Chapter 14

Gabriele Gast: West Germany’s Juliet

We call them ‘Romeos’, a title given by a western journalist to East German agents, who were responsible for seducing secretaries in West Germany and instead making them work for the intelligence agencies of the GDR (German Democratic Republic). It was a very successful business, which during the Cold War allowed the eastern camp to glean a great deal of confidential information. Indeed, the secretaries were actually chosen based on their roles: as assistants to ministers or politicians, for example, and the man who was in charge of this operation was none other than Markus Wolf, the head of East German Intelligence.

By launching his ‘Romeos’ into the West, Wolf was adapting and strengthening the Soviet system of using ‘honeytraps’: women of little virtue who were tasked with trapping western agents stationed in the USSR - a proven method in the world of espionage. They seduced, slept with and then photographed the agent, provided that any spouse did not arrive unexpectedly and threaten to provoke a scandal. This was what had happened to the French ambassador to Moscow, prompting scathing remarks from General de Gaulle.

What was the real role of these Romeos and Juliet, and in particular, a certain woman called Gabriele Gast?

Before coming to the story of Gabriele Gast, we should first mentioned Markus Wolf, the creator of what would be known as the Romeo system. Wolf, the great man of German intelligence, was the stuff of legend and for once, the term is not misused. He was born in the early 1920s, in Stuttgart, to a family of Jewish artists: his father was a playwright and one of his brothers was a filmmaker. Immediately after Hitler seized power and they became aware of the growing threat in Germany, the Wolfs decided to leave the country. As communists they naturally headed to the motherland of socialism, the USSR. There, the young Markus, now called Misha by his friends, attended the Comintern (Communist International), an international communist organisation that advocated a worldwide communist revolution. Markus then worked for a Soviet radio station that broadcasted in Germany. The young man, who was already very committed to the cause, was supported very early on by the ‘organs’ as they were called at the time, meaning Soviet bureaucracy and its leaders. The proof of this is that in 1945, Wolf was among the first German communists who were allowed to enter Berlin after the Nazi surrender. His career then progressed very swiftly: he was a journalist, then a diplomat for the new GDR and worked for the Communist Party Central Committee.

In the early 1950s he was told he was to be one of the future leaders of the East German intelligence bureau. Upon leaving for Germany and despite what he may have said later, Wolf remained a Moscow man. The ties were unbreakable. What is more, the service he was to lead played an essential role in Soviet intelligence operations in Europe, perhaps even the most important. In spite of its subordination to the KGB, his department was in direct contact with the West: there was no easier way for an East German to go into West Germany and become a spy. In the early years of the GDR the borders between the two countries were still open and the eastern agencies consequently had an active policy of infiltrating West Germany’s main administrations and even its political parties. Thousands of spies took up their positions in the West. Some were active, while others remained dormant for a long time, giving them the opportunity to set up an ideal situation for themselves. This spider’s web was woven so densely that it was estimated that no information could remain secret for more than a few days in West Germany. Even today, there are men and women living in a unified Germany that have never been exposed.

When he was in his early thirties, Wolf became the head of the HVA,⁷⁷ the GDR’s intelligence agency, an organisation that reported directly to the Ministry of State Security. According to the activities imposed by the KGB on the intelligence agencies in communist countries, the HVA was entrusted with infiltrating and providing false information in West Germany and NATO. This was in contrast to the Stasi, which was solely responsible for domestic intelligence, despite also reporting to the Ministry of State Security, but was devoted more to spying on East German citizens. In spite of these distinctions, there were no doubt links between the two, regardless of Wolf’s subsequent denials.

Wolf was a man of amazing qualities. A zealous communist and even a Stalinist, he was nothing like the other East German civil servants. He was cultured, very intelligent and throughout his long years as head of East German intelligence, always attached great importance to the human side of his business. Without going so far as to say he was a philanthropist, it is true that Wolf certainly paid a great deal of attention to the psychological aspects of being a spy. Oddly enough, he never hesitated to sacrifice someone in order to maintain contact with his agents, or to move them out of the GDR completely. This would be particularly true in the case of Gabriele Gast.

Wolf reigned as the head of the intelligence service for over thirty years, even though he enjoyed a very strained relationship with his minister in charge. He owed his longevity, in addition to his talent, to the strong ties he kept with Moscow and had rendered such service to the his Soviet KGB comrades that he had shown himself to be irreplaceable. He had also carefully built up his legend of being a man who lived in the shadows, so much so that Westerners did not see a picture of him until the end of the 1980s, at a time when he had already stepped down as the head of his department.

