The Warsaw Pact's Intelligence on NATO: East German Military Espionage Against the West,
by Bernd Schaefer
Preserving the Memory of Success
First East German penetrations of NATO had occurred as early as the beginning of the 1960s. [1] But it was between the late 1970s and the demise of the Soviet Bloc that Stasi human intelligence operations targeting the Western alliance evolved into one of the most successful enterprises by any communist intelligence service. All this work was done on behalf of the Soviet Union, and the material obtained went straight to Moscow.
By 1980, the Stasi's foreign intelligence branch (HVA) ranked the highest among the ten clusters of intelligence to be gathered "military policy, military planning and intentions, military potential of NATO, the USA, FRG [Federal Republic of Germany], other main imperialist powers, and the PRC [People's Republic of China]". The second rank included "armament research and production in the USA and other NATO countries, particularly the development and production of new strategic weapons and weapons systems". [2] From the Stasi's perfectionist perspective, this ranking reflected not only priorities but also existing deficiencies.
However, in assessing the mere fraction that is left of the original Stasi paper trail on penetrating NATO, it is the success of the Eastern intelligence that is striking. The extant record has been preserved as the monument to the Stasi leadership’s quest for living on in the memory of posterity. [3] During its self-dissolution in early 1990, the HVA destroyed the bulk of its files with the consent of East German political authorities. Stasi officers involved in this operation have testified that exceptions were made with regard to “certain material selected to end up in the archives, which might be useful for future historical assessment of HVA’s record to demonstrate the effects of our work to objective observers.” [4] Among the files selected to showcase the fame of Stasi capabilities, information on NATO and West German defense policies and armaments featured prominently. The collection published for the first time on this website draws upon those documents. It is but a fraction of the fragmentary files that have survived. It is all but impossible to extrapolate from them the actual quantity and quality of all the classified material obtained by the Stasi from the West during the Cold War. This may, of course, have been the intention of the Stasi officers in setting up their showcase for posterity in 1990.
Institutional Structures
Following the Soviet model of KGB and GRU - the political and military intelligence agencies, respectively - in the early 1950s the GDR established two separate services to gather intelligence abroad: the HVA within the Stasi for gathering political intelligence, incorporating directorates concerned with military matters, and the "Aufklärung" [5] as a specialized military intelligence service within the Ministry of National Defense. [6]
HVA as the civilian branch was commissioned by the Warsaw Pact to target West Berlin, the FRG, United States. and NATO. The intelligence it gathered was presented to the GDR's top political and military leadership. In 1988, for instance, Department IV of the HVA (Military Espionage) directed 74 FRG citizens as its agents [7], whereas Department XII, in charge of infiltrating NATO and the European Community, had 72 agents at its disposal to penetrate their institutions. [8] Of the eighteen HVA departments, four were primarily assigned to monitor and infiltrate specific countries and their institutions: Department I (Federal Republic of Germany/FRG government), II (FRG parties and institutions), XI (USA) and XII (NATO and the European Community).
The “Aufklärung” was much less independent. After West German intelligence had in 1958 succeeded in recruiting officers from the highest levels of the “Aufklärung”, the East German military intelligence service came under the control of the Stasi’s HVA. Since then, the latter gradually penetrated its partner service to a high degree, treated it as a dependency, and ‘stole’ much of its intelligence for its own purposes. The “Aufklärung” was explicitly assigned by its Warsaw Pact partners to monitor West Berlin, the FRG, the Benelux countries and Denmark. By 1975 it also ran GDR military attachés in embassies worldwide. It reported exclusively to the GDR military leadership. In 1989 “Aufklärung” employed 1146 military and civilian personnel in all its GDR facilities. At that time it directed 293 agents worldwide, among them 138 based in the FRG.
