II. ORGANIZATION OF SOVIET INTELLIGENCE WORK AGAINST THE WEST GERMAN INTELLIGENCE TARGET IN THE EARLY POST-WAR YEARS

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 02606320
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 138
• Document Creation Date: March 8, 2023
• Document Release Date: March 1, 2019
• Case Number: F-2016-02521

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--- Introduction
Soviet I elligence WO k
0' 4"
Against The
.in The Early Post-War Years
Heinz Felfe
Hans Clemens
Clemens' Recruitment by the MGB
Felfe's Formal Recruitment by the MGB
MVD Work of The Early 1950's: Increased
Emphasis on Aggressive Penetration
Felfe Settles In
KGB Work in West Germany as a Sovereign
Country: Felfe Broadens His Solopprea
Source Protection and Tactical Deception
Support of Soviet Policy and Political
Deception
New Directions?
End of Operation "Kurt"
Aftermath
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ANNEX COMMENTS
A. Biographical Footnotes; Soviet Spotting and
Recruiting in the 1940's and Early 1950's,
which Probably Paralleled and Supported the
Recruitment of Felfe:
1. Helmut Proebsting
2. Max Wessel
3. Recruitment
4. Wilhelm Krichbaum
5, Oscar Reile
B. Deception and Diversion Operations Initiated
by the Soviets in the Early 1950's:
6. The Heinz Case
7. The Lilli Marlen Case
8. Artur Karl Weber
Modus Operandi and Various Types of Defensive
Playback; Case Summaries:
9. The Sokolov Case
10. ZUVERSICHT
11. MERKATOR
KGB Personnel Appearing in"Operation Kurt":
12. Descriptions Provided by Felfe and
Clemens of their KGB Case Officers
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II, 11U:q.a..a..0ft.o.4 Soviet Intelli
The
Post-War Years
Work Against
in The Early
The, history of this penetration has its beginning
in the early post-war years. The spotting of people
like Heinz Felfe by the Soviet Intelligence services
was not accidental, but the result of a well-targeted,
well developed recruitment campaign directed against
former police and intelligence officers of the Nazi
Reich. The thesis was simple: old intelligence hands
will flock together, will seek to return to the work
they know best. Some of these peop* such as old
Brandenburg Division officers, Stahl elm and Freikorps
members, might be susceptible to a Soviet approach be-
cause of their general sympathies. Others, such as
SS and SD members, who in occupied Germany were now
war-criminals able to make their way only by hiding a
pest which had once put them among the elite, would
be the most valuable. The Soviet spotters were to be
found almost everywhere in Europe - East and West - in
the POW camps, in the war-crimes, screening commissions,
in the courtrooms. The future West German Intelligence
and Security Services could be penetrated almost even
before they were created.
In the closing days of the war, General Reinhard
Gehlen of the Fremde Heere Ost had brought the remnants
of his files and personnel to G-2, U.S. Army, for whom
he presented a valuable and relatively unique source
of information on Soviet order-of-battle. Under G-2's
aegis his group burgeoned until by 1949 it had become
recognized as the primary Western agency for the collec-
tion of Soviet OB and eventually of CI information in
the Soviet occupied zone of Germany. It was a loosely
knit organization made up predominantly of former
Abwehr and FHO officers who were held together by the
officer's code of honor and individual bonds of friend-
ship. From an institutional point of view, however,
the problems of control, responsibility and security
were serious. In July of 1949 G-2 asked CIA to assume
�the responsibility for the organization and thus under-
take a trusteeship which was to last seven and a half years.
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To the outsider, to its enemies, the Gehlen Organi-
zation looked much more like an American puppet than
it actually was. Many a Soviet Intelligence officer
assigned to work against the Americans in Germany
and Austria during this period was runhing operationsj
against. the Gehlen Organization. Many a German was
persuaded by Soviet appeals to his anti-American
resentments to work against his own countrymen.
In 1948 the Soviet State\S-curity Service (MGB)
in East Germany made its-firimportant coup against.
the Gehlen Organization.--dehlen's chief of operations
for Northeastern Germany was arrested in East Berlin,
and on the basis of his ,material, the Soviets were able
for the first time tO7makeeietis penetration plans.
y mid--19-5-2-ttre-wfork Sgainst various of Gehlen's field
bases had progressed well, but an agent inside the
headquarters organization in Pullach was stil lacking.
(1) Particularly successful had been the MGB wor
against Gehlen's field base for CE-CI in Karlsruhe._
This base was especially attractive because the major
part of its work involved the penetration for security
purposes of other German agenciwhile at the same
-tar-E-6---6-ring a direct contact to the Soviets through
its responsibility to run Soviet double-agent opera-
tions: It was especially vulnerable because it was
heavily staffed by former SD and SS personnel who in
order to maintain their jobs were obliged at least
pro forma to conceal their background and who still
suffered to some extent from the old social and pro-
fessional caste rivalries which kept the former Abwehr
(1) Primary source of information on early MGB/MVD
work in Germany is Petr S. Deryabin who was
assigned to the MVD headquarters desk responsible
for CE work in Germany from May 1952 to September
1953. He read the headquarters file of the Gehlen
Organization in July 1952 and has stated that as
of that date there was no evidence of a Soviet
agent in the headquarters; however, we cannot rule
out the possibility that there may have existed
restricted files to which he had no access.
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and FHO officers in ascendency. In reaction to this
situation there had gradually developed within the
CE organization a sort of mutual aid society of ex-SS
and SD personnel for'self-protecti9R_aad pr9fessional
advancement, which in turn renderea71b7gYr-Darticularly
susceptible both to simple blackmail and to the some-
what more complicated appeals to revenge or vindication.
(1) It was through this base, called GV"L", that one
of the most able and tenacious staff penetrations of
the Gehlen Organization was launched.
(1) There have been a variety of formal and informal
secret Nazi organizations in existence since the
end of the Second World War. According to BEVISION
the KGB has been able to penetrate and control
them since their inception as recruitment pools
and as enti�propaganda weapons. His infor-
mation on th s subject, under his codeword "HACKE",
is instruct/ye for CE analysts-ologgUaTsg in 42re-el-r-ly- rit.�1
'-par of the world.
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II. (a) Heinz Felfe
Heinz Felfe was born in Dresden in 1918, the son
of a criminal police inspector. He started his own
police career at the age of 13 as a vonnteer in a
border unit. In 1938 he waS inducted into an SS
Verfuegungstruppe, and from then on his schooling,
legal training and subsequent assignment to a job in
the Criminal Police was guided and fostered by the
SS. In 1943 he went into the foreign intelligence
section, )?R.SHA VI, where he worked first in the Swiss.
section at headquarters, then in Holland - for a while
under Schreieder of "Nordpol" fame. He finished the
war as an Obersturmfuehrer in the Waffen SS and as a
prisoner of the British. Of the many recorded im-
pressions of him from various stages of his career,
certain traits dominate: a highly intelligent man
with very little personal warmth, a person with a high
regard for efficiency, for authority, but susceptible
to flattery, venal, and capable of almost childish
displays of vindictiveness. Naturally a devious
person, he enjoyed the techniques of engineering a
good deception in his profession. He was brilliant
as an elicitor of information, an excellent listener
and an Operations officer of such generally recognized
capability that from time to time he was given special
"vest-pocket" operations to manage for the chief of
his German service. Infinitely cool and brazen in the
face of danger, thoroughly aware at all times of what
he was doing, Felfe was the "ice-cold calculator" as
he once so admiringly described his favorite agent.
The only lively emotion detectable in him is his hatred,
which, with his great admiration for Soviet power and
efficiency, and his undeniable enjoyment of the game,
seems to have sustained him throughout his career and
imprisonment. His attachment to his wife and two
children seems to have been relatively perfunctory.
As for his colleague in espionage for ten years - and
friend in adversity of even longer standing, Hans
Clemens, Felfe found him in the end merely a convenient
scapegoat.
As a British POW Felfe was interned at Blauw Kappel,
an interrogation center near Utrecht which specialized
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in the interrogation of former German intelligence
personnel. It is possible that even here his name
first came to Soviet attention through an agent among
the Dutch interrogators. One of Felfe's fellow-
prisoners, Helmut Proebsting, reported to Dutch
authorities in 1946 that he and Felfe had been
approached by one of the interrogators to work for
the Soviets, but Felfe denied that any such incident
had occurred when confronted with this information
after his arrest. (1)
Felfe returned from the war in November 1946
with the determination to settle in the Western zone
of Germany, although his home had consistently been
in Dresden. His wife and child joined him at the
end of the year. Seven difficult months followed
until he finally found work for a British military
intelligence unit (Sixth Area Intelligence Office,
BAOR). His job was to develop information on commu-
nist student groups at the University of Bonn and
under British instruction he settled himself in the
Bonn area, registered in the Faculty of Law and joined
the KPD. In the course of his work he made several
trips to East Berlin and to East Germany to observe
student .rallies, from which he took off on his own
initiative to visit his mother in Dresden. Here
again the possibility of Soviet targetiRF,5-exists.
ken one of these trips)in 19481fe says4,his mother
warned him that someone in the town had recognized
him and reported him as a former SS officer. On
another occasion he says he was arrested by the VoPo,
but quickly released at the intervention of his host,
an official of the East German Ministry of Public
Education.
The British finally dropped Felfe in April 1950
for serious operational and personal security reasons,
(1)
An-account-of-t-Ef-1--iici4ent-i-s-y.Lven in -Annex 1
because it is impOrtant as an item in the chain ;t/A
.i14-1-1"
of suspicious events which should have uncovere1 Felfe as a Soviet agent long before his actual
arrest. f--,-/-6/16 76-'
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none of which, unfortunately, came to the attention
of the Gehlen Organization in any very detailed or
forceful form until long after Felfe was entrenched
in it. British files received by the BND in 1961 and V
by. CIA in 1962 show that their early complaints against
Felfe included attempts to sell information, collected
for the British, to several other intelligence agencies,
two nest German news services and to the SED.)'- It also
contained an account of Felfe's attempt to involve the
British in a double-agent gperation with _the Srmiets,
as well as various agent reports showing that he had
blown himself as a British agent to all and sundry,
including the KPD, and that he was guilty in general
of "sharp practice" and "varnishing of the truth".
As specific grounds for dismissal the British told
Felfe that his refusal to give up undesirable contacts
with former SS personnel could no longer be tolerated.
Specifically they named Helmut Proebsting and Hans
Clemens, the latter a former RSHA VI colleague and old
Dresden friend, who was shortly to lead Felfe into t1
service of the MVD.
After leaving the British Felfe continued to work
against the KPD for the Land security office (LfV
Informationsstelle Nordrhein-Westfallen) to which he
had already been reporting on the side while a British
military intelligence agent. He incurred the wrath
of this organization on at least two serious counts:
once for having sent a report on it to his contact in
the SED and later for trying to peddle the plans for
the BfV constitution, which he had somehow acquired
from someone in the Finance Ministry, to a West German
newsman. From the Informationsstelle Felfe went to the
Ministry for All-German Affairs (Kaiser Ministerium)
where he worked as an interrogator specializing in
refugees knowledgeable on the VoPo. He remained at
this job, eventually writing a study of the VoPo for
the Kaiser Ministerium, until his recruitment into
the Gehlen Organization in 1951.
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of war criminals accused of killing hostages in
Dresden and there is some suggestion that Clemens
was similarly listed. As was soon to become evi-
dent, Gerda Clemens was working as a Soviet agent
at least by December 1949, and probably since the
end of the war, as Felfe later told his British case
officer. Her cover name.was "Erika". She reported
to an MGB Colonel called Max in an office in the
Soviet Command, Dresden, which, according to Clemens,
was concerned with tracking down former police and
intelligence officers from the Dresden area who
were liable for war crimes.
As a person Clemens was every bit as much of
a Nazi as Felfe had been, with the difference that
he declared himself more frankly. Essentially a less
complicated kind of person, coarse and probably
brutal, Clemens' human attachments were more real
and meaningful than Felfe's. Where one has the
impression that Felfe never made a move without a �
reason or recompense, one can imagine Clemens making
a gratuitous or spontaneous gesture of loyalty or
friendship. Felfe considered Clemens his cultural
and intellectual inferior, which is correct in a
certain sense, but after his arrest he pretended that
the alder man - Clemens is 16 years Felfe's senior -
had exercised a dominating and pernicious influence
over him by drawing him into the Soviet service and
making him stay there. Throughout their Gehlen
careers, however, they remained good friends, and
Clemens in his post-arrest statement claimed that
there had never been any friction or rivalry between
them in their Soviet work.
Within a remarkably short time after Clemens'
return to Germany - about two months - Max sent
Gerda Clemens to West Germany with a recruitment
proposal. This occurred just at the end of 1949 or /
possibly in early January 1950. Clemens and Tiebel
admit that the situation was perfectly clear to them:
comply or face charges. Moreover Clemens had no
steady job, he needed money and was intrigued by the
idea of a secret contact. He discussed the situation
with both Felfe and Tiebel, and while none of them
seems to have opposed outright the idea of accepting
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the Soviet approach, they did entertain the notion
of trying to offer Clemens to someone as a double-
agent. Clemens actually talked to an official in
the Ministry of Interior. Unfortunately the latter
brushed him off without giving him any concrete
advice. Felfe may have offered Clemens to the LfV-
Informationsstelle; British files show that he told
his British case officer in early 1950 that he in-
tended to do so. Felfe had already tried unsuccess-
fVlly in November 1949, upon Clemens' arrival, to
sell him to the British as an agent. (He also tried
to persuade them to recruit Tiebel.) This effort had
merely earned him the admonition to stay away from
his old SS friends, who were bad medicine for some-
one supposed to penetrate the KPD. In January 1950
Felfe tried again, this time offering Clemens as
a British-Soviet double-agent. A letter dated 25 Jan-
uary 1950 from Tiebel to Felfe states that Clemens
had already agreed in principle to cooperate with the
Soviets in Dresden. The British files contain a memo
of a visit by Felfe to his case officer on 29 January
1950 during which he reported that Gerda Clemens had
arrived two days earlier and was planning to. return
shortly to Dresden with her husband in ordee to put
him in touch with the MGB. The British lingered only
briefly over the decision of whether to play Clemens
as a double-agent. Shortly after Felfe's proposal,
evidence of his double-dealing with the LfV Informa-
tionsstelle became evident and he confessed to having
sent a report on it to an SED contact in East Berlin.
When Frau Clemens appeared in Germany again in early
April and Felfe tried once more to persuade his em-
ployers to undertake an operation the British case
officers came to the decision that they should drop
Felfe and list Clemens as a,"security risk". By this
time of course Clemens was no longer just a security
risk; he had already gone to Dresden and become a
Soviet agent.
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II. (c) . Clemens' Recruitment by the MGB
vra2(//y//9(-)
Dresden Clemens was met by his wife, who led
him to Colonel Max in the Soviet "olaidschloesschen"
Compound.. Here Max debriefed Clemens on his life
history and present contacts, lectured him on his
culpability as an SD criminal, probed his feelings
of confusion and resentment, listened constructively
while Clemens delivered himself of a long pent-up
statement of his hatred for the Americans. (They had
been twice the cause of German defeat, etc., had
Smashed his home town and caused the death of at
least five of his relatives.) Max at this point
took Clemens on a tour of bombed-out Dresden and at
the tide of Clemens' emotional reaction offered him
an opportunity of revenge against the Americans. The
proposal was clear cut and precise: as a Soviet
agent Clemens was to return to the Western zones,
seek out old Stapo and SD contacts and through them
try to penetrate the Gehlen Organization. The Gehlen
Organization was an "Amiladen" (an American shop) and
any blow aimed at it was a blow at the Americans.
Clemens agreed: for money, for a personal cause, and
to be on the side of power, but not, he insisted,
because'of any special sympathy toward the Russians.
(Here, as in many other cases, are strains of the
old Nazi theme of German superiority to Russians.)
He signed himself on as a Soviet agent with the cover
name Peter; later he used German girls' names. At
this first meeting Clemens provided Max with a list
of potential recruits in which he included the names
of both Felfe and Tiebel. Clemens says he was very
impressed by Max and by his psychological adroitness:
Max was civil, sober, authoritative, knowledgeable,
but most important - as both Clemens and Felfe have
stressed 'many times - he never pushed or threatened
directly. His watchwords were to proceed slowly and
naturally.
When Clemens returned to West Germany he told
Tiebel and Felfe the whole story and was able without
much difficulty to recruit them in turn for Max.
(Clemens claims it was perfectly clear to his friends
that Max's target was the Gehlen Organization. Felfe
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claims that he did not understand that this was the
case until much later.) Tiebel paid his first visit
to Dresden some months later in 1950 where he received
much the same treatment as had Clemens, with perhaps
greater emphasis on the threat of war crimes indict-
ment. He received the covet name "Erich", which he
kept throughout his agent career. Felfe, who by this
time was working as a refugee interrogator in the
Kaiser Ministry, .esisted_ making the trip east for
another year. He did, however, submit reports to
Clemens. Tiebel was later to be used as a courier.
Clemens was able to carry out his assignment for
1 Max with amazing rapidity. In March 1950 he came
0 across an old acquaintance from the Dresden police
\.J
�eCnamed Krichbaum who was now employed in a
A 'sub -unit of Gehien-4-s-CE/CI-)ase. (1) Through him
. Clemens was able to join The Gehlen Organization in
June of 1950 as a registry clerk and courier for the
same 4ild unit. (Clemens' Gehlen Organization alias
was Cramer.) Krichbaum himself was later to become
highly suspect as an early MGB/Dresden penetration of
the Gehlen Organization, but there exists no evidence
pro or con - that he wittingly maneuvered Clemens or
Felfe in the Organization for the Soviets. Clemens
remained in Krichbaum's unit in Bavaria for two years
during which time he reported on its organization and
personnel and that of the parent base, GV"L", and on
anything else that came his way. His reports were
typed on thin paper and hidden in cans of powdered
milk which he sent periodically to his wife in Dresden.
(1) See Annex 4 comment on Krichbaum. Actually
Clemens found Krichbaum in 1950 through another
old acquaintance and Gehlen employee named Franz
Groschek. Both Groschek and Krichbaum at this
time were in contact with Kurt Ponger (well-known
principal, with his brother-in-law Verber, in the
CIC operation "TOPHOLE") who was eliciting infor-
mation on the Gehlen Organization from them for
the MGB in Vienna.
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He collected reports from Felfe whenever they had
the opportunity to meet and sent them on in the same
way. (Since Felfe is reported, in British files, as
having made a trip to Southern Germany within a few
days of trying to sell the BfV plans tci a news service
it is a good guess that these too might have found
their way into one of Clemens' milk cans.) There was
relatively little communication from Max; what there
was was handled by Gerda Clemens, who served as
courier and mail drop.
olhen Felfe's work for the Kaiser Ministry drew
to a close in September 1951, he agreed to make his
first visit to Max in Dresden. At about the same time
Clemens recommended him to Krichbaum as a reliable and
experienced intelligence officer and Krichbaum arranged
for his employment by the Gehlen Organization. Although
Felfe will not admit it, it seems likely that there was
a definite cause and effect relationship between the
timing of his availability for work in the Gehlen
Organization and his trip to Dresden. Max was primarily
interested in the Gehlen Organization as a target and
presumably it was at the point when Felfe was actually
able to penetrate his target that Felfe became of im-
portance. There is some suggestion in our records -
no evidence - that Felfe might really have been re-
cruited earlier, but even if this is so his serious
Soviet work did not begin until he was a properly
accredited West German intelligence officer. (1)
(1) See Annex 3 comment on "Recruitment" for a
description of interesting testing and compart-
mentation techniques.
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II. (d). Felfe'Formal Recruitment by the MGB
Around the first of September 1951 Felfe flew
to West Berlin where he was met by Gerda Clemens who
conducted him to Max in the East Sektor. Max drove
him to the Soviet Compound in Karlshorst where he
questioned Felfe on his background - Felfe said he
appeared to be very well informed about him already
and. gave him the general lecture on guilt. Felfe
,admits that he wrote a declaration of willingness
"to work for peace", but claims he did not sign a
pledge to work for Soviet Intelligence as such. He
received the cover name "Paul". He tells us very
little about this first visit; he says he was well
wined and dined in the Karlshorst safehouse where
he spent the night and that Max made a great effort
to establish a friendly, sociable atmosphere. He
says Max gave him no instructions at this meeting.
whether this is true or not, subsequent events played
themselves out exactly to Max's wishes in any case.
On the 26th of October Felfe was called to
Karlsruhe for a personal interview with the chief
of GV"L". He made a good impression, was hired as
an assistant to-. GV"L" chief for Soviet CE opera-
tions, Oscar eil , and requested to begin work on
15 November. elfe's Gehlen Organization alias was
Friesen.) Felfe and Clemens celebrated the event
that night with:a good dinner. Sometime shortly
ter..- this and loefore he actually began work, Felfe
paid his second visit to Max. This time Max went
more deeply into questions of motivation and access.
He took Felfe pri the tour of Dresden and discussed
at some length the need for Soviet-West German
understanding He stressed the theme of criminality
of SS membership and the fact that Felfe would need
Soviet protecition to keep his new job and to keep
his record h dden. Having seen one more agent into
the Organiza ion, Max was now concerned to maneuver
him to the m at desirable spot. Significantly he
asked Felfe o try to get himself posted to the
Gehlen headq arters. Again, he stressed the need
Felfe would have for Soviet protection, warning him
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that even if his SS membership were not discovered
he would always run the risk of losing his job in
the intelligence service because of some flap or
other Which might not even be his fault. These
words were. somewhat more than prophetic,- for even
then were. brewing in variglus parts of the Gehlen
Organization, and particularly in GV"L" and its
sub-units, the first in a series of scandalous
"defections", "kidnappings" and security "incidents"
which were engineered wholly or in part by the
Soviets as part of a campaign to discredit and
disorient the Organization. While several of these
scandals were to erupt in Felfe's vicinity, none
was to endanger him as long as he was in GV"L".
Felfe remained at GV"L" for the next 21 months,
November 1951 to August 1953, first as assistant
to Reile and later, after Reile's transfer to head-
quarters in July 1952, as the main Soviet CE refer-
ent. Reile became very impressed with the younger
manes energy and ability and when he moved to the
headquarters CE Staff to work on Soviet targets he
opened the door for Felfe's future career as a Soviet
CE expert. (Here again, as in the case of KrichbaumA
stands a question mark: there is considerable con-
jecture and a certain amount of evidence that Reile
too was working on the Soviet side.) (1)
The late fall meetings of 1951 in Karlshorst
and Dresden were Max's last appearance. At this
time Felfe was introduced to Max's assistant, Alfred
and to another Soviet whom Felfe and Clemens nick-
named "Big Alfred", for want of any other name. In
'4)
(1) See Annex 5 note on Reile. Information from
both KGB and UB defectors seems to fit Reile
and to indicate that he has been a Soviet agent
at some time, but it is not conclusive and an
investigation of Reile after Felfe's arrest pro-
duced no legally acceptable evidence of treason-
able connections.
