Spooks Galore

"Is anything still secret in Bonn?" Konrad Adenauer once asked in exasperation. The answer then was nein -- and it probably still is today. Both citizens and foreigners in West Germany are frequently accused of being spies. That jaunty journalist is charged behind his back with being in the pay of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. This hovering waiter is suspected of eavesdropping for the CIA. All government secretaries, of course, are thought to nip out at lunchtime with top-secret letters to be photographed by enemy agents.

No one knows how many spooks are lurking in the shrubbery and behind potted palms in West Germany, but over the past two decades 25,000 people have reported to the authorities that they were asked to spy. In the same period, 3,500 persons have been convicted of treason or treasonous relations. Yet, instead of becoming inured to the rampancy of spooks, the West German press continues in full cry on the spy-expose trail.

Runge's Memoirs. The current clamor began in March in the newsweekly Der Spiegel with a series on the activities of the Soviet KGB. The magazine led off with a detailed account of the espionage activities of Soviet Embassy Counselor Yuri Vorontsov, who had died in a February collision while at the wheel of his black Mercedes 220 in Cologne. Vorontsov, claimed Spiegel, was the KGB boss for West Germany, and it put the finger on Russia's popular press attache in Bonn, Aleksandr Bogomolov, 46, as Vorontsov's successor. It also made much of his close friendship with the Krupp group's press chief, Count Georg-Volkmar Zedtwitz-Arnim.

The German press last week titillated its readers with two new tales of espionage. The first was the memoirs of KGB Lieut. Colonel Evgeny Runge, 41, who for years passed information collected from his agents through the Soviet embassy in Bonn to Moscow before defecting in 1967. The second concerns Austrian-born Rupert Sigl, who last month ended 16 years of activity for the KGB by defecting to the CIA in West Berlin. According to Die Welt am Sonntag, Sigl took with him the names of 250 Soviet agents working in Germany--a high figure for any spy to know in a well-run operation. Der Spiegel concluded that Sigl had actually been a double agent for the past nine years, working for the KGB while simultaneously being in the pay of the CIA.

Nagging Doubts. As a chief target of Soviet intelligence, West Germany has been defended by its own security units, plus a dozen or so U.S., British and French agencies. When not trailing Soviet agents, these allied units sometimes practice on each other. In West Berlin, for example, the only phone line between the U.S. mission and the Soviet embassy in East Berlin goes through a British switchboard. Says a U.S. official: "We assume that the British are listening in on the line as well as the East Germans. If the situation were reversed, I'm sure we'd be listening too." Though the Western agencies cooperate among themselves, there always remain nagging doubts as to whether information passed on by, say, the CIA tells all or only part of a story.

What is puzzling in the present round of exposes is that much of the material, including photographs of Soviet agents picking up missives from trees, is obviously being leaked by one or more intelligence agencies. Since an intelligence agency seldom admits or claims anything, such pressagentry is uncharacteristic. The explanation may lie in Germany's own intelligence setup. After the war, the allies forced Germany to decentralize its intelligence functions. They are now handled by two separate, and often competitive, organizations, the Verfassungsschutz (the German FBI) and the Bundesnach-richtendiemt (the German CIA). Matters are further complicated by the legal necessity of making any arrests with local policemen. The current furor may help prepare the German public for a more centralized intelligence operation, a delicate assignment in public relations because memories of Hitler's all too centralized secret police still haunt Germany. Still, recent newspaper headlines indicate that such a plan may be afoot. The national tabloid Bild Zeitung proclaimed: WEST GERMANY'S COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IS AS FULL OF HOLES AS SWISS CHEESE! Even the respected weekly Die Zeit lamented: THE FIASCO OF COUNTERESPIONAGE--A REFORM OF THE ORGANIZATION IS NECESSARY. Whatever the cause, the great spy expose was fulfilling the same function for the German press that August "crime waves" do for American newspapers: building circulation and excitement during a slow season.

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