Agents
Most of the important East German agents were actually native West Germans, who spied for the GDR for political reasons and personal motives. Overall they were highly committed to their cause despite initial hesitation and feelings of guilt. They conducted espionage in a professional manner of secrecy, ran high risks of detection, and more or less successfully suppressed emotions when betraying superiors and friends. Usually they did not hold high-ranking or decision-making positions. They served inconspicuously in low and mid-level functions with excellent access to classified information. Theirs are biographies imaginable only in the FRG, where they were motivated to work for the weaker German state, identifying it as a peaceful alternative society more just and on a higher moral ground than West Germany. [9]
There is no room here to tell the stories of all the agents within NATO, the West German Ministry of Defense, the German Federal Army, and the U.S. Armed Forces in the FRG and West Berlin. In all these institutions, agents benefited from opportunities to obtain NATO's secret documents. [10] Although the HVA and "Aufklärung" never managed to penetrate agencies that made decisions on nuclear planning and targeting, or else the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium, they nonetheless gathered from 1967 to 1989 an ever increasing flow of documents. In Brussels alone, these came from four main sources:
- Between 1967 and 1979 Ursula Lorenzen, alias "Michelle" worked as an Assistant to the British Director for Operations in NATO's General Secretariat. She had been recruited in 1962 in West Germany by an East German agent, codenamed "Bordeaux", whom she later married. The couple had worked closely together in Brussels until the GDR called them back abruptly in 1979, following the defection of a Stasi officer from East Berlin to West Germany. In the GDR Ursula Lorenzen gave scripted press conferences as a key witness for alleged NATO aggressiveness. While working on her memoirs, which were never published, she inspired a GDR television documentary on her secret life devoted to exposing NATO's supposed "real intentions". [11]
- Rainer Rupp [12], a student from West Germany, had been recruited by the HVA as an informant in 1968 and was codenamed "Mosel." In 1972 he married a British citizen, Ann-Christine Bowen. whom he recruited for the HVA as "Kriemhild." At that time, Bowen had worked as a secretary in NATO’s Integrated Communications System Management Agency. In early 1975 she moved on to Plans and Policy in the International Staff of NATO and in 1977 to the Office of Security in NATO Headquarters where she began to phase out her intelligence activities. That year Rupp himself finally made it into NATO bureaucracy, where he became a country rapporteur in the Directorate of Economics within the General Secretariat. When "Michelle" had to be withdrawn in March 1979, the HVA alerted Rupp to fill the gap (he even inherited "Michelle's" now vacant internal Stasi identification number, a highly unusual procedure). Renamed "Topas," he delivered in the next ten years nearly 2500 documents and "information material" to East Berlin, [13] believing he was turning the wheels of history. Every six to eight weeks he was on duty in the Situation Center of NATO HQ and reported from there. Rupp may have been a key source that warned Moscow about NATO's potential nuclear first strike.
- Between 1973 and 1980 a Belgian secretary, codenamed "Weiler," was recruited by an "Aufklärung" agent, whom she later married. She worked in the French Language Staff of the General Secretariat and delivered documents matching HVA's "Michelle" during the same period. In 1980 the GDR called the couple back to prevent detection.
- In 1987, a former West German signal officer and diplomat, "Cherry," having worked for the "Aufklärung" for many years in the FRG embassy in Vienna, which possessed extensive material on the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) negotiations between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, was transferred to Brussels and became a member of the West German Mission to NATO. Working there as a signal officer, he delivered about 800 pages of documents monthly. He and "Topas" duplicated the intelligence the GDR received from Brussels between 1987 and 1989, sometimes providing copies of the same documents without knowing of each other's activities.
Of the roughly 10.000 pages of surviving HVA records concerned with NATO and the military affairs of its member states, about ten percent have been selected for this collection and grouped into three categories of "information material." They encompass the entire period from 1969 through 1989, with a major emphasis on the last decade of the Cold War. Mostly based on original Western documents, they contain classified information snatched by East German agents from such places as the NATO Headquarters, FRG Ministry of Defense, U.S. Forces in West Germany and West Berlin, West German Federal Army, and the U.S. Embassy in Bonn.
The first cluster consists of assessments of military capabilities and reports on armament planning of selected NATO member states and other Western countries. The bulk of the documents pertain to the United States (16 documents) and France (5). Samples are provided for those pertaining to the United Kingdom (2), Greece (1), Italy (1), Spain (1) and NATO's two Nordic members, Denmark and Norway (2). The selection reflects the arbitrary nature of the destruction of which the records on hand are the result. The destroyers did not try to conceal the fact that the Stasi had obtained a much greater variety of documents on each of NATO's members on a regular basis.
The twelve documents on Western intelligence assessments of the Warsaw Pact make for especially fascinating reading. Like a mirror within a mirror, they provide the Warsaw Pact's view of its own capabilities from the perspective of the adversary, thus reflecting the Western state of knowledge of those capabilities. This allowed the East to assess how successful it had been in hiding its military secrets and possibly identify leaks and other lapses of secrecy that had taken place. Accordingly, the Eastern side could verify or dispute Western assumptions on its military strength through an "assessment of the adversary's intelligence" (see the GDR Defense Ministry documents in this collection) and apply countermeasures. At the same time, the Stasi espionage could document NATO's high respect for the Warsaw Pact's capabilities, regardless of the Western awareness of the substantial problems of individual Warsaw Pact armies and the deficiencies of their equipment. As a side effect, the intelligence the GDR obtained from NATO informed it about Soviet military capabilities that Moscow would have otherwise hardly shared with its East German ally, for example, the number and location of Soviet nuclear weapons on GDR territory.
