Whatever Happened To The Spooks In The World’s Spy Capital?

British spy writer John Le Carre is still to be seen occasionally moving about Berlin, which once teemed with spies and and was the world’s “spy capital”.

Not that spying is a big industry these days in the new Berlin. There are plenty of reminders, though, of the bad old days. One is Markus Wolf, the legendary head of communist East Germany’s long since disbanded HVA – foreign intelligence service.

The once dashing Wolf, who was the model for Le Carre’s Soviet spymaster “Karla”, lives in Berlin’s Nikolai quarter, just around the corner from the red-bricked city hall.

After German reunification Wolf was charged with treason against West Germany, and drew a six-year jail sentence. But the penalty was never confirmed and so he remains free.

Wolf, who developed a love of cooking while travelling in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote “Secrets of the Russian Kitchen” in the autumn of 1995.

The book had no references to dead-letter drops, micro-film and invisible ink – but trhere were a few anecdotes from the days when he was busy planting spies, not spices, in Western capitals.

A fit-looking 81-year-old, Wolf nowadays travels a lot, and is frequently found in Moscow where he grew up and was educated in the 1930s, after his parents were expelled from Hitler’s Germany. He still has a dacha holiday home in Russia.

Wolf was one of the world’s more successful spy chiefs. He claims that some of the methods used by his notorious “Stasi” employers were unknown even to him. The Stasi had many ways of getting information.

One bizarre method to get “glowing” reports from suspected dissidents and spies was clandestinely to label them with radio- active markers which could be tracked by Geiger counter, according to officials at the Berlin agency which now has custody of the east’s secret police archives.

Most of the former Allied spooks in Berlin are no longer active. Some have found new jobs in industry, while others have retired or died.

Many had left Berlin even before the four wartime Allied powers – Britain, France, the USA and the Soviet Union – wound up their commitments in Berlin, withdrawing the last of their troops in 1994.

Nowadays, the “normality” of the city astonishes and sometimes disappoints veteran American, British and French visitors once active in Berlin, whose memories were shaped by their Cold War experiences.

“I like Berlin, but it’s altogether different now,” says Kenneth Danforth, a former Time magazine and National Geographic correspondent based in West Berlin in the late 1960s.

“What’s changed is the atmosphere,” he says. “The Cold War spiciness has gone. Spying was an ugly and cruel business at times in Berlin. But it created a surreal kind of excitement and tension.

“The spooks were everywhere. They would show up at cocktail parties, receptions, and social functions, and zero in on journalists. At times they could be a damn nuisance.”

Before the communist-built Wall emerged in 1961, the CIA had a huge spy network centre in West Berlin, which was topped only by the scale of the KGB’s “western European” operation, conducted from premises in the city’s Karlshorst district

Britain’s foreign MI6 secret service was also busy in Berlin in the post-war years, but its operations suffered grievously when George Blake, its top operative in west Berlin, turned out to be a double agent in the employ of Moscow.

It was Blake who “blew” the CIA’s most ambitious operation in Berlin in the early 1960s – the building of a 400-metre-long tunnel designed to tap directly into Russian military communications.

In West Berlin, phone-tapping operations were largely in the hands of the British who for decades had a team of experts working from the main postal communication centre in the city’s Winterfeldtstrasse.

“Phone tapping of journalists and people linked to the media was notorious,” claims Danforth who is now retired and living in Washington.

Curiously, the German capital has never shown much interest in opening a big scale spy museum, like that recently inaugurated in Washington.

Only the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, near the city’s old border crossing point, and the “Stasi” Museum in the Normannenstrasse in Berlin Lichtenberg, provide details of some heyday Berlin spy activities.

As for the big western “ears to the east listening post,” operated by the Americans and British on the city’s man-made Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) that’s long been dismantled. Current plans are to develop the site as a luxury hotel and leisure centre.

If Le Carre, himself a former British intelligence agent, nowadays misses Berlin’s spy world spiciness, he doesn’t show it.

“He’s been two or three times in Berlin in the last year or two,” says Sir Paul Lever, Britain’s ambassador in the German capital, “and always calls in to see us.”

When the British Embassy transfer to Berlin occurred in 1999, Le Carre showed up for the big Bonn embassy farewell bash, “entertaining the departing staff with a witty speech about the little town on the Rhine.”

In the early l960s Le Carre’s career as a professional writer was launched when “A Small Town in Germany” – his first attempt at a spy novel – became a best-seller.

It had been partly written while Le Carre was still employed as a “hush-hush” man at the embassy. “It was that novel that established him as a full-time professional spy writer,” recalls Lever.