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1952 Alfred took over the handling of Felfe, Clemens
and Tiebel and ran them as a team for the next nine
years. To judge from the composite reports of his
three agents, Alfred was an astonishingly young man
when he took over the job of case offic4t - about 26.
He spoke excellent German, also English, and had a
thorough knowledge of his subject matter: the GIS,
both postwar and wartime. He seems to have impressed
the older men by his general civility as well as his
intelligence. Where they possibly expected to find
the cliche Russian bear, they found instead politeness
and a greater degree of refinement than they had
thought possible. They have all remarked repeatedly
that Max and Alfred treated them in the right way
psychologically and that this treatment went a long
way in influencing them to serve the Soviet State
Security Service.
The first problem which Alfred had to tackle as
case officer for Felfe and Clemens was to perfect the
very shaky and dangerous communications system with
his agents. At the moment it depended on Gerda Clemens,
an East Zone resident. Clemens had not reported to
the Gehlen Organization that he was still in contact
with his wife. On the contrary he went out of his way
to give-the impression that he loathed her and had
nothing to do with her. Most people had the impression
that he was divorced. Actually he was not; the Soviets
would not allow him, or help him, to get a divorce
since it provided them with a control in that his two
children still lived with their mother. This con-
stituted a shaky point in the security of the opera-
tion, since technically at least it could have caused
suspicion about Clemens on the part of the BND if his
secret communications with his wife became known.
Unfortunately, however, it is just one of several
potentially suspicious items about Felfe and Clemens
which did not come to official notice until too late.
While Tiebel had been recruited as a courier, he was
to be used only occasionally, since as a lawyer in a
small town he had only very rare excuses to go to
Berlin. (He had relatives in East Germany whom he
managed to meet occasionally in West Berlin and
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Clemens twice managed to hire- him for the Gehlen
Organization for brief periods as a source on various
general East German targets, using the East Zone
relatives as sub-sources.) Gehlen employees were
in an even more difficult position: no Gehlen em-
ployee could travel to Berlin without special per-
mission- - in effect without an official reason. The
simplest answer then was to provide the agents with
a good official reason for coming to Berlin on a
fairly regular basis. What was needed was a case
which would be seriously entertained by the Gehlen
Organization and which would specifically require
the presence of Clemens in Berlin from time to time
as the Gehlen handler.
Such a case was the "Balthasar Case" (Gehlen
cryptonym), a case engineered entirely by the Soviets
for the sole purpose of providing mobility to their
agent and cover for the transmission and fulfillment .
of EEI. It is a brilliant device which recurs with
varying degrees of refinement throughout this story.
"Balthasar" was Fritz Baltrusch, a Russian speak-
ing Bait who at one time had been Clemens' superior
in the Dresden SD. As of mid-1952 he was a doorman-
receptionist at a Soviet run uranium plant in Dresden
and an agent for the Soviet State Security - by then,
MVD. At MVD instruction he wrote to Clemens asking
for a_meeting_in West Berlin. Alfred did notief
Clemens in advance that this would happen, neither
did he tell Baltrusch that Clemens was also a Soviet
agent. Clemens rose satisfactorily to the occasion
and on his own initiative seized this chance to work
up a case which would provide him with opportunities
to meet Alfred. In doing so he also showed his good
faith to the Soviets. Clemens took a proposal to
GV"L" headquarters (very likely to Oscar Reile) that
he be allowed to go to Berlin to find out what Baltrush
wanted and to see what he might have to offer for the
Gehlen Organization. (1) The convenient result was
(1) The Gehlen Organization had a report dated in May
1952 that Baltrusch was working for MVD Dresden as
an informant on former SD members living in the
area. (MUNI-6079, 9 June 1961). Whether this
report went unnoticed or unheeded, we do not know.
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that Clemens was ordered officially to Berlin to
see Baltrusch. Baltrusch of course appeared to have
excellent possibilities as a source on the uranium
Processing plant. At a second meeting a short time
later, Clemens was able to recruit him for the Gehlen
Organization. From something in Baltrusch's manner,
however, Clemens suspected a Soviet presence. He
told Alfred about the case for the first time after
recruiting Baltrusch and learned that Alfred had
indeed engineered the contact especially for Clemens.
He admonished Clemens never to let Baltrusch guess
that he, Clemens, was a Soviet agent. Baltrusch only
knew that Clemens worked for Gehlen. In addition,
Clemens was to be very careful in his correspondence
with Baltrusch as the Gehlen case officer; he must
always let Baltrusch take the initiative in setting
meeting times, so that no one at the uranium plant
would have cause to suspect Baltrusch' intelligence
connections. By the same token, any information
produced by Baltrusch for the .Gehlen Organization
would be good and he would reply to any EEI to which
he had logical access. (Clemens was very impressed
when Baltrusch was allowed to deliver to the Gehlen
Organization in fulfillment of a requirement a piece
of uranium in the state in which uranium was regularly
shipped to the USSR for final processing. (1) Alfred
said that Clemens would not need to report to Alfred
about his contacts with Baltrusch; Alfred would get
this information from Baltrusch. Clemens would thus
be absolved after a while from communicating directly
with his wife since Alfred would learn of Clemens'
plans to come to Berlin through Baltrusch and would
automatically expect to see Clemens immediately after
the meeting with Baltrusch.
(1) Obviously this was also an ideal deception channel.
It is noteworthy that of all possible varieties
of,2peration which the IEW,39Elliave chosen atie-tc-r-rw-f4..
Pyieiticle for Clemens' they
picked one which produced information on a target
of number one importance to the West for positive
intelligence collection; to the East for security
protection.
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For the next two and a half years this case was
used as a cover forClemens;, ' - rips
-bovovn West Germany g'44 BerrInA elive ed both his
own and Felfe's reports on these trips and brought
back instructions and money (often concealed in the
lid of a candy-box). Clemens met Alfred about every
two months in a Karlshorst safehouse where their dis-
cussions were regularly recorded on tape. For the
most part their reports were delivered in clear text
or orally by Clemens. Not until later were more
elaborate and technical methods of communication
introduced. The Baltrusch case provided the main
method of communication until the fall of 1955)when
it collapsed because of one of those unhappy flaps of
which Max had spoken so prophetically to Felfe. (Copies
of Baltrusch's reports to Clemens were found in the
home of a Gehlen employee who had been accused of
working for the Eastiand the case therefore was de-
dared "blown to the opposition".) While the insecure
link via Gerda Clemens had been eliminated, the Bal-
trusch channel was slow and unwieldy. There were two
accommodation addresses to bolster it and there was
Tiebel with his automobile for emergency use, but
neither of these methods was safe or satisfactory
for regular communication.
During 1952 and 1953 Felfe and Clemens reported
extensively on GV"L" and those of its field sub-bases
which they knew. For a time they worked together in
organizing a sub-base for the Rhineland in Duesseldorf,
but for the most part their assignments kept them
physically separated - Felfe in Karlsruhe and later
headquarters (Munich) and Clemens in Stuttgart and
later Cologne. The difficulties in local communica-
tion between Clemens and Felfe remained throughout
their careers a weak part of the Soviet operation,
since Gehlen regulations officially discourage social
contact between fellow-workers. Thus, their frequent
correspondence, long-distance telephone calls and
visits were somewhat outstanding. For a while in
the fall of 1952 Felfe had a case (Dolezalek) which
allowed him trips to Berlin, but this folded for some
vaguely defined security reason. In December 1952
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Alfred provided Felfe with a cover address and a
carbon S/W system, also with an MVD office telephone
number in Karlshorst for emergency use, thus giving
him some measure of independence from Clemens. Never-
theless Alfred's cardinal operating tenet was that
his agents must do nothing outside of their ordinary
working schedule; at all costs contact with the Soviets
must occur within the framework of officially sanctioned
Gehlen business.
In August 1 53 elfe was able to transfer to the .
headquarters CE with the help of Oscar Reile.
He was now definitely the more promising of Alfred's
agents. He represents the positive type of penetration
operation: designed to last, to produce information,
even to affect policy, but run side by side with a
destructive type of penetration, of which one can see
nulwrifeinEgaescLa,the early 1950's in Germany, which
iella6KE Ato confiTse, disorient, discredit. For one
Felfe)there were any number of throw-awayA:d'r n thi4.�.
period of Soviet operational history. The 4ruere W3
operatigrwere just as necessary for Soviet purposes
as the-tblitrapA46. ones, out from time to time the one
threatened the longevity of the other.
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III. MVD Work of The Early 1950's: Increased
Emphasis on Aggressive Penetration
During the period 1952 to 1955 the major theme
on which Soviet CE operational planning in Germany
revolved was the question of the Gehlen Organization's
legalization as the official West German Intelligence
Service, and - equally important - of Reinhard
Gehlen's personal tenure as Chief of that Organiza-
tion. 1952 marks the beginning of talk about a =-
future bilateral agreement among the Western oCcupa-
tion powers and West Germany. And, despite recurrent
threats to Gehlen's tenure and powers, the Soviet
Intelligence Service had decided by the middle of
the year that the Gehlen Organization was probably
there to stay. As the creature of the strongest
occupation power, it probably,wo 1 o ecome
the responsible German servig: A t naid 1oger
simply a vehicle to harrass and penetrate U.S. oper-
ations, but another place to seek a toehold in the
future West German government. 1952 also saw the
beginning of a serious aggressive build-up in Soviet
work against the West German target. In the early
part of the year an extensive recruitment campaign
was Mounted in the USSR (among POs) and in East
Germany for.agents who could be resettled in West
Germany. In the latter part of the year a general
reorganization of the State Security Service (now
called MVD) brought to East Germany a new, tougher,
more tightly organized group of counterespionage
officers. (1) This was a period too of intense
in-fighting among the nascent West German Security
and Intelligence Services (the BfV, the END, and
in the Defense Ministry, the future MAD). They
vied with each other for the supremacy of their ser-
vice and they all vied with Gehlen, both from within
and without the Gehlen Organization, for his job. The
TT.T413Zr. S. Deryabin.
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obvious Soviet goals, sometimes complementing each
other, sometimes contradictin each other, were to
control Gehlen - by solid ' plan , by trying to sub-
stitute a Soviet agent in is stead and alternatively
to weaken and discredit his Organization by exposing
it as riddled with Soviet agents. The chief of the
KGB Counterintelligence Directorate is quoted reliably
as having made the statement that between 1953 and
1955 the Soviet services deliberately exposed over
100 of its agents in this effort. The Soviets, he
said, had two agents at that time in the Gehlen
Organization leadership. One of them was foreseen
as a successor to Gehlen, but the exposes and scandals
failed to cause Gehlen's ouster, and the Soviet plan
did not succeed. (1)
While Alfred was carefully devising a new and
complicated modus operandi for Felfe, the destructive
scandals were already taking shape in various of
Gehlen's field bases. At least one of them was
seriously to endanger Felfe. In February of 1953 a
section chief in Berlin, Wolfgang Hoeher, was appar-
ently kidnapped and spirited into East Berlin. -qt.
_aater-became apparent that this was a case of a long-
time agent being recalled and that the kidnapping
scene had been contrived both for cover and dramatic
effect. (Felfe was detailed to investigate Hoeher's
disappearance since he and Hoeher had been friends.
He reported on the investigation to Alfred; maintained
consistently to the Gehlen Organization that Hoeher
had been truly kidnapped and was not a Soviet agent
as of the time of his disappearance. Hoeher was sub-
sequently turned over to the East German Intelligence
Service for whom he ran operations against Gehlen for
several years.) In October of the same year another
penetration of a Gehlen field base in Berlin, Hans
Geier, was recalled to East Germany under the cover
(1) BEVISION from Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov (201-
266338), Chief, Second Chief Directorate, KGB.
(April 1958)
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of an ostensible arrest by the Soviets in East Berlin.
In November a third disappearance or defection took
place - again a Berlin based officer - Werner Haase.
The East German radio announced a massive roll-up of
Gehlen agents in the East Zone following Geier's
recall in October, and in December the East German
press launched an expose of the Gehlen Organization.
The main substance of the East German material appeared
to be on Gehlen's field bases, rather than the head-
quarters, with a strong emphasis on GV"L" and its
dependencies. Felfe recognized some of his own re-
porting and was somewhat uneasy. Analysts in the
Gehlen Organization also found considerable portions
of it attributable to Hoeher and Geier. The most
immediate effect of all of this was to produce a re-
organization of the CE/CI office. GV"L" was now re-
designated, reorganized and moved to another location.
Cautious analysts assumed, however, that so destructive
an expose would not be deliberately undertaken unless
some penetration asset remained safely behind to report
on the Organization.
These scandals complemented the thrust to unseat
Gehlen by discrediting him. There has been much specu-
lation as to who the Moscow candidate for Gehlen's
position might have been. (It is very difficult now
to determine who might really have been seriously con-
sidered at any one time - by either the Soviets or by
Gehlen - as a possible successor to Gehlendand who was
merely blowing his own trumpet.) There-were several
men both inside and out of the Gehlen Organization
during this period whose ambitions were well known.
One of the most vociferous and best known was the chief,
from November 1950 to October 1953, of the Intelligence
Section of the Office of Defense Planning (Blankamt,
later the Ministry of Defense), Friedrich-Wilhelm
Heinz.- Heinz was an old Abwehr officer, an ex-Stahlhelm
and Freikorps member, Who had been arrested in connec-
tion with the 20th of July 1944 plot against Hitler.
He had been in touch with Soviet Intelligence in the
1930's and possibly again after the war when he was
made mayor of a small town in East Germany. When he
moved to West Germany he apparently lost contact, since
as of 1952 and early 1953 the old file on him was being
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passed around among German section officers at MVD
headquarters in Moscow for the purpose of working up
a new case for him. (1) Heinz had already become
notorious in the West through his bid to become chief
of the future BfV. His candidacy was *opposed by the
British. who considered him too unsavory. Next, after
having formed with two other colleague the Defense
Office intelligence section, he had become a noisy
and bitter adversary of Gehlen. All through the
early 1950's he strove either to assimilate Gehlen's
functions to those of his own office or else to see
himself made chief of the Gehlen Organization. Gehlen
retaliated with equally bitter statements, including
the accusation that Heinz was a Soviet agent. In
early 1953 Heinz was involved in a court case during
the course of which he perjured himself. This, plus
the increasing unpleasantness betaeen his and Gehlen's
Organization, prompted the Defense Office to suspend
him in an effort to clear the political air. Thus set
aside from any proper bureaucratic avenue to high
places, Heinz could not at the moment be considered
by the Soviets as a likely candidate for Gehlen's job
or anyone else's. Two subsequent KGB operational
gestures appear to have had the purpose of trying to
whitewash Heinz (through the use of a throw-away
agent) and, when that failed, of trying to recall him
in a manner which would have dramatic propaganda value.
This tactic also failed and Heinz was eventually tried
by the Federal Republic of Germany for treason. We
summarize the various KGB operations involving Heinz
in Annex 6 since, even though there is much that
remains confused and mysterious about them, they
serve in general outline as a good illustration of
the type of operational plan described above by the
KGB counterintelligence chief. By the time the KGB
Heinz operation was a certified failure, the legaliza-
tion of the Gehlen Organization as the official West
German service was only six months away and the chances
(1) Deryabin. Heinz' MVD case file had the cryptonym
"Khlyust".
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for inserting another KGB candidate into the political
arena were probably lost. It is interesting to note
that some of the Soviet case officers who were working
against the Gehlen Organization, if not directly on
the Felfe case, were also working on the-Heinz case.
While many of these scandals were demonstrably
MVD/KGB organized, many were quite naturally self-
generated. The situation was over-ripe in the atmos-
phere of intense recrimination, suspicion and character
assassination which accompanied the West German politi-
cal rivalries at this time. Contributing heavily were
some of Gehlen's own security operations. The CI
branch of GV"L", and in particular the CI operations
of the deputy chief for CI, Ludwig Albert, added
enormously to local political tensions, inside and
outside the Organization. The CI branch was responsible
for the security of other West German agencies and in
the early 1950's one of its most immediate purposes
was to search out rightist elements. For this section
Albert ran a number of "special connections" or high-
level informants in nearly every Land and Federal
security agency and from time to time these special
connections became known with obviously scandalous
results. While Gehlen was honestly worrying on the
one hand about Nazi remnants and Communist infiltra-
tors, his security operations, on the other hand, did
give the impression of a widespread infiltration of
police power, sometimes of ex-Nazi police power,
throughout the West German government. Indeed some
of the investigators looked as fearsome as the things
they said they were investigating. There was alarm
on many fronts, not the least among American occupa-
tion agencies. In fear of its unwieldy offspring,
EUCOM had asked CIC in 1949 to mount a similar security
penetration of the West German government in order to
test for rightist influences. The CIC effort was
known as "Operation CAMPUS' and lasted until 1953 by
which time it had become politically embarrassing and
had to be closed down. CAMPUS worked through two
German principal agents, Heinrich Schmitz and Richard
Schweizer, who in turn had their own "special connec-
tions" throughout the various Federal and Land security
agencies. Schmitz also reported to Albert on his work
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for CIC and both of them Shared many of the same
informants. The operational situation was vastly
complicated: it was never possible to plumb the
total muddiness, but it became clear enough that
in penetrating each other's offices, the Western
investigators had allowed themselves to give a piggy-
back ride to the Eastern investigators. while the
Gehlen Organization was never officially listed as
a target in CAMPUS' operational plan, it did become
one as the by-product of the personal friendship -
between Schmitz and Albert. Albert had hired Schmitz
in early 1952 to report on CIC; he was later ordered -
to drop Schmitz because his reports were not considered
of value, but didn't because they were friends. When
CAMPUS was closed out, Schmitz was loath to lose a
\good job and kept pestering CIC for more work or more
compensation. In the course of the post-CAMPUS connec-
tion, Schmitz began to deliver reports on the Gehlen
'Organization to CIC from Albert.
From the fall of 1953 and all through 1954 Albert
had been voicing even more vehemently his dissatis-
faction with certain of Gehlen's personnel policies.
Part of this dissatisfaction was undoubtedly justified;
part surely stemmed from an old rivalry between the
CE/Cf base and the headquarters CE Staff. Albert and
his chief at. GV"L" had a long standing feud with the
then headquarters CE chief, Dr. Kohler, and when GV"L"
members like Reile and Felfe "defected" to Dr. Kohler's
staff, they too became personal targets. But even
apart from the influence of the rivalry with Dr. Kohler,
there had been numerous instances when Felfe's behavior,
operational and personal, had incurred Alb is. rtic-
ular wrath and even suspicion. Albert's o ctions
were to the closeness of Felfe, Reile and certain of
their friends in what he termed an "SD clique". He
considered them "politically unreliable" and possibly
dangerous, but his complaints fell on deaf ears with
only few exceptions. In September 1954 Albert began
to share his grievances with CIC via Schmitz, and over
a period of about six months he spelled out in very
precise terms his suspicions that Felfe, among others,
was an "enemy". He told CIC that he considered Felfe
responsible for the betrayal of one of his sources who
was named in the December 1953 press expose on the
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Gehlen Organization; he thought Felfe's behavior
in investigating some of the recent flaps was "sus-
pect" (presumably he had the Hoeher case in mind); he
described in detail several incidents in which Felfe
behaved with suspicious curiosity in matters of no
concern.to him and he elaborated repeatedly on the
extent to which the headquarters CE staff seemed to be
an SD preserve with Felfe one of the ring leaders.
Quoting Albert, Schmitz wrote: "With all due respect
to General Gehlen, there is not enough resoluteness
in taking the necessary security measures all of
the suspicions against these people are known to head-
quarters, but a removal of these people is only possible
when proof can be presented which could stand up in
court. Such a situation is impossible in an intelli-
gence organization."
If pent up animosity and frustration over Gehlen
security practices were motives for Albert to begin
reporting to Schmitz in September 1954, there was
probably also a good operational reason for doing so.
In June the KGB had successfully (for the moment)
carried out another wrecking maneuver which had shown
the Gehlen Organization that the whole CE/CI base:
organization, personnel and some operations, had been
revealed to them, and probably by an agent at the top
of the CE roster (or at least by enough varied penetra-
tions to produce a composite report of equally high-
level appearance). Under a certain lamppost in the
town of Ludwigsburg the KGB had caused the local police
to discover a cache containing a microfilmed report
on GV"L". This was dubbed the "Lilli Marlen case".
The report was signed with the name "Artur" and clearly
suggested that Artur was in GV"L". Gehlen analysts
felt that only the chief of GV"L" or his deputy could
have such a comprehensive view as was indicated in the
report, yet the style in which it was written and
certain incorrect nomenclature suggested that it might
have been prepared by an outsider. Subsequent investi-
gation showed this indeed to be the case. While one
set of KGB agents had been dispatched to set up the
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the cache and then to its discovery, another
agent was being set up as a scapegoat. (1)
Just a few days after the Lilli Marlen papers
were discovered, one of Albert's agents, whose first
name was Artur, was approached by a Soviet, agent. The
Soviet agent tried to provoke Artur into coming to the
East or, faili9pthat, to calling the local police
and having him, the Soviet agent, arrested. Artur
refused to rise to either provocation and thus spared
the Gehlen Organization further scandal
without the propaganda benefit which
have hoped for in this operation, t
reaping a substantial harvest of c
within the Gehlen Organization.
had to be dismantled and reorg
the deputy chief of the new o
was clear that the Lilli Ma
deliberate Soviet expose
was not necessarily the
was equally clear that
tial information fro
base. Furthermore t
e KGB might
KGB succeeded in
nfusion and distrust
he whole CE/CI base
ized. (Albert became
ganization.) While it
en operation had been a
d that Albert's agent, Artur,
oviet agent in this case, it.
he KGB really did have substan-
a source, or sources, on the CE/CI
wished the Gehlen Organization to
believe that the ource was in the base or closely
connected with it. Why? The major question remained
for a .long time. Undoubtedly this Was another maneuver
in the 1,p�t of operations designed to discredit
Gehlen. But, would the KGB deliberately provoke
)
(2)
But, even
See Annex 7 note on Lilli Marlen for an excellent
example of the spotting and development of a throw-
away agent. One Soviet agent had placed the report
in the deaddrop, another had been instructed to tell
the Ludwigsburg police that he had accidently dis-
covered it and a third had been sent, unwittingly,
as a sacrifice to walk into the police stake-out
and to be arrested while attempting to empty the
dead drop.
See Annex 8 note on Artur Weber.
connection" report
Defense Minis
prior to
a dou
De
in-law, L
Gehlen
to Ludwig Alb r on the
Intelligence tion. Some years
e Lilli Marl -Operation, Weber ha_d_been
e agent, re ing on MGB targeting-6f the
nse Minis - and it is believe - of his brother--
Col. Gerhard Wessel, en a higIll}ev-e---1
_Je Ministry. Weber
y the Soviet in 1952.
al
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the reorganization of a major Gehlen base unless it
had a "stay-behind" agent to report on the new organ-
ization? Who were the KGB agents in GV"L" and its
successor base? Would the KGB cause so much attention
to be focused on that organization if it really did
have good agents there? Might the KGB have had the
intention (foiled for the moment) of trying to burn
an old recalcitrant agent who was causing trouble
(perhaps Albert)? Or, might this operation have been
an attempt to deflect attention from a valuable agent
who had moved elsewhere (perhaps Felfe)?
