untold story of the CIA/Stasi double agent deserted after 22 years of service

I used to be bare, tied to a tough chair with handcuffs. Three or 4 burly fellows in uniform are standing round me, one in every of them behind me with a truncheon… ‘Sie sind ein Verräter! [You are a traitor!],’ they snap.

These are the phrases of double agent “M”, who operated for the Dutch safety service and the CIA in opposition to the East German Stasi for 22 years. In early 1985, it appeared that the Stasi could have uncovered his deception – and his true loyalty to the west. He was in East Berlin on the time and the boys had rudely awoken M round 4am. Nonetheless in pyjamas, he was taken from the secure home the place he was staying for debriefing periods along with his Stasi handlers to a van with darkened home windows that transported him, below armed guard, to a jail.

They instructed him he was within the Untersuchungshaftanstalt (pre-trial detention heart) Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, a infamous web site throughout the chilly battle below the management of the Ministry of State Safety (Stasi). M was pressured to endure a degrading and very painful cavity inspection, earlier than being taken – nonetheless bare – to an interrogation room.

His captors intimidated him by pouring chilly water over him from a bucket till the afternoon. They taunted him consistently, saying issues like “You betrayed Marxism-Leninism” and “You’re a CIA agent”. But M mentioned he felt surprisingly reassured as a result of these accusations weren’t particular – they had been meant to impress him. In different phrases, his interrogators appeared to lack proof.

We interviewed M extensively between 2019 and 2021 about his profession as a spy throughout the chilly battle. He instructed us about his life as a “double agent” and the way, in the long run, he was deserted by the masters he had served. We checked and cross-referenced his account and our analysis has been peer-reviewed and revealed within the Worldwide Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. However it’s laborious to know the complete reality in the case of the secretive world of espionage, so we have now tried to focus on these areas that are unimaginable to confirm.

It’s vital to underline simply how uncommon it’s for a former secret service agent to open up and discuss on the report about their experiences. M gave us a really distinctive perception into the key workings of three totally different intelligence businesses. He spoke about points he hadn’t even instructed his spouse about.

This story is a part of Dialog Insights

The Insights workforce generates long-form journalism and is working with teachers from totally different backgrounds who’ve been engaged in tasks to deal with societal and scientific challenges.

M’s spying profession started within the second half of the Nineteen Sixties when the Dutch safety service, the BVD (Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst) – the predecessor of the present-day AIVD (Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst) – recruited him. He was working for a Dutch multinational that we have now agreed to not identify. That profession would go on to supply glorious cowl for his clandestine work, because it concerned plenty of worldwide journey.

M labored for the Dutch service for a few years and subsequently for the CIA. The People had been eager to make use of him once they realized he had additionally been recruited by the overseas intelligence arm of the Stasi – the famend Hauptverwaltung (Chief Administration) A, recognized by its acronym HVA.

Over a interval of greater than 20 years, from the late Nineteen Sixties till the tip of the chilly battle, the HVA thought-about M their agent and he gave the East Germans data – a lot of it acquired by means of the multinational he labored for. However all through this time, his main loyalty was to the Dutch service and the CIA. From the attitude of the East Germans, M was certainly a traitor.
After seeing the proof he supplied to us, we imagine his account of working in opposition to the Stasi is credible.

Hearken to Eleni Braat and Ben de Jong speak about M’s life in an episode of The Dialog Weekly podcast.

A double-cross?

M’s motive in sharing his story stems from his want to study extra about sure episodes from his spying profession. He needs to seek out out, specifically, why his East German handlers, whom he had managed to deceive so efficiently for therefore a few years, all of the sudden appeared to show in opposition to him within the mid-Nineteen Eighties.

It transpired that the humiliating interrogation was in actual fact a mock arrest led by Stasi handlers to check his mettle. However the episode planted a seed of doubt in M’s thoughts about whether or not the Stasi was on to him. A seed that might develop over time to grow to be an obsession. He would go on to imagine that he had been betrayed.

In line with M, solely “treason” inside the CIA may clarify it – {that a} mole inside the American intelligence service had betrayed him as a double agent to the Soviet KGB. Through the chilly battle, the KGB, in fact, labored very intently with the Stasi. On a number of events, M mentioned the chance that somebody like Aldrich Ames, a infamous KGB mole contained in the CIA between 1985 and 1994, was accountable for betraying him.

