The Secret War for Germany: CIA’s Covert Role in Cold War Berlin Explored through Recently Declassified Documents

Washington, DC, May 11, 2022— The Central Intelligence Agency aggressively pursued clandestine efforts to undermine East German morale at the height of the Cold War, recently declassified CIA records confirm. Exploring one of the core chapters of post-war European history, the materials posted today by the National Security Archive detail key facets of the intelligence agency’s still meagerly documented activities in East Germany.

Those activities included supporting and advising certain anti-communist activist groups, particularly in Berlin – a fact long denied in public – which were effective enough to prompt the Soviets to make them a subject of diplomacy with Washington, in addition to implementing their own propaganda and security measures.

This e-book consists of several documents culled from the recently published Digital National Security Archive collection CIA Covert Operations IV: The Eisenhower Years, 1953-1961 (ProQuest, 2021), available by subscription through many libraries. They provide a concise look into some of the intelligence agency’s previously classified ties to covert organizations in Cold War Germany.

CIA IN GERMANY

Germany after World War II was divided into occupation zones garrisoned by troops of the Great Powers. The Soviet Union had the eastern part of the country. In the west the United States held the south and center and Great Britain the north, with a slice on the western edge assigned to France. In a microcosm of that, Berlin, located within the eastern zone, was divided among the four powers also. Much Cold War diplomacy after 1945 focused on the integration of Germany into international politics as well as its unification in one form or another. Because there was no “peace treaty” formally ending World War II, the political status of the various parts of Germany remained in flux.

With the Berlin Blockade in 1948-49 the Soviets tried to compel the Western Allies to accede to Russian control over the former German capital within the eastern zone. Many political and economic measures followed. The Americans and British initiated a currency reform that re-established a quasi-national medium of exchange. The Russians created the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in their eastern zone. The U.S. and U.K. merged their occupation areas into “Bizonia,” a rump state, on the way toward forming the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a national political entity. Berlin remained divided.[1]

At each step along the way, intelligence services participated in the developments.[2] For the Americans, this meant the CIA. Looking at this history from a spy's perspective, probably the two most memorable episodes of the 1950s were the East German riots of 1953, with the question of what CIA had, or had not, done to spark them; and the Berlin Tunnel, where CIA, in conjunction with Britain's MI-6, tunneled into East Berlin to place wiretaps on Soviet telephone cables.[3]

But the day-to-day activities of the intelligence services, while equally meaningful, were less spectacular. These were intended to produce information on political developments on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain, to gain intelligence on the adversary's military posture, and to undertake activities designed to influence those other elements. Since Berlin was an important entry point to the West for those fleeing Eastern European countries as well as the Soviet Union, it was also a key recruitment center for the CIA in finding agents and operatives willing to work against the Soviets. The full panoply of intelligence operations is too broad to accommodate in this e-book, but something we can do is to focus in on a key part of the story – CIA's efforts to undermine East German morale by means of covertly funded and directed non-government organizations that purported to consist of nonpolitical citizen activists who were actually toeing an American line.

Many of these organizations started during the presidency of Harry S. Truman. (Much more will be reported on this when the Digital National Security Archive brings out its CIA Set VI, which will cover the Truman years, where a fresh e-book on Germany is planned.) For the most part these entities were run from the Berlin Operations Base (BOB) of intelligence. During the Eisenhower period, CIA was the relevant service. Under base chief Peter Sichel, then William K. Harvey, the Berlin detachment funneled promising displaced persons to the activist groups, not just the German ones but also Eastern European and Russian. The CIA German mission, at first under Lucien K. Truscott, a “personal representative” of agency Director Allen W. Dulles, then Frankfurt station chief Tom Parrott, followed by Henry Pleasants, managed the funding of the activist groups and their relations with the political entity that became the Federal Republic.

This was the situation in June 1953, when the Soviet-sponsored East German regime attempted to implement new economic performance norms. There seems to have been a disconnect between Moscow, which perceived increasing dissatisfaction in East Germany and Eastern Europe at Soviet controls, and the East German communist authorities. The Soviets imagined a program intended to appeal to East Germans burdened by communist ideological and political controls. East German leaders, by contrast, saw themselves as enforcing Sovietization and the people rightly perceived this as revitalized oppression. East German workers first threatened, then began strike actions and actual riots, particularly in East Berlin on June 17. Surprised by these events, BOB lost touch with the situation when East German and Russian security forces closed interzonal crossings, cutting the CIA off from its networks in East Berlin.

In this turbulent atmosphere, U.S. intelligence struggled with what to advise Washington. The standard story has been that Henry Hecksher, then BOB deputy chief, cabled headquarters to recommend weapons be handed out to the East German workers, but that his superiors in Washington quashed the idea without referring it to Director Dulles, who had been absent when the cable arrived. That appears to be fictitious. Bayard Stockton, then a junior officer at BOB, avers that he was the actual author of a BOB cable which base chief Harvey, not his deputy, sent to Washington, advising that U.S. troops in West Berlin be put on alert. Hecksher was leaving Berlin for a new post in Guatemala. Stockton affirms the cable's recommendation proved quite controversial and was rejected.[4]

These details are important because the 1953 riots ended up being among the defining events of 1950s Berlin (as well as to the rest of the Soviet camp) and the question of what the CIA did, or did not do, to trigger them becomes important in Cold War history. The Berlin Base had no existing project of its own specifically aimed at stirring up trouble in the eastern zone. Therefore, a corollary question is whether the German activist organizations it supported had had such a role. At least one of them, the Fighting Group against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, or KgU) aimed at administrative harassment of GDR authorities (Document 1). The Investigating Committee of Free Jurists and the Cramer Bureau propaganda projects had the ability to sway East German public opinion but did not seem to be encouraging the East Berlin riots.

