ABSTRACT
In the middle of the 1960s, the British Secret Service learned from an East German refugee that missiles were being stored or assembled in the town of Kalkstadt, south of Rostock in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: “whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours.” The attempt to fly over the area and take pictures from a fully occupied commercial aircraft that allegedly had gone off-course was not successful, and photo-optical reconnaissance was not available. Consequently, the Service decided to send an agent across the East –West German border near Lübeck to Kalkstadt. They chose Fred Leiser, a man with a migrant background and experience, who owned a small garage in London. He was born in Danzig, Poland. He spoke very good German and had already worked for the British Secret Service during World War II. However, this time, shortly after the Berlin Wall had been built, his mission failed. Leiser killed an East German border guard, made major mistakes while operating the radio and finally fell into the hands of his enemies. Many aspects of this scenario are incorrect: civil planes, as known today, were rarely used for optical reconnaissance. Fred Leiser’s mission, “a crash operation at the border” which meant smuggling a Western agent into the German Democratic Republic (GDR), “[had] scarcely been done since the war.” In the 1950s and 1960s the Western intelligence service preferred East German human intelligence (HUMINT) instead of sending their own agents. The town of Kalkstadt cannot be found on an East German map because the town as well as Fred Leiser and the entire operation are mere fiction. The people and the plot had sprung from John le Carré’s imagination, who understood that his book The Looking Glass War would be seen as more speculative when he made one of his characters state about the airplane: “We don’t normally use the routine couriers for operational work, but this was different; something very special indeed.”1 Nevertheless, le Carré’s spy novel reflects a realistic dimension of the East-West confrontation during the Cold War. The author’s fiction deals with the assessment of the then security situation by contemporary Western specialists: especially the potential danger originating from the Soviet military, which stood with core fighting power in East Germany, and the espionage against them. Since the Berlin Blockade in 1948-1949 and the Korean War of 1950-1953, such military
intelligence gathering was common. The war in the Far East had made it clear: the Cold War could become explosive at any time. This war proved the need for information about the military enemy and confirmed the reconnaissance priorities against Moscow’s military in East Germany (close reconnaissance), as well as in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the other countries of the Eastern Bloc, including Yugoslavia and Albania, in addition to intelligence gathering in the USSR (distant reconnaissance).2 In the face of the threat from the Kremlin to their own political and geographic positions, the British chiefs of staff realized in 1950 that there could not be a British-only or Western European-only strategy in an isolated and independent form; full cooperation with the United States “in policy and method” would be necessary.3 This was not limited to the “special relationship” between Washington and London nor to the armed forces. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other US services, the French and Danish Intelligence Services, the US armed forces in Europe, as well as NATO and the West German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst – BND) operated together in their investigations against the Soviet troops and shared their results at least in part with the other partners. Against the backdrop of a permanent military threat, the result of this work presented itself primarily in the so-called order-of-battle-intelligence, which analyzed the capabilities and intentions of the Eastern military. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the main interest was directed not at the East German Army and paramilitary organizations but at the Soviet Occupying Forces in Germany (GSOFG/GBST, 1945-1954) and the (renamed) Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG/GSSD, 1954-1989).4 From the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1960s the appearance and mission of the Soviet troops in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR changed crucially. The partly poorly equipped and largely stationary occupying forces had developed into a highly mobile, offensive, decisive and powerful armed forces group which had taken over a key position in the implementation of Soviet military and security interests against Western Europe. The GSFG/ GSSD had not only, like the early GSOFG/GSBT, to protect the Soviet position in the GDR as well as the retention of power of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands – Socialist Unity Party of Germany). They also had the order to be an active military deterrent against NATO and especially against the Federal Republic. At the end of the 1960s, according to an estimate of the BND, the GSFG/GSSD together with the Warsaw Pact troops were capable of being the first squadron forming an attack from a standing position without any mobilization preparations. In a “Strategic Attack Operation” they were also capable of transferring acts of war over the western areas through the Federal Republic, reaching the French, Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic coast as well as the Spanish and French Mediterranean within 20 days.
