On American military bases outside the United States, almost all maintenance is performed by local contractors. So if you’re having trouble with the plumbing in your quarters, the contractor who comes to fix it will most likely be a German plumber. They are vetted, of course, but sometimes someone will slip through the cracks.
In Augsburg, Germany in early 1972, a newly arrived American service man and his family moved into government quarters. When he flipped the switch for the ceiling light in the master bedroom, nothing happened. Being an amateur electrician, he climbed up to check the light fixture – and found a poorly installed listening device that was accidentally preventing the ceiling light from working. He quietly left the room (and the apartment) and notified counter-intelligence.
My team was assigned to investigate. The device was designed to record for a period of time and then would download what it had recorded when activated by someone pointing a shotgun mike at the bedroom window. We established surveillance around the building and, sure enough, someone pulled up in a car, pointed a shotgun mike at the building, and then departed. Johann and John tailed him to a “dead drop” (a place where you would leave something for another agent to pick it up without making personal contact) where he left the recording tape. We kept that spot under surveillance and an hour later a little old German lady came and retrieved the recording. Kurt and I followed her to a bakery where she passed the recording to the man working the counter. He left in his bakery truck and made a delivery to the kitchen of the American Army Officer’s Club, passing the recording on to a man who worked in the kitchen. He, in turn, drove to the Wisbaden American Air Force base after his shift was over and passed the recording on to the head bartender at the Officer’s Club there. It was then that we decided to make an arrest.
Under interrogation, we found that the bartender was actually an East German agent (being the head bartender at that Officer’s Club helped him hear a lot of important things to pass on to his superiors in East Berlin). He had already become very disenchanted with his job, his bosses and the East German government and we were able to convince him to work for us as a double agent. The people in his spy ring didn’t know he had effectively switched sides, so everything they passed on to him, we got to see first and then he passed our edited version on to his superiors in East Berlin.
A lot of following people and surveillance, a bit of selling an idea to someone who was already partially sold anyway and not one punch thrown, not one shot fired, not even one pistol drawn out of it’s holster.
Definitely not a good plot-line for a dramatic spy caper movie or TV show – but, frankly, one of the more common cases my team and I worked on over a 16 year period.
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