World: Triple Double

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With some 125 East-bloc agents arrested every month in their divided country, Germans are blasé about spy stories. But the case that unfolded in a Karlsruhe courtroom last week proved that Bonn's vaunted Gehlen intelligence service had been infiltrated for ten years by the Reds, and that the organization had knowingly hired former Nazis. All three of the men on trial, longtime employees of Gehlen, were also longtime employees of the Soviet Union. By all odds, it was the most embarrassing spy scandal to hit West Germany since the war.

"I Hate Americans." Ex-Wehrmacht General Reinhard Gehlen, who is as secretive as any of his 5,000 men (his last known photograph dates from 1944), set up his outfit in 1947 with the cooperation of the CIA. It was staffed largely with veteran agents who got their training under the Nazis, although Gehlen himself had never joined the Nazi party. In 1955 the Gehlen apparatus was turned over from CIA control to the West German government; it reports directly to the Chancellor's office, has a top secret budget. Yet in court, the three men who penetrated its walled-in Munich headquarters made the feat sound about as difficult as joining a Bavarian marching and gymnastic society.

First of the trio to face the five red-robed judges at Karlsruhe was stocky Hans Clemens, 61, who peered with interest at an exhibit table covered with the tools of his trade: cameras, tape recorders, microscopes, radios, films and suitcases with secret compartments. As he told it, Clemens had been a pianist as a youth in Dresden, but changed keys and became a Nazi police official in 1933. He headed the Dresden office of the dreaded SS security service. During World War II he commanded an execution squad in Italy that killed 330 hostages and for his savagery won the title "The Tiger of Como."

Back in Germany after the war, he met a Colonel "Max" of Soviet intelligence, who suggested that he get a job with the Gehlen organization. It proved easy. The motive he gave for becoming a double agent for the Reds seemed like an old propaganda broadcast. "I hate Americans like the plague," he said in court, recalling that after American air raids on Dresden he had sworn, "I shall repay them doubly and triply."

Champagne in Streams. One major service Clemens performed for the Russians was to recruit a former SS colleague, Heinz Felfe. Cool and articulate, Defendant Felfe, 45, told the judges that he too was an ardent Nazi, had worked his way up into Heinrich Himmler's state security bureau. He bragged of his wartime successes, which he claimed included getting first reports on Teheran and Yalta from a confidant of Allen Dulles. After war's end he was classified by a German denazification board as unbelastet (not incriminated). This astonishing fact was acknowledged by Presiding Judge Kurt Weber with an outraged "Donnerwetter!" (thunderation).