In all six of our interviews, M emphasised the distinctive nature of his relationships with the three totally different companies he handled. His two long-time Stasi handlers had been recognized to him as Wolfgang and Heinz. M’s conferences with them typically passed off in East Berlin, and generally in different venues within the Japanese Bloc similar to Bulgaria or Yugoslavia. M may simply make such journeys behind the Iron Curtain with out elevating suspicions.

Discovering the CIA mole

By 1985, M was a seasoned double agent and seemingly getting on very nicely along with his Stasi handlers, Wolfgang and Heinz. Nothing, due to this fact, had ready him for the interrogation within the Hohenschönhausen jail.

Whereas M spoke eagerly of the thrill and disillusionment he felt on account of his spying profession, he initially was reluctant to speak about this traumatising “mock arrest”. In the long run, nevertheless, he instructed us about it in nice element – one thing he had by no means achieved earlier than, not even to his spouse of a few years. He instructed us:

It was early spring and fairly chilly. Their behaviour was tough, to say the least. After they’ve taken you in, they look at you. You might be ordered to undress utterly. All physique openings are being inspected somewhat roughly. They threw me in a jail cell, and after some time they took me out once more. Bare by means of the corridors on my technique to the interrogation room. The corridors had been lit. And if anyone would arrive from the wrong way, they’d push your face in opposition to the wall… It was overwhelming, to place it mildly.

He added: “You grow to be completely demoralised. You may’t do something and you might be completely powerless. They rob you, because it had been, of your id and take away each shred of humanity.” Mentally, he recited the mantra: “Hold denying, don’t give in. Hold insisting that as a foreigner you devoted your self to the great trigger, to socialism…”

Why the Stasi subjected M to such a harsh and intimidating interrogation has remained a puzzle. Was there a suspicion on the a part of the HVA, based mostly on a lead from a KGB mole within the CIA? Or was it only a approach for the East Germans to check his psychological resilience, to test if they might rely on him in a tense state of affairs? In later years, he would ask himself these questions repeatedly. The opportunity of treason from inside the CIA turned an obsession.

Both approach, the interrogation ended all of the sudden and bizarrely. Wolfgang and Heinz entered the room unexpectedly and approached him in probably the most cordial method: “Congratulations! You handed the take a look at, you at the moment are one in every of us!”

M was untied from his chair, handed again his garments and brought to a room to clean up. He was then taken to a different secure home the place he was given an award: a Golden Distinguished Service Medal of the Nationwide Folks’s Military (Verdienstmedaille der Nationalen Volksarmee).

None apart from Markus Wolf, the legendary chief of the HVA (dubbed The Man With no Face) formally handed him the medal. Wolf had arrived on the secure home in a Volvo, the favorite automobile of excessive officers within the German Democratic Republic (GDR), escorted by motors on the entrance and rear.

“We shook fingers,” M instructed us. “I discovered him a really pleasant, amicable man… At a sure level, he instructed me: ‘You probably did vital work for us’, however he didn’t go into specifics.” When M needed to carry up his earlier disagreeable expertise within the jail, Wolf reduce him off by saying: “We won’t focus on it.”

The assembly with Wolf lasted about an hour. An odd element is that Wolf apparently put strawberry jam in his tea. As a younger man throughout the Nazi interval, Wolf had lived in exile in Russia, the place this can be a widespread behavior.

The mock arrest and assembly with Wolf had been unsettling for M, as he typically mentioned throughout our interviews. The day has clearly left a deep impression on him:

I used to be mentally put off-balance, I couldn’t wrap my thoughts round it. Though the medal from the chief of the HVA flattered my ego, it additionally contributed to combined emotions. I used to be a double agent in any case, I used to be additionally a traitor.

‘I used to be a soldier within the chilly battle’

Our analysis focuses on the connection between intelligence companies and their brokers – and specifically, how indicators of gratitude and belief have an effect on this relationship.