But how did Wolf manage to have such a successful career as a spy? In order to weave such a veritable cobweb in West Germany, he had to develop particularly effective methods of recruitment. Naturally, he used all the traditional methods used in the intelligence world, such as blackmail. It must not be forgotten that at the end of the war, the KGB had raided the Nazi Party’s archives, and by blackmailing those who had Nazi secrets to hide, he was able to recruit a large number of East German agents. On the other hand, Wolf and his agency also used more conventional means of blackmail: money and sex. Above all, Wolf was an innovator and in almost a Machiavellian fashion, ordered his department to search systematically for potential recruitment targets. Consequently, thanks to his contacts in West Germany and West Berlin, he was able to identify thousands of possible targets. The HVA also used wiretaps, with some experts estimating that Wolf and his agents were able to listen in on hundreds of thousands of telephone conversations in West Germany. In an even more subtle tactic, Wolf realised that it was often easier and more useful to recruit a subordinate rather than a manager. A good secretary often knows as much as their boss: they type their letters or forms and sometimes even know the combination to the safe. If the secretary or soldier works in an organisation where information is continuously circulating around, he or she would have easier access to these documents than a higher-ranking official. What is more, no one pays any attention to these people, which is how Wolf managed to recruit dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these people.

Geoffroy d’Aumale and Jean-Pierre Faure⁷⁸

The HVA’s first big success occurred during the successful infiltration of the Socialist Party in West Germany, led by Willy Brandt, when an agent called Günther Guillaume arrived at the State summit as one of Brandt’s key advisors. In 1968 Vice-Admiral Lüdke, the deputy chief of logistics at NATO, and General Horst Wendland, the vice-president of the BND (German Federal Intelligence Service), both committed suicide when it was discovered that they had been recruited by the HVA. According to various estimates, the HVA maintained over 1000 spies in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these were West Germans who had been forced to become HVA agents after being caught up in a variety of nets: blackmail over their Nazi past, blackmail over family secrets, being seduced by a Romeo, being placed in compromising positions based on an excellent knowledge of the individual in question etc.

By using the Romeo method, Wolf’s system achieved perfection: it specifically tailored men to attract the attention of a female target and made sure that the women themselves fell in love. In the East, there was what could be called a ‘Romeo school’, where young men received training not just in the art of espionage, but also seduction! Wolf strategically sent the men to Bonn, a small provincial town that had become the capital of West Germany, where the secretaries of various ministers were often not only single, but bored to death.

Taking into account his target’s feelings, Wolf reinvented the methods used by his friends in the KGB. The Soviet honeytrap system was pretty rough: a pretty girl or boy was filmed having sex with a diplomat, who in order to avoid scandal, was then forced to become an agent, although some refused to be blackmailed. In summary, it was a brutal practice and based on the exploitation of the most basic instincts. When it had the opportunity, the HVA worked in the same way as the KGB. However, this technique had the serious drawback of producing agents who were forced to cooperate because they were being threatened. These diplomats - who were the usual targets - were thus forced to collaborate. On the other hand, Wolf sought to create spies who would work voluntarily and to achieve this, he had to resort to a much more pleasant feeling: love.

It was clearly not romanticism that persuaded Wolf to use this method. On the contrary, he was making a rather cynical calculation: a spy in love would work more effectively and for longer than a spy who was being blackmailed. This is why he attached great importance to the choice of targets, which generally corresponded to the following type: a woman in her thirties or forties, neither pretty nor ugly, single (of course), who was vulnerable due to a disappointment in love or a general lack of affection. The prey would succumb more easily to a clever seducer. The Romeo himself was generally a little older than his target, virile and confident, he would court her in the manner that best matched his objective. The day would come when he then had to throw off his mask and ask her to engage in espionage activities. Strange as it would seem, this was not as difficult as you might think. Wolf’s Romeos were equipped with a whole series of arguments in favour of such work, with the most common one used that they were contributing to the continuing struggle for peace. They put into the target’s minds that by stealing documents, they were, in fact, working for a peaceful cause. The warmongers were those in the West and somehow a balance had to be restored between the two camps.

