelligence agencies. Because of their role in deciding who was and was not allowed in, foreign intelligence powers and their West German helpers undermined the sovereignty of the postwar federal republic. By evaluating the growing volume of documentation available from German collections alongside “guarded” or “classified” information from the archives of the United Kingdom, United States, and Czech Republic, this account of migrant questioning underscores the international nature of the rule of law in Germany’s most successful postwar state.

Introduction

xvii

The story of refugees and intelligence services begins in 1945 against the backdrop of mass flight westward from east-central Europe to an unlikely destination, a defeated, divided, and occupied nation: vanquished Germany. The final months of World War II, the bloodiest phase of the most lethal conflict in human history, ushered in this new era of extensive refugee interrogation. During the last year of war and the first five years of peace, roughly twelve million people, mostly, but by no means exclusively, ethnic German expellees, fled Soviet forces advancing into east-central Europe. In occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic countries, and the western Soviet Union, Germans and their local helpers had subjected tens of millions to the immense violence and destruction of industrialized warfare and mass murder. The millions of German speakers who lived in the regions from the Baltic to the Black Sea feared revenge from the Soviets and civilians of east-central European states for Germany’s military campaigns of domination and genocide. Ethnic Germans were joined by political defectors, former prisoners of war, and millions of others classified as “displaced persons” flowing from Soviet-dominated areas of east-central Europe to occupied western Germany. 2 These massive and compressed waves were followed by somewhat smaller streams of individual migrants and their families, including the flight of more than three million East Germans by the early 1960s. 3 Reduced to a trickle of tens of thousands of individual escapees in the decades after the construction of the Berlin Wall and militarization of the inner German border, westward migration and East-West travel during the 1970s and 1980s enabled domestic and foreign intelligence agencies to extend intelligence gathering in directions unforeseen in the years immediately following Nazi Germany’s defeat. Devoting special attention to the first two formative decades of postwar questioning, this book nonetheless analyzes the places, personalities, and practices associated with efforts to interrogate newcomers in occupied Germany across the entire second half of the twentieth century. Noting differences between migrating to Germany in recent years and during the Cold War, this account explores how decisions to sacrifice the rights of arrivees during periods of heightened ideological and military tension may contribute to the curtailment of personal liberties and national sovereignty in other times and places. THE GESTAPO, THE STASI, AND ANGLOPHONE INTERROGATORS In 2014, Edward Snowden’s files documenting the far-reaching nature of British and U.S. electronic surveillance prompted Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, to initiate a wide-reaching, multiyear exploration

xviii

Introduction

of the extent of foreign surveillance efforts in Germany since September 11, 2001. 4 While members of the investigation were engaged in a behind-thescenes tug-of-war with domestic spy agencies over access to key documents, glib comparisons with ostensibly American-led intelligence regimes filled the information vacuum. Among the more incendiary was a German artist’s clandestine nighttime projection of the words “United Stasi of America” onto an exterior wall of the American embassy in central Berlin, the roof of which features—according to Snowden’s stolen files—a windowless structure used to tap the cell phone traffic of politicians across Europe’s most powerful capital, including, most famously, that of Chancellor Angela Merkel. The German language has supplied poignant epithets for invasive surveillance. While the first two postwar generations hurled “Gestapo” at particularly nefarious agents of state subterfuge, in the years after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 the term “Stasi” was leveled against the most villainous clandestine actors. The newly unified German federal government’s decision to grant unprecedented access to the most secret documents of the East German state has informed Germans’ reactions to the Snowden disclosures in ways few could have imagined following the demise of Soviet-dominated communism in east-central Europe a generation ago. Since 1992, citizens have been allowed to inspect their Stasi files. As a result, more than twenty-five years after the collapse of East Germany’s largest construction project, the militarized urban fortification known as the Berlin Wall, we know much more about the exercise of power in the so-called German Democratic Republic than in its indisputably more successful western counterpart. 5 Access to the vast holdings of the Stasi and its political overlord, the East German Socialist Unity Party, has made it possible to ascertain the extraordinary reach of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). The availability of these records has led to heightened awareness of the Stasi’s powers, a perspective on the recent past that has repeatedly encouraged pundits to contrast the corrosive influence of Communist-era surveillance and what many appear to regard as essentially comparable observation efforts of Anglo-American surveillance authorities in our own time. In the Stasi worldview, the most important aspect of the procedures set up to allow newcomers from east-central Europe to settle in the federal republic was the presence of Western security agencies. Reflecting their deeply held obsession with control and determination to sow dissent in West Germany, the Stasi, Soviet intelligence agencies, and other Communist partners dispatched untold numbers of agents as decoy refugees to obtain compromising information about West German, British, French, and American screening officials charged with intelligence service interrogation. At the same time, those Communist officials overseeing Stalinist security services never tired

Introduction

xix

of proclaiming that “imperialist agents” were exploiting those ostensibly seeking refuge in West Germany and West Berlin. Similar criticisms were voiced across the history of the Federal Republic of Germany following its establishment in May 1949. Stinging indictments of intelligence practices put forward in the West German Bundestag, typically by the small Free Democratic Party and the larger Social Democratic Party, were a recurring, if today largely forgotten, feature of West German political life. 6 Disaffection with American occupiers escalated during the late 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of East Germans were leaving Sovietoccupied East Germany each month. By August 1961, some 2.7 million people, or roughly one-sixth of the population, had abandoned the East German socialist experiment; about half were under the age of twenty-five. 7 Between 1949 and 1990, some four million in total would leave East Germany. CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS AND THE SURVEILLANCE OF MIGRANTS Notwithstanding occasional bouts of press and parliamentary criticism, the involvement of foreign services in shaping German citizenship rights was consistently, though never entirely successfully, shielded from serious public inquiry. In this sense, the Bundestag’s committee of inquiry established in March 2014 to investigate the intelligence activities of the “Five Eyes” states (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) for the period since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States was in 2016 treading on familiar ground. 8 In tones reminiscent of Chancellor Merkel’s tepid responses to revelations of Anglo-American eavesdropping on her telephone conversations and those of her ministers, in 2014 and 2015 German federal officials sought to arrange behind closed doors with the country’s most important ally delicate matters of security and citizenship for many newcomers, a reasonable if often frustrating strategy for a substantially weaker “security partner.” Germans have long framed their attempts to limit the influence of foreign services in bestowing asylum and citizenship in legal terms. Penned under the watchful gaze of the Western Allies, Britain, France, and America, West Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law, contained an explicit guarantee of free movement. 9 Muscular economic growth across West Germany—the country’s famed postwar economic miracle—lent support to calls to abolish the case-by-case reviews set up in the fragile postwar years. By the mid1950s, few claiming German heritage were denied citizenship. A desire to see the country reunified and freed of the presence of foreign military occupiers informed early bouts of criticism: from the late 1960s onward, the era

xx

Introduction

of extensive direct communication and exchange with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other socialist states known as Ostpolitik provided another rationale to question foreign intervention in the ostensibly German matter of asylum and citizenship. 10 On the other side of the equation was an abiding desire to cultivate the goodwill of an immeasurably stronger protector in the face of an aggressive foe, an enemy that had prevailed against Nazi Germany in the most extensive military campaigns in history. Those committed to the destruction of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in east-central Europe, notably German-speaking representatives of the security and intelligence services set up to work for American and British occupiers, were especially receptive to the idea of continuing the struggle against the Soviet Union begun in June 1941. Despite considerable friction among the Western Allies during the nearly half-century-long Cold War, West Germans’ commitment to the informational needs of American protectors proved steady. Neither the formal conclusion of military occupation and the creation of an Allied High Commissioner to oversee the new government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, nor the formal award of sovereignty to his government in 1955, nor the unification agreements reached in 1990 called into question the retention of special rights with reference to surveillance and military intelligence exercised by the United States and its closest allies since the end of World War II. Similarly, the conclusion of the Cold War and the establishment of unified European entry-control measures—the imperiled Schengen system of open borders within nearly all of the European Union—did not spell an end to international power relations rooted in the outcome of 1945. This book argues that foreign-run security procedures established to vet newcomers composed a vital dimension of Germany’s occupation from 1945 through the attainment of statehood in 1949 and far beyond. Foreign influence over the security clearance of newcomers outlived German unification in 1989–1990 and in crucial respects continues to this day—providing Anglo-American intelligence organizations, more than seventy years after the end of the devastating world war unleashed by Germans, with possibilities to exert influence over the lives of migrants to the federal republic. THE WESTERN POWERS AND THE ARCHIVES To trace the contours of refugee interrogation in the nation at the center of the refugee and security crises that broke over Europe in 2015, this account unites analysis of an extensive corpus of source material from the archives of both postwar German states with released files from American and British archives. Specifically, this book draws on recently declassified files from American, British, and West German supervisory agencies, as well as the

Introduction

xxi

vast document holdings of East Germany’s notorious secret police, the Stasi. Among the findings presented in this work are insights drawn from espionage documentation created by Western intelligence agencies during the 1970s and 1980s, seized by the Stasi and unearthed in the course of my research in Germany. Security documentation of this nature for the Western powers remains locked up in closed American and British archives. The Western occupiers of Germany were first and foremost the United States and the United Kingdom, subsequently joined by other liberated nations. The most important of these was France. The relationship between American and British intelligence was competitive, with batteries of American services and their many German helpers clashing with British counterparts. Outwardly, Britain and America were exceptionally close allies. The two countries’ services conducted joint interrogations of leading industrialists, scientists, politicians, and business leaders; from the earliest days of the occupation, they routinely shared reports on personalities of interest. British and American military officials pooled resources to intercept letters, as well as to eavesdrop on telephone and other telecommunications, using special rights obtained and jealously guarded to collect information of mutual benefit. 11 An early example of intercept cooperation at the highest levels of British and American intelligence was a shared list of the names and addresses of German scientists, technicians, and prisoners of war recruited to work in the Soviet Union immediately after the cessation of hostilities. Anglo-American tracking of Soviet efforts to mine German scientific knowledge constitutes a special focus of this book, with an initial emphasis on the pioneering role of British questioning practices. The Western Allies clashed over access to the knowledge held by German-speaking scientists returning to their divided homeland from the Soviet Union, as well as access to defectors, politicians, high-ranking officials, and others possessing information about the inner workings of Soviet domination. During the 1950s, the exchange of data supplied by persons of interest, especially those able to provide details of Soviet weapon making, proved spectacularly contentious. British authorities sought to ensure that the forerunner to the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) was denied top-drawer access to reports about key German scientists who had toiled in the Soviet Union and other Communist nations, stamping these “for UK/US eyes only.” To counter America’s prodigious material advantages, British agents of the Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB) sought to cultivate exclusive access to favored individuals in West German industry, science, and public administration in the hope that a more rigorous approach to refugee espionage exploitation would keep them one step ahead of American (and American-funded) competitors. British efforts to thwart the rise of multiple American and West German intelligence competitors were unsuccessful. From the mid-1950s onward, U.S.

xxii

Introduction

espionage authorities granted the service headed by the former chief of the German army’s intelligence branch dealing with the eastern front and Soviet forces a privileged position in conducting case-by-case checks of refugees in western Germany. Created in response to demands for greater domestic involvement, the last of these questioning offices administered by the West German Federal Intelligence Service and the main domestic espionage agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV), so-called Joint Interrogation Centers, soldiered on after the Cold War’s end, until June 2014, formally ceasing operations almost precisely twenty-five years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Britain’s relations with American intelligence agencies, most notably the largest stationed in West Germany during the 1950s, the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), were fraught with conflict. Just as no common experience united those displaced by the imposition of Soviet rule and the material appeals of the West, the services active in defining the status of newcomers in western Germany were, although united in a crusade against Soviet communism, often at odds with one another. Cooperation among other Western occupying powers in Germany, notably France, was limited. The presence of Communists in France’s national government during the three years following liberation provided American authorities justification to exclude French intelligence specialists from anti-Soviet espionage in occupied western Germany. 12 The British engaged with French colleagues on a case-by-case basis, with field chiefs in Germany and their London superiors agreeing during the formative early years not to share interrogation reports produced on Soviet deserters and defectors with their French counterparts. 13 As it was in other fields of security and economic cooperation, France was frequently, and sometimes publicly, at odds with British and (especially) American allies. A significant number of files from the 1950s and 1960s on persons seeking refuge in occupied Germany via mainstream departments in Britain, such as the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the War Office, and the Ministry of Defense, have been released. In London and especially Washington, DC, operational materials providing a sense of the day-today practice of interrogation for these decades are accessible to the public. For the United States, this material comes mainly from the intelligence services of the army, with pertinent records declassified from other pillars of the U.S. Cold War security establishment, especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In isolated cases, files from the best-known American espionage service extend into the 1980s. Archival materials housed at the Stasi Records Agency in eastern Germany, the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, and documents reviewed by the ongoing investigation of Germany’s lower house of parliament allow me to examine the long-lived Joint Interrogation Centers.

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Custodians of espionage materials in Anglophone capitals have displayed a willingness to declassify archival materials on intelligence operations from the first decades of the Cold War, an observation that is unfortunately not yet true of America’s first ally, France. Neither France’s three civilian nor its two military intelligence services active in occupied Germany have released substantial material. 14 Because French services were rarely closely aligned with British and American counterparts, holdings in Washington and London are frequently unhelpful for understanding French intelligence practices; nothing quite like the integration of American officers in the highest levels of British intelligence, such as the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, existed for counterparts from Paris. The most important site of Franco-Soviet encounter was the country’s sector of occupation in the northwest corner of Berlin; among the French services active there were the Sûreté Générale, the Sécurité Militaire, and the Deuxième Bureau du Commandement Supérieur des Troupes d’Occupation. Elsewhere in occupied western Germany, France appears to have played second fiddle to the Americans and British, who quickly secured and jealously guarded privileged access to those fleeing westward, carving out only a tertiary role for their French colleagues. Declassified documentation on the activities of French services is at present heavily weighted toward the perspectives of the Stasi, a fact that, at least for now, militates against a nuanced account of France’s role in interrogating newcomers to Europe’s West. 15 Notwithstanding these obstacles, this book offers glimpses into the interrogation practices of France and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries. It also provides some coverage of information gathered via migrants by Dominion powers aligned closely with Britain, as well as smaller western European states with occupying armies in Germany. Services of countries to the east of West Germany, especially Czechoslovakia (chapter 4 includes an examination based on a run of pertinent files from the Czech Security Services Archive), Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and above all East Germany, figure prominently in this analysis. PUBLIC SOURCES, ON THE RECORD The extant declassified archival record suffices to outline this multinational undertaking. For this reason, in compiling this account I have not contacted representatives of current or former intelligence services, their successor organizations, or retired agents. Intelligence officials have exercised no role in vetting this manuscript. No “off-the-record” discussions with anyone once associated with secret services shape the arguments presented herein. 16 All readers, especially critics, are welcome to consult the documents cited in this manuscript precisely as I found them, in repositories open to the public (or,

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as is the case in many countries in continental Europe, in archival facilities requiring visitors to present scholarly bona fides). In the United Kingdom and United States, new sources have been obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, thus ensuring that documents cited in the pages to come are accessible in repositories open to the public. This account reveals that a wide range of relevant information can be gleaned from declassified archival materials available to all interested parties. Just as this study forgoes private conversations with intelligence and security professionals, it does not rely heavily on information gathered from classified databases. The omniscience of vast searchable electronic collections in our time should not obscure the fact that surveillance during the Cold War was never a straightforward exercise of retrieval. Viewed across national boundaries and ideological divides, the techniques used to scrutinize those fleeing to occupied Germany often entailed a coupling of remote surveillance in the form of behind-the-scenes queries of public officials, as well as telephone and postal intercepts, with often highly emotional face-to-face encounters involving spies, informants, and a good many others, most notably the loved ones, friends, and colleagues of those regarded as of interest. Millions from all walks of life fled to Allied-occupied western Germany and West Berlin for myriad reasons. 17 Western intelligence agencies screened, filtered, and interrogated refugees on multiple occasions, at various sites, for reasons as diverse as the explanations supplied by the newly disenfranchised for abandoning homes, livelihoods, and loved ones. Striking in my review of archival documentation from several countries was the overlapping nature of questioning. A major objective during the early rounds of interrogation was to determine if Soviet or Soviet-directed or -inspired services had sent the newcomer to the West as an agent. In keeping with this objective, the tone of investigations carried out on the border was at times intense, a fact intelligence officials acknowledged. Typically, reports of rough handling reach us today via veiled critiques of competing Allied services. 18 As individual cases introduced in this book demonstrate, it was by no means unheard of for migrants to undergo several different rounds of separate interrogations in the West, with ostensibly “friendly” services and their helpers concealing insights from one another. Interrogations of an entirely different character awaited the tens of thousands who returned to the East: even the briefest perusal of Stasi interrogation reports makes this contrast abundantly clear. This study embeds complex personal narratives of those subjected to extensive interrogations within the broader international context of postwar politics, revealing from officially sanctioned and processed archives the world inhabited (and inhibited) by spies and refugees across Cold War Europe.

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DOCUMENTING REFUGEES: PERILS, POSSIBILITIES, AND PARADOXICAL CONSEQUENCES Challenges in interpreting publicly accessible intelligence documentation constitute an important theme in the chapters to follow. Redactions, deletions, and missing confidential enclosures are only the most glaring omissions one encounters in files housed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Released documents, frequently penned in an abbreviated telegraphic manner and strewn with obscure cover names, only shed partial light on the practice of overt, to say nothing of covert, intelligence gathering. More than a quarter-century has passed since the Cold War’s end, and yet only a carefully vetted fraction of the materials created by Western services has been made available to researchers. Veritable mountains of documentation have been destroyed, withheld, or mysteriously “reclassified” after having being made available in public repositories. The degrees to which reasons of operational security or public safety justify restrictions remain beyond the assessment of researchers and government officials alike, a source of frustration to many, including no doubt many employees of the intelligence agencies themselves. The difficulty researchers face in obtaining source material is surpassed by a less obvious, though arguably more significant, hindrance: the efforts of various contemporaries to hide motives and actions from competitors. The raw material of refugee surveillance revolves around incomplete, deeply subjective, highly impressionistic personal accounts. The actors at the heart of the drama, the migrant and the agent, shared little, often not even a common language. Specialists in the dark arts of deception and dissimulation, shadowy individuals with remarkable power over those who found themselves ensnared in international intrigues, created the records used in this study. Produced in the supercharged atmosphere of a global face-off, the documents cited herein—with the exception of materials created by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, which come with head-spinning interpretative challenges and deep ideological biases all their own—have been painstakingly vetted, first by the scandal-averse within the security services and then by archivists dependent on larger federal entities for both future access and funding. For these and other reasons, all materials created by secret services and made available to the public warrant intense scrutiny. 19 This exploration of the shifting terrain of intelligence cooperation and competition in occupied Germany emphasizes the significant interpretative perils of writing an account based on what passes for intelligence documentation in publicly accessible archives. 20 Making use of collections from mainly four countries, this study of refugee interrogation nonetheless seeks to reconstruct narratives

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separated by impediments of concealment, connecting personal stories to research literatures often embedded in national research frameworks. 21 THREE THEMES: PLACES, PERSONALITIES, AND PRACTICES In this book I aim to present the questioning of refugees to Germany in as straightforward a manner as possible, notwithstanding the glaring deficiencies, omissions, and selective retellings in international collections of extant declassified source material. Having traced the experiences of refugees and spies in the remarkably slippery archival documentation of several nations, I hope to contextualize the lives of those fleeing westward in a manner that readers, especially those unfamiliar with the genre of intelligence history, will find comprehensible. Interest in the interrogation of refugees during the Cold War revolved around the imperative of rapid information retrieval, an act that required parties to share, if only for a few hours or days, a peculiar questioning universe. At the heart of this interaction was a shifting terrain of places, personalities, and practices. This book contains seven chapters grouped into three parts plus a conclusion. Drawing on insights from documentary source collections housed on both sides of the former ideological divide, part 1 surveys the various sites of refugee interrogation in occupied West Berlin and western Germany, from the most prominent to the semipublic to those shrouded in mystery even today. Scrambles to recruit and exploit human intelligence sources played out in the reception centers, asylum camps, and various other facilities used to conduct extensive background checks and assessments for deployment in the Communist East. Most of these sites are barely known to a handful of espionage experts. The first inventory of its kind, the overview presented in the first two chapters of this book shows that the landscape of secrecy shaped by the threat of communism extended not only to little-known physical sites spread across all of western Germany, from the Baltic to the Alps, but also to the intimate spaces of private life. In this sense, houses, apartments, and other dwellings across the divided nation were all sites of Cold War questioning, places where violation of the rights of those seeking asylum bled into breaches of privacy affecting a broader range of citizens. Turning from sites to stories, part 2 focuses on interview programs set up by the British, innovators of Western refugee interrogation in divided Germany. Given their modest resources relative to the Americans, the British relied heavily on the creation of informal support networks within postwar West German business, politics, and culture. As I explain in chapter 3, this cultivation of hard-won ties with sympathetic Germans during the first post-

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war decade brought the British into clashes with both their American allies and their West German counterparts. The 1950s were a period not only of mass flight, with one in six East Germans abandoning their country’s socialist experiment, but of intense geopolitical conflict over the future status of Berlin. Against this backdrop of multinational contest, chapter 4 turns to cross-border escapades of the American Counter Intelligence Corps. Explaining the removal of forgotten security questioners from American-sanctioned vetting rosters, it explores the contested nature of sovereignty in West Germany during the 1950s. The fifth chapter shifts from Anglo-American initiatives to security probing conducted under the formal auspices of the German federal government. It underscores how checks on entrance to West Germany touched the lives of individuals well beyond migrants and asylum seekers. During the 1960s and especially the 1970s, travelers, pensioners, and others, including citizens of the federal republic and western European nations, fell under the purview of screening programs initially set up to establish the bona fides of border crossers in the 1950s. The declassified reports contained within what remains a modest collection of BND files at the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz offer snapshots of newcomers’ first hours or days in the federal republic, although they give the reader no sense of the interest arrivees may have generated within West German ministries or wider Allied circles active within and beyond Germany. Part 3 of this book moves on to address methodological questions. It draws inferences about long-hidden domestic surveillance centers from sources produced by the West’s best-known opponent in divided Germany, the East German Ministry for State Security. As I demonstrate in chapter 6, Stasi materials shed light on the activities of intelligence agencies in both postwar German states. Their value lies mainly in coverage of the 1970s and 1980s, decades for which little archival documentation from Western sources has been declassified. While details for the 1980s remain scarce (owing to a very limited volume of declassified materials), this account illustrates that queries put to an impressive variety of international newcomers varied a good deal, with interrogators demonstrating both ingenuity and ineptitude in efforts to cull information from a range of different individuals. The interaction demanded much of both parties; and yet, as uneven as the power relationship between refugees and spies frequently was, the documentation reveals more give-and-take among subjects and clandestine information collectors than one might imagine. The particular modes of interaction employed by Western services active in procuring human intelligence from entrants during the second half of the twentieth century receive special examination in chapter 7. With more West German intelligence sources now becoming available, 22 the time has come to

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turn greater attention to methodological concerns. Literature on espionage in West Germany has often been either polemical or cavalier in its use of source material of questionable provenance; occasionally it has been both. 23 The charged atmosphere has tempted others to explore whether West German services anticipated anti-Communist uprisings in 1953, 1956, 1968, 1980, and 1989, a research agenda that grants short shrift to what some might regard as the drudgery of explaining the pitfalls entailed in and modest returns to be expected from drawing inferences from the extant universe of declassified archival material. In analyzing documents from various domestic and especially foreign archival collections, this book attempts to address concerns flowing from interactions of spies and refugees. The sources examined herein provide the means to canvas the various sites used to question newcomers, to understand from multiple perspectives the plight of those caught in international webs of espionage, and to grasp essentials about both the tools and methods of intelligence retrieval used in several different countries. The released documents have been made available to researchers in such a way as to suggest little about the use (or misuse) of intelligence at policymaking levels of government within the federal republic, to say nothing of the Western alliance as a whole. What we can learn from the extant declassified source material is how domestic and foreign security officials insinuated themselves into untold numbers of private lives and the substance of postwar democratic rule. Intelligence services are both information gluttons and misers. The techniques of collection and compartmentalization demanded that security vetters exhibit subtle approaches to newcomers. Procuring secrets from those deemed most interesting involved both technology and psychology, from the extensive use of various technical aids, such as maps, card catalogs, portable tape recorders, high-resolution cameras, battery-powered microphones, telephone taps, postal surveillance, lie detectors, and electronic digital computers to, more profoundly, the manipulation of feelings for friends, colleagues, and neighbors, and especially those for lovers and closest family members. The Cold War brought to Germany millions of refugees and tens of thousands of spies, foreign and domestic. Ostensibly to protect internal security and to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union and its Communist allies, Germany’s Western occupiers and their helpers set up interrogation systems. Similar scenarios involving security agents and the victims of forced displacement played themselves out in the refugee crisis that grabbed headlines in 2015 and 2016. It is to interactions of espionage agents and asylum seekers during the previous era of global ideological and military struggle, the Cold War, that we now turn.

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NOTES 1. For a scholarly introduction to the prevailing mood in Germany during the tumultuous summer and autumn months of 2015, see “Wohin flüchten?” (To where shall we escape?), special issue, Kursbuch 183 (September 2015). On debates surrounding differentiations between the typologies of refugees and migrants, see Jerzy Szucki, “Who Is a Refugee? The Convention Definition: Universal or Obsolete?” in Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving International Concepts and Regimes, ed. Frances Nicholson and Patrick Twomey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 55–81. 2. Three-quarters of the twelve million, just over 15 percent of its population, were living in the new West German state in September 1950. The extent of the uprootedness in the occupied lands of what would become East and West Germany was actually much broader: in one way or another, the war had transplanted nearly half of the seventy-five million individuals residing in the four occupation zones. See Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014), esp. 553–55. On the European scale of wartime and postwar displacement, see Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 89–117. The classification of persons as “displaced” by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the U.S. Army was intended to create categories of entitlement for non-German refugees from Europe; these consisted primarily of those liberated from concentration camps, foreign and slave laborers, and prisoners of war. For recent introductions to the subject of displaced persons (DPs), see Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–12, 36–58, and Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), esp. 37–48. An English-language guide to the foreign policy challenges presented by ethnic German expellees can be found in Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). On Jewish DPs, with a heavy focus on developments in Berlin, see Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 131–82. On the traumatic clearance of ethnic German minorities from postwar Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, see R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 3. Roughly one-third of the “Soviet zone” refugees had originally arrived in East Germany as expellees from lands to the east. See Helge Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR 1945/1949–1961. Die Flüchtlingspolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis zum Bau der Berliner Mauer (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), 24, 43. The semantics of contemporary West German discussions of “expellees,” “refugees,” and various other migrants and the expectations of those authorities charged with according this status are covered in Volker Ackermann, Der “echte” Flüchtling (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1995), 283–87. On the mixture of ethnonationalism and vigorous anticommunism in defining American refugee policy during the early Cold War years, see Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), esp. 34–75. On how European wars and colonialism shaped the first post-WWII attempts to define the legal status of “refugees,” see two recent introductions by Jochen Oltmer, Globale Migration: Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2016), 127–34, and Migration vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 4. Deutscher Bundestag, “1. Untersuchungsausschuss (‘NSA’),” https://www.bundestag. de/bundestag/ausschuesse18/ua/1untersuchungsausschuss (accessed January 7, 2017). 5. The Gestapo was one of several competing security services in Nazi Germany; the Stasi and its role in East Germany’s version of communism is much more constructively compared with the Soviet service upon which it was modeled, the Soviet NKVD. For a brief introduction to comparisons between the Gestapo, Stasi, and postwar east-central European security services, see Jens Gieseke, Die hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter der Staatssicherheit. Personalstruktur und Lebenswelt 1950—1989/90 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2000), 535–39. In English, see also the substantially abridged translation of this work: Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi: East

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Germany’s Secret Police, 1945–1990, trans. David Burnett (New York: Berghahn, 2014). For a recent overview of the scholarly literature produced on the Stasi since 1989, see Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Stasi Konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013). Kowalczuk also addresses the enduring influence of Soviet services on the Stasi’s labors: see esp. 88–91. The nature of collaboration between Soviet and East German services has also recently been considered in a document collection put together by Douglas Selvage and Walter Süß. See Cold War International History Project e-Dossier No. 37, https://www. wilsoncenter.org/publication/kgbstasi-cooperation (accessed January 7, 2017). On distinctions between the Gestapo’s treatment of those believed to be part of the imagined German racial community, see J. Ryan Stackhouse, “Gestapo Interrogations: Myths and Realities,” in Interrogation in War and Conflict: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis, ed. Christopher Andrew and Simona Tobia (New York: Routledge, 2014), 75–92. 6. For an introduction, see Keith R. Allen, Befragung, Überprüfung, Kontrolle. Die Aufnahme von DDR-Flüchtlinge in West Berlin bis 1961 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013), esp. 163–94. 7. Heidemeyer, Flucht und Zuwanderung, 42–53. Guides in English to the social dimensions of the inner-German refugee movement are Patrick Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 56–88, and Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 142–63. 8. The general thrust of the inquiry is outlined in the following document: Motion Tabled to Establish a Committee of Inquiry by the CDU/CSU, SPD, the Left Party, and Alliance 90/ The Greens Parliamentary Groups, German Bundestag, 18th Electoral Term, Printed Paper 18/ 843, March 18, 2014, https://www.bundestag.de/blob/284528/a89d6006f28900c4f46e56 f5e0807ddf/einsetzungsantrag_englisch-docx-data.pdf (accessed October 11, 2016.) 9. Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, Article 11, [Freedom of Movement] “(1) All Germans shall have the right to move freely throughout the federal territory. (2) This right may be restricted only by or pursuant to a law, and only in cases in which the absence of adequate means of support would result in a particular burden for the community, or in which such restriction is necessary to avert an imminent danger to the existence or the free democratic basic order of the Federation or of a state (Land), to combat the danger of an epidemic, to respond to a grave accident or natural disaster, to protect young persons from serious neglect, or to prevent crime.” The November 2012 print version is available at https://www.bundestag. de/blob/284870/ce0d03414872b427e57fccb703634dcd/basic_law-data.pdf (accessed October 9, 2016). 10. The dramatic expansion of the Stasi’s internal powers as a product of Ostpolitik is documented in Jens Gieseke, Mielke-Konzern, Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945–1990 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001), 84–92. On the legacy of West Germany’s engagement with its communist neighbors, see Carole Fink and Bernd Schaefer, eds., Ostpolitik, 1969–1974: European and Global Responses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 269–74. A useful guide to East German ambivalences toward Ostpolitik is Heike Amos, Die SEDDeutschlandpolitik 1961 bis 1989. Ziele, Aktivitäten und Konflikte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015). 11. See Transmission to CIA Washington from the Secretary of the Joint Scientific and Joint Technical Intelligence Committees, September 21, 1948, DEFE 41/133, The National Archives (hereafter cited as TNA London). On the shifting basis of Anglo-American interception rights, consult Josef Foschepoth, Überwachtes Deutschland. Post- und Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 14–16, 35–48, 160–212, and the table on 50; the documentary source material cited on p. 50 and discussed in the passages just mentioned is reproduced on pp. 285–306. 12. The appointment of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Communist, to the directorship of the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique (CNRS) appears to have brought remaining postwar intelligence cooperation in this particular field to a standstill. See Philippe Buton, Les lendemains qui déchantent: Le Parti communiste français à la libération (Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 1993), and Pierre Jardin, “Le renseignement français en Allemagne au lendemain

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de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, 1940–1955,” in Cahiers du CEHD, Histoire du Renseignement, no. 1 (Paris: Addim, 1996), 59–75, esp. 65–72. 13. Minutes of the Joint Intelligence Committee (Germany), January 25, 1949, DEFE 41/64, TNA London. 14. Reports submitted by part-time informants to the Stasi indicate that all French services came to question refugees at Marienfelde and the so-called Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center in Berlin-Zehlendorf, with more detailed interrogations taking place on the grounds of Tegel Airport and the nearby French military headquarters in West Berlin, the so-called Quartier Napoleon. The most interesting cases were forwarded to a special French questioning facility in Baden-Baden. The most relevant documentation appears to be housed at Le Service Historique de la Défense (SHD) in Vincennes (Val-de-Marne). My attempt to secure access to relevant security collections via correspondence with Bernard Bajolet, the director general of the DGSE, were unsuccessful. A guide to (mostly Nazi-era) records can be found at: http:// www.servicehistorique.sga.defense.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/SHDGR_INV_28P7_ SECTION_SPECIALE_ALLEMAGNE.pdf (accessed January 7, 2017). 15. Scholarly literature on French intelligence activities in occupied Germany remains sparse. A useful recent introduction to the French occupation of West Berlin more generally, with some limited attention to security matters, may be found in Christian Brumter, Les Français à Berlin, 1945–1994 (Paris: Riveneuve, 2015); more specifically on intelligence services, see Pierre Jardin, “Französischer Nachrichtendienst in den ersten Jahren des Kalten Krieges,” in Spionage für den Frieden. Nachrichtendienste in Deutschland während des Kalten Krieges, ed. Wolfgang Krieger and Jürgen Weber (Munich: Olzog, 1997), 103–18, and Douglas Porch, The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 280–94. The largest cache of French occupation records, mainly from the Foreign Office, were repatriated to the Bureau des Archives de l’Occupation Française à Colmar (Haut-Rhin) before being transferred, in 2010, to the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques just north of Paris in La Courneuve. Produced in 2013, a current finding aid, Zone française d’occupation en Allemagne et en Autriche (ZFO), Archives des administrations françaises et des organismes tripartites, 1929/1945–1955/1992, is available at http://www. diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/IMG/pdf/zfo_fiche-de-recherche_v2_cle0f2c21.pdf (accessed October 12, 2016). 16. For an introduction to the interpretative battles faced by the external commission charged with exploring the Federal Intelligence Service’s history, see Fidelius Schmid and Klaus Wiegrefe, “Harte Truppe. Eine Kommission arbeitet die Geschichte des Bundesnachrichtendienstes auf. Nun streiten Historiker und Agenten darüber, wie viel Offenheit ein Geheimdienst verträgt,” Der Spiegel 26 (2015): 52–55. The labors of this and another German intelligence commission are discussed in this book’s appendix. 17. The flight of West Germans eastward—more than a half million in total—touched a nerve during the 1950s in the federal republic, although this figure was small in comparison with the number of East Germans to have left for the West. See especially Bernd Stöver, Zuflucht DDR. Spione und andere Übersiedler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), 94–146; Andrea Schmelz, Migration und Politik im geteilten Deutschland während des Kalten Krieges. Die West-Ost Migration in die DDR in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2002). 18. Interrogator’s comments submitted in reports penned by the British Army of the Rhine’s Intelligence Office in Göttingen, for instance, noted the rigorous treatment of newcomers by British Customs Frontier Service questioners. See the report on Günther Sauer, July 15, 1953, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 668, NARA II. 19. Long before the Snowden disclosures, the means employed to impede the transmission of information was gaining traction as a subject of historical inquiry. For an introduction to the scale of classified material in the United States and how the steps used to ensure state secrets remain beyond the purview of scholarly inquiry (and also commercial exploitation), see Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 229–43. An inspiring example of a monograph treatment on this subject is Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). See also Keith R. Allen, “Restricting Knowledge: Channeling Security

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Information in Recent History,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (Spring 2017), forthcoming. 20. On the interpretative limitations of Stasi interrogation files, see Armin Wagner and Matthias Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee. Westdeutsche Militärspionage in der DDR (Berlin: Edition Berolina, 2014), 26, 65–70. For a recent overview of the methods of Stasi interrogators, see Elisabeth Martin, “Ich habe mich nur an das geltende Recht gehalten.” Herkunft, Arbeitsweise und Mentalität der Wärter und Vernehmer der Stasi-Untersuchungshaftanstalt BerlinHohenschönhausen (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014), esp. 58–73. 21. Inner-German military and intelligence questions have been carefully contextualized in broader frameworks. See especially Wagner and Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee, and Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg. Geschichte eines Radikalen Zeitalters 1947–91 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007). On the tangled history of German-German comparisons in the period after unification, see Frank Bösch, “Geteilte Geschichte. Plädoyer für eine deutsch-deutsche Perspektive auf die jüngere Zeitgeschichte,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 12, no. 1 (2015), 98–114, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/1-2015/id=5187 (accessed January 7, 2017). 22. This volume’s appendix presents a brief overview of the available source material. 23. On the long history of public scrutiny faced by West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, see Jost Dülffer, Pullach Intern. Innenpolitischer Umbruch, Geschichtspolitik des BND und “Der Spiegel” 1969–1972, UHK Study No. 5 (Marburg: Unabhängige Historikerkommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bundesnachrichtendienstes 1945–1968, 2015). The polemical nature of many German-language accounts published to date is covered in Wagner and Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee, 13–19.

Part I

Places

Where were Western intelligence services especially active in questioning refugees in divided Germany? The era of mass interrogation in Germany was well under way long before the formal cessation of hostilities in May 1945, with military intelligence officers from Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union questioning individuals at civil internment enclosures—special camps for prisoners of war and war criminals—in their own countries as well as at private residences in occupied Germany. The meanings ascribed to the Cold War for much of the Northern Hemisphere have long resided in the city of Berlin. The city was the main escape route from East Germany and the most valuable base in the world for espionage against the Soviet Bloc until the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. 1 According to the director of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), nearly half of his agency’s “total strength” was concentrated there at the end of the 1950s. 2 This account of refugee interrogation—set in the nearly half-century-long period of global military and ideological struggle—begins there, then expands to encompass questioning conducted across the territory of what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. A prevalent theme here is pitched battles among Western intelligence agencies over access to both physical sites and individual newcomers, conflicts that reached a crescendo at the first refugee processing facility established explicitly for foreigners seeking sanctuary in the Federal Republic of Germany, Camp Valka near Nuremberg. Taken together, chapters 1 and 2 constitute the first attempt to document the myriad actors and sites associated with security debriefing in divided Germany across the entire Cold War period.

2

Places

NOTES 1. An introduction to the various measures of border consolidation adopted in May 1952 can be found in Inge Bennewitz and Rainer Potratz, Zwangsaussiedlungen an der innerdeutschen Grenze: Analysen und Dokumente (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1994), 13–99. 2. Memorandum from “C” for Sir Norman Brook, March 12, 1959, CAB 301/154, TNA London. See also Keith Jeffrey, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 513–21.

Chapter One

The Allied Enclave of West Berlin

Today the best-known sites of refugee questioning in Germany are facilities set up to conduct the so-called federal emergency reception procedure (Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren). In April 1953 West German president Theodor Heuss opened an “emergency reception center” for East Germans in what was then the enclave of West Berlin, in the district of Marienfelde. 1 Those East Germans arriving in the divided but not yet walled-in city were directed to proceed to the Marienfelde complex to complete this reception procedure, consisting of discrete steps and usually lasting several days, in some cases taking several weeks or even months. To clear the hurdles, authorities encouraged newcomers to provide convincing narratives of Communist persecution. 2 Designed specifically for “political” asylum seekers from dictatorial and repressive East Germany (and thus German nationals according to West Germany’s provisional constitution), this facility attracted migrants seeking material betterment, as well as ethnic German evacuees, primarily from Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, seeking the status of “resettlers” (Umsiedler). In 2017 an asylum center next to a museum dedicated to the history of the former procedure housed, like so many others in Germany, refugees from Syria’s ongoing civil war. THE FEDERAL RECEPTION CENTER AT MARIENFELDE After registration and a cursory medical examination (epidemics were a concern in the immediate postwar years), applicants seeking to enter West Berlin or, as was more often the case, western Germany during the 1950s moved on 3

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to the most important step in the refugee recognition system: establishing their security credentials. 3 A stay in Marienfelde offered important benefits to those fleeing: among the most immediate was reduced-rate airfare from West Berlin (via the American-controlled airport at Tempelhof) to West Germany, where refugees granted residency permits settled in preassigned West German states. Upon arrival, entrants became eligible for benefits that included housing subsidies, job training, tax breaks, and other social services. Non-Germans reporting at Marienfelde were often removed from the reception procedure and placed in an American “escapee” program, a course of action that typically entailed a transfer to camps set up in western Germany for foreigners. The most important center of this kind during the 1950s was Camp Valka near Nuremberg, a large American facility for “displaced persons” in the immediate aftermath of World War II and a forerunner of today’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge). As federal officials charged with the Marienfelde procedure repeatedly insisted, the questioning of East Germans by foreign intelligence was a voluntary matter, in no sense a formal component of the federal resettlement

Figure 1.1. Refugees at the Marienfelde Center, 1961. Image courtesy of the German Historical Museum, Berlin.

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procedure itself. 4 This claim was not even half true. As West German and West Berlin officials conceded in internal correspondence, both foreign and domestic intelligence services used the escapees’ precarious legal status to their advantage, informing applicants that in exchange for cooperation, they could improve their prospects in the West. 5 After filling out questionnaires providing personal information, including names of relatives in the East and positions held, places of residence, and membership in political parties and mass organizations, each of Marienfelde’s refugees was handed a green processing card (Laufzettel)—the first and most memorable piece of paper distributed to new arrivals at the reception centers (figure 1.1). The task from the migrants’ perspective was to obtain official stamps from each separate office indicated on the card. In cases in which Allied intelligence personnel regarded the applicant as a threat, this green routing card, along with all other identity documents, passports, and other personal papers, was confiscated, leaving both claimants and West German officials with recourse only to the Allied military occupation authorities charged with the divided city’s security. 6 Absent the processing card, applicants were unable to leave the Marienfelde facility. While American, British, and West German intelligence agencies pursued nebulous objectives, the West Berlin and West German authorities charged with the formal reception procedure were often torn between a formal commitment to scrutinizing those fleeing Communist repression and a desire to cultivate ties with their powerful occupiers. Well into the 1950s, especially in West Berlin, which was not formally part of the Federal Republic of Germany until 1990, tens of thousands of those fleeing were denied recognized (political) refugee status. Migrants whose applications had been rejected were generally not forced to return to East Germany (though many did of their own accord) so as not to concede the fact of East German sovereignty. Trapped in a legal limbo with ambiguous status, these migrants with recent ties to the East and often only tenuous links to the West proved attractive to American services and their helpers, particularly those committed to a rollback of Communist power. 7 The influence of Western intelligence agents on refugees proved a bone of contention in both divided Berlin and West Germany. The case files of the formal recognition procedure demonstrate the ways intelligence organizations influenced the formal review in West Berlin and the federal republic. Examples included a formal recommendation from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) that citizenship be awarded to a stenographer enlisted by the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) as an informant in order to facilitate her surveillance in the federal republic. 8 In another case, handwritten notes to the director of the procedure underscored the “valuable services” the applicant had provided to British military authorities, complete with the request that

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the application be “favorably regarded” by the formal recognition committee. 9 In still another instance, the director of the BfV’s covert annex in Marienfelde instructed federal and state authorities to accelerate their efforts in instances in which West German internal security authorities were convinced a candidate was especially deserving of formal recognition. 10 The epicenter of questioning at Marienfelde was “Building P,” known as “Building O” after 1963, where representatives of American, British, and French services put queries to newcomers. Usually on their second day at the facility, refugees, typically East Germans but in fact anyone passing through West Berlin on his or her way westward, were interviewed in their first language, in most but not all cases German, though discussions, often with especially interesting informants, were overheard in other languages spoken by interviewees and intelligence agents, notably French and English (figure 1.2). Each nation occupied a floor in the foreign intelligence services building at Marienfelde, with the Americans on the bottom, the British in the middle, and the French on the top. Short interviews, described in American and British sources as “screenings” or “flushings,” lasted only a few minutes, in some cases a quarter of an hour, with more attractive candidates occasionally drawn into longer discussions, especially at times when fewer applicants were in residence. A date of birth, rather than a person’s last name, was typically called out to summon an applicant to the interrogators’ office. The establishment of the formal reception procedure in the American sector of West Berlin strengthened the hands of American services over their counterparts. American services drew candidates from the pool of applicants, which they received before all others, in some instances providing suitable individuals with falsified identity papers and sending them on return missions in the East. Those sent back were often incarcerated, thoroughly interrogated, and imprisoned for a number of years. After serving several years in jail, such persons were expelled (or deployed) once again to West Berlin or West Germany, where they typically underwent a more extensive marathon of security checks and intelligence probing at Marienfelde and elsewhere. Those in the weakest position in the Berlin formal reception center, the French and West Germans, had to be creative. The French screening team’s response to its disadvantageous position in the Marienfelde pecking order involved an element of subterfuge: as the Stasi discovered, French services often marked the processing form (Laufzettel) of especially interesting refugees with stamps stolen from their colleagues, the British and American authorities. Procured illegally by French agents, these tools of the trade were apparently used without the knowledge of Anglo-American allies. 11 The fact that the American agencies at Marienfelde, and in West Berlin more generally, were practically tripping over one another for crumbs from Marienfelde’s table only made the scramble more difficult. Especially in the years before the Wall’s creation, American services were by far the most

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Figure 1.2. Sign directing applicants to the offices of Marienfelde’s foreign screeners, Berlin, 1950s. Image courtesy of the Berlin Wall Foundation.

numerous in western Germany and West Berlin: among those posing questions at Marienfelde were representatives of the army (Counter Intelligence Corps [CIC] and Military Intelligence Service), the air force (Office of Special Investigation and the Air Intelligence Service), and the navy (Office of Naval Intelligence), as well as a new foreign intelligence agency established by President Harry Truman in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Eagerness to exploit the movement of individuals through the federal installation for both information and agents, the autonomy enjoyed by each interrogator at Marienfelde, and each service’s vigorous defense of its position in the camp’s pecking order prompted heated battles over “persons of interest.” Compared to the placement of sources across the frontier, interaction at Marienfelde carried dramatically lower risks and required substantially less investment in capital and labor on the part of the services. Led by U.S. Army representatives, an Inter-Services Review Board was established in late 1954 to determine the order of interrogation for especially interesting cases, such as individuals who had exercised an important function in the Soviet Union or one of the countries under its domination in east-central Europe. The list of the U.S. security officials stationed at Marienfelde goes well beyond the usual suspects of acknowledged services. An array of semiofficial organizations directed by U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the Free

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Jurists (Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen) and the Fighting Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit), as well as networks of freelancers active in camps and reception centers, also posed questions and offered written assessments of applicants. 12 On the face of it, their profiles helped those federal authorities charged with the reception procedure to reach decisions about whether newcomers should be allowed to proceed to West Germany. In truth, both the Free Jurists and the Fighting Group tipped the scales in the fate of newcomers in more direct ways, in some cases even hounding those formally acknowledged by the government as “recognized” political refugees. 13 Purportedly a not-for-profit human rights organization, the Free Jurists had from its inception until its forced inclusion in the Bonn Ministry for All-German Affairs (Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutsche Fragen, or BMG) in 1960 acted at the explicit direction of the CIA. Interviewers active at Marienfelde and responsive to U.S. aims involved covert West German representatives, including but not limited to the secret nucleus of what was to become the Ministry of Defense, the socalled Blank Office, the clandestine precursor to today’s West German Ministry of Defense named after Theodor Blank, as well as questioners working on behalf of the continent’s best-known anti-Communist broadcaster, Radio Free Europe. Even the BfV and the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) operated in West Berlin as decoys. Conversations at Marienfelde between spies and refugees nearly always involved a discussion of the immediate circumstances surrounding the applicant’s flight. Plans for the future, with interest often revolving around the candidate’s recent past (and that of his or her family and friends), especially service in the military, party, or police, but also in industry, science, media, and culture, also figured prominently in the discussions. Summaries of conversations conducted in native languages, typically German, rather than full transcripts were translated into English on an as-needed basis. Individual interrogators from France, Britain, and the United States answered not only to on-site directors, but also to various off-site superiors. Both the formal reception center facility in Marienfelde and the airfield in Tempelhof, from which the majority of successful applicants were flown to the federal republic, were located in the American sector of occupied Berlin, enabling American officials to question new arrivals before informational competitors. Tempelhof Airport was an important questioning center of its own, with offices of at least three U.S. Air Force services, the most active being the Air Intelligence Service situated in the eastern wing of the massive complex. Among the many informal contributors to the pool of interviewees was a German professional association of pilots: it directed hundreds of aircraft specialists to American intelligence officials. Only in rare instances were West German services able to bring refugees fleeing via West Berlin by air to the federal republic without the knowledge of American services. 14

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A not infrequent outcome of extensive interrogations at multiple sites was the verdict that subjects were of no further interest. Troublesome or useless contacts were either dropped or turned over to West German security officials, depending on the perceived risk the individual posed to Allied questioners. Interrogations carried out by West Berlin police were routinely made available to U.S. intelligence officials stationed there, typically after, but sometimes before, American security officials had fully exhausted their curiosity. MARIENFELDE AND AMERICAN INFORMANTS: THE CASE OF KÄTHE BÜNTGEN One example of a case turned over to West Berlin authorities under dubious circumstances surrounds the escape to West Berlin of teacher-cumAmerican-informant Käthe Büntgen. According to files housed at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the former grade school teacher came to the attention of the Marienfelde screeners “through normal refugee processing channels.” A confessed Stasi agent, in early January 1959 Büntgen resided at the Marienfelde Refugee Center at the time of various American interrogations. Files produced by the Counter Intelligence Corps demonstrate the types of information the CIC Berlin Office sought to elicit—in Büntgen’s case, highly personal portraits of twenty Soviet and East German agents, detailed sketches of installations and cover apartments used by the two services, the identities of five individuals residing in West Germany who had, she believed, been approached by the Stasi to serve as informants, and descriptions of operational methods employed by the Stasi in the city of Schwerin. The CIC Berlin Office cross-checked the personalities, addresses, installations, and telephone numbers supplied by Büntgen against its own files, validating the former teacher’s statements. Her successful “debriefing” led the CIC, the largest U.S. intelligence organization in Germany and western Europe in the immediate postwar years, to offer another U.S. Army intelligence office in Berlin access to her. Purportedly rejected by the Department of the Army Detachment (DAD) Berlin, a cover for the CIA in the former German capital, “as being of no interest,” Büntgen was then turned over to West Berlin police for further investigation and “neutralization.” 15 Taken at face value, Büntgen’s case file appears to point to an instance of routine cooperation among West Berlin police officials and their American counterparts. In fact, in her case, as in many others, a selective flow of information within Allied circles reveals considerable distrust, not so much of confessed agents like Büntgen, but rather of operations run by American military services such as the CIC. Public prosecutors, first in West Berlin,

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then Bavaria, and finally the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe, took up the Büntgen case in order to censure American occupiers. A request from West Germany’s highest prosecutorial office indicates that federal police authorities suspected that the teacher had disclosed her Stasi contacts to an American agency in West Berlin four months earlier than the CIC Berlin Office had chosen to report to West Berlin police. Büntgen, it seems, had maintained contact with the CIC while living in East Germany. During still more detailed interrogations carried out in West Germany, federal officials in Karlsruhe determined that a U.S. military intelligence group had instructed Büntgen to flee to the West: to this end, a clandestine meeting in West Berlin between CIC representatives and Büntgen had taken place four months earlier than American authorities had admitted to West Berlin and West German counterparts. 16 The file contains no response from U.S. military authorities to the charge from Karlsruhe police authorities that the American service had exploited the former elementary school teacher as a double agent; one learns only that Büntgen, regarded by the CIC as “intelligent and observant, a very cooperative source,” had during the sixteen weeks prior to her “flight” westward accepted a new position as a teacher in a school catering to the needs of the children of East German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) functionaries and Stasi agents in her hometown of Schwerin. An internal CIC memorandum, one of several relevant documents not shared with West German counterparts, conceded that Büntgen had begun to plan her defection to the West “consciously or unconsciously” from August 1958 onward. At that time, or perhaps even earlier, she had established a relationship with the Free Jurists. 17 Unsuccessful in limiting the scope of American intelligence activities in East Germany’s socialist dictatorship, elected officials and high civil servants in Bonn and West Berlin trained their sights on the Berlin-based organizations working on their behalf at the Marienfelde federal reception center, specifically those with intimate connections to U.S. intelligence organizations, first and foremost the Free Jurists and the Fighting Group against Inhumanity. As the 1950s drew to a close, the dissolution of the Fighting Group and the federalization of the Free Jurists were among the concessions yielded due to West German assertions of legal responsibility for the lives of those fleeing westward. 18 Complaints about the preeminent position enjoyed by the Western powers, with laments over the attendant loss of “men and material,” form a common refrain in German-language declassified documents. Especially in Berlin, American officials exercised the right to deny even those Germans accorded political asylum the right to fly to West Germany; in response, West Berlin officials, with federal encouragement, logged cases in which American intelligence agencies had confiscated East German identity cards and other papers. 19 In May 1956 Lisa Korspeter, a Social Democratic Party

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(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) member of the Bundestag, spoke for many in her party when she demanded, in West Germany’s lower house of parliament, the immediate cessation of Allied interrogation at Marienfelde. In defense of Allied rights, a representative of the governing Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU), Agnes Katharina Maxseln, chose only to acknowledge that Korspeter’s remarks had broached a question that, “as seen from a psychological or political point of view, is undoubtedly both highly delicate and important.” 20 Particularly during the late 1950s, West German newspapers featured stinging criticism of American efforts to exploit, for intelligence purposes, the hundreds of thousands of East German migrants arriving in the more prosperous western regions of the divided country each year. Newspapers, especially those close to the SPD, brimmed with veiled allegations concerning American intelligence in the East and the refugee camps of the West: topping the list among the organizations most often singled out for criticism was the American CIC. 21 Public figures expressing criticism of American security practices in the West German parliament include the chair of the parliamentary group of the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, or FDP), Erich Mende, and the vice president of the Bundestag, SPD politician and professor for international law, Carlo Schmid. Both called on the country’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to step forward to curb American espionage excesses at Marienfelde. Coming at a time when the threat of Soviet espionage, sabotage, and outright incursion into West Berlin loomed large, even conservative West German leaders felt compelled to publicly question the wisdom of American involvement in vetting the westward movement of Germans. At an October 1958 news conference in West Berlin, Adenauer demurred when asked whether Americans and other Western Allies based in the divided city were interrogating Germans fleeing Communist oppression and employing refugees as agents. Instead he allowed his minister for all-German affairs, former journalist Ernst Lemmer, to provide his government’s reassurance that confidential negotiations had brought the practice, at least in Berlin, to an end. 22 Adenauer’s refusal to comment was prescient, for as friends and foes alike promptly asserted, his minister’s assessment was mistaken. Another cabinet member, Adenauer’s minister for refugees, Theodor Oberländer, a notorious ex-Nazi and supporter of Hitler’s 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, who in correspondence with West Germany’s foreign minister had gone so far as to compare American interrogation techniques with those of East Germany’s Stasi, was among the first to point out the rights of American, British, and French occupiers to interrogate whomever they pleased whenever they liked—in West Berlin, if no longer in West Germany. The dispute over American espionage smoldered, with a debate about refugee interrogation at Marienfelde jumping the English Channel to the House of Commons. 23 The

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questioning of refugees was also addressed in closed-door meetings in Bonn, attended by the first French, British, and American ambassadors to West Germany. 24 Dissent in the ranks created unexpected benefits for domestic intelligence agencies struggling to strengthen their foothold in the camps, reception centers, and questioning centers of West Berlin. Subsequent events—including a major international crisis culminating in the building of the Berlin Wall— eclipsed the battles among Allies over access to migrants, though never entirely, as demonstrated by flare-ups over newcomers for twenty-eight years after the Wall’s construction. Nearly thirty years after the Wall went up, criticism of Allied policy in West Berlin had not waned: if anything, the charges had grown shriller, with elected officials there demanding that the Western Allies desist from interrogating East German refugees residing in the divided city. In public, the Bonn ministries charged with the federal admission procedure carried out at Marienfelde sought consolation in a legal nicety: the essential feature of the refugee experience was not the presence of Western intelligence agents but rather the process of “recognition” (in essence the granting of political asylum, though the term was avoided so as not to impart any legal status to the entity commonly referred to well into the 1960s as the “Soviet zone” or merely “the zone”). At the Federal Refugee Office in Berlin, three-person panels—typically made up of representatives from what were then West Germany’s main political parties, the CDU, SPD, and FDP (known as the Liberal Democrats, Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, or LDPD, in East Germany), and in other cases civil servants or former refugees—decided whether individuals had been so directly menaced by Communist authorities as to make flight to the West an utter necessity. Conditions for eligibility were initially stringent, especially in West Berlin but also in western Germany. In reaching their decision, the commissions reviewed statements presented or written by applicants and sought outside expertise. 25 The files of what was presented in Berlin as a ten- to twelve-step series of distinct “stations” indicate that outside assessments, often from the Allied powers, tipped the balance in deciding whether applicants would receive political asylum. These written affidavits provided Western services with important avenues of influence over newcomers’ lives. German-language notes requesting a conversation prior to the meeting of the formal recognition commission were not unknown; nor, during the early years, were pointed handwritten comments, such as “I don’t like the looks of this one!” or “I wouldn’t put my hand in the fire for him either.” 26 The semi-judicial machinery of the formal reception procedure helped to ensure such comments were buried beneath a veneer of bureaucratic professionalism. 27 More informally and thus more effectively, connections between welfare and security officials ensured American occupation authorities received top-

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drawer access. Matters were aided by the fact that the divide between welfare and security screening was never hard and fast. To offer one example, a former member of West Berlin’s asylum commission, subsequently employed as the chief of a state refugee processing camp in Weinsberg, near the city of Heilbronn, built up what the CIA deemed an especially useful refugee debriefing program in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Toiling formally on behalf of that state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or LfV), the official was exceptionally receptive to the American service’s requests according to CIA files. 28 Unknown to claimants and appellants, the lengthy dossiers establishing or disproving claims to “political recognition,” including cases heard by appeals committees consisting of five-person groups of notables (including representatives of the Free Jurists and Fighting Group), circulated freely among West German and foreign intelligence officials. The practice of dossier removal was common at the reception and asylum centers, with files replete with highly personal information loaned to security officials, including foreign representatives. In such cases, the identity cards, residence permits, work logs, and other certificates contained therein passed through many hands. 29 Those posing questions honed their skills at leaving petitioners with the impression that the success of their application, perhaps even their fate in the West or that of their relatives in the East, hinged on the degree of their cooperation in security matters. Claimants’ responses to the formal requirements of federal asylum and reception procedures provided security officials with additional avenues of influence over their “guests.” Both they and the bureaucrats charged with the procedure were willing to soften eligibility criteria if applicants’ experiences of Soviet peril had been direct. Fault lines in the extant archival documentation emerge not only between individual West German applicants and welfare and security officials. Less visibly, West German and West Berlin officials charged with the reception procedure, on the one hand, and foreign intelligence agencies and their domestic partners, on the other, often found themselves working at cross purposes. Acutely aware of their limited sphere of influence, federal officials charged with the application procedure sought to downplay the relevance of foreigners’ questioning, insisting that, following the country’s assumption of sovereignty in 1955, refugees were only “screened” or “flushed,” with the heavy lifting being done by West German authorities, assisted by their state authority (Land ) counterparts. Insofar as security debriefing was necessary, those charged with the federal admission reception procedure sought to ensure that interviews, especially those carried out by foreigners, took place in a separate building, as in Marienfelde, or in off-site locations, allowing German officials from the Ministries of Refugee Affairs and the Interior the possibility of formally absolving themselves of responsibility for their occupiers’ use of newcomers. 30

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Viewed across the entire period, the most active federal vetting agencies in Marienfelde were the BND, the BfV, and the BMG. In the guise of decoy organizations, the Blank Office, forerunner to the Ministry of Defense, also played a role in formal debriefing at Marienfelde and official reception and asylum centers until the mid-1950s. From February 1952 onward, a sixperson team from the BfV conducted interviews at a West Berlin predecessor facility to the Marienfelde reception center. Located on Kaiserdamm 85, this office was transferred to House “H” at Marienfelde the next summer. Eager to disguise the presence of Bonn counterintelligence agents in West Berlin, a rump city not part of the federal republic and, from a security perspective, the responsibility of all four wartime victors, West German intelligence agents presented themselves as employees of the Federal Ministry for Refugees. 31 By 1960, the BfV had committed twenty-two employees to the Berlin facility, with eight members of staff toiling as interrogators. 32 The duties of this office, known formally as the Prescreening Group B I in the federal emergency reception procedure, extended to the surveillance of all those employed at the Marienfelde center and nearby camps; to this end, it enjoyed access to all personnel files held by the federal director of the reception procedure. Case reports on subjects, such as those with contacts in Soviet intelligence services in eastern Germany, were translated into English and shared with American counterparts; today unobtainable in German archives, these tended to be considerably more thorough in their descriptions of Soviet personnel than U.S. Army field evaluations. 33 Sources judged “unsusceptible to exploitation” by either the Americans or the BfV or West Berlin’s LfV were referred to Department I of West Berlin’s police. 34 Subsequent interrogations and criminal records of suspicious individuals held by both offices were exchanged with American, British, and French occupiers. Personal information from refugees encountered by the federal office’s prescreening group was compiled and forwarded to the headquarters of the main counterintelligence body in the Rhine city Cologne, where the agency’s Department IV B/3 conducted analyses and forwarded summaries to higher levels of the Bonn government. Initially recording data on index cards, the BfV appears to have introduced automatic data processing to manage information retrieval, creating overviews of addresses and sites of interest in the Communist sphere of influence, as well as a dynamic inventory of all employment positions held in East Germany. The BND’s office in Marienfelde, also in House “H,” was known clandestinely as the “Liaison Office SEIFERT.” This BND bureau compiled special green cards for particularly interesting newcomers, typically after such individuals had satisfied the informational needs of American, British, and French interrogators. Especially promising leads were diverted to specialists posted at decoy offices and firms based in West Berlin. Last in line at Marienfelde behind all foreign services, both the BND and the BfV sought to

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maximize shared advantages in information gathering among those under the age of twenty-four: during the 1950s, such individuals were directed from Marienfelde to youth camps in the western German state of Lower Saxony, Sandbostel for young men and Westertimke for young women. 35 In the early 1950s representatives of the BfV were interrogating new arrivals at Sandbostel—unofficially, ostensibly to avoid the ire of British occupation authorities—within the camp itself, as well as in a separate facility in Uelzen. 36 Select reports produced by the BfV, typically one to two pages in length, were dispatched to American and British authorities. In some cases, these included West German assessments of a refugee’s suitability for espionage work in the East, revealing a dimension of German-American cooperation left unacknowledged in condemnations of Anglo-American liberation efforts. To offer one example, the BfV’s refugee screening team at Sandbostel evaluated twenty-two-year-old Günther Henze of Magdeburg as “of moderate intelligence and comprehension; by turns servile and irritable, cunning, dubious, having psychopathic tendencies, willing to make statements—lugubrious. Statements are incomplete, confused, inexact, contradictory . . . on the whole not credible. Impression untrustworthy. Probably unsuitable for intelligence activities, however presumably suitable for minor espionage assignments, therefore caution is required.” 37 The collection of the Ministry for All-German Affairs, housed today at the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz, contains a large volume of declassified archival material from West German federal officials based at Marienfelde. This ministry’s covert office, known to refugees merely as “B2,” claimed to represent an organization in Bonn bearing the name Association for the Promotion of German Unification (Verein zur Förderung der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands). 38 On Tuesday and Friday evenings, the “association’s” reports on escapees were flown to the ministry’s headquarters in the Poppelsdorfer Allee in Bonn. In July 1963 this “association” was paired with another decoy, a so-called German Society for Social Affairs (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialbeziehungen). Interim reports, typically six pages in length, contained insights compiled by these and other decoy organizations, with longer reports featuring a table of contents. Quite possibly abstracted in the Bonn suburb of Friesdorf from notes submitted from preliminary interrogations carried out in Marienfelde (and other federal reception centers and camps in western Germany), the reports leave out the names of migrants, but not those of professional contacts left behind in the Soviet zone. Most of these reports detail physical sites. Economic enterprises top the list, though practically every public institution in East Germany, from prisons to theaters, makes an appearance in these files. Subsequently published as the Bonn Reports, these relatively polished studies based on newcomers’ testimonies appear to have been compiled in West Berlin, probably in an office building on Bayerischer Platz. As these were perhaps intended as

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primers for those reporting on life in eastern Germany, handwritten notes from staff at the Ministry for All-German Affairs—such as one instructing readers that publication of details on Soviet uranium extraction in Wismut was forbidden—are rare. 39 Less polished, more immediate one-page assessments of individual refugees from this government agency may be found in the files of the formal reception procedure housed in the Giessen suburb of Ursulum. BRITAIN’S ROLE IN SECURITY SCREENING AT MARIENFELDE Sandwiched between American services and their West German counterparts at Marienfelde were British services. Britain’s role as an interrogation power in Berlin was initially stronger than America’s. Marienfelde was not the first refugee questioning facility set up in West Berlin by occupation authorities. The British had already established three interrogation offices in the Berlin districts of Charlottenburg, Tiergarten, and Wilmersdorf during the early days of the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. Until 1949, British security agencies toiled alongside city welfare officials—that is, until complaints from the latter that British agents were sending refugees back to the Soviet zone as agents led U.K. services to seek offsite facilities at Karolingerplatz in the Westend neighborhood of Berlin. There a so-called Anglo-American Interrogation Center opened at Karolingerplatz in September 1949. 40 Berlinbased representatives of British intelligence services, known as 12 Berlin Intelligence Staff (12 BIS), bused new arrivals back and forth between the Anglo-American Interrogation Center at Karolingerplatz and various sites in West Berlin maintained by that city’s fledging Social Welfare Office under the leadership of Elisabeth Lüders. 41 The 12 BIS served better-known British intelligence agencies, most prominently the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), British Security Service (MI5), and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The director of 12 BIS held the title of principal intelligence officer and formally oversaw six departments. The most important of these, production, also served the requirements of MI6 and GCHQ. Another department focused specifically on technology/economy. Until 1956, still another department, the Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB), passed leads received from 12 BIS to MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. 42 Substantial runs of STIB records have been declassified; they form the basis for the discussion of personalities in the first pages of part 2. In September 1952 Karolingerplatz witnessed the creation of a French substation, providing French services with tertiary access to newcomers. Until the move to Marienfelde, especially interesting refugees initially passed through the offices of the British. Intelligence services formally repre-

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sented in 12 BIS reported to what was known as the British Intelligence Organization (Germany). A soldier, Major General J. M. Kirkman, commanded this civilian organization in 1953. Its headquarters were initially at Wentworth Barracks in Herford and later at Wahnerheide in Cologne. Within the formal refugee machinery at Karolingerplatz and Marienfelde, British and Americans carved out a subsidiary role for French and West German services. At facilities in West Berlin administered independently by each of the occupying powers, cooperation among Allies was much less common. The precise number of these latter sites remains undocumented, though British and especially American services operated several dozen interrogations sites during the 1950s alone, typically for years at a time, across their sectors of the divided city. Even after the Wall’s construction in August 1961, West Berlin remained both a significant listening post and forward operations base for intelligence services from these and many other nations. THE JOINT ALLIED REFUGEE OPERATIONS CENTER IN BERLIN-ZEHLENDORF Most prominent among the American sites used to interrogate refugees in West Berlin was a so-called Registration Office for Foreigners. Known from the 1960s onward as the Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center (JAROC), this was the most important American questioning center in West Berlin (figure 1.3). The JAROC’s origins may be traced to a U.S. Army-administered facility located on Fontanestrasse 16 in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin: by 1959, the offices had been moved to unmarked buildings on SvenHedin-Strasse 9 and 11 in the Zehlendorf district of the divided city. JAROC staff reported to the U.S. Army’s 513th Intelligence Group. Especially interesting refugees were quickly removed from the Marienfelde “stream” and brought here as they passed through the formal reception procedure. Many defectors, including members of the technical intelligentsia, came directly to this facility, bypassing the formal procedure altogether; once established in university or industrial positions in West Germany, the most cooperative provided access to colleagues still residing in the Communist East. 43 East German soldiers defecting to West Berlin routinely encountered federal and state authorities only after American intelligence authorities at the JAROC had completed days of questioning. Known initially as the American Registration Office for Foreigners, the Sven-Hedin site consisted of two structures, a villa set back from the street housing offices and especially interesting “guests” and a single-story annex building used for interrogations. American interrogators took up residence in the flat-roofed structure in February 1962. The modern annex on the Sven-Hedin-Strasse in the Zehlendorf district of

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Berlin no longer stands; the villa, once owned by Reichsbank president and Nazi minister of economics Hjalmar Schacht, belonged to the Bundesnachrichtendienst until quite recently. Perhaps it does even to this day. Until recently, a fence enclosed the JAROC’s grounds, with a guard standing watch. Minutes after dramatic escapes from East Germany, a call was placed from a West Berlin police precinct to the Sven-Hedin-Strasse, prompting newcomers’ transport to the JAROC, in some cases under American guard. Instructed to deposit all forms of identification, refugees were photographed and fingerprinted on the ground floor of the villa, where entrants held a sign with names, dates, and places of birth held at chest level: such mug shots from the former center may today be found in collections housed at NARA. Unlike at Karolingerplatz, audio recording devices were in use, allowing questioners to devote greater attention to their charges. Many of those who passed through this American registration office were housed at an imposing hostel around the corner, the Pension Obigt near Mexikoplatz, now a private dwelling, with meals provided in exchange for a coupon at the High-Spirited Hiker, still a sleepy restaurant located several minutes away by foot from the now-defunct interrogation site. In-depth questioning, typically led by multilingual Americans with identifiable accents, continued for several days or, less often, several weeks. Coffee, soda, cigarettes, and alcohol were generously dispensed; at the end of each day, “guests” signed a receipt confirming a daily payment of West German marks. Roughly thirty individuals were employed in the Sven-Hedin-Strasse at the end of the 1960s. Nearly all were American. Weapons catalogs and detailed topographical maps outlining troop installations, especially Soviet, as well as diagrams, sketches, photo albums of economic facilities of military and security interest, and other visual aids were in use. Of particular interest were details of Soviet military technology, especially radar, rocketry, and airfields; troop movements; large construction projects; and morale within the ranks of Warsaw Pact army units and the civilian population of the refugee’s home region. Especially prized was information about Soviet installations: select scientific experts were waybilled to a so-called Defector Reception Center in Frankfurt. Secreted away from prying eyes, both the JAROC and the Defector Reception Center made use of American and West German media when it suited their purposes. From March 1963 onward, the JAROC staff dispatched defected soldiers and police officers to Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) for interviews. RIAS was the radio station created by U.S. military authorities in February 1946 for those residing in the Soviet zone of occupation. Those who accepted offers to speak to RIAS received modest gratuities. 44 In instances in which RIAS’s political editors uncovered information they believed useful to the U.S. Army, a call was placed to the Sven-Hedin-Strasse. “Consultation fees” paid for debriefings at the JAROC, the Defector Recep-

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tion Center, and other such facilities ran to tidier sums, in several cases to the impressive amount of several thousand West German marks. 45 A key feature of refugee interrogation in Berlin was vigorous competition over access to newcomers among various allies, so-called neutrals, and also avowed enemies. In West Berlin and western Germany, the Americans commanded outsized means. Aside from the place of prominence they enjoyed at Marienfelde, perhaps the clearest expression of the resources marshaled by the intelligence arms of the three branches of the U.S. military, in addition to the Central Intelligence Agency and other civilian agencies, was the shifting number of questioning sites these and other American operators used throughout West Berlin. Located typically in or near the Zehlendorf district, many of these villas, freestanding homes, and apartment buildings were shuttered after the Wall’s construction in 1961 made escape to the West and travel to the East via West Berlin considerably more difficult. Besides the JAROC, several questioning facilities in the Zehlendorf district nonetheless outlasted the Wall. Many were situated near the Argentinische Allee or Clayallee or in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin, near what in 1948 became the anti-Communist center of higher learning known today as the Freie

Figure 1.3. The former home of the Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center, Berlin. Photograph taken by the author.

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Universität. In the years before the Wall’s construction, former residents of the Soviet Union were brought to Clayallee 146. Hostile intelligence agents were cross-examined at a so-called American Screening Center for nonGermans located at Clayallee 242. Clayallee 170–174, then home to the army espionage unit described as Military Intelligence Detachment (MID), also served as a questioning site. At Busse Allee 7–9, also in the Zehlendorf district, near Mexikoplatz and a five-minute walk from the JAROC, American interrogators—until 1958 with the assistance of German nationals—gleaned information from intelligence officers and would-be saboteurs concerning Soviet and East German security services, as well as East German harbor and other transport installations. Among the most prominent of the photographic, audio, and concealment devices mentioned in American sources were lie detectors, with inconclusive results of “truth measurement” via polygraph examinations yielding what a CIC interrogator based in West Berlin acknowledged were “intense, hostile” interrogations that aimed to “break” refugees’ accounts. 46 To determine the veracity of allegations concerning suspected Communist sympathy and espionage activity, the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps employed the Stoelting Deceptograph machine at its field offices and the Busse Strasse facility in West Berlin as early as the mid-1950s. 47 Although at the time polygraph (lie detector) testing was illegal under West German law, it was frequently used in western Germany by U.S. Army military police and the results shared with West German counterparts. 48 Several American military intelligence agencies made use of the Busse Strasse facility, including the CIA. Polish citizens fleeing to the West were brought to a facility near the Tempelhof Airport at Manteuffelstrasse 31. In these and other facilities, American CIC interrogators worked in separate units from photo interpreters and so-called order-ofbattle specialists well into the 1950s. 49 BRITISH INTELLIGENCE QUESTIONING BEYOND MARIENFELDE Representatives of American services shuttled refugees between multiple facilities during the early years of the occupation in the now legendary 1950s-era automobiles that provoked envy beyond America’s shores. British approaches were marked by less dazzle, as well as a greater reliance on German interrogators toiling on behalf of the British Control Commission. During the first years of the occupation, Lancaster House (today the imposing town hall for the district of Wilmersdorf) provided British interrogators with offices. By the mid-1950s, these and other sites had been consolidated at a British complex located just north of the 1936 Olympic Stadium, covering an area larger than the Sven-Hedin-Strasse JAROC facility.

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Known as Yorkshire House, from October 1953 onward, the structure on Hanns-Braun-Strasse near the infamous stadium housed Berlin Intelligence Staff. Access to the area, which included the British military headquarters in West Berlin, was restricted to those with accreditation. Espionage and security services working especially closely with the British, including representatives from the Benelux nations, Denmark and Norway, and Dominion countries, made use of the Yorkshire House facility under British aegis. At both Yorkshire House and the JAROC, especially promising refugees were billeted elsewhere, including in the camps sprinkled across the western half of the divided city prior to the Wall’s construction, as well as in temporary residences set up near the Marienfelde reception facility. Defectors or deserters were housed and fed in nearby villas, with three “guest houses”—at Kirschenallee 21, Lindenallee 31, and Rheinbabenallee 39a—serving British requirements into the 1960s. FRENCH REFUGEE QUESTIONING IN WEST BERLIN The most important site used by French intelligence agencies, formally included as partners at Karolingerplatz in 1952 and later at Marienfelde after its opening in 1953, was located on the grounds of France’s large military base in West Berlin, the so-called Quartier Napoleon at Kurt Schumacher Damm 42, then as now located near Tegel Airport. During the 1980s, Block 25b of this complex housed the headquarters of the Direction des Recherches en Allemagne (DRA), an annex of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage (SDECE). From the earliest days of the occupation, German nationals carried out interrogations on behalf of the French; questioners employed at Marienfelde and more clandestine sites were recruited from French prisoner-of-war camps, as well as among those who had served in the French Foreign Legion. The busiest French sites of interrogation outside the Quartier Napoleon and Marienfelde were situated in the Berlin district of Wedding; sites used by French services into the 1960s and 1970s included Müllerstrasse 117, 126a, and 197. Interaction with British and American services was limited; the degree of French exchange with West German and other foreign agencies remains obscured, though it probably grew from the early 1960s onward. Whereas refugees were shuttled from the earliest days of the occupation between British and American cross-questioning facilities and “guest houses,” similar traffic to and from French installations appears to have been rare. For most of the Cold War era, tripartite interrogations were exceptional; even the sharing of reports on individuals of interest was unusual. In fact, the Anglophone services expended considerable effort to exclude French ser-

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vices from the flow of information, including at Marienfelde, where, at least formally, all three powers shared the same building. Next to impossible to document in a comprehensive manner are various other “operational facilities” of the three Western Allies that were strewn across West Berlin. A number of detention sites, safe houses and apartments, bars, hotels, cinemas, train station platforms, theaters, dance halls, airports, hostels, hospitals, industrial firms, and various other venues make an appearance in the sources used to complete this account. American, British, and French intelligence agents used these sites, to say nothing of the various German organizations and formal agencies actually working on their behalf. A full inventory would be both tediously voluminous and most likely incomplete, in part because all services frequently swapped facilities to avoid detection by Soviet Bloc competitors. 50 Easy to trace is the presence of the Western occupiers in the many camps housing refugees across West Berlin; during the 1950s, nearly a hundred of these barracks, almost all run by private charities, peppered the western half of the former capital. Facilities were set up for girls and boys, families, and those East German migrants denied formal recognition under the reception procedure. Press accounts suggest these camps were hotbeds of intelligence activity, vice, and public indignation: espionage materials provide little reason to counter this impression. Polish and Russian emigrant organizations active in West Germany joined the chorus of critical assessments, highlighting incidents involving recruitment at private camps in the divided city by Western, especially American, intelligence agents. Less well known is the fact that voluntary associations, including those connected to West Germany’s main churches, actually served as information brokers. Along with advocacy groups established to promote the inclusion of German-speaking newcomers in the federal republic, voluntary organizations mediated relations between refugees, state and federal welfare and security officials, and foreign and domestic intelligence services. The influence of foreign and domestic espionage agents in defining admission to the federal republic remained a staple of life in Germany throughout the Cold War, even as the sites, personnel, and objects of interrogation changed over time. As the results of Stasi interrogations of returnees from the West in November 1989 illustrate, West Germany’s counterintelligence authorities questioned East Germans in makeshift reception camps set up to accommodate those who had crossed the newly opened border from Hungary into Austria. 51 The interrogation of newcomers to Germany involved foreign intelligence services until at least June 2014: quite possibly, given the presence of foreign troops stationed in western Germany and the dramatic influx of war refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq in 2015 and 2016, their engagement continues, albeit under as yet unspecified circumstances. 52

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DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE SCREENING IN ALLIED WEST BERLIN Across the entire period of German division, West German intelligence and security authorities in the city’s western half were granted formal access to fellow citizens from the East after American, British, and French counterparts—the ultimate political authorities in the divided city’s western half— had completed often extensive inquiries, provided “Allied” services had not spirited especially interesting refugees out of Berlin to their own zone of occupation in western Germany, removing them from the formal procedure in West Berlin altogether. Only after their fellow citizens had completed questioning marathons at various formal, semiformal, and clandestine questioning sites administered by the city’s occupiers and its helpers did West German officials get the opportunity to speak with many (but certainly not all) of them. Refugees from other countries within the Communist sphere of influence were considerably less likely to face West German questioners—at least in divided Berlin. Despite these obstacles, West German agencies, like their foreign counterparts, used clandestine offsite facilities in West Berlin for more extensive questioning than the “preliminary screening” associated with formal asylum-seeking procedures. Whereas the Berlin state (LfV) and federal (BfV) authorities formally charged with counterintelligence ran interrogation centers at Clayallee 138 and Fehrbelliner Platz 1–2, respectively, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) operated covert questioning centers in the Charlottenburg (Leistikowstrasse 3), Schöneberg (Apostel-Paulus-Strasse 19), and Steglitz (Buggestrasse) districts. Those toiling at these and others sites were not the first Germans to serve as interrogators in clandestine facilities in Berlin, working alongside the associations funded in whole or in part by American and British intelligence agencies, as well as “flushers” or “sorters” of foreign services employed at Marienfelde, Karolingerplatz, and various refugee camps. Both British and American intelligence organizations cultivated the intelligence efforts of German political parties, especially the Social Democratic Party. The SPD’s Refugee Outreach Office (Flüchtlingsberatungsstelle), located in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin at Hohenzollerndamm 174–177, was an important early partner of American and British intelligence services. Created in 1946 after the forced merger of the Social Democratic and Communist parties in the Soviet zone, the Refugee Outreach Office received financial support from Anglo-American intelligence services immediately before but also after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949. Offering praise typically reserved for American client organizations such as the Fighting Group against Inhumanity and the Free Jurists, an American official charged with counterespionage operations in West Berlin regarded the SPD’s Eastern Office as

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“one of the most popular and efficient private and political intelligence and resistance organizations” in the city during the years immediately after the war. 53 According to a 1958 account supplied by an informant of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, the SPD’s collection alone held more than four hundred thousand cards recording the names, addresses, and encoded details of individuals who had escaped East Germany. The party’s Eastern Office housed these cards, along with some 3,600 oversized folders containing details on East German police, security services, individual ministries, and other party organizations, in special vaults in the basement of the office’s Bonn headquarters. 54 The extant declassified archival record does indicate that the party’s Refugee Outreach Office assisted Western services in different ways. Present in 1954 at the sites administering the federal reception admission procedure in Giessen, Uelzen, and Berlin-Marienfelde and networked with American intelligence agencies—which provided secret funds for many years—as well as the BND’s precursors, the SPD’s office under the leadership of Stefan Thomas (born Stefan Grzeskowiak) had by the late 1950s fallen out of step with the party’s leadership. 55 In 1960 the party organization that had spearheaded German resistance to Communist oppression in Soviet-held East Germany was separated from its refugee assistance program and subsequently transformed into an Office for Inner-German Relations. 56 The fortunes of the so-called Eastern Offices of the three main West German parties, the CDU, SPD, and FDP, were waning as the 1960s dawned. In April 1957 a major court decision made it possible to accept virtually all applicants at Marienfelde and other federal reception centers in western Germany. With the need for detailed information about each applicant subsequently reduced, federal authorities charged with the procedure stepped up efforts to exclude actors, including West Germany’s main political parties. While the advisory offices of the largest trade union, the two main churches, and other groups representing occupations and professions, such as farmers, students, and teachers, closed their doors at Marienfelde, the parties’ Eastern Offices, the Red Cross, and organizations acting on behalf of released political prisoners remained open, albeit reduced in stature. Once valued as key members of the three-person admission and five-person appeals committees, the parties were losing ground, and their role as arbiters of conditions in the East came to be increasingly filled by individuals, often lawyers, trained for West German civil service employment. Assessments and affidavits submitted by an impressive variety of individuals and organizations ostensibly maintaining informant networks in the East, and thus purportedly able to report reliably on an applicant’s comportment on the eve of his or her departure, appear less frequently in the files of federal reception procedure after 1957, though outside appraisals, along with the review procedure itself, did not disappear altogether. 57 Intelligence gathering once undertaken under the

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mantle of political parties, interest groups, and an array of self-styled experts on the “Soviet zone” shifted largely, if not completely, to federal and state actors operating in tandem with what were increasingly known—after the 1948–1949 Berlin Airlift, the first successful Soviet test of an atomic bomb in August 1949, and the Sino-Soviet invasion of South Korea in 1950—as West Germany’s protective powers. To the victors went the spoils of information gathering: following its dismantlement in 1959, extensive holdings of the most controversial of these organizations, the Fighting Group against Inhumanity, were turned over to the BND. At almost the same time, the massive questioning files of the Free Jurists in Berlin-Zehlendorf, today held at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, were incorporated into the Berlin office of West Germany’s Ministry for All-German Affairs, an agency of the federal government that kept the practice of decoy not-for-profits alive. Similarly, the Free Democratic Party’s office at Marienfelde was formally closed in the early 1970s, though not before party leaders had submitted their entire collection of identification cards to representatives of Cologne’s BfV. WESTWARD FLIGHT AND TRAVEL: THE RELATIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF WEST BERLIN The closure of the FDP’s office at Marienfelde points to the fact that the geographic focus of questioning had long shifted from the walled-in western half of the former capital to the more prosperous West German Federal Republic of Germany. Whereas escape from the East during the 1950s took place overwhelmingly via West Berlin, after 1961 the main points of access to the West shifted back to the inner German border dividing the two German states. A physical division of the Soviet from the British and American zonal borders, consisting initially of fencing and ditches approximately ten meters wide, existed from May 1952 onward. East Germany’s subsequent militarization of the inner German border during the spring and summer of 1952 led to dramatic increases in migrants arriving in West Berlin, though even during the 1950s many drawn westward managed to travel directly to West Germany. Flight, like the German language, was always polycentric. For this reason, we turn in chapter 2 to faces and places of Cold War security questioning in western Germany. NOTES 1. On Marienfelde’s significance as a symbol of German division, see Helge Heidemeyer, “Flüchtlingslager als Bühne der Politik—Die symbolische Bedeutung des Notaufnahmelagers Marienfelde,” in Flüchtlingslager im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Migration, Politik, Erinnerung, ed. Henrik Bispinck and Katharina Hochmuth (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2014), 74–91.

