Berlin: A Spy’s Guide to its Cold War History (415)

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0:57people that they thought they could trust. I was one of them. So our unit helped them. This is Cold War Conversations. If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to first-hand Cold War history accounts. Please follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss a single episode. In the heart of Europe, Berlin stood as a city divided not only by walls but by ideologies. I dive into the world of espionage that thrived in this divided city with Special Forces and CIA veteran James Stayskall, who has written a new book, Berlin, a spy's guide to its Cold War history in story and image.

1:40We explore in some detail the intricate web of intelligence operations that unfolded, and James shares his own first-hand accounts and lesser-known stories, giving us insights into spy recruitment, tradecraft, and clandestine communications. I'm delighted to welcome James Stayskall to our Cold War conversation. Why Berlin? Berlin, I think, was the focal point between Washington, Moscow, and Berlin. Those three cities were the three prominent players or cities, locations in the Cold War. I was fascinated with the city. I had first seen it in movies and on newscasts when I was a kid. And then I was lucky enough to be stationed there with a very unique military unit.

2:32And it was a formative part of my learning of tradecraft and the skills that I employed later throughout my career. and I wanted to portray the city for what it was from the viewpoint of an intelligence officer. And having 35 years working in the field, I thought I was kind of a fairly good witness to what happened there. Absolutely. So from an espionage point of view, who are the players in Berlin during the Cold War? I think we can probably guess a few of them, but in the book, you've got quite an interesting list there. It's actually a fairly short list, too. I think in some ways you can almost say who weren't the players there.

3:25Berlin, of course, was split. So half of Germany and half of Berlin was controlled by the Soviet Union and East Germany. The other half was West Germany, and it was controlled by the British, French, and the Americans. The same held true for Berlin. Berlin, being the former capital of the Nazi Empire, was occupied by the victors in 1945. and it was split between all four of them and it became a focal point and a point of contention between the powers from that point on. I've heard it described as sort of like it's the tectonic plates of East and West meet in Berlin and sort of like clash together almost like an earthquake fault line.

4:18I think that's a very apt description. I know a lot of leaders at the time were very concerned with what was happening, not only between West and East Germany, but between the two halves of the city. Eisenhower, JFK, of course, Khrushchev was very concerned with it, Stalin as well. And then, of course, to the German people, it was very important. So there were a lot of efforts by the two competing powers, the West and the East, to find out what was happening and to control things in Berlin because it was so important to the calculus of what would happen during the Cold War. And for that reason, that's why you had just about every spy agency in the world working in Berlin, some for good motives and some for not so good motives.

5:16Indeed, indeed. I mean, a lot of our listeners will have seen the lives of others, which features the operations of the Stasi, really against internal dissent there. But I think one of the really interesting areas of Stasi work is the HVA, which was their sort of equivalent of MI6 in terms of they operated overseas or it's their foreign service. It was. And from the very beginning, the HVA was a very competent service. It took a lot of its cues from the Russians after World War II. A lot of the cadre that formed the unit to form the HVA, which is the German equivalent of the main department for reconnaissance, came back from Russia to form this organization.

6:11So they already had a pretty good idea of how to operate clandestinely and how to collect intelligence. And it was led by a remarkable individual by the name of Marcus Wolff, who was there from the beginning up until about 1987, I believe it was when he retired. But the HVA was very competent, probably more competent than the KGB or the GRU, the Russian services. And they had a leg up on the Western services because the Stasi, especially the internal service, was probably one of the most competent and oppressive internal surveillance organizations in the communist bloc. East Germany was effectively a denied area to Western intelligence, much like Moscow was to us.

7:09And it was very difficult for the primary services, the CIA, MI6, and the French DGSE to operate in those areas. Whereas operating in a democracy, West Germany or Western Europe, it was much easier for the Russians and the East Germans to operate. Obviously, no language difficulties for them operating in West Germany and a lot easier to infiltrate people in. Because I think one of the areas that you touch on in the book, which I found interesting and is an area I didn't really know that much about, was the US organization that was basically screening the refugees that came over from East Germany or East Berlin.

8:00J-A-R-O-C, I think, was the acronym. Joint Refugee Operations Centre? Yes, because the reason why the Berlin Wall went up in the first place was because so many people from Eastern Europe, and especially from East Germany, were fleeing the country, and it was easy for them to go from East Berlin to West Berlin. and the Allies sent up a center to screen those people as they were coming in to decide what to do with them and how to help them. But it was also a very easy channel for the East Germans and the Russians to put their own people into those refugee lines and get them into West Germany where they could be sleeper agents and grow up through the West German system.