The Romeo also had to use other arguments. If his Juliet was the subject of chauvinism by one of her male colleagues, it was easy to persuade her that by betraying them, she was gaining revenge. Another argument that was likely to win Juliet’s support was by playing the politics card. If one Juliet had a nostalgia for the former Hitler regime, they were led to believe that they were secretly working for a former Nazi organisation. If another was resolutely pro-Western, then she was told she was forming a part of an Anglo-Saxon intelligence network. Wolf was therefore able to find spies who delivered documents to their lovers in good faith, in the belief that they were fighting against communism, even though these very files were immediately sent to the other side of the Iron Curtain. Whatever the case, this meant that before approaching any target, the Romeo had to have a very thorough knowledge of his Juliet.

A particularly good example of this manipulation is that of Élénore Sutterlin. Given the codename ‘Lola’ by Wolf, she was the secretary to a head of department at the West German Foreign Ministry. She was approached by a photographer calling himself Sutterlin and after an idyllic romance the two married. At this time, her husband cleverly began to convince Lola of the dangers of the Cold War. He asked why the leaders in West Germany were building atomic shelters without any thought for the rest of the German population? His secret goal was to make her doubt the sincerity and honesty of the western leaders. But this was only the beginning. Sutterlin then revealed that there was a group of men who had been gathered together to try to prevent a nuclear war at any cost, before finally disclosing that he too was a part of this organisation. The naive Lola was thus caught, without knowing at any time that her husband was actually an East German agent. What makes the situation all the more sad is that Lola was sincere in her beliefs. A former officer in the West denounced the couple, who were then arrested. The truth was finally revealed: Sutterlin was a Romeo who had merely played at being in love. The shock was so hard for Lola that the poor woman committed suicide in her cell.

Luc Rosenzweig and Yacine Le Forestier⁷⁹

While denying having cynically played with the fate of women burdened by loneliness, Markus Wolf now admits that this method was very effective: ‘The real reasons for this recruitment method were simple: a secretary or archivist at a ministry, or the BND headquarters in NATO, was a thousand times more useful than their manager or someone else in the minister’s entourage. Every document - notes, statements, confidential reports - passed through their hands and they were best placed to photograph or photocopy them. It was the same in the army, where its much preferable to recruit the adjutant who stamps the envelopes, rather than the colonel who, to my knowledge, only rarely does that sort of work.’ In general, the story ended tragically for the seduced secretary, who was abandoned by her Romeo in the event of her being discovered, and left to face the rigors of justice alone.

And Gabriele Gast? Her case is more remarkable than it may appear at first glance. Born during the war and still alive today, she grew up in a rather conservative environment in West Germany. A brilliant political science student at Aix-la-Chapelle University, she remained faithful to the political ideas of her family and was a member of a student organisation similar to that of the Christian Democrats. It was here that she was spotted by an eminent professor, Klaus Mehnert, an expert on eastern countries and most likely a member of the BND, the intelligence agency of West Germany and heir to the Gehlen network.⁸⁰ Very soon, Gabriele (Gaby) became the professor’s assistant. As a talented political scientist, she had the potential to be an excellent addition to German intelligence.

In the mean time, Gaby had to finish her studies and write her thesis. It was Professor Mehnert who suggested the subject: the status of women in the GDR, and encouraged his protégé to go there and investigate.

During the Cold War, Gaby Gast easily managed to gain the necessary permissions to quietly investigate life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. She was welcomed at an East German university in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now known as Chemnitz) and was promised that she would also have the opportunity to interview women in senior positions.

Did Markus Wolf and his department, who were particularly knowledgeable about anything that had to do with West Germany, know that this student was the assistant to a professor affiliated with the BND? It is clear that they must have done as they otherwise would not have given permission for her to travel to East Germany. Did Mehnert know of the risks that his protégé was taking?

Now in East Germany, in 1968 Gabriele Gast began to interview women from the GDR for her thesis. After a few weeks she met a charming man called Karl Heinz Schmidt, who claimed to be a car mechanic. In contrast to the young lady, he was by no means an intellectual. Even though she knew she was at risk of being targeted, Gabriele Gast was completely unsuspecting. At the time, all Westerners who travelled beyond the Iron Curtain could expect to be recruitment targets for eastern intelligence agencies. This was particularly true for diplomats, military personnel, journalists and even businessmen. As an assistant to a specialist in eastern European countries, Gast must have been warned of this. Whatever the case, Schmidt was so charming, fun and attractive that she quickly fell into his arms, perhaps even out of boredom in such a gloomy country, and became the mechanic’s mistress.