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2. The privileged status granted to victims of political oppression was by no means a uniquely German phenomenon: the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees embodied precisely the same elevation of anticommunism over all other reasons to seek residence in another country. On changes in the international definition of “refugee” favoring those fleeing the imposition of Soviet rule in eastern Europe, see Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War: Toward a New International Refugee Regime in the Early Postwar Era (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991), 55–94, 218–38. 3. For an introduction to health policy toward expellees and refugees focusing on the state of Lower Saxony, see Andrea Riecken, Migration und Gesundheitspolitik: Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in Niedersachen 1945–1953 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006). On the subservience civil servants expected of “applicants,” see Volker Ackermann, Der “echte” Flüchtling (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1995), 157–59. 4. The Federal Ministry for Refugees demanded that the name of the debriefing program in Berlin, Uelzen, and Giessen be changed to reflect this “fact,” requesting that the “Preliminary Screening Group in the Federal Emergency Reception Procedure” eliminate the prepositional phrase from its name and destroy letterhead bearing what until the end of 1954 had been the questioning office’s formal name. An das Bundesdurchgangslager Vorprüfungsgruppe B I, December 28, 1954, B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 5. The West German federal minister of the interior attempted to erase connections between the vetting work of the security services and the provision of citizenship rights by removing intelligence documentation from the files of formal reception procedure set up to establish the bona fides of East Germans. See Letter to the Berliner Datenschutzbeauftragten vom Bundesbeauftagten für den Datenschutz, August 15, 1984, B 347/194, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 6. Seizure of applicants’ routing cards by American security and intelligence officials continued even after the Wall’s construction. At issue in several cases was access to information about those having helped new arrivals to escape the East, with American services punishing those who had refused to provide details about their escape path and helpers. See Keith R. Allen, Befragung, Überprüfung, Kontrolle. Die Aufnahme von DDR-Flüchtlingen in West Berlin bis 1961 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013), 209–11. 7. The best introduction to American bottom-up pressure on East Germany’s Communist regime remains Bernd Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus: Amerikanische Liberation Policy im Kalten Krieg 1947–1991 (Köln: Böhlau, 2002), esp. 362–70. 8. These files are analyzed for the first time in the course of this study. See, for one example, NAV Berlin, Reg. Nr. 639235, Bundesverwaltungsamt Köln, Aussenstelle Giessen. 9. NAV Berlin, Reg. Nr. 62620, Bundesverwaltungsamt Köln, Aussenstelle Giessen. 10. An die Dienststellen im Flüchtlingslager, NAV Berlin, Reg. Nr. 274566, Bundesverwaltungsamt Köln, Aussenstelle Giessen. 11. This process was described as creating “stamps without persons.” Auszug aus Treffberichten des GM “Argus,” October 31, 1966, MfS AFO 128/83, Band III, BStU. 12. On the CIA’s creation and direction of the Free Jurists, see the contents of the following file: RG 263, Entry ZZ-19, Box No. 2, File CADROIT/FEARFUL, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, hereafter cited as NARA II. The list of nonstate actors screening refugees during the 1950s in West Berlin is long. For an introduction, see Allen, Befragung, 25–51, 125–36. The Fighting Group against Inhumanity’s ambiguous role as vetting organization has been covered most recently in Enrico Heitzer, “Humanitäre Organisation und Nachrichtendienst. Die Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (1948–1959) im Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 64, no. 2 (2016): 145–60. 13. Allen, Befragung, 136–62. 14. See, for one example, 125/W-Rü, VEB Spurenmetalle Müldenhütte/Kreis Freiberg/Sa., September 18, 1958, B 206/1402, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 15. Report to Commanding Officer, 66th CIC Group on Buentgen, Kaethe, July 8, 1959, RG 319, “Kaethe Buentgen—HE 04 0284,” Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 98, NARA II. 16. Telefax from CC Rgn IV GP Munich to CO 66th GP Bad Cannstatt, October 7, 1959, “Kaethe Buentgen—HE 04 0284,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 98, NARA II.

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17. Memorandum on Buentgen, Kaete, July 8, 1959, signed by Robert W. Pedlow, July 8, 1959, “Kaethe Buentgen—HE 04 0284,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 98, NARA II. 18. Recipients of the Kampfgruppe’s files were the CIA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, and the German Red Cross. See Enrico Heitzer, Die Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU). Widerstand und Spionage im Kalten Krieg 1948–1959 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 34–36. 19. Such was the case of Arno Gaida, whose identity papers and other documents were confiscated by unnamed U.S. officials. See the memorandum entitled Betr. Massnahmen alliierter Dienststellen im Rahmen des Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahrens, B Rep. 002/7908, Landesarchiv Berlin. 20. Report presented by Lisa Korspeter, 2. Deutscher Bundestag—145. Sitzung. Bonn, May 9, 1956, 7647-8. Korspeter’s initiative was discussed by the directors of the federal offices’ preliminary screening teams, with the head of the Giessen annex recommending his superiors in Cologne make their preferences known. See Notiz, December 19, 1957, B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 21. The Frankfurter Rundschau, a SPD newspaper, was especially critical of Allied questioning. See articles in that outlet by Julius R. Kaim, “Ostdeutschen irren durch das Bundeslabyrinth. Durch Lager, über Geheimdienste und Obstmärkte zum Hörsaal der Universität,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 11, 1958; “Vernehmung kann abgelehnt werden,” Frankfurter Rundschau, October 4, 1958. Three days later, the widely read and influential BILD Zeitung had joined the fray with its own article titled “Protest gegen die Flüchtlingsverhöre in den Lagern,” noting that the “Landsmannschaft Saxony” had demanded a “definitive end” to the questioning of refugees from the “Soviet zone.” The SPD’s press service subsequently produced a release noting that officials in West Berlin possessed no means to inform newcomers that the answers they provided to Allied representatives had no bearing on their applications to become full-fledged citizens of the federal republic. See “Wie lange noch?” October 8, 1958, SPD-Pressedienst, B 136/3922, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 22. Allen, Befragung, 163–89. 23. Written Answers (Commons) Debate, November 26, 1958, Series 5, Vol. 596 cc 344-5, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1958/nov/26/refugees (accessed January 9, 2017). 24. On the various positions assumed by the federal ministries involved in refugee affairs at the time (the Foreign Ministry, the Federal Chancellor’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry for All-German Affairs, and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), see especially Niederschrift über die interministerelle Besprechung vom 27. Juni 1956 im Bundesvertriebenenministerium, July 4, 1956, B 150/4107, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 25. Memorandum from the Bundesvertriebenenministerium an den Bundestagsausschuss für gesamtdeutsche Fragen, Unterausschuss “Notaufnahme,” March 29, 1952, B 150/4104, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 26. Stellungnahme des Vorprüfers, undated, Reg. No. 40361, NAV Giessen, Bundesverwaltungsamt Köln, Aussenstelle Giessen. The former Stasi employee subsequently returned to the East after receiving his recognition, but not before facing more than twenty interrogations by representatives of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Giessen. 27. Documents produced by intelligence and security agencies were in later years apparently removed from the files of the federal emergency reception procedure. See, for evidence of this practice, Schreiben vom Bundesbeauftragen für den Datenschutz an den Berliner Datenschutzbeauftragten, August 15, 1984, B 347/194, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 28. Dispatch EGFA-23443/12, Subject: Leo Kroemer, undated (1959), “Kroemer, Leo,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 73, NARA II. 29. See Agent Report, December 14, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. 30. Memorandum to the Leiter des Notaufnahmeverfahrens Giessen an den Herrn Bundesminister für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte, May 17, 1955, B 150/4107, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 31. Tgb. Nr. 3291/51/I, An das Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, September 28, 1951, B 443/573. The Federal Ministry for Refugees was formally responsible for the administration of the federal emergency reception procedure until the rise to power of the first SPD-led govern-

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ment under Willy Brandt in 1969; especially during the early years, the Ministry for AllGerman Affairs did its best to make its opinions known in affairs affecting those fleeing the socalled German Democratic Republic. 32. Bundesarchiv, Die Tätigkeit der Vorprüfungsgruppen B I in den Notaufnahmelagern Berlin, Gießen, Uelzen und Sandbostel im Jahre 1959, B 443/ 773, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 33. See, for an example and the assessment of the CIC office in Berlin, BfV B I Report No. 7701/57, December 4, 1957, Statement of Härter, Liselotte nee Landgraf, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 257, NARA II. 34. The federal office’s restricted mandate reflected the shared desire of the occupying powers to prevent abuse on the part of security agencies; the net effect was to decentralize policing powers, making, for instance, the Federal Criminal Police and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution much less powerful in relation to their state-level colleagues than one might imagine from today’s perspective. See Patrick Wagner’s conclusion in Imanuel Baumann et al., Schatten der Vergangenheit. Das BKA und seine Gründungsgeneration in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH, 2011), 323–26. 35. For these facilities, see Andreas Ehresmann, “Die frühe Nachkriegsnutzung des Kriegsgefangenen- und KZ-Auffanglagers Sandbostel unter besonderer Betrachtung des britischen No. 2 Civil Internment Camp Sandbostel,” in Zwischenräume. Displaced Persons, Internierte und Flüchtlinge in ehemaligen Konzentrationslagern, ed. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (Bremen: Ed. Temmen, 2010), 22–34, and Sascha Schiessl, “Das Tor zur Freiheit:” Kriegsfolgen, Erinnerungspolitik und humanitärer Anspruch im Lager Friedland, 1945–1970 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 103–73, 365–68. 36. Letter to the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Köln, from the Vorprüfungsstelle B I im Notaufnahmelager Uelzen, undated, Bundesarchiv, B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 37. Subsequently regarded by the American Counter Intelligence Corps as a low-level East German intelligence agent, Henze was in 1960 employed by U.S. forces in Kitzingen. See HENZE, Günter, February 14, 1957, “Henze, Guenther—HE 08 41 91,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 282, NARA II. 38. For an introduction to this and various other decoy associations operating under this ministry’s mantle, see Stefan Creuzberger, Kampf für die Freiheit. Das gesamtdeutsche Ministerium und die politische Kultur des Kalten Krieges 1949–1969 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2008), 146–50; see also Gisela Rüss, Anatomie einer politischen Verwaltung. Das Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen—Innerdeutsche Beziehungen 1949–1970 (Munich: Beck, 1973), 76–79. 39. See, for one example, Uranbergbau in der SBZ—SDAG Wismut, May 16, 1958, B 285/ 319, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 40. Allied Kommandtura Berlin, Chronological Development of Allied Interrogation Procedure for Refugees in Berlin, Appendix B to BK/A(56)14, November 20, 1956, FO 1005/187, TNA London. 41. Allen, Befragung, 25–42. 42. Letter from W. J. Horner to the STIB director, August 13, 1953, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. 43. See, for one of many examples, the former head of the Institute of Optics and Spectroscopy at the Humboldt University in the Adlershof district of East Berlin, subsequently employed at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. Contact Report on Dr. Heinz Gast, September 10, 1964, “Gast, Heinz Wilhelm Paul,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 38, NARA II. 44. A 403-10-06/0008, 27/95/6, Historisches RIAS-Archiv im Deutschen Rundarchiv. RIAS’s success in reaching mass audiences in East Germany inspired the creation of Radio Free Europe programs targeting Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in 1950. A useful introduction to this subject is Paweł Machcewicz, Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), esp. 22–26. 45. Termination Report on DS-167 (Gast), November 9, 1964, “Gast, Heinz Wilhelm Paul,” RG 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (hereafter cited as RG 263), Entry ZZ-18,

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Box No. 38, NARA II. The file also contains details of Gast’s subsequent recruitment for use as a Berlin Operation Base channel to his former East German colleagues in the laser field. 46. In the immediate aftermath of one such interrogation, CIC agents discovered their subject with a belt tied around his neck and suspended from a picture hook in the wall. According to the CIC’s declassified records, the agent from the CIC’s West Berlin office let the subject down, whereupon he proceeded to cry violently. Deemed “mentally disturbed,” the former prisoner of war and alleged Soviet NKVD informant was turned over to West Berlin’s police authorities. Lie Detector Examination, Examiner’s Data Sheet on Ewald Hermann Lehmann, September 27, 1956, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 460, FE 01 32 64, NARA II. 47. See, for example, Results of Polygraph Examination, Subject: LEHMANN, Ewald Hermann, September 27, 1956, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 460, FE 01 32 64, NARA II. 48. Of the twelve thousand polygraph tests administered in criminal and security investigation that year, more than a third were conducted by U.S. Army military police. Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 146. 49. James L. Gilbert, John P. Finnegan, and Ann Bray, In the Shadow of the Sphinx: A History of Army Intelligence (Fort Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army History Office, 2005), 121. 50. At least as important, the chief document collections remain only partially declassified. The Stasi, for its part, was heavily invested in exposing these sites, as well as in spreading disinformation through various channels. For an early overview of efforts in this direction undertaken by the Stasi’s Hauptabteilung V in West Berlin, see Maßnahmeplan der HA V, Betr.: Aktion “Nachstoss,” Zeit: 12.5.-1-6-1955, MfS-AS, Nr. 178/56, BStU. 51. Information über das Vorgehen des Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz im Zusammenhang mit der Bearbeitung des Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahrens in der, November 2, 1989, MfSHA II, Nr. 27673, BStU. On Stasi interrogations in the East German centers for “West-East” migrants, see Tobias Wunschik, “Die Aufnahmelager für West-Ost-Migranten. Öffentliche Darstellung und heimliche Überwachung nach dem Mauerbau,” in Deutschland Archiv Online, http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/deutschlandarchiv/wunschik 20130307 (accessed January 9, 2017). 52. “Mit Asylversprechen Flüchtlinge abgeschöpft,” Die Zeit, January 14, 2016, http:// www.zeit.de/2016/03/geheimdienste-asylbewerber-spionage-bnd-rechtslage (accessed January 9, 2017). My point is not to obscure critical differences between the Cold War period and the migrant security crisis of 2015 and 2016. Rather, my aim is to uncover how structures of surveillance established during the previous era of global conflict may be informing how foreign and intelligence agenices in Germany have vetted newcomers from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in more recent times. 53. Precisely how the SPD’s refugee office served the aims of English-speaking paymasters remains unknown, largely because the most critical records, presumably housed in the so-called Archives of Social Democracy in the former capital of Bonn, remain inaccessible. Theodor Hans, undated, CIA-CREST, CIA-RDP65-00756R000300280, accessed on October 12, 2016, at NARA II. 54. While plausible, these claims have yet to be independently corroborated. For a deeply biased if knowledgeable perspective, see Information. Betr.: Ostbüro der SPD, October 30, 1958, Zentralarchiv 1003/67, BStU. 55. “Stephan G. Thomas,” Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, http://www.fes.de/archiv/adsd _neu/inhalt/nachlass/nachlass_t/thomas-st.htm(accessed October 12, 2016). 56. For an introduction to the services the Eastern Offices provided to refugees, see Wolfgang Buschfort, Parteien im Kalten Krieg. Die Ostbüros von SPD, CDU und FDP (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2000), 113–17. The Ministry for All-German Affairs devoted greater financial resources to the CDU office than its SPD counterpart. See VS-Vertraulich, Vermerk: Betr.: Monatliche Zahlungen an das Ostbüro der SPD, B 137/16219, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, undated, also cited in Creuzberger, Kampf um die Einheit, 143. 57. The West Berlin State Office for the Protection of the Constitution in one instance gathered letters submitted in opposition to the recognition of an applicant after his case received critical treatment in a Radio in the American Sector broadcast segment. See Schreiben an den Leiter des Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahrens in Berlin, March 3, 1953, NAV-Berlin, Reg. Nr. 84263, Bundesverwaltungsamt Giessen.

Chapter Two

Debriefing in West Germany

Questioning venues run by American and British authorities were set up immediately after surrender across almost all of western Germany, from Hamburg on the North Sea to Passau in the Alpine foothills of Bavaria. The backgrounds of staff, German and not, were nearly as colorful as locations were widespread. To offer only one example, among the investigators on the U.S. Army’s refugee screening team stationed at Berry House on Hamburg’s Sophienstrasse during the second half of the 1950s was Björn Björnsson, son of the first president of Iceland. After volunteering with the Waffen-SS in July 1941, the “neat and courteous” Björnsson served Nazi Germany’s elite as an officer during the campaign against the Soviet Union and subsequently as chief of the so-called Kommando Kopenhagen, a psychological warfare unit active in the Danish capital from November 1943 until Germany’s surrender. Following his release by Danish authorities, then several years’ exile in postwar Argentina and a short period of employment with the U.S. Air Force in his native Iceland, Björnsson returned to Germany—and to the fight against Soviet communism led by the states known as the Western democracies. 1 QUESTIONING ON THE INNER GERMAN BORDER Camps in the Lower Saxon border towns of Uelzen and Friedland, where British authorities had established transit sites immediately following Nazi Germany’s surrender, served as important conduits of both East-West migration and espionage across the entire period of ideological clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ethnic Germans from areas east and south of the Soviet zone of occupation formally entered the federal republic at Friedland, a mere three kilometers from the inner German border. 2 Boun31

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dary crossers, former uranium mining employees, and retirees from East Germany permitted to settle in the West joined their ranks. Most interviewed at Friedland from September 1947 onward were German speakers, either from eastern Germany or from other states, including Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but especially Poland and the Soviet Union; a few applicants hailed from such distant lands as Australia, Argentina, Chile, and Israel. Leads to newcomers came from customs or border patrol, resulting in interrogations of several hours and, in the most interesting cases, referrals to a British intelligence office in nearby Göttingen. 3 Already in 1949 several dozen German “general technical interrogators” at Friedland were categorizing the value of prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union so that British intelligence officers could maximize their time. 4 UELZEN AND FRIEDLAND As at Marienfelde, the presence of not only British but also American interrogators at Friedland prompted West German indignation. A special focus of attention was a group of escapees especially interesting to all security services, German prisoners of war, particularly those who had spent years toiling in the Soviet Union. This prospect, and more pointedly the privileged position enjoyed by British and American services in interrogating German prisoners of war at Friedland, led representatives of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Landesamt für Verfasschungsschutz, or LfV) to voice an extraordinary concern: that the involvement of Allied services in debriefings at Friedland might complicate the return of any remaining German internees held in the Soviet Union. According to a 1967 assessment offered by West Germany’s counterintelligence experts, the presence of American and British interrogators at Friedland might encourage Soviet authorities to regard released former German soldiers passing through the facility as Western spies. 5 This view resembled overblown arguments put forward by the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi), a sign that by the late 1960s even West German intelligence services, like prominent members of the Bundestag, perceived themselves to be on the receiving end of affronts and indignities at the hands of their allies. Over nineteen thousand persons passed through Friedland in 1966; all underwent interviews of several hours’ length with security services, including the BfV, the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND), and a third federal security agency, the Military Counterintelligence Service (Militärischer Abschirmdienst, or MAD). 6 At that time, the camp’s forty-odd buildings had the capacity to house roughly 1,500; by way of comparison, the village registered under 1,300 inhabitants in 1972. Questioning of defecting East German soldiers, typically for

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two or three days, took place at Friedland until 1989, with West Germany’s third (and smallest as well as least visible) intelligence agency, the MAD, transferring especially interesting newcomers to a special office, Am Steinsgraben 19, in the nearby university city of Göttingen. MAD ran a training program for interrogators at its school in Bad Ems that earned rare praise from its main domestic counterintelligence competitors, whose representatives cited the facility as a model for future efforts. 7 Questioning at Friedland continued beyond the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. According to a written response supplied by the Federal Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt) to a parliamentary inquiry, between 2000 and 2005 over 4,600 “brief conversations” were held there with new arrivals. 8 In total, more than four million people have passed through the Friedland camp near Göttingen. At Uelzen, the British army oversaw the construction of the largest refugee camp in the United Kingdom’s zone of occupation: from April 1, 1950, onward, the federal government in Bonn formally assumed responsibility for the camp’s administration and finances. German assistants serving British forces in Uelzen initially put questions to newcomers, typically after they had received training from British intelligence officers. 9 By the late 1950s, those with professed loyalties to the West German federal government had mostly replaced foreigners, though English speakers were also included in select rounds of questioning. A so-called Joint Service Liaison Organization, assisted by civilian employees of the War Office organized as the British Frontier Service, sought to ensure British authorities remained informed of potential leads. 10 From February 1959 onward, U.K. responsibility for the production of raw intelligence gleaned from migrants in occupied Germany fell to what became known as the British Services Security Organization (BSSO). A specialist security unit formally under the control of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the body that coordinates the work of Britain’s intelligence community, the BSSO, steered by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), paired refugee interrogation with surveillance of postal and telecommunications traffic in both Berlin and the federal republic. 11 Beyond the camp’s walls, in Uelzen itself, British services maintained offsite facilities for further questioning well into the 1960s: the best-known British questioning center was a two-story modern villa located on Alewinstrasse 19. In instances in which they deemed newcomers’ personal accounts to be fabrications, British intelligence teams shared assessments with Dominion counterparts, including the Canadian Field Security Office (CFSO) in the nearby city of Hanover. French and West German security services were invited to join Anglo-American questioning efforts at Uelzen: by the 1970s, a three-person team of interrogators from the BND was using highly detailed topographical and ordinance survey maps to pinpoint mine fields, guard towers, and other features stretched across various sections of the inner German border. Upon completion of questioning, fresh arrivals took a train to the

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university city of Giessen, where former East Germans and individuals with German forefathers then typically registered for the formal reception procedure. Uelzen lost its designation as an official site for the administration of the federal reception procedure in 1963, two years after the Wall’s construction, emerging thereafter primarily as a transit camp for the reception center in the university town of Giessen, forty kilometers north of Frankfurt am Main. 12 REFUGEES AND SURVEILLANCE IN GIESSEN Viewed across the entire period of German division, the federal reception facility at Giessen in Hessen emerged as the most visible site of screening with reference to East German newcomers. 13 Owing to its location in Hessen in the American zone of occupation, the Giessen reception facility afforded American services a place of privileged access to German-speaking migrants. Since the war’s end, American officers and civilians had been putting questions to those seeking to leave Europe at a camp next to the city’s main rail station. The Rhine-Main region hosted a large number of camps: the state of Hessen administered fifteen camps in 1960, with facilities in Büdesheim, Langen, Hanau, Hochheim, and Giessen hosting between five hundred and one thousand newcomers. 14 Across the entire Cold War period, the most visible site of American questioning at the Giessen complex was Haus Berlin-Brandenburg, a five-story structure completed in 1962. There American and West German intelligence agents solicited information from newcomers; the latter also conducted interviews in a socalled Haus Thüringen. 15 American services made room for colleagues from both the federal and Hessian State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution: Karl Walter Neumann was the chief of the BfV office at the Giessen refugee center during the 1950s. 16 As in West Berlin, various intermediaries secretly funded by the Ministry for All-German Affairs posed questions and compiled reports. 17 Still other West German interrogation organs formally absent in West Berlin, most importantly the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA), joined the questioning apparatus. After submission of a formal application, each applicant’s bona fides were checked against the files of the Federal Criminal Police in nearby Wiesbaden. Liaison with these and other German agencies—the long list included not only security officials, but also court and labor officials located in virtually every West German town and city—ensured that the results of domestic investigations, typically in summary form but in some cases as entire files, were brought to the attention of American intelligence officials. Beyond the gates of the formal reception centers, American, British, and West German services maintained revolving questioning facilities in differ-

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ent parts of Giessen: the site used longest by American services was located at Neue Bäue 1. Also present in both the reception center and offsite facilities were the Eastern Offices of the three main political parties, alongside relief organizations of the Lutheran and Catholic churches as well as various other, mainly professional and occupational organizations formally representing the interests of refugees. As the files of the formal reception procedure for East Germans make clear, each was from time to time requested to comment on the applicants. As in Friedland, Marienfelde, and Uelzen, these assessments were made available to both domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, ensuring a close, if at times tense, working relationship between aid agencies and security officials. Upon completion of the reception procedure, personal contact information for all newcomers from the early 1960s onward was forwarded to a special office in the town of Salzgitter. Established by the ten West German State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution two months after the Wall’s construction, this Central Registry of State Judicial Administrations (Zentrale Erfassungsstelle der Länderjustizverwaltungen) dispatched questioners from its headquarters to police precincts across the country to interview new arrivals in the federal republic, especially those who had served prison sentences in East Germany. THE SECURITY INVESTIGATION OFFICE The most clandestine locations of off-site refugee questioning in West Germany housed multiservice interrogators and analysts. Among the most active was the Security Investigation Office (Sicherungsgruppe). This investigative section of the Federal Criminal Police was located in the Bonn suburb of Bad Godesberg during the era of bipolar conflict. 18 Begun as a bodyguard force for high-ranking officials, it grew to include sole jurisdiction over pretrial investigation and prosecution of “political offenses” and the establishment and maintenance of a central registry of persons considered politically unreliable for employment by the Bonn government. 19 Under Ernst Brückner and Theodor Saevecke, security chiefs who personally conducted interrogations on behalf of the Security Investigation Office, the number of espionage investigations carried out from 1952 to 1955 increased nearly sixfold, from 32 to 183. 20 Headquartered from 1957 onward at Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse 1 with formal liaison to American services coordinated via an office in the Bonn district of Mehlem, Security Investigation Office staff undertook, and subsequently shared with U.S. services, detailed interrogations in Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and German. 21 Gerhard Oesterheld (1964–1966) and Hans-Wilhelm Fritsch (1967–1974) succeeded Brückner, who served briefly as vice president of the BfV. During

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the early 1960s, Werner Vieth and Heinz Lübke co-headed the office’s espionage section. 22 CLANDESTINE COLOGNE: THE INTERSERVICE REFUGEE COORDINATION DETACHMENT Defectors from Eastern security services were brought from the Security Investigation Office and other facilities to a multiservice questioning center known as the Interservice Refugee Coordination Detachment (IRCD) in the Rhine city of Cologne. Located north of the historic Old City on Merlostrasse 14, the binational (West German–American) IRCD united specialist interrogators from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense with counterparts from three West German espionage agencies, the BND, the BfV, and the MAD. Interrogations targeted those able to supply insights into the inner workings of Soviet Bloc counterparts, with sessions lasting weeks and even months. Although details remain scarce, CIA sources indicate that the IRCD sought to tie refugee questioning with more carefully concealed intelligence initiatives, including the exploitation of part-time informants active in the federal republic. 23 Questioning venues in the federal republic extended beyond the IRCD in Cologne and Security Investigation Office of the Federal Criminal Police in Bonn to an archipelago of covert and semi-overt facilities sprinkled across western Germany. As with those in West Berlin, a full catalog of these sites must remain incomplete. Allied questioning across western Germany contained multinational elements. The most common pairings were British-German and American-German “screening teams” active in smaller camps located across the country. An example of the latter form of binational cooperation involved American and Bavarian State Police interrogators toiling together during the 1950s in wooden barracks at the state transit camp near Hammelburg in Lower Franconia in the so-called Free State of Bavaria. The depth of coverage underscores the fact that teams of questioners from the federal republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States often, but by no means always, worked together closely to debrief migrants, boundary crossers, and other newcomers. The gamut of shared interrogation sites ranged from such relatively straightforward “preliminary screening” programs as the one set up in the Hammelburg transit camp to higher-security installations located in cities, including but by no means limited to the U.S. Army’s multinational team of interrogators at Berry House in Hamburg and Cologne’s multiservice IRCD.

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INTERROGATION AT CAMP KING Only two facilities in West Germany were shrouded in greater mystery than Cologne’s IRCD. The memoir literature of former intelligence chiefs, German and American, provides us with some details about these questioning sites. The first was known as Camp King (figure 2.1).Nazi security personnel first used this installation, located on the outskirts of the town of Oberursel in the rolling hills of the Taunus region a dozen kilometers northwest of Frankfurt am Main, to interrogate British, American, and other Allied prisoners of war during World War II. 24 Employed by U.S. Army intelligence immediately after the war’s end to put questions to high-ranking Nazis and known as the Military Intelligence Service Center by the winter of 1945–1946, it had morphed into a site to screen two groups: defectors from Soviet forces and suspected Communist agents arrested by the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). 25 July 1946 witnessed the arrival of Reinhard Gehlen at Oberursel. The wartime head of the German army’s general staff intelligence branch had surrendered himself and his files to U.S. Army forces in the spring of 1945. 26 Upon his return from a nearly yearlong stay at the Fort Hunt Interrogation Center, the secret military intelligence site located fifteen miles south of Washington, DC, in Alexandria, Virginia, Gehlen and his group resided at Camp King’s Alaska House, a suitably named structure for the emerging conflict with Gehlen’s perennial nemesis: the Soviet Union. 27 In early December 1947, Gehlen and his confidantes had moved to Pullach, a small town on the Isar River south of Munich, where U.S. Army intelligence granted Gehlen’s loose network of agents, stringers, and interrogators an American military cover as the “7821 Composite Group.” By the end of the 1940s, the CIA had assumed fiscal and administrative responsibility for the operation initially overseen by U.S. military intelligence. 28 Gehlen’s stay at Camp King was longer than most. Deserters, former party functionaries, and those with contacts in industry, science, or Eastern Bloc security services typically remained for two weeks. Especially interesting subjects were held somewhat longer; if their knowledge was deemed relevant or technical, they were invited to submit written reports on sites and techniques of interest. 29 As at the Berlin Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center (JAROC), defecting soldiers, border guards, and police officers warned at Camp King not to speak to media representatives were nonetheless flown to Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) in West Berlin for interviews. 30 German nationals were forwarded on a case-by-case basis to state and federal agencies, among them the Security Investigation Office. 31 Staff at Camp King, officially designated the 7700th European Command Interrogation Center, initially reported to the chief of military intelligence for western Europe, Edwin L. Sibert. Camp King’s first commander was William R. Philp. The reporting line shifted in the late 1940s to the so-called 7707th

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European Command Intelligence Center in Heidelberg. 32 After reorganization in 1957 or 1958, Camp King staff reported to the 513th Military Intelligence Group (subsequently renamed the 513th Intelligence Group). 33 This meant that staff at Oberursel was under the formal administration of the U.S. European command headquarters, a command that brought together the American military services, the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Staff of the U.S. European command headquarters was stationed in the university city of Heidelberg. Gehlen’s organization also answered to the command headquarters at Heidelberg’s Campbell Barracks until the formal insertion of his intelligence service into West Germany’s federal government on April 1, 1956—an act carried out without a new law or approval of either house of West Germany’s legislature. 34 Correspondence housed in the declassified CIC files today points to a significant amount of liaison between Camp King and various offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose West German headquarters were initially located in the IG Farben building in Frankfurt am Main. Together with sites such as Camp King and the IRCD in Cologne, these represented the top of the refugee surveillance pinnacle in occupied Germany. At the bottom of this pyramid were sites of greater relevance to larger numbers of escapees. Information passed between Camp King, the IG Farben sanctum, and lesser-

Figure 2.1. Camp King, Oberursel, 1945. Image courtesy of the Camp King Memorial Site.

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known American military intelligence “resident offices,” “field offices,” and “teams.” The presence of these substations, situated along West Germany’s border with East Germany and Czechoslovakia in Bayreuth, Hof, Kronach, Coburg, and Kassel, among other small cities and towns, is more generally known. U.S. Army units operating along the East German and Czechoslovak borders appear in the records as military intelligence battalions and platoons. They conducted some of their questioning in collaboration with West German federal, or Bavarian and Hessian state, border police agencies. According to an official U.S. Army account, during the 1950s, members of the 532nd Military Battalion, typically wearing civilian clothes and driving unmarked American cars with West German license plates, screened on average between twenty and thirty thousand defectors, illegal border crossers, and other refugees, producing several thousand reports a month. 35 In federal states not sharing a border with East Germany, such as the large southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, a subsection of the LfV charged with responsibility for offensive counterintelligence pooled leads gathered from local police authorities, in select instances sharing the results of debriefings with American authorities. Declassified records housed in the Counter Intelligence Corps collection are a useful source of information about both the frontline border questioning posts and highly secretive clandestine questioning venues like Camp King. They document the exploitation of refugees in so-called cross-border operations in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland during the 1950s. These files convey the security conundrums faced by American espionage agents operating on foreign soil. Far from merely defensive in nature, the CIC’s work went well beyond protecting American troops in western Germany. Key aspects of failed efforts to infiltrate Eastern services emerge in these documents years after erstwhile agents-cum-refugees had served heavy prison sentences in Communist nations. We can tell their stories today because of their passage through various Allied questioning centers in West Berlin and western Germany and because of West Germans’ insistence on receiving answers from American intelligence officials about operations undertaken during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s. Such West German follow-up investigations are traceable in American declassified espionage holdings. UNCOVERING CAMP KING The CIC case file of Klaus-Dieter Erdmann provides an example of West German efforts to learn about Camp King’s inner workings. In 1973, Erdmann’s application as a communications expert to an unnamed West German agency led officials at the Cologne-based Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to request a search of the U.S. Army’s central intelligence

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registry. Stasi contacts had approached Erdmann, an amateur ham radio operator, during his studies in the East German university town of Greifswald; Communist agents purportedly asked him to become an officer checking wireless messages. Recruited by the East German service as an informant to prove his abilities, Erdmann subsequently fled to West Berlin in mid-September 1960 to avoid further espionage complications. As it happened, Erdmann’s entanglement with Cold War intelligence had only just begun. As Erdmann revealed to BfV interrogators thirteen years later, he had spent September and October 1960 at Oberursel. 36 In other words, Camp King staff had sent Erdmann back to East Germany, where he was subsequently imprisoned. The response provided by U.S. Army staff from Camp King to their West German counterparts about the radio operator and erstwhile student in Greifswald is absent from this set of files; one does learn that plans for Erdmann’s exploitation had drawn the attention of another American intelligence service. At the time of Erdmann’s return to the federal republic, perhaps also his return to the fold of Western intelligence, some 1,600 individuals, including West Germans and other foreign nationals, were working at the U.S. Army Europe’s Interrogation Center. Americans constituted roughly half of Camp King’s staff; of these, most belonged to the U.S. Army, though a significant cohort of U.S. Air Force officials were also posted there. These and other personnel at the facility normally served tours of three to five years; in an attempt to put informants at ease, those working at Camp King typically wore civilian clothing. Interrogators constituted a small minority—judging from U.S. sources, probably fewer than a hundred in total. As early as 1950 a British intelligence detachment had been stationed near the Camp King interrogation center. British counterparts appreciated that their presence provoked American suspicions. 37 A decade later, one lone representative of the BSSO pointed to what U.K. intelligence officials regarded as insufficient coverage of “British requirements” at Camp King. 38 More common at Oberursel were German advisors in the Gehlen mold: among the camp’s most notorious freelance interrogators was Fritz Bayerlein, one of Nazi Germany’s successful tank generals. 39 Especially useful or informative newcomers were waybilled from Camp King (figure 2.2) to nearby Bad Soden, where U.S. Air Force interrogators administered the so-called Scholarly Institute for the Study of German History. Once newcomers had been admitted to either the Bad Soden or Oberursel guesthouses, U.S. agents confiscated personal belongings, ostensibly to analyze daily life in the East, but also to check for possible intelligence aids and for use in missions east of the inner German border. Each “guest” received at least one “advisor,” with prized technical or military specialists attracting the attention of multiple hosts. Camp King’s trained specialists pored over previous rounds of questioning conducted close to the border, at the “resident

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Figure 2.2. Camp King, Oberursel, 1950s. Image courtesy of the Stasi Records Agency.

agencies” and police precincts, or in the reception centers, camps, and various other overt and clandestine facilities, counterchecking details and considering inconsistencies anew. Compensation included on-the-spot cash payments. After a series of thorough interrogations, many “guests” were forwarded to the reception center in Giessen, to centers such as Camp Valka near Nuremberg, or even to Marienfelde in West Berlin to undergo an accelerated version of the West German reception or asylum procedures. A few bypassed these formal channels altogether, receiving legal confirmation of their refugee status, West German identity papers, health and social security validation, and an official driver’s license from their American hosts; tellingly, a suspiciously large number of West German documents listed Oberursel as the newcomers’ official place of residence. Just as the British managed to crowd their way onto Oberursel’s stage, the Americans also expanded roles for West German security counterparts. On April 1, 1962, the BfV, reluctant heir to the legacy of the Gestapo, opened an interrogation annex in Oberursel alongside the Gehlen operation already in place; correspondence with headquarters in Cologne passed through the debriefing office in the nearby Giessen reception center, ostensibly to disguise its purpose, perhaps also to divine the scope and purpose of American crossborder operations. 40 Many “guests” of the American and German operators

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active in Oberursel, especially those who fled East Germany via West Berlin, had already passed through the facility in West Berlin’s Sven-Hedin-Strasse: the director of the American “registration center”—later known as the Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center—reported to superiors at Camp King. Although visited by only a tiny minority of all those seeking refuge in western Germany, Camp King officials, like their West German security counterparts in Bonn, Cologne, Pullach, and Wiesbaden, nonetheless cataloged the personal information of all who had fled to western Germany. The Camp King facility was reconstituted in 1969 as a complex of four two-story buildings at the corner of Sintpert Strasse and Traunsteiner Strasse in Munich. Camp King’s successor received the anodyne name of Allied Forces Coordinating Committee, Munich Regional Office. 41 Questioning teams in Bavaria’s state capital remained formally part of the U.S. Army, known during the early 1980s as the 5th Military Intelligence Company of the 18th Military Intelligence Battalion of U.S. Special Forces. Not only the army but all U.S. intelligence services active in Cold War Germany used the Munich facility, consolidating efforts previously carried out at Camp King and the so-called 66th Military Intelligence Group, headquartered until the 1960s in the Bad Cannstatt district of Stuttgart. 42 As in Oberursel, interrogators from the BND were frequent guests at the installations next to the McGraw Barracks in the Giesing district of Munich. Stasi records tell us that newcomers summoned by post in 1985 were informed that a vague-sounding Allied Forces Coordinating Committee expected cooperation in a series of “active discussions” likely to last for at least several days. 43 Stateside oversight of the Allied Forces Coordinating Committee Munich, Regional Office, fell to the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) in Arlington, Virginia. The Munich facility appears to have employed between twenty and thirty Americans during the 1970s and 1980s. As at Camp King in Oberursel, roughly half were civilians. “Guests” were housed in unnumbered rooms of a nearby structure known colloquially as the NATO Hotel. Interrogators and translators operated sections devoted to coverage of the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and other socialist nations. As at Camp King, intelligence was not only collected, but also analyzed on site, with weekly summaries dispatched during the 1970s and 1980s to both the U.S. command in Heidelberg and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Supreme Headquarters in Brussels. 44 The American interrogation presence in Munich long predated the late1960s–era transfers from the Taunus region of Hessen and the Stuttgart facility near the Black Forest. As in other parts of western Germany, all U.S. services had been active in the Bavarian capital since the war’s end. In 1948 James H. Critchfield was appointed chief of the CIA’s Munich operation base and, from July 1949 onward, served as the first CIA minder to what

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were already at that time the “4,000 or more Germans” comprising the loose networks of the so-called Gehlen Organization. 45 Initial labors of the CIA’s operation base in Bavaria’s largest city involved the “debriefing” of refugees residing in the city. One of the oldest U.S. questioning facilities in Munich was situated on Marsstrasse 30. Bearing a sign reading “Historical Research Division,” (subsequently known in German as the Informations—Austausch—Dienst), this modern structure housed a U.S. Air Force facility specializing in written overtures to those new to West Germany. Branches of the scholarly sounding “Historical Research Division” existed in Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, Bremen, and Fulda. A refugee screening team of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Intelligence Service also compiled tactical insights and other technical details from new arrivals. Like its Royal Air Force counterpart, the U.S. Air Force’s activities reach back to the early days of the Germany’s military occupation; in Bremen, an unmarked villa served not only American, but also British and other services as a NATO research division. “HISTORICAL RESEARCH” AND THE FEDERAL INTELLIGENCE OFFICES During the 1950s, the country’s main domestic counterespionage agency, the BfV, spearheaded an initiative similar to the U.S. Air Force’s Historical Research Division, the establishment of Federal Intelligence Offices (Bundesnachrichtenstellen, or BUNAST) and Coastal Intelligence Offices (Küstennachrichtenstellen, or KÜNAST). A third and fourth set of unrealized plans involved the creation of Airport Intelligence Offices (Flughafennachrichtenstellen, or FLUNAST) and covert intelligence collection along West Germany’s borders with Switzerland, France, and the Saar region (at that time not part of the federal republic), Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. 46 The operations of these questioning centers—less notorious than Camp King and initially part of the BfV’s Department II (Intelligence Procurement)—remain little known. 47 Federal Intelligence Offices were set up during the summer of 1952 in three cities—Lübeck, Hanover, and Kassel— with a KÜNAST added in early 1953 in the North German port city of Hamburg. 48 Nineteen interrogators were hired at the four sites, joining the BfV’s twenty-two questioners already active at Berlin-Marienfelde, Uelzen, and Giessen, as well as at Camp Valka near Nuremberg. 49 Shortly thereafter, exactly when is not entirely clear, a BUNAST was added in West Berlin. In Friedland, Göttingen, and Helmstedt, employees of the BfV and its statelevel counterpart shared the BUNAST facility with staff of Lower Saxony’s Ministry of the Interior, with employees of the BfV stationed in Göttingen, some fourteen kilometers away, traveling to Friedland until 1967 on an asneeded basis. 50

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Federal Intelligence Offices were assigned fictive names, with the BUNAST Kassel taking on, quite possibly in imitation of its air force predecessor, a scholarly demeanor as the Archive for Scholarly Research. Richard Gerken, former member of the Nazi Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and chief of the BfV’s agent-running section and internal security, sought to ensure that the labors of these new questioning centers intersected with the aims of the then unofficial competitors, the Gehlen Organization and the intelligence arm of the Blank Office. 51 Promises of higher pay apparently succeeded in enticing some sources to switch allegiances to Gerken’s procurement (mainly the running of agents) department of the BfV, though such enticements emanating from Cologne and Pullach only strengthened the resolve of his state-level counterparts to resist the creation of a central registry containing the particulars of both LfV and BfV agents in December 1956. 52 CIA documents reveal that the Hamburg BUNAST and KÜNAST, located on the top floor of a large apartment building on Eppendorfer Landstrasse 44, both competed and cooperated with other federal entities, notably the West German Federal Border Guard (Bundesgrenzschutz) and Customs Police (Zollpolizei). 53 In Hamburg, British officers toiled alongside their West German counterparts. 54 Each BUNAST carried out its own interrogations, with the Hanover BUNAST’s stringers questioning young refugees in Sandbostel. The Hanover BUNAST also enlisted freelance “researchers” in Helmstedt, Braunschweig, and Göttingen. The Hanover BUNAST took on missions well beyond the mandate of domestic surveillance, maintaining networks of informants within a fifty-kilometer corridor along both sides of the inner German border—in other words, on the territory of East as well as West Germany. 55 The pairing of double agent operations and penetrations of so-called left-wing radical movements in the federal republic on the one hand, and refugee questioning and agent management in hostile territory on the other, produced considerable friction within the domestic counterespionage field. The Hanover BUNAST in particular proved a bone of contention with headquarters in Cologne, with the state office in the Lower Saxon capital demonstrating more zeal in infiltrating the Soviet zone than federal counterintelligence chiefs deemed appropriate, at least officially. The declassification of American intelligence documentation intended to reveal the Nazi pasts of select security officials allows us to trace the backgrounds of those staffing the BUNASTs. In its early days the BUNAST in Kassel appears to have witnessed significant turnover at the top, with a half dozen chiefs dismissed in quick succession during the early to mid-1950s. Among the heads of the covert field office in Kassel most receptive to American cooperation was Roland Eckersham, a decorated German air force pilot and, after Nazi Germany’s capitulation, an employee of the U.S. Air Force in Wiesbaden and subsequently U.S. interrogator at the Giessen refugee center. In December 1954 the second

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president of the BfV, Otto John’s replacement Hans Jess, personally dismissed Eckersham for gross misappropriation of funds. 56 Eckersham’s job in Kassel went to Max Kuehl, a former major in the German army and, after the war until 1949, a police administrator in Magdeburg. Kuehl’s right-hand man was Werner Hoch, the handling agent for most of the Kassel BUNAST’s sources, a task Hoch combined with keeping an eye on local branch offices of West Germany’s Communist Party. 57 When Hoch was put forward to direct the BUNAST in West Berlin, his successor was Gustav Lotz, whose first postwar employment was with the 702nd Counter Intelligence Corps Tactical Detachment near Munich. In 1950 the Hessian LfV in Kassel counted Lotz as its agent. Known to U.S. intelligence as a former Schutzstaffel (SS) lieutenant in charge of gold extracted from the teeth of concentration camp inmates, Lotz went to work for Hessian counterintelligence authorities as a covert employee on a contractual basis. 58 Posing as companies (WEWAG and Sales Agency Becker) rather than scholarly organizations, the BUNAST offices in Hanover and Lübeck shared time-sensitive information first obtained by federal border guard and customs officials with the headquarters office of the BfV in Cologne, the Gehlen operation in Pullach, and British and American intelligence agencies. 59 The doorplate of the Hamburg office, established in 1951, donned the name of Paul Opitz, a former member of the Upper Silesian Free Corps, the SS, the Nazi Party Intelligence Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and, like Gerken, the Nazi Reich Main Security Office. Opitz’s staff of ten at the Hamburg Coastal Intelligence Office, including a former CIC employee, worked in the diverse shipping field, canvasing industrial installations related to maritime activities and the foreigners drawn to the businesses of West Germany’s main port city. The latter included migrants and representatives of Soviet trade missions, areas of interest that the fussy and pedantic Opitz reluctantly shared with counterparts toiling for Hamburg’s LfV and the Cologne-headquartered BfV. Whereas Opitz’s relations with the Hamburg LfV, the city’s police, and federal operatives appear to have been fraught with rancor, regular interaction with CIA operatives in Hamburg ensured the American service’s access to Opitz’s working files, his office’s reports to BfV headquarters, and other internal correspondence, in addition to a steady flow of liaison materials officially presented to the main U.S. foreign intelligence service. Because they could call on the hermit-like bachelor “day or night,” CIA officials ultimately decided against Opitz’s offer to reproduce all of his KÜNAST files in one mass photocopying operation. 60 Ingratiation with the disgruntled Opitz, a man who appeared to view many German colleagues and superiors with suspicion, seems to have placed the CIA in Hamburg in a favored position. The outstation head of the Hanover BUNAST was Walter Odewald, a “contractual” employee of the federal office loaned to the state office from

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October 1952 onward. 61 In May 1954 Lower Saxony’s state office set up three additional covert sites, so-called Central Questioning Offices (Zentrale Befragungsstellen), all near the border in Friedland, Helmstedt, and Göttingen. By October 1956, the Central Questioning Offices were poised to usurp the initiative condoned and funded by the “procurement” department of the BfV, adding elicitation of legal and illegal border crossers to their duties. 62 THE ORIGINS OF THE JOINT INTERROGATION CENTERS 63 Inspired by American and British wartime examples, the networks of BUNASTs and Central Questioning Offices were precedent setting, though not precisely in the manner those engaged in the tug-of-war between Cologne and Hanover might have imagined. In 1959 a newspaper disclosure of his previous loyalties to the Nazi regime forced Odewald to relinquish his position: Odewald had been a senior leader in Hitler’s paramilitary SS, a highranking official in the SD, and head of the German Criminal Police (Kripo) in occupied Paris and, from January 1945 until Nazi Germany’s capitulation, in Prague. Odewald was shifted to Lower Saxony’s Criminal Police office. Behind the scenes, Odewald and his successors ensured the BUNAST became accountable to federal counterintelligence officials in Cologne. 64 By 1959, the BUNAST initiative had been merged into a larger form of behind-the-scenes American-German cooperation. Chief instigator was the domestic surveillance agency’s main competitor, the BND. More important to the future of refugee interrogation in occupied Germany than frictions between West German federal and state agencies or, for that matter, the moral taint of Nazi crimes was another set of struggles, never of a purely domestic but rather of a complex multinational character. At issue were the overlapping, yet at crucial points diverging, interests of Germany’s occupiers. Sustained public criticism of American-led liberation policies witnessed the creation of yet another, much longer-lasting set of migrant questioning facilities in western Germany. From 1958 onward, American counterparts encouraged the BfV’s main competitor, the BND, to deepen its reach into the lives of newcomers residing in the country’s interior. Additional questioning offices, the Joint Interrogation Centers (JICs), were known in German as Zweigstellen für Befragungswesen, or Befras. Both the federal and states offices’ BUNAST program and the U.S. Air Force’s Historical Research Division inspired the Befras’s approach to refugee interrogation. Stewardship of the JICs fell to the organization built up by Reinhard Gehlen under direct American supervision. The first JIC opened in

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April 1958, a few months before Konrad Adenauer deftly avoided public comment on refugee interrogation at a press conference in West Berlin. The British designation for the initiative became the Quadripartite Debriefing Program, owing to the subsequent involvement of West German and French services alongside British and American questioners. In no sense strictly a West German initiative, the JICs involved American interrogators from the very beginning. At the Munich Befra, the U.S. Army Europe’s 532nd Military Intelligence Battalion’s Company A supplied interrogators; from 1959 onward, British as well as French personnel were invited to join American and West German counterparts. Representatives of the British Services Security Organization staffed Befras in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Hanover. 65 At times of political instability within the Warsaw Pact, such as following the imposition of martial law in Poland in the early 1980s, Bavarian Border Police were provided with the contact information for the Munich Befra’s office to ensure that the JIC’s management could respond quickly to any sudden influx of (politically active) newcomers. The last Befras soldiered on a quarter century after the Cold War’s end, until June 2014. At least formally, American and German interrogators jointly ran investigations during the organization’s final years, though in some instances German interns, not actual BND employees, sat in for their bosses when officials were busy elsewhere. Some fifty-two Germans were formally assigned to the Befra questioning offices in 2012. 66 On the questioners’ side of the table were representatives from several different American services, including at least ten employees of the National Security Agency (NSA). Why this technically sophisticated American agency formally engaged in deciphering encrypted foreign communications was involved in acts of face-toface questioning of newcomers to Germany remains unexplored. NSA questioners even apparently ran elucidation sessions without German involvement. 67 Whether the JIC program inspired a similar project led by the United Kingdom’s Border Agency, as claimed by a former British intelligence official previously employed at a German Befra, remains unverified. 68 Befra interrogation reports are included in materials declassified by the BND and accessioned by the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz. Today over 650 dossiers containing several thousand such reports have been made available according to the terms of Germany’s Federal Archives Law. 69 While rare, JIC reports contained in American collections differ from sources in Koblenz in an important respect: they include substantial amounts of attendant correspondence. This fortunate coincidence allows historians to illuminate poorly understood aspects of espionage labors in occupied Germany, such as the often contentious relations among American services and their West German security counterparts. Although numerous documents have been removed and reclassified from the CIC files, unlike with many materials held in German archives individuals named in the documents have

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not been anonymized. Copies of official CIA documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act also provide some coverage of Befra interrogators, with attention dedicated primarily to Nazi Party ties, particularly membership in organizations such as the SS. 70 U.S. materials are not subject to the data protection laws that apply to documents accessed in German archival reading rooms, which enables me to name particular subjects and, more importantly, to trace individuals’ pathways through the multinational questioning labyrinth of Cold War Germany. 71 For the purpose of our initial focus on places, U.S. documents are useful in supplying key physical details of the semipublic Befra questioning structures: one reads they were housed sometimes in modern office buildings in city centers, as in Frankfurt am Main and Hanover, but also in leafy, affluent neighborhoods a short drive or bus ride from the center of town, as in the scenic port city of Lübeck near the Baltic Sea. Closer to the inner German border, as the documents from the U.S. National Archives illustrate, refugees circulated between the Befras and municipal police departments, with a JIC representative frequently accompanying new arrivals on trips to and from local police stations. Federal border police officials stationed in the village of Puttgarden, near the border with Denmark, supplied fresh arrivals to Lübeck’s Joint Interrogation Center, located on Wakenitzstrasse 67 (later at Kronsforder Allee 10a). 72 The Giessen Befra was situated three kilometers from the eponymous refugee processing center, on the second floor of a nondescript structure that BND employees and their American counterparts shared with Germany’s best-known local savings bank. In September 1963 staff from the Befra took up residence at the reception center itself, occupying space recently vacated by American services. 73 The Hamburg Befra at Gotenstrasse 21 shared a freestanding corner structure with another financial institution, Commerzbank, along with other businesses. Newcomers entered the Stuttgart Befra on the city’s south side at Archivstrasse 19 via a side entrance to a larger structure housing a military registration center. The U.S. Army’s relations office with the important state of Baden-Württemberg and a liaison office for French forces stationed in adjacent regions of westernmost Germany shared offices one door away. The Befra in Nuremberg welcomed promising newcomers to a three-story villa, replete with stone decorations and an expansive garden, that hosted not only East and ethnic Germans, but also multinational applicants referred from Camp Valka’s successor, the Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees (Bundesdienststelle für die Anerkennung ausländischer Flüchtlinge) in Zirndorf. While the second floor and attic were turned over to American services, West German counterparts made use of the structure’s other floors. At least during the early years of its existence, the Düsseldorf Befra, also housed in a stately villa, played a supporting role in channeling leads to the highly covert IRCD, the GermanAmerican security office specializing in intelligence matters pertaining to

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Poland and the Soviet Union, coordinating with the BND’s representatives in Cologne. Spy catching appears to have been the IRCD’s forte. Relevant information pertaining to Czechoslovakia gleaned from informants at the Düsseldorf Befra was forwarded to what appears to have been a BND office in Augsburg known as either “Transfer” or “Firma Ackermann.” The Düsseldorf JIC worked closely with “Office 24” or “Fa. Bieger,” code references, as Stasi records make clear, for the IRCD in Cologne. 74 A JIC suboffice, known in German as an Ortsstelle für Befragungswesen, was set up on the edge of the inner German border town of Uelzen. Individuals believed to pose a potential security threat, such as those with real or alleged connections to West Germany’s outlawed Communist Party, were turned over to either the BfV or the Lower Saxon LfV, 75 with select reports forwarded to a central coordinating point for all interrogation activities within the Gehlen service, a so-called Coordination Center for Interrogation Affairs (Führungsstelle Befragungswesen), presumably established at the BND’s headquarters in Pullach. The Befras augmented the intelligence presence at the reception centers, the camps, the Federal Intelligence Offices, and other questioning sites near the inner German border dating back to the earliest period of occupation. Part of their rationale was a change in the way refugees were entering western Germany more than a decade after the war’s end. As early as 1954, British intelligence officials noted that many requests to the formal recognition centers were submitted by mail rather than in person. 76 By the mid-1950s, it was increasingly common for East German migrants to bypass the West German government’s formal reception centers, a course of action possible if applicants could produce evidence of a job offer and the means to rent or purchase a residence in the federal republic. At that time, thousands of refugees were paying their own way to leave West Berlin by air each week, giving Marienfelde and the crowded camps of the former capital a wide berth. Once in West Germany, these migrants could submit applications to local authorities to obtain West German personal identity cards and passports, thereby circumventing both the conditions in the maligned camps and the prying questions of foreign intelligence denizens. By 1957, the director of the BfV questioning unit based in Uelzen estimated that some two-thirds of applications arrived by post, with only one-third appearing before the “preliminary” debriefing group based there. 77 The Befras were the intelligence community’s answer to this development, as well as a response to scrutiny of foreign vetting practices in the camps and reception centers. From 1958 onward, if an application submitted by mail indicated any past contacts with East Bloc police or military forces or high-level positions in science, the economy, or, especially, socialist security organs, newcomers who had successfully circumvented the cumbersome formal reception and asylum procedures set up in the camps and reception centers were promptly summoned to a JIC. At

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the same time, ongoing questioning by “preliminary screening offices” at Giessen, Marienfelde, Uelzen, and other camps continued to generate additional running lists of “targets” shared with the multinational staff of the Befras. 78 If a migrant’s new position took him or her to a different part of the country, Befra officials ensured the interrogation was continued at a questioning facility closer to the entrant’s new place of residence. 79 Formal reports compiled by partner intelligence agencies triggered still further questioning sessions at Joint Interrogation Centers. 80 Befra officials summoned applicants several weeks or months after their arrival in the West, with successful encounters providing the basis for discussions not only at formal offices, but also at entrants’ places of employment, residence, or other venues. By the late 1960s, the Joint Interrogation Centers had evolved beyond the original mission. By that time, a more diverse group of informants was completing a labyrinth of forms and questionnaires. In addition to refugees, a much broader group of guests, including travelers, journalists, and businessmen (and sometimes businesswomen), was subjected to questioning, with rounds conducted not only in Befra office buildings but also in restaurants, train stations, and other public venues. 81 The aims and outcomes of these questioning sessions are discussed in chapter 5. Interviews at the Joint Interrogation Centers lasted from several hours to a few days, and in isolated cases for several weeks, with the briefest conversations taking less than half an hour. 82 All subjects filled out personal history statements in which they listed friends, relatives, and associates. The record for the amount of time spent in the BND offices of a Joint Interrogation Center appears to have gone to the former director of research at a pharmaceutical concern and professor at the Technical University in Dresden. A member of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) since his nineteenth birthday, this “completely ready to testify and credible” photo chemist, who specialized in the degradation of polyurethanes, spent no less than 377 hours in conversations with BND questioners alone, yielding a total of thirty-nine distinct reports. 83 In a nod to the legitimacy of the East German state no security bureaucrat would concede in public, Befra raw intelligence reports produced by the BND record whether the newcomer had fled East Germany “legally” or not; by the 1970s, the majority of migrants from that country had resettled in the federal republic after legal shenanigans and outright harassment in the East, in many cases with West German authorities offering East German counterparts cash payments for the release of political prisoners, their families, and others. 84 Those yet to establish residence in the federal republic were sometimes housed at the JIC questioning centers or in nearby low-cost hotels. Expenses were almost always covered, with salaries and wages generously reimbursed or an honorarium offered to the unemployed. Cases of maltreatment were unusual but not unheard of. Office signs posted at the entrance and stationery

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used to summon new arrivals bore the symbol of the Bonn government, a skinny, black federal eagle. The presence of the BND, as well as other domestic and foreign espionage agencies, was hidden from outsiders: the official summons failed to disclose the true identity of those entrusted with newcomers’ data, to say nothing of the presence of foreign espionage agents. Recipients of Befra summons were instructed to bring to the session all personal identity cards and documents from the period of their lives prior to their escape or relocation. If employees gained a favorable impression of the newcomer, the refugee was asked whether she or (more often) he would be willing to supply additional details in the future. Forthcoming or especially interesting individuals received visits, sometimes unannounced, at their new places of employment in West Germany. 85 In instances in which officials of the Joint Interrogation Centers were unsatisfied with the accounts provided by new arrivals, migrants were resummoned by post to a JIC or related decoy “research center,” including a so-called Institute for Industrial Research and Cooperation in Middle Germany (Institut zur Erforschung und Zusammenarbeit der Industrie in Mitteldeutschland). Occupying the top floor of a Frankfurt skyscraper, this facility started out as a Befra, but in the course of détente and expanded trade with the East, it came to specialize in industrial espionage. In Frankfurt as elsewhere, newcomers regarded as especially useful were extended an open invitation to return to JIC offices, conditioned upon their willingness to offer details about colleagues, places of employment, or service to state and party. The extant documentation allows us to glean details about how refugees viewed their time in the Befras. For some, a visit to a JIC was superfluous because they had already shared their insights with police authorities and military intelligence prior to receiving the summons. 86 For this and other reasons, many ignored the written invitation: in early 1960, BND representatives notified authorities of the Hessian Ministry of the Interior that only 40 percent of those summoned actually responded. 87 Federal civil servants charged with the enforcement of privacy legislation corroborated this estimate for the Düsseldorf Befra twenty years later. 88 During the early 1980s, BND staff at the Befras annually questioned some forty thousand ethnic German expellees and 3,500 East German refugees. According to BND estimates relayed to the minister of the interior, roughly a third of these individuals supplied “relevant information.” 89 Documents produced by Hessian authorities indicate that state-level officials sought to ensure that West Germany’s main foreign intelligence service underscored the voluntary nature of their questioning deep in the country’s interior, a move BND officials resisted, perhaps in part by underreporting the number of those responding to their formal summons. The decision to ignore the BND’s official invitation was not always without consequences. As late as the early 1980s, at least several of those regarded as possessing relevant information and contacts

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subsequently faced a representative of the BND or BfV on their home doorstep. 90 By then, Befra summons were amended to state that the questioning offices were responsible for gathering statistical data relating to natural disasters, environmental issues, and other relevant cross-border phenomena of interest to federal authorities. WEBS OF QUESTIONING ALONG WEST GERMANY’S EASTERN BORDERS It is important to emphasize that the Befras were only one element, albeit a notably long-lasting one, in a shifting landscape of interrogation sites spread across western Germany and West Berlin. Especially interesting newcomers to reach the federal republic were often first questioned by representatives of the Federal Border Guard (Bundesgrenzschutz), the Customs Frontier Service (Zollgrenzdienst), or their municipal or state police counterparts and then brought to a BUNAST or Befra, thus bypassing—sometimes only initially, in other instances entirely—the formal reception and asylum procedures. 91 In the West German states within the American zone bordering East Germany, state police and American special military intelligence offices were among the earliest to put questions to those fleeing the East. In Hessen during the 1950s and 1960s, offices were located in Eschwege, Bad Hersefeld, and Fulda; thereafter new entrants were typically brought to the JIC office in Kassel. 92 The integration of American and West German intelligence officers in security investigations of newcomers was equally strong in the federal state of Bavaria. The first queries came minutes after arrival in the new country, with either the Bavarian Border Police or the West German Federal Border and Customs Police questioning fleeing soldiers or police officers, typically for an hour or two, and then forwarding these refugees, together with a brief written or verbal report of their encounter, to U.S. military intelligence battalion offices in Bad Neustadt, Coburg, Kronach, and Hof. Many of these reports made their way to the Befras after their formal establishment in 1958. 93 Atypical, though not unheard of, were interrogations carried out by American and British officials within West German police and customs facilities. In many instances, geographic proximity made this unnecessary: West German border authorities toiled steps away from so-called Resident Agencies in Hessen and Bavaria. West German and U.S. Army facilities in the Bavarian towns and villages near the inner German border were often, as in Bad Neustadt, located on the same street. In cases in which the individual had information deemed especially timely, such as details of troop concentrations and movements or new weapons, the Bavarian Border Police prepared reports addressed to three Munich-based authorities, one foreign, two domes-

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tic: the American consulate general’s Department of Public Affairs and the Bavarian LfV and Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. 94 ACCESS TO NEWCOMERS AND TENSIONS AMONG ALLIED DEBRIEFERS From the earliest days of the occupation, security and intelligence officials allied against Soviet communism tussled over access to the most interesting newcomers. To offer one example, in 1952 the chief prosecutor in the Bavarian border town of Hof refused a CIC agent’s request to transfer a defector to either the local CIC office or Camp King, arguing that persons who had confessed to being agents should remain in the exclusive custody of West Germany’s fledgling federal authorities. 95 The matter was settled by granting the CIC representative the right to interrogate the subject at the Hof jail. Not satisfied with their triumph in this case, CIC officers encouraged U.S. Army Europe’s Judge Advocate General to draw West German authorities’ attention to the extensive powers granted by the Occupation Statutes. The handling of those regarded by U.S. intelligence as “their” agents provoked subsequent battles, with Americans using arguments about military jurisdiction and security to remind federal authorities of their subservient place in Europe’s postwar political order. 96 Formal inclusion of West German counterparts in the Joint Interrogation Centers (Befras) sought to limit Allied clashes: notwithstanding CIA field assertions of “unilateral operational activity in the Federal Republic” destined for headquarters, 97 conflict between occupiers and the occupied over access to newcomers stubbornly persisted. Among the Befra cases detailed in the declassified holdings of the CIC in Washington is a ten-day interrogation of a man expelled from East Germany during the mid-1960s. Convicted in the East German city of Schwerin in April 1953 of performing espionage on behalf of the American Counter Intelligence Corps, Herbert Giessler found himself facing Befra interrogators in the West German border town of Helmstedt twelve years later. Giessler provided BND listeners with information on an underground resistance movement among prisoners at a penal complex in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, where he had served most of his twelve years and one month of hard labor. 98 After a follow-up conversation with the former prisoner at his home, Karl-Heinz Engelke of Hessen’s LfV advocated on Giessler’s behalf. American archival records reveal that Engelke sought to learn from CIC agents whether they could confirm Giessler’s account, ostensibly in order to buttress Giessler’s claims to compensation owing to his lengthy imprisonment in Communist East Germany. The formal exchange of information between West German and American agencies about intelligence leads appears from U.S. records to

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have been a routine matter, with the initials of the BND, BfV, and MAD ordinarily listed on preprinted American Name Trace Request forms. And yet, as Giessler’s and Käthe Büntgen’s cases make clear, information about former or current agents, as well as about attendant misjudgments and operational blunders, was withheld from domestic security authorities. Rather than admit errors to German counterparts, fingers were pointed at competitors. Sensitive to implicit criticisms of their methods in their investigation of Giessler Counter Intelligence Corps staff in 1965 shifted blame for his East German imprisonment to a competing American service, the Office of Naval Intelligence. Confronted with the Counter Intelligence Corps’ allegations, the chief of that service’s office in Frankfurt—at least according to the record bequeathed to us by U.S. Army sources—informed his CIC counterpart by telephone of his decision to absolve himself of any responsibility for Giessler’s case. This tale of American-German duplicity does not end there. The files reveal that the CIC withheld from its naval intelligence colleagues and also from the Hessian LfV information that it had gleaned from an independent interrogation of Giessler conducted years earlier. Among the more salacious details contained therein was a previous instance of American recruitment, a mission, if we are to believe these files, involving Giessler in the defection of a Soviet lieutenant colonel in 1948. This incident ended in failure for the American service and imprisonment for the enlisted Germans, including Giessler. Among the particulars unearthed to test Giessler’s claims were details Giessler had provided on the identity of two fellow prisoners he had met during his incarceration in Brandenburg, Rudolf Fleck and Wolfgang Pölitz. Still other CIC case files confirm both were American recruits, with the latter enlisted at Camp King. Choosing not to share these findings with West German security counterparts, Counter Intelligence Corps interrogators at Oberursel offered the Hessian state office—formally charged with counterintelligence—the following cryptic assessment instead: “Extensive traces concerning SUBJECT proved negative and records failed to substantiate Giessler’s claim of USI [United States Intelligence] association.” The case thus wrapped up for the American army service, an internal CIC memorandum ends with the following disingenuous observation: “No additional pertinent information available and no operational interest.” 99 While the questioning marathon in western Germany was more extensive and duplicitous than initially met the eye, the various interrogations carried out at overt and covert facilities in West Berlin and West Germany paled in comparison to the grueling interrogations faced by those who chose to return to the socialist East. Semipublic in nature and visited by tens of thousands of East German migrants, as well as refugees, asylum seekers, and travelers from other nations, the Befras were easy prey for East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, whose chief source of knowledge about the Joint Interro-

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gation Centers and a good many other Allied questioning offices was relentless interrogation of so-called returnees. 100 The Stasi is neither the only nor the best source of information on the Befras. The semipublic interrogation centers drew the scrutiny of members of another profession often paired with snooping: investigative journalists. This is unsurprising given that, unlike questioning facilities such as Camp King near Oberursel, the JAROC in Berlin-Zehlendorf, or the IRCD in Cologne, the Joint Interrogation Centers were in plain view, marked with signage, and for most of their history listed in West German address (later phone) books. Refugees, for their part, asked plenty of questions of their own about the Befras’s purpose. The Befras and their predecessors attracted public controversy, much of it stoked by journalists. Perhaps owing to the dispatch of classified letters through the regular mail, the first director of the Hamburg KÜNAST, Heinz Paul Opitz, purportedly ensured that Communist newspapers were able to announce his office’s address and mission. News of the publication and allegations of poor security standards reached the CIA’s offices in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg via his German rivals, including the staff officer for the future BND’s maritime operations. 101 Unlike the Federal Intelligence Offices, the Befras appear to have enjoyed a few years free from public controversy, perhaps owing to BND employees’ willingness to engage visitors informally about the purpose of the offices in advance of visits 102 or to the animosity between the two postwar German states immediately before and after the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. In any event, six years later the period of relative quiet abruptly ended. An extensive disclosure about the larger multinational debriefing program “broke” in a Stuttgart newspaper in 1967, prompted by a letter to the editor from a recent arrival from East Germany. Her fretting was wrapped up with not only the ongoing hostility between the two postwar states, but also the gradual thaw that was beginning to set in, a change in relations allowing a privileged few, especially retirees, to settle legally in the West. In a page-long piece, the concern attributed to the anonymous retiree related to the security implications of a summons issued to visit the Joint Interrogation Center in Mainz. The account claimed her aim was to avoid further exposure to Western security services, asserting the appointment could only lead to difficulties for her, perhaps even reprisals for her East German relatives. Her specific fear was that information she might supply would find its way to Eastern intelligence agencies, specifically the Ministry for State Security. While acknowledging a debt of gratitude to her “new” state, the Federal Republic of Germany, a country now paying her a more generous pension than she would have received in the East, she nonetheless decided, if the article is to be believed, to seek outside counsel before keeping the Befra appointment. Upon receipt

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of a second summons, she reluctantly decided to present her quandary to a sympathetic Stuttgart journalist. 103 From 1967 onward, a host of West German journalists joined a chorus of criticism. Within days of the Stuttgart publication, a reporter based in Bonn, working for the American wire service UPI, had put the woman’s plight to the press relations officers of the German state interior ministries, yielding (probably to his delight) a string of implausible denials. Stretching the limits of credulity, West German civil servants, along with spokesmen for the Ministry for All-German Affairs and the Refugee Ministry, claimed to possess no prior knowledge of the Befras’s existence. The main East German daily Neues Deutschland ran a piece of its own, making extensive use of the UPI account. 104 Subsequent coverage in more reputable newspapers made matters worse for the JICs. An account published in a Bavarian regional paper, the Fürther Tageszeitung, led photojournalists and police officers to camp outside the entrance to the Nuremberg Befra. A subsequent request from local BND staff there for additional law enforcement protection yielded unintended consequences. As it happened, the presence of so many police officers and camera-wielding journalists near the villa on Wielandstrasse 27 did more than inconvenience Western services. The show of police and media force also had the paradoxical effect of complicating the Stasi’s West German informants’ efforts to learn more about the Nuremberg center’s questioning operations. 105 Given their broad appeal to newspaper readers, allegations of Western espionage misconduct drew attention-seeking politicians into the fray. Led by a former federal minister of justice, Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician Ewald Bucher, 106 public pressure in the form of attention from elected representatives and print scrutiny subsequently prompted the West German federal government to present a tight-lipped acknowledgment: yes, the Joint Interrogation Centers were part of the federal government, staffed by officials answering to Department I of the Federal Chancellery. Not strictly false, the explanation obscured the fact that the debriefing program was carried out by the nation’s leading foreign intelligence service, the BND, in close coordination with domestic partners such as the BfV, the LfVs, and a host of foreign intelligence agencies, American, British, and French. West German reporters and select public officials have periodically returned to intelligence questioning practices at the Befras and related sites for more than fifty years. Scathing critiques of the Befras appeared in konkret, a West Berlin Marxist organ that received not only financial support, but also research assistance in the form of West German documentation from the Stasi. 107 A journalist and subsequent Red Army Faction terrorist, Ulrike Meinhof, shuttled documents between the paper’s offices and the KGB’s ally in East Berlin. 108

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Missing from the public controversy surrounding the Befras are the voices of agents, a state of affairs I rectify in chapter 5 by focusing on faceto-face interactions between BND staff and “guests,” including but by no means limited to newcomers from the socialist East. Here I would like to highlight the fact that media troubles had the effect of drawing foreign attention to the operations of the Joint Interrogation Centers, with West Germany’s main occupying powers warily studying their colleagues’ reactions to the scrutiny of press and politicians. In the view of British intelligence authorities based in West Germany, critical accounts in regional papers with wider circulation were especially serious. Yet another story in a West German daily, the Rheinische Post, concerned an ethnic German resettler from Czechoslovakia who, during a visit to relatives in that Communist nation after taking up residence in the federal republic, was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment, ostensibly because of information provided many years earlier during a visit to a Joint Interrogation Center. The treatment of his fate in this regional newspaper prompted discussions among the highest intelligence circles in London. Minutes of the British Services Security Organization show that British intelligence officials active in Germany sought to downplay revelations, while acknowledging (behind closed doors) the blow landed by a serious paper taking up the plight of ethnic German resettlers. According to British sources, similar complaints about overzealous AngloAmerican interrogators at that time to reach U.S. Army Europe’s headquarters in Heidelberg were prompting U.S. officials to take a more proactive stance. Press scrutiny, British intelligence officials feared, appeared to be leading authorities in Bonn to pressure Gehlen’s Federal Intelligence Service to revise the standard text of the summons. American officials, at least according to the British documentation, were insisting their West German counterparts, the BND, not bend to pressure from their superiors in the Bonn Ministry of the Interior. American military officials in Germany planned to take the matter up via the U.S. embassy, pressing the argument in Bonn “with a view to preserving the operation in its present form.” The British chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (Germany) announced his plan “to find out whether USAREUR had taken up the matter of the Befra letter with the US Embassy—and to be on the alert for any approach by the US Embassy to HM Embassy.” 109 While we are not blessed with an American version of these events in the available documentation, other detailed accounts, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, provide insights into intra-Allied intelligence relations during the Cold War global struggle for political domination. Critical press coverage of Allied questioning practices emerged as a recurring feature of West German political life from the late 1960s onward, with years of relative quiet punctuated by scandals surrounding interrogation methods used at a particular Befra. Media accounts during the 1970s and 1980s linked alleged misdeeds at

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Befra questioning offices with narratives of scandal at the reception and asylum centers. 110 The conclusion of Soviet domination in east-central Europe did not end criticism of the Befras. An investigation published in the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel prompted members of the German parliament from the successor organization of the SED to ask whether the Befras made use of “informants,” and if yes, how many. 111 While these questions remained unanswered by the chancellor’s spokesmen, the federal government’s written response acknowledged that in 1991 the offices employed 260 individuals on a full-time basis. 112 BEFRAS IN THE DECADES AFTER COMMUNIST RULE At some point after 1992, the Befra program headquarters was moved from Munich to the Wilmersdorf district of then unified Berlin. No new Befras were opened on the territory of the former East Germany, perhaps because so few migrants settled there, that is, until the mass exodus of newcomers to Germany in 2015. The most infamous example of refugee exploitation at a German Befra emerged more than a decade after the collapse of Soviet communism, when Iraqi chemist Rafid Ahmed Alwan—given the baseballinspired CIA cryptonym “Curveball”—offered spurious details about his country’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program in his effort to secure asylum, an account subsequently employed to justify the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. 113 During the 2000s and early 2010s, the most prominent criticism of Allied and West German questioning of refugees came from members of the Green/ Civic Forum 90 and Left parties (the latter is a successor to East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party). 114 The best known of the critics among the former parliamentary group is Hans-Christian Ströbele, the first member of the Bundestag to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in his Russian exile. Today Ströbele is a member of the German parliamentary commission investigating surveillance programs carried out by British and American security agencies since 9/11. Ströbele’s views have been amplified by Berlin-based, German-speaking American journalist John Goetz, 115 as well as former Stasi publicist Klaus Eichner. 116 Facing a familiar alliance of publicists and politicians, until several years ago the federal government’s position essentially stuck to the initial cover story published in the Stuttgarter Zeitung. In 2012 federal authorities noted they had no interest in confirming or denying whether the Befras were part of the BND. 117 Only during the past few years has the federal government reluctantly acknowledged that, until June 2014, the JICs persisted in the form of a Tripartite Debriefing Program (minus the French; exactly when French services abandoned the JICs remains unknown).