8:57And that was one of Marcus Wolf's capital ideas, and he managed to infiltrate a lot of people into West Germany and into the West German government. Yeah, I think probably his most successful exploit was getting Gunther Guillaume, who was the aide to Willy Brandt, in place. which was sort of a bit like shooting themselves in the foot because when this guy was discovered, Willy Brandt had to resign. And in fact, Willy Brandt was probably the friendliest of the German chancellors to East Germany. He was, and it's interesting because from time to time the East Germans did not like him as much as some of the others.

9:47And actually, I believe that Wolf in his memoirs actually had portrayed that operation with a tinge of regret because it brought down the West German government and he kind of regretted that. I guess the other thing that Wolf is famous for is the Romeo spies. Yes, Romeos and Juliet's, I think. Even they did that in West Germany quite a bit. They also did it in West Berlin. They would sneak people into West Berlin and they would prey on targets that they thought might be susceptible to being either approached by a woman or in some cases homosexual relationships, things that they could get a hook into somebody for so that they could exploit them.

10:38They attempted to do that to the Allies too, British, French, and Americans, but their biggest successes were with the Germans, of course. there was a tv series called the same sky i think it was unfortunately only ran for one series which was quite a reasonable portrayal of how the romeo spice operated there now amongst the players in berlin there's also special forces there which was the area that you served in berlin in in Detachment A. That was indeed my landing point for coming to Berlin. And special operations, special forces were worked on by both sides to be a key element for what these Germans would call Day X, the first day of the war, if it came.

11:40So we, the Americans, put a 90-man special forces company into Berlin that operated semi-undercover. At the same time, the East Germans and the Russians had special operations units that operated inside East Germany, preparing for that possible contingency of occupying Berlin and moving west to take over Europe. So from 1945 to 1990, both sides were preparing for the eventuality that war would come. So in that case, all things in love and war are fair. So special operations played a big part, as did conventional forces. That was where the main thrust, of course, was. For more on James and his Special Forces career, check out episode 120, our Special Forces Berlin episode.

12:38There'll be a link in the episode information. We talked about the East Germans sending potential or possible agents over as refugees. Now, they also had other methods of getting them into West Berlin other than that, particularly once the wall was up. So I think they had a special exit or entrance in Friedrichstrasse, Strasse, but they also had doors in the wall at various locations around Berlin. That's true. The East Germans called them Schleuzen, or basically slipways, where they could put people into the West. They had them along the wall between West, or the Fensland, I guess, between West Germany and East Germany as well.

13:32But all around Berlin, there were entryways into West Berlin that the Stasi could use to get their assets and agents, and in some cases, some of their officers into West Berlin. Of course, what they probably did not, or maybe they did take it into account, but once the doors were located or discovered by the West, they were also used to go from west to east. So it would actually be used by smugglers in some cases and in others by nefarious intelligence agencies to put people across in the East Germany. The one that you mentioned at Friedrichstrasse was actually a special way for the East Germans to circumvent their own custom system because their people had to go through controls to get on the train to go to the West.

14:28But their method was to go around that system and then just insert their people onto the train through a back door, which they had to think about that for a long time because the wall, when it went up, was not only bad for the Western intelligence services, it made things more difficult for the Eastern services as well. Because one of the stories you talk about is Werner Stiller, who was an HVA Stasi officer who defected to the west, and actually he defected using the door in, or that special exit in Friedrichstraße station, as I recall. He did. He understood the system, and even Stasi officers, they could not just cross on the basis of their special ID, which I show a picture of in the book.

15:26But they had to have basically a permission slip to say that they had an operational mission going into West Berlin, and it had to be signed and countersigned by officials. And he managed to subvert that system and counterfeited his own documents and was able to escape with a significant amount of intelligence, which he passed over to the British and the Americans. But he was probably the most significant defector from the HVA through their entire history. I seem to recall that he screwed up the date on the document on the pass that he was going to use to come through Friedrichstrasse and he managed to bluff his way through because he knew the guy who was effectively on the gate and managed to bluff his way through.

16:25I would imagine that guy didn't last long in that role after. Probably not, but Stiller played it well, I think, and just saw the guy made a mistake and I'll make sure it doesn't happen ever again. and I'll counsel him, turn the whole thing around and manage to get across and out of West Berlin fairly quickly. He had to do some initial interviews in the city and then he was flown out to make sure that the East German couldn't find him and try to bring him. I did an interview with Stille's son a while back, episode 134, which if people are interested in that Stille story, that's well worth a listen.

