ESPIONAGE: Mischa Meets His Match

No one has to invent East-West spy thrillers in West Germany. Since the end of World War II, the country has provided the setting for real-life cases that match anything written by John Le Carré. Early last year Bonn's counter-intelligence service cast a fresh dragnet into the depths of West Germany's espionage underworld; as a result, 81 key East German agents and numerous smaller fry have been caught.

The latest case involves a West German air force file clerk, Hans-Jurgen Jenzowski, who was arrested while handing secret documents to an East German female spy. In May, two other West Germans in sensitive positions—Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, a secretary in the Bonn chancellery's foreign affairs section, and Rolf Grunert, chief of the Hamburg police criminal division—were arrested for giving classified documents to East German agents.

By Bonn's estimate there are still about 8,000 East German spies at large in the Federal Republic; nonetheless, the latest arrests are a serious blow to the prestige of Markus ("Mischa") Wolf, 54, East Germany's Deputy Minister of State Security and top spymaster. A slim, urbane man who favors well-tailored suits and expensive cars, Mischa has run East Germany's espionage operations since 1958 with remarkable success. One major reason: his agents easily mix with the more than 3 million Germans from the Communist East who have moved West since World War II.

Mischa's master stroke was to place Agent Günter Guillaume at the right hand of then Chancellor Willy Brandt. A personal aide of Brandt's for four years, Guillaume handed over a wide range of state secrets to Mischa—and, by extension, to Mischa's KGB bosses —until his arrest in 1974.

The Guillaume scandal moved Brandt to resign, but it also spelled an end to Mischa's unbridled successes. Before 1974, West German counterspies had been "lackadaisical," recalls Ray Cline, the CIA's former deputy director for intelligence and agency station chief in Bonn in the late 1960s. Thanks to Ostpolitik, the policy of rapprochement with East Germany, Bonn was reluctant to get too tough. But Cline believes the West Germans, "probably because of shock over the Communists' actually infiltrating Brandt's personal staff, have begun to draw the line on the amount of infiltration they will tolerate."

Spy Catcher. Spearheading the drive against Mischa's network of agents is Richard Meier, 49, head of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (literally, Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution), West Germany's counterintelligence agency. A dogged, professional spy catcher, Meier reduced harmful frictions between his agency and state police departments, and with West Germany's equivalent of the FBI. He also introduced a secret computer system to ferret out even "sleepers" and "moles"—deep-cover agents whose meticulous disguises are planned for long-term use. So far, 30 East German spies have been bagged this year. Says an admiring U.S. intelligence officer in Bonn: "Mischa, who's no fool, has met his match in Meier."