The S-Bahn Spy

A defector sparks a roundup

The scene could have been an outtake from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold or Funeral in Berlin: a young East German defector huddling with his wife and their small child in the gloom of a nearly deserted S-Bahn platform in East Berlin, waiting nervously through an early evening snow squall for the elevated train that will carry them to safety in West Berlin. The defector was Werner Stiller, 31, a lieutenant in East Germany's dreaded secret police and espionage agency. Miller had been working as a spy for West Germany. Now, following orders from Bonn's counterintelligence agents, he was fleeing to the West on the S-Bahn, the prewar rapid transit that still connects the divided city.

Stiller's secret-police credentials had cleared him through an inspection by East German guards at the platform gate. Ten minutes after the train arrived, Stiller and his family got off at the Zoological Garden station, the first main stop in West Berlin. From there, waiting West German agents rushed them to Tempelhof Airport. An American military jet flew the three Frankfurt, where West German intelligence agents installed them in a safe house.

That was the end of Reel I. After debriefing Stiller, West German agents began rounding up suspects he had identified as spies who were supplying East Germany with information about the Federal Republic's civilian nuclear-power program and about disposition of West German and U.S. military units.

Two suspects eluded the dragnet. Johannes Koppe, 47, a Hamburg nuclear physicist and his wife Hannelore were gone when police arrived; they had apparently been alerted by a message on an illegal short-wave radio that was found in their apartment. Reiner Paul Fuelle, 40, an accountant for a Karlsruhe plant that recycles nuclear fuel, was caught by the Bundeskriminalamt, West Germany's equivalent of the FBI. But when the lone agent assigned to drive Fuelle to jail reached the prison and got out of the car the prisoner, who unaccountably had not been manacled, leaped out too and disappeared into the darkness. Embarrassed officials insisted that the escape was the result of stupidity, not collusion.

The Bonn government still ended up with what one official called a "most valuable" cache of documents and four other prisoners: Alfred Bahr, 58, a physicist in the solar-power division of Munich's Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm aerospace plant; Karl Hauffe, 65, head of the organic chemistry department at Goettingen University; Guenter Saenger, 32, an engineer with the giant Siemens electronics corporation in Coburg; and Gerhard Arnold, 43, an executive of a Munich computer company. None was as big a fish as Guenter Guillaume, longtime former aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt, whose arrest for spying in 1974 eventually forced an embarrassed Brandt to resign. But all were professional specialists working in sensitive areas. Hauffe apparently had been active as a spy since 1951, Arnold since 1958.

Despite Stiller's finger pointing, West German counterintelligence agents have yet to win their battle with East Berlin's spy network. There are an estimated 8,000 spies in the Federal Republic, many of them "sleepers" who have been placed in position but are not active. Late last week the federal chief prosecutor announced the arrest of another suspect. Wolf Moeller, a political-economic reporter for the newspaper Bild Zeitung, was said to be such a sleeper.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.