Sexy Spies

Secretaries wanted--badly

"It's not your wife who now wonders I whether she can trust your secretary," gloomed one West German chancery official last week. "Now you ask yourself the question."

That bit of gallows humor was part of Bonn's reaction to the Federal Republic's latest espionage scandal. In the past two weeks, six West German secretaries of high-ranking officials have been accused of spying for East Germany. The most recent suspect is Helga Roediger, 44, who worked for Manfred Lahnstein, state secretary in the Finance Ministry and Bonn's top expert on monetary affairs. Last week, after she failed to show up for work, agents of the Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz, West Germany's equivalent of the FBI, discovered that she had fled with all her belongings--as well as those of her live-in boyfriend, Robert Kresse. "She even took her canary," said a Verfassungsschutz agent.

Bonn's counterintelligence assumed that Roediger and her swain had fled to East Germany, as a number of other unmarried secretaries have recently done. Three of the women were employed by officials of the Christian Democratic Union, while a fourth worked at NATO headquarters in Brussels. All were apparently ensnared by a now familiar East German gambit: assigning handsome male Communist agents to lure well-placed secretaries into love--and spying.

The secretarial scramble eastward began with the disappearance of Ursel Lorenzen, 42, from NATO headquarters. When next seen, she was on East German television, declaring that she had "daily evidence of NATO's real preparations for totally destructive nuclear war." NATO officials ruefully conceded that she could indeed have passed classified information to the Communists.

Following Lorenzen's flight, five other secretaries were unmasked as likely East German agents. West German police arrested C.D.U. Secretary Ursula Hoefs, 34, in Bonn and Maja Zietlow, 26, a travel agency clerk, in Hamburg. Shortly thereafter, Inge Goliath, 37, a secretary working for C.D.U. Foreign Policy Spokesman Werner Marx, left her office complaining of a stomach-ache--and turned up on the Communist side of the wall. The next day Christel Broszey, 31, the secretary of C.D.U. Deputy Chairman Kurt Biedenkopf, asked to leave work early for a hairdresser's appointment. She never returned, and is presumed to have fled to East Berlin.

The rash of espionage cases followed defection to the West of Lieut. Werner Stiller, a key officer in East Berlin's state security apparatus. Stiller, who was actually a West German agent, identified a number of East German spies working in West Germany. Since his defection, 14 suspects have been arrested, and 18 others have escaped to the East.

West German officials believe that the husbands or paramours of all six spying secretaries were East German control agents. As it happens, even before the latest defections, Bonn had launched a campaign to tighten its security system; it included a special warning for unmarried female employees. Posters in government buildings show a man nuzzling a woman. The caption: "There is a code word that opens safes: love." Beneath that: "Your partner has been married for a long time--to the East German state security service. Please think about it."

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