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Ex-Stasi Officer helped make Berlin Wall:

“How we gambled and won con job in 1961”

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from
which they cannot dismount.”
—SIR WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

By ED PLAISTED 

BERLIN -- Hagen Koch isn’t proud of it but he once believed that East Germans who tried to breech the Berlin Wall were either armed criminals or dangerous lunatics.

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security) Stasi was the secret police of the DDR. The former Captain Koch explained the siege mentality of the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic). “The propaganda served several purposes,” he said. “It reinforced the state’s siege mentality and the importance of stopping escapees.”

The 66-year-old Koch, his white hair receding and needing reading glasses, met with his once American enemies last August here in the annual reunion of the Berlin Brigade veterans. He admitted he had helped in the initial design of the Berlin Wall while an enlisted man with the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army).

Koch also confirmed a belief of former MP Lt. Vern Pike that the communist gambled and won in putting up The Wall in 1961.

He also confirmed rumors that the Stasi spied on the future Pope and one of their spies bedded the late President John F. Kennedy.

“Berlin was referred to as a combat zone,” asserted Koch. “Boarder guards killed in the line of duty were proclaimed heroes. The idea of escape being a criminal offense gave justification to the order to shoot.”

“Because any escapee from East Germany would be entitled to an automatic West German citizenship, East Germans had more to gain,” Koch continued. “In the end, we didn’t care what the border guards thought, only how they behaved. That why we had Stasi informers among the guards.”

Koch, who was at the communist crossing point at Friedrichstrasse in Berlin in August 1961, confirmed recently here what Vern Pike, now a retired MP colonel, has believed for more than 46 years: the East German army and police carried empty weapons to escort the fence-builders.

Founded in the 1950s, the Stasi was police and intelligence organization of the DDR. The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin with an extensive complex in Litchtenberg and several smaller complexes throughout the city.

Widely regarded as one of the most effective intelligence agencies in the world, the Stasi?s motto was “Schild und Schwert der Partei” (Shield and Sword of the Party).

The Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and 180,000 undercover informers. They kept East Germany’s population of 18-million under surveillance while maintaining a wall loaded with mines, dogs, barbed wire and guards with shoot-to-kill orders.

Pike, now living in Pinehurst N. C., co-author with Ed Plaisted of “Checkpoint Charlie’s Angels”. believes strongly that the failure to predict the building of the Wall ranks as one of the most dramatic blunders in the history of the CIA and MI6. “Despite the flood of spooks in the city, not one was able to predict what would happen in the early hours of August 13, 1961,” said Pike.

Koch, who was a private in the East German Guard Regiment “Feliks Dzierzynski”, at the time agrees with Pike that the communists got away with building the Wall with a daring bluff.

“If the Americans had let General (Lucius) Clay knock down our barbed-wire barriers, we were under orders to do nothing,” Koch said. “Most of DDR personnel believed the Americans would call our bluff. They didn’t. It might have been different if the American president was Reagan instead of Kennedy.”

Today, Koch appears more like a college professor than a dreaded secret policeman.  This was the man who in 1961 mapped the Berlin Wall for the East German government. He was at the time an NCO in the topographical service of Guard Regiment Berlin ‘Feliks Dzierzynski.’

 The Americans questioned the white line dividing their sector from the Soviets when it was drawn in August 1961 and General Clay had it painted over. After further review Clay learned the communists were right and Koch’s skills acknowledged.

Pike would learn on a 2002 German Public TV ARD interview that featured both former adversaries that Koch help paint the first white line dividing the American sector from the Soviet sector at Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. He was a Stasi recruit at the time.

Koch, who was born July 22, 1940 in Dessau during the glory year of Hitler’s Third Reich, was a Stasi officer until 1985. He was considered an up-and-coming star by Erich Mielke, the notorious chief of the East German secret police.

Pike remembers the first to learn of the border problems was the Allied Kommandatura. Although they complained that the barbed wire barrier was a flagrant breach of the Four Power status of Berlin, they did not want to respond.

