Agony's Uncle

Exploiting an Economy Based on Human Frailty

She overdosed on sleeping pills after discovering that her marriage was an elaborate con. She was a lonely woman who had met her husband while stationed in Paris, working for the foreign office of West Germany in the middle of the 1970s. At an Embassy garden party, she met an attractive man through her friends who also happened to be German. Having no ride home, the two shared a car and they hit it off immediately. The man courted her for weeks and the two were wed by priest in an Austrian manor with the groom’s parents in attendance. The castle turned out to be owned by an agent tied to the East German intelligence service; the priest was a fake dressed up for his role under their employ. The husband and parents were also actors, all East German agents. The wife had been deeply entrenched in her husband’s spying demands and committed suicide once the operation was exposed.

By the mid-1980s, the CIA wanted to warn the public of the threat of gigolo spies. The Agency’s Bonn Station Chief, George Carver, then retired, went to the press with the story of the lonely woman who was tricked into marrying a spy. This occurred after a slate of similar cases hit the papers, such as Astrid Willner, who had worked as a secretary for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “Let’s say that there is a woman in a sensitive ministry who loses a boyfriend,” Carver explained, “or her husband is killed or she has a spat. The odds are very high that within a very short span she will meet someone—a male, if that is her preference—who is very charming, who happens to share her preferences, who plays chess if she loves chess, or enjoys art or music. One thing, as it often does, leads to another. Her new boyfriend asks her for a few small favors. She performs them. He asks for a few more. She is in love. Soon, she is snared, and she can’t get out.” Carver believed this script had been written by one Markus Wolf of the East German security agency, who above all had the advantage of time. Since 1957, the East Germans had kept in place their director of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, to whom Wolf reported. From 1947-1987, the CIA had appointed 12 directors. Wolf himself had been working for the Stasi since 1951. “[Wolf] can plan for the long term,” Carver thought. “He can do things that have no immediate payoff. He doesn’t have to come up with something by the next election.”

Mischa

There was no one more respected in the honeytrap business than Markus “Mischa” Wolf, the head of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, the foreign intelligence arm of the East German intelligence service, known as the Stasi. “Wolf has a lot of brains, experience and patience,” a West German intelligence official was quoted as saying. “But most of all, he’s got the cards stacked in his favor in dealing with an open society [in West Germany] in the same language.”

Wolf knew that espionage was a deadly enterprise and although it was a secret seldom discussed, he was aware that the Soviets still maintained a unit tasked with killing their enemies. There was the murder of Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, in 1959. Wearing a gas mask, KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky shot two cyanide-filled pellets into Bandera’s face using a specialized air pistol. The pellets released poison gas on impact, knocking Bandera unconscious; he died en route to the hospital without ever waking. Wolf also recalled the KGB assassination of defector Alexander Truchnovich, head of the Russian emigrant organization known as the National Workers Union, in Berlin while attempting to kidnap him. Known only to U.S. intelligence as a kidnapping at the time, a U.S. official criticized the action publicly as “uncivilized.”

Wolf was also aware of a KGB operative dispatched to buyers throughout the Eastern bloc carrying wares such as untraceable nerve toxins and skin-contact poisons intended for smearing on doorknobs. The only item Wolf took from this man was an array of “truth drugs,” which the operative excitedly pitched as “unbeatable.” The drugs remained in Wolf’s personal safe for years and eventually, out of curiosity, he asked a doctor to analyze their contents. The doctor returned in a horrified state, saying, “Use these without constant medical supervision and there is every chance that the fellow from whom you want the truth will be dead as a dodo in seconds.” Wolf claimed to have never used the drugs in his operations.

Death was always a possible outcome, regardless of which side one served. The price for being uncovered as a traitor in the early Cold War was very often execution following trial by one’s own government. The first such victim Wolf heard about was a woman named Elli Barczatis, secretary to East German prime minister Otto Grotewohl. Grotewohl, originally a Social Democrat prior to the post-war merger of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Communist Party in the East in 1948, remained someone his former SPD colleagues in the West hoped could be persuaded to distance himself from Soviet influence and split the ruling party. Because Grotewohl himself was a gloomy soul incapable of being turned, Western intelligence instead targeted his secretary. Barczatis was seduced by a Western agent and, as later discovered through interrogation, was assigned the codename “Daisy.” To Wolf’s knowledge, this represented the first post-war use of a “Romeo” strategy by any intelligence service—East or West—to lure a person close to a political figure into collaborating with the enemy. Wolf’s targets were women more than men, as George Carver of the CIA observed, given the fact “that there are an awful lot more lonely females in Bonn than there are lonely males.”