The case of M is illuminating as a result of it permits for comparisons between the behaviour of three totally different secret companies in direction of the identical agent. We see the various levels of gratitude and recognition that the Dutch safety service, the CIA and the Stasi confirmed for M’s work, from private consideration and verbal expressions of gratitude to materials items.

Clearly, M felt a powerful ideological dedication to the west and had no ethical qualms about betraying the Stasi. As he put it: “I didn’t contemplate myself as somebody who was deceiving others. I used to be a soldier within the chilly battle.”

The CIA was instructing M in methods the People used to recruit KGB intelligence officers who would possibly learn about penetrations contained in the US intelligence group. This operation began in 1987, amid investigations into the “1985 losses” the FBI and the CIA had suffered throughout a wave of arrests amongst their brokers within the USSR. Potential approaches of KGB officers had been preceded by psychological assessments that might estimate their willingness to collaborate.

M was tasked by the CIA to analyse the behaviour of his East German handlers utilizing these methods. The operation, codenamed RACKETEER by the CIA, used the Character Evaluation System designed by the company’s former star psychologist John Gittinger. The CIA instructed M to watch the behaviour of Wolfgang and Heinz as a result of the Stasi and KGB collaborated intently.

Paradoxically, M bonded most with these two handlers that he was deceiving. Their conferences at all times passed off behind the Iron Curtain and the 2 East Germans confirmed their appreciation for M’s work on quite a few events. In between debriefings, they drank Georgian cognac with him, lined his bills with out a lot ado, took him for day journeys and copious dinners in eating places and accompanied him on visits to nightclubs in East Berlin and elsewhere. “We visited nightclubs or a museum in Leipzig, we went for rides… In Budapest we went to these scorching baths on [Margaret Island].”

M has fond reminiscences of the time he spent along with his two Stasi companions, who addressed him with the casual “du” [you] in German:

They had been good at giving presents. I had as soon as purchased a really good ebook of fairy tales for myself in Denmark, and someday later they gave me the same ebook as a gift. I acquired medals from them, whereas the BVD by no means gave me a medal or one other signal of recognition, not even a ballpoint. At one other assembly with Wolfgang and Heinz within the East, I acquired all types of particular treats as a result of I had gotten married six months earlier [in 1970].

One of many marriage ceremony items the Stasi gave him was an beautiful Bohemian crystal vase. They’d even take M to toy retailers the place – at their expense – he may indulge his love for mannequin trains. However with the BVD, it was totally different. Years later, when M received entry to his BVD file, he discovered that on the time of his marriage, the service determined M wouldn’t be given a particular current as he had been declaring too many bills.

At a gathering in East Berlin shortly after his marriage, Wolfgang and Heinz requested M if he would admire a Frauenbesuch (a feminine customer) on a selected night. This shocked him. “I feel the HVA needed to seek out out: ‘How far will this agent go? What does he settle for? How trustworthy is he?’ Additionally, I might have put myself in a susceptible place with the East Germans by saying sure.” In different phrases, M at all times needed to be on guard in his dealings with the Stasi, even along with his “buddies” Wolfgang and Heinz.

New publications on the Stasi and the HVA began popping out in massive numbers after the collapse of the GDR. With these new sources, M managed to hint the complete names of what he believes to be his handlers, Wolfgang Koch and Heinz Nötzelmann. However his makes an attempt to contact them had been unsuccessful. The total names of Wolfgang and Heinz additionally seem in publications by the Stasi archives in Berlin, and a person mentioned to be Koch even seems in {a photograph} in a ebook on the historical past of the Stasi.

Recruited by ‘Herr Gerber’

We had been in a position to corroborate some, however not all of M’s claims about his spying profession with paperwork from his private information. M has avidly documented every little thing that occurred to him, together with correspondence, a few of it pretty latest, with the three companies. He additionally has the medal he formally acquired from the Stasi. As well as, we utilized to the AIVD for entry to M’s file, however our request was refused a number of instances.

M was from a working-class background. After finishing his secondary schooling within the Netherlands, he spent a yr at a highschool within the US which proved to be a formative expertise. After acquiring a level in engineering, he fulfilled his army service with the Dutch military and started his profession on the massive multinational. By then, he had already grow to be familiarised with the follow of espionage, together with its fundamental methods, throughout his army service.

