If it had not been for 15 minutes... Chapter 2

You are on Chapter 2. You can read chapter 1 here.

The Opposition's Players

By all accounts, East-Germany had a fantastic intelligence operation. Not only was this organization responsible for internal security, it had also been able to thoroughly undermine the West-German government by placing moles in high level positions as well as coercing people who were deemed to be of interest because of the type of information they may have had access to. The following paragraphs highlight some of the people that were involved with our defection from the "opposing team".  I did not find out how high up our case had gone in the STASI hierarchy until a West-German TV show produced a documentary about us a few years ago.

General Erich Mielke - Minister of State Security

The man in charge of the Stasi. Next to the General Secretary (the head of the country) one of the most powerful men in East-Germany. Ultimately the man driving a large scale effort of finding my mother and myself. Biography (you may want to use Google to translate). An English language version of it with lost of pop up ads. And finally a lengthy English article in a site that of all things is dedicated to the type of regime Mielke used to represent. You can also have a look at his office, although you might note that old line party members like Mielke were not intrigued by the trappings of wealth in their work place. Power was much more palatable than a fancy desk.

Markus Wolf (aka Karla)

John LeCarre, a world renowned author, depicted some aspects of the espionage game in several books, mostly in relation to British or US intelligence operations within Germany. He even modeled his main antagonist after the real-life person of East German Master Spy Marcus Wolf. In his books LeCarre gave his character the codename "Karla". Wolf,  much like "Karla" operated behind the scenes. If I'm not mistaked there were no photographs available of Wolf until after the German Reunification, which means neither the CIA nor British Intelligence knew what this man looked like. Quite an accomplishment. If you want to read up in detail about Marcus Wolf, I can recommend Leslie Colitt's  "Spymaster : The Real-Life 'Karla,' His Moles, and the East German Secret Police" Of course if you are more visually inclined you could also check out a movie based on a LeCarre book called "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", starring Richard Burton. Finally, even Wolf himself decided to write an autobiography, aptly named "Man without a Face". Interestingly, while Wolf was certainly a very high ranking member of the Stasi, I always had the feeling that on the basis of his requirement not to be known anywhere, he purposefully stayed away from the lime light of "party advancement". 

Lieutenant-General Gunther Kratsch

In as much as Wolf had been the stuff that legends were made of, Kratsch was the opposite. A party-aparatshnik (to use a Soviet term), Kratsch advanced all the way to become Mielke's right-hand man.  And while he was not as  glamorous a character as Wolf,  Kratsch nonetheless represented a much greater immediate danger to us because he was in charge of the "Hauptabteilung 2" - the Espionage Defense group, which had several hundred active members in its ranks. These were all active and trained personnel whose job it was to manage the defense of East-Germany against foreign agents. It was the job of this group to find us.

Lieutenant-General Kratsch was also instrumental in offering a the heretofore unheard of bounty of DM 1,000,000 for the  assassination of -depening on sources - either all of us or the most damaging defector Werner Stiller. Never in its history had the country offered a bounty. And while this behavior is common place today, it was completely unthinkable in the late 70's. This particular detail was corroborated by the "Berliner Morgenpost" newspaper in a story covering another member of the HVA . (Unfortunately some of these stories get mangeled quite a bit by Google if you try the tranlation page), as well as the German news magazine Spiegel

A cast of hundreds

As time progressed and no arrests had been made in our case, more and more members of the "Hauptabteilung 2" were assigned to it. According to Kratsch, after a certain point in time Gen. Erich Mielke, whose position by my estimates was the equivalent to the National Security Advisor and Head of CIA combined,  would specifically ask for progress reports on our case during each Monday morning status conference. According to Kratsch and others, by the time we actually escaped, almost the entire Espionage Defenese group was involved in our case at some level. Even if it was only to placate Gen. Mielke.

Continue to Chapter 3

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