American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

14 Spies for East Germany

Spies for East Germany JAMES MICHAEL HALL AND JEFFREY CARNEY 1 4 149 I’m not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else. JAMES HALL, East German spy; quoted by Herrington, Traitors among Us, 323 We struck a gold mine. As long as the source is careful, this could go on and on. East German intelligence officer on Hall; quoted by Wolf, Man without a Face, 328 James Michael Hall ArmycounterintelligencehadlittletimetorestonitslaurelsfromtheConrad case. On the very day of Conrad’s arrest, the US Army’s Field Counterintelligence Activity (FCA) received its first hint of another well-placed spy in army ranks. This time, however, the spy was working for the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA; Main Reconnaissance Administration), the foreign intelligence arm of East Germany’s notorious security service, the Ministry of State Security, better known by its abbreviated name, Stasi. The Stasi was well known for its massive monitoring and repression of East German citizens to snuff out antiregime sentiment. The HVA was considered equally effective in ferreting out secrets from its main adversaries, The Decade of the Spy: Other Spies of the 1980s 150 West Germany and the United States. Among its many successes were the recruitment of Gunther Guillaume, one of West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s closest aides, and Hans Tiedge, the head of West German counterintelligence . Despite these successes, the HVA, like any other intelligence service, sometimes made mistakes. The HVA rarely allowed its staff officers to recruit or meet its spies inside West Germany because of the risk of compromise , capture, or, more important, defection to the West.1 Instead, the HVA used reliable Communist Party members who were allowed to travel abroad as intermediaries to contact its spies. As often in the world of espionage , this policy involved a trade-off. Intermediaries ensured the protectionofstaffofficersandpreventeddefectionsbutalsobroadenedknowledge of an operation outside the service. Although the policy often worked, it failed in the case of the HVA’s most productive spy inside the United States’ most sensitive operations in Germany, its electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. The HVA’s intermediary in the case was an East German academic who turned out to be a less-than-reliable Communist Party member. In 1986, the professor was caught shoplifting while visiting West Berlin and claimed that he had staged the incident so his arrest would enable him to contact Western intelligence. The professor, later code-named “Canna Clay” by the army’s FCA, revealed that he had performed low-level operational missions for the HVA in Berlin but had become disillusioned with the regime and now sought to resettle in the West. Canna Clay had little to offer at the time, and FCA agents advised him that he would have to produce significant information to merit such a reward.2 Two years passed until Canna Clay suddenly contacted the army on the day Conrad was arrested. This time the information he offered was significant . Canna Clay’s duties had gone beyond low-level support missions. An English speaker, Canna Clay revealed that he had served as an interpreter in 1988 for two HVA meetings with an American source code-named “Paul.” In addition to a physical description of the spy, Canna Clay passed a wealth of details to identify “Paul.” He knew the spy’s true first name, and he advised the FCA that he was an army sergeant who had recently transferred , was married to a German woman from Bayreuth, and was a flying enthusiast.3 Most disturbing, the spy was a specialist in signals intelligence Spies for East Germany 151 and had passed a wealth of information to the HVA on US electronic intercept operations. In return he was paid $30,000 at each meeting, a testimony to the value of his information. As the FCA chief, Colonel Stuart Herrington, noted, this was not the “Conrad-style needle in a haystack.”4 Army counterintelligence immediately pinpointed the spy as army warrant officer James Michael Hall. Canna Clay confirmed their conclusion by identifying Hall from a group of photos. Hall was born in Bronx, New York, in 1957. After a year in junior college, he dropped out and joined the army in 1976. Like Clyde Conrad, he spent most of his career in Germany and married a German woman who was a waitress in a bar he frequented near the remote border outpost where he was first stationed...