The Man with 1,000 Secrets

The customs guard at Berlin's West-East Sandkrug Bridge stopped a Ford sedan one evening last week, glanced at the two men inside and gave the customary warning: "You are now crossing into the Soviet sector." The man behind the wheel laughed, said, "That's exactly where we want to go," and drove ahead into East Berlin.

The man at the wheel was Otto John, the expert in charge of all of West Germany's counterespionage. His disappearance behind the Iron Curtain last week shook the foundations of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's West German government and jarred allied secret services from Berlin to Washington. And his motive for defection, or the device used to lure him across the frontier, provided the mystery of the week.

Single Mind. Otto John was a complicated man, caught in the confusions and counterloyalties of his time. One key to his character was his hatred of Naziism, a single-minded purpose which had forced him to lead a double life. During World War II, he served simultaneously in the Abwehr (Wehrmacht counterintelligence) and as a British secret-service contact. He was legal adviser to the Nazis' Lufthansa Airline and a secret anti-Nazi resistance worker. One memorable day ten years ago last week. Otto John landed at war-battered Tempelhof Airfield, where his brother, Hans, waited.

He asked one question: When? "It's tomorrow," said Hans softly, as they drove into Berlin. Next day came the bomb-shattering climax to years of plotting on Adolf Hitler's life by Otto, Hans and thousands of others. When that day ended in failure, Hans was in Gestapo custody and Otto was flying back to Madrid for his life. In Madrid, he dyed his blond hair black, went on to Portugal and to the British (who used him to interrogate important German prisoners). Brother Hans lingered under Nazi torture until the night of April 22, 1945. Then, as the Russians penetrated Berlin's suburbs, the Nazis faced Hans to the wall and blew open the back of his head. He was one of the last men they killed for complicity in the July 20 plot.*The war left Otto John with one clear loyalty--the memory of Hans, and one clear hatred--the Nazis.

Double Life. In 1949, he went back to Germany, tried to get a teaching job and was refused, tried to get a foreign-service post but was turned down because of his having collaborated with the British. But in time he became head of West Germany's O.F.P.O.C. (Office for the Protection of the Constitution), the security agency charged with detecting espionage, subversion and treason. He was the J. Edgar Hoover of West Germany's FBI. a legendary "man of a thousand secrets." and with him to the east he carried the thousand secrets about the agents, techniques and plans of the West's intelligence.

Yet in the four years that he headed O.F.P.O.C., John apparently did an outstanding job of eradicating Communist subversion in West Germany, and had the complete trust of the Anglo-American occupation authorities. A year ago he helped smash a Communist spy ring; a fortnight ago his evidence led to the legal banning in the West of the East Zone Youth Movement.

Last Night. Last week Otto John made a pilgrimage to Berlin for the roth anniversary of the July 20 uprising. He was a drinking man, and his round of reminiscences with other survivors was argumentative and well liquored. An acquaintance recalls considerable talk about Communism, and John, visibly annoyed, snorting: "You're all afraid of Communists. I'm afraid of Nazis." Those who saw him then thought that he was short tempered, nervous, almost in a daze. His wife said he was "mentally depressed." At the memorial ceremony in grisly Ploetzensee Prison, he seemed haggard beyond his 44 years.

That evening in Berlin, Otto John sought out strange company for one who was head of the Bonn FBI. He drove to the apartment-office of Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, a busy, prosperous gynecologist who plays a hot trumpet, shares John's interest in woman-chasing, and is known to be a Communist. Sometime that evening, Wohlgemuth sat down at his desk and wrote a note: "The fact is that Dr. John will not return to the Western sector." Then they left together. Curiously enough, John left behind him in his hotel room a notebook that would have been useful had he intended selling out.

When the news came that John had gone over to the East zone, Bonn could not believe it, partly because it could not afford to. The Interior Ministry charged abduction; the police hinted at hypnosis. The U.S. High Commission agreed that the Soviets had "trapped or forced" John.

But three days later, in the afternoon, over East Berlin's radio Deutschlandsender came the clear, firm voice of Otto John, slow at first, then normal: he had defected to "establish contact with the Germans in the East," and because "Nazis are reappearing everywhere [in West Germany] in political and public life . . . West German policy has entered a blind alley . . . Possibilities for German reunification . . . must at least be tried out."

"A major catastrophe," said an allied intelligence source. Otto John had returned only ten days before from a six weeks' study tour in the U.S., where he talked with CIA Director Allen Dulles; on his way back he had conferred with British security men. Presumably neither had told him the names of any of their agents in West or East Germany, but undoubtedly he had picked up a good bit of information about their techniques and knowledge. London rushed two top agents to West Berlin to assess the damage, and canceled its code for communicating with West Germany. Soon reports arrived from the Red zone of a wave of arrests of Western secret agents. "Everything and everyone is compromised," a West German intelligence officer cried. "We must start again at the bottom."

Some of John's old friends still could not believe it. "He is absolutely a man of Western ideas." said a Bonn diplomat. "He was against all totalitarian systems, Nazi and Communist," said a Berlin colleague. But whether he had sold out, defected, or had been lured across, the ugly fact was that, voluntarily or involuntarily, Otto John could give the Communists more valuable information than anyone since Klaus Fuchs.

*The two-pound time bomb that detonated in Hitler's East Prussian field headquarters on July 20, 1944 killed four men around him, but left a barely injured Hitler alive to take a terrible revenge. He had thousands of suspects rounded up -- field marshals, trade-union leaders, ambassadors, mayors, army officers, politicians. Many were jailed or slain. The eight ringleaders were tortured for days by Gestapo experts. Finally. Hitler said: "It is my wish that they be hanged like cattle." The eight were stripped, and as they shivered in the chilly dawn, their necks were encircled by short, thin string attached to meathooks in the torture chamber in Ploetzensee Prison. Each man was then dropped to strangle slowly. Nazi cameramen captured the convulsive spectacle on film, and that night Hitler ran off the movie for the enjoyment of himself and his guests.

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