Ulrich Hinse
Black Ice Agent - A Cold War Story
When Grandpa Raschke tells
ISBN 978-3-96521-200-8 (e-book)
Design of the cover picture: Ernst Franta
© 2020 EDITION digital ®
Pekrul & Son GbR
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What you're reading now is a novel. It is based on actual events at the end of the 70s / beginning of the 80s, in the middle of the Cold War, in which I, now a retired detective, was involved as a young investigator of the Federal Criminal Police Office. And as I write the book, I realize that sometimes a historical turn has its funny moments. For example, when from one moment to the next one becomes aware of how absurd some of what one had represented with a serious expression until just a moment ago was. Some of those affected have already died, others live under a different name somewhere in the world. However, the fundamental events have taken place as described. Only the dialogues are owed to the creative freedom of the author. What the agents have betrayed or scouted out from another perspective is not dealt with. The course of history has put things into perspective and made them irrelevant. At that time, however, the actors were celebrated heroes on the one hand, but also evil traitors, at best sad figures. Depending on which direction - east or west - you looked at them from. Their motifs were seldom noble, they often acted out of an addiction to prestige, and even more frequently out of pure greed for money. Therefore all names were changed except for the title hero Reiner Fuelle and the MfS superiors Markus Wolf and Erich Mielke, who have all died in the meantime, including the names of the detectives. In spite of all this, the long past and often forgotten events are still exciting stories today.
First, the person about whom this novel tells a part of his life story. We are talking about Reiner Paul Fuelle * 26 December 1938; † 09 October 2010.
Born in Zwickau, Fuelle was recruited during a visit to relatives in Thuringia as an unofficial GDR State Security employee. He was still a young man in his twenties when he was employed at the beginning of the sixties at the Forschungsreaktor Karlsruhe as a businessman and accountant for the materials sector. Because of his friendly nature he was generally popular. He was active in the sports group and during company outings he gladly took over organisational tasks. What no one knew or even suspected was that Fuelle had been a spy for the East Berlin Ministry of State Security since 1964. For money, he provided information from his field of work to the GDR until his escape under the alias Klaus. At the research reactor there was not so much to report for abundance. This did not change until a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant was built at the research centre. In 1968, he moved to the company where, among other things, he was responsible for the commercial administration of the nuclear fuels uranium and plutonium. His eastern clients were much more interested in this area because the plutonium obtained from spent fuel elements could be used as material for atomic bombs. About ten kilograms of plutonium were needed to make an atomic bomb, for the construction of which the GDR suspected the Federal Republic of Germany. And indeed, the quantities recovered from various German nuclear power plants were considerable. Admittedly, for propaganda reasons, the GDR concealed the fact that these materials were under the strict supervision of Euratom and IAEA.
On 19 January 1979 Reiner Paul Fuelle was arrested by officials of the Federal Criminal Police Office in connection with the statements of the MfS defector Werner Stiller. He escaped to Baden-Baden and was brought to the GDR by the Soviet military mission on 30 January 1979 in a wooden box. Because black ice slipped in the pursuit of BKA officials, abundance was described in the German media as black ice spy. Not least because he always loved his personal freedom, was very reluctant to be bullied or prescribed anything, and because his wife persistently refused to move to the GDR, he pursued his return to West Germany. Equipped with false papers, Fuelle returned on September 5, 1981. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court later sentenced him to six years imprisonment for treason, most of which he was paroled on probation. After his return to Germany, I heard him for several weeks and got to know him well. Unfortunately, after Reiner Paul Fuelle was released from prison, there was no trace left until I had to read about his death on the Internet. I would have liked to have had a bottle of wine or a beer with him, but wish his wife and daughter all the best and hope not to have come too close to them with my book.
Grandpa Raschke, a picture book grandfather with a few short hairs, a grey full beard, glasses and a stately belly, guarded his grandchildren. This happened very rarely, since his children lived and worked several hundred kilometres away and only occasionally visited Godern near Schwerin with their grandchildren. A beautiful task for an old gentleman, especially when he can tell stories and the little ones hang on his lips with shining eyes. The times when his wife and children had done this were long gone. It was a lively gang of three who raved over the lawn in the garden and occasionally tried to fish the goldfish in the pond. Of course, only if Grandpa didn't see them as they believed. The frogs could tell that they were thinking about an evacuation. The two ring snakes, of whose presence in the garden pond Grandpa Raschke was particularly proud in contrast to the almost horrified Grandma, had hidden between the stones. So they believed they could survive the children's harbor unscathed. Actually, there were eight grandchildren on whom the Raschke couple could look with pride. Each of the two daughters had brought it to four children.
