From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 1/2/2006 1:44 PM
April 18, 2005
GERMAN-RUSSIAN SPY STORIES

From Russia with Love

By Holger Stark

For years, a Russian consul spied on the German army. Officials got wind of it and tried to turn him into a Russian defector. As the situation began to blow up in their faces, German officials hustled to end the matter discreetly - so as not to endanger the current German-Russian love affair.

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Lovesick or simply shrewd operators? German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin ham it up for the cameras.
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AFP
Lovesick or simply shrewd operators? German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin ham it up for the cameras.
The small baroque town of Amorbach in the Odenwald, south of Frankfurt, offered a perfect backdrop for the unique showdown last November. Just like in the good-old-days of the Cold War, German special agents tiptoed about the ruins of a medieval Benedictine convent and followed a nondescript man in his mid-forties who was obviously waiting for someone at a restaurant in this 4,220-person town.

Under the agents' scrutiny, a member of the German army entered the restaurant. He was carrying classified documents with him that contained information about telecommunications and arms technology. As so often occurred in the past, the secret documents quietly changed hands. The man receiving them spoke German with a thick Russian accent and paid a hefty sum. His pockets full and the transaction completed, the the army officer got up and left the restaurant. The other man was left to pay the bill. As soon as he did, he was captured by the waiting German agents. When they arrested him, the agents discovered that the criminal turned out to be a Russian diplomat.

The operation has since turned into myth -- one of the most dramatic espionage scandal since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It has all the components of a juicy spy thriller: treason, a chase and a diplomatic scandal. In fact, it even forced the man -- 45-year-old Russian Consul Alexander Kuzmin, to return to Russia early. The truth is that Kuzmin had been working for the notorious Muscovite military secret service GRU. His mission: to spy on the German military.

The case illustrates how keenly, 15 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Russian agents are to search for and obtain classified information. In fact, President Vladimir Putin -- himself a former KGB agent -- and his secret service seem to be creating their very own translation of "Glasnost." For them, it has come to mean the chance to spy on both friends and enemies.

Bosom buddies

The affair has erupted at the worst possible time. Officially, German-Russian relations "have never been better," says Gernot Erler, of the ruling Social Democratic Party. Lately, Schroeder and Putin have put on quite a buddy show and are often photographed joking and laughing together. At the beginning of last week, the two paled around until 1 a.m. at the Hanover Trade Fair for Industrial Goods. Over souffléd turbot, Schroeder toasted the amicable atmosphere and hailed the newly signed economic contracts between the nations -- including one to build a Baltic Sea gas pipeline -- as contracts "of historic dimension." For Putin, he had nothing but praise.

For his part, Putin is proving quite an unpredictable international operator. In his years at the KGB, he spent time stationed in the German city of Dresden and knows something about German culture. Lately, he has shown that economic investments are not his only goals. He's also after inside information. The Kremlin, for instance, is eager to uncover the inside German view on the Chechnya question, as well as to scrounge up hidden details about NATO. Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution is well aware of this Russian penchant and recently warned that Putin currently has about 130 agents spying on Germany. That's almost as many as in the heyday of the Cold War.

"If you want to know what the members of the German parliament are talking about over their mobiles, just ask the Russians," a German defense agent said sarcastically. In some cases, the Russians make no secret of their activities. The roof of the Russian embassy -- centrally located on Berlin's main street, Unter den Linden -- has special antennas affixed to its roof. Such technical wizardry and boldness continues to astonish German security agencies. In particular, Russia's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, is working on "a massive scale," said Wolbert Schmid, who works for German intelligence (BND) and who for years headed the German spy program against Russia. "Little has changed," he said, from the days of détente.

When Kuzmin was sent to the Russian consulate general in Hamburg at the end of summer 2000, he simply took over the top spying post from his predecessor. The consulate is a small branch of the more powerful Berlin embassy and is situated on the city's idyllic Alster lake. Kuzmin arrived from Moscow with his wife Fljusa, but without his adult daughter, and was soon promoted to consul. Quiet, out-of-the-way Hamburg seemed a perfect place from which to receive and channel information from high-ranking sources within the German armed forces.

