Publication: The Boston Globe Issued: Date: 1991-01-12 Reporter: Jonathan Kaufman

Berlin Wonders if Spokesman Turned Spy

 

Publication 

The Boston Globe
Date

1991-01-12

Reporter

 Jonathan Kaufman

 

The Wall may be gone and communism in full retreat, but Berlin, which has provided fodder for a bookstore's worth of spy novels, is still spawning espionage and intrigue.

The latest twist in Berlin's spy dramas is the arrest of a colorful US press spokesman who wined and dined reporters, dated the daughter of the US military commander in Berlin, helped organize former President Ronald Reagan's triumphant return to the Berlin Wall - and has now been jailed on suspicion of being a KGB agent.

Stephen Laufer, a 36-year-old South African who became a German citizen and worked for the US embassy office in Berlin, is charged with having been a KGB spy since 1977 *2. Before becoming a popular and accessible US government spokesman, Laufer worked as a reporter for the city's biggest-selling tabloid newspaper and wrote speeches for Berlin's mayor, with access to senior staff meetings. "Only the investigation will determine all that he has betrayed in the past 13 years," said Hans-Jurgen Forster, a spokesman for the German prosecutor's office, which arrested Laufer Tuesday morning, less than 48 hours after he returned from a vacation in the United States.

A Berlin official was more blunt: "What Steve probably knew was who was a drinker and who was not, who was sleeping with whom and when. It is the type of thing that they the KGB could throw into the hopper and might be useful in building an overall picture of a diplomatic mission. But we're not talking nuclear secrets here."

Still, the plot of the Laufer espionage case thickens every day. Yesterday, Laufer's lawyer confirmed that Laufer's parents moved from West Germany to East Berlin in the 1970s, when East Berlin was still controlled by communists. The lawyer, Nikolaus Wurtz, said he assumed Laufer underwent security checks before joining the Berlin mayor's office and the US diplomatic mission. But he would not speculate on what the security checks revealed or why Laufer's parents moved to communist East Germany from the West. The US government gives routine security checks to foreigners like Laufer who are hired to work in its embassies.

Laufer's arrest is the second embarrassment in recent years for US embassies overseas. In 1988, Felix Bloch, a top-ranking official at the US embassy in Austria, was suspended on suspicion of passing secrets to the Soviets. Officials said yesterday that Laufer did not have access to classified materials. But investigators say they do not know what information he may have passed to the Soviets over the years. US embassy officials were completely unaware of Laufer's activities, according to German prosecutors, and he was only arrested because someone - perhaps a former East German spy looking for a favor - named him.

Laufer's arrest also opens an intriguing window on Soviet relations with its communist comrades in East Germany. Some Germans say that Laufer's position as speechwriter and senior staff member for Berlin's mayor from 1984 to 1987 was crucial because by 1985 it was clear that East Germany's hard-line leaders disapproved of Gorbachev's reform policies and were reducing Soviet access to their own formidable spy network.

"It was important for the KGB to have an informer in the West Berlin City Hall at that time because Moscow could no longer trust Stasi East German secret police reports on German-German contacts in Berlin," said Karl-Heinz Brinkmann, a Berlin newspaper reporter who met Laufer on several occasions.

In a city that breeds spies the way Boston breeds bad drivers, Laufer's alleged espionage is considered relatively minor. In recent months, spy charges have worked their way up and down the German government, even tarring the former prime minister of East Germany, Lothar DeMaziere, who had to withdraw from the all-German cabinet when a news magazine said he had been an informer for the Stasi.

But Laufer's arrest has rattled German and American reporters because he was such a visible and popular figure, and a useful source for background and information.

In the spy novels that are a staple at Berlin's airport, spies speak with Eastern European accents, wear trenchcoats and have eyes that glint menacingly behind steel-rim glasses.

Laufer was a convivial man given to bow ties, who knew Berlin and its history intimately and was equally comfortable debating Germany's Nazi past and stalking the best Chinese restaurant in Berlin. He hosted monthly dinner meetings of German and American reporters in Berlin cafes and restaurants, where he whipped the gossip and storytelling into a frenzy. For a time he squired the daughter of the commander of local US forces. He guided visiting politicians around Berlin and oversaw press coverage of Reagan's visit to Berlin last fall. He played volleyball with US Embassy staffers at the local air base. Five weeks before his arrest he joined many of Berlin's foreign correspondents for an American-style Thanksgiving.

"Eight times out of 10 when I started on a good and interesting story, my first call was to Steve Laufer," said a correspondent here.

"That was his best cover - being good," said the Berlin official.

Speculation about Laufer's motives now consumes Berlin's press and its American community. Laufer was born in South Africa of a South African-born Jewish mother and a Jewish father who had fled Austria and the Nazis. Laufer told friends that his family had abhorred apartheid in South Africa and had moved to England and West Germany. He never mentioned that his parents had then moved to East Germany. Laufer also attended the Free University of Berlin and in 1977, at the age of 23, was allegedly recruited as a KGB agent.

Over the next 13 years, until early 1990, according to prosecutors, Laufer met five to six times a year with his KGB contact in Berlin, feeding him information about the political mood of the city and political developments.

The fact that Laufer's parents lived in East Berlin much of the time he was allegedly a spy - his father died in 1987, his mother a year later, according to Laufer's lawyer - suggests one obvious motive: that Laufer was in collusion with the communists all along. Alternatively, some suggest, Laufer may have been pressured by the Soviets to cooperate so they would not harm his parents. A third possible motive, suggested by Brinkmann, is that Laufer feared German unification and resurgent German militarism, and was determined to do anything to stop it.

With Laufer held without bail in a prison in Bonn and his lawyer declining to comment on the case, all such discussions remain speculation. Prosecutors say it may be several months before Laufer is formally brought to trial.

In the meantime, many in Berlin, as they have been so often in the past, are left to sit and wonder.

"People around the embassy are sitting around trying to take potshots" at Laufer, said a Berlin official. "But he was good at everything he did. He was a model employee. He just did one thing too much."

With acknowledgements to Jonathan Kaufman and The Boston Globe.


*1       There are elephantine fishers of corrupt men out there who will just never forget.


*2      From later press clippings :

Stephen Laufer was convicted but only given a suspended sentence for some reason. He then came back to South Africa in the early 1990s after the unbannings, worked as a journalist on the Weekly Mail in 1994, became Joe Slovo's press spokesman at the Department of Housing later that year and was then sacked by Sankie Mthembi Mahanyele after she took over.

He then worked as a journalist at Business Day.

Now Stephen Laufer is a spokesman for, inter alia, Saab and ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems.

Quite strange to begin one's adulthood as a committed communist and to end it working for a Swedish and German arms manufacturers busy plundering a developing African country.


No-one needs to wonders if the Berlin Spy turned Ams Dealers' Spokesman.