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As late as June 2014, four remaining JICs, in Berlin, Nuremberg, Mainz, and Hanover, were questioning asylum seekers from across the globe, with operational and security issues handled by the BND, headquartered until 2015 in the Munich suburb of Pullach. In October 2015 the formal parliamentary commission investigating Anglo-American eavesdropping allegations after 9/11 devoted a special session to the Joint Interrogation Center program. Viewers of the German television news program Panorama learned that a Frau K., a former director of the Befra operation (apparently acting on the advice of the federal spying agency’s legal counsel, Johannes Eisenberg), declined to provide essential details in response to queries from select members of the commission. 118 While the Joint Interrogation Centers may or may not be a thing of the past, face-to-face interrogation, as the security crisis in Germany and Europe unleashed by numerous terror assaults in 2015 and 2016 suggests, must continue. 119 In 2014 security chiefs in Germany had indicated that the geographic focus of questioning had shifted from visible structures in German cities and towns to what have been described as “crisis regions” elsewhere in the world. This viewpoint seems likely to have undergone revision in 2015. Multinational security questioning of migrants has long been linked to a world beyond central Europe: the presence of foreign interviewers ensured as much. After the Wall’s construction, flight to western Germany in thousands of cases involved escape from a variety of countries, some of them many time zones removed from Germany. Befra reports reveal that questions posed by foreign police and intelligence authorities often filled the first hours or days after escape. From Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, East Germans were interrogated before being brought to a West German trade representative, consulate, or, in capital cities, the embassy of the federal republic. Swedish police officials carried out rounds of questioning in different port cities, but especially Malmö, Copenhagen’s Swedish sister city. In Denmark, escapees were turned over to federal border police in the West German border towns of Flensburg or Puttgarden after questioning about escape routes from and military objects in East Germany. Interrogations took place both in central Copenhagen and Nykøbing on the South Danish island of Falster, sometimes hundreds of kilometers from escapees’ point of disembarkation. An East German employed in a fishery in Sassnitz who escaped via the Danish island of Bornholm faced questions at a police precinct in Copenhagen, at the border crossing point at Puttgarden, at the criminal police station in Lübeck, and at Opitz’s Coastal Intelligence Office in Hamburg before making his way to a Befra; after a ninety-minute session there, he was forwarded to the federal reception center in Giessen. Exhausted by his ordeal—his Befra questioners regarded him as “inhibited”—the former car repairman purportedly “failed to cooperate in his questioning. Each response has to be wrested from him.” 120

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East Germans’ escape routes during the 1970s and 1980s extended well beyond the port cities of the North and Baltic Seas to include still lengthier journeys to the Middle East, North and South America, and Southeast Asia. The arc of security vetting mirrored these far-flung flight paths, with questioners from Montreal to Turkish Black Sea ports to Indonesia’s international airport near Jakarta joining an enterprise rooted in Germany’s defeat, division, and occupation. INTERROGATING NON-GERMANS: ESCALATIONS AT CAMP VALKA Although German speakers fleeing via a cosmopolitan range of international escape routes constitute the best-documented group of newcomers to the federal republic, refugee interrogation both during and after the Cold War in Germany has included numerous individuals from other nations as well. While those with no claim to German ethnicity have faced dramatically different hurdles in securing their futures in the federal republic, from the earliest days of Germany’s occupation they shared with East Germans a central feature of life in western Germany both during and after the period of East-West hostility: exposure to the inquiries and interests of Western, chiefly American and British, intelligence agencies. The first refugee center established explicitly for foreigners seeking sanctuary in the Federal Republic of Germany was Camp Valka. A former hospice for members of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), Camp Valka offered shelter to persons displaced by the recent world war until 1960, initially under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), then under the administration of forty employees at the new Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees from 1953. Eight years after the war’s end, the sprawling facility on the outskirts of Nuremberg was home to some four thousand individuals from thirty-four different nations. A third hailed from Czechoslovakia. The U.S. Army (among others, as we shall see in the next section) maintained a questioning office in the camp, identified obliquely on foreign newcomers’ official routing slips as “Room No. 9.” This questioning group reported to a Counter Intelligence Corps regional office headquartered in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice. U.S. High Commissioner (and subsequent first ambassador to the federal republic) James Conant regarded U.S. intelligence debriefing centers in and near Camp Valka as superior to the “substandard conditions” at the camp itself. Conant argued that the poor conditions at Valka inflicted on escapees denied political refugee status by West German authorities supplied fodder

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for Communist propaganda, demonstrating a shortsightedness that, in his assessment, was offsetting the efforts of U.S.-sponsored broadcasters Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. 121 Chapter 4 covers the state of affairs at Camp Valka, in particular the roles of U.S. Army intelligence and American broadcasters such as Radio Free Europe as information-gathering arms of the U.S. intelligence community. 122 In the remaining pages of this chapter on sites associated with refugee questioning in western Germany, I turn explicitly to Conant’s critics. Time and again, those West German authorities assigned responsibility for internal security raised pointed charges against not merely foreign refugees, but also their American protectors. At Camp Valka, claims of American bad faith involved what West German counterintelligence officials regarded as an especially unholy alliance of Cold War actors: immoral east-central European migrants and duplicitous U.S. Army intelligence agents. Conditions at Camp Valka generated hefty doses of distress and controversy within and beyond West Germany’s borders. Even before the establishment of the federal government, as early as February 1948, Bavarian justice minister Joseph Müller had publicly declared such camps “oases and asylums, where criminals can flee and hide their deeds, and can enjoy the extraterritoriality of diplomats.” 123 Whereas Conant sought to assign blame for squalor to West German administrators, federal and Bavarian officials like Müller placed it squarely on American shoulders. Müller and Conant, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s envoy to Germany, were by no means alone: alleged espionage and criminal activities at the camp prompted criticism in such stalwart anti-Communist venues as Czech émigré publications, the New York Times, and the British House of Commons, culminating in a visit from the first UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Dutch lawyer and journalist Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, in July 1955. 124 Like the Befras, the American intelligence agencies in and near Nuremberg provoked public complaints regarding their questioning across the history of the Bonn republic. Similar to those leveled against the centers of the formal reception procedure in Giessen, Marienfelde, and Uelzen, these criticisms were voiced in West Germany’s parliament. In 1986 Burkhard Hirsch, an FDP member of the West German Bundestag, asked his government for an explanation of the legal basis for the questioning of asylum seekers carried out by an “American liaison agency” at the Federal Assembly Camp for Foreigners at Zirndorf, Camp Valka’s successor. Hirsch also requested any information the Bonn government might have about similar interrogations carried out by American intelligence agencies in other NATO states. 125 The formal answer provided by the Bonn government revealed the complicated legal contortions required in granting special privileges to foreign espionage powers. It states, “Insofar as an American liaison agency carries out questioning of asylum seekers these rounds of questioning are undertaken with

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the knowledge of those affected on a voluntary basis,” noting that “with reference to the acquisition of such information no formal international agreement exists between the Federal Republic and the respective security force.” Absent a formal bilateral agreement, the government of the federal republic nonetheless felt compelled to note that the legal basis for the actions of these services lay in “the cooperation clause of the Supplementary Agreement to the NATO Status of Forces Agreement of August 3, 1959, dictating close cooperation and mutual support between German agencies and authorities of the NATO treaty states with reference to matters of security.” Having cited a legal foundation, the representative noted laconically that he “did not regard it as his duty to provide information about any such questioning in other Allied states of the NATO alliance.” Rather, he noted, “it is obvious that the purpose of the liaison office was to clarify matters relating to military affairs and terrorist threats.” 126 As far as security was concerned, the refugee agency, even four decades after the war, was not under federal control. Today faded from public memory, charges of American-led espionage at Camp Valka and its successors were a feature of political life across the history of the Bonn republic. German-American tensions ultimately led U.S. ambassador Conant to offer a financial contribution to transfer Camp Valka to the nearby Nuremberg suburb of Zirndorf, an idea supported by the Ministry of the Interior’s Kurt Breull. 127 At Zirndorf, a former police barracks administered by the U.S. Escapee Program was made available to the federal entity known today as the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. This measure accelerated Valka’s closure in 1960. 128 Today headquartered in the former U.S. Army facility known during the global battle of national security ideologies as Merrell Barracks, a facility originally designed in the late 1930s for Hitler’s Waffen-SS and situated at the entrance to the former rallying grounds, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees resides on the largest piece of real estate in Germany bequeathed by the Nazis. As Conant acknowledged, like at the facilities charged with the process of selecting and obtaining permission to admit entrants from East Germany, at Camp Valka foreign intelligence services, including but not limited to the Counter Intelligence Corps, screened foreign newcomers immediately after their registration by local criminal police. Just like in Marienfelde, the early 1950s witnessed the emergence of domestic competitors. In early January 1953 a formal assessment team from the BfV was established at Camp Valka. Also later that year, both the federal and Bavarian State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution set up covert, off-site questioning facilities in nearby Nuremberg. 129 Representatives of the BfV wasted little time in lodging complaints that American services at Valka were confiscating documents from newcomers, arguing that they, not American counterparts from the CIC, should be first to question newcomers to the federal republic. 130

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The formal accession of federal control at Camp Valka in 1953—the same year as Marienfelde’s opening and a watershed year in federal assertions of sovereignty over refugee-related matters—led the director of Camp Valka’s screening group from the BfV to present his Cologne superiors with a catalog of American espionage misdeeds. Whereas public officials’ complaints about the “diplomatic status” allegedly enjoyed by refugees in Bavaria represented a veiled critique of American policy, charges leveled against U.S. occupation authorities in correspondence within domestic intelligence circles were more bare-fisted. Addressed to the agency’s first director (and subsequent defector to East Germany), Otto John, as well as to the high civil servant charged with refugee affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, Kurt Breull, the newly arrived BfV chief of Valka’s screening group put forward a battery of incendiary charges, including the assertion that American services were involved in recruiting security agents against whom they had toiled against “during the recent war.” In his evaluation, the Americans aimed to reassign former agents via Camp Valka to new missions in neighboring Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. In the hard-hitting assessment, the Americans bore responsibility not only for a string of lifelong sentences recently handed down against unsuccessful agents in those states, all allegedly Valka recruits, but in a more general sense for the appalling security at the Nuremberg facility, a lamentable state of affairs that cast a pall over the lives of law-abiding Germans residing far beyond Valka’s gates. For those able to escape westward, Camp Valka offered an American-protected perch from which “turned” Eastern agents infiltrated western Germany, while various other shadowy figures, with no allegiance to any particular government, peddled “intelligence” to handlers residing in neighborhoods of nearby Nuremberg and Munich. West German efforts to thwart these activities were frustrated by “Czechoslovak and Polish employees” (underlined in the original) of American services conducting interrogations, purportedly on behalf of American authorities, of those newly arrived from Soviet-dominated territories. The director concluded his assessment with the observation that “through the screening of the Allies, in particular the Americans, a thin layer of skim—genuine refugees—are laboriously filtered out either for emigration abroad or the services of the Western armies. The ‘satellite’ countries, for their part, continue to flood the new Federal Republic with migrants, leading to a situation in which the ‘much greater volume of human dregs rises time and again to the surface of the “refugee pool.”’” 131 During the early 1950s, counterintelligence officials at West Germany’s BfV faced interrelated challenges. One was to protect their country from Communist infiltration, separating what they regarded as the tiny number of deserving foreign refugees from the much larger mass of allegedly “asocial and criminal” asylum seekers. Related to this objective was a perceived desire to “cleanse” the still fragile postwar republic of those Czechs, Hungar-

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ians, Poles, and Slovaks engaging in intelligence work on behalf of foreign powers, including West Germany’s closest ally, the United States. Anything short of a full-fledged purge (Säuberung) of these interrelated challenges would ensure Valka remained “a source of infection where even those foreigners who could be reviewed for formal admission to the Federal Republic according to asylum law become contaminated.” 132 Face-to-face interrogation of newcomers in early Cold War Germany stoked immense mistrust, first and foremost among sworn enemies engaged in a global struggle involving military forces arrayed against one another across Europe and much of Asia, but also between those formally charged with anti-Communist counterintelligence in defeated and divided Germany. West German attempts to discourage further movement of east-central European refugees to the federal republic clashed with the brash-sounding psychological warfare and defector inducement objectives of U.S. military and intelligence authorities. For those charged with the internal security of West Germany, the United States’ principal ally in continental Europe, this struggle was bound up with the degree of latitude particular elements of the new West German state should enjoy in relation to a U.S.-led struggle against Communist expansion. Established in September 1950, the BfV (like the Federal Criminal Police in Wiesbaden) reported to the minister of the interior, with state offices (as we shall see in chapter 4, not least in Bavaria) enjoying not only a large measure of autonomy vis-à-vis the Cologne headquarters, but also independent liaison with foreign governments, notably the United States and United Kingdom. 133 Federal and state offices at that time served a range of clients, including political superiors within the Ministry of Interior in Bonn and the BfV’s headquarters in Cologne, as well as the informational needs of forces stationed in the federal republic. Cozy relations with leading occupiers should not obscure the fact that the BfV aimed—as did its Ministry of Interior colleagues in Bonn—to expand the federal government’s range of influence within the constellation of political and military actors stationed on the divided territory of the former Reich. The stinging allegations presented in the BfV report on conditions at Camp Valka draw our attention to inner Allied conflicts embedded in joint refugee screening, a largely unexamined battlefield in Cold War Europe. At issue was the purportedly insalubrious influence of the Counter Intelligence Corps at Camp Valka. Missing from the BfV report are the perspectives of those individuals caught in the crossfire between domestic and foreign security officials. I turn in the next three chapters to personal accounts of flight and surveillance, focusing in chapter 3 on British refugee interrogation of especially sought-after newcomers, scientists and technicians. In chapters 4 and 5, I turn to the activities of a host of American and West German vetting agencies, at Camps Valka and King, in the federal reception centers, in the

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Joint Interrogation Centers, and at still other elucidation sites set up across the occupied regions of western Germany. NOTES 1. Agent Report, August 29, 1955, “Bjoernssen, Bjoern XE 252 899,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 75, NARA II. 2. Known as Operation Hermes, questioning carried out by Gehlen’s Org began in the summer of 1947, with extensive interrogations taking place at Oberursel. For a concise introduction, see Bodo Wegmann, Zwischen Normannenstrasse und Camp Nikolaus. Die Entstehung deutscher Nachrichtendienste nach 1945 (Berlin: n.p., 1999), 250. For the wartime history of this installation, see Stefan Geck, Dulag Luft—Auswertungsstelle West. Vernehmungslager der Luftwaffe für westalliierte Kriegsgefangene im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). 3. In instances in which migrants claimed to have been working for an American service, formal reports were in some cases shared with American partner services. 4. Use of Specially Selected Germans as Interrogators, undated (1949), FO 1005/1173, TNA London. 5. Schreiben an das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, z.Hd. des Herrn Präsidenten, April 24, 1967, B 443/778, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 6. Schreiben an das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz vom Niedersächischen Minister des Innern, September 1, 1967, B 443/778, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Known initially as the Office for the Security of the Federal Army (Amt für die Sicherheit der Bundeswehr), the Military Counterintelligence Service formally came into existence in 1956 alongside the army and the Foreign Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst). 7. Die Tätigkeit der Vorprüfungsgruppen B I in den Notaufnahmelagern Berlin, Giessen, Uelzen und Sandbostel im Jahre 1959, B 443/ 773, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 8. Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Jürgen Trittin, Marieluise Beck, Volker Beck, weiterer Abgeordneter und der Fraktion BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN, July 13, 2006, Drucksache 16/2225. 9. Overt (Refugee) Interrogation Report, Intelligence Office, Uelzen to Production Directorate, HQ, BIO (G), May 5, 1954, RG 319, Entry 134-A, Box No. 26, Folder ZA 020241, NARA II. A soon-to-be-published guide to the Uelzen facility is Arne Hoffrichter, “Verwaltung, Politik, Geheimdienste. Das Notaufnahmelager Uelzen-Bohldamm im Prozess der Zuwanderung aus SBZ und DDR, 1945–1963” (PhD diss., University of Göttingen, 2015). 10. Known until 1955 as the Frontier Inspection Service, this organization served as Britain’s eyes on the border, coordinating with British forces and nonmilitary West German organizations such as the Bundesgrenzschutz and Zollgrenzdienst, as well as liaising with Soviet and East German officials. Letter to F. A. Warner, Western Department, Foreign Office from C. F. R. Barcley, British embassy, Bonn, July 7, 1955, FO 371/118334, TNA London. 11. Charter for the British Services Security Organization, March 19, 1968, DEFE 4/226, TNA London. See Richard J. Aldrich, “British Intelligence, Security, and Western Cooperation in Cold War Germany: The Ostpolitik Years,” in Battleground Western Europe: Intelligence Operations in Germany and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century, ed. Beatrice de Graaf, Ben de Jong, and Wies Platje (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2007), 134. 12. Jeanette van Laak, “Die Geschichte des Notaufnahmelagers in Giessen zwischen 1946 und 1961,” Mitteilungen des Oberhessischen Geschichtsvereins Gießen 97 (2012): 305–18, and Arno Hoffrichter, “Heinrich Albertz und die SBZ-Flucht. Zur Rolle Niedersachsen, der Presse und des Durchgangslagers Uelzen-Bohldamm im Prozess der Notaufnahmegesetzgebung 1949/ 1950,” Niedersächisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 84 (2012): 377–409. Van Laak completed a German-language manuscript (Habilitation) on the Giessen facility in late 2016. Her work is scheduled for publication in late 2017. 13. East German refugees were expected to pass through one of these three camps; once accepted, newcomers were distributed to the various West German states (Länder) on the basis

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of monthly quotas. For an introduction to the Giessen facility, see Jeanette van Laak, “Das Notaufnahmelager Giessen,” Deutschland Archiv Online, March 27, 2013, http://www.bpb.de/ geschichte/deutschlandarchiv/vanlaak20130331 (accessed October 8, 2016). 14. See Jeannette van Laak, “Zur Infrastruktur des Lagers,” unpublished chapter of forthcoming manuscript. 15. Named after the historic states dissolved by East German authorities in 1952, these names were chosen to symbolize the West German federal government’s goal of the country’s unification. See ibid. 16. Agent Report, September 11, 1958, “Peter Schilling—XE 232 569,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 678, NARA II. 17. Individual reports submitted by the BfV’s Pre-Screening Group B I at the Giessen refugee center are located in the CIC collection at NARA II in College Park, Maryland. See, for one example, Information Report on Berthold Siegund, January 19, 1954, “Otto Schade,” RG 319, Entry 134-B, Box No. 670, NARA II. 18. Today it is located in the Treptow district of Berlin. See the memorandum to the Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes vom Bundesminister des Innern, September 8, 1966, B 136/5054, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. On the administrative responsibilities entrusted to the Security Investigation Office during the 1950s and 1960s, see the analysis of weekly reports submitted in Imanuel Baumann et al., Schatten der Vergangenheit. Das BKA und seine Gründungsgeneration in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH, 2011), 159–62. These records may be accessed at the Koblenz facility under B 131/ 189-213. 19. Blacklist File Established by Security Group, March 5, 1953, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box 18, File Ernst Brückner, Vol. 1, NARA II. 20. Monthly Report of Liasion with Official West German Agencies, October 1957, 66th Counter Intelligence Corps Group, “Jung, Ludwig,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 62, NARA II. 21. Individuals arrested by the Security Investigation Office of the Federal Criminal Police on suspicion of complicity in Soviet espionage included both prominent and unknown individuals: an example of the former is Wehrmacht lieutenant colonel and Soviet prisoner of war Heinrich Scherhorn. See six translated reports of Security Investigation Office interrogations carried out in October and November 1954 contained in “Heinrich Scherhorn—XE Z5 0972,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 675, NARA II. 22. Organization and Personnel of the Sicherungsgruppe, August 10, 1962, “Vieth, Werner,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 132, NARA II. 23. IRCD reports are rare among currently declassified holdings; more common are brief summaries of information procured through interrogations carried out at the Cologne facility and distributed by the BfV. See, for an example of the latter, Informal Distribution of Raw Information, BfV, March 31, 1970, “Felfe, Heinz,” Vol. 4, Folder 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 35, NARA II. 24. Request for Information from DULAG-Luft Files, “ZF 01 10 20—Auswertestelle West Oberursel,” September 10, 1948, RG 319, Entry A1 134-A, Box No. 52, NARA II. On acts of wartime resistance and collaboration, see Notes on History of DULAG LUFT (Oberursel), RAF P/W Camp Histories, October 16, 1946, AIR 40/2466, TNA London. 25. See the account provided by the former U.S. Army counterintelligence section chief (and subsequent CIA employee) Arnold M. Silver, “Questions, Questions, Questions: Memories of Oberursel,” Intelligence and National Security 8, no. 2 (April 1993): 199–213, especially 201–4, 206–7. 26. The U.S. Army delivered Gehlen and members of his staff to a 12th U.S. Army Group Interrogation Center near Wiesbaden in June 1945, where prior to their departure for the Washington, DC, region in August of that year they were invited to produce reports on Soviet capabilities. Kevin Ruffner, “American Intelligence and the Gehlen Organization, 1945–1949,” CIA Studies in Intelligence (1997): 70–72, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/ STUDIES%20IN%20INTELLIGENCE%20NAZI%20-%20RELATED%20ARTICLES_00 13.pdf (accessed on January 9, 2017).

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27. For a recent English-language publication covering Gehlen’s stay at Fort Hunt, see Derek R. Mallett, Hitler’s Generals in America: Nazi POWs and Allied Military Intelligence (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013), 138–67. Fort Hunt’s British origins are revealed in Felix Römer, Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht von innen (Munich: Piper, 2012), 31–48. 28. On the competing aims of American intelligence organizations using Gehlen and other former Fremde Heere Ost officers at Camp King, see Ruffner, “American Intelligence,” 72–75; James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany’s Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 77–91; Mary Ellen Resse, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1990), 77–84; and Timothy Naftali, “Reinhard Gehlen and the United States,” in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, ed. Richard Breitman et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 375–406. On the remarkably loose structure of Gehlen’s Org during these early years, see Gerhard Sälter, “Kameraden. Nazi-Netzwerke und die Rekrutierung hauptamtlicher Mitarbeiter,” in Die Geschichte der Organisation Gehlen und des BND, 1945–1968. Umrisse und Einblicke, Dokumentation der Tagung am 2. Dezember 2013 (Marburg: UHK, 2014), 41–43. Based on his assessment of files held by the BND, another historian employed by this commission, Thomas Wolf, has demonstrated that much of the legwork in creating this network was carried out not by Gehlen but rather by Hermann Baun. See Thomas Wolf, “Die Anfänge des BND: Gehlens Organisation—Prozess, Legende und Hypothek” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64, no. 2 (2016): 191–225. 29. Applicants to the formal reception procedure in Giessen provided West German officials with details of the length of their stay at Oberursel; one candidate spent more than six weeks at the American-run security complex in 1960. See Notaufnahmeakten, Reg. Nr. 408256, Bundesverwaltungsamt Giessen. 30. A403-01-06/0008, 27/95/16, Historisches RIAS-Archiv im Deutschen Rundfunkarchiv, Potsdam. 31. Follow-up reports from the Security Investigation Group of the Federal Criminal Police in some cases led to far-ranging investigations of American and German staffers, their families in the United States, and other refugees from European countries. See the Memorandum from Interservice Refugee Coordination Detachment, 513th INTC Group, October 26, 1965, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 365, NARA II. “Subjects of interest” in these interrogations were Gerhard August and Rudolf Jahns; see also the documentation contained under the same entry in Box No. 337. 32. English-language copies of reports on specialists who fled to western Germany may be found in BND records housed in Koblenz and the Army Staff Record Group 319 in College Park, Maryland. See, for instance, information on the defection of nickel-wire-weaving specialists, Report No. RS-308-51, July 7, 1951, B 206/1406, Bundesarchiv Koblenz and Preliminary Interrogation Report on Vladimir Betschwar, undated (1949), Headquarters 7707 European Command Intelligence Center, U.S. Army, “XE 263745,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 69, NARA II. 33. James L. Gilbert, John P. Finnegan, and Ann Bray, In the Shadow of the Sphinx: A History of Army Intelligence (Fort Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army History Office, 2005), 132–33. 34. The absence of a legal foundation for the BND’s work was a political football even before its formal insertion into the federal government, with the SPD and FDP pushing for a law and Adenauer’s CDU eager to limit parliamentary oversight, particularly in budgetary matters, to a bare minimum. A concise guide to these discussion may be found in Dieter Krüger, “Reinhard Gehlen (1902–1979). Der BND-Chef als Schattenmann der Ära Adenauer,” in Konspiration als Beruf. Deutsche Geheimdienstchefs im Kalten Krieg, ed. Dieter Krüger and Arnim Wagner (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2003), 225–28. 35. See especially the section titled “532nd MI Bn’s Role in Border Operations,” William E. Stacy, U.S. Army Border Operations in Germany, 1945–1983, U.S. Army Center of Military History, http://www.history.army.mil/documents/borderops/content.htm (accessed October 9, 2016). 36. Telefax from ODCSI ULO Bonn Germ to USAREUR, January 17, 1973, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 437, NARA II. 37. Memorandum from W. A. Tait to Evans, July 5, 1950, DEFE 41/9, TNA London.

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38. Review of the Long-Term Future of the British Services Security Organization, July 3, 1961, DEFE 5/114, TNA London. 39. While he formally resided in Würzburg, the former Nazi general owned an apartment in Oberursel on Hohemarkstrasse 121. Bericht compiled by Becker, Kriminal-Obersekretär, Frankfurt am Main, June 19, 1954, “AE 50 16 61—Fritz Bayerlein,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 51, NARA II. On the origins of Bayerlein’s cooperation with U.S. military occupation authorities, see Esther-Julia Howell, Von den Besiegten lernen? Die kriegsgeschichtliche Kooperation der U.S. Armee und der ehemaligen Wehrmachtselite 1945–1961 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 78–84. 40. Einrichtung einer Aussensstelle von B I Giessen, April 4, 1962, B 443/789, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. This office was known as Stadtbüro OSKAR (IV A 3). 41. The city address book from 1969 noted merely (and erroneously) the presence of the “Federal Republic” at this address. See Münchner Stadtadressbuch 1969. Adressbuch der Landeshauptstadt München, 114th ed. (Munich: Adressbuchverlag, 1970), 799. 42. Presumably the files of the Central Registry of the U.S. Army, Europe, 66th CIC Group, were also transferred from Stuttgart to Munich around this time. The CIC maintained a stateside central registry at Fort Holabird in Maryland. Memorandum from State/BI—S.D. Boykin to CIA/RQM/OIS, June 28, 1955, “Schruebbers, Hubert,” 1st Folder, RG 263, Entry ZZ 18, Box No. 116, NARA II. On the 1950s-era BND central card index, see Heinz Felfe, Damage Assessment, April 1, 1963, “Felfe Damage Assessment,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-19, Box No. 34, NARA II. 43. Summons from the Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen, Zweigstelle München, unaddressed and undated (presumably 1985), MfS-HA II, Nr. 45817, BStU. 44. These summaries, assuming they have not been destroyed, were unavailable to researchers in early 2017. A KGB report shared with the Stasi on this subject is Übersetzung aus dem Russischen. Information, München-Giesing, Sintpert-Str. 42, undated, MfS-HA II, Nr. 27509, BStU. 45. Ruffner, “American Intelligence,” 78–79; Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, esp. 92–116. Critchfield and his successor, Thomas Lucid, played critical roles in shaping the Org’s relationship with the CIA. 46. Protests submitted by the Sûreté liaison officer appear to have ensured that the Referat Grenzländer West was not established. For the CIA’s knowledge of the man (aka Dr. Löchner) proposed to head this office, see Memorandum from T. C. Hughes Jr. to CO, Hq. 66th CIC Group, USAREUR, Attn.: S-3 Section, CS Division, “Halswick, Karl Gustav,” April 30, 1957, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 45, NARA II. 47. A brief introduction is Josef Foschepoth, Post- und Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik Überwachtes Deutschland, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 135–41. 48. Annexes were also planned for the North German cities of Bremerhaven, Cuxhaven, and Emden. Letter from the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz on the Bundesfinanzministerium, August 21, 1952, B 126/159262, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. See also ibid., esp. 135–37. 49. Constantin Goschler and Michel Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo.” Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Reinbek bei Hamburg: rowohlt, 2015), 61–63. 50. Letter to the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, z. Hd. des Herrn Präsidenten vom dem Niedersächischen Minister des Innern, Abteilung IV, April 24, 1967, B 443/778, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 51. With reference to Allied awareness of Gerken’s wartime past, see the comprehensive interrogation of Gerken contained in The Case of Richard Gerken, CSDIC (U.K.), June 3, 1945, KV 2/968, TNA London. Gerken was a prisoner of war in England from mid-May 1945 until the end of June 1947. See also, in West German collections, Vermerk: Besprechung mit Herrn von Lossow von der Dienststelle Gehlen in München am 16.2.1953, B 126/159262, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. On Richard Gerken’s Nazi past and leadership role in the BfV more generally, see Goschler and Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo,” 61–68. 52. Copy for Richard Gerken’s PF (BfV Ak-II), December 10, 1956, WO 208/5211, TNA London. 53. Report from L. O. Brown, August 27, 1952, WO 208/5211, TNA London.

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54. EGGA-175, Memorandum from Chief of Base, Hamburg, to Chief of Base, Pullach, November 8, 1955, “Opitz, Heinz Paul,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 97, NARA II. 55. In the fall of 1953 twenty-one “researchers” were active in the border region, boasting a total of 112 confidential plants within East Germany. Goschler and Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo,” 104–5. 56. Eckersham improved his English immediately after the war training American pilots to fly German-type aircraft. Memorandum from T. C. Hughes to CO, Hq. 66th CIC Group, April 1, 1955, “XE 30 70 33—Roland Eckersham,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 177, NARA II. 57. West Germany’s Communist Party was formally banned in 1956. Useful recent introductions to the measures adopted against Communists in western Germany during the 1950s are contained in Dominik Rigoll, Von der streitbaren Demokratie zur inneren Sicherheit. Verfassungsfeinde und ehemalige Bedienstete des Dritten Reiches im öffentlichen Dienst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1945–1975) (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 33–140, and Josef Foschepoth, “Rolle und Bedeutung der KPD im deutsch-deutschen Systemkonflikt,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 56 (2008): 889–909. On Anglo-American occupation policy toward left-wing political subversion, see Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and AntiCommunism in West Germany 1945–1956 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), esp. 229–56. 58. Federal Information Office (Bundesnachrichtenstelle), October 8, 1957, “Hoch, Werner—XE315951,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 298, NARA II. The CIC document states that Hoch divulged information about his SS duties to a German civilian. On the BfV’s extensive use of contractual employees to circumvent (often halfhearted) Allied attempts to ensure those with especially blatant Nazi pasts were not granted positions of authority, see especially Goschler and Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo,” 69–90. The granting of staff status to contractual employees was no longer subject to Allied review after the federal republic formally regained its sovereignty in 1955. 59. For an example of a report on a deserting soldier compiled in Helmstedt, drawing on information provided by the Federal Border Guard and subsequently forwarded to the BEFRA in Hanover, see Befra Report No. Z/V 44658, November 27, 1969, B 206/1585, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 60. The working relationships are detailed in EGGA-923, Memorandum from Chief of Base, Hamburg, to Chief of Base, Bonn, April 23, 1958, “Opitz, Heinz Paul,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 97, NARA II. Opitz’s successor in Hamburg was Hans Joachim Pietsch from BfV headquarters in Cologne. 61. Note on a Meeting with Gerken and Odewald, May 4, 1953, WO 208/5211, TNA London. 62. Department IV of Lower Saxony’s Ministry of the Interior subsequently administered the Central Questioning Offices at these two sites and in Friedland. Letter to the president of the BfV from the director of the LfV Lower Saxony, October 10, 1956, B 443/788, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 63. The first American Joint Interrogation Center was Fort Hunt in Virginia, a joint installation of the War Department and U.S. Navy inspired by British examples imparted by Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator. Fort Hunt’s California counterpart was Fort Tracy. On Britain’s Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (CSDIC), where eavesdropping was at least as important as direct questioning, see the introduction to the source volume edited by Sönke Neitzel, Abgehört. Deutsche Generäle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft 1942–1945 (Munich: Propyläen, 2005); on the American adaptation of the CSDIC, see Felix Römer, Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht von innen (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012), 32–33; on the CSDICs more generally, see Christopher Andrew, “Introduction: The Modern History of Interrogation,” in Interrogation in War and Conflict: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis, ed. Christopher Andrew and Simona Tobia (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–17, esp. 3–6; see also the essay titled “Conclusions” by Simona Tobia in the same volume, esp. 272–74. British-led interrogation of prisoners of war in the Middle East is reviewed in Brad William Gladman, Intelligence and Anglo-American Air Support in World War Two: The Western Desert and Tunisia, 1940–43 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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64. We can recount this story today only after a highly partial release of sources from those holding federal civil service positions. See especially Auflösung der BUNAST Hannover und Übernahme der BUNAST-Aufgaben durch LfV Niedersachsen, September 7, 1959, B 443/788, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. On the media disclosures and internal assessments within the BfV of Odewald’s past, see Goschler and Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo,” 82–90. 65. Review of the Long-Term Future of the British Services Security Organization, July 3, 1961, DEFE 5/114, TNA London. 66. Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Frage der Abgeordneten Hans-Christian Ströbele, Memet Kilic, Volker Beck, weiterer Abgeordneter und der Fraktion BÜNDNIS 90/ DIE GRÜNEN, November 21, 2012, Drucksache 17/11597. Two decades earlier, at least 260 civil servants were employed at the Befras (this estimate excluded translators hired on a contractual basis). See Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Ulla Jelpke und der Gruppe der PDS/Linke Liste, July 29, 1991, Drucksache 12/996. 67. In November 2013, the Federal Chancellor’s Office purportedly issued an order putting an end to questioning sessions in which only U.S. representatives were present. In October 2015 the last director of the Befra questioning operation supplied these and other details in testimony to the German parliament’s NSA Committee. See Ausforschung von Asylbewerbern. 1. Untersuchungsausschuss (NSA)/Ausschuss—1.10.2015. Deutscher Bundestag, https://www. bundestag.de/presse/hib/2015_10/-/390306 (accessed October 12, 2016). 68. Jack Dawson (pseudonym), “The BND’s Hauptsstelle für Befragungswesen and Its British Partner,” Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda, and Security Studies 4, no. 1 (2010): 140–44. 69. Mine is the first published account in any language of this archival collection, a run of documents, consisting mostly of interim reports, that sheds light on day-to-day interactions between employees of the BND and newcomers to western Germany. Less common at the German Federal Archives complex in Koblenz are Befra reports noting troop strength, weapons, orders, and the details of escape, especially pertaining to Stasi enlistment of informants. JIC reports of this nature can occasionally be located in the declassified records of the Counter Intelligence Corps in suburban Washington, DC. Unlike in German files, subjects of Befra reports contained in U.S. collections are named. See Befra Report Z-M 60167, August 19, 1959, “Hans J. Schieweck,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 678, NARA II. 70. An example is the former Hitler Youth and SS Führer and subsequent Hanover Befra interrogator Fritz Kosch. See the Name Trace Request form from DAD Munich, April 11, 1966, “Kosch, Fritz Otto Eberhard,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 70, NARA II. 71. The paradoxical consequences of these privacy and data protection laws in postwar Germany are becoming the subject of interesting historical work. For an introduction, see Larry Frohman, “Population Registration, Social Planning, and the Discourse on Privacy Protection in West Germany,” Journal of Modern History 87 (June 2015): 316–56. 72. Befra Report ZH 37285, June 18, 1970, B 206/1458, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 73. Memorandum from the Notaufnahmelager Giessen an den Herrn Regierungspräsidenten, February 26, 1964, H 1/10828, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. 74. The latter inference stems from stolen copies of BND files today contained in the collections of the Stasi Records Agency. Tipgewinnung über Befragungsstellen, August 3, 1959, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. 75. See, for one example, Report on Joachim Gast, Vorprüfungsgruppe B I Giessen, July 20, 1961, “Gast, Joachim,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 38, NARA II. 76. Memorandum from E. B. Abbots, Chairman of the Intelligence Working Party, undated (report of meeting on July 28, 1954), FO 1112/574, TNA London. Abbots was at this time the director of 12 BIS. 77. Notiz, Discussion with the B I directors, Cologne December 19, 1957, B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 78. Befra Report No. 605289, April 19, 1982, B 206/1596, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 79. See, for example, Befra Report No. 605322, June 18, 1982, B 206/1597, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 80. Befra Report No. 645353, October 28, 1983, B 206/1597, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.

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81. To this end, the newcomer’s place of employment was often included on the cover page of the Befra report. See, for instance, Befra Report No. 136777, July 31, 1968, B 206/1390, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 82. Befra Report No. 125664, Randerkenntnisse. Objekt: Erweiterungsbauten beim VEB Büromaschinewerk in Sömmerda, June 20, 1966, B 206/1449, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 83. See Befra Report No. 160272, February 18, 1972, B 206/1398, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. This individual continued to provide insights to the BND after assuming his new position as director of research and production at a leading West German pharmaceutical company. See Befra Report No. 151596, February 21, 1972, B 206/1509, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 84. Between 1963 and 1989, the West German government purchased the freedom of nearly thirty-four thousand individuals in this manner, in total, paying the East German regime some 3.6 billion West German marks. Jan Philipp Wölbern, Der Häftlingsfreikauf aus der DDR 1962/63–1989. Zwischen Menschenhandel und humanitären Aktionen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014). 85. See, for example, Befra Report No. 76953, October 28, 1960, B 206/1280, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 86. A former employee of East German radio from Suhl shared insights on political and military matters with a Bundeswehr office in Neuberg/Donau prior to visiting the Befra. See Z/ M 62674, March 30, 1966, B 206/1455, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 87. Bundesnachrichtendienst an das Hessische Ministerium des Innern, February 15, 1960, Abt. 503/1215, Hessisches Hauptsstaatsarchiv. 88. Vermerk, Betr.: Datenschutz im Bereich des BND February 11, 1982, B 347/614, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 89. Vermerk von 11.5.1981, z.v. HBW, B 347/614, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 90. See, for one example, Befra Report No. 640792, December 16, 1982, B 206/1598, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 91. On agreements reached with the Federal Border Guard covering the treatment of defecting soldiers, one guide is Note on a Meeting with Gerken and Odewald, May 4, 1953, WO 208/ 5211, TNA London. 92. The interrogation path of a twenty-six-year-old locksmith in 1966 was marked by questioning sessions with Federal Border Guard police, their Hessian state counterparts, and American security authorities in Eschwege; each session lasted approximately three hours. Having reportedly escaped East Germany by swimming across the Werra River, the young man, who had plans to work in his profession in the federal republic, was only forwarded to the Giessen reception facility after another five-hour questioning session in Kassel. See Z-K 52837, November 28, 1966, B 206/1283, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 93. For an example of such an “informational interview” from the Bavarian Border Police contained in the collection of the Federal Intelligence Service in Koblenz, see “Mitteilungen aus der SBZ,” Qu.: Bayer. Grenzpolizei, Coburg, September 18, 1963, B 206/1471, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 94. Examples of two-page summary reports in translation concerning deserters of the forerunner to the East German army and border police can be found in many different files in suburban Washington, DC, and Koblenz. For College Park, see RG 260, Office of Military Government for Germany, Entry 091.411 Subversive Activities, Box No. 7, Folder 092.1 Frontier Control, NARA II. For Koblenz, see Betr.: Nachrichten aus der SBZ, November 25, 1957, B 206/1488, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 95. The case involved the interrogation of self-confesseed Czech intelligence agent Hans Kotrch. See Interrogation Report, November 3, 1952, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 428, NARA II. 96. In closed-door meetings of the leading West German officials charged with refugee affairs, high civil servants acknowledged the absolute right of foreign services to question newcomers in order to guarantee the safety of their troops stationed in West Germany. See Unterlagen für die interministerielle Besprechung am 27. Juni 1956, June 26, 1956, B 150/ 4107, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Other documents contained in this file convey the deep ambivalence federal officials from the Ministries of All-German Affairs and Refugees felt toward the security questioning of foreigners, particularly by American services.

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97. See, for one of many examples, Dispatch to Chief, EE, from Chief, Bonn Operations Base, April 13, 1966, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 139, NARA II. 98. Befra Report, February 15, 1965, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 229, NARA II. 99. Memorandum for the Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Hessen, April 30, 1965, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 229, NARA II. 100. The Stasi’s awareness of the Kassel Befra, for example, dated back to May 1959, with key details provided by former East German soldiers returning to the East. See Gesamt- bzw. Teileinschätzung der Feindtätigkeit der Dienststelle. Die “Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen,” Zweigstelle Kassel, Königsplatz 59, undated (likely May 1959), MfS HA II, Nr. 42211, BStU. 101. EGGA-16 575, Message from the Chief of Mission, Frankfurt, to the Chief of Base, Hamburg, November 8, 1955, “Opitz, Heinz Paul,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No 97, NARA II. 102. See correspondence with a pharmacist who had escaped via Marienfelde the day before the Wall was constructed in Befra Report No. 91909, November 24, 1961, B 206/1401, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 103. Hans-Jörg Sottorf, “Bundesbehörde—beim Bund unbekannt. Vergebliche Fragen nach der Hauptsstelle für Befragungswesen,” Stuttgarter Zeitung 153 (July 7, 1967). See also Volker Hoffmann, “Mit einem harmlosen Leserbrief began es. Auf der Suche nach einer Bundesbehörde. Wohin mit der ‘Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen?’” Frankfurter Rundschau, July 18, 1967. 104. “‘Befragungswesen’ vor dem Bundestag,” UPI, July 13, 1967; “Bonn läßt DDR-Bürger bespitzeln. UPI veröffentlicht sensationelles Material über Spionageapparat,” Neues Deutschland, July 13, 1967. 105. Treffbericht des IM “Leonhard Schreiner,” August 17, 1967, Zentralarchiv, Bd. II, Nr. 5619/73, BStU. 106. “FDP fordert Auskunft über ‘Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen,’” Der Tagesspiegel, July 14, 1967; “Bucher will den Schleier lüften. Anfrage wegen geheimnisvoller ‘Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen,’” Frankfurter Rundschau, July 14, 1967. 107. Bernd Michels and Jürgen Beier, “Morgen wirst auch DU Agent,” konkret 7 (March 26, 1970). 108. The radical leftist was at that time also wife of konkret’s founding editor Klaus Reiner Röhl. Protokoll über die Besprechung zwischen Ulrike Meinhof, Genossen Steinke und F. K. Kaul, December 1, 1966, MfS Sekr. d. Min., Nr. 1239, BStU. 109. Joint Intelligence Committe (Germany) Minutes, October 11, 1976, CAB 190/89, TNA London. 110. For a selection of remarkably similiar coverage from different West German political perspectives, see “Aussiedler aus Osteuropa werden von BND-Dienststelle befragt. Kein Hinweis auf Freiwilligkeit derartiger Aussagen,” Der Tagesspiegel, July 21, 1976; “Polen-Aussiedler sollen nur freiwillige aussagen,” Die Welt, July 22, 1976; “In Hamburg warten schon die Spitzel. Der BND schickt ‘Einladungen’ mit amtlichen Charakter,” Vorwärts 32 (August 5, 1976); “Fragen an Aussiedler vom BND?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 4, 1982; Birgit-Ingeborg Loff, “BND schaut regelmäßig in die Akten türkischer Asylbewerber,” Frankfurter Rundschau, March 17, 1983; Klaus Pokatzsky, “Die Geheimdienste lesen immer mit,” Die Zeit 14 (April 1, 1983); “Dienst am Freund,” Der Spiegel, April 18, 1983. 111. “Fragen ist billiger,” Der Spiegel 24 (June 10, 1991). 112. Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Ulla Jelpke und der Gruppe der PDS/Linke Liste, Drucksache 12/996, July 29, 1991. 113. See the account provided by the former British “Defence Briefer and British intelligence officer” Jack Dawson (pseudonym), “The BND’s Hauptstelle,” 140–44. The story has recently been considered in Stephen Grey, The New Spymasters: Inside Espionage from the Cold War to Global Terror (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 133–56. 114. Left-wing investigative press accounts have led the way in sparking parliamentary interest. See Christian Fuchs, “Informant Migrant,” Die Tageszeitung (taz), March 25, 2009. Kleine Abfrage der Abgeordneten Hans-Christian Ströbele, Memet Kilic, Volker Beck, Ingrid Hönlinger, Claudia Roth, Josef Philip Winkler, and der Fraktion BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN, Tätigkeit der Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, Drucksache 17/

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11306, November 2, 2012, http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/113/1711306.pdf (accessed October 2, 2016). 115. Christian Fuchs and John Goetz, Geheimer Krieg. Wie von Deutschland aus der Kampf gegen den Terror gesteurt wird (Berlin: rowohlt, 2013), 119–35. 116. Klaus Eichner, “Umfassendes Lagebild. Geheimdienstliche Befragungssysteme: Die Wurzeln und Aufgaben der ‘Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen’ in Berlin,” Junge Welt, December 4, 2013. 117. See Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage zur Tätigkeit der Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, November 19, 2012. Similarly laconic responses are contained in Bundestagsdrucksachen 12/996, 12/3326, and 16/2225. 118. Antonius Kempmann and Reiko Pinkert, “NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss: Geplänkel statt Aufklärung,” Panorama, broadcast on October 28, 2015, https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/ aktuell/NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss-Geplaenkel-statt-Aufklaerung,nsa284.html (accessed October 8, 2016). 119. A January 2016 article published in the main liberal German weekly, Die Zeit, questions whether the Befras were ever closed. Kai Biermann and Christian Fuchs, “Mit Asylversprechen Flüchtlinge abgeschöpft,” Zeit Online, January 14, 2016, http://www.zeit.de/2016/03/ geheimdienste-asylbewerber-spionage-bnd-rechtslage (accessed October 13, 2016). 120. Befra Report No. 126370, July 29, 1966, B 206/1484, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 121. Incoming Cablegram from Conant, Foreign Operations Administration, June 11, 1954, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Entry 5498, Box No. 5, NARA II. On the evaluation of claims put forward by those categorized as political dissidents and economic migrants from Czechoslovakia, see Gerald Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35–57. 122. For a concise recent introduction to Radio Free Europe’s information-gathering offices in Europe, see Paul B. Henze, “RFE’s Early Years: Evolution of Broadcast Policy and Evidence of Broadcast Impact,” in Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. A. Ross Johnson and R. Euuge Parta, with a foreword by Timothy Garton Ash (New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 3–16; on the role of the broadcaster in the context of American psychological warfare operations in east-central Europe, see Bernd Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus: amerikanische Liberation Policy im Kalten Krieg 1947–1991 (Köln: Böhlau, 2002), esp. 429–41. 123. Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausländer: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945–1951 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1985), 212. Also cited in Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 48. 124. Aufzeichnung. Besuch des Hohen Kommissars für die Flüchtlinge bei den Vereinigten Nationen, Herrn van Heuven-Goedhardt, in Deutschland—Besichtigung der Bundessammellager Valka und Zirndorf, July 7, 1955, B 136/9450, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 125. German intelligence agencies there, among them the BfV and BND, also concealed their identities from newcomers. During the first quarter of 1982, the BND spoke with some 2,899 newcomers at Zirndorf, producing reports concerning 677 of these individuals. See Datenschutz im Bereich des BND, Hauptsstelle für Befragungswewen, May 28, 1982, B 347/614, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 126. Antwort des Parl. Staatssekretärs SPRANGER auf die Fragen des Abgeordneten Dr. HIRSCH (FDP), March 19, 1986. Drucksache 11/4165 Fragen 58 und 59) http://dipbt. bundestag.de/dip21/btp/10/10206.pdf (accessed October 7, 2016). 127. Letter from Breull to Ministerialamt Dr. Abicht, Bundeskanzleramt, October 2, 1957, B 443/778, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 128. On the Truman administration’s escapee program and the aims of U.S. attempts to inspire Communist subversion across the world via the induced flight of refugees, see Susan L. Carruthers, “Between Camps: Eastern Bloc ‘Escapees’ and Cold War Borderlands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 911–42, esp. 922–25; Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War: Toward a New International Refugee Regime in the Early Postwar Era (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991), 231–28.

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129. Dienstanweisung für die II/G-Sachbearbeitung innerhalb der Vorprüfungsgruppe des Valka-Lagers, November 2, 1953, B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 130. Letter to Dr. John from Nollau, November 9, 1951, B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Chief of the BfV from 1972 to 1975, Nollau was forced to abandon his position because of the Guillaume Affair: Günter Guillaume was enlisted by the Stasi in 1953 and sent with his wife, Christel, to the federal republic, where Western intelligence services screened the pair at the Giessen federal reception center. Jefferson Adams, Strategic Intelligence in the Cold War and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2015), 63–69. 131. Report titled “Die Voraussetzungen für die Übernahme des Registrierlagers Valka Nürnberg als Bundesauffanglager oder Bundesdurchgangslager vom Standpunkt der Sicherheit des Bundesgebietes” (no date, approximately November 1952), B 443/573, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 132. Ibid. 133. As late as 1966, MI6 was hosting LfV chiefs in London; state-level offices enjoyed still closer liaison with neighboring countries, including Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. See the assessment of BfV president Hubert Schrübbers in Secret Telepouch from Chief of Station, German, to Chief of Base, Hamburg, April 25, 1966, 2nd Folder, RG 263, Entry ZZ 18, Box No. 116, NARA II. Subsequent documents in this dossier indicate that at least as late as the early 1970s the CIA was able to receive reports directly from the LfVs.

Part II

Personalities

Documentary sources created by security agents of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the postwar Germanys allow me to both reveal the experiences of individual refugees and to sketch the workings of British, American, and West German intelligence services. Security officials compelled newcomers (frequently young adults, typically but by no means always male) to share a precarious moment in their lives with (often foreign) intelligence officials. New arrivals were invited to reveal or fashion life stories, to scrutinize the recent past, and to present their aims for their futures in the West. Their audiences consisted of intelligence professionals serving the federal republic, Germans working for occupying powers, German-speaking foreign occupiers, and various other non-Germans, typically but not always German speakers, enlisted to serve in the multinational struggle against Soviet communism. Few of those on the questioning side of the table offered much in the way of candor, rarely giving actual names, to say nothing of true loyalties. In the encounters staged with new arrivals at the federal reception centers, the Federal Intelligence Offices (Bundesnachrichtenstellen, or BUNAST) and Joint Interrogation Centers (JICs), and Camps Valka and King, intelligence screeners insisted that answering questions was voluntary while at the same time leading applicants to understand that their cooperation might determine the success of their applications for new lives in the Federal Republic of Germany. For individuals only hours or days past the dramatic events of their escape, now facing representatives of West Germany’s border or customs police or mysterious French, British, American, or German intelligence operators and spending their first nights in a refugee camp, the base-

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ment of a Joint Interrogation Center, or a low-cost hotel room paid for by intelligence officials, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. For those who turned their backs on the West after completing prodigious questioning marathons, the return to east-central Europe presented still greater tribulations. Agents in socialist nations carried out grueling, frequently violent interrogations of so-called returnees, laying the groundwork for trials unworthy of the name and severe prison sentences or, in isolated cases, arbitrary clemency for those willing to toil—often against the various intelligence agencies of the West—on behalf of Communist objectives. 1 Applied by security denizens and endured by newcomers, these pressures yielded a body of source material bursting with emotion. Given the incomplete nature of archival access, these documents do not fully allow one to sketch the inner workings of intelligence services, to say nothing of the broader use of insights obtained from migrants within policymaking circles. I aim not to sidestep these questions but rather to acknowledge the limitations of the source materials presented in this account without shortchanging their value to a wider consideration of questions of internal affairs and privacy. Focusing in the next three chapters on the personalities involved in refugee security screening, I seek to ensure that this account is not merely interesting reading, but also sound history, careful and judicious in its assessment of especially challenging source material from security archives on both sides of the former Cold War chasm, generalizing wherever possible but only insofar as the extant declassified archival documentation plausibly allows. Chapter 3 explores how British intelligence officials recruited and exploited German scientist refugees. The flight of scientists and technicians to the West occurred at a time when Anglo-American success in placing spies within the Soviet Union was limited and its fear, well-founded or not, of a Soviet surprise attack was palpable. These conditions granted agents active in Germany receptive audiences in intelligence circles in London and Washington, DC. As important as the ends sought by contemporaries are the means they employed to reach them. The ability of British and other intelligence officials to spy on war-related research in the nationalized factories and research institutes of East Germany, the Soviet Union, and other Eastern Bloc states involved the cultivation of professional networks in West German industry, research, and public administration. Resettlement grants, loans, offers to facilitate the commercial exploitation of technical ideas outside occupied West Germany, and informal contacts within leading firms, such as industrial and electronic giants Siemens and Telefunken, as well as prestigious research institutes, notably those of the Max Planck Society established in British-controlled Göttingen, were among the arrows in the British spies’ quiver. British practices of interrogation curtailed both the sovereignty of the West German state and the rights of newcomers and their families.

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Limits placed on West German self-determination are also a theme in chapter 4, which illustrates how American-led cross-border operations involving the newly arrived at Camp Valka near Nuremberg widened questioning into the Communist East—and in dangerously new directions. Like Marienfelde, Giessen, and Uelzen, Camp Valka witnessed pitched battles among American and West German agencies over access to a shifting cast of defectors, agents, informants, economic migrants, asylum seekers, and allegedly deceitful intruders from many different nations. American intelligence forays reaching into east-central Europe from West German territory and West Berlin drew not only criticism from journalists, politicians, and advocacy groups, but also rebukes from West German “partner” agencies. Their outcomes are in broad outline known to historians; the intensity and duration of behind-the-scenes disputes among the Allies is less so. These disputes, however, are only part of the story told in chapter 4. This book’s evaluation of newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Counter Intelligence Corps, and Federal Bureau of Investigation records also introduces American and West German agents of security vetting unknown to scholars, including but not limited to CIA-financed broadcaster Radio Free Europe and precursors to the West German Federal Ministry of Defense. Focusing on prisoners at the security agency’s notorious prison compound in the Hohenschönhausen district of Berlin, it draws attention to the interrogation and torture of Karl Hamann by the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) an East German minister whom American Counter Intelligence Corps’ operatives unsuccessfully attempted to “defect in place.” Chapter 5 turns to questioning of a more routinized nature carried out under the aegis of West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND). The Joint Interrogation Center program was established precisely two years after the April 1, 1956, unveiling of the socalled Gehlen Organization. 2 Headquartered in Munich, the Befra program consisted of questioning offices in West German cities and select sites near the inner German border. By the early 1960s, JICs were operating in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Giessen, Göttingen, Hamburg, Hanover, Helmstedt, Kassel, Lübeck, Mainz, Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, and Uelzen. During the early years, the most important referrals came from the three sites administering the federal reception procedure for East Germans, Marienfelde, Giessen, and Uelzen, as well as the youth camps in Sandbostel and Westertimke. New arrivals, migrants, asylum seekers, ethnic German resettlers from east-central Europe, and others subsumed under the mantle of “escapees from Soviet oppression” were interviewed at the Joint Interrogation Centers. Most conversations took place in German, with occasional questioning sessions carried out in additional languages, notably Polish and Russian. 3 Drawing on the BND’s declassified collection of records at the German national archives facility in Koblenz under the header “Economic

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Evaluation,” chapter 5 presents a detailed assessment of these dossiers. 4 After American-inspired efforts to liberate east-central Europe waned, the partial replacement of American security officials with counterparts from the Federal Intelligence Service expanded the domestic scope of questioning to new audiences; those targeted included citizens of the federal republic, such as journalists, short-term visitors from East Germany, and, surprisingly, nationals from western European countries. At the Joint Interrogation Centers, the geography of espionage extended to domestic venues whose character was only partially shielded from public view. 5 NOTES 1. For a comparative discussion of border enforcement during the 1950s, see Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 84–88. 2. Coincidentally, Reinhard Gehlen had also been appointed head of the Foreign Armies East espionage agencies on yet another April Fools’ Day, twelve years earlier, in 1942. The most recent published introduction to Gehlen’s wartime career is Magnus Pahl, Fremde Heere Ost. Hitlers militärische Feindaufklärung (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2012). On the interrogation of Soviet prisoners of war, see especially 119–24. Gehlen’s employees only became West German civil servants from this point onward. Reinhard Gehlen, Der Dienst. Erinnerungen 1942–1971 (Mainz: von Hase and Koehler, 1971), 181. On the ambivalence felt in Bonn in 1956 toward the loosely monitored networks of stringers fashioned by Hermann Baun and Gehlen, see Thomas Wolf, “Die Anfänge des BND: Gehlens Organisation—Prozess, Legende und Hypothek,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64, no. 2 (2016): esp. 192–93, 200–207. 3. For one example, see Befra Report No. 600343, March 19, 1982, B 206/1596, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. For an overview of parallel interactions between naturalization authorities and those forced to stake their claim to citizenship on a purported sense of German identity, see Jannis Panagiotidis, “Germanizing Germans: Co-Ethnic Immigration and Name Change in West Germany, 1953–93,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 4 (October 2015): 854–74. 4. In January 2017, the run of materials could be accessed at the Koblenz facility under B 206/1107-1762. A parallel run from the B 206 collection provides the basis for the best current analysis of the Federal Intelligence Service’s assessment of Soviet forces stationed in East Germany. For thoughtful analysis based on the latter run of BND documents, see Armin Wagner and Matthias Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee. Westdeutsche Militärspionage in der DDR (Berlin: Edition Berolina, 2014), esp. 184. 5. As Wagner and Uhl have rightly noted, analysis of concrete forms of cooperation among Western services more generally has not received scholarly attention. Wagner and Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee, 35. See also Loch K. Johnson and Annette Freyberg, “Die Zusammenarbeit der Nachrichtendienste” in Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges 1945–1990, ed. Detlef Junker and Phillip Gassert (Stuttgart: Dt. Verl.-Anstalt, 2001), 2: 268–78.

Chapter Three

British Initiators Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB)

The origins of refugee questioning in Germany lay in the final phase of the most devastating war in history. As the global conflict drew to its bloody crescendo, more people were on the move than ever before in Europe’s history. The horrors of war, inflicted on Europe by Nazi Germany and its many European collaborators, now visited the nation responsible for the outbreak of the most devastating armed conflict to date. In January 1945 the Red Army seized the remains of Warsaw and began preparations for a massive invasion to conquer Berlin. The advance of vengeful Soviet forces triggered mass flight and forced migrations. The expulsion of German speakers in 1945 in advance of the Red Army and at the hands of civilians in Sovietcontrolled Poland and Czechoslovakia uprooted entire communities. The crude and violent imposition of Soviet political and economic models ensured flight continued for decades after the guns of battle had been silenced. More than forty years would pass before the collapse of Soviet power offered Europeans, and Germans in particular, the opportunity to overcome wartime partition. During this time, mass escape to the country’s West, specifically to British- and American-controlled zones of western Germany, emerged as a defining feature of political life. While the international community formally assigned to the West German government and local welfare organizations responsibility for the well-being of those braving risks and hardships, behind the scenes the escape of refugees supplied untold threats and opportunities to intelligence services. Flight both created and sustained the interest of screening agents in obtaining information about the societies subjected to Stalinist rule, first and foremost the Soviet Union itself. 79

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Questions military authorities put to German speakers initially targeted key representatives of the Nazi order. Even before American and British troops set foot on German soil, British spies were interrogating Germans. At the end of October 1944, the British Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and the highly secretive Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up a “counterintelligence laboratory” to test materials and implements suspected of use for secret writing, especially aids in producing and reading Nazi micro photographs. A handful of self-styled “back room boys”—women actually made up more than a quarter of SOE’s staff—enjoying the prime minister’s confidence relied on the lab’s gizmos to carry out technical interrogations of captured members of German military intelligence services. Postwar assessors reached the conclusion that the lab’s effectiveness had been hindered by the fact its existence and functions were unknown to almost all British security and intelligence staff officers, let alone commanding generals. 1 Interrogations of German government officials involved not only American and British, but also Soviet military representatives in joint rounds of questioning; a prominent example was the interrogation of Adolf Hitler’s first vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, in Rheims in April 1945. 2 A shared objective of Allied questioning in the immediate postwar era was to understand how Nazi Germany had made war under remarkably adverse conditions, or put somewhat differently, how those who had vanquished the much-admired armies of the Germans and their allies might tap this ability. 3 For British services in particular, this aim rapidly became intertwined with a desire to check, perhaps even thwart, the imposition of Soviet rule then spreading across much of east-central Europe. The questioning of German technicians and scientists emerged as a special focus of all occupying powers. Even before hostilities had ended, the victors had been secreting outstanding scientific informants to their respective countries. MI6 led the best-known such undertaking, which united Germany’s scientific elite in the unlikely rendezvous of an English estate near Cambridge named Farm Hall. Anglo-American military-industrial might in the form of the atomic bomb enticed the leading lights of German science to join postwar scientific and political alliances led by Britain and the United States. For other scientific workers, offers of employment, assistance with foreign patent proposals, accommodation and rations, and not least the evacuation of loved ones to the West formed the basis for dispassionate exchanges among those who had been, only weeks or months before, sworn enemies. In Britain, fears ran rampant that appropriation of German engineering prowess might allow the Soviets to rapidly approach industrial parity with the United States. Reports on German scientists and technicians working with Soviet authorities in Germany had come to the attention of British prime

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minister Clement Attlee in late 1945. Well-placed Britons increasingly grasped that future international leadership fell not to empires like theirs but rather to the multiethnic melting pots of continental powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. All four victorious powers ignored prohibitions and restrictions on applied scientific research in military matters as embodied in high-minded quadripartite edicts. The best-known use of German scientists was “Project Paperclip,” at the time a super-secret American recruitment program that had even before the cessation of hostilities been enticing German technicians to work on highly classified military projects in the United States. 4 As a British scientific espionage chief acknowledged in a closed-door session in 1951, “Prior to October 1946 there was a general grab of German scientists and everybody was doing it.” What this British intelligence chief characterized as a “very uncoordinated” effort on the Western side was matched by what he regarded as an unflagging Soviet approach. 5 The USSR’s first transports of German scientists and technicians eastward came as early as May 1945, peaking with an operation called “Osoaviakhim” in October 1946. Approximately 2,300 German scientists, technicians, mechanics, and foremen, often but not always with their families, traveled by train and air to various sites in the Soviet Union. 6 These transports reflected the concentration of facilities associated with aircraft, guided missile work, optics, and instrumentation in the Soviet zone of Germany, dismantled after the war and sent eastward by rail, mainly to the western regions of the country ravished by German forces, as well as a more general interest in electronics and anything relating to atomic, biological, and chemical weaponry. Differences in treatment were significant. A few select individuals received access to Soviet scientific development; many more languished in idleness and isolation. Material conditions, by Soviet standards, were generally high, with salaries paid and access for children to schools and even leading Soviet universities. Security mania, not surprisingly given the xenophobia of the last years of Stalin’s rule, appears to have been a defining feature of Germans’ experience. Those returned to East Germany faced close surveillance carried out by a Ministry State Security (Stasi) special directorate assigned the task of keeping close tabs on “bourgeois” elements in the armaments and aircraft industries. 7 Alongside industrial specialists, defectors and prisoners of war emerged as targets of rapidly expanding questioning programs championed by military and intelligence occupation authorities. Especially prized was time-sensitive information about the strength, command structure, and disposition of Soviet forces arrayed against the West. 8 Among the schemes devised to gather so-called order-of-battle intelligence, the occupiers sought to tap the special knowledge of defectors: a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer in Germany estimated that between 1945 and 1951, more than five hundred

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Soviet soldiers and civilians defected westward, where British and American services interrogated them. 9 Defectors represented both opportunities and exceptional challenges for all intelligence operators in occupied Germany. The traitorous or noble, depending on one’s point of view, intentions ascribed to those who exchanged lives in what many insisted upon viewing as diametrically opposed societies exercised public opinion across the divided nation. The best-known case of a West German defector was that of Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) founding director Otto John. Critical elements, even today, remain poorly understood. His story is rooted in the experience of war and his resistance, in stark contrast to most of his countrymen, to Nazism. At the time of the July 20, 1944, plot to overthrow Hitler, John was a chief auditor for the German airline Lufthansa. In December 1943 he had begun supplying Anglo-American intelligence officials with information on German rockets, fighter aircraft, and submarines. Evacuated by British foreign intelligence from Spain to the United Kingdom after the plot’s failure, John toiled for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office at a secret broadcasting station at Woburn. For at least three years after the war, John interrogated German generals and other prisoners of war at Bridgnorth and other locations in England. In 1948 he applied for naturalization as a British subject; among those to sign his application were diplomat Robert Vansittart and historian Jack WheelerBennett. 10 John’s wife was a British subject. Why John abandoned his new life in London and then his prominent position as first president of the BfV for exile in East Berlin on the tenth anniversary of the unsuccessful plot to overthrow Hitler remains unclear. A strong aversion to the rise of erstwhile Nazis to positions of prominence in the Bonn government was a motivating factor. 11 Initially at a loss, the federal government prevaricated, then offered a half-million-deutschmark reward for information leading to his return and pleaded with the American, British, and French high commissioners to approach Soviet counterparts. It soon became clear that John’s defection served the purpose of Eastern propagandists; having gone voluntarily to East Berlin, John then spent more than three months in the Soviet Union, where he supplied answers to queries posed by KGB interrogators about European security planning. 12 Following his return in December 1955 to West Germany via West Berlin, the West German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe convicted John of treason and sentenced him to four years’ imprisonment; German president Theodor Heuss pardoned John in July 1958. 13 Documents housed at the Stasi Records Agency reveal that John’s decision to redefect took Stasi chief Erich Mielke by surprise, dashing plans to produce a film about John’s life, an initiative that East German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED)

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chief Walter Ulbricht had supported in the hope of appealing to “bourgeois” circles in the federal republic. 14 Files in the U.K. National Archives facility in southwest London yield still more interesting facts about the John case. These relate not so much to John’s biography as a British spy as to West Germany’s future as a sovereign nation, another part of the rationale that led John to forfeit his position in federal government for exile in the East. During his time in East Berlin, John, a sincere anti-Nazi and thus a great prize for the unpopular Communist regime, led journalists to believe that his decision stemmed from knowledge of secret clauses demanded by the Western occupying powers concerning arrangements for the European Defense Community, the unsuccessful forerunner to the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In his first public comment on John’s flight, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer categorically denied that he and his closest ministers had kept hidden from the scrutiny of West Germany’s parliament (and thus the media and public at large) the existence of clandestine intrigues with the country’s occupiers. Adenauer’s mention of secret clauses produced consternation in at least one major German daily newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well as among British Foreign Office staff in Bonn. 15 The chancellor’s decision appeared to have alerted critics in the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD), to extensive surveillance powers that the leading Western powers were planning to include in a secret memorandum of understanding following the collapse of the European Defense Community initiative in late 1954. 16 Article 3 of the secret memorandum spelled out that West German authorities would be compelled to bring to the immediate attention of Allied intelligence agencies a broad list of “persons of particular interest,” including “Soviet and satellite defectors and deserters, line crossers, former prisoners-of-war, refugees, and other repatriates.” 17 John’s—and Adenauer’s—public references to the secret intelligence requirements of the three Allied powers warrant as much scrutiny as John’s sense of unease with the preponderance of high-ranking former Nazis in the Bonn government. Interrogations of returning German prisoners of war, many of whom had been engaged in rebuilding Soviet factories, mines, roads, and railways, are voluminous in British and American archival collections. Upon release from their Soviet captivity, the vast majority of German prisoners of war were taken to the border transit camp at Friedland, where several British services organized in a so-called Special Interrogation Unit in the nearby village of Bad Driburg closely questioned the most interesting—some 5 percent, or roughly three hundred per month. The Royal Air Force was among the most active in conducting reinterrogations there. Most German informants had been held in the Soviet Union, though a sizable minority arrived from nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Prisoners of war

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held in Western countries, such as France, also faced questioning. Despite its relatively late start, the U.S. Air Force’s Wringer Program interviewed even larger numbers of escapees than its British counterpart: between 1949 and 1954 alone, the U.S. Air Force interviewed at least three hundred thousand returning German prisoners of war, producing in excess of a million reports. 18 In Ulm, U.S. authorities screened those bound for the French zone; those forwarded to French services faced rounds of reinterrogation at the hands of western Germany’s third most powerful occupier. A place was made for the Gehlen Organization on the assumption that ex-POWs would be more willing to share information about Soviet-led military industrialization with fellow countrymen of a similar political outlook. A chief impetus behind the interrogation of defectors, prisoners of war, and so-called political infiltrees in western Germany was a desire to learn as much, and as quickly, as possible about the war-making potential of the Soviet Union. The urge to deny the USSR German scientific expertise grew rapidly as the contours of the cold postwar peace became clearer. Factory dismantlements in Blankenburg and the Harz mountains, in Bleicherode where guided missile work was underway only weeks after the Nazis’ defeat, and in the massive aircraft complexes near Dessau seemed to clarify Soviet intentions. 19 In the British zone of occupation in the northwestern part of Germany and the British sector of Berlin, the interrogation of technical experts within Germany rapidly (though never thoroughly) eclipsed the internment and questioning of German scientific and political notables outside the country. In the United States and especially the United Kingdom, 1946 marked a clear shift away from the procurement of Nazi science, in operations known by such uncharitable names as “Dustbin,” “Ashcan,” and, slightly less embarrassingly, “Paperclip.” 20 Teams of English-speaking experts and enlisted German assistants, often scientists or technicians in their own right, now directed efforts toward gathering up-to-date information on Soviet weapons and war-related science and technology from Germans. After the successful Soviet atomic test in 1949, the quest to locate airports and atomic research facilities morphed into a burning desire to compile a running inventory of the Soviet Union’s ability to wage war. An abiding focus of questioning aimed at gauging the USSR’s atomic stockpile, followed quickly by ascertaining as much as possible about the Soviet Union’s ability to deliver a hydrogen bomb via a long-range missile. Reports supplied by prisoners of war, defectors, and especially scientific experts were employed to draw up plans for an air assault, while in occupied Germany, a new machinery of information collection was rapidly expanded out of programs set up to exploit Germany’s war-making expertise. German-speaking scientists and technicians involved in Soviet atomic energy, nerve gas, radar, jet propulsion, and guided missile projects emerged as sought-after objects of inquiry, with the most valuable individuals offered inducements by all occupying powers.

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Long before the internment of Germany’s leading scientific workers in the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and other powers had been offering German scientists substantial material assistance. To the chagrin of professional organizations of scientists in Allied nations, a policy that rewarded German-speaking scientists and technicians, lavishing salaries and even citizenship on the most valuable, quickly replaced the impulse to eliminate German war potential. Especially from the autumn of 1946 onward, Allied services, led by the British, cultivated relations with an expanding range of German scientists, engineers, and technicians. One British program, “Matchbox,” screened hundreds of well-placed scientists and technicians upon arrival at “transit hotels” at Bad Driburg, in Minden, and at a villa in Bad Hermannsborn, offering those selected a monthly retaining fee as “consultants.” From January 1947 onward, sums were paid for reports that became property of the British Control Commission. The pronounced aim was to halt the enticement of scientific experts by the USSR and Soviet satellite countries, as well as Allied France. 21 Especially interesting contacts were retained for longer periods. Placements in the United Kingdom or its dominions were rare but not unheard of. This “Matchbox” program was the responsibility of the Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB) of what was known in U.K. security circles at that time as the Intelligence Division. Administered by the British Intelligence Organization (Germany) and the War Office, operational control for STIB fell to the Joint Technical Intelligence Committee chaired by the director of scientific intelligence. Screening and interrogation of “denial value” candidates at operational hotels—yet another form of refugee interrogation—fell under STIB’s purview. Illustrative of the improvisational nature of British intelligence work, at times when the influx of prisoners of war was greatest, specially selected Germans were rechristened temporary “Matchbox” consultants and deployed as extra questioners. 22 BRITISH RECORD KEEPING AND A STASI SPY In identifying and developing prospects, STIB worked closely with overt organizations. These included the Scientific Research Branch of the Control Commission, the administrative body for encouraging West German science along lines Allied occupiers deemed desirable. 23 Research Branch’s first director was Bertie Kennedy Blount. A recipient of a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1931, Blount became closely acquainted with German scientific luminaries in the British zone immediately following Germany’s surrender, including the leadership of what in February 1948 became the Max Planck Society. 24

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Located first in Göttingen, then in Koblenz (1951), and finally in the Bonn suburb of Bad Godesberg (1953), Research Branch monitored applied scientific research throughout the three zones of western Germany, an oversight role yielding valuable opportunities to interact with leaders of German science and scientific policy. 25 At the heart of Research Branch’s operation, as well as its assistance to STIB and other British covert intelligence organizations through the preparation of confidential reports and informal liaison, was the act of record keeping. To ensure files on sought-after scientists and scientific breakthroughs were complete, in April 1956, Research Branch chief Blount, acting on a suggestion from a German advisor, aviation expert Joachim Pretsch, hired Karl Jasznewski (see figure 3.1), a fellow student and fraternity brother of Pretsch’s during the pair’s studies at the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University), as Research Branch’s scientific and technical document research officer. After several eventful years in British-controlled Germany, Blount swapped the fieldwork assignment there for a promotion in London. In the British capital, Blount headed the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, leaving the multilingual Jasznewski to mind the growing volumes of records collected by Research Branch. Drawing on Jasznewski’s labors, both Blount and his successor, Karl Lauder, supplied military intelligence officials with profiles of scientists returning from east-central Europe and the Soviet Union. Deletions in the original source material illustrate that Lauder’s organization provided leads to British intelligence, including MI5, MI6, and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ): representatives of these and other British intelligence organizations paid regular visits to

Figure 3.1. Karl Jasznewski, 1959. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

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STIB’s and Research Branch’s offices, copying materials they found especially interesting. 26 KARL JASZNEWSKI’S BETRAYAL Three years after STIB’s and Research Branch’s dissolution, Jasznewski proposed to a representative of the Soviet embassy in East Berlin that he perform vocational duties similar to those he had previously undertaken for Britain’s Research Branch. Jasznewski’s contact with the foreign intelligence arm of the East German Ministry for State Security came via his solicitation of professional advice from an East German he claimed to hold in high regard, Karl Bittel, director of what was then known as the German Institute for Contemporary History. 27 Bittel and his Stasi handlers harnessed Jasznewski’s collecting zeal for intelligence missions in the federal republic. Pretsch’s protégé Jasznewski served as an informant for the Stasi’s main directorate for foreign intelligence, or Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, from 1955 until his arrest four years later. Following Jasznewski’s (and his wife’s) arrest in 1959, his apartment yielded a prodigious cache of nearly forty oversized ring folders, more than thirty thousand index file cards, vials of secret writing ink, and miniature films containing material about military units and installations and information about scientific and economic developments compiled over more than a decade (see figure 3.2). 28 A decade earlier, in 1949, the first German scientists leaving the Soviet Union had begun to reestablish themselves in occupied Germany. Some four thousand would return in intervals between 1949 and 1958. 29 Their reappearance in divided Germany prompted the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence to dispatch scientific officers from London to conduct detailed interrogations. Based in the British zone of Germany, a region containing the Ruhr area, the Cologne basin, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and the major port of Hamburg, STIB appears to have carried out the bulk of the inquiries. 30 MEANS OF BRITISH PERSUASION To reveal the state of Soviet military development and preparedness, STIB spearheaded efforts in western Germany and West Berlin to trace the whereabouts and activities of those who had spent years toiling, some willingly, others less so, in different regions of the vast Soviet Union. Censorship put in place to safeguard the security of occupying military forces facilitated this task. Listening in on telephone conversations and reading letters intended for others furnished English-speaking Allies with unique access to details of private lives and professional loyalties.

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Figure 3.2. Records seized during the investigation of Karl Jasznewski, 1959. Image courtesy of NARA.

Provisions of the Status of Forces agreement offered yet another way to ensure that subjects submitted to foreign questioning, even if West German federal representatives refused to cooperate fully. All three allies worked together to ensure they could interrogate anyone of interest arriving from the Soviet Bloc even after the formal reestablishment of West German sovereignty. 31 When authorities of the Federal Ministry of the Interior or statelevel counterparts refused access on the grounds of the professed wishes of individuals in custody, Allied intelligence organizations shared a copy of the agreement underscoring their right to interrogate German citizens wherever they saw fit. In securing the substance of what they sought, they used persuasion more widely than compulsion with influence-wielding West Germans reading the political landscape and aligning themselves with powerful benefactors. The fact that until the mid-1950s West German taxpayers picked up the tab for occupation costs, including interrogations of Germans and all others fleeing to western Germany, aided Britain’s “human intelligence”— information gathered from those categorized by security officials as spies, migrants, defectors, agents, informants, and legal travelers.