Felfe was among those assigned to work on the
investigation of the "Lilli Marlen case". Albert
complained about this too. Schmitz told CIC that
Albert thought "Felfe had something to do with the
Ludwigsburg affair", but unfortunately he did not
describe his suspicions. One of the Gehlen Organiza-
tion security officials (Bernhardt) complained once
in veiled terms to his CIA liaison contact that he
found ,Felfe's behavior during those investigations
frustrating and curiously obstructive.
On the night of 13 July Albertis interrogators Jo
thought they saw signs that he was ready to talk
about something and warned the jailers to watch him
carefully. Towat44Fning when their attention
wandered, Albert himself - an action as baffling
still for many people as on the day it happened.
This suicide was taken by many others, however,
as a confession of guilt. If Albert had been an SfS
agent, that would explain many leaks in GV"L" and in
particular satisfy the question about a highly placed
GV"L" source for the Lilli Marlen papers. Clemens
was worried that the case might lead to further exposes
and endanger him. He asked Alfred if it was a Soviet
operation. Alfred couldn't give him an immediate
answer, but the next time he saw Clemens he told him
that Albert had been neither a Soviet nor an East
German agent. He suggested in an off-hand way that
perhaps he had been a Polish agent. Felfe, who along
with his chief Reile, had been detailed to do some of
the cleaning up investigations of Albert's cases, also
asked Alfred. Felfe says Alfred reacted in a non-
committal way to his question which left him with the
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impression that Albert had indeed been a Soviet agent.
This still leaves us with a conundrum. As to the
"single agent" upon whose word so many arrests had
been made, Weinmann was released from prison after
serving a somewhat reduced sentence for black marketeer-
ing. He continued for another year to provide informa-
tion on the SfS: some good, some obviously fabricated.
Shortly after his release in November 1955 he was the
object of some East German attention which looked very
much like an attempt to confirm WeinMann's "bona fides":
a very, much blown double agent allowed the Gehlen Organ-
ization to come into possession of a letter addressed
to Weinmann by Weinmann's SfS case officer. In it the
SfS case officer expressed surprise that Weinmann had
been released from prison po soon and concluded that
he must have "conducted" himself well. A few months
later Weinmann was contacted again, but this time it
seemed to be a more securely managed contact and it was
not clear whether the contact was meant to come to
Western attention or not. At this time Weinmann was
given instructions to "continue" giving infomation in
the way he had been giving it, with a few specified
exceptions. That Weinmann was a bona-fide SfS agent,
there was no doubt, but whether the inspiration to
finger certain bona fide SfS agents-and to name among
their number Ludwig Albert was his own or the KGB's
inspiration remains a question. Adhering to the latter
theory are a number of people, who were members of CIC,
CIA and the Gehlen Organization at the time) who felt
strongly that Albert was framed; these in turn separate
into those who believe he had not been a Soviet agent
at all and those who believe he was. Unfortunately,
the evidence that he was framed, or moreover that he
was framed by the KGB in order to protect Felfe, or
anyone else in Felfe's coterie, remains mostly circum-
stantial. The possibility is certainly suggested by
the events.
As Albert had rightly predicted to Schmitz, bureau-
cratic sloth and an absence of any form of documentary
incrimination, saved Felfe. Felfe understood this too
and was not panicked when, in belated consequence of
Albert's accusations, he was subjected to a security
review on charges of "SD and Eastern connections", In
February 1956 Felfe was asked formally, "officer to
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officer", to make a statement for the BND about his
SD connections, and was severely reprimanded for having
concealed them when he was first hired. Felfe still
refused formally to admit SD membership and the results
of the BND investigation remained "incoRclusive". Al-
though the security file was to be kept up on him in a
desultory fashion for the rest of his career, nothing
'much was to come from it alone. From time to time it
bothered him. In March 1956 he indirectly probed one
of his CIA liaison contacts, saying that he had heard
�that Albert had asked Schmitz to investigate him. He
said that while he had received a vote of confidence
from Gehlen, he hoped that there wasn't anything derog-
atory about him hidden away in some American file. (1)
But, by the time the notion of starting a security
investigation of him had really taken hold, he was
already well on the way to becoming one of the more
energetic and ',productive CE experts in the Gehlen
Organization: his professional reputation was growing
and'Felfe's corner was a disheartening place in which �
to look for more treachery.
(1) Alfred C. Pincock contact report, March 1956.
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III. (a) Felfe Settles In
While all these storms were breaking, Felfe was
carefully settling in to.:his,new_job. He had his
first meeting with Alfred as a headquarters officer
in the fall of 1954 - almost a year after his trans-
fer. He reveals only very generally what they dis-
cussed at this meeting: problems of access, his and
Clemens'; and questions of how to hinder the legali-
zation of the Gehlen Organization. He gives no further
detail, but under these headings one assumes that the
basic modus operandi and a certain number of specific
cases must have been discussed. The basic operating
plan was that Felfe should have one general meeting
with his Soviet case officers each year. Communica-
tions from him would be via Clemens as courier and
via S/W letters to an East Berlin accommodation address.
Communication from Alfred would be via Clemens or
directly to Felfe via microdot. (Felfe and Clemens
disagree in their testimony as to who was to receive
and develop microdot. Clemens' statements seem more
plausible, namely that it was Felfe who handled the
microdot communications, retrieving and developing
the film and sending to Clemens only those EEI which
strictly pertained to him.) Training in the various
techniques: S/W and microdot was given to Felfe in
1954 and in addition he was presented with a Minox.
These technical innovations in the operation provided
yet greater compartmentation between Felfe and Clemens
and reflected the fact that Felfe was now seen as the
senior of the two agents.
From the fall of 1954 on Felfe photographed Gehlen
registry cards on a regular basis for Alfred; also
performed specific 'name checks for the KGB. Other file
material he photographed on a more selective basis. As
an example of his enormous sangfroid (or perhaps of the
ease with which a spy can operate even in a highly com-
partmented agency), Felfe says that he used to photo-
graph file material for Alfred in his office, with a
tripod, during the twenty minute interval between the
official closing time of 5:00 p.m. and the beginning
of overtime when special registration of one's presence
in the building was required. He says he never photo-
graphed after this hour, even if he worked late officially,
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for fear of being controlled when leaving the building.
When leaving the building he hid the film under his
clothing next to his skin. Sometimes he handed the
film directly to Clemens, sometimes he sent it to him
by registered Mail. On other occasions he checked
files out officially and took them with him when he
had official business in Clemens' vicinity. Then he
would photograph the material in Clemens' apartment,
to which he had his own key. He was a keen amateur
photographer (and in general a lover of gadgets) and
later on built himself a darkroom in his weekend
cottage where he could do some of his KGB work.
What Felfe does not tell us about this 1954 meet-
ing with Alfred was, however, probably infinitely more
important. Within a very short time after his arrival
in headquarters Felfe had been put in charge of a double
agent through whom he was soon to make a reputation for
himself as an authority on Soviet CE matters. This al.rtm
was called the "LENA case" and was incontrovertibly the
most important single contribution to Felfe's career as
an intelligence officer. Felfe claims he never dis-
cussed this case with Alfred, that it. was a "clean" BND
operation. While he may, technically speaking, not have
discussed it, there is very little doubt in anyone's
mind-that it was anything but a Soviet Controlled opera-
tion. This case gave Felfe maneuverability as a Soviet
agent and status as a BND officer; it provided him with
a channel to receive and to fulfill EEI; it broadened
considerably his access both to collect and sometimes
to disseminate information (misinformation). It fits
the basic formula of the Balthasar case only with a
much grander conception and much greater complexity.
For the years 1954 to 1958 it moves like the shadow
play of Felfe's real Soviet,career.
LENA is the BND cover name for Guenther Hofe, an
East German political functionary and publisher. Hofe
was a member of the Central Committee of the NDPD
(National Democratic Party of Germany - an ostensibly
independent political party), director of its publishing
house, "Verlag der Nation" and editor of the party organ,
Nationale Zeitunq. He had a minor reputation as a politi-
cal analyst, traveled frequently to West Germany and was
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well received in certain West German socialist circles
as an apparently independent, outspoken East German.
Hofe's story to the END was that he had joined various
Communist front groups in order to "bore from within";
that very soon after the war he decided for ideological
reasons to volunteer his services to a Western intelli-
gence service. Through an old Luftwaffe comrade in West
Berlin he came into contact with the SDECE in 1948. The
French ran him for several years as a political source
and were apparently highly satisfied with him. By early
1953 it had become apparent that the ex-Luftwaffe comrade
was sharing his services as a principal agent between
the SDECE and the Gehlen Organization, and for a year .
or so Hofe was in effect run jointly. In mid-1954 the
case was officially transferred to the Gehlen Organiza-
tion. Somewhat prior to the turnover, the Gehlen Organ-
ization asked CIA to evaluate some of Hofe's intelligence
product for them. Without naming the sol.irce. they pre-
sented us with a copy of a study of the(FDP12>ritten by
Hofe. CIA's branch for the study of international
communism wrote an evaluation which said in part: "This
study is a biased ol ection of overt and semi-overt
knowledge of the NDP missing several essential points
pertaining to the rganization, purpose and utilization
of the Party by the.Soviets in Eastern Germany. ..the
extensive use of members by the Soviet Intelligence
for missions in west Germany is not mentioned," - a
prophetic note, but easier to read with hindsight. (1)
Despite this one negative evaluation, Hofe became
highly regarded by the Gehlen Organization as a political
source. Within five months of Felfe's transfer to
headquarters, however, he abruptly became a CE case.
Through the daltk Party Chairman he had been introduced
in January 1954 to a Soviet Intelligence officer. After
a flurry of meetings he was formally recruited in early
March and immediately assigned the task of creating a
net of agents to produce information on the West German
Foreign Office, the Chancellor's Office and the Federal
( 1)
STC/ICB memo transmitted to Pullach in EGL4 750,
9 April 1954. Sea.
in
..i_ta,-Ann=tscff=>
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Press Office. The plan was grandiose: Hofe was to
be the "German net director", to recruit two principal
agents and a sort of general political advisor and
spotter, several support agents and to provide names
of potential penetration agents. As a double-agent in
contact with the Soviets, Whose activities were directly
to affect West German official secur'tv, the LENA case
now properly belonged to the CE of the Gehlen
Organization. Felfe was made the headquarters case
officer. He directed Hofe through a field case officer
Whom he met regularly each time the field handler saw
Hofe-. Felfe met Hofe officially only two or three
times. There is no evidence that the field handler or
any other Gehlen personnel besides Felfe who were
connected with the LENA case were Soviet agents, although,
since all analysis of this case insists that it was a
KGB "set-up" from the beginning, one is strongly tempted
to assume the presence of a helping hand in the Gehlen
headquarters -GE�s-eG-t----i-ei . to ensure that Felfe would be
made the responsible case officer. The highly suspect
Reile was Felfe's immediate superior at this time; per-
haps he helped steer the case - perhaps Felfe was simply
told to go after it.
Hofe was cast as the perfect agent: intelligent,
cool, a daemonic worker ("needs only four hours, of sleep
a night") with a phenomenal memory (he claimed to find
it relaxing to memorize the license numbers and makes
of the Soviet automobiles he saw in Karlshorst!). Felfe
took great pains to point out Hofe's excellent personal
qualities and to emphasize the indications in his re-
porting that the Soviets also had a very high respect
for him. In contrast to Hofe, however, the Soviet
handlers seemed somewhat naive. Indeed all his Soviet
case officers in succession had the shocking fault of
being chatterboxes and through them Hofe was ostensibly
able to pick up a great variety of information about
other Soviet agents and operations in West Germany Which
were unrelated to him. Furthermore, the KGB officers
enjoyed talking politics to such an intelligent man and
from these long conversations the END was now and then
given an apparent glimpse into Soviet policy. (Certain
deception themes will be pointed out later in this
narrative.) Much of the information Hofe delivered to
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the Gehlen Organization, which he supposedly picked
up outside the framework of this Foreign Office pene-
tration operation, was excellent. 5evera1 -bon-a fide
�-Mg and MfS agents were identified for the BND in this
manner; the KGB apparently had little compunction
about throwing away the assets of its sister-services,
although it did give away some of its own assets too.
The license plate numbers, telephone numbers and
addresses of KGB safehouses were all accurate; that
is, there were traces from other cases on them. Un-.
fortunately it was not completely clear in 1954 and
1955 that these other cases were blown cases of the
KGB/CE section working against the Gehlen Organization
and the other German seouritv services. Looking back
on this fact one can say that it should have been dis-
concerting to find so many traces from blown CE cases
in a case which the KGB pretended was a political
intelligence collection operation. Similarly dis-
concerting was the fact that one of Hofe's case officers,
Vladimir Shchukin, had been described to us in early -
1954 by Petr Deryabin as a former colleague working on
West German security and intelligence agencies. Shchukin
had in fact been one of the case officers in the Heinz -
"Khlyust" - case. Deryabin described him as incompetent,
one fact at least which seemed to be corroborated by
Hofe.- In addition to their talkativeness, Shchukin and
his colleagues were unusual and puzzling in another
respect: they dealt with their agent under their full,
true names. (1) They were thus readily checkable.
/LA-173'11
(1) Note by way of co arison that neither Heinz Felfe
nor George Blake 44,1p-..e ever given full names or true
names of their Karlshorst KGB handlers. Blake knew
the full names of his London-based handlers, however,
so that he could check MI-6 records on them. Al-
though in Germany the KGB case officers were opera-
ting from protected territory, we cannot assume that
they were disinterested in knowing what traces exist-
ed on them in enemy files. Through Felfe they could
of course feed names buried in lists to be traced
through Gehlen and CIA files. The LENA case provided
one very good means of running controlled and re-
peated traces on certain Soviets without necessarily
even le-qing Felfe know who was who, but presumably
he coulOave been given lists directly for tracing,
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Technical discrepancies a unded too: for ex'thnple
the KGB gave Hofe a fal�West German identity docu-
ment in August 1954 of that
the said they were obliged to apologize and that
un ortunate y were unable to produce anything
better!
On the surface Hofe's Soviet operation to
penetrate Bonn seemed less spectacular than his BND
operation to penetrate Karlshorst. The leads he
gathered for the Soviets were numerous,but they often
petered out. Many potential recruits were reported '
to the Soviets (the Gehlen Organization standing by
to make a double recruitment in case the Soviets
followed up), but only one real penetration was
actually recruited, an ailing and incompetent gentle-
man in the Press Office who contented himself with the
product of waste baskets for his source material. It
seemed incredible at the time that the KGB should go
through so many motions just for this. And, indeed
they did not. The KGB wat,497fact very interested in
information on the ForeigAWal Chancellor's Offices:
personnel rosters, table of organization, internal
directories and other memoranda, compromising infor-
mation on leading officials, but not through Hofe's
.feeble net alone. These EEI were all given directly
to Felfe by Alfred. He admits that at his 1955 and
1956 meetings with the KGB officer they discussed
these targets. In addition Alfred asked him to iden-
tify Gehlen informant's within the other government
departments. Felfe denies that he was able to ful-
fill Alfred's requirements; he claims he told Alfred
he had no access to such information, but the fact is
that the LENA case did his work for him - whether he
"knew" it or not. (1)
The singular and especial importance of Hofe's
net was that it forced the Gehlen Organization to
produce "build-up" material on the target agencies on
(1) Felfe's insistent over-evaluation of Hofe's
product to BND superiors, amounting sometimes
to a distortion of the facts, plus his energetic
work in collecting build-up material for the case
suggest strongly that he did know what it was all
about.
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a systematic basis and
ever been done before.
duced to Soviet questi
giving the impression
the comprehensive nature of Hofe's targets and because
of his detailed reporting (described by CIA officers
as "more than necessary"), Hofe quickly became tagged
as Gehlen's most important CE case.. Felfe begged for
permission to pass appropriate build-up material to
keep Hofe's faltering net alive: the theory was that
one had to please the Soviets so that a source of
importance both for West German security and possibly'
for an eventual penetration of the KGB might remain
viable. Felfe's principle problem was that at this
time there was no provision for clearing build-up
material in the German government. Felfe first tried
to a great
It caused
s, while
Soviets
r extent than had
answers to be pro-
t the same time
Because of
to persuade various security officials in Bonn, then
he went to a CIA liaison officer hoping that we would
intervene in some way. Then he went to the Federal
Attorney General and obtained a statement from him to'
the effect that any material already demonstrably
known to the opposition was automatically no longer
secret. By extension, that which was no longer secret
could be passed to the opposition as build-up material.
Finally, Gehlen himself briefed Adenauer and the State
Secretary of the Federal Chancellery, Dr. Hans Globke,
on the case and obtained Globke's agreement in the
matter: specifically in the first instance to pass
personnel information on the Foreign Office to the
Soviets. (1) Thus armed, Felfe was able to maneuver
(1) PULL-7867, 29 April 1954. Here is a quote from
remarks about Felfe's technique written by the CIA
liaison officer for sectirity matters to the Gehlen
OrgliWtion: Felfe "very cleverly played the
Obe sanwalt (Federal Attorney General) against
his own superiors. He obtained access to the
Chancellor's office through Gehlen's own access.
Then he used /the Chancellery/ approval of his
wishes to insure the approval of Gehlen. Along
the way he made references to the uncooperative
attitude of various other officials, including the
BfV and security officers in the Foreign Office.
All in all, he made fools out of everybody in the
name of the security of the Federal Republic, when
the entire case was obviously designed to gain
access to all appropriate offices for Felfe and
to build him up...". (EGMA-58737, 10 May'1962.)
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an an amazing variety of information "legally" into
Soviet hands. All that Hofe's Soviet case officer
had to do was to declare that certain areas of infor-
mation were already known or already "covered" by
them, and then Felfe could argue the v4tue of pro-
viding that information to Hofe as build-up or to
satisfy presumed KGB cross-checking on Hofe or as a
way of trying to smoke out the presumed Soviet source.
Any number of Soviet targets could be traced in Bonn
and in BND files simply by working them into Hofe's
EEI in some way. There are many examples in Hofe's
reporting of persons or subjects of Soviet interest
who flash into the limelight for a moment - perhaps
long enough to be checked out in Western files? - and
then disappear from the LENA case with the Soviet case
officer's remark that he is no longer interested. (1)
To make this exercise more thorough ,Felfe even-
tually managed to get permission t examine he per-
sonnel known to be under study by the oviets, who
were seeking information on vulnerabilities for re-
cruitment attempts. Even more brash is the incident
when Felfe asked a CIA liaison officer if1CIA could
provide leads2 from lists of dropped agentUX6inight
be employed at aQrelatively high level in different
Bonn ministrierillahom he could then recruit and "feed"
to the KGB via Hofel Felfe discovered during the
course of the LENA operation that CIA could be useful
,411.0,;7 ?
(1) An interesting maneuver which permitted Felfe to
check Hofe was made possible when Hofe expressed
concern to his Soviet case officer about operating
in the Federal Republic as a Soviet agent and about
the danger that the BfV might get on his trail. The
Soviet case officer told Hofe to have no fear; the
BfV had only two files on him and they contained
only routine information on Hofe's party activities.
When Felfe got this information from Hofe he checked
the BfV on an appropriate pretext and found that
their files were exactly as described by the Soviet
case officer. This was proof, Felfe said, that the
BfV was penetrated. This event was cited rather
widely by Gehlen, Felfe and other BND officers to
their American colleagues and presumably to other
elements of the German government, which exacerbated
the already existing friction between the BfV and
the BND.
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to him in more than one way. In this operation as
in many subsequent ones, it was of enormous value as
a kind of super-liaison, since the various German
services would sometimes tell their foreign confidante
more than they would tell each other. 40-len Hofe's
KGB officer wanted him to recruit a laborer working
on the new Chancellery office building in 1955 so
that a transmitter might be buried in it, Felfe came
to CIA with the complaint that there were at least,
seven different German agencies to which a workman
might report a recruitment approach and that his
Organization could be sure of hearing automatically
from only two of them. He feared that if he did not
have timely warning of such an approach he might lose
the opportunity to double the worker securely: would
we please monitor the situation for him? Typically
for the LENA cases nothing came of this plan to recruit
a workman and to plant an audio device (a communications
operation makes a poor subject for doubling). Possibly
we were supposed to believe that the Soviets had not -
yet succeeded in penetrating the Chancel ery
a
cally. .441
P7Much a case, while dazzling for a while, produced
many questions and suspicions in the minds of analysts
in both the Gehlen Organization and CIA. The unnatural
talkativeness. of the KGB case officers, the endless
and inconclusive backing and filling in the setting
up of his net, the lack of Gehlen control (Hofe came
and went at his own initiative, and always in a hurry,
to the West Berlin home of his old Luftwaffe friend
where he simply recorded what he wanted to say on tape
and left); all these features were puzzling even while
the case was new. One colleague of Felfe's, Dr. (alias)
Herder, was puzzled enough to write a review of the
case in late 1955. He decided it was a fraud, but he
was not yet quite certain why. Felfe's CIA contact
felt the same way: there seemed to exist the possi-
bility of a deception, but the obvious take for the
Soviets did not appear to pay for output in terms of
good leads given to the West. There was no internal
logic to the case. This of course was the correct
conclusion. There was no internal reason for running
the case as a deception, but there was a very good
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"externaluone: Felfe, whose benefits far outweighed
the loss of any information to the West from the LENA
operation. These stirrings of suspicion about the
LENA case consitutedthe second obvious major danger
signal - after Albert's denunciations to Felfe.
The LENA case would have to alter its course.
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IV. KGB Work in West Germany as a Sovereign Country:
Felfe Broadens His Scope.
The year 1955 marks a major change in KGB opera-
tional policy in West Germany. The post-war period was
over and West Germany had become a sovereign nation.
On 12 July 1955 the Gehlen Organization became the
Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst -
END), a dependency of the Chancellor's Office, the legal
foreign intelligence collection agency of the Federal.
RepubliC of. Germany. Formal CIA trusteeship ended six
months later; the END was considerably reorganized and
CIA left in the dark to be a "normal" liaison partner.
n September 1955 formal diplomatic relations were
established with the USSR; a Soviet Embassy and Trade
Delegation were opened in Bonn. To meet the new situa-
tion new un,its,were created in the END and BfV for the
penetration of the Soviet installations. CIA 'bases in
Frankfurt and Bonn also turned their efforts on these
targets and in doing so found the need, and the obliga-
tion, to operate closely - but as liaison equals - with
the newly independent German agencies. In Berlin, CIA's
operations base redoubled its efforts against the Soviet
"extra-territorial" headquarters - Embassy, Trade Dele-
gation, KGB and GRU - in East Berlin, producing in the
process a farly comprehensive body of documentary and
biographic material, which, along with the CIA German
Station's library of CE case histories, became widely
used for crosschecking new information as well as for
trading purposes in the new liaison relationships.