Learning the Craft

After the East German uprising of 1953, Wolf’s biggest priority was the upcoming meeting of the Allied foreign ministers to be hosted in Berlin. It was the first time such a summit was happening so close to home and Wolf did not know what kind of intelligence gathering was expected of him. Moscow wanted a detailed operational plan and Wolf tried to devise something that would flood them with top-tier reports from his officers.

A specialist from Moscow arrived and inspected the giant planning chart sitting on Wolf’s desk. “Naturally you’ll need a malina throughout the operation,” he remarked. Malina in Russian literally translates to “raspberry,” but Wolf thought it was unlikely that the adviser was proposing dessert. Eventually, it became clear that he was using the term as slang for a brothel, a place where Wolf’s agents could entice wandering delegates into loosening their tongues after some indulgence.

At that early point in his career, Wolf had no standard operating procedures for using sex in espionage but he was not about to let his Russian colleague see how green he was. Wolf quickly converted a small safehouse in southern East Berlin into a combined bordello and trap site, complete with listening devices in the sitting room and a camera with an infrared flash hidden inside the bedroom light fixture. The equipment was crude in those days, which meant the photographer had to hide inside a tiny linen closet until the targets departed.

Next came the challenge of recruiting women. Wolf’s team contacted a senior police official who had once headed the Berlin vice squad. The man’s appearance was shabby, but he knew every corner where prostitution had gone to ground in the new puritanical state. He directed them toward the Mulackstrasse district, historically home to the lowest tier of Berlin’s sex trade. Wolf’s superior officer, utterly immune to shock after a lifetime in clandestine work, phoned him with the bleak assessment: “You wouldn’t consider getting your leg over any of these for even a mark.”

Wolf had better luck at a milk bar on Karl-Marx-Allee, a prominent boulevard in Berlin, where he found appealing young women who lived respectable lives during daylight hours, yet were willing to take on disreputable evening duties in service of the homeland. The scheme was simple: send dozens of agents into West Berlin press venues, bars, and restaurants near the conference, where they would befriend delegates, invite them for drinks, and if things looked promising, escort them back to a “small party” at the malina, where female companionship was assured. Everything seemed ready in terms of the implementation, but Wolf’s telephone rang in the middle of the night with an important update. The madam had insisted on medical checks and discovered that one of the girls was infested with pubic lice. “I ordered her withdrawn from the operation,” Wolf recalled.

When the conference began, the intelligence team waited on edge for something to happen. Not a single visitor appeared; apparently the ministers’ entourages were unusually virtuous that year, Wolf thought. Only on the final night did they receive one guest: a West German journalist. Drinks and snacks were served, the women took their places, and then yet another calamity struck: the officer running the evening accidentally drank the liqueur laced with the aphrodisiac meant for the target. As a finale, pornographic films were to be shown. They were deemed to be contraband in the East but were made available through their former vice-squad chief when needed. Wolf’s operative sat in a trance, intently watching the film, while the journalist showed no interest whatsoever and retreated to the kitchen for polite chatter with the maid. By the next morning, the journalist was the only person from the party who was entirely sober and to their pleasant surprise, he signaled that he was willing to cooperate. Technically this counted as a success, though hardly worth the cost or embarrassment, and the recruited women had to be paid and were sternly instructed to keep quiet.

The successful recruitment of an agent resulted in an unexpected twist. Instead of the journalist, one of his colleagues, Heinz Losecaat van Nouhuys, claiming to be from Der Spiegel, appeared for the arranged follow-up meeting. Wolf never learned whether they planned the substitution themselves or whether Western counterintelligence engineered it. In any case, van Nouhuys proved eager and, although Wolf doubted some of his claims, his information lined up with other sources. His career later led him to edit Quick, a large conservative magazine hostile to the East, yet he continued feeding them material from within. He was outed in 1973 by a rival magazine, Stern, as a Stasi double agent, his work from 1954 to 1960 earning him a reported 200,000 Deutsche Marks (roughly $500,000 USD today). Nouhuys later became editor of the German edition of a Playboy knock-off, Lui, which sought to become Germany’s largest lifestyle magazine by adopting a new formula of: “Chest out, brains in.”