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Britons’ interrogation of returning experts paired the cultivation of relatives, especially spouses, with targeted surveillance of colleagues residing in Germany’s western zones. Details gleaned about the health of “targets” (for example, scientists in the Soviet Union) and their employment prospects upon their return to occupied Germany were especially prized. West Germany’s intricate reception and asylum procedures emerged as a means to this informational end, as foreign intelligence services and their domestic security assistants, not those charged with separating legitimate political refugees from so-called economic migrants, granted permission for German scientists, technicians, and their families to cross from East to West. A tiny espionage organization in comparison to its competitors, STIB consisted of some twenty individuals: a director, deputy director, five specialists, three casework officers, and German-speaking interrogators, many drawn from the “Matchbox” pool. Staff maintained a permanent base at Friedland, an especially valued perch for information supplied by returning prisoners of war, as well as offices in West Berlin and in Herford, Cologne, and Bonn, where many fuller interviews were conducted. During the first half of 1950, STIB undertook over two hundred interrogations, most lasting between one and three days. Subjects included naval warfare, atomic energy, electronics, radar, and air warfare, with a special focus on guided missiles. Where judged cooperative, refugee scientists were asked to submit detailed accounts of their activities in the Soviet Union, enabling the STIB representative to concentrate on the most important points during the interview itself. STIB’S LEADERSHIP, A SOVIET INFORMANT, AND A FLEET STREET EXPOSÉ STIB’s director was David Evans. A prewar fire surveyor and wartime intelligence officer, Evans was sent, after serving in Jerusalem, North Africa, and India, to the British zone of Germany in September 1945. Redeployed in August 1946 as a civilian, Evans led STIB until its dissolution in February 1956. 32 He received his orders from the Joint Intelligence Committee in London; his superiors, including Blount, regarded him as an expert in chemical warfare intelligence. In 1956 Evans returned to the British capital, where he headed up a scheme to place attachés in select embassies to extract information from visiting Soviet scientists and others who had recently spent time in the Soviet Union. Headquartered in the United Kingdom after 1956, British services applied this model of soliciting information informally from visiting experts to other parts of the world, notably South Asia. 33 Evans’s successor in West Germany was Frank Clifton Bossard, convicted in May 1965 of spying for the Soviet Union. From 1961 until his arrest, Bossard had exchanged cash payments for compromised documents in

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London. These consisted chiefly of secret files on guided weapons. 34 According to a tabloid account published on Bossard’s second day in prison, the fifty-two-year-old claimed, “I can honestly say I had no fear—no real fear. Taking secrets from the Ministry of Aviation was too easy for that. My only problem was one of conscience. I enjoyed a senior status at the Ministry of Aviation and there were no questions asked when I went to the registry to draw out secret and classified files. . . . Sometimes if I was in a hurry I did not even bother to do this. I just walked out with the documents, tag and all. This was not the correct procedure, but dozens of other civil servants were doing the same thing, and my actions never aroused suspicion.” 35 The Home Office did not know how material for Bossard’s newspaper account had made its way from his prison cell to Fleet Street, though Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s staff suspected that “someone, presumably Mrs. Bossard,” had been paid handsomely for the compromising sketch. 36 BOSSARD’S FALSE STATEMENTS AND BRITAIN’S “POSITIVE VETTING” PROCEDURES The formal investigation into Bossard’s espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union sheds light on the muddled state of vetting in British security circles years after the defections of the now legendary Cambridge Five. Chaired by Sir Laurence Helsby, head of the Home Civil Service, the investigation focused on how Bossard had come to work for secret intelligence and what vetting had taken place after his employment. The verdict was unambiguous. Bossard’s false statements under oath had been multiple, frequently repeated, and widely ignored by several branches of government. In his applications to join the Admiralty in 1939, the Royal Air Force in 1940, and the Ministry of Civil Aviation in 1946, Bossard had provided false biographical information. 37 In 1951 responsibility for Bossard’s recruitment rested with the Foreign Office (acting on behalf of occupation authorities, formally known as the British Control Commission for Germany). Bossard had presented false statements about his record of offenses in applications to previous appointments, and shortly before his appointment as STIB electronics advisor he had once again asserted in writing that he had never been convicted of a criminal offense. In 1955 he was subjected to what was regarded as a more comprehensive screening procedure, known then as “positive vetting.” In a security questionnaire completed in the West German capital of Bonn, Bossard reiterated that he had no criminal convictions. In fact, police had first arrested Bossard in German-speaking Europe, in Innsbruck, Austria, in February 1934, where he faced charges of swindling. A month later, back in England, the King’s Lynn Magistrates’ Court sentenced Bossard to six months’ imprisonment for check fraud. These criminal proceedings revealed

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that Bossard had been a member of the Nazi Party and employed by this organization during previous stays in Germany and Austria, a fact British prime minister Harold Wilson was forced to acknowledge at Westminister a generation later. 38 When his lies surfaced in the course of the 1955 security vetting procedure, Bossard offered an apology for what he dismissed as lapses of memory. His casual attitude mirrored the nonchalance of those doing the vetting; a check with the police had provided the Foreign Office in 1951 with full knowledge of his King’s Lynn conviction and given the lie to various other false claims, including his supposed attendance at the prestigious Rossall School in the north of England, three years of instruction at the Technical University of Munich, and attainment of a professional engineering qualification. His “MI5 vetting in the clear,” the Foreign Office chose to discount his criminal record and false statements on the grounds of youthful indiscretion, allowing his 1955 appointment in West Germany (presumably to MI6) to proceed. Officials in both the War and Foreign Offices chose to focus narrowly on the relevance of Bossard’s conviction two decades earlier rather than on what his failure to acknowledge about his past might indicate about his ability to conduct intelligence work. 39 Then residing in Cologne, Bossard was granted provisional positive vetting clearance in 1955. A lengthy delay in “field inquiries”—Bossard by that time headed the Bonn office of the Overseas Liaison Branch of the Joint Intelligence Bureau, with intimate connections to MI6—ensured his full positive vetting clearance was not actually granted until 1958. We cannot attribute the decision to overlook Bossard’s unsuitability for a top intelligence post in West Germany solely to a natural impulse, as was the case with the Cambridge Five, to trust one’s own, an attitude then ingrained in British elites. 40 Bureaucratic inertia, perhaps even ineptitude, also played a role. By the mid-1950s, with Bossard ensconced in a well-established career and with so many other officials to vet, figures in MI5 and the Foreign Office apparently felt that disclosing “youthful discretions” such as Bossard’s offered little gain. His August 1955 questionnaire contained character references; one came from David Evans. Bossard’s superior considered him “a solid sort of person, extremely tactful, and commended on several occasions for his excellent work and good relations with the Germans.” 41 Evans’s annual assessments of Bossard were all outstanding. Bossard’s second reference came from the head of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, Hugh Young, who expressed his high regard for his “personal friend,” noting Bossard’s “integrity, conduct, and ability.” 42 For Evans, the driving factor in hiring Bossard was an urgent desire to secure the services of an expert as an electronics advisor, a position he had faced difficulties filling for more than two years. 43 Dr. W. J. Stern, a former “Matchbox” consultant responsible for coverage of the physical sciences,

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had taken on the electronics advisor vacancy until Bossard’s arrival; Stern was an old school friend of Hermann Blenk, the wartime director of the Volkenrode aeronautical research center, where Stern worked under British supervision until 1947. 44 Stern, Bossard, and his STIB colleagues all enjoyed free housing, with Bossard taking up residence in the Bayenthal neighborhood of Cologne, a few blocks from the Rhine River. Much of STIB’s interrogation burden fell on colleagues in West Berlin. STIB staff members based there were John Horner and his deputy, H. G. Darlison. Both remained in the divided city after STIB’s dissolution in early 1956. During the STIB era, Horner appears to have been only nominally the chief; the more industrious half of the Berlin operation was Darlison. 45 For a time the latter’s cover name was “Richter,” but Darlison too was an adopted name. “Darlison’s” actual family name was Schuhmacher. He was appointed assistant to the deputy director of 12 Berlin Intelligence Staff (12 BIS). Born in Bremen, Darlison wore the uniform of a lieutenant. One of the most prolific interrogators, he, like Bossard, appears after 1956 to have worked for MI6; during his STIB years, atomic energy matters were among his chief responsibilities. 46 STIB informants passed through the camps, reception centers, and other questioning offices, particularly in West Berlin, where Darlison and his 12 BIS colleagues had established the city’s first refugee screening initiatives, moves that brought British intelligence into close, if contentious, working relationships with West Berlin welfare officials. 47 The city’s reception procedure, subsequently administered in the Marienfelde neighborhood, remained an important source of informants across STIB’s ten-year history. As David Evans put it in November 1955, “It is quite possible that important information may appear through the Refugee Center and we do, in fact, rely on the machinery there for ‘bread and butter’ cases.” 48 That said, STIB representatives typically encouraged well-informed contacts to give Marienfelde a wide berth, leading many intelligence officials to regard those passing through the formal federal reception procedure of their own accord with suspicion. Berlin-based British intelligence staff members encountering “targets” at Marienfelde were for this reason instructed not to display any special interest in promising candidates to appear in the facility and to establish contact only after the potential informant had established residence, typically in West Germany. Reports and related correspondence housed in the Ministry of Defense collections in the Kew neighborhood of London underscore STIB’s determined efforts to learn from those fleeing westward about the development of Soviet atomic, biological, and chemical weaponry, as well as guided missiles and electronics. 49 This declassified collection reveals that Soviet security measures were largely successful in preventing German scientific workers from discovering much of value about Soviet research and development.

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Most Germans sent to the USSR were able to perform exceptionally little meaningful scientific work during their time there. As STIB’s director conceded to his superiors in the autumn of 1953, “A study of Soviet utilization of the large number of German scientists deported in 1946 shows that very few Germans have been absorbed into Soviet scientific life or even given the opportunity to make original contributions to research and development in Russia. The more general picture is that of exploitation of wartime German ideas and the development of embryo projects up to but not very far beyond the state of German forward thinking at the end of the war.” As Evans concluded in October 1953, “There are some exceptions, but the general conclusion must be that the Russians were not interested in absorbing German science into their own.” 50 A CIA report declassified in 2009 echoes the British intelligence chief’s firsthand assessment, noting that most German experts were brought to the Soviet Union not to rebuild Soviet research, development, and production facilities according to German models, but rather to augment the training of Soviet engineers in fields where Germanspeaking engineers and technicians had enjoyed technical advantages, such as high-frequency techniques, navigation and direction finding, and specialized vacuum tubes. 51 A common refrain in the STIB reports is the view that, at least for most German-speaking informants, the years of enforced detainment had been largely wasted, an assessment echoed in the best German-language account of the Soviet exploitation of German-speaking rocket scientists published to date. 52 Two exceptions deserve mention. One was Helmut Gröttrup, who had worked as a high-frequency technician for V-2 rockets at Peenemünde from 1939 to 1945. Evacuated by American authorities to Witzenhausen in Hessen, Gröttrup turned down an offer to go to the United States, ostensibly because wives at that time were not permitted to accompany their husbands there. 53 In the autumn of 1945 Gröttrup traveled eastward to the Soviet zone. After penning a series of reports about Peenemünde and undergoing Soviet interrogations, he was appointed by Soviet rocket designer Boris Chertok as German director of an extensive Soviet-controlled program to reconstruct ballistic rockets at Bleichrode. The electronics specialist was subsequently allowed to take part in V-2 firings at Kapustin Yar in the fall of 1947, though his removal from rocket research as head of the so-called Ostashkov group in October 1950 ensured that, by the time of his flight to the West four years later, his secondhand knowledge of Soviet missile development was outdated. Nonetheless encouraged in a series of lengthy interrogations in West Germany and reinterrogations in London to speculate beyond general observations about the inflexibility of Soviet scientific management, Gröttrup traced possibilities for future development that proved erroneous. 54 By the mid-1950s, many consumers of STIB intelligence had come to a nuanced understanding of the limits of knowledge possessed by German-

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speaking internees, including that presented by those few interned scientists, like Gröttrup, integrated into Soviet nuclear weapon making. In June 1955 Nikolas Riehl, at that time the most sought-after scientist by Western espionage agencies, was resettled along with all of his possessions in West Berlin. First enlisted by the Soviets two days after Nazi Germany’s capitulation, the Russian-speaking Riehl had during the war coordinated the activities of the Auer Society, including a chemical plant in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, that processed rare earths such as thorium, mesothorium, uranium, and radium. Enticed to Moscow after Soviet forces had moved the complex from Oranienburg to a site near the Soviet capital, Riehl spent several weeks in a safe house operated by STIB before proceeding at MI6’s instruction to the reception center at Friedland in 1955. The initial purpose of his stay was to appraise other scientists and technicians of interest to British and American intelligence rather than to provide profiles of Soviet research. In the meantime, Riehl’s wife and two daughters were brought from the East German industrial center of Leipzig to the West German city of Mannheim, together with all of the family’s possessions. American intelligence authorities approved Riehl’s award of a scientific position of confidence in a planned reactor plant administered at the Technical University of Munich on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Atomic Affairs, delegating his continued surveillance to the Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution. 55 Exceptional individuals like Gröttrup and Riehl aside, the vast majority of German-speaking scientists, technicians, and others scooped up in 1946 found themselves serving primarily as advisors to Soviet counterparts. In STIB’s heyday, the most important challenge both American and British defense officials faced was ascertaining when the Soviet Union would possess the means to deliver hydrogen bombs with long-range missiles. 56 On this central question, interrogations of returning scientists proved of limited value. As acknowledged by Paul Maddrell, author of the only monograph study of STIB’s work in gathering information about the Soviet threat, STIB’s program to exploit returnee scientists “barely broke the skin of Soviet missile development.” 57 Once scientists had crossed over to the federal republic, their fleeting acquaintance with Soviet science had faded, their impressions clouded by multiyear “cooling-off ” periods at remote locations. The fact that many German scientists were savvy enough to exploit the appetite of Western services based in West Germany and West Berlin to augment existing records should not obscure what the best-placed agents and their military intelligence superiors 58 acknowledged as the incomplete nature of Germans’ insights on Soviet weapon development. The extensive reinterrogations of and follow-up reports on technicians, scientists, and various others, all handsomely remunerated, generated reams of what one might charitably describe as field observations but little actionable intelligence. 59

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Much of the information provided by German technicians and scientists was, as British agents like Evans noted, available at the time of their interrogation by other means and in greater volumes. Streams of communication about the Soviet rocket research derived from the radars based at Samsun, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, and at Mehed in the Elburz Mountains of northern Iran. 60 The emphasis American interrogators in western Germany placed from the early 1950s onward on the physical characteristics of buildings and structures, particularly on roofing materials, point to the attention granted to radar targetry. 61 Intercepted telegraph and telephone messages, including those gathered in the infamous spy tunnels of Vienna and Berlin, also presented troves of information. 62 Image analysis via overflight, practiced as early as the late 1940s and taken to a new level through the high-altitude, single-jet Lockheed U-2 spy planes and satellites, generated volumes of visual data. 63 Probably more important, if as yet not well understood, was communication analysis carried out by Britain’s GCHQ and its American counterparts enabling detailed monitoring of key targets deep inside the Soviet Union, including airfields and missile sites. 64 By 1964, Anglo-American technical intelligence capabilities, from signal intelligence to radiation monitoring, had advanced so rapidly that U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was able to announce China’s detonation of a uranium bomb in the Xinjiang desert two weeks in advance. 65 DOMESTIC NETWORKS IN ANGLO-AMERICAN REFUGEE INTERROGATION Absent the decisionmaking context of top-level executive arms of governance, field intelligence reports and related correspondence created by STIB, considered alone, appear to be of dubious significance to the questions most relevant to policymaking contemporaries and indeed many historians. This appraisal seeks to reveal fresh points of relevance. The insights I garner from declassified espionage materials housed at the U.K. National Archives relate not so much to the Communist East as to the nature of STIB’s informant networks in science, industry, and civil service circles in West Berlin and West Germany. These dimensions of British and American intelligence activities during the era of clashing ideologies warrant exploration alongside more familiar narratives of superpower rivalry stoked by the two-generation conflict. STIB maintained give-and-take relationships with hundreds of West German industrialists, research scientists, key policymakers, and influential others, including not least the spouses of scientists toiling in the Soviet Union. Almost all of these contacts lived and worked in western Germany and West Berlin, as did British intelligence operators. STIB’s energy, creativity, and

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not least financial resources went overwhelmingly toward the cultivation of contacts in West Berlin and the federal republic, a fact that STIB’s declared interest—unseen target areas thousands of kilometers to Germany’s east— should not obscure. True, to profile members of Soviet Bloc technical intelligentsia, STIB authored top-secret catalogs, including for MI6. Compiling these types of reference works required the service to nurture close relationships with West German informants. According to Evans’s (and later Bossard’s) superior in London, Director of Scientific Intelligence Hugh Young, British intelligence might properly regard these individuals as “secret agents” who did “nothing contrary to the laws of their country.” 66 STIB cultivated connections to key executives at West Germany’s leading industrial concerns. Among the most important were Siemens and Telefunken, both firms with strong ties to the sector of West Berlin occupied by the British army. Heads of personnel at both Siemens and Telefunken gave STIB’s West Berlin office lists of new employees who had previously worked in factories in East Germany. The lists, complete with private addresses, were forwarded to Britain’s embassy in Bonn. 67 Relations between British intelligence agents and British-friendly business in West Berlin were even cozier. Evans’s and Bossard’s Berlin-based colleagues interacted frequently with Telefunken’s Hans Heyne, chairman of the electronic firm’s board of directors and its managing director. They also enjoyed working relationships with such senior employees as Wilhelm Runge, head of the transmitter and development departments, and Erich Wiegand, chief of the electronic tube facilities in Berlin and Ulm. An especially valuable contact at Telefunken was Karl Steimel, who in late 1955 was drawing STIB Berlin’s attention to new arrivals, at the Ulm electronics factory, of Soviet-zone technicians that had neither passed through the formal refugee machinery nor had come to the attention of services competing with STIB. Targets of interest identified by Steimel included Werner Hasselbeck, a high-frequency specialist who had just returned from Gorki, and Walter Dirbach, who, like Steimel, had previously been interned at Fryazino. Both Hasselbeck and Dirbach were subsequently employed at Telefunken in Ulm, with Hasselbeck, a former colleague of Steimel’s from prewar days in Berlin, heading the facility’s direction-finder department. Steimel also ensured recently arrived prisoners of war came to the attention of other branches of British intelligence in West Berlin, including MI6. 68 Germans returning to their occupied country from Britain also provided avenues of influence, with government officials in the United Kingdom alerting STIB counterparts to potential candidates bound for home. While still in Britain, Karl Wilhelm, who had worked on the development of frequency control for communication equipment at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at South Farnborough from February 1947 to February 1952, shared with British intelligence his plans to contact Telefunken.

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Among the pertinent biographical facts the Foreign Office conveyed to STIB was an assessment of Wilhelm’s personality as “extremely cooperative.” 69 While benefits accrued to the foreign intelligence agencies formally charged with the security of the former capital, cooperative industrialists, for their part, did not walk away empty-handed. The STIB files show that when Telefunken required West Berlin residence permits for specialists returning there, STIB, not municipal authorities, supplied them to prospective employees. Hans Heyne turned to STIB’s Berlin chief John Horner to address both personal and professional matters, including passports, places of residence, and the reemployment of Telefunken employees returning from the Soviet Union. 70 In his search for a deputy head of research for Telefunken’s facility in Hanover, Steimel turned to STIB Berlin contacts; in return, Steimel offered fresh news of a former colleague’s plans to return to Germany from the Soviet Union. 71 The benefits of association extended to transit. Among the most common requests fielded by 12 BIS was the removal of furniture from the “Soviet zone.” More audacious was a proposal to transport two trucks’ worth of Telefunken valve-development equipment obtained in East Germany from Berlin to West Germany in violation of Allied restrictions on trade with the Soviet Bloc. According to British records, Steimel turned to STIB’s Horner with a proposal to bypass the embargo strictures of federal customs officials. As E. B. Abbotts of 12 BIS viewed the matter, the calculated risk was justified to offset the growing influence of American competitors. As far as I can see this type of service is the only way we have of sweetening our excellent contacts with such firms as Telefunken who have already received contracts amounting to some 10 million Marks from the Americans and who will undoubtedly get assistance from the Americans should we not be able to provide it. Only a fortnight ago, for example, I received a visit from a representative of OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence, CIA] from the Zone, who said that they were becoming interested in Scientific Intelligence and were contemplating making contact with all the large firms in Berlin. As you know, that somewhat piratical organization possesses far more in the way of funds than we do and the sole trump card which we hold is the excellent ground work which has been done by HORNER and DARLISON over the years. 72

The declassified British archival record does not reveal whether STIB actually delivered Telefunken’s goods in violation of West German law. We do know that many West German government agencies were viewed not as impediments to STIB’s work but rather as levers of influence. West German actors both contributed to and profited from the collection efforts of British services, with selective exchange of information extending to West Germany’s equivalent of MI5, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitu-

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tion. Much of this took the form of small personal favors. In 1956 Frank Bossard recommended, via the British Services Security Organization’s Liaison Section in Cologne, Leonig Berg for an employment interview. Having brought the former Latvian national to the West to learn more about his work as an interpreter with a Soviet security service in Marfino, located on the northwestern outskirts of Moscow, Bossard felt Berg could most usefully be employed in “the political field.” 73 STIB’s government contacts were not limited to intelligence circles. In a similar vein, at STIB’s recommendation the West Berlin office of the Ministry for All-German Affairs offered resettlement assistance to scholars in fields other than natural and physical science. This office recorded information about those longing to return to Germany: British sources reveal that a representative of the Ministry for AllGerman Affairs in Berlin, Karl Pagel, periodically shared insights with Darlison in Berlin. 74 STIB was eager to secure influence over the placement of senior German scientists and technicians in suitable employment, an activity that from 1953 onward shifted to Pagel’s colleagues within the Ministry for All-German Affairs. Known officially as the Von Dellinghausen Committee, this influential ad hoc committee was closely associated with the nascent Ministry of Defense, the so-called Blank Office. 75 INFORMED EXPERTS IN BRITAIN’S LEDGER At STIB’s recommendation, the Von Dellinghausen Committee was staffed by industrial contacts close to British interests, most prominent among them committee secretary Joachim Pretsch (see figure 3.3). An employee of the Aerodynamic Research Institute in Göttingen, Pretsch had worked closely with David Evans immediately after the war. Until 1949 he was formally assigned to Blount’s Research Branch; he only relinquished this assignment for a civil service post within the new West German federal government, where he assumed responsibility for research funds distributed by the Federal Ministry of Economics. From the mid-1950s onward, Pretsch was centrally involved in the development of atomic energy in West Germany. 76 Students were also among the targets of British information collection. STIB’s student counterpart to Pretsch in Bonn was Dieter Spangenberg in West Berlin, head of the Office for All-German Student Affairs and later protégé of Willy Brandt, the West Berlin lord mayor and subsequent West German chancellor. STIB records show that Spangenberg collated lists of Soviet guest professors in East Germany for STIB’s John Horner. 77 As Evans boasted to superiors in London, “Throughout Western Germany there is a body of informed experts who, for various reasons, but mostly out of common interest and respect, inform H.M.G.’s representatives if something which they think is interesting in the scientific and technical intelli-

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Figure 3.3. Joachim Pretsch, 1950s. Image courtesy of NARA.

gence field comes to their notice.” 78 This claim should not be taken at anything close to face value. British intelligence was by no means unique in exploiting ties to German industry. The records of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), as we shall see, reveal an equally vigorous “operational use” of numerous firms in the U.S. sector of occupied Berlin by American services. STIB records do show that via “listening posts” British services procured reports on the latest military-industrial developments not only in countries under Soviet direction, but also in the British, French, and American zones of western Germany. Evans went on to claim that British leverage derived from an “inherent respect” for his country’s institutions, traditions, and government, soft power he believed should be used to establish a “European”—the quotation marks are his—understanding to counterbalance the effect of “lavish U.S. cash investments and offshore contracts.” This assertion also likely reflects wishful thinking. We only know for certain that Princess Margaret’s visit to the federal republic in 1954 was a success Evans sought to replicate on a larger scale with a visit from Sir Winston Churchill; judging from the decision to award the British wartime prime minister the prestigious Charlemagne Prize in the city of Aachen the following year, Evans’s lobbying efforts may have contributed in some small way to this objective. 79

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BRITISH CONTACTS AT THE STATE LEVEL: LEO BRANDT IN NORTH RHINE-WESTPHALIA The list of well-placed individuals in western Germany with whom Evans and other STIB officials collaborated to mutual benefit extended beyond the orbit of Bonn and divided Berlin. While Pagel and Pretsch served as the main federal contacts in West Berlin and the West German capital, an important contact in state-level government was Leo Brandt, the most important postwar scientific administrator in West Germany’s most populous and industrialized state, North Rhine-Westphalia (see figure 3.4). Like Pretsch, Brandt brought to STIB not only a highly useful set of contacts, but also a still more valuable commodity in short supply in postwar Britain: revenue. To augment the modest resettlement grants that STIB and Research Branch provided to key scientists, Evans boasted to his superiors in London that the “unlimited depths of Brandt’s direct and indirect pockets” had time and again proved useful in the mutual exploitation of West German scientific research. 80 Brandt’s biography provides some basis to support Evans’s assertion. Like Karl Steimel, Leo Brandt was a Telefunken man, having joined the firm in 1932 upon completion of his electrical engineering studies at the technical universities of Aachen and Berlin. By 1938, Brandt was directing research into the development and construction of various types of radio equipment, such as transmitters, receivers, and direction finders. 81 An influential wartime authority on radar, Brandt delivered a presentation at the Reich Air Ministry headquarters in Berlin in February 1944. 82 His organizational skills as head of radar development at Telefunken extended to the direction of eight hundred workers spread across eight facilities on the grounds of the former cloister at Leubus near Breslau in Silesia, a region of German-held Europe largely beyond the range of Anglo-American bombers. 83 After Germany’s capitulation, Brandt began a fresh start as a research manager at the opposite end of the divided country, in West Germany’s most important industrial region, North Rhine-Westphalia, the new state including the Ruhr Valley. In April 1946 Karl Arnold, a founder of the main West German conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU), and SPD mayor of Düsseldorf (later Frankfurt am Main), Walter Kolb, entrusted Brandt with the directorship of the Rhine railways; three years later, Brandt had joined the new state’s government under Arnold’s leadership. Brandt’s skill rested on his ability to connect the worlds of research, industry, and politics while consistently taking into careful consideration the objectives of Germany’s British occupiers. Both Brandt and Evans maintained close ties to Franz Wever from the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf; Wever and several other directors of Max Planck institutes in North Rhine-Westphalia were members of Brandt’s influential

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Figure 3.4. Leo Brandt, early 1960s. Image courtesy of the German Technical Museum, Berlin.

research group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes NordrheinWestfalen). Established in June 1950, this organization aimed to keep alive the spirit of the Prussian Academy of Science. In a more practical sense, the organization aided Brandt in exerting ministerial influence over the direction of applied scientific research. 84 The project appeared to mean so much to Brandt that in early 1952 he turned down an offer to take over the technical development program of the AEG electrical conglomerate in West Berlin. 85 Instead Brandt embarked on a successful career as a funder and promoter of applied science, with particular emphasis on aircraft construction and atomic

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power. 86 Brandt’s most visible achievement was the establishment of a nuclear power research center near the town of Jülich. For this project, he enlisted the support of Otto Hahn, co-discoverer of nuclear fission, director of the Max Planck Society, and West Germany’s elder statesman of postwar science; the Nobel Prize–winning chemist returned the favor by ensuring Brandt was named a deputy director of the German Atomic Commission, although Brandt, as the former Telefunken manager confided to Hahn, was unqualified for the position. Six years later, Hahn delivered the keynote speech at the opening of Brandt’s Jülich center in September 1961. 87 JOCKEYING FOR INFLUENCE: LEO BRANDT AND BRITISH MINDERS British intelligence aligned itself with the influential Brandt via personal favors. Encouraged by MI6 and STIB field agents in western Germany, erstwhile technical interrogator and director of scientific intelligence R. V. Jones accepted an invitation from Brandt to attend a radar conference held in Frankfurt in April 1953. 88 Brandt had set up the meeting of wartime radar and signals experts in anticipation of West Germany’s pending reentry into the postwar military-scientific establishment; attendees included twenty-six former German generals and other representatives of the Blank Office, the future West German Ministry of Defense. A further expression of AngloGerman goodwill was an agreement to solicit a high-level British speaker for an annual address at Brandt’s new NRW Academy, today’s North RhineWestphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts. STIB’s chief sought to trump American public relations efforts: the previous year’s presenter had been Harvard professor and first U.S. ambassador to West Germany James Conant. Evans’s objective was to impress upon Minister President Arnold that Brandt maintained British friends in high places. Because STIB had not yet been officially “declared” to the West German government, public interaction between its representatives and Brandt received little note. One encounter came in 1954, when Evans used a meeting of an expert organization Brandt had founded three years earlier, the forerunner to today’s prestigious German Institute of Navigation, to reintroduce Gröttrup to his West German scientific peers. Regarded as the best informed of all German repatriates on rocket developments, the young scientist and former collaborator of Wernher von Braun was made “aware that West Germany may not entirely welcome his arrival and that his personal rehabilitation is being supervised by Mr. Evans, the director of an un-named organization which arranged his refugee status.” 89 Among the participants Evans had suggested Brandt include at the gathering held at Wever’s Max Planck Institute for Iron Research were three “old friends” from the Aachen Technical High School.

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The most important of these was Friedrich Seewald, the postwar chair of the Aerodynamic Experimental Station and, according to Evans, advisee to the Blank Office and the Gehlen Organization on air and guided missile matters. 90 As the competition over speaker suggestions for Brandt’s academy makes clear, U.S. services maintained their own networks of informants within the worlds of West German science, public administration, and industry. For influential Germans, the Anglo-American rivalry demanded careful attention to both sides. Figures like Pretsch and Brandt sometimes found themselves enjoying favors bestowed by multiple bidders. In early 1950 aerodynamic expert Pretsch was summoned to the United States to deliver lectures on boundary layer control at the University of Virginia. In return, Pretsch brought with him on the sponsored trip details about the projected program for the resumption of industrial research in West Germany. 91 ROCKET EXPERT AND CIC INFORMANT ERNST STUHLINGER American documents reveal that offers to assist came from scientists residing both in Germany and in other countries, including recent German immigrants to the United States. An important American conduit of information on the newcomer Gröttrup (see figure 3.5) was Ernst Stuhlinger, a Pennemünde guided missile expert who, unlike Gröttrup, had chosen to accept an offer to work in the United States after Nazi Germany’s capitulation, initially at Fort Bliss in El Paso County, Texas. In 1954 Stuhlinger, along with Werhner von Braun and other Peenemünde rocket scientists brought to the United States with the “Paperclip” program, was employed at the U.S. Army’s (later NASA’s) rocketry center at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1955 Stuhlinger would obtain U.S. citizenship at a ceremony alongside von Braun. Gröttrup’s master’s thesis advisor and in his own estimation “an old friend,” Stuhlinger agreed to use his attendance at a conference in Innsbruck to obtain information for U.S. Army intelligence about his former student. Although they regarded Stuhlinger as “very sincere in his desire to assist Counter Intelligence Corps and the United States,” U.S. military intelligence officials nonetheless placed him under close personal surveillance during his time in Europe. 92 Documenting the deal making between Western intelligence services and German scientists and industrialists is not straightforward. At Brandt’s behest Evans brought to the attention of Young and the Ministry of Supply in London plans submitted by scholars at the Technical University of Aachen to obtain a secret patent for guided missile propulsion. 93 While Evans’s attempt to secure financial support in this instance proved unsuccessful, STIB’s ef-

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Figure 3.5. Helmut Gröttrup, 1954. Image courtesy of NARA.

forts to facilitate a course of study for the scientist’s two daughters at a British university via the Anglo-German Academic Exchange ensured that a measure of goodwill would persist. Evans also prodded Young to find a position in Canada for Professor Karl Überreiter of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in the Dahlem district of Berlin. The aim was to help “their” friend, Überreiter, an expert on high polymers, to resist “American pressure.” 94 Evans was not above recommending to his superiors in London the award of research contracts “from us instead of USA.” One such award went to Siegfried Günther on his reinstatement at the Ernst Heinkel aircraft works. 95 The leading scientific research complex in the federal republic, the Max Planck Society, was among the many scholarly institutions to place contacts at the disposal of British intelligence. Directors, scientists, and administrators affiliated with some forty Max Planck institutes in 1960 reported items of interest to British intelligence organizations. Tips came from those in leadership positions, including Ernst Telschow, general secretary of the Max Planck Society, as well as many scientists at the society’s other individual institutes. A message from Max von Laue alerting British intelligence to a scholar’s flight from Jena University to West Germany was routine, setting in motion additional contacts at the Carl Zeiss works and various professors at West Berlin’s Technical University in an effort to determine his whereabouts. 96 Another prestigious contributor to STIB was fellow Nobel

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Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, the leading figure in West Germany’s natural sciences during the 1950s. As director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics, president of the German Research Advisory Council (Deutscher Forschungsrat), and vice president of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Heisenberg was on personal terms with both Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and British intelligence agents. 97 STIB records illustrate that Heisenberg agreed in January 1951 to fire an aspiring young physicist named Alexander, described by Research Branch’s Lauder as the leader of the Göttingen Communist youth movement. In a remarkable display of political flexibility, with assistance from fellow physicist Robert Rompe (a leader of scientific administration in East Germany and member of the Central Committee of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party, or SED), Heisenberg found a place for the young scientist in the physics department of East Berlin’s Humboldt University. 98 Ideological purity was not Heisenberg’s paramount concern; nor was it the chief obsession of British intelligence service chiefs. Both STIB and Research Branch fostered relationships with professors suspected of Communist sympathies in western Germany, ostensibly to understand the evolving Soviet military threat. One such encounter involved physicist Hans Klumb, a professor at the University of Mainz in the French zone of occupation. Recommended to STIB by Karl Lauder, head of the Scientific Research Branch, “as a man of some vanity, who would respond to any situation in which he became a figure of apparent importance,” Klumb was known to the British as a member of the German-Soviet Friendship Society. STIB’s Stern described him as “very bohemian in manners and appearance,” a man who “looks much more like a professor of literature than of physics.” Having spent several hours in Klumb’s office at the University of Mainz, Evans regarded a conversation with the specialist in high-vacuum technique and aerosols, during which Klumb “did nearly all the talking,” as “extremely interesting,” an assessment seconded by Hugh Young, deputy director of the Division of Scientific Intelligence of the Joint Intelligence Bureau in London. 99 Tapping fellow travelers and other recent visitors to the Soviet Union for information about research promised an alternative means to obtain intelligence at a relatively low cost. With his organization’s place contested within the British field of intelligence organizations and subjected to cost-cutting pressures, the enterprising Evans, with at least one eye on the concerns of his superiors in London, was eager to identify such viable alternatives. STIB’s extensive network of contacts brought the small British service into a hive of American and West German competitors. At the highest levels, yes, U.S. and British intelligence worked closely together. Britain’s postwar strategic weakness vis-à-vis the Soviet Union made this imperative. Major conferences in Washington, DC, and London on subjects such as Soviet

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guided weapons, together with the integration of liaisons in the top levels of British and American espionage echelons, fostered Anglo-American cooperation, perhaps especially among collators and evaluators of intelligence based in the respective capitals. 100 Some of this spirit filtered down to field operators. At the end of 1951 STIB had shared all of its master files with the CIA in Washington. The Anglo-American exchange of imagery intelligence, such as the information gathered by overflight of the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors connecting western Germany to West Berlin, appears—at least from Foreign Office source material and interviews with protagonists—to have been extensive. 101 Evans’s superior, Bertie Kennedy Blount, and his opposite number within the CIA in Washington, H. Marshall Chadwell, chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, shared a desire to promote AngloAmerican interchange between STIB, Research Branch, and American counterparts. Among the collectors of leads on the ground in occupied Germany, however, approaches to intelligence gathering often conflicted. At times, Anglo-American relations at the field level became outright belligerent; while joint interrogations and report sharing were common practice, interservice strife, not cooperation, appears to have been the norm. 102 During the 1950s, many British intelligence agents exhibited a worldweary air toward their well-heeled American colleagues. British officials never tired of insisting that STIB’s example had inspired the CIA’s Scientific Research Division to create a similar organization housed in the office of the High Commission in Frankfurt, the so-called IG Farben Building, a massive block of offices built for the notorious chemical concern that later became home to the Pentagon’s Military Intelligence Headquarters and today forms part of the campus of the University of Frankfurt. From there, in 1951 the CIA launched the Returnee Exploitation Group (REG). 103 Acting on orders from London, Evans supplied not only reports, but also leads and active cases to the Returnee Exploitation Group, brushing aside qualms about delays and a lack of preparation and accuracy. His motivation stemmed from what he regarded as the threat posed by less considerate American rivals. 104 In gathering detailed knowledge of individuals and institutions with scientific potential, STIB faced not one but a shifting array of larger Americandirected counterparts, from the many offices and arms of U.S. military intelligence to the generously funded CIA to a cadre of West Berlin and West German organizations acting more or less openly on behalf of western Germany’s wealthiest and most powerful occupier. As early as 1951, Evans gloomily reported to his superiors in London that he and his colleagues in western Germany were outnumbered by at least ten to one—not by the Soviets or East Germans but rather by the Americans. The United States superior resources lay at the heart of the matter, a point Evans conceded while recounting in detail perceived American vices. At the top of the list was America’s lack of parsimony. In October 1952 Evans was instructing his

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Berlin staff not to be drawn into a “price war” with the Americans, as “they have a long history not only of lavish payments but of vastly exaggerated promises. An attempt to compete with them at their own game,” he surmised, “is more likely in the long run to do us harm than good.” Rather than match lucrative-sounding defection offers, the British espionage chief instructed his staff to provide scientists with assurances that “the assistance of British Intelligence is a considerable privilege; it ensures that cases are handled with discretion and efficiency from a broad background of knowledge and ability.” 105 No matter how one views Evans’s claim to superior professionalism— perhaps critically in light of his successor’s identification as a Soviet spy a decade later—from the vantage point of the early 1950s the difficulties in Anglo-American relations sprang from a particular American vice that grew out of a volatile mixture of the country’s outsized means and insufficient global experience: the strained relations between various competing American bodies in occupied Germany. While plausible, Evans’s explanation probably also reflected a personal concern about well-heeled domestic competitors, among them MI6. 106 While Evans occasionally offered cautious praise for U.S. Air Force and REG representatives, STIB’s director generally felt that “the quantity and the tone of content of US reports reflected the inclusion of unreliable material, frequently amounting to sheer guesswork and fabrication, with payment made on the basis of the quantity of paper submitted.” Recognizing the incendiary nature of this off-the-cuff observation, Evans requested his assessment of the Americans’ “long dissertations on matters of which the source has very little knowledge” be marked “guard,” ensuring they would not be shared with American officers, including those integrated into his superior’s directorate in London. 107 Others in the British intelligence and civil service hierarchies shared Evans’s dim view of American espionage professionalism. London’s spy establishment portrayed American military intelligence services as brash and inexperienced, eliciting feelings of exasperation from British counterparts. Young, for his part, affirmed that he and his colleagues agreed with Evans, informing him that they continued to accord responsibility of interrogation to “properly qualified intelligence officers,” an approach they hoped, via an ongoing “educational process of CIA in America,” would lead to change in American circles as well. 108 Evans and his staff registered London’s condescension toward their American security counterparts, an assessment that likely encouraged them to seek out and amplify examples of American ineptitude. While well-placed Britons cherished hopes for increased professionalism as the Anglophone CIA expanded its scope, the tone adopted toward American military intelligence services, especially those of the U.S. Army, was, by way of contrast, more strident. In divided Berlin, where American

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agents were practically tripping over their British counterparts, clashes were probably inevitable. In 1953 an American representative of naval intelligence walked in on a conversation between STIB’s Berlin chief John Horner and the wife of a scientist toiling in the Soviet Union. British military intelligence records suggest Horner’s informant was “already very jittery, was quite upset” and the American’s speedy departure in a large official vehicle with U.S. Navy license plates purportedly “did not please the lady.” 109 Some returning specialists, for their part, grasped the opportunity to play to British jealousies. One of the few STIB informants granted a code name, Hans Kerschbaum, alias “Kingpin,” correctly regarded by Horner in 1949 as a likely future managing director of Siemens, noted the greater cooperation German manufacturers enjoyed with their American, as opposed to their British, counterparts, predicting that even his enterprise would “fall to a certain extent under American influence.” Alleged to “dislike the Americans intensely” and assessed as “friendly as ever and even more cooperative,” Berlin chief Horner inquired whether it might be possible to get Kerschbaum invited to England as a guest of the influential Board of Trade with a view toward cultivating deeper relationships with British industrialists. 110 STIB sought to deflect the Americans’ advance by including U.S. counterparts on routine calls to second-tier informants, especially in the American-controlled zones of southern Germany. Such was likely the motivation behind a May 1952 closed-door visit to the offices of Hans Hoyer at Lech Chemie in Gersthofen, just north of the city of Augsburg. Concerned about his physical safety, the company’s chief of organic chemical research and former nerve gas expert purportedly welcomed the presence of a U.S. Army representative alongside the more familiar face of STIB military advisor R. E. F. Edelstein. The CIC dossier on Lech Chemie underscores the readiness of this American scientific detachment to exploit not only Hoyer’s security concerns, but also its British allies’ confidence. Once the formality of the joint Anglo-American house call was out of the way, without informing STIB a representative of the U.S. Army’s Munich office was dispatched to speak informally with Hoyer. The aim was to ensure that in the future he brought his security concerns to U.S. Army intelligence and no longer to the British. For reasons not described in his CIC file, Hoyer declined the American offer. 111 A more significant crossing of swords with American intelligence gathering ensued in the wake of American efforts to cultivate contacts like Lech Chemie’s Hoyer on a mass scale. Anglo-American tensions flared in 1951 after a form letter was mailed to several hundred scientists in both the British and American zones. Penned in awkward German, the stilted note requested information about professional qualifications and personal suitability, ostensibly with a view toward employment in the United States. A volatile mixture of envy, consternation, and perceived professional superiority boiled over a

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year later in a case involving the defection of Karl Steimel, who, prior to his arrival at Telefunken’s plant in Ulm, had headed up a group of electronics engineers in Fryazino, a town twenty-five kilometers northeast of Moscow, where he had worked for Soviet authorities from October 1946 to early 1952 (see figure 3.6). ANGLO-AMERICAN TUSSLES OVER TELEFUNKEN EXPERT KARL STEIMEL At the end of May 1952, Steimel and his secretary, with whom the former (and future) Telefunken valve expert had fathered two children during his time in Fryazino, made plans to move from East to West Germany. Negotiations with the managing director of Telefunken, Hans Heyne, initially appeared to ensure STIB the lead role in bringing the man, which both American and British services regarded as Germany’s preeminent authority on electronic tubes, out of Soviet-controlled East Germany to the British zone via West Berlin. Steimel, for his part, sought to play the interest displayed by American, British, and, apparently, East German intelligence agents to his own advantage. Among his initial moves was to forward to Heyne a request that he be flown from West Berlin to West Germany prior to his actual defection; the aim of this secret rendezvous in the British zone was to discuss terms of his cooperation. While the British files do not include a full record of this discussion, they do reveal that on the return car journey from Berlin-Gatow airport to his residence in the divided city’s eastern half, the returnee scientist confided to STIB’s Darlison that East German authorities had presented him with several attractive employment options. According to an account of their conversation compiled by Darlison’s superior, John Horner, Steimel disclosed that, were he to remain in East Germany, he could choose from one of two professorships, in either Jena or Dresden. Alternatively, he could assume the position of consulting engineer for all electronic research and development in the German Democratic Republic. 112 As Evans subsequently learned from American sources, Telefunken and Siemens had in addition pooled resources to offer Steimel forty thousand deutschmarks to lure him away from Dresden. 113 The enticements offered to Steimel in East and West Germany reflected his reputation in the key technology of electronic tubes, a fundamental component of communications hardware until the commercial introduction of transistors. 114 Like Leo Brandt, Steimel had attained most of his professional knowledge working at Telefunken, Europe’s largest tube manufacturer on the eve of World War II. After completing his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Cologne under the direction of physicist Hans Rukop, from 1934 to 1945 Steimel had built up a world-class electronic tube laboratory at

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Figure 3.6. Karl Steimel, early 1960s. Image courtesy of the German Technical Museum, Berlin.

Telefunken, a position enabling him to visit the American East Coast on business in 1937. 115 In 1943 Nazi armament czar Albert Speer granted the foremost electronic tube production engineer in Germany the authority to

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supervise all activities pertaining to valve production across the entire Reich. 116 Nazi Germany’s capitulation did not halt Steimel’s research into electronic tube production; if anything, he was more in demand than ever. The services Steimel offered to Soviet authorities immediately after the Nazis’ defeat included valve development work personally approved by Nikolai Berzarin, the first Soviet commander to enter Berlin in April 1945, as well as consultations with Soviet experts in order to establish a new valve research and production facility in central Russia. To this end, Steimel set about conducting interviews in East Berlin with engineers, foremen, and craftsmen to draw together a cadre of Germans to work at a clandestine Soviet-led institute in East Berlin. Concurrently, Soviet authorities instructed Steimel to rebuild a valve and high-frequency laboratory in the Oberschöneweide district of the city, on the grounds of the main plant of AEG, before the war the world’s leading electricity company. 117 In the autumn of 1946 Steimel’s efforts on behalf of Soviet authorities brought him to the Soviet capital of his own volition. From October 1946 until April 1952 he resided in Fryazino, today the Russian center of microwave electronics. Steimel claimed to have maintained contact during his Fryazino years with U.S. authorities via smuggled letters. A check carried out by the U.S. embassy in Moscow at the CIA’s behest uncovered no such record of correspondence with Steimel. 118 We can verify several American services’ interest in Steimel long prior to STIB’s creation. During his first visit to the United States in 1937, Steimel became acquainted with representatives of both Corning Glass Works and General Electric. On this occasion, he may have established contact with a Brent (Irl) D’Arcy, the American officer subsequently entrusted with the collection in Berlin of scientific intelligence for the U.S. Army in Europe and, according to D’Arcy, a personal friend of the applied mathematician from before the war. While STIB’s Darlison and Horner spirited Steimel out of East Berlin for a daylong blitz visit to the British zone, D’Arcy took matters in the opposite geographic direction. According to British military intelligence sources, the U.S. Army representative arranged a clandestine gathering with the electronic components expert in East Berlin. The meeting’s guest of honor was none other than the scientist’s estranged spouse. D’Arcy’s arrangement of the stillmarried couple’s rendezvous provoked an outpouring of British indignation over the “improper handling” of “their” contact. Forced to withdraw an offer of employment in the United States, D’Arcy ceded the case to the British, who in turn made a place at the table for several different American interrogation units. 119 Buoyed by his organization’s success over its richer and more powerful American competitors, STIB electronics expert Frank Clifton Bossard presented a gushing appraisal of the “foremost valve research and production

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engineer in Germany.” According to the future STIB chief (and Soviet spy), “Steimel has a quiet, unassuming manner which inspires respect and confidence. No difficulty was experienced in getting him to talk about his experiences, which he did in a well-reasoned manner.” 120 At the end of July 1952, Steimel was flown to London for further discussions. Steimel’s VIP itinerary included courtesy visits to the National Physical Laboratory, at that time the world’s leading national measurement institute, and the offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation. And yet, even after a hastily arranged AngloAmerican espionage truce, Steimel’s exploitation provoked further rounds of interservice discord: an American representative dispatched to London from Washington was refused access to Steimel, with a follow-up meeting of senior U.S. and British intelligence matters in Berlin failing to ensure the valve expert’s exploitation was truly binational. A liberal view of national interests appears to have extended to both sides: the British paper trail reveals a further attempt by D’Arcy to put certain technical questions to Steimel in Berlin, followed by yet another round of clandestine, British-only questioning in London. Steimel, for his part, claimed that he had intended to settle in West Berlin, but both Allies, at least according to a narrative he crafted years after his “escape,” had other plans for him. We do know for certain that he ended up as head of research for Telefunken in the southern German city of Ulm, where his position and contacts proved useful to both British and American services. 121 In 1952 Steimel joined the firm’s management: for the next four years, he was formally responsible for research and development, most of it related to secret military matters. In 1956 Steimel moved to Frankfurt am Main to establish a new research department for AEG. 122 Among the more valuable tips Steimel offered his British contacts during his years in Ulm was information about the electronic equipment his company had illegally supplied to the forerunner to today’s Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND), Reinhard Gehlen’s “Org.” 123 STIB’s success with Steimel came with costs as well as benefits. On the minus side of the ledger was a blow to Anglo-American relations. For more than three years, this took the form of exclusion at an important conduit for East German refugees: U.S. Army officials ensured that British services were denied access to “flush” prospects passing through the Marienfelde reception center. Whether Telefunken’s commercial relations with American electrical firms suffered as a consequence of STIB’s jostling with U.S. intelligence authorities is unknown but appears unlikely. As his links to D’Arcy make clear, Steimel’s parallel cultivation of American contacts was subtle and effective. Both the Berlin and Ulm security offices of the Telefunken plant provided the Counter Intelligence Corps with access to employment records, offering American agents background information before subjects were questioned. Once installed at Telefunken, Steimel was only one link in a

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much longer chain that included such contacts as Wilhelm Runge and Hans Rukop. 124 Other American security services also appeared to be satisfied with their relationship to Telefunken and Steimel in particular. So far as the FBI was able to discern, “Steimel’s technical and factual statements were at least in December 1952 regarded by CIA as completely reliable.” 125 A deepening of Steimel’s own special relationship with American authorities occurred the following autumn with his visit to the eastern seaboard; his itinerary included a meeting with CIA representatives. 126 FBI records confirm that the president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Mervin J. Kelly, along with General Electric representatives, summoned Steimel to New York. The degree to which American intelligence authorities encouraged corporate leaders to extend this invitation remains undocumented. 127 In a letter to Allen W. Dulles, then director of the CIA, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover stated that his agency’s interest in Steimel centered on the Soviet use of magnetrons produced by Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. 128 Steimel’s “knowledge” of Soviet electronics proved less valuable than field agents in Germany had imagined. A subsequent FBI investigation conducted in the United States established that the relevant technical information concerning the magnetron in question—one in use during Steimel’s time in the Soviet Union—had been declassified immediately after the war’s cessation, with pertinent manuals made available in public libraries or bookstores. Even the prized devices themselves, as the supervisor of tube research at RCA Laboratories confided to an FBI investigator, had been on sale as government surplus in New York City only months after V-E Day. In other words, anyone residing in America’s largest city immediately after the war and sympathetic to Soviet aims could have acquired the relevant information about the magnetron in question and ensured it reached America’s wartime ally, then Cold War enemy, with very little effort. Correspondence between the Langley-based service and Hoover substantiates Steimel’s meeting with CIA representatives during his 1953 visit to the East Coast; FBI and CIA documentation also indicates that such conversations with sympathetic German nationals on personal or business trips to the United States were common. 129 British sources reveal that Steimel’s 1953 journey to the United States produced fireworks in unlikely quarters. According to Evans, Steimel appears to have drawn redbaiting Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s attention to an alleged cache of American secret documents recently “discovered” in the Soviet zone of Germany. 130 Conflict with U.S. military intelligence in Berlin was a price that the British field agency was willing to pay again in December 1953, as the “acquisition” of another high-level electronics expert with Soviet experience, Helmut Gröttrup, makes clear. Notable in STIB’s exploitation of Gröttrup was a desire to balance one-time coups with longer-term cultivation of valued American contacts. So long as they assumed a deferential attitude, Evans

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was inclined to assist certain favored American services, particularly the CIA, in making the most of sought-after STIB informants. Guided by a team from London, Gröttrup’s extensive questioning involved an American specialist, an association Evans believed he had successfully hidden from Gröttrup. 131 By the tenth anniversary of the war’s end, the field of scientific exploitation in western Germany and West Berlin had become spectacularly crowded. Competition from American intelligence and security services in Germany proved vexing to newcomers and old hands alike, with West German federal officials and British intelligence agencies sharing concerns about American dominance. The latter’s options in what many British security agents perceived as their diminished nation’s stoic battle against American hucksterism proved limited. A newcomer with which the British agency struggled to reach a modus vivendi, especially after the British High Commissioner’s formal disclosure of STIB to Adenauer and his national security advisor Hans Globke in 1954, 132 the so-called Gehlen Organization was an entity many British intelligence agents appeared to regard as little more than a particularly nefarious “American” service. Evans had negatively reported on the unwanted German recipient of American patronage as early as August 1951. He warned of contacts within the scientific community who had purportedly been working for some time for the new German “Abwehr” (the wartime designation for Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency) under American aegis. 133 During World War II, German army intelligence under the leadership of Reinhard Gehlen had set up groups to torture and interrogate Soviet prisoners of war. As Evans’s superiors were aware, the “Org” had already been operating as an extended arm of American intelligence even before Gehlen’s return from Fort Hunt in Virginia. Records housed at the German National Archives facility in Koblenz reveal that the embryonic service, at this stage a loose collection of stringers with loyalties to Reinhard Gehlen and his American paymasters, had by the autumn of 1946 established an economic division to gather information about firms in both East and West Germany. 134 Efforts focused initially on cultivating ties to former employees of the Carl Zeiss works in Jena. At that time, the legendary precision optics firm was attempting to restart production in the small West German towns of Heidenheim and Oberkochen in Württemberg. 135 To this end, agents working on behalf of the “Org” began interrogating border crossers with backgrounds in optical precision instruments as early as the autumn of 1946, offering the nascent service and its American handlers details concerning the transport by the Soviet Ministry of Interior Affairs (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, or MVD) of Zeiss specialists to Brateyevo, today on the southern outskirts of Moscow. 136 While American services were providing Gehlen’s outfit copies of intercepted personal letters, including those penned by German-speaking scien-

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tists in the Soviet Union to their families in the western zone, the CIC-funded Gehlen network was pursuing its own domestic political agenda. An early focus was to prod both the Hessian state ministry for economic affairs and U.S. military government officials to rescind denazification measures in instances in which the threat of Soviet influence over Western enterprises seemed poised to offer an avenue of Communist infiltration. At stake was an alleged attempt on the part of Zeiss in Jena to exercise control over the Hensoldt works in Wetzlar owing to the suspension of former director Karl Hensoldt. 137 At this early stage of American scientific espionage, Gehlen’s interrogators were active at Camp King in Oberursel, questioning technicians shared with, among others, Counter Intelligence Corps officers, the so-called Free Jurists, and U.S. Army screeners based in West Berlin and western Germany. 138 By the summer of 1954 Gehlen representatives were paying visits to the employment sites of scientific returnees toiling in West German industry. 139 Gehlen’s Org was also poaching contacts among those who had previously served British paymasters. British military intelligence records show that STIB dropped a former German air force engineer and former commander of the Luftwaffe’s testing station at Rechlin, Franz Kirch, for what the British regarded as his divided loyalties. At issue was the Gehlen group, and in Evans’s view, a more aggressive stance toward the exploitation of select incoming scientists was required. At a meeting of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence in May 1954, Evans convinced his superiors that a recent— and according to British records unsolicited—arrival in the federal republic, Günther Bock, the wartime director of the German Aerodynamic Experimental Station (Deutsche Versuchanstalt für Luftfahrt), should be interrogated not within but outside of Germany, in the south of England. Evans’s superiors agreed that unless it was absolutely unavoidable Bock should not be allowed to proceed to the Gehlen Organization for interrogation; at the same time, “it was not considered very undesirable for the Americans to have him if you felt that this was the right course to assist in future cooperation.” 140 The subsequent year, 1955, witnessed a further narrowing of Britain’s radius of action in occupied western Germany. A September 1955 conversation with Hans Jürgen von Oertzen, an atomic scientist who had worked closely with Nikolas Riehl, alerted the British that Gehlen’s men in West Berlin were informing all returning specialists that they would be unable to secure positions in West German industry without first submitting to the Gehlen Organization’s—not STIB’s—interrogations. Given the intimate relationship it enjoyed with American benefactors, this practice called into question the relevance of future uncoordinated initiatives led by British services. 141 The challenge to STIB, a British organization with, at least until then, few back channels to the as yet undeclared Bundesnachrichtendienst, was self-evident. Not only Gehlen’s organization, but also the military intel-

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ligence department of the Blank Office, the forerunner to today’s Military Counterintelligence Service (Militärischer Abschirmdienst, or MAD), was ascending at the moment that STIB was forced to scale back German operations. Agreements with ostensibly sympathetic American counterparts, such as the CIA’s Returnee Exploitation Group, brought no relief, with U.S. officials tipping off Gehlen operators to the arrival of fellow Germans and encouraging them to act independently of “Anglo-American” agreements. 142 To buttress his organization’s increasingly contested role as an interrogator power in divided Germany, Evans sought to improve relations with the German-American competitor, arranging a personal meeting with the head of Gehlen’s scientific section in Bonn in July 1955. A successful rendezvous cleared the way for face-to-face consultations a week later between STIB and Gehlen representatives in West Berlin. Head of a small military intelligence service operating in a cluttered field of much larger competitors, Evans appreciated that refugee interrogation in occupied Germany had never belonged solely to the British. Rather, even before the war ended, the movements of persons escaping Soviet rule was drawing the interest of many different clandestine actors. During the second postwar decade of refugee interrogation, espionage entrepreneurs created, funded, and in some cases directed by American, British, and other foreign services faced stiffening competition from domestic actors. Greater attention to the objectives of the Bonn government took different forms. Some diehard anti-Communist groups were disbanded, as was the case with the Fighting Group against Inhumanity. Others, like the Free Jurists, were absorbed into the West German federal government’s Ministry for All-German Affairs. The disappearance of these two organizations, both by this time CIA operations, from migrant screening appeared to reflect a decision to back away quietly from claims to “liberate” east-central Europe. This point of convergence among policymakers in Bonn and Washington came at a time when the flight of East Germans to the federal republic was reaching dramatic proportions, but the importance of the formal procedure administered in Giessen, Marienfelde, and Uelzen as a conduit of information was in decline. The deployment of West German services to procure information and contacts from migrants appeared to strengthen the federal government’s hand in matters of invigilation. The story is actually more complicated. Yes, when viewed from today’s perspective, the insertion of the BND into the West German government on April 1, 1956, marked the long-term ascendency of security actors with formal allegiances to the federal government. The establishment of the Joint Interrogation Centers precisely two years later seemed to underscore the increased autonomy enjoyed by the formally sovereign Bonn government in matters of surveillance and citizenship.

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The actual terms of interaction among those charged with security matters under the aegis of the government in Bonn during the 1950s warrant closer examination. We can make sense of intra-Allied relations with reference to the legal status of entrants by extending the scope of the investigation beyond the usual suspects. The foreign and state actors we often take as logical starting points for inquiry into intelligence practices only tell part of the story. Before turning to a fuller exploration of Germany’s best-known foreign intelligence agency’s extensive role in vetting new arrivals, pensioners, and travelers during the 1960s and 1970s, chapter 4 devotes attention to interactions between American vetting authorities and relatively understudied domestic agencies that, at least today, appear either to have been on the margins of the formal security assessment process or to have been erased from its history altogether. NOTES 1. Consisting of four individuals, the laboratory was formally attached to the 21st Army Group. See Memorandum on the Counter-Intelligence Laboratory, August 15, 1945, KV 4/314, TNA London. 2. Interrogation of Franz von Papen, held at Rheims, France, April 16, 1945, FO 371/ 46777, TNA London. See also Report No. 6724 DIC (MIS)/X-P7, June 2, 1945, FO 371/46778, TNA London. 3. For a recent introduction to thematic emphases in British and American questioning in the months immediately following victory, see especially Richard Overy, “Interrogation of Nazi War Criminals,” in Interrogation in War and Conflict: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis, ed. Christopher Andrew and Simona Tobia (New York: Routledge, 2014), 93–109. 4. A superficial introduction to Operation Paperclip based exclusively on American sources is Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2014). An older but more valuable scholarly introduction is John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); see also Audra J. Wolf, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 5. Report by David Evans to the Technical Intelligence Conference, June 4–14, 1951, DEFE 41/154, TNA London. 6. Christoph Mick, Forschen für Stalin. Deutsche Fachleute in der sowjetischen Rüstungsindustrie (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000), 80–92; also valuable is the summary contained in Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 220–26. 7. Based on a review of archival materials in Moscow, see especially Mick, Forschen für Stalin, 286–314. 8. Joint Information Committee delegation report, May 7, 1953, DEFE 41/129, TNA London. 9. Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 40–41. Sanitized U.S. defector reports from eastcentral Europe produced at Camp King in Oberursel and the so-called Defector Reception Center in Frankfurt during the mid-1950s are included in RG 466, Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, NARA II. Sources typically completed a paper that interrogators subsequently used to expand and clarify points in their questioning. Similar reports, also sani-

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tized and separated from related correspondence and subsequence analysis, are located in the National Archives facility in London. 10. Memorandum on Otto John from John E. D. Street, May 12, 1948, FO 1093/449, TNA London. 11. Introductions to the John affair include Constantin Goschler and Michale Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo.” Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Reinbek bei Hamburg: rowohlt, 2015), 48–49, esp. 142–60; see also Bernd Stöver, “Otto John (1909–1997). Ein Widerstandskämpfer als Verfassungschutzchef,” in Konspiration als Beruf. Deutsche Geheimdienstchefs im Kalten Krieg, ed. Dieter Krüger and Armin Wagner (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2003), 160–78, and “Der Fall Otto John. Neue Dokumente zu den Aussagen des deutschen Geheimdienstchefs gegenüber MfS und KGB,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47, no. 2 (1999): 103–36. John’s successor was Hans Jess until December 1955; he served a year on a provisional basis after John’s defection. On December 19, 1955, Hubert Schrübbers, erstwhile member of the Waffen-SS, received the formal appointment upon completion of a three-month probationary period. 12. Confidential Memorandum from C. T. E. Ewart-Biggs, February 27, 1959, FO 371/ 146036, TNA London. 13. Based on an assessment supplied by Ernst Brückner, head of the Security Investigation Office from 1953 to 1964, the Bonn CIA office felt John may have been detained in the East with the threat of exposure of undisclosed cooperation with Soviet intelligence during World War II. Message to the Director from Bonn, October 8, 1954, “Hossbach, Johannes,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 57, NARA II. 14. Letters from Mielke to Ulbricht, November 18, 1955, and December 13, 1955, MfSSekretär des Ministers/1893, BStU. Ulbricht felt that John need not appear in the production to be directed by Karl-Georg Egel. Letter from Ulbricht to Mielke, November 18, 1955, MfSSekretär des Ministers/1893, Part 2, BStU. 15. Telegram from Bonn to Foreign Office, August 7, 1954, FO 371/109324, TNA London. 16. Telegram from Berlin to Foreign Office, August 11, 1954, FO 371/109324, TNA London. On the nature of West German self-rule prior to 1955, see Walter Schwengler, “Der doppelte Anspruch: Souvernität und Sicherheit. Zur Entwicklung des völkerrechtlichen Status der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1955,” in Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik 1945–1956, Vol. 4: Wirtschaft und Rüstung, Souvernität und Sicherheit, ed. Werner Abelshauser (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997), esp. 46–69. 17. Brief No. 1 for Allied Negotiators. Processing Persons of Intelligence Interest. Appendix to the Letter from Charles Johnston (for the High Commissioner) to Frank K. Roberts, Foreign Office, September 21, 1954, FO 371/109736, TNA London. 18. Paul Maddrell, Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany, 1945–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107. 19. Mick, Forschen für Stalin, 33–65. See also Burghard Cisela, “German High Velocity Aerodynamics,” in Technology Transfer Out of Germany after 1945, ed. Matthias Judt and Burghard Cisela (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), 93–106. 20. An overview of U.S., U.K., and French scientific and technical exploitation of Germans is presented in Douglas O’Reagan, “Science, Technology, and Know-How: Exploitation of German Science and the Challenges of Technology Transfer in the Postwar World” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014). 21. Reorganization of Co-ord. Section, November 26, 1947, DEFE 41/81, TNA London. 22. See the minutes of the Joint Scientific and Joint Technical Intelligence Committees, April 13, 1949, DEFE 41/72, TNA London. 23. Another organization, the Scientific Research Division of the Military Security Board, a tripartite policy body responsible for fields of war potential, appears to have been kept at arm’s length from British intelligence interests. 24. Blount penned one of the first histories of the society’s tumultuous origins in the immediate postwar era, translated by the Humboldt Foundation and subsequently used as the basis for an account of the society’s foundations published in the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Robert Gerwin, “‘Es ist doch nur der Name . . .’ Ein listiger Einfall rettete die MaxPlanck-Gesellschaft,” Die Zeit, February 24, 1978. Compare with Blount’s translated account:

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Bericht von Dr. Blount über die Zusammenarbeit mit Herrn Dr. Telschow und den Alliierten zwecks Neugründung der KWG/MPG, undated, Abteilung III, Rep. 83/38, Archiv der MaxPlanck-Gesellschaft, Berlin. The decision to name the research body after the physicist Max Planck—the only German permitted to attend the three hundredth anniversary of the Royal Society in 1946—appears to have come from Blount. 25. The origins of the Max Planck Society’s rhetorical emphasis on basic rather than applied research (Grundlagenforschung) lies in this era of postwar Anglo-American surveillance. (An internal commission has begun work to canvas this history: for a brief description, see https:// www.mpg.de/8947555/Die-Geschichte-der-Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [accessed January 10, 2017]). 26. Minutes of the Eighth Joint Meeting of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence and Joint Technical Intelligence Committee, DEFE 41/76, April 29, 1953, TNA London. 27. A well-known Communist publisher from the Baden region of southwest Germany, Bittel moved to East Germany in 1949 to accept positions with the Soviet zone’s press organization and the institute. Index Card, Bittel, Dr. Karl, December 1951, “XE 26 20 25—Karl Bittel,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 74, NARA II. 28. See the interrogation carried out by the Security Investigation Office of the Federal Criminal Police included in Jasznewski’s CIC case file. Interrogation Report on Karl Jasznewski, September 25, 1959, “Karl Jasznewski—HEO 73339,” Folder No. 1, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 338, NARA II. After his apprehension by local police, Jasznewski’s case was tried by the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. He received a five-year sentence. “Wo beginnt der Landesrrat?” Die Zeit, July 29, 1960, 31. Unmentioned in the contemporary newspaper coverage was Jasznewski’s previous service to British occupation authorities. 29. Matthias Uhl, Stalin’s V-2. Der Technologietransfer der deutschen Fernlenkwaffentechnik in die UdSSR und der Aufbau der sowjetischen Raketenindustrie 1945 bis 1959 (Bonn: Bernard and Graefe, 2001), 205–7; Mick, Forschen für Stalin, 299–314. 30. Interrogators sent from London to conduct detailed interrogations typically consisted of one or two specialists, often belonging to different authorities. Sometimes as many as four interrogators were sent; among the competing agencies were the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Air Ministry, the Joint Intelligence Bureau, and the Ministry of Supply. 31. Letter from P. A. Wilkinson to C. M. Anderson, Western Department, Foreign Office, February 13, 1957, FO 371/130860, TNA London. 32. Record of Service of Mr. D. M. Evans GM, undated, DEFE 41/33, TNA London. 33. Evans to Young, Scientific and Technical Intelligence; Future Plans, January 21, 1955, DEFE 21/23, TNA London. 34. Appendix I, Bossard’s Statement to the Police on March 15, 1965, DEFE 29/7, TNA London. 35. Cited in Report on Defendant, Bossard, Frank Clifton, 1965, CRIM 1/4369, TNA London. 36. Note from Philip Allen to Mr. Mitchell, initialed as read by the prime minister, May 12, 1965, PREM 13/580, TNA London. 37. See his signed application to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, October 17, 1949, CSC 11/ 22, TNA London. 38. Security Commission, May 10, 1965, PREM 13/580, TNA London. 39. Confidential Memorandum, Committee on Security in the Ministry of Aviation and the Ministry of Defense (Army) 1965, PREM 13/580, TNA London. 40. Ben Macintyre, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, with an afterword by John Le Carré (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 41. Confidential Memorandum, Board of Inquiry, Explanatory Notes on and narrative of the Bossard case, undated, DEFE 29/7, TNA London. 42. Character Reference for Security Questionnaire, Bossard, August 17, 1955, WO 32/ 20732, TNA London. 43. Evans to Director of Administration, July 5, 1949, DEFE 41/34, TNA London. Ironically, Evans noted in this memorandum that “the security consideration is over-riding.” Whether Bossard was first recruited by Soviet intelligence in London in 1961 or earlier in Germany remains unknown.

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44. Memorandum to Foreign Office (German Section) from Appointments Branch, CCG Lübbecke, July 29, 1949, FO 936/450, TNA London. 45. Evans to Neville, Chairman, JS/JTIC, August 12, 1949, DEFE 41/34, TNA London. 46. Report from GM “York,” November 26, 1956, MfS Zentralarchiv, Allg. S. 71/77, Band 3, BStU. 47. Keith R. Allen, Befragung, Überprüfung, Kontrolle. Die Aufnahme von DDRFlüchtlingen in West Berlin bis 1961 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013), 32–34. 48. Letter from Evans to New Director of STIB, November 12, 1955, DEFE 41/142, TNA London. 49. On the feared alliance of German scientific prowess and the resources high-level British intelligence authorities believed the Soviet Union commanded immediately after the war, see A. Craig, “The Joint Intelligence Committee and British Intelligence Assessment” (PhD diss. Cambridge University, 2000), 33–42. 50. Memorandum for the Chairman, Joint Information Committee (Germany) from Director, STIB, October 10, 1953, DEFE 41/28, TNA London. 51. Information Report, Role of German Electronics Specialists in the USSR, April 6, 1954, CIA-RDP82-00047R000400270009-8, last accessed via CREST at NARA II on May 11, 2016. 52. Mick, Forschen für Stalin, 315–20. 53. Probably also a factor in his decisionmaking was Gröttrup’s provision of intelligence to the Soviets during the last phase of the war, an act of espionage that led to a half-year house arrest in 1944. See STIB Interview Report No. 138 on Helmut Gröttrup, December 23, 1953, DEFE 41/100, TNA London. 54. See the assessment of Maddrell, Spying on Science, 224. 55. Summary of Information, Prepared by the USAREUR Central Registry, 66th MI Group, February 26, 1960, “Nikolas Riehl XE 288 199,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, NARA II. 56. The first successful Soviet test of a hydrogen bomb came in the summer of 1953; Soviet long-range rockets were able to reach North America from 1957 onward. On contemporary American evaluations of the Soviet nuclear program, see Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), esp. 63–88, 214–306. 57. Maddrell, Spying on Science, 221. 58. See, for instance, the chief of Intelligence Division’s acknowledgment of his “new respect for the psychological handling” of German-speaking scientists by the Soviets. Letter to K. H. Lauder from J. M. Kirkman, January 16, 1951, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. 59. See, for instance, Günter Bock’s paper on aeronautical research in the Soviet Union presented to the AGARD Test Panel in Rome in February 1956, based substantially on a précis Bock provided to STIB and the CIA’s American Returnee Exploitation Group. 60. Tripartite Conference on Defence against Ballastic Missiles, January 20, 1956, DEFE 7/ 698, TNA London. 61. Evans to Young, August 26, 1953, DEFE 41/9, TNA London. 62. David Murphy, Sergei Kondrasev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 205–37; Tim Wiener, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 110–15. 63. Both Project Aquatone, the U-2 overflight program, and Corona, the first U.S. satellite program, bypassed military intelligence; they were directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. See Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: Murray, 2001). 64. See especially Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ (London: Harper Press, 2010), 19–120, 207–12; also important as an overview to the neglected state of research on signal intelligence is Christopher Andrew, “Intelligence in the Cold War,” in The Cold War, Vol. 2: Crises and Détente, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, 5th ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 417–37. A top-secret executive order from President Harry S. Truman led to the establishment of the National Security Agency in 1952. No history of the NSA comparable to Aldrich’s study of the GCHQ currently exists. 65. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, 301–2.

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66. Notes to a Memorandum on a Charter for STIB, February 2, 1955, DEFE 21/24, TNA London. 67. Memorandum to Bossard from STIB Berlin, February 1, 1956, DEFE 41/136, TNA London. Siemens and Halske and AEG established Telefunken in 1903. Control of Telefunken passed completely to AEG in September 1941: AEG subsequently enabled the company to establish its independence that year; relations between the two companies remained very close. 68. Memorandum to Bossard from STIB Berlin, November 28, 1955, DEFE 41/136, TNA London. 69. Memorandum from Mrs. M. Tjaden, Foreign Office (German Section), January 10, 1952, DEFE 41/61, TNA London. 70. Letter from Horner to Evans, December 7, 1951, DEFE 41/2, TNA London. 71. Memorandum from STIB, Berlin to Bossard, February 11, 1954, DEFE 41/113, TNA London. 72. Letter from E. B. Abbotts (signed “Crash!”) to Evans, August 10, 1953, DEFE 41/113, TNA London. 73. Letter to the BSSO Liaison Section, Cologne, from F. C. Bossard, March 21, 1956, DEFE 41/137, TNA London. 74. Memorandum on Operation “Dragon Return,” DDR Officials, August 21, 1953, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. During the first quarter of 1951, six German scientists and engineers who had just returned from the Soviet Union were interrogated first in West Berlin and then more thoroughly in the British zone of Germany, with these sessions forming a key part of the operation subsequently known under the cover name “Dragon Return.” 75. See the memorandum from the STIB director, June 3, 1953, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. CDU Bundestag member Theodor Blank was clandestinely charged with the task after the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula during the summer of 1950. Prominent leaders of the West German military toiled on behalf of Gehlen’s clandestine “Org” prior to the ministry’s declaration, notably the first chief of staff of the Federal Armed Forces, Adolf Heusinger. For an introduction to the establishment of the military espionage arm of the new service, see Dieter Krüger, Das Amt Blank. Die schwierige Gründung des Bundesministeriums für Verteidigung (Freiburg: Rombach, 1993), 72–77; Niclas-Frederic Weisser, Die Entwicklung des Bundesnachrichtendienstes. Historische Einflüsse, Grundlagen und Grenzen seiner Kompetenzen (Göttingen: Sierke, 2014), 160–81. 76. Niederschrift zur Sitzung des Fachausschuss für Uran-Geologie und- Bergbau der Physikalischen Studiengesellschaft Düsseldorf mbH, Düsseldorf, June 28, 1955, Abteilung III, Rep. 83, 183/1, Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin. Pretsch was transferred to the office of the federal minister for atomic questions effective January 1, 1956. Memorandum to Z2 from Abteilung II, May 24, 1956, PERS 101/73606, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 77. Duty Book Dispatch to STIB, Bonn from STIB, Berlin concerning the Amt für Gesamtdeutsche Studentenfragen, September 29, 1955, DEFE 41/142, TNA London. 78. Report to British Intelligence Division, Scientific and Technical Intelligence, Future Plans (undated), DEFE 41/86, TNA London. 79. Handwritten notes from David Evans to H. S. Young, undated, most likely January 1955, DEFE 21/23, TNA London. Churchill accepted the prize in Aachen the following year (1956); it was his first visit to Germany after the Potsdam Conference of July 1945. 80. Evans to Young, March 29, 1954, DEFE 21/27, TNA London. 81. Kurzgefasste Dartstellung des Lebenslaufes/beruflichen Werdegangs des Herrn Staatssekretärs Prof. Dr. med. h.c. Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Ing. Leo Brandt, Düsseldorf, undated, NW 0292 53, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen. 82. Leo Brandt, Deutsche Funkmesstechnik 1944. Ein Vortrag von Dipl.-Ing. Leo Brandt, gehalten am 8. Februar 1944 zur Einführung der Zentimeter-Technik für das Funkmessgerät (Dortmund: Verkehrs- und Wirtschaftsverlag, 1956). 83. Report on Organization of Telefunken April 21–26, 1945, Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee Firmenarchiv AEG-Telefunken, I.2.060 C, 7786, Historisches Archiv des Deutschen Technikmuseum Berlin, 31. 84. Leo Brandt, ed., Aufgaben deutscher Forschung auf dem Gebiet der Natur- Ingenieurund Gesellschaftswissenschaften. Versuch eines vorläufigen Überblicks mit zusätzlichen Anga-

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ben über Forschungsstätten und Förderer deutscher Forschung (Westdeutscher Verlag: Cologne and Opladen, 1952), 383–85. 85. Visit Report No. 121, Ministerial Direktor Brandt, April 15, 1952, DEFE 21/14, TNA London. Brandt single-handedly prepared and directed almost all of the working group’s first three hundred meetings, including sessions after his retirement from public service. See Anlage zum Schreiben an Herrn Kühn, April 1966, RW 0180, No. 547, Landesarchiv NordrheinWestfalen. 86. Several popular tracts of his emphasize Germany’s scientific losses—to the Nazis via persecution of German-speaking Jews, but also to those powers victorious over Nazi Germany after 1945—alongside the threat posed by socialist nations’ willingness to invest heavily in aeronautics and atomic energy. See Leo Brandt, Die Forschung. Das Tor zur Zukunft (Düsseldorf: Staatsbürgerliche Bildungsstelle des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1958), 9–12. 87. Letters from Brandt to Hahn, August 2, 1955, and Hahn to Brandt, September 19, 1961, Abteilung III, Rep. 14A, Bestell-Nr. 420, Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin. 88. Notes on a visit to Germany dated April 11–21, 1953, by Professor R. V. Jones, DEFE 40/28, TNA London. 89. Bonn Embassy Cipher to the Ministry of Defence, London, January 11, 1954, DEFE 21/ 27, TNA London. 90. Letter from Evans to Hugh Young, March 25, 1954, DEFE 21/27, TNA London. 91. Letter from John C. Green to Harry Pontius, March 15, 1950, “Joachim Pretsch,” RG 330, Entry 1B, Box 128, NARA II. 92. Agent Report, Subject: STUHLINGER, Ernest [sic], GS-15, Redstone Arsenal, August 2, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 246, NARA II. During his 1958 stay in West Germany and West Berlin, another naturalized American, German-born rocket engine expert Arthur Rudolph, agreed to contact CIC offices on a daily basis. Message to Field Offices from CO 66th CIC Group Bad Cannstatt, June 4, 1958, “Arthur Louis Rudolph,” RG 319, Box No. 654, NARA II. 93. Young to Evans, March 14, 1955, DEFE 21/26, TNA London. 94. Note to DSI Ontario, Canada, from H. S. Young, August 6, 1952, DEFE 21/14, TNA London. 95. Handwritten notes from David Evans to H. S. Young, undated, most likely January 1955, DEFE 21/23, TNA London. 96. Memorandum on Prof. E. Schuetz (ex. Russia) Jena University to STIB, Bonn, March 8, 1956, DEFE 41/137, TNA London. Other key contacts at the Max Planck Society mentioned in STIB files were Albert Betz, Wilhelm Rudorf, Hans-Joachim Schlichting, and Karl Ziegler. 97. Memorandum from Evans to Chief, Intelligence Division, April 12, 1950, DEFE 41/84, TNA London. On Heisenberg’s relations with Adenauer and other political leaders, see Cathryn Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 308–40. 98. Lauder to Chief, Intelligence Division, Herford, January 4, 1951, DEFE 21/14. 99. STIB Interview Report (unnumbered), Prof. Dr. H. Klumb, March 31, 1955, DEFE 21/ 14, TNA London. The meeting with Klumb was arranged for Dr. Stern by another informal STIB contact, Dipl.-Ing. Otto Fuchs. 100. On other forms of Anglo-American cooperation, see Maddrell, Spying on Science, 82–87. 101. Keven Paul Wright, “Cold War Reconnaissance Flights along the Berlin Corridors and in the Berlin Control Zone 1960–90: Risk, Coordination, and Sharing,” Intelligence and National Security 30, no. 5 (October 2015): 615–36. 102. An interesting overview of the denial and sharing of scientific knowledge acquired in Germany in the years immediately following 1945 is John Krige, “Building the Arsenal of Knowledge,” Centaurus 52, no. 4 (2010): 280–96. 103. The Returnee Exploitation Group formally reported to the Department of the Army Detachment (DAD), which was a cover for the CIA in Germany. REG was one of two divisions reporting to DAD until 1955; the second was a so-called Deserter Resettlement Center (DRC). The CIA set up suboffices for the REG in the castle at Kronberg and in Königstein and Bad Soden.

