Espionage a High-Level Game of Tit for Tat

By Thomas A. Sancton

Rarely has the "secret war" been waged so publicly. First the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced the defection of London KGB Station Chief Oleg Gordievsky and demanded the departure of 25 alleged Soviet agents. Two days later Moscow ordered an equal number of British subjects out of the country. Early last week London upped the ante by expelling six more Soviets. Within 48 hours, Moscow sent half a dozen Britons packing. At that point, London called it quits after a diplomatic test of nerves that had lasted more than a week and resulted in the expulsion of 31 diplomats, journalists and commercial employees from each capital.

Meanwhile, West German officials announced that a husband-and-wife team of suspected spies had fled to East Germany. The pair were identified as Herbert Willner, 59, a defense expert influential within the Free Democratic Party, and his wife Herta-Astrid, 46, a secretary in the office of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Their defection came four weeks after Hans Joachim Tiedge, one of Bonn's top counterespionage officials, had fled to East Germany, along with three other suspected Communist agents. The Willner case prompted renewed demands for the resignation of Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann, who oversees Bonn's domestic intelligence agency.

The tension between London and Moscow began on Sept. 12. Two days later Soviet Foreign Ministry Official Vladimir Suslov angrily denounced the initial British expulsion order as a "hostile and malicious" action designed to "poison Anglo-Soviet relations." Suslov handed British Ambassador Sir Bryan Cartledge a list of Britons slated to be expelled.

The harshness of the first Soviet retaliation came as a surprise to British officials, who had expected only token reprisals. Last week in London, the Foreign Office summoned Soviet Charge d'Affaires Lev Parshin, denounced the expulsions as "an unwarranted victimization of innocent people" and demanded the departure of six more Soviets. After Moscow matched the new expulsions man for man, Thatcher said that Britain would make "no further response." The British expulsions, she asserted, had "eliminated the core of the subversives." Declared Thatcher: "This shows the Soviet Union in a pretty poor light. They were caught red-handed and are now red-faced."

Moscow's reaction to the British expulsions was interpreted as a blunt message to the West from Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev two months before his November summit with President Ronald Reagan. "He may want to look like a man you can do business with," said a Western diplomat in Moscow. "But he also doesn't want to look like a weakling." With grudging admiration for the Soviet leader's tactics, a British official declared, "The way the Russians have played tit for tat demonstrates Gorbachev's skill in making the best of a bad job."

Still, Gorbachev's stance could hardly undo the damage caused by Gordievsky's defection. Although his bid for asylum came to light only two weeks ago, the veteran KGB officer had worked as a double agent for the Danish secret service during the 1960s and '70s and had been acting as a mole for British intelligence for more than three years. The KGB bureaucracy in Moscow will now have to scan every dispatch sent by Gordievsky to determine how much disinformation he may have reported. It must also reexamine the loyalty of Soviet agents who worked with him. For the Soviets, says former CIA Director Richard Helms, the lengthy process will be "nothing short of agony."

Compared with Gordievsky, the spy couple who escaped to East Germany last week were small fry. Nonetheless, investigators in Bonn were anxiously assessing how much the two may have compromised state secrets. Willner, a senior associate of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, an F.D.P.-affiliated institute near Bonn, had high-level connections in West Germany's political and military establishments. His wife apparently did not deal with sensitive military matters, but she was intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Chancellery. Said a senior West German security specialist: "Both were in very important positions, and both had interesting targets for any special service. If they worked together, it would be even more dangerous."

Doubts about the couple first surfaced in 1976 when West German intelligence received indications that Willner might be an East bloc spy. Born in China, Willner was reared in Dresden before being drafted into the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler's elite force, during World War II. After his release from a Soviet POW camp, he settled in East Germany and studied at Karl Marx University's department of journalism, a favorite training ground for East German intelligence agents. In 1961 Willner fled to the West and in 1974 married Herta-Astrid.

The Willners' names recently turned up in a routine computer search conducted by Bonn's intelligence apparatus that matched them to the profile of many East German spy couples: they were professionals and childless and had married late in life. A West German government spokesman last week admitted that in August the office of Interior Minister Zimmermann had informed Kohl that Willner was suspected of spying for East Berlin. The Chancellor, however, did not act on an official request to place the Willners under surveillance, and the couple were allowed to leave the country for a vacation.

Bonn officials also revealed that ex-Counterintelligence Chief Tiedge had been assigned to investigate the couple before his defection last month. That led to speculation that Tiedge himself may have tipped off the Willners, who were last seen in Spain. Last week their former employers received letters of resignation, mailed special delivery from East Germany. In his message, Herbert Willner explained that he had feared prosecution on charges of "espionage activities against the Federal Republic."

With reporting by William McWhirter/Bonn and Frank Melville/London