20 Years After The Wall

10/16/2009 01:16 PM

The End of East

West German Secret Service Opens GDR Files

By Klaus Wiegrefe

EXCERPT:

Germany's foreign intelligence agency recently released some of its files from the run-up to the collapse of East Germany. The papers show that West German spies had conflicting information. At times they were well sourced, but they failed to see that the Berlin Wall was about to collapse.

It could have been a real coup: Erich Honecker escapes to the West, and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, is the first to know. It was Nov. 7, 1989, two days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The BND notified the Chancellery that the leader of the East German Communist Party, who had been overthrown only a few weeks earlier, "visited his sister in Wiebelskirchen in the Saarland region on 11/6" and then "traveled to Switzerland for medical treatment."

The sobering correction of the story came later. Not only was the BND the first to know about Honecker's supposed escape, but it was apparently the only one to know. The report had turned out to be incorrect. In reality, Honecker was at his home in Wandlitz near Berlin, and he wasn't taking the fall of East Germany in stride.

The story of Honecker and the BND is one of hearsay, knowledge and false information. In September 1989, for example, BND agents sent an "express message" to the Chancellery in Bonn to announce that Honecker had died on the 13th of the month, and that the funeral was planned for the 24th. The information had come from the Americans and was reported in the tabloid Bild, but the BND was responsible for spreading the supposedly sensational story, even though it noted that there were "considerable doubts" as to the veracity of the report. Those doubts were correct. Honecker would remain alive until 1994.

Was it just bad luck, incompetence or just another of the usual scrapes anyone working undercover in unknown territory is likely to get into? How effective is the BND? This has been a hotly debated question ever since it was founded. And not even insiders would venture to guess how efficient West German intelligence gathering was on East German territory. This makes it all the more astonishing that the BND, responding to a request from SPIEGEL, has now, for the first time, declassified large numbers of documents relating to a landmark even in postwar history: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Sphere: Related Content