For the KGB, the END was no longer a target for
possible destruction; far more,now,it was an object to
be manipulated. The opportunity to replace Gehlen had
been lost, but he could still be embarrassed. It was
no longer possible to make use of his complicated
jockeying with political rivals, but he et+++-4,ad
certain political dreams which could be played upon.
The fundamental theme of Soviet policy in Germany,
now stronger than ever, was neutralization, and as
West Germany's economic and military status increased
the KGB moved correspondingly to support its own govern-
ment not simply with the collection of information or
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broaden his access. Alfred's factual EEI for the 4,40-4
period 1956-59 reflect the need for detailed organiza- U
tional and personnel information on the BND and its
liaison partners: the internal security service, BfV,
the military security service, MAD, the Foreign Ministry,
Chancellor's Office and, primarily among the Americans,
CIA. Alfred's purpose was primarily protective: of '
Soviet installations in Bonn and East Berlin and of the
operations run from them. USSR internal security require-
ments were reflected too in requests for Felfe to develop
infoi-mation on the END section running penetrations into
the Soviet Union and to outline Foreign Office security
procedures for the German Embassy in Moscow. In general
Pelfe and Clemens were expected to warn the Soviets of
any projected operation against them; they were also
given specific names to check and on occasion asked to
try to recruit certain people. (Both men deny having
carried Out any recruiLwent attempts and both say that
they withheld from Alfred a certain number of their own
cases on the theory that they would be able to behave
more naturally in running them and also in the event
of a flap.)
with a better bureaucratic position and the allure
Of being an "expert" Felfe had considerably more maneuver-
ability in his own right after 1956. In addition he was
enterprising and his talent for elicitation was phenomenal.
He made a practice of winning a personal contact in every
important Federal and Land Security Office: more than
one security official has ruefully admitted that he used
to brief Felfe regularly and informally on his cases in
order to get the expert's opinion. And where he could
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the parrying of its enemy's operations but by mounting
a number of "influence" or "inspirational" operations,
some of which filtered through Felfe's fingers.
With the help of the LENA case - and in spite of
its potential dangers and the distrust of Dr. @ Herder
Felfe had established himself in the headquarters organi-
zation fairly solidly by 1955 as the most energetic,
aggressive case officer working on the Soviet intelli-
gence target. In late 1956 or early 1957 he succeeded
/
Rene as deputN,ch.ef (in practice the real chief) of / l/s
the Soviet CE jand his work for the next few /
years on behalf of the Soviets was essentially to
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not develop an already existing contact he would try to
insert one in the guise of a "special connection". (1)
Whenever Felfe had to visit another government agency
on BND business he would look up other contacts in the
area just to keep Up with what was going-on. After a
while he devised the practice of taking along a tape
recorder so that he could cover more ground efficiently.
Soon BND colleagues found this a handy way of having him
take care of some of their liaison for them and he was
eventually relaying questions and answers on various
matters concerning Soviet, Satellite and KPD operations
of the END and BfV which otherwise were not of official
concern to him. From the END's own damage assessment
we have the characterization of Felfe during this period
as "shamelessly curious".
Clemens in the meantime had been transferred to
Cologne to work in one of the new units targeted against
(1)
An interesting example of this kind of maneuver by
Felfe involves a man named Max Klemm, a former SS
officer and late returner from Soviet PW camp. Felfe
was instrumental in having Klemm taken on as an agent
by-the BND and in having him get a job in the Office
of the Federal Chancellor. Felfe argued that such
a person as Klemm on the Chancellor's payroll would
probably attract a Soviet recruitment attempt. The
BND (Felfe) could then monitor the operation for
"security purposes"! Somehow Felfe succeeded in
selling this idea to his superiors, but there was
never any sign of a Soviet approach. (Whether this
reflects a failure of detection on our part or a
failure to act on the part of the KGB is an interest-
ing speculation.) In any case Felfe succeeded in
achieving for a while a personal penetration in the
Office of the Federal Chancellor. Later Klemm be-
came the I3ND liaison officer to the Security Group
(SG), the unit responsible for security of high
governmental officials and the executive action arm
of the Office of the Federal Chancellor. (EGMA-55905,
21 August 1961.)
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the Soviets in Bonn. His unit was designed to pene-
trate (primarily by audio installation) the Soviet
Trade Delegation and worked in tandem with a corres-
ponding unit directed by the BfV against the Soviet
Embassy, Felfe was later - in 1959 - to be assigned
to the headquarters supervision of these penetration
programs, but in the interim he could learn much from
Clemens, and in any case as a CE staff officer had
the right to review certain relevant cases from time
to time. The END has commented that during the period
1956-59 the unit working against the Soviet Trade
Delegation uncovered no genuine intelligence activity
on the part of a Soviet in the Trade Delegation which
would have allowed the BND to work up a pr-I-e-tration
operation, something which the corresponding BfV unit
was able to__accomplish many_times.m As usual the LENA
case had sOmething to offer on this subject. iri_niDc-
ember 1955 Felfe reported to CIA officers that Kole.-g
Soviet case officer had claimed that there would be
no intelligence officers among the first 45 Soviets
assigned to the new Embassy in Bonn because there
had already been too many Soviet Intelligence em-
barrassments. Felfe said he thought this remark
indicated that the SoViets were waiting to see what
the Western security services were going to do.
Actually, independent traces showed that there were
indeed Soviet Intelligence officers in the first
Embassy contingent to Bonn.
The LENA case was also helping to break ground
on liaison with the Americans for operations against
Soviet installations in East Berlin. The Berlin
Operations Base, which handled these operations, still
enjoyed the possibility of working unilaterally. The
BND naturally wanted badly to have its share of sources
in Karlshorst, the seat of KGB headquarters in Germany,
and Felfe strove with a variety of ploys to further
both the END's and the KGB's cause. In September 1956
Felfe and Reile visited the United States, and CIA
Headquarters, as members of a END CE orientation group.
During this visit Felfe gave a talk on the LENA case
describing it as clean, one of the best operations
the BND had and practically a penetration of the KGB
itself. The LENA case had at this time begun to produce
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sizeable amounts of information on KGB real estate
in Karlshorst - safe house addresses, license-plate
numbers, telephone numbers, etc. - and. in June 1956
the BOB Soviet operations chief had discussed the
case with Felfe offering full support in evaluating
and checking out LENAls information. Felfe agreed
to supply ,the positive operational detail ob-
tained by R-IgqZ through normal 3ND-CIA channels and
he also offered off-the-record to pass whatever
sensitive information he received affecting West
German security if we would agree to be very discreet.
We responded with alacrity, Not only did we wish to
keep our foot in the door now that the newly legalized
BND was so often eager to dispense with us, we hoped
that through this case we could try to defect the
apparently clumsy and unprofessional case officer,
Shchukin. Even more important was the necessity to
have as many sources as possible within Soviet con-
trolled territory such as Karlshorst who could give
us "early warning" information on any major Soviet
retreat or redispositlon in East Germany. (The
Soviets �q1q1cd their goodwill in this respect by
letting n'..0.E.p give us a whoie twenty-four hour adver-
tisement of the East German-USSR Troop Agreements,
and again by giving as some spurious indications of
alleged Soviet withdrawals from the Karlshorst Com-
pound in 1957.) The by-product of this cooperation
was to indicate more or less unavoidably that CIA had
a certain coverage of the Karlshorst Compound. A
similar process was repeated In another operation
which had been run by the 3ND against the Soviet
Trade Delegation Polyclinic in Karlshorst and which
produced an enormous quantity of personality infor-
mation on the Trade Delegation and on some intelli-
gence officers under Trade cover. In later 1956 BOB
offered full support to this operation, which was
eventually to follow- the almost classic pattern of
suddenly turning into a CE case and being put into
Felfels hands. (1)
In 1958 Felfe began a concerted campaign to
collect detailed information from CIA on its Karls-
horst penetration program. To this end he engineered
a series of crises in CIA-BND relationships which
(1) UJDRILY.
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resulted in his being briefed by CIA on the status
of its effort. The first of these briefings occured
in May 1958. In October 1958 Felfe tried unofficially
to get another with the chief of BOB without END
approval but was turned down. A second official
briefing followed in February 1959 and a third in
July 1959. At this point a mechanism was created
for close, continued official END-CIA cooperation
against Karlshorst A END case officer was placed
in the Berlin Compound and worked closely with BOB
liaison officers. This was an important and delicate
step since the END representative had to be documented
as a U.S. Berlin Command employee, supplied with an
automoblle with U.S. Forces license plates and other
American Army support facilities. Felfe in turn be-
came the END headquarters' supervisor for the now
official END Karlshorst penetration program and the
immediate supervisor of the END case officer in the
Berlin Command compound.
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IV. (a) Source Protection and Tactical Deception
By late 1959 Felfe was officially responsible for
the headquarters supervision of nearly all END opera-
tions against the Soviets in Germany. The KGB could
well congratulate itself. At the same time it had to
be willing and nimble enough to counter the Western
efforts on a broad scale without endangering its
source. At a meeting with Alfred in Berlin in Decem-
ber 1959, Felfe discussed the CIA operations against
Karlshorst. He said he had been making some headway
in discovering what the Americans were up to, but as
yet they were not revealing their sources to him.
Alfred proposed that he "help" the Americans by
sending some sources for them to recruit, but Felfe
claims he tried to discourage this. Some cases of
planted recruits were of course uncovered by CIA,
but not through Felfe's admissions, so we are unable
to offer proof that they were manipulated in direct
support of Felfe.
(1) In mid-1957 Felfe had discovered
through traces on some of the KGB safehouses
in the LENA case, that BOB had an excellent
source in the Karlshorst Housing Administration.
(A source in this spot was able to provide con-
siderable "order of battle" information on a
variety of Soviet agencies, including the intelli-
gence services, through regular monthly reporting
on Soviet billeting assignments.) This source
had been one of BOB's major Karlshorst assets
for some years. In 1959 after the BND-CIA
cooperation against Karlshorst was institution-
alized, one of Felfe's colleagues succeeded in
recruiting this source's-co-worker in the
Housing Administration., Her name had of course
become evident to the BND in the process. After
this, we began to note that our source's access
to information was slowly diminishing. What had
happened - w presume - was that she had been
identified d the KGB, but the latter, had deter-
mined. to 1 ave her alone in order to protect their
souree (F lfe) and to allow the END equity in
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Karlshorst to grow. Her activities were
closely monitored, however; MfS surveillants
watched her come to West Berlin for meetings
with her CIA case officers4 although she was
eventually allowed to rfuee to West Germany.
Shortly after she refugeed, her colleague, the
BND recruit, received an anonymous warning
letter and fled to West Berlin. Thus the
Housing Administration was purged.
(2) In other cases we have been able to
determine that within a certain period of time
ranging from two to nine months after an agent
or prospective recruit had been identified to
Felfe, the agent was either arrested, or simply
disappeared from sight, or lost access to our
target. In one case Where CIA penetration of
another East Berlin housing unit was obviously
suspected by the KGB, Felfe very boldly provoked
the revelation of our agent by trying to recruit
one of his colleagues. He placed an ad Pi( in the
Nest Berlin newspapers designed to attract
secretarial help from the East Sector. Our
agent's secretary answered it (at KGB behest)
and Felfe announced to us that he intended to
recruit her as a BND Karlshorst source. We were
then forced to tell him that we already employed
her chief and begged him to stop his approach
since it might endanger our agent - who already
covered the target in any case. Shortly after
this the Wall of 13 August 1961 put a stop to
many of these operations, and those of our
agents who were able to remain in correspondence
with us (including the one Whose secretary Felfe
targeted) soon showed definite signs of hostile
control.
While the Wall made KGB CI work in Berlin consider-
ably easier, it did nothing for the Soviet diplomatic
and trade installations in West Germany. In the West
the problems of negating German and American CE work
without revealing the existence of a major leak were
more difficult. Paradoxicallyi Felfe himself
had been largely responsible for promoting an operation
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to tap Soviet Embassy telephones in Bonn. The KGB
regarded this situation in a fairly relaxed manner,
however. Felfe kept them supplied with information
from the transcripts and the operation was allowed
to continue for several years. (1) Presumably it
gave the KGB a good security check on the Embassy
employees as well as a convenient deception channel;
and, of course, they knew precisely Which Soviet
offices were not tapped and, therefore, safe. The
Kirpichev case, described below, contains examples
of the deliberate use, as well as of the careful
avoidance, of tapped wires for operational purposes.
For different, and obvious reasons, the KGB was also
quite sanguine about the joint END-CIA audio opera-
tion against the New- China News Agency. Felfe re-
potted to the KGB on this operation and it remained
moderately successful from our point of view. But,
while the KGB seems to have been willing to allow
us a passive coverage of their official installations
through telephone taps, they were somewhat more
energetic in trying to counter audio operations
against individuals and in frustrating Western agent
operations mounted on the basis of the audio product.
By procrastinating bureaucratically Felfe could foil
many a plan. If not, then the audio equipment would
often fail technically for some unexplained reason,
although in no given case could the failure be
positively ascribed to anything but accident. In
other cases the target of the audio operation would
suddenly be moved to .another billet at the last
minute after the audio installation had been com-
pleted and an employee of no great interest to us
would be assigned to the wired apartment in his
stead. In some cases, however, the defensive ploys
had to be more complicated and sometimes they did
not always succeed. Two of the best known examples
concerned the Soviet �Intelligence officers, Kirpichev
and Pripoltsev.
(1) AELADLE reports that he learned in 1959 or 1960
that the KGB had many reports on the monitoring
of Soviet conversations in Soviet installations
in West Germany. He conjectured at the time that
these must have come from a KGB agent connected
with END audio operations. (LZ 63, 19 March 1962.)
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Dmitriy ivanovich Kirpichev was a KGB/Emigre
operations officer assigned to west Germany under
cover of the Soviet Freight and Transport Office
(SOVAG) in Hamburg. Kirpichev had been in contact
with a Soviet emigre residing in West Germany, who
in turn was reporting on his contact to the BfV.
Kirpichev had been under surveillance by the BfV in
an effort to establish some legally incriminating
material which might serve as the basis for an arrest.
Felfe says he learned of this case and of a plan to
arrest Kirpichev at a routine BND-BfV conference
sometime in the first half of February 1961. On
11 February he had a meeting with Alfred in Berlin
at which time he informed the KGB about the Kirpichev
case. Alfred then asked Felfe (according to Felfe)
if he thought it would endanger Felfe if the Soviets
"undertook something" to protect Kirpichev. Felfe
says he replied in the negative, aslong as the Soviet
counter-operation were carried out "with the necessary
finesse. He even suggested the idea of having
Kirpichev pretend to fall sick while on a trip to
Berlin. Immediately after this, on 16 February,
Felfe had a conference with the BfV referent for
work on the Soviet Embassy. From him he learned
the details of Kirpichev's emig-e operation including
the emigre's KGB covername, Kritik. Subsequently
Felfe reported to Alfred in secret writing that the
arrest was to take place soon. At the moment he
knew definitely that the SG planned to interrogate
Kritik formally on 21 February for the purpose of
preparing the legal basis for the subsequent arrest
of Kirpichev in Hamburg. He may or may not have
been aware that the arrest was definitely planned
for the 23rd.
On the afternoon of 21 February Kirpichev left
Hamburg and traveled to Bonn where he spent the night
in a hotel near the Soviet Embassy. Meanwhile
official telephone conversations conducted among
various Soviet offices indicated that Kirpichev was
about to depart on a business trip to Berlin, but
would return to Hamburg on the 23rd of February.
The END tappi-a operation on the Trade Mission pro-
duced this information, as the KGB knew it would,- and
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Felfe sent it on to the BfV. Kirpichev proceeded
to Berlin on the 22nd. The 23rd came and went with
no arrest. A few days later Kirpichev's wife in
Hamburg made some explanatory remarks on the SOVAG
premises where a BND agent was employed. Presumably
this agent was known to the KGB; in any case Kirpi-
cheva took care that he overheard her saying that
her husband was severely ill in Berlin. Two more
days passed and the BND agent in SOVAG was able to
report the receipt by that agency of an official
announcement from Berlin that Kirpichev had been
stricken by an inflamed appendix and confined to a
Berlin 'hospital. Felfe sent this report to the BfV
in a routine manner. On the 16th of March this
report was "confirmed" in a telephone call between
the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin and the Soviet
Trade Mission in Cologne. Now all that remained
for the KGB to do was to give the BfV and the BND
a specific reason on which to pin the failure of
the Kirpichev operation which at the same time might
head off any potentially dangerous general inquiry.
Kirpichevalet the BND source in SOVAG hear her remark
that she had been under surveillance in Hamburg by
an unknown person. Meanwhile the BfV's double-agent,
Kritik, received a conspiratorial message from
Kirpichev warning him that they had been under
surveillance during their last meeting and that
Kirpichev had fled. otest Germany for security reasons.
Felfe informed the BfV of the SOVAG penetration
agent's report; the BfV sent him the item about.
Kirpichev's message to Kritik and it seemed as
though the operators had only themselves to blame
for everything. Although Felfe tried to give the
impression that he did not give this operation away
in the first place, he was obviously interested in
seeing it work out well for the KGB. According to
Clemens, Felfe asked him some time in 1961 to ask
Alfred "if everything worked out and Kirpichev got
out alright." Clemens said Alfred answered in the
affirmative.
An interesting side light on the modus operandi
in this case is that in its earlier stages (before
Felfe had reported to the KGB that Kritik was a
double-agent), the KGB provided Kritik with an
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emergency contact in the Press Section of the
Soviet Embassy. The significance of this is that
the Press Section was housed in a separate building
from the rest of the Embassy and the KGB knew,
through Felfe, that it was not tapped, unlike the
offices of Kritik's regular case officer
Not so successful was the Pripoltsev case.
Valentin Aleksandrovich Pripoltsev was an engineer
assigned to the Soviet Trade Mission in Cologne.
The BfV had uncovered Pripoltsev's role as case
officer in three cases which they were monitoring.
Felfe learned of this first in May 1961 at a routine
interagency conference. In July at a second con-
ference he learned that the BfV was thinking of
making an arrest. The date of the planned arrest
was, however, a closely guarded secret. Felfe
learned it on 24 August, only two days in advance
of .the arrest date. The result was that he was
unable to warn Alfred in time. Pripoltsev was
arrested and sentenced to four years in prison on
charges of espionage. Felfe in turn received a
reprimand from the KGB. (This event became another
cause for the KGB's subsequent insistence on a
faster communications system through the use of
an Illegal.) Felfe made some sort of effort, how-
ever. As soon as he heard of the date for the
arrest he sent a telex to the Cologne office of
the END suggesting, on his own initiative, that
they have a Russian linguist standing by. In doing
this he used a cryptographic reference in a strange
way which revealed the name of the Soviet to be
arrested. The END subsequently surmised that Felfe
could have done this to alert Clemens or simply to
extend the range of knowledge of the planned arrest
in order to cover himself in the event that Pripolt-
sev disappeared before his arrest.
Other variations on the successful rescue are
illustrated in the Kropotov case. Oleg Sergeyevich
Kropotov was a member of the Soviet Trade Mission
in Cologne. Through intercepts the BND had decided
that a 4est German who: was in contact with him was
conclusively guilty of treason and in early 1961 had
turned the case over to the BfV. In July 1961 Felfe
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reported to his headquarters that he had heard that
the BfV had changed their minds about Kropotov's
contact: they had investigated him, had decided
he was loyal and that Kropotov in fact was "destern
oriented". Felfe now proposed that the BND should
control the case after all, and that they should
consider the possibility of defecting Kropotov.
By this sleight of hand Felfe. got the case turned
back to the END, while in actuality the BfV had
been planning to force Kropotov's departure from
the Federal Republic.
Another operation, known as the Sokolov case,
demonstrates Felfe's usefulness in matters of Soviet
internal security. During 1959 and 1960, in the
course of investigating an insecure RU officer,
Felfe and Alfred managed to direct a series of
provocations in such a manner as to involve nearly
every German and American Intelligence Service in
West Germany together in one anti-Soviet case, thus
giving the KGB a remarkable insight into the liaison
practices of the Western agencies. This case is
treated in some detail in, Annex 9i because it is
another excellent example of operational deception
very intricate, well timed deception complete with
apparent confirmations and cross-checks of informa-
tion and real sacrifices of agents and equipment.
The. primary goal of the KGB in this affair was to
investigate and entrap Sokolov, an insecure and
possibly treasonous RU officer who had been operat-
ing for some years against U.S. air bases in West
Germany. In this respect the case can also be read
for an illustration Of the KGB mission to investigate
the operational security of its military intelligence
colleagues. By creating, or elaborating upon, various
double agent operations involving Sokolov the KGB
was instrumental in provoking operational interest
in him and his West German agent net on the part of
thc2, EfV, two LfV's, the END and CIA (on its own and
in7Capacity as liaison representative for CIC and
OS Y interests). By inserting into BND spotting
channels an agent who claimed to be Sokolov's mistress
as well as his agent and who hinted that he might be
defectable, the KGB put the BND in a position to
inspire the creation of, and then to monitor, a joint
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task force consisting-of representatives of all the
interested services. For six months the German and
American representatives operated in close, daily
liaison to prepare the hoped-for defection of Sokolov
and capture of his West German agents. This consti-
tuted a bureaucratic tour de force which put Felfe
�at the center of what was virtually a sort of central
clearance mechanism for the handling of ets case.
(To judge from the general- satisfaction reflected in
the files about the success of this coordination, one
cannot exclude the possibility that it might have
set a precedent-. To speculate that it would have,
or that the KGB's planning in this case incorporated
this hope is useless; however, there is no doubt that
a continuing allied system of this sort for anti-
Soviet double agent cases - with Felfe in a monitor-
ing position - would have satisfied the KGB enormously.
In this respect it might also be borne in mind that
General Gribanov had been stressing the need, in his
briefing of Soviet and Satellite CI personnel in
late 1958 and early 1959, to emphasize the collection
of information and documentation on "coordination"
among the Western services which could be exploited
propagandistically against them. (1)
In the course of the Sokolov operation each
participant had considerable opportunity to learn
about the other's bureaucratic and operational methods,
and considerable amounts of background information
were exchanged. CIA as usual was the most prolific
with traces and organizational information on the
Soviet Intelligence Services. Felfe's role through-
out was unusually passive (his colleagues remarked
later on his atypical behavior), although he did try
during a certain period to persuade his colleagues
to try to "recruit" Sokolov rather than to defect
him. Indeed, as the BND significantly remarked after
his arrest, his principle role was just to sit back
and let himself be briefed by all sides. When it
came time to begin the executive action phase of the
operationjthe roll up of Sokolov's net went very
(1) BEVISION, 5 April 1959. Comments on "Aktion".