Felix

Wolf was far from the originator in terms of using sex in espionage, which had been present since ancient times. He later remarked, however, that if he went down in espionage history, it might well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying, particularly when it came to using men to entrap women. These men were called ravens in the KGB (the women used in honeytraps were referred to as swallows), but Wolf preferred the term Romeo. His Romeo spies became globally notorious by winning the hearts of women—known as Juliets—in order to gain access to state and political secrets. Once he began the practice, he “had no idea of the harvest it would bring for us,” Wolf remarked. As far as he was concerned, it was merely one instrument among many available to a cash-strapped and inexperienced intelligence service. Wolf claimed that they never used blackmail, as it risked driving women to confess to West German authorities and create propaganda disasters.

Women in the twentieth century, for Wolf’s purposes, were becoming useful in roles beyond kind-hearted prostitutes and seductresses. They were increasingly working as secretaries to powerful figures and, with some in positions as senior officials, advisers, and academics, they were now keepers of state secrets themselves and prime targets for seduction. Wolf’s first Romeo began work in the early 1950s. His codename was Felix and as a student he had impressed senior officers during their recruitment trips, which Wolf compared to East German talent searches for elite gymnasts. For every hundred candidates drawn from the Party, universities, or youth organizations, only ten were interviewed after background checks, and of those, only one might ultimately work for them.

In the spring of 1952, Wolf traveled with a senior colleague to the southeast German town where Felix was studying engineering. Felix was clever and earnest, but less than impressed when they revealed their identity and intentions, since he feared interrupting his studies. They urgently needed operatives to work in the West and persuaded him that espionage life was more enticing, certainly better paid than a pedestrian state job.

Felix was assigned a practice mission in Hamburg. They led him to believe it was a genuine emergency so they could evaluate his judgment under pressure. After meeting a contact near the main train station, he was to collect material from a man on a small pier. Felix had been taught surveillance-avoidance methods and carefully studied their diagrams of visual angles and crowd-positioning. Upon arrival, Felix became convinced that a man in a gray overcoat was following him and soon believed that an entire legion was not far behind. Gray coats were simply fashionable at the time, but Felix interpreted every one as an enemy agent. He signaled for his mission to be aborted by shifting his newspaper and the transfer never happened. Wolf and Felix later laughed at this failure once the junior operative had developed into an expert agent in Bonn.

Felix established his presence in the West using false papers and worked as a sales representative for beauty supplies. The original objective was to penetrate West German counterintelligence (the BfV), headquartered in Cologne, but his business trips to nearby Bonn shifted their attention to the Chancellery, run by former Nazi Hans Globke, a close confidant of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Wolf’s team lacked reliable intelligence from Adenauer’s inner circle, lacking even a phone directory of his workers, and decided to redirect Felix toward the Chancellery. There was the problem of how a supposed sales agent who dealt with hair products could infiltrate this high-level organization. Felix suggested he strike up conversations with employees at a bus stop after work. After several attempts, he met a dark-haired Chancellery secretary, whom they gave the codename of Norma. Their growing friendship soon turned into romance, allowing Felix to gather operational knowledge.

Once accepted socially as Norma’s boyfriend, Felix was able to attend outings, boat excursions, and bowling with her colleagues. His charm, humor, dancing, and drinking made him popular. Norma, not considered particularly attractive, was happy to have a partner, and although she was a means to an end for the service, Felix developed a real affection for her. They moved in together, but marriage was impossible for agents using false identities, as West German authorities thoroughly checked marital applicants, especially connected to the Chancellery. As a result, agents were instructed typically to claim prior marriages or disinterest in matrimony.

The affair continued successfully for years and Felix never revealed his real intentions. However, internal intelligence reported that a security group had begun investigating Norma’s partner, so Wolf’s Romeo was recalled immediately. Norma returned home one day and Felix was gone without a trace, never to return. “The unfortunate woman must have been devastated to discover that her lover had disappeared,” Wolf surmised, “but in a choice between saving an agent and saving a romance, I had to be ruthless.”

Wolf’s job now involved acting as an emotional counselor. Felix was heartbroken upon returning to East Berlin, and Wolf sat with him as they downed two bottles of vodka and Felix laid his emotions bare. Fortunately for Wolf, Felix still had the intelligence service’s operational goals in mind and he suggested another possible candidate: a middle-aged, lively secretary in Globke’s department.

Astor

Although there was no obvious reason to assume she would cooperate, Felix believed this secretary might be influenced by another handsome, self-assured man with a convincing story. The postwar shortage of men among middle-aged women provided an exploitable opportunity. After evaluating candidates, they selected Herbert Söhler, code-named Astor, an amateur pilot and former staff officer to the German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Captured by the Soviets and converted to communist cause in captivity, Söhler found his career in East Germany blocked by his Nazi Party past and he accepted the assignment of infiltrating the West enthusiastically.