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104. Evans to Young, July 23, 1952, DEFE 41/14, TNA London. 105. Subject: Phillip Schuhmann, Memorandum from Evans to STIB Berlin, 12 (Berlin) Int. Staff, October 13, 1952, DEFE 41/15, TNA London. 106. How the latter organization viewed Evans’s attempts to reduce the main foreign espionage agency’s radius in scientific matters remains classified. 107. Evans to the Chairman DSI/JTIC, Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, March 5, 1953, DEFE 41/9, TNA London. 108. Young to Evans, March 12, 1953, DEFE 41/9, TNA London. Young would assume the directorship in 1954, when the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence was absorbed into the Joint Intelligence Bureau. Young’s predecessor was R. V. Jones. Huw Dylan, Defense Intelligence and the Cold War: Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau 1945–1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 122–23. 109. Horner to Evans, February 26, 1952, DEFE 41/9, TNA London. 110. The files currently provide no response to Horner’s request, but see Letter from Horner to Evans, October 24, 1949, DEFE 41/128, TNA London. On the role of the Board of Trade in luring German experts to the United Kingdom in late 1945, see Mick, Forschen für Stalin, 76–78. 111. Summary of Information, Dr. Hans Hoyer, July 15, 1952, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 316, NARA II. 112. Letter from Horner to Evans, April 28, 1952, DEFE 41/13, TNA London. 113. Notes on Discussion on May 16, 1952, at REG HQ Frankfurt between Hagstette, Thayer, Graham, and Wilberforce, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. 114. Prior to the introduction of transistors, electronic tubes were used to create, rectify, amplify, and modulate electrical signals. The revolution in electronics is discussed in David Reynolds, “Science, Technology, and the Cold War,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3: Endings, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 378–99, esp. 382–94. 115. Steimel joined Telefunken in 1932, where he came to direct the electron tube research department initiated there by his doctoral adviser, Hans Rukop. His university salary in Cologne was paid for by Telefunken, Rukop had joined Telefunken in 1914. See Günter Dörfel and Renate Tobies, “Elektronröhrenforschung nach 1945. Telefunkenforscher in Ost und West und das Scheitern des Konzepts der ‘Gnom-Röhren’ in Erfurt,” in Physik im Kalten Krieg. Beiträge zur Physikgeschichte während des Ost-West-Konflikts ed. Christian Forstner and Dieter Hoffmann (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013), 91–92; Renate Tobias, Iris Runge: A Life at the Crossroads of Mathematics, Science, and Industry, trans. Valentine A. Pakis, rev. ed. (Basel: Springer, 2012), 161. 116. Letter from Karl Steimel to the District Mayor of Berlin-Zehlendorf, June 16, 1945, translated and reprinted in Tobias, Iris Runge, 390–93. A copy of this letter (in German) is located at the German Technical Museum in Berlin. See Letter from Steimel to the Bezirksbürgermeister des Verwaltungsbezirkes Zehlendorf, June 16, 1945, Firmenarchiv AEGTelefunken, Personendossiers, Bestand I.2.060, 3483, Archiv des Deutschen Technikmuseums, Berlin. 117. On Soviet designs for this East Berlin facility, see Johannes Bähr, “Das Oberspreewerk—ein sowjetisches Zentrum für Röhren- und Hochfrequenztechnik in Berlin (1945–1952),” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 39, no. 3 (1994): 145–65. 118. According to a 1953 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report obtained for this project: Memorandum on Karl Steimel—Internal Security—GE, from W. A. Branigan to A. H. Belmont, August 13, 1953, RG 65, Entry No. 136-P, Box No. 144, “65-61448–Sec. 1,” NARA II. 119. Relations with Telefunken—American Intervention, undated (probably August 1952), DEFE 41/13, TNA London. 120. STIB Preliminary Interview Report No. 64 on Karl Steimel, July 9, 1952, DEFE 41/97, TNA London. 121. A production facility established in Łódź in August 1942 was transferred in August 1944 to Ulm; included in the shipment were three hundred train cars of equipment and 1,400 “Poles.” See “Notes on the Chronik der Röhrenwerkes von AEG-Telefunken in Ulm,” January

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23, 1978, Firmenarchiv AEG-Telefunken, Bestand I.2.060 C, 7847, Historisches Archiv des Deutschen Technikmuseum Berlin. 122. Berthold Bosch, “Zum Gedanken an Dr. phil. Dr.-Ing. E.h. Karl Steimel,” Funkgeschichte 77 (1991): 10. Firmenarchiv AEG-Telefunken, Personendossiers, Bestand I.2.060, PD 3483, Archiv des Deutschen Technikmuseums, Berlin. 123. Evans encouraged the head of the Berlin office to impress upon Steimel the many contacts Bossard enjoyed in England. Evans’s hope was that Steimel might take the hint to exploit STIB as his preferred channel for unofficial inquiries. Evans to STIB Berlin, March 11, 1953, DEFE 41/11, TNA London. 124. See the assessment of Max Hans Knoll dated July 28, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box 412, “X 9 03 05 47,” NARA II. 125. Memorandum from SAC, Newark, to Director, FBI, December 1, 1952, RG 65, Entry No. 136-P, Box No. 144, “65-61448–Sec. 1,” NARA II. 126. Evans to Young, November 12, 1953, DEFE 41/129, TNA London. 127. Memorandum on Karl Steimel—Internal Security—GE, from W. A. Branigan to A. H. Belmont, August 13, 1953, RG 65, Entry No. 136-P, Box No. 144, “65-61448–Sec. 1,” NARA II. 128. CIA Memorandum for the Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 28, 1956, RG 65, Entry No. 136-P, Box No. 144, “65-61448–Sec. 2,” NARA II. 129. Special message from John Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, July 22, 1953, RG 65, Entry No. 136-P, Box No. 144, “65-61448–Sec. 1,” NARA II. 130. Evans to Young, November 12, 1953, DEFE 41/129, TNA London. For an introduction to the depths of McCarthyism, see David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 46–67. 131. Evans to Abbots, December 16, 1953, DEFE 41/129, TNA London. 132. STIB was rather cryptically revealed as “a Ministry of Defense unit in Germany, responsible for assessing the threat to Western Europe from the East.” See Minutes of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence and Joint Technical Intelligence Committee, May 26, 1954, DEFE 41/ 76, TNA London. 133. See Evans to Director, DSI/JSIC, August 20, 1951, DEFE 21/13, TNA London. 134. Records of this division form the basis for discussion in chapter 5. 135. Eigene Beobachtung, November 1945, B 206/1336, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 136. Deportierung deutscher Arbeiter aus Jena, 500/550/1043, October 21, 1946, B 206/ 1336, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 137. Report titled “Sowjetischer Versuch, Hensoldt-Werke Wetzlar über Zeiss-Werke Jena unter sowjetischer Kontrolle zu bringen,” July 1948, B 206/1136, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 138. See, for example, the report supplied by a former Zeiss employee dated May 28, 1953, and the chief accountant of the VEB Schwermaschinenbau in S. M. Kirow in Leipzig, July 8, 1954, B 206/1335 and B 206/1372, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 139. See, for example, Meldung Nr. 20894, August 31, 1954, B 206/1388, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 140. Memorandum from Young to the Director of STIB, May 27, 1954, DEFE 21/14, TNA London. 141. Memorandum to the Director of STIB, September 8, 1955, DEFE 41/142, TNA London. 142. See Notes on a visit to Germany April 11–21, 1953, by Professor R. V. Jones, DEFE 40/ 28, TNA London.

Chapter Four

American Liberators The Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC)

Drawing from the records of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), in the following pages I first turn to an unfamiliar vetting agency, a largely unknown precursor to today’s Military Counterintelligence Service (Militärischer Abschirmdienst). The so-called Institute for Contemporary Research, a favorite of Bonn’s Ministries of the Interior and Defense, provoked a behind-the-scenes battle over access to newcomers at Camp Valka with long-term implications for West Germany’s occupation. The exclusion of the Institute for Contemporary Research from political litmus testing during the mid-1950s called into question the allegiances of the Bavarian state office formally charged with domestic security, the Bavarian Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz (LfV). Forced to choose between the wishes of Bonn and Washington, key officials from this Bavarian security entity placed their faith in American occupation authorities. Still more dramatic struggles at Camp Valka extended to a foreign screening authority no longer remembered as such, the broadcaster Radio Free Europe (RFE), financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The review in this chapter of CIC files considers the espionage activities of a RFE employee, Jiří Kalaš, a Czech- and German-speaking redefector to the East. Kalaš’s case engaged American security agencies in pitched cross-border battles with their Czechoslovak and East German counterparts. An American decision to forfeit the struggle over former RFE employee Kalaš reflected a desire to quietly revoke the United States’ professed desire to overthrow Communist regimes in east-central Europe. Clashes over the newly arrived in western Germany and West Berlin extended from Eastern Bloc spies like Kalaš to individuals incarcerated and 125

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tortured by the Minstry for State Security (Stasi) and its Soviet overlords. One particularly unlikely trio, a Stasi guard and two of his inmate charges, managed to escape the imprisonment of the Ministry for State Security at the notorious Hohenschönhausen penitentiary. The remarkable tale received extensive West German media coverage, whereas the interrogation narratives of most others incarcerated there were carefully shielded from journalists. This chapter then introduces two very different individuals held at Hohenschönhausen and described extensively in the CIC files: Karl Hamann, East Germany’s first minister of supply, and Erhardt Knappe, a microanalytical chemist, Nazi spy, and Stasi prisoner and collaborator. Part 1 concluded with a catalog of American misdeeds compiled in 1953 by the new director of the screening office of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) at Camp Valka. In his stinging assessment of those charged with screening displaced populations, the administrator named only one foreign intelligence agency outright: the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. For the various domestic and international services involved in vetting new arrivals at Camp Valka, the overriding concern was access, ideally privileged, to all foreign-born newcomers. CIC documents reveal that in April 1954, Kurt Breull, the high civil servant in Bonn charged with responsibility for refugee affairs in the West German Federal Ministry of the Interior, forwarded classified instructions to the director and deputy director of Camp Valka. According to Breull’s secret note, all arrivees at the camp should in the future be processed through a newly established transit barrack, and all documentation that newcomers had brought with them to the federal republic should henceforth be confiscated prior to any encounter with either American or West German agencies operating in the camp. Documentation seized by German border police and security officials would thereafter be made available to intelligence agencies at the explicit instruction of Breull’s superiors within the Bonn Ministry of the Interior. 1 West Germany’s Ministry of the Interior has declassified only a limited portion of its records from the 1950s. 2 Given the current state of restricted access to these pertinent collections, we must rely on CIC sources to trace plans put forward in 1954, apparently by senior members of the Bonn government, to change the pecking order for questioners. The circumstances surrounding behind-the-scenes attempts to reshuffle questioning to afford Bonn officials greater control over asylum security warrants scrutiny, for it indicates how German-American quarrels during the period informed struggles over hegemony and the relevance of West German legal procedures. Breull’s maneuver did not escape the attention of American services at Camp Valka. Sergeant John Kohn of the U.S. Air Force’s Historical Research Division in Nuremberg relayed information about the Ministry of the Interior’s move through “casual sources” up the chain of command. Kohn

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then observed his German colleagues’ reactions, particularly those of the many domestic security services then active alongside the Americans at Valka. The first sign the initiative spearheaded by the Ministry of the Interior might gain traction among Kohn’s West German counterparts came a few days later at a meeting involving three individuals: the Valka chief of the BfV, Wolfgang Walter Menzel; the BfV’s representative in Nuremberg, Hans Gross; and Edmund Hinze, chief of a debriefing unit then publicly known as Prescreening Group “C,” which reported to a so-called Institute for Contemporary Research (Institut für Gegenwartsforschung). Hinze’s “institute” was in turn a cover for an intelligence collection agency of the Blank Office, the clandestine organization charged with plans to establish a West German Ministry of Defense. 3 HINZE’S CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH: BREAKING RANKS WITH AMERICAN SERVICES How exactly this Institute for Contemporary Research, a forerunner of Germany’s third intelligence organization, the comparatively small and almost entirely unstudied Military Counterintelligence Service (known initially as the Central Security Office and subsequently as the Office for the Security of the West German Armed Forces), lost its place in Camp Valka’s debriefing queue invites us to consider the inner workings of the federal republic’s security machinery from fresh perspectives, based not on highly relevant West German records, which remain for the most part classified, but rather more circuitously—on insights contained in the individual case files of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps housed in suburban Washington. Undeclared to the public until 1955, the Institute for Contemporary Research would ultimately be absorbed into the military intelligence establishment of West Germany’s Ministry of Defense. How this organization disappeared from refugee screening at Camp Valka warrants exploration. In the autumn of 1954, representatives of this “institute” launched an initiative to exclude the BfV from security vetting at the country’s main asylum center, an initiative that enjoyed the support of the Ministry of the Interior. The stated purpose of the institute and its questioning outfit at Valka was to roll back the advance of communism; closer to home, it was intended to challenge, perhaps even supplant, its two main competitors at Camp Valka, both the American-inspired and -funded Gehlen Organization and the BfV, the domestic security agency designed to prevent the rebirth of the Gestapo, at that time reeling from the defection to East Berlin of its first president, Otto John. According to U.S. Air Force representative Kohn, Hinze rapidly emerged as the most willing of Camp Valka’s West German representatives to break

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ranks with the country’s leading occupier. In keeping with Breull’s memorandum, Hinze proposed to Gross and Menzel, his fellow espionage counterparts at the BfV, that all newly arrived refugees at the camp face West German intelligence offices before drawing the unwanted attention of American counterparts. According to minutes of the discussion between Hinze, Gross, and Menzel secretly provided to the U.S. Air Force’s Kohn by Gross’s and Menzel’s secretaries, Hinze went one step further: in a letter addressed to both the Cologne headquarters of the BfV and Breull’s Ministry of the Interior in Bonn, the head of Valka’s Prescreening Group “C” proposed to include a request that no American agency be allowed to physically remove any refugee from the camp for questioning or any other purpose without first obtaining the explicit approval of all German intelligence agencies stationed at Valka. Hinze’s suggestion echoed critiques supplied by the director of the camp’s screening group from the BfV only a few months earlier. Criticisms of American-inspired espionage activities and assistance American occupiers were allegedly granting to east-central European agents formed the crux of the dispute. At stake was not the mobilization of American power on behalf of democracy everywhere, a goal championed especially vigorously by the Dwight Eisenhower administration during the early 1950s, or the alleged misdeeds of agents and stringers from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, but rather access to entrants, especially those with ties to Communist regimes apparently eager to destabilize the as-yet-untested federal republic. The main impediment to access was American: in their pursuit of greater autonomy at Camp Valka, Bonn’s Ministry of the Interior was prepared to risk affronts with American occupiers. The observations of U.S. Air Force and Army representatives provide us with insights into how the local representatives of the BfV positioned themselves vis-à-vis Breull’s and Hinze’s assertions of independence. The BfV formally answered to the minister of the interior and was thus, at least on paper, part of the chancellor’s policymaking inner circle. Documents included in the records of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps reveal that both Gross and Menzel balked at Hinze’s suggestion. Their decision unleashed a series of events culminating in the ouster of the clandestine military intelligence branch of the then undeclared Ministry of Defense from the formal debriefing machinery at Camp Valka. Four months after the delivery of Breull’s orders, the intelligence services at Camp Valka, foreign and domestic, were exactly as they had been, minus one: Hinze and his organization had been removed from the prescreening roster of what was then known as the Federal Agency for the Recognition of Alien Refugees. Breull’s efforts to ensure West German security organiza-

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tions loyal to Bonn authorities were the first to scrutinize all newcomers at Valka’s screening center had met with failure. 4 The turning point in this clash of American and German interests appears to have come with Hinze’s dismissal, signed by his superior, Rudi Schulz, the head of the Institute for Contemporary Research in Munich. Responsibility for Hinze’s firing appears to have rested not with Schulz, his formal supervisor, but rather with the Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German security office with close ties to American intelligence authorities. Ernst von Hohmeyer, an employee of the Bavarian State Office in Nuremberg, had, through observation of Hinze, reached a remarkable verdict that squared with American objectives: the chief of the Institute for Contemporary Research at Camp Valka had worked for the Soviets before coming to western Germany. Hinze’s troubles, at least as Hohmeyer assessed them, did not end there. Investigations by a Yugoslav screener at Camp Valka enlisted by Hohmeyer yielded further complications: Hinze’s father had been, and perhaps still was, a Soviet collaborator. Hinze’s immoral behavior offered additional proof of his unsuitability, or at least gave his detractors further ammunition. Among the offenses leveled against Hinze was an after-hours drinking bout at the camp’s Czechoslovak canteen and the attempted rape of a Hungarian Jewish displaced person, Elisabeth Szegedi, an act confirmed in writing by two witnesses, fellow inmates at Valka. As grievous as the various charges against the head of the Institute for Contemporary Research appear, it is worth noting that Bavarian state authorities had in the recent past chosen merely to reprimand Hinze for similar incidents rather than to remove him (and his office) from a position of authority. A less obvious, though arguably equally important, factor in Hinze’s dismissal was the readiness of American officials to see his screening operation, and by extension the intelligence nucleus of the future Ministry of Defense, excluded from Valka’s interrogation roster. As early as April 1953, an American memorandum contained in the CIC records notes the “serious difficulty” Hinze was causing to the U.S. Air Force’s 7053rd Air Intelligence Services Squadron “by diverting refugees from them, etc.” The proposition the air force representative at Valka put to his army colleague was unequivocal: “Maybe we can remove him somehow.” 5 With the assistance of the BfV and representatives of the Bavarian LfV, domestic competitors that stood to gain from the Ministry of Defense’s loss, U.S. Air Force officials apparently got their wish. In August 1954 a padlock was placed on Hinze’s office, and the Institute for Contemporary Research’s number was stricken from all copies of the routine slips handed to newly arrived refugees. Dire as matters seemed for Hinze, less had changed for him personally than at first met the eye. His dismissal did not spell the end of his career in intelligence or even a cut in his pay. Hinze continued to draw his full salary, while he and his family re-

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mained housed in the stone barracks, a group of buildings immediately adjacent to Camp Valka that were, at least formally, reserved for those foreign individuals granted full asylum rights. Officials from various security agencies continued to supply him with reports, including fresh analyses from another state-level security agency that enjoyed warm relations with American intelligence services, Bavaria’s Border Police. Hinze, it seems, had friends in high places, and not just in Bavaria. Two months after his dismissal, a meeting in Bonn with Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, head of a military intelligence organization answering directly to the Office of the Federal Chancellor, appeared to usher in new possibilities for the former Valka screening chief. 6 Heinz offered him a position within what was known as the Advisory Group for the Protection of German Industry, subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, the Bonn authority Hinze had recently if unsuccessfully supported at Camp Valka. Heinz was extending the opportunity to establish informant dragnets to trace “foreign agents and Communist elements” in the industrial plants that he and Hinze felt certain would soon be producing armaments for a reborn German military. 7 Despite his (and his office’s) abrupt dismissal, his immoral behavior, and his (and the Ministry of the Interior’s) confrontational course vis-à-vis American services such as the U.S. Air Force, Hinze seems to have burned few bridges at Camp Valka. Both leading representatives of the Bonn federal government and some American intelligence officials appear to have willingly consigned the unpleasant incident to the past. In 1955 Hinze was reportedly on friendly terms with a former Valka Counter Intelligence Corps agent, Captain Winifred Tosczko, volunteering information about his future plans and expressing a desire to maintain casual contact with the American service. Whether Hinze provided assistance to the CIC in later years is unknown: the file reveals only that, after a stint in direct sales, he took up the pen to cover local news and sports for Nuremberg’s main daily newspaper. 8 The CIC files do show that the Camp Valka chapter was only one in a much longer volume of Hinze’s relations with U.S. military intelligence. Hinze had launched his postwar intelligence career running an informant net in Berlin, working there for Jakob Kolb, head of the so-called West Berlin Information Service (Aufklärungsdienst). In early 1952, after several years spent serving the informational needs of multiple Western services active in the divided former capital, the Kolb group became a Berlin outstation for Heinz within the Blank Office. 9 After his stint with the Information Service, Hinze took up a position within the Fighting Group against Inhumanity, the controversial German anti-Communist resistance organization bankrolled by the Counter Intelligence Corps and the CIA. 10 After his stints in Berlin, Hinze toiled for the “fighting group” well behind the actual battle lines, in the West German town of Karlsruhe. From there, he made his way to Camp Valka, where his vetting office began supplying Gerhard Schacht, a former

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paratrooper and Munich-based representative of Heinz’s clandestine intelligence group, information on illegal border crossers in exchange for generous monthly cash emoluments. 11 Exploitation of Camp Valka’s refugees for political capital drew the attention not only of a surprising number of American and West German agencies, but also of the now infamous Communist Bloc security services. The most important of these represented the two countries sharing a border with the Free State of Bavaria: East Germany and Czechoslovakia. An episode that brought a more familiar cast of Cold War–era intelligence organizations and interests into a lengthy multinational struggle over the loyalty of another, as-yet-unknown two-man questioning team at Camp Valka came to the brief attention of a national audience on April 1956, when the 9:00 p.m. broadcast of Czechoslovak state radio invited listeners to hear the confessional testimony of a “returnee” to Prague. ASYLUM POLITICS AND CLANDESTINE INTRIGUES: THE JIŘÍ KALAŠ INCIDENT Identifying himself as Jiří Kalaš, the speaker proclaimed that Radio Free Europe, the American-run government broadcaster made famous by its dramatized accounts of escapes to the West, was in fact an organ of American intelligence performing secret acts at Camp Valka. 12 Declassified Counter Intelligence Corps records confirm in broad outline the validity of Kalaš’s announcement, as well as a sense of relief among the CIC’s Nuremberg Field Station staff that their former “information-gathering agent” had left unmentioned a string of highly sensitive American espionage contacts, betraying in his broadcast only one individual by name, Munich RFE editor Otto Graf. Kalaš’s history, like Hinze’s, extended back to the tumultuous period immediately following the war’s end, when U.S. intelligence agents had recruited Kalaš to collect information on industrial production at a small state-run enterprise in the Bohemian border town of Jablonec nad Nisou. Like Hinze’s, insofar as the CIC was concerned Kalaš’s tale reveals misdirected energies, muddled initiatives, and breathtaking excesses. The discovery of Kalaš’s alleged work on behalf of the CIC may have led the Czechoslovak intelligence service, the Státní Bezpečnost (StB), to imprison his contacts, purportedly occasioning his flight westward in the late summer of 1952 via East Germany to West Berlin. 13 According to declassified “counter subversion” documents, Kalaš was removed from West Berlin’s normal refugee processing channels by the König Group, yet another network of informal “subagents” then recruiting in the former German capital on behalf of U.S. military intelligence. Subsequently flown to Frankfurt, Kalaš was soon thereafter registered at Camp Valka.

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From May 1953 until March 1956, Kalaš, like Hinze, resided and worked in the Federal Assembly Camp for Foreigners in Nuremberg. Both men occupied apartments in the camp’s stone barracks. Kalaš’s employer at Camp Valka was the Information Section of Radio Free Europe. 14 His formal responsibility to the Munich-based broadcaster was to interview new arrivals from Czechoslovakia, focusing on matters of economic and military significance. 15 His spadework at Valka, much like Hinze’s, brought him into contact with the BfV’s Menzel. Whereas Hinze’s clash with the Americans and their BfV allies led to his and his organization’s ouster, Kalaš’s confrontation with the nation’s lead occupier vaulted the German-speaking Czech to new assignments within the nebulous world of the Czechoslovak security service. In early 1956 Kalaš fled Valka. Via divided Berlin, he traveled to Prague, essentially redefecting. In the estimation of the CIC’s Counter Espionage Division, however, the Radio Free Europe interviewer’s decision to return to the country of his birth stemmed not from ideology, but rather from the pleas of his mother and his former wife. Both had remained in Communist Czechoslovakia following his escape to Berlin during the late summer of 1952. Years after his redefection and their own failure to entice him back across the border to western Germany, American intelligence officials conceded— thanks to investigative labors carried out by Menzel’s BfV—that an StB agent, Lubor Juza, had succeeded in luring Kalaš back to his homeland. 16 American CIC operatives in Nuremberg were aware that Kalaš had received letters and telephone calls from his wife and mother urging him to journey to either East Germany or Czechoslovakia prior to his disappearance from Camp Valka. Such ploys were common; the RFE employee’s attachment to his wife and homeland were at the heart of efforts to manipulate his allegiances and actions. Czechoslovak security records obtained for this project reveal that after two unsuccessful attempts, with assistance from Stasi chief Erich Mielke, an officer of the Ministry of the Interior in the Czech town of Karlovy Vary succeeded in recruiting the bilingual twenty-eightyear-old as an StB agent in mid-December 1955. A relatively young, if apparently somewhat directionless, womanizer and drinker, the “haughty and bourgeois” Kalaš was given a crash course in cyphering—and marched back to Camp Valka. 17 During his three-month tenure there as an StB spy, Kalaš provided information on American CIC agents dispatched to Czechoslovakia, Czech and Slovak refugees to West Germany, and Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Polish employees of the foreign services based at the Bavarian asylum center. Beyond these betrayals, his files, today housed in Prague, also reveal the threefold aim of his own evening broadcast: to discredit the popular American broadcaster in the eyes of Czechs and Slovaks, to cause American agents active in Czechoslovakia to doubt their personal safety, and to foment West German domestic criticism of liberation policies embraced by Camp Valka’s most important vetter of those trekking westward.

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Kalaš’s cooperation with the Czechoslovak intelligence agency continued for more than twenty-five years. Regarded as a reliable collaborator, Kalaš’s travels (and toils as an StB agent) brought him to such far-flung destinations as Cairo, Havana, Bombay, and Beijing. In 1974 the Czechoslovak security service trusted him enough to allow him and his much younger wife to travel to Austria and Switzerland. Depression and alcoholism led Kalaš to take his own life in February 1982. 18 Like many other personal fates extensively detailed, if rarely fully elucidated, in the declassified CIC collection of Personal Name files, the documents on Kalaš leave one with the impression that the complicated affair could have ended on a positive note for the American service had it not been for other security operatives’ regrettable errors. In Kalaš’s case, jockeying among the various intelligence agencies emerges as a key theme in a convoluted spy narrative short on results and resolution. 19 Prior to his departure from Camp Valka, Kalaš had reportedly informed his interrogator colleagues of his plans to spend the weekend in Baden-Baden with a French officer assigned to a Nuremberg screening unit. As it happened, the Radio Free Europe interrogator traveled not westward to Baden-Baden in the French zone, but rather north to Berlin. Several days after his departure, Bavarian Border Police hauled Kalaš off a train coming from East Berlin, the Communist half of the former German capital, and held him near the inner German border town of Ludwigstadt. The circumstantial evidence against him was considerable. Having arrived by train from Soviet-held East Berlin, Kalaš produced an East German temporary identification document made out to an alias. In addition to a falsified passport, in his possession were more than one thousand West German marks, at that time a veritable fortune. A police officer’s telephone call to a mysterious contact in Nuremberg confirmed connections to a U.S. Army office in Fürth. Acting on orders from the Nuremberg office of the BfV, the station commander released Kalaš, allowing him to proceed to Camp Valka. 20 Local police had not ignored basic safeguards. On the contrary, they had acted on orders from above to release the suspect. The StB spy’s final stay in Bavaria proved brief. Upon arrival at his apartment in the stone barracks complex, Kalaš quickly gathered his belongings and proceeded via train to Nuremberg and then Frankfurt, whence he traveled by plane to West Berlin. A visit to a local police precinct in East Berlin brought Kalaš to the attention of the Stasi. A day later, the East German service had spirited the former RFE employee onward to the Czechoslovak capital. U.S. military intelligence was aware that Kalaš may have been working for Czechoslovak security prior to his defection, a suspicion brought to the attention of local CIA operatives by a British intelligence officer stationed in the Nuremberg area. 21 Rather than acknowledge this possibility, U.S. Army

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and other American security officials launched a multiservice operation to bring the erstwhile Valka interviewer back across the West German frontier. In their bid to counter the emotional appeals of his wife and mother, in 1958 the CIC Field Office in Nuremberg recruited a former lover of Kalaš’s, Gertrud Weber, a West German employed as a receptionist at a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremberg. This decision was unfortunate. In the CIC’s estimation, Czechoslovak intelligence recruited Kalaš’s paramour while she was visiting him in Prague. Records of the StB confirm her recruitment, mainly via Kalaš’s assistance, in the Czechoslovak capital in April 1957. In January 1959 Weber agreed to work for U.S. intelligence. A volatile mix of emotions must have informed her decision. Revenge for Kalaš’s return to his homeland and his wife probably motivated her to become the CIC’s double agent. Hoping to capitalize on what they regarded as her checkered past, U.S. Army security agents presented Weber with a difficult mission: to induce Kalaš’s return to Camp Valka via West Berlin. U.S. Army intelligence officials did not send Weber into the arms of the West’s ideological foes empty-handed. Kalaš’s CIC file notes that they supplied her with “peripheral information” on Czech and Slovak émigré personalities, Czechoslovak American civilian employees in Nuremberg, and individuals employed at Radio Free Europe. To the CIC’s dismay, providing Weber with personal dossiers believed to be of interest to the Czechoslovak service failed to yield Kalaš’s head on a platter. The former RFE interviewer remained ensconced in his native country, with several forays to East Germany and Czechoslovakia on the part of Weber yielding nothing of substance. Worse, each trip across the border seemed to bring Weber and her American handlers deeper into a complex web of Czechoslovak state security and Stasi contacts. Perhaps sensing their American colleagues’ frustration, the BfV’s representatives at Valka—the CIC’s stalwart ally in many untidy affairs, including the successful effort to rid themselves of Hinze and his Institute for Contemporary Research—offered its “counterespionage” assistance. Having learned from their interrogation team at Valka of the CIC’s initiatives to use Weber to entice Kalaš back across the border, the BfV expressed its own interest in what now several internal security agencies regarded as an especially promising affair. The CIC’s experts gave their West German counterparts the cold shoulder, citing their operation’s sensitive nature. Only in the wake of yet another of Kalaš’s failed redefection attempts by a “W. Ger. Group”—perhaps the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND)—did the CIC, the only American intelligence service with the formal power to arrest individuals in Germany and Austria, agree to summarize its operation in the form of a brief memorandum for the BfV and thus to absolve itself of further responsibility for the troubling affair.

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The American decision to dump the case on domestic helpers led the BfV to turn its sights not on Kalaš but rather on the bird in hand, his lover Weber, a German citizen. 22 U.S. intelligence assigned “financial and moral responsibility” for the “failed” double agent to Dr. Karl Nühlen, head of the BfV’s satellite desk of the Counterespionage Analysis Section. According to an assessment filed by the CIC’s Nuremberg Field Station, Nühlen had in the past proven himself cooperative. 23 Having outwitted intelligence services from three countries, Weber also appears to have slipped whatever noose Nühlen and his colleagues had laid for her. According to Kalaš’s StB file, Weber—a clever operative in her own right—succeeded in obtaining from the CIC a payoff sum of two thousand deutschmarks. And Weber’s final act in the cross-border drama involved still another romantic liaison: in early 1962 Weber and her new husband, an American soldier, moved to the CIC’s “Zone of the Interior,” the region of the world better known as the United States. Incidents such as Kalaš’s defection and Hinze’s dismissal stoked controversy at Camp Valka, an alleged hotbed of vice where questionable American liaisons and outsized resources added to the complexities faced by a plethora of security and welfare actors. At Camp Valka, much as in the formal reception centers in West Berlin and western Germany, intelligence agents of uncertain provenance solicited the engagement of (often inscrutable) new arrivals from many different nations on terms anything but clear to the parties involved. The maneuvering of American security agencies was a source of consternation to West German officials eager to impose predictability and national homogeneity on a disorderly, multinational process. Kalaš’s and Hinze’s accounts indicate that there was more than a grain of truth to domestic accounts depicting cross-border misdeeds involving deeppocketed American security officials. They also reveal the limits placed on West German sovereignty by murky alliances among domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. Aside from the hefty bouts of jousting among Western security officials in and around the controversial Federal Assembly Camp for Foreigners, the Kalaš case also points to obstacles U.S. military intelligence staff faced in overseas intelligence operations. In terms of cunning, ruthlessness, and what passed in intelligence circles for professionalism, the Counter Intelligence Corps was outmaneuvered. The decision to fold security activities in West Germany’s camps and reception centers into ill-conceived operations in eastcentral Europe exacerbated relations between American military intelligence and many West German security and police officials. As the federal republic gained strength, support for American foreign policy aims increasingly came with a price, with federal counterparts committed to the struggle against Soviet hegemony asserting demands to take the lead in face-to-face exploitation of those seeking sanctuary at West Germany’s organized encampments,

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reception centers, and semi-clandestine questioning offices designated in declassified records by the peculiar German abbreviations of BUNAST, KÜNAST, and Befra. WESTERN SUCCESSES AND STASI MISSTEPS: ESCAPE FROM HOHENSCHÖNHAUSEN Securing the allegiance of individuals deemed valuable to the maintenance of secrecy bedeviled all intelligence operators active in occupied Germany, as it did East Germany’s now infamous Ministry for State Security. Of special interest to all Western services throughout the period was the defection of Soviet and Eastern Bloc intelligence officers, military personnel, and border police: according to Arnim Wagner and Matthias Uhl, for the period from 1950 to May 1989 the Stasi registered nearly eleven thousand East Germans in these categories. 24 Regarded today as especially formidable, these figures remind us the East German security apparatus was far from omniscient or infallible. Particularly in the early years, the Stasi’s missteps, even in its East Berlin stronghold, were notable, and like the ham-fisted efforts of Communist organs to exploit the propaganda value of American misadventures launched from Camp Valka, the foibles of Eastern services received media coverage on the capitalist side of the ideological divide. Publicizing the flight stories of especially daring, notably photogenic young men served to remind West Germans of their society’s growing material and immaterial attractions, as well as to paper over abiding frictions within the contentious Western security alliance. Rare but not entirely unheard of during the 1950s were press accounts that sought to instill confidence in the elaborate security procedures slowing the advance of hundreds of thousands of native German speakers each month into West German society. One such treatment involved an escape from the Stasi’s now legendary Hohenschönhausen prison, the largest Stasi remand center from 1951 to 1989 and today a museum in northeast Berlin. West Germany’s most important newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, in recent decades a vocal critic of America’s espionage reach in Germany, provided the first detailed account of such a breakout—and subsequent questioning in Marienfelde. 25 A STASI JAIL BREAK AND TECHNICAL MARVELS AT MARIENFELDE According to Der Spiegel’s dramatized account, late one Saturday evening in July 1954 Stasi guard Hans-Joachim Dittmann summoned two political pris-

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oners from their cells. They were needed, Dittmann explained to a fellow guard, for electrical work. The task involved installation of American-manufactured sound equipment in one of East Germany’s jet-black EMWs (“E” and not “B” in a nod to the city of Eisenach, where the East Germans were copying BMW designs). Once his colleague had rounded the corner and was safely out of sight, Dittmann motioned to the two prisoners, Herbert Friedrich and Gerhard Lau, signaling that the pair should climb into the car’s trunk. After gently closing the lid over the two political prisoners’ heads, Dittmann got behind the wheel, started the engine, and exited the garage. Following a terse exchange with a fellow Stasi guard, Dittmann and his clandestine human cargo motored away from the prison’s last control point. Minutes later, the unlikely trio had abandoned their getaway car for public transportation, the elevated rail system connecting the city’s two halves known then as now as the S-Bahn. Their destination was the Marienfelde reception center. In the newsmagazine’s version of the Hohenschönhausen jail break, the highlight of the escapade came not in East but in West Berlin, in what Der Spiegel’s writers described as the “interrogation offices” of the federal emergency reception procedure in Berlin-Marienfelde. Called upon to substantiate the extraordinary claim that they had spent several years constructing secret microphones and broadcasting units on behalf of Soviet espionage services and the Stasi, Friedrich and Lau produced two thin metal tubes. After placing the ends of two tubes in their ears, the stern-faced bureaucrats of the formal recognition panel broke into gentle laughter, rewarded as they were with the crystal-clear sound of their own voices raising questions they had posed only a few minutes earlier in their interview of Lau and Friedrich—a technical marvel at the time. The sense of wonder conveyed in the newsmagazine’s description of the mini microphone recording device strikes one today as quaint. More akin to our own time is the venue where the miniature recording devices were fashioned: a secret laboratory complex on the grounds of the notorious police prison site. At Hohenschönhausen, as readers learned, the Stasi had tapped the high-frequency, chemistry, and engineering skills of a small number of prisoners to record and transmit private conversations in ways previously untried. 26 How had the newsmagazine, just weeks after the events at hand, received so many precise details of the trio’s dramatic escape? The CIC files provide an answer: according to a brief note, the newsmagazine’s scoop rightly belonged to the U.S. Army. American archival documents also make clear that the journalists at Der Spiegel had either omitted or, at least equally likely, not been privy to key details of the trio’s doings, starting with a visit the Stasi guard Dittmann had paid several days before the dramatic escape to “an official German intelligence agency in West Berlin.” 27 Only after thoroughly rehearsing the plan with this unnamed organization (an assessment submitted

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by the CIC Berlin Office stated that British intelligence had planned Dittmann’s operation 28) was the Stasi minder able to spirit the two prisoner technicians out of East Berlin’s high-security prison. Also unmentioned in Der Spiegel’s account was an expression of interest on the part of the BfV in using the daring, perhaps even reckless Dittmann—according to the federal office’s questioning operators in Giessen, Dittmann’s recent erotic conquests had included both a secretary at the Hohenschönhausen installation and the wife of Stasi lieutenant colonel Georg Zimmermann—in a subsequent crossborder attempt to infiltrate the Eastern espionage organization. 29 The critical assistance Dittmann had received from foreign intelligence personnel prior to his escape with the sought-after pair of prisoner technicians went unmentioned in Der Spiegel’s account. Whether a British or a German organization had been the first to greet the trio upon their arrival in West Berlin is unclear: one learns only that the CIC’s first discussions with the three men had occurred less than forty-eight hours after their escapade. Of greater interest to the CIC and its numerous competitors was Friedrich’s description of a special laboratory maintained at the Stasi prison compound and equipped with elaborate chemical and mechanical instruments. According to Friedrich, only two convicts had been granted access to a special wing of the prison’s clandestine facility. Held in this cordoned-off section in isolation, the pair received far better treatment, higher pay, and superior meals to other prisoners. Friedrich was unsure about the exact nature of the work conducted behind the prison’s walls, though he indicated it involved chemical mixtures and small wireless microphones similar to the electronic equipment the trio had smuggled out and, in the journalistic exposition provided to readers of Der Spiegel, displayed to members of Marienfelde’s formal recognition panel. Friedrich also described monthly visits of high-ranking East German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) officials to the new prison laboratory. The last and perhaps most important piece of evidence he offered the CIC Berlin prior to his (and Lau’s) departure for North Rhine-Westphalia was the identity of one of the two scientists: Erhardt Knappe, described as an Austrian national formerly employed by the IG Farben company. 30 ERHARDT KNAPPE: ELECTROCHEMIST AND INTELLIGENCE CAREERIST When security agencies believed they could use knowledge provided by escapees to their own clandestine ends, they withheld key aspects of narratives from the prying gaze of journalists. Information about Hohenschönhausen inmate Erhardt Knappe, chief chemist to Soviet and East

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German intelligence services at the Stasi penitentiary’s technical laboratory at the time of Friedrich’s escape, remained strictly under wraps. Aside from their service to the Ministry for State Security at the Hohenschönhausen complex, Erhardt Knappe and Hans-Joachim Dittmann shared little in common. Fifteen years older and born into a wealthy, multilingual family, Knappe hailed from the Bohemian lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He and his relatives assumed Czechoslovak nationality after the dual monarchy’s dissolution. Knappe’s and Dittmann’s paths crossed only briefly at Hohenschönhausen, where, as Dittmann informed officials of the BfV in Giessen, inmates from yet another Stasi prison complex, at Bautzen, had recently been transferred to a newly constructed apartment block for a specific set of highly clandestine projects. Having grown up in the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia, Knappe, the son of a wealthy industrialist, studied chemistry in Vienna and Berlin prior to completing his academic training in the Austrian city of Graz. 31 Unlike the twenty-one-year-old Dittmann, whose soccer coach in the East German border town of Görlitz recruited him to work for the Stasi, Erhardt Knappe’s long career in intelligence was of his own making. His field of expertise was microanalytical chemistry, and upon completion of his doctorate, Knappe joined a radio intercept unit in German-occupied Poland in 1940: after Nazi Germany’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the young chemist had become a German national. Upon completion of his training in radio interception at the so-called Heeresnachrichtenschule Horch, a German army intelligence school, Knappe, a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) since October 1938, was dispatched to a fixed listening post near Warsaw to intercept and decipher the shortwave messages of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany’s then ally and partner in Poland’s destruction. In April 1945 Knappe returned to his hometown of Böhmisch Kamnitz, today the Czech village of Česká Kamenice. 32 Knappe made his way to Dresden during the first half of 1946, where, from June 1946 to April 1947, the Soviet Military Administration of Saxony assigned the electrochemist to toil for the reparations section. His duties included supervisory functions over several Dresden firms producing chemical instruments. According to CIC records, during this period an old army acquaintance, Wolfgang Standare, approached him in Dresden with a potentially lucrative mission on behalf of an American office in Munich: Knappe was to obtain information on Soviet troops, their types and equipment. Whatever anti-Soviet espionage plans, if any, the two wartime comrades had hatched in the Saxon capital appear to have gone awry. While Standare escaped arrest, his brother and Knappe, along with fifteen others, fell into the clutches of the Soviet foreign military’s main intelligence directorate (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, GRU). Tried in secret in August 1947, convicted of espionage by a Soviet judge in Potsdam, and facing a twenty-

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five-year sentence, Knappe was forced, or perhaps merely encouraged, to place the expertise he had acquired in the service of Nazi intelligence to the uses of Germany’s Soviet overlords. 33 At the Hohenschönhausen prison installation, Knappe was called upon to organize a secret chemical laboratory; it was here that fellow prisoner Herbert Friedrich had been compelled to perform electrical work, and not far from where Dittmann launched his daring escape plan. Placed in charge of the clandestine laboratory, Knappe subsequently developed secret inks, code systems, and drugs until his release in December 1955. Four years later, in American protective custody, the scientist agent with an exceptionally checkered past confirmed Friedrich’s report that he and a handful of other technicians had enjoyed preferential treatment: beyond having his choice of meals, Knappe received permission to keep a collection of tropical fish in his cell. 34 Instructed that his service to the Ministry for State Security must continue after his release, Knappe subsequently obtained, with the Stasi’s approval, a position as chief of the Analytical Division at the Central Institute for Microbiology and Experimental Therapeutics in Jena, the forerunner to today’s Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. Knappe’s handlers told him to report to his new colleagues that he had spent the past nine years not working in the Stasi’s infamous prison facilities but rather toiling, like so many of other “returnees” observed closely by the Stasi and tracked prodigiously by Anglo-American services like the STIB and REG, at a scientific institute in the Soviet Union. Fear of being locked up again, coupled with the threat of reprisals against his family, purportedly ensured the chemist’s fealty to the Stasi and the SED state. And yet, as his Stasi (and perhaps also Soviet) handlers soon discovered, like Dittmann, Friedrich, and Lau, the accomplished chemist agent was plotting his own future. Like so many talented others at that time, Knappe intended to escape to the Federal Republic of Germany. Employed at the Zeiss works in Jena and granted permission to travel to an international scientific exposition in Frankfurt am Main in June 1958, Knappe established contact with Artur Deubner, a former fellow inmate at the Bautzen penitentiary. Knappe confided to Deubner his plan to use his participation in an upcoming scientific gathering in Birmingham in September to request political asylum. Deubner’s precise role in Knappe’s defection remains unclear. After executing his plan, Knappe appears to have made his way from the English Midlands back to Deubner in Frankfurt am Main, where in August 1958 the chemist hailing from the Bohemian lands of today’s Czech Republic was reunited with his recently escaped wife and daughters. Deubner, host to Knappe’s entire family and a close confidant, recommended that the chemist present himself to West German intelligence services, whereupon, if we believe the CIC file, the BND brought him to a safe house on the outskirts of the Alpine town of Bad Tölz. Offering the prodigious sum of two thousand

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German marks for two weeks of his time, the Bundesnachrichtendienst instructed him never to contact its Allied counterparts. In the event Western intelligence services nonetheless discovered his talents, he should make every effort to conceal his former working relationships with Soviet and East German security organs. 35 Knappe, as the CIC records illustrate, chose to ignore the BND’s unsolicited advice. Instead he initiated contact with staff at the CIC office in Offenbach; there army intelligence staff corroborated Knappe’s tale with reports contained in the files of other Stasi defectors, including those relating to the case of Hans-Joachim Dittmann. After comparing Knappe’s initial debriefing with the testimonies of Dittmann, Friedrich, and Lau, the special agents in Offenbach decided to call in two teams of technical experts, a so-called Special Publications Detachment and the CIA’s Technical Aids Division. 36 Knappe’s debriefing at the hands of U.S. Army intelligence experts in Frankfurt lasted more than three weeks. The subject’s knowledge of the Hohenschönhausen technical services prison workshop was transcribed verbatim from seven audiotapes, with lengthy passages translated into English. The chief of the U.S. Army Special Publications Detachment, Charles Yech, initially seemed pleased with the yield, noting that Knappe “represents the best source of this type of technical intelligence to which our organization has had access.” Stating that “it was impossible to put a dollar value on the information obtained,” Yech averred in February 1959, “It is conservative to say that it is worth very many times the amount paid.” 37 And yet by December of that year the chief’s “operational interest” had considerably waned, with Yech now stating, at least in confidential exchanges with those most familiar with the case, that Knappe’s knowledge of the Stasi’s shortwave camouflage techniques was “too limited as well as too obvious to make dissemination worthwhile.” 38 While calling the value of his insights into doubt, the file does not reveal the price paid for Knappe’s services: we learn only that American services had taken it upon themselves to provide for his “future welfare” in the federal republic. 39 At least initially, given this openended commitment, Knappe was eager to hold up his end of a longer-term bargain. His file notes that he supplied the CIC’s Special Publications Detachment with introductions to a number of audio experts and electrical engineers previously employed by the Stasi, including at Karl Steimel’s old enterprise, Telefunken in Ulm, where Knappe secured, perhaps with U.S. assistance, a comfortable position of his own. Among other insights, the file reveals that the Bohemian-born electrochemist was not the first, but rather the third, employee from the Telefunken Ulm plant previously tasked with constructing miniature transmission equipment on behalf of the Stasi.

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KARL HAMANN’S PREDICAMENT—AND NATIONAL COMMITMENT Whereas details surrounding Knappe’s flight were carefully shielded from public inquiry, accounts involving the flight of leading public figures from East to West (or West to East, and sometimes back again) received extensive press coverage in West Germany and indeed beyond. Unlike Der Spiegel’s account of Dittmann, Friedrich, and Lau’s escape, these accounts often passed negative judgment on those arriving in the West, especially when individuals had held positions of authority in Communist societies. American and British intelligence services, for their part, viewed such cases quite differently from West German media. They typically regarded well-known public servants from the Soviet orbit as especially valuable as sources of information about the inner workings of Communist regimes. For such prizes, they overlooked histories of service to Soviet oppressors, a decision that not infrequently placed Western intelligence agencies at odds with much of the West German public, especially those committed to the American-led global struggle against Soviet hegemony. Among the more interesting public figures entangled in the nets cast by espionage agents in occupied Germany were members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPD), the East German counterpart to West Germany’s Free Democrats. The LDPD, like the East German version of the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU), was tolerated as a pliant, if largely inconsequential, junior element on the East German political scene. The most important post held by a LDPD politician in East Germany was that of minister of trade and supply: until December 1952, Karl Hamann, who also chaired the LDPD, headed this office (see figure 4.1). 40 Entrusted with the unenviable task of running a postwar Stalinist planned economy when West Germany’s economic miracle was gaining momentum, Hamann devoted energy not only to questions of public administration, but also to the more perilous business of extending olive branches to ideological enemies—public figures in West Germany. Recipients of his attempts at rapprochement included Theodor Heuss and West German federal ministers Franz Blücher and Thomas Dehler. Such exertions toward national unity came to an abrupt conclusion with Hamann’s arrest and expulsion from East German political and party offices in December 1952. Following a lengthy Stasi incarceration prior to his secret trial, Hamann was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for sabotage. One of his daughters, Liv, also received a draconian ten-year prison sentence. Following her husband’s imprisonment, Hamann’s wife, Helene, together with four of their six children, fled to West Berlin (a sixth daughter, Karin, resided in Stuttgart) in early January 1952. Their escape prompted not sympathy but public indignation. While interest groups lodged protests against

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Figure 4.1. File page from Karl Hamann’s CIC dossier. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

their formal “reception” with West Berlin’s lord mayor, press accounts alleged that the Stasi could not possibly have allowed the incarcerated former minister’s family to leave of their own accord. 41 Public knowledge about Hamann lent credence to the charges. He had, after all, held an important ministerial position in the East German regime for several years. And he was publicly committed to still other causes deeply unpopular in West Germany, including the East German Communist experiment and reconciliation with

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Poland. Hamann was a member of the first East German People’s Council (Volksrat) delegation to visit Warsaw in September 1949, a city German forces had obliterated five years earlier. 42 Hamann’s acquaintance with East Germany’s Soviet overseers was intimate, though not in the way many West German press accounts suggested. Between his arrest in December 1952 and sentencing in May 1954, Hamann faced over one hundred grueling and demeaning Stasi interrogations. The longest ran for seventy-six uninterrupted hours. Hamann endured—by all accounts bravely—physical and psychological torture at the hands of Stasi interrogators and their Soviet control officers. 43 One of the more remarkable and, until now, unknown facts of the Hamann case involves access to the interrogation reports compiled by the Stasi during the period of the former minister’s pretrial incarceration at Hohenschönhausen, the complex of buildings where, at the time, Dittmann served as a guard, Friedrich and Lau were imprisoned, and the prisoner chemist Knappe had recently arrived from Bautzen. As declassified files housed at the U.S. National Archives reveal, Western espionage agencies succeeded in securing verbatim transcripts of several Stasi interrogations carried out against Hamann, apparently only days after they were recorded by the East German service. Source “744,” apparently a Western informant to West Berlin’s LfV, had obtained copies of Hamann’s interrogation reports for the summer of 1953. Mimeographs of his verbatim question-and-answer sessions were in turn shared with American services, including the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps; they are today available to researchers at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, Maryland. According to Carl W. Rankin, the High Commission for Occupied Germany (HICOG) liaison to the West Berlin LfV, Source “744” was likely either a typist or a stenographer in the Stasi’s Main Directorate IX, the branch charged with preparing trial prosecutions via the relentless interrogation of persons held in investigative custody. For reasons unclear, this Stasi employee had apparently chosen to risk her (or his) life to provide a running account of Hamann’s battles with his Stasi interrogators. 44 The Counter Intelligence Corps, for its part, used the Stasi’s interrogation reports to draw its own conclusions about Hamann’s character and political aims. The verdict on the former was unequivocal. Hamann had demonstrated bravery in the face of truly harrowing interrogations, a point even the Stasi major charged with his case appears to have conceded. As American and West Berlin services discovered, Hamann’s opponent had included in his interrogations a memorandum noting that when questioned concerning his political ties to the West, “Hamann became provocative, shouting that he had engaged in no criminal activity and did not have anything to hide, that the investigating agency is not in possession of any proof of criminal activity and is only trying to justify itself. After being admon-

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ished to desist from his provocation, Hamann declared that it was his business to decide when he chose to be quiet and that he demanded justice. Upon being admonished once again to silence, Hamann emphasized that the investigating agency had no evidence of his guilt, adding that ‘It is a sad thing that such people,’ referring to the major, ‘were appointed in judgment of him.’” 45 The audience passing judgment on Hamann as he struggled with his Stasi tormenters was more cosmopolitan than the former LDPD chairman could likely have imagined. The Counter Intelligence Corps sought to use the transcripts of the Stasi major’s interrogations to understand the motivations behind Hamann’s exceptional efforts to promote reconciliation between the leaders of divided Germany. Hamann’s attempts at cross-border understanding prior to his incarceration had come at a time when relations between the two postwar German states were icy. All the more remarkable was a journey undertaken by the East German minister Hamann in January 1952 to the federal republic in an official government car, accompanied by his personal assistant, soon to be CIC informant Hanns Heyne. East German minister president Otto Grotewohl condoned Hamann’s and Heyne’s journey. Perhaps the most extraordinary encounter during their trip was a two-and-a-half-hour audience with Josef “Ochsensepp” Müller, founder of the Christian Social Union (CSU), then as now the sister party of the Christian Democrats. Müller served at that time as the Bavarian minister of justice. According to a report submitted by Heyne, after naming West German personalities Hamann might approach, the CSU chair asked the East German minister to send his bests regards to the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, Vladimir Semyonov, as well as to Sergei Tiulpanov and Vyacheslav Molotov, hardline Stalinists with whom both the Bavarian justice minister and Hamann were on personal terms. 46 What else transpired in Hamann’s meeting with Müller is unknown: a report on their conversation was removed from the CIC files in 1956, four years after Hamann’s journey to the West. 47 Several days after their conversation with the father of Bavaria’s postwar conservative party, Hamann and Heyne were expelled from the federal republic. More intimate than Hamann’s exchange with Josef Müller were his interactions with Helmut Külz, son of LDPD founder Wilhelm Külz. 48 Hamann’s close relationship with the younger Külz, one of the first major LDPD politicians to flee to the West in June 1948, remind us that Cold War rivalries in early 1950s Germany were intense but by no means insuperable. As the Stasi (and, via Source “744,” the West Berlin LfV and U.S. military intelligence) learned, Külz and Hamann had maintained postal contact via Külz’s mother, Erna. Residing in West Berlin, Erna Külz served as courier for her son and his friend, conveying the men’s letters by hand between the city’s two halves, and returning with fresh missives addressed to cover names. In East Berlin, Erna personally delivered her son’s missives to Hamann’s ministerial

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offices. In December 1951, she allowed her son and Hamann to use her apartment in the West Berlin district of Wilmersdorf for three clandestine meetings. Equally remarkable was a rendezvous the two men arranged in East Berlin: as Heyne subsequently reported to the CIC Berlin Office, Hamann and Külz had spent an evening in the autumn of 1951 at the East German minister’s personal residence in the East Berlin district of Wilhelmshagen. The men’s and Erna’s commitment to national unity seemed to justify the personal risks. Their shared aim—to overcome the country’s rapidly widening postwar division—was one at the time cherished among many German-speaking elites. To this end, Külz proposed a meeting in the spring of 1952 with Erich Ollenhauer and Herbert Wehner, leaders of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party. A recent convert to German social democracy, Külz was seeking to impress his new party colleagues with his influential, if controversial, connections in East Berlin. Heyne, as Hamann’s emissary, assured his contact at the SPD newspaper Der Telegraf, Werner Nieke, that the entire matter would be treated with the utmost discretion, that is to say, left unmentioned in any of East Germany’s state-controlled newspapers. SPD leaders ultimately judged a meeting between LDPD and SPD representatives as inopportune, a position advocated behind the scenes most vigorously by the head of the SPD’s Eastern Office, Stefan Thomas. 49 Hamann, who had shared with East German minister president Grotewohl his Külz-inspired plan to meet Ollenhauer and Wehner in West Berlin, soon thereafter found himself confronting a radically different audience. Denied the opportunity to orchestrate a gathering of influential leaders from the postwar German states, Hamann instead faced Stasi interrogators at Hohenschönhausen. Just as the East German minister’s options closed, those of Hamann’s personal assistant, Hanns Heyne, opened in new directions. In October 1952 the CIC Berlin Office enlisted Heyne, a new arrival denied political asylum under the formal reception procedure, as an informant. Heyne, who may have been working for an American or British intelligence agency prior to his escape to West Berlin with his wife and infant son, was assigned a major task: to bring his former boss into the orbit of U.S. Army intelligence, as either a defector or as an informant. To this end, Heyne was instructed to set up a meeting with Hamann’s daughter, Ilse: the two were to meet in the Steglitz district of West Berlin. As it happened, not only Ilse, but also Hamann’s wife, Helene, arrived at the agreed-upon wine shop rendezvous. The three appear to have gotten along well in unfamiliar surroundings. A longtime family confidante, Heyne (and thus his CIC handlers) learned of Frau Hamann’s repeated, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to persuade her husband to abandon his prominent position in East Germany for a new if uncertain life in the West. Playing opposite to Helmut and Erna Külz, this unlikely duo, Hamann’s former right-hand man, now a CIC informant, and Hamann’s wife agreed to coordinate their efforts to change Hamann’s course. As Heyne

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subsequently informed his CIC handler in October 1952, Hamann might defect if “Western representatives would guarantee his right to obtain a residence permit in Western Germany.” Berlin representatives of the CIC were receptive to these terms. In the estimation of the Leipzig-born attorney Heyne, political life in the federal republic held no appeal to his former chief and confidant. If the minister and LDPD party chief succeeded in escaping from the East, he would return to farming, his first professional calling. Uninterested in Hamann’s plans for a quiet life in the countryside, U.S. military intelligence sought a different harvest: high-level East German contacts as a means toward regime change. Asked whether Hamann would be willing to furnish information about his East German colleagues prior to his flight, the CIC handler observed Heyne’s hesitation. Heyne could, his CIC file states, only affirm his eagerness to make the approach to his former boss if called upon to do so by his American handlers. To ensure Heyne’s contact with Hamann remained undivulged, the former personal assistant enlisted Hamann’s daughter, Liv, to hand-deliver secret missives. Sensing the possibility of a big catch, the CIC Berlin team sought guidance from headquarters: Should a full-fledged escape operation be set in motion or was “defection in place” more desirable? 50 Absent from Hanns Heyne’s CIC file is a response to the Berlin team’s provocative request. Hamann’s fate, as we know, was not American-inspired defection, in place or otherwise. In early December 1952 events conspired against the LDPD chair. Following a heated exchange with Grotewohl and Walter Ulbricht, both Hamann and his daughter Liv were tossed into prison. Without waiting to learn of his guilt or innocence as defined by SED leaders, Hamann’s LDPD colleagues unceremoniously expelled the popular politician from his party. 51 Suspended as minister following a cabinet meeting and under pressure from two LDPD colleagues, Hans Loch and Herbert Täschner, to publicly acknowledge his “guilt,” Hamann steadfastly refused to bend to the will of East Germany’s apparatchiks. 52 Liv, like her father, also bravely faced Stasi interrogators. Her alleged transgression was similar to Erna Külz’s: passing letters from her father to his West Berlin contacts, most prominently Hanns Heyne, a young man stranded in the western half of Berlin and enlisted in service of the CIC. Charged with procuring rationed items in chronic short supply, Hamann was first in line to be criticized for the eastern regime’s inability to guarantee foodstuffs and basic consumer items, a significant factor in the eruption of public protest across eastern Germany in June 1953. While the explosion of dissent came several months after Hamann’s arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Stasi, the former LDPD chair provided the East German regime with a convenient scapegoat for material and immaterial shortcomings. The SED’s abuse of Hamann’s commitment to German national purpose extended far beyond his arrest and the period of his detention overlapping the

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June 1953 uprising. In October 1956, following intense efforts on the part of his wife to rehabilitate her husband and daughter, the SED Politburo agreed to release both Karl and Liv Hamann. 53 Even after all Hamann and his family had endured, the former minister was not prepared to abandon the life he had begun in eastern Germany. Further efforts on Helene’s part were required to convince her husband to sever his ties to East Germany, including another period of residence under Stasi surveillance with the pair’s youngest children in Leipzig. Almost another year would pass before Hamann would leave East Germany. 54 Upon his arrival in West Berlin and during the processing of his asylum application in Giessen, he underwent additional rounds of vetting by security officials from West Germany and abroad. Once he had finally cleared these hurdles to entry to the federal republic, Hamann, like Külz before him, faced the daunting task of professional rehabilitation. After sixteen years spent removed from public life, he died in relative obscurity in Munich in June 1973. In 1991, eighteen years after his death, a court in Berlin finally vacated his 1954 sentence. For those selected for extensive interrogation at transit camps, reception centers, and various clandestine or semi-secret off-site locales, the most intimate details of their private lives, during but also long before the era of Communist domination in east-central Europe, were scrutinized with a view toward their value to the ideological conflict then rending Europe asunder. For every voice of a refugee enlisted in the struggle against communism captured in the files generated by the more than 1,100 CIC operatives then active in Germany, 55 dozens of silent displaced others went unrecorded. Attempts such as Hamann’s and Külz’s to overcome the two Germanys’ division collapsed under the weight of the crushing of East Germany’s and, three years later, Hungary’s uprisings by Soviet tanks. Integration into supranational blocks ensured Germans, unlike Austrians, faced a divided and contentious future. Led by the Western occupying powers, domestic intelligence agencies like the BfV, the BND, and others stepped forward to tap the Soviet-inspired exodus from east-central Europe to understand, and ultimately to undermine, the rule of what Western intelligence circles regarded as the vilest political regime of the twentieth century. On the other side of the equation, Soviet services, assisted by their own legions of helpers and couriers, attempted to buttress their precarious authority through Leninist and Stalinist methods of physical violence and repression. After the Berlin Wall’s construction and a decision of East German leaders to open selectively to the West, another hallmark of late twentieth-century Communist regimes, relentless personal surveillance, came to assume special importance in East Germany’s hegemony.

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WEST GERMANY’S BUNDESNACHRICHTENDIENST AND THE BEFRAS For West German intelligence authorities, the flight of individuals like Hamann, Knappe, and numerous others yielded a plethora of low-cost, low-risk targets. Extensive travel to and from the federal republic to the Soviet Bloc during the era of détente widened informational possibilities in new directions. We know practically nothing about the pen-and-pencil surveillance efforts carried out at West Germany’s Joint Interrogation Centers, commonly known as the Befras. Administered for optical purposes by the interior ministry, these centers actually drew their domestic staffs mainly from the Bundesnachrichtendienst and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. The Befras outlived the rise and fall of Communist regimes across east-central Europe, one of several signs that intelligence agents attributed value to face-to-face questioning in an era increasingly, but never fully, committed to electronic forms of surveillance. As I demonstrate in chapter 5, the consequences of face-toface interrogation were profound, and not only for the violently resettled and their loved ones. With reference to questions of individual citizenship rights within the new West Germany, demands for self-determination consistently took a back seat to the wide-ranging, often inscrutable objectives of foreign and domestic espionage agencies. NOTES 1. Summary of Information on HINZE, Edmund, “Hinze, Edmund G8 01 37 79,” April 20, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. 2. On the hurdles currently facing those wishing to access records from the Ministry of the Interior, see Josef Foschepoth, Überwachtes Deutschland. Post- und Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 12–16. See also the following announcement published by Professor Foschepoth on the website of umbrella organization of historians in Germany: http://www.historikerverband.de/fileadmin/_vhd/ bilder/2009-09-23-VS-Akten.pdf (accessed January 10, 2017). 3. Known as the Archive for Contemporary Research (Archiv für Gegenwartsforschung), from July 1950 onward it was typically referred to simply as the Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz Service. See Susanne Meinl, “Im Mahlstrom des Kalten Krieges. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz und die Anfänge der westdeutschen Nachrichtendienste 1945–1955,” in Spionage für den Frieden, ed. Wolfgang Krieger and Jürgen Weber (Munich: Olzog, 1997), 247–66; “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz,” in Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence, ed. Jefferson Davis, Historical Dictionaries of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 11 (Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 172–76. On the British Foreign Office’s inconclusive assessment of Heinz’s brief defection to East Berlin, see the Bonn Telegram No. 714, December 23, 1954, FO 371/109329, TNA London. 4. Breull’s attempts to shift the discussion of Valka’s future to the delicate topic of U.S. intelligence activities were repeatedly thwarted. See Memorandum for the Record, August 10, 1954, RG 59, Entry 5498, Box No. 5, NARA II. 5. Letter from Smith to Commanding Officer, Hqs. 66th CIC Detachment, April 13, 1953, “Hinze, Edmund G8 01 37 79,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. 6. In early 1950 Hans Ritter von Lex, the influential state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior until 1960 and subsequently president of the German Red Cross, proposed Heinz for

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the directorship of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. On Heinz’s Weimar, Nazi, and postwar careers, see Susanne Meinl, “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz (1899–1968). Verschwörer gegen Hitler und Spionagechef im Dienste Bonns,” in Konspiration als Beruf. Deutsche Geheimdienstchefs im Kalten Krieg, ed. Dieter Krüger and Arnim Wagner (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2003), 61–83. 7. Agent Report on HINZE, Edmund, July 27, 1955, “Hinze, Edmund G8 01 37 79,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. Hinze was to be billeted in Frankfurt with Erwin Wolff, a professor of philology at the university in that city. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution subsequently assumed responsibility for industrial security screening in West Germany; whether this initiative predated the plans of the Blank Office is unclear. Drawing on West German archival materials, a recent essay on American-led industrial espionage directed against the federal republic’s chemical industry during the 1950s has been published by Mario Daniels, “Die Kampagne der westdeutschen Chemieindustrie gegen den Brain Drain in die USA,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64, no. 3 (2016): 491–515. 8. Summary of Information, Region IV, 66th CIC Group, September 18, 1956, “Hinze, Edmund G8 01 37 79,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. 9. Meinl, “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz,” 70–74. 10. Also an agent of Heinz’s service in Munich, Kolb was released from his post in early 1954. Recruited by a Soviet service, Kolb subsequently lured Heinz to East Berlin on at least two occasions, the second of which led the East German news service to broadcast the claim that Heinz had defected to East Germany. What exactly Heinz had in mind with these sojourns remains unknown; the excursions and especially the subsequent tidal wave of negative press coverage brought an end to his career as the head of a military intelligence organization answerable to Adenauer and independent of the Western Allies. Susanne Meinl and Dieter Krüger, “Der Politische Weg von Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz. Vom Freikorpskämpfer zum Leiter des Nachrichtendienstes im Bundeskanzleramt,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1994): 39–69, esp. 68–69. Its own survey of the “Karlshorst wire” and information supplied by the West German Ministry of the Interior left the British Foreign Office without an explanation, able to conclude only that “Heinz is a rogue and his story may well be untrue.” Minutes, Heinz and Kolb, December 22, 1954, FO 371/109329, TNA London. 11. Hinze received from Kolb five hundred deutschmarks upon leaving Berlin. Index Card for HINZE, Edmund, December 6, 1949, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. 12. Kalaš’s diatribe was familiar to Soviet Bloc listeners: radio and press in Communist countries responded time and again with vitriol to Radio Free Europe, an effective lever of American soft power. Both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation were later identified as separately run CIA operations. On the influence of American intelligence over programming, a good introduction based on privileged access to CIA records is A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). On the importance of the Munich-based broadcaster as a window on the world beyond Soviet rule in east-central Europe, see Paweł Machcewicz, Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), and Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), esp. 34–64. 13. According to Czechoslovak documentation submitted by the regional prosecutor’s office, after his escape Kalaš was charged with theft from his former enterprise in Jablonec nad Nisou. Report of Criminal Charges, undated, Krajské správa Ministerstva vnitra (Regional Office of the Ministry of the Interior), Archive Code No. 72807, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 14. Kalaš’s activities with RFE and the StB are covered in a publication produced by the Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, a subdivision of the Czech police. Prokop Tomek, Československé bezpečnostní složky proti Rádiu Svobodná Evropa: Objekt Alfa (Prague: UDV, 2006). Kalaš’s name does not appear in a recently published history of RFE by the same author. See Československá redakce Radio Free Europe—Historie a vlin na Československé dějiny (Prague: Academia, 2015).

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15. The chief of the Frankfurt HICOG office charged with intelligence gathering described Radio Free Europe as “by far the most active and successful exploiter of Czechoslovak escapees for other than military and technical information.” See Foreign Service Dispatch from Charles G. Stefan to the Department of State, Washington, November 19, 1952, “Germany— Country Unit,” RG 59, Entry 5498, Box No. 5, NARA II. 16. Report on KALAŠ, Jiri for BfV, March 23, 1960, “F8 06 73 74—Jiri Kalas,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 370, NARA II. 17. Report written by Captain Redl, December 12, 1955, ZSGŠ [Zpravodajská správa generálního štábu—Military Intelligence, Directorate of the General Staff], Archive Code No. 19148, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 18. TS Alexandr, 4141, April 9, 1982, ZSGŠ [Zpravodajská správa generálního štábu— Military Intelligence, Directorate of the General Staff], Archive Code No. 19148, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 19. On divided loyalties to intelligence agencies along the inner German frontier, see Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 158–63, and Armin Wagner and Matthias Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee. Westdeutsche Militärspionage in der DDR (Berlin: Edition Berolina, 2014), 61–120. 20. Report on KALAŠ, Jiri from Günther Nollau, April 9, 1956, “F8 06 73 74—Kalas,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 370, NARA II. StB sources confirm the circumstances surrounding his internment at the Bavarian Border Police station in Ludwigstadt. 21. Letter to the Liaison Officer, Department of the Army Detachment, May 18, 1956, “Hinze, Edmund G8 01 37 79,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 290, NARA II. 22. Letter from McComast to Liaison Officer, Department of the Army Attachment, December 17, 1959, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 370, NARA II. 23. Army officials nonetheless stipulated that the federal office provide them with any Radio Free Europe contacts developed in the context of future operations. Letter from McComas to G2 (Military Intelligence) USAREUR Liaison Office, OCA, U.S. Embassy, March 23, 1960, “F8 06 73 74—Kalas,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 370, NARA II. 24. Wagner and Uhl, BND contra Sowjetarmee, 190. 25. A map of the escape route published in Der Spiegel’s account has been reproduced in Peter Erler and Hubertus Knabe, Der verbotene Stadtteil. Stasi-Sperrbezirk BerlinHohenschönhausen (Berlin: Jaron, 2005), 85. None of the protagonists are named therein. 26. On the Stasi units producing eavesdropping systems, hidden cameras, and false passports, consult ibid., 45–54, 85–88, and Elisabeth Martin, “Ich habe mich nur an das geltende Recht gehalten.” Herkunft, Arbeitsweise und Mentalität der Wärter und Vernehmer der StasiUntersuchungshaftanstalt Berlin-Hohenschönhausen (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014), 55–58. An introduction to the complex as a whole has recently been published; see Julia Spohr, In Haft bei der Staatssicherheit. Das Untersuchungsgefängnis Berlin-Hohenschönhausen 1951–1989 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015). 27. Agent Report, September 17, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 131, NARA II. On Der Spiegel’s interactions with the Bundesnachrichtendienst, see Jost Dülffer, Pullach intern Innenpolitischer Umbruch, Geschichtspolitik des BND und “Der Spiegel,” 1969–1972 (Marburg: UHK, 2015). 28. Incoming Message, August 19, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 131, NARA II. 29. CIC files convey no details of such a return mission. See Agent Report, September 17, 1954, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 131, NARA II. What precisely the German agency had in mind is unclear: the file does note Dittmann’s assessment that the chief of the department “S” might be approached by a Western agency. 30. D-379746, July 30, 1954, 66th CIC Group, Region VIII, CE Team, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 131, NARA II. 31. Knappe’s CIC file records his claim to have received a doctorate from the Austrian university of Graz. According to my correspondence with an archivist of that university’s library on January 18, 2016, the university archive contains no reference to a completed dissertation.

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32. R. u. S.-Fragebogen, Erhardt Knappe, May 31, 1939, RG 242 BDC A3343 Rasse- und Siedlungs-Hauptamt (RuSHA), Roll C538, D0001-D0072, NARA II. 33. Incoming Message from CO CIC GP RGN III, Offenbach to CO, 66th CIC GP, “HE 03 96 36,” January 16, 1959, RG 319, A1 Entry 134-B, Box No. 410, NARA II. 34. Agent Report, “HE 03 96 36,” January 5, 1959, RG 319, A1 Entry 134-B, Box No. 410, NARA II. Erhardt Knappe’s labors appear to have been directed by the electronic surveillance requirements of an office at Hohenschönhausen run by the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, described in the CIC files as the HA S, or Special and Experimenting Workshop. The vast majority of the records of the HA S have unfortunately not been accessioned by the Stasi Records Agency. 35. Memorandum from CO 66th CIC Group, Bad Cannstatt to CO CIC GP RGN III, Offenbach, January 20, 1959, “HE 03 96 36,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 410, NARA II. 36. The CIA office is described in the records as the Department of the Army Detachment. This was a CIA designation used in Germany. See Jens Wegener, Die Organisation Gehlen und die USA: deutsch-amerikanische Geheimdienstbeziehungen, 1945–1949 (Münster: Lit, 2008), 129. 37. Letter from Charles Yech, Chief, SPD, to Headquarters Region III, February 3, 1959, “HE 03 96 36,” RG 319, A1 Entry 134-B, Box No. 410, NARA II. 38. Yech further noted, “When and if enough additional information on this general topic becomes available to us such a report will be distributed as a general information bulletin not attributed to this or any other individual source.” Memorandum from Charles Yech, Chief, SPD, to Commanding Officer, Headquarters, Region III, December 4, 1959, “HE 03 96 36,” RG 319, A1 Entry 134-B, Box No. 410, NARA II. 39. Telefax from CO CIC Rgn III to CO 66th CIC GP, January 14, 1959, “HE 03 96 36,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 410, NARA II. 40. On Hamann’s biography, see Ilko-Sacha Kowalczuk, Stasi Konkret . Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 97–117. 41. Westdeutsche Neue Presse, Welt am Sonntag, dpa—January 5, 1953. See also the Reuters wire service notice, “Ousted Red’s Wife Flees. Former Supply Minister’s Family Reported in West Berlin,” January 3, 1953. 42. The West German government would not establish diplomatic relations with the governments in Warsaw (and Prague) until the early 1970s. For an introduction to the inner German struggle over Eastern Bloc governments, see Werner Killian, Die Hallstein Doktrin: Der diplomatische Krieg zwischen der BRD und der DDR 1953–1973 (Berlin: Duncker and Humboldt, 2001). 43. Ilko-Sacha Kowalczuk, “Opfer der eigenen Politik? Zu den Hintergründen der Verurteilung von Minister Karl Hamann (LDPD),” Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung 16 (2004): 241–48. 44. Memorandum from Carl W. Rankin to HQ 66th CIC Group, undated RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 257, NARA II. 45. Aktenvermerk, 1.10.1953, Vernehmung des früheren Ministers Dr. Karl Hamann, October 7, 1953, “XE 25 85 75—Karl Hamann,” Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz Berlin, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 257, NARA II. The Stasi memorandum in the original is also cited in Kowalczuk, “Opfer,” 252. 46. Another CSU leading politician to cultivate ties to the German Democratic Republic during the mid-1950s, Federal Minister for Finance and Vice Chancellor Fritz Schäffer, held clandestine meetings in East Berlin with Markus Wolf, head of the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. See Karl Wilhelm Fricke, “Markus Wolf (*1923). Drei Jahrzehnte Spionagechef des SED-Staates,” in Konspiration als Beruf. Deutsche Geheimdienstchefs im Kalten Krieg, ed. Dieter Krüger and Arnim Wagner (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2003), 289–90. 47. In e-mail correspondence an archivist of the CSU party foundation indicates that there is no record of the conversation. 48. On Helmut Külz’s efforts to thwart the chilly reception he faced upon his arrival in the federal republic, see Keith R. Allen, Befragung , Überprüfung, Kontrolle. Die Aufnahme von DDR-Flüchtlingen in West Berlin bis 1961 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013), 140–41.

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49. Summary of Information, SPD—LDP, October 10, 1952, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 257, NARA II. U.S. Army sources reveal that Grzeskowiak (Thomas) was from the working-class Neukölln district of Berlin; he appears to have been recruited by MI6 for work in Cairo. In 1944, “Thomas” (along with Erich Ollenhauer and Waldemar von Knoeringen) was employed at Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire, where German prisoners of war were closely monitored; following the arrival of British troops in the spring of 1945, he was named head of police in Hanover, where the SPD’s Eastern Office was established in 1946 under the cover name of Refugee Assistance Office East (Flüchtlingsbetreuungsstelle Ost). 50. Possible Approach to Dr. Karl Hamann, October 20, 1952, “XE 25 85 75—Karl Hamann,” RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 257, NARA II. On the U.S government’s attempts at this time to stimulate flight west, see Susan L. Carruthers, “Between Camps: Eastern Bloc ‘Escapees’ and Cold War Borderlands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 911–42. 51. Herbert Täschner also appears to have served the CIC as a source of information on Hamann and other senior members of his party. 52. For an introduction to these inner-party struggles, see Jürgen Frölich, “Der ‘Fall Hamman’ und die LDPD,” in Beiträge zum Leben und Wirken von Dr. Karl Hamann 1903–1973, ed. Wolfgang Glaeser (Stahnsdorf: Karl-Hamann-Stiftung, 1993), 52–67. 53. Gespräche zwischen LDPD und FDP, SAPMO, DY 30, I IV 2/2/502, Bundesarchiv Berlin. 54. Kowalczuk, “Opfer,” 265–71. 55. The estimate is Richard Gerken’s, based on a response he received at a question-andanswer session during a late summer 1952 visit to the CIC Stuttgart headquarters and subsequently conveyed to his British liaison officer. See Notes from L. O. Brown, PF 198, September 1952, WO 208/5211, TNA London.

Chapter Five

West German Administrators The Federal Intelligence Service (BND)

During the first decade of the occupation in particular, British and American services assumed the leading role in determining whether Marxist fifth columnists existed in their midst. From the earliest days of the occupation, the nature of concealed power over those fleeing westward had contained domestic elements. All occupying powers enlisted Germans with espionage backgrounds or inclinations, with many serving multiple masters and regimes. Domestic agencies exhibiting varying degrees of loyalty to the elected Bonn government only gradually succeeded in carving out, jealously guarding, and expanding their radius vis-à-vis many foreign counterparts. Victorious in behind-the-scenes scrums with British intelligence agents over access to leading luminaries in West German science and industry, American services ceded authority to favored domestic agencies from the mid-1950s onward for an amalgam of reasons. Compliance with U.S.-defined strategic aims fostered trust, with many German-speaking assistants, especially those having served the previous political regime, demonstrating as much enthusiasm for combatting communism as their Anglo-American counterparts. Another reason to upgrade the status of West German intelligence operations rested in a desire to commit greater attention to parts of the world beyond central and east-central Europe. The dissolution of the British Empire and swift expansion of American hegemony shifted attention eastward, most dramatically following the Soviet-supported North Korean attack on the Republic of Korea in June 1950 and, less than a decade later, with the intensification of anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia. Long before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the geographic emphasis of the struggle 155

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against the Soviet Union had begun to shift to regions beyond the most familiar European battlegrounds of the 1939–1945 war. New theaters of operation, located in parts of the world regarded by Americans and their leaders as culturally unfamiliar, encouraged intelligence services to earmark greater resources for technological surveillance. Rather than end intelligence interest in divided Germany, the new geographic and thematic foci of espionage work spelled a greater reliance on the West German service most closely aligned with U.S. intelligence objectives on the European continent. Stationed within the narrow confines of East Germany, the largest formation of Soviet ground and air forces outside the USSR, maintained at high standards of efficiency and equipment across the entire period of confrontation with the West, ensured that interest in postwar Germany never disappeared altogether. Suspicion of Communist states made certain that the security services continued to vet select “escapees” to the West intensely. Mistrust of newcomers and fear of infiltration forged collaboration between relief and intelligence agencies across the entire period of Germany’s division, and indeed beyond. EAST-WEST TRAVEL AND WEST GERMAN–LED SURVEILLANCE Just as the presence of Soviet troops guaranteed Western attention to eastern Germany, the perceived benefits of face-to-face questioning schemes survived a communications revolution. By the mid-1960s, defecting soldiers and border guards were joined by those able to flee East Germany by submitting applications to move to the West. By the 1970s legal newcomers came to include a diverse pool of migrants, many of whom had gathered work experience in East Germany and other socialist states, including the Soviet Union. In total, some 650,000 East Germans moved westward between 1961 and August 1989. A much larger volume of West Germans traveled to East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other socialist states for work or pleasure. Those targeted for questioning at the Joint Interrogation Centers (JICs) of the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) were refugees and migrants, though informants later included tourists, travelers, and family visitors, including those of West German and western European citizenship. International agreements reached after the removal of East German leader Walter Ulbricht in 1971 created significant breaches in the Wall. Even from the end of 1964, East Germans of pensionable age and, in select cases, accompanying relatives (typically spouses) had been allowed to travel to West Germany once a year, with younger East Germans permitted

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to visit relatives under special circumstances from 1973 onward. During the 1970s, individuals other than pensioners and those regarded by the East German regime as disabled or in need of special care were, during the 1970s, also granted opportunities to travel westward for special family occasions, such as relatives’ funerals. 1 Beyond family visits, the East German party leadership’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975 (in particular the human rights section) enabled hundreds of thousands of East Germans to apply to emigrate to the West. Together with those whose freedom was purchased by the West German government, these “legal” immigrants to the federal republic between 1962 and 1989 constituted nearly a half million people. Although its influence was limited, the federal republic sought to ensure westward travel and emigration remained an option for still other East German families, tying loans to concessions reluctantly granted by Socialist Unity Party (SED) leaders. By the 1980s, the number of retiree visits to the West had jumped to an average of a million and a half annually. 2 Though formally committed to an ideology vilifying the West, the selective latitude of gatekeepers in East Berlin ensured the West German Branch Questioning Offices (Zweigstellen für Befragungswesen), or Befras, remained busy, with the pool of visitors swelling to include large numbers of retirees, defectors, migrants, and others, most notably travelers and visitors from West Germany and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. At least outwardly, Communist state policy during this period appeared to many to be less heavy-handed. Behind the scenes, the course of mutual coexistence vis-à-vis the West produced a slew of internal security measures. A point well understood among scholars of East Germany (and given wide currency in popular media during the first decade of the twenty-first century), this chapter shows that détente marked the emergence of new forms of vetting in western Germany as well. The questioning operations of the Joint Interrogation Centers, initially established to capture the insights of immigrants and migrants, asylum seekers, retirees, and other new arrivals, also came to envelop the actions of a wider pool of travelers headed in both directions across the (once again) increasingly porous Cold War divide of postwar Germany. Questioning rounds with newcomers took place at Joint Interrogation Centers immediately upon their arrival in western Germany and then again weeks, sometimes months thereafter. In the latter instances, a standardized postal notice, often triggered by the arrivee’s registration for residence in the federal republic, instructed the newcomer to travel to a Joint Interrogation Center in a nearby city. Newcomers thus appeared at Befras both before and after elucidation sessions at federal reception and asylum centers, police offices, so-called border agencies run by foreign powers, and various other clandestine questioning sites maintained by Allied authorities.