But only the eldest had come to visit with her children. Derek, the oldest of the lively four, was already in grammar school and naturally felt superior to his two younger brothers and little sister. With his shoulder-length hair appearing older than he actually was, he was occasionally called a smartier by grandpa. Almost arrogantly, he looked down on the two younger brothers. He had already sat down at his grandfather's table on the terrace when the two younger brothers, Carlo, the somewhat brawny-looking muscleman, and Miguel, the rather petite but completely fearless daredevil, had discovered the landing net hidden behind the small garden shed. Triumphantly screaming, they began to free the fish from their element. Now Grandpa intervened. He felt sorry for it, but somewhere there were limits for the grandchildren and the life of the animals in the garden pond seemed much more important to him than the creativity of the offspring. The neighbour, who had watched with a critical eye from the garden fence, seemed relieved. After all, it was Saturday noon and not everyone felt that the roar of young Germany in the planned weekend noon rest was a positive perspective for the future. The two hobby fishermen trotted with hanging heads on the terrace.
"Grandpa? What were you doing in the war?"
The question of the eldest of the dear little ones met Grandpa, who puffed back over the well-kept lawn and dropped into the armchair, completely unprepared. He could remember that he had once asked his father this or that way. At the end of the Second World War he had returned home in time from East Prussia on the Hansa auxiliary cruiser across the Baltic Sea.
"Uh, what war? I wasn't in the war. I was born after the war."
"No, it can't be," the grandson insisted, "you're lying to me."
"Well, listen, you louse boy. Grandpa's not lying. You should remember that. Grandpa doesn't need that anymore. Especially not in front of you kids. Well, I really wasn't at war with him." The grandson, who not only at this moment seemed nine times clever, did not let up.
"Yes, you did. Mom and Dad said you were at the front in the war the other day."
The grandfather fixed his grandson now slightly grinning and rubbed his white beard. He hadn't shaved it for a long time since he planned to walk the Way of St James in Spain again in a few months. And since, in his opinion, a longer beard belonged to a more elderly pilgrim, he had one grown at the moment. The grandchildren didn't care war´s, they only knew grandpa with a white beard anyway. Sometimes a little longer, sometimes shorter.
Grandpa Raschke was now a little over sixty years old and a few years ago had been retired from the police service, which he had carried out to the day for almost forty years after a few years with the German Navy. With a live weight of a good hundred kilos, he now sat contentedly on the terrace of his little house near Schwerin and looked after his grandchildren while his wife and daughter and granddaughter were out and about in the city. The son-in-law was only expected back next evening from the long-planned fishing trip to the Baltic Sea.
"Were you at the front or not?" the eldest of the hopeful grandchildren, as grandpa believed, insisted on answering his question.
"You know, my boy, there are roughly two kinds of war. One of them's a hot-headed shooting game. But that's been over in Germany for more than sixty years. And then there's a war where you threaten yourself with more and more weapons. But there's no shooting. It's called the Cold War. And if you will, then I was actually at the front during that time. On the Cold War front."
"That's exciting, Grandpa. Are there any stories you can tell us?" Grandpa was still hesitant for a few moments, but then he let himself be persuaded.
"So", he began his narrative, "once upon a time more than twenty years ago there were two huge military blocks. In the West this was the North Atlantic Defense Organization, or NATO for short, and in the East the Warsaw Pact. So called because a number of states in the sphere of influence of the then Soviet Union had signed a defence alliance against the West in Warsaw. These two blocks threatened each other, but kept each other in check. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) belonged to NATO, and the second German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), belonged to the Warsaw Pact.
In spite of the same language and the same history, one felt like an opponent, and because the governments of the countries did not trust each other, one's own secret services were instructed to spy on the respective opponent. In the FRG there was the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and in the GDR the Ministry for State Security (MfS). And, of course, they developed their own lives. From the bitter experiences of the Third Reich, the foreign secret service BND had been created in the FRG and strictly separated from the domestic secret service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It's in charge of defending against intelligence attacks. In the MfS, which was headed by Army General Erich Mielke, different departments were responsible for attack and defense. The large area for foreign espionage was headed by a colonel general named Markus Wolf. The latter, in turn, had set up various departments which were responsible for their respective special fields. One area was the science and technology sector, or SWT for short.