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well: five agents were arrested, many more suspects
identified, considerable espionage gear including
one of the newest Soviet W/T sets was captured. Not
so successful, however, were the efforts to defect
Sokolov. This was not in the KGB interest and each
time we tried to move closer to him he would be "in
the hospital" or otherwise out of reach. The KGB
had completed its basic requirement when it allowed
the west Germans to arrest, along with Sokolov's
other agents, the woman who purported to be his mis-
tress. (Despite her willingness in helping her
Western handlers to try to defect Sokolov, she
failed ultimately to convince them of her bona fides.)
Her testimony described Sokolov's insecure behavior
and his "Western tendencies". Felfe states that he
sent a copy of her testimony (or excerpts therefrom)
to Alfred and one assumes that from there it found
its way to the Soviet military prosecutor.
Clemens - always a little slower than Felfe -
was shocked that Alfred had let this agent be arrested
by the West Germans, indeed had deliberately let her
.walk into a trap. Alfred's reply to him was to shrug
and say "this had nothing to do with my office" and
"Sokolov will certainly be arrested." Felfe admitted
that he had observed this case with some glee and
was amused to deliver derogatory information to the
KGB about the RU officer. He received a bonus from
the KGB of 140w00 DM for his efforts. His nest German
prosecutors Thought it was strange that he should
receive a bonus in a case which had actually been a
"failure" for the Soviets, e.g. five RU agents arrested.
Felfe may have found this amusing too since he merely
replied that he had been compensated for hard work
despite the "losses" suffered.
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IV. (b) Su_pport of Soviet Policy and Political
Deception
ghile Felfe could serve admirably as watchdog
for KGB assets in Germany, Soviet needs on a somewhat
broader level after 1955 had also created for him a
private role on the political scene, which in some
ways might have provided Felfe an even greater sense
of excitement and importance than did his bureaucratic
omniscience. LENA - as ever - provides a clue. During
the period of legalization and reorganization in the
BND, the LENA case had been dormant, possibly sleeping
off Dr. @ Herder's probing criticisms. In mid-1956
it suddenly awoke, but this tim the guise of a
political case. Shchukin told to forget tempor-
arily about his net to penetrate the Foreign Office
and to concentrate on investigating the existence of
a possible neutralist faction in vest Germany. Shchukin
said that the Soviets were doing everything in their
power to establish a. neutralist party which would make
some dent in the 1957 vote for Adenauer. (when election
time came, however, he admitted that the Soviets did
not have this capability: he said they had no assets
for starting a political party!) Soviet interest in
Hofe's task waxed and waned several times during the
year between the summer of 1956 and the summer of 1957,
but as tension began to grow in the Kest about the
imminent unveiling of a Soviet ICBM and o4ver the
4c0�
recent East German troop agreements, t,wm-p's case
officer spoke more urgently of the neutralist assign-
ment. In the summer of 1957 Wfe came to a CIA
officer with a report from Ii4f4 which he sail, e con-
sidered very significant: the KGB wanted 1Za4.e to find
out if there did indeed exist in the west German govern-
ment a faction advocating closer rapport with the East
German government and with the USSR. Nothing very much
came of this item of "intelligence". It was not treated
significantly for a variety of reasons, not the least
of which had to do with CIA's increasing bafflement
with the LENA case as a whole and increasing speculation
that it might be a deception. As an indication of
KGB operationaj,lintent, however, it is interesting.
After this, f-4! returned briefly to work on the Bonn
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penetration project, but in early 1958 was told
definitely by the KGB to ease out of it and to
devote himself entirely to political reporting.
Simultaneously Felfe was involved in another
KGB attempt to support its government's policy.
The Rapacki proposals for a nuclear free Central
Europe had come to naught with the successful passage
by the Bundestag in March 1958 of a resolution favor-
ing nuclear armaments in Nest Germany. Nevertheless,
Soviet clandestine feelers for some kind of rapproche-
ment were still out. 4e can see a small example in
one of Felfe's operations. Ever since the early
1950's the Soviets had been interested in ex-4ehrmacht
officer, former chief of the military planning section
of the Military Security Office (Blankamt), Boguslav
von Bonin. Von Bonin was a well-spoken, and out-spoken,
neutralist, with excellent social connections, strong
idealism and rather little political acumen. In 1955
von Bonin was dismissed from the Defense Ministry for
publicly propounding his views. At the same time
the KGB, through Colonel-General Aleksandr Pavlovich
Tarasov, Chief of Staff of the Soviet Forces in
Germany, invited him to discuss the German problem
in East Berlin. He went, was delighted with General
Tarasov, left him his notes on his thoughts, but
violently repudiated a direct recruitment pitch
from a KGB representative Gehlen, who had been in
touch with von Bonin on and off for several years,
backed him in his trip to Berlin. Allhough he realized
von Bonin's basic political naivety, he had hoped to
use him in some way to further an old personal dream;
that he could somehow be instrumental in bringing
about a rapprochement if not a reunification of his
country through a personal channel to the other side.
Felfe was Gehlen's personal representative with von
Bonin (1)
(1) Felfe stated to his American interrogators that
he thought the von Bonin case was a good example
of a Soviet "political operation run by CE methods."
He added his opinion that the Soviets in running
this type of operation against the 2ND were under
the impression that the BND played quite a different
role in the German political scene than it actually
does play.
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In the fall of 1958. the von Bonin case was
raised again from the Soviet side. In that year
Felfe had three important meetings with the KGB.
The first in Berlin was with Alfred and wad' designed
primarily to introduce a faster communication system
by means of OgVL. Through the new radio system Felfe
was summoned to Vienna in September 1958 to meet a
new and imposing person introduced simply as "the
director". The following month he met the director
again in 'Berlin. Felfe will not tell us in detail
or in any kind of organized fashion about these
meetings, but he does convey that the basic opera-
tional reason for them was to discuss von Bonin.
Felfe says the director asked his advice about what
to do with this case; if Felfe thought it would be
advisable for the Soviets to extend another invita-
tion for talks to von Bonin. These meetings seem
to have made a great impression on Felfe. He speaks
of the director almost with reverence. Certainly
this man appealed to Felfe intellectually, and he
obviously cultivated Felfe's not insignificant ego.
Felfe told. Clemens when he returned from the Berlin
meeting that he and the director had talked at length
of many "deep and important" things. To his interro-
gators, Felfe presented the topic of the director's
talk as though it were a kind of situation or policy
statement. Actually we ought also under the circum-
stances to consider it in terms of a kind of propa-
ganda outline. The director began with a discussion
of historical Russian respect for Germany. He said
that Soviets realized the impossibility of making
4est Germany into a communist country, but that this
was all the more reason why everyone should try to
see agreement, to find some\ guarantee of peace. The
Soviets were disappointed, he said, that the contacts
started by Adenauer on his trip to the USSR in 1955
had not been followed up. There now seemed little
likelihood of success on the official diplomatic
level. Now the Soviets must try to seek unofficial
contacts. Enemy intelligence chiefs should maintain
satisfactory contact with each other. There were
distinct possibilities in this direction and "the
doors were always open." This is all Felfe tells
us, but in the context of the von Bonin operation
it s ggests much. It looks as though information
in the one case, LA, namely that the
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Soviets were sincerely interested in a peaceful
solution in Germany, was produced to confirm the
rightness of Gehlen's intentions in the other case,
von Bonin. These are but small details - one would
expect to find many more - of the peace message
which has often been played against the louder
themes of more warlike Soviet statements. (About
three weeks after the director's meeting with
Felfe on the von Bonin case, the Soviet govern-
ment made its first threatening statement of the
Berlin crisis - Khrushchev's statement of 10 Nov-
ember 1958.)
Felfe says that the director went on to urge
him to develop his political reporting - even to
join the Foreign Office (although this last comment
might be one of Felfe's own embellishments rather
than a real KGB idea). The director urged Felfe
to speed up his political reporting, particularly
the transmittal of BND and BfV weekly situation
reports which he had begun to send regularly in
about March 1958. He also asked for information
on the BND offices concerned with political intelli-
gence collection on areas other than the Soviet
Union.
Apart from these substantive concerns, the
1958 meetings with the KGB officers brought about
an important change in Felfe's and Clemens' techni-
cal modus operandi. After Clemens lost the Balt-
hasar case as an excuse to travel to Berlin, Erwin
Tiebel, who had been more or less in reserve since
his recruitment, took over as .courier. He collected
Felfe's and Clemens' reports concealed them in a
suitcase with ape paneljtwhich Alfred had sup-
plied his agentsAwith Nest German identity documents
in other names. (Completely valid documents, unlike
the product of the_LENA case!) On these occasions
Alfred would meet(theM)at a predesignated kilometer
marker (Km Stone 107) inside East Germany on the
Helmstedt-Berlin Autobahn and relieve them of the
incriminating material. TheOest German could
then proceed normally into gest-Berl' and meet
Alfred later in Karlshorst. Clemens at this time
(1956) had also been given an S/4 system and a code
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system for using one-time pads. This procedure
was fairly satisfactory, but Clemens had increas-
ingly less chance of lengthy oral reporting to
Alfred, while at the same time the volume of re-
porting increased. Felfe had begun to rely more
and more on the tape recorder (he was apparently
very lazy about composing written reports - several
instances of Alfred's impatience with him in this
respect are documented)) and his reporting consisted
primarily of a handful of Minox negatives and
several spools of tape on which (according to
Clemens) he recorded situation reports and the
latest changes in BND personnel and T/0. Some-
times he would visit Clemens in Cologne where he
would dictate a report in cipher which Clemens would
then transpose into S/N. This worked well enough
until March 1958 when Clemens was unexpectedly
relieved of 7l1s post in the Cologne penetration
unit and demoted to a surveillance team. Clemens'
superiors in BND headquarters had apparently been
dissatisfied with his work for some time. Now his
usefulness to Felfe and to the KGB was sharply cur-
tailed. He claims that Alfred was uninterested in
the information he was able to develop from most of
his surveillance activities (primarily against FLN
members in Germany). At this point OWL was intro-
duced. Clemens acted as the receiver and decoder.
Communications were made once a week, with one
alternate per week as well. After a while a
"burst" transmission method was introduced for
which Clemens had to use a tape recorder hooked to
his radio. After recording the high-speed trans-
mission he would play the tape at slow-speed and
thus be able to decipher the message. At one time
Alfred wanted to introduce a system of rubbing
metal shavings onto the tape so that the impressions
would become visible, but Clemens and Felfe found
this method too messy and too unreliable and refused
to use it.
Clemens says that from 1958 on he received very
few personal instructions from Alfred and that the
majority of the messages were for Felfe. In short,
he had become largely a support agent for Felfe.
When he did go to Berlin after this date it was
unofficially (until 1960 when Felfe was able to
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bring him back briefly to an operational role in
a double agent case). Alfred tightened up the
security by refusing to let Clemens come to the
East Sector any longer. All their meetings were
merely brush meetings on the street, useful only
for exchanging material, but not for discussion.
Felfe tried repeatedly - with only occasional
success - to bring Clemens into a case in order
to give him legal excuses to go to Berlin, but
the problem of quick, secure communication re-
mained a serious one.
It was as much to this problem - as to political
matters - that the director addressed himself in his
September and October 1958 encounters with Felfe.
He announced that he wished Felfe and Clemens to
sever personal contact with Alfred and the East
Berlin Rezidentura and to work from now on solely
through an Illegal Rezident in gest Germany. They
would be introduced to the Illegal, but their pri-
mary communication with him would be via dead drops.
Each man would have his own set of dead drops and
it would no longer be necessary for Felfe to commu-
nicate laterally so often with Clemens on KGB busi-
ness. The director said that any communication via
this system would reach Karlshorst within 24 hours.
The immediate reaction of Clemens and Felfe was
dismay. Their refusal to comply with such a pro-
posal was adamant. They claimed that the introduc-
tion of an unknown intermediary between them and
Alfred would merely provide more risk of exposure
or accident over which they would have no control.
The director and Alfred tried to reassure them,
saying that the Illegal Rezident was an absolutely
reliable person, a Soviet citizen, but the two agents
continued to refuse. For the next few years the
Soviets allowed them to have their own way. (1)
(1) The KGB idea of using an Illegal Rezident in
support of gest German CE operations goes back
a long way. Petr Deryabin told us in 1954 that
while he was on the German Desk in Moscow in
1952-53 there were plans afoot to set up two
such rezidents, one in ,Duesseldorf and the
other in Munich.
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Sometime in 1959 Felfe received a new KGB
cover name: Kurt. Clemens became Hanni and along
with liebel was referred to in KGB files as
part of "Kurt's Team" or of "Operation Kurt". (1)
In 1960 during one of his rare visits to Berlin
Clemens was presented with a citation by the KGB
in honor of his ten years of service: a letter
from the then KGB Chairman Shelepin and a bonus
of 2,000 DM. Felfe also received a letter from
Shelepin, and we presume also a bonus, although
he did not confess to this. A BND comment on this
subject conjures up a humorous scene in which
Clemens "in the purest Saxon dialect" innocently
asked his KG3 case officer "who this Shelepin might
be". Alfred apparently was really shocked, and
Felfe claimed to be annoyed with Alfred for not
orienting Clemens better.
(1) AELADLE.
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IV. (c) New Directions?
We have seen how Felfe as chief Soviet counter-
espionage referent was able in the last years of his
career to cover Soviet requirements on a variety of
levels and a variety of topics: positive, protective
and political. By rigging an operation especially for
Felfe, Alfred could force answers from almost any
element of the West German government in the guise
of "build-up" material; by creating certain opera-
tional situations or complexities, Alfred could help
Felfe in his bureaucratic manipulations; indeed even
promote the formulation of helpful bureaucratic
regulations or precedents. By introducing a Soviet
CE factor into any END case anywhere, the KGB could
cause the case to be transferred to the protective
custody of Felfe. By introducing a Soviet CE factor
urgently affecting German security into the operation
of any other agency, German or foreign, the KGB could
hope to bring many another case under Felfe's scrutiny.
(For example, Felfe was able to help the internal CI
directorate of the KGB. In one case a double agent
run by CIA for the collection of economic information
on the USSR and by the KGB for CI information on the
West German and U.S. Embassies in Moscow, was apparently
already suspected of Western intelligence connections
by the KGB. By closinc out all the agent's targets
except one, namely to spot, recruit and maneuver into
place a West German girl suitable to be a German Em-
bassy secretary, the KGB succeeded iforcing the case
out of CIA hands and completely intoABND, where Felfe
was the headquarters case officer. In another case, a
West German woman run by CIA, Felfe provoked revelation
of our interest by sending us reports accusing her of
serious insecure behavior while in Moscow. Subsequently
she became the object of a "dangle" operation - a Soviet
lover who appeared always potentialiy, but never, really
recruitable. In both cases the significant feature was
that the change of handling after the Western side of
the case had been reported to the KGB had the purpose
of revealinc Western assets in the USSR.) Finally,
Felfe, because of his own personal qualities - brashness,
inquisitiveness, aggressiveness - was able to broaden
his access to information in areas for which there was
no official excuse for him to be at all. (In this
respect he is reported by one of the BND security
investigations as having tried to meddle in a BND
operation involving a West German nuclear scientist
probably in response to a specific request from
Alfred.) In the end Felfe had become much more than
just a simple servant of the KGB. (Its doubtful if
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he had ever thought of himself as such.) Evi-
dence from intercepted OWVL broadcasts - as well,
of course, as Felfe's own statements - shows that
Alfred often asked Felfe for advice about the Soviet
handling of certain operations, both as to the tech-
nical aspects of handling BND-KGB double agents as
well as the timing and tenor of KGB propaganda
operations. Felfe had become in many ways some-
thing of a consultant to the KGB on the BNDias well
as an agent.
In spite of the fact that in many ways Felfe
had an almost ideal position, there is evidence
that in 1960 he was instructed by the KGB to move
on to a new job. This was the post of security
officer for the END Communications Unit. At this
time discussions were underwayLicthe establish-
ment of the END as GermanC gns intelligence
authority. Felfe knew that the post of communica-
tions security chief was shortly to become vacant,
through the retirement of its incumbent, and he
probably guessed thatLT job would assume greater
importance once the ,Vicant agreement was signed.
He submitted his application for the post early
and worked hard to sell himself as the next candi-
date. In many respects, however, this is a job
which might not have interested him as much as
his old one, and it is curious that he tried so
hard to get it. In his post-arrest statements he
went to great pains to claim that the KGB was
definitely against having him transfer, but there
is sufficient evidence (including intercepted
telephone comments between'Felfe and Clemens) to
suggest that the opposite is true. If so then the
obvious corrollary springs out: the KGB could not
conceivably have asked an agent who was de facto
chief of the END Soviet CE Section to give up this
job unless they had a replacement with equal or
better access.
This raises the difficult problem of "other
penetrations" which is suggested all through Felfe's
history, and of whose existence if not identity,
we have been informed by various defectors. Felfe,
of course, denies that he ever recruited another
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source. Possibly he did not, but in BEVISION's
words, it is impossible that Feife could have
worked for the Soviets for ten years without having
tipped another source in the END to them, and it
is very likely that Felfe has an idea of who among
his leads became a recruited source. One of Felfe's
last operations lends itself to the interpretation
that it might have been intended in some respects
as a support operation for another CE section pene-
tration. (See the Busch case described below.)
There are also disturbing and mysterious indications
in ORVL traffic and in the notebook which Felfe
kept so meticulously on his KGB and END operations.(1)
In addition there are a variety of names ofpossible
suspects which have been suggested to us through
other operations and other sources, particularly
those among Felfe's and Clemens' coterie of ex-SS
officers. Finally, there is a general and simplified
quality about Alfred's last EEI to Felfe which sug-
gests that they might have been, in part at least,
comprehensive instructions for someone else, but
here, admittedly, we are allowing ourselves pure
speculation.
(1) OWL traffic to Clemens contained references
to someone called Manfred. Manfred appeared
to be a cover name. Neither Felfe nor Clemens
ever volunteered this as one of their three or
four cover names. Clemens simply did not know
the name. ghen Felfe was asked who Manfred was,
he reacted violently and strangely. He seemed
upset and tried to pretend he didn't know the
name, then he somewhat clumsily accepted the
interrogator's suggestion that it mignt
one of his own cover names. Another strange
incident shows Felfe at his coolest and most
brazen. In the presence of interrogators who
were reviewing his notebook with him, he snatched4
up a pen and scratched out a name in a sentence
reading "According to , Schumacher
is a Karlshorst source." He refused to divulge
the name on the grounds that it was "incriminat-
ing"i various hypotheses as to the name have
been made; possibly the closest so far is Reile,
since Schumacher (201-4176) did at one time
work closely with him. (Interpretationof former-
CIA-BND liaison officer for security. EGMK-11493,
9 February 1962.)
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Alfred held his last meeting with Felfe and
Clemens in Vienna in September 1961. At this time
he informed his old agents that at the end of the
year he would leave Germany for good. This time
there was to be no question of whether or not they
would work with an Illegal Rezident. Alfred in-
formed Felfe and Clemens that at their next Meet-
ing later in the fall they would meet the rezident
and that after this they would work through dead
drops. Each man was to select and set up drops
for himself: Felfe in the Munich area, Clemens
in the Cologne area. From time to time they would
have personal meetings with a KGB case officer in
a third country, and if they should ever feel
themselves in danger they could go to the Soviet
Military Attache in some western European country
other than Germany. After giving the new instruc-
tions Alfred went on to discuss the professional
situations of Felfe and Clemens. (In this context
Felfe elaborated to his interrogators that Alfred
wanted him to stay in his old job, which probably
signifies just the opposite!) Alfred listed a
number of specific questions or themes for Felfe
to work on for their next meeting. He gave Felfe
a typewritten reminder which listed: steps taken
by the END after August 13th as a result of the
changed Berlin situation; explanation of certain
END operational moves against various Soviet
officials in West Germany; further development
of the Busch case. Finally, in a rather strange
repetition of the obvious EEI which Felfe had
already been covering as a matter of course for
some time, Alfred listed instructions to report
on all END agents; to report the contents of all
cases run by the END against Soviet installations,
to find out more about END liaison with the Laenderi
with NATO, more about END work against the USSR,
and to report new recruitment leads among END
headquarters members (specifically Alfred had
been for some time interested in the END officer
who controlled the agent card files). One would
assume that after several years of being instructed
to report on these targets Felfe
would not need a written reminder of them.
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Having noted Felfe's effort to get the job
of COMINT security chief and having described the
KGB operational position with Felfe at the same
time, we will proceed to a description of the
Busch case. This was another complicated opera-
tional chess match, somewhat on the order of the
LENA case, possibly replacing it to some extent
as an operational vehicle. The Busch case had
as its imMediate purpose to deceive the END about
its own security. Read side by side with a des-
cription of Felfe's effort to be transferred to
a new job and with Alfred's instructions of Sep-
tember 1961, one is left wondering, at least,
if the case -c:Iight also have been destined as a
support in some way for another Soviet CE section
penetration. The Busch case is actually two
cases, one superimposed on the other. It is a
fascinating example of multiple deception - the
more so since it was not entirely successful.
On one level it involved a KGB/CE officer (call-
ing himself "Heinz") running a deception opera-
tion against the END. He had begun with a straight
penetration attempt, discovered it to be controlled
by the END and then tried to salvage what he could
by using the connection to pass deception about
the state of KGB information on the BND. At the
other end of the operation was a END field case
officer named Friedrich Busch who worked under
the direction of various 3ND Soviet CE section
officers to counter the KGB operation with decep-
tion material on the END. At a certain point in
the operation, when both the END and the KGB
seemed to think it unworthy of further attention,
Felfe and Alfred entered - behind the scenes - to
direct it in ways which suited their own purpose.
On the BND side Busch was of course unwitting of
Felfe's inimical role. On the KGE side the KGB
case officer "Heinz" was allegedly unwitting of
Alfred's role. Felfe quotes Alfred as saying,
"Busch's case officer has no idea of the real
situation", and did not even know Alfred person-
ally. This was a had situation in some ways:
Alfred's marionette did not always dance the way
Alfred wanted him to. Consequently Alfred had to
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ask Felfe to make his BND puppet Busch provoke
the desired responses from the other KGB officer.
Felfe was forced at the same time to the very
crude and dangerous business of having to make
fabrications to his superiors about Busch's
operation. This was Felfe's last great plot:
he was arrested in the middle of it and we have
no way of knowing exactly where it was supposed
to take him. The essential purpose as stated4'37a-agN
was to set up a BND staff officer for KGB re-
cruitment as a BND deception against the KGB.
We conjecture that it had to do in some way,
however, with getting another real KGB staff
penetration. A macabre touch of humor in the
files is a remark from a BND security officer,
before Felfe's arrest, to the effect that Felfe's
handling of the Busch operation was so strange
it wouldn't even be surprising if Felfe were to
suggest himself as the target for KGB recruitment! (1)
We would like to describe this operation in detail
because at nearly each stage of its development
it was replete with signs of danger, which should
have been heeded by an alert Western service.