Spying on the spies

As a last resort, Germans called in intelligence big wig Heinz Fromm to sort out the diplomatic mess.
DPA
As a last resort, Germans called in intelligence big wig Heinz Fromm to sort out the diplomatic mess.
Kuzmin met his restaurant source around 20 times before he was nabbed and always arranged meetings in small pubs or restaurants in remote towns in southern Germany. The Russian was trying to get information on German weapons systems, secret codes of the armed forces and any salient details he could find out about the troops. The German had only one interest: money.

The military security service of the German army (MAD) estimates that about €10,000 passed in this way from Russian to German hands. Sometimes sources provided documents. Other times, information passed via computer disks. As the head agent, Kuzmin was responsible for his transactions and had to keep careful records of how his money was spent. As such, he asked for receipts each time money changed hands. With stereotypical German meticulousness, he noted down the name of his tipster, along with the date of the transaction and the amount traded for the information.

What Kuzmin did not know about his restaurant source, however, was that the man had early on told MAD what was going on. MAD then used him as a "counterman," a double-agent who pretended to sell to the Russian, while actually telling the Germans everything that happened at each meeting.

Last summer, MAD began an operation unusual even in the murky world of spies. If they could convince Kuzmin to himself become a double agent, they would accomplish an unprecedented espionage coup. To date, no Western secret service agent has ever successfully infiltrated the GRU. No one really knows how many agents work for the intelligence agency, but the best estimate is about 12,000. Turning Kuzmin would also be a late retaliation for the loss of German defector Hansjoachim Tiedge in 1985. Tiedge worked for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne when he was successfully recruited by the East German secret police, known as the Stasi.

As such, the Kuzmin case presented a rare chance to realize a long-sought dream.

Putting the plan into effect

To test the waters, last June, German agents discretely handed Kuzmin a slip of paper with a Cologne phone number and asked him to give a call. In the coded language of spies, this is an unmistakable message. His cover had been blown.

Kuzmin took the paper, but never called. Was he too scared?

The Germans decided to try another tactic. On a cold grey Friday in mid-June, a team of CIA agents and MAD members caught up with the diplomat on the banks of the Alster. They wanted to win him over straight away and tried to reason with him. To no avail.

The Germans then gave the consul time to think over their proposition and allowed him to return to Moscow for his annual vacation. When he returned, they reasoned, they would turn the screws tighter.

Espionage is a dirty business. Money and blackmail are standard operating tools, not only in Russia. Counterespionage works the same way and Germany is no exception.

MAD agents found out that the consul was having an affair and that his wife Fljusa knew nothing about the liaison. They had also heard rumors that the consul had occasionally forged passports, allegedly in exchange for several tens of thousands of euros in bribes.

The consul, it seemed, was an ideal candidate for blackmail. This time around, the German agents approached his wife. It was their third and last attempt to turn him.

When Kuzmin still failed to react, MAD and CIA agents, as well as officials from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, blew his cover by catching him in Amorbach. They allowed their own double agent -- the man he was meeting -- to slip away. They then gave Kuzman his final choice: cooperation or confrontation, treason or refusal.

One can only speculate why the diplomat -- who clearly had a penchant for intrigue -- refused to cooperate. Perhaps it was fear: The punishment for treason in Russia is years locked away in a prison camp.

That left the German intelligence officials and politicians in an awkward position -- a bit like one feels when one catches a good friend stealing. They were left wondering what they should do. Putin was, after all, their chancellor's close friend.

What do you do when your friends spy on you?

"The chancellor knows about the unpleasant tradition of espionage but tries not to be affected by it," the SPD-member and Russia expert Erler said. Still, it was more than just Schroeder's relationship with Putin that had both sides scrambling for a swift solution. The BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency, too, is no stranger to spy games and carry on the same sort of operations in Russia. They could hardly take the moral high ground with the Russians.

When all hopes of acquiring a high-ranking defector to their side were shattered, Heinz Fromm, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, hopped on the next plane to Moscow.

Fromm, who heads the counter-espionage division, made an appointment for general talks with the civil foreign intelligence agency, known as SWR. He wanted to give the impression he was on a routine visit. Politely, but nevertheless with verve, Fromm told SWR head Sergei Lebedev, who has close ties with Germany, about the Kuzmin case. Lebedev, a fluent German speaker, promised to do what he could to resolve the matter.

That was on December, 3rd 2004.

Two days later, the Kremlin called its dynamic diplomat back to Moscow. This time, for good.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,352649,00.html
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