Now, more than thirty years ago, there was an intelligence officer in the SWT who for some reason suddenly rejected the political leadership he had hitherto worshipped. From one day to the next, the country in which he worked and in which he had believed so far without reservations was no longer his. Since he worked in the area in which General Markus Wolf was in charge, and he also led agents in the FRG, he considered exactly what he wanted to do now. Sure, he wanted to go to Germany. The class enemy. And so he very carefully collected documents from his field of work, which dealt with the procurement of information from the Federal Republic of Germany. He knew that he would only have a chance to be recognized if he also brought information with him. Without this information, authorities in Germany would have no interest in him. They wouldn't send him back to the GDR, but they wouldn't protect him either. And he needed that protection. He could imagine that the GDR superiors would do everything they could to seize him again and bring him back to the GDR. And then what happened to him, he could easily imagine. There would be a show trial and that, he had no doubt at all, would end with his death sentence. So he worked very carefully and prudently.
On the night of 18 January, he broke into the safe of his head of unit, took out documents and put them in a briefcase for his own records. Early in the morning of January 18, 1979, he went to Friedrichstraße station. As an officer of the MfS, he had the opportunity there to get onto the platform without control, and so he fled with the S-Bahn to West Berlin.
West Berlin, you should know, had a special status and belonged only indirectly to the Federal Republic. Since the Second World War there has been the so-called four-power status. This means that the Americans, the English, the French and the Russians each had a sector which they administered. The Russians had allowed the GDR to establish its capital in the eastern sector. The FRG was not allowed to do this and therefore had its capital in Bonn on the Rhine. But the three Western powers, Americans, English and French, had set up a German administration in West Berlin, which had joined the FRG and worked like a federal state of its own.
In West Berlin, the authorities immediately recognized who had fled to them. He was immediately taken over by the Americans and housed in a secret place. After some time he was able to continue his journey by air to the Federal Republic of Germany. With the help of the Americans, of course. And in the Federal Republic he was then squeezed out by the German security authorities, especially the BfV. In the meantime, the investigators of the Ministry of State Security, who had noticed the escape immediately at the start of duty, had dubbed him SCHAKAL.
"Grandpa, why did they give him this strange name?" Carlo, the second youngest of the grandchildren, wanted to know. He had sat down on the floor with Miguel in front of his grandfather and was literally hanging from his lips.
"Well, you have to know, it's common practice in intelligence. So you can talk about a person in a circle of colleagues without having to give your real name. In this case, however, he should also express contempt for the agent, because a jackal is despised by all men because of his insidiousness."
"But why contempt?" the grandson continued to ask curiously.
"The agent had caused great damage to his office by transferring to the Federal Republic of Germany. And that way you can be sure they didn't leave good hair on him. And the jackal is a wolf-like animal, lives from small and medium-sized prey animals and from carrion. He usually goes hunting alone at night. Among us Europeans, jackals have a reputation as cowardly scavengers. But that's not true. They are efficient hunters, who supply themselves with varied food through big skill. I suppose that his former GDR colleagues or better comrades wanted to defame him with that expression or just make him despicable."
"But I'm sure he doesn't care about that. He wasn't even with his colleagues anymore. He's already been to West Berlin."
"Yes, my boy, you're right, of course. But his ex-colleagues had to talk about him from time to time, so they just called him a jackal. Is that all right?" Grandpa Raschke was annoyed by the questions, and when grandson Carlo just nodded and didn't ask any more, the world was fine again for grandpa Raschke. He was about to go on when Derek spoke this time.
"Mmh, grandpa, you know. The agent must have been married. What happened to his wife?" Grandpa Raschke coughed a bit deranged. Now it really went into detail. He really hadn't expected that. He just wanted to tell a story. Now he had to dig deep into the furthest corners of his memory to answer the question.
"If I remember correctly, he had a girlfriend who was smuggled to West Germany via the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Poland." Giggling, Carlo called again.
"Was that an old frigate?" Grandpa Raschke kept the spit away.
"You louse boy, why would you think that? No, that was a young woman."
"You just said she was being smuggled. There are only ships being smuggled and I remembered that Mama had recently said "old frigate" to a woman in the city. But so she didn't hear it."
Grandpa Raschke grinned. "Well, that's what I mean. But that's not why I said smuggle. The word is an expression used by secret services more than once when a person is to be taken from one country to another on winding and non-direct paths. Happy?" Grandson Carlo nodded again.
