Spy Chiefs: Volume 1: Intelligence Leaders in the United States and United Kingdom by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626165182
Amazon: B0791MHP81
Barnesnoble: B0791MHP81
Goodreads: 38917669
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2018-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

I already felt an abhorrence for the German Democratic Republic before this trip. In my CIA days I had seen that East Germany was among the very worst offenders when it came to training terrorists or destabilizing countries. They were perhaps the most aggressive of all in the spying business and would stop at nothing to further their ends. It was the East Germans to whom the Soviets turned to carry out a lot of the ugliest missions. They were the chief bully of the East bloc.50

The judgment “the chief bully of the East bloc” applies well to Mielke personally. As his record shows, he was cruel and unscrupulous. There is no evidence of sadism, however; nor is there evidence from any time of his life that points to psychological imbalance. His mental faculties were in steep decline in his last years as minister, but he does not seem to have been fully senile. Despite his failing mental powers, he was still sufficiently compos mentis to realize, in 1989, that Gorbachev’s reform policy was encouraging popular opposition in the GDR that was capable of overthrowing the regime. When Leonid Shebarshin, the head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (PGU), its foreign intelligence service, visited the GDR in 1989, Mielke told him that Gorbachev’s reform policy threatened the very existence of the Communist regimes.51 He gave the same warning that summer to Sergei Kondrashev, one of Shebarshin’s senior officers who was vacationing in the GDR, and asked him to pass it on to KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov for transmission to Gorbachev himself.52 Meeting his officers that summer, Mielke asked them whether there would be a popular uprising.

A careerist, Mielke lusted for office and power. He was still trying to stay in power in 1989, when he was eighty-one. Like the Soviet security chief Lavrenti Beria before him, he showed cunning by ingratiating himself with his political superiors in the GDR’s ruling Socialist Unity Party and the Russians. His success in cultivating them—particularly the leading KGB officials—was the greatest success of his career. He consistently sought to make himself and his ministry appear indispensable in their eyes. He cultivated the SED first secretaries he served obsequiously. His state security ministry obtained Western luxury goods for the Socialist Unity Party leaders just as the KGB did for the Soviet Communist Party’s elite (its nomenklatura). It even stole such goods from packages sent by West Germans to their East German relatives and friends.53

A cunning man, Mielke understood that every senior Communist official had to be a courtier. He displayed political gifts. He always took care to present himself as loyal to the Socialist Unity Party’s first secretary. He was always asking senior officials who dealt frequently with the first secretary for the latest news about him. In fact, he betrayed both of the first secretaries he served. He supported Erich Honecker’s attempt to overthrow Walter Ulbricht and later supported Egon Krenz’s move to overthrow Honecker.54 He also abandoned his chief, Wilhelm Zaisser, in 1953, when circumstances and Walter Ulbricht turned against the then minister for state security.

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