According to Koch, DDR operation ‘Chinese Wall’ was the brainchild of Walter Ulbricht. Preparatory work began under the aegis of Eric Honecker (1912-1993), who was responsible for security matters within the Central Committee of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED). Allied secret services heard about it from an East German defector, and Ulbricht betrayed himself by replying to a newspaperman?s question with, “Nobody has any intention of building a wall.”

The Soviets gave their blessing on August 3, 1961. At midnight on August 12, some 25,000 DDR militia men took up posts every two meters. At 2:00 A.M., the underground and S-bahn ceased to operate. The tanks of the Red Army and the DDR’s National Popular Army (NVA) established strategic positions. The Red Army was in a state of alert but careful not to infringe on the rights of the Allies.

“The American response was inept,” asserts Pike. Koch was quick to agree with his now American friend.

At the time, the combat-arms units of the Berlin Brigade consisted of two pentomic battle groups (1,362 officers and men each). They were the Second and Third Battle Groups of the 6th Infantry and Company F, 40th Armor.

The USAREUR (United States Army Europe) commander, General Bruce C. Clarke, decided to take no action unless the Soviets actually started to blockade Berlin. Secretary of State Dean Rusk believed the DDR action did not threaten Allied rights in the city, so he let President Kennedy continue sailing off the Massachusetts coast. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said casually, “Nobody is going to fight over Berlin,” and continued his golf holiday in Scotland.

The lack of intelligence may be explained by the fact that between 1956 and 1959, more than 100 Berlin Operating Base CIA agents were arrested or shot by the KGB and Stasi.

Pike, like most Army officers, had little love for the CIA agents they referred to as spooks operating in Berlin.

Berlin Operating Base (BOB) was headed by William Graver, one of the tallest men in the CIA at six-foot-four, with an ego to match. Garver’s nickname, El Supremo, came not from his size but from his reputation for going to extremes with women.

It was Garver who ridiculed U. S. Army Colonel Ernest von Pawel’s warning about the communist plan to close the border with some kind of system of barriers. Since CIA officials were prohibited from travelling to the DDR or East Berlin, BOB?s only reliable information came from the  U.S. Military Liaison Mission (MLM), of which von Pawel was the commander. The MLM operated out of Potsdam, in communist East Germany whose mission was to locate and identify Soviet military units in the Soviet Zone of Germany (East Germany)(likewise, each of the World War II Four Powers - U.S., UK, France, Soviet Union, operated MLMs).

In Washington, President Kennedy was desperate for information about Berlin. JFK’s instincts that the CIA and the State Department were withholding information from him were correct.

The Soviets, however, were in possession of the American defenses in West Germany and West Berlin. They had been obtained in 1959 by U.S. Army Major William Henry Whalen, a double agent for the Stasi, who sold out his country for $14,000 over five years. By August 1961, the Soviets knew from these reports that the United States had no plans for defending Berlin and in fact had very few military assets in the divided city. The KGB reported to Khrushchev that the Americans had no realistic way of defending Berlin, short of a suicidal nuclear exchange.

“The Berlin Wall was the ultimate and seemingly permanent reminder that our top spooks had gone up against the KGB and Stasi on the front lines of the Cold War, and lost,” Pike says.

“Top DDR functionaries were so concerned about their safety that in 1960 Ulbricht directed them to a new compound outside Berlin,” Koch remembers. “It was located in a forest that bordered a lake near Wandlitz, about 23 miles from Berlin. It consisted of two dozen villas, shops, recreation facilities and an indoor swimming pool. It was closely guarded by Stasi forces.”

Mielke, who lived in Villa No. 8, demanded a code of silence so that outsiders had no idea of the residents high living.

It was here late in June of 1961 that Mikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to the DDR, was invited for a talk. The ambassador pursued Khrushchev to give into Ulbricht.?

“The Allies? tepid response to the barbed wire barrier emboldened Ulbricht that he could transform the wire fence into a concrete wall,” Koch said.  “On August 15, at the Ackerstrasse, cranes began lowering a line of prefabricated concrete blocks into place. These were the first of thousands of blocks that would make up the initial Berlin Wall.”

According to Koch, “The Wall stood about six feet high in most places and ran in a zigzag fashion for twenty-seven miles between two halves of the city. Another seventy miles of wall separated West Berlin from DDR territory in the north, west, and south.”