Unfortunately, the use of multiple cryptonyms
to disguise sources and agents and the fierce
compartmentation in the BND in this, as in the
LENA case and many others, prevented anyone from
putting two and two together for a long time. To
make sure that no one could arrive at the proper
conclusions in this case, Felfe charged out all
the pertinent file material to himself and no one
else had access to it.
Friedrich Busch was another old Gestapo
friend of Clemens from wartime days in Italy.
He was also an old acquaintance of Oscar Reile
and the protege of Carl Schuetz - Clemens' former
chief in Cologne. Clemens recruited Busch for
the Gehlen Organization in 1951 as he had Schuetz -
and subsequently Busch worked for a time in GV"L"
(1) @Fleming to CIA Liaison Officer. (EGMA-56011,
5 September 1961.)
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with aeile and Felfe. His professional history is
cloudy at best: while a GV"L" case officer he
appears to have tried to run a Soviet double agent
case without informing his BND superiors. (1) When
the deception was uncovered he gave a rather lame
excuse and was transferred to a non-sensitive job
in a field debriefing office. He is described as
a weak man who cries under pressure and not partic-
ularly "quick on his feet". Our files contain a
note that Felfe tried at some point to get him a
staff position in Headquarters, but was unsuccess-
ful.
In early 1956 Oscar aeile brought Busch into
an extensive la,11 deception operation known by the
BND cryptonym, '2ANCPTIKUN.. The first player to fill
the lead role in 17,ANOPTIKUM was General Friedrich
Panzinger, former deputy chief of aSHA IVa. He had
been in charge of Rote Kapelle investigations for
a while, later Chief of SD Ostland (Baltic States
and Belorussia). In 1947 he had been captured by
(1) Busch,s double agent operation was called
UJDROLL_JRY-15, a typical Soviet operation for
the period and possibly significant for the
early history of this case: the brother-in-
law of a Gehlen employee had run a sort of
service in the immediate post-war years assist-
ing former SD personnel to cover their tracks
and to find gainful employment. The HGB in
Vienna caught on to him and with this compro-
mising knowledge managed to recruit the Gehlen
employee. The Gehlen man wanted to report the
Soviet recruitment and found himself with Busch
as a case officer. Why Busch really tried to
play him back without telling anyone is not in
CIA records, nor is any description of the
content of the play-back which lasted nearly
two years. As of March 1955 a Gehlen Organiza-
tion security officer was planning to investi-
gate. (EGLA-13018, 11 March 1955.)
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the Soviets in Vienna and imprisoned in. the Soviet
Union on charges of war crimes committed against a
Soviet officer. In 1956 he was released on the
promise that he would work for the KGB "to pene-
trate the BND and to report on political events
in the Federal Republic." Upon his return .to
Germany in early 1956 he went directly to an old
friend, the President of the Bavarian LfV, who in
turn passed 77dm on to the BND in the person of
Reile. Reile's plan was to put Panzinger in con-
tact with an ostensible BND net (real people, fab-
ricated activity), about which he could then report
to the KGB. When Panzinger happened to become re-
acquainted with Busch, whom he had known before
the war, Rene allowed Panzinger to mention this
to the KGB. Panzinger did not know Busch was a
BND man until the KGB wrote back telling him to
be wary of Busch. Reile then made Busch Panzinger's
BND case officer and a deliberate sitting duck for
the KGB. The case was handled in a desultory
fashion by Reile for a while, then by another
colleague, until the fall of 1958 when it was
given to Felfe. During this two year period
nothing much happened. Indeed,Panzinger's KGB
case officer, Heinz, exhibited all the reactions
of a very suspicious man. Panzinger met him only
once during the two years (in one of the li".NA
case safehouses in Berlin!) and the whole pro-
ceeding had come to a near standstill when Felfe
moved in.
At this point the case, picked up spectacularly.
Felfe proposed to the CF section to make Panzinger
more attractive to the ROB: he had Panzinger tell
them that Busch had asked him to serve as a letter
drop for the BND and also that Busch had been made
chief of a special 3RD office handling Baltic and
North Sea operations. In February 1959 he had
Panzinger ask the KGB for a meeting. As reason
for the meeting Panzinger was to discuss the war
crimes charges which hung over his head. The
Soviets had neleased Panzinger without giving him
an amnesty and the old General lived in fear of
arrest. Actually, sometime previously the 3RD had
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arranged with the Bavarian LfV President to brief
a high offictal of the Bavarian Justice Ministry
so that no action would be taken against Panzinger
without prior warning of the END. Unfortunately,
only one such person in the Justice Ministry was
briefed. The KGB apparently knew of it, however,
since once before when Panzinger had discussed
the charges with his KGB case officer, the latter
had assured him that his case would never come up.
Nevertheless, under Felfe's direction Panzinger
asked the KGB case officer for a meeting to discuss
this problem. He traveled to Berlin on 22 February
1959 where the KGB case officer told him he would
see what he could do about the charges, but did
not offer much hope for an amnesty. At the same
time he said he thought Panzinger's case merited
a more "secure" communications arrangement and
instructed him in the methods of OWVL reception.
(Felfe told his Western colleagues with great
interest that this was the first END double agent
to receive OWVL from t1r1 KGB; he added that he
thought he might give' l to Hofe of the LENA
operation in case the Berlin situation deteri-
orated!)
Now strange things began to happen in Panzinger's
operation. In July he received a KGB instruction
via OWVL to find out if the HVA defector Max Heim
had been a END or a BfV agent prior to his defection.
This was in many ways a very indiscreet question
on the part of the KGB. The CIA liaison officer
for security matters, who was already hot on Felfe's
trail at this time, wrote the following comments in
August 1959:
"Unless Panzinger has grossly overstated
his BND connections to the Soviets it is strange
that the KGB seems to think he might have access
to this information. If the KGB actually asked
the question this could be an indication that
the KGB knows Panzinger has been turned and
calculates that the END will supply a true
answer. On the other hand...consider the
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possibility that (Felfe) has been asked this
question ... It is also interesting why the
KGB did not ask which American agency was
running Heim, since the fact that the Americans
are returning him to Berlin for re-interrog tion
has probably not escaped KGB notice ..." (1)
In the meantime Panzinger had innocently carried out
his KGB case officer's instruction to ask Gehlen,
whom he knew slightly, for a job in the END. He
wrote a letter of application and after an appropriate
interval Felfe drafted an answer for the signature of
one of Gehlen's deputies. Felfe's draft was nothing
short of a death blow to the Panzinger operation, and
indeed there was speculation even at the time that
it was in some way a deliberate blow. Felfe and his
colleagues in the END and CIA had di cussed the type
of answer which should be prepared gak Panzinger's
letter of application and had decided together that
a sort of non-committal reply suggesting "no present
vacancies" but still holding out some hope would be
the best. It appeared strange then when Felfe pro-
duced the signed reply which stated that Gehlen could
not employ Panzinger until the matter of war crimes
charges was settled. The CIA liaison officer report-
ing on this apisode wrote:
"Considering the fact that the charge was a
very painful thing to Panzinger - as time
proved - it seems somewhat unusual and a bit
grotesque that Felfe should have written a
letter to Panzinger on such a literal basis.
Felfe, a fellow alumnus of the RSHA along with
Panzinger and Busch, could have prepared a
less cold-blooded reply We can only
(1) EGMW-8131, 3 August 1959. In his post-arrest
interrogations Felfe claimed that he had
criticized the KGB to Alfred for failing to
amnesty Panzinger when they._weleased him from
POW campiaA* thus prejudicekheir own case
from the beginning!
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speculate as to the reason for the change.
At any rate it would seem that (the) other
approach would have served to keep the KGB
more hopeful and interested and at the same
time would not have rubbed salt in old
Panzinger wounds."
Four months later a warrant of arrest for war
crimes was served on Panzinger and as the police
officers waited for him to collect his belongings
he committed suicide by poisoning himself. This
occurred on a day in early August 1959 when both
Felfe and the one man in the Bavarian Justice
Ministry who had been briefed to forestall an
arrest were absent. Felfe's comments to a CIA
liaison officer made shortly after this are inter-
esting. He said he thought Panzinger had been -
depressed for some time (this was true) and had
shown signs of emotional instability. He had been
clearly worried about the war crimes charges. As
to the operation, Felfe thought that perhaps the
KGB might not regret having him out of the way
since in a sense, even though he had been the KGB
channel to a BUD officer, he was also an obstacle
between the KGB and the BUD officer and now the
KGB could approach the latter more directly. The
KGB would reason, said Felfe, that through Pan-
zinger they had been able to gather enough evidence
of Busch's "indiscretions" to enable them to make
an approach - an approach which earlier they might
not have believed possible. In fact, said Felfe,
the KGB might now be expected to move against
Busch and in doing so they might even go so far
as to reveal their knowledge that Busch too was
a war criminal. (This was the first time this
information about Busch became known to thA- CIA)
While making wise surmises about the KGB to
his American colleagues, Felfe set about franti-
cally in the BUD to cause the very contact with
Busch which he had been predicting. Shortly after
Panzinger's suicide Felfe and Alfred met in Vienna,
where, Felfe admits, Alfred asked him how they
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could keep the operation going and extend it to
Busch. Felfe hit upon the effective and simple
plan of having Panzinger's brother write to Pan-
zinger's old KGB accommodation address saying he
had found the name and address among Panzinger's
effects and was infoLming them of Panzinger's
death. The brother invited the addressee to write
back either '.=c) him or to Panzinger's "closest friend
during his last days", i.e. Busch. In this way
Busch began corresponding directly with the KGB.
A meeting was arranged to take place in Rome in
August 1960 during the Olympic Games. An urgent
OWITE, message from Alfred admonished Felfe to remem-
ber that he was responsible for the safety of the
KGB officer, who was coming from Moscow for this
meeting. The KGB officer, "Heinz told Busch he
had been sent from Moscow especially to recruit
him, but Busch played the role of hard-to-get
intelligence officer, challenged the KGB officer
to provide bona fides and refused to accept recruit-
ment by anyone but the "boss". They parted with an
agreement to meet again in Geneva in early 1961.
Felfe presented this turn of events to the
BND as very remarkable and he immediately set
about the creation of a deception unit on which
Busch could report in the event of his recruitment.
Some people found this a bit premature, but Felfe
kept moving and during the next few months gave
the impression of great activity surrounding the
Busch case while he collected all the necessary
approvals for Busch to accept a KGB recruitment,
to nominate a (real) candidate for KGB recruitment
in the headquarters and for the release of decep-
tion material. He set. Busch up in Heidelberg in
an office consisting of Busch, one colleague and
a secretary. His theory was that Busch would
report freely on this office thus giving the KGB
the impression that they had reached their goal
of penetrating the BND. Ae reasoned that in this
way the BND could keep the KGB busy while fending
them off with deception and at the same time
monitor the extent of KGB knowledge about the BNDI
The files show fairly universal feelings of incre-
dulity at the time Felfe propounded his plan.
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Unfortunately the incredulity did not extend to
Felfe's immediate supervisor, the 3ND CE chief.
He was fairly well hoodwinked by Felfe in this case,
and in several others, to his intense embarrassment
later. Bach time the security section officers
wanted to review the case, they found that the
material was inaccessible; finally, in July 1961,
one of them was able to get into Felfe's safe and
discovered to his amazement that, contrary to all
impressions, absolutely nothing had happened in
the Busch case since the meeting in Rome.
The KGB simply did not appear for the meeting
with Busch in Geneva, and no word came from the
case officer "Heinz", suggesting a new Meeting. At
the same time Felfe knew from Alfred that there
would be no meeting. Via ClemensAlfred sent the . 1
message in early 1961 that Busch's KGB case officer
was having difficulty in obtaining documents for a
trip to to Switzerland. The KGB "Heinz" was hard to I .0,,�A% � 8,-ul
fi 7
push around, however. One surmizes that he was
14,54/4"-
. cm. �
already quite suspicious of Busch and prepared to 0-1 _Ari4
drop the case. He would have to be prodded from
4u0
the West. In May 1961, Busch wrote him a letter
saying he was sorry they had missed each other and
that if "Heinz" was still interested he should set
a new meeting date. Busch stipulated that the
place should be anywhere but France, since he was
blacklisted in that country. Slightly more than
two months went by before "Heinz" replied offering
to meet Busch - in Paris! Now Busch had to write
another letter. (A tap on Felfe's telephone, which
was already operating by this time, reveals that
Felfe informed Clemens about this time that the
END would not give Busch permission to keep a KGB
meeting in Paris. Since Clemens had absolutely no
official reason to know this information, one assumes
that he was supposed to pass it on to Alfred. The
implication is that Felfe had to keep Alfred informed
about the KGB side of the case as well as about the
END side.) Another six weeks were used up in negoti-
ation for a new meeting. Finally Busch and "Heinz"
agreed to meet in Vienna on 11 September 1961. At
a meeting in Berlin on 10 August, Felfe's own KGB
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handlers informed him privately of the new meeting
plan. They urged Felfe not to let the END counter-
surveil Busc7a's meeting with "Heinz", since if "Heinz",
"who doesn't know the real situation", were to spot
the surveillance he would simply break contact.
Nevertheless, the END were insistent about the sur-
veillance, various sections for various reasons. The
CE section wanted to identify "Heinz"; Felfe wanted
an excuse to get Clemens (now in the surveillance
unit) a chance to meet with Alfred and to counter-
surveil Felfe's own meetings with Alfred, and the
Security Section and CIA wanted to surveil Felfe!
To this it must be added that the KGB "Heinz" had
his own countersurveillance; the only man we do not
know about is Alfred - possibly he would have done
well to have had some surveillance of his own - if
he didn't.
When Busch arrived in Vienna, "Heinz" told him
that he was the KGB "bosg,for this operation; that
he had come again espicalrY from Moscow and was
prepared to offer Busch $10,000 if he would work
as a source on the END. (The money would be paid
later into a Swiss bank account, for which :Busch
should make his own arrangements.) Busch modestly
replied that he doubted if he could be a very good
source since he was not a headquarters case officer;
had been in a debriefing unit (ignoring the previous
fabrications about his work) for some years as a
result of earlier difficulties, and actually knew
no more about the END than that which had been pub-
lished in the East Gelman and Soviet exposes of
GV"L" at the time of the great flaps of the early
1950s. "Heinz" assured him (Felfe wrote in his
report to the END" "swore to him") that incredible
as it might seem the content of these old exposes
was in fact the sum total of KGB knowledge about
the END and they were hungering for .more. He said
that Busch was a most important man for the Soviets
and he gave Busch a list of requirements on the END:
true names and pseudonyms of case officers, identi-
fication of agents in the East; all information
about the headquarters, about bus routes to the
headquarters, END license plate numbers; political
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and operational information about Berlin. In
addition to these penetrating E2I, "Heinz" made
several interesting political observations - much
in the old LTA style; elfe wrote them up as
follows:
"It was said that the Soviets do not
understand Adenauer; because he doubted the
deteLmination of their demands respecting
Berlin, and was not ready sooner to negotiate,
since now after the 13th of August Adenauer's
negotiating position is appreciably less
favorable than before.
"The Americans in Moscow were said to
be of the same opinion. From them it became
known to the Soviet intelligence service that
they wanted to force the victory of Brandt in
the Dundestag elections or in a general victory
of the SPD. In this case the Soviets would
then try to see that 3randt would not become
so powerful as Adenauer.
"Khrushchev reportedly will stand on his
word: a peace treaty with the 'DDR' can still
be signed this year and Berlin become a free
city. Otherwise, one can reckon with further
difficulties in Berlin."
"Heinz" sent Busch home with an S/W system, some
developer and a te:et to practice on, and the agreement
to meet again in Vienna in April 1962. In the mean-
time Felfe prepared his report on the case, assessing
it as follows:
"The continuing patience of the Soviets over the
years and their careful procedure underline the
repeated statements that everything had been
stopped (referring to the hiatus between the
Rome and Vienna meetings) for security reasons,
since our agent was especially important to
them. The S/W system given him and the money
paid (500 DM) without receipt support this
interpretation. The interest of the Soviets
is undoubtedly in this case to penetrate head-
quarters or at least to develop the possibilities
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for doing so. For the future handling of this
case it is decisive to determine if, ard to what
extent build�up material on the BND, especially
about the headquarters, can be passed and if it
would be possible to find an ostensibly witting
source in the headquarters for our agent, whom
our agent could describe in at least a few
details." (1)
When Busch got home he tried out his new VW:
practice text was in Russian, which he couldn't read
and the code consisted of several number groups for
which he had no key. His first communication then
to the KGB was a rather stinging complaint. As of
early November 1961 when Felfe was arrested there was
no reply to Busch; indeed none came until well after
it was clear that Felfe's operation was at an end.
In January 1962 a routine letter for Busch arrived
asking why nothing had been heard from him. This was
the end of the PANOPTIKUM case. Busch was interro-
gated by the nun just after Felfe's arrest) and the
conclusion resulted that Busch had been operating
honestly in respect to the BND.
( 1 )
Report dated 28 September 1961 by Friesen (Felfe)
on the PANOPTIKUM case: "Bericht ueber Gegnertreff
am 11.9.61 in Wien"., Attachment D to EGMA-56556,
23 October 1961.
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V. The End of Operation "Kurt"
For almost every year of Felfe's post-war
existence an item of derogatory information was
entered in the files of some Western agency. Un-
fortunately no one agency, much less the BND, had
it all until shortly before his arrest. Both
Clemens and Felfe have praised Soviet security
practices as greatly superior to those of the END,
and their account of the KGB handling shows a
continuing concern with operational security. The
weakness of the Soviet operation cannot be laid so
much at Alfred's door as at Felfe's and Clemens'.
The weakness, of course, was built in: the clannish-
ness and susceptibility of the ex-SD officers which
drew them to KGB attention in the first place also
bore the seeds of an eventual breakdown. Felfe
and Clemens refused the discipline of maintaining
contact via an Illegal, insisted on keeping up
their lateral communications and their trips East
to meet the KGB officers after 1953. One can at
least understand what psychology might have motivated
the two agents in their refusal of the impersonal
and mechanical communications system. Technically
their stubborness was disastrous, and as time passed
their operatttonal practices became more and more lax.
Rhat saved them for so long was the fact - over Which
they had little or no control - that no thorough
investigation was ever made of either Felfe or Clemens
by any one agency. The END, hamstrung between the
requirements of "respectability" and the need for
experienced personnel, did not (at the time Felfe
and Clemens were recruited) perform background checks
on new employees and did not routinely trace them
with other agencies. Instead it tried to rely on
rigid internal compartmentation as its primary
security technique.
As early as April 1950 ,British files contained sufficient sufficient derogatory information on Felfe
to make anyone wary at the very least. Aside from
such general and common post-war sins as the falsi-
fication of Frageboaen, "insecure" talk and informa-
tion peddling to several agencies at once, the British
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4
file contained: (a) Felfe's report on Gerda
Clemens' attempt to recruit her husband for the
MGB Dresden; indication that Clemens might have
accepted recruitment and Felfe's offer of Clemens
to the British as a double agent; (b) Fel,fe's
admission that he had sent a report on the LfV
"I-Stelle" Nordrhein-Westfallen to a contact in
the SED in East Berlin; (c) a report that Felfe
had attempted to peddle to at least two West
German news agencies the charter of the proposed
BfV which was about to be presented to the Ministry
of Finance for approval. The history of Felfe's
possibly dangerous contacts with Max Wessel and
Helmut Proebsting were also recorded in some detail,
as well as indications of untrustworthiness, possible
theft and general "varnishing of the truth". Some
of this information was made available in general
terms to the BND in Januart 1958 when the BND
requested traces on Felfe in the course of their
1956-57 investigation of him.
CIC had a certain amount of derogatory infor-
mation on Felfe by the fall of 1954, mostly from
Ludwig Albert, who had become aware of the existence
of black marks against Felfe in the BfV and the
Bundeskriminalamt through his own early CI work.
CIC also had the report of Max Wessel's alleged
two approaches to Felfe.
By 1956 CIA had what CIC had, although in
condensed form without source description. It
had Deryabin's information in early 1954 which in-
dicated the existence of two MVD agents in the
Gehlen Organlzation with the cover names Peter and
Paul (Clemens' and Felfe's cover names at the tim
but unfortunately Deryabin was unable to provide-
enough details to identify the agents. After 1957
when CIA officers began to Work more closely with
Felfe the file of suspicious, or at least puzzling,
items about him grew.
also
WiTo-fr
_44
�rifts,'
wifl-(< ,04e
The BND had as of 1953 Ludwig Albert's denunci- wort
ations of Felfe, but these went unheeded. Albert
himself made a practice of denouncing many of his ip,itoft., ,P
e
colleagues who transferred from the GV"L" to the
o'vk
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headquarters CE units and furthermore was not
entirely above suspicion himself. The first con-
certed investigation of Felfe of which de have
record was begun by the BND in 1956 on the official
grounds of "Suspected SD and Eastern Connections".
when the END traced the British in the course of
this investigation they received a memo on 21 January
1958 generally outlining Felfe's insecure and decep-
tive practices as a British agent and specifically
pointing out suspicious contact with Helmut Proebsting
and "the RIS attempt to recruit Clemens". The memo
did not contain an account of Felfe having offered
Clemens to them as a double agent. In addition the
British pointed out that as late as August 1957 Felfe
had attempted to establish an unofficial connection
to a British intelligence officer in Duesseldorf.
None of this seems to have stirred. the END particu-
larly. Felfe was "called on the carpet" and asked
to explain his SD connections (a rather pro forma
reprimand we suspect) and Felfe (equally pro forma)
denied them, and here the "investigation" seems to
have petered out.
In the meantime, during 1956 or 1957, the CIA
security liaison officer to the END had been making.
a review of the horrendous GV"L" flaps of the early
1950's. He reasoned quite simply and accurately
that if the KGB had deliberately sacrificed a number
of agents in the GV"L" bases, they did not do so
without leaving some penetrations in place to report
on the subsecuent CE/CI organization of the END.
To find the remaining penetrations one should look
primarily in the headquarters CE section and in
the Frankfurt-Cologne field base, which had absorbed
a number of the old GV"L" officers after the dissolu-
tion of that base. in a memo dated in early 1957
this officer suggested several candidates for in-
vestigation among whom iere Felfe, Reile, Clemens
and Schuetz. His conclusions were given to the
END security section where they were added to the
general suspicions of Felfe and his coterie, but
again, unfortunately, did not succeed in sparking
any sort of investigative action Which might have
tested out the logical analysis.
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The security situation continued to fester
quietly in this way until early 1959, when finally
the emergence of a high-level "inside" source
(BEVISION) shot. us into action. In March 1959 we
received a report from him that the KGB had had
two agents in the BND group which visited the U.S.
in September 1956. The KGB also had an agent,
BEVISION reported, who was in position to obtain
information on a joint American-BND office running
operations against the Soviet Embassy in Bonn and
against the Soviets travelling in the West. The
KGB had guidance papers used by this office and
prepared by the Americans in 1956. The original
source of this information was at the highest level
of the KGB, the chief of the internal counter-
intelligence department who had addressed the
assembled satellite intelligence chiefs in 1958.
