The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

officer until the end and would do his best to retain his dignity. The CIA officer said good-bye and then took him at his word. From then on, the CIA would leave him alone to fade away into the new Germany.

East Berlin, April 25, 1990

After years of failure and frustration, the CIA suddenly had a new and burgeoning network of spies in East Berlin, all brought on board over the space of just a few weeks. The telephone pitches hadn’t worked, but when the CIA switched tactics and decided to start going directly to the homes of current and former HVA and MfS officers to talk to them in person, the results improved almost immediately.

Not every man was like the HVA colonel, willing to put a dying country before his own future, and soon so many East Germans had agreed to cooperate that we were starting to wonder back at Langley how we could keep up with all of our new East German agents. We had to create a special East German Task Force just to keep up with the flow of intelligence from East Berlin.

To be sure, most were short-term agents. The Stasi officer who had revealed that Curly was a double agent was the only one who seemed destined to become a long-term asset. But the logistics of processing all the new intelligence was becoming difficult. The payments we were willing to make to former Stasi officers were also starting to decline, now that their information was becoming less valuable as East Germany edged closer to political oblivion.

Still, some of our new spies continued to bring unexpected intelligence windfalls when they walked off their jobs laden with secret Stasi documents. One agent outdid the rest: He looted an entire file room before leaving his job and volunteering to work for the West.

Early in the spring of 1990, West German counterintelligence officers based in Bavaria contacted the CIA’s base in Munich, seeking help with a new case. An East German had contacted them and told them he had a friend in the East who wanted to sell documents. Could the CIA, the West Germans asked, arrange to meet the man in the East? At the time, West German intelligence was still reluctant to conduct operations on its own in East Germany.

The request was routed to the CIA’s East Berlin Station, and the station’s most junior case officer was assigned to handle the case. The young American officer drove to a small village not far from East Berlin, called a phone number, and gave a “parole” to identify himself. The East German agreed to meet him.

That night, the CIA officer and the German drove separately out to some woods beyond the village, and then pulled their cars over into the dark. As the American walked over, the East German opened the trunk of his car, and the CIA officer saw that it was packed with bundles of documents wrapped in newspapers. As quickly as he could, he began transferring them to his own car. Before long, the CIA had the files in West Berlin ready for inspection.

The bundles turned out to be a vast compendium of the Stasi’s logs of thousands upon thousands of telephone wiretaps that the East Germans had conducted against individuals in West Berlin and West Germany. The files, which included some seventeen thousand index cards, showed the telephone numbers that the East Germans had tapped, cataloged how often their conversations had been recorded, and in some cases included the transcripts of individual calls. The records provided a road map to many of the Stasi’s operations in West Germany. They showed who had been targets of East German surveillance and investigation and so could help reveal how the East Germans had tried to penetrate its main target, the West German government. After sorting through and analyzing the files, the CIA turned them over to West German intelligence to examine.

Yet the records that the CIA really wanted—files from the most sensitive espionage cases of the HVA and MfS, including their joint operations with the KGB—were still out of reach. The crowds that had surged into Normannenstrasse in January hadn’t gotten them, either. Instead, the protesters had ripped open file drawers filled with the records of the banal, neighborly betrayals that had sadly been so commonplace under the Communist regime.

Only later did the CIA pick up hints that a few handpicked Stasi officers had already trucked the most sensitive files to East Berlin’s Schoenefeld Airport. From there, the boxed files were to be transported to Moscow. The Stasi was turning over its crown jewels to the KGB for safekeeping.

The most sensitive Stasi files were out of the CIA’s reach—for now.

It would take years for the CIA to obtain those sensitive files after they were in KGB custody, and when the agency did, it would find a wealth of information about East German intelligence operations against the West.

The political wheels were now grinding inevitably toward the eventual absorption of East Germany into West Germany, but the CIA was still very interested in recruiting high-ranking HVA and MfS officers, particularly those who could reveal the identities of any additional American spies. So the most attractive targets of the cold pitch campaign were always the HVA and MfS officers who had been involved in operations against the United States. At the top of the target list was HVA Colonel Jürgen Rogalla, chief of the American Department of the HVA.

David Rolph had never held out much hope that he would be able to convince Rogalla to spy for his old adversary. Like the HVA colonel, Rogalla was a hard-core Stasi man. But the agency was determined to give it a try, and Rogalla was tentatively given the code name GTPULSAR.

Rolph was surprised when, on his second attempt to contact Rogalla, the burly colonel invited him into his apartment in downtown East Berlin. Rogalla ushered him into his living room, and after the two sat down to chat, Rolph outlined his pitch. The