Relocating to Bonn, Söhler worked as a real estate agent and joined the Hangelar flying club, a place frequented by government employees. He soon met the secretary, codenamed Gudrun, who saw him as a valuable partner, while he discovered that key memos about Adenauer’s contacts with Reinhard Gehlen passed across her desk. They became romantically involved, with Söhler posing as a Soviet officer; an unusual method, but in this case, it proved effective. Gudrun viewed the Soviet Union as a global power, while rejecting the GDR as a legitimate state. Söhler’s wartime tales and his claimed experience with a humane Soviet cultural officer who taught him about the inextricable ties between the Germans and the Russians resonated with her.

They staged the formal recruitment meeting in a secluded Swiss mountain location to allow for rapid escape if necessary and to avoid counterintelligence traps. Their elaborate preparations ultimately proved unnecessary, as Söhler had already persuaded her. Wolf concluded from this that many women, the Juliets, recruited romantically by men, the Romeos, instinctively sensed the true occupation of their partner but suppressed the realization. He learned never to underestimate a potential recruit’s awareness and always to ensure a Romeo had a swift escape route if rejected.

Unfortunately for Wolf, Söhler developed a lung disease and was withdrawn, later succumbing to his illness in East Germany. Attempts to interest Gudrun in another romantic partner all failed; she was let go given her unbreakable loyalty to Söhler. She was unlike other Juliet targets who became attached to the thrill of espionage and could be reassigned to another Romeo. However, the intelligence she provided allowed them to finally begin their campaign against Globke. Wolf credited this initiative with leading “to his resignation in 1963, a net gain for us in the removal of an obsessive opponent of East Germany while simultaneously bringing to the West’s attention the extent to which ex-Nazis served the West German government.” Left out of his account was the fact that Globke’s retirement was due to his reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65.

Discovery

“There is a code word that opens safes: love. Your partner has been married for a long time—to the East German state security service. Please think about it.”

-West German government poster warning unmarried secretaries, 1979

Wolf knew that success in the Romeo operations could not go on forever, that at some point an operative would be exposed. To his astonishment, this did not occur until 1979. When Ingrid Garbe, a West German NATO secretary, was arrested by West German authorities for spying for the East, the media pitched it as a major case of treason and hyped up the “spy for love” angle. To Wolf, Garbe was but one of many agents at their disposal.

More exposures followed: that March, newspapers reported another West German NATO secretary, Ursel Lorenzen, had defected to the East. Lorenzen had worked as a NATO aide for 12 years, most recently in the Operations Directorate, where she had access to war plans and other sensitive materials. Another secretary in NATO from Belgium, Imelda Verrept, also requested asylum in East Germany soon thereafter. While the government leadership in East Berlin was pleased that defections were headed eastward instead of westward for a change, Wolf was in a foul mood. Seeing these women on TV, while it was a useful piece of propaganda, meant a loss of intelligence sources for his work. They would have been much more operationally valuable to Wolf had they stayed active inside NATO.

A short time later in the spring, on a skiing trip, Wolf received yet another report of the arrest of a secretary: this time Ursula Höfs, who worked in the West German Christian Democratic Party headquarters. Wolf initially failed to recognize her name, since knowledge of the real names of agents was restricted for security purposes. Not wanting to risk a call to East Berlin, he rushed home, listening to West German radio and trying to deduce which agent of his Höfs represented.

A week later, two additional secretaries from Bonn were splashed across the headlines: Inge Goliath and Christel Broszey. Goliath had been employed by Werner Marx, head of a think tank, and Broszey had been an assistant to Kurt Biedenkopf, chairman of the Christian Democrats. Wolf noted with glee that Broszey had followed orders flawlessly; showing no fear, she left work with a cheerful wave, saying, “I’m off to the hairdresser’s. See you tomorrow,” but she never returned. She was portrayed in the press as a “supersecretary,” who ranked consistently in the top of her profession in typing competitions. Since she had worked under three consecutive Christian Democratic Union chairmen, it was a challenge for West German authorities to determine what she knew and the damage her defection inflicted. A week afterwards, Helga Rödiger, secretary to Manfred Lahnstein, a top finance ministry official, also casually departed and made her way to East Berlin. “She even took her canary,” an agent remarked from the West German equivalent of the FBI. Methods of escape were always carefully considered: agents were instructed to take plane routes through countries such as Belgium or Switzerland and to arrive in East Germany carrying an empty West German passport. Upon seeing this, border officials knew what to do and would seek out a superior officer who would contact the Stasi through a secret telephone.