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The declassified Befra reports record details of economic development across individual enterprises and industrial sectors of East Germany, a country regarded by many during the last two decades of the Cold War, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as a leader within the Soviet-led Socialist Bloc. Considered alone, the reports might lead one to overinflate the ability of the BND to gauge in precise detail the socialist regime’s military and economic assets; at minimum, they bear testament to the BND’s intention to provide Bonn authorities with detailed assessments of East Germany’s military-industrial capability. Whether the BND used interim reports compiled at Befras to produce national or industry-sector assessments must, given the current state of archival access, remain a matter of conjecture. Formal estimates submitted in Bonn probably included evaluations flowing from the Befra reports on specific sectors of the economy, so-called socialist people’s enterprises, and research institutes. Circumstantial evidence suggests that West German statisticians drew more heavily on another source of information about their eastern neighbor, the socialist country’s falsified statistical yearbooks, to form a mistaken picture of East Germany’s relative economic health. Such widely available published sources, rather than focused analyses compiled by BND analysts drawing on the field labors of the Befras, were likely more important in forming the relatively uncritical impression of the country’s industrial economy put forward by Helmut Kohl, West Germany’s chancellor at the time of East Germany’s political collapse. 3 Whether the BND’s estimates of East Germany’s economic strength were spot on or wide of the mark—a concern for key participants in the last global espionage face-off—remains difficult to appraise given today’s state of archival access to the key policymaking collections of the West German state. 4 The more than 650 declassified dossiers currently accessible contain little information on the central planning agencies of the East German economy. The run of documents ends in the early 1980s, years before the Wall fell. What’s more, they provide no insight into interaction between the BND and the key federal ministries assigned defense, economic, and security responsibilities. 5 Bearing in mind the limitations presented in the extant source material publicly available at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, the coming pages present the first analysis of the declassified reports compiled at the semipublic network of intelligence sites run by the BND, the Befras, also known as Joint Interrogation Centers (JICs). While interim reports from the JICs are the main document type included in these dossiers, other materials, such as statistical yearbooks, newspaper accounts, and sketches and photographs, are also contained therein. Rare but not entirely unheard of in the dossiers are documents from covert sources, including the results of postal interception. 6 Notes included in the files lead me to surmise that weekly

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reports on economic matters in the “Soviet Zone,” especially as they related to armaments production, were submitted to headquarters in Pullach. 7 Unlike the documents housed in the Washington and London collections, the Befra reports maintain the anonymity of both the interviewee and interviewer, with the identity of the former being hidden behind the designation “Qu.,” from the late 1970s onward “Qubef.” (“Qu.” abbreviated the word Quelle, or source, and was subsequently amended with the abbreviation for the Befras, “Bef”. 8) Recorded at the top of each JIC or Befra report is the date and, for the initial years, the location of the interrogation(s). A reference line introduces readers to targets of interest reported on by the newcomer. In the Koblenz collection, these comprise industrial concerns or scientific institutes in which informants had previously been employed. 9 The report’s cover sheet also denotes whether this was the first encounter with “the subject” or a follow-up session and notes the duration of each conversation, measured in hours. Also frequently recorded is the border crossing point and date of entry; whether the transfer was “legal”—a term used by the service, despite the fact that West German officials did not use it publicly in order to avoid giving the impression that East Germany was a legitimate state; and previous rounds of questioning at the hands of West German or Allied authorities, including “preliminary screening” at a reception or asylum center or, less often, a clandestine facility run by an American or British service. The descriptions of informants—migrants and refugees from the Communist world, but also travelers, journalists, and others mainly from the federal republic—captured in the JIC reports consist of one, sometimes two or three, short paragraphs. 10 Personal assessments of the former group suggest that the encounter between security screening authorities and guests at the Joint Interrogation Centers often proceeded relatively smoothly. During his three-hour “supplementary interrogation” (at least eighteen other reports can be tracked back to this source), for instance, a twenty-five-year-old aspiring chemist proved to be “credible, willing to testify, and cooperative.” His handlers believe the young professional was “probably not holding back any information of interest. Intelligence, observational ability, and memory are all slightly above average.” The details he offered on his former employer in Magdeburg yielded in the interrogators’ assessment “no contradictions.” 11 Neither tension nor a lack of cooperation cast a shadow over this encounter. IDEAL INFORMANTS: BIDDABLE MALE TECHNICIANS This subject was young, but the Bundesnachrichtendienst’s screening employees seemed to enjoy the best relations with established male professionals, with the highest praise reserved for goodwill displayed by select middle-

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aged engineers and scientists fleeing westward. Cited approvingly was the “openness” and “politeness” of a computer programming graduate of the Institute for Economics (Hochschule für Ökonomie) in East Berlin, as well as “his willingness to allow himself to be led” through the questioning, perhaps indicating that the questioners proceeded according to a standard routine. 12 Invited to speak to interrogators in Munich on five different occasions in December 1960 and January 1961, the former director of production impressed his questioners as being “intelligent, open-minded, friendly, and accommodating. His responses were clear and well thought out. His willingness to testify stemmed from the fact that he had broken with the communist regime for good.” Having traveled to the federal republic via West Berlin in August 1960, the subject revealed “his difficulties began with raising his children according to the dictates of the communist regime and grew still larger when the party called on him to regard his laborers in much the same way.” Purportedly called upon at an all-staff gathering of his collective enterprise to denounce a colleague unable to fulfill plan requirements, the source reached his decision to flee the country. Quiet by nature, he “was aware of the importance of the information he conveyed without displaying any sign of arrogance. The interview was characterized by an atmosphere of trust entirely absent of suspicions or mistrust.” 13 As the thirty-six-year-old had reported directly to the deputy minister for national defense, the account was of interest to several different readers of the report, judging from cryptic handwritten comments made on his report’s cover sheet. The questioning of a forty-year-old computer scientist who had fled to West Germany via Prague in April 1969 produced still greater written accolades from Befra screening officials in Düsseldorf: they judged him a “source par excellence.” Praise did not end there: “Ready to supply answers, credible, intelligent, and open-minded,” the source was “knowledgeable and technically well-versed, in his answers brief and concise, in essence, a sympathetic character.” After ten hours of cooperative exchange, the new arrival had supplied a sketch of his former place of employment, an engineering firm specializing in calculating trigonometric points to determine the trajectory of rockets, as well as of army installations in East Berlin. 14 BND questioners regarded this German- and Czech-speaking expert as an anomaly, providing “an oasis in the desert of daily interrogations.” The BND’s vetting officials deemed such willing and knowledgeable informants more the exception than the rule and seemed to have regarded questioning in many other instances as tedious and routine, a perception that occasionally led them to set aside the professionalism one might expect from federal employees. Readily discernable in the anonymized reports is disdain for many newcomers, a sentiment especially pronounced toward those unwilling to respond quickly to the needs of their intelligence hosts. So long as they were in a position to provide details about specific research enterprises,

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military installations, and personal details about former supervisors and colleagues, newcomers received a measure of tact in their encounters with the BND. Among the praiseworthy adjectives assigned to a twenty-eight-yearold machinist fitter were “courteous and extremely conscientious”; both his manner and the fact the information he supplied contained “no contradictions” ostensibly reflected his “excellent upbringing” (gute Kinderstube). 15 At the Joint Interrogation Centers, patience wore thin with less-thanforthcoming guests, especially when newcomers’ backgrounds differed markedly from those of their information-hungry hosts. Not only class and professional standing, but also differences in age appear to have caused frictions. Interrogators at the Hanover Befra were damning in their faint praise of a sixty-six-year-old retiree from Halle; while “quite prepared to make statements,” the former machinist was judged “too primitive to consciously incriminate himself with falsehoods.” 16 BND questioners faced an uphill struggle in establishing a rapport with older migrants, though in at least one instance the testimony supplied by a cooperative older subject offered a Befra employee the opportunity to criticize his security colleagues. The personal assessment of a retired fifty-nineyear-old construction engineer from Potsdam led a BND screener in 1981 to complain that colleagues “had failed to produce queries for his office, despite his best efforts to elicit such requests.” 17 If advanced age was often a strike against those summoned to give evidence, disdain for those with workingclass backgrounds or atypical physical appearances more commonly provoked dismissive comments. In the eyes of his Düsseldorf interrogators, a Berlin toolmaker who had worked his way up from apprentice to engineer at his socialist enterprise displayed not only “ignorance,” but also “the typical craving for recognition and know-it-all manner of physically small people.” 18 While BND officials favorably regarded self-assurance in accomplished, middle-aged male professionals, weaknesses of the sort associated with what interrogators labeled “escape psychosis” counted against JIC visitors. In fact, both nervousness and hubris were frowned upon. Young men, including a newly arrived machinist apprentice from a Stralsund enterprise manufacturing nautical instruments, were faulted if they appeared to display awareness of their potential importance as observers of East German life. 19 On the other hand, those with a “very elementary intellectual level” received praise so long as they were in a position, as was a tire changer from Neubrandenburg during his fifteen hours of interrogation, “to supply precise details without being pushy.” 20 Newcomers able to cite a father’s military or police service to the Nazi regime were regarded sympathetically. In such instances, an escapee’s desire to acquire a similar position in the federal republic was communicated in reports to superiors. 21

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Stasi records establish that the report writers stationed at the BND’s Joint Interrogation Centers were predominately male. 22 These men’s written evaluations of East German women migrants offer few surprises. They granted a measure of understanding to younger newcomers, particularly those who conformed to contemporary ideals of feminine beauty and comportment. A Düsseldorf Befra employee assessed one thirty-four-year-old shorthand typist as “a well-groomed, good-looking, and congenial lady. Willing to provide testimony, her responses were objective, commensurate with her solid intellectual background. Cooperative in every possible way, her statements appear quite credible, with no contradictions evident and no sign she was consciously withholding information.” Slightly more to the point, BND handlers deemed her both “very German” and “pro-West,” noting her willingness to make herself available for follow-up queries. 23 So long as they comported themselves according to conventional strictures, even women without information, particularly the young and the attractive, might receive a measure of compassion. A twenty-one-year-old stewardess deemed easy on the eyes was forgiven for her lack of interest in military matters; the young woman had escaped to the West during her ship’s layover in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. A “simple, clean girl of a friendly, obliging nature,” she was ostensibly distracted by personal matters—above all, her plans to emigrate to Belgium and reunite with her fiancé, a Belgian she had met several years earlier in her Saxon hometown. 24 The prevalence of women’s paid labor in East Germany—a marked contrast to the ideal if not always the reality of life in the federal republic— provoked sexist comments from BND elucidation officials. 25 A 1967 report filed on a male migrant’s impressions of a large spinning mill in Leinefelde near Erfurt noted that 80 percent of the facility’s employees were women. High temperatures within the mill purportedly led them to dress lightly at work. Stimulated by the display, the report reads, the plant’s men responded with amorous overtures and flirting matches. On the report’s margins, an agent reader jotted down his observation that this phenomenon had long been a feature of the industry and that nearly every textile tradesman was in a position to offer “nice stories.” 26 Substantive comment about the spinning mill—an “intelligence target” far removed from analysis of Soviet military power—is absent from this file. Professional women, especially those from nontechnical backgrounds, provoked disdain from JIC questioners, as attested by the interrogation of a postdoctoral researcher in South Asian studies from the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University). Brought to the Joint Interrogation Center in the city of Mainz by Frankfurt am Main airport police, the escapee had arrived by plane from the Indian capital of Delhi. Her interrogation in September 1970 reportedly began on cordial terms, with the scholar “initially friendly and ready to provide testimony.” The next day matters took an unexpected

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turn for the worse, with a now reluctant informant expressing the view that she was being held “like a prisoner.” A heated discussion nearly brought the questioning to a premature end. With encouragement, however, the source agreed to supply personal details about her former colleagues at East Germany’s leading university, the country’s foreign ministry, and East Berlin journalists covering South Asia; as BND interrogators learned, her husband had served as a correspondent for the East German state news service. Had pressure been applied? The BND documentation provides no clear indication. A handwritten note indicates that, notwithstanding concerns about the reliability of her account and possible Stasi connections, her report should be brought to the attention of contacts in West Germany’s capital. 27 RECEPTION CENTERS AND THE JICS: GAUGING THE AIMS OF DOMESTIC SPIES For those who had already passed through federal reception centers, encounters with intelligence screening agents, both foreign and domestic, were far from new. Prior to their Befra appointments, several newcomers had consulted federal authorities at the reception centers to divine the purpose of the JICs. A technical inspector and his wife (both former railway employees) had inquired during their “preliminary screening” in Giessen as to the official character of the Befras before appearing at the Munich Joint Interrogation Center in January 1959. Perhaps sensing potentially valuable information, the Pullach service’s questioners appear not to have been put off by the curiosity of the railway employees, both acoustics experts. 28 Many other visitors were in the dark about the Befras’ purpose, with some reading their personal concerns into the official summons to appear at their local JIC. A retired clerk assumed her postal invitation to the Mainz JIC in September 1970 would give her snippets of information about the whereabouts of her husband, a soldier she claimed was still missing from the war. The presence of concerns other than those first and foremost on the minds of JIC staff did not spell an end to her visit; on the contrary, after overcoming “initial obstacles,” BND interrogators were engaging the sixty-one-year-old woman in a conversation about her former position at a Leipzig foundry plant. Looking back on the session, a BND employee stationed in Mainz recounted how “dissatisfied” the woman, a retiree from the East, had become by the end. The realization of just how much “comprehensive information” she had supplied to West German intelligence agents, purportedly contrary to her intentions, cast her into a bout of depression. 29 In the interrogation offices of West Germany’s Befras, prying information free from those who had often risked much was the overriding objective. Reticent newcomers came in for special criticism, particularly if, like the

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South Asian specialist, they had initially displayed a readiness to share observations. Interrogators at the Nuremberg Befra in July 1960 showed displeasure toward an otherwise cooperative thirty-two-year-old foreman from a welding and fabrication shop in Chemnitz, complaining he had displayed “exceptional reserve” when the conversation turned to his relatives and acquaintances in the East. 30 Why the Bundesnachrichtendienst was so eager to possess personal details remains unclear: like many others, this file contains no discernable connection to “order-of-battle” intelligence. A forty-one-yearold computer expert from Gera regarded as “garrulous” by his JIC hosts during their four-hour encounter also seemed “highly anxious not to divulge any ‘secrets.’” While Befra administrators felt the guest from Gera was unlikely to be a Stasi agent, the former teacher and IT expert became, in the course of his interview, suspiciously taciturn. Condemned to work for nearly three years at a chicken farm prior to receiving permission to immigrate to West Germany, the man was, in BND officials’ estimation, described the man as unwilling to answer any questions put to him. Frustrated by the reticence of an individual who had so clearly been at odds with the East German regime, or perhaps by a professional inability to break his quiet resolve, the Befra questioner opined that the young man was “a good deal less intelligent than he chose to present himself to the world.” 31 Such condescension toward newly arrived individuals disaffected with the SED state contradicted the Befra summons’ stated aim of national unity. How they colored the dissident’s first impressions of life in the federal republic remains unclear. 32 By the mid-1970s, many younger newcomers refused to answer BND interrogators’ queries. A decision of a twenty-nine-year-old manager to withhold information about the artists and technicians employed at Meissen’s legendary porcelain workrooms was firm, but by no means exceptionally so. Pressed to explain his flat refusal to supply any personal or professional insights, the trained economist responded that he sought to entirely avoid any further association with security services, East or West. 33 VYING FOR NEWCOMERS: BND CRITICISMS OF RIVALS Just like British and American sources, BND Befra reports offer pointed criticism of rival organizations’ approaches to information retrieval. At the heart of one dispute was a woman of “above average intelligence, friendly, and ready to provide testimony.” During the late 1940s, the promisingsounding informant had served at the Soviet naval office in the Berlin district of Karlshorst, then the headquarters of all Soviet forces based in East Germany. One learns that she had escaped East Germany via Maribor, on the Croatian coast of Yugoslavia, to Graz, where she traveled onward to Passau

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in Bavaria with the assistance of unspecified “Austrian friends.” If we believe her Befra report, the determining factor in the forty-five-year-old woman’s reluctance to share further details about her escape, particularly about those who had aided her in her successful flight, was her “direct and massive interrogation in the Federal Emergency Reception Center in Giessen (the BfV Office No. 111).” The report writer lamented that the Giessen-based competitor’s zeal for security control had thwarted the BND’s own “intensive interrogation and exploitation.” 34 While the veracity of this particular allegation cannot be determined, the case reveals that the BND staff at the Befras interacted closely, if by no means always harmoniously, with other domestic espionage authorities. Frictions in this instance probably arose from the strong position the BfV’s experts enjoyed in Giessen: a decade later, the Cologne-based counterintelligence service outnumbered BND staff at the local Befra by four to one. 35 Fear that the Stasi and other Soviet-inspired services were using the possibility of flight to the West to place agents nonetheless appeared to ensure a base level of cooperation between the two main West German intelligence services, though we really do not know for certain how much the bickering overshadowed security cooperation. While Communist infiltration was without doubt a central fact of life in western Germany, an evaluation of the successes and failures of West German security agencies in this realm remains a task for future espionage researchers. We do know from declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files that flight to the West ensured surveillance years after the formal inclusion of newcomers into the federal republic. At the behest of the Cologne headquarters, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and its state-level counterparts carried out periodic checks on those East Germans who took up residence in the federal republic. How many years these spot checks of residences and confirmation of other bona fides continued is a matter of speculation, as the relevant files either remain under lock and key or have been destroyed in accordance with data protection laws. TRAVELERS AND MIGRANTS Deficiencies in West Germany’s intelligence capabilities remain a subject for future inquiry. While employees of the BfV kept a watchful eye on East German newcomers, ethnic Germans, and other foreign asylum seekers, both the BfV and its main competitor, the BND, seized opportunities presented by détente to obtain information from those journeying between the two Germanys or between West Germany and other points eastward. Among the leastknown patrons of the Joint Interrogation Centers were visitors to the federal republic described obliquely in the Befra reports as “East-West travelers.” Questioning sessions involving travelers to the federal republic took place

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not only in the formal offices of the Joint Interrogation Centers, but also in impromptu settings, including train coaches and railway stations. 36 Perhaps not surprisingly, many informants, especially those still residing in East Germany, proved circumspect. A telexed record of a conversation with a laborer from Pirna—the reluctant East German informant was visiting the federal republic to attend a relative’s funeral—recorded his testimony as “credible,” though his BND interrogator also described him as both “highly cautious and intimidated.” 37 Such sessions between intelligence personnel and travelers targeted not only East Germans, but also West Germans. Representatives from the latter group included frequent visitors to the German Democratic Republic (GDR, i.e., East Germany), such as retired couples with relatives in the East 38 and accredited journalists who had ostensibly developed contacts in parts of East German society of interest to the Pullach-based foreign intelligence service. 39 Individual journeys from West Germany and West Berlin to Communist countries, especially the German Democratic Republic, exploded after 1973. As in earlier periods of westward mass migration, travel to the East occasioned fresh rounds of questioning directly at the border, with Western travelers returning from east-central Europe subjected to screening rounds carried out by representatives of state and federal border police as well as BND and BfV staff based at Befras. On the basis of encounters with travelers, the Bavarian Border Police, for instance, prepared daily summaries for both the BND headquarters in Pullach and the 18th Military Intelligence Battalion in Munich; each organization exploited the reporting in keeping with its own requirements. 40 Records from the U.S. National Archives show that both CIA and BND officials reviewed accompanying lists of both eastand westbound travelers for what they deemed “operational purposes.” 41 How these field objectives related to the operational security of NATO forces based in western Germany is open to interpretation. The means American and West German officials employed to debrief travelers via the Befras and other sites, clandestine and otherwise, remain ambiguous; we only know for certain that the BND’s so-called travel collection missions made use of the Joint Interrogation Centers. One example of a JIC encounter with a West German publicist with access to East German journalistic circles yielded a concise account of a secret research facility south of Jena. In lieu of a formal report, a telex submitted by Befra screeners noted that the Carl Zeiss works in Jena supplied the engineers and scientists employed there. According to this source, by the early 1980s the firm was interpreting satellite photography on behalf of the Soviet Union, as well as developing laser technology to guide the latest generation of rockets deployed on East German territory. 42 Details about the travel collection missions remain sketchy. In some cases, the Befras’ expanded brief allowed them to maintain contacts with long-term informants. Declassified CIA records indicate that via the

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Befras’ BND agents solicited the engagement of West German nationals engaged in Soviet industrial projects: in at least one instance, a Braunschweig businessman subcontracting with state enterprises in Salavat, in the socalled Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, purportedly rebuffed the overtures of the “Gehlen man.” 43 The CIA, for its part, was not reliant upon the goodwill of West Germans, including those employees of the American-established Gehlen Organization. CIA operatives based in West Germany periodically made use of West German industrialists to stake out routes rarely traveled by foreigners in the Soviet Union. One agent in particular, construction engineer Walter Mehnert, carried out reporting assignments over a seven-year period. A prized informant, Mehnert apparently required only a minimum of case officer attention and minimal financial investment; he accepted only a few small presents, refusing formal compensation for his reports. 44 Key meetings with Mehnert took place in the restaurant of Braunschweig’s main railway station, a practice the CIA may have copied from, or coordinated with, “Gehlen’s men,” including but not necessarily limited to those staffing Joint Interrogation Centers. More unusual but not completely unheard of in the Befras were BND elicitation sessions involving rail travel into the federal republic across the country’s western borders. One such journey led to the questioning of a thirty-four-year-old electrical engineer residing in Belgium. Born in East German Riesa, the interviewee had several years earlier escaped not to West Germany but to Belgium, where, owing to his Belgian-born wife’s citizenship, he succeeded in establishing his permanent residence. A 1977 eastward journey from his home in Belgium to the federal republic brought him to the attention of JIC officials. His four-hour session at a Befra provided details on production at East Germany’s leading computer concern, the Robotron factory. The encounter was, from the BND’s perspective, not without difficulties: the Belgian’s interrogators could not shake the feeling that the middle-aged engineer was withholding information, dismissing him as a “sly fox.” 45 As the 1980s dawned, West German employees of the country’s foreign intelligence agency were boarding domestic trains, setting up shop in railway stations, and paying house visits to likely informants throughout West Germany. In some cases, the extra effort paid dividends; a December 1982 visit to the new home of a production engineer from Chemnitz succeeded in convincing the recent arrival to travel to a nearby Befra office, overcoming a formal written refusal he had submitted to the semi-clandestine office only a few days earlier. 46 Such written denials were probably rare. We do know for certain that initiatives to bring around the wary were by no means always successful, for personal as much as professional reasons. Even those guests to arrive without bidding and “prone to chattiness” eventually left their intelligence hosts with the impression they were eager to “put the questioning

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behind them as quickly as possible.” 47 A thirty-two-year-old machinist from Poland was by no means unique in conveying to her BND questioners in Kassel the impression that she regretted her decision to emigrate to the federal republic. 48 Day-to-day life at Befras oscillated between tedium and occasional bouts of psychological intensity, with a routine of scheduled appointments occasionally punctuated by swift turns of events. At the JICs, dramatic clashes of opinion, physical collapses, and even sudden bursts of mortal fear led to abrupt conclusions. 49 At other times, more prosaic concerns, such as ongoing job searches, 50 the monotony of day-to-day life in reception camps, 51 or retirees’ plans to meet relatives for lunch 52 thwarted the aims of the BND’s sleuths. Field operations work in West Germany often veered toward the banal, with veteran collection personnel assuming tasks far removed from the sort of daring counterespionage operations embraced during the Cold War’s early years. Perhaps most frustrating of all, what began well at the Befras occasionally ended badly, with especially promising sources turning stone cold. Such was the case of a sixty-five-year-old former Zeiss Jena dispatcher who refused to cooperate in follow-up sessions despite an exceptionally positive first interview. 53 Remarks supplied by his JIC interrogators in November 1975 offer interesting clues as to his change of heart. They remind us that the possibility of travel between the two Germanys not only presented fresh opportunities for intelligence agents, but also posed new obstacles. In the case of the Zeiss dispatcher, the possibility of return travel to his former home and relatives in the East, coupled with public skepticism about the Befras’ role in West German society, appear to have tipped the scale against the informational needs of the Bundesnachrichtendienst. EASTWARD TRAVEL: A RETIRED TECHNICIAN’S DENIAL OF THE BND A mere five days after his first session, the Zeiss dispatcher from Jena’s “craving for recognition” and “promise to supply further details” had morphed into a resolution to provide absolutely no additional information to West German intelligence agents. His JIC interrogators attributed his recalcitrance to the negative influence of friends and local officials in his new Swabian hometown of Kaufbeuren. Striking a very different tone at his follow-up Befra appointment, the lifelong Zeiss employee announced his wish to shield his former employer from the BND’s gaze, defending his stance with the concern that any details he might divulge to the Pullach service could end up in the possession of the BND’s archenemy, the Ministry for State Security.

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The retired defense contractor’s future plans, reluctantly shared with his Befra interrogators, suggested how such a transfer of his personal observations might come to pass. After having resided only a few weeks in the federal republic, the newcomer was already making plans to pay a visit to his daughter and two grandchildren in Jena the following spring. On sharing with friends in Kaufbeuren his intent to return to East Germany for a visit, together with an abridged version of the line of questioning he had endured during his first JIC appointment, the retiree received the well-intentioned advice to avoid further entanglement with BND security officials. As his new neighbors had rightly noted, were he to visit relatives who had remained in the East, the Stasi might find a way to force either the retiree or his loved ones to reveal the precise nature of his disclosures to West Germany’s security services at the Joint Interrogation Center. This promising informant had been part of the world-renowned Zeiss plant’s production management since before the war, his career in Jena only once interrupted by a seven-year stint at ZAVOD 393 in Krasnogorsk near Moscow. There he had participated in the analysis of time-lapse aerial photography. Upon his return to Zeiss’s headquarters in Jena in 1953, the optics firm entrusted the skilled technician with analysis of air photographic reconnaissance. Designing and producing high-demand angular measurement devices, he served as the firm’s liaison to the East German army. He also had a hand in the management of Zeiss’s branch plants in Weimar and Eisfeld. Now faced with their newcomer’s adamant refusal to supply information on sites of particular interest in both East Germany and the Soviet Union, the BND’s screeners sought to rationalize their failure, offering up an implausible dismissal of the potential informant’s value. A “partial disability,” one reads, had ensured that he could only work at the legendary Zeiss facility for three hours a week; the fact that he had made no secret of his plans to immigrate to the federal republic further limited his contacts (and thus presumably his military-industrial-related insights). For these reasons, the lifelong Zeiss employee had for some time no longer enjoyed access to “security-sensitive projects.” Whether their superiors concurred with the rationalization put forward by JIC field agents remains unknown. The file concludes, like so many of the most interesting ones, with a removal notice indicating that “classified materials of foreign origin,” quite likely American, have been removed allegedly for “security reasons.” 54 Enthusiasm for face-to-face interrogation marked the early years of the JICs, when the BND had been formally entrusted with custodianship of the new questioning centers. This period may have been the busiest, as it overlapped with the last years of mass flight from East Germany’s “new socialist order” prior to the Berlin Wall’s construction. During this time, newcomers’ willingness to share observations with West German security officials remained pronounced. In the autumn of 1960, an official at the city of Kassel’s

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Befra could report that a “lack of time at our office” prohibited interrogators from learning as much from an economist from Leipzig as they believed possible. Fortunately for the West German foreign intelligence service, the “source,” described in unusually precise detail as a “single, slender, clearsighted man, with light blue eyes and blond hair combed backward,” had announced that he was “unreservedly ready for further questioning.” 55 Such expressions of alacrity among newcomers, even among young male professionals of Aryan-sounding appearance, became less frequent in the years to come. After leaving a Cuba-bound aircraft during a stopover at Ireland’s Shannon Airport, a thirty-four-year-old chemist regarded as sympathetic and strictly opposed to the East German government nonetheless insisted that the information he provided about his former employer, the Leuna chemical works, was entirely voluntary. Visibly ill at ease with the direction of questioning, after rising from his seat several times in the course of his interview, the former director of a gas engineering group drew the conversation to a premature end. 56 As the atmosphere of intense Soviet-Allied confrontation gave way in Europe to the relative quiet of the mid- to late 1960s and 1970s, even especially promising candidates expressed a reluctance to make themselves available for follow-up sessions. By the end of the 1970s, even among those regarded as potentially knowledgeable visitors one finds references to subjects’ desire to cut short appointments, as well as to multiple no-shows to prearranged follow-up sessions. 57 Although the extant materials only permit conjecture, the 1975 case of the former Zeiss precision mechanic indicates that the prospect of visiting relatives in the East—and the great likelihood of Stasi exploitation of eastwardbound family journeys for its own ends—may have encouraged many knowledgeable informants to think twice before entrusting the details of their former professional lives to the semipublic Joint Interrogation Centers. Apparently even in such traditionally conservative towns as Kaufbeuren, chats with West German neighbors strengthened newcomers’ resolve to keep to themselves what they knew about their former socialist homeland. In his case and others, the possibility to visit relatives, a harbinger of the détente era first granted to pensioners, led guests of the Befras to withhold sought-after details. 58 RETURNEES AND THE STASI: WESTERN QUESTIONING FROM EAST GERMAN PERSPECTIVES Even during the markedly different political environment of the early 1950s, limited travel between the two divided blocs was a prominent feature of inner German encounters, as Karl Hamann’s sojourn reminds us. Inner German

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traffic in individuals and ideas was never entirely westward bound. Of the more than 3.3 million East Germans to migrate to West Germany between 1949 and 1988, some four hundred thousand chose to return to the German Democratic Republic. 59 Intelligence parties engaged in soliciting information from newcomers to the West knew that a small but sizeable minority of the new arrivals to the federal republic would ultimately choose to return to their former homelands in the East. Stasi interrogations of so-called returnees in special facilities located in or near the grim socialist cities scattered across the country 60 added a final questioning destination to arcs extending to such far-flung locales as Beirut, Delhi, Jakarta, and Montreal. While the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and severe restrictions on travel to the capitalist West staunched the westward flow of East German migrants, subsequent moves among the leaders of the Socialist Unity Party to establish formal relationships with the state government of West Berlin and then federal authorities in Bonn presented the security police of Communist regimes with new internal surveillance challenges. 61 From the vantage point of the Stasi and its political overlords, the SED, greater exchange exposed Soviet-style socialism to decadent Western ideas and values, 62 with pensioners, business travelers, and—as both the Befra interim reports and the interrogations of returnees made clear—many others leaving for the federal republic. During this period of substantial inner German interaction, the number of Stasi employees more than doubled, from 45,600 in 1971 to 91,000 in 1989. 63 Unlike in the Befras—where time was limited, participation was voluntary, and summons were frequently ignored altogether—Stasi interrogations took place under conditions of compulsion and duress, with inhumane imprisonment, including pretrial confinement, stretching over months and years. Psychological and physical abuse and threats to loved ones remained central to the Stasi’s repertoire until the service’s—and the East German state’s—dissolution. The files produced by the East German Ministry for State Security are so numerous and so widely accessible that the perspectives of the Stasi will likely shape discussions of the bygone era of East-West tensions for years to come. The volume and relative accessibility of the Stasi’s records encourage us to consider what inferences concerning the questioning practices of the Stasi’s archenemies, Western intelligence services operating in the postwar democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany, can be drawn from the voluminous East German security documentation. In chapter 7, I shift attention from interactions between informants and security agencies to shared approaches uniting all intelligence actors in Cold War Germany. In turning from actors to methods, that chapter focuses on common denominators: the tools, methods, and emotional approaches used by intelligence officials to solicit information from those on the move within Cold War Germany.

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NOTES 1. Patrick Major has described this latter group as “compassionate leavers.” See Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 199–209. 2. Ibid., 195. 3. As quoted in Karl-Rudolf Korte, Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft: Regierungsstil und Entscheidungen 1982–1989. Geschichte der deutschen Einheit 1 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998), 386. We do know that the country’s armaments output, with the possible exception of shipbuilding, was modest, which is perhaps unsurprising given the Soviet Union’s thoroughgoing expropriation of war-making capability in its zone of occupation during the years immediately following Allied victory. 4. Hans-Georg Wieck, chief of the BND at the time of the Wall’s collapse, claimed that leaders of the West German federal government ignored the formal assessments his agency prepared for the chancellor and his inner circle. British historian Paul Maddrell has recently reviewed the war of words between Kohl and Wieck in “The Economic Dimension of Cold War Intelligence-Gathering. The West’s Spies in the GDR’s Economy,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 2 (2013): 87–90. 5. The value decisionmakers within key Bonn ministries attached to specific assessments drawn from the human intelligence compiled at the Joint Interrogation Centers remains unclear, with many pertinent collections currently off limits to researchers. 6. See, for one example, P.-Bericht, Abgangsort (19b) Genthin, February 26, 1962, B 206/ 1449, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 7. Unfortunately, such weekly summaries, if they still exist, are not part of the declassified Koblenz collection. See Mittweide, June 4 (no year provided) (HBS/1), B 206/1401, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. The back of this note led me to this conclusion about weekly reporting. 8. Bodo Hechelhammer, “Nachrichtendienstliche Begriffsbestimmungen der ‘Organisation Gehlen’ und des frühen Bundesnachrichtendienstes,” Mitteilungen der Forschungs- und Arbeitsgruppe “Geschichte des BND” 4 (November 2012): 29. 9. One way in which American and German services were similar was in assigning scores to the testimony of newcomers. Capital letters A to F denoted the subject’s reliability: (A) reliable, (B) generally reliable, (C) fairly reliable, (D) not always reliable, (E) unreliable, (F) the reliability cannot be assessed. The quality of the information provided was assessed according to the following scale: (1) confirmed by another source, (2) probably true, (3) possibly true, (4) doubtful, (5) unlikely, and (6) the veracity cannot be determined. 10. As reports predating the Befras make clear, they appear to have been based on fifteen questions upon which BND interrogators were expected to report in summary form. These include, in the order they appear in such reports, 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

source’s willingness to testify sophistication of the source’s responses source’s general intelligence source’s ability to interpret maps source’s memory for details source’s general observations source’s ability to offer reliable estimates source’s talent for drawing source’s willingness to follow the line of questioning whether the source repeatedly contradicted him- or herself source’s reliability in the estimation of the interrogator whether the subject’s willingness to testify was based on hatred or revenge source’s level of sympathy with the West whether the source seemed to be withholding information whether the source could be reached for follow-up interrogations

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See Report No. 20894, August 31, 1954, B 206/1388, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 11. Befra Report No. 257679, January 28, 1977, B 206/1142, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 12. Befra Report No. 139387, March 10, 1969, B 206/1117, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 13. Befra Report No. 77864, October 3, 1960, B 206/1157, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 14. Befra Bericht Nr. Z/D 28 441, April 15, 1969, B 206/1126, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. During the 1960s, travel to the Eastern Bloc was severely limited, with tourist trips to Czechoslovakia one of the few outlets for foreign travel. Major, Behind the Berlin Wall, 196–97. 15. Befra Report No. 257135, October 9, 1975, B 206/1606, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 16. Interviewed in 1966, the retiree machinist was among the first allowed to travel westward. See Befra Report Z/V-43551, November 24, 1966, B 206/1585, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 17. Befra Report No. 237841, January 12, 1981, B 206/1594, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 18. Befra Report Z/D 28387, June 5, 1968, B 206/1585, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Dismissive, at times outright insulting assessments of working-class newcomers produced by the Düsseldorf JIC are not uncommon. See also Befra Report No. 142824, October 10, 1969, B 206/1512, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 19. Befra Report ZL 35174, October 12, 1966, B 206/1453, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 20. Befra Report No. 235634, June 13, 1973, B 206/1405, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 21. Befra Report No. 149787, April 30, 1971, B 206/149787, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 22. Chapter 6 focuses on the inferences one can plausibly draw from Stasi materials about Western questioning practices at the JICs and other sites. 23. Befra Report ZD 24547, March 17, 1961, B 206/1354, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 24. Befra Report No. 143716, December 19, 1969, B 206/1406, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 25. On women’s paid labor and social policy in East Germany, see Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); for a contrasting view, Anna Kaminsky, “Frauen in der DDR,” in Erinnerungsort DDR. Alltag, Herrschaft, Gesellschaft ed. Andreas H. Apelt, Robert Grünbaum, and Jens Schöne (Berlin: Metropol, 2016), 63–77. 26. Befragungsbericht, Betriebsverhältnisse in dem VEB Baumwollspinnerei Leinefelde, Bez. Erfurt, June 30, 1967, B 206/1356, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 27. The collection includes no response from Bonn authorities: we have only the Befra report as a basis for pondering the psychological impact of such dubious questioning sessions. Befragungsbericht No. 145220, September 20, 1970, B 206/1126, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 28. Befra Report Z-M 600003, January 19, 1959, B 206/1134, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 29. Befra Report Z/Z 95108, September 11, 1970, B 206/1360, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 30. Befra Report Z/N 70069, August 1, 1960, B 206/1344, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 31. Befra Report No. 215341, November 14, 1974, B 206/1605, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 32. Other reports reveal that pensioners were actively encouraged to share any disappointments they had encountered during their first months in the federal republic. See, for example, Befra Report No. 144094, January 26, 1970, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 33. The informant explicitly declined an invitation to a follow-up interview, stating his unwillingness to engage in any further acts of “betrayal” (Verrat). See Befra Report No. 215163, May 17, 1973, B 206/1499, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 34. Befra Report ZG-83-347, July 14, 1966, B 206/1136, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 35. The BND appears to have posted three employees to the city’s Befra, whereas the BfV had at least twelve full-time employees working at the formal reception center in Giessen. See Bericht über den Besuch des Staatssekretärs von Schoeller im Notaufnahmelager Giessen, B 106/97553, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 36. See, for instance, Zugaufklärung—Erkenntnisse zum Thüringia Feinkeramik Maschinen—VEB, February 24, 1982, B 206/1596, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 37. Telex dated November 5, 1976, B 206/1505, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 38. Telex dated October 19, 1973, B 206/1521, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 39. On conversations between representatives of the BND and West German media, see “Die CIA-Kontakte konnte ich zu Hause anrufen,” interview with Lothar Loewe, in Korrespondenten im Kalten Krieg. Zwischen Propaganda und Selbstbehauptung, ed. Lutz Mükke (Cologne: Halem, 2014), esp. 181–85.

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40. Card files were also shared with the BfV from 1952 onward. Vermerk: Betr.: Datenschutz im Bereich des BGS: Erfassung von Ostblockreisenden, November 28, 1979, B 347/219, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 41. Deferred Telepouch, June 1983, Cascope and Humint Collection Concerning Indications and Warning, “Zuber, Ebrulf,” Vol. 1, Folder 2 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 145, NARA II. 42. Report on the Forschungsobjekt Rothenstein südlich von Jena DDR, October 13, 1981, B 206/1595, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 43. Contact Report, Agent Cryptonym AEABYSS-1, “Mehnert, Walter,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 87, NARA II. 44. Asked by Mehnert whether he had interaction with the BND, his (unnamed) case officer denied any relations. Among the sites detailed by Mehnert were a polyethylene plant in Salavat and a chemical combine in Kazan. Dispatch from Chief of Station, Germany to Chief, Soviet Bloc Division, April 27, 1967, “Mehnert, Walter,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 87, NARA II. 45. Report on VEB Robotron RIESA, 1977 undated, B 206/1590, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 46. Befra Report No. 640792, December 16, 1982, B 206/1598, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 47. Befra Report No. 215650, November 28, 1975, B 206/1606, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 48. Befra Report No. 133857, January 10, 1968, B 206/1491, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 49. For an example of the latter, see Befra Report No. 201228, December 4, 1974, B 206/ 1608, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 50. Befra Report No. 645172, November 19, 1981, B 206/1595, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 51. Befra Report No. 133857, January 10, 1968, B 206/1491, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 52. Befra Report Z/D 28387, June 5, 1968, B 206/1585, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 53. Befra Report No. 257194, November 10, 1975, B 206/1606, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 54. Ibid. 55. Befra Report Z-K 50588, October 28, 1960, B 206/1280, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 56. Befra Report No. 231251, March 31, 1966, B 206/1498, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. The process engineer traveled to the federal republic from Dublin. 57. Befra Report No. 232370, January 25, 1979, B 206/1592, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 58. Befra Report No. 111746, March 20, 1964, B 206/1497, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 59. Another two hundred thousand West Germans, mostly in the years before the Wall’s construction, moved to the east of their own accord. On their motives, see Andrea Schmelz, Migration und Politik im geteilten Deutschland währen des Kalten Krieges. Die West-Ost Migration in die DDR in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2002), 45–48. On recruitment practices and enticements offered by East German authorities during the 1950s, see Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 152–63. 60. For a brief introduction, see Tobias Wunschik, “Die Aufnahmelager für West-Ost-Migranten. Öffentliche Darstellung und heimliche Überwachung nach dem Mauerbau,” Deutschland Archiv Online, February 7, 2013, http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/ deutschlandarchiv/wunschik20130802/?p=all (accessed on October 14, 2016). 61. An English-language introduction to inner-German negotiation during the early 1970s is Mary Elise Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). On the critical round of relaxations in 1984, see Major, Behind the Wall, 214–17. 62. Sheffer, Burned Bridge, 233–39. On the erosion of East German authority over travel restrictions, see Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 286–320. 63. Ilko-Sacha Kowalczuk, Stasi Konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich: C. H., 2013), 190.

Part III

Practices

Chapter 6 presents the first preliminary review of what East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) handlers and interrogators learned about Western questioning practices. It underscores that interrogation reports and analyses compiled by the Stasi represent an especially problematic means to understand the places, personalities, and perspectives associated with Western questioning in divided Berlin and western Germany. As they serve both as a gauge of the Eastern service’s ability to infiltrate Western asylum questioning offices and as an unlikely source of paperwork generated by services stationed in western Germany and West Berlin, however, the collections administered in the late 2010s by the Stasi Records Agency require attention. After canvasing the limited insights that Stasi materials provide in analyzing the questioning operandi of Western intelligence agencies, I turn in chapter 7 to an evaluation of the means used to extract knowledge from migrants, refugees, border crossers, and numerous others across the Cold War period. The tools and techniques of information handling encompassed an array of paper tools, searchable databases, and clandestine instruments. In their quest to extract insights from newcomers, all Cold War security agencies made use of vast reams of paper. Examples range from the humble processing slip (Laufzettel) handed to all applicants at the federal reception centers to still classified reports destined for decisionmakers’ desks in headquarters and capitals. While giving assurances of protection and influence, in extracting information intelligence officials sought to exploit domestic relations involving family members, closest friends, and trusted colleagues. While the specifics of each investigation matter, one also notes the general readiness of

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intelligence services to subjugate domestic relations to security and institutional agendas. This legacy of Cold War interrogations invites consideration.

Chapter Six

Westward Migration and East Germany’s Stasi

This chapter presents insights into Western screening practices deduced from the largest collection of espionage documentation about the East-West confrontation available: the records bequeathed to us by a most unlikely ally of transparency, East Germany’s Ministry for State Security. For those seeking to understand how the perceived triumvirate of American, British, and West German services vetted migrants and asylum seekers, Stasi materials come with more drawbacks than advantages. Archival vestiges of the socialist service provide deeply biased glimpses of interactions between Western security organs and migrants to western Germany. Considered alone, Stasi intelligence reports and analyses are poor guides to relations among Western intelligence powers stationed in West Germany and West Berlin. The investigatory service responsible for domestic order in the unpopular socialist dictatorship exaggerated the West’s ability to infiltrate Communist east-central Europe. 1 So long as the overwhelming weight of evidence comes from one side of the Cold War, researchers must treat with skepticism the highly inflated, if in isolated cases quite possibly broadly accurate, claims put forward by the Ministry of State Security and allied Warsaw Pact security services. Using Stasi records to evaluate the relative success or failure of Western services to infiltrate Communist societies is a task more befitting pundits and former agents than those interested in understanding how, where, and why Western services conducted their elucidation labors during the nearly halfcentury of global ideological and military competition. 2 Against the backdrop of mass migration to central Europe in 2015 on a scale unseen for seventy years, I seek to historicize aspects of protection seeking and migration that have eluded scholarly inquiry. For this reason, in these pages I aim 177

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wherever possible to corroborate details gathered by Soviet and Soviet-inspired security agents with archival materials from American, British, and West German repositories. To what ends can the vast collections accessible at Germany’s Stasi Records Agency help us understand Western intelligence asylum screening? We possess scant information obtained by East Germany’s agents abroad, owing to the destruction (or disappearance) of the records of the Stasi’s chief foreign operations branch, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. 3 Aside from the service’s foreign spies, other sources of Stasi knowledge—returnees, decoyed asylum seekers, informants, defectors, and a range of opportunists—left behind mountains of documentary evidence no single researcher alone will ever master. STASI INFILTRATION OF THE REFUGEE MACHINERY Stasi files provide the easiest way to gauge the success of the East German security agency in infiltrating American, British, and French refugee interrogation sites. Main Directorate II—the Stasi branch formally charged with counterespionage directed against Western intelligence services—targeted especially heavily the most sensitive sites of American interrogation, the Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center on the Sven-Hedin-Strasse in BerlinZehlendorf, Camp King in Oberursel, and, after 1968, Camp King’s successor organization in Munich, the complex of four two-story buildings located at the corner of Sintpert Strasse 42/Traunsteiner Strasse 1 known from 1981 onward as the Allied Forces Coordinating Committee Munich, Regional Office. 4 The Stasi most thoroughly infiltrated questioning offices in West Berlin, and of these, the federal reception center in Marienfelde may well have topped the list. By the end of the 1950s, East Germany’s security service had compromised all three of the foreign preliminary screening teams stationed at the Berlin site administering the federal reception procedure set up to accommodate the mass flight of East Germans. In three betrayal narratives from Marienfelde, money, ideological alignment, and sexual attachment motivated German employees to double-cross their foreign employers. 5 REINHARDT HELLMANN AND FRENCH SCREENING AT MARIENFELDE After volunteering his services at a police office in East Berlin, in April 1958 an informer code-named “Christian” (his actual name, Reinhardt Hellmann, may be disclosed here, as his identity was revealed in East and West German

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newspaper accounts in early 1959) began feeding his Stasi case officer a steady diet of secret information about those passing through the offices of the French screening team at the Marienfelde center. For nearly a year, Hellmann turned over troves of sensitive information, much contained in paperwork stolen from his French employers. His reports show that at least three French services were active in West Berlin during the second half of the 1950s, the Sûreté, the Sécurité Militaire, and the Deuxième Bureau; each hired representatives at Marienfelde reporting to a chief there as well as to off-site directors of the three French agencies. Among Hellmann’s first submissions to his Stasi paymasters was a detailed floor plan of the offices shared by the director, deputy director, and eleven staff members on the second floor of “Haus P,” along with a German-language list of the most commonly posed questions. 6 Hellmann’s Stasi mentor prized his extensive, ongoing profiles of the facility’s French director and deputy director, along with the French team’s locally hired interrogators—most of whom were German—working on behalf of the French services at the reception center. 7 Among the salacious details “Christian” supplied his handlers were finegrained physical descriptions of his fellow interrogators’ daily routines, including inventories of perceived vices, moral shortcomings, personal weaknesses, and sexual interests, as well as more innocuous hobbies. Hellmann also offered sketches of the Sûreté’s main office in West Berlin at the Napoleon Barracks, along with the names and habits of many working there. Several of his reports were audio-recorded. 8 After several years of captivity as a prisoner of war, Hellmann made his way eastward to West Berlin. In 1949 “Christian” began working for French occupation authorities in Berlin, initially as a gardener. From May 1955 to February 1959, he toiled for the Sûreté at Marienfelde as an interrogator. According to Hellmann’s account, the Berlin boss of the Sûreté—not his direct supervisor at Marienfelde—recruited him to produce leads among those denied the prized status of political refugee. 9 Hellmann’s files reveal claims currently impossible to corroborate via parallel document collections; we only know for certain that the Stasi sought to confirm key details of his reports by comparing his insights with those supplied by other informants among the foreign intelligence teams active in West Berlin. Among the more intriguing, if unverified, of his assertions was the claim that the head of the Sûreté in Berlin, “T,” 10 had advised him to record all instances in which British and American services had diverted candidates from their French colleagues. 11 Although Hellmann’s account of T’s vein-bulging fury over an American decision to remove a particularly interesting refugee from the “flow” at Marienfelde and to fly him directly to West Germany for intense questioning accords with the questioning escapades reviewed in part 2, absent confirmation in other document sources it remains little more than conjecture. Equally plausible if unproven is Hell-

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mann’s assertion that the head of the Sûreté in Berlin had instructed him to keep a running list of all persons diverted away from French services by their American and British counterparts; it is likely that Hellmann was attempting to inflate his importance to his Stasi handler. His assessments of the concerns most pressing to his French superiors also fall into the category of plausible if unverified observations. According to Hellmann, in 1958 France’s strategic concerns revolved more around insurgent warfare in North Africa than around the possibility of armed entanglements with the Soviet Union in central Europe. Again, if we can believe the Stasi reports, the worsening military conflict in Algeria lead the head of the Sûreté in Berlin to instruct “Christian” to form relationships with leading personalities in the then newly established German-Arab League, a West Berlin–based organization. 12 His files reveal no sign of success in this particular endeavor. Hellmann’s motivation in supplying information to East Germany’s Ministry of State Security was financial. Equally free of ambiguity are detailed instructions relayed to him by his Stasi handler at clandestine meetings in East Berlin. The fact that his instructions were often repeated, with many tasks left undone, indicate Hellmann’s limited effectiveness as a procurer of well-guarded secrets. Hellmann had a way of suggesting new tasks rather than completing old ones; he needed reminding that he should focus primarily on cataloging personal weaknesses among those working on behalf of French services in East Berlin or East Germany and only secondarily on identifying persons of interest passing through the Marienfelde complex. That his Stasi handler devoted precious minutes at multiple clandestine meetings to his informant’s marital difficulties also suggests Hellmann’s limited usefulness. A complicated private life probably contributed to his inability to focus on what his handler regarded as the most immediate tasks at hand. A full-time French interrogator and active Stasi informant, “Christian” also served as co-chair of the Heimkehrerverband, the main national association of German soldiers returning from years of captivity and forced labor in the Soviet Union. The Stasi officer in charge of Hellmann encouraged his participation in the Soviet returnee organization. His leadership role in the association seemed to offer East German agents insights into those West German groups most militantly opposed to the Soviet system. Here Hellmann appears to have failed his socialist benefactors. Among the assignments Hellmann pursued without success was the establishment of liaison with the director of the main Russian émigré organization, the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (Narodno Trudowoj Sojus, or NTS), and the founder of the Eastern Europe Institute at the Free University of Berlin. “Christian” also came up empty-handed in efforts to cultivate relations with the Eastern Office of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) and the Fighting Group against Inhumanity, funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

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Overworked and distracted, “Christian” was an imperfect source. In terms of the insights he offered on a crowded federal refugee center in divided Berlin, however, his services were considerable. The bulk of his reports consist of detailed biographical sketches of migrants passing through the French office at the Berlin reception facility. Hellmann obliged his Stasi contacts by providing names, dates and places of birth, occupations, and current places of residence, as well as reasons offered for escape, for all visitors to the foreign screening offices. More than a single-spaced page in length, Hellmann’s profiles of escapees included compromising information about migrants’ families and colleagues left behind in the East. Sloppy security made his betrayal possible. His Stasi file reveals that the chief of the French screening operation at Marienfelde, “R,” allowed “Christian” to take home with him confidential case files compiled by his office on those passing through the facility. During late-evening rendezvous in conspiratorial apartments in East Berlin, Hellmann and his Stasi case officer exchanged both insights and original paperwork, including full copies of case files from Marienfelde’s formal reception procedure. His handler, for his part, assumed the role of the fatherly mentor, attending to his young charge’s relationship difficulties and ideological quandaries. In response to political queries, his guide from Germany’s socialist East handed the aspiring philosopher pamphlets outlining the main elements of dialectical materialism. More important in ensuring Hellmann’s cooperation were prodigious sums of deutschmarks. During a fiveweek period in the autumn of 1958, for services rendered Hellmann received 1,200 West German marks. 13 A hefty sum even today, at the time this was an exceptionally large payment. “Christian’s” difficulties in securing the full confidence of his immediate superior at Marienfelde hampered his effectiveness as a Stasi mole, though the ultimate source of his troubles lay in his handler’s approval of risky assignments: of these, a proposal that the French employee obtain the key to his boss’s safe at the Marienfelde office represented a particularly brazen objective. His Stasi mentor, like Hellmann, appears to have been reckless, overreacting to suspicions that Hellmann’s supervisor at Marienfelde appeared to entertain about the Stasi plant. Rather than instruct him to maintain his composure and a low profile, Hellmann’s handler sent his imperfect informant on the offensive, instructing “Christian” to assemble compromising material on the chief in an attempt to “neutralize” him. This plan backfired spectacularly. His boss’s suspicions raised, “Christian” lost the privilege of taking files home and picked up a tail—by whom it is not entirely clear—seriously diminishing his value to the Stasi. Only at this point was his East Berlin–based handler willing to acknowledge Hellmann’s limitations: in his zeal to deliver material in exchange for West German marks, he violated basic conspiratorial rules. Among the most conspicuous of the vices the Stasi

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officer conceded were his extensive debts, sums several times beyond the capacity to repay of a salaried man of relatively modest means. 14 For reasons not explained in his Stasi handlers’ meeting reports, the French head of the Marienfelde screening operation appears to have harbored personal suspicions of “Christian” for some time. Matters came to a head early one morning in February 1959, when “R” 15 instructed Hellmann to cut short an interrogation that he had just begun. A dramatic face-off involving the director of the office ensued. Suspicions centered on Hellmann’s debts in excess of two thousand deutschmarks. 16 The damage to his reputation in the eyes of the Marienfelde screening chief was irreparable; from the warped perspective offered by Hellmann’s Stasi files, however, it seems unlikely that the chief’s powerful colleague “T,” purportedly head of the Sûreté in Berlin, shared his concerns about the young interrogator’s suitability. Had the French chiefs searched they would have uncovered their employee’s betrayal: as it happened, he had an incriminating camera and film carefully stashed away in his suit jacket pocket, within arm’s reach of his accuser. Hellmann, it seems, had luck on his side. While “R” appeared to possess enough information to suspect “Christian” of divided loyalties, precisely to whom their double-crossing employee answered remained a mystery. After a heated exchange, “R” and “T” agreed to dismiss Hellmann in what they regarded as an appropriately discrete manner. Hiding their suspicions, they sent no notification of their decision to fire Hellmann to the West Berlin State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV) or the West Berlin police. His access to the refugee stream at Marienfelde cut off, Hellmann’s fate remained undecided. Officially dismissed, ostensibly “at his request,” he received from “R” and “T” one final set of instructions: to depart immediately for West Germany. Before he left the grounds of the Marienfelde reception center for the last time, “R” warned him to steer clear of any contact with the numerous espionage operatives then active in the divided city. Unemployed, heavily in debt, and, despite the warning from his former employer, still residing in West Berlin, the thirty-two-year-old weighed his options with his Stasi paymasters. Concluding that his best days as their informant were behind him, Hellmann’s socialist handlers decided to exploit their compromised source’s propaganda value, settling him and his girlfriend, a former East German refugee residing in West Berlin, in the Communist eastern half of the city. In a Stasi-orchestrated campaign to expose West Berlin as a hotbed of foreign espionage activity, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) leadership lifted the curtain on and dramatized various alleged misdeeds of Western intelligence services in West Berlin. 17 Among the many politically inconvenient facts of Hellmann’s former labors studiously ignored by the Stasi’s agitation office were the well-remunerated services he had supplied over the course of many months as the Stasi’s mole. To ensure that this and other insalubrious features of his life story remained unknown be-

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yond the walls of the Ministry for State Security, following Hellmann’s introduction at a press conference to loyal representatives of the East German press, all media were denied further access to the French traitor. 18 THE STASI’S “YORK” AND BRITAIN’S SCREENERS AT MARIENFELDE A handwritten note in Hellmann’s Stasi files reveals that his handlers had considered presenting him during the former French employee’s press conference alongside another interrogator-turned-informer, “GM (Geheimer Mitarbeiter, or Informal Collaborator) York.” 19 “York” initially served as a driver to 12 British Intelligence Staff (12 BIS) beginning in 1946. Purportedly the first German male to serve in the 12 BIS outfit, “York” had long enjoyed a position of confidence and was thus allowed to travel throughout the British zone of western Germany at a time when occupying armies sharply curtailed the movement of Germans within the western zones of occupation. Sometime during the late 1940s, British authorities in West Berlin entrusted with post and telephone surveillance placed “York” on their payroll. In 1948 and 1949 “York” was sent to the United Kingdom for training, first to Blackpool and subsequently to Birmingham. “York” also underwent military instruction at a British facility in Höxter, in Westphalia. After a short return to his former position as a driver—among his last passengers was Helene, the wife of East Germany’s first minister of supply Karl Hamann— the former German army captain accepted a position as an interrogator at the Anglo-American Interrogation Center at Karolingerplatz in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin and later at the Marienfelde federal reception center. Beyond providing, like Hellmann, detailed accounts of the vices, perceived or real, of British intelligence staff, “York” pinpointed key decisionmakers within the British operation. In November 1957 he drew the conclusion that the brain of the Marienfelde operation was not the formal director but rather a Briton born in Bremen and educated in Berlin. Mr. “D” had been, like “York,” part of the British intelligence presence in Germany since 1946; as British military intelligence files reveal, he had served in the Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB) until 1956 and was likely picked up by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) thereafter. Providing a detail not included in British archival sources, “York” noted that Mr. “D”—Darlison in British records—only socialized with Germans, naming the head of the federal reception procedure in West Berlin, Dr. Karl Zimmer, as among his close acquaintances. 20 Whereas “Christian” seemed unable to gather information beyond the Marienfelde debriefing offices, “York” supplied key details of British opera-

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tions across the western half of the city. These extended to the most important British espionage center in Berlin, the Yorkshire House complex next to the 1936 Olympic Stadium, the headquarters of 12 BIS. Code-named after this most valuable British target in West Berlin, “York” reported to his Stasi mentor that German nationals were only allowed to proceed to the second and third floors of the structure if accompanied by a British officer (at least a major in rank). 21 British intelligence agents, one reads, allegedly used the top floor to photograph and scrutinize intercepted postal and telegraph messages. These and other assertions contained in his Stasi files, though plausible, remain unconfirmed in British archival sources. 22 British Foreign Office records from the mid-1950s note merely that each of the three Western occupiers conducted postal surveillance in West Berlin according to different criteria, with Britons focusing on the source of the mail as their guide, the Americans tending to open mail addressed to interesting or suspected persons and organizations, and the French purportedly intercepting correspondence to promote espionage directed more against West Germany than the Soviet Union. 23 Among the more interesting of the driver-turned-spy’s uncorroborated observations was his assessment that, by 1957, the vast majority of British intelligence agents serving at the Yorkshire House complex were engaged in matters other than the cultivation of agent networks east of the inner German border. According to his account, by the late 1950s only a small unit located somewhere on the grounds of the Olympic Stadium remained involved in assisting “underground movements” in the so-called Soviet satellite states of east-central Europe, notably in Poland. 24 This observation cannot be confirmed, as the pertinent MI6 materials remain classified. To ensure the trusted former chauffeur remained firmly in their clutches, the Stasi enlisted his wife as an informant, referring to her in records as “Bianca.” Both she and “York” reported to the same handler. 25 Whereas Hellmann’s boss “R” nearly caught the former student redhanded, “York,” by way of contrast, appears to have eluded British suspicions altogether—that is, at least as far as we know from the one-sided account provided by the Stasi. How or when his deceit came to an end remains unclear; perhaps he was never discovered. Somewhat clearer was his motivation, which, unlike Hellmann’s, seems to have been ideological. A measure of the value assigned to his testimony is the fact that the Stasi’s Main Directorate II was still using his informant reports to compile extensive profiles of former 12 BIS employees residing in West Berlin as late as March 1971. 26 Stasi files conclusively document that “York” and “Bianca” were a small if important component of a larger informant-driven operation directed against British security services in West Berlin. During the early 1960s, no fewer than eleven moles were supplying information about 12 BIS.

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SEXUAL ENTANGLEMENTS, SLIPSHOD SECURITY: AMERICAN SCREENERS AT MARIENFELDE The U.S. Army’s security breech at Marienfelde stemmed from its own lapses with troubles beginning at the top of the screening operation. Within the preliminary vetting team, romantic entanglements involving a German stenographer opened the door to the enemy in ways beyond the access provided by “York” and “Christian.” The Stasi’s infiltration of American security at Marienfelde comes not from informer accounts but from a different type of source, interrogation reports compiled by Stasi Directorate IX, the branch of the Ministry for State Security that prepared trial prosecutions via the brutal, often violent interrogation of persons held in so-called investigative custody. 27 Whereas the double crosses of “York” and “Christian” found their way into the Stasi Records Agency’s holdings via reports compiled following clandestine meetings in East Berlin, the account we have of alleged misdeeds on the part of American services comes to us via interrogation minutes produced during the pretrial incarceration of a West Berliner who had toiled only weeks before as a stenographer at the U.S. Marienfelde screening office. “Reni” joined the American debriefing staff at Marienfelde in December 1955 as a typist, having purportedly acquired her excellent English during previous employment at a hospital in the Surrey village of Milford in England. Until June 1960, “Reni” served as a stenographer and translator of reports compiled by German interrogators working on behalf of American services. During the summer of 1960, for reasons her Stasi files do not make clear, “Reni” found herself in East Berlin. While we do not know how she arrived there, her files reveal that, in dozens of interrogations, she provided meticulous sketches of the personal habits, hobbies, interests, and perceived weaknesses of her former German and American colleagues at the Marienfelde office. A subtle observer, “Reni” came by her information through extensive personal interaction, including sexual liaisons with several Americans stationed in West Berlin. Her file indicates that during the 1958–1959 winter she was on intimate terms with the American director of the Marienfelde screening office. According to accounts produced by her Stasi interrogators, for nearly five months the two rendezvoused every Saturday evening at West Berlin’s Airlift Memorial, located at the entrance to Tempelhof Airport. With “H” at the wheel of his 1956 Oldsmobile, the pair then proceeded to an apartment the director had allegedly rented for romantic liaisons; at around 3:00 a.m. the next morning the same Oldsmobile returned her to her mother’s apartment in the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin. The stenographer subsequently initiated a relationship with the American screening team’s driver, a passionate photographer and frequent visitor to the U.S. Army’s “Rifle

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Ranch” shooting range in West Berlin’s expansive Grunewald forest. Clandestine visits to her mother’s apartment ensued. The driver shared with “Reni” his aspiration to become a pharmacist. Like his boss, he placed limits on their liaison, denying “Reni” permission to share nights at his private dwelling. Precisely how her relationship with this young Missourian concluded remains unclear: like so many other details provided in these files, we currently possess no means of establishing the veracity of claims attributed to the woman held in “protective” custody. One reads that “Reni” informed the Stasi’s interrogators that the personable American driver, not the outgoing German stenographer, had ended the affair in April 1960. Perhaps the conclusion of their relationship prompted her to flee to East Berlin, though this appears doubtful. The files show that an earlier and more intense relationship with a basketball-playing Nebraskan named “Jerry” yielded what Stasi interrogators regarded as key details about American sites used for more extensive questioning and recruitment, including a stately home at Brümmer Strasse 6 in the Dahlem neighborhood of West Berlin, a structure to which “Jerry” had repeatedly granted “Reni” unlawful access. 28 “Reni’s” various encounters with Americans stationed in West Berlin— there were still others—enabled the Stasi to develop profiles of sixteen of her American and eighteen of her German colleagues. While the means employed in this instance differed from the British and French cases, the results obtained from the former gardener, driver, and stenographer were broadly similar. Depictions of questioners and various high-profile refugees questioned by the Americans and subsequently identified by “Reni”—just like “Christian” and “York” before her—fill many typed pages. While the volume of these accounts suggests intense Stasi scrutiny and points to its limited successes, they have minimal value as reliable guides to the day-to-day operations of Western vetting at Marienfelde. How “Reni’s” involvement with the Stasi began and ended remains unknown, though we have more details concerning her fate than we do for “York.” The lurid details of her testimony notwithstanding, the Stasi’s appetite for American secrets remained unfulfilled. Her file makes clear that her handlers felt she, unlike Hellmann, could still be gainfully employed in the West, a deployment to which “Reni” apparently assented. In September 1962 Stasi officer “Fritz Schröder” assigned “Reni” a cover name, “Sybille,” together with a fresh set of intelligence objectives in West Berlin. “Sybille” was unsuccessful as a deployed informant. Records from the Berlin state archive document her arrest shortly after her return to West Berlin. Incarcerated in the notorious Moabit prison in October 1963, the thirty-year-old soon found herself once again at an interrogator’s table, albeit in her hometown. After a brief hospitalization for a wound on her left hand, perhaps incurred during an in-custody suicide attempt, she was turned over to

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the questioning experts of the Security Investigation Office of the Federal Criminal Police. 29 Her paper trail, and perhaps also her career in intelligence, ended there. “Reni” may have been recruited as an agent during her time in Marienfelde, though it seems more likely she obliged the Eastern service following her defection to East Germany. While the circumstances surrounding her flight eastward remain blurry, the Stasi’s success in extracting information from German-speaking informants, spies, and defectors regarding Allied questioning at Marienfelde is beyond dispute. 30 Less obvious, but no less important, are insights into questioning practices in West Berlin and West Germany conveyed to the Stasi from its partners across east-central Europe. During the Cold War period, so-called fraternal organs in the Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Soviet, and especially Polish ministries of internal affairs shared valuable synopses of the questions American, British, French, and West German services were posing at Marienfelde. 31 These reports from Communist security counterparts encapsulated insights garnered from many different sources, including informants, spies, and returnees, in addition to “open” sources, especially Western print media. Drawing heavily on the assistance of fellow socialist services, in 1987 the Stasi compiled a catalog that revealed no fewer than 186 questions typically posed by foreign and domestic screening agents active at Marienfelde. 32 Whether this list corresponds to queries actually raised by Western intelligence services remained at the time of publication unverifiable. STASI INFILTRATION OF WEST GERMAN QUESTIONING OFFICES The reach of Soviet-inspired services extended beyond the foreign screening operations at the Marienfelde reception center. Among those successfully targeted by the Stasi and its socialist allies were West German federal, state, and local offices along the inner German demarcation line. The questioning practices of West Germany’s federal border and customs officers contained few mysteries for the Stasi analysts. A critical source of information for the Stasi’s Main Directorate II was the interrogation of returnees, though the successful cultivation of longtime informants, including but not limited to an especially prodigious source residing near the Lower Saxon border town of Goslar, also yielded valued insights. 33 As moles and informants, West German civil servants supplied confidential information about federal refugee and asylum procedures to the East German regime until its collapse. A notable late success for the Ministry for State Security and the SED was the 1987 acquisition of an informant at the Zirndorf facility for foreign refugees in Bavaria, Camp Valka’s successor.

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The Stasi recruited “Dieter S.,” a polyglot employed by the Foreign Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees from 1970 onward, during his visit to relatives in the East German chemical center of Merseburg. Working to the Stasi’s advantage was Dieter S.’s alleged disaffection with his political party, the SPD, specifically for what he regarded as the Social Democrats’ willingness to crimp the right to asylum enshrined in West Germany’s constitution. 34 The East German security and intelligence service also enjoyed late successes in infiltrating West Germany’s Joint Interrogation Centers (JICs). In March 1989 a mole supplied a report on an East German refugee summoned to the Stuttgart Branch Questioning Office (Zweigstellen für Befragungwesen), or Befra. In his four-hour interrogation, the newcomer related his escape via the East German embassy in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, as well as recent activities of the socialist nation’s trade mission there. 35 WHEN VETTERS DEFECT: THE CASE OF FEDERAL INTERROGATOR KARL HEINZ FALK Attempts to exploit for propaganda value those abandoning their countries of origin proved irresistible to intelligence services, particularly when, as in the case of former French interrogator Hellmann, a would-be defector’s accounts seemed to present a compelling counternarrative to the West’s success in encouraging so many to abandon Soviet-inspired socialism. An attempt to divert attention from the mass flight of East Germany’s best and brightest may account for why, less than two months before the Wall’s construction, the defection of Karl Heinz Falk, an interrogator employed in West Berlin by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV), was showcased in a major press conference and a special news bulletin broadcast on the main East German television news program. 36 First hired by the U.S. Army to maintain records at the Berlin Document Center, the most important repository in postwar Germany for Nazi-era individual case files, Karl Heinz Falk accepted a position as a preliminary screener at the BfV in Marienfelde in 1957. Four years later, in East Berlin, Falk reveled in the disclosure of his former colleagues’ identities, in his case the federal office’s covert six-man interrogation team at the reception center. After raising a host of allegations surrounding the alleged American recruitment of newcomers as agents, Falk, like Hellmann before him, supplied the names and addresses of refugees who had passed through his office, one among several indications that the concerns both men professed for the wellbeing of East Germans was disingenuous. 37 Subsequent media accounts, including one published in the main East German daily Neues Deutschland, featured deeply unflattering profiles of

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Falk’s former colleagues. 38 Unlike after the defection of BfV chief Otto John, West German media offered muted responses to the Stasi’s charges. For its part, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) went in for a measure of character defamation, claiming Falk had never been an employee of the BfV and conceding only that he had been “active as a questioner as part of the federal emergency reception procedure.” RIAS broadcasters asserted that Falk had been fired nine months prior to his defection. Alleged by the American broadcaster to have succumbed first to beer and then schnapps, Falk was purportedly too distracted by his drinking habit to have ever actively served as a BfV debriefer. 39 While the fiction of BfV absence at the federal reception centers provided both the American broadcaster and the BfV the opportunity to disavow the traitorous Falk, several West Berlin newspaper accounts seemed to accept, at least in broad outline, the veracity of his—and the Stasi’s—allegations. In this context, it is instructive to review the Stasi’s agitation department’s preparations for Falk’s press conference. One reads that the aim was to “further expose the role of the so-called refugee centers in West Berlin and West Germany as centers of human trafficking and playgrounds for the secret services and their agents.” An important secondary aim of Falk’s disclosures, one learns, was to “unmask” BfV employees as “a clique of former Wehrmacht and SS officers and pawns of US intelligence.” 40 The political instrumentation of Falk’s testimony, and in larger senses the twined legacies of National Socialism and postwar American occupation, could hardly have been more frankly expressed. Judging by the volume of accessible records, the Stasi’s primary source of information about Western intelligence practices appears to have come not primarily from defectors, agents, informants, or even fellow socialist services, but rather from closer to home, specifically from East German returnees, a poignant reminder of how porous the “Iron Curtain” actually was—or, put slightly different, how central human intelligence gathering remained until communism’s demise in east-central Europe. Furnishing the Stasi a steady flow of information about all Western questioning sites and practices, tens of thousands of returnees closed a loop that often began with their initial decision to flee—a choice not infrequently triggered by Eastern Bloc state security officials’ attempts to intimidate or harass their own subjects. PURLOINED DOCUMENTS OF WESTERN PROVENANCE—SEIZED BY THE STASI The documents housed at the Stasi Records Agency include paperwork of West German origin brought eastward, including by returnees. Standardissue documents created to facilitate the procedures set up to process East

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Germans, ethnic Germans, and other asylum seekers are among the most numerous of these documents. Alongside form letters such as Befra summons, processing slips (Laufzettel) from the emergency reception procedure, and other official documents, including employment records, passports, residence permits, and driver’s licenses acquired during stays in the federal republic, one encounters in Stasi interrogation files highly personal items. Among the most moving are handwritten postcards and letters sent by newcomers in the West to their families still residing, some willingly, many less so, in East Germany or other so-called socialist states. Loved ones’ replies, accompanied by chilling Stasi assessments of the “reliability” of the family members in question, are typically included therein. The confiscation of documents from newcomers on both sides of the inner German border by intelligence agents was par for the course: at the Befra in Giessen, for instance, rounds of questioning conducted by the BfV and the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) led the latter to seize from a former citizen of the federal republic thirty-six original documents and film negatives. 41 Unlike in Stasi collections, however, these materials have been removed from dossiers made available to researchers at the Federal Archives facility in Koblenz. Providing irrefutable evidence of the service’s successful infiltration of Western intelligence services, the holdings of today’s Stasi Records Agency underscore the ability of Soviet-directed and -inspired services to seize paperwork created by ideological foes. Documents of Western provenance stolen by the Stasi and subsequently included in files range from moving personal missives from loved ones to soulless form letters issued by West German bureaucrats. While the former makes for emotionally compelling reading, the relevance of the latter should not be overlooked. Captured summons issued to individual newcomers reveal how the BND altered its appeal to those invited to the Joint Interrogation Centers over time. A June 1961 summons from the Stuttgart JIC sought to find common ground with newcomers, asserting that a new arrival to the federal republic “[would] understand that the economic, political, and scientific labor of restoring the unity of our Fatherland can only reasonably be accomplished by creating a comprehensive picture of developments in all parts of Germany.” 42 A generation later, the screening denizens of the JICs had dropped the appeal to national unity. A standard-issue note posted from the Giessen JIC during the 1980s introduced the BND-coordinated questioning office in the following manner: “It is the responsibility of the Joint Interrogation Centers (Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen) to collect and evaluate reliable information about foreign countries on behalf of the federal government. You can help with this task. We would be grateful to you if you would attend a meeting at our office, and ask that you bring to this meeting any personal papers and documents you possess from the period before your residence in the Federal Republic.” Also

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appended to the 1980s-era summons—likely in response to West German press scrutiny and behind-the-scenes pressure from opposition party politicians—was the statement “The degree to which you entrust us with your knowledge is in your hands” and the assurance that the office guaranteed visitors “strict confidentiality.” 43 The intelligence-gathering agencies of the West German government requesting this leap of faith remained unnamed to recipients, thus ensuring a key initial encounter with federal officials involved subterfuge. CAPTURED U.S. COUNTER INTELLIGENCE CORPS REFERRAL SHEETS Changes in tactics deployed by West German security organs to entice those new to the federal republic to visit the JICs are far from the only insights revealed in documents stolen by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security. Less common but not unheard of in holdings available today at the Stasi Records Agency are documents covering Western refugee security tactics in foreign languages. One example is a field report penned during the early 1950s by an American agent. This English-language document comes to us from typed notes created by the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and smuggled—precisely how remains unknown—to East Germany. Purloined CIC “referral sheets” capture the voice of U.S. military intelligence in what might charitably be described as battle mode. Also included in the file and not recounted in these pages are the actual names, addresses, and dates of birth of new CIC recruits, their monthly allowances, and contact information for sympathetic West German industrialists supplying the CIC with tips concerning new arrivals. In order to convey the breathless tone at least some CIC agents used to discuss the exploitation and recruitment of potentially interesting refugees, I cite at length one note concerning a recent newcomer (and prospect), “Hans P.”: Hans P. said that he would be willing to write a letter to a guy named Rudolf D. According to P., D. knows the border better than the back of his hand and he would be damn glad to run across as often as necessary if there were a few dollars in it for him. Also, Rudolf D. has a son named Siegfried D., presently stationed in HARZ/Kreis WERINGERODE with the KVP [precursor organization to the East German Army]. Siegfried is planning to desert the KVP in the near future and he could be convinced to stay if contacted particularly by his father. That was all I had time for: maybe he could be connected in GIESSEN but I lost him somewhere along the line. He was damn good and was very willing. 44

Whether the CIC succeeded in contacting P. at Giessen is not conveyed in files reviewed for this project.