The third cluster of material includes ten representative Western documents from 1980 to 1988 illustrating the deployment and eventual dismantling of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) in Western Europe in response to the installation and later removal of the Soviet SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe.
The document dated 4 October 1989 is unique in presenting Stasi knowledge of the nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile potential of several countries on the threshold of development of such weapons.
Conclusions
Almost all of the remarkable wealth of intelligence on the Western alliance obtained by the East German secret services went straight to Moscow. For Soviet state holidays, the Stasi sometimes prepared leatherbound volumes with exquisite morsels from NATO files and proudly presented them to the KGB as special gifts. KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov was reportedly so excited at being able to read the same documents as the “NATO generals” that he wanted to see not only the Russian translations but also the original English originals. [14]
Only the Soviet Union had the capacity to verify the substance of this unrelenting stream of classified Western material in trying to apply it to develop and refine its own military strategy and technology. The HVA and "Aufklärung" departments of analysis in East Berlin were rather small and, in case of the Stasi, understaffed, perhaps deliberately. [15] The GDR's political leadership also did not fully grasp the sophistication of NATO strategies and armaments. Only the East German Ministers of Defense and Chiefs of the Staff approximated their Soviet military counterparts' sensitivity in these matters.
The quantity and quality of documents obtained from NATO since the late 1960s may well have undermined some of the more extreme Warsaw Pact scenarios for nuclear war inherited from the 1950-60s by confronting them with the reality of Western capabilities. [16] Or, on the contrary, the knowledge may have encouraged the Soviet Union to follow in the 1970s a more aggressive strategy of seeking military superiority by counting on division and weakness within the Western alliance. As the superpower confrontation mounted by the end of that decade, the amount of intelligence from NATO sources expanded substantially.
The intelligence increased Moscow's fear of a Western "surprise attack" by a nuclear first strike - the fear rooted in the "trauma of 1941" that was still the formative experience of much of the Soviet military and political leadership. Ever since Hitler's attack in World War II, the adversary's capabilities were equated with the intention to use them for aggressive purposes once the conditions were right. NATO's option of the "first-use" of nuclear weapons in case of an Eastern conventional attack was interpreted as a "first-strike" intended to decapitate the Soviet Union. [17] The Soviet "war scare" peaked in November 1983, after Moscow's worries about "VRYaN" (Likelihood of a Nuclear Missile Attack) in 1979 and then "RYaN" (Nuclear Missile Attack) in 1981. [18]
Such perceptions of military threats did not subside in the Soviet Union before the mid-1980s, leading to a fundamental change of Warsaw Pact military doctrine in 1987. Because of the inaccessibility of Soviet military records, it is impossible to estimate to what extent the change may have been influenced by the intelligence on NATO received from the GDR agents during those years. Thanks to them, the Soviet Union was thoroughly aware of Western strategies and plans. The intelligence provided support for two contradictory options, both of which the Soviet leadership pursued during the 1980s: Either exploiting NATO's weaknesses by striving for military superiority, particularly by thwarting the deployment of the Euromissiles, or else acknowledging the West's growing military strength and technological advance, leading to negotiation and accommodation.
Stasi intelligence could be used to substantiate either strategy. Through the East German agents NATO may have inadvertently fertilized the ground for the military changes implemented in the Gorbachev era. In another paradox, the intelligence on NATO may have also accelerated the Soviet disarmament proposals and domestic reforms in the USSR, thereby unintentionally undermining the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact. The secret files from Brussels amply demonstrated NATO's anxiety about the impact of Soviet disarmament efforts on the morale of its members, particularly their willingness for continued military spending, which in turn may have spurred further Soviet disarmament efforts. In the late 1980s, however, neither the West nor the Gorbachev leadership grasped the depth of the reverse impact of Moscow's new defensive military strategy and disarmament drive on the morale of Warsaw Pact military and political leaders. In the end, the reforms and disarmament initiatives turned out to remove yet another stone from the shaky edifice of the Soviet empire.
The East Germans ultimately cut pathetic figures in these historic happenings. They were of course ignorant of how the products of their efforts might be interpreted and used by Moscow or East Berlin. They were certainly no “messengers of peace,” as they were heralded by the GDR’s official propaganda and as they still often think of themselves. They may be more properly described as reckless gamblers—not only because of their unsavory personal double-lives but, more importantly, also because of the unpredictable results that the information they supplied could have had in the hands of both paranoid and reasonable Soviet leaders.
