Overloaded Circuits

For years, the security shield that protects the top-secret information of the West German government has had the reputation of being as full of holes as a slab of Tilsit. In fact, classified documents are so readily available in Bonn these days that a good spy need only read the daily papers. Two weeks ago, entire sections of the highly classified draft treaty between West Germany and the Soviet Union were printed in the Bildzeitung, a sheet whose ordinary preoccupations range from sex to crime.

The Bonn government was furious, but hardly surprised. Last March, after police arrested a matronly secretary who worked in the Science Ministry, rumors circulated in Bonn that East German Party Boss Walter Ulbricht regularly saw the minutes of Chancellor Willy Brandt's Cabinet meetings on the same day the meetings were held. On the other hand, as a common saying puts it, "In Bonn, secrets are kept only from those who should know." Last April, the chief of Bonn's trade mission in Warsaw spoke openly about Brandt's private letter to Poland's Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka because he had not been told that the letter was supposed to be secret.

German officials complain that the problem is aggravated by the fact that allied embassies in Bonn--whose own security is not above suspicion--have access to a wide assortment of German documents. Novelist John le Carre, who served in the British embassy in 1962-64, drew upon his knowledge of Bonn's spies and intrigues to write A Small Town in Germany. But clearly the leading factor is the huge number of spies lured by an availability of secrets there and ease of access from East to West Germany. The Interior Ministry recently offered amnesty to an estimated 16,000 Communist agents believed to be operating in West Germany and West Berlin if they would only cease operations. The large number of agents may help explain why the East Germans recently approved an increase in the number of Telex lines between the two Germanys from 19 to 35. Could it be that with all those secrets flowing to East Germany, existing lines were overloaded?

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