Spy – agent life: for love – and also for cash

Horst Tatzkow spied for the CIA for ten years before he flew in 1968 and was convicted of life imprisonment, his wife received eight years. He had to attribute the exposure to himself: he threw his letter into the post sac from the mail to the friendly man from the post office, who emptied the mailbox No. 33 on Greifenhagener Strasse in Greifenhagener Strasse in the morning. However, the man from Swiss Post was a man from the MfS, namely the operational employee of the post -control department m called Jürgen Raasch. Department M had already intercepted 13 letters on deck addresses in the West and had been looking for the sender for weeks. Raasch knew the typeface on the Kuverts. And now recognized it again on the thrown letter. That’s it.

Days later and a few meters away, in front of the house at Wisbyer Straße 66, Käte Tatzkow and her son Jürgen said goodbye to their Thuringians. An hour after the family photo was taken, the prosecutor rang the rang with retinue, they showed the search decision and took the mother with them. The 15-year-old son observed surprised how a recipient, disguised as a battery, ink, papers and other secret service documents, were found and confiscated in the parents’ apartment. Suddenly he and his brother Erich, two years older, were without parents …

Jürgen Tatzkow even became a teacher in the 1980s in Köpenick, even in the 90s, today he is a pensioner. Before two decades, he led interviews with his father, who died in 1996, and researched his secret service in archives. He received only half of the papers there by the Stasi documents authority, not a leaf from the CIA, and other western services showed him the cold shoulder during his request. He wanted to know when and why his father first worked for the MfS for the CIA, then in the “Kowalowsky” and after the turn for the US intelligence service. It must have been Love. His friend, who brought him the CIA, had-as suspected father and son-were sent from the GDR education to the West and probably turned there.

The agent history, which is supported from various sources with documents, is convincing, but incomplete not only because of the lack of certificates – Tatzkow’s father also did not tell him the whole truth, as the author had to find out when researching. But there is a second level, and I find it almost more exciting than this sometimes opaque secret service. Jürgen Tatzkow tells how the two brothers succeeded as temporary orphans because the MfS prevented them from having to go home. We read how they learned in different ways and developed confidently. The two were neither outlawed nor violated by society, completed their apprenticeship in the work for television electronics, and were actively in the FDJ singing group. Jürgen Tatzkow acquired the university entrance qualification at the evening school after the NVA and studied at the Humboldt University. Only when he wanted to marry the daughter of a very well-known GDR historian did the past of his parents seem to fall on his feet for the first time. The professor was a burned child: he was used because his other daughter protested against the military intervention of the allies in Prague in 1968. He didn’t want to experience that again. Well, that was clear, Tatzkow is still married to this woman, a historian.

The life stories that are spread in this book are unique, but somehow typical GDR. Of course it is the bizarre story of a double agent, but it was actually none, because he did not work at the same time, but one after the other for the news services on both sides. In the interview he confessed to his son: “I was not well suited for this job.” But he did it. Out of love and also for cash, less out of conviction. The damage caused by him was limited: he delivered personality profiles, reported on moods in society and in his party, the SED. Sources such as Tatzkow-and there were more in the GDR than their security organs-provided the information with which the western intelligence services made themselves a precise picture of the state of the GDR society and derived conclusions for politics. Even if dilettants provided them with them: they made sharp ammunition in the class struggle.

Jürgen Tatzkov’s book activates insights that now seem buried. Although the teacher, he does not do this with a raised index finger, but it does in a memorable, convincing way.

Jürgen Tatzkow: My father, the spy. On behalf of CIA and MFS. Edition Ost, 256 S., Br., € 20.