Seventy-eighth edition of the N&O column / Spooks newsletter

(Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 15:50:35 +0000)

Intelligence news

Germany

The 3rd of October is Germany's re-unification's day. This was the reason for 2 German TV stations to bring programmes about espionage from the GDR against the Federal Republic of Germany - and the other way arround - during the cold war. - Daniel, one of my German correspondents for the "German Branch" of ENIGMA2000, kindly sent me an English description of the contents of these 2 interesting TV transmissions. Thanks, Daniel.

At October 3rd, the German TV station 3Sat showed two programmes dealing with espionage.

The first programme was the feature film "Romeo" (with documentary background) showing how the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklaerung, foreign intelligence office of the GDR) recruited West German women; they put special leading agents ("Fuehrungsoffiziere"), so-called "Romeos", on them to start a (pretended) love relation with the potential spy. The movie dramatizes (with many flashbacks) the relation of a West German female agent to her "Romeo" and to her daughter and how she comes to terms with that time on the occasion of her trial for high treason. Again, number stations were used here as a "decoration" in three scenes: In one scene, she sits in front of the radio and transmits 5FG amid tears. (Quite questionable IMHO since AFAIK numbers were rarely transmitted live and a spy would not use an easily locatable transmitter... See below for more on how they really did it.)

Another short scene shows him sitting in front of the radio receiving a 5FG transmission. Again, it seems to be a "mock-up" numbers station with a live male voice, to me it did not sound like a known real numbers station, but might resemble to G6.

One scene shows her again receiving (fake) numbers and she mumbles whilst still receiving the plaintext of the message! One Time Pad decryption on the fly, quite a performance! :->

The second programme that evening was a documentation about Klaus Kuron ("Klaus Kuron - Spion in eigener Sache").

Klaus Kuron joined the Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS, frontier police) in 1954, was an expert for radio and deciphering in the police headquarters radio station in Bonn, worked for the Verfassungsschutz in Cologne in 1962 (domestic security, political police), in 1967 executive (inspector) there and responsible for the surveillance of leftist political parties. He was talented in converting foreign agents to make them work as so-called Counter Men (CM) for the West German Verfassungsschutz. He later came to the opinion that the GDR was not necessarily of disapprove and gradually gained sympathy for the political order there, finally making contact to the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklaerung) and becoming their collaborator, i.e. a double agent for the Verfassungsschutz and the HVA. In that programme, there were some interesting sentences:

(Comment, off:) "... After a few days time he receives the encrypted request via A3-radio to take part in a meeting in Brussels at an appointed weekend." (Is the term "A3-radio" ("A3-Funk") HVA jargon or do they mean the CCIR designator "A3" for AM Modulation?)

Further quotations from Kuron:

"... received the message via radio ..."
"... I was familiar with encryption and radio techniques from my times at the BGS ... normal text was converted into rows of numbers and compressed via a software supplied by the HVA. This text then was copied onto a dictaphone. With this dictaphone I then went to a telephone box and dubbed this row of numbers, which now only was a buzzing noise of two to three seconds [duration], to a certain phone number in the central office in [East-] Berlin."

[Source: historical, teletext news of the German TV station ARD, June 06, 2000]

"German news magazine "Focus": Siemens maintained Stasi computer

Technicians of the Munich sited Siemens group obviously maintained the central computer of the GDR foreign espionage organization for years without their knowledge. ...

Cuba

In mid-October we heard, that a citizen from Cuba, called "Pedro", was charged with spying and arrested (probably by the USA?) for 15 years in prison in Matanza (Cuba?). -Since these days, the "irregular presentation" of V2/2a increased. We hope, that we get more info for the next N&O edition.

See Newsletter 89.