-Caveat Lector- http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=119088 Monday, 18 September 2000 21:34 (ET) Spying on politics By MARTIN WALKER WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- The sudden eruption in Britain of a Cold War-era spy scandal, with an alleged East German 'mole' inside the top London think-tank on international affairs, has thrown up a startling pattern of Soviet block espionage targeting not military secrets but peace movements and politics. The Stasi, the nickname for East Germany's State Security Service, claimed to have deployed at least 28 strategically-placed spies in the upper reaches of the British establishment. Three of them were providing reports from the heart of the then- ruling Conservative Party, headed by prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Another was providing documents prepared for the ruling body of the chief opposition party, the national executive committee of the Labor Party. And another was providing internal documents from the Social Democratic Party, a centrist and breakaway group from Labor that at one point threatened to overtake the parent party as the main challenger to Mrs. Thatcher's Conservatives. The presence of the Stasi mole code-named 'Eckart' inside the Royal Institute of International Affairs, did not come as news to MI5, Britain's veteran counter-intelligence operation. They had been tipped off under an intelligence-sharing agreement with the US- based Central Intelligence Agency, after CIA officers took advantage of the chaos in East Berlin after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to plunder the Stasi files. But the presence - and political targets - of the remaining moles has remained secret until German code-breakers finally cracked the ciphers under which the British operational files were protected. The story broke in London over the weekend, after British academic Dr Anthony Glees, director of European politics at Brunel University, analyzed the decoded index to the Stasi files. "This is a unique and compelling archive, and the importance of its discovery should not be under-estimated", Dr Glees said. "We have long known that the Stasi were active in Britain at this time, but we have never before known exactly what they were doing. (This index) shows that British agents were able to provide the East German regime with key insights into the realities of British political and strategic thinking". That is the point. The conventional view of Cold War spying was that military and nuclear secrets were the main targets. But the work of the Stasi 28 in Britain suggests that East Berlin, reckoned by far the most loyal of the satellites of the Soviet block, was focusing instead on the inside story of politics and policy-making. There was a flurry of political protests in London against the recommendation by MI5 not to prosecute 'Eckart' under the Official Secrets Act. But MI5 sources claimed that it was "not at all clear that a conviction could be guaranteed", an indication that it might be difficult to prove that real secrets - as opposed to policy analysis - had been betrayed. Chatham House, as the Royal Institute of International Affairs is named after the 19th century prime minister who lived in the classic Georgian house on St James Square where the think-tank now boasts one of the finest addresses in London, is the place where Britain's foreign policy establishment thinks aloud. The favored setting for visiting dignitaries to deliver policy speeches, it also publishes 'International Affairs' , one of the world's top foreign policy quarterlies. It hosts academics and foreign policy specialists, and publishes a range of quasi-official policy papers. "But this is not a place that gets secrets in the classic sense", commented one insider yesterday. "This place is about discussing and disseminating foreign policy ideas and concepts, not about military hardware or war plans". Intelligence analysts have noted a similar pattern in the way the Stasi targeted Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway. DESTA, (standing for Destabilization, Terrorism and Disinformation) is a highly-regarded Nordic newsletter on security affairs, devoted an entire issue this year to Stasi operations in Scandinavia, and again the focus on politics, rather than military secrets., is striking. The Norwegian agent Akker, recruited in 1966, specialized in reports of meetings between Social Democrat parties and leaders throughout Europe. Agent 'Toeppfer', also recruited in 1966, reported on diplomatic policy-making towards East Germany by various Western European countries. Other agents reported on Norwegian politics, on the formation of Norway's economic and foreign policies, and its links to the European Union. In Sweden, agent Kiesling was recruited in 1982 to report on the Swedish peace movement and its relations with similar groups inside the Soviet block. Agent 'Dom' specialized in reports on Sweden's anti-apartheid movement. Agent 'Martin' was recruited in 1986, and reported on Swedish links with Namibia and the SWAPO independence movement. Another agent, 'Pioner', reported on Swedish and other countries' links to Mozambique - which at the time was an East German ally. There is no doubt that the Stasi were also looking for hard military information, like British military planning and Swedish capabilities in defending against chemical and biological warfare, but the Stasi seems to have been fascinated by the way Western politics worked and the way policies were made. Maybe it was a division of labor between the Soviets and the East Germans, and maybe the Stasi found it so hard to penetrate military secrets that they took whatever their agents could get, however tangential the information might have been. The Swedish authorities also decided not to prosecute the Stasi agents who had been exposed, Justice Minister Laila Freivalds told the Swedish parliament in February. Some twenty possible cases were pending, she noted, but no decision to prosecute had been taken because "it had not been possible to establish criminal activity and beside, the statue of limitations applied in some cases". (This means that the alleged offence had taken place too long ago to still count as a crime.) It remains as a remarkable footnote to the history of the Cold War that one of the Soviet block's most feared spy agencies should have spent so much time probing the thinking of Western European politics and the semi-public process of policy-making. But then even Stasi agents had to justify their stipends and their expenses. "No classified documents would ever go anywhere near Chatham House", noted Rupert Allason, the former Member of Parliament and author of a series of works on intelligence. " "Whoever 'Eckart' was, he would be perfectly entitled to pass Chatham House material to the Stasi, and the security service (MI5) would only be interested on the basis that their surveillance could identify a Stasi officer working in London under diplomatic cover". But then MI5 had penetrated the Stasis's London network already. In 1985, a Stasi couple working under deep cover, Reinhard and Sonja Schulze, were arrested after five years in London, running a 'safe house' in the quiet suburban street of Pownall Gardens in Hounslow, West London. -- Copyright 2000 by United Press International. All rights reserved. -- Kathleen Abolish Unfiltered News on the Internet: Vote Gore 2000!
