Word: mischa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...Mischa's master stroke was to place Agent Günter 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...
...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...
...Catcher. Spearheading the drive against Mischa's network of agents is Richard Meier, 49, head of the Bundesamt für 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...
...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...