Wolf was distraught and confused by the sudden exposure of his agents. He wrote in his diary: “This is a real life-or-death struggle and the opposition is breathing down our necks. On the outside it does not seem dramatic at all, but it causes inner tension and insecurity. One must have strong nerves to survive, but still not allow one’s skin to grow too thick.” The only shared factor he could identify was that most of the secretaries had husbands or partners who were agents living under aliases in West Germany. These men had probably registered as doppelgängers, using identities of West German emigres. Perhaps each woman had sensed that her cover was in danger, Wolf thought. It became clear to him that West German intelligence had cracked part of their infiltration system. Wolf decided that they needed a full reset and made the painful decision to recall female agents along with their Romeos. Ursula Höfs and her husband did not benefit from this and were sentenced to two years in prison. It turned out that the BfV had caught on to the scheme, totalling approximately 40 agents in total, through a process of beginning in 1979 to vet the partners of single women in sensitive jobs. One case involving Gabriella Kliem, a secretary who worked in the Bonn U.S. Embassy beginning in 1974, was only found through an examination of files in 1991.

Eventually, Wolf received vague hints that a legion of mostly retired bureaucrats in West Germany was sifting through residency registrations searching for specific patterns. Wolf formed a special working group to determine what traits were being targeted. The service already knew that solitary male travelers between the ages of 25 and 45 carrying minimal luggage or displaying mismatches between appearance and identity documents could be questioned. West German intelligence had gone further, identifying more subtle traits, such as long hair being common among young West Germans in the 1970s, whereas East German recruits, who were often teachers, had short haircuts that differed somewhat from the Western styles. Undercover surveillance teams also observed post-arrival behavior: Easterners almost always browsed nearby shop windows, unable to resist the allure of goods unavailable in the East.

Hansjoachim Tiedge, a senior West German counterintelligence official who defected in 1985, later told East Germany that authorities had detected approximately two hundred suspected false identities over ten years. Between 1972 and 1982, Wolf estimated that thirty agents had been arrested and approximately ninety withdrawn, costing around one hundred operatives. What had started as one exposure was now a major loss.

Another example involved Helga Rödiger, code-named Hannelore. Her original handler had to be withdrawn due to security worries. Determined not to lose such a valuable source, the service identified a new Romeo candidate, a young agent code-named Gert, operating in West Germany under the identity of Robert Kresse, who had emigrated to New Zealand. Wolf decided to oversee the pairing personally, both because he was curious to meet Helga and because she had a crucial career decision to make: whether to move with her boss to the Finance Ministry or remain in the Chancellery. She sent a coded message requesting guidance.

The Winter Olympics in Innsbruck in 1976 served as effective cover for a meeting. Helga rented a holiday bungalow nearby. At their first meeting, she agreed to accept a West-based intermediary. Gert was introduced, and Wolf observed them at dinner, seeing no immediate romantic connection. The service concluded that the Finance Ministry was the safer placement, and she continued to provide secrets. In time, Helga and Gert developed a genuine and lasting relationship. After Helga was withdrawn in 1979, Gert was also recalled, and the two were finally free to marry. The ceremony took place in Wernigerode, and Wolf attended as guest of honor.

Wolf’s Romeo agents became the subject of intense scrutiny within the Western intelligence community and quickly captured public attention as well. The German tabloid Bild-Zeitung assembled a photo montage featuring twelve women on East German payroll under the headline “THE SECRETARIES WHO SPIED FOR LOVE.” A weekly magazine ran a cover story displaying a naked bosom adorned with East German medals. Wolf sensed that Western services were troubled by the operation’s success rate and investing money into shaping a media narrative: “The secretaries were relentlessly portrayed as pitiful, misused victims, all of a certain age, single and hungry for love, delivered helpless into the arms of misfortune.”

Super Romeos

“All we need are those coordinates, and we can drop a bomb on them and slice right through the West.” The Soviets wanted NATO’s plans for a nuclear strike against the East and they believed Markus Wolf could be the man who could get them. Soviet commander Marshal Koshevoi would cheeriily flatter Wolf with, “You [East] Germans are so good. Can’t you get us some more of the coordinates?” The Soviets were hoping that they could neutralize NATO bases in the event of nuclear war.

