Word: bonnes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...there was the mysterious death of Rear Admiral Hermann Lüdke, suspected of photographing NATO documents for a foreign power. Then came the suicides of four other West Germans involved in government or defense work. West German counterintelligence agents had only begun to sort all that out when Bonn admitted yet another serious-and bizarre-security gaffe. Attorney General Ludwig Martin announced that three men had been arrested for providing the Soviet Union with secret equipment, including a U.S.-designed missile, stolen from a supposedly tightly guarded NATO base...
From there it was a matter of getting the purloined rocket to Moscow. To the profound embarrassment of the Bonn government, that proved to be the simplest part of the whole caper. The spies took the Sidewinder apart, wrapped it in packages and sent the pieces on the next commercial airliner going to the Soviet Union-via ordinary postal air freight. The cost...
...darkroom assistant in Dancker's photo shop in Bonn could hardly believe his eyes. Among banal vacation snapshots on a strip of film taken from a Minox camera were nine pictures of NATO documents clearly marked "Top Secret" and "Secret." It took police and the West German Counter Espionage Service four days to identify the owner of the film. He proved to be Rear Admiral Hermann Ludke, formerly deputy chief (early 1966 to mid-1967) of the logistics section of SHAPE, NATO's European command, who was on the eve of his retirement from the service...
...weakest security link. But even the most cynical were soon fascinated, for Ludke's death marked the beginning of an astonishing wave of suicides among government officials. On the day of Ludke's death, Major General Horst Wendland. 56, deputy chief of the Federal Intelligence Service, Bonn's equivalent of the CIA, shot himself in his office. The government explanation: he was despondent over an "incurable depressive illness." On Oct. 15, a promising young official in the Economics Ministry hanged himself. On Oct. 16, a woman working in the Federal Press and Information Office took a fatal...
...death, but security officials did not rule out other motives, even though only Ludke, Wendland and Grimm had had access to classified information. One line of speculation suggested that extensive security checks launched in sensitive departments after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia might have frightened enemy agents into suicide. Bonn admitted last week that toward the beginning of October, after one East German agent had been arrested, six others fled West Germany. But it did not tie them to the admiral. By week's end the Ludke case remained open-and with it lingered the specter of a major...