“Ambitious though it was, it was backyard fencing compared to the final Berlin Wall that evolved in the 1970s,” Koch says. “It became a monster thirteen feet high and capped with a rounded top. Along much of its eastern side ran a broad ‘death strip’ of bare ground enclosed by a small wall of electrified wire fence. Guards in towers with searchlights covered the area with orders to shoot anyone trying to leave the ‘worker’s paradise.”

During the Berlin Wall crisis, the basic principle of American policy remained unchanged: International agreements had the force of law and could not be changed except by the common consent of the countries that made them. They could not be changed by force or threat of force, but only by negotiation.

The United States, Great Britain, and France were in Berlin as the result of international agreements made with the Soviet Union. Those agreements applied not just to West Berlin, but to Greater Berlin as defined by law, all of it. As a result, throughout the Berlin Wall crisis, the United States refused to compromise on agreed rights deriving from the Four-Power status of the city.

Pike will never forget that night of infamy in August while he was on patrol in Kreuzberg. About the only thing that pleased him that night was that he knew his duty at the golf course was history. He didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but Kreuzberg would eventually be surrounded by the Berlin Wall on three sides.

“While on patrol, I looked down Friedrichstrasse and spotted a bunch of workers with jackhammers tearing up the pavement. I asked my driver, ‘What the hell is going on’ On further inspection, they were putting concrete posts in the road and stringing barbed wire.”

Pike radioed headquarters. It was about 2:00 a.m. when he reported to the MP desk sergeant. The sergeant called the operations officer, and he called the provost marshal.

“We were just reporting this as MPs,” Pike says. “The spooks and everyone were reporting it. We had several clues that something was about to happen after I noted on earlier patrols the stockpiling in East Berlin of concrete and barbed wire. We dutifully reported it, and the spooks laughed it off. Nobody seemed to be overly concerned about it. So I don’t put much credence in anything the CIA did in Berlin. If there was any real legwork done in the spook world, it was done from Detachment A of the Army Special Forces, not Berlin Operating Base.?”

“The timing by the communists was excellent,” Pike agrees. “It was a quiet summer weekend with all the leaders of the Allies on vacation breaks. The initial reports from taxi drivers and reporters of unusual activity in East Berlin took a long time to reach the high command. Even then, the lack of Allied action astounded the outraged Berliners and led them to believe that they had been betrayed.”

On Thursday,  17 August  1961, East German laborers began building the Wall on the Potsdamer Platz. The S-Bahn entrance was sealed. The anger of West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt over the action of the DDR could not be ignored. In Washington, American’s new president of just six months, Kennedy, was confused on how to act because of conflicting suggestions from advisors. His military commanders in Germany were demanding a quick show of force to counter the DDR actions.

JFK’s initial action was to dispatch General Lucius Clay, the hero of the 1948 blockade. The general had already volunteered, but because Clay was a Republican who actively supported Richard Nixon in the election, Kennedy did a balancing act by sending Vice President Lyndon Johnson with Clay on Saturday, August 19, 1961.

“Johnson and Clay achieved what JFK expected of them,” Pike says. “The two were greeted with frenzied celebration wherever they went. The Berliners revered General Clay. He was the father of the Berlin Airlift in 1947-48. With his presence in the city, the Berliners felt protected, safe, and confident that everything would be restored before the start of the Wall. When he was recalled by Kennedy, the Berliners? spirits sank into near despair for a while.”

The reinforcement of the Berlin Brigade by 1,500 troops and the delivery by rail of additional British armored cars and scout cars helped in the patrol of the Wall. British troops reacted by placing wire around the Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten after the guards’ relief arriving by bus had been stoned by angry West Berliners.

“The commies continued building their wall,” says Pike. “The eighty-eight crossing points were reduced to only thirteen, with differentiation between those that could be used by West Berliners and West Germans. Only one rail connection was allowed, the Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn Station. The platform was sealed off, and passengers were processed through a series of tiny cells. Our rights to circulate freely through the city were now in contest.”

It was at Friedrichstrasse that the Americans established Checkpoint C, or Charlie in military language. Alpha, for Checkpoint A, and Bravo, for Checkpoint B, were established at the Helmstedt and Berlin ends of the autobahn corridor connecting Berlin with West Berlin.