Some of the more exotic operations used for this purpose involved two super-Romeos, each with a unique personal style. The first, Roland G., was a master of melodrama. He had served as director of a small but well-regarded East German theater in Annaberg in the Erzgebirge mountains. He was admired for his celebrated performance of Faust in Goethe’s drama about a man hungry for every human experience who seduces and disgraces a naïve girl named Margarete. Highly intelligent, fine-featured, and gifted with an actor’s instinct for disguise, he embodied the perfect Romeo candidate. Wolf had a regional branch office in Karl-Marx-Stadt that was known for devising wild schemes and officers there recognized Roland G.’s talent. In 1961, he was dispatched to Bonn to target a woman named Margarete, who worked as an interpreter for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the military HQ of NATO.

Roland G. was handed a false identity and became Kai Petersen, a Danish journalist whose fluent German was touched with a Scandinavian inflection. Margarete, attractive, single, and devoutly Catholic, lived a quiet existence. Three earlier agents had already attempted, and failed, to seduce her. Roland G., however, was more determined than his predecessors. He arranged a romantic trip with her to Vienna, introducing her to the Italian nudes in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, then taking her to the Spanish Riding School, and closed off with an excursion to the lavish Dehmel café for Viennese coffee and rich pastries. All financed by East German intelligence, his expenses raised eyebrows at the service, but his case officers allowed them given their view of the importance of the target.

Following a show at the Burgtheater, Margarete kissed the agent and declared, “I have never had such a lovely time with anyone before.” After a night spent together, he lied and told her he was a Danish military intelligence officer. As a smaller member of NATO, Denmark felt excluded and required access to the organization’s secrets. Margarete agreed to provide the information he was looking for and they would meet in small hotels, where he learned about NATO preparations, military plans, and insights into their internal assessments of strengths and weaknesses.

The Soviets, with whom this material was shared, demanded more. Wolf resented this, believing his service provided far more valuable analytical insight than mere map references of where to attack. East Germany continued to search for nuclear deployment coordinates in Europe, but never succeeded in completing the full picture, which Wolf suspected because the Pentagon wisely kept such essential material far from its West German allies, whom it considered far from leak-proof.

Meanwhile, Margarete began experiencing an intense moral conflict, as if she were following the storyline of her namesake in Goethe’s tragedy. She had supplied documents to the man she loved, whom she believed served a harmless Scandinavian service, but that had required significant persuasion. Her strict Roman Catholic beliefs also weighed heavily on her mind, making her uneasy about not only the espionage but also the sexual relationship outside of marriage. The couple spent Christmas and New Year’s 1962-63 in the picturesque resort town of Arosa, Switzerland. There, Margarete informed him that she could not continue spying on his behalf or the relationship unless they were to marry and in addition, she needed to fully confess her sins to a priest. Roland G. came up with a quick answer: marriage was impossible because his work for Copenhagen’s secret service meant that he could never live in any place for an extended period of time. He asked Margarete to wait until a trustworthy Danish priest could be located. This request was passed to the branch headquarters in Karl-Marx-Stadt, where it caused considerable agitation. The East German service had many resources, but a Catholic priest who could speak Danish was not readily available in their roster.

East German intelligence eventually settled on staging a fake wedding, using one of their agents posing as a military chaplain. He was trained in the art of taking confession and taught basic Danish words such as “hello” and “goodbye.” His German accent had to be suppressed in favor of something more Nordic. A small, seldom-used church in a Jutland village was secured, and once the coast was clear, the fake priest entered the confessional and Margarete was ushered in to confess. The priest proved remarkably understanding of her plight and encouraged her to continue her espionage work “with the blessing of the Lord.”

Wolf feared the operation would devolve into farce, but to his astonishment, it worked. He observed that in espionage, often the most bizarre schemes succeeded, while the simplest ones failed. Regarding the moral implications, Wolf never felt guilt or shame over such methods. Some operations had spiraled beyond their intended limits, “but at the time we believed that the end justified the means,” he later wrote.

Margarete was ultimately lost as a source when Roland G. was taken out of West Germany due to suspicions that he was being investigated. She continued briefly with a replacement Romeo, but the partnership proved ineffective. Her commitment had always been rooted in her love for Roland G., and after his departure, her motivation evaporated.

Wolf’s other top agent who worked as a Romeo was a surprising success story, given his attractiveness was not immediately obvious like Roland G. He was Herbert Schröter, a man with a rough name and an appearance to match: a broad frame “with a square head” and a brutish voice. Wolf could not understand his appeal to women, but the results were undeniable: Schröter was able to recruit two secretaries in sensitive and useful positions of the enemy. While both women were ultimately arrested, Schröter managed to escape capture on both occasions. “Sometimes the tactic can lead to true and lasting romantic relationships,” Wolf opined, “sometimes to tragedy.”

