The coldest place in the Cold War
Divided Berlin was a playground for spies
It was New Year's Eve 1962 when Margarete's conscience got the best of her. A devout Roman Catholic, the young woman working as an interpreter at NATO's command center was having an affair with a man she thought was a Danish intelligence officer. To boot, she was feeding him classified information gleaned from her job. It wasn't treason, her lover, "Kai Petersen," assured her. She was simply helping a small nation normally excluded from the information loop by NATO's great powers. Yet Margarete still felt a stab of guilt: She wanted to confess to a priest.
At the drab, imposing East Berlin headquarters of the HVA, the foreign intelligence branch of East Germany's secret service (Stasi), spymasters puzzled about how to maintain the cover of Petersen, also known as Roland G., one of their top spies. "We badly needed to find a priest for this woman," recalls Markus Wolf, head of the HVA from 1952 to 1986. In Berlin, there was little that the Stasi couldn't get its hands on. So weeks later, in a tiny church along Denmark's Jutland coast, Margarete was absolved of sin. The "priest," an East German agent given a crash course in Danish, told her to continue spying with the Lord's blessing.
At the height of the Cold War, Berlin was the coldest place on Earth. Carved up by the conquering powers in the wake of World War II, the city became an espionage capital once the United States and Soviet Union turned on each other, with over 8,000 spies skulking about its streets. The novelist John le Carre called Berlin "a cabinet full of useless, liquid secrets . . . a playground for every alchemist, miracle-worker, and rat-piper that ever took up the cloak." It was a place where history and identity, like Margarete's sins, could be created and wiped away in an instant.
Spying in Berlin reached its apex during the 1950s, the decade before the Berlin Wall was erected. The CIA's legendary Berlin Operations Base could smuggle agents into East Berlin with relative ease, and the KGB and HVA used the cover of thousands of refugees flowing into West Berlin to escape Soviet reach to plant agents in the West. In the days before spy satellites loitering high above enemy territory, the spooks of Berlin used every trick to deliver what mattered most: human intelligence. There were car chases across sector boundaries and spies planted in brothels, where the world's two oldest professions mixed freely.
In this playground, nobody played the game better than Markus Wolf. The inspiration for le Carre's fictional spymaster Karla, the former head of the HVA was communism's most successful intelligence chief and the CIA's bête noire. "As a loyal American, you have to say he did things that tremendously damaged this country," says espionage expert H. Keith Melton. "But as a historian, you have to admire his amazing skill at his work." Known as "the man without a face," Wolf was such a mystery to the West that the CIA didn't know his name and had no pictures of him until one of his proteges defected to West Berlin in 1979.
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