Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948-1968

5. East German Military Intelligence for the Warsaw Pact in the Central Sector

75 5 East German Military Intelligence for the Warsaw Pact in the Central Sector Jan Hoffenaar “Our military politics as a whole must . . . be based on a realistic assessment of the adversary.” With this statement made in 1964, Heinz Hoffmann, the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) minister of defense, underpinned the importance of spying on the adversary.1 As simple as this age-old logic seems, it is often very difficult to put into action. A realistic assessment of adversaries demands sufficient accurate intelligence on them. It is difficult and to an extent impossible to trace precisely how intelligence gathering, information analysis, and the respective political, strategic, and military conclusions from this analysis developed in the Eastern bloc during the 1950s and 1960s. This is because key parts of the relevant archives have remained sealed and, as yet, little research has been undertaken in this area. The organization of intelligence gathering and the quality of the intelligence obtained are, relatively speaking, the easiest elements to research. It can be concluded from various studies that of all the intelligence services in the Warsaw Pact, the Verwaltung Aufklärung (Intelligence Service ) of the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA), the armed forces of the GDR, worked the most intensively at military intelligence gathering. This took place mostly in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), in France, and in the Benelux countries. The military intelligence service of the Soviet Union, the Glavnoy Razvedovatel’noy Upravlenie (GRU), to which the NVA-Aufklärung reported directly, relied heavily on its findings. In the 76 Jan Hoffenaar 1960s the division of intelligence tasks was more or less formalized within the Warsaw Pact.2 In its own country the NVA-Aufklärung—the military Aufklärung was formally a part of the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (Garrisoned People’s Police) until 1956—dealt with the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (Directorate of Intelligence ) of the all-powerful Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), better known as the “Stasi.” This division focused specifically on, among many other subjects, the foreign policies of NATO member states, and less on the specific military aspects of those policies. From the 1960s onward there was intensive cooperation and exchange of information between the two services, with the Stasi leading the way. Unfortunately, there is as yet no in-depth study into the interrelationships between the two intelligence services.3 Nevertheless, it can be assumed safely that the NVA-Aufklärung gathered the most targeted intelligence material on the NATO armed forces in the Central Sector. It is, therefore, unfortunate that much of the archives of the NVA-Aufklärung was lost. However, enough material has been preserved , in original form or documents assessed by the Stasi Hauptverwaltung I (“Absicherung der NVA und Grenztruppen nach Innen und Aussen”), to construct a quite clear picture of their findings.4 One general complication that comes into play during studies of analyses made by military intelligence services in Communist Eastern Europe must be noted: the services always based their analyses on the assumption that the capitalist, “imperialist” NATO countries had aggressive intentions. Springing from Marxist-Leninist ideology, it was axiomatic that war would always start with an attack by the Western allies. The Communist leadership needed to maintain this image of fear and a clearly recognizable common enemy in order to keep the Warsaw Pact countries in line. In addition to ideological and manipulative reasons, historical experiences were at least as important for retaining this aggressive image of the enemy. Allied military support to the anti-bolshevists in 1918–1920 and the massive German invasion in 1941 had led to a permanent and deep-seated distrust among the political leadership in Moscow. Given this setting, only factual reports could provide a modicum of objectivity.5 Attempting to establish the measure to which the strategic and operational military planning of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was determined by intelligence is, in fact, impossible so long as the archives in Moscow remain closed. This chapter, therefore, is limited to a provisional analysis of the “yield” of military intelligence. What were they most interested in, and why? What information did they manage to gather? And what information East German Military Intelligence 77 did they not gather? And to what degree was this information correct? What were the conclusions drawn? And to what degree were those conclusions correct? The Build-Up Phase: 1952–1958 On the basis of the available archival...