By means of his profession in a number of European, African and Asian nations, M acquired many worldwide contacts and was in a position simply to acquire data that was of curiosity to intelligence companies. Initially, Dutch safety tasked him with infiltrating native extremist organisations, each on the left and proper, that had been a part of worldwide networks. Nevertheless, in 1981, they handed him over to the CIA as a result of his spying actions had grow to be too worldwide for the nationwide orbit of the Dutch safety service.

Within the winter of 1967-68, throughout an internship in Israel that was a part of his research, a considerably older German-speaking man introducing himself as “Gerber” approached M and invited him for dinner. Gerber confirmed a eager curiosity in M’s background, such because the yr he had spent at an American highschool and – a somewhat uncommon matter for an informal dialog amongst strangers – Israeli nuclear developments within the Negev desert.

Later, in West Germany, by means of a stranger who approached M on the street, “Herr Gerber” despatched him his regards and requested for a gathering in East Berlin. M’s Dutch handlers appropriately interpreted this strategy as a recruiting try by the Stasi, and inspired him to reply favourably. He turned a double agent: by efficiently pretending to be a Stasi agent, M would purchase invaluable data on the personalities of his Stasi handlers for the Dutch service.

He additionally gathered data on the kind of short-wave radio receivers, communication units and codes the East Germans used, in addition to the sort of intelligence they needed him to accumulate within the many alternative nations the place he was stationed for his job. To his Stasi contacts, M defined his willingness to work with them as a consequence of the defects he noticed in western capitalism, specifically the various types of social and racial injustice he had personally noticed.

When he turned engaged to his future spouse, M confided throughout an intimate dinner at a restaurant that he was working as an agent in opposition to the Stasi. His spouse didn’t know the main points of his spying, however she was conscious of the various journeys he made behind the Iron Curtain to satisfy his Stasi handlers. Certainly, she instructed us she may see for herself how M was at all times utterly exhausted when he got here again house from these conferences, having spent a number of days within the firm of Wolfgang and Heinz.

All this time he must take note of each element, nevertheless small, and ensure that he didn’t betray himself as a double agent by a careless comment or gesture. On a number of events, his spouse even performed an operational position. A number of instances after M’s return from the Japanese Bloc, she was the one who made a telephone name to transmit a pre-arranged coded message to the CIA, implying that M had come again safely.

Belief and gratitude

Our analysis has discovered that brokers and double brokers want a relationship with their handlers that includes belief and gratitude, not only one based mostly on monetary compensation. This want could be defined by the often-hostile surroundings an agent operates in, which includes mistrust, concern, hazard and social isolation.

However all of the sudden, in 1988, M’s relationship with Wolfgang and Heinz cooled. In his debriefings with the CIA, M had given elaborate descriptions of the personalities of each – mentioning Wolfgang’s brown eyes as a hanging bodily attribute. Then, throughout a subsequent assembly, Wolfgang mentioned out of the blue: “You don’t like brown eyes, do you?” M was shocked. His shock was even larger as a result of Wolfgang mentioned this in English, within the exact wording M had utilized in his CIA debriefing. M instructed us he barely managed to manage his feelings:

I may now not belief anybody… I needed to be consistently alert and cautious… To stay on this place over such a protracted time period requires a lot stamina… There’s a line of appreciation, belief, but additionally of abandonment… You might be getting used as a pawn by one thing amorphous, by an entity that you just can not enter. No, they are going to strategy you… You might be appreciated on your efforts, however [these services] stay a darkish cloud that you just can not enter.

This episode ushered in a interval when each Wolfgang and Heinz turned extra distant. The male bonding and the toasting had been over and their physique language had modified. M stored questioning if he had made some error or, once more, whether or not a CIA mole had blown his cowl.

Lastly, in early 1990 – lower than a yr after the autumn of the Berlin Wall – the HVA cancelled a gathering abruptly, and that concluded his profession as a double agent. No gunshots, no bomb explosion, no Stasi dungeon. It wasn’t like the flicks. A gathering was merely cancelled, and the door on his spying profession slammed shut.