17:11One of the many parts of the book I found fascinating is some of the details you go into around clandestine communication methods. And, you know, I was familiar with some of them, you know, dead letter drops and a brush pass and stuff like that. But it was interesting, the story you told about the, I think it's a CIA officer who developed a technique called exploiting the gap. Yes, passing the buck. The very brief encounter that he developed for using in the Warsaw PAC countries. Very early on, the CIA realized that they were having problems speaking with some of their assets. And restaurants in places like East Berlin and Moscow or Prague were not really possible because the surveillance was so pervasive.

18:04So he developed a method to basically use screening to pass a message to a friend or an asset. And because he found that as he was walking through the city or through the subway, there were often places where surveillance teams would lose sight of him for several seconds. And with the proper planning, he determined that you could meet an asset within that window of several seconds, pass him something, and then get him out of the way so the surveillance teams would not see him, and that would be a successful mission. And he demonstrated that in the lobby of a hotel to several senior CIA people who were questioning whether or not this was possible.

18:58And it actually went down. And as the senior people were watching, one of them was going, well, when's this going to happen? And the guy said, it already did. You missed it. So his method was proven and they started teaching it. I mentioned that the Special Forces unit in Berlin was very unique because we were one of the only units that routinely practiced this type of trade graph were used in an underground organization. And we had instructors come from the States, known to us only by their nickname, Team 10. Well, Team 10 was actually agency annuitants, retired agency officers who had had a successful career and who are now teaching this kind of stuff to their own people and to us.

19:51So we would practice this stuff on the streets of Berlin. And like I said, this is where I got my formative exposure to this kind of training and operations. And it was quite interesting, quite fun sometimes, and quite harrowing others. Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. Let me go home. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Go! Out there, just kill or be killed. Jacob Alordi. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin. Shoot first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Qualley. Ow! Okay, tough guy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up! The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott.

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21:17And we did it a couple of times. And the British, of course, MI5, MI6 were very concerned with those people from Ireland who were causing some problems. So they asked the Americans if we could send a team of terrorists. I don't think the British had any idea of who was going to come over. But we got tasked to do this, and teams were selected, small teams of about four people, and they were given targets. And basically, the idea was to simulate a terrorist team, whether it was from Ireland or Basque territory, it didn't matter. and that was where we got to employ a good training environment to employ this kind of training.

22:09We learned very early on that the British did not play fair. They would try to do things like give us rental cars that they knew we would use but they also knew the license plates and everything else. So our folks, naturally being innovative, would come up with ways to ditch those cars, come up with different ones, and not do what the teams were expecting. So we had some very good results over there. Most of our guys eventually would be arrested because it's hard to be an American in a town like Southampton or Portsmouth and not get noticed. But we also, I think, demonstrated to your services or the British services that we had the capabilities to do this kind of thing.

22:59They must have thought so because they asked us if we might be interested in working in Northern Ireland. But yeah, that's the subject of one of my fiction books.

23:13so you've arranged a personal meet with an asset in a bar or something now you've got this feature of like recognition or safety signals could you just give an example of how that might work well there there are actually two separate signals a recognitionist signal is merely a way to innocuously show yourself to the person you're meeting so that they know you're meeting the right person. And it might be something as simple as holding or be reading a specific newspaper or a specific magazine, being in a specific location, carrying a specific piece of equipment or wearing a piece of clothing. So that's the recognition signal.

24:05And if you know each other, obviously, you don't have to use that. The safety signal, though, is something that indicates it's okay to approach. And the safety signal is not something that you have to do if you're suddenly going to be arrested or something like that. The safety signal is something that is present and tell that moment that it might become dangerous. So the absence of a safety signal tells the guy not to come. It might be holding a newspaper in your right hand and switching it to your left, something easy like that. But that's the last-minute signal that says it's okay. Now, those are obviously used for personal needs.

24:58Now, we talked about Werner Stiller, and you've got a number of fascinating cases featured in this book. And I think one of the ones that I was intrigued by, because I definitely never heard this one before, was Mr. Gruen. Mr. Gruen, yes this is a tale of an American counterintelligence officer who had a very difficult time convincing his superiors that there might be a Warsaw Pact agent trying to infiltrate, trying to get information from American soldiers. And there are a couple other instances in the book about successful ones. But Mr. Gruen, that is an alias name. This case, by the way, the names have all been changed because otherwise it would not have been in the book.

25:57Mr. Gruen was a longtime refugee who came to the United Kingdom after World War II and assimilated himself into society. in reality was an asset for the Russians. And we believe it was run jointly by the KGB or the GRU and Stasi. But the Gruen was a very experienced agent, a very long-term member of the Communist Party. But he would approach people, Americans specifically, in West Berlin and give them financial advice. And of course, getting access to a person's financial status and weaknesses provided him leverage to possibly use people to get information. So this is really a case of how he was operating, and one specific instance where he tried to recruit an American soldier, which led to his eventual being uncovered by counterintelligence.

