While Ceausescu was prudish about sex, his wife was the opposite. One of the
most disturbing of innumerable horrifying passages in Pacepa’s exposé of the
couple’s corruption, Red Horizons, concerns Elena’s dislike of a loyal
secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party, purely because
his wife was a Jew. “You’d better shove one of your sexy illegal officers up
under her skirt,” she told Pacepa. “I’m sick of her pretending to be the
Virgin Mary.” When the mission to seduce the secretary’s wife failed, an
enraged Elena screamed at Pacepa: “You have three more months to get her to
hike her skirt up… I want her tape-recorded, photographed and filmed… Let me
see her lying naked under your man. Wiggling her precious rear end until
they reach orgasm.”
In Romania, the training of these “sexy” illegals took three to eight years
and was done not in a Transylvanian school but in 150 safe houses where
trainee agents were kept under round-the-clock control. Many of these safe
houses were ordinary flats, moved from time to time to avoid suspicion.
There, illegal agents perfected the language of their target country, learnt
appropriate skills, such as tennis and bridge, and were taught how to
infiltrate western scientific and industrial targets.
Despite the high priority given by the DIE to recruiting illegals with huge
penises, Pacepa says only one seduction operation was used externally by his
organisation, and that was a honeytrap involving a female Stasi agent, also
used by the DIE. In May 1958, he was at a meeting in East Berlin with Markus
Wolf, the famed chief of the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence service, when Wolf
heard that a Moscow-trained DIE illegal, Gheorghe Mandache, who’d been moved
to the city to perfect his German, had vanished with his East German
girlfriend. It took over a year to find them; they were living under new
identities in Düsseldorf, West Germany. The PGU wanted Mandache killed to
discourage other illegals from defecting, and decided that “Gerda”, a
German-born Romanian spy, would seduce him.
In September 1959, Pacepa met Gerda at one of Wolf’s safe houses. “So what do
you think of your next lover?” Wolf asked her with a wink, after showing her
Mandache’s photograph. “My job is my only lover” was Gerda’s flat response.
“She seemed as emotional about her new task as if she’d been going grocery
shopping, not leaving to kidnap a human being who’d certainly be shot
afterwards,” recalls Pacepa. In fact, Gerda’s mission failed. Mandache was
too in love with his girlfriend to be susceptible to her charms. But Pacepa
was chilled by the episode.
Gerda was one of a number of agents who Pacepa claims underwent cosmetic
surgery on their genitals by specialist PGU surgeons. This surgery was most
commonly practised on “wives” — women illegals whose role came into being in
the 1950s and early ’60s, when the DIE’s Soviet advisers insisted they
provide Romanian “wives” to as many western agents as possible in order to
keep them “tied” to the DIE for ever. Under PGU guidelines, a “wife” had to
have a “tight sex orifice, so that she could squeeze her lover’s penis like
a vice,” alleges Pacepa. “PGU doctors specialised in mould-ing the sex
orifice according to the particularity of each case,” he explained. It was
crucial that the “wife” was sexually experienced. “Each candidate was
secretly filmed making love; those selected were helped to perfect their
sexual technique by illegal officers who could no longer be sent abroad.” In
Programmed to Kill, Pacepa builds a convincing case that Marina Oswald, the
wife of Kennedy’s assassin, was a KGB “wife” created specially for Lee
Harvey, a loner who was unlikely to have had the social skills necessary to
marry a Russian woman in the brief time he courted her.
The activities of the DIE were modest in comparison with those masterminded in
East Germany by communism’s greatest spymaster, Markus Wolf, himself a
womaniser. A figure so elusive that it took western spy agencies 20 years to
find out what he looked like, the “man without a face” started using agents
as “Romeo” seducers in the early 1950s, when he headed up the Stasi’s
foreign-intelligence service, the FVA, and arguably perfected the use of
them.
An MI6 source says that, while honeytrapping was not unique to communist spy
agencies, the Soviets and eastern bloc countries were quickest to realise
that the rise of the status of women in society meant that, for the first
time in history, they had access to national secrets. The KGB, Stasi and DIE
exploited that knowledge mercilessly. Under Wolf’s direction, senior FVA
officers
scouted around East Germany for promising candidates in the manner of sports
scouts, recruiting only one in every hundred chosen. These Romeos were then
dispatched mainly to West Germany, where they had a catastrophic effect on
national security. Although the Soviet bloc countries began to use the
honeytrapping agents in the 1950s, the practice continued for more than 30
years. During the 1970s and ’80s an incredible 25 Bonn secretaries were
seduced, duped or willingly co-opted by Soviet or East German agents.
In Man Without a Face, co-written by Anne McElvoy, Wolf recalled how the
Bild-Zeitung put together a photo-montage of 12 women beneath the headline
“The Secretaries who Spied for Love”. To his annoyance, “The secretaries
were relentlessly portrayed as pitiful, misused victims, all of a certain
age, single and hungry for love, delivered helpless into the arms of
misfortune.”
In actuality, Wolf said, the way it worked was this: “When we sent a young
male agent to the West with a specific espionage task, we would say to him,
‘Okay, you are likely to have a private life like anybody else, but if you
do happen on a secretary, and a well-placed one at that, so much the
better.’ The rest was up to him.”
The truth was rather less prosaic. In 1960, Leonore Heinz, secretary to a
high-ranking official in the West German foreign ministry, fell in love with
Heinz Sütterlin, married him and confided to him every scrap of information
that came her way. Sütterlin passed films of the documents his wife smuggled
out to an East German illegal officer codenamed Maks, who was being run by
the KGB out of East Berlin. When Maks defected to the CIA, Sütterlin and his
wife were arrested. Confronted by her husband’s admission that he’d married
her not for love but on orders from the KGB, Leonore hanged herself in her
cell.
