Espionage: The Biggest Net

A big element in Moscow's effort to squeeze West Berlin has been Nikita Khrushchev's complaint that Berlin and West Germany form one vast launching pad for spies. In support of that charge, a wave of spy cases has appeared in the Soviet courts since early September, when Marvin Makinen, a 22-year-old American studying in West Germany, drew eight years in prison for allegedly photographing military installations while on a tour of Russia. In rapid-fire order, two Dutchmen and two West Germans were grabbed, sentenced and jailed on similar charges.

Last week two more West Germans went before Kiev's military tribunal: a shoe salesman named Adolf Werner and his wife Hermine, accused of entering Russia under cover of seeking material for U.S. picture magazines. Actually, the Russians insisted, Werner was shooting radar stations, radio antennas and army camps, and filled his notebooks with invisible writing (he supposedly carried invisible ink refills for his ballpoint pen). The court decreed 15 years' imprisonment for Adolf Werner, who confessed partly, and seven years for his wife.

Whatever the merits of the Soviet prosecutor's charges in the Werner case—U.S. intelligence denied them—Moscow's noise seemed largely intended to camouflage the Communists' own espionage operation headquartered in East Germany. According to a remarkably detailed U.S. State Department report released last week, it probably is the largest concerted spy system in history.

Layer upon Layer. The East Germans' own Ministry for State Security (MfS), with headquarters in East Berlin's Normannenstrasse, has a staff of 22,000 dedicated primarily to subversion, sabotage and penetration of the West. The Czechs maintain in East Berlin large branches of their Interior Ministry's State Security Service as well as Staff Section II of their Defense Ministry; Hungary is there with the dreaded AVH and Katpol intelligence groups; the Poles, Bulgarians, Rumanians, and even North Koreans and Red Chinese have East German bases for operations in West Berlin and West Germany.

Operations are coordinated by the Russians' own big spy agency, which is massively represented in East Germany: the Committee of State Security, or KGB, latest label for the Russian secret police, once known as OGPU, NKVD, etc. The East German branch of Russia's KGB has at least 1,000 recruiting agents and specialists at Karlshorst, an East Berlin suburb, not counting the military espionage groups of Russia's Ministry of Defense with offices at Schwerin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Chemnitz and East Berlin, each staffed by at least 25 Soviet officers.