Latest / The Shadow Dossier / The Shadow Dossier — The West German Spy Chief Who Wasn't

Transcript

The Shadow Dossier — The West German Spy Chief Who Wasn't · The Shadow Dossier

• 0:00
  The Shadow Dossier. Act I. The Perfect Hire.
• 0:08
  In 1951, as West Germany rebuilt an intelligence
• 0:12
  service almost from nothing, a former SS intelligence
• 0:16
  officer named Heinz Felf was recruited into the
• 0:20
  Gelen Organization, the predecessor to West Germany's
• 0:23
  foreign intelligence agency, the BND. Felf had
• 0:27
  genuine wartime counterintelligence experience,
• 0:30
  spoke fluent Russian, and rose quickly. By 1958,
• 0:35
  he headed the BND's counter -Soviet espionage
• 0:38
  section, the department specifically responsible
• 0:41
  for catching Soviet spies inside West Germany.
• 0:48
  It was in hindsight... An almost perfect placement
• 0:52
  for a man who had already been working for the
• 0:55
  other side for years. Felf had been recruited
• 1:06
  by Soviet intelligence in 1951. Around the same
• 1:11
  time, he joined the Gellin organization, reportedly
• 1:14
  motivated by a mix of ideological disillusionment
• 1:18
  and straightforward payment. For roughly a decade,
• 1:21
  he fed detailed West German and American intelligence
• 1:25
  to Moscow, including the identities of West German
• 1:29
  agents operating in East Germany, many of whom
• 1:32
  were arrested and some of whom were executed
• 1:35
  as a direct result. His position running counter
• 1:41
  -Soviet operations gave him an extraordinary
• 1:44
  vantage point. Felf could not only pass along
• 1:48
  what the BND knew about Soviet intelligence,
• 1:51
  he could also actively steer his own agency's
• 1:54
  investigations away from real Soviet penetrations
• 1:57
  and toward false leads, protecting other Soviet
• 2:01
  assets while burnishing his own reputation as
• 2:04
  a skilled spy catcher. Suspicion built slowly
• 2:15
  through the early 1960s, helped along by information
• 2:19
  from a Polish intelligence defector and by West
• 2:23
  German counterintelligence, noticing that operations
• 2:25
  connected to Felf kept failing in ways that suggested
• 2:29
  betrayal rather than bad luck. He was placed
• 2:32
  under surveillance, and in November 1961, West
• 2:36
  German authorities arrested him. The case was
• 2:42
  a profound embarrassment for the young BND, led
• 2:45
  at the time by Reinhard Gellin himself, the organization's
• 2:49
  founder and a former Wehrmacht intelligence officer
• 2:52
  whose recruitment practices, drawing heavily
• 2:56
  on former Nazi intelligence personnel for their
• 2:59
  operational experience, had made this kind of
• 3:01
  penetration possible in the first place. A trade
• 3:09
  like so many others. Phelf was tried and convicted
• 3:15
  of treason in 1963 and sentenced to 14 years
• 3:21
  in prison. He did not serve most of it. In February
• 3:24
  1969, in an exchange arranged between East and
• 3:28
  West, Phelf was released. and traded to East
• 3:31
  Germany in return for the freedom of 18 prisoners
• 3:34
  held by the East German and Soviet sides, including
• 3:38
  several Western intelligence agents and political
• 3:41
  prisoners. He lived out the rest of his life
• 3:47
  in East Germany, where he was treated as a hero
• 3:50
  of Soviet bloc intelligence work, taught at an
• 3:53
  East German university, and wrote his memoirs.
• 3:57
  He died in 2008, having spent roughly a decade
• 4:01
  at the very top of West German counterintelligence
• 4:03
  while, the entire time, working for the service
• 4:07
  he was supposed to be defending against. This
• 4:12
  concludes declassified file number 065 of the
• 4:16
  Shadow Dossier, the West German spy chief who
• 4:20
  wasn't. What dangerous secrets await in our next
• 4:26
  file? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS
• 4:33
  .com, and YouTube so you never miss an official
• 4:38
  declassification. This is the Shadow Dossier.
• 4:43
  Thank you for listening.