Koch confirmed that the Stasi spied on the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger three decades before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

“This was long before his nomination as prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith that our agents kept watch on him” Koch asserted. “We had started surveillance in the spring of 1974 when he was a theology professor and visited then DDR (East Germany) to lecture at a Catholic seminary in Erfurt. Our leaders saw him as one of the fieriest enemies of communism.”

Koch pointed out the Stasi kept files on up to 6 million East German citizens -- one third of the entire population.

“We operated with broad power and were very detailed oriented,” he said through an interpreter. “All phone calls from the West were monitored. So was the mail. Similar surveillance was routine domestically. Every factory, social club and youth association was infiltrated. We even blackmailed citizens to spy on their families.”

The Stasi tracked potential subversives by collecting scent samples from people by wiping bits of cloth on objects they had touched.

“These samples were stored in airtight glass containers and special dogs were trained to track down the suspect’s scent,” Koch explained. “We also conducted smear campaigns against suspects. This included sending anonymous letters and phone calls to blackmail the suspect. And, of course, torture was an accepted method to get information.”

Koch grew up as the Third Reich was becoming toast. His father was a panzer staff sergeant. His town was fire bombed by the British and Americans in March 1945 ‘after the war was almost over’ and that fueled his anti-American feeling as a boy of five.

“When the Americans occupied my town, some GIs looted our home and took my father’s photo and his military dagger as souvenirs,” Koch said. “Before that the Soviets had occupied our town and their soldiers were nice to us kids.”

Koch’s anti-American feelings were increased during the Berlin Airlift (1948-49) during a period of near starvation caused by the Soviet blockade. A Soviet plane dropped leaflets on our town blaming American President (Harry S) Truman for the famine. It claimed the Americans had his planes drop potato beetles.

Koch was troubled by being brought up a Nazi and then converting to being a communist. But by 19 he was in the army, thinking, “If this is my future, it doesn?t get any better if I was in heaven.”

Koch has many stories to tell of his years as a Stasi officer. None is more shocking than how the Stasi got an agent in bed with JFK in 1963. Her name was Ellen Rometsch, a 27-year-old frau of Luftwaffe sergeant attached to the West German embassy in Washington.

“She may have stolen some missile secrets by her sexual adventures with defense contractors and an official of the American space agency,” Koch said. “She was part of a group of call girls run by Bobby Baker who provided them to senators and other powerful Washington men including the American president Kennedy.”

Reports suggested FBI director J. Edgar Hoover knew the woman was a spy who had landed in JFK’s bed. So it came as no surprise that attorney general Robert Kennedy ordered the expulsion from the U. S. of Rometsch on Aug. 21, 1963, in total secrecy.

“I confirmed that the woman was a member of our foreign espionage directorate who was a product of Markus Wolf. She may have been loaned to the KGB because America was in its domain.?

Koch soured on the communist system and in 1985 when he resigned from the Stasi he was put in prison for four years.

Koch is now campaigning to get a pension from the German government. He is the founder of Berliner Mauer-Archiv.

“I don’t defend the DDR policies because I served prison time for protesting them,” Koch said in an interview at the Check Point Charlie Museum. “We didn’t commit any human rights abuses. We only carried out orders.”

Koch was one of 500 defectors from the Stasi. “I had become disillusioned with communism,” he explained. “At times we faced starvation. Alcoholism and promiscuity dominated social life.”

He was luckier than most. The Stasi kidnapped 120 defectors living in West Germany and returned them to East Germany as enemies of the state Seven of these were executed.

Koch’s former comrades are causing a stir by mounting a public campaign for rehabilitation, claiming they were only following orders in jailing dissidents and upholding a shoot-to-kill policy that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people as they tried to escape to West Berlin.

-30-

(Ed Plaisted is a retired newspaperman turned author. He is an Army veteran who served as a PIO in Germany during the Cold War. He and Col. Vern Pike are co-authors of Checkpoint Charlie’s Angels and Plaisted’s latest novel, The Impostor Wore # 13. (BlueWaterPress) is available on Amazon.com along with earlier novels Disaster Plan and Terror In Berlin.) 

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