Throughout the Cold War, the Western parts of Germany and Berlin were bursting with secret agents. They were also awash with wave upon wave of new arrivals: expellees, returning prisoners-of-war, escapees from East Germany, resettlers from Poland, and stray defectors from Soviet-bloc touring companies. A myriad of trajectories could catapult individuals across the border to some processing camp or other: Marienfelde in West Berlin, Friedland near Göttingen, “Camp King” in the Taunus, or dozens of other facilities. Some sites were well known to the public; others are revealed for the first time in this publication. Keith Allen's book offers an entry point for understanding how competing intelligence agencies sought to exploit newcomers in order to gain detailed information about economic operations, military technology, and troop deployments on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Allen's main interest is procedure. What sorts of interrogations did newcomers undergo, and by whom? He identifies a long list of interested parties: US agencies such as the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC); West German institutions such as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV); British spies from the Scientific and Technical Branch (STIB). As Allen shows, these groups expended a significant amount of energy trying to poach one another's sources and displace each other at the principal interview sites. Certain US agencies partnered well with German counterparts, but Allen finds more instances of unnecessary duplication and nonsensical infighting. Relations between the British and American authorities were unexpectedly poor, particularly in the early Cold War years.
Depending on circumstances, subjects were interviewed for as little as a half-hour, or for a period of several days, sometimes even weeks. Persons of interest often did not know the identity or even the nationality of their interrogators. What did the agencies do with all this data? In some cases, the information contributed to monthly estimates about economic activity in East Germany—material that may not have had any use at the policymaking level in Bonn. In other cases, agents sought to recruit the newcomers as intelligence assets. Many brave or foolhardy souls wound up returning to their original homes entrusted with delicate missions as Western spies.
Allen makes plain his disapproval of this recruiting, and of the interrogation process in general—particularly the reliance on emotional manipulation to elicit information. He situates his study within the context of Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its clandestine listening posts. Yet, Allen does not address moral issues in detail, leaving unexplored the many differences between uninvited mass eavesdropping, on the one hand, and, on the other, face-to-face cooperation often underpinned by shared Cold War sympathies. To be sure, incoming refugees faced pressure to comply; in the early years, they were frequently misled into believing that their final admission to West Germany depended upon providing complete information about family members and work situations they had left behind. By the 1970s, however, a significant number of arrivals managed to elude the official reception facilities, and they faced no penalties for ignoring subsequent “summons” from interview boards. Those involved in extended sessions with US agencies were compensated for their time. The greatest harm seems to have come from double agents: the Stasi paid handsomely to acquire information about the families of those who had fled the East. Data leaks of this sort do suggest parallels with digital forms of surveillance in the present day.
It takes painstaking work to compile and cross-reference records across multiple agencies, as Allen has done, relying mainly on declassified documents from the British, American, and German national archives in Kew, College Park, and Koblenz, along with the German state archives in Berlin, Hesse, and North Rhine-Westphalia. He also delves into Stasi records to see just what the East German side was able to piece together about Western methods. The most engaging passages of this study involve brief case studies highlighting the cross-border networks that could “push” or “pull” desired informants into Western hands. A particularly vivid case takes Allen to the Archive of the Security Services in Prague. The source material illuminates all manner of Cold War fates, pointing the way toward a social history of border-crossers. Other scholars are beginning to pursue such avenues as well, such as Jeannette van Laak in her 2017 Habilitation (Einrichten im Übergang. Das Aufnahmelager Gießen 1946-1990).
Allen's main contribution is to deepen the institutional history of the security state in West Germany, a locus of intensive research over the past decade. He breaks considerable new ground by documenting the internal workings of “Joint Interrogation Centers,” known in German as “Befras” (Befragungsstellen). As Allen points out, salacious stories about the Befras did make headlines in West Germany from time to time, leading to angry condemnations in the Bundestag. But they have yet to feature prominently in political history narratives, and Allen's monograph advances the rewriting of the Federal Republic as initiated by Josef Foschepoth in his pathbreaking study Überwachtes Deutschland. Post- und Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik (2012). Given the continuities that mark West German administrative procedures across the decades, Allen is surely right to wonder whether comparable interrogation practices have been foisted upon the latest wave of migrants, namely, the refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