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More common in Stasi collections are information-gathering materials produced by screeners posted to West German and West Berlin screening offices, with the largest volume originating from the federal reception centers at Giessen and Marienfelde. Not all of the vetters were state employees, let alone intelligence agents. The most voluminous cache of documents I have scrutinized contains assessments of individual applicants to the emergency reception procedure submitted by the Eastern Office of the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, or FDP) at Marienfelde. 45 Even the most intriguing-sounding documents should be regarded with suspicion. For instance, a twenty-six-page verbatim summary of questions that BND staff at Marienfelde put to persons from areas of Europe under Soviet rule in 1958 yields few surprises; in broad outline, the catalogue corresponds to the queries put to newcomers considered in chapter 5. 46 Files accessible at the Stasi Records Agency also contain internal correspondence produced by employees of the BND. A small cache of documents seized by the Stasi directorate most intimately involved with returnees and counterintelligence affairs provides some insights into how the BND’s “liaison offices” at the federal reception centers and the then new Befras interacted with one other, as well as with other branches of the West German foreign espionage agency. Precisely how copies of Bundesnachrichtendienst files made their way eastward remains unknown, though theft and betrayal likely played a role. 47 With reference to West German interrogations of foreign newcomers, among the BND documents currently housed at the Stasi Records Agency is a six-page report titled “Acquiring Leads and Research via the Emergency Reception Centers and the Interrogation Offices.” Submitted in mid-July 1959 by “285,” a designation for an office apparently known as the Lead Representative for Operational Areas of the BND Headquarters (Führungsbeauftragter für op. Bereiche der BND-Zentrale), the document acknowledged the importance of the reception centers in Berlin-Marienfelde, Giessen, and Uelzen “in placing sources within the Soviet zone of occupation.” 48 The tone and font of this document housed today at the Stasi Records Agency correspond with materials I have examined in the declassified BND collection housed at the German Federal Archives repository in Koblenz. At least for the late 1950s, this suggests we lend credence to the assertion that the BND’s interest in vetting revolved primarily around infiltrating Soviet-occupied East Germany. Among the revelations contained in this particular captured BND document (likely produced by the Lead Representative for Operational Areas of the BND Headquarters) are frank admissions of the absence of the Pullach service’s legal mandate and the competitive pressures of working alongside foreign intelligence allies. BND officials keenly felt these strains in West Berlin, where the West German foreign intelligence service operated at the discretion of Allied, above all American, intelligence services. Acknowledg-

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ing the BND’s contested position at the end of an unenviably long pecking order at Marienfelde, the document’s author nonetheless sought to ensure that his agency’s employees made the most of their disadvantaged position there by directing its “Liaison Office Seifert” to conduct only very brief screening sessions lasting several minutes, described as “flushings,” of those under age twenty-four. The report states that the aim of these back-and-forths should be to compile leads that West German–based BND staff might take up at greater leisure in the Lower Saxon youth camps of Sandbostel and Westertemke. 49 In other words, BND security officials in West Berlin placed a premium on targeting young adult male and female applicants in a manner unlikely to raise the interest of American, British, French, and domestic intelligence competitors. This dossier of captured West German intelligence documents indicates that the BND’s game of masks continued along similar lines at the formal reception procedure facilities in Giessen and Uelzen: BND agents were to direct tips arising from brief conversations with those passing through these two sites to external decoy offices known as “Fa. Erhard” and “Fa. Keller.” (“Fa.” is an abbreviation for “firm,” a ploy adopted to disguise the questioning venues’ true purpose.) The author sought to ensure—whether successfully or not remains a matter of conjecture—that all other leads were directed to “631,” an administrative entity known as the Coordination Center for Interrogation Affairs (Führungsstelle Befragungswesen), possibly a designation for a branch office located at the service’s headquarters in Pullach. From there, “tips”—that is, individuals of interest first covertly identified as such at the federal reception centers in Giessen, Marienfelde, and Uelzen—should be directed to what were then one of the newly established Joint Interrogation Centers. 50 A second report compiled by the same BND official—the unnamed lead representative for operational areas of the BND Headquarters—offers clues about how leads generated at the JICs were (at least in theory) directed to interrogation specialists within the BND toiling elsewhere in West Germany. The author’s memo intended a special role for “24,” a BND liaison office in Cologne. Quite possibly the Interservice Refugee Coordination Detachment (IRCD), this office specialized in intelligence about the Soviet Union. This document also notes that the Befra in Düsseldorf, located a brief train ride from the IRCD in Cologne, was granted a special role in the acquisition of intelligence about the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland; the Düsseldorf JIC also appears to have played a supporting role to “24,” again possibly the designation for the IRCD. 51 The Stasi file containing these purloined BND documents concludes with a note indicating that results had been turned over to the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. Like so many others leads to the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm, the paper trail ends there. 52

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By hook or by crook, the acquisition of BND documentation may have granted the Stasi early advantages in divining the operational procedures of the Joint Interrogation Centers. We lack the means to determine whether this was so with any degree of confidence. Extant Stasi materials do reveal that the insights gained from the service’s seizure of Western espionage materials left many of the Stasi’s own questions unanswered. As a Stasi department chief conceded in a twenty-page report in 1967 (that is, more than eight years after the security service’s theft of the two documents reviewed earlier), his information-gathering directorate possessed only limited knowledge about the individuals toiling at the JICs. 53 WEST GERMAN PRESS AND PURLOINED DOCUMENTS: THE STASI AND THE BEFRAS The publication of critical newspaper accounts in West Germany about the Befras from 1967 onward (discussed in chapter 2) appears to have prompted the “sword and shield” of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party to take a hard look at gaps in its knowledge of the BND’s Joint Interrogation Centers. Notwithstanding the advantages gained from extensive networks of informants, defectors, spies, returnees, and not least open Western media, another five years would pass before the Stasi’s Main Directorate II claimed significant progress in learning which administrative offices were encoded in the numerical designations in the documents seized in 1959. 54 During the 1970s, the Stasi’s pilfering of Western documents continued to define priorities of future information retrieval. And yet compared to open sources or the interrogation of returnees, theft of Western documents appears to have proven of generally limited value. Even highly clandestine sources yielded less than first meets the eye. Procuring (exactly how remains unknown) the March 1974 report presented by Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to the West German parliamentary committee on domestic security seemed to offer the Main Directorate II insights into West German refugee screening practices. According to the stolen report, in a closed-door meeting with elected parliamentary representatives charged with responsibility for domestic security, Genscher acknowledged that his ministry had only recently instructed BfV representatives in Giessen to alert newcomers of their right to refuse to offer information to interrogators. In other words, the Ministry of the Interior was no longer involved in misleading newcomers into thinking they were actually required to supply details to preliminary screeners. 55 The change in policy, startling as it may seem at first glance, was actually yesterday’s news. Two months before, several press accounts had provided the Stasi—and of course anyone else reading West Germany’s main newspapers—with advanced notice of the Ministry of the Interior’s plans to intro-

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duce a string of new security measures at the Giessen reception center. In fact, critical press accounts revealed more than the purloined report, including the name and age of the deposed chief of the BfV team and future plans to rotate screeners in Giessen every four years. 56 WESTERN SECURITY SCREENING AFTER NOVEMBER 9, 1989 While West German media unwittingly aided the labors of the Ministry for State Security, other important sources of information on Western security practices were testimonies supplied by East German subjects, that is to say, those who returned to the German Democratic Republic after a period of time, typically several months to a year, in West Berlin or West Germany. Even for a brief few weeks after the Berlin Wall’s collapse, the Stasi’s vast information-gathering bureaucracy lumbered on, appropriating documents obtained by subjects crossing the newly opened inner German border. Western espionage documents from the period after the revolution of November 1989 appear to have come, as in previous years, not from nefarious informants or defectors but from citizen returnees, individuals who, after having turned their backs on the East, now chose to give it a second chance, typically following unsuccessful attempts to make new lives for themselves in West Berlin or western Germany. One such document brought to the Stasi’s attention after the Wall’s collapse in Berlin on November 9, 1989, is an unsigned handbill from the BfV. Because access to documents of this kind in Western archives is at present unheard of, I have translated the leaflet in full: Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! We welcome you to the Federal Republic of Germany. We have a major concern we wish to discuss with you. Perhaps you too have been contacted by the intelligence service of a Communist-run country and asked to work on behalf of this service in the Federal Republic of Germany. We know that many facing such a situation saw no alternative and thus permitted themselves to be enlisted. For this course of action we have a measure of understanding. If you choose to ignore this commitment and renounce any future cooperation with this intelligence service, your decision will have no adverse consequences.

This flyer provided newcomers with a contact telephone number in Cologne, headquarters of the BfV, along with further assurances that West German security officials were acutely aware of the circumstances under which such enlistments took place. For those individuals unmoved by the BfV’s assurances of professionalism and confidentiality, the threat of an unannounced visit by a representative of West Germany’s counterintelligence bureaus served as a reminder that the prospect of intelligence entangle-

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ments, a prominent and notoriously unpleasant feature of their recently abandoned lives in the Communist East, might persist in the federal republic. 57 STASI RECORDS ON TRIAL In instances in which parallel collections may be consulted in archival holdings from both sides of the former Cold War divide, analysis of Western documents obtained by Stasi operatives active in West Germany or, as was likely more often the case, brought eastward by returnees may provide illumination of Western debriefing practices. Comparatively few of the Stasi’s assertions are independently verifiable. An example is the number of East Germans to have passed through the BfV’s West Berlin preliminary screening operation in Marienfelde. The Stasi’s Main Directorate II reported that during the months of September and October 1986, 178 and 127 individuals faced BfV debriefers there. The vast majority were purportedly male: of the September total of 178, 148 were men; in October, the relationship was 99 men in a total of 127 expellees. 58 When compared with estimates provided by the Federal Chancellor’s Office regarding the number of individuals questioned between 1985 and 1991 in the Befras, approximately 3,000 annually, or 250 a month, the Stasi’s figures appear plausible. 59 The inability to corroborate the vast majority of Stasi assertions demands interpretative caution. Only in a few instances have I been able to verify observations presented by the Stasi’s Main Directorate II. For example, Stasi records indicate that upon formal registration for the emergency reception procedure in Marienfelde—that is, typically after rounds of “prescreening” by all three Allied powers—federal officials formally charged with the registration process during the late 1950s alerted the BfV, BND, and Ministry for All-German Affairs to the potential value of a newcomer as an informant by marking his or her green processing form (Laufzettel) with the number “40.” 60 Examination of processing forms handed out at Marienfelde from this period confirms this practice. In an as-yet-unknown number of limited instances, Stasi assessments may prove accurate, though the current state of archival access encourages interpretative caution. More general observations about foreign-instigated espionage offered by those toiling for the SED’s security service present interpretative challenges. If we look past the pro forma propaganda clichés, East German analysis may in select cases be confirmed. A 1987 analysis of the questioning practices in the refugee screening centers and Befras undertaken by the Main Directorate II reached the conclusion that fighting terrorism at home and abroad, no longer communism in east-central Europe, had by that time emerged as the preeminent focus of intelligence labors at the federal emergency reception centers and the Joint Interrogation Centers. 61 Penned

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five years later, in 1992, a formal response from the Bonn government to questions concerning the Befras poised by Ingrid Köppe (a member of the German federal parliament from the Green/Civic Forum 90 Party denied access to the Düsseldorf Befra at Immermannstrasse 11) seems to verify that the thematic emphasis of questioning at the JICs had shifted to terrorism, narcotics trafficking, technology transfer, and weapons trading. 62 Whether this transition began in the final years of what we today regard as a period of intense confrontation between the West and the Soviet Bloc or after the demise of communism in Europe in 1989 and 1990 remains unclear. At least equally intriguing are Stasi assertions about Western use of refugees as infiltrees. Allegations of this nature extend across the entire period of the Stasi’s existence, with several foreign asylum seekers ensnared in what appears to have been intra-Allied battles during the late 1980s. The absence of Western intelligence documentation from this period requires that we approach such claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. To offer one example, a Stasi office in Potsdam reported that an attempt by an American service in West Berlin to recruit a recently arrived Iraqi chemical technician had recently ended in failure, with the forty-two-year-old specialist (and subsequent West German citizen) from Kerbala lodging a formal legal complaint in West Berlin courts against the American occupiers. According to the Stasi’s account, “Al-H’s” charges had found their way into his formal asylum application. In his case, “Al-H” was extensively interrogated by all three services at Marienfelde about his activities in Iraq’s chemical weapons plants, as well as his subsequent unsuccessful attempts to find safe haven in Morocco, Libya, Hungary, East Germany, Denmark, and Greece. The files uncover the Stasi’s intention during the second half of 1989 to reawaken the interest of American services in the then unemployed chemist via a cooperative American citizen in West Berlin, identified in his file merely as “Missouri.” 63 Relying solely on the Stasi’s overblown claims of Anglo-American perfidy, one might conclude that even the fall of the Berlin Wall did not bring to an end Western attempts at recruitment, at least judging from an offer, purportedly extended at the Marienfelde reception center in a mix of German and English, to a twenty-four-year-old informatics instructor from Rostock to come work for a “(West) German security office.” Having returned to the East after moving legally to West Berlin to reside with his “homosexual partner” (a former East German subject), the young man’s response—at least according to his Stasi handlers—to what appears to have been a rather wobbly American recruitment attempt was as follows: “I don’t know, I need time.” If this Stasi file is credible, the young man delivered this polite if somewhat ambiguous nein in English. 64 Recruitment of spies by Western agencies for missions in Soviet-dominated Europe was indeed a feature of espionage across the Cold War period,

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not merely the era of American-led liberation policy during the 1950s. 65 One way to assess the fevered claims of intelligence officials is through comparison with documents produced by internal experts within opposing security organizations. The overlap is unlikely ever to be truly satisfactory. Leaders of the crusade to rid Europe of the scourge of Soviet-led Communist oppression, American services commanded willing domestic allies to engage the enemy behind its lines, a fact one can sometimes confirm in declassified CIA records. We now know from this American agency’s documents that “crossborder” operations involving agents of the Bundesnachrichtendienst extended into the early 1980s. CIA documents reveal that the BND’s chief of Soviet and Eastern Bloc operations, Ebrulf Zuber, reported to CIA counterparts his success in recruiting some twenty East German truck drivers. What ends the drivers served or whether the CIA used the Joint Interrogation Centers or other migrant questioning centers as conduits remains unknown. 66 Claims of Western infiltration submitted by opposing intelligence agencies, especially by the Stasi, should be regarded with wariness. Tellingly, consultation of the East German Ministry for State Security holdings often suffices to refute the agency’s relentless drumbeat of espionage charges. According to a 1975 report produced by the Main Directorate II, between January 1973 and June 1975 CIA operatives had allegedly provided special training to eight East German refugees—before returning the men for missions in East Germany. All in their early twenties, six of the alleged “agents” had purportedly deserted the East German army between 1972 and 1974. 67 Examination of interrogation records compiled by the Stasi’s Main Directorate IX reveals that East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party proved unable to produce compelling evidence of Western intervention in these cases. After fleeing to the Danish port city of Gedser in June 1971, one of the alleged refugee agents, Georg S., made his way to Danish Nykøbing and, from there, to the West German border town of Puttgarden. After passing through American and German screening offices of the formal reception procedure and the Joint Interrogation Center in Giessen, Georg S. boarded a Hamburgbased Shell tanker bound for Nigeria as a nautical officer. His residency in the capitalist world lasted precisely one year. The following June found the well-traveled twenty-eight-year-old East German lining up to reenter the German Democratic Republic. The Stasi’s attempt to exploit the former nautical officer’s concerns about the health of his eighteen-month-old child figured prominently in his decision; his file records the Stasi’s instructions to his wife, Ingrid, to write more about their young son and her plans for the upcoming Christmas holidays, wishes to which the estranged wife conceded. Hours of grueling interrogation underscored Georg S.’s resolve not to bend to the pressures inflicted by his cruel interrogators. Several reports affirm his intention to refute previous testimony procured by coercion. At issue were allegations of CIA instruction that the sailor had purportedly received at the

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so-called Allied Forces Coordinating Committee complex in Munich—the successor to Camp King—during the autumn of 1971. Dismissing the claims, Georg S. blithely noted, “These were what the investigating organs had wanted to hear from me.” His attempts to exert influence extended beyond his imprisonment on trumped-up charges warrant mention. His application to secure permission to reside in the federal republic records numerous attempts to have his sentence reversed after the democratic transition in eastern Germany of 1989 and 1990. 68 Georg S.’s tribulations remind us how the Stasi’s insights into Western intelligence relied on its infliction of human suffering: in his case, as in so many others, intelligence gathering involved the prolonged manipulation of both East German citizens and their loved ones. Hope aside that future scholars may one day be able to scrutinize Stasi claims vis-à-vis intelligence documents housed in public archives, there is little to be gained by broadcasting Communist officials’ overdrawn claims of Western infiltration without independent means to evaluate them. BEYOND THE STASI’S DEMISE: STEALING GLIMPSES INTO THE FUTURE Discernable in analyses produced by East Germany’s secret police are earlytwenty-first-century struggles against international terrorism and protracted military conflict in Iraq. While they possessed no crystal ball, Stasi operatives received glimpses into the future. A German-language translation of a furtive, informal, “unofficial” exchange of views in 1989 between lead representatives of West Germany’s BND and the Soviet KGB seemed to presage the Stasi’s demotion, if not outright demise. According to this Soviet source, a meeting between BND director Hans-Georg Wieck with his KGB counterpart, Vladimir Kryuchkov, included suggested topics for a discussion— namely, the coordination of measures against terrorism, organized crime, and drug smuggling. 69 To corroborate information about Western refugee questioning, Stasi analysts scoured publicly available sources, first and foremost West German print media. Employees of the socialist service compared accounts of Western provenance with documents stolen from opposing services, using both to compile reports that also included information gleaned from networks of informants, defectors, and spies. Time and again, local West German press accounts offered the socialist service advanced notice of opponents’ intentions, such as the American decision to move Camp King from Oberursel to Munich in late 1968. 70 Not least, the Stasi profited handsomely from the spadework of socialist partner services. The Stasi’s most important source of domestic information about Western questioning was most likely harrowing

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interrogations of its own citizens, those unfortunate souls who returned to the socialist East. Available today in overwhelming abundance, records compiled by the Stasi department responsible for arrests, observations, and preparation of political criminal cases for trial, the Main Directorate IX, underscore the Eastern service’s ability to produce sought-after physical and psychological descriptions of foreign-born and German interrogators toiling at security facilities across western Germany. Coupled with other Stasi documents, particularly those created by Main Directorate II, they allow us to document security breaches at Western questioning centers and to examine purloined Western documents currently locked away in public archives. For those seeking to grasp the aims and methods of Western questioning, however, Stasi records are, especially when considered alone, of limited value. BIPOLARITY OF COLD WAR SECURITY SCREENING When Stasi materials are juxtaposed with documents from repositories in Koblenz, London, and Washington, a fact of life in both German states after 1949 emerges: the pervasive character of refugee questioning in central Europe’s interrogation nation, Cold War Germany. While the prevalence of surveillance in East Germany renders direct comparisons between the postwar German states pointless, the practices of interrogations carried out in the name of diametrically opposed ideologies nonetheless reveal baseline commonalities. Interviewees at the Befras and asylum centers, as well as those held in the Stasi’s clutches, confronted walls of silence and wide avenues of misdirection. In response, the displaced, migrants, and eventually travelers, pensioners, and family members granted permission to emigrate to the federal republic were summoned to provide sensitive personal information about relatives, friends, and neighbors, as well as acquaintances, colleagues, and (especially) foreign “guest” workers and mortal enemies. The pervasiveness of questioning in western Germany and West Berlin revealed in the documentary archives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and West as well as East Germany encourages us to consider the price of security vetting—in human and political terms. Before turning to the personal and social costs of mass interrogation in chapter 7, I survey the approaches most commonly deployed by security services in Cold War Germany to extract information from newcomers. NOTES 1. The founding myth of the Stasi rested on overblown claims of “Anglo-American imperialist” agents. For an introduction, see Jens Gieseke, Mielke-Konzern Mielke-Konzern. Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945–1990 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001), 21–26, 48–53.

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2. Former moles and retired agents of the Stasi have repeatedly claimed that the Berlin Wall was constructed in response to a security crisis set off by the two sides’ industrious spies. A recent introduction to allegations of this nature is contained in Klaus Eichner, Imperium ohne Rätsel. Was bereits die DDR-Aufklärung über die NSA wusste (Berlin: edition ost, 2014). East German publicist and SED member Julius Mader was an especially prolific source of such accounts penned during the East-West face-off. See, for an example of his labors, Die graue Hand. Eine Abrechnung mit dem Bonner Geheimdienst (Berlin: Kongress Verlag, 1960). Select defectors have also joined this chorus. See, for a widely cited example, Heinz Felfe, Im Dienst des Gegners. 10 Jahre Moskaus Mann im BND (Hamburg/Zürich: Rasch and Röhring, 1986). 3. Under circumstances as yet unclear, American services, including the CIA, procured the main index entries of the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung; known as the “Rosenholz files,” these may or may not include larger runs removed by American services from the Stasi’s collections during the early 1990s. Soviet, later Russian, services were also involved in confiscating records in early 1990, apparently with support from East Germany’s post-Communist government. For an introduction to this post-Wall chapter that raises more questions than it answers, see Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Sabine Fiebig, Rosenholz. Eine Quellenkritik, 2nd ed. (Berlin: BStU, 2007), also accessible, as of October 10, 2016, via the agency’s website at http:// www.bstu.bund.de/DE/Wissen/Aktenfunde/Rosenholz/rosenholzbericht2007_pdf. pdf;jsessionid=EE06EDD457BD7AD7282D815822144016.2_cid329?__blob=publicationFile. See also Ilko-Sacha Kowalczuk, Stasi Konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 352–53. 4. On Camp King, see Ausarbeitung zur Dienststellenakte über die zentrale Dienststelle des US-Geheimdienstes 513th Intelligence Group Camp King, February 1967, MfS-HA IX, Nr. 3708. Additional documentation on the Oberursel facility is located in AS 139/76, HA II/ 32141, HA IX/2582, HA IX/4754, HA IX 4794, HA IX/4795, HA XX/AKG 6920, ZAIG/ 15462. ZAIG was the Central Evaluation and Information Group. For a report on Stasi incursion at the latter institution, see Bericht über meinen Aufenthalt in München, Sintperstrasse und Traunsteinstrasse, October 25, 1977, MfS-HA II/17482, BStU. 5. For an introduction to the Stasi’s recruitment practices in western Germany, see Helmut Müller-Enbergs, ed., Inoffizielle Mitarbeit des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit, Vol. 2: Anleitung für die Arbeit mit Agenten, Kundschaftern und Spionen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2011), esp. 118–89. 6. Treffbericht mit KP Christian, April 15, 1958, HA II/17998, BStU. 7. Reports supplied by a second French employee of the Marienfelde questioning center from 1959 to 1965 offer a means to verify many of Hellmann’s assertions. See Analyse zum deutschen Mitarbeiter der französischen Sichtungsstelle Berlin-Marienfelde, November 19, 1964, MfS-HA II/33962, BStU. 8. Treffbericht mit GM “Christian,” January 27, 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. 9. Betr.: Zurückziehung des GM “Christian” und Übersiedlung zur DDR,” March 23, 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. 10. His actual name, together with others designated with an initial in quotation marks in the coming pages, is provided in Stasi documents. Such names have been omitted herein in accordance with the Stasi Records and German Federal Archives Laws. 11. Treffbericht mit dem GM “Christian,” November 5, 1958, MfS-HA/17999, BStU. 12. Ibid. 13. Notiz. Betr.: Durchsicht der letzten Treffberichts des GM “Christian” der Verw. GroßBerlin Abteilung II, February 23, 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. For an introduction to the motives of those who toiled in West Berlin and West Germany for the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm, see Georg Herbstritt, Bundesbürger im Dienst der DDR-Spionage. Eine analytische Studie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007), 250–99. 14. Notiz. Betr.: Durchsicht der letzten Treffberichts des GM “Christian” der Verw. GrossBerlin Abteilung II, February 23, 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. 15. Data protection laws governing source material obtained in Germany prevent me from disclosing this individual’s actual name. Several additional names will be anonymized in this manner.

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16. Bericht zum Treff mit GM “Christian,” March 3, 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. Page 9 notes the Stasi lieutenant’s surprise at the extent of Hellmann’s debts. 17. “Sichtungsstelle Marienfelde,” Wochenpost 28, no. 59 (July 11, 1959): 10–11. See also Erklärung des ehemaligen hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiters des französischen Geheimdienstes, Hellmann, auf der Pressekonferenz des Presseamtes beim Ministerpräsidenten der DDR am 2 Juni 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. 18. Notiz. Betr.: Publikationen Hellmanns, July 30, 1959, MfS-HA/17999, BStU. 19. Betr.: Zurückziehung des GM “Christian und Übersiedlung zur DDR,” March 23, 1959, MfS-HA II/17999, BStU. Allegations against American, British, and French services (Hellmann’s contribution) were disclosed at Hellmann’s staged conference and subsequently covered in the Communist press, including in western Europe, such as by the Rome daily L’Unita. See Italian Communist Daily Reports Press Conference of Four Alleged Former Western Intelligence Agents, January 11, 1959, “Schwarzwäller, Ernst Jochen,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 117, NARA II. 20. Aus einem Vorgang der Abt VI des MfS vom 24.11.1957, MfS Zentralarchiv, Allg.S., 71/77, Bd. 2, BStU. 21. Treffbericht GM “York,” November 14, 1956, MfS Zentralarchiv, Allg. S. 71/77, Bd. 5, BStU. 22. Abschrift. Abteilung P + T Office (Briefzensur), August 11, 1959, Allg. S. 71/77, Bd. 5, BStU. 23. Memorandum from C. P. Hope to Head of Chancery, HM Minister, October 7, 1955, FO 1060/655, TNA London. 24. Treffbericht GM “York,” August 8, 1957, MfS Zentralarchiv, Allg. S. 71/77, Bd. 5, BStU. 25. See Auskunftsbericht, July 16, 1962, Treffbericht GM “York,” November 14, 1956, MfS Zentralarchiv, Allg. S. 71/77, Bd. 2, BStU. 26. See, for example, Bericht der Hauptteilung II/3 über Hans-Ulrich L., March 30, 1971, MfS-HA II, Nr. 33823, BStU. 27. A recent introduction to this Stasi directorate’s interrogation of returnees during the two decades after 1945 is contained in Paul Maddrell, “Die West-Geheimdienste und die Flüchtlinge aus Ostdeutschland. Nachrichtendienstarbeit im ‘goldenen Zeitalter’ der Spionage (1945–1965),” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 64, no. 2 (2016): 129–44. 28. Vernehmungsprotokoll der Beschuldigten, August 8, 1960, MfS-HA IX, Nr. 4005, BStU. 29. Ersuchen um Aufnahme zum Vollzug der Untersuchungshaft, Untersuchungshaftanstalt Moabit, October 18, 1963, B Rep. 265-03, Nr. 158, Landesarchiv Berlin. 30. See, for example, Erkenntnisse zur Arbeitsweise der Sichtungsstelle der Alliierten Behörden im Notaufnahmelager Berlin-Marienfelde, November 15, 1989, MfS-HA II, Nr. 23973, BStU. 31. Beispiel für Fragestellung der Mitarbeiter des USA-GD, Nachrichtendienstliche Infiltration der Flüchtlinge im Lager Marienfelde (translated from the Polish), undated (presumably 1985), MfS-HA II, Nr. 29135, BStU. Pairing Bulgarian military intelligence sources with holdings drawn from databases compiled by the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm has recently been employed to assess KGB motives. See Doug Selvage and Christopher Nehring, Die AIDSVerschwörung. Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und die AIDS-Desinformationskampagne des KGB (Berlin: BStU, Abteilung Bildung und Forschung, 2014). 32. Auszug aus VPr.V. February 19, 1987, Befragung durch Sichtungsstellen im DH Marienfelde, MfS-HA IX, Nr. 10168, BStU. 33. See, for instance, BGS—Goslar/Rammelsberg-Kaserne Befragung von Grenzverletzern DDR-BRD, January 30, 1984, MfS-AIM, 12570/87, Bd. 20, BStU. 34. Aufgenommener Gewinnungsprozess zu einem Beamten des Bundesamtes für die Anerkennung ausländischer Flüchtlinge (BAF) der BRD in Zirndorf/Bayern, April 22, 1987, MfSHA II, Nr. 29721, BStU. 35. A Befra report for this particular visit has not yet been declassified and made available to researchers at the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz. This Stasi report hints at a crucial aspect of the Befras’s work by and large excluded from the Koblenz collection: intelli-

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gence gathering beyond the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact countries of east-central Europe. See Zu Erkenntnissen über die Erkundungstätigkeit der Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen der BRD, March 1989, HA II, Nr. 44699, BStU. 36. Because it was widely reported in contemporary press accounts, Falk’s name may be used herein. 37. Erklärung des in die DDR übergetretenen Mitarbeiters des westdeutschen Bundesamts für Verfassungsschutz Karl-Heinz Falk, ZAIG, Nr. 10591, BStU. 38. “Westberlin—Zentrum für Menschenhandel. Ehemaliger Mitarbeiter des ‘Amtes für Verfassungsschutz’ enthüllt Verbrechen der Frontstadtclique,” Neues Deutschland, June 21, 1961. A longer “interview” with Falk was also published in the Berliner Zeitung under the title Verfassungsschutz-Spezialist Falk bestätigt: “Westberlin-Spionagezentrum,” June 21, 1961. The East German wire service ADN also provided a synopsis of his press conference. 39. RIAS I, June 23, 1961, broadcast at 7:10 p.m. According to my correspondence with an archivist at the Rundfunkarchiv, no record of this broadcast has been preserved. 40. Abteilung Agitation, Agitationsplan 2/61 zur Aktion “Lager,” April 17, 1961, Aktionsplan MfS, ZAIG 10591, BStU. The ZAIG was the division of the Ministry for State Security used to evaluate public opinion in East Germany. 41. Befra Report ZG-84492, September 26, 1969, B 206/1281, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 42. Form Letter from the Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen, Zweigstelle Stuttgart, June 26, 1961, MfS-HA II, Nr. 41433, BStU. 43. Form Letter from the Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen, Zweigstelle Giessen, undated (during the 1980s), MfS-HA II, Nr. 43867, BStU. For an early example of the BND’s efforts to resist parliamentary influence, see Bundesnachrichtendienst an das Hessische Ministerium des Innern, February 15, 1960, Abt. 503/1215, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden. Indirect pressure on the Befras and the BND to acknowledge the voluntary nature of questioning of ethnic Germans came during the last decade of the Cold War from data protection advocates. See the Letter from the Der Bundesminister des Innern to the Bundesbeautragte für den Datenschutz, September 23, 1980, B 347/614, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 44. CIC field notes, captured by Stasi operatives, AFO 123/83, Bd. 4, BStU. 45. Two files I reviewed for this publication, MfS-HA II, RF/36 and MfS-HA II, RF/41, consist entirely of assessments supplied at Marienfelde by the FDP’s Eastern Office during the 1960s and 1970s. 46. A handwritten note in the field indicates that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had issued the guideline in 1958; precisely how and when the Stasi seized the document remains unknown. Hinweise für die Befragung von Personen aus dem östlichen Machtbereich, undated (1958), MfS-HA IX, Nr. 3838, BStU. 47. One plausible candidate is the former ardent Nazi and future Soviet intelligence operative arrested in November 1961, Heinz Felfe. Felfe may be the source, but we currently possess no reliable confirmation. The senior BND counterintelligence officer was exchanged for three German students in February 1969. The CIA’s evaluation is contained in Heinz Felfe, Damage Assessment, April 1, 1963, “Felfe Damage Assessment,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-19, Box No. 34, NARA II. 48. Memorandum from “285” to Fa. Ehlert, RPG, Dst. 69, Transfer, Tipgewinnung und Forschung über Notaufnahmelager und Befragungsstellen, July 14, 1959, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Notably absent from the currently available declassified collection in Koblenz are Befra reports on socialist foreign nationals; without access to Stasi records, one might come to the erroneous impression, based on what is currently accessible at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, that the work of the Befras was intrinsically intra-German in nature. Memorandum from “285” to Dienstsstelle 24 (a BND office in Cologne), Betr.: Tippgewinnung über Befragungsstellen, August 3, 1959, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. 52. See especially Erläuterungen zu den im Material aus der BND-Zentrale enthaltenen Bezeichnungen, Nutzung von Befragungsstellen und Stützpunkten in Notaufnahmelagern (NAL) durch den BND, September 29, 1972, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. As mentioned in

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part 1, the records of the latter organization have been destroyed or subsequently removed by the German federal government at the behest of American and other foreign counterparts. 53. Die Rolle der Befragungsstellen im System der nachrichtlichen Arbeit und der sogenannten modifizierten Ostpolitik, July 21, 1967, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. 54. See especially Erläuterungen zu den im Material aus der BND-Zentrale enthaltenen Bezeichnungen, Nutzung von Befragungsstellen und Stützpunkten in Notaufnahmelagern (NAL) durch den BND, September 29, 1972, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. 55. Zur Vernehmungspraxis im Notaufnahmelager Gießen, Innere Sicherheit, Nr. 22, April 29, 1974, MfS-ZAIG, Nr. 9310, Bd. 2, BStU. 56. “Bonn will Giessener Verfassungsschutz-Beamte ablösen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25, 1974. See also “Übergriffe des Verfassungsschutzes in Giessen bestätigt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 20, 1974, and “Man hört’s anders,” Der Spiegel 6 (February 4, 1974). By the mid-1970s, the Cologne domestic intelligence agency employed more than 2,500 individuals. Constantin Goschler and Michael Walla, “Keine Neue Gestapo.” Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Reinbek bei Hamburg: rowohlt, 2015), 11. 57. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, undated (after November 1989), MfS-HA II, Nr. 27673, BStU. 58. Interna aus dem Bereich Zuwanderer aus der DDR des BfV Köln, undated (presumably mid-November 1986), MfS-HA II, Nr. 46340, BStU. 59. Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Ingrid Köppe und der Gruppe BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN, September 29, 1992, Drucksache 12/3326. 60. Der Weg eines Flüchtlinges über das Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren in Berlin-Marienfelde, Marienfelder Allee 66/80, undated (probably 1959), MfS-HA II, Nr. 41765, BStU. 61. Information über Erkenntnisse zum gegnerischen Befragungswesen, July 24, 1987, MfS ZKG, Nr. 745, BStU. For a concise overview of the Stasi’s extensive support for so-called liberation movements from Zanzibar to Palestine, see Gieseke, Mielke-Konzern, 220–24. On how surveillance designed to target left-wing terrorists spilled over during the early 1970s into investigations of hundreds of thousands of West German state employees, see Larry Frohman, “Population Registration, Social Planning, and the Discourse on Privacy Protection in West Germany,” Journal of Modern History 87 (June 2015): 316–56, esp. 322, 332–35, and Dominik Rigoll, Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland: Von der Entnazifierung zur Extremistenabwehr (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013). 62. Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Ingrid Köppe und der Gruppe BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN, September 29, 1992, Drucksache 12/3326. 63. Zwischenbericht zur OPK “Kerbela,” June 19, 1989, BVfS Potsdam, Nr. 548, BStU. American and West German documentation of this asylum case remains strictly classified. 64. Information zur Vorgehensweise gegnerischer Geheimdienstsstellen im Zusammenhang mit der Bearbeitung des Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren im DWH Berlin-Marienfelde, undated (after November 9, 1989), MfS-HA II, Nr. 23973, BStU. 65. A useful translation of the document from the earlier period is “East German Ministry of State Security, ‘New Methods of Operation of Western Secret Services,’” November 1958, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, ZA, MfS-HA IX, Nr. 4350, BStU, 341–60, trans. Paul Maddrell. Names redacted in accordance with the German Law on State Security Records. Available at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118653 (accessed January 10, 2017). 66. Memorandum for the Records, Discussions with CASCOPE/Ackermann on June 2, 1983, “Zuber, Ebrulf,” Vol. 1, Folder 2 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 145, NARA II. While noting that most of the drivers were coopted by the Stasi, Zuber felt confident enough of the program to consider extending it to Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian truck drivers. 67. Hinweise zur Arbeitsmethode der Dienststelle des US-Geheimdienstes München, Traunsteiner Strasse/Sintpertstrasse, July 14, 1975, MfS-HA II, Nr. 45828, BStU. 68. Erklärung zum Aufnahmeverfahren, Reg. Nr. 1167910 L, Bundesverwaltungsamt Köln, Aussenstelle Giessen.

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69. Übersetzung aus dem Russischen, 1514/89 (undated, 1989), MfS HA II, Nr. 44699, BStU. Insofar as I am currently aware, results of this Soviet-German meeting are not covered in any other declassified espionage files. 70. See, for example, Hinweise zur geplanten Verlegung des “Camp King” Oberursel nach München, undated, MfS-HA II, Nr. 32141, BStU. Like the KGB, the Stasi was both secret service and secret police to a dictatorship; its operatives made little formal distinction between internal repression and intelligence gathering.

Chapter Seven

Shared Approaches to Security Questioning

This chapter evaluates methods used by intelligence officials to question migrants in Germany during the Cold War. It focuses primarily on the screening practices of the most active Western services—the United States, United Kingdom, and West Germany—with some limited attention devoted to East Germany’s Ministry of State Security. Having mapped sites of interrogation used by foreign and domestic powers in western Germany and West Berlin, examined personal biographies of different individuals ensnared in Cold War espionage networks, and weighed the perils and possibilities of using Stasi files for understanding the aims of Western intelligence, this chapter reviews precisely how security services active in divided Germany obtained information. It demonstrates that the ways and means of refugee screening extended from the sophisticated to the mundane: from commercially available city maps to technical laboratories so secret that most espionage agents at the time were unaware of their existence. The resource-intensive nature of Cold War surveillance should not lead us to discount the personal nature of the encounter between interrogator and refugee and the modest if powerful tools used to elicit personal insights. To capture viewpoints, intelligence officers made prodigious use of paper, a remarkably robust and flexible medium. Examples of its myriad uses in Cold War debriefing include specialized reference aids and weapons catalogs, as well as more mundane tools such as sample questionnaires and color-coded index cards. This chapter begins with an evaluation of the paper sources employed to manage the glut of data obtained from escapees. It links the use of paper tools to the establishment of resource-intensive mechanical and electronic systems to make readily accessible collections of those surveyed in the name of security. 207

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Success or failure in the acquisition of information from newcomers ultimately depended not on the aid of machines and data collators, but rather on the skill of field agents in eliciting observations. The quintessence of Cold War questioning was human interaction. For this reason, intelligence officials sought to cultivate rapport with those believed to possess knowledge about opposing societies and systems, including colleagues toiling for allied security services. Central to the objective of information extraction was the exploitation of newcomers’ collegial and familial relations. Secret servants from all nations appreciated that personal commitments to spouses and lovers nearly always trumped all others. Their readiness to exploit the emotional attachments of those subjected to security vetting is a legacy of Cold War refugee questioning and perhaps also a harbinger of times to come. This chapter evaluates the use of interim carriers of information, such as card files, questionnaires, and print reference aids. Intelligence officials put paper to extensive use, fingerprinting and photographing guests and photostatting foreign identity documentation. The abundance of cheap paper allowed agencies like the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) to record items of note in short sentence form on oversized index cards of different colors. As files housed at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, reveal, especially valued informants contributed to still further collections of cards and files on sites of interest and individuals. The services of all countries considered in this account encouraged newcomers to submit drawings, blueprints, and other visual descriptions, including handwritten notes and sketches. The act of carding emerged as a key output of interactions between security screeners and newcomers to the federal republic and West Berlin. Bilingual secretaries at the American office in the Marienfelde center, for example, recorded key details on color-coded index cards for each of the 1.35 million applicants to pass through the Marienfelde facility during the years between 1953 and 1989. At the end of each work day, a representative of the Marienfelde Security Screening Team—perhaps at one point “Reni’s” driver from Missouri—transferred “refugee referral cards” and select other files created by the Marienfelde Security Screening Team to the U.S. Army Headquarters on the Clayallee in the Zehlendorf district of West Berlin. It was likely there that CIC agents assigned to the most interesting applicants an alphanumeric code indicating the reliability and truthfulness of the information provided and case control numbers; the forerunner to the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND), funded in its infancy by the CIC, adopted this method. Carding practices also served as a way to criticize intelligence colleagues. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) dismissed the value of carding done by State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution (Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz, or LfVs). Card files com-

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piled on personnel, objects of interest, and personal names by the Federal Intelligence Office (Bundesnachrichtenstelle, or BUNAST) came in for substantial criticism. According to an unfavorable assessment compiled by the BfV’s Cologne headquarters, the value of the personnel card files was negligible, as they contained a good deal of “irrelevant material.” An examination of the card indexes maintained by another state-level LfV in Lübeck prompted the verdict of the federal headquarters in Cologne that they were “fragmentary, often useless,” ostensibly owing to a lack of context about the events in question, including why they had been recorded in the first place. 1 These comments echoed a slightly more diplomatic assessment of the status and efficiency of counterintelligence work in Hanover offered by a British intelligence chief in 1951. While praising the “good standard” of its secret intelligence, a formal progress report put together by Britain’s Intelligence Division concluded “the LfV’s evaluation of information and intelligence tends, however, to be affected adversely by the non-selective acceptance of a mass of material.” 2 The BUNAST in Hanover used friends and relatives residing in West Germany, together with short underground telephone cables and couriers, to maintain contact with recent arrivals, according to sources shared with U.S. Army authorities in 1957. 3 Negative assessments of state operations likely stemmed from attempts by federal counterintelligence officials in Cologne to assert greater control over largely autonomous state-level counterparts. 4 The presence of interim data carriers in the CIC files from the mid-1950s onward, such as IBM punch cards ostensibly bound for a Department of Defense Central Index of Investigations, indicates American services were at that time machine-processing “carded” information gleaned from newcomers. 5 According to notes contained in British War Office files of a September 1952 visit paid to the CIC’s Stuttgart headquarters by the three leading officials in the BfV—Otto John, Günther Nollau, and Richard Gerken—a chain of interconnecting rooms, all joined by an open corridor, housed a giant card index system and case file complex. Among the details Gerken provided his British liaison officer at an autobahn diner was the absence of automatic card index systems, notably Hollerith machines. Instead, female clerks accessing card files by hand provided answers to queries about escapees. Among the German agencies “carding” migrants was the Security Investigation Office (Sicherungsgruppe), the division of the Federal Criminal Police in the Bonn suburb of Bad Godesberg. Compiling card file information released from other West German intelligence agencies, the Security Investigation Office collaborated with the BfV to maintain central registries of all those to have fled to the West, irrespective of visits to reception and asylum centers, with surveillance and periodic checks of such persons extending years beyond their date of entry to the Federal Republic of Germany.

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To determine the veracity of information carded at Marienfelde and offsite facilities such as the Joint Interrogation Centers (JICs), Camp King, or the Interservice Refugee Coordination Detachment in Cologne, American intelligence officials enjoyed routine access to West German and West Berlin personal data collections. A diverse array of records—asylum applications appended to inhabitants’ registration cards, penal and tax registries, records of trade registration and patent offices, and state and local criminal police files—were open to foreign intelligence actors. Representatives of occupying forces procured sensitive personal documents consistently hidden from migrants, their loved ones, and federal and state officials. Still further acts of concealment revolved around the use of insights garnered from these collections. As noted in part 2, key findings of interrogations were frequently shielded from competing services formally charged with West Germany’s security, particularly those loyal to the Ministry of the Interior and the Office of the Federal Chancellor. Selective retellings disadvantaged newcomers, their families, and even elected officials. Excessive secrecy and sometimes duplicity undermined the occupiers’ commitment to the democratization of the country that had unleashed the bloodiest war in human history. With few exceptions, security bureaucracies in occupied Germany made extensive use of similar, often the same, paper tools. Examples of the former encompassed standardized cover sheets and index cards to compile “tips.” Some of the most commonly used tools of the refugee interrogation trade in western Germany were essentially identical, such as the alphanumeric scoring system used by the BND and CIC. Western services active in the federal republic also shared scaled maps: by the 1960s, American, British, and West German foreign intelligence services were all using products issued by the American Defense Mapping Agency. 6 Using the same maps made comparison of comments offered in previous questioning sessions, including those carried out by colleagues speaking a foreign language, easier to follow. Scaled American maps also provided a common starting point for more detailed sketches tailored to the interests of individual questioners; such was the case of an interrogation carried out in 1982 at a BND-administered JIC of a construction laborer regarding plans to build nuclear reactors near the East German university city of Greifswald. 7 Whether this particular spinoff “product” of an American-produced scaled map was shared with foreign colleagues remains unknown. A retrieval notice in the file suggests it may have been. The shared basis of map-derived interim field reports may just as easily have enabled the BND to create a paper product strictly for internal consumption. Similar tools, such as grading systems, could be put to different ends, tailored to the specific needs of the individual security service in question. Critical was the quality of the interaction with informants and, as in this instance, their relative ability to interpret maps. Tools such as maps were only useful insofar as they elicited thoughtful

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responses. For this reason, in JIC reports one of the most frequently noted observations had to do with refugees’ ability to read scaled maps. At the BND’s JICs, those able to estimate distances according to scale were singled out for praise. 8 Skilled informants completed detailed object drawings, and especially capable newcomers were invited to add notations to standardized test sheets. More common were sketches of the exterior grounds and interior floor plan of objects of particular interest. In American, British, and West German reports, these drawings are sometimes included in the files. In Stasi collections of individual interrogations, particularly those compiled by Directorate IX, they are still more common. In soliciting information, field agents made extensive use of the technical and interpersonal means they regarded as best suited to their service’s requirements. Granted special ministerial allowances and wide latitude to pursue objectives set and loosely monitored in distant headquarters, intelligence agents stationed in questioning centers made wide use of an array of gadgets ranging from complex audio recording equipment to highly complex special laboratories. Machines of all kinds required and produced paper, and to manage the flow, financially secure agencies hired legions of local staff. Stenographers were everywhere a key part of inquisitorial operations, taking handwritten notes, operating tape recorders, and filing documents and “tip” cards. Special note-taking methods allowed interviewers at the BND’s Joint Interrogation Centers, working alone or in pairs, to focus their attention on the emotional dynamics of face-to-face conversations. Just as the ability to scrutinize maps established a basis for exchange at the JICs, the willingness to discount loyalties to loved ones served as a prerequisite to information retrieval. In their reports, BND bureaucrats singled out for commendation those individuals willing to prioritize the informational needs of their unnamed hosts over incalculable risks to the well-being of their loved ones still stranded in the East. In October 1982 a BND employee praised a former export director of a people’s enterprise in Dresden for his willingness to “ignore a sense of nervousness about his family still living in the German Democratic Republic.” 9 A November 1979 interrogation of a fifty-two-yearold engineer from Eisenhüttenstadt, judged “exceptionally frank,” offered approval of the migrant’s “readiness to give chapter and verse, and that in spite of the fact that his family is languishing in the East, waiting to hear whether they will be permitted to emigrate.” 10 In balancing the frequently inscrutable demands of their hosts and their palpable loyalties to loved ones, most newcomers required more than a few kind words of encouragement to expose themselves and their dearest to rounds of governmental investigation. Acts of hospitality helped newcomers to shed their inhibitions. Personal favors, including small courtesies extended to those new to the Western world, fostered a measure of ease. 11 Prior to the formal debriefing, an employee of each Joint Interrogation Center accompa-

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nied deserting soldiers to local department stores, purchasing a fresh set of civilian clothes on the newcomer’s behalf. Meals and accommodation at British and American questioning centers were free of charge, with recently fled soldiers receiving cash payments for their time and effort. At Camp King (figure 7.1), newcomers housed at the so-called White House received a sponsor, ostensibly to attend to their personal needs, but also to alleviate any difficulties in obtaining residency permits, passports, or employment. 12 Secret intelligence officers placed before individuals—dressed, fed, and cared for by their Western intelligence hosts, yet still aware of their status as “applicants” to the federal republic—a new set of documents, among them topographical maps, together with photographs and detailed questionnaires about military and economic installations, as well as cultural and social life in their homelands. 13 These paper aids provided an opportunity to jog memo-

Figure 7.1. Camp King interrogators, 1958–1962. Image courtesy of the Camp King Memorial Site.

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ries about military and industrial facilities of interest. Consistently noted were details about weapons and military technology, particularly of Soviet provenance, as well as material difficulties encountered in meeting the objectives of centrally planned economies. Responses to standardized questionnaires from previous discussions with police and border authorities, as well as with the officials charged with the formal reception and asylum procedures, were available for consultation. The additional paperwork offered a way to look over the shoulder of both migrants and informational competitors. Upon request, refugees provided comment on questions raised in previous rounds of questioning administered by domestic counterparts and partner services. Security officials also used cooperative encounters with newcomers to forge alliances within their vast organizations; for example, staff at the JICs offered colleagues within the BND stationed elsewhere the opportunity to submit specific technical questions. 14 Complications arose when security officers sought to align the murky allegiances of individual newcomers with the closed-mouth objectives of state-sponsored information gathering. In the BND’s Joint Interrogation Centers, romantic interests and future employment prospects emerged as particularly fraught topics: when the two subjects, love and work, collided, the mixture sometimes proved too volatile to manage. A BND report on a twenty-five-year-old female mechanical engineer concluded she was withholding information about her previous employer in Schwerin. Her aim was reportedly to protect not her former colleagues, but rather her future boss and lover. Included in the tangled mix was a recurring source of irritation to BND officials: commerce between firms across the inner German border. Her file notes that employees of both the BND and the BfV had concluded in 1975 that a citizen of the federal republic and member of the management of a West German firm illegally trading in the East had arranged for the female engineer to be smuggled westward. Her paramour had apparently instructed her to conceal her flight from security authorities in both East and West Germany. Certain that as an engineer specializing in numerical control she would be in a position to respond thoughtfully to their queries, BND questioning authorities surmised that the source of their woes was not her misplaced loyalties to the East German regime, but rather fresh allegiances to her new West German lover and future employer in the federal republic. Reluctant to abandon a promising lead, the file reveals that suspicions shifted from the newcomer to the West German firm clandestinely supplying technology to the divided country’s ideological foe; the file does not indicate measures taken against the industrial enterprise. 15 In these examples and others, building confidence among interviewees and intelligence officials was complicated by the latter’s firm insistence on guarding details. 16 To add structure and purpose to encounters between mercurial arrivees and secrecy-obsessed intelligence administrators, foreign and domestic ser-

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vices continually revised sample lists of questions. An early example of a German standardized list of questions put to newcomers dates to 1953: issued by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, the queries covered a total of twenty-five distinct data points, including details about family members, friends, and colleagues left behind in the East, as well as the refugee’s professional goals in the West. 17 Standardized questioning sought to ensure priorities set at headquarters took precedence. The balancing act involved circumscribing the radius of freewheeling interrogators without stifling their initiative and willingness to cut corners and deals when necessary. One of the bigger problems was competition among services, especially those formally serving the same country. In 1955 the so-called Production Directorate of British intelligence arranged briefing material provided to British officials soliciting information about eastern Germany in such a way that particular “battle relevant” subjects, rather than the specific wishes of individual “consumer agencies,” were placed front and center. British Services Security Organization (BSSO) headquarters staff organized lists of sample questions, target lists, and priority requirements in a loose-leaf binder in the expectation that field agents would extract pages as they saw fit; for this reason, appendices were left unnumbered. 18 The introduction of scaled maps, drawings, photographs, and weapons catalogs aimed to steer interrogators’ attention to their supervisors’ interests. Questioners, for their part, introduced reproduced images to boost the informational yield of individual newcomers. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interviewers at Camp King and the Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center in West Berlin, for instance, employed scientific periodicals to confirm details and raise new questions. 19 To ascertain the value assigned to newcomers’ testimony and to compile special yearbooks on future targets, staff at clandestine American facilities requested briefs from German-speaking military and technical experts, mimicking practices adopted by British services during World War II. 20 DATA PROCESSING AT PULLACH: CIA AND STASI PERSPECTIVES Public sources tell us relatively little about how field responses to scripted queries carried out at reception centers, the Joint Interrogation Centers, and numerous other covert questioning centers were sorted, accessed, and analyzed within the vast, complex hierarchies of individual Western intelligence services. In July 1991, in response to a German parliamentary inquiry, representatives of the Federal Chancellor’s Office acknowledged that BND officials were creating card files on all individuals questioned, with the results of those interviews anonymized. 21 Declassified Joint Interrogation Center re-

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ports housed at the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz conform to this pattern. Standardized headers and numeric values assigned to profession, language skills, education, military service, previous position, and “contact or suspicion of contact with the enemy” suggest the practice of electronic data processing. That BND analysts actually used standardized data points to run electronic searches matching resources with questions of interest, as claimed in a 1973 report prepared by the Stasi’s Main Directorate II for the state security police’s foreign espionage arm, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, seems likely. 22 CIA records confirm the possibility existed. A 1970 demonstration of the BND’s “personality search program” drew on the agency’s holdings in machine languages to answer specific natural-language queries. At a technical session run at the Pullach headquarters by Ebrulf Zuber, at that time chief of the BND’s Operations (Beschaffung) Division, an unnamed CIA Europe chief was presented with the electronic results for the following sample question: “Show us all Bulgarian students in the federal republic.” 23 The long-term aim of the head of BND’s collection directorate, at least according to the account supplied by this CIA listener, was to computerize the flow of information into the Pullach headquarters, uniting the storage, display, manipulation, correlation, and evaluation into a single comprehensive system. According to the CIA account, a significant obstacle that the BND intelligence chief and his colleagues faced was ensuring that field staff reported incoming information in a manner that permitted rapid inclusion into database systems. In the assessment of the unnamed CIA official, personnel changes within the Pullach organization were at that time complicating the BND’s tabulation challenges. Following his promotion in 1970, Zuber’s replacement by a mathematician from a cryptographic office in Bonn may have actually impeded the BND’s progress toward what we might think of as data mining today. According to the American assessment shared with the CIA’s director, the qualified technician lacked critical administrative and managerial experience. 24 Automated data processing enthusiasts faced resistance rooted in the perception that stewardship of highly personal information was ideally entrusted to experienced field agents, not technicians operating in headquarters. While Zuber’s enthusiasm for the abstract realm of machine coding was noteworthy, it may well have reflected a minority opinion among West German intelligence leaders during much of the Cold War. Other German security chiefs felt secure enough in their skepticism about computer-driven data extraction to share their negative appraisal with influential American counterparts. A notable denial of big data’s allure came during a high-profile visit to Washington. Nine years prior to Zuber’s demonstration at Pullach, Ernst Brückner, head of the Security Investigation Office of the Federal Criminal Police, had poured scorn on the idea of devoting significant resources to expensive IBM-manufactured mainframe computers and engaging

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in complex data analyses when, as he put it, “a simple card file was infinitely simpler and usually more effective.” 25 Brückner, as even CIA officials in Washington conceded, was not in principle opposed to the investigative benefits of computer processing. Unnamed CIA agents took solace in the view that Brückner, notwithstanding his criticisms, was unlikely to stand in the way of its implementation. Like Zuber, Brückner was promoted shortly after offering his assessment of data-driven espionage to American hosts. Whether Brückner’s assumption of the vice presidency of the BfV in October 1964 changed his opinion of automated data processing is unknown. SECRET ANNEXES TO THE BRANDT/GUILLAUME DOSSIER Precisely when, and to what degree, observations supplied by newcomers to the federal republic were transformed into machine-readable data in the central registries of the BfV, BND, and other West German police and internal security services such as Brückner’s influential Security Investigation Office remains unclear. 26 To answer such questions we must currently rely too often on the perspective of the East German Ministry for State Security. That service’s most interesting insights into West German data practices emerged from purloined documents, specifically an analysis based on secret annexes to a West German report submitted following the April 1974 arrest of a Stasi operative successfully dispatched to West Germany as a “political” refugee, Günther Guillaume. 27 As Guillaume had been a close confidant of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, architect of his country’s Ostpolitik, the policy of increased engagement with the Communist East, his treason directly contributed to the fall of Brandt’s government. Secret annexes to the so-called Eschenburg Commission report requested by Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s interior ministry (and stolen by the Stasi) concluded that the BND’s archiving system left a great deal of room for improvement. 28 The larger problem, at least according to the Stasi’s read of secret appendices not contained in the file today obtainable at the Stasi Records Agency, was one that plagued large governmental organizations across the second half of the twentieth century: the stovepiping of information. With various (unnamed) offices and branches effectively separated from one another, links between individuals and places of interest remained uncorrelated, an unfortunate state of affairs that the commission hoped to remedy through future emphasis on electronic data processing. 29 Precisely how and when the West German foreign intelligence service succeeded in harnessing data power in the manner envisioned by Zuber in 1970 and the Eschenburg Commission five years later remains undetermined. The CIA in Germany, likely among the stronger contemporary propo-

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nents of data analysis, faced informational overload, with staff based in the federal republic lamenting to Langley headquarters about their inability to process and exploit the volume of reports on refugees, migrants, and frontier crossers supplied by Bavarian Border Police officials. In 1983 matters were so dire that the CIA’s Munich-based agents poured cold water on a suggestion from Bavarian police authorities to establish a new program to jointly question legal travelers to the Communist East. Rather than accept the tantalizing challenge implicit in accepting as much raw material as possible, the CIA office instructed the Bavarian Border Police to limit its submissions to representative samples, as the time required to process any larger volume of material was beyond the agency’s capacity to manage. 30 At least during the early 1980s, CIA Germany’s appetite for raw data of Bavarian origin knew limits. The Stasi also struggled mightily to overcome informational backlogs. During the 1980s, at least half of the thirty thousand to forty-five thousand hours of Main Directorate IX’s taped interrogations remained untyped—and thus not processable via most forms of data computation. 31 PERSONAL RAPPORT AMONG ALLIED SECURITY CHIEFS While leads supplied by newcomers and returnees apparently remained locked away in unprocessed data collections, in their quest to verify facts and uncover secret intelligence, chiefs and field operatives alike attended to interpersonal relationships. Both at the pinnacle of intelligence hierarchies and in low-level encounters between intelligence bureaucrats and asylum seekers, the human factor loomed large. Personal ties, such as favors to family members, consistently provided the basis to forge key relationships among top spies. Face-to-face exchange appears to have been easiest when giver and receiver knew each other relatively well, though careful attention to acquaintanceships stretching over years, and in some cases decades, helped to bridge divides of culture and temperament. Drawing their British and American counterparts to one side at private cocktail parties and dinners, prominent German espionage agents dropped their air of cool detachment to solicit advice and request help for family members, especially children. When BfV president Hubert Schrübbers submitted a request on his daughter’s behalf for research assistance in compiling her law dissertation on “state secrets,” CIA Europe’s chief was quick to oblige. His alacrity stemmed from the fact that Schrübbers had submitted a parallel request for assistance to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). 32 The dependence of German security chiefs on the goodwill of foreign colleagues was especially pronounced during the first postwar decade, with clashes among British minders and West German security chiefs among the

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most fervent. Mistrustful of a man regarded as a “hypocrite and opportunist,” a British liaison officer pointedly criticized BfV agent-running chief Richard Gerken (see figure 7.2), citing the latter’s outbursts “ranging from rage to tears of self-pity.” 33 Trimming sails to the prevailing wind was to British minders apparently forgivable. A public loss of face was a different matter. Fit for senior posts were those believed to value logical analysis and to demonstrate firm emotional control. Informal interactions provided occasions to determine whether a measure of trust might be accorded to foreign colleagues. High-level foreign intelligence agents, including those of the CIA, sought to overcome differences of approach and opinion by cultivating ties at gentlemen’s evenings—CIA correspondence uses the German term Herrenabend—during visits paid by leading West German security officials to the American capital. 34 Among the German VIP guests of CIA-sponsored Herrenabend gatherings in Washington was Ernst Brückner, director of the Security Investigation Office from 1953 to 1964 and personal security chief to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Theodor Heuss. Following a CIA-sponsored tour of the American West Coast and Midwest, payment of expenses for his teenage son to participate in the American Field Services Scholarship exchange program, and a cocktail party given in his honor at the SheratonCarlton Hotel, “Carpetmaker,” as Brückner was known to his CIA counterparts, was deemed a “valuable liaison asset” who nonetheless “could not be recruited as an agent.” 35 Brückner’s right-hand man, Theodor Saevecke, proved more amenable to American persuasion. Although in 1951 the CIA Karlsruhe’s chief of station described him as a man “who still hankers back after the days when the [Nazi] Party was in the saddle,” 36 the CIA had nonetheless recruited him during the late 1940s to toil as a “counterespionage investigator in Berlin.” 37 In his subsequent role as Brückner’s chief of investigations—in essence his deputy—at the Security Investigation Office, Saevecke continued to serve the CIA as liaison despite his enduring devotion to Nazism. The CIA’s close relationship with the former Nazi agent worked to both parties’ benefit, that is, until a member of the Italian parliament brought public attention to Saevecke’s role in the execution of civilian hostages during the last years of World War II. His earlier direct involvement in the supervision of deportations of Italian and North African Jews further complicated the postwar American-German liaison. In July 1954, in response to allegations passed from the West German consulate in Milan to Hans Globke in the Federal Chancellery, Saevecke appealed to the Bonn CIA chief for renewed assistance in sanitizing his past, insisting that British and American interrogations carried out immediately after the war exonerated him. 38 His activities in Italy were known to Director of Central Intelligence Allen W. Dulles, who made clear his views on the allegations, stating, “If [Saevecke’s] past [is] in any way defensible, we may pass Fedrep [federal republic, Interi-

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Figure 7.2. Richard Gerken, West German agent-running chief, 1950s. Image courtesy of the National Archives, London.

or Ministry] with our opinion CABANJO [Saevecke] politically suitable. If not, we will keep out.” 39 In support of Dulles’s objective, CIA officials secured a copy of a June 1945 British interrogation of Saevecke. Even according to the CIA’s interpretation, the report documented Saevecke’s direction of the shooting of hostages at the village of Corbetta, ostensibly in reprisal for the killing of a German Schutzstaffel (SS) official. After reviewing the wartime incident with the beleaguered confidant, an unnamed American agent noted in conclusion, “The usefulness of this lever in furthering our control over him [Saevecke] is obvious.” 40 The taint of Nazism was thus in his and in other cases a valued tool of American cajoling. Following a short period of uncertainty, State Secretary Ritter von Lex from the Federal Ministry of the Interior recalled Saevecke from a brief voluntary leave with pay. Nearly another decade would pass before Saevecke

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requested transfer from the Security Investigation Office in Bonn to headquarters in Wiesbaden, the impetus being the prospect of further rounds of press scrutiny of his public role in leading government raids and arrests against the publishers of Der Spiegel on charges of treason. Pushed upstairs in the wake of the federal republic’s most significant political scandal, the socalled Spiegel Affair, CIA asset “Cabanjo” once again successfully evaded the consequences of his Nazi past. 41 In subsequent years, Saevecke would take charge of the Federal Criminal Police section dealing with capital crimes. ESTABLISHING RAPPORT WITH RETURNING SCIENTIFIC SPECIALISTS While cultivating ties to domestic security chiefs like war criminal Saevecke proved manageable for British and American espionage agents, the challenges implicit in creating rapport with the newly arrived were palpable. Interactions between field agents and recent entrants required a deft hand; the creation of knowledge production systems demanded interpersonal skill. Interrogators of Britain’s Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch (STIB), keenly aware of their financial limitations, were somewhat more attuned to these emotional dynamics than their initially less experienced, often monolingual American counterparts. In approaching recent enemies, staff of this small scientific intelligence service had less to offer than a host of American competitors. As illustrated by the case of Karl Steimel, described in chapter 3, even potential informants still residing in the East could negotiate with STIB from a position of relative strength. Complicating matters still further was the fact that influential German contacts with whom Britons were eager to “talk level,” like Siemens’s Hans Kerschbaum, were adept at highlighting the United Kingdom’s junior partner status vis-à-vis more powerful North American services. Exacerbating the challenge faced by Britain’s STIB was the fact that many of the scientific laborers they sought to approach had just returned from the xenophobic atmosphere of Stalin’s Soviet Union, an emotionally damaging experience that further complicated attempts to supplement dossiers of scientific activities. Cool deliberation proved complicated under these circumstances. The most dramatic encounters with long-sought sources came in interviews involving not merely repatriated scientists and technicians, but also their families.

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RETURNERS’ EMOTIONAL TURMOIL: WALTER KLAGES AND HIS FAMILY When families had been sent to the Soviet Union together, the strains on family members were in some instances so intense as to foil the informational forays of STIB interrogators. Such was the case of the STIB’s initial interview with Walter Klages, a conversation held less than an hour after he and his loved ones had abandoned East Berlin. As they refused to be separated, the interview took place in West Berlin with the whole family present. Klages, along with his wife and three children, had first been quartered in Monino, twenty-five kilometers east of Moscow, and then in the Soviet capital. He had been part of a team working on guided missiles; in Moscow, the couple’s oldest daughter had pursued university studies. On the day of the Klages’s first STIB interview, the eldest daughter, Sigrid, disclosed to both her British hosts and her family that the Soviet Ministry of Interior Affairs (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, or MVD) had attempted to recruit her as a spy. The revelations shocked her parents, especially Sigrid’s mother, who demanded that the British interrogation be immediately brought to a premature end. The STIB interrogator acceded to the wish, though not before arranging “further exploitation in a calmer atmosphere.” Three subsequent days of interviews with the Klages, this time one by one rather than altogether, took place three weeks later in Cologne. 42 The Klages’s family ordeal was intense, in some ways exceptionally so. STIB officers had contributed to the charged atmosphere by encouraging Klages to migrate to the West before he had made up his mind to do so. STIB’s overzealous approach earned the service a rebuke. At issue was not the Klages family’s well-being, but rather an attempt by a competitor to recruit Walter Klages as a long-term British agent. STIB’s impetuousness had apparently thwarted the attempt of another British service (perhaps MI6) to persuade the scientist to remain in East Germany—and thus to become an “in-place defector” informing the United Kingdom on East German scientific developments. 43 While the delicacy of relations within the Klages clan was exceptional, the feeling of rupture among returning specialists with past lives was not. Many arriving in the West after years in the late-Stalinist Soviet Union had experienced loss, shock, and sorrow. Sharing confidences with British agents or their German-speaking minions demanded that returnees acknowledge repressed social needs. On the other side of the table, listeners considered whether these individuals might be persuaded to reconsider their decision to migrate westward or to provide confidential information about former colleagues, especially those still residing several thousand kilometers east. For instance, only after employing a “certain amount of social ‘softening up’” on engineer Joachim Tröger, including an account of his recent successful inter-

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view with Siemens, was STIB interrogator (and subsequent KGB spy) Frank Bossard able to overcome Tröger’s “nervous disposition” to obtain details of the engineer’s work on V-2 successors in Soviet Monino and brief employment developing pneumatic regulators for Askania in East Berlin. 44 Whether other British services party to his exploitation attempted to persuade Tröger to return to the Askania works in the city’s Communist half is unknown; STIB files only reveal that his former employer stood at the top of a list of firms in which British intelligence agents in Berlin were seeking to place informants. 45 STIB interrogators understood that not merely the burden of the past, but also the stark prospect of starting over in the federal republic or perhaps even in another country an ocean away weighed heavily on the minds of many new arrivals hardened by the experiences of Nazism, warfare, and then Stalinism. The psychic burden was evident. Bossard judged one former specialist for measuring equipment employed in Erfurt, a man nearly fifty years old, as “not at his best from an interrogation point of view as at one moment he completely broke down when thinking of the rather meager prospects which the future held for him as a simple draughtsman in a very small organization in the Ruhr.” 46 Bossard, a technical imposter, dismissed the quality of his informant’s observations concerning the products manufactured at the radio and television plant in Erfurt as “singularly low.” 47 STIB questioners balanced psychic pressures, granting repatriated technical experts opportunities to supply answers, documents, and contacts, if necessary, over the course of weeks or even months. British interrogators came to appreciate that success depended on their ability to overcome the hesitancy or evasiveness of select informants, which in turn hinged on British intelligence’s analysis of background material provided by former colleagues and potential future employers in the federal republic and West Berlin. STIB agents coupled insights garnered from those professionally acquainted with high-grade targets with the cultivation of personal ties. While links to personalities of interest extended outward with few discernable limits, STIB agents took care to ensure that the names of those in contact with British intelligence were not shared with German informants. Left in the dark about the true nature of their aims and contacts in both postwar German states, British agents used both knowledge and obfuscation to maximize influence over the lives of spouses, parents, children, and other relatives eager for news. FAMILY TIES AND TECHNICAL AIDS IN BRITISH QUESTIONING British military intelligence exhibited both skill and determination in harnessing technical means and commercial connections, uniting both with a

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careful study of their targets’ families. Translated censorship intercepts and business ties enabled intelligence officials to trace whereabouts and movements, as well as to insert themselves squarely in the middle of family dynamics. Emphasizing shared values and similar perceptions of future challenges, STIB agents went the extra mile to cultivate networks and distribute contacts to newcomers and valued informants alike in West German public administration, research, and industry. For instance, a member of STIB’s Berlin staff wrote to agency chief Frank Bossard in February 1956 to inform him that he had been in touch with Dr. Hans Schlitzberger, head of personnel at Siemens and Halske in West Berlin, regarding Kurt Berner. “We told him that Berner was interested in re-joining Siemens & Halske on his return from Russia, and Schlitzberger had been making enquiries for us in Munich. We visited Schlitzberger today, and he informed us that Siemens & Halske, Munich had a definite interest in Berner, and that the firm would be glad to interview him on his return from Russia. We propose to inform Berner’s family accordingly.” 48 Improvement in Berner’s life situation offered a basis for a joint consideration of matters of interest, but only because British agents had committed themselves to building relationships with the technician’s family and likely future employer. Pairing background information from personnel chiefs with censorship intercepts, business associates, and spousal ties gave British intelligence a sense of who might be approached to act as a source of information. By November 1950, STIB had gathered “some background” on approximately 1,500 German-speaking scientists and technicians working in the Soviet Union. 49 Curtailments of privacy could be used to forge links with family members and fellow professionals willing to support British objectives, but also to exclude overzealous householders. A “very pro-British” aunt and uncle of Horst Pardau went so far as to express to their STIB custodians their shared desire to sit in on their nephew’s interrogation. STIB operatives decided that a more discreet rendezvous to discuss his work in East Germany’s main laboratory for tactical radio communication technology would better serve British interests. 50 All services active in occupied Germany, foreign and domestic, assessed migrants and their closest relatives in terms of their potential usefulness to their own organizational objectives, an approach that often led to a coldhearted, calculating approach to the emotional plight of their subjects. The British presented no gentlemanly exception. STIB chief David Evans and his colleagues repeatedly leveraged family and professional ties of high-status targets to establish a modus vivendi with competitors, including but not limited to the future Bundesnachrichtendienst. At the height of STIB’s efforts to reach accommodation with what was then known as Gehlen’s “Org” or “Rusty,” the Berlin STIB office reported a visit by the wife of Paul Schirge, an aircraft engineer still toiling in the Soviet Union. In a state of

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considerable despair, Frau Schirge and four other women (three residing in East Berlin) had received letters indicating that their husbands were to be moved to the south of Russia, likely prolonging their stay in the USSR for another thirty months. The censored letters purportedly revealed a state of mutiny among the husbands, with one intercepted missive stating, “We have all collectively refused.” While the male scientists held in the Soviet Union faced pressure to sign fresh contracts, their wives were in agreement that something must be done to secure the men’s prompt return to divided Germany. Frau Schirge confided to the STIB representative the women’s intention to dispatch one wife, Frau Bleschke, to the West German capital. Her mission was to bring the matter to Chancellor Adenauer’s attention. Offering assurance that his organization would do what it could, STIB Berlin chief John Horner convinced the wives that his organization would see that the matter came to the attention of the appropriate office within the federal government. Having persuaded Frau Bleschke not to fly to Bonn, STIB took charge of the problem. A note to Bossard offered a suggestion as to how the British might make the use of the scientists’ (and their families’) dilemma: “We have seen John [Horner] this morning regarding the proposed meeting with the Gehlen people in Berlin, and you asked for our suggestions for a good-will gesture. What about handing over the Bleschke, etc., Group?” 51 The last of the Bleschke scientists would not arrive in the federal republic until three years later, in 1958: upon each member’s arrival at Friedland, Western intelligence actors were there to facilitate Bleschke’s and many others’ formal “reception.” 52 The disruption of household structures presented agents with still further possibilities to exert emotional control over targeted experts. In some cases, the exclusion of women judged overbearing served as a basis for AngloAmerican cooperation. STIB’s most important discussions with Günther Bock, who had been imprisoned at the notorious Lubyanka Prison before being sent to the Central Aero-Hydronamic Institute near Moscow in July 1946, took place after STIB’s Dr. W. J. Stern and Bock’s four American case officers jointly succeeded in preventing Mrs. Bock’s attendance “on some pretext.” 53 Many British and American interrogators appreciated that flight to the West represented a watershed moment in the lives of migrants, asylum seekers, and resettlers, in some cases entirely altering the constellation of those considered family or closest loved ones. Scientific workers not infrequently seized the moment to change life partners. While most gave up homes and livelihoods and others abandoned spouses, a few even left behind children. Technical draftsman Erich Hoppenz fled westward via the Marienfelde camp, leaving his wife and children in Leipzig, presenting himself instead with his new girlfriend. 54 Wives, caught in the crossfire of their husbands’ actions, availed themselves of their limited opportunities. Karl Steimel’s first

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wife’s liaison with a U.S. military intelligence officer in East Berlin demonstrated agility in the face of her spouse’s plans to flee westward with another woman. She was far from alone in grasping the possibilities offered by Western services’ voracious appetite for information about scientist returnees. Following her husband’s flight in 1955 via Marienfelde to a village near Stuttgart, Edith Brier lost her position in the research lab of Manfred von Ardenne, East Germany’s most prominent physicist. With her three children in tow, Frau Brier gave the British detailed plans for the then new Institute for Research on the Physics of Electrons, Ions, and Ultramicroscopy located in the Weisser Hirsch suburb of Dresden, as well as von Ardenne’s adjacent private villa. 55 In such cases, settling scores with wayward husbands may have worked to both parties’ advantage, though in general the benefits appear to have accrued mainly to intelligence agencies. When the gripe was not with a spouse but rather intelligence officials of a new or foreign land, family members’ leverage was circumscribed. And yet even in cases in which missions involving husbands as agents had clearly gone awry, wives exercised what limited recourse they could muster. The family members of those with loved ones abroad, including those sent there on ill-conceived liberation missions, seized on whatever possibilities existed to their own advantage. Left in the lurch by both her husband and the U.S. Army, the wife of Wolfgang Pölitz, who, according to CIC’s interrogation office in Bad Cannstatt, had “made several men for USI [U.S. Intelligence] to Holland, Belgium, and East Germany,” contacted the local CIC office in Giessen “two or three times” after her husband’s capture in the East. While the cryptic quote tells us nothing about her husband’s espionage activities, American largesse may have addressed at least some of Frau Pölitz’s most immediate concerns: her husband’s case file reveals she was “given 5000 WDM for which she signed a quick claim.” 56 The file does not convey what was “made” of the men enlisted by U.S. intelligence, though the handsome figure of five thousand deutschmarks indicates Frau Pölitz’s husband had delivered valuable services of his own. Approached as information brokers in their own right, wives and lovers represented more than expensive nags in intelligence officials’ eyes. Rather, they consistently offered avenues of influence, and for this reason, security authorities carefully weighed the pros and cons of having partners attend briefings of long-sought targets. Beyond contributing to a sense of ease or even confidence, they occasionally supplied insights of their own. In one instance, the wife of a fifty-two-year-old tire manufacturer from the East German town of Riesa was called upon at a JIC debriefing to complete her husband’s testimony after he had suffered a sudden insulin collapse. 57

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THE GRÖTTRUPS: BRITISH EXPLOITS AND GERMAN CAREERS More than obliging substitutes for incapacitated husbands, even in an era more overtly conservative than our own, when the avenues for women’s professional advancement were dramatically circumscribed, wives occasionally emerged as key brokers in intraservice struggles. After Steimel, the next most valuable contact to exit the Soviet Union via East Germany in 1954 was rocket expert Helmut Gröttrup: he and his wife, Irmgard, had been invited to London in January 1954 for secret consultations only after Irmgard had provided information about potential defectors that was passed on to MI6. 58 Shortly before departing for London, the gifted, if headstrong, thirtyseven-year-old electronics specialist, erstwhile Marxist, and now critic of the Soviet model had made his desire known to British military intelligence: Gröttrup sought to create and lead a rocket group of his own in West Germany. In no position to grant his wish, the British instead attempted to steer him toward a position in private industry. Like former British Control Commission employee Karl Jasznewski, Gröttrup ended up at Standard Electric Lorenz AG in Stuttgart. Whereas documents analyst Jasznewski soon began supplying a hostile intelligence agency, the foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi, with highly classified information about American rocket-launching bases, Gröttrup would, after his successful integration into West German life, invent a much smaller if ubiquitous technological marvel: the chip card we carry in our purses and wallets. Less famous are Helmut Gröttrup’s wife’s accomplishments: as his British case file reveals, these aligned with the aims of British intelligence. A cable from the British embassy in Bonn explained that the pair required careful handling, as they were “in a state of high nervous tension” and “wildly temperamental.” Written in preparation for the couple’s exploitation in London, the Foreign Office missive hinted darkly that the children would remain in Germany and that “Irmgard has been given an understanding that she will be free to return to Germany on 22nd January. Helmut has received no definite indication of length of stay.” Demonstrating a keen appreciation of the pair’s emotional dynamics, Bonn embassy contacts with foreign intelligence interests predicted, “We assume that he will get extremely anxious not later than one week after Irmgard’s departure. This may be mitigated by definite employment prospects such as discussions on utilization of his patents and positive interest in Irmgard’s proposed autobiography which might be adaptable to IRD [Information Research Department of the Foreign Office] requirements.” 59 By indicating his account would be considered at the highest level of government and that his time would be handsomely remunerated, a so-called working party at the Ministry of the Defense leading his exploitation in London paired carrots with sticks. Acknowledging that the

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high-frequency technician would be “skinned fairly dry on scientific and technical matters,” the head of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, Hugh Young, sought to couple the technical yield with a more personal assessment of Gröttrup’s future usefulness to British intelligence aims in Germany. A précis offered by King’s College professor Frederick Norman shifted the attention of British intelligence toward his older, noble-born wife as an avenue of influence, offering the appraisal that she was “several cuts above him” and “rather more anti-Russian.” 60 The Information Research Department of the Foreign Office shared Norman’s judgment. In the wake of a meeting with a British intelligence organization at which her more distinguished husband was conspicuously absent, officials based in West Germany suggested Irmgard be brought back to London on a separate journey to prepare an anonymous article for the popular illustrated weekly the Picture Post, which would include photographs she had taken in Russia. 61 Four years later, Irmgard published the first German-language account of those scientists who had, as she put it, toiled “in the shadow of the red rocket.” 62 The usefulness of wives’ influence, past and future, was carefully weighed in both London and Washington, as another aspect of the Gröttrups’ saga makes clear. As described in chapter 3, an additional important CIC source of information on Gröttrup was another German rocket expert allocated to the United States for exploitation, Ernst Stuhlinger: the latter had received a tip that Gröttrup was residing in Stuttgart from his wife, Irmgard Stuhlinger. In espionage circles, romantic liaisons were regarded as an especially useful means of procuring influence, information, and access to agents, current as well as former. The tale of Jiří Kalaš, the former U.S. agent and Radio Free Europe interrogator at the Camp Valka asylum center near Nuremberg, the forerunner to today’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), provides a compelling example to illustrate this point. In its struggle with the Czechoslovak intelligence agency (Státní Bezpečnost, or StB) and East Germany’s Stasi, the CIC displayed indifference in turning over to the BfV his West German lover, Gertrud Weber, a West German employed as a receptionist at a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremberg. More questionable was the wisdom in sharing, via Weber, an unknown number of other Western espionage contacts with the StB and Stasi in what proved to be a poorly executed bid to redefect a man the CIC insisted upon viewing as its asset. A readiness to manipulate newcomers’ most intimate ties to those they loved emerges as a common thread in the declassified espionage documentation examined in the course of this research. The dogged efforts of socialist intelligence services to lure escapees into liaisons against their best interests to mold the lives of spouses, parents, children, siblings, and close friends were especially gruesome, though by no means unique. As compared to their Western competitors, security services from Communist nations appear to have had an almost unbounded readiness to manipu-

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late fraternal, collegial, and especially familial ties. Their keenness to insert themselves into the heart of delicate intrapersonal dynamics assumed sinister forms of persuasion, such as the ruse the StB adopted in luring Kalaš to his native Czechoslovakia. To overcome his fear of arrest and to strengthen his feelings of homesickness, the StB arranged for him to receive heart-wrenching letters from his estranged wife and mother, followed by an agent’s delivery to his office at Camp Valka in Bavaria of a promise of safe return— provided, of course, Kalaš pledge his “cooperation.” 63 Both the StB and the Stasi deployed time-honored emotional techniques—a mother’s candid advice, a wife’s physical desire, and the suggestion that the two most important women in his life agreed that the time had come to make amends—to motivate him to take action against American intelligence. In ensnaring Kalaš, the regional office of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior in Karlovy Vary incurred a minor setback from Kalaš’s ex-wife Květa Kalašová. After various forms of harassment, Kalašová had become indignant at the security services’ forcing her to cooperate in her ex-husband’s entrapment. 64 Initially she had cooperated reluctantly in the ruse, forwarding a note she sent to her ex-husband at the StB’s instruction thanking him for a Christmas present of stockings and placing a pleading telephone call to him from the East German city of Plauen. Thereafter, however, she drew the line, refusing involvement in further entrapment schemes. Because of her alleged insouciance, Kalašová, whom a regional branch officer of the StB characterized as “very prudent, modest, and intelligent,” 65 faced dismissal from her position and the threat of a ten-year jail sentence. 66 The dramatic circumstances surrounding the forced defection of Jiří Kalaš and his subsequent impressment into service on Czechoslovak intelligence missions abroad reminds us that the East Germans held no monopoly on Stalinist-inspired zealotry. 67 The plethora of accessible espionage files produced by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security provide us with vistas from which to consider the personal and social ramifications of Soviet-inspired security mania. While outright torture became less frequent, in terms of their readiness to manipulate family ties little appears to have changed across the four and a half decades of Communist rule in eastern Germany. Stasi records from the last years of Germany’s division point to the fact that Georg S.’s decision, reached while at sea on a Shell tanker en route to Nigeria, to return to the East had been prompted by that socialist service’s instructions to his wife to pen missives to him about their young child and their Christmas plans—in awareness that they would reach him thousands of nautical kilometers from home. Notwithstanding the Stasi’s success in bringing Georg S. back to East Germany in 1972, its security agents’ reach nonetheless met limits, as illustrated by Georg S.’s denial of admissions of involvement in American-led plots procured under duress. His was by no means the only such refusal. The ability of the Stasi and other Soviet-inspired

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services to secure insights via face-to-face questioning was not boundless. As Karl Hamann’s comportment in the face of his gruesome questioners reminds us, the Stasi’s power to manipulate, even in the darkest hours in the interrogation cells at Hohenschönhausen, provoked acts of personal resistance, not least from those denied the most basic liberties that governments after 1945 claimed to guarantee their citizens. NOTES 1. Besuch bei BUNAST Hannover, KÜNAST Hamburg, BUNAST Lübeck, November 25, 1954, B 443/788, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. In Switzerland, the centralization of domestic intelligence information processing in the form of a massive card index created similar problems on a still larger scale. See Dorothee Liehr, Skandal und Nation. Politische Deutungskämpfe in der Schweiz 1988–1991 (Marburg: Tectum, 2014); in English, Hannes Mangold, “Monster in the Box: The Card Index Affair and the Transformation of Switzerland’s Intelligence Information System, 1989–1994,” Journal of Intelligence History 14, no. 2 (2015): 129–38. 2. Annex “B,” Progress of LfVs during the Past Year, Review of Progress in the Federal Security Service (BfVs and LfVs) during the Last Twelve Months, August 21, 1951, FO 1006/ 281, TNA London. 3. Federal Information Office (Bundesnachrichtenstelle), October 8, 1957, RG 319, Entry A1 134-B, Box No. 298, NARA II. 4. For a British intelligence perspective, consult Review of Progress in the Federal Security Service (BfVs and LfVs) during the Last Twelve Months, August 21, 1951, FO 1006/281, TNA London. For these relationships we are too often reliant on outsiders’ perspectives, as accessing the records of the LfVs remained exceptionally difficult in early 2017. On accessing state-level intelligence collections, see Jens Niederhut and Uwe Zuber, eds., Geheimschutz Transparent? Verschlusssachen in staatlichen Archiven (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2010), 9–15. 5. Computers were then still rare: in 1954, there were only seventy computers in the United States. Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done before and after Global English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 213. 6. Befra Report No. 211187, October 27, 1975, B 206/1605, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. See also BSSO Overt Intelligence Report, Report No. 200/711, July 20, 1960, B 206/1459, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 7. See, for instance, Befra Report No. 645353, October 28, 1982, B 206/1597, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 8. Befra Report No. 125664, Randerkenntnisse. Objekt: Erweiterungsbauten beim VEB Büromaschinewerk in Sömmerda, June 20, 1966, B 206/1449, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 9. Befra Report No. 605415, December 29, 1982, B 206/1598, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 10. Befra Report No. 232723, November 11, 1979, B 206/1593, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 11. The role of trust as a political objective and rhetorical strategy at West Germany’s highest policymaking levels is emerging as an area of new scholarship; examples are presented in Reinhild Kreis, ed., Diplomatie mit Gefühl. Vertrauen, Misstrauen und die Aussenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2015). 12. According to descriptions offered in Walter Stern and Franz Gajdosch, Die Amerikaner in Oberursel, Camp Hist. 543, Sammlung Gajdosch, Erinnerungsort Oberursel. 13. A line included in the boilerplate of many reports notes “material used during the questioning.” Common among employees of the BND was the use of various editions of maps of U.S. origin, such as a report produced at the Befra Stuttgart using AMS M 841, Sheet 4049, 3rd ed., 1:25 000, LÜBBEN (SPREEWALD). See Befra Report No. Z/S 10666, December 18, 1959, B 206/1378, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 14. For an especially detailed example from the period before the formal establishment of the JICs, see the memo from 125/W-Rü IV to 124/W4 dated August 1, 1957, B 206/1393, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.

