Espionage East Germany

Authorities arrested the last chief of East Germany's spy network on espionage charges Wednesday in Berlin, a federal prosecutor's spokesman said. The arrest of Walter Grossmann, coming hours after the two Germanys were united, backs up promises by prosecutors that they intend to track down agents of East Germany's former Communist government and pursue espionage cases.

In the destitute months before and after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the blond, blue-eyed toddlers from the orphanage in this Saxon village walked along the rubble-strewn roadside each day, holding fast to a rope trailed by a matron to keep them together. The skinny foundlings caught the eye of a lonely war widow who eventually took one of the girls, Aud Rigmor Harzendorf, then 3 years old, into her home and her heart.

It did not end like cloak-and-dagger stories are supposed to, with briefcases exchanged on foggy bridges or midnight dashes across nameless borders. Instead, one of the most thrilling chapters in Cold War espionage closed with a German nursery rhyme sung by a lonely, drunken spy: "All my little duckies, swimming on the pond . . . heads deep in water, tails to the sky."

A onetime Pentagon lawyer and her labor organizer husband were convicted Friday of spying for East Germany after a fellow spy testified for the prosecution and a federal jury rejected arguments that they had been unfairly entrapped in an FBI sting. Theresa Maria Squillacote, 40, and Kurt Alan Stand, 43, face a maximum of life in prison at their sentencing Jan. 8.

A state supreme court in Duesseldorf found master spy Rainer Rupp guilty of treason Thursday and sentenced him to 12 years in prison, in what prosecutors said was the worst espionage case in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

A strong voice, a quick smile and direct manner all convey the self-assurance that helped make Joachim Nimtz a successful actor on the East German stage in the decade before communism collapsed. But today those same qualities help mask something very different: an inner turmoil born from the public airing of his terrible secret.

In the destitute months before and after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the blond, blue-eyed toddlers from the orphanage in this Saxon village walked along the rubble-strewn roadside each day, holding fast to a rope trailed by a matron to keep them together. The skinny foundlings caught the eye of a lonely war widow who eventually took one of the girls, Aud Rigmor Harzendorf, then 3 years old, into her home and her heart.

The glum spies obediently open their briefcases and pockets for the citizens now standing guard outside security police headquarters, and a table outside the gate holds petitions demanding that the compound be turned into a nursing home. Freshly painted insults cover the thick wall that once concealed microphones and cameras. East Germans accustomed to scurrying by with heads bowed now brazenly snap pictures out front and glare at the police still brave enough to report for work.

Orange County soldier Michael A. Peri pleaded guilty Wednesday to espionage charges for giving East German officials U.S. defense secrets and assessments of Soviet troop strengths, saying he was "frustrated" with his military job. Peri, 21, a 1985 graduate of La Quinta High School in Westminster, faces a maximum punishment of life in prison, said Sgt. Maj. Dale McInnis, spokeswoman for the 5th Army Corps in West Germany. Appearing nervous at times during the four-hour hearing at the U.S. Army Community Center in Fulda, West Germany, Peri told a military judge that he crossed into East Germany on Feb. 20 because he felt overworked and unappreciated in his job as an intelligence specialist (Spec.

The German soccer scandal, in which former East German players are losing their jobs because they once were informers for their country's security police, has spread to the bobsled team. One of the world's best four-man drivers, European champion Harald Czudij, admitted to the German coach this week that he was employed by the Stasi to report on the activities of his former East German teammates.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 West Germans helped East Germany's secret police over the decades, a government agency said.

Three Washington-area residents, including a former high-ranking lawyer at the Pentagon, are being held on charges of spying for East Germany in the years before the end of the Cold War, federal law enforcement officials announced Monday. The three, arrested last weekend in an FBI sting operation, decided to become spies during their student days at the University of Wisconsin and were motivated by leftist leanings, the government officials alleged.

A lengthy attempt to prosecute Markus Wolf, the legendary "man without a face" who ran East Germany's spy agency for more than 30 years, ended with a whimper Tuesday as a state high court gave him a two-year suspended sentence on relatively minor charges and let him leave the courthouse a free man.

Markus Wolf, the former East German spymaster, faced a second trial Tuesday, this time to answer charges in a case that is probably the German state's last good chance to prosecute a prominent member of the defunct Communist regime's leadership. Virtually all other ranking, former East German officials have died, grown too sick to stand trial or been made by circumstances to seem too washed-up or irrelevant to be satisfying targets for blame for the wrongs of the East German state.

In a trial that evoked Cold War times, a former West German politician was convicted of spying for East Germany and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison. Karl Wienand, 69, the Social Democrats' parliamentary whip in the 1970s, was convicted of feeding information to the Communists about West German politics from 1974 to 1989.

A state judge convicted Berkeley-educated sociologist Jeffrey Schevitz of spying for East Germany during the Cold War, rejecting the American professor's elaborate, sometimes tearful claims that he had spied at the behest of the CIA and had always been loyal to the United States.

Markus Wolf, reputed to be the Cold War's most cunning spymaster, goes on trial today for treason, an unbowed and unbroken victim of his own spectacular success. The case of the Federal Republic of Germany vs. Markus Wolf is one of ironies within ironies, intrigues within intrigues, a denouement worthy of the John le Carre thrillers whose crafty protagonist Karla is said to be modeled after Wolf himself.

A code expert from West Germany's mission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels has been seized on suspicion of spying for East Germany. The case may have done enormous damage to the Western Alliance, officials said. The officer, whose name was not given, is being held in West Germany on suspicion of having passed alliance secrets to East Germany for more than 20 years.

In espionage circles, Ed Pechous was nicknamed "The Poison Dwarf," a monicker FBI officials had derisively attached to the diminutive spy, some in the CIA say. But if Pechous seemed like a character torn from the pages of a John Le Carre spy novel, there was nothing fictional about his enormous influence within the shadowy intelligence world during the twilight of the Cold War.

Germany's federal appeals court threw out the conviction of former East German spymaster Markus Wolf and ordered a retrial to determine if he ever personally spied in the West. The decision follows a May 23 ruling by Germany's highest court that East German spy leaders could not be tried for treason if their work was done entirely in East Germany. Wolf, who headed East Germany's foreign intelligence service from 1953 to 1986, was sentenced to six years in prison in 1993 for espionage.