Mischa Meets His Match

No one has to invent East-West spy thrillers in West Germany. Since the end of World War II, the country has provided the setting for real-life cases that match anything written by John Le Carre. Early last year Bonn's counter-intelligence service cast a fresh dragnet into the depths of West Germany's espionage underworld; as a result, 81 key East German agents and numerous smaller fry have been caught.

The latest case involves a West German air force file clerk, Hans-Jurgen Jenzowski, who was arrested while handing secret documents to an East German female spy. In May, two other West Germans in sensitive positions--Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, a secretary in the Bonn chancellery's foreign affairs section, and Rolf Grunert, chief of the Hamburg police criminal division--were arrested for giving classified documents to East German agents.

By Bonn's estimate there are still about 8,000 East German spies at large in the Federal Republic; nonetheless, the latest arrests are a serious blow to the prestige of Markus ("Mischa") Wolf, 54, East Germany's Deputy Minister of State Security and top spymaster. A slim, urbane man who favors well-tailored suits and expensive cars, Mischa has run East Germany's espionage operations since 1958 with remarkable success. One major reason: his agents easily mix with the more than 3 million Germans from the Communist East who have moved West since World War II.

Mischa's master stroke was to place Agent Guenter Guillaume at the right hand of then Chancellor Willy Brandt. A personal aide of Brandt's for four years, Guillaume handed over a wide range of state secrets to Mischa--and, by extension, to Mischa's KGB bosses --until his arrest in 1974.

The Guillaume scandal moved Brandt to resign, but it also spelled an end to Mischa's unbridled successes. Before 1974, West German counterspies had been "lackadaisical," recalls Ray Cline, the CIA's former deputy director for intelligence and agency station chief in Bonn in the late 1960s. Thanks to Ostpolitik, the policy of rapprochement with East Germany, Bonn was reluctant to get too tough. But Cline believes the West Germans, "probably because of shock over the Communists' actually infiltrating Brandt's personal staff, have begun to draw the line on the amount of infiltration they will tolerate."

Spy Catcher. Spearheading the drive against Mischa's network of agents is Richard Meier, 49, head of the Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz (literally, Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution), West Germany's counterintelligence agency. A dogged, professional spy catcher, Meier reduced harmful frictions between his agency and state police departments, and with West Germany's equivalent of the FBI. He also introduced a secret computer system to ferret out even "sleepers" and "moles"--deep-cover agents whose meticulous disguises are planned for long-term use. So far, 30 East German spies have been bagged this year. Says an admiring U.S. intelligence officer in Bonn: "Mischa, who's no fool, has met his match in Meier."

On the defensive, Mischa has stepped up "Lothario" operations, whereby handsome agents lure lonely Bonn government secretaries into bed and, ultimately, into East German service. He also takes advantage of West German unemployment by trying to recruit jobless people who might one day become useful sources. Thousands of unemployed computer technicians, data analysts, engineers and journalists have been offered jobs in innocuous-sounding "research" firms that turned out to be East German intelligence-gathering fronts. Many of the job seekers patriotically report the ploy. In a classic counterintelligence maneuver, some of Mischa's supposed recruits may have been "turned" into double agents for Meier.

The life of a double agent is not an easy one. Consider the case of Nikolai Artamonov, a former Soviet navy captain who defected to the U.S. in 1959 and later became a double agent, employed by the FBI under the name of Nicholas Shadrin. When Shadrin went to Austria in 1975, ostensibly on a skiing vacation, he stopped off in Vienna for a prearranged meeting with two Soviet secret policemen who thought Shadrin was their agent. While his wife waited in their luxurious suite in the Hotel Bristol, Shadrin kept a rendezvous with the two KGB officers on the steps of a Vienna church. He vanished. High-level U.S. intelligence officials in Washington believe Shadrin was kidnaped and is probably in a Soviet prison or dead. Some U.S. agents suspect he may have been a KGB plant in the first place.

Shadrin's Polish-born wife Blanka, however, is accusing the FBI of bungling his Vienna mission, then abandoning a loyal American to his fate. The White House has declared that the U.S. is trying to obtain information about Shadrin, a U.S. citizen. But a top State Department official said that Washington could not be expected to give Shadrin's disappearance high priority in U.S.-Soviet relations. After all, he observed, anyone who becomes an agent, especially a double agent, is playing a perilous game--and knows it.

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