27:10But it also is a case of how difficult it was to work in Berlin sometimes to even convince your superiors that there were spies out there. Despite the fact that everyone knew it, people just said, oh, this can't happen to us. But Mr. Gruen was eventually uncovered by our CIA agent, who is by the name of Richard Gordon. And he had basically a fight on his hand. It took him almost two years, but they ended up with the help of the West German authorities to eventually capture him in West Germany. I'm not sure what his status is now, but I don't think he's working for the East Germans and the Russians anymore.

27:54He'd been a member of the Communist Party since the 1930s. So he'd been, as you say, around for a long time. and I think in the book you say it's believed to be one of the oldest and deepest moles in Europe. Over 50 years, I think. Wow. Wow. The other case which I'm familiar with, but perhaps other people may not be familiar with, is the Geoffrey Carney case. Geoffrey Carney, yeah. One of the other interesting aspects of Berlin was the fact that we had a very large signal intercept site. Actually, there were three major sites that were in Berlin. There was a joint NSA, U.S. Army, and also British GCHQ site on top of a place called Teufelburg, Deviled Mountain, which was the largest and most extensive signal intercept site in the world.

29:03And then we had two other sites, one on Tempelhof Airfield and another one down by Merienfeld. So there were a lot of these signal people working in West Berlin, Americans, British, and civilians also. So this was a major target for both the KGB and the East Germans. They wanted to know what we were collecting and how we were doing it. So their major target was recruiting Americans specifically. And so they tended to focus on junior enlisted people. They knew they were vulnerable for a lot of different reasons, either personal problems or money or alcohol. And Jeffrey Carney was one of the guys that actually decided he was going to turn himself over to the Russians on purpose.

29:56He felt that he could do something to stop what he thought might be World War III. So he turned himself over and tried to offer himself to them as a source. The fact that he was also gay may have played a part in it. He may have felt that he was not being treated well within the military, and that's very possible. But the East Germans, when they finally did talk to him and interview him, they don't care about that. They care about how they can exploit a person. So they don't care if they're gay or not. And Carney was one of the guys that became a very important asset for them. And he worked for them for a number of years and even went back to the States and provided information.

30:42And it was only after the wall went down that the Americans were able to figure out that he was a spy. And they actually arrested him after the reunification of the two countries. Which was quite contentious with the German government, because effectively the U.S. had sent a team into the unified Germany to arrest someone who was affected. had he not had German nationality or he'd been given East German nationality? He had been given East German nationality and he was a very fluent German speaker. As far as his neighbours knew, he was German. So this was after reunification and I believe it was after Berlin had been handed back into the federal government.

31:34And so a team of CIA investigators went into what had been East Berlin and basically found out where he was living and arrested him without telling the Germans. And the Germans were naturally a bit upset about that. Yeah, but too late by then. and then he afterwards he served time in the states tried to go back to germany and tell them actually i'm a german citizen here is my east german passport but the west german said well actually we don't recognize that passport so why don't you go back home so he's living what i understand is not a very happy life back in the states i've got a book on my shelf somewhere which I think is a biography that he wrote, but it's quite a chunky tome that I haven't dug into.

32:31No, an interesting case there. What's clear in Berlin is it's not purely intelligence organisations that are operating there, but in East Berlin, there's a number of terrorist groups. and one of the most infamous terrorists during this period is Carlos the Jackal. Carlos by that time was actually more or less freelance. Carlos has an interesting, very interesting backstory and he was from Venezuela, much like Che Guevara, did not like the capitalist West and became a member of the Communist Party and eventually traveled to Beirut to join the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Wadi Haddad's group.

33:29And he was basically a contractor for PFLP doing operations. He had a falling out with BFLP and was ejected from the organization. And he started doing other operations just to get revenge or retribution against some of his main protagonists. One of them was the French, because his wife had been arrested. His wife was a West German terrorist and was arrested by the French. And so Carlos decided that he was going to get some retribution against the French. With the support of the East German Security Service, he came into East Berlin and then directed an operation against the French Cultural Center in Berlin with a bomb.

34:20which is pretty interesting because the East Germans were very interested in using any means to destabilize West Germany and one of their means was to support the German terrorist groups the Red Army faction and the revolutionary cells but they also helped support some of the Palestinian groups as well and provided training for them so they could come into East Germany through Eastern Europe and then using the fairly easy methods we already talked about, come across into West Berlin and conduct a terrorist operation with not too much problem. And that's what Carlos did. He used a couple of people to plant a bomb in the cultural center and then went off.