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15. Befra Report No. 215528, July 8, 1975, B 206/1609, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 16. To mitigate against infiltration, but also to strengthen rapport within their organizations, security denizens socialized and married within familiar circles. Whenever possible, they employed family members, friends, and co-workers, as well as their own and their colleagues’ wives. With its employees residing and socializing in areas segregated from most of society, such as the BND’s compound in Pullach, the intelligence world represented a cosmos all its own. A recent introduction to family life behind Pullach’s gates is Susanne Meinl and Bodo Hechelhammer, Geheimobjekt Pullach. Von der NS-Mustersiedlung zur Zentrale des BND (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2014), esp. 181–84. 17. Letter from the Bayer. Staatsministerium des Innern an das Bundesministerium der Finanzen, October 14, 1953, B 126/159262, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 18. Production Questionnaire Eastern Germany, June 24, 1955, DEFE 41/143, TNA London. 19. Dispatch to Chief, CSB, Frankfurt from Chief, Berlin OPS Base, September 24, 1964, “Gast, Heinz Wilhelm Paul,” RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 38, NARA II. 20. See Alexander W. Hoerkens, Unter Nazis? Die NS-Ideologie in den abgehörten Gesprächen deutscher Kriegsgefangener von 1939 bis 1945 (Berlin: bebra Verlag, 2014), esp. 9–42. 21. The federal government’s official response failed to note that the personal names of individuals included in the report were not anonymized. Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Ulla Jelpke und der Gruppe der PDS/Linke Liste, July 29, 1991, Drucksache 12/996, http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/12/009/1200996.pdf (accessed October 12, 2016) 22. Nutzung von Befragungsstellen und Stützpunkten in Notaufnahmelagern (NAL) durch den BND, September 29, 1972, MfS-HA II, Nr. 28361, BStU. 23. Memorandum for the Record, Visit to CATRIBE, July 21, 1970, “Zuber, Ebrulf,” Vol. 1, Folder 2 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 145, NARA II. Consider alongside the description of the BND classificatory system presented in Datenschutz im Bereich des BND; Erörterungen am 7.5.1980, May 12, 1980, B 347/219, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 24. In charge of East German operations throughout the 1970s, in 1981 BND president, Klaus Kinkel, put Zuber in control of Soviet and East Bloc operations as well. Telefax to Director, CIA, December 1981, “Zuber, Ebrulf,” Vol. 1, Folder 2 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 145, NARA II. The weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel published an influential sevenpart series on West Germany’s “police and secret service databases” during the first half of 1979. The largely favorable response of the federal commissioner for data protection to this series has recently been declassified. See Presseberichte zum BKA. hier: Stichpunkte zur Spiegelserie “Das Stahlnetz stülpt sich über uns,” June 13, 1979, B 347/219, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 25. Dispatch from Chief of Station, Germany, to Chief of Base, Bonn, June 16, 1961, Memorandum for the Record, Meeting with Dr. Ernst Brückner, Chief of SG, Bonn, June 20, 1956, RG 263, Entry ZZ18, Box 18, File Ernst Brückner, Vol. 2, NARA II. 26. The integration of insights supplied by visitors at Joint Interrogation Centers into BND databases may well have taken place during the early 1970s. See, for instance, brief notes to this effect included in B 206/1492 and B 206/1503, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Data automation within Befra field offices appears to have been unusual even a decade later according to impressions gathered by federal data protection advocates at two JIC offices in 1982. See, Vermerk, Datenschutz im Bereich des BND, July 3, 1985, B 347/614, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 27. Concerning the extensive parliamentary inquiry documenting the affair that unfolded at the same time as the Watergate scandal in Washington, a recently published introduction may be found in Eckard Michels, Guillaume, der Spion. Eine deutsch-deutsche Karriere (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013), 247–67. 28. Named for eminent political scientist Theodor Eschenburg, the official version of the report was presented to West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt in mid-November 1974; the public version was printed in December 1974. Ibid., 253–54. 29. Exactly how this enhancement might be brought about remained unspecified in the Stasi’s read of the secret annexes—a dimension of the Guillaume spy case, postwar West

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Germany’s most famous, previously unexamined until this publication. “Information zum Bericht Vorbeugender Geheimschutz” der sogenannten Eschenburg-Kommission, undated (1975), HA II, Nr. 41418, BStU. 30. Deferred Telepouch, June 1983, Cascope and Humint Collection Concerning Indications and Warning, “Zuber, Ebrulf,” Vol. 1, Folder 2 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 145, NARA II. According to this document, responsibility for the exploitation of Bavarian Border Police reporting within the BND fell within the jurisdiction of Department XIV. 31. These records consisted primarily of interrogations and conversations with inmates, including refugee-returnees. See Ilko-Sacha Kowalczuk, Stasi Konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 131. A recently published volume on data archiving within the East German security service is Das Gedächtnis der Staatssicherheit. Die Kartei- und Archivabteilung des MfS, ed. Karten Jedlitschka and Philipp Springer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015). 32. Dispatch from Chief, EUR to Chief, Bonn Operations Base, August 18, 1966, “Schruebbers, Hubert,” 1st Folder, RG 263, Entry ZZ 18, Box No. 116, NARA II. 33. CRI R. Gerken, March 2, 1954, WO 208/5211, TNA London. 34. See, for example, Meeting with CARPETMAKER (Dr. Ernst Brückner, Chief of SG, Bonn), June 27, 1956, RG 263, Entry ZZ18, Box 18, File Ernst Brückner, Vol. 2, NARA II. 35. The memo concludes with the cryptic assessment that Brückner’s relationship with the CIA would suffer if he were to “uncover operations which we are running against the West German government.” Memorandum for the Record, Meeting with Dr. Ernst Brückner, Chief of SG, Bonn, June 20, 1956, RG 263, Entry ZZ18, Box 18, File Ernst Brückner, Vol. 2, NARA II. 36. Dispatch from Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, to Chief, Foreign Division “M,” August 6, 1951, “Saevecke, Theo,” Folder 1 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 111, NARA II. 37. Memorandum to Richard Helms, Chief of Operations, Subject: Query to Director on Theodor Saevecke, July 8, 1954, Folder 1 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 111, NARA II. 38. Classified Message to the Director from Bonn, July 7, 1954, “Saevecke, Theo,” Folder 1 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 111, NARA II. 39. Classified Message from Director, CIA, to SR Rep Bonn, Frankfurt, July 12, 1954, “Saevecke, Theo,” Folder 1 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 111, NARA II. 40. Dispatch from Chief, EE, to Chief of Mission, Frankfurt, August 5, 1954, Folder 1 of 2, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 111, NARA II. Saevecke’s biography is dissected in Imanuel Baumann et al., Schatten der Vergangenheit. Das BKA und seine Gründungsgeneration in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH, 2011), 219–40, esp. 224–36. 41. “Aus der Bonner Sicherungsgruppe versetzt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 19, 1963; “Höcherl stellt sich vor Kriminalrat Saevecke,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 20, 1963. Saevecke’s transfer to the BKA headquarters led the Stasi to assemble a press conference to highlight his role in crimes committed against Polish civilians in Poznań from September 1939 to the fall of 1940. See “Ost-Berliner Zeugnisse gegen Saevecke,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 22, 1963. The charges against Saevecke also entered the familiar territory of SPD parliamentary criticism of the federal republic’s archconservative civil servants. See “Erinnerung an Tunis,” Der Spiegel, February 27, 1963, and “Höcherl zum Fall Saevecke,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 7, 1963. 42. STIB Preliminary Interview Report No. 70, August 13, 1952, DEFE 41/114, TNA London. 43. Memorandum on Operation Dragon Return, September 9, 1952, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. 44. STIB Interview Report No. 76, September 5, 1952, DEFE 41/114, TNA London. 45. Memorandum on Operation Dragon Return, September 9, 1952, DEFE 41/92, TNA London. 46. STIB Interview Report No. 317, March 31, 1952, DEFE 21/41, TNA London. 47. STIB Interview Report No. 317, March 31, 1952, DEFE 41/96, TNA London. 48. Memorandum on Kurt Berner, Suchumi to Mr. Bossard, February 8, 1956, DEFE 41/ 136, TNA London.

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49. Paper by D. E. Evans on “long-term” aspects of STIB work titled “Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch,” November 15, 1950, DEFE 41/84, TNA London. 50. Contact visits in Berlin, including Horst Pardau, are included in DEFE 41/136, TNA London. 51. Message from STIB Berlin to Bossard, July 14, 1955, DEFE 41/136, TNA London. 52. Übermittlung von Daten über Spätaussiedler an den BND, November 30, 1979, B 347/ 614, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 53. Professor Gunther [sic] E. Bock, July 19, 1954, DEFE 21/14, TNA London. 54. STIB Interview Report, No. 193, undated, DEFE 41/103, TNA London. 55. STIB Interview Report, No. 238, September 9, 1955. See also a CIA report that appears to have been based largely on her interrogation: Research Institute, Dresden, September 26, 1955, RG 263, CREST, CIA-RDP80-00810A008000720001-6 (accessed October 4, 2016). 56. AETCIC-SC-27, December 12, 1964, RG 319, Entry 134 B, Box No. 229, NARA II. 57. Befra Report No. 615823, March 30, 1982, B 206/1596, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 58. Preliminary Interrogation of Dipl. Ing. Helmut Gröttrup, January 30, 1953, DEFE 21/27, TNA London. 59. Bonn Embassy Cipher to the Ministry of Defence, London, January 11, 1954, DEFE 21/ 27, TNA London. 60. Norman to Young, Report on Gröttrup, January 25, 1954, DEFE 21/27, TNA London. Norman also served as an intermediary between Ernst Telschow and B. K. Blount. Norman offered the viewpoint that “from general conversation I formed a very clear impression that he did not know very much about Russia or the Russians. He was very much cut off, met only Germans, and he knows surprisingly little Russian. He admitted that he could not read the language with any ease. The Russians who ‘contacted’ him obviously collected everything he produced, and that was the last he ever heard of it.” 61. Letter from Young to Evans, Gröttrup, January 28, 1954, DEFE 21/27, TNA London. The Foreign Office ensured that Irmgard’s name was excluded from the newspaper sketch; photographs she had taken during her and her husband’s stay in Russia were used in the piece. 62. Irmgard Gröttrup von Steingrüben, Die Bessenen und die Mächtigen. Im Schatten der roten Rakete (Hamburg: Deutsche Hausbücherei, 1958). Her novel was translated into English and published the next year under the title Rocket Wife (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959). 63. Preparation for meeting with informant Květa Kalašová, September 8, 1954, Archive Code No. 728707 MV, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 64. Complaint from Kalašová, Květa, March 3, 1955, Karlovy Vary, ZSGŠ (Zpravodajská správa generálního štábu [Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff]), Archive Code No. 19148, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 65. Ustanovka, Květa Kalašová, October 14, 1953, Archive Code No. 72807, MV, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 66. Record of Statements made by Květa Kalašová, February 14, 1955, Karlovy Vary, ZSGŠ, Archive Code No. 19148, Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague. 67. A relatively recent German-language introduction to the status of research in the Czech and Slovak republics is contained in Petr Blažek and Pavel Žáček, “Tschechoslowakei,” in Handbuch der kommunistischen Geheimdienste in Osteuropa 1944–1991, ed. Łukasz Kamiński, Krzysztof Persak, and Jens Gieseke, trans. Jürgen Hensel, Norbert Juraschitz, and Heike Schlatterer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2009), 395–480; on archival access to security records in the Czech Republic, see esp. 465–67.

Chapter Eight

Conclusion Refugee Screening—the Past as Prologue

How government officials operating in divided Germany weighed demands for national self-determination and guarantees of personal freedoms against the exigencies of a global military and ideological conflict has relevance for other times and places. Just as the previous era of military and ideological confrontation framed a complex and shifting amalgam of perils and possibilities, mass migration, warfare, public security concerns, and international jihadism present both fresh espionage opportunities and new challenges to civil liberties. In Germany, the presence of foreign troops, an enduring legacy of World War II, appears to strengthen the hand of surveillance agencies from abroad in vetting individuals seeking refuge in central Europe. Their positions as co-arbiters of Germany’s internal security seem likely to ensure the continued influence of foreign intelligence officials in apportioning rights ostensibly bestowed by the federal government in concert with the supranational institutions of the European Union, including but not limited to asylum and citizenship. During the Cold War and for several decades thereafter, these individual rights, defined in theory by German and European elected officials, were in practice curtailed by imperatives formulated in other parts of the world. Enjoyment of the right to live and work in the federal republic depended on satisfying the informational appetites of intelligence agencies, a fact that enabled domestic and foreign security officials to upturn private lives and the rule of law.

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THE LONG SHADOW OF COLD WAR SECURITY VETTING This study offers a composite picture of the places and practices of refugee interrogation in Cold War Germany, a contested, occupied polity shaped, from a security perspective, by multinational actors and allegiances. The insights I have acquired from declassified espionage materials housed at the U.K., U.S., and German national archives relate less to the Communist East than to West Berlin and West Germany. Accordingly, I have traced the creation and maintenance of informant networks in science, industry, and civil service circles in the more successful of the postwar German states. During the Cold War, eliciting information from newcomers brought security actors into practically every imaginable public venue in western Germany and West Berlin, from train stations to corporate boardrooms to private dwellings. In industrial enterprises and public bureaucracies, in professional bodies and research institutes, intelligence officials expanded their opportunities to gather contacts and information within West German society as a whole. Long recognized as an important dimension of rule in the socialist East, the prevalence of mass face-to-face questioning in the western twothirds of the nation divided and occupied after 1945 has remained understudied. The diminishments of personal liberties as a consequence of multinational efforts to relieve and capitalize on public fears about those seeking asylum is part of a history rooted in World War II, cemented in Germany’s division, and perpetuated by Germany’s occupation. Institutions and practices molded by the Cold War struggle outlasted the global face-off by more than a generation, as the example of the Joint Interrogation Centers reminds us. The questioning of East Germans at the Joint Interrogation Centers officially ended on June 30, 1990. Interrogations of asylum seekers, ethnic Germans from elsewhere in Europe, and many others continued for another twenty-four years. Across this entire period, from 1958 to 2014, face-to-face interactions at the Joint Interrogation Centers formally administered by the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV) time and again fired the imagination of pundits, with no end in sight. A November 2015 article in the influential liberal Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, conveys the tenor of recent reporting on the Joint Interrogation Centers. Drawing on testimony supplied to the German parliament’s National Security Agency investigative committee by the last director of the Befras, the article claims that some thirty-nine individuals were granted official refugee status in Germany in 2010 in exchange for information provided to the BND. The article’s three authors posit links between electronic drone warfare and human intelligence questioning at the Joint Interrogation Centers; concerned primarily with al-

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leged secret German cooperation in drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia via U.S. facilities in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base and the United States Africa Command near Stuttgart (the former hometown of the American Counter Intelligence Corps), the journalistic trio asserted that “U.S. agents” sometimes donned the identities of German questioners in order to procure information that may have culminated in a drone strike. 1 Addressing such concerns about refugee questioning involving Americans currently or recently stationed in Germany, while important, is not primarily the responsibility of historical researchers. At base, historians aim to explain past events without reducing them to the concerns of the present. This means not that researchers ignore lines of continuity, but rather that we remain open to parallels in the past that challenge today’s certainties. A development central to Cold War vetting systems and our own era of unending warfare was the creation of vast data archives. These consisted mostly of paper. Acts of gleaning intelligence and committing insights to various paper products warrant greater inquiry, especially when record-keeping technologies are linked to face-to-face interaction. The crucial first step in obtaining insights revolved around the art of manipulation, not of datasets recorded on index or punch cards, but rather of the emotions of those individuals summoned to interrogation offices or questioned in less formal settings. Acts of archiving and retrieval from newcomers required, in the most immediate sense, the ability to extract information from a diverse array of individuals, from those uninterested in politics to Communist agents. Winning hearts and minds, particularly during the era of greater cross-border exchange brought about by détente, required more than a shared commitment to anticommunism or national unity. Crucial to the successful exploitation of collection techniques was an appreciation of migrants’ emotional bonds with neighbors, friends, colleagues, and especially intimates—above all parents (especially mothers) and lovers. In their quest to verify facts and uncover secret intelligence, chiefs and field operatives alike attended carefully to interpersonal relationships. Their propensity to devote their most precious resource, time, to the cultivation of social relations in West German industry, science, and public administration warrants closer attention. Today, as calls for increased scrutiny of newcomers grow louder, the domestic relations of migrants are likely acquiring relevance. Because practically nothing captured in digital form and stored in relational databases truly disappears, self-disclosures procured from newcomers and formalized in written determinations may be mobilized against the newly arrived and their loved ones in ways foreshadowed by the historical experience of questioning in Cold War Germany. 2 Those at risk appear to include migrants and travelers; as the experience of security vetting during the last global face-off suggests, the list of those selected for greater scrutiny does not, however, end with border crossers.

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The terms of security services’ involvement in West German society and clashes between Western intelligence officials over access to informants, newcomers, and their loved ones are recurrent and interrelated themes in this book. The espionage materials presented in these pages document tensions among Allied security personnel engaged in querying foreign newcomers. Rigorous competition over asylum seekers prompted intelligence agencies to seek leverage by cultivating networks of contacts in academia, state and federal government, and industrial concerns. To offset their dependence on American services, Britain’s Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch showered favors on well-placed individuals employed by applied research organizations and commercial enterprises across West Berlin and West Germany. Recipients of British intelligence assistance included industrial and electronic giants Siemens and Telefunken, as well as leading research institutes, including the Max Planck Society and major universities. American traffic in acts of goodwill traveled along similar lines, with U.S. services exercising additional avenues of influence over individuals and networks inserted into a wide range of businesses and West German civil administration. German vetting officials more closely aligned with the objectives of federal and state governments cooperated with American officials while privately expressing reservations about their strongest protectors’ ability to successfully exploit anti-Communist opportunities east of the inner German demarcation line. The Cold War experience suggests that upbraiding in media outlets and even parliaments is unlikely to thwart extensive cooperation between German foreign and domestic intelligence services and their Anglo-American counterparts. A defining feature of Germany’s internal security remains the order maintained for nearly three-quarters of a century by the country’s most successful occupiers, the United Kingdom and especially the United States. Although frictions are unlikely to abate, in early 2017 a remedy for behindthe-scenes foreign engagement in domestic security affairs did not appear to be on the horizon. The omnipresence of electronic surveillance does, however, suggest that bouts of controversy will command attention for years to come, a development that will likely heighten scuffles among the many police and intelligence agencies active in the federal republic. This study demonstrates that the history of Cold War refugee screening can be reconstructed from publicly available documentary collections. It is unnecessary to conduct off-the-record conversations with interested parties who provide essentially unverifiable information to those seeking to understand the complex interplay between security risks and opportunities, migration, and sovereignty and individual rights. What interpreters of the past can reliably determine about the plight of asylum claimants stems from access to archival documents, not assessments submitted decades after the events by those with a stake in defining outcomes. Unlike many spy histories, this

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exploration of intelligence sharing and struggles underscores the challenges of interpreting declassified archival records. In the future we should insist on rigorous discussions of the epistemology of intelligence sources rather than accept accounts based on privileged access that essentially tell us, “I know this thing is true, but I cannot tell you why.” While the observations and perspectives of Cold War protagonists may provide compelling narrative material, they are of substantially less value in exploring Cold War questioning than holdings in public archives accessible to all interested parties. As the Counter Intelligence Corps files presented in chapter 3 illustrate, a thorough exploration of the extant declassified archival material reintroduces both concerns and actors long associated with security debriefing that have since faded from memory. Clashes along West Germany’s borderlands flowed from the readiness of multinational security officials to exploit Germany’s partition to their own ends, not merely the extensive machinations of Sovietaligned services. With reference to the questioning of migrants to western Germany and West Berlin by foreign and domestic intelligence officials, historians’ archival entrée to the Cold War will likely remain asymmetrical. This state of affairs may well ensure that East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) will figure prominently in narratives of Cold War hegemony in central Europe for years to come. 3 This propensity to rely on insights offered by the Stasi and its SED overlords will require historians to assess the value of the security service’s documentary legacy without succumbing to the deeply biased ideological perspectives embedded in the mountains of accessible files preserved in 2017 at the Stasi Records Agency. Using collections assembled by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security to understand Western security practices is fraught with difficulty and less rewarding than one might imagine. Although all Soviet Bloc secret services, not merely the Stasi, devoted significant energy to tracing Western practices of interrogation in the federal republic, we should not exaggerate the relevance of these efforts, particularly given that access to comparable materials in many nations remains under lock and key. Beyond the infiltration of Western questioning offices and the seizure of Western intelligence correspondence, reports, and field notes, this study emphasizes the limited value of Stasi materials in decoding flight narratives. Although far more abundant than their Western counterparts, the records of the Stasi, when considered alone, are less useful in explaining West German, British, and American questioning practices than their sheer volume implies. 4 Our increasing detachment from the Cold War’s outcomes may one day encourage us to regard access to the vast outpouring of Stasi interrogations and analysis as a mixed blessing. When it comes to answering basic questions about how and why Western intelligence performed security functions on behalf of the federal

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republic and the forces of those nations stationed on its territory, historians must devote the lion’s share of their attention to those collections containing insights that can be corroborated. For the Stasi files, verification remains, in many instances, an elusive goal. 5 Having acknowledged essential differences between the Stasi and Western services, without suggesting false equivalences, this book examines how opposing intelligence agents, while working at cross purposes and pursuing different societal aims, shaped lives in both East and West Germany. While some pundits may be tempted to draw parallels between the misdeeds of Cold War security services and early twenty-first-century intelligence officials, those more familiar with the extant historical documentation will note significant points of divergence between the various actors engaged in acts of intense scrutiny of those forcibly displaced during the second half of the twentieth century and in more recent times. Emphasizing salient differences between contests over access to newcomers in distinct historical periods should not prevent us from identifying commonalities in approaches to refugee screening across the Cold War period and beyond. Once researchers succeed in lifting further classification restrictions, interpreters of the recent past should aim to compare the tools and techniques employed in the espionage trade across what many for a long time have rigorously defined as an ideological chasm. This account seeks to contribute to a wider dialogue about the terms and consequences of questioning those driven out of their homes, a process that during the previous global military and ideological conflict engaged investigatory bodies from across and beyond Europe. During the Cold War face-off, all services active in occupied Germany, foreign and domestic, made use of impressive batteries of personal, administrative, and technical resources. Several of the most valuable tools security officials employed to their advantage, such as telephone tapping, are difficult to visualize. 6 Other common aids used to capture and disseminate information, from lie detectors to weapons catalogs to scaled maps, are easier to imagine. Tools of the interrogation trade extended to such staples of the office world as handheld recording devices, standard questionnaires, and database retrieval systems. The declassified record suggests how intelligence services—likely through a series of missteps, mistakes, and dramatic breakthroughs—maximized and guarded against competitors their immense informational stores before and after what we today describe as the “computerization” of records. Tracing the means security services used to chart a vast and shifting archipelago of objects, subjects, and persons of interest has begun. The proliferation of collecting and collating tools warrant greater attention in the years to come, as do the structures and strictures employed to restrict, channel, and circulate working files and card catalogs compiled about newcomers and informants.

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A key feature of the second decade of the twenty-first century is a propensity to define the world as a technological creation. The screening of migrants during the Cold War was at base an intimate affair. The interaction began with a face-to-face encounter involving a field agent and an entrant. Success or failure in this tête-à-tête often hinged on the ability of individual security officials to define, negotiate, and exploit emotions. At the heart of law enforcement and security officials’ desire to penetrate other people’s secrets were extensive, personalized efforts to manipulate the intimate ties of kith and kin. So long as humans are involved in gathering and interpreting observations, this integral element of surveillance appears unlikely to fall by the wayside. The most effective and, with a view to our future, perhaps the most ominous strategies used to exercise control over the actions of those interrogated in Cold War Germany centered on relations with migrants’ intimate family members. Irrespective of the state or ideology they served, intelligence services proved willing to instrumentalize newcomers’ closest loved ones in pursuit of amorphous ideological and political objectives. The readiness of security denizens to exploit domestic relations in creating and sustaining informant networks warrants further attention. The preservation of privacy in the face of public security threats hinges on our ability to draw broad lessons from the recent past. At stake is not merely the personal and national security we cherish—entities often conflated—but the fragile liberty we continue to enjoy as individuals. NOTES 1. See John Goetz, Antonius Kempmann, and Frederik Obermaier, “Daten für den Drohnenkrieg,” Süddeutsche Zeitung 257 (November 7–8, 2015). Compare to the testimony as stated in the committee’s official record: Ausforschung von Asylbewerbern. 1. Untersuchungsausschuss (NSA)/Ausschuss 1.10.2015, https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/2015_10/-/ 390306 (accessed January 11, 2017). 2. On apparent trade-offs implicit in societal aims to control behavior via new technologies and individual privacy, see Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), and the (still remarkably timely) work of Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1968). With reference to the legacies of data surveillance for privacy, see Bruce Scherer, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), esp. 125–34. 3. The value of scholarship on East Germany produced since reunification in 1990 has generated polemics too detailed to cover here in detail. A concise introduction to the issues at hand is Martin Sabrow, “Die DDR 25 Jahre danach: Historisierung als Hoffnung,” in Die DDR als Chance. Neue Perspektiven auf ein altes Thema, ed. Ulrich Mählert (Berlin: Metropol, 2016), 181–88. Contrast Sabrow’s views with those presented in a more detailed essay in the same collection by Dierk Hoffmann, Michael Schwartz, and Hermann Wentker titled “Die DDR als Chance. Desiderate und Perspektiven künftiger Forschung,” 23–70. 4. On the gulf between the Stasi’s actual reach and its place of prominence in early-twentyfirst-century media cultures, see Mike Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality (London: Longman,

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2003), and Barbara Miller, The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004). 5. The lack of research data—a common refrain among Cold War historians, perhaps especially those engaged in work on intelligence matters—is more common in other fields of scholarly endeavor than many historical researchers imagine. On the surprisingly low rates of “data release” in the natural sciences, see especially Christine L. Borgman, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 205–39. 6. An introduction to the practice of East German telephone surveillance during the 1980s, consisting of 151 key policy documents, short biographies, and a glossary of terms, has been published by Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Arno Polzin. See their edited volume titled Fasse Dich kurz! Der grenzüberschreitende Telefonverkehr der Opposition in den 1980er Jahren und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014).

Appendix The Changing State of Archival Access

While major political challenges triggered by migration and security shaped European media coverage as I concluded this project, when I began research for this account, public attention was riveted on extraordinary reports of digital observation. 1 During the summer of 2013, a spy-cum-refugee launched what rapidly became a far-reaching campaign to expose the vast global purview of Anglo-American electronic surveillance. To ensure his revelations reached the widest possible audience, former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden summoned two fellow Americans living abroad, a filmmaker based in Berlin and a journalist residing in Brazil, to a now infamous top-secret rendezvous in Hong Kong. The trio’s startling disclosures prompted the U.S. government to mount an international manhunt for the renegade whistle-blower; meanwhile, with the support of Chinese officials, Snowden boarded an Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow. Unable to prevent his escape to Russia, U.S. authorities subsequently thwarted the programmer’s attempts to secure passage westward, quite likely to Berlin, where the German government rejected Snowden’s application for political asylum. After spending nearly forty days and nights in a transit area at Sheremetyevo International Airport, Snowden, regarded by many in Germany at that time as a veritable postmodern Moses, accepted what advocates of governmental transparency might regard as the ultimate Faustian bargain: political asylum in Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation.

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CRISES OF ESPIONAGE AND MIGRATION The extraordinary reach of American and British intelligence organizations exposed by the former contractor’s stolen espionage files, and subsequently popularized in an Oscar Award–winning documentary produced by Berlinbased American Laura Poitras, received saturating news coverage for more than two years: in Germany, only the European refugee crisis during the second half of 2015 eclipsed Snowden’s revelations. German media interest in the former intelligence contractor and his (wiki)leaks—he had support of still another English speaker, Julian Assange, the exiled Australian activist holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, who promoted Snowden’s escape—continued to smolder in early 2017. 2 Why this European nation has responded especially fervently to the clarion calls resulting from Edward Snowden’s now infamous espionage revelations remains poorly understood. English-speaking commentators frequently, if not entirely accurately, attribute Germans’ visceral reactions to Anglo-American surveillance to their long-divided nation’s firsthand acquaintance with profoundly undemocratic regimes, Nazi and Communist. During a joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel in February 2015, U.S. president Barack Obama ascribed Germans’ “sensitivities” to the information revealed by Snowden and his expatriated collaborators to the country’s Nazi and Communist pasts. He encouraged Germans to step out of the shadow cast by their history and to focus instead on the period of exceptional German-American cooperation since the end of World War II and especially the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. In light of the close strategic partnership forged between the two countries during the past two generations, the president called on skeptical Germans to grant the United States, in his estimation an exceptional guarantor of personal liberties, the “benefit of the doubt.” 3 Germany’s tumultuous twentieth-century history, including its legacy of spying, most assuredly shaped its citizens’ reactions to eavesdropping revelations, though in ways more interesting than those suggested by the president’s remarks. Germans’ responses to government security exploits are also primed by their country’s experience of Cold War vetting programs conducted by Western occupiers to parry the threat of Soviet communism. The refugee security operations that have, since the end of World War II, bound Germans to their most successful occupiers are important in provoking a complex amalgam of fear, anxiety, and envy concerning the measures the United States and its closest English-speaking allies have adopted in combating very different security threats.

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ARCHIVES AND COMMISSIONS: THE CHANGING STATE OF ACCESS The opaque vetting procedures employed at innumerable sites across Germany remained unexamined until the publication of this book. A paucity of declassified source material long hindered critical examination of refugee debriefing. This is no longer the case either within or beyond Germany. While many relevant collections within the federal republic remain off limits or have been destroyed in accordance with the country’s privacy and data protection laws, access to limited documentation produced by domestic espionage agencies has recently been granted at the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz. More files are on the way: in recent years, both the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) have established external scholarly commissions to examine their organizations’ early histories with a view to revealing postwar continuities with the Nazi regime. 4 While the much larger of the two, the BND commission, is not scheduled to release the full range of its findings until late 2017, 5 the commission of the BfV concluded its labors in January 2015. The commission’s two scholars published their book-length treatment in September of that year. 6 With the approval of the commissioning agency, most of the documents cited in the BfV authors’ report were deposited in the German Federal Archives and made available to researchers in May 2016. 7 In 2018 documents cited by the four historians leading the commission to investigate the domestic history of the BND should also be made available, perhaps at the Koblenz facility or at a future “historical office” housed in the Bundesnachrichtendienst’s headquarters in central Berlin. 8 METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES Historians of the recent past frequently conceive new monographs in response to major archival releases. This book is no exception. I have made use of materials from document collections until now unexplored. As scintillating as the emergence of new sources is, researchers should approach the topic of espionage as it pertains to the fate of refugees not solely in empirical, but also in comparative and conceptual terms. Just as the unprecedented opening of East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) materials unleashed an avalanche of research on the East German state, the labors of two formal intelligence commissions are now yielding studies shaped to a considerable degree by national research agendas. The common theme uniting the work of both commissions, the long shadow cast by National Socialism over

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the first decades of the federal republic, is not new. 9 Those familiar with the early history of divided Germany know that the main foreign intelligence agency collected and shared potentially damaging personal dossiers with Hans Globke, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s closest aide. 10 Salacious as these intermeshings may appear at first glance, we have been informed about the existence of such dossiers—compiled on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of leading West German politicians, journalists, scientists, and high-ranking military officers—for more than forty years. 11 Accounts focused on the uses and abuses of intelligence within the highest circles of the West German federal government and the long lines of continuity between the National Socialist regime should not obscure an important point about the exercise of political power in Germany since 1945: its abidingly international character. The focus on multinational conflict and cooperation within Germany in this book does not indicate a lack of interest in the practices of refugee security questioning from domestic perspectives or the complex legacies of Nazi rule. This account has drawn together analyses of records from those ministries of the federal government responsible for refugee and security affairs, the private collections of key public research institutes and industrial firms located in western Germany and West Berlin, and West German intelligence services. It is the first account to access the files of the federal emergency reception procedure set up to process claims submitted by the nearly four million East Germans to flee to the federal republic; until 2015, this collection was closed to researchers. I have used these and other West German materials to better understand the inner workings of the West German federal government, many of whose internal documents, particularly from the Ministry of the Interior, remain unavailable. 12 An official commission was established in early 2015 to write histories of the East and West German interior ministries. Led by the two preeminent German institutes for the study of contemporary history in Munich and Potsdam, research teams began their investigations in early 2016. This commission’s labors promise to lead to greater awareness of records created by West Germany’s influential interior ministry, perhaps also to enhanced access to declassified materials at the federal records repository in the Rhine city of Koblenz. Inner German struggles over refugee interrogation, viewed in conjunction with the aims and objectives of the leading Western occupying powers, are of central importance to this account. Declassified materials on the Joint Interrogation Centers housed in Koblenz have gone unexamined for nearly fifteen years. Starting in 2002, Befra appraisals completed by the main West German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, have been made publicly accessible according to the terms of German federal law. These Befra reports, intermediary products of field intelligence work, have undergone substantial internal vetting by record keepers at the BND and

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the German Federal Archives facility in Koblenz. The hand of archivists in pruning files is visible to researchers in the form of removal notices, reminders of record keepers’ decisions to expunge from the historical record correspondence with Allied agencies. Unlike in American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) records housed at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), interaction with foreign counterparts has in most cases been removed from the declassified collections in Koblenz. The absence of significant correspondence with the occupiers might lead one to the erroneous conclusion that the last decades of the Cold War in Germany boiled down to a face-off between East and West German security services, with strong, silent patrons lurking in the background. Fortunately for researchers, the inclusion of German-language translations of reports supplied by partner services, including the British Security Services Organization, the U.S. Air Force’s 7000th Support Wing, the U.S. 7th Army Headquarters in Stuttgart, and the U.S. Army’s Joint Interrogation Center office in Munich, remind us that Anglo-American services never fully relinquished their privileged position in West Germany’s questioning machinery. 13 Missing from the BND collection on the Joint Interrogation Centers in Koblenz are substantive assessments of individual newcomers from multiple services, such as those described in part 2 drawn from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Counter Intelligence Corps collections housed at the NARA. One does find in the Koblenz collection brief notices recording whether Allied services had already spoken to a particular newcomer; these references become less frequent by the late 1960s, disappearing altogether by the mid-1970s. Stamps on select reports indicating the desire to shield particular interpretations from so-called partner services hint at intra-Allied competition, but such incomplete references do not allow researchers to trace Allied-German relations involving the questioning of newcomers. 14 How these several thousand interim products of field intelligence work, typically twelve to fourteen pages in length, were used to craft “finished intelligence” briefs, a question of relevance to addressing the concern of how security screening may have shaped policy toward socialist states, remains indiscernible on the basis of the released materials. How these reports made their way through the BND’s vast bureaucracy, where they presumably underwent review and evaluation, remains shielded from public inquiry. The policymaking nexus between intelligence work and decisionmaking, most likely embedded in the Ministry of the Interior and the Chancellor’s Office, remains obscured. In this respect, the three collections, American, British, and West German, are ultimately more similar than different. Among the more striking omissions in the Befra reports currently accessible in Koblenz are full accounts of precisely how individuals had successfully fled Communist oppression. A December 1977 report provides a good example of the laconic nature of escape descriptions supplied in the reports.

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It states that “accompanied by his fiancée, an acquaintance, and their eightyear-old child source fled by boat from Sulima (Romania) across the Black Sea to Istanbul (Turkey).” 15 The absence of detail, which barely hints at the extraordinary lengths this and many other migrants had gone to in their struggle to reach the federal republic by no means reflects a contemporary lack of interest on the part of foreign espionage officials. In fact, the circumstances surrounding displacement were recorded in a different run of Befra reports, but unfortunately for researchers, these Befra accounts have either been withheld by the BND, destroyed, or remain classified in the shadow holdings of the German Federal Archives. Details of West German escape helpers and Stasi operatives dispatched to Black Sea resorts and the capitals of fellow Soviet client states may, however, be gleaned from materials housed at the Stasi Records Agency. OF GREAT ABUNDANCE AND LIMITED USEFULNESS: STASI FILES This manuscript juxtaposes extant West German materials on refugee debriefing with the infinitely more numerous files available from the East German Ministry of State Security. It assesses the value of Stasi materials in describing the aims and methods of Western intelligence, considering British and American questioning practices in divided Germany alongside West and East German counterparts. Although most files of the Stasi’s chief directorate for foreign intelligence, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, were apparently destroyed (or removed) after the Wall’s collapse, significant numbers of documents created by other directorates of the Stasi have been made accessible for this project. The availability of records from these directorates may in a very limited sense offset restrictions researchers confront elsewhere, notably in the Russian Federation. 16 Anglo-American coordination with Soviet interrogators, during the war but also in the brief period of fourpower occupation, remains unexplored. Whether Britons and Americans, for instance, learned from Soviet practices or shared leads and results with Soviet counterparts will require that future researchers pay greater attention to interactions with all security agencies operating in Cold War Germany. East German and other Communist security operations devoted considerable effort to capturing highly sensitive documents created by their foes. For this reason, the Stasi Records Agency and other intelligence archives in eastcentral Europe, notably the Czech Security Services Archive in Prague, emerge as sources of archival material for Western intelligence services. The German Federal Archives seems likely to absorb the Stasi Records Agency by 2021. The current law regulating access to Stasi records is set to expire in

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2019; a special commission established to determine the agency’s future formalized this and several additional recommendations in April 2016. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES IN WASHINGTON AND LONDON In early 2017, in London and especially in Washington, DC, it was possible to locate substantial runs of materials produced by the main West German security actors that one seeks in vain in public archives in the federal republic. Evaluations and significant name-related attendant correspondence produced by the CIC are preserved at the NARA facility. 17 A series of reports, memorandums, interrogations, and interviews contained in so-called Personal Files of the CIC’s Investigative Records Repository document the role of the CIC in refugee interrogation. 18 This collection of nearly one thousand archival boxes was available only in paper form in early 2017, though name files preserved in folders are electronically searchable via the Freedom of Information Act. Organized by personal names, the files extend to the late 1970s, with the bulk of the records covering the 1950s and early 1960s. A large portion, roughly half, of these files cover U.S. Army and other services’ intelligence-gathering activities in France, Austria, east-central Europe, and, above all, occupied western Germany, with coverage also extending to East Asia, mainly Japan and Korea, as well as counterespionage and screening activities in the United States itself. With reference to occupied Germany, a significant minority of these records, roughly 20 percent, covers the Nazi era. The activities of individuals regarded, mistakenly or not, as sympathetic to the aims of West Germany’s Communist Party comprise another focus of security interest left unexamined in this account. Individual CIC units submitted weekly reports of the most important events to headquarters, initially housed in July 1945 in the IG Farben building in Frankfurt am Main and in the Wallace Barracks in the Bad Cannstatt district of Stuttgart after 1951. 19 Individuals sworn to secrecy used these weekly reports from field offices to compile summaries of the most important events pertaining to refugees and other intelligence matters in occupied Germany. These weekly summaries of refugee affairs were forwarded to the offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington. The released army counterintelligence files contain neither the weekly accounts bound for Stuttgart nor the digest reports sent to the FBI, though these occasionally appear in declassified records of the FBI and the CIA. Attempts to obtain a substantial run of summaries compiled for the FBI’s headquarters in Washington were unsuccessful. Owing to their “interim” nature as undigested intelligence, army records preserved at the NARA facility supply insights into the intertwined personal and political struggles concerning individuals seeking refuge in the West. This

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account is the first to evaluate the CIC’s collection in its entirety to trace U.S. policy toward asylum seekers, migrants, and other “unwanted aliens” in Cold War Germany. American records from the 1950s and 1960s pair nicely with collections at the U.K. National Archives (TNA) in London. A limited amount of interchange between American services and the British Services Security Organization (BSSO) is included in Ministry of Defense collections cited herein. I have enjoyed some limited success in having additional reports declassified and added to these runs of files thanks to the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information process; all of these materials are now available at the National Archives facility, with many reports electronically obtainable. Other files describing the functions of the BSSO, an organization that coordinated the work of Britain’s intelligence community, remain classified, many presumably at the instruction of the Ministry of Defense. In the U.S. National Archives, I have unearthed significant runs of German-language materials produced by the BND, the BfV, and the latter’s influential state-level counterparts. Often unattainable in German public archives, these reports and attendant correspondence are located in released holdings of the U.S. Army’s CIC and CIA files declassified under the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act. 20 Coverage peters out in the early 1970s. Comparable runs of German espionage materials have been excised from British files; attempts to procure copies of such documents via the British Freedom of Information procedure were unsuccessful. Some limited inferences about Anglo-German cooperation involving the BSSO and the BfV may, however, be drawn from declassified CIA records. In rare cases, these files extend into the early 1980s. Files from other Dominion powers with troops stationed in the federal republic, notably Canada, may offer fresh perspectives on this important relationship; Belgian and Dutch archives may also yield examples of mutual learning, though attempts to secure access to comparable materials in national archives in Brussels and The Hague met with no success. Further spadework awaits future researchers: the case of security vetting in formally neutral Austria, a country occupied and divided in a manner similar to Germany, invites comparison. A thorough review of declassified files from those countries along the flight paths of escapees, for instance, into and through Denmark, might also yield interesting perspectives: Stasi interrogations of returnees provide key biographical details that might enable archivists at the Danish National Archives to supply leads. The types of U.K. and U.S. documents housed at the Stasi Records Agency and cited in this account should prove useful to future researchers in a variety of ways. These include concerted attempts to structure detailed Freedom of Information requests bound for the responsive staffs at NARA in College Park and at TNA in Kew. Understanding Germany’s Cold War past will likely involve a good deal of future interaction, virtual

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and real, across the British Channel and North Atlantic. If you are among the fortunate individuals who partake, I hope this appendix proves valuable. NOTES 1. For an interesting discussion of why the crisis that gripped Europe in 2015 was primarily one of European Union institutions, not migration, see Geoff Gilbert, “Why Europe Does Not Have a Refugee Crisis,” International Journal of Refugee Law 27, no. 4 (December 2015): 531–35. 2. The scale of the coverage is too vast to encapsulate in one note. The German magazine Der Spiegel, Europe’s largest weekly, featured Snowden’s revelations in no less than seven cover stories between June 2013 and May 2015. In earlier years, the subject of AngloAmerican espionage launched from West Germany was a topic of coverage. See, for instance, the February 20, 1989, cover story titled “Freund hört mit” (Our friends are listening), Der Spiegel, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-21113756.html (accessed October 12, 2016). 3. “Remarks by President Obama and Chancellor Merkel in Joint Press Conference,” White House, February 9, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/09/ remarks-president-obama-and-chancellor-merkel-joint-press-conference (accessed October 11, 2016). 4. Nazi continuities in the personnel and institutions of the West German Federal Republic have emerged as the focus of high-profile studies commissioned by federal ministries. For an introduction to the complex issues surrounding the accounts produced by such endeavors based on privileged access to declassified materials, with emphasis on the most recent study of the German Foreign Office under National Socialism, see Magnus Brechtken, “Die Debatte um ‘Das Amt und die Vergangenheit,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 63, no. 1 (January 2015): 59–91; Martin Sabrow and Christian Mentel, eds., Das auswärtige Amt und seine umstrittene Vergangenheit. Eine deutsche Debatte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischertaschenbuch Verlag, 2014); Richard J. Evans, “The German Foreign Office and the Nazi Past,” Neue Politische Literatur 56, no. 2 (2011): 165–83. Parallel efforts in the United Kingdom have apparently inspired recent intelligence commissions set up in Germany: for an example of the former, see the authorized history published by Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 5. As of October 2016, scholars associated with the BND commission had produced interim studies on the service’s anticipation of anti-Communist uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Ronny Heidenreich, Die Organisation Gehlen und der Volksaufstand am 17. Juni 1953 (Marburg: UHK/BND, 2013); Andreas Hilger and Armin Müller, “Das ist kein Geheimnis, sondern echt.” Der BND und der Prager Frühling 1968 (Marburg: UHK/ BND, 2014). See also the edited collection of BND documents titled Dokumente der “Organisation Gehlen” zum Volksaufstand am 17. Juni 1953, ed. Bodo Hechelmammer (Berlin: BND, 2013). A recent introduction to the East Berlin construction workers’ demonstration that sparked a national rebellion in June 1953 is Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Der Volksaufstand vom 17. Juni 1953 in Wissenschaft und Erinnerungskultur,” in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2013, ed. Ulrich Mählert et al. on behalf of the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2013), 107–36. 6. The work’s authors conclude that the BfV was less tainted by Nazi affiliations and worldviews than has previously been assumed. See Constantin Goschler and Michael Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo.” Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Frankfurt am Main: rowohlt, 2015). On the origins of the commission established by the Federal Intelligence Service as described by the agency’s chief historian, see Bodo Hechelhammer, “Offener Umgang mit geheimer Geschichte,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 64, nos. 18–19 (April 28, 2014): 26–31. 7. Goschler and Wala, “Keine Neue Gestapo,” 12. The first independent review of these newly declassified materials has been presented in these pages.

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8. See Jost Dülffer et al., eds., Die Geschichte der Organisation Gehlen und des BND 1945–1968: Umrisse und Einblicke. Dokumentation der Tagung am 2. Dezember 2013, with editorial assistance from Andreas Hilger, Sabrina Nowack, and Gerhard Sälter (Marburg: Unabhängige Historikerkommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, 1945–1968). The files of the service’s wartime precursor, Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost), were located at still another location, in Freiburg, on nearly the opposite side of the country in early 2017. Gehlen was appointed head of the Foreign Armies East in the spring of 1942. 9. While gaining a deeper understanding of the National Socialist roots of West Germany’s main foreign and domestic espionage services underscores both security agencies’ commitment to greater openness, tracing the recruitment paths of those regarded as especially tainted by the stain of Nazi crimes does not alone constitute a groundbreaking scholarly contribution. This point has also been taken up most recently in Armin Wagner and Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Spione und Nachrichtenhändler. Geheimdienst-Karrieren in Deutschland 1939–1989 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2016), 15–20, 331. 10. Klaus-Dietmar Henke, “Der Gehlen-BND in der Innenpolitik,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 64, no. 18–19 (April 2014): 32–36. This argument can also be found in somewhat longer form in “Der Auslandsnachrichtendienst in der Innenpolitik: Umrisse,” in Dülffer et al., Die Geschichte der Organisation Gehlen, 92–100. Relationships between Adenauer’s most powerful assistant, Globke, and Gehlen are documented in Stefanie Waske, Mehr Liaison als Kontrolle. Die Kontrolle des BND durch Parliament und Regierung 1955–1978 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009). 11. See Bodo Hechelhammer, “Die ‘Dossiers.’ Reinhard Gehlens geheime Sonderkartei,” in Dülffer et al., Die Geschichte der Organisation Gehlen, 83, 88. These dossiers were disclosed in the course of a 1974 parliamentary inquiry established to determine the espionage activities of West Germany’s most famous spy, Günther Guillaume. The agency’s chief historian currently places the number of dossiers at 210; some ran to more than five hundred pages. 12. See Dominik Rigoll, “Sicherheit und Selbstbestimmung. Informationspolitik in der Bundesrepublik,” Zeithistorische Forschung/Studies in Contemporary History 10 (2013): 115–22; Stephen Lehmstaedt and Bastian Stimmer, “Akteneinsicht. Das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz und die Historiker,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 60 (2012): 493–512. 13. One of these reports ran to a total of sixty pages. See B 206/1473. For an example of a translated report compiled by the U.S. 7th Army, see the report titled “SBZ–VEB Industriebahn und Industriebau Berlin,” November 29, 1961, B 206/1126, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. For an example of a translated version of a U.S. Air Force report in which the refugee is named, see SBZ—Erkenntnisse über Meissen, January 16, 1964, B 206/1400, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. For an example of an English-language BSSO reinterrogation, see Report No. 990338, November 10, 1959, B 206/1455, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 14. These include the phrase “Banned for Partners and Missions” (Für Partner und Missionen gesperrt). “Fleurop,” a florist chain in West Germany, was the general designation for partner services, with the most important Allied nations receiving their own flowers (France: narcissus; the United Kingdom: aster; the United States: hydrangea). 15. Befra Report No. 216163, December 8, 1977, B 206/1590, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Other reports note merely whether entry into the federal republic had been legal or illegal; see, for instance, Befra Report No. 149787, February 26, 1971, B 206/1498. 16. German-language introductions to the Soviet security apparatus in eastern Germany during the first decade of occupation include Jan Foitzik and Nikita W. Petrow, Die sowjetischen Geheimdienste in der SBZ/DDR von 1945 bis 1953 (Munich: De Gruyter, 2009), esp. 11–65. This collection of documents was also simultaneously published in Russian. See also Wassili S. Christoforow, Wladimir G. Makarow, and Matthias Uhl, eds., Verhört. Die Befragungen deutscher Generale und Offiziere durch die sowjetischen Geheimdienste 1945–1952 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), esp. 1–41. A highly useful guide to individual Soviet security agents is Nikita Petrov, Die sowjetischen Geheimdienstmitarbeiter in Deutschland. Der leitende Personalbestand der Staatsicherheitsorgane der UdSSR in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands und der DDR von 1945–1954, trans. Vera Ammer (Berlin: Metropol, 2010). For a recent discussion of challenges embedded in using Soviet archival sources to

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understand occupation policies in eastern Germany, see Detlev Brunner and Elke Scherstjanoi, eds., Moskaus Spuren in Ostdeutschland 1945 bis 1949. Aktenerschließung und Forschungspläne (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), esp. 7–16; also noteworthy in this volume is an index of Russian- and German-language literature on the early years of Soviet occupation presented by Felicitas Claus, 129–44. See also Jan Foitzik, ed., Sowjetische Interessenpolitik in Deutschland 1944–1954 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2012), esp. 5–38. The most recent introduction is found in Matthias Uhl, “Von Agentenjägern und Spionen. Die Bevollmächtigen des sowjetischen Geheimdienstes in Deutschland 1945 bis 1956,” in Achtung Spione! Geheimdienste in Deutschland von 1945 bis 1956, ed. Magnus Pahl, Gorch Pieken, and Matthias Rogg (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2016), 1:67–81. 17. Headquartered in the Bad Cannstadt district of Stuttgart, the 66th CIC Group was divided into twelve regions during the 1950s. Region VIII, West Berlin, was stationed in the headquarters for all military services in the divided city on Clay Allee 170/172 in BerlinZehlendorf. James L. Gilbert, John P. Finnegan, and Ann Bray, In the Shadow of the Sphinx: A History of Army Intelligence (Fort Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army History Office, 2005), 92–93. 18. The War Department established the CIC on January 1, 1942. By the end of the 1940s, the agency had deployed some six thousand personnel worldwide. In 1961 the CIC was absorbed into the Defense Intelligence Agency. Ibid., 24, 83. 19. Ibid., 87. 20. Both collections are housed at the NARA facility near College Park, Maryland. The perspective is heavily weighted toward American versions of events. An example of a translated document of interest to a broad range of researchers from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is Results of Counterespionage in 1963, “Felfe, Heinz,” Vol. 4, Folder 1, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, Box No. 35, NARA II. On the history of the interagency working group set up to declassify CIC, FBI, and CIA files, see Richard Breitman et al., U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 443–60. On the relevance of the American document releases in 2002 and 2007 to tracing the diverse motives of the U.S. military authorities in the immediate postwar era, see Wolfgang Krieger, “German-American Intelligence Relations, 1945–1956: New Evidence on the Origins of the BND,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 22, no. 1 (2011): 28–43.

References

ARCHIVES CONSULTED Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Prague Krajské správa Ministerstva vnitra (Regional Office of the Ministry of the Interior), Archive Code No. 72807. Zpravodajská správa generálního štábu (Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff), Archive Code No. 19148. Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin Abteilung III Nachlässe von Mitgliedern, leitenden Angestellten und Freunden der KaiserWilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Bundesarchiv Berlin, incorporating the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO-BA) DO 1 34.0 Hauptabteilung Innere Angelegenheiten DY 30 Zentralkomitee der SED Bundesarchiv Koblenz B 106 Bundesministerium des Innern B 126 Bundesministerium der Finanzen B 131 Bundeskriminalamt B 136 Bundeskanzleramt B 137 Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen B 150 Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte B 206 Bundesnachrichtendienst B 285 Gesamtdeutsches Institut—Bundesanstalt für gesamtdeutsche Aufgaben B 347 Der Bundesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit B 443 Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz B PERS 101 Personbezogenes Archivgut Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatsicherheitsdienstes (BStU) Allg. S. Allgemeine Sachen AFO Archivierte Feindobjektakte AIM Archivierter IM-Vorgang AS Allgemeine Sachablage BV(S) Bezirksverwaltung für Staatssicherheit HA II Spionageabwehr HA VI Passkontrolle, Tourismus, Interhotel HA IX Untersuchungsorgan

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FO 371 Foreign Office: Political Departments: General Correspondence from 1906–1966 FO 936 Control Office for Germany and Austria and Foreign Office, German Section: Establishments: Files FO 1005 Foreign Office and Predecessors: Control Commission for Germany (British Element): Records Library: Files FO 1006 Foreign Office and Predecessors: Control Commission for Germany (British Element): Schleswig-Holstein Region FO 1093 Foreign Office: Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department: Registered and Unregistered Papers FO 1112 Allied Kommandatura: Directives, Minutes, and Papers KV 2 The Security Service: Personal (PF Series) Files KV 4 The Security Service: Policy (Pol F Series) Files PREM 13 Prime Minister’s Office: Correspondence and Papers, 1964–1970 WO 208 War Office: Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, and Directorate of Military Intelligence: Ministry of Defense, Defense Intelligence Staff: Files Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes B 12 Abteilung 7 (Ostabteilung)

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Index

Abbots, E. B., 70n76, 97 Abwehr, 114 Adenauer, Konrad, xx, 11, 46, 83, 104, 114, 218, 223, 243 AEG, 100, 109, 112, 121n67 Allied Forces Coordinating Committee Munich, Regional Office, 42, 178, 198 Allied High Commissioner, xx Alwan, Rafid Ahmed, 58 American Consulate General’s Department of Public Affairs, 52 American Field Services, 218 American Registration Office for Foreigners. See JAROC (Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center) Anglo-American Interrogation Center, Berlin (Karolingerplatz), 16, 18, 21, 183 Anglo-German Academic Exchange, 103 Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 100 Ardenne, Manfred von, 224 Argentina, 31 Arnold, Karl, 100, 102 Askania, 221 Assange, Julian, 242 Attlee, Clement, 80 Auer Society, 93 Austria, 90, 148, 248 Bad Cannstatt (Stuttgart), 225, 247

Bad Driburg, 83, 85 Bad Soden, 40 Bad Tölz, 140 Baun, Hermann, 78 Bavarian Border Police, 36, 47, 52, 129, 166, 216 Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, 52, 213 Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, 52, 62, 93, 125, 129 Bayerlein, Fritz, 40 Befragungsstellen (Befras). See Joint Interrogation Centers Beirut, 170 Belgium, 167, 248 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 112 Berg, Leonig, 97 Berlin Airlift, 24 Berlin Airlift Memorial, 185 Berlin Wall, xvi–xvii, xviii, 1, 12, 33, 34, 59, 155, 171, 195, 197, 201n2, 242 Berner, Kurt, 222 Berzarin, Nikolai, 109 BfV: Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), xxi, 5, 7, 14, 23, 24, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41, 43–44, 45, 51, 53, 56, 62, 64, 82, 97, 126, 128, 133, 148, 164–165, 188–189, 194, 195–196, 208–209, 217, 234, 243–248 BIO(G): British Intelligence Organization (Germany), 16, 85 269

270

Index

Bittel, Karl, 87 Björnsson, Björn, 31 BKA: Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Police), 34, 35–36, 64, 209, 215, 219. See also Sicherungsgruppe Blank, Theodor, 7, 121n75 Blenk, Hermann, 91 Blount, Bertie Kennedy, 85, 87, 105, 118n24 Blücher, Franz, 142 BMG: Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutsche Fragen (Ministry for All-German Affairs), 7, 14, 15, 24, 34, 56, 97, 116, 196 Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service), xxi, xxvii, 7, 14, 17, 23–24, 32, 36, 42, 46, 47–48, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58–59, 77, 112, 115, 116, 134–135, 140, 148–149, 156–169, 189, 192–194, 196, 199, 208, 210, 211, 214, 216, 223, 234, 243, 244, 248 Board of Trade (U.K.), 107 Bock, Günther, 115, 224 Border Agency (U.K.), 47 Bossard, Frank Clifton, 89–91, 95, 97, 111, 221–222, 222 Brandt, Leo, 100–103, 109, 122n85 Brandt, Willy, 98, 216 Brateyevo, 114 Braun, Wernher von, 102, 103 Breull, Kurt, 62, 63, 126, 127 Brier, Edith, 224 British Frontier Service, 33 British Security Service (MI5), 16, 80, 86, 90, 91, 97 British Services Security Organization (BSSO), 33, 40, 47, 57, 97, 213, 244, 247–248 Brückner, Ernst, 35, 215, 216, 218 Bucher, Ewald, 56 Bulgarian students, 214 BUNAST: Bundesnachrichtenstellen, or BUNAST (BfV’s Federal Information Offices), 43–45, 46, 49, 52, 55, 75, 135, 208 Bundesamt für die Anerkennung ausländischer Flüchtlinge: Foreign Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees, 128, 187

Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge: Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, 3, 62, 227 Bundesdienststelle für die Anerkennung ausländischer Flüchtlinge: Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees, 48, 60 Bundesinnenministerium (Federal Ministry of the Interior), 43, 51, 57, 64, 88, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–130, 149, 194, 210, 216, 218–219, 244, 245 Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery), 32, 56, 196, 210, 218 Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft (Federal Ministry of Economics), 98 Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren (federal emergency reception procedure), 3, 12, 13, 24 Bundestag, xvii, xix, 10, 32 Büntgen, Käthe, 9, 53 Busse Allee, 19 Cambridge Five, 90, 91 Camp King, 37–42, 53, 55, 75, 115, 198, 199, 210, 212, 214 Camp Valka, 1, 3, 43, 48, 60, 60–64, 75, 77, 125, 126, 127, 128–131, 136, 187, 227 Campbell Barracks, 37 Canada, 248 Caracas, 187 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), xxii, 6–7, 12, 19, 36, 44, 45, 47, 53, 77, 81, 92, 105, 107, 112–113, 125, 130, 164, 180, 197–198, 214, 216, 218 CFSO (Canadian Field Security Office), 33 Chadwell, H. Marshall, 105 Charlemagne Prize, 98 Chemnitz, 163, 167 Chertok, Boris, 93 chip card, 226 Churchill, Winston, 98 CIC: Counter Intelligence Corps, xxii, xxvi, 9, 11, 19, 37, 38–39, 39, 45, 47, 53, 60, 62, 77, 98, 108, 112, 115, 125, 126–148, 191, 208, 209, 210, 225, 236, 244, 247 Commerzbank, 48 Conant, James, 60–61, 102

Index Corbetta, 218 Corning Glass Works, 111 CSU: Christian Social Union, 145 Czech Security Services Archive, xxiii D’Arcy, Brent (Irl), 111, 112 DAD: Department of the Army Detachment, 9, 152n36 Darlison, H. G., 92, 97, 109, 183 Defector Reception Center, 18, 117n9 Defense Mapping Agency, 210 Dehler, Thomas, 142 Dehli, 162 von Dellinghausen Committee, 97, 98 Denmark, 21, 248 Der Spiegel, 57, 136, 136–138, 142, 219 Der Telegraf, 145 Deserter Resettlement Center, 122n103 détente, 235 Deubner, Artur, 140 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), 104 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialbeziehungen (German Society for Social Affairs), 15 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ortung und Navigation (German Institute of Navigation), 102 Deutsche Versuchanstalt für Luftfahrt (German Aerodynamic Experimental Station), 115 Deutscher Forschungsrat (German Research Advisory Council), 104 Deuxième Bureau du Commandement Supérieur des Troupes d’Occupation, xxiii, 178 Dirbach, Walter, 96 Director of Central Intelligence, 218 Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, xxiii, 87, 226 displaced persons, xvii, 3 Dittmann, Hans-Joachim, 136, 137–138 Dominion powers, xxiii, 21, 33 Dresden, 211 drone warfare, 234 Dulles, Allen W., 112, 218 Edelstein, R. E. F., 108 Eichner, Klaus, 58

271

Eisenberg, Johannes, 59 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 61 Eisenhüttenstadt, 211 Eisfeld, 169 Engelke, Karl-Heinz, 53 Erdmann, Klaus-Dieter, 39–40 Erfurt, 162, 222 Ernst Heinkel aircraft works, 103 escape psychosis, 161 Eschenburg Commission, 216, 230n28 European Command Intelligence Center, 37 European Defense Community, 83 Evans, David, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98, 102, 103, 106–107, 113, 115–116, 223 Falk, Karl Heinz, 188–189 Farm Hall, 80 FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, 77, 112–113, 247 FDP: Free Democratic Party, xix, 11, 12, 24, 25, 56, 192 Felfe, Heinz, 203n47 Five Eyes, xix Fleck, Rudolf, 53 Flüchtlingsberatungsstelle (of the SPD). See Ostbüro of the SPD Fort Bliss, 103 Fort Hunt Interrogation Center, 37, 114 Freedom of Information Act requests, xxiii, 247–248 Freie Universität Berlin, 19 Friedland, 31–32, 34, 43, 45, 83, 93, 223 Friedrich, Herbert, 136–138, 139 Fritsch, Hans-Wilhelm, 35 Fryazino, 109, 111 Führungsstelle Befragungswesen: Coordination Center for Interrogation Affairs, 48, 193 GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters, 16, 86 Gedser, 198 Gehlen, Reinhard, 37, 46, 57, 78, 114 General Electric, 111, 112 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 26n2 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 194, 216 Gera, 163

272

Index

German Atomic Commission, 100 Gestapo, xvii, xviii, 127 Giessen, 24, 33–34, 40–41, 43, 44, 48–49, 59, 61, 77, 116, 163, 164, 193, 194, 198, 225 Giessler, Herbert, 53 Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye (GRU), 139 Globke, Hans, 114, 218, 243 Goedhart, Gerrit Jan van Heuven, 61 Goetz, John, 58 Görlitz, 126 Graf, Otto, 131 Graz, 139, 164 Green/Civic Forum 90 Party, 58, 196 Greifswald, 210 Gross, Hans, 126 Grotewohl, Otto, 145–147 Gröttrup, Helmut, 93–94, 102, 113, 226 Gröttrup, Irmgard, 226, 232n62 Guillaume, Christel, 74n131 Guillaume, Günther, 74n131, 216 Günther, Siegfried, 103 Hahn, Otto, 100 Halle, 161 Hamann, Helene, 142, 146, 147, 183 Hamann, Ilse, 146 Hamann, Karin, 142 Hamann, Karl, 77, 125, 142–147, 148, 149, 170, 183, 228 Hamann, Liv, 142, 146–147, 147 Hasselbeck, Werner, 96 Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, East German Foreign Intelligence (Stasi), 87, 152n34, 178, 193, 201n3, 214, 246 Heeresnachrichtenschule-Horch, 139 Heimkehrerverband, 180 Heinz, Friedrich Wilhelm, 129, 149n3, 150n10 Heisenberg, Werner, 104 Hellmann, Reinhardt, 178–183, 188 Helsby, Laurence, 90 Helsinki Accords, 156 Hensoldt, Karl, 114 Hensoldt works, 114 Henze, Günther, 14 Hessian Ministry of the Interior, 51

Hessian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV), 34, 44, 53 House Alaska (Camp King), 37 Heusinger, Adolf, 121n75 Heuss, Theodor, 82, 142, 218 Heyne, Hanns, 145, 146–147 Heyne, Hans, 96, 109 Hinze, Edmund, 126, 134 Hirsch, Burkhard, 61 Hitler, Adolf, 80 Hoch, Werner, 44 Hochschule für Ökonomie (Institute for Economics, East Berlin), 159 Hohenschönhausen, 77, 125, 136, 136–141, 228 Hohmeyer, Ernst von, 129 Hollerith machines, 209 Hoover, J. Edgar, 112 Hoppenz, Erich, 224 Horner, John, 92, 98, 107, 109, 223 House of Commons, 11, 61 Höxter, 183 Hoyer, Hans, 108 Humboldt University (University of Berlin), 86, 104, 162 IBM, 215 IG Farben building, 38, 106, 247 IG Farben company, 138 INSCOM: Intelligence and Security Command, 42 Institut für Gegenwartsforschung (Institute for Contemporary Research), 125, 126–127, 129, 134 Institut zur Erforschung und Zusammenarbeit der Industrie in Mitteldeutschland (Institute for Industrial Research and Cooperation in Middle Germany), 51 IRCD: Interservice Refugee Coordination Detachment, 36, 37, 38, 48, 55, 193, 210 Istanbul, 245 JAROC: Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center, 17–21, 37, 41, 55, 178, 214 Jakarta, 170 Jasznewski, Karl, 86–87, 88, 226 Jena, 166, 167, 168

Index Joint Intelligence Committee (U.K.), 33, 57, 89 Joint Interrogation Centers (Befras), 46–53, 56–59, 75, 77, 116, 135, 149, 156–166, 167–171, 190, 193, 210, 211–213, 214, 234, 244, 245 Joint Service Liaison Organization, 33 Joint Technical Intelligence Committee, 85 Jones, R. V., 102 Judge Advocate General, U.S. Army Europe, 53 Jülich, 100 Kalaš, Jiří, 125, 131–135, 227, 227–228 Kalašová, Květa, 228 Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlicheit (Fighting Group against Inhumanity), 7, 10, 13, 23, 24, 116, 130, 180 Kapustin Yar, 93 Karlshorst, 164 Karolingerplatz (Berlin). See AngloAmerican Interrogation Center Kaufbeuren, 168, 169 Kelly, Mervin J., 112 Kerbala, 197 Kerschbaum, Hans, 107, 220 KGB, 56, 82, 199, 221 King’s Lynn Magistrates’ Court, 90 Kirch, Franz, 115 Kirkman, J. M., 16 Klages, Sigrid, 221 Klages, Walter, 221 Klumb, Hans, 105 Knappe, Erhardt, 125, 138–149 Kohl, Helmut, 158 Kohn, John, 126, 127 Kolb, Jakob, 130 Kolb, Walter, 100 Kommando Kopenhagen, 31 König Group, 131 konkret, 56 Korspeter, Lisa, 10 Krasnogorsk, 169 Kripo (German Criminal Police), 46 Külz, Erna, 145–147 Külz, Helmut, 145, 148 Külz, Wilhelm, 145 Landesarchiv Berlin, 186

273

Lau, Gerhard, 136–137 Lauder, Karl, 86, 104–105 Laue, Max von, 104 Laufzettel, 5, 6, 175, 189, 196 LDPD: Liberal Democratic Party, 12, 142, 144 Lech Chemie, 108 Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology, 140 Leinefelde, 162 Leipzig, 163, 169, 224 Lemmer, Ernst, 11 Lex, Hans Ritter von, 149n6, 219 Leubus, 100 Leuna chemical works, 169 LfV: Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz (State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution), 12, 23, 32, 38, 44, 45, 48, 56, 208 Loch, Hans, 147 Lübke, Heinz, 32 Lubyanka Prison, 224 Lüders, Elisabeth, 16 Lufthansa, 82 MAD: Militärischer Abschirmdienst (Military Counterintelligence Service), 32, 36, 53, 65n6, 115, 125, 126 Main Directorate II (Stasi), 178, 184, 187, 192, 194, 196, 198, 199, 214 Main Directorate IX (Stasi), 144, 185, 198, 199, 210, 216 Mainz, 162, 163 Marfino, 97 Maribor, 164 Marienfelde Refugee Center, Berlin, 3–17, 19, 24, 34, 43, 49, 61, 63, 77, 92, 112, 116, 178–187, 187, 197, 208, 210, 224 Matanzas, Cuba, 169 Matchbox program, 85, 89, 91 Max Planck Institute for Iron Research, 100, 103 Max Planck Institute for Physics, 104 Max Planck Society, 76, 85, 100, 104, 118n24–119n25, 236 Maxseln, Agnes Katharina, 10 McCarthy, Joseph, 113 McGraw Barracks, 42 Mehed, 95

274

Index

Mehnert, Walter, 167, 174n44 Meinhof, Ulrike, 56 Meissen, 163 Mende, Erich, 11 Menzel, Wolfgang Walter, 126, 132 Merkel, Angela, xvii, xix, 242 Merrell Barracks, 62 Merseburg, 187 MID: Military Intelligence Detachment, 19 Mielke, Erich, 82, 132 Milford, 185 Military Intelligence Group, 42 Military Intelligence Service, 6 Military Intelligence Service Center. See Camp King Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, or MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), 114, 221 Ministry of Aviation (U.K.), 89 Ministry for State Security (Stasi), xvii, xviii, xxv, xxvii, 11, 23, 32, 39, 42, 54–56, 81, 125, 132, 136, 141, 142, 144, 163, 168, 170, 171, 175, 177–200, 207, 214, 216, 227, 228, 237–238, 246 Ministry of Supply (U.K.), 103 Moabit prison, 186 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 145 Monino, 221 Montreal, 170 Moscow, 221, 241 Müller, Josef “Ochsensepp”, 61, 145 name trace request forms, 53 Napoleon Barracks (West Berlin), 178 Narodno Trudowoj Sojus, or NTS: National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, 180 National Physical Laboratory, 111 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), xxiii, 42, 83, 156 Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Acts, 47, 248 Neubrandenburg, 161 Neumann, Karl Walter, 34 Nieke, Werner, 145 Nigeria, 198, 228 Norman, Frederick, 226, 232n60 North Rhine-Westphalia Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, 102. See Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung

des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen NSA: National Security Agency, 47, 234 Nühlen, Karl, 135 Nykøbing, 59, 198 Obama, Barack, 242 Oberländer, Theodor, 11 Oberursel. See Camp King Occupation Statutes, 53, 61 Oertzen, Hans Jürgen von, 115 Oesterheld, Gerhard, 35 off-the-record discussions, xxiii Office of Naval Intelligence, 6, 53 Office of Scientific Intelligence (CIA), 97, 105, 247 Office of Special Investigation, 6 Ollenhauer, Erich, 145 Opitz, Paul, 45, 55, 59 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 158 Ortsstelle für Befragungswesen , 48 Osoaviakhim Operation, 81 Ostashkov group, 93 Ostbüro of the SPD (Eastern Office of the SPD), 23–24, 29n53, 34, 180 Ostpolitik, xix, 216, 235 Pagel, Karl, 97, 100 Papen, Franz von, 80 Pardau, Horst, 223 Passau, 164 Peenemünde, 93, 103 Philp, William R., 37 Picture Post, 226 Pirna, 165 Plauen, 228 Poitras, Laura, 241, 242 Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office, 82 Pölitz, Wolfgang, 53, 225 positive vetting, 90 Pretsch, Joachim, 86, 98, 100, 103 Princess Margaret, 98 Project Paperclip, 81, 84, 103, 117n4 Pullach, 37, 44, 59, 165–166, 192–193, 214–215, 230n16 Putin, Vladimir, 241 Quadripartite Debriefing Program, 46

Index Quartier Napoleon, 21 Ramstein Air Base, 234 Rankin, Carl W., 144 RCA: Radio Corporation of America, 112 Rechlin, 115 Red Army Faction, 56 Red Cross, 24, 149n6 Redstone Arsenal, 103 REG: Returnee Exploitation Group, 106, 107, 115, 122n103 Reich Air Ministry, 100 “Reni” (codename), 185–187, 208 Research Branch, 85–87, 100, 105 RFE (Radio Free Europe), 60–61, 77, 125, 131, 133, 134, 227 RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), 18, 37, 188 Riehl, Nikolas, 93–94, 115 Riesa, 167, 225 Robotron, 167 Rompe, Robert, 104 Rossall School, 90 Rotterdam, 162 Royal Dutch Shell, 198, 228 Rukop, Hans, 109, 112, 123n115 Runge, Iris 3n115 Runge, Wilhelm, 96, 112 Rusk, Dean, 95 SA: Sturmabteilung, 60 Saevecke, Theodor, 35, 218–219, 220 Salavat, 166 Samsun, 95 Schacht, Gerhard, 130 Schacht, Hjalmar, 17 Schengen, xx Schirge, Paul, 223 Schlitzberger, Hans, 222 Schmid, Carlo, 11 Schrübbers, Hubert, 118n11, 217 Schulz, Rudi, 129 Shannon Airport (Ireland), 169 SDECE: Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage, 21 Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 1, 16, 33, 80, 86, 90–91, 93, 95, 102, 107, 183, 184, 217, 221, 226 Sécurité Militaire, xxiii, 178

275

SED: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party), xviii, 9, 50, 82, 104, 138, 156, 182, 187, 194, 196, 198, 237 Seewald, Friedrich, 102 Semyonov, Vladimir, 145 Sheremetyevo International Airport, 241 Sibert, Edwin L., 37 Sicherungsgruppe Siemens, 76, 96, 109, 221, 222, 236 Snowden, Edward, xvii–xviii, 58, 241, 242 SOE Special Operations Executive, 80 South Korea, 24, 155 Spangenberg, Dietrich, 98 SPD: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany), xix, 10–11, 12, 83, 100, 187 Special Publications Detachment (U.S. Army), 140 Speer, Albert, 109 Spiegel Affair, 219 spy tunnels (Vienna and Berlin), 95 Standard Electric Lorenz AG, 226 Stasi Records Agency (BStU), xx, xxii, 82, 171, 175, 185, 189–190, 216, 237, 245–246 Státní Bezpečnost (StB), 131–133, 135, 227, 227–228 Status of Forces Agreement, 61, 88 Steimel, Karl, 96–97, 100, 108–113, 123n115, 220, 224, 226 Stern, W. J., 91, 105, 224 Stoelting Deceptograph, 19 Ströbele, Hans-Christian, 58 Stuhlinger, Ernst, 103, 226 Stuhlinger, Irmgard, 226 Stuttgart, 187, 209, 234 Stuttgarter Zeitung, 55–56, 58 Süddeutsche Zeitung, 83, 234 Sulima, 245 Sûreté, xxiii, 178, 179–182 Szegedi, Elisabeth, 129 Täschner, Herbert, 147 Telefunken, 76, 96, 97, 109, 112, 141, 236 Telschow, Ernst, 104 Tempelhof Airport, 3, 8, 185

276 Thomas (Grzeskowiak), Stefan, 24, 145, 153n49 Tiulpanov, Sergei, 145 Tosczko, Winifred, 130 Tripartite Debriefing Program, 58 Tröger, Joachim, 221 U-2 spy plane, 95 Überreiter, Karl, 103 Uelzen, 14, 24, 31, 33, 34, 43, 48–49, 61, 77, 116, 193 Uhl, Matthias, 136 Ulbricht, Walter, 82, 147, 156 Ulm, 96, 112, 141 United States Africa Command, 234 University of Virginia, 103 UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), 60 Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen (Free Jurists), 7, 9–10, 13, 23, 24, 115, 116 U.S. Air Force, 126, 127–128, 128, 129, 130, 244 U.S. Army Europe’s Interrogation Center, 40 U.S. Signals Intelligence Agency, 39 V-2 rockets, 93, 221 Vansittart, Robert, 82 Verein zur Förderung der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands (Association for the Promotion of German Unification), 15 Vieth, Werner, 35 Voice of America, 60 Volkenrode aeronautical research center, 91 Volksrat: East German People’s Council, 142 Waffen-SS, 31, 62 Wagner, Arnim, 136 Wallacks Barracks, 247 War Office, 85

Index Warsaw Pact, 18, 32, 47 Weber, Gertrud, 133, 135, 227 Wehner, Herbert, 145 Wehrmacht, 189 Weimar, 169 Wentworth Barracks, 16 Weringerode, 191 West Berlin State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV), 144, 145, 182 Westertimke, 14, 77, 192 Wever, Franz, 100 Wheeler-Bennett, Jack, 82 Wieck, Hans-Georg, 172n4, 199 Wiegand, Erich, 96 Wilhelm, Karl, 96 Wilson, Harold, 89, 90 Wilton Park, 153n49 Wismut, 15 Woburn, 82 World War II, xvii, xix, 234, 242 Wringer Program (U.S. Air Force), 83 Xinjiang desert, 95 Yech, Charles, 141 “York” (codename), 183 Yorkshire House (Berlin), 21, 183–184 Young, Hugh, 91, 95, 103, 105, 107, 226 Zeiss (Carl Zeiss Works), 104, 114, 140, 166, 167–169 Zentrale Erfassungsstelle der Länderjustizverwaltungen (Central Registry of State Judicial Administrations), 34 Zimmer, Karl, 183 Zimmermann, Georg, 137 Zirndorf, 48, 61, 187 Zollgrenzdienst (West German Customs Frontier Service), 52 Zuber, Ebrulf, 197, 214–215, 216 Zweigstellen für Befragungswesen, or Befras. See Joint Interrogation Centers