Schröter was assigned to the Alliance Française in Paris under cover as a commercial agent in the early 1960s. This location was an established recruiting ground for the intelligence service, nicknamed the “secretaries’ sandpit” because civil servants were sent there for French language training. Gerda Osterrieder, a clever and slim 19-year-old was his first target. Their romance developed and eventually he revealed his true identity. She agreed to seek a transfer to the Foreign Office and became a remarkably enthusiastic and efficient informant. In 1966, she was able to secure a job at the Bonn Foreign Office decoding center, known as Telco.

Telco’s operational security was lax. Telegrams arrived on ticker tape, allowing Osterrieder to slip bundles of material into her handbag without ever being searched. In 1968, she temporarily worked in Washington, DC for three months. She also worked as a decoder at the West German Embassy, where she excelled further by passing information on relations between Bonn and Washington, as well as the ambassador’s assessments of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Later that year, she reunited with Schröter in Bonn and continued reporting. After another five years, Osterrieder was transferred to Warsaw and Schröter was kept in West Germany for security reasons. The separation from her boyfriend caused the relationship to deteriorate and she began to develop a drinking problem. Osterrieder found companionship in a journalist from West German who happened to be working as a secret Bonn intelligence operative. She eventually confided in him about her espionage work and he convinced her that confession was the best course of action. Yet her loyalty to Schröter held long enough for her to warn him using their prearranged message: “Go to our friends. It is very important.” This allowed him to escape to East Berlin and narrowly escape arrest.

Wolf could feel his agent slipping away as he received word that she was being confined in the West German ambassador’s Warsaw residence to prevent contact with her former handlers. When two West German intelligence officers arrived to question her, Wolf’s emergency lines “were burning up” as he desperately hoped to win her back. He contacted Polish intelligence, who agreed that every effort be made to maintain her as a source. Wolf suspected that failure would earn a stern reprimand from his counterpart, Miroslav Milevski, then chief of Polish foreign intelligence and later interior minister.

A final rescue attempt was staged. As West German officials escorted her through airport customs, an undercover Polish operative approached and offered her asylum. Osterrieder hesitated, causing the diplomat from West Germany to freeze in terror at the possibility that he might be remembered as the official who lost a confessed spy at the airport steps. Osterrieder saved the man’s reputation by shaking her head and proceeding to board the Lufthansa aircraft.

Once returned to Düsseldorf, she received a prison sentence of three years for her espionage activities, reduced due to her cooperation with authorities. Wolf was left embittered by the failure, believing that his service had been too casual in managing the relationship. Worse still, they were now responsible for Schröter, an awkward man who no longer had operational utility and had been fully compromised through Osterrieder’s exposure. To buy time, Wolf sent him on holiday to the Black Sea. After a few weeks, Schröter returned in a jubilant mood: “I think I’ve got you another useful girlfriend.” She was Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, a stunning brunette he had encountered on a beach. Inventing another false identity—Herr Herbert Richter—he claimed to be divorced, mirroring her own recent separation. During their romance that followed, he was horrified to find a newspaper report on Osterrieder’s trial complete with a photograph exposing his identity. He decided to come clean with Kahlig-Scheffler and she was impressed with his honesty; their relationship continued.

Kahlig-Scheffler worked as an assistant to a Munich journalist, a position of limited intelligence value. However, East German intelligence hoped that she would work her way into more sensitive positions and financed her studies in French and stenography, as well as her daughter’s education at a boarding school in Switzerland. She later took a job assisting a university professor, whose recommendation in the fall of 1975 enabled her to secure employment in Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s office. The secretary agent cleared all of her security background checks with ease and meetings with Schröter were arranged in Vienna, Geneva, and Innsbruck.

Given the codename Inge, she served East Germany for several years, providing insight into internal dynamics within Schmidt’s leadership team and on European security discussions with President Jimmy Carter. She was hardworking and well-liked by colleagues, known for staying late and covering holiday shifts. During those quiet times, she photocopied documents continuously, creating extra copies for East Berlin or microfilming documents for their use without her bosses’ knowledge.

Despite the long-distance nature of Inge’s relationship with Schröter, their connection remained strong. She longed for marriage, and although Wolf’s organization discouraged it, they feared losing her cooperation and arranged another fake wedding. She received an East German identity card in her maiden name and was flown from Bonn to East Berlin, where she was taken to a registry office in Lichtenberg near the Ministry of State Security. The full ceremony was performed, rings exchanged, and the register signed, but the relevant page was later removed and destroyed without their knowledge.