On the basis of this information and of several
other leads from BEVISION, all of which had a
definite ring of truth, CIA- began a quiet, closer
investigation of suspect KGB agents in the BND.
(The BND was not immediately informed because of
the extreme sensitivity of the source.) From the
list of participants in the BND group visiting the
U.S. in September 1956 Felfe and Reile emerged as
the two most likely suspects. As to Felfe, the
first step was to pull together file information on
him and on the stranger of his operational activities
the LENA case and PANOPTIKUM - and to try to restrict,
if possible, his access to the most sensitive infor-
mation - at least to monitor him to some extent.
By early 1961 the circumstantial evidence
against Felfe, the positive evaluation of BEVISION's
information in gevrAland the fact that BEVISION
had zIrrivcd safelyr'N.W ae nest, brought CIA to the
point where it felt it must inform the BND. when
General Gehlen was told in February 1961 of the
specific report about two KGB agents in the group
which visited the U.S. in 1956, he immediately nominated
Felfe as his own major suspect! He set up a small
special task force to investigate BEVISION's leads
in the BND. Now, with the impetus of information
from "the horse's mouth" the new investigation picked
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up rapidly where it had left off six years previously.
A tap was placed on Felfe's telephone in mid-March
1961 and from this point on the KGB's operation
"Kurt" unraveled rapidly. The first lead came from
a remark of Clemens who complained to Felfe about the
high cost of his phone calls to Felfe: if these had
been official calls there would have been no need to
complain. The END then began te look at Clemens more
closely and discovered that he was in correspondence
with his daughter in Dresden via a third person
(Tiebel) even though he went to great pains to give
the public impression that he had no connection with
his East German family. The END security team also
discovered that Felfe had been falsifying his expense
accounting: they noticed his relatively high standard
of living, including a weekend house built, suspiciously
it seemed, right on the Austrian border. In the summer
of 1961 Felfe began dropping remarks about having re-
ceived a large bequest from a recently deceased aunt
in the U.S. CIA checked and found the aunt very much
alive and that there was no record of her having made
any foreign money transaction. Indeed, a few weeks
later she applied for a passport to make a trip to
Germany to visit Felfe and Felfe began mentioning a
loan instead of a bequest.
During the course of the spring and summer of
1961 telephone coverage on both Felfe and Clemens
revealed that they were definitely in clandestine
operational contact with each other on business matters
which could not be identified with official Gehlen
operations. They spoke quite openly - very "insecurely"-
about Gehlen affairs on the telephone, but double talked
certain other matters. It was also evident that they
were corresponding with each other on operational
matters of some kind although they had no official
BND reason to do so. Mail coverage was placed on
Felfe. By piecing together various scraps and shavings
from the taps and from close observation of Felfe, the
END security officer was able to establish a significant
pattern of action on Felfe's part. It became clear that
Felfe was always extra curious and aggressive just after
his bimonthly trips to Cologne. (The investigator
drew up an impressive analysis showing how Felfe pushed
for information on a subject not normally of7iirect-
concern to him - namely the whereabouts of an engine
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recovered by the END from wreckage of a Czech owned
IL-18 which had crashed in Bavaria - at a time when
normal interest in the air crash had died down, but
just after one of Felfe's trips to Cologne. Felfe
later admitted that the whereabouts of the IL-18
engine had been an urgent EEI from Alfred.) The
investigators reached the conclusion that Felfe was
receiving his EEI in Cologne via Clemens, who served
as a communications link to the East. In August
three very damning telephone intercepts revealed
that Clemens had been "called" and asked to find
out from Felfe what had happened in the Pripoltsev
affair. Felfe told Clemens that he had written
something about it the previous day, which would
be "over there" the following day. By early October
it was clear to monitors that Clemens was receiving
OWVL, and they were able to establish his frequencies
and schedules (every Saturday at noon, alternate
repeat on Mondays at 1700 hours). Several messages
were subsequently broken when Clemens relinquished
his OTPs.
In addition to this form of observation,Felfe's
more extraordinary operational behavior was being
scrutinized as never before. In the LENA case a full
scale security review was ordered - the reviewer
unaware of the pressing reasons for it, however.
Within two months after this order was given the
slippery principal of the LENA case, Hofe, announced
that the Soviet's had lost interest in him and turned
him over to the MfS. In Felfe's safe evidence was
found that he had falsified official Registry records
on the LENA case. In the PANOPTIKUM case both CIA
and END investigators watched nervously as Felfe and
Clemens prepared to accompany Busch to the 9 September
1961 meeting with the KGB in Vienna. A successfully
discreet surveillance of Felfe in Vienna by CIA re-
vealed that he took extreme evasive tactics when
leaving his hotel at a time when no activity was
scheduled for Busch (e.g. to go to his own meeting
with Alfred).
By the end of October 1961 the evidence from
telephone intercepts was convincing enough to prompt
the END to seek the opinion of the Attorney General's
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office as to the chances for taking executive action
against Felfe. On 19 October the State Attorney
advised that none of the tapping evidence was
juridically useful so far, but he advised to con-
tinue te investigation. On the 28th of October
a series of very provocative telephone calls were
recorded between Clemens and Felfe. From these calls
it emerged that Clemens was having difficulty decipher-
ing a "call from Alfred". Clemens said, "They must
have called when I wasn't here", since "several pages
seem to have been skipped". ghen Clemens was at last
able to read Alfred's message, he reported to Felfe
that Alfred wanted Felfe's advice for the continued
direction of a press campaign currently being directed
against the BND regarding the murder of the Ukrainian
emigre leader, Stefan Bandera. (The cases of Stefan
Liebholz and Bogdan Stashinskiy.) The KGB had already
learned from Felfe about planned American and German
publicity on this case, and on the basis of Felfe's
information and with his guidance were preparing to
steal the show with counter publicity of their own.
Alfred also wanted Felfe's opinion about the further
handling of Fritz Busch's operation. Most important
for the investigators, however, was Felfe's news for
Clemens that he had just made arrangements for Clemens
to accompany Busch to Berlin in mid-November as a
counter-surveillant for a meeting Busch was to have
with a double agent. Clemens could, therefore, have
an opportunity to see Alfred again. Felfe remarked
that the double agent didn't know yet that there was
to be a meeting, but that Felfe was about to write
(to Alfred) to arrange a meeting on the 13th or 14th
of November. At last it looked as though there would
be an opportunity to catch one or the other of the
agents with incriminating evidence on him. Further-
more, it seemed certain that Felfe's request to the
KGB to make a specific meeting arrangement, would
produce a response from the KGB in the next scheduled
04VL broadcast. This was to be on Saturday noon,
4 November, or alternately on Monday afternoon at
1700 hours, d November. Furthermore it was likely
that Clemens would be telephoning to Felfe immediately
after the receipt of the OgVL message to report its
contents. Perhaps at this point the much needed
evidence would appear.
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All assumptions were accurate. The expected
04VL message was picked up on Saturday noon. During
the afternoon Clemens made three telephone calls to
Felfe the gist of which was that Alfred's message
contained more about the press conference, nothing
as yet about the new meeting in Berlin, in fact
"nothing special", consequently Clemens would just
send it along to Felfe by registered mail. Thus
the weakest joint in the KGB's communications channel
was presented to us. The opportunity was ideal. The
following day, Sunday, saw hurried legal conferences
between the BND security chief and the Federal
Attorney's office and between CIA and the chief of
the intercept service. The coordination and planning
among these offices for Felfe's arrest was superb -
not a simple matter since Felfe's own "special
connections" had to be circumvented without arousing
ire or suspicion.
At 1030 on Monday morning, 6 November, Clemens'
registered letter to Felfe was officially handed to
the BND and the Federal Attorney. By 1130 the appro-
priate police officers with BND escort were assembled
at the BND headquarters building in Pullach; Felfe
had been summoned to the office of a senior BND
official on an unalarming pretext; the compound gates
were locked, the telephone lines cut; all principles
were armed and the BND doctor was standing by for
any emergency. A few minutes later the arresting
officers entered the office in which Felfe was con-
ferring and served their warrant. Felfe's first
reaction was to grab for his wallet and attempt to
destroy a scrap of paper which was in it. There was
a small scuffle; the officers retrieved the paper,
subdued Felfe. By an enormous stroke of luck the
captureknotes turned out to be Alfred's typewritten
EEI which Felfe had received in Vienna in September.
Felfe refused for several days to make any admissions.
Clemens, whose arrest had been carried out in Cologne
about eight minutes after Felfe's, began talking
immediately and led his arrestors to the place where
he had hidden his OTPs. Erin Tiebel was arrested
the following day in his home town. Thus ended
nearly ten years to the day Felfe's career as a
Gehlen Organization officer. Agent Kurt had at
least been rendered inoperative; but, unfortunately,
this was not the end of the story of BND penetration.
At 1700 hours on Monday, some five and a half hours
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after the arrests and while knowledge of them was
still very much restricted, the 04VL message of
4 November should normally have been repeated by
the KGB. It was not.
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V. (a) Aftermath
By 8 December 1961 news of the arrests was
generally known throughout the West German govern-
ment. By 12 December it was in the newspapers.
The trials took place after lengthy (and from the
counterintelligence officer's point of view, unsatis-
factory) interrogations in July 1963. Felfe received
a sentence of 14 years in prison; Clemens nine years
in prison and Tiebel two years at hard labor. Through
his mother in Dresden Felfe managed to reestablish
contact with the KGB and limbo- continued to correspond
with them7l'om his prison cell. (Ever resourceful,
Felfe first prepared an SR system from the alum in
his shaving kit - later he undoubtedly received a
better system. From time to time he has "recruited"
criminals about to be released to smuggle his letters
out for him. Some of his letters have been inter-
cepted, but not all, and it is apparent that Felfe
lies asked the KGB to sendhim, suitably concealed in
laundry, reading matter, chess set, etc., various
paraphernalia for escape and for clandestine communi-
cations. He has also obviously been giving the KGB
a fairly comprehensive and self-exonerating damage
report - blaming_ as much as possible on Clemens.)
As of the last reporting, Felfe remains confident
that he will eventually be pardoned, exchanged or
will manage to escape.
In Felfe's two major deception operations, LENA
and PANOPTIKUM, the KGB endeavored to act as naturally
as possible. Fritz Busch received a routine message
in early 1962 asking why he hadn't corresponded lately
with the KGB. Hofe of the LENA case went to elaborate
lengths to misconstrue or simply to ignore the danger
signals which the BND kept sending him and insisted
on sending "political intelligence" back to his West
German case officers. The KGB even went so far as
to let him come to fiesermany on one of his regular
business trips at which-0he was arrested and interro-
gated on charges of espionage. He refused to admit
KGB control; however, there were enough inconsis-
tencies in his story to bolster the earlier analysis
that he had been KGB directed from the beginning.
After a brief period in prison, Hofe was returned.
to East Germany in a prisoner exchange agreement.
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The manner in which the East Germans conducted these
negotiations was evidence in itself that Hofe was
regarded by the East as a person of special impor-
tance, whose return was urgently desired.
The von Bonin case was recently "burned" by
the KGB in an ..appareRt effort to aO4te it for
propaganda purposes. In a January 1966 interview
with the Moscow correspondent of Der Spiegel, on .
the subject of The Penkovskiy Pa.pfrs, a self-styled
"retired Colonel of Soviet Intelligence" described
the von Bonin case as an attempt on the part of
General Gehlen to establish a connection with the
KGB in order to explore possibilities for an East-
Nest rapproachement. These efforts failed, said
the Colonel, because of Gehlen's unwillingness to
halt espionage activity against East Germany. He
also said that von Bonin had offered to put the
Soviets in touch with political representatives of
Nest German splinter parties of the Socialist Party
to discuss neutralism and reunification, but the
Soviets claimed to have found von Bonin an unsuit-
able mediator. (Der Spiegel, No. 3, 10 January
1966.)
In 1960 an officer from the KGB Rezidentura
in East Germany returned home to the USSR. At KGB
headquarters in Moscow he told a colleague that
double agent operations had become very much in
favor in Germany in recent years because they gave
great scope for influence. He said that there was
really nothing much that the gestern intelligence
services couldn't find out about the East German
services. Consequently, the KGB disposed of a vast
amount of expendable build-up or throw-away material
from East Germany which could be used in support of
its double agent operations. (1)
ghile it is clear in.myriad ways that Felfe
was not - is not - the only KGB agent of his level
in the Kest German intelligence and security services,
(1) AELADLE. Interview with BND, January 1963.
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it is probably safe to say that his work as a
Soviet agent contributed heavily to the develop-
ment of KGB CE theory. One can see it take shape
in the increasing elaboration of the deception
cases, the piggy-back operations, which dot Felfe's
career, from the relatively simple "Balthasar" to
the absurdly convoluted "Panoptikum". If any
single major point needs to be stressed in conclusion
it is that a penetration of a CE office - the
recruitment of an officer responsible for double
agents - can be a useful tool for any type of
operation against any type of target, to collect
or disseminate. To this end, the KGB is demonstrably
willing to support a good agent to the hilt and in
the process deception plays an inextricable role.
But, such excellent support, such tenacity and
singlemindedness as we can see in Operation Kurt
are impossible without:
(1) A large working capital of agents
at various levels, for the direct operational
support or protection of the source, and more
importantly as throw-aways for deceptions and
diversions designed to protect the source or
to further his operations;
and
(2) The ability to give away information
on a great variety of subjects. This includes
information on Soviet targets of interest to
the West, information on Soviet and Satellite
intelligence operations, personnel and equip-
ment deliberately given to the West to further
the source's operation. It also includes
information which the Western enemy gathers
through its own operations which the KGB can-
not terminate without endangering its source.
As corrollaries to these conditions we see that the
KGB is willing to mount whole operations if necessary
in order to maneuver a source or to protect him and
that for any given step of deception, careful attention
is paid to providing the Restern agencies with apparent
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cross-checks and confirmations. The same is true in
the KGB defensive tactics, where we can point out
numerous cases of a creative use made out of a known
rqestern penetration. This is particularly true of
Arestern audio penetrations and of certain double agent
operations which are used to feed back items of
deception or otherwise to divert us from our course.
It is obvious that Operation Kurt would never
have survived as long as it did without maide_42-Lag
ILJ,Dslsin the END and in other German agencies as
well. dhat really saved it was that in the olest it
took investigators so long to put reason to the test;
that it took the fortuitous appearance of a defector,
or source-in-place, to start the investigation which
the extraord:tnarilycur9te,security analysis of
1957 had indlcatie4d-p�Aen -Ne detective work did
begin it was a brilliant and tightly handled operation.
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� Annex Comment 1:
Helmut Proebstinq (201-311447)
SS Hauptsturmfuehrer in the Dresden SD prior
to World War II, ran CE operations in Holland (BdS
Niederlaende) during the war where he knew Felfe.
Proebsting and Felfe were interned together in Blauw
Kappel near Utrecht. Proebsting reported to Blauw
Kappel camp authorities in 1946 that he and Felfe had
been approached with the suggestion to work for the
Soviets by one of the Dutch interrogators, Max Wessel.
Both Felfe and Wessel later denied this, and Proebsting
when questioned about Wessel several years later did
not mention the approach. Proebsting escaped from
Blauw Kappel in November 1947 and with the aid of
Dutch friends (presumably former sources of his
during the occupation) he assumed the identity of
one Dirk Kruiff and managed to live illegally in
Holland until his rearrest in February 1949. During
this period, November 1947 to February 1949, Proeb-
sting worked for the CVD as an informant, using,
among others, Felfe as a sub-source. Felfe through
his work for the British was able to provide Proeb-
sting and the CVD with information on East Germany.
Proebstina's contact in the CVD was said - according
to British records - to have been one (fnu) Lagas.
Traces on this name suggest that it might be one
D. Lagas - SYMPATHIZER 45, who has appeared in our
records once in connection with work on the Russian
Orthodox Church and once as a security interrogator.
While in touch with Lagas, Proebsting was also
very much involved during 1948 with a Professor Coops,
described as an old friend, who was organizing an
anti-communist underground group to penetrate the
CPN, spread Titoist and anti-Moscow propaganda and
thereby divide and disrupt the party. Proebsting
took an active part in this deviation work and obtained
through Felfe a considerable amount of .ati-Soviet
propaganda aerial on East Germany, primarily East
one newspapers. The British gave us in 1962 copies
of Proebsting's correspondence with Felfe during this
period which contains many names, identification of
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targets and asks to be carried out in connection
with Coops' organization. Coops is possibly identical
with a well known professor of chemistry named Jan
Coops (201-182724) who has occasionally been of
interest to us and to SYNCHRONIZER. In addition
to Lagas and Coops, Proebsting was also unofficially
in contact with a Utrecht police official, (fnu)
Decker, who was also working on the CPN.
Proebsting remained in Dutch detention from
February 1949 until 12 June 1950, when he was sent
back to Germany. In December 1950 he was interviewed
by British Military intelligence officers in Krefeld,
to whom Proebsting gave information on his work for
the Dutch, his acquaintance with Felfe and Wessel,
but omitted the episode of Wessel's suggestion to
work for the Soviets. The British memo of this
interview concludes with the notation that Proeb- �
sting would probably be willing to accept any assign-
ment from the British.
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Annex Comment 2:
Max Wessel
Part Dutch, part Indonesian, born in the Nether-
lands East Indies in 1921; employed as interrogator
at Blauw Kappel interrogation center for German intel-
ligence personnel from March 1945 to September 1946,
when he was fired by the Dutch, presumably on security
grounds. Proebsting reported Wessel's veiled recruit-
ment attempt shortly before this, but Wessel had al-
ready been the subject of a variety of unconfirmed
accusations that he was a communist courier. Although
no longer officially employed by the Dutch, Wessel
continued to represent himself as a Dutch intelligence
officer. In October 1948 he approached CIC-Wiesbaden
claiming to be a Dutch IS officer interested in gather-
ing information on former Nazi and Nazi "underground
organizations' in Germany and wishing to "exchange
information" with CIC. (Interestingly enough, in one
of his first letters to Felfe in connection with Coops'
intelligence organization, Proebsting asked this same
question about Nazi underground organizations. This
may be pure coincidence, but it is worth noting that
this was a typical avenue of approach for MGB spotters
during these years.) When CIC discovered that Wessel
was not an officially accredited Dutch intelligence
officer, they interrogated him. In the course of
the interrogation Wessel denied having tried to recruit
Proebsting or Felfe, but admitted that he had seen
Felfe a few days previously on the street in Bonn and
that they had discussed old times. The British files
go a little further on this point and state that
Wessel tried to recruit Felfe again at this meeting
allegedly for a Dutch intelligence officer named
Horstmann.
When questioned on these contacts - Proebsting
and Wessel - after his arrest in 1961 Felfe made
significant efforts to avoid any comment.
For references please see, in addition to the
relevant 201 files, Volume XIV of U.-I-DROWSY Ops Chrono,
British records sent under EGMA-58737, 10 May 1962.
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Annex Comment 3:
Recruitment
There is a great deal in Clemens' and Felfe's
own admissions about their early post-war years which
suggests that Felfe might have been recruited by the
MGB in East Germany sometime in the '40's rather than
the '50's. Interestingly enough when BEVISION read
Felfe's testimony he came immediately to this con-
clusion also. He said he thought Felfe had probably
been recruited while working for the British and
traveling to the East. Our best guess is that this
would have been in 1948 when he was allegedly arrested
by the VoPo and released by a benefactor in the
Education Ministry. BEVISION surmised that it was
probably Felfe who spotted Clemens to the MGD, which
then assigned the "recruitment" of Felfe to Clemens
as a test. Clemens was probably never the wiser.
BEVISION stated that he thought the Soviets did not
employ this technique of "concealed recruitment" (the
writer's terminology) too often, but claimed to have
seen it often enough to be completely familiar with
the method. Certainly Clemens' account of his recruit
ment of Felfe makes Felfe seem as though he had been
waiting for it with open arms.
To add to these speculations of BEVISION - and,
indeed, several other observers - are certain curious
parallels in an important deception case, the LENA
case (see discussion in main text). LENA was a double
agent ostensibly controlled by the BND, actually by
the KGB. He was set up by the KGB primarily to
provide Felfe with cover and mobility for carrying
out KGB tasks within the Gehlen Organization. In
very many res?ects this case was a sort of overt
shadow play of Felfe's secret Soviet career. Many
of the techniques and maneuvers used by the KGB with
Felfe seem to have been tried out at some time or
another with LENA. For this reason an example of the
concealed recruitment method which appears fairly
early in the LENA case is worth noting. LENA reported
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to the BND in early 1954 that he had spotted a
close business colleague of his for the KGB. He
said that the KGB case officer told him he would
recruit LENA's colleague and then instructed him
to recruit LENA in turn as a subsource. LENA should
pretend to accept the approach without admitting
that he already was a Soviet agent and responsible
for the other man's recruitment in the first place.
In this way the KGB would have an excellent double
check on the new agent and LENA himself would enjoy
a slightly greater degree of security since he and
the other man were very close professional colleagues.
(Readers familiar with the LENA case will recognize
here an episode involving Dr. Scurla of the Verlag
der Nation.)
More than just parallel are Felfe's and LENA's
experiences with a KGB spotting mechanism in the
East German Ministry of Education. ghen Felfe (as
a British agent posing as a communist student) attended
a KPD function in East Berlin in August 1948, he re-
ceived an invitation from an official concerned with
student affairs named Herbert Theuerkauf to stay on
and attend a two-week interzonal KPD course at the
University of Jena. It was at some point during this
visit that Felfe says he was arrested by the VoPo and
later rescued by Theuerkauf. Theuerkauf's chief in
the Ministry of Education was one Rudolf Boehm, who
during the early 1950's became notorious in the
intelligence community in Germany as an HIS spotter
and possible principal agent. He was even thus black-
listed in a Gehlen Organization handbook of Soviet
agents. He later became LENA's chief in the East
German Office, for Literature and Publishing (Literatur
und Verlagswesen), and when LENA became a KGB-Gehlen
double agent in early 1954, he reported that it was
Boehm who had put him in touch with the KGB.
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Annex Comment 4:
Wilhelm Krichbaum (201-24823)
Schuetzpolizei member Dresden, 1933; Geheimefeld-
polizei, Abwehr/II, RSHA/I and IV during World War II.
Served as a witness at Nuremberg for twenty months in
1947-48, entered the Gehlen Organization in February
1950 as chief instructor of special training for CI
officers, later head of field unit, BV/Sued of GV"L",
July 1951. Became chief of BV/Bayern of GV"L" in
February 1952; relieved in April for incompetence as
result of Ponger-Verber case and assigned to innocuous
CI jobs. Died in 1957.