"Well, go on. The agent was a lieutenant and had studied physics. It was also claimed that he had worked for the Federal Intelligence Service for some time. But it's not that sure. It could also be that the BND only said this to humiliate the GDR secret service. This is how business at the intelligence level is often. But as I said, the agent had brought his documents with him and with their help a large number of GDR agents were uncovered. Of course, the arrest of these people had to go very fast, because the GDR organs had already noticed the disappearance of their employee and especially of the documents. You could imagine where he'd gone. The escape route in East Berlin could be traced very precisely up to the Friedrichstraße railway station. The MfS had immediately warned all agents that the employee had looked after. They were supposed to destroy their intelligence records and best of all immediately settle in the GDR. Only very few succeeded. His address book uncovered and arrested numerous GDR agents in West Germany, France, Austria and the USA. But more than forty agents had also received the recall of the MfS in time and were able to escape prosecution by fleeing to the GDR."
"What's law enforcement?" Derek wanted to know. Grandpa Raschke moaned when he was interrupted again, but for the grandchildren every question was important. So grandpa tried to answer them. If the boys didn't understand something, they'd keep asking anyway.
"Well, my boy, as the son of a lawyer and a lawyer, you should know that by now. But let's start all over again. When the police are called in, they only work if the perpetrators have done something that is punishable by the Code. This work is called law enforcement. Any questions?" All three boys shook their heads in unison, so that the hair flew.
"In Cologne, at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the strategists there now sat together. They considered how to deal with the information. Possibly one or the other agent was still to be turned around and could work from now on also for the people of Cologne. But the Attorney General, who had been consulted on the considerations, wanted the quick success. He wanted the available information to be passed on to the officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office, from where the investigations against the agents could begin. The investigating officers of several BKA departments, for example, waited nervously in the BfV office building and awaited the information that was to be presented to them. The whole thing was a pretty staff-intensive thing. As you can imagine, all the investigative departments had been alerted. Finally the Federal Attorneys appeared with important faces and distributed the proceedings. Each paper got several.
"What are federal prosecutors?" Grandpa Raschke reacted with stoic calm to the new interruption. He knew that the dear little ones would ask again and again if they didn't know something, which came so easily over his lips without much thinking.
"There are prosecutors who accuse a crook in a court of law. I'm sure you've heard that before?" All three nodded in agreement.
"In certain proceedings, which are very important, and espionage proceedings are part of them, it is not the public prosecutor's office of any district court that accuses a perpetrator in court, but the Attorney General. He's in Karlsruhe. And since he can't charge every case on his own, he has a number of employees to do it for him. They're called federal prosecutors. In this case, the federal prosecutors divided up the preliminary proceedings and distributed them to the waiting BKA officials. I also got a procedure. It was an agent code-named Bronze. That's all I knew. That's all the agent had to say. According to the documents he had brought with him, Bronze had to work in the management of an energy company in Essen. In cooperation with the company's security officer, the man was quickly found and then arrested by me. I transported him together with my colleague to Karlsruhe. There he was brought before the investigating judge of the Federal Supreme Court, who had to decide on the arrest warrant. I locked the man up in Karlsruhe first. At the morning case meeting I learned what had happened to my colleagues in Karlsruhe. And this is where the story of the black ice agent begins."
Finally it was our turn to speak. The procedure was strictly according to the order of the numbers of the presentations. I was a member of the Thirteen Section. The units eleven and twelve had already received their proceedings and had left immediately after who knows where. Our head of unit, Detective Director Erhard Korn, was called out of the waiting room. The room was very sober. Even for the sometimes dreary offices of a public authority. The smoothly plastered walls were painted in an egg-shell-coloured white. There were no pictures. No flowers either. Two closets were empty. Sure, if police officers are waiting in that room, it's better to empty the closets first. Curiosity about what might be in the cupboards is immanent in this occupational group. Police, BKA, get over here. The seating furniture, a desk that had been converted into a table and was also empty, and a simple, grey telephone for the authorities standing lost on this table completed the sober office room, which had been reduced to the bare essentials. The waiting detectives looked after their boss bored. Outside it was dark and from the cold light of a neon tube on the ceiling one stared out of the window into a black nothing.