BERND SCHAEFER is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. where he is currently working on U.S. foreign policy since 1969. He graduated from the University of Tuebingen (M.A.) and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (Master of Public Administration). From the University of Halle he got his Ph.D. on postwar East German history. Within PHP he coordinates the research in the East German Stasi archives.
Notes
[1] Hans-Joachim Bamler, "Die erste NATO-Residentur", in Kundschafter im Westen. Spitzenquellen der DDR-Aufklärung erinnern sich, ed. Klaus Eichner and Gotthold Schramm (Berlin: edition ost, 2003), 33-38; Markus Wolf (with Anne McElvoy), Man Without a Face. The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster (New York: Public Affairs, 1997), 149-151.
[2] Helmut Mü&ller-Enbergs, ed., Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit.Teil 2: Anleitungen für die Arbeit mit Agenten, Kundschaftern und Spionen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1998), 542-543.
[3] Jochen Hecht, "Die Unterlagen der Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung des MfS (HVA): Vernichtung, ۢerlieferung, Rekonstruktion", in, Deutsche Fragen: Von der Teilung zur Einheit, ed. Heiner Timmermann (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), 199-218. For English-language publications on the Stasi: Jens Gieseke and Doris Hubert,The GDR State Security. Shield and Sword of the Party (Berlin: The Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service, 2002); John O. Koehler,Stasi. The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1999); David Childs and Richard Popplewell, The Stasi. The East German Intelligence and Security Service (New York: NYU Press, 1996).
[4] Klaus Eichner and Andreas Dobbert, Headquarters Germany. Die USA-Geheimdienste in Deutschland (Berlin: edition ost, 1997), 276-277.
[5] Official East German terms changed with time from "Allgemeine Verwaltung", to "Verwaltung 19", "12. Verwaltung", "Verwaltung Aufklärung" and "Bereich Aufklärung". In West Germany "Militärischer Nachrichtendienst" (MilND) was most common.
[6] Walter Richter, Der Militärische Nachrichtendienst der DDR und seine Kontrolle durch das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Heinz Busch, Die Militärspionage der DDR (Berlin: Manuscript, 2001); Peter Siebenmorgen,"Staatssicherheit" der DDR. Der Westen im Fadenkreuz der Stasi (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993), 127-134; Helmut Göpel: Aufklärung, inNVA, Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, ed. Klaus Naumann (Berlin 1993), 221-239; Andreas Kabus, Auftrag Windrose: Der militärische Geheimdienst der DDR (Berlin 1993).
[7] Müller-Enbergs, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, 211-214.
[8] Jens Gieseke, Mielke-Konzern, Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945-1990 (Stuttgart: DVA, 2001), 214.
[9] Klaus Eichner and Gotthold Schramm, ed., Kundschafter im Westen. Spitzenquellen der DDR-Aufklärung erinnern sich (Berlin: edition ost, 2003); Gabiele Gast, Kundschafterin des Friedens. 17 Jahre Topspionin der DDR beim BND (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000).
[10] In particular two secretaries working in Bonn at the U.S. Embassy (Gabriele Albin: "Gerhard") and the FRG Defense Ministry (Erika Schmitt: "Erich") provided quite some NATO documents for the HVA.
[11] Günter Bohnsack and Herbert Brehmer, Auftrag: Irreführung. Wie die Stasi Politik im Westen machte (Hamburg: Carlsen, 1992); Günter Bohnsack, Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung: Die Legende stirbt. Das Ende von Wolfs Geheimdienst (Berlin: edition ost, 1997).
[12] Rainer Rupp, "NATO: mittendrin", in Kundschafter im Westen. Spitzenquellen der DDR-Aufklärung erinnern sich, eds. Klaus Eichner and Gotthold Schramm, (Berlin: edition ost, 2003), 38-51.
[13] The PHP obtained copies of titles for 1043 of Rupp's "informations" of which about two-thirds consisted of NATO documents rated as "valuable" by the HVA: BStU, SIRA TDB 21, XV 333/69, ZV 8243845.
[14] Markus Wolf, Man Without a Face, 334.
[15]According to Busch, Militärspionage.
[16] See on the website of the Parallel History Project on NATO and Warsaw Pact (PHP) in particular the collections on the 1964 Warsaw Pact war plan and the 1965 Warsaw Pact war game.
[17] For a representative sample of Warsaw Pact propaganda at the time: Albrecht Charisius, Tibor Dobias and Wolfgang Roschlau, Presidential Directive No. 59. Kernwaffenkriegsstrategie der USA gegen die Staaten des Warschauer Vertrages (Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1981).
[18] Ben B. Fischer, A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare (Washington D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997). See Vojtech Mastny's introduction to this website collection.