Krichbaum had some sort of contact to MGB/Dresden
in 1946 according to BND security investigators. He
was not-spected of Soviet agent activity by the BND
until 190, however, when AELADLE provided a descrip-
tion of a KGB agent whose background paralleled that
of Krichbaum. Krichbaum was investigated by the END
in 1953 as- a result of the revelation that Kurt Ponger
had been Using him to collect information on the Gehlen
Organization for the Soviets. Kurt Ponger and Krich-
baum had been, acquainted since Nuremberg days and
during 1952 Poilger had been using Krichbaum as a
source. The/goal of Ponger's operation was apparently
to place in/the Gehlen Organization someone (Willi
Hoettl) whom the MGB hoped would be able to rise to
a controlling position within it. Ponger hoped that
Krichbaum could help in hiring Hoettl for the Gehlen
Organization, although Krichbaum had no success as of
the time of Ponger's arrest. Ponger said he had sus-
pected Krichbaum of being a Soviet agent; Krichbaum
said he had not suspected Ponger, however. The result
was the conclusion that Krichbaum had been an innocent
incompetent who had been used unwittingly by Ponger.
It is interesting to note that in the Gehlen Organi-
zation's report to CIA concerning Krichbaum during
the Ponger-Verber investigations, there is the state-
ment that Krichbaum had not reruited anyone for the
Gehlen Organization. (Reference: PULL-5344, 2 April
1953.)
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Annex Comment 5:
Oscar Reile (201-10590)
Along with Felfe, Reile has appeared as a prime
suspect for KGB penetration described by both BE-
VISION and AELADLE. He was the subject of a covert
investigation by the BND but unfortunately no infor-
mation was produced by it which qualified legally as
evidence of treason. (Under German law this practi-
cally means that the suspect has to be caught in
frac:Tr-ante.) However, the END and CIA officers who
were concerned with Reile's case are personally per-
suaded by the circumstantial evidence available that
Reile is a long-standing KGB agent. Reile was re-
tired from the END in August 1963, but still remains
very much a target of CIA/CE interest.
Reile was born in West Prussia in 1896. After
service in the Reichswehr in World War I and intern-
ment in a British POW camp, he entered the Danzig
Police force. In 1934 he joined the Abwehr, posted
first to Kassel, then Trier. During World War II he
was Commander of Abwehr in Paris (Leitstelle III West
fuer Frontaufklaeruno) from which base he ran CE
operations against the Allies in France, Spain and
North Africa. A notation by, Reile on one of his
personal history records states that he traveled to
the USSR "as a soldier" sometime between 1939-44.
Reile became a British POW for a second time in 1945;
was released to the French in 1948. Reportedly, he
obtained his release from the French by agreeing to
work for the French intelligence service in 1949.
He has maintained various explained and unexplained
contacts with. the French until the present day -
some of them probably "vest-pocket" operations of
General Gehlen. In 1949 Reile was hired by GV"L"
for which he worked first in Trier, then in Bad
Mergentheim and for a while in Berlin on foreign
counterespionage operations. He was Felfe's first
Gehlen Organization supervisor. Reile's Gehien
Organization pseudonym was Otto Rischke.
In the summer of 1952 Reile transferred. from
thc fiel6 -CCI base to the headquarters CE cction
GV" L"
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of the Gehl( n Organization,pand there was responsible
for helping Felfe along in his career. Of particular
interest at this time would be the revelation of the
true facts surrounding the transfer of the LENA case
from the French to the END and within the END to
Felfe. Several END and CIA analysts feel strongly,
although proof is lacking, that the various adminis-
trative and bureaucratic maneuverings of this very
important deception operation were deliberately con-
trolled by the Soviets, possibly with Reileis help.
Reile remained in the CE section working on Soviet
cases until about 1956, when he transferred to work
on Arab, especially Egyptian targets. He also appears
to have been involved in an operation to contact the
OAS.
In 1956 Reile traveled, with Felfe and six other
END officers, to the United States in a CE orientation
group. When BEVISION's lead that the KGB had two
agents in this group was analyzed, Reile and Felfe
were considered to be the most likely candidates.
Also to be measured against BEVISION's information
about Soviet agents who were candidates for leading
positions in various West German security services,
is the fact that Reile did indeed consider himself
at one time as a possible successor to Gehlen (this
was more a reflection of Reile's vanity apparently
than of the true state of affairs). In early 1950
Reile had been more actively considered for the post
of deputy chief of the BfV. His name was actually
proposed, but one report states that it was vetoed
by the French; another states that Reile refused to
take the job because of his antipathy for Otto John
(Chief, BfV), who had interrogated him While he was
a British POW! In any case, Reile considered himself
to be of some importance ,1-1d assumed that he was to
a certain extent a protege of Adenauer, for whose
son Reile had done some favor during the war.
From AELADLE we have various other leads which
seem to fit Reile. AELADLE believes he saw a file
on Reile in. the KGB in the summer of 1951. This was
among a group of files from which AELADLE remembers
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that one of the Soviet agents was a former RSHA
officer in France who had operated in Spain and
North Africa. This topic was developed by BND
interviewers and AELADLE during talks in January
1963.
Finally, a much mor conjectural lead, but one
of potentially great imp rtance, is the possibility
that Reile's Danzig Krip history May tie him into
one of the operations (Loellgen) which BEVISION has
described under the code name "Hacke".
.5J'HH�
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C E
Annex Comment 6:
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz (201-66844)
Heinz' story - or what we know of it - illustrates
the Soviet program to unseat and replace General Gehlen
in the early and mid-1950's. While their agent material,
Heinz, was extremely shrewd, intelligent and capable,
he was at the same time too ambitious and unscrupulous
for anyone to work with. His own natural talent for
making enemies eventually rendered him useless to the
Soviets as a serious candidate for high-level office
in West Germany, but the KGB did try to salvage their
connection with him for the purpose of .creating a
scandal.
Heinz was born. in Frankfurt/Main in 1899. As a
young man he had been a member of the "Stahlhelm" and
of the "Freikorps" and at various times had written
articles which ranged from the extremely nationalist-
militarist to 'bolshevistic".- He entered the Gestapo
in the 1930s; became a member of the Abwehr under
Admiral Canaris in 1930. Sometime in 1934 he made
the acquaintance of a Soviet cultural attache in Berlin
named Alexander Hirschfeld whom he continued to visit
regularly at the Soviet Embassy until the outbreak of
hostilities between Germany and the USSR. This contact
was documented in NKVD head%Ifters files under the
cryptonym "Khlyust",.Hirschf d"was apparently co-
opted at some pointcLbut--Nffether the association
amounted to a formal recruitment or was merely a develop-
mental operation is not clear. In any case the contact
was lost until the early 1950's. Because of his early
leftist sympathies Heinz was obviously always documented
with the Soviets as a potential friend and aid. In
July 1944 Heinz was arrested - held briefly and released -
in connection with the plot against Hitler. After his
release from arrest and dismissal from his job he went
into hiding in the home of an old "Stahlhelm" acquaint-
ance. At the end of the war he remained in East. Berlin
and was given the job of mayor of a small town near
Potsdam - in itself an indication of some measure of
Soviet trust. In May 1946 Heinz and his family fled
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to West Boilin claiming that they were in danger
because Helnz refused to join the SED and because
the Soviet., had "found out" that he was a former
Abwehr officer. In Berlin he went to work for
various Western intelligence agencies: from some-
time in 1947 to July 1948 he ran an 0/B collection
chain for the CIA predecessor's Berlin Base. He
was dropped when it was discovered that he was
sharing the information collected with the French,
7 for whom he then went to run a more expanded collec-
tion operation. It was suspected that he also had
some contact with MI-6 and also with the Dutch.
In 1949 Heinz moved to West Germany where he
immediately set about reviving his old political
contacts. He quickly entered the good graces of
Ritter von hex whom he served for a while as un-
Official intelligence-security advisor on plans
for the BfV7 but the British and the French re-
jected him as of "questionable character". Never-
theless, he continued to work ex officio for von
Lex and became, in addition, a secret agent under
the direction of the TafV Nordrhein-Westfallen (at
about the same time Felfe was attempting to do the
same thing without British knowledge). During the
same period, late 1949-1950,, Heinz attached himself
to General Schwerin, then Adenauer's unofficial
military adviser. For Schwerin, Heinz worked out
the liaison system between the German security
aPencies and the HICOG Intelligence Section. After
General Schwerin's dismissal in late fall 1950,
Heinz was provisionally appointed as operations chief
for the Intelligence Section of the embryonic German
Defense Ministry (Blankamt). In December 1950 this
appointment became official. The Chief of the
Defense Intelligence Section at this time was Achim
Oster (who at the same time was reportedly one of
Heinrich Schmitz' sources for Operation CAMPUS).
During the next two years Heinz was in the vanguard
of Blankamt-Gehlen Organization rivalry. It cul-
minated in July 1952 in the preparation by the
Gehlen Organization of a 22-page document for the
Press and Propaganda Chief of the SPD which included
the accusation that Heinz was a Soviet agent. The
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politiking and backbiting had become so bad between
the two organizations that in October 1953 Heinz
was suspended from his job and asked to resign
formally as of the 31st of March 1954. This was
supposed to clear the air between the two agencies.
In the meantime Heinz was also facing trial on
charges of perjury.
To what extent the MVD actually thought during
1951 and 1953 that Heinz had any chance of assuming
a leading position in the Gehlen Organization we do
not know. It was fairly widely rumored in Germany
that Heinz was a candidate for the job, and it is
interesting that the Soviets should mount two opera-
tions involving him just at the point when he was
being dismissed from the Blankamt. Petr Deryabin
reported to us in early 1954 that as of September
1953 Heinz was not, to his knowledge, a recruited
agent of the MVD, but he was a target. The old
"Khlyast" file had been pulled out of the archives
and had been circulating in the German section during
the first part of 1953 to see what could be done with
it. The confessions of Alfred Friedrich, who was
arrested at the end of October 1953 after an un-
successful attempt to recruit Heinz, illustrate, at
least in part, to what use the former Hirschfeld con-
tact was put. Friedrich himself is also another
illustration of the usefulness of the thoroughly
blown and thoroughly low-level agent. He had per-
formed various low-level tasks for the MGB/MVD
since his recruitment in 1949, but between February
1952 and February 1953 he had been left alone. In
February 1953 Friedrich was recontacted and given
the assignment to approach Heinz and to remind him
of his former acquaintance with Alexander Hirschfeld.
(Friedrich was to give Heinz a cigarette case which
Heinz had once presented to Hirschfeld.) Friedrich
was then to tell Heinz that the Soviets had infor-
mation that the Gehlen Organization was in possession
of evidence that Heinz had committed perjury (in
connection with a criminal procedure in which Heinz
had been involved) and that the Gehlen Organization
intended to prove that Heinz had maintained a connec-
tion with the Soviets. Friedrich should invite Heinz
to come to the East Where he would be welcomed by
the Russians.
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Nothing came of this first contact.. But, after
Heinz'. suspension from duty on 1 October, Friedrich
was sent back to him. On.29 October Friedrich visited
Heinz and informed him that if he would remain in the
West and work for the Soviets, that the Soviets in
turn would see to it that he would be maneuvered
into the position of Chief of the Gehlen Organization.
The Soviets, Friedrich was told, were at that time
arresting many Gehlen agents and were endeavoring to
have the Gehlen Organization so discredited that it
would be possible to steer Heinz into General Gehlen's
position. As proof of Friedrich's story, Heinz should
listen to the Deutschland Sender on the evening of
31 October. (This proved to be the date of the
announcement of Hans Geier's "arrest" and of the
rollup of Gehlen Organization agents in the Soviet
Zone.) In return for Soviet help Heinz was asked
to report on Blankamt agents. Heinz' reaction to
Friedrich's approach was to call the police and have
him arrested, and considering the extreme low calibre
of Friedrich as an agent as well as the crude recruit-
ment pitch and its inopportune timing we can conjecture
at least that Heinz' action was just what the Soviets
expected of him. The Gehlen Organization - perhaps
not for the right reasons - immediately conjectured
that the Friedrich approach was a whitewashing opera-
tion to convince people that Heinz really was not
a Soviet agent. Heinz was too "dirty" to be white-
washed, however. The Gehlenites averred that Heinz
must have rigged the operation himself, but that is
probably not a serious hypothesis. The fact that
the KGB was still targeting Heinz during 1954 shows
at least that they still thought they were in his
good graces.
In September 1953, just shortly before Heinz'
suspension, KGB agent "Siegfried" was given the mission
to recruit the chief of the Berlin branch of the
Blankamt Intelligence Section. This was Jacob Kolb,
who had already recommended himself for agent work
by serving as a PON informer while in Rumania in
1945 and 1947. "Siegfried", better known as Heinz
Stoeckert, had been a State Security agent since
1949. He had worked side by side with Felfe for the
Kaiser Ministry as a refugee debriefer both in Giessen
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and in Berlin, and he apparently reported to the
same case officers as did Alfred Friedrich. (At
one point Felfe's KGB case officer urged him to
try to get Stoeckert into the Gehlen Organization.
Stoeckert had been begging Felfe to help him, but
Felfe told the KGB that he couldn't stand Stoeckert
personally and did not want to recommend him to the
Gehlen Organization.) Stoeckert, alias "Siegfried",
was unable to carry out his approach to Kolb immedi-
ately, however, because Kolb was caught embezzling
Blankamt funds and sent to prison. In early July
1954 after Kolb's release, Stoeckert was finally
able to see him and invited him to meet Soviet
intelligence officers in East Berlin. At this
point, according to Stoeckert's later admissions,
Kolb remarked that Heinz had "given his approval"
for Kolb to accept a Soviet recruitment pitch!
Obviously there is much that is left untold here,
but the implication, along with Heinz' later strange
behavior, is that Heinz was already, quite independ-
ently of Friedrich, in touch with the KGB. Shortly
after Stoeckert's visit, Kolb accompanied him to
Karlshorst and was given the mission to "approach"
Heinz and bring him to a meeting with the Soviets.
This Kolb was able to do in September 1954. In
mid-December, Heinz and Kolb received a summons to
"defect", to come to the East and remain there.
Stoeckert was similarly recalled the following week.
Heinz explained, Stoeckert later reported, that
these "defections" were part of a political action
operation. Kolb and Stoeckert obeyed and remained
in the East Zone for the next two years. Heinz
stayed only one day and then returned to West Berlin
with the fantastic story, which he promptly reported
to the police, that he had been arrested by the
Soviets in East Berlin, but had managed to "escape".
(Kolb and Stoeckert reported years later that Heinz
had simply walked out the front door of the Karls-
horst safehouse with no difficulty. Heinz was
later tried for treason in West Germany. Kolb and
Stoeckert - the latter had been turned over to the
MfS as a principal agent - turned themselves in to
Western security authorities in 1957.)
Obviously this account is very incomplete and
full of question marks and mysteries. Nevertheless,
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the events surrounding Heinz in the early 1950's
form an important part of the Soviet work against
the Gehlen Organization and an important, though
as yet not understood, part of the history of the
security problems of west German intelligence. Un-
doubtedly there are still "live" ramifications of
this case. Looking at these events in the context
of our knowledge of overall Soviet operational policy
during this period to unseat Gehlen and to denigrate
his Organization, we offer one tentative, and ad-
mittedly simplified, view of the Heinz case: that
Heinz, with all the political distractions which
he quite naturally created, was seen by the Soviets
as a diversion and a decoy. The underlying thesis
is relatively simple and we have met it often before
(explicitly in historical accounts of the great
Okhrana and OGPU deceptions, and implicitly cer-
tainly in the LENA case, to take one example):
advertise your plan or your target in such a manner
as to give the impression that you have failed in
your mission and that you are probably incapable
of succeeding. Behind this screen of incompetence
do your best. Here we may repeat the comments
ascribed by 3EVISION to General Gribanov: During
the period 1953-55 the KGB had two agents in the
Gehlen Organization hierarchy. One was foreseen
as a replacement for General Gehlen. The KGB threw
away "over 100 agents" in an effort to bring about
Gehlen's dismissal by discrediting him.
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Annex. Comment 7:
The Liili Marlen Case
This was one of the KGB's operations designed
to discredit and demoralize the Gehlen Organization
at a crucial period in its existence when it was
striving to become legalized as the official German
foreign intelligence service.
Using information gathered (we believe) by
several penetrations of Gehlen's CE branches, the
KGB prepared a comprehensive document on the per-
sonnel, organization and operations of GV"L" (the
CE/CI field base). The document had the appearance
of a report from an agent in place in GV"L" or near
the chief of .G.V"L" and was signed with the name
"Artur". The content was genuine and implied a
real Soviet penetration or penetrations, but there
were some discrepancies in the use of organizational
terminology which suggested that the document itself
might be a fabrication. The document was photo-
graphed on microfilm and the microfilm placed in a
dead drop at the base of a lamp post in the Nest
German city of Ludwigsburg by an agent whom we
have never identified_
The document was brought to the attention of
West German police by two agents, one whoswas briefed
to report to the police that he had accidentally dis-
covered the dead drop and by another who was briefed
simply to empty the dead drop and in doing so, un-
wittingly, to walk into the police stake-out, be
arrested and thus provide confirmation of the exist-
ence of a Soviet operation in GV"L". The account
of the recruitment, preparation and handling of these
two agents (drawn largely from their confessions)
provides some excellent examples of tactical decep-
tion techniques. In general it should be noted that
both agents were of very low calibre - too low to
possibly be used in an intelligence operation;
both had already been lown in one capacity or another
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to various Western intelligence agencies. The KGB
presumably used them in the Lilli Marlen operation
not only in spite of their lbw agent quality but
because of it! Their handling exhibits meticulous
attention to problems of compartmentation.
The Agents:
"The Informer": Bodo Fromm, born in 1915, was
a former Wehrmacht Lieutenant from the Dresden area.
He joined the Fighting Group against Inhumanity in
early 1951, was caught distributing leaflets in East
Germany and recruited by MGB/Dresden. Fromm continued
to work for the Dresden MGB/MVD as a penetration of
the Fighting Group; staged a "flight" to West Berlin
when the Soviets arrested his colleagues. Subsequently
he tried, on Soviet instruction, but without success,
to get agent work with the French, the British and
the Americans in West Berlin. Later he was able to
operate as a penetration of the Committee for Libera-
tion from Totalitarianism, a group which was event-
ually taken over by the Gehlen Organization. At this
point Fromm was introduced to a new case officer in
Berlin Who told him that his targets were the BfV
and the Gehlen Organization. In the fall of 1953 all
the West German agents Whom Fromm had been able to
identify to the SovietsAarrested in the Soviet Zone
(except one - so that Fromm might not be suspect)/
and Fromm was ordered to refugee to West Germany
where he was to await further instructions.
"The Throw-Away": Walter Kunde, born in 1908
in Berlin, a periodically unemployed salesman. In
1950 and 1951 Kunde worked for the British in Berlin,
but was dropped on charges of being a swindler and a
fabricator. While employed in a West Berlin depart-
ment store in 1951 and 1952 Kunde made the acquaint-
ance of an. East Berlin customer named Rolf Rhedin.
Rhedin was an old KPD member from Dresden, a long
time Soviet and MfS principal agent, spotter and
recruiter. He was already documented in the files
of various Western intelligence services. (Of par-
ticular interest in connection with the Lilli Marlen
case is the fact that Rhodin had also appeared in
the case of Wolfgang Hoeher, a Soviet penetration
of one of GV"L"'s sub-bases in Berlin who had re-
turned to the East through a staged kidnapping in
1953 and who could very well have provided some of
the information contained in the Lilli Marlen document
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Kunde lost his job in mid-1952, was destitute
for the next year and a half. In late November
1953 he accidentally met Rhodin on the street; told
Rhodin his troubles and accepted Rhodin's offer of
help in return for "favors", to be specified at a
later date. Kunde thought at the time that Rhodin
was referring to matters connected with East-West
trading. Between November 1953 and mid-May 1954
Rhodin met Kunde fairly often without making any
specific points, but was apparently assessing him
closely.
The Operation:
As of spring 1954 both Fromm and Kunde were on
call for the KGB/CE section. Fromm was a completely
initiated Soviet agent and was in direct contact
with KGB officers. Kunde knew only Rhodin and had
no precise idea of whom or what Rhodin represented,
Neither agent knew the other .
In mid-May 1954 Fromm received a summons from
the KGB to come from West Germany to Karlshorst for
a meeting. Rhodin at the same time called on Kunde
and told him to prepare himself to make a trip to
West Germany. (Kunde had to apply for the appro-
priate travel documents.) On 24 May Fromm met his
case officer in Karlshorst and was told that in the
near future he was to receive instructions to do
something (not specified) within a 50 km radius of
his home in Stuttgart. The case officer gave Fromm
instructions in S/W, a cipher and open code signals
to be used for making meeting arrangements.
On the 10th of June 1954, Fromm received a
telegram summoning him again to Karlshorst, but
Fromm was unable to travel until the 17th. He let
four days go by, however, before he informed the
KGB of this fact_ In the meantime Rhodin had told
Kunde to keep in very close touch with him since he
was waiting daily for a telegram from West Germany
which would give him some idea of when Kunde could
make his trip. Kunde had his travel documents ready
by the 11th of June.
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On 17 June 1954 Fromm arrived in Karlshorst
for his meeting with the KGB case officers. They
were annoyed that he had tot been able to come
earlier and said that Fromm's task concerned a very
important matter which had "already cost many thou-
sands of marks". It was crucial that Fromm be in
Ludwigsburg on 18 June at precisely 0700 hours.
Fromm was then given his mission: he was to look
for a minox box concealed at the base of a certain
lamp post. If he found it he was to leave it there
and go punctually at 0800 to the Chief of the Lud-
wigsburg police and tell him the story of seeing a
man put something near the base of the lamp post.
He was to give a plausible excuse for being at
that spot himself early in the morning and was to
say that the man had acted suspiciously, making
Fromm suspect some spying activity. The Soviets
also gave Fromm a. physical description for the man,
which they said was notional and which he could
relay to the police. Fromm was to be sure to
report only to the Chief of the Ludwigsburg Police
since he was known to be very pro-American and
would certainly inform American agencies and have
the dead drop surveilled.
The Soviet case officers further explained
that another man would empty the dead drop, would
be arrested and would confess that he worked for
the Soviets in Karlshorst. (Here they relied on
Rhodin's personal assessment of Kunde's character.)
As soon as Fromm had completed this assignment he
was to send a report to Rolf Rhodin. (This was the
only time Fromm was to use Rhodin's address.)
While Fromm was being thus briefed, Kunde was
meeting with Rhodin. Rhodin explained that the
matter of Kunde's trip to Kest Germany (task still
unspecified) would become acute two days later, on
the 19th of June. Rhodin would meet Kunde on the
morning of the 19th and give him the exact details
of his mission.
On the 18th of June Fromm arrived in Ludwigs-
burg, found the minox in its cache as predicted and
reported to the Chief of Police at 0800 precisely as
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as instructed. Inter in the day he returned to
Stutte