"My ass, they make it exciting. I think it's urgent. No matter what happens. The hierarchy is held firm by the authorities. A braid that should be cut off as quickly as possible," mocked chief detective Helmut Heller. The other officers looked a little irritated at him, because otherwise he was known for his very sober and correct formal language. Heller was not very popular with his colleagues, but he was respected. He had what it takes to make colleagues envious of him. He was undoubtedly the best of the younger officers. Before him stood only Heinz Harder, the deputy of the head of department and First Commissioner of Criminal Investigation, called Heinz Emil, who was about to retire. Because he looked like a Cologne beer advertisement. There was a more mature gentleman with a glass of Koelsch in his hand. Under the picture was written: Emil drinks Cologne beer. Because his colleagues believed that Heinz Harder had been the godfather for the advertising, he was only called Heinz Emil. He didn't like to hear it, but he couldn't stop it either. But Heinz Emil had just now vacation and was not to be reached.
"Probably Heinz Emil is now gymnastics on his Latifundien in the Spessart through the area. He doesn't answer the phone on vacation. Probably because he has none there in Hesse," Helmut Heller knew how to tell.
"Or there is no connection", Guenter Beil threw in a giggle and reaped an evil look from Helmut. The other officials, Raschke, whose first names no one knew and therefore no one called, Anni Hornung, Werner Warnke, Hanspeter Berger, Karl Korte, Erhard Reichenberg, Bertram Peiler, Peter Raddatz, and Gunter Weißgerber, and three other younger colleagues, who had only come to the department a few days ago, did not take note of the short conversation. Everyone had their own thoughts. After a little while it was Guenter Beil who growled back.
"Helmut, be glad that Heinz Emil is not here and don't whine after him. Now you're Korn's deputy and I can imagine it's not your damage. You'll get the thickest piece of the pie. I'm sure you are."
"Your safety passes my ass", poisoned Helmut Heller, "how long are you now with us in the paper? Two months? A little more respect for your colleagues would be appropriate."
"Well, well," Erhard Reichenberg, an otherwise rather reserved loner, interfered, "I mean, you're going too far here. If you want respect, say so. But don't speak for all the other colleagues." Helmut Heller closed his eyes and turned to Erhard. Before he could say anything, the door opened. An employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution called Helmut Heller, Raschke and Anni Hornung from the waiting room.
The three detectives walked silently behind the constitutional guardian, turned right on the narrow corridor after a few meters and got into the spacious office, which with a sofa, the conference table and the pictures on the walls even seemed comfortable for an office room. Raschke noticed that there was no picture of the Federal President or the Chancellor among them. It was a tasteful landscape picture from the Lower Rhine or from the Netherlands and a colourful flower picture. No one was sitting behind the tidy desk. At the conference table, the rather corpulent head of department was the perpetrator on the front side. A federal prosecutor and Erhard Korn sat next to him.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you've come to know what this is all about. We have a defector and he has brought us documents that we must act on immediately and without delay. I'll give you your files now without much pen reading, and you put your teams together. You immediately go into your operation rooms and arrest the people who appear in the papers. I don't have to explain to you how you do it. Please pass on the results of your investigations immediately to the respective Federal Prosecutor, who is the competent lawyer in the files."
"And of course immediately to me," Erhard Korn objected. The federal prosecutor nodded a little reluctantly.
"To your head of unit, of course. I assumed that unspoken. The biggest team will probably result from the Karlsruhe case. That is why, after consultation with Mr Korn, I have chosen Helmut Heller as head of this department. The second largest team goes to Goettingen. As Mrs. Hornung studied in Goettingen and knows her way around, she will take over the management there. The third thing is for Raschke. You drive to Essen to RWE. We don't have a clear name here. You'll have to investigate him first. You'll be able to do this with a second colleague. It might take longer." Raschke received his documents. That's all there was to it. The Federal Prosecutor has again devoted himself to other papers. So they got up, took their files and left the room. The head of the BfV department accompanied her, because he wanted to discuss something with Erhard Korn. Raschke noticed that the man had apparently wet himself. A big wet spot was visible on the grey suit pants between the legs.
Alarmed, Grandpa Raschke interrupted his story because at that moment the children began to yell out loud. At first, he didn't realize why. He looked at her questioningly.
"Ha, ha, he certainly pissed his pants," cheered Carlo, and the other two laughed and hit their thighs with pleasure. Grandpa Raschke pulled his eyebrows together and looked at them angrily.
"It is not appropriate to shout and cheer. There's nothing to laugh about. I'll explain right away and you should listen carefully and not squawk." Glucksend the boys sat down again and had visibly trouble not to laugh again loudly loosely. Grandpa Raschke did not take note of this and continued.