Her espionage career ended in 1977; suspicion fell on her West German control officer, Peter Goslar, who had been infiltrated into Düsseldorf with his wife under false identities, passing through London with British cover papers as Mr. and Mrs. Antony Roge. A computerized sweep targeting unusual resettlements revealed them and surveillance followed. When their apartment was searched, documents were found hidden in the vegetable basket and bathroom, including Schmidt’s confidential notes quoting British Prime Minister James Callaghan criticizing U.S. attitudes with words such as “arrogance” and “stupidity.”

Authorities soon identified Inge as the source. The Goslars’ meetings with her were filmed. A second search found briefing papers for the West German delegation to the 1978 London economic summit. Inge was arrested, tried, and sentenced to four years and three months. Wolf later met an elderly Düsseldorf courtroom guard who had seen multiple secretary-spies and told him, “She was the most fantastic-looking woman I have ever seen.” After her arrest, she discovered that her marriage had never been legally registered and reacted with fury. With the collapse of this operation, Schröter’s spying days were over and he lived quietly in East Germany, “with no more exotic holiday romances.”

Targeting the U.S.

Wolf directed East German espionage on American soil primarily toward obtaining scientific and technological information. Progress was minimal given the FBI’s monitoring of suspicious foreign nationals. The absence of an East German Embassy or official representation in the U.S. meant that any agents Wolf sent would be “illegal” and lack diplomatic protection. The FBI already scrutinized any East German attempting to settle there. Wolf believed that any of his operations in the U.S. had to be especially innovative and flawlessly implemented to avoid sending agents only to become bargaining chips in spy exchanges.

Despite these obstacles, Wolf’s service managed to settle a small number of illegal agents, with backgrounds and names based on real people, some of them deceased. To make the false identities credible, candidates first had to be legalized in a third country with less stringent vetting procedures, such as Australia, South Africa, or countries in Latin America. It would take years of establishing residency in the third countries before they would attempt to enter the United States. They were also instructed to not recruit any informants until they had also spent some time in the U.S. An inside joke within Wolf’s team was that by the time such agents finally became active, “we had forgotten who they were or why we had sent them.”

One of Wolf’s most promising agents was Eberhard Lüttich, who was provided with the codename Brest. Given his sterling reputation within the service, was moved to New York and tasked with overseeing U.S.-based intelligence sources, particularly those close to being exposed, as well as reporting on military troop movements and armaments through his cover working for a multinational transportation company. Lüttich disclosed everything he knew following his 1979 arrest in exchange for a reduced sentence; this included the identity of his West German intermediary and how East Germany was sending radio one-way radio message to their U.S. agents through a transmitter stationed in Cuba, an initiative that had taken decades to develop. Several U.S.-based illegals were compromised through local authorities looking for single, middle-aged men who frequently changed jobs. Wolf believed that Lüttich had been captured using this methodology; however, it was actually a Stasi defector, First Lieutenant Werner Stiller, who gave his name to the West Germans and East Germany never bothered to recall him from the U.S. to mitigate the security risk.

Wolf never mentioned in his account a female CIA employee the Stasi targeted in 1983. She was codenamed Fee (or “Fairy” in English) and it was discovered through Eastern Bloc intelligence databases that she had been the subject of Hungarian surveillance. Hungarian counterintelligence, led by Colonel Laszlo Csordas, had extensively monitored her in Vienna, bugging her apartment and gaining valuable information from her casual conversations, including details that helped expose a Yugoslav Defense Ministry colonel who was secretly a CIA source. The CIA officer and a secretary would often meet after work for a drink; the Hungarians would listen as she revealed the upcoming movements of CIA operatives. “These women would bitch and moan over their drinks and let out their frustration by gossiping about the human frailties of their fellow workers,” Hungarian Colonel Rainer Wiegand recalled. “It was a gold mine not only for the Hungarians but also for the KGB who got copies of everything…”

When Fee was later posted to East Berlin, the Stasi prepared to recruit her by wiring her new apartment for audio and video surveillance. However, the KGB insisted on taking over the operation, claiming priority over the recruitment of Americans. A KGB specialist who could speak English was sent from Moscow for this effort. The other intelligence services waited to see what this “big man,” in Wiegand’s words, would handle the CIA employee. The specialist visited her apartment one evening in the summer of 1984. The audio and video recorders were running as the man entered, claiming to be an American who needed help. Once inside, he quickly changed tactics, becoming severely aggressive, confronting her with the transcripts from her private conversations with the secretary and saying that she needed to join the KGB if she wanted to save herself. Her reaction shocked them all.