Tiedge, who fled to East Berlin on August 19 1985, had been working for the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (BfV), West Germany’s federal counter-intelligence agency, for 19 years. Depressed, in debt and increasingly alcoholic, he was ripe for recruitment. But his boss within the BfV, Heribert Hellenbroich, was loth to fire Tiedge or move him on to less sensitive work, for fear of “tipping him over the edge”.
Hans Joachim Tiedge
The decision cost Hellenbroich his own job shortly after Tiedge issued a terse handwritten confirmation from East Berlin that he had “gone over to the GDR on 19/8/85 because of a hopeless personal situation, but of my own free will”.
Markus Wolf, by contrast, had no qualms about exploiting individual weakness, and the defection of Tiedge proved his biggest coup since the planting of a mole, Gunter Guillaume, in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Tiedge was supposed to have been leading the hunt for East German and Soviet spies in West Germany. Instead, it turned out, he was almost certainly protecting them. In the weeks before he defected, for example, three women thought to have been East German spies fled to the safety of the GDR.
These included Sonia Luneburg, secretary to the leader of the West German Free Democrat Party, a junior coalition partner. A matronly woman with a round figure and a grey bob, Luneburg had worked for Martin Bangemann for 12 years, gathering inside information on the deliberations of the West German government. The other spies gathered plans of army bases and controlled a network of further agents.
Worse came three weeks after Tiedge defected, with the news that Herta-Astrid Willner, a long-serving secretary in the office of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had also defected to East Germany, along with her husband. The case was particularly embarrassing because the pair managed to escape despite being under investigation for espionage, a fact to which, West German intelligence reluctantly admitted, they had almost certainly been alerted by Tiedge. It later emerged that Tiedge had previously led several “investigations” against Willner.
The series of humiliations provoked Kohl to fury, and had serious ramifications for intelligence sharing among Nato allies, as America — and to a certain extent MI6 — began to wonder whether their secrets were safe with their West German counterparts. The answer was that they certainly were not.
Hans Joachim Tiedge was born in Berlin on June 24 1937 and studied to become a lawyer. He joined the BfV, based in Cologne, in 1966, initially as a clerk. But he embodied neither the glamour nor the secrecy usually associated with the espionage profession. Though he signed notes to contacts with the alias “Karl-Heinz”, for example, he lived under his real name and his number was listed in the telephone directory.
His relationship with his wife, Ute, was tempestuous, with neighbours reporting loud arguments. In the summer of 1982 she accidentally hit her head against a sink and, after falling into a coma, died. Her death propelled Tiedge into a deep depression and he became known within the service as a heavy drinker. By then, however, he was already safely ensconced in Department IV: Counterespionage.
After his defection he lived in East Berlin under the name Helmut Fischer, taking a degree at the Humboldt University (where his dissertation was on West German intelligence). On August 23 1990, with German reunification underway, he moved to Moscow.
It was only then that the story of Hans Joachim Tiedge was fully explained, with the confession by Tiedge’s deputy at the BfV, Klaus Kuron, that he too had been working as a double agent. Kuron feared he would be unmasked following Reunification, and preferred to reveal all rather than flee to Moscow. He even offered to work for the BfV as a triple agent against the Soviets.
Unlike Tiedge, however, he had been a model BfV employee – a hard-working, disciplined family man. But he had offered his services to Wolf by letter in 1981 and, a year later, travelled in disguise to Dresden to meet the master spy in person. Wolf paid him almost half a million dollars for information until 1990.
It was only Tiedge’s defection that allowed Kuron to remain undetected, by leading West Germany to think that its intelligence leak had been plugged. In fact, Kuron was the real source of information. How much spying Tiedge actually did for Wolf remains in question. German prosecutors even suggested that Wolf had falsely implied that Tiedge was a spy “in order to protect [Kuron]”.
In Moscow, Tiedge prepared the manuscript of his memoirs. But in 1998 5,000 copies of the book, entitled The Defector, were seized by his former employers before they could be distributed. Among other things, the book detailed how Germany’s secret services employed senior Nazis as agents after the Second World War. It was later published online.
Hans Joachim Tiedge and his wife had three daughters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8448961/Hans-Joachim-Tiedge.html
Hans Joachim Tiedge was born in Berlin on June 24 1937 and studied to become a lawyer. He joined the BfV, based in Cologne, in 1966, initially as a clerk. But he embodied neither the glamour nor the secrecy usually associated with the espionage profession. Though he signed notes to contacts with the alias “Karl-Heinz”, for example, he lived under his real name and his number was listed in the telephone directory.
His relationship with his wife, Ute, was tempestuous, with neighbours reporting loud arguments. In the summer of 1982 she accidentally hit her head against a sink and, after falling into a coma, died. Her death propelled Tiedge into a deep depression and he became known within the service as a heavy drinker. By then, however, he was already safely ensconced in Department IV: Counterespionage.
After his defection he lived in East Berlin under the name Helmut Fischer, taking a degree at the Humboldt University (where his dissertation was on West German intelligence). On August 23 1990, with German reunification underway, he moved to Moscow.
It was only then that the story of Hans Joachim Tiedge was fully explained, with the confession by Tiedge’s deputy at the BfV, Klaus Kuron, that he too had been working as a double agent. Kuron feared he would be unmasked following Reunification, and preferred to reveal all rather than flee to Moscow. He even offered to work for the BfV as a triple agent against the Soviets.
Unlike Tiedge, however, he had been a model BfV employee – a hard-working, disciplined family man. But he had offered his services to Wolf by letter in 1981 and, a year later, travelled in disguise to Dresden to meet the master spy in person. Wolf paid him almost half a million dollars for information until 1990.
It was only Tiedge’s defection that allowed Kuron to remain undetected, by leading West Germany to think that its intelligence leak had been plugged. In fact, Kuron was the real source of information. How much spying Tiedge actually did for Wolf remains in question. German prosecutors even suggested that Wolf had falsely implied that Tiedge was a spy “in order to protect [Kuron]”.
In Moscow, Tiedge prepared the manuscript of his memoirs. But in 1998 5,000 copies of the book, entitled The Defector, were seized by his former employers before they could be distributed. Among other things, the book detailed how Germany’s secret services employed senior Nazis as agents after the Second World War. It was later published online.
Hans Joachim Tiedge and his wife had three daughters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8448961/Hans-Joachim-Tiedge.html
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