Management controls over these entities were weak. From mid-1954 on, base chief Harvey would be preoccupied by moving his burgeoning CIA base to new accommodations, reorganizing the BOB, and backstopping construction of the tunnel necessary to wiretap Soviet telephone cables. The expanded BOB would have sections for East Germany, the Soviet satellite countries, the Soviet Union itself, and counterespionage. Really only the East German section was set up to guide the activist groups and it was stretched thin. A November 1954 project review (Document 1) notes the CIA anticipated only one officer at Berlin Base (and two more at headquarters) were sufficient to ride herd on the KgU. This was especially sensitive since the Fighting Group Against Inhumanity had harassment as one of its aims in East Germany. Its VII Bureau consumed the bulk of the CIA money, with a central office staff of 5, 10 more in field sectors, and 125 in East German networks. These operatives received and circulated propaganda material and participated in the harassment operations.

The Committee of Free Jurists and the Cramer Bureau (Documents 3, 4, 6, 11) were other propaganda sources. All had been active before the East German riots. In July 1952, in a major provocation, East German security service agents had kidnapped a top official of the Free Jurists. The Jurists' desire to strike back was evident. Both the Jurists and the Cramer Bureau crafted propaganda products after the Berlin uprising that built on those events. Therefore, it was not easy to dismiss allegations that the CIA, through its German activist organizations, had had a role in triggering the East German troubles.

The kidnapping of Dr. Walter Linse, a senior official of the Free Jurists, in West Berlin by East German operatives,[5] shows the increasing East German and Soviet preoccupation with defeating the covert enemy. Linse was never seen again. Through 1959, as many as 62 persons followed him, kidnapped into East Germany. There were waves of arrests within the GDR, notably after the Berlin riots. Eastern courts handed out over 126 death sentences for alleged association with the KgU alone. Soviet authorities carried out the executions. In 1955 the eastern zone authorities mounted a media campaign against the German activists. This included inserting East German agents among the flow of Displaced Persons to the West, who then infiltrated the Fighting Group and the Free Jurists, purloined documents, and then redefected to the GDR, where the materials were used in the media campaigns.

In the fall of 1955, the anti-Western maneuvers spilled over into the West German press, when the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel and the daily newspaper Die Welt published exposés of activities of the Fighting Group. The CIA labored to contrive tactics to meet these attacks. One such measure was to hire a lawyer familiar to many of the actors involved to defend the KgU and implicitly threaten defamation suits against the newspaper and magazine (Document 2). Another form of defense was to improve the cover arrangements made to preserve the secrecy of the covert activities. The CIA experimented with one of its projects, LCCASSOCK, deepening the conventional publishing role of its covert entity, the Cramer Bureau, to make it appear more innocent (Document 6). Another tactic was to stop creating phony versions of East German publications and substitute propaganda that simply mimicked the style of GDR propaganda, as shown in the 1956 project renewal for LCCASSOCK (Document 4).

The underlying reality of the CIA operations, however, made it imperative to increase cooperation with the West Germans and the role of the recently formed Federal Republic of Germany. CIA deliberations on how to do this flitted back and forth between headquarters and the field (Document 3). No matter what the degree of U.S.-FRG cooperation, in the sensitive political atmosphere of the time, the West Germans were under pressure for permitting the presence in Berlin and West Germany of entities that not only distributed propaganda in the GDR but carried out commando operations. Debates in the West German legislature, the Bundestag, in 1957, showed the FRG moving toward criminal investigations of commando-type actions of, at a minimum, the Fighting Group Against Inhumanity (Document 5).

Ultimately the CIA had few alternatives. When the West German government refused to take over full responsibility for the CIA covert operations, the agency made preparations to close them out. The Soviets assisted in the shutdown by making an issue of the covert entities. In particular, in the 1959 Berlin crisis – often called the “Berlin Deadline crisis” because of Soviet demands for a resolution of longstanding Berlin issues by a certain date – Moscow denounced Western (U.S.) espionage and propaganda carried out from the divided city.[6] As it happened, the Central Intelligence Agency was already operating under an October 1958 decision to shut down the Fighting Group, at a minimum, by June 1959 (Document 8).

Still, field operatives could not resist the temptation for one last roll of the dice. In early 1959, the Berlin Base advocated a program of covert actions which might complicate the Russians' diplomacy. A high-level study group chaired by senior diplomat Robert Murphy backed the idea. The CIA's Board of National Estimates, the intelligence community's top analytical office, expressed serious doubts (Document 9), however. On May 15, 1959, President Eisenhower convened a meeting in the Oval Office to consider the action program. Eisenhower made no immediate decision, but he appreciated that similar initiatives had worked previously, and he did not speak against the Murphy committee's idea (Document 10). However, the president ultimately rejected the covert initiative. Nevertheless, a June 1960 CIA record demonstrates that the Cramer Bureau was still in the process of being liquidated (Document 11). This illustrates the difficulties associated with shutting down agency covert operations.

There is no overall scorecard demonstrating success (or failure) in the secret war over Germany in the 1950s. Both the Western countries and the Soviet Union avidly pursued this conflict, as the documents here help to illustrate. There can be no doubt that their machinations complicated the effort to create a viable state in place of the former Hitlerite Germany. The covert operations added to hostilities that persisted through the era and led to the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. That crisis, the sharpest yet, contributed to Soviet anxieties that led to the world-threatening Cuban Missile Crisis.