It was during a second visit to Karl-Marx-Stadt that things became clearer. One evening, Karliczek (a tender nickname Gaby had given to Schmidt), invited her to his house. He wanted her to meet one of his best friends, Gottard Schramm, who was introduced to Gaby as an important HVA agent. At the same time Gaby learned that Karliczek was also an HVA agent. The two men did not try to hide their true identity as they knew that the young woman was already caught in the net. They said that as an assistant to Professor Mehnert, she was clearly working with the West-German BND and could be visiting East Germany to engage in espionage activities. In East Germany, just as in other countries, such accusations were not to be taken lightly and even if she was innocent, the authorities now had enough material to extract a confession, imaginary of course, but enough to ensure her imprisonment. This is what the two men threatened to do to Gabriele, but suggested that she could escape all of this by agreeing to work for them. Although still a student, she was close to a BND expert and a member of a very conservative student organisation, meaning she was certainly able to provide valuable policy information, not to mention the fact that her political future seemed very bright.

The young woman accepted, not only because she was afraid, but also because she was still in love with her Karliczek, despite his recent revelations! As extraordinary as it may seem, Gaby did not blame him for using seduction in order to recruit her and the two lovers would later tie the knot. Here we have a young woman who was thrown to the wolves and not content with being chewed up by them, even decided to marry the very man who had abused her affections.

As far as the HVA were concerned, the recruitment of this brilliant, young political science student represented a form of investment and promised her a bright future. Indeed, on her return to West Germany, she was officially recruited as a research officer by the very intelligence agency that her thesis supervisor belonged to, the BND. Gast had to write summaries on East European countries for her bosses at the BND, as well as the West German government. To do this, she was provided with BND documents from its honourable correspondents or diplomatic personnel, which were naturally extremely confidential. Before being hired, the BND had investigated Gast, just as any other intelligence agency would have done. For some reason, the fact that she had stayed for such a long time in the GDR did not seem to pose any problems.

It goes without saying that thanks to their spy’s continued collaboration with the HVA, the East Germans had a top-drawer source for information. However, they needed to develop a system that would allow her to keep in touch and be able to deliver this vital information to them. They decided they would send a couple of HVA agents into West Germany to act as couriers, who would then employ the standard espionage techniques in order to collect the information from Gast. As for the husband, Karliczek, Gast cut all ties with him after six months. From now on, they would only meet during gatherings organised under the upmost security by Markus Wolf himself, at holiday camps. Gaby met Wolf several times and the master German spy was clearly delighted by his agent’s excellent work. He was attracted to by the personal and intellectual qualities of this young woman, and in a holiday mood, they chatted to each other easily.

Unfortunately, everything has to end and in September 1990, months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and when no longer working for the HVA, Gabriele Gast was arrested. The HVA had been dissolved and Markus Wolf had resigned five years earlier on the grounds that he did not share the same political beliefs as the more conservative leaders of his party. It was a former HVA agent who denounced Gast and she was apprehended when trying to cross the Austrian border, most likely in an attempt to join her husband. She was tried for high treason, but even though she was sentenced to several years in prison, it was not long before she regained her freedom. Yet another inconsistency and one which questions the official version that Gast was a spy for the East.

Without denying at any point that Gast had liaised with communists, should we not first stress the importance of the services she rendered to the BND? Her meetings with Markus Wolf, for example, would she not have reported these to the BND? She was a spy for the West as well as for the East. After her release from prison, she maintained that she was nothing more than an agent for peace. The truth lies in the HVA archives. Strangely enough, one of the men officially responsible for clearing out these archives, and of course for clearing them up, was none other than Gottard Schramm: Gaby Gast’s case officer and the best friend of her dear Karliczek! Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything had to be done to hide the extent of communist infiltration in West Germany, as well as the many secrets, including that of Gabriele Gast, who was either an eastern spy or a double agent for the West.

The most likely theory is that Gabriele Gast was manipulated by the BND: why else would her teacher send her to the GDR?

Christopher Andrew⁸¹

‘She needed to feel that I needed her, and would give her my personal attention’, Wolf was to write. ‘Sometimes her messages carried the hurt tone of a wounded mistress who now just felt like part of the furniture.’ Wolf met her personally seven times. Mutual respect was richly given. ‘Gaby did an impeccable job for us. She gave us an accurate representation of what the West knew and what they understood of the entire eastern bloc. This proved vital for us when we had to face the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, in the early 1990s.’