The top of the friendship along with his East German handlers and “the insecurity and risk” that it generated, in M’s phrases, had a substantial influence on his wellbeing. It contributed, in his view, to his ensuing despair and nervous breakdown within the early Nineteen Nineties for which he would obtain psychiatric therapy. “You would not have any colleagues in espionage,” he mentioned.

You might be left completely to your individual units. [The separation from my handlers] was actually a turning level. Till then I used to be engaged in all types of geopolitical developments, I used to be proper on prime of them. I had attention-grabbing contacts. After which all of the sudden, all this ended, and I used to be sitting at house. That was a shock.

Having fun with the thrill

M’s story is convincing, regardless that not all particulars could be verified, as is usually the case in intelligence historical past. The prevailing literature on intelligence historical past permits us to verify components of M’s story or assess the probability of sure episodes by evaluating them with different recognized circumstances. And plenty of particulars in M’s story in regards to the modus operandi of the three companies he handled could be confirmed from different sources.

Most significantly, latest correspondence between M and the Dutch AIVD about entry to his file exhibits that he had been their agent. M additionally acquired some materials regarding his case that survived the destruction of the HVA archives in 1989-90, by means of the German authorities company in Berlin that administers them. He allowed us to see and test all of those paperwork. They show that he had additionally been a Stasi agent.

The Stasi equipped M with Dutch, American, Swiss, British and West German passports that enabled him to journey inconspicuously below totally different names, particularly when he was on his technique to a rendezvous along with his Stasi handlers. He additionally communicated with them by means of useless drops (pre-arranged websites the place each events may go away messages, cash or documentation) and written or oral messages. M acquired messages from the Stasi by means of short-wave radio transmissions in code from a so-called numbers station within the GDR. These messages consisted of numbers learn out monotonously in line with a pre-arranged transmission schedule.

Generally M would additionally alternate messages and materials the East Germans had been considering by means of fleeting conferences in lodge lobbies with East German diplomats. Such conferences are known as “brush passes” in spy-speak.

M clearly loved the position he performed behind the scenes throughout the chilly battle and the thrill that got here with it – a typical phenomenon within the intelligence world. It’s also clear, nevertheless, that traumatic reminiscences from that interval proceed to be a substantial burden to him. His obsessive curiosity in spies, brokers and treason is hanging. His former CIA handler (who M managed to get again in contact with lately) suggested him in an e mail: “Let it go, man, let it go.” However this was clearly to no avail.

Deserted in any case these years

Traumatic reminiscences that come again to hang-out folks a few years later are a typical phenomenon for battle veterans. M feels the CIA deserted him after the chilly battle, when he was now not helpful for them. He feels the BVD did the identical once they handed him over to the CIA in 1981, renouncing any additional duty in direction of him.

When M lastly received entry to his BVD file within the mid-2010s, he was not allowed to make notes or copies. To his amazement, he got here throughout a doc he had utterly forgotten about which he had signed himself. It involved his switch to the CIA in 1981. It acknowledged that from then on the BVD would now not bear any duty for him. He instructed us: “The BVD deserted me utterly… in any case these years that I had risked my life…” This doc got here to play a task in his dealings with the Dutch service after his spying profession had ended.

In 2016, M’s emotional issues turned acute, and he spent an evening in an hospital emergency ward. This episode coincided along with his approaching the AIVD about receiving entry to his file. He requested for his or her help in getting therapy from an company “with expertise in treating the emotional burdens of a long-time double agent”. After 9 days, he acquired a solution from the AIVD’s authorized division (which we have now seen) saying that “on the Ministries of Inside Affairs and/or Defence there aren’t any services for the psychological make it easier to requested. I counsel you to contact your GP, so he/she will be able to put you in contact with an everyday therapist.”

This lack of cooperation on the a part of the AIVD intensified M’s emotions of bitterness. He instructed us:

In that world, they simply fuck you. This isn’t how they need to deal with those who have labored for them for therefore a few years. In spite of everything, I went behind the Iron Curtain for them on many events.

In the long run, hopefully, M managed to seek out assist at an establishment that specialises within the therapy of battle veterans. This therapy continues to be ongoing. Certainly, it was additionally his bitter emotions that made him desirous to share his fascinating life story with us.

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